Friday, June 1, 2007

COME NIGHT

Come night and the ease of being alone with the rain on the window. The pain is more acutely human. And the mournful trains in the darkness get on with the homely business of being us. I turn the light around more deeply inward and discover there are tears on the other side of my eyes that have been falling for years into the mirrors of a kindlier likeness. So much doesn’t matter, but the little that does, overflows the cracked cup of the world. Come night and I am swayed like a leaf on the stream; come night and I am the ploy of a thousand suggestive faces that people the way things seem. I am the dream, I am the dream, I am the dream, and when it’s true, the dream is me. So much I wanted to do; where did the wanting go? The clock limps royally by in iambs contemptuous of the freedom of the verse, but it isn’t time that heals the unspeakable wound that is suffered by everything as if the sky wore the moon like a scar; it’s the night that grows its herb in the injured seeds of who we are. On the tongue of every blade of grass, a star, a voicing of the light within no cloud could foil. Come night and our roots digress in the soil that fervently dreams of us, that summons our lucidities like inspiration to enlighten its toil with urgent transformation. The trees, our lungs; the seas, our eyes, and our minds, the unwitnessed clarity of a sky that isn’t there to obstruct the night, there are water and fire, light, blood, star, and thought streams within that run down from the mountains far beyond us like the coloured threads of a forgotten wholeness unravelling like a childhood sweater, lifetime after lifetime, to thread the eyes with vision and amend the absence with poetry.

PATRICK WHITE

IMAGINATION ISN'T FEIGNING

Imagination isn’t feigning if I imagine I’m awake. No more than a mystery is the mask of something waiting to be exposed. If life is the medium of a dream then the dream must be reality without a second thought, no proliferation of witnesses; the leaves on the tree not testimony, no shadow at noon. The well thirsts for itself, and the fire is martyred in its own burning. The stars are blinded by the blaze. And the emptiness is always full like a woman in love. Which side of the window is clear; and which is sky? And if you consider the eye made both, arrayed both for the sake of the view, and you are the view, then where’s the distinction that would make one a fraud, and the other, the high fields of God, never broken by a plough, where under every seed the wind sows like stars, there’s the root of a demon and the flower of an angel weaving crude haloes out of compassionate herbs and scars? And when you read this; who’s inside out? When you want to know where someone you cherished and lost went; it’s easy. When the moon is on the water there’s water on the moon. If the cup were only there to contain itself, where could the wine find room? Intoxications of the morning, flower-fire, and I’ve barely woken up, and I’m already drunk. No left-handed bells, please; no lead-footed cornerstones. Let the mist pick itself up and don’t ask what lake last night left its lingerie all over the trees; it’s too early to be arraigned by the day’s convictions. Is the blood of the rose wounded by a thorn? The moon gored on its own horn? Love’s the waterlily in a swamp of porn. And look. Almost a hit. And I haven’t signed anything yet. Get it. The dawn is not an inflammation, and the imagination, the permanent side-effect of a spiritual antibiotic. Because if it is, the disease is doctor to the herb, and ministrant to the cure. Sweet fever that dances like a pulse when a woman lifts up her eyelids like a bra.

PATRICK WHITE

POETRY IS LIKE

Poetry is like swinging a cup through the river like a bell and holding it up to your lips, and drinking until you meet the sea. Strange intermingling of simulacra where the stone flows and and the trees sculpt the wind and every painting is a portrait of the brush. The stars come out, and it’s your eyes that are shining, your seeing that the myths are shades of. The majority rejected by the individual, and the individual, the apprentice of a tyrant, what discipline isn’t the foreplay of chaos? Every theme comes round again like the petal of the hour, and the shrieks and the dreams, the laughter, the sighing and the sorrow, all the alloys of an ambiguous art, are the conditions of ignorance that enlighten the word when the word listens to its own advice. It may be Buddha, but I’m grateful to the anthropogenetics of my ancestral abyss. Here. Look into this, quickly. It’s not true we’re a death shy of the view. Look at the palette, not the painting, but don’t mistake the facial for the face. That’s the mysterious grace of the seeming that recognizes you. Poetry is not like asking a shoe about a journey you made, and if you’ve raised the sail of your voice to blossom on the wind, remember, that’s only the prelude of the fruit of where you’ve been, and the wind will wreck it, and the leaves grow green.

