AFTER THE LONG LABOUR OF ASHES IN THE RAIN

AFTER THE LONG LABOUR OF ASHES IN THE RAIN

After the long labour of ashes in the rain

the phoenix is shrieking like fire into life again.

I can hear it in the valleys auditioning the mountains

like a voice torn out of the heart of pain.

My shadow is in complete empathy with the ghost

I cast like an imaginative projection of myself

into the emptiness of my crowded solitude

where everyone is recognized by the inside of their faces

in the light of the return journey to the seasoned innocence

of my homelessness beyond the gates I’ve passed through

like an earthly garden blooming in the star fields.

Singing again, as if the stars knew all the lyrics to the song

long before I opened my mouth to swallow their fire

without setting myself ablaze like a funeral pyre

gone supernova in a neighbouring galaxy.

As if a lighthouse off the dark coast of the shipwrecks

knew that timing was the medium of the message

and it was time to rise again on the updrafts

of these buoyant adagios of picture-music,

like a heart immersed a long time in the depths

of its own crazy wisdom abounding

in the bliss of an unknown treasure

rising like a lost continent that drowned in its sleep.

And even in the weeping for things that have passed

through the immensity of the solitude I was the last to leave

like the captain of a lifeboat going down on the moon,

an undiscovered joy in the way I learned to breathe underwater

in the ocean of sorrows that overwhelmed me

like the beauty of a rose that burned

like a torch of blood in the rain.

I’ve given up trying to save the world like a moral ransom

I pay to the one-eyed pirates of circumstance

for the redemption of a self that was more a mirage on the moon

chained like an empty cup to a wishing well

than real water that flows like the tears

of diamonds thawing like glaciers from my eyes.

And may all the wildflowers of this circuitous blossoming

astound the nostrils of God like a fragrance of music

growing like white sweet clover along the roadside.

May every firefly and lightning bolt of insight

illuminate the whole universe like the flaring of a single match.

Let the dead whose souls I bear toward the south

know that I remember their names like loveletters

I’ve sent on ahead like the return address of the future

that waits to encounter them again like birds

that came to the windowsill of this burning house of life

like the notes of a song from a voice well beyond

these spinal cords that bind us like kites to the sky.

I scatter my cremations like ashes on mirrors of ice

for those who would follow me to ground

like the cornerstones of a tent

pegged to the wind like a flower.

I gnaw on the dice of my bones

like a wolf above the timber line

mining the white gold of a motherlode of marrow

and I let tomorrow sing of the things tomorrow brings

like hungry lovers to the round table of feasting stars.

And bless the sword that guts me like an envelope

that bleeds like a wound of love that never scars

the words that are written on a magnanimous heart

that doesn’t pace the rate at which it gives itself away

like a poppy dreaming in a field of leonine dandelions.

And though I fall like an oak on a hill in a lightning storm

let me not live on my knees dumbstruck by the revelation

that burns in my heartwood like a calendar of fire

where somebody’s fixed the dates of spring

as if they didn’t want to forget how to be taken by surprise

like a scholar that can’t bring himself to believe

in the chameleonic nature of his own eyes.

Though I fall like a waterclock of rain from the sky

into the deepest blackholes of time, let no root say

it was ever denied access to my watershed

that even the dead were the guests of a living host

that welcomed them like the voices of a familiar solitude.

Uplifted by spirits of fire, stone, and water,

I’m flying through stars with my wings ablaze

like a comet that exalts in jumping for the sheer joy it

from the black halo that encircles the beatified sun

like the prophetic zero of the final outcome.

And I shall not set my circumpolar throne

on the hills of the skulls of my traditional enemies

nor abide by the jinx of the birds on a prayer-wheel

turning in the direction of cosmic destruction

like an ill wind fouled by the contagion of time.

Every moment of the day, every era of the night

I shall remember the infallible atrocities of blind religion

that gouged the eyes out of the light like gravediggers

cooking rocks in the shovels of the backhoes

rummaging through the remains of the resurrection

for the relics of the names on vandalized gravestones

weathered by the acidic rain of the great desecration.

