Saturday, June 30, 2012

BEAUTY IN THE ALOOFNESS OF MY USUAL SORROWS


BEAUTY IN THE ALOOFNESS OF MY USUAL SORROWS

Beauty in the aloofness of my usual sorrows.
A respite in time and care. A hole in space
I can escape through without setting off any alarms.
And I don’t care what this poem is going to be about
I can write it with no preconceived deceptions,
no utilitarian intent, no split lip ego-defects.
For a moment, the ice age is thawing
and the blue chicory and English ox-eyed daisies
like the taste of the air, and the drainage-ditches
are a riot of Queen Ann’s Lace and Viper’s Bugloss.
Temperate consolations modify my mood
into a truce with the bleaker conditions of life.
I’m gulled by the sunshine. I’m a schill of the mindstream.
The killer bees are away from their hives.
Amber tears of Baltic honey flow in my veins
without attracting flies. Life is unconscionably reasonable
in the efflorescence of its mystically specific details.
Even my dragon skull basks in the beatific wavelengths
of a better attitude toward its own martyrdom
in the greener fires of earth like salt in a flame.

And later tonight, if I’m still so entranced,
I’ll make my way down to the Tay River
to see if the fireflies are out dancing pianissimo
with the abandoned lighthouses of the stiff-necked cattails.
I’ll sit on a rock that doesn’t aspire to lord it over
anyone’s kingdom, and I’ll stare at the stars
until they’re tattooed like an indelible starmap
on the back of my eyelids, to keep my tears
from diluting them like smeared watercolours
or my more igneous aspects, from shattering them
like the menagerie of a zoo with glass bars.

And o, basking in the freedom of my own madness,
hilarious as peace, the infinite homelessness
of knowing I come from everywhere all at once,
and there’s nowhere I’ve walked alone in my life
down any road beset with assassins, or feathered
like strippers in boas of white sweet clover,
I haven’t been stepping across the threshold
of another wilderness always as vast
and cautiously intriguing as I am mysteriously lost
when the human intimacy of a longing heart
encounters the sentient impersonality
of an infinite mind that isn’t aware of anything
the heart doesn’t bring before it like a child’s drawing.

And there are themes you can follow
like bush wolves through the back woods
trampled down by the padding of their circuitous descents
into the dangerous pantries of the farms
pseudomorphically nestled between the hills.
It’s an itinerary that’s serviced the pack for years
with a sufficiency that’s got them this far against the odds.
And each to their own way, go with the gods
and I’ll rejoice in hearing you howl among the trees
to the chagrin of your detractors listening
with a begrudging admiration a civilization away
from what’s been bred out of them like freedom
under a full moon in heat. As for me
and my homeless approach to the ghost towns
of future zodiacs, I never want to know where I’m going
until I get there inconceivably as the only path
I could have taken in the first place,
because that’s always the way it is
even when you delight in the wiles of going astray.
Signs of your emptiness in the midst of the great unknowing.
Time and space mindscaping the exploration
you keep thrusting into the dark like the light and the lamp
of an estranged nightwatchman, hoping
you haven’t been here before, and anything
worth keeping an eye on has already been given away for free.

PATRICK WHITE

FULL MOON AND THE MOURNFUL THUNDER OF A TRAIN


FULL MOON AND THE MOURNFUL THUNDER OF A TRAIN

Full moon and the mournful thunder of a train
passing through town. Venus, Jupiter, Mercury
long gone down for the rest of the night.
Orion a pale imitation of itself in the west.
Mars near Regulus, the little king with the heart of the lion,
and Saturn off to the east. Like water returned
to the river it came from, everything immersed
in the fluidity of silence
swimming through the trees
as if virgins were older than fish at the spring equinox.

A habit of wandering when no one else is around
walks me out of town like some unknown journey
stringing my feet along with a line
and two minutes with a lunar hook dangling
in the effluvial plains of the moon’s volcanic seas
as if I needed to be played into it by the sacred syllables
of ancient starmaps talking in tongues like oceans of awareness
into the ears of the seashells who can repeat
every word they say to themselves in secret.

