THERE ARE MEMORIES SEARED INTO MY SOUL

THERE ARE MEMORIES SEARED INTO MY SOUL

There are memories seared into my soul

like tattoos on the inside of my eyelids,

starmaps that lost sight of their own light

a long time ago, still shining in the dark

with the vaguest of hopes they still might

illuminate themselves somehow along the way.

The most intense, when memory is an event,

not a passive recollection, those that scorch my seeing

like the Shroud of Turin, or the Northern Lights,

with images of love that takes the mundanity

of what wasn’t even noticed at the time

and makes it burn, God, it burns like a sunspot

on the heart enflamed by the mystically sublime

specificity of it forever passing into oblivion

as if into a fearful dream that vapourizes my eyes

when I try to follow it into the dark.

My brother and sisters and I getting ready

for school in the morning, the Beatles on the radio

singing I Want To Hold Your Hand, and my mother

wrapping peanut butter and jam sandwiches

in wax paper, a long board sticking out of

the woodstove, everyone temperamentally busy

about something petty and crucial, and in the air

such a riot of love and hope before hope came

to be understood as just the better-mannered upside of despair,

and the energy in the world on those navy blue mornings

as new and intriguing as we were to it. Gone.

For good. Once. The fragrance of a dream.

Did we even exist? I’m lightyears away and alone now

but it sticks like the koan of a crow in my throat.

I can write about it, but still, it’s a paper cut to my heart.

A postcard with no return address from the edge of nowhere.

Where did we go? Why didn’t we wake up together

as we always used to like dream figures

grounded like root fires in each other’s being?

Was I even there, trying to get the part in my hair right

as my sister squealed to my mother I was hogging the mirror?

Barely a hair’s breadth of a wavelength among the stars,

a homely vignette in the vastness of space

of a happier time, what could it mean to anything

in the radiant immensities of this unanswerable abyss

that I should endow this trivial thread of my unravelling

with the significance of a strong rope I’m bound to

like an umbilical cord to the rest of the universe?

Dark mother, explain. Why do the waters of life

taste of such heartbreaking farewell as we’re

washed away by them like alluvial starmud out to sea?

If you saw me now, would you recognize me

by my shining, like those flowers I used to steal for you

from the neighbours on the more floral side of life,

you taught me the names of as you tamped them into the earth?

Flowers were a good start in life for a thief of fire

who worked his way up like a cat burglar

into stealing stars through an open window

in the houses of the zodiac when their lights went out.

The white lettering on the blue Evening in Paris

bottles of perfume I used to buy for you

will always remind me of the nebular Pleiades,

or the star clusters of wild asters tangled in September grass,

but, mother, my heart aches to know where it all goes at last.

Does it all go down into the basement with you

and get stored in one of six steamer trunks

like the alabaster gravegoods of a regal woman

for a better afterlife than this one to come?

Mother, am I stuck like a star to the flypaper

of the human condition, or is my genome

a starmap of fireflies trying to see where I’m going

by the light you gave me to go by? Why

do I want to cry like a telescope when I see

what a beautiful constellation we made back then,

you, the habitable planet, and we, your shepherd moons,

and the myths of origin we all shared with you

around the same woodstove on cold nights

when you burned the couch and the kitchen chairs

to keep us warm in your presence like books and bread,

and then time, like a bluejay, gouges the eyes

of the sunflowers out, seed by seed, the teeth

of prophetic skulls, as if we were born

to see the light a moment, flower and be happy

and then go blind before the forbidden vision

shows us how the darkness shines beyond us

like a star in an eyeless state of radiant grace.

PATRICK WHITE

SWEET AS A SUMMER NIGHT YOU WERE

SWEET AS A SUMMER NIGHT YOU WERE

Sweet as a summer night you were,

wild and beautiful, astonishing as the stars

through an open window, simple and stylish

as a single-petalled rose, amorous as

a strawberry as brash as it was shy,

and you had a literary bent for fucked up poets

inspired by the succubi that drank from their hearts

like bloodbanks that paid high dividends

without taking much of a creative risk

you’d get thorns in your mouth

from eating too much cactus. Dangerous

fragrance of a forbidden flower in the dark

that cursed you in the same breath it blessed you in,

what misery and mystery of the nymph phase

wasn’t mythologically attributable to you and the moon?

