COLD SUNSHINE IN THE CHILLY ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE DAWN

COLD SUNSHINE IN THE CHILLY ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE DAWN

Cold sunshine in the chilly enlightenment of the dawn.

A paint rag of dreams I’m working on. I study

the grime on the window like the gnostic gospel

of a dead docetist I’m trying to decipher.

I expected to be happier than this when I woke up

but when have I never? As my bones have stiffened

I’ve grown more mentally supple over the years

like a sapling flaring out of a stump, green fire

shooting out of the ashes of the eyes of a dragon

on its pyre like the second innocence

of a surrealistic fairytale after the myth

didn’t keep the crops from failing from lack of rain

and the temples were burned by those who built them.

I’m an oracle in an observatory abandoned on Mars.

Night after night, I make the rounds of an unknown zodiac,

checking the doors in a ghost town like a solitude

people will come back to if you give them

enough time alone with the stars. I love

the creative energy of the morning like a tree

loves its cambium, but there are signs deeper

in the heartwood of the night that speak like the arcana

of an older magic that keep the lights turned down low

like a subliminal house of life with mysterious windows

into a past they’re looking forward to

like a prodigal afterlife they don’t have to break again

like the waters of life to get into because

death doesn’t stand at the gates of renewal

to bar the path of the returning exile and the morning birds

aren’t the urns of last night’s sky burial.

On the easel, red dragon breathing fire over Chernobyl.

On the computer screen, a mosquito having

a mystic revelation that snowblinds it in the light.

Bad omen to start a poem by killing the first

punctuation mark in sight, but Zen or no Zen,

I’ve got a right to sacrifice a bloodbank

like a medium to the message now and again.

Give the horse I bought with his purse

back to the Buddha because I don’t need wings

to fly anymore. And I don’t mind a little grime

on the eyes of my vision of life. It makes

the windows feel more at home, and even the sun

occasionally sullies its own light beams waking up

to scry its own sunspots like a maculate birth

or if Venus caught up to it sometime in the night

like the transit of a waterbird in a wet dream.

If perception is reality then things are the way they seem

for you and you alone, your eyes only, like a big secret

hidden from all the others out in the open

where you’re least likely to look for it in retrospect.

I’m a prophetic skull in orbit around an ancestral planet

of foundational hearthstones where I burnt the starmaps

of a nightsky so many have lost like the use of their mother-tongue

they’ve forgotten the names of the constellations

they were first born under like the archetypes

of an ancient dream grammar with strong aorist verbs

that don’t sweep their tracks after them like stars in a false dawn

that makes things seem more insane in the morning light

than the madness of the clairvoyant measure

your eyes make of the night when Virgo rises to her feet

and knights the black walnut trees with a stalk of wheat.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU CAN TELL BY THE BURNT OUT HALOES

YOU CAN TELL BY THE BURNT OUT HALOES

You can tell by the burnt out haloes and copper moondogs

around the match head pupils of her eyes

she’s been digging deep black holes

like a star-nosed mole a graveyard for the fireflies

gathering like a starmap of the extinct creation myths

of dead relatives at the end of a long dark tunnel

she doesn’t recognize anymore except as camouflage

for the ghosts of the lives she disguises for the living

not wanting to violate the innocence of their lies.

She nurses a darkness inside like a tumulus of petro-coke.

There’s no gold in the ore of her suffering, no blood

in the rock. Medusa’s been writing her memoirs

in glacial runes on her heart, and the ashes

of her loveletters read like the hollow urns

of charred dovecotes she’s scattered like the cinders of crows.

I can remember when she was a Pythian oracle

at Delphi, the new moon of a high priestess

alluring as a pole dancer in a snakepit at a strip joint

not this lunar crone who keeps her secrets to herself.

Queen of a street that’s grown so numb to its outrage

it isn’t nearly enough to be merely brutal anymore,

she didn’t get those fangs at a needle exchange.

First crescent kills and the last if she feels like it

heals. She doesn’t dance to the green bough

of a flute the way she used to like a moonrise

of music in the east, but if you make a firestick

of a dead willow branch, sometimes you can see

the ice crack under your feet like a wry smile

of winter on her face thawing out the longer wavelengths

of the knotted snakes in her heartwood. Love shrieks

what it used to whisper clear as a broken mirror.

And the veins of the roses have collapsed like rivers

in a map of the Sahara. She shoots the silver bullet

of an hourglass syringe like a sniper in the desert alone

under her tongue like passage through the slums of the dead.