A little bit of joy balancing on a perilous precipice.

I know about falling. I know the risk. Not a mandate

nor anything I choose to take as if the danger were all mine.

But just a little sweetness in life, a wild grape, the eye of the wine.

A moment stolen from behind the backs of the calendars

like a man in space, with no time to reflect on the outcome

of being younger than when he left. Not listening to signs

but resonating with the hidden harmonies of myriad symbols

arranging picture music for the eye and the ear and the tongue

like dew in the night, whole notes and semi quavers

on the staves of the dreamcatchers and spiderwebs

when the shining comes to the morning as unprepared as swallows.

All my Platonic ideals, the black matter of desire

in a goldrush of the heart that can’t hold anything back

in a Zen panic to stake its claim on nothing

as the fairest jewel of all to give back

to the ocean of awareness you retrieved it from

and hope the moon among the corals appreciates the gesture.

Buddha, too, had an ill-advised attachment to the unnattainable .

I won’t starve my delusions, just to please my insights.

My mirages drink at the same well I do without condition

and it’s ok if they want to leave their veils on too.

And I’ll observe an ethical truce with society

But more goes on in the dark, inconceivably,

than even the light could possibly visualize

on a cold seeing night from a mountain top

with an asphalt road that coils all the way around

like a serpent doing research into the seven ages of man

trying to keep its credibility up with the times.

On my left palm, the star of Isis, keeps me from drowning,

and in my left ear, enough gold, if I’m washed ashore

on some galactic island after another shipwrecked exemption

to burn me down by the sea on a pyre of stars this time.

I want to ingather my ghost out of the smoke, and watch it shine

like fireflies in the fog, like lighthouses along the coast

off the starboard side, looking for moonboats

on the slopes of the swells heaving easily

like bells full of emotion swinging out over the edge

to prove it’s not afraid of falling back

to the ground it arose from like a boy

daring the devil to an apple fight

in the crowns of the trees to see who

can climb high enough to scare the other down.

PATRICK WHITE

IN MOONLIGHT AND RUBBER BOOTS I LOVED YOU

IN MOONLIGHT AND RUBBER BOOTS I LOVED YOU

In moonlight and rubber boots I loved you.

Ladies of the Lake who came like waterlilies

into my life and cast your dark sexual mysticism

over the latest initiate to pass through your veils

like the silhouettes of shepherd moons in transit,

that never edited the shadows out of your loveletters

or deprived the dragons of serpent fire

the new moons that brought on the rain

like the compassionate eclipses of the enlightened

when they show you the way home in the dark

by blowing the candle out. Everyone’s got eyes

but you were the first, as your mindstreams

fell on hard rock, to teach me to throw away

the crutches of light I thought my seeing depended upon

like the flame in a lantern, inside and out,

and flow along with my own visions of life

as if I shone like water on the moon

at the oceanic floodgates of an overwhelming emotion.

In despair, terror, doubt, sorrow, loss and aspiration,

I loved you, I loved the dangers in your raptures

when your intensities threatened to cremate your desires

like a field fire that’s being carried away

by an updraft of itself like a red-tailed hawk

riding its own thermals like aerial stairwells to the top.

Approximation was always more pragmatically true

than perfection and I wanted to live with you

as an indefensible human reasonably at peace with the world

as long as the truce holds. How many times

was I a witness to your desecration of the holiness

of the things you cherished most in life

as if we were on an heretical pilgrimage together

to some unknown shrine of starmud

that would light up heaven in the same fire

you cast hell down into unconfessed.

I loved you even then like the sea loves its weather

whatever its mood, or the sky its clouds and birds,

or an eye that recognizes a star it knows the name of

and can easily pick out from the rest of the crowd in disguise.

