Friday, August 31, 2012

WERE THERE STARS


WERE THERE STARS

Were there stars in your hair that night?
I cannot remember,
so taken with your face
and the mystery and the silence and the sorrow
of the tender bell in your eyes
that could summon ghosts
of yesterday’s embodiments to the fire
of any passion that lost itself prophetically
at a rave of shadows among the trees.

You eased out of your wardrobe of rivers
like a snake on the moon
sloughing its skin like the eclipse
of a far more vulnerable shining,
and I couldn’t tell if you were
a doe or a lynx
stepping out of the alder groves warily
to lap the moonlight
that flaked the shore
with the silver petals of an undulant rose
older and darker than nightblood.

I could feel the danger within you,
the abyss of the early grave
that waited for you like a key
to come in out of the pain
that bled you like a shadow
pouring out of an open wound
that whispered to you like a secret scream
only the dead who owned you could hear.
Your hunger desperately sought salvation
from the eyes
that pleaded with you
to blow yourself out like a candle,
cancel the inevitability of your suffering
with the shudder and sigh of sex.
We lay down naked together
by the willow-stained waters
in that summer of flesh
and sought oblivion from each other
like two compatible cremations
that concealed a ravenous phoenix
ending its fast of fire.

Purified by the depth and darkness
of your intensities,
I burned in you
and felt the flames
of a dangerous angel
who had broken her afterlife like a curfew
flow over me
like dawn at a keyboard of feathers.

Your breasts still come up overnight
like supple mushrooms against my chest
and the moist heat of your mouth
throbbing with flowers like July
as you seized your joy
from the agony of the roots you tormented
to give up their dead
like bruised cherries.

I have never died as fully since
at the insistence
of any woman’s appetite
nor known a night so final,
so brutal with time and beauty
as the pendulous moon swung
like an executioner’s ax
over the nape of its own reflection
swanning on the waters.

We made love as if
we were both defying
the truth we didn’t need to say.
I wanted to plead with you,
I wanted to call out into your emptiness
like a beseeching bird
disappearing into a dark valley,
but my voice ran ahead of its echo like light
and the things I would haved asked you
not to do
had already been achieved.

Heroin, your asp,
at the funeral I stood back
beyond the baffled wreaths of flowers
and the ambivalent silence
of the modest gathering that mourned you,
maculate in the shadows
of the Japanese plum tree
we once made love under
and I kissed the rose of your blood
shedding in mine
like a wound
my love was never sword enough to heal
as they closed
and boarded you over like a well.

I spent the night like an empty vase
beside your grave
until the stars that bloomed above you like wildflowers
thawed my tears in the morning light.

I walked out of the cemetery
through the hard harps and spears
of its iron gates
and I have never been back.

The years since have been
chameleonic as a hooker
who plys her art
on the stairs of a temple
even the priests of my lust
are forbidden to enter,
but as you said I would
as you lay with me that night
like a knife beside the sea,
I have returned to you over and over again
like a witching wand
looking for water in hell,
like a cult of one to a lost island
that holds you like a secret
and wept like a candle of honey
in the dark hive of your unasnwerable silence,
intoning the names
of an impossible god
on a rosary of black suns
until my heart hangs like a bell
dumb with grief
looking up at the stars
you rinsed like a tide from your hair.

And I lean on the crutch and the crook
of a shepherd’s question,
looking everywhere for you
like the wind
sweeping the shadows of fireflies
like the fall of hair from your eyes
that night you tore yourself away from me
like a veil of blood and sorrows
wounded by the terrible light
of the black pearl
that ripened within you like the skull
of a full eclipse.

O my poor, broken angel,
you might have been fat and frumpy by now
if you had lived.
I could have watched your beauty
shed like the moon over the years,
and smile like an island
to remember how lost I was in your tides once,
a constellation of starfish
tumbled like dice in your dark undertow,
trying to shine, god, how
I tried to shine for you, how
I ached to embrace your planet safely
in the mandala of an empowering radiance
that could show you
I was worth living for
if nothing else.

Given the freedom
of the emptiness that engulfed us both,
we could have lived within each other,
we could have evolved our own atmospheres,
appointed our own stars,
written our own myths of origin
on the black pages of that journal of skies
where you scribbled down the events
of your pre-emptive afterlife
as if you wanted to make your ghost indelible.
As it was, the only thing I could do,
was take you in
like the last breath of a summer night
I could never let go of
without following it
like a shadow of you into death.

