O COME ON NOW

O COME ON NOW

O come on now, you can bend space and time

more imaginatively than that when you’re

intense enough to sway the light with a glance

of your gravitational eyes. No iris in the eye

of the fire that burns invisibly all around you,

why blindfold yourself with rainbows

or paint the snail tracks of the stars on your eyelids,

as if glowing in the dark like the last window at night

to go out, were the same as lighting it up

like the Pleiades on a cold, winter evening when

you feel the stillness in the heart of time

even as it passes like crows across your lunar eyes

and everything seems like the echo of an abysmal silence

tuning the mind where the roads divide

to the tines of a snake’s tongue witching for fire?

You can put contact lenses on your retina

or replace your corneas with razor-sharp lasers,

and flavour the light like a lifesaver you’ve been

sucking on until it’s thinner than the thin ice

of the cataracts you’ve been walking on

like stained-glass windows. Hard rock, or good soil,

if a visual image sprouts roots it blooms

into a symbolic visionary with low-hanging fruits

like buckets from the boughs of a woman returning

from a well to water your mirages with a taste

of the real thing that can’t be divined by defining it.

The immensities of the universe aren’t measured

by the golden yardsticks of the telescopes

you point at it like artillery aiming through

a spider mount trained on superclusters of fireflies

crazed in a cult of light like gnats in the air at dusk.

Show me your starmaps. Show me the sundials

of your clockdrives, the six on the floor red shift

of your spectral speedometers laying rubber on the road

like the wavelengths of blacksnakes swimming like rain on asphalt.

I don’t want to read about the cliches that bond you

to your inlaws at Christmas like a high school home chemistry set

you’ve been fiddling with like a spare-time terrorist

who looks at the sky like fireworks at Halloween

masked like God by the screening myths of your culpable origins.

A genie can tell whether you love it or not

by the way you caress the lamp, and the camera

you summon like a photogenic muse to capture

reality like a firefly in a digital Mason jar

as if there were no other interpretation available

to the comparative passports you hand out

like Ellis Island to homeless refugees on the thresholds

of your borderlands, because you’re afraid

of crossing your own event horizons into the black holes

in the rhetorical arguments you propose

for blood-testing everybody’s homogeneity

to make sure their aesthetic sensibilities are consonant

with yours. Ensure they release the same dopamines as you do

when you see a drop of blood like the tear of a rose,

and what pierces your heart as the water turns into wine,

isn’t the simple beauty of it, but the enigma of its thorns.

And right away, I can tell, by the way your eyes

emerge from the darkness like stars and lamp posts

you suppose there’s some hidden secret

in the occult poetic arcana of the crazy and wise

you can seize upon like a shepherdess of wolves

while the sheep are howling at the moon in their sleep.

Some nightsea of a dark jewel that’s never

been touched by the light before like an unused eye

you’re swimming through for your life,

squalls of stars in your wake like the dust of the roads

behind you. No rudder. No sail. No anchor on your lifeboat.

All that iridescent, thin-skinned buoyancy of spirit

that leads you around like a seeing-eye dog

a blind lighthouse that caught a glimpse of two wavelengths

copulating to heal themselves like a winged caduceus

on the axis of a prayer wheel. You’re an angel

with a flaming sword outside the gates of Eden

and you’re trying to master the skills of dragons

older than fire, you’re trying to steal the moon

from the window and get away with it like an eclipse.

More power to you. That’s what I say. Let it rip

like a ticket to ride you got for parking it somewhere

for too long with the windows closed,

and an Egyptian dog-god inside dying to get out

and lap like a waterwheel at the reflection of its own mirage

among the stars, Alnilam, Alnitak, and Mintaka

in the belt of Orion, Osiris at heel like a hunting dog

chained to the chase beyond the stargates

of time shining down upon the earth for once

as if, brighter than light, it revealed more

in one sacred syllable of a nightbird urgently alone

in the woods on the broken masthead of a battered pine,

calling out to others like echoes of the same silence

the hills answer as if they were talking in their sleep

about all the stars that have drowned like flashbacks

in the housewells of the waters of life piped like bad music

through the tear ducts of your underwhelming eyes.