All I’ve done most of my life is write and paint
spring, summer, winter, fall, four seasons,
and a writer not only adds another dimension
to the state of affairs, but constitutes
a fifth season of his own as well, a sphere
of thin-skinned spirit that covers the earth
like an invisible aurora of imagination,
the third eye of a wobbling satellite
lost in space with spiritual vertigo
like the black sheep of a shepherd moon. Five
seasons in all, but the fifth includes the other four
like a mood ring on a chameleon in front of a mirror.

And the rest of my life in between
exotic flame-outs and catastrophic inspirations
has been about running back home to my life
like an ambulance, a squad car, or a fire truck,
and, yes, even the occasional water bomber
to put a root fire out before it broke into blossom
and spread like daylilies to the rest of the neighbourhood.

Just as I can’t help looking extemporally at
the extraordinarily ordinary dandelions sometimes
and thinking they must have been born middle-aged
because they all look like yellow G-7 type bachelor suns
that have rubber-stamped themselves all over the place.
Dandelion wine, but I wonder if anyone of them
ever longed to be born a red head, looked
at the gypsy poppies like blood at the side of the road,
wearing too much black mascara , and wished somehow
they could be just as uniquely scarlet and carefree.

And in the night, out in the woods on my own
without a light or a fire for a companion
you’re never alone with, I think, o yes,
a poppy or a dandelion would be good right about now
and I make them a mental substitute through
intense creative visualization and though
I’ll sit out here spiritually naked all night
somehow by the morning I’ve melted a block of ice
like a Tibetan monk in the Himalayas
who was trying to focus on stars.
So when I take these long starwalks
through the desolation of stark and delicate things,
and their ferociously bold slow-hand insistence
on returning the way they came like fruits
ye shall know them by, back to the wild apple trees,
I’m not just walking among solid things
that overemphasize their reality at the expense
of realizing their full potential as an event of metaphors
that can shapeshift musically into anything they want to be
from dandelions with short haircuts
to poppies with the manes of solar flares.

My life is being conducted by a symphony of fiddleheads
at a seance of violins. I look at the desiccated milkweed pods
and I don’t see a coffin or a brittle fortune-cookie of a womb
that’s gone to seed, but the eyelids of visionaries
who gave up everything to the seeing they had to give
like millions of little ghostly white parachutes of moonlight
landing like prophetic time-capsules from the flowers
who refused to go blind, even after jumping from paradise,
and emptier than a widow’s mailbox
still stare blankly up at the stars
with their mouths open in utter amazement
trying to remember all their children’s names and myths of origins
shawled over their shoulders like the Milky Way
as if that were some kind of cold comfort
for a lifetime of absurdly trying to rinse
the shadows out of the light with their tears.

PATRICK WHITE

NOT INTERESTED IN THE BRAND NAME OF YOUR AUDIENCE


NOT INTERESTED IN THE BRAND NAME OF YOUR AUDIENCE

Not interested in the brand name of your audience.
Poetry makes its own up on the go, resonates
with the stars and the fireflies, mysteriously
marauds its own sacred shrines for the relics
of holy metaphors that can be melted down
into new sensibilities. And you, when you lose
your faith in your herbs ability to heal,
is it you that lets the medicine down,
the exhausted wavelength of an imploding star,
or is your magic just not strong enough anymore
to know when to keep its mouth shut, its grammar
like the secret name of a god, not a public convention.

It’s irrelevant to me if you blood your abstractions,
mythic deflation stabbing them through the heart
to keep it from pumping the colour out of the rose
and hanging them upside down over a bathtub.
Or that your insecticidal severances have been
so cleanly disposed of like the wings of butterflies
in the mandibles of seriatim ants. The reek
of formic acid. And it’s hard not to notice
that your gypsy nettles don’t dance to music.
You’ve got your head stuck up the eye of the needle again.
Must cost you a fortune in locksmiths.
And why, when you make a confession
of all your sins of omission, does it always sound
like you’re ratting someone out? Or you’ve got
a deathmask on you’re always threatening to take off
like a crab carapace in a tidal pool with a detached claw
trying to intimate the great sea of awareness beyond
that’s never heard of you, into making waves
even a shore-hugger buried in a puddle could handle?

