I STILL BELIEVE THE PURSUIT OF AN EARTHLY EXCELLENCE

I STILL BELIEVE THE PURSUIT OF AN EARTHLY EXCELLENCE

I still believe the pursuit of an earthly excellence,

not in name alone, but in the act of elucidating

even so much as a firefly’s insight into the darkness

to add your experience and confusion to the abyss

like a myth of origins in progress, is a noble calling,

a privilege accorded by the moon to wear the hide

and head of a wolf when the spirit howls in longing

to lift the agony of humans up to the stars as if

there were no greater sacrifice we had to give than this

that makes us peers of those fires, eye to eye, mirror to mirror

as above so below, the jewel of compassion in the slag

of our suffering, the beauty of the rose in the midst of its thorns

weeping holy blood on the skulls of her prophetic children.

A poet among people, a voice, a hermit thrush or an owl,

a red-winged blackbird on a dead branch or a crow

on the cabled bridge of the green blackberry,

or an indigo grackle, the eclipse of the mourning dove,

regardless of who or who isn’t listening to the wind

rasp over this desert of stars in an hourglass

like the wavelength of a serpent of fire as a sign of intelligence:

Say what is uniquely human about you so that

others might recognize themselves in the music.

Mourn as you must as if it were your funeral

you were going to as one day it will be,

your ashes in the locket around a loved one’s neck,

and break trail along the way as you explore

the wilderness of your loss so that others might follow,

assured by the dolmen of your presence in their solitude

the dangers of the journey are humanly surmountable.

A poet among people, that’s what you can say to yourself

on your deathbed and mean it in gratitude with a smile

at whatever shape of chaos you’re worshipping at the time,

you had a summons to suffer, praise, rejoice, mean and go mad

on behalf of other people, you, a self portrait of them.

Your love of them voluntarily going into exile,

or driven into it by the very ignorance you’re dying to overcome,

to know their homelessness as if it were a threshold your own,

to sow the available dimensions of the future

with metaphoric weeds and wildflowers in the starfields

so we don’t forget what all the fuss about enlightenment

means to a species rooted like a waterlily in its starmud

as if that were the dark genius behind all that shining,

the apex, the acumen, the anthos, not the denouement

of our flowering, and no future habitable that isn’t freely human

to express its awe and wonder at being imaginatively alive

like a purpureal crocus under an eyelid of opalescent snow.

Poetry is the discipline of a crazy person

who walks wisely among people half-fearful

of how fiercely vulnerable you must become to love them

as if there’d never be anything in it for you,

the most indefensibly human of them all

o so much more substantial than your dream figures

once you wake up, stubbing your heart on the rock of the world,

a razor blade to the artery of the rose that bleeds

just a profusely as you do when death cuts obliquely

into the stem and presents it like the ear of a bull

to the moon in a sacred brothel around the corner

opposite the Iseum where they make the partial whole again.

Incited by life to be demonically playful in the darkness,

angelically withdrawn like the stars and shadows at noon,

cherish the inconceivable nights that are not rewards

for anything you could have done or earned, as love

and inspiration aren’t, and marvel the more

at the strangeness of the miracle that things are this way.

Exhausted mid stride between the noon and dusk of your life,

don’t underestimate the mysticism of action

in the mundane labours of the day responding like bees

to the floral opportunities of tending the larkspur

like a voice coach pinging a tuning fork on their stamens.

Work at nothing that isn’t a form of worship

that demands your passion. Not to be fascinated by your life

is a child labour sweat factory of human enslavement.

The petty won’t brave their own happiness

nor that of anyone else, but the generous will

who understand that happiness is a grace of the heart

that happens to you from the inside out like a fortune cookie

not a law of causality misery is endlessly trying to repeal

beyond a reasonable doubt of ever coming true.

But seldom a joy without a bruise for a poet

whose bell of sorrows depends like most humans

as much upon the rain as the light to ripen

into the warm sugars of life like wild apples at sunset.

The eyes that look the deepest are usually the saddest

like housewells anyone’s free to draw from

but god, what poignancy of light smiles favourably

upon the faces of the tragically fulfilled

who lived out their singular prophecies

to purge everyone’s terror with empathy for their fate.