And all her sacred syllables have gone into exile

like ostrakons she’s given up trying to slash her wrists on.

And her children despise her like a tarpit

on the dark side of their blood and she hardly

seems to care anymore whether they think of her

as prey or predator. She doesn’t have her stomach pumped

for prophets in the belly of a whale anymore

when she comes up for air like a moon with no atmosphere

she can’t cling to for long like a bubble in her bloodstream.

She’s Algol hanging like a bloody chandelier

from the hand of Perseus swinging his trophy like a bell

of depression era glass. And, yes, she’s ugly now,

hallucinogenic as a toad you’d have to lick

like the back of a stamp or the blood seal

on a loveletter to a wax museum. And if you were

to paint the agony of seeing like a tormented soul

that’s weathered her eyes on the widow walk

of a haunted lighthouse, you’d have to do it in encaustic

by a votive candle with a wick of serpent fire

that used to burn like Draco at both ends

among the dragons of desire that wrote her name

in lights that have shadowed her for the rest of her life.

What she knows about being on the receiving end

of human beings with nothing to give to an outcast

would bleed your eyes of the light like leeches

clinging to a vision of life like a scapegoat for the tribe,

smallpox among the natives, infected

by the blanket you committed sexual genocide under

relying on the immunity of your feigned innocence

to protect you as if God were on your side

as you drove her out into the wilderness

like a beautiful wound that came back

in a deathmask of scabby scar tissue to mock you

as if you could ever have made love to a thing like that.

And suddenly you seem uglier than original sin itself.

PATRICK WHITE

TRYING TO SHINE TO BLIND THE VOODOO DOLLS

TRYING TO SHINE TO BLIND THE VOODOO DOLLS

Trying to shine to blind the voodoo dolls

sticking sharp pins of insight dipped in stinging nettles

into my eyes like burning thorns that won’t wash out

even when the blue rose of the sky

puts her face in her hands and cries her heart out.

Made my Icarian ascent to the sun

like a kamikaze pilot in reverse trying to be positive

about the self-destructive aspirations

under my thawing wings, now

I’m trying to keep my balance on my spinal cord

stretched like a highwire suspension bridge

across an abyss that keeps expanding my insignificance

as I juggle planets with my feet I keep dropping

like my head in a guillotine made for mercy.

I want to say this is the dung-heap, this is the dogshit,

these are the maggots that thrive in the corruption of it

like toxicara worms that get in your eyes

and under your fingernails, and burrow

like small black holes through your heart

and let all the light out of your life like a slow leak

somewhere in the pipeline of the universe

that’s fracking me inflammably like a watershed

and I’m trying so hard to snow all over it

with the highest ideals of understanding and compassion,

every mystically specific flake sidereally designed

to ameliorate the repulsive and obscene

by cloaking it in white like an albino hypocrite.

For light years I used to believe if you

threw flower seeds in it, you could work it

like starmud blooded by a battlefield of torn corpses

into a bumper crop of zinnias and sublimely poignant stargrass.

Marvellous transformations of an outhouse

into the lunar beauty of the nocturnal Taj Mahal

making the black mirror, like the lost sheep, more beautiful

in a universe where love and light and life so often seem

mere mutations of the darkness.

Didn’t really want to make an ideology of a wild guess,

that would only add to the mess of cultish concepts,

and not really born to sow stardust

into the ploughed wound of a worm,

nevertheless, I drew a gold sword

out of a philosopher’s stone

and plunged it through the base metal of my heart

to suffer all those little deaths in life

and those liberating space twisting

indelible excruciations of cosmic transformation

that wrought this discipline of disobedience

I practise like an art into the absurd freedom

of the crazy wisdom that’s needed to make

a start somewhere, somehow, however small

by adding my crystal skull to the shining

like the sacred syllable of a drop of water

off the tongue of a silver leaf in the moonlight

that listens to it fall like a cross

between a good word and a tear on deaf ears below.

So I throw flower seeds on it in passing, the way

I throw all my loose change into a guitar case

trying to sing for a living against the impossible odds

of a dungheap laid like the corrupt cornerstone of things,

the ship of state expurgating in public like a sick whale

spinning the Parisian potential for the screening myths

of expensive, narcotic fragrances of rot on the Perfume Trail.

Say it isn’t so, Joe, but there you go, it is.

