O WHAT A DELIGHT IN LIFE IT IS

O WHAT A DELIGHT IN LIFE IT IS

O what a delight in life it is just to sit here

following my mind down to the river

on the deerpaths of wherever it takes me

as I flow along like a shadow in the wake of myself.

The sky is urgent with sparrows above

the fretting woodshed of another year

without dry wood. My kind of devotion

to a life that’s been living me like the hagiography

of an exhumed poet from the sixteenth century who died

in blissful penury not ever knowing

if he were discovered or not. No matter

he wrestled with his own shadow like the angel

in the way, creative contention is the usual mode

of life going offroad to get around things

like rocks in the waterclock of the mindstream

listening to dangerous explanations suggested by Shakespeare.

I keep wondering what kind of a mirror of magistrates

do I compare my mind to to suspect behind my back

I’m sophisticatedly crazy? Things only

seem to make a surrealistic kind of sense

that leaves me feeling existentially estranged

on a less habitable planet than the one

I thought I landed on in a homier atmosphere

than this abyss I’m multiversally immersed in now

shedding yellow leaves from other worldly elm trees

that exhilarate me as if I were falling with them

like gusts of Canada geese descending on a cornfield

the tractors have trampled like hogs and cattle

after the moon’s been husked like a pearl. A civilization

based on agriculture with nothing to eat.

I’ve always pursued an earthly excellence

in the name of remaining true to my folly

as an exercise in how to live wholly as a human

while I’ve still got enough instincts about me

to know it standing on an immodest escarpment

getting lonelier and lonelier the longer

I look at the stars as I have since I was a boy

with such longing to go there I cried myself

to sleep every night for three years realizing

I was born too early to be actualized by my dreams.

I’m dancing through beartraps in a marijuana patch

the spectrographs, the bikers and the ultra lights

missed by a hair on an emission spectrum

that coloured the whole affair like science fiction

but please don’t take my metaphors too literally

or attribute them to a lack of ardent conviction.

I’ve never got any i.d. on me when a traffic light

stops to ask me who I am and it cuffs me

like a crosswalk when I tell it I don’t

have a credible answer it would be inclined

to believe anymore than I can bring myself to anyway.

Must be the autumnal freedom of creative decay

that makes me think I can get away with things like that.

I’m sleepwalking in the dream of a junkyard bear

in deep hibernation in a niche of the earth

wasting my fat on votive candles I’m trying

to keep lit in the greenhouse I enshrined

like a water palace with as few impurities in it

as I could manage with a manual pump and a housewell

for a heart. Northern pike eyeing you under the ice

in winter like submarines under what’s left of the Arctic ice cap.

Minnows running the rapids of the spring run-off

before all the snow’s melted down to the knees

of a scarecrow’s blue jeans, I don’t have to be happy

to take a delight in the solitude of my own nature.

Like the shrew or the deermouse or the bedraggled

white tail buck unnerved by the wolves

that have drifted like hungry snow across its tracks

as if their noses were the spearheads of a ouiji board,

or any other creature befuddled by the urgency

of being excruciatingly here to wonder as if

wonder were a solitary form of worshipping

what comes as naturally as flowers to a beloved’s grave

as if they could say things about life only

the most perishable could whisper to the dead

in the full light of day and have them believe it,

I live elementally on the edge of extremes

and rebuke my abstractions with compassion

for everything that lives as I do, and everything does.

Don’t be fooled by the false idols again.

The priests eat their food for them and swallow

and the angels at the door were born without appetites.

What I despair of is always so much more intriguing

than what I hope for I’m always a shadow shy

of shining. I enter through the exit door

as if dawn were the beginning of a prolonged farewell.

And I’m best met at twilight with Venus in the west.

Life should turn away from me more often than it does.