Arete, excellence. Aristos of merit. Beauty of soul, mind, body, heart,

the quality of your awareness, the largesse of your experience,

the natural humility of the bow you return to the mystery

of a tree in bloom, and the wisdom of an old stump,

not in the way of perfection, but the brilliance and courage

of your failure to attain the unattainable, enlightenment

the ultimate defeat for the benefit of all because it’s never complete

even when the Buddha goes straight to hell like an arrow.

Not void bound, bless the intuitive disobedience of the poet

who burns in the flames of her most sacred heresy,

savagely curse with compassion the erosive injustice

of the greedy legislating impoverished standards of living,

raise your voice when you see murder being done

so your silence isn’t complicit and the power of your rage

mollified by the slag of association that blunts

the edge of your sword when the only mercy is a quick kill

with a sharp blade and you go to it like your own execution.

I don’t care if you’re a junkie sleeping on a car seat

on the back porch of a crack house in the summer,

wondering in a moment to yourself if the stars ever weep for us,

or an associate professor of English at the University of Victoria,

cherishing a pair of thin leather gloves some raving beauty

left in your office and though she never returned

to reclaim them and you as for years you hoped and hoped

still rot like black banana skins on your windowsill,

a divorced housewife doing investigative forensics

on what happened to her life at the kitchen table,

share whatever starfields you’ve sown with tares or wheat

as if there were always enough bread to break with everyone.

Take the gold coin you call a career from under your tongue

like a false moonrise and washing your corpse

in your own grave, take the edges off your sphericity,

average the crucials out like a pebble or a planet

in the great tides of life you’re immersed in

like a human panning their own starmud for a little more light

to be shed in the depths of their oceanic awareness

than there was before you showed up like one bright fish

and lit your cells up like votive candles dedicated to the dark

and started seeing things by the light of your own life,

not the Rosetta stone of three dead languages

that never spoke from the heart about the ruses

of being human that get us through the darkest nights of ourselves,

so when someone takes a greasy volume of poems

down from the shelf, the cover worn off, the glue

of the perfect binding crumbling like dreams

in the corners of their eyes as they wake up,

and they’re shuffling loose pages as if they were

paginating a deck of cards, or trying to keep

the leaves of an autumn tree together, though you’re dead,

though your tongue is a leaf on the wind

and your eyes are clouds, your breath gone proto-nebular,

and it’s three in the morning, and the solitude is withering,

and insanity is grinning in their face as if to say

you always knew this is what it would come to,

and they reach for you like a home-brew of magic syllables,

yarrow sticks and tea leaves, liver spots and fossils

in a bonebox at the bottom of your skull cup,

write in such a way they don’t just read what you’ve said

but sit down on the ground with a friend they can share things with

and break your book open like a loaf of bread

spiritually cooling on an open windowsill as fragrant

as white sweet clover growing along the roadsides of paradise,

but as substantially nurturing to life as compassion for the flesh.

PATRICK WHITE  

FREE

FREE

Free. Not falling, not wounding the herb I’m healed by,

as the stars change, as the nuts and the berries and the acorns

come to the trees, mast for the bears and the boars and the birds,

time, is it time that does this, enlarging the nightsky of my mind,

until eternity burns invisibly a point above the spearhead

of the candle flame thrust into my eyes, tears not enough

to put it out, fire on the water, hot sorrows, and the beauty

and bliss thereof, as the stars change, and I am a stranger

to myself over and over and over again, come to the same gate

and the flowers bedraggled by what they’ve accomplished,

knowing no one lives there anymore who knows me.

Realms, states of mind, bells of the soul, mundane conditions

of poetic visions, broken arrows and eyeless snakes of the heart,

maybe a dream with a nightwatchman---is it conceivable?---

allegorizing the emotional life of a window he’s peering through

from the outside, anybody there, come out and show yourself

as the shadows of the light he sees by dodge the lamp,

thieves in the dark, tight-lipped as flowers in an eclipse.

Images, symbols, glimpses, insights, musical riffs

of the picture-music carried on the night air like the fragrance

of a voice blooming late in the year up the street out of sight,

and autumn drinking my blood like wine out of a prophetic skull

and the torches of the tall elms, every tree, reeking

of sacrificial guitars like burning bridges I’ve yet to cross.

