Thursday, March 29, 2012

FLOWERS ADRIFT ON THE FRAGRANCE OF THEIR OWN FOREGOING


FLOWERS ADRIFT ON THE FRAGRANCE OF THEIR OWN FOREGOING

Flowers adrift on the fragrance of their own foregoing.
In the night that takes me under its wing
to shelter me from myself, arrival and passage of spring.

Fish nibble at the wafer of the moon on the tongue of the lake.
The wind bitter as a green apple with an innocent cruel side.
Saturn at dawn,Venus at dusk, things abide in their own good time

without knowing for whose sake they shine until the mind
can’t keep a secret anymore and let’s the heart know
what the heart has always known. Reason is colour blind.

Everything that’s hidden out in the open isn’t invisibly camouflaged
to look like God at a quick glance. Flowers don’t dance
with their deathmasks on. Things may have changed

since I last walked here, but they haven’t aged. Autumn
not an older season than spring, spring not younger than yesterday.
Water’s never heard of a virgin birth that ends in a real death.

Silence of time as it appears to the spirit in a deepening sea of awareness.
Nothing disfigured. Nothing restored. Nothing scarred.
Nothing wounded in the moonlight, pleading to be healed.

Earth pungent with the expectations of urgent ghosts.
And dust in the eyes of the stars, the cries of Canada geese
with more longing in their voices than celebration

like the wailing of a train disappearing like smoke in the distance
from a sad fire in danger of going out. Exits and entrances galore
there are as many ways out of here as there is space and time to stay.

Bush wolves on a far hill agonizing over something in the night
like blues harps of blood. And in the heartwood of every leafing tree
I can hear the first violins of a symphony tuning up to the light

as if something sublime were about to begin with the first drop of rain
pinging like a tintinnabulum beside the kettledrum of thunder at the back.
To speak now would be to conceal what I really feel in words.

Lavish with life, I reveal my voice in a rush of waterbirds
startled off the lake like a mantra of sacred syllables
that nuance the ripples they leave in their wake

with a whole new way of phrasing the light with eyes
that see things musically as they fall away from their wings
like the meaning of things when meaning isn’t necessary.

PATRICK WHITE

AMAZING AS THE STARS IN THE DARKNESS, MY EYES


AMAZING AS THE STARS IN THE DARKNESS, MY EYES

Amazing as the stars in the darkness, my eyes,
though I’ve never seen them directly, only
as a reflection I take at its word they’re blue.
And when I look a little deeper, there’s
no part of me that isn’t eventually invisible.
Everything’s like that, the seer and the seen,
so wholly absorbed in each other,
there’s no sign of either of them, just the seeing,
the heart and its feeling, the mind and its thought,
the flower and the eye, crocus, turk’s cap, tiger lily, lilac
all one spontaneous happening without distinction,
one infinitely collaborative creative event flashing
out of the dark resources of the plenum-void
to give it a name for the sake of rendering experience
communicable through a delirium of form.

If you’ve ever walked by a mirror and the mirror’s disappeared,
mercury into mercury, water into water, fire into fire,
a mother into her child, an unsuccessful lover into his longing,
that’s something like it. You’re everything
and in that everything you’re nothing, you’re selfless
to the point of not even knowing what that means anymore
except it’s of no significance whatsoever. There’s just
this star flashing out of a night it’s surrounded by,
just these dark hills where the dead buried themselves
as they did their children, as they had lived, secretly
under the leaves that covered their gravestones,
lichens, moss, growing hundreds of wild columbine
on a modest rock of ages with the sensibilities of a butterfly.

If you stand by a gate that doesn’t latch by itself anymore,
and the garden’s been left to its own inner resources,
because no one lives there any longer, as, perhaps, even you once did,
o in a dream, how long ago was that? And watch the moon rise,
as if the healer and the wound were remembering
an old love affair that’s gone well beyond the inseparable
because there never was a time, a prelude to seeing,
they were ever apart. You’ll understand passing
as a perpetually new approach to things, you’ll see birth in why
the flowers fall, and death, in why they rise again.
The simultaneity of the life and death of all things.
How present you are in the midst of your longing.
How clear in the absence of everything you’re missing.