And that dark side? When your eyes would cloud

with the ghosts of old transgressions from

the firepits that made a lunar mindscape of your soul,

and I’d sit like a circumspect mammal quietly

out of sight listening to Jurassic Park amp up at night

as if I were some iota subscript at the foot of a species

worthy of my wary respect, did you even know

why you penumbrally slipped into an eclipse

of the new moon sometimes and looked at me

like the sign language of another eyeless night?

I loved you like the nocturnal side of life.

You were the asterisk that alerted me

to something stirring in the urns and furnaces

of my starmud firing up the ashes in the kilns

I was tempered in like a waterclock of wombs

hardening into a new alloy of water and fire

like a sword no one before me had fallen upon.

It wasn’t easy keeping my edge around you.

I didn’t want to be blunted like something

sleazy on the moon that couldn’t draw first blood

if it wanted to, and when did I ever, then or since?

Part of the art of loving a rose with a black heart

is not to disarm it of its thorns, or put on a crown

and a crucifix like a sacrificial king on a hill of skulls.

I always sat in the corner with my back to the wall

when I went out with Calamity Jane,

but one look at you and I knew I was holding

the Queen of Spades. Digging my own grave

on Boot Hill, knowing it would kill me to call your bluff

and because I loved you enough I never did

and bit the bullet through the back of my head

like the ricochet off your last relationship with the dead.

PATRICK WHITE

I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M HERE FOR

I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M HERE FOR

I don’t know what I’m here for.

I just write. I just paint. Like breathing

in and out. Inspired expiration. I watch the rain,

blankly, sometimes for hours, washing off the dust

from the leaves of the trees in the traffic.

I stare at the comatose clouds through the grime

on the windows and wonder what the stars

are doing backstage. My skymind

unfolds like a star map and I disappear into it

like a nightbird with a message it doesn’t care

is heard or not, because when I’m singing,

I’m not singing into a mirror. Verbal expression

isn’t thinking, and I’m not spider enough

to hang suspension bridges between

my words and my thoughts to harmonize the web

everybody gets caught up in like packing tape

as my bodymind tunes me up like a guitar

to the electrical buzzing of flaws in my argument.

I don’t know what I’m here for, but I often think

it’s pathetically petty to go looking for a meaning to life

like the light going round and round trying

to catch a glimpse of the shadow it casts like a tail,

when we’re the life of the meaning from beginning to last.

One meaning for everything? One size fits all?

The same collective death mask for every individual?

I fall asleep dreaming and wake up

like a mirage in the morning trying to sort out

the grain from the chaff, what’s real from what’s

merely the facts of the dark matter. But by the time

I’ve rubbed the crumbs of starmud out my eyes

and the lake mists still clinging like hungry ghosts

to my visions of last night have been exorcised

like lunar atmospheres, I can see clearly enough

I’m just the space all these thought waves travel in,

and as they say in Zen, the eternal sky

doesn’t inhibit the flight of the white clouds.

What is space here for? Or light? Or water?

Or the colour, red? And what meaning for love

was ever necessary in the throes of it?

Should this long, dark, radiant firewalk

in our sleep along the Milky Way ask my feet

what the meaning of going anywhere is, why we’re here

extrapolating ourselves back into the past

as if who we were yesterday is who we are today?

Evolution’s given me a taste for the evanescence

of a self that keeps on shapeshifting like space and time

in the live-streaming dreams of a belated Etruscan

watching the river turn like smoke in the air.

Poetry is the art of expressing what you can’t define

though it sounds as if you knew what you were

talking about at the time as everyone listened

sublimely in silence to a nightcreek babbling

through the woods in the dark like the waters of life

in the laughter of a child lost in the seriouness

of playing opposite herself for awhile like a new moon.

Ever wash your hands and feel somehow

you’ve stepped far enough back from yourself

you’re not the one who’s rinsing them off

and something eery and intriguing overcomes you

when you realize not even your fingers are your own?

I don’t possess my thoughts. I don’t own my emotions.

I’m a great creative collaboration with the unknown.

