Monday, March 30, 2009

CATARACTS IN THE EYE

CATARACTS IN THE EYE


for April, when she’s crying


Cataracts in the eye,

flowers in the sky.

Or is it

cataracts in the sky,

flowers in your eye?

Either way,

painting your window

won’t clarify the view.

Just leave things as they are

without any more worry

and let the starmud settle in the pond

so the sky can get on with its clouds.

You can understand everything at a glance

if you touch it lightly with your eyes and heart.

But the moment you start to stare

deeply into the well

to see if anyone’s there, kerplunk,

you’re a lost penny

looking for something to wish for

or you break off like a key in your own door.

And you’re free

to consider your life a mistake

or even more mistakenly,

successful and correct,

but the trees don’t know

what you’re talking about

when they’re busy burning their leaves,

and water isn’t a failure of snow

when the crocuses begin to break through.

The winners do their crying out loud in crowds;

The losers cry alone at home in their rooms.

They both get wet.

They both ruin their makeup.

You keep advising yourself

like the Summa Theologica

to reconcile reason with God

who never wears the same church twice

in a world whose only holy cornerstone is change.

You can’t factor yourself out of the truth

and turn your philosophy into a formula

for self-advancement

when you are the truth

of what you’re looking for.

Everything seeks itself in this life

like the continuity of flowing water

that is everywhere at home

in all its forms like the moon

but the rain isn’t looking for flowers

when it falls

and the wounded apple-tree in the sunlight

isn’t making mystic amends

by bleeding from all of its boughs.

Is it fair to be you; is it unfair?

Have you been weeding a mirage for years

and wondered why no one,

not even the wind,

ever stops by for a drink?

Seeing your reflection

on the surface of a delusion

might be what you look like

but it isn’t what you think

no matter how long you wait

for high tide in the mirror

to unscroll you like a sail.

The earth isn’t a planet,

it’s an eye that’s as blue by day

as the sea

and as black by night

as the sky

and it’s never seen its own likeness

except as stars and trees,

and the darkness in between,

irises by the river

and robes of snow on the mountaintops.

Is your eye bad

when it looks upon the obscene

or good

when it spots a beauty queen?

Bad meat down the well

or fireflies

clowning with stars,

there’s no sour or sweet to your eyes

just as water and space

aren’t maimed or enhanced

by what they embrace

because your mind

is not conditioned by form

anymore than the nature

of water or blood is

by the rut it runs in.

Your seeing can be a sin.

Your seeing can be a blessing.

You can grow large and mercurial

or small and focussed

at both ends of the telescope

and witness the abundance of despair

in a famine of hope

and like empty words

eat the air,

or dancing on the eye of a lense

like a gnat above the water

agitate the fish to jump for the moon.

So which eye’s the winner;

which eye’s the loser

crossing the finish line of your nose

when they both run backwards

in opposite directions

as you so blithely suppose?

You can be a big beginning with a small end,

or a big end with a small beginning.

The first is what you will turn out to be.

The second is what you are.

Make a road of your own walking one night

through an open field,

then stop and look up

and ask any star.


PATRICK WHITE











Saturday, March 28, 2009

MAYBE GOD KNOWS

MAYBE GOD KNOWS


Maybe God knows like any woman

that the unanswered prayer

is always holier to men

than the ones that come true

and that’s why she doesn’t respond.

She lures you into speaking to her through the silence

as you realize the road ends

in the most intimate whisper of stars

like your breath alone on a winter night

as you take all of Orion in at a glance

to taste your own shining

in her universal nonchalance

like a candle you’re trying to advance through the darkness

to find her room, and you do,

but she’s never at home when you knock.

Or she blows you off like autumn,

snuffs the pure flame of your urgency

you bring to her door like a bouquet

in the hands of a chimney-sweep

who burns in his passion like leaves

with no tree up his sleeves to cling to.