Water sylphs, witches, queen of the fireflies,

black apostate madonnas that cried real blood

like roses in the darkness surrounded by thorns,

cowgirl muses and vamps with the bodies of bloodbanks,

Pythian oracles high on the prophetic vapours

of active volcanoes, I have loved each of you

like flesh bound copies of the original mystery of life

I saw published in your eyes the first time

we ever met. Not love at first sight, but the authority

of an intuition something were astronomically bound

to occur between us like a sailor and a sea on the moon.

Each of you, a crystal skull, a chandelier, an open window

into the palatial nature of God drawing up blueprints

for the hovels and estates of water and light.

I could taste more of life in a single tear

you polished like the lens of a third eye

with a nightsky for a cornea, than I could

white-water rafting through the rapids of my mindstream

in the spring run off of my ancestral glaciation

thawing like a mirror to the notion of a lot more warmth

in my life since you plunged like a comet

into the midnight sun with no fear of flaming out like Icarus.

You were the waterbirds of my life, you were

the golden fish that spontaneously jumped into my lifeboat

when the moon had no hooks in the water

and you taught me how to swim out of my depths

by not underestimating myself like a shore-hugger

that refused to go along with the stream

and suffocated under his own weight

like a barnacle the rock it’s anchored to

or a pod of dolphins in a tidal mud puddle.

I’m not even going to try to say thank-you

because gratitude could only sound shabby at best

compared to what I owe you for the blessing

of an insurmountable debt that showed me

the mystic largesse in even the pettiest acts of love

each in its hour and place, were a star

flowering on the river among the waterlilies,

as if what were most enduring and indelible about love

were a light kiss of fire on the face of the waters of life

that leaves no trace of its shining, no starmap

for the albino crows of noon to navigate

their way back to black, nor adds one shadow more

to the darkness of the insight I return my eyes to

from time to time, alone, late at night, in tribute

to the watersheds they were drawn from, the women,

the friends, familiars, companions, the spirits of the well,

the muses, the moondials of the eras of my love I’ve shed

like rose petals and thorns along my path through life,

with no less passion in the lees of the wine that red shifts

tears into blood, than regrets in drinking from mirages

when the wild grapes were blue, under each of their skies

when it was as hard to tell then as it is now, where the deserts

left off and the stars began to add their lustre

like a universe to every mystic detail of a grain of sand

that enlightened the windows with the clarity of what’s

translucently apparent there before them, like the eyes

the stars follow, as I still do theirs, this soft, silver light

of a distant island galaxy that shines deeper into the dark

than the crow flies, or the fledgling arrows of the heart

can hit their mark like the scars of spring in the tree rings

of the lost art of rising to the moment like a candelabra of coral

on the shipwrecked seafloor of an unannounced moonrise.

PATRICK WHITE  

SURREALISTIC HARMONIES OF LOVE

SURREALISTIC HARMONIES OF LOVE

Surrealistic harmonies of love fill the dead air

of the sugar-craving heart detoxing like the thorns

of a rose from the bloodbank of beauty that was

withdrawn from it like a fix in the spiral arm

of a sea star addicted to the radiance of the Milky Way

like a pulse of fire bleeding out albino caulking

from a poppy that died honourably by opening its veins.

What dreams may come, of unimaginable tenderness

and the affection of many dusks that glowed

like votive candles in the niche of shadows

that once hallowed the mere vision of a lover’s face

like the calyx of a waterlily your eyes drank from

like the holy grail the moon’s been looking for all along.

Crude truces are not a substitute sweetener

for the sophisticated tastes of a mystic peace

between you and the universe that’s never

been declared a defeat or a victory but nevertheless

leaves nothing unsaid between you and another

and though you could still hear the echoes of the snakes

hunting stars in your housewells like the occult wavelengths

in the visionary telescopes that put their eyes out

like broken mirrors to see prophetically better in the dark,

how dangerously courageous joy can be

when we turn it on each other like garden hoses

even as this house of life we’re leased to

burns down around us for want of water

to keep the most festive mirages of night

from becoming unsubstantiated liars in their sleep.