I haven’t wished for much over the years,
and the dreams have come and gone as they will,
and my hair has gone gray
and my eyes are looped like powerlines
and the sad bells of a heavy solitude
that has yoked me to the grindstone of the turning world
to mill the stars like a tide
on the bloodwheel of a worn heart.

I finally burned and broke all the weeping mirrors
I consulted like half-assed mediums
to see if I could restore you somehow
to the more intimate shining of that last night
you turned and ran back,
your shoes in your hand,
to make sure your final kiss would endure like a temple.

You pitied the agony of shapeshifting
you knew the black water ahead
was about to go through
as it smashed like goblets and crystal chandeliers
on the roaring skulls of the rocks.

You pitied me because you knew I loved you,
because you knew you were already
a future memory
and I was a prophecy from the past
that had ridden beyond itself like light
to illuminate nothing but your absence
measured in the filaments and lifelines
of eyeless oceans
like a seabird
circling a blind lighthouse on the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

WEARY OF THE WORLD TONIGHT


WEARY OF THE WORLD TONIGHT

Weary of the world tonight. Can’t stand the lies.
Some drunk loud-mouth out on the street
wants all the girls to know he’s there,
My noise is bigger than your noise.
Someone playing a guitar badly in a doorway.
A homeless cat cries, lets out a howl
of torment as if its sinews were being keyed
as tight as guitar strings about to snap.
Out of the window that hasn’t said anything yet:
you touch that cat again, slugger,
and I’ll be right down with an axe
to give you a gender change. He looks up
startled. But all bullies are cowards
trying to deny it to themselves
while wearing their sister’s underpants.
The cat makes a quick getaway
through a dark heritage alleyway.
Supercharged like a fire hydrant full of blood
throbbing through my temples, and demons
I haven’t seen in years smiling darkly in the mirrors
my shadow always regretted like left-handed virtues
that got the job done. Demonic compassion,
colder than intelligence, with a deep
poetic sense of of infernal irony
whereas a muse ago in this specious present
I was longing for a small hobby farm
on the dark side of the moon, now
I’m a dragon eating waterlilies down
by the banks of my mindstream
quietly letting go of itself
like an unmoored lifeboat full of emptiness
drifting no where in particular I want to be
except here where I can shed my humanity for awhile
among the living and the dead
who don’t care what I am and am not
as long as I’m not a threat to them.

Darkness, my solace, moon, my longing,
Star, warmer than any fire I’ve ever
sat around to exorcise my ghosts,
you, who’ve danced like my third eye
with the other two still chained to their irises,
the poetic lucidity that mentored me
in the ways of light and taught me
the creative rapture of the fish
that still swam like flashs of insight
to the surface of my oceanic tears,
I don’t know how many light years
either of us have yet to shine or cry over,
but tonight, come down from your unindictable heights
and sit with me like the intimate stranger of a candle
in my eyes, in my soul, in my blood,
be the small flame that trembles in my breath for awhile,
be the sole illumination of my spirit for awhile,
ease my bodymind with the elixir of your radiance
emanating from the inside, and let me
be born again of that fire that burns within me,
purge my starmud of these urns and bones and black dwarfs
that weigh me down like disappointed bells
and feisty mastodons in the tarpits of my heart
that sink deeper the more they struggle to get out.

And I don’t even care if you’re the last firefly
to transcend my cosmic solitude like a wavelength
of the transmorphic singularity at the beginning of time
that woke the valley up with the roar of a dragon
in that elemental morning of mad genius
that’s be the dawn of every moment ever since
in this chiliocosm of energies and forms
flashing out of the mystery of the questions we ask
about the inconceivability of being here to ask them.

No purpose. No meaning. Except the one
we all live vaguely as ourselves like a nebularity
out of which we might precipitate stars
of a different order of shining beyond what we can see.
Sit with me awhile as if we both had the same nature.
And you can look at the world and me through my eyes
and I’ll look at you through yours as if I were seeing you
from the inside out, and there were ashes in my heartwood
even before I began to burn, as in yours,
there were the urns of heavy elements even
before they were born of their own afterlife.

