BY THE LIGHT I HAVE BEEN GIVEN TO GO BY

BY THE LIGHT I HAVE BEEN GIVEN TO GO BY

By the light I have been given to go by,

I can see how homeless the journey truly is.

How provisional the shrines along the way like milestones

we stop to paint like the inside of our skulls

or the caves we first dwelled in with our dead

buried under fire and the numinosity of our picture music

impregnating the womb walls of a space made sacred by fear.

The darkness bears my secrets, and in the torchlight,

in carbon and red ochre, a diary of shamans

gored by defecating rhinos speared to death.

I have imagined my way into an understanding

that is a rite of passage into a space that is

a vast abyss of intelligence, a nothingness

that speaks through an intuitive grammar of things

as if a galaxy, a star, stone, tree, raindrop were each a thought,

a sign, a word, the syntax of a growing paradigm

of creative awareness that we’re completely alone

and lost at sea like fish on the moon crawling out of its tides

as if nothing bound us, not even detachment,

nor a god that exists as a confession of the way we do,

nor any medium we work in as reflection of our presence

labouring away at an unattainable world that won’t exist

until we do, and it’s 7 to 5 against anyone making it that far.

But what a joy to emerge out of our own nothingness

like a secret we’re letting ourselves in on,

making it up as we go along like a deportable myth of origin

we can adapt to our infinite beginnings

because for starters, it has none of its own.

We were born to express ourselves like apple trees.

We were born to see and be happy marvelling at the event.

To enjoy longing for things we were never missing

and be guided by wise men we never listen to

back to a silence that has nothing to say for itself

that we didn’t already know in the first place.

Everywhere is the threshold of the return journey.

Life is either an exile, or it stays at home like a follower.

Bless the enlightened apostates of the dangerous religion

that desecrates the mind by worshipping it.

Why make a chain out of your umbilical cord

and get your head wrapped around it like a noose

because you forgot meaning was an art

and not a way to take yourself way too seriously to heart?

Why go to war with your own mind

just to administer to the needs of the suffering

when you can paint a god in blood and ashes

and decultify yourself with the creative freedom

of your imagination deconstructing the fable of your belief

that it’s the being, not the becoming, that endures.

And you can do this without even knowing how to draw.

A starmap doesn’t shine. A blue print doesn’t open a door.

If you ask a crutch to do your walking for you,

it’s going to throw you away like a miracle

at the top of the stairs of Notre Dame de Coeur.

Better to be the sacred whore of a thousand profligate gods

than the unrepentant nun of one who shuts the world out,

like art for art’s sake, to revel in her own extinction

in a mystical connubium with an unregenerate imagination.

You can burn your gates and cages in a wild field if you like

for not being able to keep the flowers in, or keep the wind

from rioting with the leaves way past curfew,

but there was never any risk of being granted what you ask

because life is the unpredictable moon rise

that deepens the calendars with a renewed humility

towards the extraordinary mutability of time.

What have you ever been that baffled your imagination?

It isn’t reason that inspires us to become a stranger tomorrow

to the self we knew today. Genuine faith isn’t

an artificial life support system to keep something alive

that should have been allowed to die quietly away yesterday.

Millions upon millions of facts like a graveyard of skeleton keys

to a door we can’t find open within ourselves

as if we’d just stepped through it to be here where we live

deciphering the shapes of the clouds as if we lived in code.

Hide your secret deep enough if you want it to be known.

Walk alone as far as you can until you can’t

if you want the world to walk the rest of the way with you.

The white demon that knows heaven and hell experientially

mentors the senses in the spiritual subtleties of the black angel

that comes like the new moon of a third eye

to help the exegetes of light see further into the dark

by blowing their candles out like flowers.

All seekers are roads looking for a map to follow.

Preludes after the fact, that set out to look for their own endings.

Be a star. And keep your afterlife behind you

like the shadow of the last form you cast upon the earth.

Be an eye that doesn’t leave any room between the moon

and it’s reflection so that the substance of life is seeing

not that you’re a distinct and separate entity

that cosmically identifies with your exclusion

but that you’re wholly within easy reach of everything

that depends upon you for its existence. Just as every leaf

you let fall in the autumn like an adage of wisdom

about how you can know the world by its fruits

first came to the tree like a smile to your face

when you realized your imagination was

the inconceivable dynamic of a creative state of grace.

