Saturday, May 5, 2012

WILLOW-MINDED FRIEND OF MINE


WILLOW-MINDED FRIEND OF MINE

Willow-minded friend of mine
you’re the star of Isis in the palm of my hand
that keeps me from drowning in a sea of glass.
How often have I been washed ashore
on the coasts of your flesh
like a naked sailor in an icestorm
of breaking chandeliers
and been taken to see the king
by a princess doing laundry?

A firefly in the distance
might be a great star up close
and your every breath
seed the whirlwind
with golden drops of rain
after the tempest has exorcised its pain
and you grow more beautiful picture by picture
like someone who wants to be redeemed
in her own eyes
for things that only she could be.
But that’s not why I love you.
No siren no muse no priestess no witch
no shepherdess of exotic snakes
squirming with the future
like mystic themes around your body
no sacred whore ready to party in the temple
with Minervan night owls and Cepheid movie-stars
that don’t want anybody to turn the lights on
to see what’s going on in the darkness
they are to everybody,
you are to me more
than I have eyes to see
to the beginning and end of things
but I can feel the night within
flowing like dark energy through space
and tendrils of time growing like paisley lifelines
into something sweeter than the wine
the white mirror drinks from its own reflection.
Before the arising of signs
I can feel your presence moving in me
like unborn constellations playing chess with time
to see who shall be the blossom
who the root
who the leaf
and who shall prime the lightning of the vine.

Long before your veils are parted by no one
like rivers of insight
I can hear your stars
whispering things into my ear
that make whole worlds appear
rocking life in their arms like water.

Time is a mental space
with different flavours.
You taste like the wounded grace
of an eloquent truce with flowers
or as Dogen Zenji said in l238
the lucky day is when you discover it’s all one day
meaning one chameleon
turning many different colours
to match the hours it spends
in front of the mirror
that keeps it guessing
who’s the seer and who’s the seen.
The grass turns red.
The flower turns green.
How long have I waited for you
like a tide on the moon to come in
like the spoke of a tree for a rim of stars
like a metaphor in the chrysalis of a dragonfly for wings
you could see through like a stained-glass window
divining the silence like a witching wand
in a waterless church?

And it’s all just been a moment ago
that isn’t at the discretion of birth and death
I learned to breathe with you on the moon
like some atmospheric fish
transformed by a new medium
into whatever you wished me to be
when I was the lifeboat
in the eye of the endless sea
that washed me out like a cinder
with the tears of a passing mindstream
as if I got in the way of my own dream
and you?

You were the mystic specificity
as you will always be
in the lunar pearl of it all
that sometimes doubles for my skull.
And isn’t it funny how when the night screams
it’s always an aurora
that everyone mistakes for dawn?
A snail of a comet smears the mirror and moves on
and it’s as good a path as any to follow I suspect
if I had a destination in mind
that wasn’t looping in retrograde like a noose.

I may be as footloose and fancy-free as a ghost
but there’s no end of this longing
that keeps making me up as I go along
trying to be true and strong
to what I love the most about being dead.

I think of you
and I burn in the terrible clarity
of a light that’s never fallen on anyone
as if illumination were endlessly eyeless.
I think of you
like water looking up at the moon as it rises
and I realize the wingless openness
of the dark gates before me
and pass through like a midnight sun
whose seeing evaporates in the morning
like visions and words and waterbirds
that have been transcendentally uplifted out of the graves
of their own reflections.

We are what we need to be to each other
without knowing what that is
like a phantom kind of picture-music
that’s always changing its lyrics
to keep up with the mood of the times
whether it’s the high definition tunnel vision
of the smokey beekeepers
trying to bring law to the unruly flowers
or the dark energy of an expansive space
driving the stars like exiles
into the absolute sublimity of a starless place
deep in the heart of God
that even creation can’t fill
or we’re just kicking pebbles down the road together
through clouds of white sweet clover
like afternoon companions of each other’s solitude.

Time is the poetry of the eternal
when love sits by itself under its willow tree
and watches the stream pass by
like the flowing eye it drinks from.
I drink pellucidly on the moon
from old grails of sacred blood
like an ark that survived the flood
only to find itself abandoned like a farm
on a mountaintop with two of every kind
except for one
who made his way down alone with the alone
to sing his lover up out of the dead
as if he were missing one of his eyes
and the other had turned to stone.

