Wednesday, October 31, 2012

THE AMERICAN FLAG JUST BELOW MY STUDIO WINDOW


THE AMERICAN FLAG JUST BELOW MY STUDIO WINDOW

The American flag just below my studio window
one floor down, a real estate office carrying the colours
on the left and on the right, the Maple Leaf,
stubbornly clinging to its flagpole like the bough
of a tree that won’t let go of it even in a storm,
are both snapping in the air like two mad dogs
at the end of their chains, as if they smelled bush wolfs
moving through the dark without any respect for property.

Poor dogs. Poor wolves on a night like this.
Store lights smeared on the black asphalt streets,
a Fauvist palette, or the trail of a snail of lipstick
on a mirror in full eclipse. Everything tonight,
a jaywalker, a refugee, an exile, or a pariah,
with a mind shattered like pottery into any one
of a hundred ostrakons. No country for him,
his identity ends at the limits of town
as the willows rave in the asylum of Stewart Park.
The windows are rattling and the doors are banging
their pots and pans to keep the ghosts at bay
as the hard eyes of the rain sadistically whip my face
while the waters of the Tay froth like a troll throwing a tantrum
over the rocks under the Rainbow Bridge
that’s standing its ground like a harp in a rage.

Nocturnal greys with a tinge of infra-red in the clouds.
For anyone who likes to look up, it’s a night
to keep your eyes on the ground as I make my way
to Devil’s Rock, to watch the white mustangs
of the river run wild the way they used to drive
sheep through town a hundred years ago
before the coyotes and coydogs took their toll
and the vagrant hearts of the shepherds
found it a lot easier to go with the flow
by leading from behind with a couple of dogs
turning their flanks than I do tonight,
with a hemorrhaging heart in the eye of a hurricane rose
stirring the cauldrons of things up like the golden ratio
of galaxies and sunflowers thrown into the mix
like memories of better days at an exorcism.

Things torn away like children and lovers
caught in the turmoil and undertow of cosmic venting
that breaks the koan like a one-fingered wishbone
and achieves liberation followed by
the interminable solitude of going it alone
on a starless night out into the open fields
trashed by autumn after the harvest,
complicit with the storm, the pathetic fallacy
of the objective correlative that plunders my soul of adjectives
until all that’s left are these verbs gnawing at my bones
like a neolithic grammar of scarred calendars
and discarded manuscripts not worth another draft
with beautifully illustrated cave paintings
spit on the walls of my inaccessible skull
like shamanistic magic under a Hunter’s Moon
I can feel, even if I can’t see it, under this snarling
wolf-hide of clouds, from the inside out,
howling back in agony over the roadkill I’ve become.

PATRICK WHITE  

IF ONLY I COULD REMEMBER THINGS FOR AWHILE


IF ONLY I COULD REMEMBER THINGS FOR AWHILE

If only I could remember things for awhile
as they were before they changed. Savour them.
Let the flavour of the jewel
that’s been ripening in my voice
wash through my mouth
like the mystic blaze of a star sapphire
and every word I say be a firefly of insight
that can shed some light on dark matter.

Would that my tears fell fruitfully enough
to feed the world, that one drop of my blood
after years of preparing the potion, were enough
to immunize a whole planet from affliction.
And what marvels would my eyes not delight
in showing anyone, if they could astonish the blind
like an orbiting telescope that’s just had
its cataracts removed
like the reflection of the moon peeled
like an albino eclipse off the black mirror of the lake
only to discover that all this time they groped through the dark
like star-nosed moles, it was their own face that got in the way
of what was shining. If only my hands
knew how to build like the birds
and my bones were strong crossbeams and rafters,
what palaces of light and water and air
would my heart not offer to the homeless
like the growth rings of a maple tree
that threw them the keys like winged samara
and said, move in, its yours. It’s built on bedrock
not the quicksand cornerstone of a slum lord.

For the lonely sitting with their cats and their elbows
in half-opened windows, observing
the pigeons and the stars for memorable events,
I would break this long fast of my solitude
like black Slavic peasant bread with strangers
who sat above the salt at the table
as my honoured guests, and ask them, eye to eye,
heart to heart, all ears, as if I were a radio telescope
listening like Seti, if they’ve heard any news back yet
from Bellatrix or Rigel, and which
of Jupiter’s shepherd moons is hiding
a secret affair with life that everyone’s dying to know.