PATRICK WHITE

SITTING ON THE OUTDOOR PATIO AT O'REILLY'S

SITTING ON THE OUTDOOR PATIO AT O’REILLY’S

Sitting on the outdoor patio at O’Reilly’s

in a shady corner with the umbrella down

where they abide the smokers like lepers in an ashtray.

O, bad, bad. Say the purists whose way of life

is a diet. Pot of black coffee squatting like a guru

in the middle of the table, two beer for my buddy, Simon,

I’m anchored to my chair foursquare at the corner

of Gore and the Universe, watching the leaves

on the crab apple trees in the parking lot below

the heritage fire tower shed easily in the sunshine

like passing afterthoughts. Yellow eyelids.

Knowing there are not too many years left

I’ll be able to do this. Sit and watch. In the flesh.

The numbness and strain on the novellas

of the faces of a married couple shell-shocked

by the barrage of frontline circumstances

they’ve been under most of their adult lives

as if they had to bury their hearts just to survive

like something they’d come back to later,

Roadkill. A doe and buck. Ten points, no less.

The woman with a steel factory of thick, red hair

listening sexually to a career-oriented man

in a patchy beard he trims every Thursday

chat her up as she tries to recall the last burning bush

that left a rash on the inside of her thighs.

It’s good to see love still has its enthusiasts.

Almost nautical. The canal near. The heritage lamp.

I pull a pen out of the inside pocket of my leather jacket

that makes me look rougher than I actually am,

beautiful pen, peacock blue, with heft, like a sword,

or an oar I took for free when I last went

to pay part of my rent at the real estate office

across the street with the bricked-in windows

that look like the eyes of the blind. Impervious.

And I scribble on the brown envelope that scared me

at first, but only wanted to tell me how much

I would be getting on my old age pension

and guaranteed income supplement cheque

as if somehow I’d rounded all the bases

back to homeplate and now it was time to clean

my locker out and retire my number like a lottery ticket,

Normal’s even more surrealistic than spaced out is

because it’s not expected to be, my thought for the day.

Maybe that will become part of a poem later

as I wonder, looking out my apartment window,

how I ever ended up here, or why I’ve stayed

for the last thirty-three years other than cheap rent,

the company of trees, and long, long eras in which

to perfect my solitude like one of ten thousand lakes

around here that hasn’t been named yet

for some peculiarity of easy reference. Poet Lake.

Why not? I’ll be the first to drown my book in it.

Love lyrics to the fingerling water sylphs I’ll stock it with.

How many open doors of liberation have I had

to step through in the course of my life so far

to avoid being incarcerated by what I stepped into

like the new moon on the surface of the La Brea Tarpit

in the depths, or a soul into a body that was

confused by it like starmud and spiritual window putty?

How many tears have I beaded like a rosary of water

on oil, trying to make some sense of human sorrow,

compiling a zodiac of extinct species for a coffee-table

nobody ever opened? All my life I’ve stolen

poems from my poverty like a thief that gives back

tenfold. It’s a kind of poor boy pride I expect

but at least it’s mine and I’ll stand and I’ll fall by it,

moonrise and moonset, with no bitterness or regret,

few heralds at the entrance and no paid mourners at the exit.

Patinas of lustreless brass, old gold in the Bronze Age,

and scarlet letters like a sacred vowel of life

triple x-rated by the mythically-inflated hypocrites

at the auto de fe of the maples who’d rather

burn with desire in the house of life than

eat their own ashes out of the ethical gutter

of the hand of God washed in the blood of the lamb,

I watch the shadows of the leaves falling

against a wall of warm fieldstones giving

their heat up to the approaching night

like loaves of home-made bread cooling

on a windowsill it’s easy enough to mistake

for the threshold of a vagrant homelessness

I’ve laboured at like a road with no way back

to the security of the delusion I was going somewhere

when here, just as much as there, was where

it was at all along and will be, hallelujah, after I’m gone.

lol

PATRICK WHITE

A MOMENT IN THE WORLD, WITH NO REGRET

A MOMENT IN THE WORLD, WITH NO REGRET

A moment in the world, with no regret

I cancel the madness, the sadness, the hurt, the pain.