I can see the wake of wildflowers in the starfields

I once walked through resurgently in the spring

through a gate large-leaved soft basswood trees

towered over like a sacred grove of paintbrushes

the crows came home like the backlit ashes of the day

to roost in like a choir of minor nightmares at a black mass

when love grew fearful as a sign of deep devotion

there was a funeral bell on the dark side of the mirror

the blazing of so much light blinds it to and sets about

unravelling the wicks of its shadows and flames

like flying carpets of mystic happiness the moon wove

in the spare time of its crone phase, as Sinbad the Sailor

candles like a parachute in the bloodlines of hapless Icarus.

Eros and death. Thanatos and life in the same breath.

Copulative food for thought when the hourglass alarm clock

on the back of the black widow is timed to wake up

like a food chain in the middle of a climax

that ensures the continuance of life by ravishing

Daddy like the living host of a cornucopious pantry.

In time, by repetition, you might come to add

a diminutive to the most significant events of love

that inspired you like a flute intoxicated by snake music

before you switched from pica to piccolo

and your serpent fire began to sound more like an asp

buried in the sand, than the swaying wavelengths

of cobras in exstasis. Diminish the black magic

of your Medusan transfixions as just another one

of the facts of life that break like the filaments

of the spiderwebs that once lit up like dreamcatchers

in the dawn of elementally mysterious beatitudes of light.

If not the facts, then, at least, the acts of life

erected like obelisks of scar tissue to commemorate

the intimate war wounds of a crusading heart

in the bird-stained patinas of a public gravestone

that says we died significantly, though over the course

of time, the spell of the dream grammar wears off

and the logic of metaphor is like a tree ring

of fossilized rain buried in the dead heartwood

of the syntax we recollect our lives in the tranquillity

of dead languages that ebb and neap like a sea of shadows

on the moon, so, ghosts of who we once were

to one another, despite these seances we hold

with ourselves that can fairly say, yes, we died,

we gave it all up, you can retrospectively tell

by the depths of the solitude in our eyes

no one’s ever fully satisfied they know for sure for what.

Among the dragons of life, if the fires of love

don’t end in ashes, you have reason to doubt

the sincerity of the withered star buried in the urns

of the rosehips that have shed their petals like eyelids,

their scales like feathers in the balance

of a trial constellation worthy of all the trouble

you went through to keep on shining for lightyears

after there was nothing left to burn

but your unidentifiable fingertips like butterflies

in the sulphuric atmospheres between Venus and Vulcan

when your tears fall like acid rain on the firepits

of the scorched flowers that immolated themselves

like an Arab spring in the black market gardens

of the secrets you keep to yourself like swords

you once fell upon like wild irises pressed between

the covers of a book that’s never going to open

its mouth again like a nightbird between dawn and dusk

without celebrating the rootfires of the pain in a lovesong

even the floodwaters of life aren’t deep enough to put out.

PATRICK WHITE

I CAN FEEL THE SKIN PEELING OFF ME LIKE OLD PAINT

I CAN FEEL THE SKIN PEELING OFF ME LIKE OLD PAINT

I can feel the skin peeling off me like old paint

around this windowframe I’ve pictured myself

standing in for the last two years like an astronomer

at the shallow end of a lens, or a water snake

shedding another ghost of what’s it’s grown out of

and leaves like a windsock to any passing breeze

that thinks it’s got the moves or the requisite serpent fire

to fit it. For me it was always a nightsky too tight.

A cellophane straitjacket, larva in a chrysalis

who thought the wingspan of dragonflies to come

were like man, the measure of all things. I’ve

been trying to step out of myself like a star-nosed mole

at the end of a black hole that’s turned the feathers of the crow

back to white like the fountainhead of a whole new universe

moving on like a waterclock from the empty bucket wish

of this one on its deathbed spiralling down like a kamikaze dove

that had been shot down in the flames of a spiritual fire

that burned like a dragon on the pyre of its own ashes.