You can make a cult of your doubt and cynicism,
snakes on the ladders and stairwells of your pretensions,
but I’m not going to be initiated into it. Just because
I was born in a sewer doesn’t mean I bathed in it
every time it rained. A metaphor is a metaphor
that’s looking for something to compare itself to
and picture-music isn’t a drum roll at the unveiling
of a new logo for the hysterically futile fans
of your dysfunctional aspirations to make a big splash.
As if the pond were never big enough for the frog.

Your words don’t touch my heart, change my life,
make a serious attempt on my life, derange me,
do anything to me, just lie there
so disconnected from my spinal cord
they’re clear cut yarrow sticks that have never heard
of the Book of Changes. Lean-tos and collapsed tents
in the shadows of Stone Henge. No moon. No Taj Mahal.
You’re an architect of flowers, but you don’t come
with any instructions for assembly. Or even a bag of tools
to flint knap your costume jewellery into arrowheads,
you could always hurl at a turtle on the run, since
it’s obvious there’s nothing wildly alive in the woods
that has anything to fear from a poet who can’t handle a bow
anymore than he can a lyre strung from his own gut.

No urgency in your work. No necessity, risk, danger.
Nothing lethal in the windowsill jungles you explore.
Nothing driving you like the inconsolable dead
into the unmarked grave of a black hole
that never bottoms out like a death in life experience
giving birth to a whole new universe of not two
every morning you wake up in it grateful for the chance
to teach your club-footed absurdity to dance with the bones
of distinguished skeletons who are experts
at knowing how to necro-romanticize the abyss.

When words talk to words about words
it’s not because imagination has run out of poets
who aren’t unsayable or self-destructive enough
to sacrifice their voices bleeding for the unattainable
so that every poem is history written by the losers,
it’s because there’s no visionary flash back
when you drown in your own reflection
in a narcissistic labyrinth of mirrors. No crash and burn
in your elegaic encounters with what you’re missing.
Your absence doesn’t leave a mark on the world
as you seek corporate applause for your trained individualism
tweaking your neuronic synapses with the reflexes
of early amphibians, one foot on shore, one in the boat
just to play it safe, a wishbone bridging both mediums
like a witching wand twitching over a watershed
with a dislocated pelvis that makes you dance with a limp
like Giovanni’s frog jumping between electrodes,
or as I remember, growing up, little girls playing hopscotch
on a sidewalk chalked with the outlines of corpses
with photo ops of the brand names on their toe tags.

