YES, TO GIVE ALL, TO ENNOBLE THE CALLING

YES, TO GIVE ALL, TO ENNOBLE THE CALLING

Yes, to give all, to ennoble the calling,

suffer the anguish of the rising and falling

of the unemblazoned stars, nameless heralds

of the blood, mute hermits of our lost

ancestral lines, the pain thresholds

of our exits, less brash than the entrances

we made as if we’d been expected

all along. To realize the absurdity

of our assent as merely the flowering

of the smallest mirage in the vastness

of the expanding starfields we disappear into

like parachutes of milkweed back to their roots.

How sweet the whisper of life in our ear,

how insanely beautiful when the light

unmasks the hidden night like a secret

it keeps to itself, shy in the shadows

with big eyes that take us in at a glance,

strangers to the silence that astounds us

like the sacred syllable of a mother tongue

that passes through us like the song of a bird

we haven’t heard in years. Is home near?

Is the river threading the eye of the sea?

Too much of the past in our greetings,

no future in our farewells, the moment

before the first kiss stalls and the chance

is lost in the widening wake of our regret.

The snake doesn’t ride the spiralling thermals

of the hawk, a wavelength shy of transformation,

and the plumed serpent comes crashing

like the aspiration of a kite to the ground.

Was it an act of God, or a fear of heights

that so much of the dead was left undone?

Brown stars of the spirit pressed like flowers

between the preludes and epilogues

of the delights that were fossilized

by the sedimentary layers of starmud

transfixed like badges to the covers

of our books in an unread cemetery

where the wine bleeds a watercolour of rust

and the restless wind mourns our lack of ardour

in risking it all as if it were nothing

but a gust of stars kicked up by the wings

that bring us to heel in the shadow

of the Beloved, intangibly, irrevocably,

like a message from the gods we failed to deliver.

PATRICK WHITE

I DON'T SQUANDER MY TIME SEEKING OUT DESIGN FLAWS IN CHAOS

I DON’T SQUANDER MY TIME SEEKING OUT DESIGN FLAWS IN CHAOS

I don’t squander my time seeking out design flaws in chaos.

I celebrate the intelligent randomness of a creative universe

predicated on the spontaneity of the copulative verb

that never interfered in my being here in the first place.

I don’t make a precedent out of the missing links

in my ancestral antecedents. Nothing remotely dynastic

about a periphrastic genome talking like evolution

in its sleep, tinkering with the alphabet blocks

of the dream grammars of Ugarit in the penumbrally

dark ages of forgetting I ever knew how to write.

I don’t make totem-poles, obelisks or imperial columns

with wrap around plaster and bandages of flypaper

commemorating the victors of mummified wars

to impress wax and clay, flesh and blood,

with the cuneiform scars of spray-bombed graffiti

on the empty cattle cars sent to relocate

subjugate mother tongues in the full stop

at the end of the tracks that run on time

like Mussolini hanging by his heels from a lamp post,

pendulous as his place in history, or a periodic sentence

that gets around like a mindstream, not a highway,

through the shadows and the moonlight in the woods at night

circling back on itself to throw its pursuers off its trail

like the sixth patriarch of Zen, pointing out,

there’s no need to enlighten your mindlessness

because when you take nothing from nothing,

robe or begging bowl from nothing, the sum remains

nothing missing from zero, no gap between the arrow

and the target, broken or in free flight, lame

in the Bolshoi Ballet, or faster than the speed of gravity.

You have to go a long way to discover your childhood

never left home, you’re looping backwards

into the indolent youth, alone on the rock of his thought

trying to imagine how he ever got to be you.

I’m making retrograde progress through all the stations of life

I passed through on my way back here like a prodigal stranger

on a homeless road to nowhere I’ve ever been before

like a snake that takes the omega of its tail

in the alpha of its mouth, so the first sacred syllable

it utters is the last it will mutter on its deathbed,

unborn, unperishing, so no one can tell where things

begin and where they end, as you climb up

this ladder of thresholds out of the blackhole

it’s scary for the light to be buried in implausibly alive.