I went looking for the holy grail, even it be

I had to drink the waters of life from my own prophetic skull,

or my eyes ran down my cheeks in sacred tears

of the most indescribable bliss of being lost

without hope of rescue on the vast nightsea of my awareness.

There was no beginning or end of things, nothing

as far as the eye could see, not an archipelago

of spiral galaxies washed up on a deserted beach

like a nautical starmap of sea stars that strayed

too far off the path like a Milky Way of fireflies

who are wise enough to know you have to keep

jumping orbitals like tree rings all the time if you

want to release the photons of spring, and, and, and

like the co-ordinate conjunctions of the rain

dropping from the eaves, I ended up here on the nightwatch

bailing the sea out my lifeboat with an urn

as full and round as the skull of the supermoon

reflected in the eyes of all these unread windowpanes.

Here’s as good as anywhere yesterday lingers

and tomorrow takes its time like an old growth forest.

I don’t drink, so I never have to pass the time

feeling hollow and empty as a gas can looking for a refill

to get back on a road that ran out on you

like a wife and kids that have had enough

of living in a ditch for the sake of love delayed.

In my work, I seek a greater intimacy with words

than merely inking my fingerprints

like labyrinthine firepits in the snow for the record.

I want people to listen to the roar of the oceans

in the rosey seashells of their own inner ears

when the wind is tinting the silver, Russian olives

like the patina of an alloy of copper and moonlight

as if the most expansive visions of life hid

in the mystic details of how to paint the picture-music

implicit in all this like shapeshifters bingeing on the light.

I’ve deepened my understanding over the lightyears

until I’ve lost sight of what I’m doing or why,

and it may be arrogance to pursue this kind

of earthly excellence long after you’re counter-intuitively sure

your eyes have returned to the sea like two waterbirds

evaporating into the aerial blue of the distance

like hidden muses in this dream of life

that cries out in its sleep as if it were drowning

like a lighthouse off the coasts of its own poetic consciousness.

Happy with the divinity of the image we were

born into or not, false idols of creator-gods and goddesses

shaping the starmud of their universe on the wheel

of life and death, and after it’s been fired

in a kiln of stars, and it’s been cooled like the clay

of the flesh in the tears that temper our passions,

return it to the source like a sword drawn from stone,

shrugging the world off our shoulders along the roadside back,

as we mutter some reflexive mantra under our breath

about how, at the least, we tried and tried and tried

as if that were some kind of sign that things were good enough.

Taking big steps for humankind on the moon

or getting up on your own two feet for the very first time

like a bipedal unicycle with a gyroscopic sense of balance

in a gravity free atmosphere has always been as much

the aspiration of the wrong stuff that weighs you down

as much as the right that ballasts your buoyancy

or a god-particle that tweaks your mass by passing

right through you like the contrail of a hadron collider

annihilating the positive spin of the English

you put on the cue ball to take a long shot

at sinking the solid in the sidepockets of the real.

You can think about it all you want, but thinking

is just the life of a flute wondering where the music

comes from that passes through it like a breath of light

appearing like the Pleiades on a windowpane late at night.

Thought falls like the shadows of things in print

across our paths from one margin to the next

like silver-tongued ploughshares yoked to the necks

of two white oxen gouging boustrophedons

like labyrinthine crop circles into the innocence

of our starmud. But where’s the seed, where

are the magic beans, where are the weeds

and the wildflowers the stars envy for their beauty?

Art is deaf, dumb, mute and blind as a starmap of Braille

in the eyes of those who’ve conditioned their eyes

to perpetually looking for the grails of their skulls

that are as lost as they are in the world as if

to find something they were happy with

put a stop to their minds and filled their mouths with silence.

Out of the dark, a vague prompting in the nebular heart

and things start shining of their own accord,

when the solid and the real merge like diamonds

in the waters of life translucent as the music

of bird-bone flutes that have gone on playing like dawn

in the graves of Archaic Indians lying by the Strait of Belle Isle.

