THE SEASON

The season wears out like an old pair of shoes

too far gone to reheel the sunlight

and the road is rough with the gravel of time,

and it’s doubtful the gates I’ve walked through

aren’t groaning on their hinges by now,

all those faces that were me,

those random rags and glimpses of the past

saturated with visions of me

that don’t know I exist as I am now,

and that bank of the river tenable if at all

only as a delusion, I grow strangely

freer and freer in the intimate impersonality

that whispers me like a shadow into the void.

Actor, audience, god, and play

however pure and empty,

however unaware of the creation

that dogs them for answers,

the four corners of the known world,

four dunces in the classroom

weaving a chalk tapestry

of reformative lines.

What would you have me put in their stead,

the puffed-out cheeks

of the cherubic quarters of the wind,

the maudlin sensuality of copulating serpents,

a rosier vista with garden futures,

fountains in a vast, indifferent desert

that drinks skies from the skulls of planets?

I was never good enough to lie like that,

and I never thought not knowing was evil

though divine ignorance is the ultimate heresy

among those afflicted by slothful certainty.

And it took me years to realize

the virtues of omission

weren’t just another pair

of used surgical gloves,

that not doing was the hidden engine of the universe,

the black hole in the boiler room

that drove the galaxies like pistons,

the dark mother behind the forbidden door

beyond the distinctions of birth and death,

exit and entrance.

I still walk around not knowing

what I’m doing here

coercing myself into directions

that have never been schooled by a compass

into believing they’re going anywhere.

And what’s the point

of burying yourself prematurely

under a tumulus

of acquisition and achievement?

Though I come back to the hive

with the pollen of orchids,

though I’m given a Roman triumph

in the colonies of the ants

for the dismembered body parts,

the wings and the antennae

I have plundered from the junkyard of the world,

the aphids I have subdued in chains,

what triumph among the stars,

what more than a little smoke

among the luminous exhalations

of the mystery that breathes worlds into the dark?

And who so spiritually bad-mannered

to insist on their existence

in the face of that?

And I have held myself up like a candle

to the face of love

and still don’t know what it is,

what colour its eyes are,

or what it feels like to run my fingertips

over its skin,

the shine and flow of its hair,

but there have been women with names

that I have whispered things to in the night,

that I have cursed and celebrated, wept over

and survived, women who aroused my longing,

who brought the mystery close

and blew out the candle

and made my body shudder with delight

and there were things done and not done

that I remember, vows upheld and transgressed,

and furies of blood and light

that left me whole and broken.

I don’t know what love is,

but I remember these

who were the skies I walked under,

who mingled their solitudes with mine

in a frenzy of stars

that changed everything forever

where we are alone together here with everyone.

Man, the meaning of life,

woman, the life of meaning,

one, definitive, the other, expressive,

two birds from the same mouth,

I learned to sing in the dark

at the knee of the moon and the ocean,

and saw that everyone had to be right

for mistakes to exist,

that ultimately all rivers made the sea,

that two eyes made one seeing,

that longing is the first feather of union,

and wisdom just another way of losing your mind,

an enlightened form of ignorance,

an eyelash of clarity,

a bar on a window in an unmedicated asylum.

I dedicated my mouth to poetry

and over the last ten thousand pages

haven’t said a thing since

that wasn’t just another

jest of the silence that roars

like a wounded dragon

at every echo of a whisper in the valley

to proclaim its night of life

as nothing more remarkable

than a butterfly on a gate the next morning,

the eye of the lantern

that’s never seen itself,

hidden in the light of what it reveals,

the blind fountain of its own penumbral lucidity.

PATRICK WHITE

A CREED FOR THE DESPERATE

A CREED FOR THE DESPERATE

Don’t let your bones be softened by fear.

By the time you hear it the lightning has already struck.

Don’t listen for the echoes of things you haven’t said.

And stop breaking your fortune-cookie skull open

like an old prophetic head

that claims it’s been to the dark side

without being dead.

Don’t let disaster define you.

You’re not the bouquet

of a second class vinegar

hovering over a first class wine.

No crisis ever comes with its own identity

until you give it yours.

Move calmly over your own waters

like clouds in the eye of a puddle.

Walk as if you were already

following your own funeral

and lost your way to the grave.

People make much of being

but seeing is enough

to save you sometimes

from your own obscurity.

And when was there ever any security

in security

as if this flame were safer than that?

How long has the universe risked being you?

Take a chance on your own magic

and pull your life like a tiger

out of your own hat

to eat the rabbit you’ve become.

Then there’s nothing to run from.

Become the sword

and you won’t cut yourself.

Become the fire

and you won’t burn.

Become life again

and you won’t pass away

breath after breath after breath

wishing you could stay

in the negative space

of a comfortable death

that eulogizes your lies.

There are full moons

that don’t weigh

like pennies on your eyes

to keep you from seeing too much.

And there are things of the earth

that have followed you into exile

like a new birth of things you can touch

that are wholly yours in passing

like music from a keyboard

or a fire in church.

And you may be down

to your last black beatitude

and righteously uphold the sanctity

of your will not to listen

to anything but the clinking of your own chains

and the mournful whistle

of your distant dying derailed thought-trains

giving up the ghost

but you’re just sucking on the tit

of a perverse purity

and you’re milking it

like the bitter truth

for all it’s worth.