I can think like a bell when I need to, but not until

the demonic clarification of my sensual inebriation

as a man coming to terms with looping back on himself

as if the future were already behind him

and the past had yet to come like the ghost

of the present that haunts this derelict house of life

like a train whistle way off in the distance,

does the incredible sadness of being alive

in a universe that doesn’t cherish what it labours

so effortlessly to perfect move you just as equinoctially

to love life with an autumnal tenderness

for what’s savaged like a sacrifice at a bad harvest

as well as the foolishness of the negligently enlightened

taking possession of their own emptiness hand to mouth

scooped out of the begging bowls of their cranial detachments.

Burn to love like an affirmative protest of the way we are.

Don’t feign a tear under the third eye of a warrior clown

but be in no doubt about what flowers and dies

on the waters of life like an unanticipated surprise.

PATRICK WHITE

EVEN THOUGH IT'S ONLY THE CANADA GEESE

EVEN THOUGH IT’S ONLY THE CANADA GEESE

Even though it’s only the Canada geese

moving like prayer beads and caravans

out of a white Sahara of snow to come,

it’s still a child’ first night in hospital alone,

abandoned, it’s still the electric dagger

of separation in the hand of an assassin

you raised as one of your own. Native

absentia around a wounded firepit

that died like a besieged town from within.

The last waterbird flying out of the cauldron

of Stalingrad as the sixth army looks upon

the futility of its glory disappearing into

the distance as it’s about to be boiled

like a kid in its mother’s milk. Seig Heil

like an hour hand at midnight at the stroke

of doom. Goose-step your way into

the cooking pot. The wasps in the apple-orchard

grow nasty and then they’re numb

as frozen semi-colons on the windowsill

or as the Arabs say, the first to get angry

loses. When the last lifeboat’s left, drown

in your own isolation like a beach in paradise

or learn to swim through fire out of your depths

like hot diamonds on ice, or a meteor

with life inside making a quiet impact

in Antarctica like the stem cell of another

roll of the dice we carved from the skull

of the moon as if we were poaching mammoth tusks

like the first and last crescents of an extinct species.

Insulated by hibernal modernity from the elements.

Distracted by the labyrinths of loneliness

we wander in, convinced we’re getting somewhere

that’s always better than here, but when

you hear the geese high overhead at night

as you have a thousand times before you can’t help

but hear something sad, wise, intractable

in the calling of a wounded voice ancient

with farewells. It’s a funeral march. It’s a requiem.

It’s a dying trumpeter swan in the sunset

addressing the dead it too will soon forget.

This autumn I listen to the fireball whiskey

raging like old drunks sitting like flying buttresses

at the bar, exaggerate the fire-power

in the hearts of last year’s campaign

consigned to the pages of history now

like leaves to the duff and detritus

of the archival forest floor acidic

with slippery calendars caked together

like leeches bleeding the autumn to break

the fever like war with a scalpel big as a bayonet

and a doctor’s certificate to be absent without leave

like the shedding trees when it’s harvest time

in East Anglia and Harold’s medieval army

has to leave at precisely the wrong moment

to bring in the sheaves and split the heartwood

with a diamond cutter’s eye for how

it cleaves so much easier when the blood freezes.

Undone in the midst of chaos. The maples

are throwing their colours down on the ground

like a half mast that took it too far down

when it came time to surrender and begin

to befriend the beauty of autumn in the ruins.

Pillowed in goosedown snow in an empty nest

isn’t going to insulate us from what we dream,

though we hope for a good night’s rest,

when it’s colder than blood on the snow outside

and the wind in blue wode empowered

by a moon that asks no quarter and gives none,

doesn’t hit the window like the soft thump

of a sparrow or a snowball but shrieks like a demonic she-wolf

baring its snarling icicles like the fangs of chandeliers

barn dancing with scarecrows and strawdogs

in an ice storm making a frontal assault

on hospitalized emergencies behind a gated parking lot.

Stragglers of the wild grapevines flambeed

like brandy you don’t need a gasmask to breath

the bouquet of as it vaporously sublimates

like a good year for metaphors that cut to the quick

like the ghosts of past autumns cradled in your hand.

Like the bubble of a crystal snifter warming up to you

like a skull it gets easier to believe as the night wears on

as if the last ice age were a distant relative

you discovered you had in common too late

to make everything you carefully prophecied come true.