PATRICK WHITE

I AM SO ALONE

I am so alone in this namelessness, sometimes so immured to the wall that my blood moves like a fresco someone’s painted over. I am a tree that has held on to its leaves through the longest of winters into the next spring. And all for what? I could have fared better with the dead. I could have scattered myself down any random road, lost maps to nowhere, trying to follow their own coastlines back to the first sighting. The dark. The ticking. The space is too tight around my body. So much always had to happen before I could, but this is not my straitjacket; mine’s got the sky for a hood. Times like these I tighten like a pipe wrench around the throat of a parking meter for not being the bud of a daffodil. My mind is the afterlife of an ancient future that haunts me for not being born. Pick it up in the morning. Sleep. Sleep. There are graves everywhere footnoting the text with their epitaphs; and not a scientist among them to verify the facts. Wry, pathetic, pleading last words, blighted cherubs of stone, punctuating the quote, as if the earth were indifferent to what it used. I can’t believe that I have lived for nothing. I can’t believe that life loves her children. I can’t believe that love conquers all; and I can’t believe in what does. The mirror longs for what it cannot contain. My heart is number than a thimble. The halo I used to wear so proudly in the rain, is now a nose ring chained to a rosary of slave-trading profundities. The dark is tar. Space, this hateful disparity of leering glass. I have waited to know. I have prayed. I have studied. In my rage for transformation, beside my reservoirs of ignorance I have flagellated my bodymind with the blood-caked hair of purifying comets to turn the water into wine, blood into light, for the stars to be poured into the eye of the green apple that it might taste the radiance before it falls, but the wind is a rough companion and the birds have pitted me like the moon. My life is twisted like a tie on a garbage-bag someone left after they moved out. My life is the lichen of rain on the ceiling that replaced the fraudulent rosette. Or am I wrong to ask, impugned for asking, somehow give affront if I ask why everything seems so inevitably unique and periphrastic? I am appalled by the onceness of everything, the horror of cherishing beauty that must pass, the violence of the sorrow when it does. I have looked upon the world, its trees, its clouds, its people, as the perennials of my own nature; and its fates and accidents, tragedies and toys I have learned like the grammar of my native tongue, and I have seen the earth turn from an ark into a lifeboat with limited space, and given up my own place, again and again, to the immensity of the solitude I saw in the human face. I have not managed to feel compassion for the vicious, but I can aloofly grieve the death of an innocent snake. Petty fool. Mystic migraine. Have my urgencies lied? Le poet maudit. I have dipped my quill of light in the tarpit to illuminate the darkness like a black candle, but this spring takes me aside and candidly suggests for all that I have fed to the flame I have laboured for shadows in vain. The darkness is a mouth, and even the abyss disappears with a hiss like the mirage of a snowflake on a furnace, and time anchors it fangs in my voice and wrenches me from my breath, another coil tighter. Is this data? Is this witness? Is this prayer? Are these the beached thoughts of the new conquistadores of significance slyly advancing up the alien shore of an elitist prophecy? Or merely the ghostfroth and seafoam of a dead tide clinging to rocks on the moon? Why do I suffer? What do I mean? What don’t I mean? Does a clown ask the question even as he paints his face in a mirror framed by lightbulbs that shine like the regimental lotuses of enlightenment? Are the answers skewed because the questions are awry; or is the antidote merely an encore of the toxins, and it’s better to be subsumed like a crowd in the delirium than milk a fang for mercy? The darkness is a shark’s eye. No iris. How long can I twist in a yoga of agony like an arrow bent by its target, before I am strung to my own spinal cord like a feathered serpent finally heeled to the yielding of the bow, and I let go?