Be that moment within me when time breaks into light
and even the shadows, like sunspots, shine
in their own right, and nothing is disturbed,
not even the silence that is intensified when the fish jump
or a dog is barking hills away at what approaches
out of the dark, and the waterbirds in their onceness
might seem to fly away, but have been here from the start.
Fill my life with the unimaginable splendour
of all those nights you’ve looked down upon the earth
and witnessed the horror and the wildflowers
in the same breath on a cold windowpane in winter
etching the light like an artist with an eye for life
or the praying mantis of a small telescope in the summer
its legs spread like a doe about to drink from her own reflection
or one half of a collapsed bridge to the other side
of everywhere at once. I don’t ask for bliss or enlightenment.
Just show me how you make the shadows luminous again.
Even on a starless night, how to mourn like the eyeless rain
even as it renews the leaves and roots of the constellations
of the wild asters with their violet plinths and yellow suns
burning fiercely as a distant relation of your myriad myths of origin.
Do that for me and I’ll show you how to intensify
the darkness into a diamond chrysalis of transformation
like a deeper mystic bliss in life, enhanced by the ores of pain,
as your light is by the night, or the flying stickshifts
of the dragonflies put the waterlilies in park for the night
as if they’d just got out of a car by the side of an unknown road,
not to find out where they are, but just
to gape up at the stars in the midst of decay
and let the wonder of it all heal me as it always has
by showing me how to make a cradle out of a grave
or the long, slow art of a human out of a wounded heart.

PATRICK WHITE

Thursday, August 30, 2012

PAINTING NATIVE MASKS ALL DAY


PAINTING NATIVE MASKS ALL DAY

Painting native masks all day. Concrete.
Poured into a mould, their supple souls set
into the permafrost like a mammoth’s skull.
I don’t know what they were the gods of,
two of them. Could be a life or a deathmask.
Possibly Nootka, Salish, Kwakuitl, Chinook, Cowichan
Fossils, their faces, ferocious and threatening
though I doubt I’ve got the good sense to be scared.
Red for blood. Green for always. Black
for the night they were absorbed back into
like crows a moment in the moonrise, then gone
to some grove where they’ve driven the squirrels out
of their rookery. There but anyone’s guess where.

Terrorist hyperbole, or totems from darker realms,
one, perhaps, more human than the other,
an eagle shaman with a salmon moon in its talons
and the other, bucktoothed, like a nasty beaver,
but almost sacred clowns, as if they were designed
to scare the children like grandfathers
making monstrous faces without meaning
to make anyone cry. And I take it as a sign,
given the inconceivable atrocities of human obscenity
tearing at its own flesh in a high-minded rage of hatred
that threatened our own childhoods since these were made
to protect the innocent from their own nightmares.
Do ut abeas. I give so that you go away. A sign
that the nightmares have grown astronomically catastrophic,
and even though a hundred million people died
in the twentieth century, that’s still not enough
to satisfy the hearts of the generals, evicting
entire peoples and nations from the house
they were born into before they were driven
into an exile of violated thresholds and broken taboos.

I imagine them carved in rainproof cedar, red or yellow,
and just as a medicine wheel has to be blessed
by a real healer, so I wonder if the hands of those
who shaped these out of the uncarved block
of their heartwood ringed by halos of rain
were invisibly sanctified by the medium they worked in
as sometimes mine seem when a poem
circles overhead like an osprey for the pure joy of it,
or a painting suddenly breaks into life
in a limestone cave of hunting magic
that enchanted its prey in a trance
of holistic identification with the mystery,
not of how life takes life to survive,
but how life gives itself to itself like a gift
that thrives in the hands of those who do the giving
and multiplies the grazing herds of the stars
and rivers you can walk across like a messiah
on the backs of fish, without overextending
your supply line the way Napoleon and the Nazis did
when they tried to live off the land
by treating the people like retreating buffalo
or realizing, a nemesis too late, you can only keep,
conqueror or not, what you’re willing to give away
with an open hand. And the rest is just a map of smoke
on the Road of Ghosts, beaten armies
dragging their weapons behind them
like their mythically-deflated ambitions,
wishing they’d defended their pre-emptive ideas
with tools instead of rifles, a paintbrush or a knife
to fashion their own unlikeness into the divinity
of a lifemask you could wear among the gods
without losing face as a human that you haven’t learned by now
when you reach Moscow, this way, self-destruction,
that way the pathless path, the gateless gate
to the old growth totem poles of creation
collaborating imaginatively in their own interpretation.

PATRICK WHITE

YOUR FACE WAS A MOON I HAUNTED


YOUR FACE WAS A MOON I HAUNTED

Your face was a moon I haunted, and your body
twisted me into agonies of sexual driftwood
that wanted to burn at midnight under the stars
like the last signal fire of an isolated survivor
high up on your affluent shores.
I wanted to do dark things with you
in the shadow of eclipses that put their hands over
the eyes of the flowers and sent the birds to bed.
With you, I would have asked for closure
from the spring constellations swarming overhead
like free radicals paroled to the wind
tuning up the larnyx of the birch-trees,
I would have lain down with you in the bedlam
of a thousand cares and zirconium delusions
and lived beside you like an island and a telescope
drunk on the wine of your circus mirrors
that crash before they talk; all night, all night,
wave after wave, I would have caressed
the famous reflection of you in black carnation panties,
and lavished the wealth of the sea on your ears.
And we could have built a little shelter among the shipwrecks
or lived rent free with the swallows
in the silo of an aging lighthouse,
listening to the foghorns bellow like slaughtered cattle.