Everybody’s trying to survive the gift of life

they’ve been given to make their way in the world

like an object lesson to those who refuse to listen.

I practise an offroad discipline of disobedience

in the wake of this compass leg of my journey

trying to walk like crutches on a runway of water

I’m trying to take off from like a ring-necked loon

that doesn’t care if you understand why you’re arrested

by the fading echoes of its lonely ululations or not.

The picture-music is empowered by the suffering in a voice

that estranges thought like a misfit at its own funeral.

If you’re not reading the chapbooks of the butterflies

as sensitive as the pistils and stamens of the wild poppies

with scarlet letters on their foreheads, like a mad man

that doesn’t give a damn about poetic reputations

getting in the way of a more intimate love affair

with the elusive truth that’s never signed a loveletter

that couldn’t be denied in public, you’re still illiterate.

You’re etching runes on your eyes like the striations

of glacial glassware you were as afraid in the ice-ages

to smash up against the cave wall like a prophetic skull

you were drinking from to celebrate the grand opening

of your spiritual fingerpaintings trying to identify

the vague nature of the in you’ve got with God

like the candelabra of a handprint anyone

can see right through like an artificial third eye at first glance

as you are now looking for a meaning that doesn’t

dance on your grave like a troupe of wildflowers

you never asked to sweep you off your feet.

You never learned to sit down on the ground

under the shedding leaves of your perfectly bound books

and have a good laugh at the idiocy of your insights

into the nature of a life that doesn’t exist except

as a surrealistic circus tour of sacred clowns

practising their priestcraft like mendicant monks on the road.

Back to the robe. Back to the begging bowl.

And even if you’ve got it all together, I defy you to lift it

like your head off the pillow of the deathbed

you’re dreaming on like a frog on a stone lotus

trying to make a big splash in this belly-flopping pond

of a world that exalts itself like a pearl diver

in high places it takes a lifetime to climb up to

before you plunge into an oyster bed on the moon

that’s always been tight-lipped about the secrets

you can pry out of her like birthmarks slashed

across her delicate, thin-skinned wrists by

the shuck and jive of the knife you’re using on her smile

like the optical illusion of your bifurcated consciousness.

Try another lens. A gravitational eye at the far end

of your telescope that bends the light in aberrant conformity

with the radical departure of your own seeing

off the beaten path of less wayfaring moonbeams

so you don’t ending up telling me the way it seems

is only the proxy appearance of an understudy standing in

like a deathmask for the way it is when everywhere you look

is opening night for the imagination playing tricks on the mind

on the streetcorner of Gore and the Universe

when every step of the journey that doesn’t leave home

like starlight, is another yellow stripe down the spine

of a crosswalk of freshly painted thresholds like dance steps

waiting for the lights to change from red to green

as if autumn got a leg up on the turn, counterturn

of the strophic epodes of the spring waltzing with the wind

like willows in the gowns of a Viennese ballroom

under the imperial chandeliers of falling stars

you can put in your pocket like chump change

and save for a rainy day as if life didn’t depend

upon its own extravagance to survive

the famine of metaphors in the lean lightyears

of your face-painted eyes with their glass blown tears.

Shakespeare: would he had cut a thousand lines

playing midwife with his own umbilical cords.

Mozart: too many notes, too many birds in the tree

celebrating the dawn spontaneously all at once.

Butterflies: no end of the books and canvases

displayed in the rogue galleries of the oyamel forests

of the Yucatan, sustained by the manna of milkweed

in the long exodus across the chemical deserts

of North America like a promise made and broken

then swept under the quota of prayer rugs like a price tag.

PATRICK WHITE

I COULD SAY NOTHING

I COULD SAY NOTHING

I could say nothing. Or I could exert my imagination

to say the way it never is, nothing but exceptions

working to rule, functional disparities between chaos

and clarified thought, the dream grammars

of magicians on the nightwatch asleep on the job.