And it’s hard to love someone

you’ve never met before

though you whine like a dog at a door

that is always opening you like a scar

that adores the wound that makes you feel

when you look up at the nightsky

and ask why,

the bow that set it all going,

that feathered the stars like blood

with the light of their flowing

through a night of unknowing

may be a fiction,

the chameleon of your own conviction,

but, at least, by the way

it wings your mythic heel

the arrow’s real.


PATRICK WHITE





WHOEVER I AM

WHOEVER I AM


Whoever I am

it’s only for a moment that passes

as quickly as the universe.

Sometimes my eyes

outshine the stars they’re looking at,

and thought is faster

than the speed of light

and every feeling

feathers the flight of the fire like a flame.

I have a name

that I’ve been trained

to turn toward like a sunflower

but ultimately it’s only the sound

of another wave crashing on the shore

of an uninhabited island.

Sometimes listening

to the music of the spheres within me

I think I can hear

the single, silver note of myself

timing my life like a drop of water

at the end of a blade of stargrass

or a triangular tintinabulum

that catches the attention

of the whole, cosmic, symphony orchestra

like the first sign of rain,

but more often I feel like ditchwater

carrying rose petals down the drain.

And there are things that I’ve exhausted myself against

like a fly against a windowpane

looking for an emergency exit

out of my own shame

at being what I am,

but it’s just another delusory sham

of the flypaper I’m stuck on like the self

of a conning chromosome.

So I call my own bluff

and shatter the lamp

and break the mirror

that buffs my seeing with stars

and dig up all these scarecrow, cruciform, avatars of being

that lie buried under my words

like bad advice from the birds,

and disappear

though I can’t say where

as if I had never existed.

But it isn’t as if

I was here and now I’m not

and there’s a great emptiness

that marks the spot like a black hole in my heart

and there’s anyone to suffer

long term loss for short term gain.

Everything’s still the same

and there’s no end of the pain

that flares up over and over again

like the universe

through an open window of the darkness

to immolate itself like a moth

in the trick candle-flame of a life

I can’t blow out on my birthday

because it’s only as old as I am

and I’ve been here forever.


PATRICK WHITE







NOTHING. I WAIT.

NOTHING. I WAIT.


for Brad Williams, with affection


Nothing. I wait. I

sweep all the stars off the stairs

and break all the windows

and melt like winter

to return in the spring

and wash myself away

to keep the view clear

and let the blossoming

go on without me.

I don’t jam a doctor in the womb

to guide the baby into being born,

or impose the apple on its flower

like like an agenda that must be met

before the fall.

I listen without expectation

to the vast silence of my own absence

and if something happens, it happens.

A picture flashes in the void

long before anything can be said

and a whole new world

takes its first breath

and breathes out the things of the world

to make a home for themselves in their homelessness.

And it’s the old-new way of delight

that playfully comes into being

like the first day and the first night

without depending

on the turning of the light

for its extinction or illumination.

The darkness the lamp dreams in

is not less bright than its burning

and the seeing isn’t a function of eyes.

And the only sin in life,

the only death,

as it is with your body,

is not to be creative, not

to discover within yourself

you are neither creature, nor created,

not the afterlife of the Big Bang

fourteen billion years ago

but this very moment now

when God asks who she is,

breaking her own hidden secret

and you know it’s time to tell her

in babies and paintings and poems and birds

in music and clowns

and sinners burning saints,

in fire and water and stars

and vagrant scholars wandering Mars,

that everything’s out in the open

and the secret is unsayably ours

in the way we express it to live.


PATRICK WHITE



Wednesday, March 25, 2009

WHAT A SAD, VIOLENT LITTLE SHIT

WHAT A SAD, VIOLENT LITTLE SHIT


What a sad, violent little shit you’ve become

now that your crackin.