And it’s sad and lonely and fearful
watching the sky fall on the swords of its own horizons every night
and no one to mourn the sunset
that unspools from the wound like a bewildered snake,
and it’s dangerous the way I go erect as a symphony
around the hives of killer bees
still swinging from the old steeples believing
they’re just a misunderstood form of fruit.
And I’ve tried to master the dictionary of razorwire
that’s propping up the blase window, but I don’t like the way
I’m always a rose short of blood at the end of the day,
and the bouquet of startled flashlights
you placed on the nightstand keeps blacking out
like the eyes of dying bees in pollinated coffee-cans
and you keep looking at my balls
as if they were always nesting pelicans with something to eat,
and I haven’t talked to you about
dismemberments and Orphic skulls
in a good all-night asylum for years. What a shame
I won’t get a chance to toke with your firing squads,
or be secretly committed to one of the volunteer rehab centres
you’ve franchised like a brain selling straitjackets to lightbulbs
suffering the opprobrium of their maladjusted shades.
There aren’t more pages in the book of sorrows
or ghosts on the moon compared to the cults of the silver tide
I would have filled you with
like dolphins swimming ashore
to get their landlegs back. And think of the horns we’ve missed
charging through the labyrinths of our blood enraged
by the stungun behind the cape of the corrupt matador
gored and trampled like a bat in a blaze of honesty; how
some conversations would have hung in the air for years
like the get-well elegies of postcard suicides.
And maybe worse, because sooner or later,
I would have been compelled to confess
three mountains I didn’t name after you
to honour your breasts on the last lunar landing I made
to read the fine print between the lines
of the pre-nuptial tatoo of the anniversary spider
I signed on your chest
when you took your bra off like an hourglass
and there were questions just too momentous to ask.


PATRICK WHITE

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

THE BLACK ANGEL


THE BLACK ANGEL

The black angel in my blood tells me it’s time to die, go, disappear
from myself into the next loveless oblivion
like rainwater down a snake’s hole. The black angel
in my heart laughs and reminds me how worthless I am
to any of these who keep dying like rivers in a desert
everytime I look to see if there’s anything real to drink
behind the mirage of their smiles. Look how they all salt their own gardens,
killing anything green that had a chance to grow
with their incessant no no no to anything
that isn’t a straitjacket they ripped off one of their mental dolls. My heart
says die, my heart, too hurt to cry on any more fires, says die
and be done with all these shifting sands and lies
that look like life but turn out to be nothing more than nothing more,
black match heads trying to bloom in the dark, extinct flowers
cut off at the root of being by their own refusal to open.

No is their own rejection; no is the mirror returning their own reflection
like a passport at a border to a face that isn’t enough
to be admitted in, to cross the threshold, to enter, flowing,
the sea. And yet they all say they want to know, want to be
more than the adolescent outside the dollar-store, peering
penniless through the window, over
the monkey-bars of a baby buggy. My God, how they cheep in their shells
at the chance of any real sky outside the cramped confines
of their postered walls. But show up like a crack,
show up looking anything like liberation and growth,
and everyone chickens back into the coop, wingless and terrified
in the shadow of the hawk high overhead
riding the wind for the joy of it. Frauds and imposters,
day-old dainties in a bakery-window singing lead
in a choir of flies. And the demons within me scoff,
and the black angel comes forward out of the miscarried dream,
carrying the dead child that gave its life to believe in them
and asks me if I’ve had enough of their toxic ordinariness,
their insistent tainting of the secret wells it took so long
to divine on the moon with a broken water-wand. Idiot children
peering out of the shattered windows of an abandoned orphanage
like tiny eyeless idols waiting the return of a huge blind god
that can’t see to sign their creation. And it isn’t judgment, it isn’t
any lack of compassion or understanding
that wants to thaw their glass tears and heal
the home-made tattoos that puncture their hearts
with dirty needles of ink, it isn’t feeling above or beyond them
that turns the life-boat into a floating hearse crammed with moaning ghosts;
it’s watching them look for salvation among the sharks
that devour them one by one
in a frenzied graveyard of fins. Tonight, so alone, so dispirited, so
uselessly empty, a suicidal clown in a tentful of humorless junkies,
I weep into my own hands like a man
trying to wash off his own face in the acids of a private hell so complete
death is the only rumour of a messiah
these black winds whisper in the ashes
of everything I wanted to be. What’s the use of love, what’s
the good that comes of wasting a lifetime learning to care,
learning to give and killing yourself off to give more,
giving away your eyes, your heart, soul, hands, blood, time, talent,
until exhausted and immaculately impoverished
you don’t know what you’ve got left to give
when everyone’s smearing lipstick on their rectums
and sewing their mouths shut
so nothing real or true gets said
when they tell you how much they appreciate
the generosity of your death
and ask for more before you’re buried in their bull.