PATRICK WHITE  

WHILE THE GREAT BLUE AGENCY WHALES

WHILE THE GREAT BLUE AGENCY WHALES

While the great blue agency whales sift us

like the metadata of krill through their baleen wiretaps,

and the rainbow in the iris of my eye is identified

like a fingerprint grown suspicious of its own reflection,

and it dawns on me there’s somebody else out there

that wants to know who I am as badly as I do,

I just want to disappear like an albino crow

in the snow for awhile, go mystically snowblind

in the blazing of a billion diamonds on a nightcreek

exploring its way through the woods like a tributary

of the Via Galactica, that milky road of ghosts.

The life of a fish is conditioned by the quality

of the water it swims in, same as any medium,

We’re either a loveletter to a stranger down river

or a message in a bottle pleading for rescue from ourselves

bobbing along the mindstream like the prophetic skull

of the image we used to entertain of a self.

By their fruits ye shall know them was always

good advice, but just as do unto others

as you would have them do unto you mutated

into do unto others before they do it unto you,

tonight, looking straight into the third eye

of a spy satellite that’s been following me

disguised as Spica flickering through the trees,

I say it out loud, without popping my ps,

if things don’t get worse, and they will, of course,

history is going to look back upon us and ask

who we were, and all we’re going to be able to answer

is a collection of laminated deathmasks in a wax museum

as we slowly forgot what our living faces

looked like to one another once. The silence.

The Wonder. The mystic shadows that we cast

like Venus on a moonless winter night,

the crowsfeet around our silver eyes like laughlines

cracking the mirror up like an ice storm

when we feel it’s all been one long, endless joke

at our own expense, and herein lies wisdom.

Neither nostalgic for an old-fashioned kind of ignorance,

nor enlightened by the eugenic photo-shops of the orthodox,

miasmic as I am, evanescently veiled by the solar flares

of my own unique insight into the feminine atmospheres

of whatever right-brained planets and moons

I happen to be orbiting at the time, imprecisely

focused as I am on my peripheral vision

of the mystic specifics of these retroactive flashbacks

of future memories without the precedent of a prophetic past,

I resist being fossilized prematurely in the Burgess Shales

in some Cambrian sea floor of a corporate data bank

as if I were being forensically interred for eternity

like Opabinia or Pikaia, or some remnant fingerprint

of a sacred syllable that once lived its life

like a prayer in progress albeit whispered under its breath

in the accent of a dead language, a hierogylphic

on the hard drives of whomever’s listening in.

Some people were born into the open enough

to express life. Covert others merely to overhear it

like shadows keeping an eye on the light that cast them down

they’ve dedicated their lies to spying on like spin-doctors

looking for the disease in the heart of the cure.

Ask any fanatic. Certainty is the mother of doubt.

The one returns to the many, and the absolutes

grow relative as paranoid second cousins.

There are ferocious, predatory octagonal buildings

that have developed new sensory receptacles

to archive the asylum of junkmail that constitutes

human consciousness like an ip address for a seance

into espionage in an era that doesn’t even trust the dead.

Or as the Zen master said, just look at the extreme chaos

of conditioned consciousness. The more

you listen in the louder we can hear the silence

of what it is you won’t come out and say

like an echo in the labyrinth of that seashell

you hold up to your ear like a hearing aid

trying to record everything the ocean says

like the sonic bells and whistles of nuclear whales

under the Arctic ice-caps thawing out

like a northwest passage through the cataracts

of a global warning not to wear rose-coloured contacts

when you’re pearl diving for new moons among the corals.

Best place to hide is out in the open. So, come on,

take a look. My life is an open book skimming

my thought waves like a kingfisher on a halcyon sea

of oceanic awareness after the Titanic went down.

You can board my brain like a shipwreck

at the bottom of the Burgess Shales. And you can tell

which way the wind is blowing by the lack of my sails.

Somewhere in this abyss of water you’re bound

to come across the eyes you want to look into

as if you were doing a spectroscopic analysis of my tears,

and it were compassion to wipe them away

like a swab of dna red shifting into the longer wavelengths

of extinctions to come that will make

the most infamous eclipse on the worst day

of the Middle ages pale like a new moon by comparison.