I’m an unpaginated encyclopedia of minor miracles

that come and go like sparrows to a tree.

And when it rains, the eyes of the universe are upon me.

But I don’t know what I’m here for. Does it

matter anymore? When I die is it all that radical

if I don’t know why? All my life I’ve fallen in love

with less reason than that. And do I really need

a philosophy to separate? A modus intendi

to back up my alibis for why I’m not always loveable

when I can see it in my lover’s eyes when she cries

on a winter night like an abandoned housewell

that the lightbulb’s gone out that used to keep her warm

and she doesn’t know what she’s here for anymore.

Nor do I. As we both agree to an honourable death

as if death would otherwise rebuke us for disloyalty

and the three quarter inch copper pipes

slash their wrists longitudinally the way

you’re supposed to when you’re serious enough

about renewing your virginity sitting naked

in a bathtub full of fireflies trying to freeze-dry your wounds.

If you don’t know what you’re here for. Go for it.

Or don’t. Maybe you can start a new religion

of your sins of omission and the left-handed virtues

of all the things you didn’t do, right or wrong,

and won’t. Or win a prestigious literary award

in a cherry-picked succession of unremarkable poets

who hang out like flypaper at night with porchlights

hoping among all the insects they attract

they might find one black dwarf of a first magnitude star

that sticks like a burnt-out match head to their chromosomes,

a mutant cinder of genius that doesn’t get in their eyes

so they don’t have to start crying all over again

like a watercolour in the rain to wash it out.

Can’t find any training wheels on why you’re here,

and all the scarecrows you made out of your spare crutches

to keep the birds from raiding your secret gardens,

are chafing under their armpits like medical skeletons

working on a cure for themselves that doesn’t

come too late to do them any good? Maybe it’s time

to walk out on yourself for once and stand up on your own

among the homeless who have no one but themselves

to rely upon. Or maybe you prefer a life that’s become

a hospital where the healthy aren’t welcome,

and only the worst atrocities of mediocrity

are admitted by the emergency nightshifts

to the asylums muttering in their dreams as if

they’d been medicated by the full moon threshing

short straws of genetically modified wheat?

For the last two years I thought I was here

to walk along the banks of this seance of rivers,

late at night by myself, under the willows and the stars,

revamping the images of old lovers like the wavelengths

of spectral flowers reflected back like old radio programmes

from hydrogen clouds in deep space that kept

their ghosts intact out of earshot of the facts of my life.

Somehow the candles have gone out

in the bright vacancy of noon like the shadows

of sundials and I weary of my purpose in life now

like a compassionate man who has been overly generous

with his lies at the bedside of someone dying inside.

I’m waterclocking my way like moonset into a new abyss

just to pass the time rinsing the blood off my hands

of the hemorrhaging roses I put my heart into

trying to save from the endless sacrifices

they made of themselves on my behalf, but couldn’t.

I hear the voices of dead singers from my past.

Or You tube conjures their images like Merlin

and I know they’re skin and bones by now

and their fingernails have grown out like guitar picks,

and their skulls are more oracular than fallen meteors,

and I am overcome by the poetic sweetness

of the sad shadows that once drove us to drink

as we firewalked the whole length of our lyrical cremations

just to fill our urns with something as inextinguishable

as lace and pretty flowers, dragons in the lockets of angels.

I rehumanize the simulacra of their fossilized remains,

images of pixellated skin, echoes of the refrains

I remember like the mantras of my youth when the dawn

was as shrill as a killdeer in the spring, and nightfall

was a hospital for wounded nightingales

and washed-up phoenixes weeping on their own parades

sat at kitchen tables long into the night ruminating

like candles on the glory days of tragic heroes

making a farce of their legends by living them

like morality plays mythically inflated at the end

by a lot of repetitious zeroes getting carried away in chains.

How strange to be singing a friend’s song to myself

long after the whole world’s outlived them,

and their names are being ushered funereally

like rare antiquities into grave robbing halls of fame.

And who knows? Maybe that’s how legends are made,

what we’re here for, born for, die for, like a vow

of silence we made over the graves of tomorrow

we revel in breaking like a curfew of sorrow today.

Que sais je? Montaigne’s motto. What do I know?