I cancel the thorns on the footpaths through

the labyrinths of the brain, I absolve the dragons

of the vows they took to protect the taboos

around the silver snake skins the moon shed

on the lake just before it went insane among

its secluded death masks. A nanosecond of peace

symbolically invoked against the gestures of darkness

calculating the odds of it ever happening

by a poet who lays his reason down

like the sacred syllable of an astrolabe in the grass

and shouts hallelujah at the stars until he’s got them

so well trained to the echoes of his voice

they spontaneously pour their best season of aged light

into the seashells and wine-cellars of his ears.

I short circuit the fuses and nerves

of the terrorist’s spinal cord wired to hatred

and say, brother, you can’t make a watergarden

of bloodshed in paradise by blowing up children

like waterlilies or trying to teach a snakepit

of downed powerlines to dance to the sound

of your Ousi or AK-47 like a flute. Making scar tissue

of the moon isn’t proof of the sincerity of your wound.

Allah is great. Not petty, clever, and cunning.

Yahweh made friends with a man from Uruk.

Eve was a starlit night in Ethiopia and the mother

of us all. Adam means the red man. Melanin

is a mood ring. Our flags are torn like blossoms

from a bough. O improbable cause just for once

take the barking dog off the short chain of your mind

and will, and let it run free in a wild starfield

while you lie down in paradise alive and well now

writing love lyrics for the roses in the valleys

you wander into without forgetting the name of God.

And you put down the rod. You the whip. You

the voice and the tongue that throws acid

in the eyes of your native language like a spitting cobra.

You the book that drank saliva out of another man’s mouth

to justify the public fountains piped from the sewers

of the Via Cloaca of political affairs. Get

real naked, as nude as the truth, and take a bath

in the stars for once to see what a little bit of dirt

you really are, compared to the creative radiance

of their magnificence. Take a few minutes off the clock

and throw them like flower seeds that glow

in the dark starmud of your soul on the dungheap

of your ambitions and taking root like a heart

in your body again, a blessing of change

that transforms you from the inside out,

watch them bloom like starclusters of New England asters

with astronomical aspirations undeterred

by the black dwarfs of yours that burn out

like a matchbook of solar flares along the return journey

of the looping lightyears of the humbler eras

of your second innocence better than the first

because you’ve overcome the worst in yourself

the better to receive it as a gift you didn’t

give yourself behind your back like a shadow

of what it’s supposed to be. Put down your arrogance.

Put down your deceit. How far can you get in life

anyway? Think of the 3.5 billion years

of upright walking on the earth it took put one footprint

down on the moon. Already standing on two good legs

like pillars of the public why do you reach out for

the crutch of a human who’s only got one

on their lunar lander and as much hope

as the nostalgic ghost of a child amputee?

I’ll reserve judgement for another day, but for now

put it on hold as if you had another more important

call to take from a nightbird you haven’t heard from

in a long time, trying to clarify your original longing

for something just as real, as it is sublime

whether you attain it or not, or die happily in the attempt,

as long as it takes for an electron to jump

the quantum gap between orbitals to release

a photon of insight, stop underwhelming yourself,

the rest of us, and the world. On the face of it

we’re all on the same side of seeing as our eyes are,

the same bank of being as our presence here is

listening to our mindstreams whisper lyrical suggestions

to the prophetic skulls of moonrocks caught in the flow

like glacial lockets of an underground ice age

dreaming of a day it might rain on the moon.

Un-noose the knot wrapped around your neck

like the umbilical cord of a premature birth.

Unloose the Circlet of the Western Fish

and throw them back in the water to swim away.

Kick the stool away like rabies from a mad moondog

and take it as the first sign of a parallel universe

that today’s not a good day to commit suicide,

to kill someone, to injure and maim, to bully the earth

because you’re in debt to your own self-worth.

One riff of picture-music. One gust of stars

in the dread locks of the willows, one sip of time

running like clear water down from the world mountain again,

that isn’t polluted by the oilslicks of our own reflections in it,

one moment of silence, to stop and remember your death

like a muse that comes every night to sleep on your grave

because you failed at everything she urged you to do

and you did, by losing and growing, losing and growing

against the angel in the way you never hesitated to take on.

One little mutant side-step of evolution off the beaten path

so there’s no road kill in the wake of the journey

that’s revealing your life to you like crows and crocuses

in the spring, self immolations of sumac in the fall

because you’ve finally found something worth dying for

that demands nothing less than everything of your life

all the time you’ve got it like a burning candle

to befriend the light by flowering a little. Vetch

in the quantumly entangled starfields, or Lady at the Gate

over by the abandoned pump on the moon

with the broken trigger of a waxing handle for leverage.