The terrorist oilwells are planting i.e.d.s

of inflammable water in the faucets of everyone’s kitchen,

so we can all burn to death

drowning in our showers in the morning

trying to chill things out

with corporate hellfire and brimstone

and legions of demon lawyers that give lying a bad name.

Been trying not to get so down I get

knocked off my axis like Neptune

ducking down below the celestial equator

and be dragged down into my own depths

by the snapping turtle of the world

that’s founded upon it like a totem on a gantry.

Barring the occasional eclipse to keep

the calendars tuned to the prophecies of doom

ranged against the small beginnings of the new moon

that might squeak through the third eye of the needle

just like mammals did at the end of the late Triassic

as the insignificant consequence of a cosmic event

that upgraded scales to feathers and fur to skin

as wolves turned into whales. Creative destruction

evident in extinction and evolution the same.

I try to keep my spirits up like a lead kite

by approaching it all as if it were

delightfully and horrifically absurd spontaneously

but an unmeaningly free and creative medium nevertheless,

and even if it isn’t etc., the most intriguing of delusions

it’s taken me light years to adapt to

without sitting in perpetual judgement

on the immensity of the darkness

that intensifies the nebularity of my enlightenment

with starclusters of insights that flower

like a mirage of fireworks in my dazzled mind.

Even if it’s no more than a flash of light out of the void

richocheting off the facet of a grain of sand,

or a firefly trying to stand up to the lightning,

or slim volume of igneous poems

wedged like a matchbook between tomes

like anthers of fire with phosphorus pollen

that will spread like wildflowers when it finally blooms

like foxfire in the ashes of an old growth forest.

Even to stand like a lighthouse on the moon,

having lost its sense of purpose, and yet,

still keep the fire in the tower burning as if

there might be a storm the way things change

and there could be a shipwreck, some nights

are so strange they’re like waves or cats

that leave things like dead moles and snakes

on the threshold of the far shore of your door out of here,

I’ve tried to keep on shining like a candle

trying to stay awake at a black starless mass

trying to make things dark enough to make an appearance,

and even when I haven’t managed it,

and all my shepherd moons are scattered like black sheep

by the snarling wolf of my mystically liberating nature,

suddenly showing up like the skull and crossbones

among the angel fleets grazing on the waves,

I’ve elevated waterlilies of constellations

that sat below the salt in the lowest place of all

to the zenith of my dreams like starmaps in transit

I’ve kept alight in a nightwatchman’s eyes for years

as he makes the rounds of the zodiac

like a candle still burning in the lanterns of his tears.

PATRICK WHITE

CANTERBURY BELLS, A CARILLON OF THE SORROWS WITHIN ME

CANTERBURY BELLS, A CARILLON OF THE SORROWS WITHIN ME

Canterbury bells, a carillon of the sorrows within me.

Something beautiful growing out of a garden-plot of pain.

The dark so deeply wounded, it brings forth stars.

And the river runs by the willow as time speeds up

to a standstill, nothing in sight as far as the eye can see

as it evaporates like a crystal ball with all its visions,

a wraith in the mist, a breath on a winter night

when you’re looking for your shadow cast by Venus

just to say you’ve seen it and somehow that’s significant.

No will of its own the abyss is inexorable,

and you feel so ageless and alone you can’t help

but know this is the image of divinity you were created in

like a hidden secret that wanted to be known,

a black hole peopling its inconceivability

with familiar dream figures it can relate to

its own estrangement through by looking

through your eyes like a snakepit of oracular telescopes

trying to read their own bones. Canterbury bells,

violet as a touch of sad genius, flowering.

Hard to know who’s making who up when

you’re collaborating on a dream together

with everything else that substantiates your existence.

As you, theirs. It might well be an empty lifeboat

full of moonlight drifting without a star on the horizon

anywhere, and though you can reasonably unexplain it,

your understanding, grown inclusive as the nightsky

inevitably glows like a pilot light of compassion

for every sentient thing, and don’t think the rocks

are any less animate than the starmud you’re made of,

lost on this great nightsea in a squall of awareness

that sometimes sees you scuttled on the moon

in the Sea of Tranquillity, and others, shipwrecked in the Pleiades.

