I COULD NEVER REMEMBER YOU IN GARISH PACIFIC SUNSETS

I COULD NEVER REMEMBER YOU IN GARISH PACIFIC SUNSETS

I could never remember you in garish Pacific sunsets

or the luster of opalescent Ontario dawns.

These would be ill-fitting gowns, wrong

wardrobe of metaphors to clothe you in, you

who loved to wear the moonlight like water on your skin

and your heart like the blood of a black cherry on your sleeve,

that the rain, and I saw how hard it tried like a watercolourist,

could never wash out. When I looked

as deeply into the nightsky of your eyes as I could,

six thousand stars lavished on the dark to the naked eye,

I always saw a white tailed doe looking back at me

from the brindled woods where they opened into the starfields

and I let the silence surmise old dangers had made you shy.

I could never remember you as you were and fix

the image in amber like a butterfly in a paper weight

as time wept glacially by like an ice-age in an hourglass.

Shapely as the cedar candelabra of a passionate forest fire,

you were the elegant daughter of dragons, the willow witch

of your own desires, and you spoke to my body

in the occult languages you kept alive for the sake of the dead

who were always with you like voices in your sleep.

I put this albino abyss of a snowblind canvas on my easel

like the negative starmap of the nightsky I imagine

death to be, so the wind can colour outside the lines

of the constellations as you were fond of doing

with an elfin kind of glee like a happy bell

you’d hung around the neck of something bleaker

as you often did with your life as if you were

bending space to your will like a black hole

at the nave of your galactic prayer wheel

turning in the wind like the golden ratio of a sea star.

I paint you in the picture music of a wounded heart

punctured like a matador on the thorn of the moon

as I looked upon you haunting your solitude

and knew like the last crescent in the book

of waning scars, there were some roses

just too beautiful in what they’d made of their pain

to heal. The eyelids of black roses shadowed

by penumbral eclipses of carboniferous mascara.

The deepest starwells of our sorrows flower

into the most expansive fountains of compassion,

and what a tender champion the small things of the world

found in you. The starling under the windowpane,

the Monarch butterfly that just stopped like

a slim volume of poems, intact, at the moment of perfection

denying death its deconstruction, and those

dozens of shepherd moons that showed up

like the skulls of racoons and groundhogs in the grass,

relics of a tragic past you arranged like asteroids

on the windowsills of your studio like the eastern door

of an Ojibway burial hut you adorned with the feathers

of red-tailed hawks until the autumn moon

could free their spirits from their bones.

I could never remember you as a blue-jay

among the sunflowers, you were never as abrupt

and decisive as that. You beaded all parts

of the disassembled world into the flowing

of one long continuous wavelength of a rosary

like different skulls with a variety of names

for the same spinal cord of a narrative theme

that whispered, like your life, louder

than the savage sparrowhawks of your emotions

shrieking out in predatory pain and as I remember well

how your eyes would grow wider than owls

or the new moons of Spanish guitars

when you were astonished by the symbolic depths

of some black pearl of transformative wisdom

you’d discovered dreaming on the seabed of your heart

like a lunar eclipse among the feathered corals.

The red violet that lingers over a city on a cloudy night

and saturates the air with tinctures of iodine and diluted blood,

I will add that hue to the palette of your likeness,

and glaze the bricks in the sphinx gate of your moonrise

with ultramarine blue and fleck the lapis lazuli

of your nightsky with gold paint on the bristles

of a toothbrush to simulate stars pouring out of

the watersheds of Aquarius to cool the scorched roots of things

in sacred pools and fountains inextinguishable pain

found its way to as if you were some kind of Gothic cathedral

cratered out of the moon like a river of stone

that taught the outcasts and the damaged fruits of life

how to flow up the stairwells of their renewal

with the courage of wild salmon called home from the sea.

I knew it was crucial not to make a mess of my dying

the night you left, to honour the spirit of the life

we had lived together, to make the end

as charismatically intriguing as the beginning had been.

So something inspired by our separation

could keep growing beyond us like a bridge

where incomplete solitudes could meet as strangers

and say farewell to one another like full siloes

in the plenum-void, whole as the sun and the moon

who go on shining in the darkness of ten thousand lonely nightfalls

not as the undoing of the dawn in the broken mirrors of the stars

but as a way of housing the buckets and bells of their tears

under the strong rafter of the well by the locust trees

blossoming among its thorns in the spring to summon the bees

that once sang to us, as if honey had a voice so poignantly sweet,

however deeply gored the heart by the horns of the moon,

waxing or waning, full or eclipsed, it never left scars on the music.