PATRICK WHITE

Friday, June 29, 2012

BEGIN


BEGIN

Begin anywhere.
Topple fall jump stumble plunge
into the eyeless abyss
into the roadless homelessness
of not knowing where you’re going
or who’ll you’ll be by the time you get there.
Slash your way through the stretched canvas
of a painted sky
like a rogue star
with the blood of Betelgeuse
dripping from your brush if you must
perform your own Caesarian
to get out of yourself like an egg
into the Big Abide Beyond
and stretch your wings from dusk till dawn.
Don’t hover like a cloud over starmaps
trying to work out a flight plan
waiting for the weather to clear for take-off.
In an infinite universe such as this
wherever you are
in this spatial lost and found
you’re always the center of everything.
How could you not know where you are
or who
when there’s nowhere to go
and no one to be
that isn’t centred in its own origin eternally?
But it helps to get a jump on your own light like a star
now and again
if you want to stay in the game
long enough to turn your farce into a legend
that isn’t hard on the eyes.
So begin.
Like a surprise.
Like a leftover birthday you found in the attic
you were saving for a special day that never came.
Get it on.
Begin.
Break the mirror.
Throw a rock through your own reflection.
There’s no countdown
for a firefly or lightning bolt
no fuse on the Big Bang that became the universe
so let’s just have ignition
spontaneously timeless and complete
go off
get out
get down
like the primordial atom
with your own expression of yourself
before the arising of signs
teaches the flowers
they mustn’t colour
outside the lines of themselves.
Don’t let the Lilliputians tie Gulliver down again.
Don’t imperil Pauline
by tying her to the tracks
like a rehabilitated junkie
to wait for a train in vain
on the same old beaten path
your thoughts tread like cattle
back to the barn of your brain at dusk.
Or horses when it’s burning.
Begin in your aftermath.
Shoulder the world that weighs
like a rock in your grave
meant to keep you from rising
and blow it off like dust.
Come down on yourself like a meteor
and begin a new species of life
among the bones of the dinosaurs.
Get lost in this desert of stars
like the Rosetta Stone
of a new language of scars
no one’s ever spoken before
around a fire in the night
and be the first word of your own light
to give names to things in the garden.
The happy genius of your own beginnings.
How many nights must pass?
How many days?
How many full moons wane
and ice ages come and go
and trees turn into grasslands
and continents shatter like skulls
that grind their teeth in the night
before you finally let go
and begin.
Mercury had wings on his heels
when he took off on the wind
but look at you
standing there
at the edge of the world
with parachutes on your shoes
like a medium without a message.
Take them off.
Go barefoot over the stars of your firewalk like water.
Take off that used straitjacket
you bought at the Salvation Army
like the larva of a dragonfly
looking for a hand-me-down chrysalis on the cheap.
You can’t read your fate like dna
in another man’s fortune-cookie.
And there’s already enough sky around us
for everyone to share
like a planetary cocoon
without anyone running out of room
for worms to turn into butterflies
wolves into whales
raptors into birds with feathers and scales.
Where things end is where they begin.
They’re Siamese twins
you can’t separate like a loveletter
into before and after
because they’ve only got
the one birth
the one breath
between them both
and the same is true of their death.
So if you’re already over before you begin
why hesitate?
What have you got to lose
when there’s nothing to choose
between lying in wait like yesterday
for what you think you know
will come along in its own good time
and what you can’t anticipate
that comes up on you from behind
like eyes to the blind in a dream
and says it’s later than it seems.
Where have you been?
You’re on in the next scene
right after the death of the old queen.
Let the lines memorize you for a change.
Friends fall apart
when they stop being strangers to one another.
Babies stop turning solitude into single mothers.
You can gnaw on the bone of the known for years
to get down to the marrow of things
and still not be satisfied when you do
and then the hunger you never taught to hunt
begins to eat you.
So jump.
Like a fish in a still pond.
Like a frog from a lilypad.
Go mad.
Go ballistic.
Go beyond that place
where even to say you’re lost in space
doesn’t make any sense
and nothing’s ever moved in a straight line
that wasn’t a special form of a curve.
Why wait for the apocalypse
to come down on you like an old rafter
that breaks with every firecracker that goes off
when your own explosive potential
makes that look like a firefly with a wet fuse?
How long have you lepered your stars in the sun
or your constellation paled in the dawn
like a tattoo you had taken off your arm
like an old love affair that’s over and gone?
Live on.
Jump from the top stair.
Slide down the bannister
in the opposite direction
like a double helix
in the southern hemisphere.
Do something
you can get away with
that stays true to your disobedience
like evolution.
Draw a line in the sand
then overstep the bounds
like a crosswind that wipes it out.
The measure of a human is a human
without a forwarding address
that can find its way back
like an abandoned cat
to the threshold and doorway
of our homelessness
where we left like a loveletter to the world
that returns unread
with nothing to say
that would have made any difference anyway.
A phoenix might be born in fire
but it doesn’t nest in the flames.
You can’t keep what you won’t give away
so if you want to stay here
like a chameleon in front of a mirror
that likes to reflect things as they change
you have to do it like air
and grow wings.
You have to become a dragon.
Or a snake who knows
how to rise above things
like an eagle or a sea on the moon
that got caught like a fish out of water
in the first and last crescents of its own talons.
Don’t let yourself be tossed around
like an overturned lifeboat
that set out to rescue you
from the undertow of reality
and got swept off its own feet
before they could turn into oars.
Don’t be a shore-hugger
on the dunes of your own mindstream.
Go along with the flow
like the oxygen in your blood
that was conceived in a fire-womb
in the belly of a star
in outer space
and then took a meteor to this place
where it’s bagged by your lungs
and rushed to your face
like a lip transplant for a kissing-stone.
Just as every question is the prelude of the answer
so every prayer for direction
is the direction of prayer.
The Kaaba waits like a pilgrim
for the first crescent of the moon
to circumambulate you
in all directions at once
and in all months of the year
like the sun through the zodiac
when it shines at midnight
and the sky is unusually clear.
The mystery of life
that seeks you out
like its best guess at everything
is just that
is just this
a mystery
not a secret waiting to be told
like a baby without a name
that’s grown post-mature
and gummy in the womb
like matter in the matrix of being.
And when things let go of the green bough
like the singing bird in your heart
or a windfall of silver apples
shaken from a dead branch by the wind
when the moon goes down over the hills
and all that’s left of the view
is two elbows on a worn-out windowsill
watching things return to themselves for the night
like stars and dust and dew
and love when it’s over
tastes autumn on its breath
like long sad thoughts of last September
that always seem to end in death and sorrow
it helps to remember
the seeds in the green apples of spring
that are buried in their birth
as if there could never be a tomorrow
that wouldn’t open their small sad eyes
like fireflies in the orchards of earth
that age like the truth
in a purple passage
on the second to last page
they burn through falling asleep
thinking of things to come
as if each were either a lighthouse
or the evening star in the morning
or a tiny Armageddon in a mason jar
as big and bright as the universe
that goes off without warning
everywhere all the time.