Canada. The meeting place of frozen rivers

and flying saucers come to pick up the survivors

of 1111 stamping out encoded s. o. s.s on

the shrinking ice-floes of dispossessed polar bears.

My mother used to tell me when she was

an Australian artist in the American Red Cross

as red-bellied zeroes were flying over Brisbane

dropping pamphlets like gum tree leaves when

it’s spring in the northern hemisphere

to terrorize the indigenous citizens with nightmares

too implausibly conceivable to be believed,

everyone agree the next war would be fought

in Canada like the arising of the great black snake

in Blake’s cold-blooded, prophetic poem, America.

I’ve wondered superstitiously about that since

I first heard it. Who dislikes a peacekeeper

selling treaties to the natives like real estate

with reservations on the moon like Grey Owl

pretending he wasn’t English enough to be eaten

by the queen or a culture molesting Catholic school

beatifically blaspheming a mother tongue

that wasn’t allowed to speak up for her children

when they cried out in their sleep like the Ojibway

word for pain when a snowman puts its hand

over their mouths to smother the fire in smoke

like Zyklon B as if they were smudging a peacepipe

with sweetgrass for tourists who want to get back

to the inhuman nature of the way things used to be?

Remember when the beaver were skinned

to sit on the heads of Europe like stovepipes

and lampshades that slapped their tails

at the first sign of a wolf nosing around

their lodge poles with an heraldic device?

Brebeuf burned at the stake by the heretically innocent

who refused to be demonized imperiously

by a civilized bestiary of xenophobic totems?

PATRICK WHITE

NAMELESS TONIGHT, NOT ME, IMMENSITIES

NAMELESS TONIGHT, NOT ME, IMMENSITIES

Nameless tonight, not me, immensities

beyond my reach. The windows

thawing in the heat. Blue moon

above a junkyard of farm machinery.

The pioneers’ bones have been exhumed

from the land they settled. Empty

the graves of those who slept in these hills,

lunar lichens plastered like playbills

over the closing night of their names.

Echoes we all disappear into like waterbirds

soon enough, skipping out over the lake

like gravestones in the hands of those

who effaced us from our own history.

I can’t place myself anywhere,

alive or dead, no homestead of my own,

where I can watch the raspberry bushes

flourish year after year and listen to the rain

drumming the tin toolshed roof into a trance.

I’m unselfishly disciplined when it comes

to rendering the unsayable communicable

through events of form that shape-shift

to the counter-intuitive logic of metaphor

that transcends physics in post cosmological realms,

but that doesn’t mean I’ve got the will of a socket wrench

to go on tightening loose bolts the rest of my life.

Rocking fields they won’t let me die in.

I like knowing the pioneers used wildflowers

for soap, Bouncing Bet, Pride of London,

Lady at the Gate, and if I were ever

to survive a nuclear war, I’d put this knowledge

to good use like a lantern in a housewell

to keep the hand pump from freezing,

potato peels in the fire to desiccate the creosote.

I’d eat staghorn sumac and briney frogs for breakfast.

My mind would be an assortment

of different size nails and screws

I’ve saved for years to meet any occasion

I might have to keep things together anti-dramatically.

In the meantime I explore these old farms

the way a raccoon exploits an abandoned barn,

listening for the torrential wavelengths of snakes

fleeing the rain to hunt mice in the dishevelled bales

of sour hay way past dreaming of mangers.

After the original occupants die

and the last born son has left the farm for good,

we’re all strangers in a used solitude.

The indignant silence makes everyone a trespasser.

Names on gravestones. Names carved in barn beams.

A scripture of old curtains hanging from the windows

like the priestcraft of spiders that haven’t been disturbed in years.

Prewar magazines espousing the miracles of magnetism

in relieving the agonies of rheumatism

and hairline fractures of cracked vertebrae

that took the load upon themselves out of pride

one too many times without thinking

of their own cornerstones and rotting floor sills.

A roof collapsing. A door on one hinge like a drunk

trying to hold on to something upright and final.