The beatific ambiguities of perishing. When

do the blessings end? The housewells of the mirages run dry?

The root fires of inconsolable passions burn themselves out,

kin at last to their own humanity, urns of ashes,

smoke and vapours in the spiritual starfields we people

with our deaths? Our dreams smudged of us

by cedar boughs like bats in the attic, by sweetgrass

to drive us off like unwanted spirits into deserted places

where the curses are creative, and the graces, severe?

Purple thistle and the galactic curds of Queen Ann’s Lace,

loosestrife and golden rod along the roadside, whose

paradise was this? The lame duck fields lie fallow.

Someone’s harvested the abyss and taken it in.

A dog barks in the distance. The moonrise gilds the stubble.

Aimless, the hour. Free. Unharassing. The witness

untroubled by the silence that follows the unanswered question,

the imagination unattached to what it creates as if

it articulates the world as less of a statement, than suggestion.

Is this solid? Is this real? The wind intimates less than it feels.

The husks of the milkweed whisper immaculate conceptions

into their own ears, oceans in a seashell that never

come to fruition, embodiments of love born of deception

to help make things clear by blooding their abstractions.

Needing everything, wanting nothing from anyone,

a poem grows like a tree in the abandoned silo of my heart.

Saturn, Venus, Spica and the moon at dusk, Mercury and Jupiter

just before dawn, I thresh the emptiness for starwheat,

for habitable planets where life is as wise as a loaf of bread

fresh from the oven of the sun, shared like a granary

with everyone who eats. The farmhouses stare back

as if their windows have gone insane threading

the third eye of a needle like a blackhole

that doesn’t mend anything but expands

your field of view into an infinite pointlessness

where everything you do is lyrical, absurd, free.

Poetry’s a deepening spell you get caught up in

the more you cast it like moonlight struggling

with its reflection on a tarpit of watersnakes

that swim like oilslicks on the waters of life.

Nor is the quality of darkness diminished

by those who can’t taste the difference between

a new moon and an eclipse, but, still, they try the hardest,

to no avail to mean what they haven’t seen or been

touched by like eyewitnesses at a mock trial,

and the dissolution of forms on the cold night air

weren’t the style of brevity with the staying power

to disappear like a star or a wildflower or a poet

knowing there’s only so much time, and then there is forever.

PATRICK WHITE

A GOOD DAY AND NIGHT ON EARTH FOR ME WOULD BE

A GOOD DAY AND NIGHT ON EARTH FOR ME WOULD BE

A good day and night on earth for me would be

hurling paint at an eight by four foot canvas

propped up on a rusty hay rake for an easel

on top of a hill by the soft basswood trees in late September.

A thin thread of blue smoke rising from the farmhouse

down below, somebody home and a satisfied ghost,

rising idly like a spirit from the heartwood of a log

of two year old maple I cut and split and stacked myself,

ten cubic cords of habitable planet to make it through the winter.

A good day and night on earth for me would be

like the early Muslims under Umar ibn al-Khattab’s caliphate,

knowing the angels were going to visit the town

around four in the morning, knowing everyone on earth

were given bread and flowers enough not to go to bed hungry tonight, 

that everyone had something they wanted to get up for in the morning

that made it easy and exhilarating to be alive, wild asters

saturated with sunlight and the humming of clumsy honey bees

just below the window apprenticed to a telescope.

Short focal length, Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector

on an equatorial mount with a clock drive synchronized

to the wheeling of the earth like a moonrise in Virgo.

A good day and night on earth for me wouldn’t be

knowing I was loved, but looking back over the tree rings

in my heart like the history of rain that left its mark on me

like every woman I’ve ever loved, sad, mad, bad, beatific

or indifferent to the fact she could make a locust tree bloom

as if it were enraptured by its own crucifixion, the crowns

and stigmata of the thorns it wore with prophetic distinction

like the first heretic ever burned by the new moon

who could taste the mystery of life in the ashes on his lips

when she kissed him one last time, and to steal a line

from Jim Morrison, turned his blood to mystic-heated wine.

