Thursday, December 5, 2013

AS THE EVENING PORTENDS TOWARD ITS MORE OCCULT PROPHETIC ENDS

AS THE EVENING PORTENDS TOWARD ITS MORE OCCULT PROPHETIC ENDS

As the evening portends toward its more occult prophetic ends
of candles and incense and blue glass skulls on the windowsills
of perception the marshmellow emotions of the day as the darkness
that is here to stay overwhelms them into writing little thing
razorblades of suicidally incisive poetry unquestionably influenced
by the exhaustive torment of light and shadow going on in my body.

The piebald clown takes on a serious tenor
and forgets to laugh at himself in the mirror
when he sees the six crows feet streaming
like bicycle handlebar comets from his eyes
six weeks ago have frayed into the thirty-three tributaries
of the split end strong rope rootfires of the Nile delta shrieking mandrake.

I’m emptying into the Mediterranean sea. I’m an old sphinx
with rainmarks from when the desert was green.
I’ve aged five years around my eyes in the last thirty-three days.
Dorian Grey is crackling. The varnish is yellow
as amber eras of age. Time take your foot off the gas.
I’m going to pass. Dark energy cover your eyes and face and move over
I’m expanding too fast for the stars to keep up with the pace.

Maybe if I go far enough into the abyss with this
I’ll start moving backward in time and the next time I look
I’ll be a boy again begging salmon from the fishermen
that came in to port at sunset to unload and oil their boats
at Johnson Street Harbour with the ballast block cast iron bridge
that swung like the pendulum of Thor’s hammer
to keep time with the pulse of our comings and goings
as they stacked my forklift arms up like cubic cord wood time capsules
to take home to my mother to make her proud of me,
and say, hey, kid, tell us when enough is enough is enough.


PATRICK WHITE  

THE EVENING DEEPENS INTO THE LEES OF ITS MORDANCY

THE EVENING DEEPENS INTO THE LEES OF ITS MORDANCY

The evening deepens into the lees of its mordancy.
The broken pines seem more tragic. The corpses in the cemetery
less lifelike. Spirits move over the face of the leaf littered grass
as if someone were throwing thousands of loveletters away in disgust.

The darkness is more threatening. You can feel the presence of the dead
slipping under the doors and the cracks in the windowsill
like smoke and cold wind and life threatening protestations
of undying love. Not a rumour of sound from the town.

The wind is holed up somewhere in a bar that doubles as a lair
knocking another one down for the obliterate illiterate night ahead.
Recite. Recite. Recite. The unlettered prophet was told
by the angel of light. I don’t recite so much as I let it write me
into the destiny scribbled on the lines of my forehead,
birds coming and going like musical notes on hydro line staves
with ivy treble clefs coiling around the pole like medical snakes.
Baby, I’m a caduceus. You be the dove above it all.

The silence pregnant with manifestation. The furnace
has stopped cracking its knuckles. The flanks
of the American flag above the real estate office downstairs
has stopped flexing its muscles at the command of the wind
and the horse whisperers are out in style trying to calm things down
to a ghastly serenity. The stillness is a bread knife
cocked diagonally on the white vinyl kitchen sink counter
like a sabre of the new moon sitting there the koan
of a blank but focused stare with an essential existential question to ask you
about whether you want to live or die by seppiku.

The mirrors are hiding their eyes. Someone’s in bed
bleeding to death because of a loveletter they’d just read
that said life was better off without you falling in love with it
all over again with the unbearable pain and joy
of having to leave it this way through a hole in the wall
they just painted over to sell the thralls to a new slumlord
from the underworld who keeps bragging about his dirty jewels
and excoriating the fools who are not dead enough yet to appreciate them.


PATRICK WHITE

WAITING TO TALK TO THE RADIOLOGIST

WAITING TO TALK TO THE RADIOLOGIST

Waiting to talk to the radiologist at the Burr Cancer Wing
in Kingston Ontario by a fortified lake of grey round houses.