Schools and churches, pews, desks, and woodsheds,

everything as functional as the hives and houseflies

that cluster in the walls like those born to follow

the tried and trued, straight and narrow road

through the winding woods reweaving it

like a loose thread that unravelled the labyrinth

of the spiritual lost and found that dug up their bones

for hygienic reasons that had nothing to do

with how deep they were buried in the land

before their corpses were washed away from the soil

that clung to them like faithful hunting dogs

that slept on their graves for weeks after they died,

not knowing, how the city would come to them,

even in their homegrown deaths, like roadkill and erosion.

I’ve seen crucified barn boards warped by the sun and rain,

pull their old fashioned square-headed nails out

with their own teeth like dogs extracting porcupine quills

from the voodoo dolls they’ve made of themselves

like a self-fulfilling hex of hunting magic gone wrong.

And I admire all that the way I admire the palatial virtues

of the strong who live like glacial hills among

the heaped tels of Sisyphean rocks beside

the valleys they dug for themselves and their children

expiring in moats of scarlet fever, to lie down in

like time capsules without a table of contents

that could have anticipated that all they laboured for

would cast them away like strawdogs after a moribund ritual

that would not let them rest their heads on the rock of the world

and dream they were returning to the wild

like their gardens that have gone on blooming without them.

Salt of the earth with bedrock hearts, I come

like the deus ex machina, as you would have seen me

in terms you could have understood, late in the day

like a ghost to a morality play on tour in the country,

looking for a clearing among the trees to view the stars

long after the applause has died away. And the longer

I stand here surveying six thousand photogenic stars

burning without fire permits in the summer dark,

mourning your exorcism, the more I feel crowded

by your absence as if the Summer Triangle

were missing an eagle and the Seven Sisters

in the orchards of the Pleiades, carried away by the wind,

like Sabine maidens, had pruned the horns of Taurus

by deboning the land of the humans

they’ve torn out of it like the stumps of the locust trees

that used to sing here at night, bright with blossoming stars

and the occasional night bird like me

on its way to somewhere else,

and in the morning, was backed-up

by the ecstatic choirs of the born again honey-bees.

PATRICK WHITE

MOONRISE AMONG THE CRUMPLED SWANS OF THE BED SHEETS

MOONRISE AMONG THE CRUMPLED SWANS OF THE BED SHEETS

Moonrise among the crumpled swans of the bed sheets

ploughed aside like snow at the sides

of the impossible road it didn’t matter

whether we walked alone or together.

No one was going anywhere for the winter.

Your eyes grew numb with the long gaze

of windows that haven’t had much

to look at for awhile, and though you

only had to smile to convince me

the wild irises were still burning

in the water gardens down by the river

I knew you were snowblind inside

and gave you my shades like eclipses on crutches

to take the bloom off the angels’ albino rose

and remind you there were stars emerging

from the dark at the end of these

long, somnolent afternoons lazy as fog.

Sometimes people relate to each other like stones

pushed around by one too many ice ages,

meat and berries, and they start consulting

the skulls of their ancestors under the hearthstones

of the fires that kept them alive, and o

every once and awhile, didn’t they, suddenly blaze

when some spirit of the wind danced around them?

Do you still paint your face when you’re indulging

in savage sex? I’m looking at stars that no longer

exist lightyears away from where I hope

you’re shining now. I’ve got this indelible wound

in my heart with a typo in it like a thorn

that’s probably out of print by now but I’ve learned

to live with it like the arrowhead of an extinction event.

The winter was too long. The isolation too deep.

The ashes gathered around our feet like the pyres

and smokestacks of genocidal sky burials

and even the chandeliers began to fumigate the air

like the pendulous censers of our ritual heartbeats.

Dark’s one thing. But bleak’s another that’s harder

to account for like a rusty bullet after a long war

with the elements strategically arrayed against you

when the sofas go into hibernation like fat bears

and the cardinals come to the bird feeders

hanging from the locust trees like rare flames

to a candle on the greyest of days that sputter out

before you have a chance to make it to the window.