It’s a polymorphous perverse multiverse

that will take any neo-gestural suggestion

as seriously as a potter shapes the emptiness

of the urn he’s making for himself on the wheel

of birth and death, his hands caked in starmud

that comes with its own kiln baked into the mix.

I could say nothing about the lack of an inexplicable reason

for why it is the way it is and return to my ignorance

by default like a solar prominence lashing out

into the dark as if it were scourging the softness

in the eyes of the upper atmosphere almost in tears

for the way it rants at a planet determined to see for itself.

I could busy myself, soul-searching for words

the silver-tongued Russian olives might risk

whispering into the ears of the willows still in their gowns.

I could mine the crude ore of the asteroids and turn

the motherlode into subtler refinements of the mind,

as the soothsayers of greed have foretold

like an oracular app on their stealth cellphones.

I wouldn’t be alone in this, with all

these affable spy satellites and drones for familiars

keeping watch on what I write about the breadlines

outside the surrealistic circuses that distract us

with the infinite variety of living like people

with no choice but to be consoled by the private rights

of wild animals shocked into performing

for a ringmaster with a whip and a footstool

to keep the savagery of our rage from getting out of hand.

Or something disgustingly cute to take us off the ball

we’re losing our balance on, keeping in mind

inside every sentimentalist is a nasty brute.

Trying to seed a sea change with bullets in an exchange

of gunfire is the forget the immaculate conception

this sea of precarious awareness first had of us

when it breathed light into the waters of life

like moonset into the barrier reefs of the sponges

and corals that engendered us to live outside the law

as if we were honest with ourselves. First impressions

shall be the last, and the last shall be the worst of them all.

If people don’t concentrate enough to lose their focus

in someone they love anymore, the rest is fate, and we

just dissipate back into the void like a passing thought

or the one way tickets of Monarch butterflies on the way home

like illegal aliens estranged by the toxicity of our pestilential

presidential run-offs as we research how to musically embrace

extra-terrestrials in a bond of cowering friendship to feel

we’re not alone in the world, except together with each other,

where it isn’t familiarity that breeds contempt,

but the encylopedic holy books of our hatred we keep

preaching to the choir like voice coaches and spinny healers

laundering the bedsheets in a cult hospital of blood-stained angels

racially profiling the stranger at the gate

as if his shadow fell any darker on the earth than ours

in the doorway of a house on fire torched by a burning cross.

Dry ice for tears, people don’t cry for each other anymore,

they evaporate spiritually, they sublimate, they sigh

for a better world than this worst of an infinite number

of better alternatives as they arm their innocence

like a children’s crusade on the way to another holy war.

Is it feasible any image we were created in the name of

to love one another is as rabidly addled as the memes

we follow like Ibn Attar’s pilgrimage of birds

to look into any god’s eyes and see ourselves

in a parliament of corrupt politicians padding their travel-fares

as they do their bodies, egos and hairdos at public expense?

When hasn’t the death hex of the military industrial complex

not been a blessing in disguise to the corporate undertakers

who wash the corpses for burial like sins off their hands.

Offices of great state enshrining human rights on the Vietnam Wall.

Dividing, we rule. Together, like the old woman

who unwound her spinal cord into a million weak threads

as if she were sorting out the bloodlines of xylem and phloem

in the heartwood of the tree of humankind, we open

a school of assassins to preemptively protect the golden rule

with concealed weapons against the genocidal madmen

who secretly feel, by killing children indiscriminately,

they’re pschoBabylonically on the road to becoming one of us.

PATRICK WHITE

I CAN SEE THE LOVE AND THE LOSS IN YOUR GREEN, GREEN EYES AGAIN

I CAN SEE THE LOVE AND THE LOSS IN YOUR GREEN, GREEN EYES AGAIN

I can see the love and the loss in your green, green eyes again,

stars away from the light I wanted to be in your life.