You talk like Michaelangelo in a quarry

selecting Carrara marble

for the translucency of its alluvial veins,

and you talk about painting with feeling,

but it’s hard to get anything done

when you’re just another Tom Thumb

crushed under a tiny avalanche of rocks

so all you ever really do

is prime the ceiling white

over and over again like a sail

when there’s not much of a wind.

I watch you trying to think,

ferocious with thought,

and it’s like watching a ball

jumping around

trying to pick up its own jacks

like the stars of the razorwire constellations

that dance like a hareem of mean angels

on the head of your pin.

Only a real prick

can scare the needle,

and little brother,

you’re not even that

under all your washaway tats

as you run like a watercolour

in the acid rain of that battery brain

you’re wired to.

Once you were full of doubt and indirection,

you didn’t know who you were

and there were tears

for other people’s sorrows

that wept like candles in elegant chandliers

and a tolerance for the folly of others

that excused your own

that made you seem

at the unlikeliest of times

compassionate and wise.

You were vulnerable.

You could be hurt,

betrayed, rejected,

and I saw in your eyes

that you had no answer for anything

when she left you like a lighthouse

without any warning.

But at least you had the courage of the morning

to get up again and zombie your way

through the rest of the day

as if Lazarus wasn’t a lie.

Now you’re all severities

of radical rock

like a mad dog

biting at its own heart

as if it were an ulcer.

And every second acephalic thought

falls like a head into the breadbasket

at the foot of the guillotine

that makes everyone edgy

about what you truly mean

when you introduce your girlfriend

like a pampered queen,

a trophy butterfly

in the plagiarized web

of an award-winning spider.

You love her like a miner

at a cocktail party

with an ice-pick,

but later when she thaws

she will stab you in the bath like Marat.

Love for you isn’t about

joy or pleasure or children,

not the hive, nor the honey.

It’s the engine

of a fanatical rampage

that fires you up

like a killer bee

to swarm any form of life

that isn’t you in the shopping mall

like a bad tatoo

that can’t make an indelible impression

on anyone

trying to have a gang life

that doesn’t bang around like you

when you sport your true colours like your girlfriend,

tricked out in black and blue

and patched with bruises

where she shoots what she uses of you

like the last crumb in the eye of a dream

you cooked in a spoon without eyelids.

Little brother, don’t come back.

Don’t sit at my table, don’t

greet me when I pass.

You’re just another scream

on fastforward, you’re

just another improvised explosive device, an i.e.d.

buried in the road you’re on

like a heart attack

waiting to happen

like Iraq to an amputee.

If once it was hard

to take the measure

of what you could have been,

like a new energy policy

that insisted on being clean,

now you’re as easy to understand

as Chernobyl or an oilslick.

You’re a spiritual polluter,

a dirty needle, just

another chrome-plated dipstick

in a motor-mouth

that runs on mystic gangrene.


PATRICK WHITE












Sunday, March 22, 2009

I DON'T TRY TO ALLAY THE INEVITABLE

I DON’T TRY TO ALLAY THE INEVITABLE


I don’t try to allay the inevitable as much as I used to.

Let it come.

All my efforts are exhaustive and absurd.

I checked it out.

I’m not on the agenda.

I didn’t make the honour roll

and no matter how you dress the worm

maggots don’t turn into butterflies.

The important thing

is to wake up from conciousness

without dreaming you know who you are

or that there’s any right road to anywhere

that comes with a star.

If you want to shine,

you’ve got to learn to shine up

through the roots of everyone alike

as if there were no purpose to the light

or meaning to the flower that opens its book to the night

as if it were looking for a publisher.

I have died and died and died again

to empty myself like mirrors and rain,

focussed myself to the point of a pin

until space was the last balloon of my lonely skin

before I exploded into oblivion

to begin it all again

like an interminable birthday party

that keeps presenting me with a brain

like a watch on a gold chain

that runs too slow

to keep up with the accelerated pace

of my exponential afterlife

running like stars ahead of the light.