Thresholds of bark and snow we brushed off

the tree rings of the fossil fuels of two springs ago

we kept throwing on the fire as if a genie

would be born of the flames without smoke

and suggest what we might have been able

to wish for from one another when we took

our hearts out of the freezer and unwrapped them

to see how badly they’d been burnt by the cold.

Don’t expect to see you again waist-high

walking toward me out of the golden grass.

One of those moments so off-handedly forever

time’s never crass enough to repeat it, nor

need it be, given it’s occurred to me a thousand times

since that summer above the marsh

with its galaxies of waterlilies at the beginning

of the universe with only you and I in it,

as if it signified something deeper than even love

can discern between a man and a woman

trying so hard not to hurt one another knowing

there was no way to avoid it for the rest of their lives.

PATRICK WHITE

TOO MUCH TO SAY GOOD-BYE TO THOUGH I HAD

TOO MUCH TO SAY GOOD-BYE TO THOUGH I HAD

Too much to say good-bye to though I had,

I sat down by a fork in the road and wept

into both my hands like a flashflood

in the dry creekbeds of my lifelines,

lightning over the nerve endings of the shedding trees

my heart shrieking like a red-tailed falcon

with an arrow in its wing, my life

uprooted like mandrake and ginseng

as I remember every woman after that

I ever said yes to was a truce with the pain.

X-rated, vampiric muse with the style

of a chandelier at the death of a candle,

witch of the retrograde sixties, you never age.

The night retains its mystery, though the day

grows old like too many stiff springs

in the matresses of the faith healers in a turf war.

Hellebore, bella donna and deadly nightshade

I’ve kissed Medusa on her eyelids in her sleep

and tasted what she dreamed of before

she became the queen mamba of black prophecy.

Spider on a widow walk, you took the Tarot

too seriously and stopped weaving mandalas

of undulant silk like the aurora borealis

drifting like the fins of Oriental goldfish on the wind.

O it was beautiful to watch you work your magic once.

A transformative experience I still like

to look back upon like a waterlily in a cauldron

of frog soup fit for a prince of darkness

carnal as the starmud of a tenant farmer

on a summer night in the sweat lodge of his pores.

If you empower the dark roots of the mystery

the stars will come as naturally as wildflowers

to the nightsky, or the potpourri of black roses

preparing a deathbed for a lover to lie down upon

with you in their arms like a new moon

things get done under like a spooky affair

with silence it’s a taboo with its tongue cut out

to talk about like shoes gossiping about a firewalk

on the other side of the door where you took them off.

You wouldn’t recognize me now among

the vagrant souls exorcised from this furnace

of life on the first cold night at the end of October

waving farewell on the road of ghosts where

it turns down into the birchgroves and out of sight

having cleared the creosote and starlings

out of the chimney pipes with a voice as thick as fire.

Will I live again? Is it necessary? Did I do it wrong

or was there never a right way to proceed?

Or should I ask for reparations for the tears I shed

like a sundial that foreshadowed its own extinction

like a nightbird on the same wavelength

as a snakey dragon saint in a black boa

of gathering storm clouds summoning

the lightning and then the rain to cool

the burnt heartwood of the pine that once stood

like a man on a hill that looks back over its shoulder

into a valley it just passed through guided

by a surrealistic starmap of dragons with the charms

of fireflies, as he turns and goes down into the one

you apprenticed him to walk, whistling

inconceivably in the dark without you

as he casts the deathmask of his shadow up ahead

as the only path where love was meant

to surpass itself like a moment from the past

that overtakes tomorrow like a light

it can’t run from followed by a night it can’t run to.