Not to assess how well I was loved, but to feel extinct

knowing I gave everything I had to love and still fear

it wasn’t enough. It’s an indelibly memorable mode of madness

I may have fallen into like a habit that stuck like the La Brea Tarpit

somewhere along my antediluvian way, but I hold

the onceness of forever as lovers step away from each other

like an abyss on the downside of a dangerous precipice

up to my jugular vein a razorblade away from where Allah says

he is when I have no reason to disbelieve him. Love

is a sword dance with a waterclock in three four time so

a good day and night on earth for me would be

out walking with the stars alone through the high summer fields

quilted by wildflowers as the moon came up like a water-gilder

and breathed a skin of gold around every one of the tears

they’ve ever shed in joy when some cosmic egg cracked

like a koan in a dragon’s jaw and they were set free

like a winged horse beside Aquila and Cygnus to ride

their own eyebeams in the free range of the sky anywhere they liked,

when the wind throws off its chains like the rain

and I feel forgiven like a starmap for the times

they stubbed their hearts on my life like an asteroid belt

they couldn’t see in the dark on their way to the black market

of a species exchange on earth for something completely different.

A good day and night on earth for me would be

advancing backwards through all the stations of my childhood

and father myself like the man I always wanted to be

like some kind of playful wizard who knew he was

a great fool to squander his life on joy, but knew how

to stop the bleeding in a boy by uncuffing his life from a bike chain

or at least, when the lifeboat goes down, keep him

from feeling like salvage that should have stayed aboard to bail.

I want to mend that wound in every adolescent heart with gold

like the midnight sun smiling on good starwheat in the siloes

of a radiant end to a dark start. That what I sow outlives me well.

Like morning glory in the lobby of the Hollyhock Hotel.

If it were a good day and night on earth for me, it would

have to be for everyone else as well. I’d have to see

the homeless wearing new thresholds on their feet

that welcomed them at the door like prodigal sons and daughters

that didn’t want a black sheep slaughtered in their honour,

and every young girl weeping in the corner of a restaurant

right now so her friends don’t see her nursing a broken heart

like a voodoo doll gored on the horns of a heavy curse

might rise from her gloom like the moon-rise

of a Minoan bull leaper vaulting through the crescents

of her dilemma and landing on her own two feet on the other side.

PATRICK WHITE

TIME GRIEVES IN ME, AUTUMN IN THE APPLE

TIME GRIEVES IN ME, AUTUMN IN THE APPLE

Time grieves in me, autumn in the apple.

Warm sugars in the dusk, my body mourns

the flowering farewells of what has passed,

the eerie twilight smiles of ghosts at the gate

I haven’t seen in lightyears, heraldic seabirds

this far off the coast of an approaching landfall

where I’ll step out of the lifeboat claiming

nothing in the name of anyone who doesn’t

already live there like the private diary of a sundial,

whether they cast a shadow or not, or time

loses its sense of direction in eternity between

one thought-moment and the next, and the waterclock

I was will say out of what I remember of being human,

no destination, you’re free to drift as you wish.

Or if the arrows’s broken for good, the weathervane

doesn’t crow anymore like a cast iron rooster

in a dawn that doesn’t distinguish its voice

from the silence of the darkness that absorbs it

like the white noise of the mute and the dumb

as back up singers to the background cosmic hiss,

let space do the flowing as a change of pace.

Sit on your hands. Unborn. Unperishing.

Embrace your own stillness like a starmap

making plans not to do anything more for the night,

knowing space is as important as timing used to be

to content, when you were all creation myth

in the beginning, and untimely allegory of perishing

at the end. And the young? How you baffled them

lingering in the doorway of an abandoned house of life

they ran to for sanctuary like an old man with nothing

but room on his hands. Be a sea to the waterbirds.

Be a sky to the stars. Death the measure

of how far we’ve walked together without ever

coming to a fork in the roads where we parted company

and birth, the second innocence of the return journey,

better than the first, because, like the flowers of earth,

didn’t we always cherish those most that bloom last?

Oceans ago. When we took the height of starfish

to know how far we’d sunk, and plumbed the eyes

of blackholes with galactic irises for haloes

to determine how long it would take for a shipwreck

to rise again on the event horizon of our next port of call.

Black sail, white sail, same photograph

flying the colours of a country not our own.