PATRICK WHITE

MORE AND MORE I REALIZE I'VE NEVER BEEN

MORE AND MORE I REALIZE I’VE NEVER BEEN

More and more I realize I’ve never been

who I thought I was when I was nineteen

to sixty-five, but to believe I did was

a useful delusion to get things going until now.

It’s a mask to rub the mask off your face

and say you’ve improved the complexion

of the moon. You have to include your wrong

in your right, your ugliness in your beauty,

to be holistically accurate about being

nobody you’d care to meet as well

as somebody you can’t tear yourself away from.

Isn’t it so? Would you want to have a coffee

with you? Or would you make an excuse

and forgo the encounter? Or maybe

you’ve been dying to meet yourself for years?

Would you ask yourself for your own autograph?

Give somebody a crystal skull and a Nazca terraglyph

and they’ll come up with a meaning of life

that’s as good as anybody else’s good guess

except they heard it from an alien they were

listening in on like the NSA to a cellphone.

I was always a diamond in the rough

education, art, poetry, women and teachers

who marvelled at my anomaly, were

going to cut and polish every facet of

as if I were having crowns put on my fangs

like the first and last crescents of the moon,

and I don’t say they weren’t motivated by love,

for the most part, but enough was enough.

If you want diamonds that flash like the moon

on water, you’re going to have to put up

with the darkness of the ore they’re derived from.

Everybody’s the collapsed parachute

of how high they’ve fallen to ground, shooting star,

withered daylily in the autumn, dandelion

or milkweed seed trying to land on good soil,

some do, some don’t, but it once was

very different before they paved the starfields

and the comets had to root in the minds of humans

like comas and commas, rat tail combs

sticking out a back pocket, like a sign

of what could have been, with a precautionary warning

you can’t exorcise all the ghosts and still

have someone to live for. You can’t

white-wash a wanted poster over and somehow

pretend you’re in the clear. Sooner or later

you’ll catch up to yourself and shoot first

and ask questions later. You’ll hang with horse thieves

though you were only along for the ride.

There’s a force driving me like a spy satellite

around a shepherd moon to greener pastures

where I’ll graze among the stars like the first time

a man goes down on a woman to give her

as much pleasure as he’s possessed by

as the crumpled surf of the bedsheets

have to open at the same time for a safe descent.

Skydiving is an erotic experience. Time and again.

You see two snakes copulating and modesty

makes you go prophetically blind as a planet in transit

across the sun that shines at midnight, while the moon

opens flowers like loveletters on the sly.

It’s nice to be admired for the things you hope

you do well, but you’re never admired, except

by maybe one or two, for who you are if

somebody out of your mind not theirs were to ask you

about your masterpiece. The colours of

the Jurassic waterlilies don’t fade for

three hundred and fifty million lightyears,

but the grey on your head has gone to seed

with the Scotch thistles who once stood armed

and violet. The bones in your starmud

are scattered like a wetland of dead trees,

yarrow sticks of a moonrise in

the Book of Changes. Nine in the fifth place

will never be a nightclub where women

fight over you again. And you got to meet

the Byrds just as they found Jesus and the music

was never the same again. Here’s

to the tinny guitars of the sixties lest we forget.

Anybody remember what that was all about?

There was a boom of ghost towns we called ideals.

Revolution became a hot commodity on Wall Street

and it was a lot easier to sleep around like Leonard Cohen.

I didn’t believe all the flowers I saw

in everybody’s hair just as I don’t place

much faith in the flamethrowers that are the rage

of today. Eventually it all goes up in smoke.

It flares and dies away like a supernova.

Flowers grey, hair grey, and the dragons mere

warm breath on cold air. They ran out of natural gas.

Smoke, smoke, smoke, a chimney spark,

a firefly, a flash of lightning and then we

go into the dark like a poppy or a matchbook.

The savage rose is dry blood on the snow.

So what lasts? The colours of the lilies perhaps.

PATRICK WHITE

WITCHING FOR WATER IN HELL IS LIKE

WITCHING FOR WATER IN HELL IS LIKE

Witching for water in hell is like

trying to drink a mirage from an hourglass.

All lightning, no rain. More axons than glia.

Hazel yokes might break like wishbones

but you never get what you want.

I wanted you like a madness I never

wanted to get over, I’d have to make

a truce with to live as if it were worth it.