PATRICK WHITE

THE GREEN BERRY RED AND ROTTEN

THE GREEN BERRY RED AND ROTTEN

The green berry red and rotten,

the fledgling flown, windfall solar systems

of sun-spotted apples in the stargrass,

the white flower corrosively spoiled

by exposure to the eyes, the stars, the bees

that once doted on it but now abuse

the masterpiece of its unassuming beauty

by using it for a dish rag soaked in vinegar

to clean the windows with. It’s time

to lay your burdens down, give them up

to the earth that shall know you by them,

rose-hip, chokecherry, blackberry or blue,

black walnut, hawthorn or sunflower seed,

whatever the taste of life in your heart,

let the bell fall from the steeple, lower

the boughs of the yoke you’re bearing

like two buckets balanced by an ox

plodding back from the well and let go, let go,

as if you’d come as far as the road goes

and from hereon would have to start

making your own through deep snow

in the moonlight the wolves that follow

will pack down with their cracked

and bleeding pads like a great seal of approval

in hot wax on a night as severe as a scalpel.

Hour of birth and ruination. Fulfilment

and failure. Full moons in the pumpkin patch,

new ones shedding the skin of the most recent

eclipse of their medicine bags like black pearls

ripening in the dark like an active sexual life

that goes on blooming all winter to counteract

the effect of snow and plaster. Hour

of an old man racking black dwarfs

like prophetic skulls on an abacus

he never learned to play like starlings

on the powerlines of musical staves

that keep the snakes dancing circumpolarly

like a hermetic caduceus with the wings

of a dove copulating with the quantumly entangled

wavelengths of dragons that will burn

your eyes out until you stop crying

over spilt diamonds and start to see

your own starmud shining in the dark

like a star that’s been shadowing you for lightyears

through the shedding trees like a spark of life

you could start a galaxy with in the eye sockets

of any one of your visionary firepits.

Hour of letting go in the midst of the abundant silence

of the inarticulate garden that’s said all

it had to say as it waits for the first frost.

Let go of whatever you’re clinging to

like an umbilical cord to the rocket gantry

of the dark mother, and follow your own

circuitous flightpath like a silo on its way to the moon

and when you get there, unpack your suitcase

like a loaf of bread big-hearted enough to feed a famine.

Hour of death in life. Dream seeds under the eyelids

perishing like moonset over the denuded hills,

the maples burning their leaves like the first draft

of a novel they don’t want anybody to read

like a closing chapter in the life of an arsonist

who ends up eating his own ashes out of bird fountain

that holds a merciful spoon up to his lips

like the French kiss of a death wish in an urn

as he dies reconciled to the heresy of his life

in the eyes of the dead who thought he went too far.

Let’s hear it for the stars that made death possible

as the improbability of life that comes of it

that makes much out of the little it has to work with

like poems inspired by the fire in their lover’s eyes.

Marigolds holding out along the widow walks

of lonely souls communing with their solitude

like a family album of sacred tattoos the leaves

left like a last impression on cement gravestones

laid end to end like a road that turns back home again

with a childhood secret it shares with the crossed hearts

of the dead sworn to the perennial silence

of the memories that make life implausibly forgiving

without understanding a word of what’s said

about why it has to be this way, except

it has to be borne like distant hills ageing

under the echoes of lupine requiems mourning

the loss of one of their own as if it were the moon’s fault.

Blame it on the autumn. Blame it on the spring

that turned out to be the false dawn of everything

you’ve ever believed in like a mirage

in the third eye of a hurricane in a desert,

or what your lover said to you in bed one night

when you shared the same pillow like flesh of your flesh,

blood of your blood, bone of your bone,

as you both spoke of a creation myth that was already old

before you were born to mourn for it

like an apostate priest of a profligate abyss

that will swallow you whole like a dragon

the glain of the moon and disgorge it again

like the waterlily of a used condom

or a skin some lake shed like a starmap

to the wistful radiance in the eyes of the dead.

O yes, the eyes of the pervasive dead who fill space

with nuances of the light distilled from past dreams,

who look upon it all in pain and separation

and crack a smile like the scar of a stronger weld

than the original brain stem it mended

like a lighthouse on the moon where you

came to drown the sword you hammered out of fire

like a vow you made to the water sylphs

a long, long time ago before the salmon returned

to the place of their birth to continue dying

deeper and deeper into their awareness

of the mystery of life still throwing cornflowers

poppies and wheatstalks in the hands

of equinoctial virgins like cargo into the lifeboats

of our graves lowered over the side of the sinking earth,

stern up to the sun as it goes down into the underworld

like the Orphic skull of a habitable planet

dismembered by the mad muses of the autumn

for the lenience in his voice the dead

are especially susceptible to this time of year.