Deadly nightshade and sunflowers, I remember the loveletters

that used to arrive like wounded doves with strawberry hearts

bleeding through the snow, wild roses in an ice-age

with flint knapped thorns and the lunar horns

of a dragon of desire for firesticks. I would have

smudged my ghost with a noose of sweetgrass

from the highest rafter in this house of life long before this

if you hadn’t left the gate of your absence open

to the dark paradise of the abyss I’ve been falling through

ever since love got precipitous as a Clovis point with a razor’s edge

and every nightbird in the repertoire of the songs I wrote

started playing with my jugular like a one-string guitar

strung like a highwire act over the voice box

they’re still looking for close to where I crashed.

Some people focus like telescopes on what they can see.

And some look under the eyelids of their deathmasks

at the dreams disappearing like the fragrances and vapours

of the spirits that changed the way they look at life

like a waterclock of endless nights that write their names

in their breath on the black mirrors of a seance of new moons

that can’t meet the same stranger twice, given once

is enough of an afterlife to make death seem petty

compared to the nightmare of the exits we have to go through

to get here, alone and homeless as a welcome mat

on the threshold of a fire escape that descends into a dark alley

where I jam with the feral cats on the urn of a burnt guitar

I carry the ashes of my love poems in like a moonrise in my throat,

birds of the morning singing in the false dawns

of the creosote clinging to my vocal cords like boat-tailed grackles

on a powerline that came down in a storm, how

could it have been otherwise, like a bullwhip across my eyes.

Fireflies are intimate with the tenderness of pain,

but the dragons of love wreak utter destruction in their wake.

And everybody dies in the intensity of the conflagration

like a savage heart on the bone altar of its pyre

just to keep the fire fed like a star that consumes itself

for the sake of shedding a little light on the immensity

of its solitude, many, many nights without curfews ahead.

I resent nothing. I regret less. I don’t plead

like a rosary of skulls beaded like black dwarfs

on an abacus of love that renders an account of all I’ve lost.

If I’ve grown wise as an enlightened eclipse from the encounter,

it was an accident, and if I’ve deepened my ignorance sufficiently

to understand the evanescence of dark matter, there was

never any intent to seek shelter under the wing

of an evil portent that mentored me to see in the dark

that the petals of your loveletters had stopped blooming

in the Jurassic greenhouse of your eyes, like the flowers

and feathers we hoped would evolve out of our scales

like guitar picks into the quills of an oracular snakepit

of picture-music singing back up to the hidden harmonies

in the lonely ballads of the cosmic hiss that puts a finger

to the lips of the silence in a command performance of bliss

that made the darkness shine for awhile, and aged the wine

in the bells of the sorrows that emptied the urns

of the skulls we once raised to celebrate fire on the moon

like lunar starfish burning under water like a shipwreck

of white phosphorus in the Sea of Tranquility

you had to learn to handle like fireflies piloting the Pleiades

through the earthbound starclusters of the New England asters

as if it would always be September ever after

like the crossbones of a harvest moon perishing

like an outdated calendar with the scenic view of an abandoned house

where life once happened in the shadows of the candles

in a wax museum I’ve never been able to put out

like a nightwatchmen that keeps all the doors to his heart unlocked.

A gust of stars settling like dust on the windowsills of the past

and if I don’t say it in a rush of light, I forget

all the words to the song and start making things up

like the flying buttresses of fossilized dragons

I dredge up from my starmud to support the loss

of the faith I used to have in my memory not to lie to me

about how rapturously intimidating it was to see you

walking up the driveway to the door

that keeps opening me up like an unread loveletter

as if you were always standing on the other side

of the pain thresholds I’ve crossed out like the tree ring

of my name carved into the heartwood of a scratched guitar

just to see the love and the loss in your green, green eyes again

and maybe sing, o yes, sing a little in the dark

of what you meant to me like a star in the willow boughs

of the saddest poetry I’ve ever recited like a fire in the night

I ghost dance around in the war bonnets of love

I shed like the swan songs of summer stars in the autumn

as our flightpaths arc like arrows fletched in flames toward earth.

PATRICK WHITE

DEEP ENHANCEMENT. DARK WOUND

DEEP ENHANCEMENT. DARK WOUND

Deep enhancement. Dark wound. Ancient pain.