It’s heart-breaking that we can’t all bring our tears to bear
into one cloud weeping over a drought like a dry creekbed
where we’re all hibernating in our own starmud
like toads and frogs waiting for flashfloods of the next rain
to underwhelm us like gravestones in a makeshift cemetery.
What would the world be like if we could
walk up a long country road at night far from ourselves
and not have to ask the roadkill for directions in life?
As if we were sure enough where we were going
to risk being followed by the lost like a starcluster of fireflies
within the compass of everyone’s bearings, not
out there somewhere like the ghost of a spaced-out lighthouse
but like the porchlight of nearby farm on a summer night
that draws living things out of the dark like the full moon to it,
even if it just be gnats in the air, bats, or Luna moths,
what a seance of life we could be to each other
as if we left the screen door unlatched
for any lunatic of the light on the road this late at night
who might wander in like the seeds of new themes on the wind
to enrich the bright vacancy of our dark abundance
with a starmap to where our buried treasure lies hidden
like diamonds in the ore of the hearthstones of our hearts.

If I could take the whole of my darkness
and enchant its snakepits into the wavelengths
of the light I would have emanate out of me
like the rainbow body of a Tibetan rinpoche
entrusted with the wisdom of the Himalayas
to seek a low place among the stars like a sea
that all things flow down into like the shining images
we retain of ourselves like the reverberations
of experienced luminaries echoing
like seasoned birds to each other
in the valleys and black holes of tears and death below.

Sacred syllables of immortal butterflies
in the orchards of morning and moonrise.
I would shine down upon the abyss of the lovers
like a water star from the bottom up
of all the burning bridges they have yet to cross
like Aldebaran at zenith, or Cygnus at nadir,
to get them to the other side
of what binds them to each other
like water and air, light, earth and fire,
and each moment of my life, every step
I risked anew, I would become the way
that’s never taken itself before this deep into the mystery
of what it means to be alive and everywhere
be endangered by the beauty of our own awareness.

Instead of breathing for the dead as long as I can
underwater on the moon, I would invite them
to make a new birthmark in new medium
that calls them back from the night like light
from the scattered ashes of the empty urn of a star
coming together again in a gravitational womb
of their own remains, where everyone achieves
the all consuming illumination of their endless afterlives
by opening the koan of a single flower
in the light of their darkest hour of perennial insight.

PATRICK WHITE

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

LIVING OFF THE GRID


LIVING OFF THE GRID

Living off the grid in the interstices between the threads
of the spider webs bejewelling the sky with stars
like the net of Indra in the morning dew. Mark one drop
and they’re all marked. Subtract from one
and you take from all. Same way with our eyes
when they see like crystal skulls right through
the ruse of themselves to the glassblowers
of fifteenth century Germany. Cool visuals.
The light refracting off the nuanced smear
above their left front parietal lobes as if
they had something as happy and irrational as water
to be clear about in a brittle kind of way.

And that’s ok, that’s ok, that’s ok, too,
but you’ve got to get down and dirty in the starmud
like the root of an optic nerve deep in the dark matter of the brain,
if you want to be what you see in the visionary sense of the word.
If you want to fly with the dragons that bring the rain
you can’t sip like a hummingbird collecting blood samples
from the hollyhocks. You can’t live like a tuning fork
witching for a lightning strike if you haven’t got
the circuitry for it. If your axons aren’t grounded to the earth
you’ll be blown out like the brown out of a power station
that wasn’t a fit companion for the sun
because you couldn’t handle the excruciating transformations
of your own shining, the disciplined ferocity
of a controlled burn. You’re either one of the fire wombs of life
or the ashes of a dragonfly in the furnace of a chrysalis
that breaks like the under-fired pottery of a fortune-cookie urn.

Or a stale koan. Either way you’re not a guru of the absurd
that’s been enlightened by the crazy wisdom standing
in the backlit doorways of delusion, grateful for a hand out
if you’ve never shaken your spiritualism down on the street
to feed your hungry ghosts something meaty and sweet.
If you want to build your house in the back starfields
of an off road zodiac, you’ve got to start like an incipient galaxy
with a big black hole as deep as a godhead in your heart
and the bedrock foundation of an asteroidal avalanche
that brings the mountain down on the valley like a gravestone
that’s waiting for somebody to put their name and return address on it.