And even if you could. Me and my mantra. Who can say?

PATRICK WHITE

IF YOU WORRY ABOUT WHERE YOU'RE GOING

IF YOU WORRY ABOUT WHERE YOU’RE GOING

If you worry about where you’re going

before you go, you’re not worthy of the road yet.

If you’re not having some black-hearted fun

with your worst nightmares, because they’re

just as surrealistically absurd as the bliss

of your most recurring dreams are, how

are you ever going to avoid taking yourself literally?

If you’re not crazy enough to wander

through a cemetery saturated with the moon

in the early hours of the morning, trying

to organize a choir of singing gravestones,

how are you ever going to recover a voice of your own?

That dowdy wren you let go of when you first discovered swans?

If you ever want to sweep across the lava plains of the moon

in a rush of emotion of a homecoming ocean,

but you can’t feel the tide in a single drop of water,

you haven’t cried enough yet to drown in your own sorrows

and see everybody’s life flash before your eyes

as you go down in retrospect, wiser than bubbles

in the way you descend like feathers trying to smile.

O, it’s hard here, isn’t it. Isn’t it brutal at times?

All your beautiful teeth knocked out against a concrete curb?

Inoperable cancer. The savage inexplicability

of the death of children it would be sacrilege

to even think there was an acceptable answer

to appease the loss, to satiate the grief. And I know stones

I’ve turned over I wished for years I hadn’t, things I’ve seen

that make me wish I’d never been born with eyes,

that have rendered my nemetic courage dysfunctional,

estranged from the Pleiadic radiance of my seeing

as if it were a black farce on tour in Taurus.

But if you want to shine like the fire of a pioneer star

in the clear light of the void, as I keep reminding myself

like a mantra over and over and over again,

you’re going to light up the intensity of hell

as readily as you do the cruel immensity of heaven

when it terrifies you with joy. Be a brave boy, I say to myself,

resolved to live all the lives of the Tarot Pack

and then go looking for the cards the Sufis say are missing,

just to say and smile at the end of time, if only to myself,

yes, I played all the stations of my life

as if they were the winning hand of an inveterate gambler

calling my own bluff in an unbeatable casino.

Seven come eleven, I’ve rolled my prophetic skulls

up against the wall like a printer in inky coveralls

in the back alley delivery entrance of a cosmic newpaper

on its lunch hour, throwing snake-eyes around

like the fang marks of a prison tat turning to Braille.

If you haven’t blooded your sword by falling on it yet,

and hemorrhaged by a river wild blue irises, just to add

a little Zen beauty to your death in life experience,

if you haven’t felt love slash its nadir across your wrist

and worn it like the talismanic bracelet of an unmentored initiate,

how are you ever going to transit zenith

as if you were crossing the threshold

of that thirteenth house of the zodiac

you raftered with your bones to accommodate your heart,

to cherish your own ashes like the mystery

of the afterlives you had to live through

until you burned like a star that had learned

the art of shining is the art of inexhaustibly letting go?

More doubt in our joy than in our pain, if

you don’t learn to ignore your certainty to the point

you disappear into the abyss of an expanding universe,

giving no second thought to whether you exist or not,

with no nostalgic attachment hovering over your emptiness

like the halo of a black hole, how are you

ever going to evolve the mystic green thumb you need

to root sunflowers in the darkness like neighbouring galaxies?

How are you ever going to adapt to the things you cherish

if you can’t endure the transformations that come with them?

If you skip the cocoon and go straight to the butterfly,

all you’ve really done is traded your birds in for a kite

that doesn’t know how to sit or sing on the power lines

it’s entangled in, nor how to negotiate the wind with wings.

You may glimpse the unattainable, yes, like a moth

at a closed window, wondering what it must be like

to be annihilated in a candle like an old love poem,

but the vision’s not sustainable as a way of life of your own

until you’ve set fire to your own antennae like wicks

that are not consumed by the flame, or extinguished in the rain.