It only takes one mood ring of a chameleonic shapeshifter

to bring out the lion in a lizard, and fill the wax museum

with the Mayan ruins of itself. In the slightest of interactions

the compendious motion of an entire universe

past, present, and wondering what’s to come of it

as the stars get further apart like constellations

on a mythically inflated unbounded balloon of a universe.

Who’s going to be left to talk to like another neuron

along your axonic way, as you listen to what they have

to say about having covert access to everybody’s lies

when you’re virtually trapped in your own hydra-headed server

like the straitjacket of an expert who’s heard it all before

bottom-feeding like a microphone on the fossils

of who we were zodiacs ago when life went crazy

as a genius in an arms war of the senses and things

were revealed without confession or innocence

like Hox genes deciding where to place our eyes

on both sides of the great divide of our noses

wiring security cameras in the hairs of our nostrils

as the watchers watch to see who’s looking at them

instead of breaking genetically modified bread

with the hysterically distracted circus mob calling for the blood

of martyred lions burning in the manes of their own

solar coronas glowing brighter than the dark haloes

of the black holes in the conservation of data principle

the darker it gets like a blindfold in front of a firing squad

when the light turns around like a double agent on itself.

PATRICK WHITE

THIS LATE IN THE DAY

THIS LATE IN THE DAY

This late in the day, could I love you, could you

love me? If I made a black rose of my blood,

redshifting into the dark, and gave it to you,

not knowing what to expect, would you counter-intuit

the wounded watershed of the poetic imagery?

Younger I was a lot more dangerous than I am now,

though I wasn’t trying to be. Dragons raged in me

in infernal crusades of the bad against the worst

as I stood at the flaming gates of the vulnerable

and said to their worst nightmares you shall not pass.

I used my horns and scales to empower the innocent,

trying to turn a curse into a virtue, the atrocities

of the left-handed legacy of my condemned childhood

into something even a stranger might be proud of.

In Zen it’s said that nobody likes a real dragon

and even among those I came to the rescue of

like a Viking long boat with runes like scars

chiselled into stone, and well-seasoned swords

that backed up my word down to the very least detail,

even among the exiles who felt compelled to love me,

even among those who didn’t want to be seen

as hypocrites of their fashionable memes if they didn’t,

I could see people backing away from me

like an expanding universe running on dark energy

and that was ok, I was raised to bite the bullet

whenever my heart was liberated by amputation.

Free of me, I am unencumbered by concern.

I can solo in the night skies I return to without fear

of estranging the stars with my intensities.

Now there’s more mage than king in my immensities,

and time, sorrow and death have blunted my edge

like broken glass rounded in the turmoil of the tides

and Merlin has returned Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake,

I feel more like a rodeo clown in a barrel

with a funny hat, a painted tear, and a flower on my head,

a floppy poppy in red, trying to turn the crescents

of the moon bull on me like a Mayan calendar

to keep from goring the fallen who were mounted

above me like heroes that took a fall. A dragon

sheds its deathmasks like petals of the moon.

So if I presented myself to you as I am

could you learn to love an enlightened buffoon

with the injured nobility of a distinguished demon

guarding a small boy’s notion of doing

some good in the asylum of the raving world,

intrigued with the urgency of innocence

to redeem itself like a mutant gene in the fuse

of an occult chromosome that’s always

about to go off like a bomb buried

in the Milky Way of a fanatical supernova?

Was a time I’d hang the heads of my enemies

like Al Ghoul from my earlobes if they dared

to threaten anything I loved that couldn’t defend itself.

Was a time I’d start a fight at my own funeral

just to stand up for someone when I couldn’t.

Now I’m hemorrhaging like amaranthus

on an infernal summer day and my heart

is a coal bin of all the things I used to be

and there’s more tears in the diamonds than blood.

I don’t dip my pen in the trough of the world,

and I don’t shepherd wolves to graze on the mountain.

