Spring Rain In The Small Hours Of The Morning Poem by Patrick White

Spring rain in the small hours of the morning,
exlixir of leaves, tears of anthracite on the asphalt streets,
drumming circles rippling out of every pulse of the heart
that makes an impact, ghosts of gasoline thrown
on the pyres of the rootfires trying to ignite the lampposts
that have never known what it was to shine on their own
like daffodils and crocuses, trout lilies and wood sorrel,
without someone else telling them when and when not to.

Water music in the iron vocal cords of the gutter
free-flowing into its own underworld echo
like a mind stream making found art out of
accumulated garbage that announces it has no soul
though the dolmens of the pygmy fire-hydrants
stubbornly refuse to believe it. Some nights so brutal
the moon knocks its teeth out trying to take a bite
out of the curb like a crust of bread made of cement.
Corpses of soiled swans sculpted by the rain
lying like road kill in the parking lot of Mac's Milk
like a ghoulish leper colony in fluorescent light.

The powerlines weeping like mandalic spiderwebs
on their own, melancholic dreamcatchers letting it out
like broken necklaces of tears filling the moats
around the throats of crystal skulls losing it
like glaciers to global warming, prophetic windows
thawing out their frost-bitten eyes by disappearing
from sight as the cedars sweep chandeliers of light
from their wings as they try to take off the lake,
the rain packing down the starmud of the path
they were meant to take, their feet on the earth,
their heads in the clouds like totem poles and pagodas.

Soaked to the skin, the bloom of the rose with thorns
like silver buckles off my black leather jacket
heavy and sodden as the flesh of a rat snake
that's been run over by some stupid farmer
as it was coming out of hibernation like a wavelength
pariahed by rainbows, as water droplets tap
their fingers on the rim of my gangster hat
tilted on its axis like a total eclipse of the rings
of Saturn trying to look tougher than it actually is,

there's nowhere to go but down to the rising river
where the willows are rinsing their hair
under the faucet of a kitchen sink the way
my sisters used to before our blood parted
like the waters of the Red Sea that never closed up
behind me like a wound that's gone on hemorrhaging
for lightyears like hydrocephalic Al Gol in Perseus
holding his sword down like the reflection of a headlight
trembling in tribute to the ladies of the lake who hold
their bare arms out like the boughs of drowned trees
to receive it. The snowman with eyes of bituminous coal

disappears in a bath of warm, carboniferous tears
that appeal like black diamonds to the evergreens
for understanding and compassion not to come too late
as I open the floodgates of my heart like a lockmaster
white water rafting the spring runoff in a lifeboat
he's trying to bail out like a waterclock that's jumped
an hour ahead of itself to wander in the light
like the narrative theme of a real dream character
trying not to drown in its own mindstream
this close to waking up like the ghost of a sleepwalker.

No one in my bed I long to return to like a shipwreck
No poem in my heart I'm trying to protect
like the dishevelled bouquet of a wet matchbook
trying to keep love alive like a dying art long enough
to catch fire like the vernal equinox in the imagination
of an underground flowergirl setting my roots aflame
with blue hyacinths and wild irises of tantric sex.
My solitude seeks no mercy from the rain.
No dilution of my blood that runs like a watercolour of pain
vainly trying to unskein the black and red threads
of a passion for life from the bass riff of a death wish
blinded by the approaching light of the eerie beauty
of the black sun eclipsed at nadir in the Circlet of the Western Fish.