Canterbury bells on nightwatch, greyed by

the tungsten lamp post as somebody sleeps

they’re looking out for like a tower of delicate mouths

with no secrets left to disclose, except for

the green clappers of their pendulous capstones

still in bud. And I could go on like the widening wake

of a simulacrum trying to circumscribe

a sense of identity encompassing all the god-particles

and the wavelengths they inspire in the imagination’s

passage through time until the waterclocks of our mindstream

don’t know what hour it is for any of us anymore except it’s dark.

But my presence has caught the attention of a star

taking a bird bath in the foliage of a well-plumed elm

standing like an imposing fountain in the ocean of itself,

its roots as deep as its crown is high as I sense

an intelligent resonance, indigenously wise and aristocratic,

an earthly excellence it’s kept alive in its heartwood

after all these lightyears of quotidian profusion

like a secret aspiration to reach out for the moon like a river

beginning to shed its leaves like waves, a long road

worth the walk, a ghost dance of smoke around

the homeless evanescence of an underground root fire,

that speaks as one for many tongues, breath by breath,

aspire beyond yourself like a shadow of the inconceivable

when you’re wandering alone at night through the heritage life

of a small town, intrigued, in passing, by how unbelievable

extraordinary, ordinary things are when you show them your solitude

like the scar of a bond with the moon that remains unbroken.

PATRICK WHITE

WRITERS STRIVING SO HARD TO BE UNLIKE ONE ANOTHER

WRITERS STRIVING SO HARD TO BE UNLIKE ONE ANOTHER

Writers striving so hard to be unlike one another

as they’re looking for new similitudes between themselves

and the many in the one, the one in the many,

everyman writing the autobiography of his loss of identity.

Everywoman etching hers with her fingernails

like grafitti on a glass ceiling breaking

like chandeliers of rain along the fault lines

of a shift in continental plates. Captain of a dreamliner

I set myself adrift like a lifeboat a long time ago.

I sing to my own silence whenever I want to be heard.

Savagely vatic, a wry surrealist with mystic outcomes

I rely on too much, I can see the horror and the humour

in the sublimity of the black, morality farce

that gets laid over your face like a death mask

people can recognize you by like a patina of soot

on the thin chapbooks of the butterflies sipping

from a Venus fly trap like the wellspring of the muse.

Young, in a room that doubled for a shrine,

I had a dark genius for making people mad.

Later, as islands emerged out of my magmatic rage,

my fist relaxed and I acquired a grace for making them cry

but that was still the lunar achievement of a journeyman

watergilding children walking skinless through the world,

wrapping their tears in the iridescent sheen of the nightsky

like a lullaby that had compassion for their dreams.

Master of nothing now, working in the creative freedom

of an abyss that entices me out of myself

like nature into the vacuum of an unknown medium

when I’m not a genie on call, I can hear the laughter

of the sacred clowns in the iconic guildhalls

of a little skill, more yielding than a thousand acres,

you can carry around with you for life like the voice

of a nightbird that knows how to penetrate the dark

like the embodiment of a longing that asks for nothing back.

Ripples on the waters of life. Echoes in solitude.

If I shine, I shine without deliberation. If I love

I rise like foxfire from the ashes of the inspiration.

Ragged in the cloak of a noble calling, sometimes

I’m wrapped in darkness like the skeletal kite

of a troubled bat that can hear more than it can say.

The night is not a reward, but there’s never

a credible alibi for not laughing at yourself

for the crazy wisdom of an allegorical starmap

trying to get you to sit still like a fixed star

for your astral portrait in eighteenth dynasty starmud

glazed in Babylonic lapis lazuli and copper from the moon.

The gesture of a Mosaic snake among the pharoah’s magicians,

I wear the jester’s cap of a daylily when the stars

look into my eyes too seriously to see what keeps me burning

after so many light years away from the island universe

on which I was born. Life, the mystery of perishing perennially,

there’s a hidden secret to being clear that supersedes the obvious.

And when death calls for it, I gouge my eyes out

like symbolic jewels embedded in the underworld

so I can envision the eschatology of meanings

trying to justify their ends as if death had embarrassed them

by not making any sense they could cling to for solace in life.

I celebrate the absurdity of the insight death brings forth

like a firefly with the candlepower of billions of stars.

How the mighty must fall to appreciate the magnificence

of their own insignificance raised up like a grain of sand

to keep the pyramids in perspective like studs on Orion’s belt.

I enjoy a hermetic social life among a variety

of prophetic skulls, but even the moon isn’t a palliative

for my solitude when I hallucinate the fate that awaits me

like a lover at every corner of my coffin. Pay the mourners

before the tears on their cheeks are dry. Didn’t I write

the most amazing odes to catch their beauty on the fly?