PATRICK WHITE

ANY DARK DEEP PLACE


ANY DARK DEEP PLACE

Any dark deep place will reveal the shining.
Membranes in hyperspace.
Big Bangs from cosmic kisses.
The oak is in the acorn.
The dragon’s in its egg.
A hundred rooms in your mansion
and you’ve only turned the lights on
in the one you’re sitting in.
The fireflies will show you
as well as any starmap.
The lightning will put you in the picture.
Ten thousand security cameras
as you walk to the grocery store
but you still don’t know where you are.
Where you are is Who you are.
Lead me to the sidereal capital
of your mindscape
your shining city on the hill
and still you haven’t left home.
Take one step outside.
The threshold’s infinitely wide
and even the stars haven’t managed
to cross it yet.
And though you walk for light years
down the Road of Ghosts
through Cygnus and Aquila
back to a quiet place as dawn approaches
and lie down in your grave
is this in or is this out?
Have you left your chair by the lamp?
Not just one
but infinite universes in a grain of sand.
Why do you let them slip through your fingers
like an hourglass?
Everybody has their limits.
That’s why it’s an expanding universe.
Almost broken.
Almost dismembered.
You can feel your limbs being quartered
by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Your spirit stretched like the hide of a ten point buck
beat on like a drum in a rain dance.
Like the membrane of the next universe.
Like a heart in a trance
brow-beaten by its own pulse
into emptying its medicine bag
like the trinkets of an old magic
that no longer has any use for the world.
The snake sheds its skin.
One day abruptly something just splits
like a bean sprout out of its cotyledons
like a virgin out of her maidenhead
like the sky in a sudden gust of a tailwind
and you’re out in the open of the new you.
The old skin feels empty and disembodied
like the ghost of someone you used to know
like the last backwards look
at the apartment you’re moving out of
as you slowly close the door and return the key.
But your latest incarnation
comes with its own atmosphere.
Strange constellations
that have outgrown their myths of origin
and moved on to deeper enlightenments.
Darker nights and more radiant insights.
In this clear state this tabla rasa
beyond words conceptions
where nothing’s been named yet
and the stars splash like rain on a windowpane
as wide as your seeing
and run down the glass like tears of light
to see if it’s safe for the birds
to fly through your translucency yet
or if you’re still obstructing them with mirrors
the first thing you realize
is that ignorance is as unattainable as wisdom
that there are no more moon rises and sunsets to the shining
and things as they appear
are no longer just warm-up acts for reality.
The lies are just as revealing as the truths
in every doorway
in every window
in every room of the house you open
to the blessings and the risks of who you might be now.
Is it so different for a worm to inch its way
through its house of transformation
and come out holding its wings up
like the graduation diploma of a butterfly?
How long are you going to hug the womb
like a cave painting
without ever stepping outside
to witness the creative fertility
of your own imagination
playing witchdoctor to the throngs of stars
grazing on the grasslands of climate change?
Clinging to your last white-knuckled ice age
in the midst of effortless transformation
is the sole root of your agony
as if growing were any less scary than being born.
Leave your frosty prophets in the past
trying to read the dead leaves
of a frozen garden better left to the sun.
Yesterday mammoths.
Today gazelles.
Yesterday the Book of Kells.
But today nothing begins with a capital.
Today wherever you stand in a boundless universe
you’re at the centre
like a black hole
summoning galaxies into existence
out of the old ghosts
you cast out of your last seance
like a wardrobe
you can never wear more than once
because it no longer fits the medium you’ve grown into
like a wavelength of light
that’s just shed its skin
to wind its way deeper into the night.