I’m trying to be as kind a scalpel about this as

I possibly can. Forgive the nick of the incision

that’s trying to free you from you. I just don’t see the point

of constructing poems like dams to hold back a sunami of dew.

PATRICK WHITE

LIVING ON A PLANET THAT KILLS MORE PEOPLE THAN IT HEALS

LIVING ON A PLANET THAT KILLS MORE PEOPLE THAN IT HEALS

Living on a planet that kills more people than it heals.

And the most dangerous of predators, our own ideals

turning on us like ingrown hairs, solar flares the wind

blew in our faces without any of the veils or auroral graces

that used to adorn our amazement at what our eyes

in creative collaboration with victimized ions, could do

with the last breath of an expiring sun god to make it

mystically beautiful and awe-inspiring. Just

to be a witness to it was enough to keep your mouth

shut for the next ten thousand years, the silence

before the sublimity of being in the presence

as convincing to the farmer as it was to the astronomer.

As civilization progresses into an improved savagery

and people grow more bovine in their living rooms

as the one-eyed liar at the nadir of the third eye

entrances them into believing they’re still

grazing in the starfields of genetically modified astroturf

they were raised on, slowly, from a moon cow’s point of view

it’s beginning to dawn on people that civilization

is nothing but the history of war since Sargon of Agade

first turned the plunder of cattle and women

into the military imperialism of the few against the many

by staying like a parasitic cosmic egg laid

on the pineal gland of a host caterpillar so civilization,

mimetic word, a cattle prod, an axe, and an abattoir,

is coming to be seen for the death trap that it is.

Muddy Waters, there’s anotha mule kickin in yo stall.

I grew up in an impoverished neighbourhood

where the garbage cans were full of people

but I swear, and I’ve seen a lot I wish I hadn’t,

I’ve never seen so much rot, corruption, and ignorance,

lacking even elementary street smarts, as I do

in the portly politicians and their fanatically overkempt hags

that make you feel so sorry for their hairdressers,

and the tailors that have to fit them like a hidden agenda

of hate and greed, oozing through the seams

of their shapeshifting, deformed-fitting suits.

Makes you want to stick the old peace sign of the sixties

down your throat and throw up. Or pack up

a small tent, like a refugee or an emigrant

and get in line with the rest of the waterlilies

who’ve finally given up on trying to turn

the festering swamp into something redeemably beautiful

and would rather be homelessly lost among the stars,

floating down the Milky Way with wild black swans,

than sit like the eggcup of a crown on the skull

of a false prophecy missing more than one link in its evolution.

And if you think not to be appalled by the stink of the world

is a kind of experienced wisdom, a seasoned outlook,

then I might suggest that you’ve aged like offal

complicit in the contagion of worms in the grass

where the children play on the swings. And your last best hope

is that your eyes have retained some of the original innocence

of the fool that you used to be,

before the Medusa turned them to stone

and the colour flaked off like the irises of violated covenants.

Radical in the sixties, I was into self-creative destruction,

tallowing sand candles out of napalm and beeswax

that went off like fifty calibre lipstick shells in your face.

I occupied. I dropped out. I blew my own mind

more than once just to make sure the bridge was burning

by the time I got to the other side of my own mindstream

and no one was following me like another blistering ideal

that got thrown like acid in the maculate face of the full moon.

It was easier to believe in everything back then

than to make peace with myself even now,

though I know it’s just one illusion dead set against another

and I’m sitting naked in the Himalayas alone at night

trying to hatch a new cosmic egg for myself

or at least a new cosmology for this glass third eye

I’ve ground like a lens or the mirror of a reflecting telescope

with gritty carborundum down to within an angstrom of perfection

just to be on the same wavelength as quicksilver and diamonds

when it comes to seeing things that don’t easily disappear.