You can make constellations

out of anything you can see,

and franchise them all along the ecliptic

like truckstops for the longhaul planets

but the thirteenth house of the zodiac

is the only one where you can live in the moment

beyond your own future,

and before history.

You can live in clarity

with the unbegotten

of a generous mystery

that gives your life back to you

like something you might have forgotten.

You know how to be

a grain of sand in the universe,

and count yourself small and trivial

but you know nothing about

conducting yourself like the universe

in a grain of sand.

So you wash yourself

out of your own eyes in tears

and go on watering mirages in a desert

that never blooms.

You case your own house like a thief

looking for a way to break in

that doesn’t alarm the windows

that can see you coming

from a long way off

like the back of your eyes

and like the woman in the mirror

you broke into a million images of you last night,

your face reflected in a million lockets of water

that broke like a womb,

how can you be fooled

by your own disguise

and pretend there’s no one here

in this long line of mugshots

taken of you as a loser

you recognize?

You want to know how to win?

Collect on the bounty.

Turn yourself in.

There’s a price on your head

more precious than life to the dead.


PATRICK WHITE















Saturday, March 21, 2009

THE EUPHORIC HIGHS

THE EUPHORIC HIGHS


The euphoric highs,

the terrifying ecstasies

don’t last too long

so why ride the comet out to the end

without reading your own doom

in what comets portend

when there’s a third extreme you’ve overlooked

in the middle

that is born of the other two?

That’s why your words

don’t have three wings

and when you’re all dolled up

like the suns’s puppet

you’re still just a snowball on strings.

And hypocrite that I am,

I love the way you can turn your heart

into a nightclub for demons on shoreleave

from an ocean of shit,

the anti-madonna

of an older religion than light

that binds the serpent to its charms

by out-tempting the apple of knowledge

with the more alluring urgencies

of a woman rebooting her flesh

before the begetting of forms.

I’m as beguiled as any of your tides

by your ebbing and flowing

and there’s no end

to the simulacra of the moon

where I have lived too long alone

like an island in the sea of shadows

waiting for your return

without believing it was possible.

Eventually everyone’s an ocean

that can’t endure its own weather

and disappointed in gravity

wanders off into space,

scars of water among stars.

Now it’s one of my strangest graces

to cry over the slightest thing

without warning

whether the bell of a sorrow

too heavy for anyone to lift,

or any human excellence

that transcends understanding.

Some people follow them like blood

and some people cut across them like veins

but the road I’m on

is as wide as it is long

and it hasn’t gone anywhere for years

but I don’t let my homelessness

exaggerate the importance

of making it back to my own heart

because if there were any love there in the first place

things are best left to do that on their own.


PATRICK WHITE








Wednesday, March 18, 2009

THE IMPERIOUS SHAME OF A SELF

THE IMPERIOUS SHAME OF A SELF


The imperious shame of a self

that isn’t susceptible to compassion

is a garden that refuses to root,

is ice that doesn’t know how

to thaw into itself

and exhilarate the flowers.

The fleets of the paper-boats

that get sent off in the spring

like poems and blossoms

don’t arrive with a cargo of apples.

Even the sun at midnight

can’t open your eyelids

and I’ve heard

some of your most seasoned constellations

who signed up for life

are having their tatoos removed.

Bright as you are

it’s hard to understand

why you haven’t caught on by now

you can’t drink water from a fist.

Ah, yes, the ladder;

I forgot about the ladder

you’ve been trying to walk on for years like stilts

and you’re always two rungs down

from where you think you ought to be,

but going forward

isn’t always the quickest way up

and it must be hell

leaning up against

the burning window of the world

with no one to rescue but yourself.

Besides, what happened to your feet?

Do you and the ladder ever go dancing

or the birds ever build in the rungs

or a leaf ever grow

on the dead branch you cling to

like autumn afraid to let go?

Your bitterness

is the impotence of vanity,

your ego

an egg that keeps growing bigger

to avoid escaping from itself

that nothing can fly out of free

to feather the wind

with the joy of its vagrancy.