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN IT ISN'T THERE

When it isn’t there, when the door’s closed and the key’s broke off in the lock, and the heart is an older stone than the moon, and where there was no threshold I’m the junkmail coupon for something you don’t want, and I’m gathering asteroids for ballast, and over everything there’s the nuclear fallout of the one that got away, and the species are drawing straws, and it looks as if winter’s here to stay, and the aloof clouds are as intimate as ashes, and the gold sunrise in the crowns of the royal quatternio is beginning to turn back into lead, and the alchemical hermaphrodite is missing one of his/her heads, and I don’t know why, never know why, my spinal cord is always winched to a black bell in a bottomless well, trying to haul up water to put the fire out. Not to be loved. To feel unworthy. Not to know why you aren’t. And to remember you felt as if you were. That’s nothing but the water-harps of the sirens on playback after they’ve left like seals. Homing songs on reel to reel, though there’s really no one to return to. And it’s hard to cherish the absence when the absence doesn’t need you. Have you ever wondered why they don’t hang a lot of mirrors in the lobby of a funeral parlour, and the silence is always a carpet and a fern? But the crematorium is no longer my last rite of passage. I burn, but less flagrantly. Candle. Coffin. Urn. The hearse doesn’t know where to bury me, and only the corpses have the physique to carry me. Bring on the professional mourners if you wish, but the small, tender flame of my life that endures has freed itself from the hook of your wick like a goldfish and swims away, a fan dance, through the auroral depths of the night. And it’s not that I don’t love you. I do. I’ve never seen you. I’ve never touched you. But your letters and your poems, the candour of your passionate declarations, were birds in a sky that hadn’t seen birds since the last full moon raved like a sty on an infected third eye. And there’s no point in thrashing around in the catacombs of the computer for resurrectable prophets, or trying to string someone else’s bow with my arrow as if I were just another one of Penelope’s romping suitors. I am gratefully arrogant enough to be sustained by the upwelling of my disaffected dignity raised like a flag of blood on the ruin of a castle in the distance. I can withstand a siege like the moon, pitted and scarred by the comets and the catapults, but obdurate as the gravestone of a captive that wouldn’t quit. And that’s the irony of it, the oxymoronic coincidence of the contradictories. These cold, bright, hard heights are merely the absence of your warm, dark, soft valleys where I walked in the shadow of your breath, psalming my sheep through the gorge when I was your eloquence and you were my content. Nothing. Not a word. For weeks. The extraction of an axis like a sliver. I weave like a drunk top in the headlights of a trigger-happy cop. Sooner or later, the pain will thaw away from itself like snow and snakes in the garden, and I’ll review the agenda of my transformations like a phoenix in therapy because I can’t cry, or the nugget of a worm with gilded wings, and knock until I don’t answer, on a thousand and one doors, intrigued without wonder, at the strange cosmetics that pitch themselves like snakeoil, a complete make-over, inside and out, on the threshold of a faithless necrophile with taste.
PATRICK WHITE

DO I NOT KNOW YOU NOW

Do I not know you now, you, without past, without future, you distant probabilities of breath, prevalence of a moment that does not exist yet, and will not exist even when you do? As the garden keeps coming up mint and roses, so the earth keeps growing lips and eyes and fingers, and I have those now as you do, gates to greet the world. It’s true the mind makes itself a body out of the detritus and effluvia of the earth; but it does not act like the living upon the inanimate, like God upon dirt, but living collaborates with the living, and all things live, to build itself a chrysalis, that what crawled might now have wings. Black dragonfly on the glowing milk of the waterlily and not a bruise on the light. Four petals of a flowering diamond, and the rest, a bolt of anthracite, I dip my brush in the hotspot of the sun reflected in its eye, and paint you a picture in space, the shorthand symbols and images of my secretary voice, auroras you can see and hear when your eye and your ear are one immediate clarity, a breeze of vital light, the tip of the tongue of the wind on your translucent skin, a visionary summons to live aware of me as I am of you, not later, but now, here, at this joining of rivers such that my thoughts, emotions, insight and blood flow into yours and yours into me on this long fall down from the mountain to the sea. But I have not come before or after you, but with you, and my breathing and pulsing in this unbounded brevity of space, is yours, and the seeing and the hearing and the touching yours, and what of my voice that isn’t your saying, that isn’t a river whispering into its own ear like a future memory, things the mountain said to tell the sea? And if my ignorance is a window of coal trying to stare its way into an enlightened diamond on the moon, a subtler deception of the light, and if the folly of my pain is to try to build picket-fences of whitewashed virtues erect as military palings, and more than a few off the gate, missing without leave from parade, to keep the snakes out, and if I labour freely to assist the effortless effort and know I am not needed, so do you, so is yours, so are you as I am now, a bubble of sentience arising from a spiritual watershed breaking like a womb. Not subtle. Not obvious. You will come to the world like a memory, and what you know, and all that you can know, you will have already been. Blue lights over the entrance; red over the exit. Like a river, I am not poured into you; nor you poured out of me. What I didn’t cry for but held onto like a grape, you will let go of like one tear over the edge of the cup, and that will be the sweetest drop in the vineyard because it was aged in a darkness deeper than night, like a message or a dream in a bottle, a man embodied, to be the wine you get drunk on to fall across the threshold of my blood, relieved to have made it home out of the maelstrom of voices and visions, that call for a mouth, eyes, hands, a heart, the silver earring in my left ear that hangs like a planet from the lobe of the moon that rises higher tonight in the west, a sail unfolding like a loveletter, the first blossom, to unveil the passage in the shale of your breath like a warm wind in the dark.
PATRICK WHITE