Cool bliss I’m beginning to trust, and lust,

God bless lust, taking its time like a slow cologne,

savouring what it used to gulp as if it were

trying to make an ice-cream cone last. Self-sufficiently

mad enough to be gainfully-unemployed finishing

the long labour of destroying my life creatively

I’ll go down into the underworld with my tortoise-shell

abalone Chinese voice-box within a voice-box,

that’s saved every echo of the sirens and muses I’ve ever listened to,

and death or no death, I won’t waste my futility on

trying to make sense of it all, crying over

the vaporous nature of tears. Death is no business

of mine. And life’s a long holiday I took in the flesh.

But I’ll ask her to come with me just the same.

She’ll look back on everything and her hand

will slip from mine like a loveletter of lifelines

out an envelope that hasn’t got anything

to look forward to but what’s been left behind

like a name traced in an afterthought of dust

on a windowsill, an old threshold of seeing

like a bird with a message, a star, a housefly,

the tuning fork of a mosquito, a lightning strike,

a firefly, the wind before a veil of rain, a firefly

that looked down upon the rooftops of a small town

with tears in its eyes for what transpires here,

and a telescope with a hand-painted lens of what it wants to see

when the mirages I crossed starless deserts for

are too near, far too near to my heart to be believed.

Never tell anybody the truth about the causes

and conditions of suffering, and love that asserts

it doesn’t have any, unless there’s enough

mercy in your heart to remember that we

are all humans, expressions, not definitions of ourselves.

But I’ll praise her in such sad, hermetic songs

the great secret of love and life and art

can’t help but speak for itself through her eyes alone,

neither true to the sunset she shines in, nor

false, when she rises before it, to the dawn.

PATRICK WHITE

HOME-THOUGHTS

HOME-THOUGHTS

Earth created lavishly here, spread out,

a canvas gessoed with ice-ages of snow,

glacial cataracts covering the third eye

that dreams in the seed underneath the eyelid

of a pine-cone, tacky with fire, of a mindscape

slashed and hacked out of thick paint

with trowels and knives and the double-bladed

lumberjack axe that deforested the moon. Quick,

violent gestures of life clinging in the interlude

of great ages clashing like continental ice-floes

grinding their teeth in their sleep off the coasts

of an unsalvageable consciousness crushed

like the masts of a matchstick flotilla of lifeboats.

Dark ores of a dream brought to the surface

for refinement from the underworld

of a jewellery box in the form of a coffin,

everybody survives by not looking back

like a fox in retrograde hunting a pheasant

that doesn’t cover its tracks in the snow

in the wake of its feather dusting tail

under the ochre smudge of the winter sun,

the yoke of a smashed egg at the foot of a tree

where the birds return like bush pilots

every year to the shattered mirrors of the lakes

like the sacred syllables of unpronounceable native tongues,

the silence still vast enough to be intruded upon

by engines and chainsaws snarling in the wilderness

in an unholy ghost of blue fumes infernally reeking

like motherless demons shadow dancing

around an angry campfire that scatters the stars

like evangelists of greater conflagrations yet to come.

We gouge and we wound. We die with the sun

and revive like the wraiths of thin atmospheres

that wail like the banshees of the northern lights

outside the frozen windows feathered in ice ferns

we look through darkly like albinos at the moon.

Our cultural life has pink eye. Morning here

is a bad fisherman that doesn’t take its own advice

and heed the warning of how nice the weather always is

whenever there’s a false dawn on the horizon

sailing under the colours of another country

that doesn’t take the black sail of the night down

or shroud the dead they bury at sea in the aniconic flags

that navigate by the starmaps of a neighbouring galaxy.

In this arcane darkness you learn to shine

by your own lights or you die in the cold

like an asteroid belt of boundary stones around

the firepit of the hearths and hardware stores

you’re buried under like an avalanche of prophetic skulls

that went out like a chimney fire of daylilies

rooted in creosote, smothered in a seance of smoke.

Human immensities dwarfed like the afterthoughts

of inhospitable harmonies reconciling the savage discord

of impersonal energies still shaping the world

like turtle blood and starmud in the abyss

of a cosmic medicine bag where the waters of life

break like a northern river out of a birth sac

that chews through its own umbilical cord

like a leg hold trap beside of a rose of blood on the snow.