Homogenized labyrinth of anonymous posters in the halls
of undecorated functional duplicate rooms doubling arithmetically
as moonlight incommensurables. Where the hell am I?

I ask for directions from sympathetic lighthouses eager
to guide me like Rubrich’s cubes deeper into my bafflement
pharmaceutically emotionally isotopically induced.
I want to carry my own road sign protest placard
wherever I go from now on like a cross I’m willing to bear
in the name of knowing where where where am I going.

Cancer Clinic Burr Wing Level l. The doctor will see
you earlier. Wait here please. Fill out these forms.

Cold black plastic vinyl chairs with people sitting in them
sporadically like the last of their teeth in an ass’s jawbone.
Sad foggy faraway look on everyone’s faces and a few
like me trying to face the whole situation a bit too cheerfully.

Dr. Phain. Great name. Epiphany. Sends two interns
in advance like Rosenbrendancrantz and Guildenhilda
to interview me too mechanically inquisitively
to make me feel they’re not so much interested
in interviewing me as a symptom they read about
in their medical texts who suddenly incarnated
as the skeleton of Pygmalion who is answering
them in his bones like bamboo windchimes of what
they want to hear until the doctor gets here and makes
everthing muggy and clear as musical chairs on a merry go round
and round and round and round as a jinxed plaid prayerwheel.

I’m in a hostage situation with Munich syndrome centred
on the radiologist explaining to me the half life of the patient
as all the U-238 in the room slowly turns to dead lead
base metal iron pyrite stoned philosopher’s fool’s gold
disenchanting him of the false dawn of the false hope
he’s going to live more than another six months of this.

Everybody writes that down like check mark quill feathers
dipped in the ink pots of little boxes little blue boxes on forms.

Meantime I stare out the window at northern Lake Ontario
gusting deep midnight Prussian blue with angry white caps
cantering out of suffrage instead of galloping with gusto
through a Tom Thomson painting of a bleak northern lake
as over on the further shore dozens of windmills, windmills, windmills
tall as the war of the worlds bouquet and spread
like wildflowers along the borders of mournful grass leafless elms
and some sad woman always walking off into nowhere
as a sundog light burst breaks through the clouds
it halos in the encircling sky as a sign of the fact
I’m not going to conquer anything like Constantine in the name
of a sign like this no matter how alluringly beautiful and soothing
it is through the dirty grime of the grey cancer clinic windows.

I have my prescription renewed for thrush, 100 more \
4 milligram pills of apo-dexamethasone and an ointment that will help
soften the scales in the crack of my ass like moonlight in a niche
of silver. Rosenbrendancrantz takes a look. Says. It’s got
nothing to do with me. You better see your GP.
Must be nice to be an expert that doesn’t help without permission.


PATRICK WHITE

THE LACHRYMOSE SHINE OF DAMP POLISHED BLACK WORKBOOTS

THE LACHRYMOSE SHINE OF DAMP POLISHED BLACK WORKBOOTS

The lachrymose shine of damp polished black workboots.
The leather of the asphalt street suffused with a patina of storelight
as the ghoulish banks of snow startle the colour white
with albino ranges of impassable blockades from the ice age.

The white’s unreal in the tungsten lamp posts. Blue apricot
titanium corpse. Sybil priestess in a California laundry sheet
in a cult of 1111 who died before the mothership could
take her back. My dear, my darling, do you hear me where you sleep?

Again, tonight, awake and at the window waxing pellucid
about absolutely nothing. The faint cachet of someone’s
distant dreams. No stars, No flowers. A garden of traffic lights
and lamp posts and parking meters. No people. And the trees

garlanded in Christmas tree lights looking like fattened forlorn bulls
for a sacrifice to Mithras Tauroctonus Tautologous whose come back
to claim his birthday from Jesus when the sun is born again
in the winter Roman solstice hammering in the golden nail of the New Year
which is the only poem Horace ever wrote for Augustus.