HOW MUCH ACCRUES

How much accrues to every word, like the deserts and rainforests in the voice of the wind, that are never heard. Under the wet plaster, the duff of last year’s words, first violets and the bones of the deermouse, local candidates with big meanings. And there are hermaphroditic mushrooms, two sexes in one, penis and gills, mortar and pestle, that come up in the night unobserved from the spores of an ancient vessel. What I have said, and, without invention, didn’t mean, though I could see the dolphin off the bow, is more of a book than the one I did write, straying with the flowers and the shadows that strewed my path. Now I follow like a bird in the aftermath of my life, and the sirens let down their hair like comets in the themes of my wake, to play me gently with the thorn of another heartache because I am a willing sorrow, not a scuttled defeat, and the music that gulls the reef is sweet.

PATRICK WHITE

IF WE MEET AGAIN

If we meet again, don’t quote your scars at me as if you were the moon. It’s hard to sympathize with the smile of a knife when it’s bleeding. There are some stains on the bedsheets even the light can’t wash away, and a mouth is not a wound you can close with a kiss. And I know some part of me is struggling with this like a cut worm who won’t bless the plough, but many women before you, because I died wholly for them, have taught me that even the most normative caprice of severance is the east of my deliverance, and all I have to do is wait in the cave of the Seven Sleepers for the eras to pass that will restore me like a face to a mask. But you’ll be bones by then, and the nightwind will not rescind the taste of your name just to please the flowers. You need a younger man who knows why he cries as I once did; older, I ache like a stone, but only metals move through me like swords and crowns unsheathed by wizards and kings, the boyish imaginings of my injured prowess when I’m bored with the lies that are inscribed under the eyelids of the wedding rings. And yes, this mute, mouthless, abysmal silence stings and the words that mated in a fury of night have lost their wings like flying ants that busy themselves with smaller dismemberments in the dirt. Or less symbolically rendered, I hurt. Quartered and torn asunder. Down, down, down under where I can look up at the roots and wonder if anything flowers on the bright side, or if my gravestone pops up like toast for another bride of the morning that wakes up glitzy beside my ghost. But this is an old coast I’ve been down before like a fly at a windowpane looking for a passage through the absolute glass of the ice pack in my way. And it’s not a matter of doubting there is a Cathay to be ultimately reached, but if I’ve grown sadder and wiser in all kinds of romantic weather, repeatedly beached, the compass of my little sage is more a map of where not to go than anything, but I don’t preach. Like a wolf above the timberline you can hear but can’t locate, the peaks scrambling the echoes like an early warning defensive missile system, I have learned to stay to the high paths above the radioactive dumps of the emotional melt-downs that glow like the half-life of cities in the dark. Howl there and no one understands the sorrow and the madness that’s drawn out of your blood and soul by the poultice of the moon; everyone’s tuning their bark to a voice coach, and behind every pitbull there’s a pooch. Better, my solitude, better this precipice with a view, than all the sirens and muses I’ve screwed the night before my sacrifice. I will not grovel on the bestial floor in the gore of my wretchedness, nor saint myself in a waste of blood and love just to prove I’ve been true to my hallucination. You can’t churn honey from yeast, or inflate the bread with pollen, and why bother trying to lift the pillars of old civilizations that have fallen into the rubbish and rubble of their kingdom-comes? I was never much of a goat you could tie bleating to a stake to con a tiger, or kill a god. Only a little magician is the fool of his rod, and there are darknesses well beyond sorcery that unmaster even the greatest adept of their demonic clarity. If you want to see into things don’t rely on your eyes. So I grieve; love palls and the flowers fall and I’m sad for the passing of everyone and everything, for the thin vapour of the dreams we keep breathing out like used air, for the unnamed star with dead planets like burrs in her hair, for the agonized cigarette-butt stubbed into the worn wood of the indifferent stair. If once I aspired to a failure beyond my utmost; at least, now, in times like these, when I search my heart like Atlantis for the occasional throne, I’m equal to my own inadequacy, and if I’m alone, I’m alone. Nor do I blame you anymore than I would the eyes behind the e-mail curtains that parted like the Red Sea to take a look at my exodus below into a gloomier theocracy. The same old menu of manna and vipers as the last time I crossed over, and the screening myth of a murder now the press release of a lie, and no sorrow in the eye that washes pharaoh out to sea, and tomorrow always the promised land just out of reach like the face of a woman only fingertips away from the obedience I breach and the breaches I obey. Did I not labour for you like a well in a desert, and bleach the water with sunstruck ghosts before I held it up to your lips like the moon to dispel the fever of a chronic eclipse? I was you and you were me. You said so. Closer than blood and breath. Maybe I just wanted to believe a greater intimacy than I had ever known was possible between people. Maybe the night was bored and sighed and the sigh stirred us into words and a nighthawk shrieked at the top of the moon’s stairwell, higher than it had ever been lifted up before by the bedsprings of its spiritual thermals where you lay down with me, our only skin, the sky. I saw your face once. I saw your tattooed arms and legs. I saw your eye. And the moist star that adorned it. The man and poet that I am are the two footings of the same bridge astraddle the mindstream that has no banks, and most of the time it’s hard to tell whether it’s the water or the bridge that flows, but my heart knows when it’s been touched, and you touched it. I felt you like the sky feels a new constellation crossing over for the first time, fascinated by the dark currents that swirled below, a confluence of voices, and the reflection of stars that mimed your radiance, as, effortlessly, a spontaneous inversion of the night, I returned your shining to you. But now, if you’re gone. Full stop. And this silence that widens in my wake like the compass of a departing waterbird on its way to the next pond, is all that’s left of everything that’s gone, this tremor of time in a dark space that once shone, the light with its tongue cut out learning to sign, I will not blow out the star in your eye that webbed the dreamcatcher in the corner of mine. I will remember you some nights when there’s only the field and me and the night and the stars, and I stand in the vastness lordless and alone, and feel the dark efface my life in its boundless immensity, and all my feelings a halo of black comets that once flared in the sun, I will remember you; I will remember you with intensity, and I will wonder.

