TENDERLY THE EVENING DESCENDS INTO A DARK BLISS

TENDERLY THE EVENING DESCENDS INTO A DARK BLISS

Tenderly the evening descends into a dark bliss

and lays its poultice like a cool leaf against my forehead

and draws the fever of the day out of the night.

I ease back on my elbows like an easel down by the river.

When I’m burnt, I make a blister

and cushion myself with water,

a more useful approach to tears.

The mosquitoes swarm like insistent circumstances

that thin my blood, but a soft wind

is blowing them away from Pearl Harbour.

The long blue grass yields as easily to a man as a deer.

I want the stars near enough to overhear what they’re whispering.

Still amazing to me I can embrace all of them with a thought

as if they were my idea in the first place

and feel humbled and exalted at the same time

by the sublimity of their radiance and the strangeness of my own.

The river sustains its clarity by wandering.

Single male in the autumn of life, I’ve let go of so much

the only thing left to let go of is the letting go itself.

I’ve forgone the commotion of inducing myself into creation.

Things will fall out by themselves. Playfulness

return to surrealistic perversity

to explain the shape of the universe

and fools like me counter-intuit the crazy wisdom

of squandering their lives on voices in the distance

leading them on deeper into the subtleties of a poetic narcosis

that haunts them like the face

of a beautiful woman they once knew.

Don’t we all belong to a nobility of longing, even though

we don’t live up to it, and start to grasp and scratch

like dead branches screeching across

an intransigent windowpane on a stormy night

that let’s us look at the fire, but doesn’t let us in?

Where do you go with your serious spirit

when you’ve been rejected by your solitude?

Do you know the secret art of being enhanced

by the qualities of anything you’re not attached to,

without killing off the desire for what you’re missing?

Live with gratitude for the abyss in your heart

it’s impossible to fill like a grave

that took more out of you than it put back in.

You can be adorned by your failures.

You can be humiliated by your victories.

Coming and going, your path can be strewn

with roses or thorns. You could be walking on stars.

You could be lying down beside a river at night like I am

savouring a sorrow you like the poetic taste of,

because it includes everything within it

like the skin of the dew and the moon as the source of life.

Even sweeter than a rainbow body of light

or an atmosphere with ocean to match,

this last touch of clinging before you evaporate

into the mystery of everything you’re leaving behind.

No more than you can pour water out of the universe

through a black hole, can your mindstream be poured by time

into the uncomprehending darkness of the black mirror

you’re looking for an image in tonight

in the eyes of all these stars shining down upon us,

knowing our starmud is just as old as their light

and we’re not wandering orphans lost in their shadows.

We’re firewalking on water like stars in the shapes

of self-immolating swans, two parts flammable

from the start, and one of oxygen like a toxin

we depend upon for life like an alien export we adapted to.

Same with death. Until you include it in the nucleus,

inviting your enemy in to feast behind the gates

that laboured like water to keep life in the seas,

you’re vulnerable to the delusion of your own exclusion

like the face of an exile in your mirroring awareness.

Don’t underestimate the creative potential

of the dark genius of death to come up

with new paradigms of seeing and being

that make us feel we lived our whole lives

confined and blind in the coffin of a seed

that stored a harvest of what we’ve reaped in a silo.

Out of the dead ore of the moon

pours the white gold of wheat

like metal from a stone in a starfield

that yields more life than can be lost

in the living of it. Without a sword. Without a ploughshare.

Isn’t it in the nature of our evanescence to move

like light and water and wind from urn to urn

of one sky burial to the next at sea and then the earth

like a water clock that runs so urgently

from full to an emptiness that has to keep expanding

like the human heart just to contain it

so when the cup’s broken like a skull

you can drink the whole of the sea and the sky

in every single drop of your mindstream

and the stars will still be climbing your roots

up to the flowers within that bloom every year

like a deepening insight at zenith into

the dark generosity of becoming something

even beyond the scope of death to imagine extinct?

PATRICK WHITE

TIME TO MYSELF

TIME TO MYSELF

Time to myself.

The first half hour feels

as if I’m sitting at a bus-stop

waiting for something that’s never going to come.

Thoughts like stray threads of hair on my shoulder.

Old love affairs that have gone grey in my absence.

After the last flashflood I scuttled the ark of my heart

on the moon, like a dog far enough into the country

it couldn’t find its way home again.

Love’s always a mystically unique reality

but the cosmic urgencies of the pain

I endured demonically in the name

of things that were too feeble to believe in,

eventually came to hum like white noise

in the background of a boring curse

where all you could do was dogpaddle

in the flotsam and jetsam of incredible trivia

that floats up to the surface of a shipwreck on the bottom

waiting for the next lifeboat.