Why don’t you lie down like a chromosome

or a bridge sometimes,

show a little spine

and let someone cross over

the abyss between you and the other

so that ditch that surrounds you

like a gaping wound

can scar up like the moon

into the open road out

of your indefensible defenses?

The puppets and the puppeteers

are manipulated

at both ends of the same strings

and when the master

aspires to ascendency

the slave arises stronger.

A fist of stone

disowned by your own mountain

what can you possess

of the valley stream

that makes its way around you

like a lion of water

roaring past your skull,

that extinguished meteorite

that mistakes itself for a Kaaba?

No cornerstone

you’re not even a pebble

to throw at the devil.

Until you can feel

someone elses’s pain as if it were your own

and effortlessly respond like the rain

the elaborately cracked creekbeds

that braille your brain

will never flash into life

nor the lightning turn you

like a winter weathervane

toward the light

that reaches into the darkness to see

how everywhere

by shining on everything alike

it has become life.

You might think you’re the jewel of jewels

in all that junkyard

of craters and crowns on the moon,

but it’s painfully obvious

by the way you’re enthroned

like a fool in the corner

of your own delusion

you’re just another trembling compass

embedded in the handle of a pocket knife

that feels surrounded by its own polarities

approaching from all directions

as if there were no point to your life.


PATRICK WHITE












Monday, March 16, 2009

WIDE OPEN NIGHT

WIDE OPEN NIGHT


Wide open night, supple and unresponsive

you come on like a cool, black pearl,

an eclipse of the mind,

to keep me from going blind.

And it hurts to think

of how I could love you and won’t.

There’s a mystic urgency in the pain

of a universe in a grain of sand

trying to catch a pyramid’s attention,

and I doubt if I’ve caught yours

though I know the names

of all your stars

and saved the first drafts

of all your pulp-fiction constellations

as if they were the fakings of a holy book.

I don’t know why

my passion for you

always ends up feeling

like the afterbirth of small nations

on third-world rations,

or worst-world cannibals

trying to teach me how to cook.

One day I’ll compile a grammar

of the indecipherable markings

on the flaring hood

of the queen cobra in the room

that bides her time

by swaying to the music

as if she were the writing on the wall.

I’ll learn to speak to you about unspeakable things

and when you smile at me

I won’t feel as if my blood

were being strained through a teatowel

like stewed blackberries

being thickened into jam.

I will be maculately clear

about who I am

and you will know

that each of us

is experiencing

the whole of the universe

in every moment

as ourselves,

and life is not more

and death is not less

than they have ever been,

that no river is flowing the wrong way to the sea,

that what you see is engendered by the unseen

and what flowers within you

is the perennial theme

of water in the mindstream

enabling forms effortlessly

along the uncontainable way of its growing

to play at being you

deep in the wells and watersheds

of your unfathomable eyes

and more lightly on the grass like dew.


PATRICK WHITE














WIDE OPEN NIGHT

WIDE OPEN NIGHT


Wide open night, supple and unresponsive

you come on like a cool, black pearl,

an eclipse of the mind,

to keep me from going blind.

And it hurts to think

of how I could love you and won’t.

There’s a mystic urgency in the pain

of a universe in a grain of sand

trying to catch a pyramid’s attention,

and I doubt if I’ve caught yours

though I know the names

of all your stars

and saved the first drafts

of all your pulp-fiction constellations

as if they were the fakings of a holy book.

I don’t know why

my passion for you

always ends up feeling

like the afterbirth of small nations

on third-world rations,

or worst-world cannibals

trying to teach me how to cook.

One day I’ll compile a grammar

of the indecipherable markings

on the flaring hood

of the queen cobra in the room

that bides her time

by swaying to the music

as if she were the writing on the wall.

I’ll learn to speak to you about unspeakable things

and when you smile at me

I won’t feel as if my blood

were being strained through a teatowel

like stewed blackberries

being thickened into jam.