Spiritual diamonds don’t forget where they came from,

their perishable beginnings, and though they can shine

like water and rainbows, their clarity smeared

by the chromatic aberrations of their colour-blind telescopes,

they haven’t forgotten how to burn like bituminous coal

in a basement furnace, or melt the intensity of their emotions

like a glass river making its way to the sea or how to use

a meteoric explosion as a way of sowing adamantine insights

like seed stars in an immaculate ocean of enlightened awareness,

the life-mask of the inconceivable assuming form

to express itself as an event in time that outgrows itself

transcendentally without a revolution or message for anyone

but itself, thereby ensuring, given our inquisitorial nature,

that everything from stars to rocks to apple trees to humans,

overhears it as a revelation of angelic gossip

waxing the long after-hour halls of a demonic institution

that was founded synarthritically on the cornerstones of our skulls.

Zen might be the taste of tea. But if you’d rather spice the water,

do it with all the flavours of life, dip an eclipse

in the full moon of your cup now and again,

and let the darkness work its cure upon you like a spell

deeply steeped in your imagination like a school bell.

Attend to your shadows, not as a theft of flowers,

or the clone of a brighter garden you’ve lost your way back to,

but as mute voices with a grammar all of their own

deep enough to show you the stars you wish upon

from the bottom up of a well with fireflies caught in its throat

it articulates like chimney sparks, even at noon,

or when the black sun shines at midnight

through a clearing in the tree-line of the starfields.

The snake that takes your life grows wings

and turns into the bird and the dragon that uplifts it

with oxymoronic lyrics of fire and rain that are as real

as any symbolic gesture that plays suggestively with your heart

in the cauldrons and fountains of being

that elaborate you as you are, slack water in a mirror

that neither ebbs nor neaps, as the tides reverse direction

like a heartbeat or the flow of your breath.

This mysterious third extreme in between life and death

where everything you sought among the mountain peaks

finds you at the moment of your withdrawal

from your circuitous passage through the valley of longing.

And in every emotive thought, the serpentine wavelength

of the immensity of the transcendent silence

overwhelms you with the intimate impersonality

of its approach to you in every risky step you take toward it.

PATRICK WHITE

LONG DAY PAINTING BY MYSELF DOWN BY THE LAKE

LONG DAY PAINTING BY MYSELF DOWN BY THE LAKE

Long day painting by myself down by the lake

where I used to paint with you many years ago,

and now your absence haunts my solitude

as I grey my greens with cool alizarin red

and though the trees and the water are the same

it’s a much eerier world just to know once

you who were here with me, are utterly gone,

and what has carried on without you, though

I’m affably intimate with its creative characteristics

is wholly estranged from the name I’ll write on this painting.

As if an era in art had passed. Dreams and assumptions,

things you take for granted because in living them

you sometimes must, like love and oxygen,

and the presumption of life going on between us,

for the most part unplanned,

but a commingling of waters nevertheless,

a sharing in the other’s quiet amazement

that the other exists as they are in your mindscape at all.

A heron rises from the cattails in the shallows.

A fish jumps at a dragonfly on the tip of a sword

of the wild irises in a muddle of mystic indigo

and a sulphur butterfly struggles in the thick pthalo blue

of the sky I slashed in with my painting knife

as if I were grouting the canvas like a mason

to lay a fieldstone wall that wouldn’t keep the birds out

that have learned to ignore me like a scarecrow

in warpaint ghost dancing at an easel

spreading its legs like a doe

come out of the woods

to drink quietly from its own reflection.

Everything seems thriving and deserted.

The waterlilies still clutter the wild rice

like prolific constellations of the frogs

whose singing doesn’t sound all that bad after awhile.

I’m a curiosity to the fox

that’s been taking a profound interest in my work

all afternoon as if I were some kind of savage impressionist

and it were a cultural savant with a few pointed suggestions.

Two raccoons luxuriating like moss on a femur of oak

behind me, watching me underpaint the lakeshore rocks

like two kids through the wire fence of a construction site.

Events of the day. Transactional armies in the grass,

bees and ruby-throated humming birds

enabling the daylilies like pyromaniacs

and soon, the green dragon of the sumac

will burn in the auto de fe of the fall as well.

But you are not here to mention it to

and compared to the quality of the isolation

I once lived here with you in paradise

the beauty of my painting lacks the highlights

and finished details I used to attend to

knowing how they’d shine by the light of your eyes

as an effect of the atmospherics you brought to the scene.