Now I can see the stars dancing clearly from the inside out.

I’m looking for an abandoned observatory on the top

of the world mountain standing on the shaky cornerstone

of a snapping turtle, and I’m not being driven out this time,

exiled among exiles, like some scapegoat beaten

like an objective correlative for what is most ugly in humans

that don’t sacrifice themselves for their own sins.

I’ve been leaving of my own accord for the last thirty light years

of this wilderness experience for the wind knows where.

And I still care. And I still help the waywards of life

that blow across my path like losing lottery tickets

and one winged butterflies trying to fly

like the unbound page of a book with half a wingspan.

I still fight with words and actions that have been blooded

like Damascene swords in the sacred forges of my infernality.

I’ve gone on exploring the elusive dark energy

of my expansiveness long after the universe went out

and sight stopped being a kind of love as lucid

as the imagination on a good seeing night for the sky bound.

But as my compassion has grown deeper, more holistic

and mystically specific simultaneously so has the sadness

of feeling so many suffer the indistinguishable pain

of simply being alive to endure the agony

of cauterizing their cosmic wounds with the very stars

they wished upon a heartbreak ago when the waterclock

broke like an ice-age dam and the baby mammoth

was washed away like starmud in a glacial flood

of Pleistocene tears. And life seems so randomly perilous

in the way it maims and kills the body and the mind,

it seems even the wise and the sublime die as surrealistically

as the sarcastic mentors of trash and trivia

trying to distract our attention away from our dilemma

with cheap thrills and punchlines about the meaning of nothing

so we can’t feel the house burning down around us

until we’re reminiscing in our urns,

as if we were still haunted by eyes in the dark

like some lingering significance to our demise.

Lachrymae rerum. Sometimes I think the mute rocks

don’t just speak, they weep like stars

for the things they’ve seen like the headstones

of prophetic skulls in a cemetery of ancestral asteroids.

An abandoned observatory, yes, the jewel in the lotus,

and a large garden where I can grow my own constellations

like esoteric zodiacs of asters and sunflowers

and a lover I can bed down with like an equinox

when our celestial equators intersect our ecliptics

at the equinoctial colures of our cosmic G-spots

and we can implode like supernovas in each other’s presence

just for the pure joy of immolating ourselves in bliss

to renew the tenderness of the fireflies who know

there are no limits to how far we can take this.

PATRICK WHITE

I COULD LOOK AT IT WITH SWEETER EYES

I COULD LOOK AT IT WITH SWEETER EYES

I could look at it with sweeter eyes.

The way boys and cowards romanticize war.

I could emphasize the honeysuckle and fireflies.

I could say that’s not a noose in my hand, it’s an ankh.

I could run an extortion racket of jukebox mirrors

and have them placed in all the best cafes

so when you put a quarter moon in

they reflect anything you ask them to.

You’ve got a beautiful face. Man

are you smart. Yes, you’re the son of Zeus

and I’m the oracle of Amun at Siwa.

And every occasion I can with integrity

I try to praise the larkspur.

I’m exhilarated by the waterlilies

that have almost come to mean

as much to me as the stars on a summer night.

I rejoice in extraordinarily ordinary events

between people, I don’t expect to experience again

the way he walks beside her like a green crutch

coming into bloom and leafing like a loveletter

trying to be a strong tree she can lean on,

and so much is so crucial to a blessed few

or a father walking down the street,

listening to his daughter as if she were the Buddha

or middle C and he had to keep his eighty-eights straight.

Born a cellular optimist or too stupid to be a cynic,

though there are days I live like a dog,

and I know that denying this suggestive reality

is to summon its affirmation as if

something in the context of life heard you

and though you’re never certain, out to prove you wrong.

And likewise endorsing it, invites its denial.