I will be maculately clear

about who I am

and you will know

that each of us

is experiencing

the whole of the universe

in every moment

as ourselves,

and life is not more

and death is not less

than they have ever been,

that no river is flowing the wrong way to the sea,

that what you see is engendered by the unseen

and what flowers within you

is the perennial theme

of water in the mindstream

enabling forms effortlessly

along the uncontainable way of its growing

to play at being you

deep in the wells and watersheds

of your unfathomable eyes

and more lightly on the grass like dew.


PATRICK WHITE














WIDE OPEN NIGHT

WIDE OPEN NIGHT


Wide open night, supple and unresponsive

you come on like a cool, black pearl,

an eclipse of the mind,

to keep me from going blind.

And it hurts to think

of how I could love you and won’t.

There’s a mystic urgency in the pain

of a universe in a grain of sand

trying to catch a pyramid’s attention,

and I doubt if I’ve caught yours

though I know the names

of all your stars

and saved the first drafts

of all your pulp-fiction constellations

as if they were the fakings of a holy book.

I don’t know why

my passion for you

always ends up feeling

like the afterbirth of small nations

on third-world rations,

or worst-world cannibals

trying to teach me how to cook.

One day I’ll compile a grammar

of the indecipherable markings

on the flaring hood

of the queen cobra in the room

that bides her time

by swaying to the music

as if she were the writing on the wall.

I’ll learn to speak to you about unspeakable things

and when you smile at me

I won’t feel as if my blood

were being strained through a teatowel

like stewed blackberries

being thickened into jam.

I will be maculately clear

about who I am

and you will know

that each of us

is experiencing

the whole of the universe

in every moment

as ourselves,

and life is not more

and death is not less

than they have ever been,

that no river is flowing the wrong way to the sea,

that what you see is engendered by the unseen

and what flowers within you

is the perennial theme

of water in the mindstream

enabling forms effortlessly

along the uncontainable way of its growing

to play at being you

deep in the wells and watersheds

of your unfathomable eyes

and more lightly on the grass like dew.


PATRICK WHITE














Saturday, March 14, 2009

THE SHAPE OF EXPERIENCE

THE SHAPE OF EXPERIENCE


The shape of experience

is always a woman first.

There’s an allure,

a come-on by life

that is spiritually-sexual,

a betrayal of the old dilemma

you cling to like salvage

after a shipwreck

as if that was all

that was keeping you afloat.

You call it hanging on to yourself

but all you’re doing

is clutching at a board like a wave

to keep from drowning in your own mirage.

And there’s life,

an island, a tide, a shore

smothered in sirens

enticing you to let go

like a note or a bird

into your own music,

to disobey your own misery,

to stop pressing that voodoo doll

you’ve horned with your own features

against your heart

like the only surviving child

of a toxic eclipse

you’re raising like a king

among swineherds,

the royal seal stamped in dung.

Let go. Life transcends itself

by inclusion

so nothing can ever be lost

or gained.

Let go. Your shining

isn’t diminished by the occlusion

and the light isn’t stained

by oilslicks in the telescope.

Stop trying to court experience

by taking your own sad advice.

Let go. Elope.


PATRICK WHITE






YOU'VE GOT TO

YOU’VE GOT TO


You’ve got to look under

your own reflection sometime

like the lucid scar of the moon

to see what’s healing

and why you wear your face

like a poultice

to draw the infection out,

what’s behind that gash of a smile

that must taste like acid on your lips.

Can you see

what’s funny about the sage,

what’s serious about the fool?

Are you one of the rubies

or a sapphire of the blood?

There are ways of knowing

that are like old cups

with cracks in them

hanging in the cupboards

that shepherd the wines of life

into the same old creekbeds

that have sloughed their flowing like skin,

like snakes and grapes.