And though everything appears the same,

it’s uncanny not to be heading homewards

with the shadows and the crows

as you and I did so many nights

well pleased with what

we laboured for all day in the sun

to a farmhouse full of paintings

whose windows cling to the remaining light

as we did like waterbirds for awhile

around a lake full of constellations

as the Eagle, the Swan and the Lyre,

went down behind the abstract expressions

of the sad geometry of the barn roof

weary of rusting like wavelengths of rippled tin,

not knowing whether it’s holding out

against the wind, the rain, the field fires

or still holding something empty

as an urn full of stars

that were scattered like chimney sparks

on one of the coldest nights of my life, in.

PATRICK WHITE

ALL THESE BUSY BUSY ENTREPRENEURIAL POETS

ALL THESE BUSY BUSY ENTREPRENEURIAL POETS

All these busy, busy entrepreneurial poets

trying to substitute their usefulness for talent.

If you can’t sing well enough to bear your own voice

to get lovers and applause on your own merits,

manage a band, control those who can,

network like gypsy moths in a Dutch elm,

take two creative writing courses

from a narcissistic mystagogue projecting

the fraud of the Wizard of Oz on the unsuspecting

listening to a firefly of talent talking like a starmap

about shining, about black holes and supernovas

dark energy and gravitational eyes, and the myriad galaxies

he teaches on the lower rung of a swing

in an institutionalized aviary of higher learning

as if the closest he’s ever been to the light

was a dead starfish among the usual relics of a low tide

or sodden firecrackers of insight on a Halloween night.

He teaches you to take out whatever there was never much of

to put in. To strike the definite article

like crab grass out of your well-mown lawn

so you ending up writing in the patois of a robot.

Listen to this swarming starcluster of gnats

in the sunset of the word that’s wondering

where all the songbirds went. Maybe it’s me

and I’ve grown reactionary without knowing it

into a vicious old age but I swear my stomach

can’t turn another page of a saddle-stitched chapbook

that reads the tea leaves in the broken skull-cup of the moon

like a bowl of soggy cornflakes that taste like breakfast haikus.

You can’t live like a maggot and write

like a wounded dragon of the soul. You can’t

paint a tsunami in watercolours and claim you know

what it’s like to be caught up in the emotional undertow

of a tidal pool that threatened to sweep you out to sea

until your guru or your shrink reminded you like a tugboat

you have to sink before you can call yourself a shipwreck.

I think of Van Gogh. I think of the intensity of a man

of immense humanity, and it occurs to me if he were sitting

on your saffron sectional in your coffee-book living room,

going on obsessively about the nutritional value of cadmium yellow

you’d commit the same sin of omission and condemn him

to his solitude like an asylum for the underfed

listening to the voices in their head telling them

they’re better off mad or dead than living on

the aesthetically modified junkfood

you drop in their begging bowls like chump change.

And, o yes, wouldn’t you just be the exception to the rule

who knew how to tell the difference between a sad joke

and the rage of a sacred fool eating his palette like buttered toast.

I think of all the poets that have been crucified

as a proxy for you like kings and queens of the waxing year,

as you try to step into their shoes like the waning twin

who isn’t Orphically dismembered between July and December

to ensure the creative fertility of your cloned cornflakes.

Merd! Rimbaud screamed as he stuck a knife

through the hand of a pompous muse-molesting poetaphile

and abandoned his rational dissociation of the sensibilities,

denying he ever wrote poetry, to run guns in Ethiopia.

A temper tantrum over the point size of your name

on a poetry poster and the publishing hierarchy

that sorts the planets out from the shepherd moons

by the order in which you’ve been asked to read

isn’t the same as the creative demonism of a real enfant terrible.

You can’t rent a ghost in a creative writing class

and then wear its deathmask around as if your persona

were tragically haunted by the past. Or pretend

you’re a bad ass from a bourgeois suburb where

the closest you ever got to a slum

was your Mommy’s makeshift studio basement

and an album cover you shot on the wrong side of the tracks.

Fifteen minutes of fame in a photo op with a candleflame

isn’t enough to shed a lot of light on a regressively darkling world,

or even turn the head of a single sunflower.