I’ve spent much of my life preparing gardens for planting.
Shaking out roots, rocking fields. Wondering
whose house of life the bones I dig up once belonged to,
cornerstones and rafters in arrears
to the temples they once upheld to themselves.
And come nightfall, my work finished for the day,
I’ve paused and looked to see if I could identify
through the trees, the whole of a constellation
from a single star. As if gazing in wonder at it
in the mutual solitude and hugeness
of the unknown immmensities that surround us both,
and bind us to a weary body and a still heart
leaning on a shovel in a garden, as if the silence
could look up or down, either way, were made sacred
by the poignancy of a momentary insight
that penetrated both our hearts as if time and space
were mere bubbles of awareness in a dream.
And in a differentiated union of not-two,
I saw myself shining through the eyes of a star
as it laboured over what flowers it intended to grow.

Without a thought or a feeling I could call my own
I was a desert of stars without a mirage
to keep up appearances. I was a single point of light
with infinite distances in it, and even the word, one,
had gaps in it I learned to jump like a star.
And I saw with the certainty of water, that
when one was a wave, the other was an ocean
and separation was simply the blindfold we put on
at midnight in front of an imaginary firing squad,
as if our whole life depended upon it, to watch
the stars shoot flowers at the sun like blanks
I seeded the garden with like constellations
breaking ground through the tree tops like Vega in Lyra.
Astro-flowers. The Pleiades approaching
the larkspur like bees. Honey in a new hive.

Light years of perceptions in a garden of starmud
encompassing strangers only an insight away from home.
It’s an immensely intimate universe. Go out.
Get down on your knees in the soil. Plant flowers.
And when you go in look at your hands, at the stars
shining under your fingernails as a sign
of some honest cosmic work well done.

PATRICK WHITE

NOT LESS AWARE IN THE DARK


NOT LESS AWARE IN THE DARK

Not less aware in the dark
than I am in the light
though it’s my blood
that sees better than my eyes,
I listen to my own breathing
and my heart banging
like a storm shutter in the wind,
and I wonder who it’s all for, if anyone,
and if there were stars in my seeing
before I walked myself like a telescope up to the roof
to get a better view
and if all these leafy yesterdays
that look so much like the tomorrows they proposed to be
that I’ve shed like thoughts and birds for years
to reveal the tree that follows itself like a map
into its own flourishing
were not already memories in the world
before I mistook this mind for my own
by giving it a name.
Nothing before, nothing after this night,
worlds within worlds, and light upon light,
I wipe myself away like the carcinogenic smear
of a sunspot in the mirror
tear my face down like an old campaign poster
to better elect the immaculate by acclamation
and step down from all these vacant offices of me
like spent cartridges
from the judicial chambers of an empty gun.
It’s not suicide if you kill yourself into life,
if the pharaoh’s ka makes it all the way to Orion
and there’s more delight in heaven than relief.
It may well be wrong and perverse on my part
but I refuse to sugar the rim of a black hole with belief
and live on the crumbs of someone else’s dream
in the corner of an eye
that looks down upon me
like a black lightning bolt an erratic firefly.
And I’m not saying once you’re nothing being turns divine.
I’ve always been too restless
to lie down for long with the mystics
sipping nectar from the moonlit goblets on the vine.
Life’s not a drunk or a hangover.
And I love to paint, it’s true,
but I won’t paint my window over to improve the view,
nor add my little bloodstain like a dye to the seeing
to make the poppy burn blue
just because I can’t take it anymore.
And it may be a long, hard, dirty, demonic coal road
lined with ditchwater and dutiful corpses all the way
to the diamond lucidity of an illuminated human being
but I still stop sometimes, alone with the stars
and listen to the cry of a bird in the night
unspeakably shake the darkness
with the vastness and agony of its life
as if it were a human heart in a rootless tree
whose solitude, like seeing, exceeded the expanse of its being.