Creation is always the first draft of an inspiration

that’s never finished revising the tree rings

in its heartwood as if the rain were never sure

of the genre of things it was working in

on a loose scaffolding of dead trees uprooted

on a mountainslope better thatched by snow

than water trying to walk across its own land bridge.

Coming home from an alien space

like a prodigal exile from a foreign land

is always like entering a new continent

where the large mammals of the Pleistocene

haven’t disappeared yet, and you can

instinctually feel the lethal glee of the moon

sword dancing with the sabres of a crouching Smilodon

when you relinquish the comfortable airport

of your arrivals and departures, and cross

the dangerous threshold of your homelessness

like a spiritual materialist with a knack for survival,

tricks on how to live like a snow hare in winter

that smokes the unprepared magician out of the hat

like the cherry red stovepipe of a Napoleon airtight

roaring like the ringmaster of a mammoth hunt

in a surrealistic circus of extinct species

that can trace their lifelines all the way back

to the mountainous watersheds of the Burgess Shale,

the Book of Life written in the fossilized hieroglyphs

of starfish patched like the angelic death’s-heads

emblazoned like coats of arms on the Canadian Shield.

Tradition just a path someone broke in the snow

like an offroad short cut through the woods

that wasn’t expecting to be followed by a cult

of snowshoes woven from the sinews of wild deer

like dreamcatchers in a web of empowering mandalas

that hang on every word you say like the suspension bridges

of community support groups across the Capilano River

of their vertiginous disbelief. We sway like silk

in the heights of our ionized ideals, aurorally,

and even when we don’t shed a lot of light on

what’s real at the end of a long winter, and what is not,

most people think we’re beautiful for the way

we treat our apparitions like the fair-minded history

written by the referees of the victors too polite

to crow in the dawn like Chanticleer in the windows

of another culture being exorcised by the teaching nuns

of another genocidal day at native school. The dominion

of Pandemonium where the fallen angels settle

like big, wet kisses of early April snowflakes

on the lips of the crocuses opening like the mouths

of baby birds in the abandoned nests of the great blue herons.

Goose-down and fur. We’re insulated by the covers

of books that were bred for the purpose

on a fox farm of eternal flames to wrap around our necks

and get us through the winter at the expense

of someone else’s nakedness trembling like a death sentence

in a purple passage of frozen poetic prose.

The cold cuts like a Medusa head of whips

biting you in the third eye of your peripheral vision

like the thorns of something toxic that wants,

not out of spite, but reflex, to lay you out

like a comatose junkie shooting burnt out comets

in a morgue full of falling stars and flash in the pan meteors

you can wish upon with one hand on the shoulder

of St. Peter, martyred upside down like a foundation stone

upon which you can build a church or cube the Kaaba

with a little dirt from outer space washed out

of the god’s-eye of a hurricane of razorblades

railing starclusters of cocaine up their nose

like the C.P.R. in the nasal passages of the Rocky Mountains.

There she blows like a narwhale in the Arctic.

Burial huts of gangrenous crustaceans in lobster pots

enflamed by the seaworthy dawn that hauls them up

like stars caught in the net of Indra, mark one jewel

and you mark them all, over the gunwales

of a waning moonboat that will disappear

like a bar of greasy soap left too long in the water

before it reaches the zenith of its swan dive

and goes the way of all snow like a Martian ice-cap

on a globally warming bald spot in the ozone.

Ancestral elephants carved in ivory like the tusks

of a moon that never forgets, iced like collateral damage

in the turf wars of multicultural gangland glaciers

marking the limitless borders of where everyone

came from in the first place like post cards and passports

from the edge of dispossessed nowhere stamped

by the monarchial wavelengths of a bureaucratic blood oath

that approves of your living and dying here

on the dark side of the moon, six months of the year.

Fewer Canadians commit suicide than Scandinavians

because of light deprivation. The raccoons wear

outlaw masks to keep from going snow blind

in semi-hibernation hiding out in the time locked

cryonic vaults in the suspended animation of a dream

where the only safe place is in a house that’s burnt to the ground

when the birds are falling out of the frigid air

in mid January like a Hitchcock movie made

in Hollywood North that couldn’t keep

the medicine wheels of its own spiritual flightfeathers up

let alone the lapwings of the alarmist divas

in the immaculate choirs of shadowless noon.

