Come Some Moments In The Squalls Of Time Poem by Patrick White

Come some moments in the squalls of time,
however flammable the orchids are
behind the burning woodshed,
your life turns into an inert gas
and you're not holding hands with anything.

Singly the waves go to their graves
like trombones in a rock band
as harmonicas rave at the moon
like lonely dogs that have lost a faithful owner.

What can you say, what can you say
to fill such a vast silence
with gravitational eyes that can bend
time and light back around your way
instead of sending the usual flowers?

Sometimes in the brutal shallows of life
you find yourself out hunting dragons
with a butterfly net that's gentle on their wings
and all you catch are fireflies that sting.

Occasions of insight, eventful revelations,
the stars divide into congregations
of myopic constellations to improve
the ferocity of their narrow points of view.
I am the Hunter. I am the Swan.
I am the whirling castle of Arianrhod
in the last crown of the Celts
who could sing in silver almost
as well as the moon on an autumn night.

And none of this is true by three in the morning
but it will help get you through
the worst of yourself like an air raid warning
screaming like a banshee at a broken window
for your blood in a black out of bombed-out cities.
Whatever befalls you in this matrix of accidents
you don't attribute to the errors of mere coincidence.
You'll catch up in time to whatever you're seeking
if you sit still enough to outrun your thought,
whether it's a god or an enlightened woman
in a Zen brothel, and when you do, you'll say,
I love you, and they'll both ask
what language you're speaking
in the accent of a demotic form of betrothal.

And that's when the roses fall on their thorns
like a woman in the doorway of an honourable death
and you're dazed by how easy it was
for them to believe you were the candle
of a friend to the end, until you blew it out
to be where you were going on your own in the dark.

Isolate star, flint master of the synderetic spark
you chip off your diamond nature
like a flake of light in the starless abyss
of a dead furnace that died
like an underground cedar fire
that miscarried a prophet of doom
that lived long enough to change his tune
and eat a spoonful of his own ashes.

Cat-eyed lucidity of lunar parentheses
sharpening your claws on the clouds,
mauling small palpitant hearts
you're crazed enough to play with
as if the world were your toybox,
expand your field of vision,
deepen your depth perception
to include me in your darkness.
Initiate me into the mysteries of your fire.
Immolate me on a tiger's pyre
and scatter my ashes on the brainwave
of a holy river like rose petals and the eyelids
of the insights I kept as clean
as chromium scalpels shining in the moonlight.