Nothing’s true but that’s beside the point.

Take true from false and there’s nothing

left to go wrong though the fools play

one off against the other like razor-blades

at a cock fight. Cock-a-doodle-do, who

are you? King of the dawn with a Zippo coxcomb?

Witching for water in hell is like

reality living the afterlife of theater.

You just don’t know who to believe anymore,

the writer or the actor. Or you’re gulled

in the wake of a B.C. Ferry by your own ideals.

Your audience hides behind the wavelengths

of the curtain that you’re parting like the veils of Isis.

If you can do that, if you can pull back the rain

to see there’s nobody at the door, you’ve

already amounted to nothing. Significance

becomes a bore. You do things for the hell of it,

knowing it’s only a staying pattern until

you’re given permission to land in the cemetery.

Witching for water in hell isn’t

an ingenuous man trying to live

like a fire extinguisher mounted on a wall

while above him shine the green-eyed banshees

that go off as if somebody were trying

to steal his car and he wasn’t enough of a heretic

to burn at the stake and have it done with.

Hell, I mean. As if suffering were

the antecedent to everything that’s perishable

about life, the way you wear holes in your dream

pacing under the window, more to lose

than win as if sleepwalking weren’t part

of the delusion. And waking up

weren’t a breach birth of broken glass.

I had both hands on the prayer wheel

of birth and death once, at eleven and two,

navigating between the clashing rocks

so I didn’t get smashed between the opposites

like a bird with no wings and a sky that’s waiting

for it to fly. You can only touch as much

as you can imagine your senses are trying to tell you.

Witching for water in hell is like

a man with eyes that can see learning Braille

so he can track himself like hierogylph in the mail,

a triangular planet that passes like a kidney stone

through the urethra of the zodiac, the slime path

of a boneless morning snail adding

its ribbon of shining to the garden while

the sidewalks are still cool enough not to blister on.

I live in an air conditioned shell with running snot and water,

my body a bag with nine orifices like a sprinkler

on the lawn pretending it’s a galaxy, a sunflower,

the golden ratios of the conch shells of eternity

fossilized in the Burgess Shale, and all

the armies that they called, terracotta

in a lake of mercury that will make me live forever.

But witching for water in hell is like

an action figure with a sword of dry ice

that cries like a ghost of itself it’s dying to return

like a river to a forbidden watershed on the moon.

I loved you once and maybe I’ll love you again.

I’ll greet the snow in your hair as you stand

in the doorway as it adorns something warm

and incorrigibly human that looks at life

as more of a furnace than a fridge. Fire and ice.

The way the world is destroyed in the name

of a madness inspired by the fossils of the fountains

of love, witching for water in hell to amuse the insane.

PATRICK WHITE

BRUTAL, COLD NORMAL LIFE

BRUTAL, COLD NORMAL LIFE

Brutal, cold normal life with a few

familial affections to warm your heart at

as if you held your hands toward a fire.

The heart goes blue, the heart goes red,

two-thirds of a triune traffic light.

I’m not shedding, the way the autumn trees

are, there’s still hair on my head

though its the urn of somebody’s ashes

I never met. I try to treat it with respect

and there’s a smile on my face the colour

if my eyes I use for default when there’s a glitch

of good luck that makes a grey day blue.

I’ve forgiven my lovers and friends

their careless infidelities. The match

thrown from the car that started

a forest fire of sensitivities that didn’t

like to be criticized. I only know one

who keeps his word like an exotic bird

in his rib cage he’s teaching how to escape.

If I ask it’s precious, little enough

compared to what I’ve given, though

most of my gifts remain unopened,

I’ve dropped my pine-cones like time capsules

on a seabed of compass needles to soften the blow

when I root in the conflagration to come,

take hold, and show you what it is

to be Slavic and stand up to the wind.

I don’t ask for much so I’m never disappointed.

There are verities. And then there are

perennial truths. Sooner or later you get

sick of them, their relentlessness, almost tyranny

and after that there’s nothing but oblivion

to look forward to exploring, as if it

never mattered which boot you put on first,

or if your toothpaste tasted like a blessing or a curse.

And you don’t know if you’re eloquent Aaron

or recalcitrant Moses when he faced his snakey rod off

against pharaoh’s magicians. Big snake

eat the little snake and the little snakes go down

easy, like wet noodles, the wrong way.