And I listen and I listen and I listen with my ears and mind and heart
until their small doomed stars are splinters of glass in my own eyes,
their pain mine, their healing mine, their fate my own
until the dagger’s buried in the wound of my own being so deeply
I alone am left to the business of dying over and over again
in this solitude of regenerative hell
where to ask for a drop of blood in return, a touch, a smile, a last embrace,
one word of genuine love
to ease the fear of the passing
is to be refused with honey and cunning, is to learn, bitterly
that all you gave as a gift
is taken in theft
and fenced in the seedy pawnshops of their pedestrian greed.
Look, there’s my heart in a greasy window, over-priced, almost
the cost of a new one with a guarantee, and there
by the chipped plaster of a mantlepiece wolf
howling at a nicotine moon, the soul
I squandered like a sudden flashflood
on a dry creekbed that said it was going nowhere.

PATRICK WHITE

I WOULD SPEAK TO YOU IN MY NIGHT VOICE


I WOULD SPEAK TO YOU IN MY NIGHT VOICE

I would speak to you in my night voice
if you were still here. If you were even as near
as the stars commingled in my breath,
I’d thaw my secret zodiac of crystal skulls
and let my mindstream run wild at your feet
like a flashflood waking the dry creekbed up
from its long dream of making the desert bloom
with real flowers in a mirage of metaphors.
I would ignite the pilot lights of a thousand stars
to blaze in an honour guard of mythic starmaps
waiting for you to bless their colours,
because wonder’s never been known to start a war
with a world it’s amazed by in every mesmerizing detail
without annihilating itself first, bursting
its own bubble in an efflorescent multiverse.

I’m a surrealistic mystic to give it a funny name,
and you’ve seen my hidden housewells, sacred pools
receiving the moonlight on the water like the blades
of ceremonial swords that tasted my blood first
like a rose bleeds on its own thorns, now let me
show you my watersheds, the fathomless voids
of dark abundance and bright vacancy
where my eyes swim like the Circlet Of The Western Fish
that never swim out of themselves
or the oceanic awareness they’re luminously
immersed in up to their gills in the clear light
of the emptiness shining back at them like a distant mind.

Under the icy eyelids of methane seas on shepherd moons
I can feel life stirring like the muse of itself
and though it’s too early in evolution to see yet
I’ve jumped ahead of myself like the light of the Pleiades
and gathered up a herd of wild telescopes
grazing on the stars like big-eyed, thin-legged antelopes
waiting for you to make an appearance on opening night
and watch how they’d dance and leap for you
like grasshoppers in the Bolshoi Ballet
who didn’t give a damn that autumn was on its way
to throw cold water on the fire because in this universe
imagination is the physics of the place, and the ants
might busy themselves gathering butterfly wings
like the covers of slender chapbooks of poetry,
but I’m drunk on these lyrical elixirs of the mind
that I take as a sign that you are near in the night
and who has to worry about snow,
when they can live in your light on an occult planet
where myriad seasons can pass in a moment of spontaneity
and the fruits of life invariably fall toward the sky?

Are we both not rooted in the ancient fires overhead?
Nervous systems of black matter, scaffolding the mind
climbs up to paint the origin of worlds before their grand openings,
dark palettes of our third eye, skeletons of pictographic bones
beneath these scriptures of flesh we can read with our fingertips
like holy books and X rays written in the boustrophic signs
of the last time we ploughed the dark side of the moon together
and filled the siloes of the stars with galaxies
that spun like Tibetan prayerwheels, or Moroccan Sufis
or dust devils at the heels of winged messengers
conducting us like the flightfeathers of the dark arcana
we can read in each others eyes like loveletters
written in the cursive dream grammar the heart sings to itself in
when it’s a lonely nightbird, and you’re there like the stars.

PATRICK WHITE