No one locks their doors in the country

unless they’re living a field away

from a hobby-farm, hillbilly crackhouse

that’s been handed down like the story

of a body in a lost housewell somewhere on the property,

so if someone were to step in out of the night,

I wouldn’t stand my ground like a ten point, white-tailed buck

on a hill that’s been posted against hunting

with grenades, and feel too sure of myself,

but just the same, I’d watch from a distance for awhile.

Like a wolf made shy by intelligence,

I wouldn’t come down from the timberline

until I was convinced by the probable concourse of events

there was no bounty on my head

and no judas-goat was pleading in a leg-hold trap.

Sounds brutal when I say it, but not to those

who’ve been shot at by shepherd moons

trying to cull the pack like asteroids into extinction

whenever it tried to snatch the golden calf by the throat

and bleed it like a rose of transubstantiation in the snow.

The most insane things I’ve ever done

in a world that specializes in absurdity

I’ve done for the beauty of the madness

that overtook me like the acids of a Venus fly-trap.

Sometimes love can be a lighthouse on the moon

with no one to give a warning to, it may be a mermaid

but it’s been singing the same old song on the rocks too long

and I’m poet enough to go down with the ship

but not as a creature of habit. The scratched guitar

with a warped neck in the corner

that made a benign hobby out of a way of life

that was once the death call of the music

that only endangered species could hear and dance to.

Love needs a wide screen to feature

the wingspans of its emotions so any sky

you might find yourself flying in fits you like skin.

But me? I can see a masterpiece in the paint rag of a parrot.

And there are worlds within worlds within worlds

so unanimously unconcerned with us

they have to read ancient history just to prove

that we exist as an unexplained anomaly

of the cosmic background hiss of radiant annihilation

deconstructing into the echoes of its original inspiration

like birds crying in the throat of a valley

that holds its notes too long

to keep time with the pace and passage of life.

Love’s a melodic state of mind with a percussive heartbeat

and no one’s ever really missing from the band

on the road like religious icons of democracy,

even when they get homesick for their girlfriends

and the drummer is moved in his heart of hearts

more by paranoia and lust than he is love and music

to end his calling in a bus station with a broken phone,

trying to make sure his girlfriend’s there

when he gets home at two in the morning.

Not especially bitter, and only occasionally longing,

but I remember the happy day my Greek chef friend announced

he no longer worshipped at the feet of the great goddess sex,

and died of cancer five months later, and how

even Mahatma Gandhi couldn’t pacify the hydra

of his sexual desires by lighting little fires

all around him when he slept on a pyre of women.

Worse than celibacy is abstracting the flesh into a hungry ghost.

To damn the body with the faint praise

of a sin of omission that denigrates its earthly excellence

as an instrument of God in the hands of rank amateurs

trying to weave flying carpets on the loom of a guitar

to add their wavelength of lament to the disappointed stars.

Where the bullet comes to rest

in a cosmic game of Russian roulette

is forensically irrelevant. Who

got it through the heart and who

got it through their head can go on arguing forever

who suffered the deepest death

when the daffodils began behaving like periscopes

intent on torpedoing the love boat

zigzaging through the sealanes of a wolfpack.

Open-armed as the bay of a seaworthy sailor,

I embrace love these days lightly with a kiss

like a ticket in a lottery I’m not expecting to win

but revel in like a Zen poet dancing with the moon

as if he were water, and it was taking its sail down

over the treetops, to stay awhile on his enchanted island

where delusion is not an obstruction to bliss,

and enlightenment isn’t anymore of a seer

than the scars of the star that strip mined your eyes are.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU, MY HOUSE OF BURNING THRESHOLDS

You, my house of burning thresholds, come

to me written on the breath of urgent windows,

and the palms of the walls that want their fortunes read, come

with palettes and kittens and your blue notebook of poems

that grows through ages of skin and mushroom kisses

on the forest floors of your flesh, the bracken spume

of the fountain that pebbles its tears in the light,

and the thoughtful rocks with moss-covered shoulders.

Come like a spoon that sips from the heart

and your blood a riot of sea roses, pink and green,

and the black ashes of the eyes of your secrets

and the locks on the loveletters you wrote on the wind

and I will bury my boat in the waves of your mind,

and be your ghost forever, and live as if I were blind.

There are poppies in your paintbrushes, cherries, wine,

earlobes of blue, and the tongues of mute tattoos

that have pierced your body with sad revelations

of the lives that you leave behind, all the simple journeys

that unravel the keys of the mystery in the dark inks

of another face, another crime, dead trains in the tunnels

caught like words in the throat of a mountain

that forgot what it meant to say, the long, mourning sentences

that carry you away from life to life in the arms of today,

and the bells and the lanterns that swing like fruit

in the lonely midnight stations flowering under their names.

Bring me your love, your art, your wounded past,

your wardrobe of rainbows and scars, and the chaste rings

that chain your body like a planet with mutable orbits

to the vast freedoms of stars in the rain, all the comets

you could never explain to the skies you riddled from blue,

and all the men you’ve married under the fallen bridges

of final farewells. Come in the hour of thieves, in darkness

with your windows open, and the ladders we’ll never climb down,

from our islands in the clouds that call like whales across the moon.