Even if you’ve blooded your abstractions with soporific poppies
and you’re sleepwalking through dreamland, you’re still
not homeless enough to be in exile from yourself.
You’re still breathing in and out like a hinge on a gate in space.
And there’s a light in your face that tells me you’re
a lantern in the dark that’s never worn its own deathmask
to a ghost dance without paling like the stars
in the false dawn of the fire that consumes them.
And I’ve noticed you never take
the cranium of your begging bowl
around to the door of an entrance
from which there is no exit.
And that’s ok, that’s ok, that’s ok, too.

PATRICK WHITE  

COMPASSION THE SWEETNESS THAT ENTERS


COMPASSION IS THE SWEETNESS THAT ENTERS

Compassion is the sweetness that enters
the wounded apple of knowledge after
you’ve taken your first bite out of it.
It’s not an antidote to the facts of life and death.
And you should know by now if you’ve suffered at all,
and it’s impossible not to from the moment you open your eyes,
the night is not a reward, nor the lantern of the light
that goes before you on a graveyard shift of the stars.
Compassion is the oldest instinct of the heart
and first muse of the mind that can taste only
the blowing blossoms and bitter green apples of the spring,
gripe brain, before it ripens like a sunset in your blood.
That’s why the heart knows more about it than the head.
And I expect, on that basis, no one is more capable
of loving us who must doubt that we’re worthy of love
to live up to the truth of it than the dead who can open
the tiny koans of the seeds at the core of things
like the lockets of fortune-cookies that break
like twisted cosmic eggs in a rush to spread their wings
like waterbirds who write the lyrics of their songs on the fly.

Words for the eye. Words for the ear. Words
for the voice of the wind like black walnut trees
and kites in a storm. And if you really know how to listen,
I mean if you can hear the wavelength of a black snake
swimming across your blood like a mantra
of terrifying, beautiful wisdom that keeps its secrets
to itself, or hear the unfathomable oceans in the black rose
whose petals and eyelids are always smashing
like white eyelashes in a squall of sunbeams
against the breakwater of a white dawn that passes
like an albino eclipse in a moonlit leper colony
of extinct black rhinos. If you even remotely
hear what I mean when I speak like this sleepwalking
through a dream grammar like a prophetic skull in a trance,
words that dance like light on the mindstream
rejoicing in the clarity of the voice that expresses
the hidden message encoded in the genes of the fireflies.
You have mouths. Speak for yourselves.
Some like lighthouses along the banks of life.
Some like thieves with searchlights for eyes on a bomber’s night
when everyone is underground and the bummers are out
plundering the evacuated houses of the zodiac.
Might be the ravings of a star struck maniac talking to himself
to make sure nobody else is listening. Might be
the surrealistic lament of a Dadaist night bird
singing out loud in its sleep for things it doesn’t know
it longs for, or maybe a lunatic is waxing prophetic
in a labyrinth of his own echoes trying to sound his way out
of the mountains without end he’s being trying to befriend
like a cloud or an eagle silvered a moment
like the ore of a dream in the corner of the eye
of a moonrise coming on like a hurricane
with a black pearl in its teeth. The eclipse of a sacred lie
compassion concedes to an alibi without a myth of origin.

Compassion is the child of imagination that identifies
with its simulacra of suffering by applying the heart
like a bloodbank to the wounded eidolons of eyeless images
that didn’t know how to bleed, or breathe, or cry or see
until compassion tempered their impression of themselves
as paradigms of rationality, by shedding real tears
in an ice age of lenses that kept their illusory distance
from the stars that came out after the rain, wet and shining,
laughter radiating through our tears, because life isn’t a dry fire.
It’s the hand on the rudder of a lifeboat
that keeps you from drowning from the day you were born
in the undertow of the tides of the new moon
until the night of the full when you haul everyone aboard
who’s been swimming through glaciers of tears
like baby mammoths for the last twenty-five thousand years
afraid of extinction if they ever stopped to catch their breath.
Compassion is accepting everyone’s death as a portion of your own.
Everyone’s life as your third eye, a vital organ of your own body.
Compassion is an undisciplined action of the heart.
Compassion arises like a moonrise of inspiration
in the eyes of the older sister of the muses
who walks too much alone as if she’d devoted her solitude
to the suffering of a wounded stranger she met along the way
when she let her hair down like willows of rain
to cool the scorched earth and slake the roots of pain
until they bloomed like foxfire in the shadow of her passing.