Estranged childhood. I hurt. I hurt. To no good purpose

at the end of things. No timing. No content.

And the body mourns the broken wings of the words

that once rose to the occasion like startled waterbirds,

the wind in a prayerwheel that didn’t know what to ask for.

And the heart, stubborn enthusiast, homely shrine

the gods don’t enter into anymore, used razor blades

scattered like the pages of an unbound holy book

that cut all five jugulars of the fatted calf

that bawled like a guitar at the use its innocence

was put to like a musical sacrifice to the tone-deaf silence.

And the mind, that Mephistophelean shadow

that lives in the wake of the dead angel that said

she died for my sake until I saw who showed up

at the funeral. All those black umbrellas, bats in the rain.

Achievement without consolation. Fulfilment

the scam of a false idol. My clothes are soaked

with the tears of ghosts that blew in my eyes

like smoke from a burning sundial. Bad house guests

in the ghost town of the zodiac I once lived in

like a gold rush in the mindstream of the mountain

singing to itself as if the stars were listening

to heal the ache of an old fault line in its heart

that sends a shudder through its foundation stones

like an avalanche across a narrow road winding

its way between a high place and the certain death

among the ice-floes of a jade-green northern river

coiled like a green mamba below. Sad to see

the roadkill of a wolf that had no other place to walk

below the timberline of the life it was hunting for.

Dangerous to stop. The bus hurries on toward Prince Rupert.

Another poetry reading. How long ago was that? Where

I’ll howl at the top of my lungs like the death lament

of my lupine melancholy in a lunar solitude where

my voice carries through the deranged emptiness

of a vacuum that’s come to abhor its own nature

and the most highly disciplined severities of insight

aren’t communal enough to cope with it like a happy face

on a moonrise instead of the usual prophetic skull.

Blue Flower. Black Dog. Sunbeam and nightfall.

Hydra-headed snake fire. Death to release it.

Death to try and hang on to it all. The agon of life.

The struggle to live. The struggle to die.

As raw at the entrance as the exit is refined.

I struggle with the angel in the way like a mind

that lost an eye to the ferocity of the encounter

trying to see past the halo into the black hole of the vision

it was grappling with like a choke hold

on the throat an experienced shapeshifter

that keeps eluding my grasp of the light

like fireflies without starmaps in a hoax of dark matter.

Between the mountain and the river, where

to be held up is to be cast down like an ostrakon

into the abyss where the victors live in exile

throwing their bodies like gauntlets of roadkill

along the side of whatever road they’re on as they

raise their voices in a deathsong like a challenge

to the quixotic echoes that stand in their way

threatening to bring this house of life down

like a handful of starmud on the impromptu graves

of the losers brilliantly infamous for fire walking

their spinal cords like acrobatic spiders unravelling

their silken safety nets like unnamed constellations,

across the moats of the mountains, scapegoats on a drawbridge

that lets its guard down a thousand times a life too often.

PATRICK WHITE

JUST GO. JUST GO.

JUST GO. JUST GO.

Just go. Just go. I don’t want to do an autopsy

on your voodoo doll. Leave me to the asters and stars

on my long walks into the fields and woods around here.

It was your fault, your fault, as you keep pleading.

I’m glad you see me now the way you couldn’t before

but the roses keep bleeding and candidly, lady, I’m bored

with the abysmal misery of trying to understand

why you look like the Taj Mahal but act

like a hamburger stand where they pat the meat down

with dirty hands. You did what you did,

now be done for good and bad with it. Let’s not

look upon it as a mistake you made, but

as a creative opportunity for us to separate

the salt from the fresh waters of life in our tears.

I don’t think I was cut out to be an organ donor for love.

Full measure and a bit beside. Enough, or too much,

as the poet once said. I gave you all I had to give

with a full heart and an open hand. You were great

in bed, a demonic mystic with a hunger for sex,

but the blood-caked altars remind me of guillotines these days,

blocks to swan on at Tyburn and Smithfield,

and if I thought putting mine on the black market

might bring about a change of heart in you,

the river might flood, the wheat grow taller,

the scapegoats stop boiling their kids in mother’s milk,

I might be more inclined to take a message to the gods,

stimulate my stem cells into reconstituting my body parts

like a Promethean liver eaten like roadkill on the rocks

by turkey vultures circling like undertakers on the fly.