This is the middle extreme and it should be lived

immensely with intensity like a Sufi gyroscope

in dynamic equilibrium with your wingspan

whether you’re homing to a sacred grove for the night

and your heart is a bell of shadows

or you’re one of the good sugars of life

fulfilled by the dawn where all the birds

sound like one harmony, but if you listen a little harder,

they’re all out of tune with each other,

this one a bass run and that an arpeggio

on a water flute that can hold a note like a drop of dew

on the tongue of a blade of stargrass when it wants to.

When the long wavelengths of its tears

aren’t breaking ashore like a menagerie of glass horses.

My mystic guestimate is. In the dark beyond

the blazing memes that have yet to light a candle to the stars,

love silvers the harvest of the heart in moonlight

and comes by day with a golden scythe to thresh it,

and an understanding that puts its trust in the future of life

like a windfall of apples swarmed by wasps like a train

that had jumped its tracks, or dozens of whales

were beached overnight and crushed their lungs

under their own weight, though that wasn’t as buoyant

as the previous metaphor, nevertheless it’s not

an injudicious verisimilitude for what I’m getting at.

If your passion for anything is ferocious enough

sooner or later you’re going to meet a nemetic dragon

though I’m sure that’s just a dream cloak

for projecting my anxieties onto a blaze

of cold-blooded reptiles with inflammable wings,

and you’re going to look deeply into the fangs of its eyes

as if you had to go through this ordeal

to suffer for what you love to prove you’re real.

Today I lived like one long mouthless scream.

I could have kicked stars in someone’s face.

Too much of a black farce to be the credible dream

of the air corridor I’m trying to sustain

like a black hole to the other side of the hourglass

that’s timing all this like a heartbeat of picture-music.

Now I’m writing poetry beside an aquarium

at two in the morning with three goldfish

hovering in their sleep beside me like hummingbirds

gone back to the sea as we all do eventually.

And it feels good to see the likeness in disparate things

and bring them together like the moon on the mindstream,

maple fire dancing to the rhythm of northern water,

and though it’s impossible to assess the worth

of what I’m doing as a poet in the twenty-first century

I can feel the compassion of a crazy wisdom

in every feather of light that falls to earth like Icarus.

PATRICK WHITE

JUPITER GONE FROM THE WINDOW

JUPITER GONE FROM THE WINDOW

Jupiter gone from the window. Homage

to the ambiguously forgotten moments of light

that shine down upon the earth awhile

whether anyone’s watching this time of night

or not, intimate fireflies of the terrible largesse

of the diminished gods that once dwarfed our childhoods

in the shadows of the shepherd moons they cast

like an abacus of wandering stars. Thaumaturgic

strangers at the gates of our youthful wonder

as we cried ourselves to sleep at night because

we were born too early to walk on another planet

surrealistically pictured in the collectible spacescapes

of the bubble gum cards we swapped like Jupiter for Mars.

Nothing more hurtful than the unrequited love affairs

that ached with longing at the city limits of our starfields.

Postcards from the edge of nowhere left unsigned.

The first betrayal of astonishment on the thresholds of time.

A curse of distances that left us spell bound

by an abyss of inconceivable mysteries illuminating

the ancient texts of our estranged starmud homesick

to return to the original fire wombs of our shining

instead of being marooned here burning our ships

on the beach of a circumnavigable island

as if we could do nothing but under-reach ourselves.

Lightyears ago before I discovered thought was faster

in the gaping interstellar spaces of my own mind than light

and sight was a kind of love that touched the heart of things

and brought them infinitely nearer than a mirror or a lens.

That what I really longed for from the intangible brilliance

of their emphatic absence in my life was to

humanize the unknown with the evanescent metaphors

that bridged the gaps between our departures and arrivals

like analeptic waterclocks thawing the tear ducts

of cold eternities eager to learn as much as they could

from the brevity of our unbearable passage through

the recurrent perishing of our lives and unborn deaths.