What am I doing here like a strung out line of Canada geese
migrating like a prayer bead abacus skull nugget calendar
from the studio into the den the kitchen the hall and then
back again as if I were caught up in migration older than my own?

What am I walking off like an exiled hourglass across
the Rub al kali desert full of stars and mirages and itty
little white gravestone pills that give me the shakes when
I try to lie down under them and everything quakes
as if the fault lifelines in my life were about to change for the drastic.

Sick of the drastic. Sick of the catastrophic. Sick of the apocalyptic.
Sick of the climacteric. Sick of the asterisk. Suddenly
a hundred little white pills go running over the precipice
like lemmings in a year of overpopulation balancing the books
of evolution with Malthusian mass suicide chuteless fruitless jumps.

The same way Neanderthals used to kill mammoth and stag moose
in the Pleistocene. Driving them over a cliff
with heritage lampost streetlight torches with reduced Led lumens.
Not much life left after they were wiped out like an extinction event
for humans with an appetite for living it a little bit differently.

Where else should I be? That wants to make me live my death
as bad and deep and bleak as this beatifically condemned place.


PATRICK WHITE

MY CAT LIES FULL LENGTH OUT SLACK ON THE GLASS COFFEE TABLE

MY CAT LIES FULL LENGTH OUT SLACK ON THE GLASS COFFEE TABLE

My cat lies full length out slack on the glass coffee table
but for her head poised like a minor sphinx looking
into the long, foggy distances of grey longing
blued by a mood of moving away from things
in a kind of emotional aerial perspective the same
as I’m looking into the open with about as many answers
maybe less than she does. Female feral cat three month
old kitten unfleaed unfixed on facebook I think
I saved a little bit of both our lives that day
I could still drive and got in the car and picked her up.

Took her right out of Rain Dumoulin’s good moon arms
in the embryonic studio of someone who was
learning how to paint to celebrate and counteract
the widow walk dance of her husband’s recent suicide.
What a cruel world that has such lovingly tragic fools in it.

Bang the screen door and we were all the way
back to my red Starfire and you to the back window
to see where you might be going now that
you’ve been captured again all the windows done up
until you learned that I fed you because I intended
to love you and I wanted you to live as an affable familiar
of me who’s got goldfish but they’re awful hard to caress
when you want to reach out and just touch something soft
as smoke wafting across your cheek like the echo of a dream
somebody’s having about being loved in bad economic times
and I was willing to clean up your methane mess for it.

I’m pampering you. You’re living almost exclusively
on treats. If not now when? When do you get a small
special consideration for the emptiness that’s going
to build a little coffin in your heart
and put a picture of me in it like a locket
of Temptations seafood medley singing
softly to you from the tower of Cohen’s song.

Simon’s going to take you. He’s a good man. Loves cats.


PATRICK WHITE

I CAN'T SLEEP IN THIS BEAUTIFUL STORM OF TEARS

I CAN’T SLEEP IN THIS BEAUTIFUL STORM OF TEARS

I can’t sleep in this beautiful storm of tears
that keeps showing me how much love there is in the world
now that I’m leaving it through the rose trellis exit
where there’s a drop of water on every
anointed thorn of my thoroughly wet eyelashes.

It’s beautiful loss that’s sad and scary all at the same time.
It’s a flashflood of emotion that thaws the frogs out
and gets them singing like small ice floes in a lily pond
clinging with polar bears to what’s left of the Arctic ice cap
that’s unravelling all around me like a snowman
riding its own melting into an oblivious mindstream.

Easy to love ordinary things now as if they were sacred,
domestic rituals, chores, objects, dust in the air,
dirt in an organized drawer, cracks in the plaster
diversifying the dinosaurs like fractured Pangaea’s skull.
The thunder and pulse of a lost drumbeat in the jungles of time.