PATRICK WHITE

THE SINGULARITY


THE SINGULARITY

You were the singularity at the bottom of the blackhole
where all the light and life and love and money went.
You were an abyss that just couldn’t stand being empty.
You wanted to be a fat void in the midst of plenty.
You took your own body as the Standard Model of the Universe.
You were a death-maze that tried to make a living selling breadcrumbs.
You used to tell me
I could run from the blessing
but I could never escape the curse
of being an optimist for whom
things kept turning out for the worst.
You always did try to make an original point of the obvious
but your clarity was invariably cruel and cunning.
So I gave up arguing with you
and learned to grow orchids
that slept with secrets
in the shadow of that outhouse on the moon
you kept up like a diary of your changing moods.
Being the stupid one
I thought love had substance and content
the way thought and feeling had flesh and blood.
You thought it was a wardrobe of auroral attitudes
you could put on or take off as you wish
like smoke in a mirror
or a whisper of lingerie.
Sex with you was always a good day
and we had a lot of them
and that’s how I ended up staying for six years.
That and the compassion I felt
for the tears of rage you would shed
like rain on the lava of a wounded volcano
that would pop up on the west coast without warning
and bury both of us like Pompey and Herculaneum
trying to grow geraniums on its harassed slopes
like the hippies who grew pot
on Mt. Saint Helen’s
who aren’t selling anymore.
I always thought you gave your love to someone
and that’s what made it a gift
but you bestowed yours upon me
as if it were a right
I should be grateful to receive.
I was abolished from diplomatic lip-service
in the court of the mad queen
time and again
for things I didn’t mean
even in my native language
that were just too insane to believe.
But the body endures.
The mind copes.
And despair and ashes to me
given the tragic optimist I am
are full of high hopes
like spiritual loveletters
in earthbound envelopes.

And just as I did then
when at least I taught you
what not to look for in a man
I hope you’ve found the simulacrum
of the real life you were looking for
and it’s healed that crack in the mirror
that used to scar you like a black sail
on an empty horizon
waiting for cosmic news of the weather
that kept running you aground
like a widow on a beach
everytime the tide came in like providence
and left you just out of reach of yourself
like a wedding bouquet
the bride tossed away over her shoulder
without looking back.
As for me
things have gotten worse for the better over the years.
Swimming through quicksand.
Swimming through stone.
Impersonal revelations of intimate stars.
Sometimes the moon shows me
the fossils of the ancient oracles
she’s pressed between the pages
of her darkest shales
like deep wounds
gashed in the matrix of space and time
that were the distant ancestors of us
who have survived the truth of their prophecies
like scars without a myth of origin.
I still end where I begin
like the black grammar of a white magician
answering for myself before my own inquisition
for heresies that were holy enough
to be condemned to the fire as proof
of their volatility.

Your blood was a watercolour.
Mine was an oil.
And red was the colour of pain.
I shook things off me
like water off the fur of a dog
that’s just come ashore
on the far side of the river.
You ran in the rain
like a crazy ribbon
from the gifts you were given to give
and didn’t know how to survive.
But wanting to live
isn’t the same thing
as trying to stay alive
though they’re the two ends
of the same telescope.
When despair becomes
the orthodoxy of the age
and sinks like a heavyweight
who threw the fight like Atlantis
when it lost its sea-legs
the only true protest is hope
and the abandoned courage of a bubble
expanding like the universe
to break the surface
in a rapture of aquatic freedom
and disappear into the new medium
of an evolving atmosphere with wings.
And sometimes it’s hard
to remember the way things turned out
as if the certainties were brief weathervanes
of the good days that never came
and the doubts went on forever
looking for scapegoats they could blame
like the leftover smoke
of an extinguished candleflame.
And though I might be slow
I know I’ve been thorough over the years
in wishing you love and life
and laughter among friends.
So I’ve never summoned you by name
like a ghost to a seance of strangers
who think they know you better than I do
and make way too much of too many little things
that don’t matter anymore.