No lack of midnight specials flashing in the dark,

I grew up looking down the long Buntline barrels

of alta-azimuth refractors with small spotting scopes

aiming at things impossible to hit. No collateral damage

from ricochets, except for the occasional planet or star

through the heart, and the childhood fever

of the wounded wonder of it all lodged there forever.

Despite what the Cyclopean optimists insist

with their big third eyes orbiting like automated proxies

for their spiritual lives in a brutally cold, space

you have to look into the dark if you want to see the stars.

I looked up at them out of the immensity of my solitude

and they looked deeply back out of their abyss into me

and once our eyes met and mingled like wary animals

in the woods at night, out of the corner of a window,

fireflies hair-braided into the willows, in the cuffs of a dream,

in the nebular chandeliers of a lover’s eyes moist

with the Pleiades, none of us have been the same ever since

like mini nirvanic flashbacks from the eternal sixties.

Light upon light, the way of gods and humans in the world,

and well beyond, o so much deeper into the dark

where seeing leaves our eyes behind, and it’s not

the insights that are revealed along the roadsides

of the starmaps we’ve memorized like wildflowers

that our divining aspires to, not the lamps

of the nightwatchmen with master keys to secure

the doors of perception our childhoods walked through,

light through the black holes and pupils of our eyes

and telescopes out into the open of our expanding minds

and their multi-tasking worlds, a seance of friendly faces

at the end of a tunnel of light, but to be enlightened

by the shining of the secrets that leave you in the dark,

burning in the window on the grave yard shift

long after Jupiter has set in the west over the Lanark hills.

PATRICK WHITE

EVEN THE TINIEST WILDFLOWER IN THE WOOD

EVEN THE TINIEST WILDFLOWER IN THE WOOD

Even the tiniest wildflower in the wood

tangled in the shadows of the grass,

smaller than an insect, a lonely diminutive yellow,

five sounding flukes of pygmy whales for petals,

is a starmap to the whole universe

shining back at itself, the invisible made manifest,

by swimming against the current of the light.

It’s just as much the obstructions in life

that show you the way, the lost key, chance, hope,

the door you’re only allowed to live on one side of,

the tree root of the willow in the garden

you’re chopping at like the tentacle of an octopus

with a double-bladed axe that reminds you of the moon

as it is the lanterns of the random fireflies

that light your way through the woods

like a chaos of lamp posts and guiding angels.

Maybe you could stand the tentacles straight up

like the towers of the hollyhocks and larkspur

and let them blend in with the rest of the garden?

But that’s a little too wily and wise for me to propose.

And the way you frustrate yourself like whitewater

in a torrent of apple-bloom from the spring run-off

is as long a mile of the journey as the last three lightyears

of flowing freely around the angel in your way

with a gravitational third eye that bends you its way

like Jacob’s hip and Vulcan’s limp, and you’re

mythically inflated enough to begin to suspect

you’re a symbolically crippled sacrificial king or queen

of the Waxing Year. Even the Boy Scouts have forgotten

how to tie themselves into labyrinthine knots

the way you do when you’re not weaving snakepits

into flying carpets like M-theories out of

the stringy wavelengths of guitar-shaped black holes.

Poetic dismemberments are more a way of the one

returning to the many like a river plunging off a precipice

into millions of gleaming eyes, each a window

in a palace of water with a star for a candle inside,

than body parts planted like the ashes of your sister

in a rose garden that blooms for that purpose alone,

though their visions seem heavy and sad

as the bells of abysmal solitudes that have passed

like an era of individuals into the transmorphic anonymity

of a Meta-Conservation of Data Principle

that archives every iris and pixel of your digital fingerprints,

if you were born a poet, you’ll always be that stranger

sitting beside you in the shadows around a fire

telling ghost stories with narrative themes of cedar smoke.

Dynastic Dionysiac plenipotentiaries of the wild grape vines.