PATRICK WHITE

I'VE TRIED TO APPEAL

I’ve tried to appeal to your nefarious side; if I couldn’t marry the white, marry the black bride. But you reek of artificial colognes that could almost pass for the real emotion, too much ambergris, not enough ocean, and I’m sick of a mannequin’s devotion. Even under the sartorial skies you’re draped in, your whole life is a prosthetic device, the limbs of a disjointed tree, Frankensteinian reproduction of a fully assembled amputee. Staked to a lightning rod in a department store window, you never go anywhere that isn’t on display, your butterfly and your comet, under glass. But I couldn’t live your way; as if I were the only needle, and everyone else were hay. I like the wooden spoon of your shapely ass, but where’s the cake, where’s the batter? You see? All bowl. No matter. The Mad Hatter without a tea party to go to. It’s time for a makeover that isn’t a makeover; new stars, new symbols, time to thumb the features of a new face out of a supple space with a new feel. I have lived my way through enough illusions, to prefer the real, the clarity to the cloud. I want a science of becoming that isn’t the art of scrying the breadcrumbs for a unified field theory of bread; and a heart that isn’t a black apple placed at the eastern doors of the dead. I want a sky big enough to host the stars in my head that have hived their honey into light to serve the bees that sip from the spoons of the flowers. I want to sit in the dark for a couple of hours alone, marrow in the bone, and discuss with God the possibility of a world of my own.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN EVERYTHING'S RANDOM

When everything’s random; is anything ever awry? Every river’s going to make the sea; so what river’s flowing the wrong way, even if it ends in a desert like a beached whale of salt being carved up by the locals? And whose life among us is somebody’s else’s starmap? Whose constellation isn’t the cut of their sail? Success, an ultimate failure; failure, an unanticipated success, no face is a bad portrait, no hand fuller or emptier than another, no eye, an illegal immigrant to the seeing, a tunnel under the border of anything. Why live in a palace of billboards and pop-ups like a jack-in-the-box, where your vital signs have become a product key of microdiesels and digits that could deactivate your system if the coupling in the lock proves false, and nothing exists until it is electronically spermed on the wall of the one-eyed womb of the t.v.? Do you thumb through the computer like a recipe-book of spells, as if the cauldron were a god who could choose its magician and vision to throw down the snake that will eat yours whole as if it were your mind? Junkie. Dazzle. Data. The moonlight is the frost of a white eclipse, and there’s a card our disconnected roots are looking for to network with the rain. And the roads and the riverbeds and the mindstreams we might have taken, the transformations we might have undergone, left to surf our own feelings and thoughts, to browse our own beings for insights in the woodlots that don’t need a mouse and a pad, are left to explore your absence like an understudy of the view. What was forgotten when we learned to write; what will be forgotten now that we can overclock the light? You are the cauldron, the wand, the summons and the vision; your life is the spell you cast over everything. Why forego the greater tree of the divining, the one the lightning hits like a fast dose, for the little stick that goads you through the labyrinth looking for the eye of the needle like the stray thread of your own unravelling? It’s not the ghost of the content that matters the seed into growing, but the mode of the knowing that shapes the flowing. Panes et circenses, sed quis custodes custodiet? Bread and circuses, but who watches the watchers playing us on the other side of the screen like the upgraded vessels of the merchant marine that port and traffic and trestle our bloodstream, the new fishermen, spiders in bubbles, bending and mending the spaces and faces under the veils of their nets, not out to catch souls or fish this time, or to bleed the ocean with slaughter, but the water, so that when a fish swims they prescribe the seas, and when a bird flys it downloads the skies they freely move it through, unspooling the birthcord of the kite that’s tethered to their windows, everything ready and feathered for flight, and a weathervane to cue the wind which way, which way to blow the measured seed to the binary field that serves the sowing of the morphology of our knowing.