It’s hard to know whether to resign yourself

to life, or celebrate like the clown who

believed there was something sacred

about his calling, making the mourners laugh

at their own funerals. Haven’t been that way

since Grade six when an award taught me

the Book of Changes begins with a logjam

of yarrow sticks, a sloppy job of clear-cutting

everything that goes on in an old growth forest.

I got as far as the Book of Total Knowledge,

volume L, and gave up cramming my drawers

with the old wind socks of flights I’ve never taken

because of the rain and poor visibility.

Pick a loose thread from the shoulder

of an oil spill and you’ve got a total eclipse

of everything you’ve ever tried to understand

blacked out like London in the blitz.

Lightning wars that freed the slaves like rain

when one or the other got its feelings hurt

by witching for water in hell. By now

the grail is a skull full of stardust that won’t

slake anybody’s thirst in this mirage of a desert.

I don’t blame anyone anymore for the things

they did or didn’t do. History’s an old menu

for blood and the peasants are always

caught off guard like the Newfoundland cod banks

when the Catholic church passed an infallible

papal edict that said everyone had to eat fish on Fridays.

Ichthus. Good Greek word. The sun is in

the vernal equinox. A hunter’s moon in Virgo.

Why not? Is quantum physics any less superstitious?

Everybody’s good guess must be tolerated

though the wilderness is more of a natural antidote

than a pharmaceutical fish farm. But wouldn’t it be

a bummer if they learned how to make

everything live forever thirty years from now?

Bad timing, as if we had anything to do with it.

I’ve grown nostalgic for the waterclocks

my youth knew before I started wandering by myself

by the Tay River late at night when I might be

somebody dangerous, when, in fact, I’m just alone

with my own thoughts and memories as if

it weren’t anybody’s business but my own,

though it’s not wise to freeze up in the highbeams

of an inquisitive squad car that thought it saw

a raccoon with a balaclava instead of a mask

on its head. The terrorists have infiltrated

our genetically modified, corn-fed gardens.

Darkness and anonymity are my close friends

though I’m sure they know who I am.

Solitude is my longest standing, undemanding mistress.

I can’t understand most of the follies of people

anymore than I can any longer distinguish

the gaudier feathers of the strutting peacocks

compared to the dowdiness of the hens

when it all comes down to whether you want

to enjoy sex with me tonight or not. I’m not

shocked by anything except a virgin at forty-one.

Or a nun who knows the Pierian spring is between her legs.

I walk like the old bull who’s been led

to the altar many times before strong enough

for the slaughter and the sacrifice, but bored

with the details of why it must be so.

Didn’t I look far enough into your eyes

to make course corrections on my starmaps

before you started shining like a moonrise?

Don’t tell me it wasn’t love at first sight

when you looked at me like a slumlord

and you saw the rent like a matador in a tauromachia

of the sun and the moon on the hoofs and horns

you draped in garlands of gored roses?

The scorpion jumped on the back of the frog

and the lesson was on him. Too bad a dragon

stopped to give you a ride you couldn’t poison.

Misplaced compassion isn’t always a mandate

for extermination. Or a good deed the onset

of a rebuke by the devil that feels like punishment,

or the truce of love, surrender to a creature

that can’t help being what it was meant to be,

but it’s circumspect to note the stinger at the end

of the question, when the sphinx looks forward

to the interrogation as if the future of the answer

lay ahead like the one voice for the three ages of man.

PATRICK WHITE

IF I WERE TO SAY MY HEART AND MIND AS I WOULD

IF I WERE TO SAY MY HEART AND MIND AS I WOULD

If I were to say my heart and mind as I would,

no difference between the picture-music inside

I’m singing to myself, I’m being sung by,

and the world as it is when I look under

the stones of my eyes, amazed by how much life

goes unregarded, as if, ultimately, it were

none of our business whether we know about it

or not, but verbal expression is not thought.

Seeing is not the same as saying what you saw.

Life isn’t a state. Death isn’t a state. Being

and existence, and their opposites, are conditioned

by the authorship of those who try to define them.

If you beat the pinata long enough manna

falls from heaven, or the rain cools its lightning roots

with tears the wind will cheer up with a windfall of apples.

Why not? Life’s the engine of every move you make,

not a thing, not a force, but the indefinable

once you get past looking at your corpuscles

as if they were not yours, or worse, your source.

I live as if there were a sight in end to what

I’ve been vaguely labouring toward like a kid

swinging on the garden gate of my hapless beginning.