PATRICK WHITE

SWEET SEPTEMBER FIELDS SWEEP ME AWAY

SWEET SEPTEMBER FIELDS SWEEP ME AWAY

Sweet September fields sweep me away

with the stragglers among the wildflowers

when the woods are emanating the fragrance

of the collaborative solitude of life

and death smells like an old couch

that’s been left out in the rain, abandoned

like a barn. Or a coffin in no hurry

to bury itself. Scotch thistles, asters,

eggs and butter, all the chicory’s gone

and the Queen Anne’s Lace. I’m hitchhiking

out to Smokin’ Eagles as if I owned space

and time were its caretaker. Lord

of all the estates I survey in passing

from the back of a Ford pick-up truck.

My family thousands of miles away

I haven’t seen for years, my daughter

inexplicably alienated, my son, god knows

where, lovers and friends in the past

still hanging on the walls of my mind

like ashen renditions of the mystic visions

of the Neanderthals, or busty out of date calendars

with nineteen fifties sweater girl sex appeal,

or scenic autumns that never shed their leaves,

yet however culpable I might feel

because I’m shadowed by the arrogance

of thinking anything’s ever anyone’s fault,

I’m freer than I was yesterday, and I’m ageing

like a tree in an old growth forest that’s been

spiked by nails through its heartwood

to keep it from being clear cut down.

And though there’s a sense of integrity

about being alive I still feel I don’t deserve,

as the clouds speed by and everything

is imploding into a point it’s trying to make

I’m certain I’m never going to get,

but so be it, I’m not fleeing from anything

or being drawn by anything up ahead

like a siren on the rocks I was born to drown

in my attempt to rescue. Neither a vector

nor a locus. A man with an irrelevant name

and a poem in his pocket, watching the mustard

take over the fields nobody has any use for

anymore. As they return to what they were

originally dreaming before they woke up

green as wheat in an eternal recurrence of innocence.

I study the fractals of the uppermost branches

of the maples where they meet the sky

like rivers and axons flowing into a sea of light.

Fire, fire, fire, the dragons are rising from the pyres

of the aspen groves like low lying Chinese fog

intermingling with cosmically aspiring Hindu smoke.

Words burn in the heart like processional waterbirds

heading south, and then just as quickly put themselves out

like an Indian paintbrush mixing too much burnt sienna

in its cadmium orange. And though there’s a tinge,

a patina of sad blessing in the air that’s as ancient

as the earth itself, I’m borne by life like a torch

into the dark. I illuminate without leaving any sign

or indelible mark to say I was ever here that wasn’t

at least as perishable as the vetch or the cattails

in the drainage ditches alongside these sweet September fields.

Younger, you paint your life in oils, but as

you grow older you begin to realize life is

a watercolour in a backwash of tears that runs

like blood in the water under the bridge

whenever you cry with no regrets for the evanescence

of the lightyears you left still sleepwalking somewhere

where the river turns and the willows cut off all their hair

behind you, to show you the empty nests

and downy ghosts of the fledgling stars born of the dead.

PATRICK WHITE

AND SHOULD IT COME TIME TO SPEAK OF THE SADNESS

AND SHOULD IT COME TIME TO SPEAK OF THE SADNESS

And should it come time to speak of the sadness

that reaches fruition in the medicine bag of the heart,

don’t bring a teacher that can’t heal by singing and dancing

to the wounded discipline of a lost art that’s gone

into the sacred solitude of the secret suffering

that upholds the integrity of the silence in your eyes.

This is a seeing that has nothing to do with truth or lies

or the innovative causality of pain. Don’t speak

of its release as enlightenment or liberation,

as if you were uncaging doves from the ashes of your voice.

Don’t seek what has eluded you when you’re cloaked

in an eyeless night like the screening myth of a lonely alibi.

And should it come time to speak of the sadness

don’t humble the message at the expense of the medium you choose

to weep in when the hidden urges you into the open

like a dragonfly emerging from the hovel of a chrysalis

into a palace of air with the wingspan of your diaphanous windows

beaded in tears like the afterbirth of the rain

in the post-natal mirrors of your indefinable awareness of life

as the sweetest agony of sorrow transformed into bliss

you ever had to endure like the darkest night

of a sea change in the unforeseeable nature

of your inconceivable soul trying to emulate

the unknown likeness you shapeshift to accommodate

the arrival and departure of everything you’ve ever had to let go of

like summer stars, and waterbirds, and legendary ordeals of love

when the full moon so often filled the empty silos of your longing

with the unsuccessful harvests of hungry ghosts

that competed with the sparrows and the scarecrows

for the seeds of a garden the wind neglected to sow.