You should learn

to drink your reflection

from your own fathomless hands

until you drown in it,

until you can look back up at it

from the bottom

and realize

how the water-lilies

wire their constellations in series

and weave their myths from the mud.

It’s a lie that a reflection has no depths

or that the depths don’t have a reflection.

Everything here is the likeness

of everything else

and it isn’t only the water

but sometimes the desert

that’s the mirage.

Haven’t you ever

looked into your own face

and known it wasn’t you

who was looking back

and that maybe millions of people

with eyes as many

as stars in the darkness

were peering through your face

like wine through a crack in a cup?

Besides, it’s only fair,

after all the seeing

they do for me,

I let my eyes check out

what they might be

and turn the light around

like salmon called from the sea.

And I don’t worry

too much about meaning.

Meanings are born of themselves

and like waves

there’s no lack of them

and if you can understand

what you’ve experienced

then you’re not living intensely enough.


PATRICK WHITE






Wednesday, March 11, 2009

CLARITY'S JUST ANOTHER INTERPRETATION

CLARITY’S JUST ANOTHER INTERPRETATION


Clarity’s just another interpretation,

history, a suggestion from the grave,

and reality, for most,

a mutually reinforced consensus.

And I wonder about things like

the evolution of dreams

and the shadow-cats of conciousness

whose eyes widen in the dark

and how there’s no name you can give it

that the mind will answer to when you call

because your own voice is the mind as well

and that which you seek

is already here.

You can’t define the indefineable

but everything and everyone

is an expression of it

and in all they do and don’t do

express it.

The important thing is

not to let the bells of your profundities

sway like onerous horses

but to let them loose in the high fields

to play equinely with God.

You must learn to play like a child

with dragons

without being mastered

by the genius of your freedom.

You must understand

the spiritual life of clay

is an enrichment of the light

and one night in the flesh

is the collaborative aspiration

of trillions of stars

that have lived and died

their way to you

who sees and names

and includes them

in your vaster spaces within

as you have the sky and the moon and the trees.

You can’t drink the wine of life from a cup

and even if you can see the stars at noon

and the sun at midnight

you can’t put out to sea

from the bottom of a well.

You can’t illuminate a black hole

and you won’t find your reflection on the moon

and though we learn

life has nothing to teach.

Try to grasp it

and it’s always an apple

shy of your reach.

Express it effortlessly

as if there were nothing to say

and no one to say it

as children do when they play

and you’re the tree that bears it all

and life is what it is

and you are what you are.

A windfall.


PATRICK WHITE











Sunday, March 8, 2009

MAYBE I'M DOING SOMETHING THAT MATTERS

MAYBE I’M DOING SOMETHING THAT MATTERS


Maybe I’m doing something that matters.

Maybe not.

But having chewed off my last leg

to be free

and drunk my blood

down to the last black hole

that took it all in like an eye

without an iris,

it’s ironic that there are nights

when all I seem to be able to do now

is lie here like bait

in a trap that’s coiled like lightning

to catch something

I don’t even know exists.

Worlds within worlds,

subtleties within subtleties,

it’s difficult to assess

how many labyrinths

have lost their way in me,

but I am humbled by the vastness

of my incomprehension

when I look at the stars

through a clearing

on a backcountry road

seizing their existence out of space

and returning it like a river of light

to the darkness.

I am staggered by the magnanimous silence

of the sheer weight and wonder of it all

that I should exist to be this

as if there were no eyes

between the vision and the seer

and I was not the delinquent mirror

in an uninhabited holy place

that had forgotten my face.


PATRICK WHITE









HARD TO FIND MY PULSE

HARD TO FIND MY PULSE


Hard to find my pulse, my heart sometimes

in all the mundane commotion

of the gateway circumstances

that keep shuffling along like refugees

well past the last embassy

that might have been able to identify them.

Imagination sets the scene

and empathy peoples it

with lonely miracles of transformation

that liberate us like emotions in a dream

and for awhile, it’s peace to be who we are

with everyone else in the same lifeboat

breathing in and out

as if we were all rowing

toward the same star.