I haven’t swept the stars off my stairs in years.
And there are loveletters
piled up in the mailbox
that say I’m in arrears
and when the windows cry
as they sometimes still do
looking out over the vastness
of the view from here
at the solitary figures fading
into the landscape of their homelessness
I try to cheer them up
like a reflecting telescope
by getting them to look at the bright side of things
by exchanging their lenses for mirrors
the way love does
new lamps for old
when everything that’s beautiful and lucid
disappears under a veil of rain
like old eyes looking out at the world
through the new tears of a stranger’s pain
like a faithful death-wish that’s come true again.

PATRICK WHITE

THE ONLY WAY TO CONTROL THINGS


THE ONLY WAY TO CONTROL THINGS

The only way to control things is with an open hand.
Water on rock
a fist can’t do anything to stop the rain
that keeps washing its bloody knuckles
by kissing the raw red buds
of the pain-killing poppies clean.
Anger grows ashamed of itself
in the presence of unopposable compassion
just as planets are humbled by their atmospheres.
The soft supple things of life insist
and the hard brittle ones comply.
Bullies are the broken toys of wimps.
Power limps.
But space is an open hand.
Mass may shape it
but it teaches matter how to move
just as the sky converts its openness
into a cloud and a bird
or the silence nurtures
the embryo of a blue word
in the empty womb of the dark mother
like the echo of something that can’t be said.
The only way to control things is with an open hand.
Not a posture of giving.
Not a posture of receiving.
Not a posture of greeting or farewell.
Not hanging on or letting go
but the single bridge they both make
when they’re both at peace with the flow.
It’s not the branch it’s not the trunk
it’s not the root it’s not the fruit
but the open handedness of its leaves
that is a tree’s consummate passion.
Isis tattoos her star on their palms
like sailors and sails
to keep them from drowning
and into the valleys of their open hands
that lie at the foot of their crook-backed mountains
the aloof stars risk the intimacy of fireflies
and fate flows down like tributaries into the mindstream
as life roots its wildflowers on both shores
as if there were no sides to the flowing
of our binary lifelines.
The only way to control things is with an open hand.
You cannot bind the knower to the knowing
as if time had to know where eternity was going
before anything could change.
X marks the spot where all maps are born
to lead you back to yourself
like a treasure you forgot to bury.
An open hand is a ploughed field ready for seed.
An open hand is the generosity that is inherent in need.
An open hand is and is not an open hand.
No hinges can define it
because it’s not a two-faced Janus
standing in the doorway of a new year.
An open hand doesn’t look forward.
And open hand doesn’t look back.
What opens like a flower doesn’t close like a door
and when a hand opens
it opens at the urging of a light within
that makes the light without
glow like the mother of wine.
An open hand isn’t the writing on the wall.
Moses came down the mountain with a stone tablet
but an open hand makes
an avalanche of the ten commandments
and goes its own way without submission or regret
like a vine with a prehensile grip.
An open hand is the only way to control things
when things are out of control.
It isn’t a day of yes followed by a night of no.
There’s nothing divine or infernal about it.
An open hand is all that humans need to know
about their own nature
when they let their gods and demons go.
Nothing missing.
Nothing complete.
An open hand is enlightenment.
A fist puts a bad spin on ignorance.
An open hand is a book older than the Bible.
An open hand isn’t a tool
or a new kind of stealth weapon.
An open hand isn’t a weathervane
or a rudder in the wind
or one wing of a bird
with a secret twin.
An open hand is the only way to control things
without killing them for their own good.
An open hand does not say thou shalt not
or you should.
An open hand is not a white flag of surrender
a victory flag or a sloppy salute.
It’s not the price tag you look at
when no one is looking
on a second-hand suit
you’ve been wearing out like a body for years.
An open hand isn’t the hesitant offer of an uncertain friend
held out like a placebo that can’t heal anything.
You might have fixed the palings
but you still haven’t mended the fence.
An open hand is the way things feel when you’re truly alive.
It’s got nothing to do with how the fittest survive.
An open hand is the afterlife of a fist that died in defeat
trying to unseat an older power
that swallows it like a god
dissolves a cube of sugar in water