Most poets sit around the lesser fires of their art
trying to divine the smoke of what’s burning in their hearts
like autumn leaves they’ve heaped into books
that smoulder in tears more often than they break into flames.
But if compassion turns her eyes toward you
like a star in the darkness beyond your blazing
the Milky Way runs like a bloodstream through your veins
and you see in terrifying clarity the great mystic details
in the deep watersheds of picture music efoliating
like wildflowers and galaxies, grails, fountains,
lunar herbs, and starfish raised up off the ground
to take their place among the shining, radiant with life,
in the low valleys and high fields of an imagination that heals.

PATRICK WHITE

Monday, October 29, 2012

BACKGROUND SADNESS. COSMIC HISS.


BACKGROUND SADNESS. COSMIC HISS.

Background sadness. Cosmic hiss. Cool blitz of the rain.
Too late to do the fossils of the flowers any good. Grim air.
Morose silver-grey homogenous sky. Curds of colour.
Though the trees that have hung on to their leaves
like poets afraid to publish their works on the wind,
hoarding them like flakes of dried blood from previous passions,
remind me of the Library of Alexandria going up in rusty flames.
The drainage ditches are full, and the chandeliers
of the New England star clusters aren’t shining anymore.

This morning I’m the fragrance of smoke
in a bombed out city that’s eaten all its horses.
A drenched scarecrow without a function
wandering through a field of shattered cattle corn.
More smouldering than combustible. The earth
lays a poultice on my heart like green moss
on the skulls of the rocks. And the agony of healing
sometimes hurts worse than the original wound.
Dark starmud clings to my lily-white winged heels.
And though the arrows of my words have been
fledged by the sky like ospreys among songbirds,
I’m still flaking spear heads off the obsidian
of prolific new moons. And it’s hard to know
if I’m weeping like a candle that’s still burning in the rain
or crying long, slow, pungently languorous tears of resin
down the trunks of the dolorous pines.

Wet raw umber leaves stick to my boots
like decals on a guitar case of one night stands
like the lament of a bird moving from tree to tree
without understanding what it’s longing for.
Too many sundials past the equinox
in the season of the dead, I’m hauling
the blue stones of my emotions from distant quarries
as I walk these fallow fields like a crop circle
with notions of refounding Stonehenge here in Lanark County,
stacking pagan trilithons out of heritage Christian cemeteries
as I close the endless gates behind me, chain by chain,
so nothing gets out that isn’t meant to, except me
and the fox that’s stopped to eye me
from the far side of my field of view
that’s been abandoned to its own recourses
for the rest of the year in and year out.

I came for a casual walk, but I find myself
wary and prowling through a carnivorous solitude
like a drenched bush wolf in the middle of too much agriculture
and I’m many long wavelengths away from home.
There’s a brutal exactitude about a life that doesn’t love you
because you were born with fangs, even when
you lie down with the lamb to share vulnerabilities.
Some like it high above the timberline
where everything is as sublime as nightfall
on a good seeing night and the stars are so ferociously hot
they cauterize your eyes like focused fireflies of blue acetylene
so you never have to cry again quite the way you used to,
or if you do, your tears shatter like chandeliers of dry ice
and weeping glass. And then a black walnut tree
that’s been unfeathered by the wind like a snapping turtle says
the trouble with wild predators is they never
get down to the roots of things. Come the autumn
they’re still wandering homelessly in the shallows of life alone.
Too sad to argue, I nod my assent, and think to myself
so do your leaves, your blossoms, your seeds, your windfalls,
the burnt planets of your scattered solar systems
strewn at my feet like black cue balls that break for us all.