I suppose you expect me to cry or something

and I will, after my own fashion, when this glacier

retreats like an ice-age my species has been adapted to

for way too long. I’ve been flint knapping new moons

like shards of obsidian into spearheads with a razor-edge,

and I may have mastered the art of hunting bigger prey

than I am, but the dreams of the Neanderthal

that has been living on inside of me against the odds

has left me a little flakier than a shaman in a cave bear’s hide

and I’m weary of singing in the false dawns

of the genetically engineered beginnings you keep

offering me as an alternative to my imminent extinction.

The death songs don’t sound the same

when they’re accompanied by a backup band

and a drum machine that never misses a beat

to be real enough to roll with the pulse of the moment

when the heart begins to jam with the rhythm of life

too close to last call to take another request. So please

just go, just go. Shut the lid on the coffin

of my guitar case and save your change for someone else.

I’ve stretched the membrane of my heart out

far enough for you to jump on like an animal skin

that thought of itself as more of a drum at a ghost dance

than a trampoline on the rebound when you

finally came back down to earth like a shooting star

I’d wish on like a lucky scar that might not disappoint me

like the last time you shattered my glass house like a Perseid

throwing the first stone at what you were capable of,

the dregs of a comet that didn’t burn hot enough

to burnish your golden chariot in the emotional crematorium

where the slag of a slum’s been mined out like love.

I buried the yellow canary that used to warn me

you were coming like the Wailing Wall

beside the Dome of the Rock in a bed of Jerusalem artichokes.

Take your body with you when you go. Take

your lips and your hair, your hips and your breasts

and the mammal magnetism of those dresses you wear

as if they were being modelled on a catwalk by the floor

beside someone else’s bed, and I’ll walk skinless

through the world awhile and feel everything again

like a wild aster in the acid rain of a significant climate change

it’s a lot easier to adjust to without you, than it is

to explain to my solitude looking for signs among the stars,

fireflies burning in all these ice-age Mason jars

I’m releasing like the Pleiades from the urns of my eyes,

chimney sparks in a gust of wind, lights out over

the sea at night, and when you’re gone, lightyears up the road,

these first magnitude starmaps I’ll use to start a fire

I’ll sit around, and listen to the wind rustling

through old creation myths like leaves well into autumn,

and try to identify the sound of a tree falling

in an old growth forest when there’s no one there to hear it

and the Canada geese are heading south like hearses of the spirit,

hello and farewell, included in the same calling out

to the silence and the distance between one absence and the next.

PATRICK WHITE

THE NIGHT THAT HEALS THE BROKEN DAY

THE NIGHT THAT HEALS THE BROKEN DAY

The night that heals the broken day.

The dark that mends the shattered lamp.

The moon that salves the puncture wound.

The star that welds the injured eye

into a stronger bond than the original vision.

The silence that tempers the battered heart

in its own tears like a sword of light it fell upon.

The word that tends the forsaken voices

in our ears, like water whispering

into a dry wishing well on the moon

or bees and hummingbirds come like shibboleths

and sacred syllables to the larkspur and hollyhocks.

Down by the river where there are no mistakes

I can sense the long sorrows of the willows

making preparations for spring. The dead branch

troubled by a dream of leaves it didn’t expect.

The ancient hills washing their own corpses

laid out against the skyline like anonymous chthonic gods

led out of the labyrinth of their watersheds and roots

by melting snow welling up in their eyes

like the first signs of life coming out a coma of permafrost.