Maenads. Muses. Valkyries bobbing for prophetic skulls

in the Aegean like apples off the coast of Lesbos.

Everybody sings along with Sappho after upstaging

their Orphic voice coach. It’s the natural order of things.

Full moons of the mistletoe and dusty blue planets

with wine-dark seas. Barring the F chords on your

lyres and turtle-shells, capos like starlings on the staves

of the hydrolines strung out like a power grid

of bird nets and dreamcatchers in the palm of your hand.

You want to glimpse the quick of it, don’t drive yourself crazy

trying to understand. Just dance to the rush of the river

over the rocks like castanets. Love disastrously, with no regrets.

PATRICK WHITE

I SHED SKINS LIKE ECLIPSES

I SHED SKINS LIKE ECLIPSES

I shed skins like eclipses and black latex gloves

peeled back from the new moons of unravelling snakes

that have outgrown their starmaps. Fire-sage

of a surgical dragon wound around circumpolar north,

there’s freezing in my fangs, little arrows of toxin,

and the milk of human kindness in my anti-venom.

I’m a wavelength unto myself, not a path

for anyone to follow. There are aimless rivers for that.

Poets skilled at setting paper funeral boats afire

as if they were burying their dead like real Vikings.

When you’ve left everything behind, you get used

to not leading anywhere. A cul de sac is as useless

as a labyrinth when you’re lost like the wind. Yarrow sticks

in all directions. Dishevelled stalks of dry summer grass

broken like the sarissas of a phalanx on a hillside.

You take the lowest of the low and join it

to the highest of the high and you have the makings

of a dragon that never overinflates or underestimates

the mythic potential of the quantum entanglements of life.

Scales and feathers. Winged horns ascending

over the birch groves of the lake like a dangerous moonrise

as I try not to cut my eyes on the talons and the sabres,

the Damascene crescents of clarity I’ve been running

across my tongue like the folded edges of ancient blood vows

to risk nothing less than everything all the time

making peace in a holy war of dead metaphors

buried too deep in the collective unconscious

to ever rise again with the same perceptive innocence

of their first alchemical revolution. The bloom

is off the rose. Beauty bares its thorns. Monks of gold

mine their own base metals for lesser transformations.

They unhinge their jaws to swallow their cosmic glains.

To them its all eggshells in a manger at Easter,

the two crows of Egypt, the triune identity

of three faces in one of St. Hillary, the Catholic Druid.

I sleep in my coils like a pagan hill fort

at the center of a mandalic crop circle

with occult starmaps tattooed under my eyelids.

I’m writing a grammar of symmetrical unlikenesses

to give my dissimilarities a chance to express themselves

without peristaltically swallowing thousands of contradictions

like the moon in a single gulp to bring the rain down

on the serpent fire of the lightning that engendered it.

Once you’ve passed through the monoliths

of dualistic reasoning like stone labia

at the Medusan entrance to the cave, you don’t suffer

the metamorphic uncertainties of what you were born to be,

quite as much. You’re free as a forest fire

to immolate yourself like a heretic at your own sky burial

on a pyre of crutches you threw away like the Tunguska meteor

radiating out in all directions like compass needles

from the unmarked grave of an auto de fe that made an impact

without gouging the eyes out of the truth like an unbearable fact.

PATRICK WHITE

WANT TO WRITE OR BE WRITTEN

WANT TO WRITE OR BE WRITTEN

Want to write or be written. Whatever comes first.

Want to slide down a Martian sand dune

like a hockey puck of dry ice etching clawmarks

into a copper plate as if I were trying to cling

to something I couldn’t get a grip on like a snowman

thawing. A mirror melting. I want to plough

the desert in an hourglass into a Zen garden

where the stones flourish like weeds. I want to

swim in the wavelengths of my own mirages

in a month of heat, but there’s a small, nasty voice

like a deerfly buzzing the wheelhouse in my head

that bites like a cattle prod of conditioned guilt

because I’d rather write a poem than fill out

the deadpan forms of the world. All those deathmasks

plastered over our faces like papier mache over the years

just to prove we’ve got some kind of nonrefundable identity.