Chaos built the Taj Mahal. Give it an order

and it’s doomed to fall. Where did the flowers go

that were a moment of who I was for awhile

in this dream that never stops masking everything

in terms of something else. Say one thing, anything,

like a black walnut on the sidewalk that reminds me

of Rumi’s poem about a scorched, black future

where everything’s incinerated in a black hole

or a nuclear holocaust, and you elaborate a world

through the translators of Rumi’s words, not Rumi

as he knew himself before he went on changing.

Be a desert with the choicest mirages

your housewells and hourglasses ever envied

or wrap your mouth in mummy cloth

until the star storm blows over and you’re

not blinded by the blazing anymore

and you’ll start whining like the ubermensch

about nobody listening to Zarathustra

trying to enlighten everybody with his lantern

in the market. If you can’t see the supernova

in the candle-flame, adding more pixels

isn’t going to do you any good. Everybody

set themselves on fire. It’s Arab spring

in the middle of autumn. The nightingale’s wings

are the cage it defends like its freedom to sing

what it wants about the impositions of the deranged.

I’ve come back from a lot of holy wars I’ve lost

and won, that didn’t mean a thing, and what

have I got to show for it but a lost earring

and a child’s shoe? Horror is as intimate as love.

There are snakepits you fall into like a bird bone flute

that has to weave myriad wavelengths

into a flying carpet of picture music if you want

to get out without being bitten by a downed powerline.

Radical changes whose time may or may not have come.

So the year begins in the middle of an ice age

and breaches the Arctic as a sign of global warming.

I take my sleeve and wipe my breath off the window

to polish the stars like gold burnished by fire.

I imagine thrones because I’m a peasant who toils

with his hands in the starmud of his mind.

I wear rubber-boots like an insulated pair of plyers.

If you were to speak your heart and mind

as clearly as it’s impossible, would it make

any sense, even to you? You can make a seabed

on the moon, or you can step out of the crumpled sheets

like Aphrodite who associates sex with

the bloodstream of an earthly tide when the moon

crests like a lunatic with gravitas at a distance.

What did the man say? Intense heat, unusual sprouts?

Are there pilot lights on the stars? How far

to the next stone in the Milky Way do we

have to jump before we realize we’ve cobbled

the way with our prophetic skulls, that our lifeboats

are the ships of state that navigate the whale roads

hoping Moby Dick doesn’t sound like an ice-floe

and pull us all under because we stabbed it in the heart

like the albino eclipse of a utopian third eye?

Waking and dream are so quantumly entangled

in the net of Indra, dolphin drown with their gills

caught in the interstices, when you’re not asleep

and you’re not awake, and it could be

a mandalic spider web, the aura of a magnetic field,

a dreamcatcher, a boring starmap washed in

by the watercolours of the northern lights,

or the collateral damage of fisherman making

a living by walking all over their own tears

at the expense of the sea that sustains them.

My heart doesn’t beat for me alone.

My eyes don’t see a name on the book they’re reading.

I write but my mind speaks in the accent

of everything I do like the Tower of Babel.

Every wildflower in the field is a definition of life

in its entirety. What’s been said? Once you’ve realized.

PATRICK WHITE  

PINE GROVES ON THE BATTERED HILL

PINE GROVES ON THE BATTERED HILL

Pine groves on the battered hill

giving birth to a bell on the nightwatch

as the moon rises like a midwife with a clean towel.

Pine cones like pagodas enlightened into life

like the eyelids of a fire that passed through

this summer like a poet with a seed bag

of first drafts. Ancient melancholy, lachrymose

secret, I can feel the ghosts of things

I don’t understand, slow tears at the edge

of the grasslands they’re lost in at the river’s edge.

Should I care for a darkness I’m not meant to know

as the bears are stuffing themselves on town dumps

and windfalls to fuel the winter in their layers

of candle fat as if they were still worshipped in caves?

I sit around the lotus of my many-petalled fire

blooming in mythic shadows enlarged

by the coven of trees they’re dancing with.

Here evil isn’t deliberate, and violence is innocent.

The thieves take what they need to live

and leave the rest. I’m afraid sometimes,

but the beast in my blood is in accord with the risk

and the cold air smells engagingly dangerous.

A warm rose spills from the throat of a quick kill,

the only mercy available to a snow owl that has to eat.

There’s more integrity in dying alone

in the woods at night for indiscernible reasons

with perfect timing than there is in dying en masse

in a drone strike as collateral damage.

