Angry, Smashing Antiquated Croci Like Faberge Easter Eggs Poem by Patrick White

Angry, smashing antiquated croci like Faberge Easter eggs.
The air is rationing its oxygen, and even the wind begs.
I'm holding it all together like an abandoned barn,
but there are flashfloods in the mirror trying to humble
my lack of concern whether it rains for forty days
or all goes up in fire as I've been forewarned.
Don't care if it's nuclear winter, or just a passing storm.
I'm not mining diamonds like stars in the rifts of the clouds.
They can do without my eyes for awhile. Looking
for a white hole on the other end of this black one
like a ground hog with two, or the flip side of a telescope
shining at the other end of the tunnel the dead go through.

Madness imparts a significance to everything I do.
The spiders are weaving dreamcatchers and badly tuned harps
between the antlers of a dying caribou, and here
in this cow pie of starmud I call a brain, the warp and woof
of my axons are hairbraiding dead protein
into straightjackets for the two-headed wavelengths
of my meditative theta snakes. And it hurts to write this
like an exorcism of myself without fireflies in attendance
or the scribes of the wild grapevines
intoxicated by their purple passages of blood.
But I'm the only ghost writer left in this scriptorium
of solitude, where the beeswax candles dripping
with lachrymose honey keep confusing their wicks
for the stingers of drones defending the hive
like the Golden Dome of Jerusalem. Though it comes
as no surprise when I tell them God's not on anybody's side.

Wild crab apples crushed underfoot with no appetite for war,
it's flight or fight in the woods once you get past
the autumnal equinox like a truce between day and night
to give the herbivores a chance to squirrel away the dead
before everything slips into a coma with the raccoons
and the bears, and the houseflies cluster like black dwarfs
into a galaxy of anti-matter between the walls
of the hovel that's all that remains of the pioneer ice palace
two farms over and six generations down the sway-backed road.
Sickly sweet, the smell of decay, like the corpse of an angel
under a tumulus of fieldstones shrouded in bracken
to keep the wolves from digging it up like grave-robbers.
And all around it the clarions of the daylilies
with their flaming swords and trumpets
all tapped out at sundown like collapsed lungs.

The lake has less to say now that the loons are gone
and the trashed cornfields are pitstops for the Canada geese
bumping into each other without a traffic cop on take-off.
Joy always receives a warmer welcome than despair
when it comes like guest to the door, but, in fact,
one can be as dangerous as the other when its car breaks down
on a lonely dirt road, and yours is the only heart
for miles around, where it can seek shelter for the night.
So how could I set a place at the table for one above the salt
and the other below. When guests come. Receive them,
knowing you can delight in a disease that intrigues you
and sleight the cure because it tastes of hopelessness.
I celebrate the graces of joy and observe the protocols of despair.
Butterflies and bluebirds yesterday. Alcyone in the Pleiades
now Algol bloodied in the fist of Perseus. I break bread with both.
Yesterday I wined and dined with the stars like a chandelier.
Tonight I'm gnawing on an avalanche of moon rocks like a glacier.