And should it come time to speak of the sadness

that saturates all human affairs in an aura of mourning

that hangs in the air like a mingling of swords and bells,

don’t pretend your life was a nuclear winter of unrelieved misery

when everyone knows if it weren’t for trying to cling to joy

or even the longing for it, you might have smiled your way

through everything like the cold stone of the moon.

Remember those thoughts that used to come

like snakeoil salesmen that greased their sinusoidal way

into your heart like coiled serpent fire that mesmerized you

like the blue bird of happiness on your own projections

until the promise wore thin, and all your ploys at joy

turned out to be nothing but the hucksterism of tapeworms?

And, then, as it sometimes happened more often in autumn

than spring, your heart soared like a guitar with a broken string

taking wing like a waterbird off your tears

until you burned out like a comet with an uplifting message

in a niche that was meant for candles with slower wicks?

That kept you hanging onto life like a burning box kite didn’t it?

And should it come time to speak of the sadness

like a sin of omission that overpowers us all eventually

because the best things we promised ourselves

were never unattainable and the joy we sought and fought

and laboured for, and did not find, was barely explainable

even to us who became experts in grinding mirages into lenses

to reveal where it might be hiding somewhere in the universe

right under our noses. Up close and as intimate as our eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

WON'T MEAN MUCH IF YOUR EYES AREN'T OPEN IN YOUR BLOOD

WON’T MEAN MUCH IF YOUR EYES AREN’T OPEN IN YOUR BLOOD

Won’t mean much if your eyes aren’t open in your blood.

If the stars can’t see you because you don’t know how

to read them poetry in the small cafes of your heart

accompanied by spoons and plates and broken goblets

of the cheap house wine that smash just like love affairs

dashing your skull against the rocks, hoping the mermaids come back.

If you can’t hear in the parking lot of a raucous industry

the colours of your emotions, you’re a deaf chameleon

and who could make you listen to what you can’t listen to

even if you had enough people who loved you around you

to want you to try to listen to your own tears when you cry?

Your ear on the same wavelength as a corrugated tin roof,

maybe you can see what I’m trying to say to you

if you close your eyes, and just listen to the rain without

trying too hard to make a big effortless effort to be

auditorily enlightened by the racket of your delusions.

I can’t remember when my life stopped being my own

and I went to bed one night, and I was as human as my toes are

and I awoke, I was merely the afterbirth of a visionary

I didn’t recognize, as my eyes were being igneously wrung

from a cope of dark ore like stars out of the distant hills.

Not a lot of self-respect from the beginning, maybe

it wasn’t that hard becoming everyone and everything else,

and I was a prime candidate for effacement

but when I looked into the mirror of my

ten inch, equatorially mounted, clock-driven, reflecting telescope

I used like a canning jar to capture and mount stars and fireflies

on a black velvet starmap, all I could see

was this abyss staring back at me that couldn’t say

where I’d gone, but the last I thought I heard

was that I got a job as a janitor in an hourglass

sweeping mirages out of a desert of private school stars.

I say what I see as it occurs to me spontaneously.

And I’m compelled to say it without hesitation

so the vision isn’t tainted by the colour of the jewel

it’s passing through, from one eye to the next, ad infinitum.

No light pollution in the shining, though there’s something

about the idea of purity that continues to appal me

because I never had so much against chaos from the beginning

and I sense a deep hatred of all that is soiled and flawed,

in which case, I’d rather be an outlaw than one of these monks

who disdain me because I can’t help seeing their discipline

as uncreatively redundant. Eventually, if they’re blessed,

all our faces are going to fall off by themselves

like the scabs of sunspots that healed the wounded light

like a wildflower shedding its petals like nurses’ caps

and deathmasks frozen like a moment in time meant

to last forever though we go on being estranged by them forever.

Uncanny transformations of the solid into the real.

Maybe it’s time to let the mindstream flow as it will

and let the burning bridges of our delusions cross us for a change

to get to the other side of a life that’s only got one bank

and it’s as clear as space, we’re not even standing on that.