It may be preyed upon but the white-tailed buck

doesn’t feel victimized by the unlicensed culls of the wolves.

Nothing can happen to me out here

that the beaver and the muskrat don’t

have to live with as well where skulls

are flowerpots and the ants mulch the Monarchs

too old and late to make the trip back,

that sipped on milkweed unfouled by pesticides

until they pressed themselves, intact,

between the covers of a collectible chapbook.

I like poems from the heartwood

with the bark still on them and a growing edge

more than those that have been pulped and milled

through a creative writing school

that sits in the corner like a piece

of erudite furniture meant to impress

more than unjam a logboom with the pike of a pen

or offer anyone a chance to take a load off.

I sit on a glacial rock and it feels like

the throne of the Stone of Scone returned to the Scots.

I hear a twig break like the wing of a tragic nightbird

in something’s teeth, or the dead are walking

the way the Algonquin used to along this riverbank

without ever imagining someone like me

camped here painting their features in smoke

as if all we had left of our common humanity

were the stars that looked down upon us

with the impersonal compassion of the tears

of the pines in their eyes hardening like a river

in the approaching cold of the dragon that shed them

like incense over the pyre of a coniferous miscarriage.

PATRICK WHITE

PEACE A MOMENT

PEACE A MOMENT

Peace a moment. A bubble of cool bliss

in the skin of a tear. Grace, with a green thorn.

The moon as I’ve never seen it before.

A ghost in the willows feathers down

upon the dark waters of the Tay

in an aura of moist summer air,

indelible as chalk on a blackboard

as if it were trying to write its name.

Solitude’s a priestess leashed to a water snake

that meditates on the moonlight

like a theta wave on its own path through life.

Look where you will, even the search parties

you organize like poems with real candlepower

are still lost in the labyrinth of your homelessness

looking for your true address until

you realize it’s been under your feet all the time.

You are the road. And there’s no one on it.

The shadows of the trees lie down

like thresholds that sense someone’s

been crying in a derelict doorway for years.

Severe sorrow. A bell for a bucket

bailing out the empty lifeboat of the moon

long, long after it’s set. Love. No help for it.

White sweet clover, swan’s plumage,

both sides of the road. The wind

in the vocal cords of the wild grape vines

overgrowing the half closed gate

of someone who meant to return one day

like a loose page of a book to its binding.

An unfinished loveletter to the fire that wrote it.

The maples reach out to touch me

to see if I’m real. Nocturnal enough,

but who’s to judge? The dream

doesn’t have a dawn or dusk. The end

goes on forever. The beginning never happens.

Born into perishing my way through life

what could death mean but another night

of living my passage through it

as the juniper sweeps my tracks

from the trails I cut down to the river

like deer paths, and the stars

in the shrine of my eyes devote their candles

to the same darkness that inspires the fireflies,

or my insights into the nature of love

as the way the nightsky is transfixed

by what is born of it like the mystery

of why life shines on its own likeness

without going blind or turning into stone

as if imagination were the first sign,

black walnut trees losing their voice

like Lyra in the west, as above, so below,

autumn approaching, o, yes, the autumn

and the poignancy, almost the flavour

of creation, that what we love last

and the deepest, is the perennial beauty

of our own passing, galaxies and waterlilies

embedded in our hydra-headed starmud

like a blue moon inseparable from

the dark waters of life it blossoms in.

A nightbird shrieks. A ghost kicked up

by the dust of the Milky Way in my wake

weeps like a sad loveletter that’s taken the words

right out of my mouth like an empty mailbox

standing at the side of the road, listening

when there’s nothing, not even an echo,

a whisper of my own innermost voice,

to the silence that lingers in the woods

for asylum from the intimacy that has

forsaken it, and the love in its heart

that trues it like an arrow fletched by the light

to a rapturous wound that hasn’t,

as the fish at both ends of the equinox

jump back like bulls-eyes into the targets

they made of their exits from one medium

to hit in the next like the tree rings

of the grand entrances we make on our way out.

Love perishes like apple bloom in the spring

to be born again among the windfalls of autumn,

the burning bridges of the maple trees

between the fountains on the moon, with birds,

and the housewells we dig like graves

here on earth, to drink our own tears from

like sacred syllables pouring through

the open floodgates of the moonrise

like a prophetic skull trying to hit

all the oracular high notes of the shrill treefrogs

celebrating the dark abundance, bright vacancy

of our corporeal entrances and disembodied exits.

PATRICK WHITE