Didn’t I publish the names of the flowers and the stars

that moved my spirit to give them something

to remember me by like the lyrical elation

of an unpredictable moonrise? Didn’t I emblazon

the heraldry of new constellations with argent starmaps

on the shield walls of exoskeletons in the Burgess Shale?

Wasn’t my madness enough to convince the shore-huggers

of the imminent dangers of an oceanic awareness

beyond the eyes of their circumspect tidal pools?

Came a time when I realized it crucially necessary

to be given up for lost like a heretic with nothing to confess

but forgiveness for the spiritual search parties

in the labyrinths of everybody’s fingertips in order

to decipher a way out of here like Braille hieroglyphs

breaking trail like a cul de sac in a desert of stars.

Don’t the homeless still seek shelter within

the boundary stones of the firepits I left in my wake

like lost and founds along the way I had to take?

Don’t gauge the size of the city by the measure of its gates.

Exits don’t always live up to the expectations of the entrance.

Sometimes the sunset disappoints the dawn.

And then here and gone all things turn around in a heartbeat

like the wind and the sea, and the toxicity of tomatoes,

and all those weathervanes we used to flip through

like telephone books with tenure, set in their ways

like wet cement, appear cumbersomely contrived and shallow

beside the depths of the nightbirds singing

in the shadows of the moonrise they’re drowning

their voices in like stars in the throats of autumn trees

with their hearts in their mouths like the taste of wild blackberries.

PATRICK WHITE

WRITERS STRIVING SO HARD TO BE UNLIKE ONE ANOTHER

WRITERS STRIVING SO HARD TO BE UNLIKE ONE ANOTHER

Writers striving so hard to be unlike one another

as they’re looking for new similitudes between themselves

and the many in the one, the one in the many,

everyman writing the autobiography of his loss of identity.

Everywoman etching hers with her fingernails

like grafitti on a glass ceiling breaking

like chandeliers of rain along the fault lines

of a shift in continental plates. Captain of a dreamliner

I set myself adrift like a lifeboat a long time ago.

I sing to my own silence whenever I want to be heard.

Savagely vatic, a wry surrealist with mystic outcomes

I rely on too much, I can see the horror and the humour

in the sublimity of the black, morality farce

that gets laid over your face like a death mask

people can recognize you by like a patina of soot

on the thin chapbooks of the butterflies sipping

from a Venus fly trap like the wellspring of the muse.

Young, in a room that doubled for a shrine,

I had an dark genius for making people mad.

Later, as islands emerged out of my magmatic rage,

my fist relaxed and I acquired a grace for making them cry

but that was still the lunar achievement of a journeyman

watergilding children walking skinless through the world,

wrapping their tears in the iridescent sheen of the nightsky

like a lullaby that had compassion for their dreams.

Master of nothing now, working in the creative freedom

of an abyss that entices me out of myself

like nature into the vacuum of an unknown medium

when I’m not a genie on call, I can hear the laughter

of the sacred clowns in the iconic guildhalls

of a little skill, more yielding than a thousand acres,

you can carry around with you for life like the voice

of a nightbird that knows how to penetrate the dark

like the embodiment of a longing that asks for nothing back.

Ripples on the waters of life. Echoes in solitude.

If I shine, I shine without deliberation. If I love

I rise like foxfire from the ashes of the inspiration.

Ragged in the cloak of a noble calling, sometimes

I’m wrapped in darkness like the skeletal kite

of a troubled bat that can hear more than it can say.

The night is not a reward, but there’s never

a credible alibi for not laughing at yourself

for the crazy wisdom of an allegorical starmap

trying to get you to sit still like a fixed star

for your astral portrait in eighteenth dynasty starmud

glazed in Babylonic lapis lazuli and copper from the moon.

The gesture of a Mosaic snake among the pharoah’s magicians,

I wear the jester’s cap of a daylily when the stars

look into my eyes too seriously to see what keeps me burning

after so many light years away from the island universe

on which I was born. Life, the mystery of perishing perennially,

there’s a hidden secret to being clear that supersedes the obvious.

And when death calls for it, I gouge my eyes out

like symbolic jewels embedded in the underworld

so I can envision the eschatology of meanings

trying to justify their ends as if death had embarrassed them

by not making any sense they could cling to for solace in life.