PATRICK WHITE

THE GHOST OF A COMET

The ghost of a comet screams across the sky like the old groan of a planet that once was, and I can see in a flash, the pivot of prophecy and the dark gate that waits like a nightbird for the moon to rise, that it might grapple the prize in its eyes with its talons. Times when I’m probably mad, I see the clearest. I am what the vision sees, what the portrait acquainted with me, paints me to be. Maybe the underside of the moon’s reflection whispers to the dark side that’s never known water, that all things are fluidly free, and the black face with the stars burnt into it, tries to imagine the radiance of her eyes on the flowing. And needs me to tell her. Who knows? Maybe there’s a purpose to the things that haven’t happened yet, a trim, no-nonsense necessity that will expose the unsuspected dream grammar that is muddled in the shadows of the powers of Babel today, but now it’s everything a voice can do to make an appearance among the daffodils, the microphones, the stoned windowsills of incoherence. Here is my heart. See how it hurts? See there behind the burning bush, the cat that hunts it like a robin? It’s not much different from yours, all feathers and flames. Sometimes it grows scales like a snake and thinks it’s a knight on a holy quest for the grail, and there have been times, powerful but few, when it’s worn nightskies for wings and risen like a dragon from its waterlair to swallow the moon whole like the eclipse of an egg. It asks when it’s tempted to beg, but it doesn’t piss down its own leg, trying to lure a fire-hydrant to a dog. I’ve lost track of how many Circes have transformed the hog back into a man, to wander from catastrophe to catastrophe, until I don’t know if I’m Moses washed up on an island, or Odysseus murdered on the threshold of the Promised Land. But I recognize the snake, Nehushtan. And there are arrows strung to the bow of my voice that will outwit the axes like wood, because it’s the dead tree that shafts the moon, and the live ones that swan on the block like evergreens. Though it would be hallucinating to know what that means, still, you can feel it, you can open the eyes in your blood and reveal it to the sky of why like a constellation you had up your sleeve to trump the blind. And don’t tell me we’re not of the same mind; I know what you leave out, what you leave behind every time you move in the middle of the night from one plight to the next, as if you weren’t so much impoverished as hexed. I know what you curse and bless and how you always conceal the truth as if it were something you had to confess. I’m freaked like the gold wiring in your irises to the same seeing, and the solitude speaks of rain to the wind swinging on the same unlatched gate. We may lie under bullet-proof glass in state alone, but we’re fools together in the backfire of the comic prop that knocks us off our feet under the big top. And it’s got to mean the same to you that I’m getting tired of running at a snap of the shadow of the riding crop that drives me through my paces like the same mask of blood behind a thousand painted faces. A peacock on a trapeze is not a comet no matter how many eyes are fixed upon it. So I walk with you through the parting sea of white sweet clover down the same backwoods, pot-holed road, as if we had left Egypt behind us like an underfunded project of the body to preserve itself. And it’s of no importance who’s leading who out of what because when God talks to herself in the ashes of an old fire, recalling some part of herself like a poem inspired by now, she’s never directive, sowing the wind to find its own way to guide the seed of what she has to say to a face where it might flower, every flame of her arousal, a memory and a mirror, this endless bouquet of comets she keeps throwing to the bridesmaid stars, to give herself away, espousal after espousal, at the end of every play.
PATRICK WHITE