There’s a renewed hope in the lyrics

of the night birds exorcising the echoes

and mirages of this albino desert of ice

from their leprous solitude growing back

new limbs and flightfeathers at the approach

of the vernal equinox, moved to sing more earnestly

for reasons quite beyond them

because there’s no logic among the muses

anyone can follow like music rationally for very long

without getting lost in a starmap of metaphors

like a field fire burning off the short straws

in the hands of isolated scarecrows on nightwatch

all winter long, as Virgo offers them all

another chance to feel the wind caressing

an ocean of starwheat again like a new riff in the urn

of a greening guitar sprouting out of its ashes

like the first note of orchards, windfalls and harvests to come.

Soon the sun will treble the clefs

of the wild grapevines like tendrils

and the mushy raspberry flesh of the old women

grow firm again and the green-stick fractures

in the hospitals of the birch groves

raise their branches up to the sky

like wands of wine witching for stars.

And the young will be exhilarated by seeing

everything for the very first time

like new lamps for old and the genie within

understanding why it’s cast aside by their elation

will smile with the affectionate wisdom

of a third eye that’s been watching

this riot of apple bloom and trout lilies for light years.

And the rain will root like wild columbine

on the skulls of the moss-pated rocks

and the cochineal crocuses in the dilated pupils

of the wide-eyed snow will put their petals

together in prayer like eyelids appealing

to a stranger in passing like white water

over the rocks in the wake of his heart

and say, hey, mister, please, we could use those tears

if you’ve got no further use for them. Come here

and help us turn the waterwheels of the eternal recurrence.

Or lend us your breath, if you’ve forgotten what it’s for

to enhance the shining tenderly burning in our starmud

by blowing on the kindling of the fires of life

like a volunteer arsonist attending a nesting pyre

of yarrow sticks from the Book of Changes

we can lie down upon like the phoenix of the sumac

refeathering its skeletal wings in fledgling flames.

The ant that repairs the tunnels and doorways

of its snow-covered barrow to let the light dispel

the shadows from the bone boxes of its dead

like a stem cell happy to be at work again.

The red-tailed hawk repairing the burnt rafters

of its last sky burial by shouldering the wind

upon its shoulders as if the earth weren’t

such a heavy burden to bear as it sometimes seems.

The scarlet cardinal that kept the memory

of lost poppies alive like the lantern of a dream

burning in the windowsills of long, dark nights

of returning one day like a prodigal

to the firepits of hell to discover

they’ve been sown by the dipeptides of meteors

like circular gardens bordered by

Martian fieldstones lying like the kissing stones

of black Kaabas in Antarctica to celebrate

the renewal of life and the return of the light

to the radiant gateways of the trilithons of Stonehenge

where any place you shine like a firefly on the horizon

face to face with the night is the true direction of prayer.

The pine that sweeps the needles from the stairs

like the rusty eyelashes of shipwrecked compasses.

The blue shift of the Canada geese beating their wings

like a drum circle of wavelengths on the eye of the lake.

The garter snake that slept for an eternity

with its tail in its mouth ungnarling the knots in its hair

to seek its own equilibrium like water

in the tree rings of a warmer rain

rippling through archival calenders

like a higher frequency of life in its heartwood.

The thorns that stung like locust trees

beginning to take down the Chinese lanterns

of the hives of the paper wasps and replace them

with the blossoming pinatas of honey bees

singing in a beatific cloud of unknowing

to the metamorphic glory of compassionate mysteries.

The dragonflies drying their wings in the light

that wipes the tears from the eyes

of the rubble of fortune-cookies they emerge from

like gerry-mandered shrines of transformation

with stained-glass windows cracking like old paint

to open themselves as wide as they can

like an aubade of pagan totems at midnight

to the lifespan of the sun enlightening the moonrise

with prophetic fire flowering in the eye sockets of an eclipsed skull,

chandeliers of votive candles burning in the sacred niches

of a holy wall of secret messages riddled with nesting swallows

like waterlilies and love letters from the distant stars.

Breaking like the womb of a beaver dam

with the waters of life flooding the roads

we have to take to make our way here as we are,

the broken tea pot of Aquarius that mends

the continental shards of the rifts of old ostrakons

like Pangea in the spring with scars of gold.

PATRICK WHITE