And it’s not worth much.

And you may have flattened

all the mountains

and filled all the valleys

of your flatlining event horizons

but there’s still life going on

in the crooked backalleys

of secret dimensions

you don’t know about

stuck in the house all day

like a child afraid to go out.

You look at a tree.

You see a crutch.

You look at the moon.

You see a scar.

You look at a star

and you’re lost for good wherever you are.

And it’s not really a dysfunction of your imagination

that you can look at the Taj Mahal

and see a one-room hovel with slumlords

jacking up the rent.

It’s good to look both ways

at any spiritual crossing.

But you see a stick in the water

and you think the water’s bent.

And to shrink anything as the Tao says

you must first expand it.

But I think the Tao meant the universe

not a used condom on the death’s-head

of a stillborn resurrection.

But you’d have to fall

further than you have

to understand it.

You’d have to fall

from your present plight on the world mountain

all the way down until you came to a space

where there were no more opposites in the abyss

and nothing in order

nothing amiss

nothing is meant

to scare you into being

and nothing is trying to hold you back.

What’s your lover’s mouth

if not a wound

you can kiss into healing?

You can see it that way.

Or you can harden the bruised fruit

with brittle tears

and flintknap chandeliers

to fall from star-crossed mirrors

like rain from broken glass

that hasn’t fired up a single root in years

to dream of flowers.

The mind’s an artist.

The painting’s yours.

A self portrait in the image of God

whom no one’s ever seen.

I see a black star in the bottom of a tulip

shining up at me

like the direction it took

to get to the other side.

You see a poisonous spider

like the leftover lees

of a flowerless wine

in the eye of a toxic goblet.

And you might raise it to your lips

like a lunar eclipse

but you never drink up.

And even when you do

it’s a bad guest in the house of life

that drinks from his own skull

like the grail of a grape on the vine

with one eye open

as if he trusted the wine

but not the cup.

You’re not the cure

that failed the ailing kingdom.

And you’re not the miracle

that got up and walked away

to spread the word like a bird at sea

that had just discovered a tree to perch in

you might have sinned as a crow

but now that you’ve been saved

you’re a carrier pigeon.

You can sit here all day if you want

like a buddha on his tatami mat

thinking bituminously

about burning enlightened diamonds

back into eyeless coal.

You can squat like a tree in rings of fat

smashing small thoughts

like eggs on the rocks

trying to read your fate

in their misfortune

like a chromosome

you hold in common

with all those who hate

having been born.

You can heap your afterbirth with scorn.

You can turn your eyes

into a pair of gravitational lenses

like dark matter

and wince at the stars

like cinders of light

that contradict your seeing.

And you wouldn’t be wrong

because you can see it that way too.

The same eye by which I see God

is the eye by which She sees me.

Two creative geniuses in one studio

painting each other in the nude.

And she shows you hers

and you show her yours

as she enflames your solitude

by not putting her name on it

though it’s a perfect likeness of you.

Your face warped into

a convoluted starless space

like the opening gala

of a staged extinction.

And your soul shrouded in lampblack

like a candle

that soils its own light

by putting on a deathmask of night

like a snakeoil salesman

selling skin to ghosts.

And there where your eyes used to be

two black holes

surrounded by random haloes of light

like lipstick on the mouths of star-nosed moles.

And look at that scar of red she’s used

to catch your ambiguous smile.

That’s the kind of genius

that leaves the asylum gate open for awhile

for everyone to get into your style

of imploding your eyes

like black dwarfs

with abstract depressionist astigmatism

as if gravity couldn’t dig a grave deep enough

or matter make a stone heavy enough

to put on your chest to keep you from rising again

or the gold of the moon in your mouth

ever prove true enough to pay the ferryman

to get you to the other side of nowhere

as if he knew somehow

you huffed life like a paint thinner

trying to escape the race a winner

by never crossing a starting line

that wasn’t already

a dark horse lamed by life behind you.

And he couldn’t be bothered with anyone

who would fix their own death

and lay a bet against everyone

their pain could outrun their compassion

and in the second heat

their bitterness the truth.

But if you want a way out

like an emergency door

I’ll let you in on a little secret.

Life doesn’t grow into death

and death isn’t waiting

to take your next breath.

And there’s an eye of liberation

in the darkest hurricane roses of despair

that frees the light like life enough to care

that all it falls upon alike

should see its own face everywhere

through a crack of black lightning

in the white mirror

where everything that appears

evaporates like a ghost off a lake

or cataracts from the eyes

of the orthodox

who couldn’t see straight enough

to thread their keys through their locks

like mystic heretics

to have known

the deepest wounds give birth

to the sweetest spears

that life has ever thrown

like light on a roadless night

or insight like a bird through the sky

that enters the sunset

like a planet following the sun

through the seven coloured doors

of the seven blind seers

who disappear in a vision of one clarity

with many more eyes

than there are lightning bolts and fireflies

whose age can be measured in light-years.

If a fraction of nothing is nothing.

Then a fraction of eternity

isn’t a brevity less than the eternal

and every fraction of anything is all.

There now that’s not too hard to follow.

The white face of the moon

veils the dark other you never see

because it’s all been timed to turn away.

The moon and its month are one day.

Things might be empty

but they’re not hollow.

And you’re free to go or stay.

PATRICK WHITE