PATRICK WHITE

Thursday, June 28, 2012

SUMMER TRIANGLE THROUGH THE LEAF COVER


SUMMER TRIANGLE THROUGH THE LEAF COVER

Summer triangle through the leaf cover
of the birches and pines, Deneb, Al Tair, Vega,
a swan, an eagle, and a lyre, and the sun
headed toward Vega at l8 km/sec. Arcturus
sinking into the west. Knowledge disconnected
from the stars. How could they know how
I see them paradigmatically, how they’re shaped
into the legends of our seeing on a starmap,
the powers that have been attributed to them,
though for me my solitude evaporates
into their lucid immensities like dry ice.

I hug my knees on a moonlit outcrop of rock.
More lichens than a suitcase has travel stickers
or a bike gang has patches and rockers. Grey green
and a muted arsenic orange. Alien aspects
of the rags of life from Mars. Cold temperatures
and high carbon dioxide atmospheres and they’d thrive.
Now they’re a wardrobe paupered by the Canadian Shield.
Fossils of moondogs. Decals of lunar seas.
And underneath the pines, a graveyard of compass needles,
rusty eyelashes, amputated hands of analogue watches.
The woods are alive with shaking cattails
and snapping branches, shedding and falling,
the occult hunting magic of the lake
that keeps everything eerie, wary, and estranged
as they take what they need from each other
with a yelp, a howl, a shriek, a squeal to sustain
the lives they’re meant to be living at life’s expense.

You come to mind as the reason why I’m here.
Just a fragrance, the auroral cachet of your image
on the temperate night air. The great blue heron
might embody the silence and the stillness,
spearfishing among the nocturnal water lilies
but me, I’m catching these glimpses of you
like a seance of fireflies among the birch
as if happenstance had a hidden theme up its sleeve.

A resonance, a nuance, as if I blew on a dandelion
and it scattered like a gust of stars out of an urn
into a constellation waiting for me to adorn it
with a myth of origins that might explain it to us both.
The old ashes of the fire pit strewing
dragons of passion again, and it’s ok to speculate
but I keep a bridle in their mouths. I’m not riding
bareback yet. I’m not rescinding my last immolation.
Though there’s something ingenuously thrilling about
the creative commotion of the approach of another galaxy
and the way the fireflies keep stoking my devotion
as if my intensities were about to go supernova
after so many years of emotional implosion, I’ve been
singing lullabies in braille to black stars
just to get to sleep at night without anyone noticing.
I’ve been wearing a halo of X-rays around
the omnidirectional event horizon of a black hole
I thought I’d given myself up to by acclamation
like the incommensurable solitude of a singularity
that had escaped itself into an alternative universe
every bit as absurd as I was, with equanimity.

I’m sick of pain. Too many squalls arising
out of nothing, too many red dawns, too many
shipwrecks turning into coral reefs that rip the hull
out of the moon like Caesarians, hearts bashed
like pinatas at the birthday parties of the sacred cartels
and everyone’s simple, quiet dream of everlasting love
and all its attendant protocols, observed with genuine feeling,
lovers mesmerized by the shadows of the things they want
but can’t quite be. Unconditional love, if its abstractions
are blooded by experience, crueller than
the sado-masochistic discipline of a saint.

Never abandoned love, just somehow came to feel
erosively disqualified, as if my starmud,
though it bore other fruits, yielded harvests
and danced under a blue moon like a scarecrow
left out to face the winter alone, would never bring forth
those flowers again. As they faded
like Confederate money into a more perfect union
of absurdity at peace with itself. Approximately.
Everything being the interpretation of an interpretation.

PATRICK WHITE