Then the moment slips out of that sky

like a snake shedding its skin

and I’m confounded

by all these new constellations

blowing around on the wind

as if they revelled in their homelessness.

Yesterday they were traffic lights,

myths, street signs, lighthouses and beacons,

but today they’re all gypsies and fireflies.

Reality is not the basis for understanding

because it is wholly without characteristics

and the black sun of noon

and the white sun of midnight

are inherently blind

in the midst of their own radiance

just as your eyes that see everything

can’t see themselves

except as simulacra and reflections.

Your eyes can’t prove to your eyes

that they exist

just as you can’t prove to you

that you don’t.

In the tiniest thing,

the vastest expanse,

no seer, no seen,

space is the seeing

that animates being spontaneously

like this poem out of my better lies

or a mushroom turning the pages

of its book of gills

like an earthbound moon

looking up at itself like a lost sea

it holds in its arms like a small madonna.

More and more I am becoming everything

as I descend through my own facelessness

and the emptiness opens its eyes

to be astonished everywhere

by its own likeness in the nature

of the aeonic myriads of the forms it sees

rising and falling like waves and weather

on the dream-tides of the living ocean

that inconceivably conceives

the inexhaustibility

of its reflective awareness

in every drop of water that falls

from everyone’s eyes at the same time

though this one calls it a tear

and that one already tastes the wine

that gushes like a grape in love

hoping I’m already drunk enough

to believe it.


PATRICK WHITE







Monday, March 2, 2009

SOMETIMES THINK

SOMETIMES THINK


Sometimes think I’m always

a life too late

to catch up to my own

walking away weary of waiting for me.

Or I’m a star too far ahead of my own shining

and that’s why it’s always dark.

I know the agony

in the stones of an abandoned bridge

that shoulders the world for nothing,

upholds nothing but its own mass

and waits for things to pass.

And even when I fall into the river

to flow along with my own mindstream

without consulting the leaves like maps

I still can’t get the moon off my back.

Look at all these orchards

littered along my banks

from the tent of a single blossom.

And there are nights

when I can smell snake on the wind

as if everything were about to happen again

and I still haven’t milked the fangs of the moon

for an antidote to the pain

or put out the third eye

of the irrational surveillance camera

that oversees the sorrows of the insane

when it’s full.

I like my perfections whole enough

to include what is not

and if I am immoderately empty

it’s so I can make space for the world

like the blood-sea of the rose

that flows out of nothing

into tides that shed their waves

like the eyelids, brides and petals

of a human heart.

My breath is silver.

My breath is gold

I’ve mined from the mystic mountain

that got in my way

whenever I tried to cross

the valley threshold.

I had to evaporate to rise to the top;

I had to get myself together like a cloud

to transform my own delusions

into a glimpse of the other side

that didn’t take a scapegoat for a guide.

Now space is my only familiar

and the being behind the face

of who I was a moment ago

is just another snake in the furnace

of this star that sheds my skin like fire.

Streams of insight

that are not predicated like mirages

on deserts of thought

trying to spin themselves

into mirrors and silks of glass

like a new religion

sweeping the world like sand

advance the gardens

of the water-givers underground

who teach the flowers how to bloom

and drown like stars

in the infinite opening of their eyes.

And I’ve mauled the nets of the constellations

like a man in the morning

walking through a high field

radiant with spiderwebs

and if there’s anything

left hanging in the wardrobe

that used to house my masks and cloaks

they’re veils I’ve torn from the light

to better see into my darkness.

I’m still looking

but nothing has appeared yet

and no sleight of mind

that’s ever mastered me

has ever taught me how

to realize the inconceivable

except in the proportions of a human

whose mere existence is utterly unbelievable

whenever I turn the light around

and discover the dispersing stars

I have followed so long and far

into the unborn darkness where I begin

shining within.


PATRICK WHITE