WHAT A WASTE

What a waste of wide-eyed radiant madness to get serious about anything, what a conversion of the profound and unbounded to the dumb and confounded of the trivial. Who needs to tie little knots in the wind to remember when there’s nothing to forget? Isn’t a cemetery a family album of ghosts; doesn’t the mind have spaces for the fallen blossoms reflected like faces on the skin of the apple that deposed them? The phases of the moon bloom and curl into the slow fires of extinction, and yet nothing ripens in the nothingness but the longing to be overwhelmed by the longing, to be swept away or up or under the sprawling tides of its agony like the remnant of something disemembered, something drowned, something, inestimably, over. If the hurt goes on for too long, the whole world turns into an open wound, and the moon, the nurse and knife of a self-inflicted cure. What’s important is to realize that when you democratize your clowns, you raise a vicious king like a snarling bone to a petty throne. You bug your own laughter with spies to report back to a comic delusion that doesn’t think you’re funny. And there is no sanctuary in the absurd, no home in the circus, because it is the nature of the absurd to be without nature, home, and sanctuary. Me? I’ve sewn a tent together of some of the more enduring skies I’ve slept under, and, at night, by the provisional fire of a vagrant heart, I replot the first draft of black matter into a supernova. I turn the light around and return the shining to the stars. I break the breadstone of my flesh to reveal the gold within like grain and show the moon when it picks up its ax like the last crescent to labour away at my heart like a miner, I am wealthier than the substance of the world. My blood doesn’t run through me like a corrupt currency to replenish my diminishing inexhaustibility. Things make rivers of me like hidden metals on the moon, and when I weep, my tears turn into diamonds to cut my way through the glass sky that tempts my will like a brick I’ve cast in the form of my anger. At the end of anything, it’s always classier to cut a throat than break a skull. You can always arrange the blood on the mantle of a sentiment like roses to commemorate the purple passage of a lie. And there’s always a judicious blowjob waiting like a new aesthetic in the delicious ambiguity of the gesture.

PATRICK WHITE

INSTRANSITIVE MORNING

Intransitive morning, early spring, nothing much pops up. I’m a dullard. Crumbs of dreams in the corner of my eyes, and night still clinging to my brain like tar. Reality check: Fifty-nine this year. Getting old. Or at least trying it on for size, an era or two, here and there, coming undone at the seams. I’m beginning to sign truces with my body where I used to rule. Flashes of myself as the king of quicksand with a turtle for a throne. I’ve got to be one of the last flags of the sixties to come down. What were we saying back then: things about love and truth, justice, freedom, revolution, compassion, the creative lucidity of unconditioned play? Amazing how the idealistic spontaneity of those years has degenerated into the violent protocols of a sanctimonious purity, frightened people reaching for God and a rifle, reflexively. I think I’m looping; living again backwards what I advanced through. Maybe it’s the way I’ve been wired to the planet to inform on myself, but I swear I jumped from the stage of the sixties into the mosh pit of the same old crusades that tore down Byzantium and slaughtered Jerusalem in l099, Jesus and Muhammad having it out in the desert, while Lucifer-Iblis thrives on the bets he’s taking, playing both sides against the refugee camp in the middle. Shades of Vietnam. But remember when we killed to steal a weapon, a woman, a cow? We took it and left. Woe unto you Sargon of Agade. Now we kill for an idea; now we occupy; now we reform things in the nucleus, now our virtues seep into the crevices of the boundary stones of the brain, the imperializing minerals of our ideological pseudomorphoses, death everywhere pre-emptively imposing its solitary sanction on the innocent and evil just the same, being the one, true, democratic, egalitarian that it is. Coffee. Cigarette. Power. Lights. Computer screen. I’ve got a god’s-eye view of the ongoing autopsy in the global abbatoir of a self-destructive teaching hospital. And the words are trying to arrange the marriage of the silence to the disgrace, but the bride’s been decapitated before her brother could throw the first stone. No wonder God doesn’t wear a human face and had to create space to find somewhere within himself commodious enough to hide in, having clicked on to the demonic icons of our features and futures. One body, the planet, breaking into thought. Volcanoes of pain. And the great sky, from looking, half-insane; its stars, smeared with weeping, muddled as fireflies, as the weather turns around like a wounded animal to confront its priestly redactor. Millenarian apocalypse now, astronomic catastrophe, or the black rapture of total extinction, the same; who would have guessed there would be so many days of judgment that the clock has been converted into a war crimes tribunal as its hands come down like swords on the nape of every moment? Once it was attended by recording angels, one, to the left, one, to the right, the cherubs and epaulets on our shoulders, but now the human heart is bugged. Strangers in unindictable rooms gag it with its own blood. And the children; let’s not mention the children whose deaths by the millions have done more to advance the rage and the rhetoric of the impotent like a verbal aphrodisiac than all the bloodlust of the colisseums of the Roman empire ever could, high on the opiate of another festive holy day. How do I expiate the self-loathing I feel when I don’t forget to remember the children, and there before me arrayed in objective exactitude beside a shovel at the edge of a grave, is the singular futility of the life I have squandered on chasing the literary simulacra of the living features I could have been saving? How do you live inexcusably trying to ameliorate your own indefensible humanity by cultivating the eloquence of a caravan on the perfume trail to Solomon, all frankincense and dung? I live homelessly in the slums of myself to avoid being enrobed judiciously in the guilty night velvets of my blood-caked interiors. And I am appalled at the rabid affliction of my species sprawling across the planet like a deranged virus adapting ingeniously to its own extinction. How do you celebrate the rose that poisons your breath without corrupting the truth? Glad I asked, but my voice isn’t conveying anything it wants leaked to the press, for fear of incriminating itself like a judas-goat in a cover up engineered by its mould-hearted superiors. We forgive the lies we won’t admit are true. The ruse of the left hand washing the right. Even with the most seasoned intentions, to live here, even below the salt and under the table with anxious dogs avoiding the swat to vy for a morsel, where one can grow fat on the garbage, is to dress up like a float and parade down streets that are packed with roadkill. And literary immortality? What’s that if there’s no blood in the stone, but a way of trying to squeeze a textbook out of an epitaph? There’s an overworked doctor in a tent in Nigeria I should have been.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT'S BEEN DONE