You need more than a flashlight to get a rose to bloom.

You might be the loudest toad on the biggest lily pad

in a small pond, sounding off like popcorn

in the lobby of your own double-feature,

but you lick your sticky fingers clean with a long tongue

when you sup with the devil like an award-winning liar

and there’s no long oar of a spoon in your lifeboat.

And even when you claim to be a damselfly in distress

I don’t see any starmud caked on your winged heels

after you say you crushed the head of the snake

that bit Persephone in the spring while she gathered wildflowers.

You might sleep with the Lord Of Jewels, but who said

you could sing? Though I like the bling

of all your dangling participles ringing like wind-chimes

in synch with the dissonant cosmic hiss of universal bliss.

Kunaikos. Dog. In classical Greek. Diogenes the Cynic

asked Alexander to get out of his light, not turn it off

because the music was over and all there was left to glean

were the random seed words of an abandoned alphabet

that will never come to flower like sacred syllables

in the mouths of scavenging birds pecking among the pebbles

at the feet of a crucified scarecrow where the literati

are rolling snake eyes for the emperor’s new clothes.

What did Horace say when he’d had enough?

Terence, this is stupid stuff. As the cynics bark

like barnyard dogs at every shadow and blade of grass

that moves in the dark woods beyond the knotted chains

of their dying dactyls while the wolves bay elegiacally at the moon.

Which page of this book did you suffer the most to write?

Clever the way you put the climax of the narrative on the cover.

Best place to hide is out in the open. And, my God,

just look at the quality of the quotes you’ve

called into court like a twitter account to verify

your inability to write an alibi for why

your works aren’t literate enough to speak for themselves.

Odious the stink of number 2 book paper and hot ink.

Worse the lack of the use of your nose when you’re writing.

Or the way you abuse your eyes by looking at the world

through a glass darkly as if you were aging the wines of life

like a total eclipse of the new moon in an antique inkwell

no one draws inspiration from anymore since the bottom

fell out of the bucket when you replaced the Pierian spring

with an unenlightened fire hydrant in a volunteer fire brigade.

And who more reasonable than you about

all the aesthetic atrocities going on in the world.

When murder is done I know of no one

more eloquent than you about not raising your voice

for fear of polarizing the situation unnecessarily.

But peace isn’t a euphemism for cowardice

and if your words aren’t guilty of precipitating a confrontation

then your critically acclaimed silence is complicit.

When did the sheep start practising hunting magic?

When did the m.b.a.s start chanting like Druids

and the gleemen of the king make a jest of their calling?

Are you still experimenting with taking all those

tiny fractals and digital pixels of retinal experience

and one day elaborating them by cutting and pasting

into a unified field theory of the visionary continuum

that focuses on the infrastructure of the scaffolding

at the expense of Michelangelo who had to scramble up on it

like monkey bars in a playpark to paint the origin of the species

as he saw it in his imagination before the plaster dried?

Here, if you give me an award, I’ll make one up of my own

and give it back to you in return. That way everyone

can feel special about their mediocrity. Watch out, Mozart

here comes the lunar fire of the lime they throw on your corpse

like desiccated moonlight before the dirt. Burn, baby, burn.

The fire hydrants are learning to play the harpsichord like amputees.

And Keats is trying to pick out a more buoyant font

than the lead of his despair to write his name in water.

The roots are dead, the leaves are gone, the blossom flown,

the fruit has dropped and the branches dry and brittle

as an old woman’s bones. Pageants of funeral barges

floating down the Thames like the wilting lilies

of long-necked swans that used to make

the most beautiful compound bows out of the arrows

of their fletched reflections. The timber clear cut

and the underbrush flogged to death by the bush hogs

and snarling chain saws in the mountains of the muses.

What do you think, is Shakespeare still out there somewhere

leafing the stumps with the magic rods of his imagination?

Is all the world still a stage, the airy nothing

he gave a local habitation and a name, or merely the dream

of the crone mother of the muses on her death bed, Mnemosyne,

reaching for a cellphone, trying to remember who she was

before they erased her on facebook and disconnected the internet?

PATRICK WHITE