I allegorize the woods to humanize my lupine mythologems.
And then there are some. Siloes of dark abundance
standing in the starfields of an emotional famine
that have been living on nothing but the crumbs
of the forgivable shining of their former dreams.
Sometimes think I’m one of them as well, among
so many fortune-tellers reading the lifelines
of the open palms of the trees. But I don’t get fixed upon it
for fear the fireflies of insight I revelled in this summer
stop burning holes in my starmap that lets me see
clear through these obvious paradigms of the light
to the shapeshifting constellations of chaos on the other side
that unravel these monstrous myths of human origin
as quickly as they weave them out of nothing
so that in the end we’re always the beginning of something else.

And there’s a hidden compassion in all of that. Mercy
in the mobile protocols of passage that initiate us
into a deeper awareness of the pathos of our passions
emptying the urns of our hearts like the ashes
of the Canada geese flying high overhead above the clouds
that our pristine emptiness might be renewed again
by the yellow leaves we’re kicking through in the rain
like sodden flames strewn across the trail
beside the mindstream I’ve been following like the Tay
where the fleets of sulphur butterflies
timed to the weather reports of the dying flowers
have taken down their sails like the wings of old loveletters
to walk alone with the Alone without saying
anything short-sighted or humanly intrusive along the way.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU WERE THE INTIMACY