I celebrate the absurdity of the insight death brings forth

like a firefly with the candlepower of billions of stars.

How the mighty must fall to appreciate the magnificence

of their own insignificance raised up like a grain of sand

to keep the pyramids in perspective like studs on Orion’s belt.

I enjoy a hermetic social life among a variety

of prophetic skulls, but even the moon isn’t a palliative

for my solitude when I hallucinate the fate that awaits me

like a lover at every corner of my coffin. Pay the mourners

before the tears on their cheeks are dry. Didn’t I write

the most amazing odes to catch their beauty on the fly?

Didn’t I publish the names of the flowers and the stars

that moved my spirit to give them something

to remember me by like the lyrical elation

of an unpredictable moonrise? Didn’t I emblazon

the heraldry of new constellations with argent starmaps

on the shield walls of exoskeletons in the Burgess Shale?

Wasn’t my madness enough to convince the shore-huggers

of the imminent dangers of an oceanic awareness

beyond the eyes of their circumspect tidal pools?

Came a time when I realized it crucially necessary

to be given up for lost like a heretic with nothing to confess

but forgiveness for the spiritual search parties

in the labyrinths of everybody’s fingertips in order

to decipher a way out of here like Braille hieroglyphs

breaking trail like a cul de sac in a desert of stars.

Don’t the homeless still seek shelter within

the boundary stones of the firepits I left in my wake

like lost and founds along the way I had to take?

Don’t gauge the size of the city by the measure of its gates.

Exits don’t always live up to the expectations of the entrance.

Sometimes the sunset disappoints the dawn.

And then here and gone all things turn around in a heartbeat

like the wind and the sea, and the toxicity of tomatoes,

and all those weathervanes we used to flip through

like telephone books with tenure, set in their ways

like wet cement, appear cumbersomely contrived and shallow

beside the depths of the nightbirds singing

in the shadows of the moonrise they’re drowning

their voices in like stars in the throats of autumn trees

with their hearts in their mouths like the taste of wild blackberries.

PATRICK WHITE

THAT MOMENT OF LOVE WHEN LIFE CALLS TO ITSELF

THAT MOMENT OF LOVE WHEN LIFE CALLS TO ITSELF

That moment of love when life calls to itself

and the summons is answered creatively

and people and things come forth, the stillness

moves and the silence is a song sweeter than words,

the darkness, a shining brighter than the light of stars.

All things are flowers of the mind even

the absence, even the shadows, rooted

like river deltas of lightning in the marshlands

of lilaceous starmud breaking into waterlilies

that enlighten the heart awhile with a beauty

born of perishing, as if all eternity were

included in it, just for a moment, a mystery

beyond wisdom when the words fall away

like petals from the calyx of a star to reveal

the dreamer in the lotus of her emptiness.

Like love, at times, it seems the light

is a kind of impoverished darkness. Bright vacancy,

dark abundance. The candle on the windowsill

of death is a grave-robber opening the eyelids

of the seeds like tiny coffins by the spring.

I’ve seen the radioactive wavelength of the water snake

hunting chlorophyll frogs among the wild irises

harbouring their eggs like the future in the eyes of life.

Happenstantially, it appears. No purpose. No motive.

As if meaning weren’t the end term of what

there is to live for, or why, not even the seeking itself

the grail I’m drinking my life from to green

the ailing kingdom. Love is a happy tragedy

however long it takes the light to get to know you.

To humanize the seeming vastness and indifference

of every star that awakes from its grave within you

like a prophetic skull that’s just had a dream

of a creation myth that leaves the vital heart

of its endless beginning, unexplained. To gentle

these dragons of the abyss with three feathers

of moonlight laid like the three best breaths of life

you ever took, wonder, gratitude, and praise,

each in its own right, the waterbird of an atmosphere

that takes the whole homeless world in under its wing

like a dark mother and gives it shelter for the night

as if it weren’t in her nature not to love

the wayfaring stars that show up at her door

lost, taking their eye off their own light

in a labyrinth of rootfires burning like a starmap

of New England asters to show them where they are.

This is earth where everything we love perishes

like a return journey strewn with plinths and petals

all along the way like the hands of a circuitous waterclock

that renews what flows away on the mindstream

whispering into the ear like the dream of a night creek

to a man walking in his sleep toward a voice he knows

as the woods know the nightbirds. Wake up. Wake up.

We’re almost there.

PATRICK WHITE