PATRICK WHITE

I SEE YOU IN THE EYES OF THE RAIN

I SEE YOU IN THE EYES OF THE RAIN

I see you in the eyes of the rain

and in the broken aspirations of the swallow

that hit the windowpane dead on.

Fire that no longer burns.

Water that no longer drowns.

Earth that no longer receives.

A gust of air that no one breathes.

I see you in the tender, green tendrils

of the wild grapevines clinging to life

like the last plank of a shipwrecked lifeboat

washed up on the shore of the moon.

The most bitter farewells are those

compelled by understanding

to cry a little in the open doorway

and leave as if there were nothing more to say.

Words lightyears beyond communication.

Metaphors like burning bridges

that never quite make it to the other side.

And o how gentle an eclipse comes

to a lover’s coltish eyes

when it’s time to say good-bye

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

and if you’re good, it’s a sacrifice.

Good-bye, get out, be gone,

I’ll live on in my palace of lonely windows

like a man with class in an hourglass

and I’ll write faceless songs

to the passage of time as autumn approaches.

Leave me now to the pain

I must wrestle with alone

like an angel in my way

that knows I don’t have what it takes

to pull up stakes like a heretic

before I burn for the mistakes I made

on your invigilated test of love.

Once I feel like a loser again

I know I’m at home with myself

and I can feel the clouds laughing in tears

as I get around like rain.

I loved your body like a wishing well.

You loved my brain like an occult spell.

Three afterlives of a star, once you left me

holding the medicine bag of your absence,

I named a desolate street after you

like some kind of municipal gift

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

My pain is consoled by my art

like a weather vane is comforted by the weather.

I ghost write the lyrics of the storm.

I incite riots against the norm.

I blood my poems like spearheads

in a wound that never scars the moon.

I shall be the nightwatchman

who makes the rounds of the zodiac

inspecting doors and windows

that are steadfastly closed to him

like lilies in the festering gene pools

of the idle rich in their bridal tents

spawning into money like goldfish.

I shall be an eagle at the extremity

of my wingspan and soar over the smoke

of burning cities like a cinder of freedom

in the eye of a failed revolution

and I will not lament my own extinction

when my starmud settles like a constellation

into the hearsay of bloodshot mirrors.

I will linger in precipitous heights

then shriek like the paper airplane of a poem

down on some bumptious homing pigeon

that was promised a comfortable flight

from here to there, until it was

snatched from the air like a pillow fight.

I will do this because I can feel the glee

of my talons sinking into hypocrisy

like the three crescents of the moon

with an eyrie full of skeletal snakes

that look like a pit full of twisted combs

without any meat on their bones.

Liars convince. Communicators convey.

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

that makes all the difference to the meaning

that tones me like a moody chameleon

resonating with a tuning fork of colour

that flickers like a photo-op of lightning

trying to get a glimpse of itself in the mirror.

And then I’m an illiterate divinity student

with a heart as big as an orphanage

full of baffled pilgrims that have lost their way

crutching through the labyrinths of the divine

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

like the rapture of an apocalyptic anti-climax.

I talk to God about you and she talks back

like a comprehensive alibi for the way things are.

She’s got a scar as big as the smile

on the dark side of her face she keeps

turned away from me like an embarassed moon

she doesn’t want to reveal to anyone.

But I can see it in the rear view mirror

of my infernal lucidity leading me away from her

like an atomic Sufi reversing my spin

in the charged particle field of my happy sin.

I walk on the wild side in cowboy boots

in a truce with the shadows of Zen

that says a great general may establish peace

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

And I’m resigned to the sternness of my discipline

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

like a ferocious heart to a gentle mind.

PATRICK WHITE