Even when space turns to glass, and water leaks out

of the reactor like a constrictor from an aquarium

I endure the inverted question marks

of the hooks I hang on in a deep freeze

as if just to endure were to spite in spades

the cruelty of conditions taking their natural course.

Seven come eleven, but I can look at things

through the snake eyes of frost bitten dice

and not end up piping on a stone flute.

I was born standing in the doorway of an exit

that glowed red at night like a miscarriage of the light

but still the road sign of a back way out of hell.

So if I wrote you a poem you couldn’t understand

would you exalt in your power to unman me

or would you feel the tenderness of the beast

behind the eclipse of the black lion that wears

the corona of the sun for a mane, a sunspot for a face?

Would you trust that the darkness is full of eyes

and some are hunting you, and some are shy

in your presence like wolves that have been shot at

because they’re wild and as cunning as life?

Would you bait the meat with poison in a leg hold trap

or would you defang me into affability

and teach me to lower my voice when the moon was full?

Would we lie in the same bed with a sword between us?

I could befriend your fireflies. I could mitigate your thorns.

I could get behind whatever you dream

like dark matter behind a light filled universe

and when you were sad, let the rain play my scales

like a harpischord or a guitar with a black hole

in the middle of it I would descend into

like an Orphic underworld to sing you back to life.

I would lift all my taboos for you and give you

an exemption in the night to approach me as you wish

and even if your hand weren’t brave enough to ask

I would fill it full of jewels with magic properties

that tempt the thieves of light to risk the labyrinths

of the inviolable graves on the dark side of the moon.

I would beatify you like a grail in a secret society

of warrior saints that haven’t had a drink in years.

And if your chandeliers ever had a nervous breakdown

in a lightning storm, I would dig up the bulbs

of the crystal skulls I buried in your garden for next year

and let you talk to them yourself about your fears

of what’s to come, and how to heal the shattered

with the dark clarity of compassionate crazy wisdom

drifting on the oceans of your tears

like a hydra-headed lifeboat empty but for you.

I would plunder spiritual islands in the wake

of extinct volcanoes to bring you

the rarest herbs of insight prophecy could afford

to see you dancing again like a constellation

rising over my event horizon with no fear of the abyss.

I could do this, I would be this, and will and more

and mean it if you’d let me. I could be the quicksilver

water of life and you could be the white sulphur

substance of the great work, its spirit and activity.

Or the other way around, if you like, given I was born

on a Wednesday with wings on my heels and head.

I could be the dragon trickster, infernal and divine

the hermaphroditic hidden secret

buried in the earth, creature of fire and air,

and you could be the salt, the anima mundi,

the philosopher’s stone, the light of the soul,

the wisdom that gives life and energy their forms,

mistress of the planets and the stars, the divine energy

that moves all things around to bring things about.

What an experiment we’d make, what an art,

what a conjunction of life and love and bodyminds

what signs we could reveal, what prophecies scry,

what freedoms take we could be burned at the stake for.

And the sand paintings we could pour through an hourglass

that would blow away like the dust of the road

and the comets that fell from their black halo

around the sun, and the lifting of waterbirds

in the pewter moonlight feathered on a lake

we could observe, and the scores of new constellations

we could form like new houses of an alternative zodiac

for the dispossessed stars of the homeless

burning their hearts out around oil drums under bridges

that span them like the Egyptian sky goddess Nut,

and the poems that would flow like spiritual transfusions

into the carnal bloodbanks of the burning rose

with a needle exchange of thorns, and the transmutations

of base metal into gold and back again, of dragonflies

gleaming like anthracite in the birth fluids of their chrysales

drying the filigreed silver of their wings in the sun,

paper clipped to the waterlilies like pencils behind their ears,

and the light years of passion and devotion

this would take to be done in unison, in chaos,

in wonder and bliss, in fingertips, eyes, skin and lips,

two alchemists in the Vas Hermeticum of a conceivable abyss.

PATRICK WHITE