Do this, do this, do this, and then, this. As if

business had become the sign of a healthy spiritual life.

Curse the opportunistic careerism of our pettiness.

I’d rather hide like a tiger in the stripes and shadows

that are cast upon him by the busy, busy villagers

tying a judas-goat to the stake of an hour hand,

forgetting that time’s a waterclock, not a traffic cop,

to draw it out like fire from a moonrock.

Tears of blood flaring like the stamens of a matchbook

brief as a poppy blooming like a solar prominence.

No auroras in its wake. No scarves of light

lingering on the air like the fragrance of a mystic insight

into the humbling depths of our own ugliness and ignorance.

Que sais je. The clearest of all corneas. The Kepler

of all third eyes in orbit around some guru of a shepherd moon.

Life’s a mystery, not a question. Don’t expect me

to answer that. You can autofill your own blank.

Or try to second-guess your way out of the abyss

you wander in as if emptiness were a labyrinth

you had to follow your daily bread through

like the crumbs of the dreams you left behind as clues

to where your freedom went when you closed the windows

on what was once as wonderfully useless as a sunset about you.

Whatever it costs. Whether they cut me down

and make my skin into wallets to cover the expense

of hanging me from a heritage lamp post like a flowerpot

nesting in midair from the bough of a one-armed tree,

hemorrhaging violet petunias, I will still

heretically insist on how crucial it is just to drift

down your own mindstream as if your only purpose in life

were not to have one that moored you like a lifeboat

to a long walk off a short pier. You can sing to the stars

or you can call for help. You can water plants

like green lanterns in the window waiting for love

to hand out starmaps to your stem cells as if

you only direction in life were some kind of photosynthesis.

It’s a dangerous calling to live creatively free.

There are always hounds barking in the distance,

coydogs yelping after the magic rabbit in the hat,

deerflies trying to land like kamikazes

on the flightdecks of your carriers in Pearl Harbour

whether they’re out to sea or not, low-flying topedoes

released like snakes from the claws of sea-eagles

trying to train them to bite other people. Good luck

in the snakepit. I’m out of it like an emergency exit.

I’m not into mindwatching from a crow’s nest

for any sign of trouble on the horizon. I’m not into

crawling across my thresholds like the rungs

of a burning ladder for the upwardly mobile.

I’d rather fall toward paradise than cling to it

like mordant ivy on a church. And truth to tell,

I’d rather search than find. Build my house

on the waters of life than a gravestone that covets

my relics like a bone-box in a Gothic cave.

Water’s always on the move like a true pilgrim

following its own thought waves like tree rings

in the heartwood of a cross of terebinth

many springs have hung the fruits of life upon.

Peace be upon the pilot lights of the prophets

who taught the spirit how to make it through

another night without freezing to death in the firepits

of cold zodiacs feathered in shrouds of ash cloth.

Rites of passage trying to thrive like fish in the desert

around the great artificial barrier reefs of the moon

that ossify like dental plack and barnacles

on the decks of our spiritual shipwrecks

in the dead seas of life we’re walking on

like root fires of our own radiance in the housewells of light.

Whether you make an ashtray or a body cast

out of your starmud, no matter, the dragons of life

burn no less hot in their urns than they do

in the furnaces and kilns of the stars whatever

prayer wheel they’re being turned upon

like the inconceivable embodied like the sun,

the moon, and Venus, in the false idols of visionary insights

that shadow the ineffable with the simulacra

of the painterly senses that know of their own accord,

like unsuccessful saints, who better?---there is no metaphor

for the light upon light, the mind upon its own waters,

until your seeing isn’t discoloured by the eyes

you’re looking into as if they were brighter than your own.

PATRICK WHITE