What’s been done, what’s not been done. Why regret the outcome? Could it have been different? Did you have the will to order the course of events, or were you more the anchor than the rudder; more the talon on the bough, than the wing? Was life a medicine you could take by prescription, a way of healing childhood wounds, a herb of the moon, a steroid, something to pump up the volume, a balloon of nitrous oxide outside a Grateful Dead concert, laughing gas? And now it’s drooping like a lily that’s had its day, a jellyfish, a Medusa, tangled like a parachute in its own powerlines? The grain of sand is covered in nacreous pearl, the pearl in shell, the shell in water, the water in sky and the sky in the black space of a lung it’s never going to fill, like you, my friend, my inadequate atmosphere. Player, stayer, goer, what’s the difference? You never took your Harley on the roadtrip to Baja, did you? Did you conclude that there was no tangible acquisition to be derived from the experience, afterall? No surety you wouldn’t be diminished by the gain of something you couldn’t evaluate? Did she who is not with you anymore, gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond, prefer a life among the shadows of her own destruction, than one with you in your tower of light, that judas-goat lighthouse of yours that draws people in like moths and ships so that you can rummage among the salvage of what you’ve wrecked? People like barges of surgical waste, heaped in the water that couldn’t wash itself clean of you, hey, slick? Even with that guitar in your hand, you’re not the sun at midnight, buddy; you’re just midnight; you’re just painted in the tars of your own eclipse, and every time the moon rises now, the ghost of herself, she adds another feather, another cold flame to your darkness. Now comes the mystery to your insistent mystique and discovers you’re as boring as every other match head that ever flared in the sun. Did she look up at the stars, and, running up the path, half-dancing, cull wild lucidities from the nightfields, and you, as she pointed out the constellations, and told you their legends, see surveyed real estate elapsed for taxes? You always had a way of salting the earth, as if everything that wasn’t you, was Carthage, though I suspect the allusion is lost upon you, but what pest control are you going to use on the stars? You’re the striped worm slumping out of toothpaste tube, not a dragonfly in a chrysalis going through a hard time. You sweeten your breath only to corrupt it with your voice. Your ambitions were imperial, but now you’re the reigning monarch of that little patch of dirt in my ears I always wash out to be fit to be seen in public. What’s been done; what’s not been done? Why make the distinction when you’re a master illusionist and all the oases who posed as you in a desert of unactualized windows and pearls and people, were sins of omission, things you didn’t do that could never come undone? She’s dead, brother, a vapour on the wind, something you took in like a playful gust in your sails, and breathed out, when you arrived, withered. Now the moon screams like an ambulance, doesn’t it, as it pulls the darkness up over her face again and again like a sheet?

PATRICK WHITE