and finds it sweet to be absolved of the deed.
An open hand is a cup that could hold an ocean
but never overflows.
An open hand isn’t a relic of the thorns
that pinned a butterfly messiah
to the webbed cross of a sacrilegious spider
or Ciceronian appendages nailed to a senate door
like a bill that didn’t pass
or Che Guevara’s hands cut off
by the people they laboured for like rebel fruit
that went against the grain of the tree
that poisoned everybody like a jackboot.
An open hand isn’t a proposal for reform.
It’s not the new norm.
It’s not what not to do
when people are watching you
to see if you’re the same as them.
An open hand is the only way to control things
when you don’t know what to do
at the genetic crossroads
of cosmic and domestic things
that weigh on your mind
like the dirty laundry of evolution
piling up in the corners
like falling standards of confusion.
It doesn’t question anything
so it never rejects an answer.
It doesn’t pretend to be the sign
that beatifies its own suggestion.
An open hand isn’t trying to make
a housewife of an iris
or trying to nail things down
to get a grip on things
like a man who knows how to suffer like a floor.
An open hand isn’t something
worth living or dying for.
It won’t save your life.
It won’t take it.
It’s not a lifeboat or an anchor.
Four fingers and a conductor for a thumb
don’t make a choir of flesh
that will make the angels come like groupies
and just because
you’ve got runners on four bases
doesn’t mean you can hit a home run
like the stand-in umpire
behind the home plate of your palm.
Four men out and one man on
and the thumb bunts to the outfield
in the last inning of a pre-fixed playoff game
that shaves the score like a pencil into points.
An open hand is the only way to disarm a fist
that buries the road you’re on
like an improvised explosive device
timed to go off in your face like a hand grenade.
The only way to control things without controlling them
is with an open hand.
An open hand does not deny or affirm.
An open hand legislates like the light
and judges like the rain.
Five fingers are the roots of a hung jury.
Five syllables of an incommensurable life sentence.
An open hand isn’t the servile agent of a wilful mind.
It doesn’t do anyone’s bidding.
It isn’t the delta at the end of a long river
whose life flashes before its eyes
like an ancient civilization
as it disappears into the sea.
An open hand doesn’t squat on the ground
like some denuded navel-gazer
who mistakes his belly-button for his third eye.
An open hand says as much to the deaf as the blind.
The only way to control things is with an open hand.
An open hand is the sign of a mind at rest
with what it doesn’t understand.
An open hand isn’t a contract with anything.
An open hand isn’t a flatlining fist.
An open hand is a loveletter that doesn’t insist
on being returned like a dove
that’s just discovered land.
An open hand is the fairest image of a god
ever created in the likeness of a human.
An open hand is the omnidirectional threshold
of the homelessness we built
on a cornerstone of quicksand
like water moonlighting as a rose.
An open hand isn’t celibate or promiscuous.
An open hand warms itself
around the cold fires of the stars
and tells tall tales about the constellations
of scars and callouses that have sprung up
like villages along its lifelines.

The only way to control things is with an open hand.
An open hand is a myth of origins
that ends where it begins.
An open hand makes no distinction
between matter and mind.
An open hand is the enlightened gesture
of a human who knows without grasping
what they don’t understand
and welcomes without expectation
all those who cross over it like the floor
and pass under it like the roof
of a house without a door or a window
to keep anything in or out.
An open hand is as certain as doubt
it doesn’t know what it’s all about
but the only way to control things
when they’re coming apart
and coming together
is with a hand
as open as an ample heart
that gets it by letting it go
one breath one death
one footstep one heartbeat
one spring one autumn
one hail and farewell after another.

The only way to control things is with an open hand.
An open hand rests in its power like the flower
the Buddha gave away to Ananda
as all he could and couldn’t and wouldn’t say.
Seekers look for starmaps to paradise
like the night looking for the day
that shines all around them
and blinds them.
But look as they may
an open hand is always the way that finds them.
The only way to control things is with an open hand
that binds us to the boundlessness
of letting go of who we are
like a star on the lam
that poured itself out like insight
to say to the night I am.
This is my hand.
It’s open.

PATRICK WHITE