PATRICK WHITE

I LIVE IN OBSCURITY WITH THE NIGHTBIRDS AND NO ONE SIGNS THE AIR

I LIVE IN OBSCURITY WITH THE NIGHTBIRDS AND NO ONE SIGNS THE AIR

I live in obscurity with the nightbirds and no one signs the air.

I listen to the click languages of pebbles on the riptarian shore

as one thought washes over another, hand over hand,

as if they were making a pact with one another they meant to keep

this time, one corpse washing the back of the other,

a flowering of hands on the heft of a sword-dancing vow.

It’s difficult to take your silence seriously in a crowd

and not be estranged by it. So many voices looking for a home,

so many gleeman to the king of the oildrum booming

like a bullfrog under the overpass of a careless city

where the poets are more venal than the middle class they castigate

like the sins of their parents visited upon them. Scare someone

meaningfully enough and they’ll atavistically return

to what they know best. Boo! But take it in jest.

Maybe never to have been born is best after all

has been said and said and said and said as Sophocles did

and so little done to make a difference to the tragi-comical

starfish drowning in the tidal pools of their own eyes

depending on the prescription they’re wearing at the time,

oceans in the rose, puddles of turbulent starmud,

or the Hubble wowing us like the rainbow body

of a one-eyed guru born without lachrymal glands,

visions of life lining the highway like roadkill

or moon-toothed muskie dying of thirst in a freshwater lake.

May the anguished eyes of starving children eat your poems

like the junkfood you went bobbing for in the dumpsters

of literary tradition. Gag them on the mouthy paint rags

of your genetically modified masterpieces. Too outlaw

by nature, not inclination, to feel at home in the 4-H Club

poetry’s become, where the cutest piglet wins a blue ribbon,

and a quarter hind of bullshit has its horns manicured

like the fingernails of the moon, so the roses

aren’t gored on their thorns, and everyone clarifies

the creosote clinging like polyps to the strings

of their cardboard voice-box guitars to sing like starlings

caught in the throat of a cold chimney in spring,

I live out here like a hermit thrush untroubled

by the peripheral visions of co-habitable women

who make no bones, like muses, of what they do

and do not want. It’s good to give as good as you get

and a bit beside if you’re trying to make a spiritual point

to somebody’s lies, but, in private, in savage solitude,

I howl at the moonrise on my own terms like a bush wolf

and the hills reiterate the forms my longing takes

when something deeply wounded inside, opens my mouth

like a waterlily in a nunnery of muses when the pain of what

it’s gangrenously rooted in breaks its vow of silence

like the oracular fortune-cookie of a madwoman

losing her virginity to the godhead of a koan

that possesses her faculties like the oxymoron of a unitive life

reconciling opposites in a coincidence of trivial profundities

and the Longinean lacunae in the anonymous lives of the sublimely absurd

as if she were trying to put the pagan back in the cult and coven of the word.

I look up at the night, sometimes, in a wanderlust of wonder

among the willows down by the river, and I name

the constellations I remember like bubble-gum space cards

from my childhood, and I swear I can read the occult tattoos

on the flesh of a blue Pictish witch jumping naked

through fire of the Pleiades as if there were no urns to be afraid of

but the ones that choke on the ashes and smoke

of the expiry date of their smouldering desires

trying to smudge their ghosts with sweetgrass

like astroturf above the flower arrangements

of their matchbook pyres, like undertakers

at a careerist impasse for words synonymous with love

as they have, like the Inuit vocabulary for snow,

read backward in the breathless mirrors

that pronounce them enigmatically dead

as the paradigmatic da Vinci code deciphered

like a loveletter they were afraid to throw into the flames

for fear of depriving literary culture of twenty six ways

of avoiding a word for their fear of death, as fluently

as the sacred seed syllables that can be derived

from the alpha and omega at the beginning and end

of a work of love, not self enhancement, deep in the woods,

in the vernal shadows of the moon, under the catkins of the aspens

because long before the leaves started publishing

their spring and autumnal memoirs, poetry, like the love of life

depended upon nothing, not even the occasional hermit thrush

in a black walnut tree, pouring its solitary heart out to the Pleiades.

PATRICK WHITE