PATRICK WHITE

DRIVING UP TO MABERLY


DRIVING UP TO MABERLY

Driving up to Maberly for cheap cigarettes
at the Two Eagles Trading Post
across the highway from Silver Lake,
frost of the night,
mist of the morning lifting
in the blaze of the sun
in the bleach-blue sky
that wheels the reds and oranges,
and the wild, canary, grosbeak yellows
into their complementary hue,
I can’t really see the autumn
until my blood stops thinning itself down
to peer through the lenses
of the watercolours in my eyes
and flowing, deeper, darker
turns into fire and paint
and dancing on the funeral pyre
of my last unknown masterpiece
instead of trying to walk on stars,
celebrates the crazy wildness of my solitude
by elaborating a world
I can almost forgive
as I brush myself
off the shoulders of the hills in passing
like a thread of smoke,
a parrot of ash,
a glaze of Prussian blue,
and cry like an arsonist
in an old-growth wilderness
that the trees don’t wait for me to burn.
There is a void, an abyss, an emptiness
that wears a human face
in the presence of things everywhere
that are reflected back
in the black mirror of space
as the mystically specific features
of every mineral, plant, and animal
I’ve ever been.
I’m not just a figure in a landscape
I am the whole of the scene
and even in the shadows
that don’t feel like me,
that are sometimes horrid and strange,
intensities of separation in faces
that have fallen far from the tree,
I am the child in the darkness
rooted in a fever of fear
that is slowly learning to trust me.
And it’s been like this for years
though memory is just another way
of quoting yourself
more comprehensively
through the tears
that keep turning up
like Desdemona in autumn
to audition for the play
by drowning for real.
Have you seen October sumac
set its wings afire?
I wrote that in my twenties
sitting down on the curb
with Ben Jonson
watching the house burn,
writing odes
to Vulcan’s acumen as an editor.
If you summon a phoenix
a phoenix will come
like an aspiring passion
for enlightenment
that will shake you like ashes
out of the Buddha’s sleeve
where you’ve been hiding
from a world you didn’t conceive
and doesn’t believe
in abiding with anyone
longer than it takes to say good-bye.
Now you’re alone in the darkness
with yourself as the only witness
down to your last match
like a tiny lighthouse
looking for a lifeboat
lost like a voice in the fog
and you strike your head against the rocks
like one of the black eggs of music
a phoenix lays in a nest of ashes
and suddenly the autumn flares all around you
like the sum of all sums
in a womb of sacred fire
that immolates you into being
the light in the night
of your own unborn, unperishing clarity.
Go ask the star, the candle, the maple-tree
setting fire to the roof
of the abandoned roadside fruit-stand
with its vagrant leaves
whose light their light is the child of
and how it is they all have the same eyes as you
when you don’t bind yourself
like a nun to a cross
or a blind man in the mirror
to a match that has gone out
like the swords in the hands
of the flammable angels
who burnt paradise to the ground
so they could be doused
like the torches of autumn
in the retrospective lakes of their own tears
and know what it is
to die into yourself
like a god or a human
or a leaf of fire
like the torn page
of a calendar
on the mindstream
that makes its way
through the placenta of the full moon
all the way to everyone of us
like water through a dream
of things to come
that come of us
who are the magnanimous hosts
of our own transience.
Fountains of words
from a golden mouth
for the ghosts and the birds
that are always heading south
or like me, west,
up highway seven,
a shadow at the wheel of a sundial
or the spirit of an Ojibway outcast
set free from his burial hut
after ten years in isolation
without a cigarette
flying with the geese
who carry the souls of the dead
toward whatever afterlife they want
as if their futures were already forgiven.
Forgiven for having outlived
whoever we are
like the light of the stars
that go out in the wells of our eyes
so that we can see,
or the small search-parties of the fireflies
who won’t stop looking for us
like a postmark
we left like a homeless fingerprint
on the lost address
of the last constellation
of the transcendent myth
we were born under
like a loveletter to everyone
written on the leaves of autumn
in passion and paint,
blood and pain,
in the cursive script
of every artery and vein
that throws its books and maps in the fire
like the posthumous effects
of an old affair.
And there, it sheds us like the apple
of an expiring art
that seeds
the myriad keyholes of the heart
with peeping toms
that lower their zeniths
on the star-crossed thresholds
before the promiscuous doors
of the moon-horned virgins
who wait like owls in the trees
for the x-rated version
of their venereal hagiographies
to be martyred into movies.
And as I said to myself only yesterday
life has a good eye
and anyone can say it and see it
in every detail of the passing scene
like water trying to hang on to its roots
but when the lens of the air
is angled for fire
like the third eye
of a deciduous choir
then it’s one thing to see it
but it’s altogether
a much more dangerously creative affair
even among the inane mundanities
when it takes more than the truth
and less than a lie
to be it.

PATRICK WHITE