Hang on. Let go. It’s just your hand opening and closing

like a door in a dream, and you’ll find your falling

just as fast as you ever were and if you were to ask your eyes

they couldn’t tell in this vastness whether your were falling up or down.

When you’ve dismantled all you’ve desired,

post neo-deconstructionism sets in like spiritual rigor mortis

and you can’t tell if you’re sleeping with the living or the dead

when you haven’t got your mask on. You can wear holes

in your shoes, and windows and carpets, pacing

like a waterclock of the heart in an hourglass of waiting

like a boy at the edge of the curb with his elbows on his knees

and his face in his glum hands, waiting for a parade

with sacred clowns throwing away free candies

like stars along the route of the mystic Milky Way.

Just be sure to keep your eyes open like a spring thaw

so the light can recognize you like the flower that brought it

to full illumination this time last year like a candle

that keeps blowing its petals out so you can see

the black matter of what you are not deeper

into the eyeless dark than you’ve ever bloomed before.

PATRCK WHITE  

I APPROACH THE ANGER OF MY INNER CHILD

I APPROACH THE ANGER OF MY INNER CHILD

I approach the anger of my inner child

with the smile of a Buddha and let the squall

blow until it burns itself out like a field fire,

defaulting into my second innocence,

more experienced than the first to fall.

Everything is looping progressively backwards through time.

I do what the stars do. Blue through red, I shine.

I grow huge. I implode. I go supernova.

Then I’m blind as a black dwarf that will come

of all of this. I lay my ashes on the roots

of the roses and say make what you can of me.

Pour a portion of your cup back into the river

you drink from in tribute and gratitude

for what it’s given you. You take. You die.

You receive. You live. But it takes years

of coming back to life to try again

to learn how childishly simple this is

and how enlightening it is to be mentored by the rain.

Bless your ashes as a gift of the flame

that burns in you. Return yourself like dust

to the long road as lost as you were you

firewalked with like a companion who never

said a word, but trusted you to guess

where you were going and followed you

like a shadow as if nothing were left unsaid.

Dead is dead. Whatever death is, even

if it’s more of an is not than anything

we won’t have the imagination to wish for

like eyes of dark matter that keep the light

to themselves, the photonic spheres

of our skulls in blackholes and our femurs

more like firesticks than peacepipes or bird bone flutes.

If you’ve got a soul left worth speaking of,

puts wings on your urn and learn to transmigrate

in the bodies of Pythagorean birds or Iranian angels

as if you had a message written on the wind

that clarified the medium it was encoded in

without any preconditions upon your imagination.

You write it. It writes you. Starmaps and dice.

You’ve got to roll your bones like an avalanche

at least once. Bit by snake-eyes before

you clear the table like a house of Tarot cards.

I’d be nine in the fifth place if I were the I Ching.

I would do it all differently to keep it the same.

I’d be an event instead of a thing. I’d be as obvious

as the sky in my sophistication. More stoutly good,

perhaps, than spiritually uplifting as if that

were the easy path of a godless man’s insistence

upon evil, when it’s more a matter of perceptive error

when you begin to distinguish between mirages and water

and who has access, and who does not, to your housewell.

No heaven to aspire to. No hell to avoid.

No narrow bridge over a dizzying height.

No mystic vertigo at a Sufic crossroads.

The dark shines as fearlessly as the light.

Take a human pride in the night

that has fashioned you out of its own starmud.

The dark mother who knew the colour

of your eyes before you did. The one

you showed her, and the one you hid

like a private life at the back of your head.

And if you’re taken by surprise the way

an osprey seizes a snake and finds it’s

grabbed a dragon by the tail, or an Aztec

takes hold of your heart as a sacrifice

to a plumed serpent, don’t squander

your superlatives on things you didn’t mean to say.

Be diamond. Be aquiline as Al Tair in Aquila.

Don’t waste your eyes on pedestrian jewels.

High in the mountains of the moon, pursue

an earthly excellence like the sport

of a peasant king or queen in exile. But remember,

any valley you might find yourself wandering through

like a nightstream seeking its equilibrium in low places

isn’t a grave plot to overthrow you

as you approach the sea with your eyes wide open

and no summons in your hand you’ve been asked

to answer for. As if your silence weren’t witness enough.

PATRICK WHITE