And there are laments we can only say in echoes, in valleys,

in the loose threads of the stream, huge shadowing sorrows

that walk like clocks through our dreams, looking again

for faces in the window that passed their orchards in pain;

looking for tomorrows in the way they came in the night

to a doorway at the top of the stairs, that once was theirs.

There are reasons in the blood that we loose like gloves

and seasons and departures, exits and arrivals

that brave the coming and the going with maps and graves

that lead us each like bees to the heart’s destinations.

Let love guide you through the labyrinths and maze

and putting on wings feathered from the fires of sad silvers

that fall away like water and stars from the herons of our rising,

fly from the old reflections of the mirrors at your feet

out of your face of lilies and fish into a deeper darkness

that waits like a man on a bus with a vase, beside an empty seat.

PATRICK WHITE

I SEE YOU IN THE EYES OF THE RAIN

I SEE YOU IN THE EYES OF THE RAIN

I see you in the eyes of the rain

and in the broken aspirations of the swallow

that hit the windowpane dead on.

Fire that no longer burns.

Water that no longer drowns.

Earth that no longer receives.

A gust of air that no one breathes.

I see you in the tender, green tendrils

of the wild grapevines clinging to life

like the last plank of a shipwrecked lifeboat

washed up on the shore of the moon.

The most bitter farewells are those

compelled by understanding

to cry a little in the open doorway

and leave as if there were nothing more to say.

Words lightyears beyond communication.

Metaphors like burning bridges

that never quite make it to the other side.

And o how gentle an eclipse comes

to a lover’s coltish eyes

when it’s time to say good-bye

and if you’re a bad man, it’s revenge,

and if you’re good, it’s a sacrifice.

Good-bye, get out, be gone,

I’ll live on in my palace of lonely windows

like a man with class in an hourglass

and I’ll write faceless songs

to the passage of time as autumn approaches.

Leave me now to the pain

I must wrestle with alone

like an angel in my way

that knows I don’t have what it takes

to pull up stakes like a heretic

before I burn for the mistakes I made

on your invigilated test of love.

Once I feel like a loser again

I know I’m at home with myself

and I can feel the clouds laughing in tears

as I get around like rain.

I loved your body like a wishing well.

You loved my brain like an occult spell.

Three afterlives of a star, once you left me

holding the medicine bag of your absence,

I named a desolate street after you

like some kind of municipal gift

to the run down ghetto of a sub-prime heart.

My pain is consoled by my art

like a weather vane is comforted by the weather.

I ghost write the lyrics of the storm.

I incite riots against the norm.

I blood my poems like spearheads

in a wound that never scars the moon.

I shall be the nightwatchman

who makes the rounds of the zodiac

inspecting doors and windows

that are steadfastly closed to him

like lilies in the festering gene pools

of the idle rich in their bridal tents

spawning into money like goldfish.

I shall be an eagle at the extremity

of my wingspan and soar over the smoke

of burning cities like a cinder of freedom

in the eye of a failed revolution

and I will not lament my own extinction

when my starmud settles like a constellation

into the hearsay of bloodshot mirrors.

I will linger in precipitous heights

then shriek like the paper airplane of a poem

down on some bumptious homing pigeon

that was promised a comfortable flight

from here to there, until it was

snatched from the air like a pillow fight.

I will do this because I can feel the glee

of my talons sinking into hypocrisy

like the three crescents of the moon

with an eyrie full of skeletal snakes

that look like a pit full of twisted combs

without any meat on their bones.

Liars convince. Communicators convey.

It isn’t what I say. It’s the way I say it

that makes all the difference to the meaning

that tones me like a moody chameleon

resonating with a tuning fork of colour

that flickers like a photo-op of lightning

trying to get a glimpse of itself in the mirror.

And then I’m an illiterate divinity student

with a heart as big as an orphanage

full of baffled pilgrims that have lost their way

crutching through the labyrinths of the divine

on a cross that walks them to the end of the line

like the rapture of an apocalyptic anti-climax.

I talk to God about you and she talks back

like a comprehensive alibi for the way things are.

She’s got a scar as big as the smile

on the dark side of her face she keeps

turned away from me like an embarassed moon

she doesn’t want to reveal to anyone.

But I can see it in the rear view mirror

of my infernal lucidity leading me away from her

like an atomic Sufi reversing my spin

in the charged particle field of my happy sin.

I walk on the wild side in cowboy boots

in a truce with the shadows of Zen

that says a great general may establish peace

but that doesn’t mean he gets to enjoy it.

And I’m resigned to the sternness of my discipline

like salt to the earth, like a sail to the wind,

like a ferocious heart to a gentle mind.

PATRICK WHITE

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