YOU WERE THE INTIMACY

You were the intimacy
of the things I loved
that were so impossibly far away
I could never reach out and touch them
except by touching you.
In the long silence of these past thirty-seven years
I have never been able to look at people again
the way I used to see them before I met you.
There’s a fear in the way I love them
that I learned
from living your absence.
A deep black wounded space within
that has sadly outgrown the stars
like October outlives its fireflies.
And every threshold I’ve crossed ever since
has turned into a long road
with a precipice at the end of my spinal cord
swaying like the first night I met you
on the Capilano Suspension Bridge
and you said
the only way
to overcome your fear of falling
is to have the courage to jump.
And I laughed and said
staring into the gorge
and the thin silver water down below
what’s to fear
if you know how to fall toward paradise?
And you knew right away
I was your kind of challenge.
And I knew you wanted
to sword-dance with razorblades
you laid out like the Tarot
later back at your place
as if you wanted to convince yourself
you were still silly enough to believe in tomorrow.
The candle beside the cards on the floor
didn’t turn out to be
enough of a lighthouse
to warn us of the approaching storm.
We were sincere in the darkness
for a little while
astounded by the expert innocence
of our mindless flesh.
You shone like the sun at midnight
and I came undone like Icarus
to prove I was falling
without regrets
like a spent star
into the singularity
of a whole new universe
where everything that didn’t happen in this one
came uncannily true in the next
for both of us
as if we were at last worthy
in each others’ arms
of our own happiness.
When happiness is brave
it’s bliss.
And when it’s afraid
there’s nothing sadder
than a gift that was never opened.
Joy is a warrior that risked hoping
there was nothing left dying for.
Sorrow comes up with a million reasons.
The only way of life
is not making a way of life.
Nor making
not making a way of life
a way.
One day you just get off the road
and start taking the long way home through the starfields.
You stop looking in the mirror
to see if you still have eyes.
For years after your death
no matter what I looked at
I always saw the same thing.
The black clarity
of your existential absence
staring me in the face
without turning me into stone
because that would have been mercy.
Try how I might
I could never quite
shut the lid on your coffin
or accept
that you were buried in me for good
or that my blood burned
like the infernal red
of an emergency exit
to show me the way out
of heaven and hell
by falling on them both
like a two-edged sword
that killed me deeper into life
than your death ever did.
Either life’s unfair
or I’m not man enough
to live up to your suicide
but I remember how I used to love
feeling the weight
of the nightstream of your hair
as it poured through my hand
like a landscape that could feel
for the first time in a long time
water running in the dry creekbeds of its lifelines.
Things woke up.
And I saw the flowers
among the thorns
that had been guarding them
like the secret names of God
you had to know
to get past the burning angels
through the gates
of your sad return to Eden alone.
The eloquence of your flesh
when you walked on the earth
as if your heart danced to your blood
like an old song we both knew
now a broken harp of bone,
a wounded guitar,
someone laid down for good.
A prophetic skull
without a future
anyone can foretell.
The full moon going down
like a spare penny
into a dry wishing well.
Me looking at the dark hills
like the contours of your corpse laid out
under a collapsed tent
as they wheeled you into the ambulance
to spend your first vast impossibly long night in the morgue
among the dead
who don’t catch their breath
or break their bodies like bread
alone in the stillness
that can’t distinguish one death from another.
However I wept for you
all the hard bitter baffled tears
all the sweet radiant wellsprings
that washed the dust like stars
off the wings of the birds
that had laboured to carry the souls of the dead
far to the west
when I remembered
how blessed I really was
that things had been
so beautifully dangerous for awhile.
And all the dark fathomless watersheds of lucidity
I drowned in like a eye in a grail
looking for butterflies in a suicide note.
All the black pearls
the diamond skulls
the eclipsed chalices
all the precious jewels of my grieving
that death hoarded underground
nothing in the end
but nameless water
frozen between the cracks
of a gravestone as old as the moon.
I remember how I loved your ice-blue eyes
and how they burned with an Arctic clarity
you had to dress warmly for
if you didn’t want to suffer from frost-bite
but there’s more nightshade in them now
than chicory
when I look into them like tundral flowers
and the light turns hurtful and eerie
when I recall how the melting snow
washed itself clean of itself
all those years ago
when we didn’t know
what all this meant.
It’s of little relevance
that we once loved each other
the way we did
and once you’ve exhausted
the meaning of signs
like galaxies expanding
ever more deeply into space
less significance.
What does it look like from Mars?
Your death was a koan
not a fortune-cookie
and the koan broke me
like a man it couldn’t understand
rationally.
There is no scar for you.
You will always be
this open wound inside of me.
When I look at the stars
I can’t dissociate beauty from absurdity.
I cherish their clarity
as something that can’t be
contaminated by my eyes
when they’re nothing
but two black holes in space
a snake-bite of the light
in the middle of my face
like a colon without the following:
the kind of faith
that makes what little is left
so incommensurably greater than what’s been lost.
I can see the blue morning glory in the garden
as if moonlight had turned to skin
just to feel what it’s like to flower
but I can’t forget the frost
that fell like your death over all of it
when I went so numb
space turned into glass
and time pulled the blind down on the window.
I closed my eyes like a mirror
content to let the stars make sense
of their own reflections.
I gave up on directions
and burned my starmaps
and followed who I was
without caring what I became.
Absolutes of ice
spread like cataracts
over the relativities of the river
that went on flowing
as if nothing had changed
and my life was still a dream without eyelids.
A ghost would be easier to deal with
than the fact
that you don’t exist anymore
except as bare bones
denuded of the world
like yarrow sticks
thrown before the Book of Changes.
But then I expect
you’d exorcise yourself
at a suggestion of the night
that the stars would be so much brighter
if you only blew out the candleflame.
You’d do it just to see
if things got better.
You’d leave me in the dark again
staring at the stars
like white ink
on a black loveletter
you left unsigned
as you disappeared into death
like your last breath on a cold windowpane.
I’ve long since forgiven you my solitude.
I’ve long since forgiven you
the severity of the wisdom
that hardened my eyes
like diamonds in the darkness
that could cut through anything
except my attachment to you.
I have forgiven you
for the way I have grown through suffering
to realize
how much I owe your death
and the terrible eyeless abyss that followed it
like an enlightened insight
into the impersonal nature of compassion.
I have forgiven you
the way I am spontaneously compelled
to love a world that is so estranged from me
I feel like water on the moon
trying to imagine what it must be like
to fall like rain on the intimate earth
with a reasonable expectation
of coming up flowers
that weren’t destined
to be laid on your grave.
I’ve gone grey gathering them up
and bringing them to you
like bouquets of paints and brushes
that are ready at hand
should you ever wish
to pick them up again
and show me what the world looks like
without a body for a picture-frame
as you play the part of the upstart genius
who lived the black farce of creative pain
like the agony of the wick
burning at the stake like a heretic
between the flesh of the wax
and the spiritual aspirations of the candleflame
thrusting spears into space at the stars
as if the only way you could ever know God
if you ever met up
was by the scars.

PATRICK WHITE