Everything glows. Even the dark shines.
With an aura of beautiful mysterious numinosity
that polishes the dawn like a dusty abalone shell
on an opalescent day at deserted beach as long and wet as yourself.


PATRICK WHITE

WASTED IN THE MORNING

WASTED IN THE MORNING

Wasted in the morning luxuriating in the semi-comatose
numbness to the last ghost you’ve seem returning
to its grave without being bothered by it like an immune system
you could take for granted as a sign of the state
of the health you’re in when you can’t get to sleep with tumours
and all you want to do is disappoint pillows. Vita brevis. Arta longa.

Look out the window at the enlargements of the dawn
as much as you can when you’re able to stand.
Pet the cat. Have a long blue drag on a fat cigarette
that’s beginning to look like a pregnant guppy
humping a seahorse in my hands. Remark
to myself that I’m not the first man
to see the pigeons flying over the tarpaper roofops
as if it were fun to be a pigeon with the northern lights
around your neck and I wished I was one of them
waking up in a happy town to throw myself around
like wedding confetti at a morning marriage of bells
or a scrapped manuscript torn to bits because it’s got talent
or apple bloom and mailmen trying to get some coffee into them
cooped up in a restaurant like one of hidden wonders of the age.


PATRICK WHITE

HOW MUCH PAIN CAN YOU HOLD INSIDE UNTIL THE RESERVOIR EVAPORATES?

HOW MUCH PAIN CAN YOU HOLD INSIDE UNTIL THE RESERVOIR EVAPORATES

How much pain can you hold inside before the reservoir evaporates
into the great sky of awareness like a watershed waterbird
crying out in anguish for something that’s frightened it
looking into the long dwindling journey ahead.

The distances. The distances. The distances
from one sea to the next like a waterclock that never stops.
Like the human heart with a wheelhouse pulse.
The eye of the storm your only oasis for miles around.

You become spectral, dissociated, unglued, unbound
as a Promethean god freed by Shelley,
metastasizing in your liver like vultures eating it
for crimes of fire you were a good thief at.

The damage unto the privilege of the fatuous gods
you have done and there’s nothing but nothing
they can do back to you now for it but chain you
to a rock in the Caucasus and hope it hurts.

There’s a fire in the starfields I can see from here
and a scarecrow poet try to blow the flames out
on his jester’s long sleeves. The fire god came looking for fire
and he found it under my t shirt like a burning fox
I didn’t tell anybody about on the bridges I’ve crossed.


PATRICK WHITE

YOUR EYES ARE A BLUE CRACK OF SKY TO ME

YOUR EYES ARE A BLUE CRACK OF SKY TO ME

Your eyes are a blue crack of sky to me at the bottom
of a very deep mine. And when your heart shines down
it’s not a flashlight but a majestic sunset I’m looking up at.

Under this avalanche of gravestones
I’m trying to sing the dead back to life.
I’m beguiling the gibbering shades with picture music
that sings like deadly nightshade
to the bruised darkness within me
people keep stepping out of
like the ghosts of white nocturnal orchids
pale as the ghoulish moon on the limbs
of the naked dead trees the herons build their nests in.

It’s the function of a prophetic Orphic skull
to walk among the dark jewels of the underworld
with all the eyes open in its blood
but none to see into the blue sky above
what you’re looking at when when you

see how blind I am to the wavelengths copulating in your eyes
like the twining of two snakes on a caduceus
topped with the snowflake of a dove.
Hermes Trismegistus for a companion guide
and a little girl who leads me around like a seeing eye dog.

I’m sort of the Teresian Orpheus of my own hybridization
who keeps falling back like Sisyphus with a gravestone
when nothing’s coming back above ground
but the stars in another round of your zodiacally clear eyes.


PATRICK WHITE

OFF INTO THE MORNING

OFF INTO THE MORNING

Off into the morning like a bird with insomnia
that sings its choral part in the tree as it sleepwalks
into the dawn not knowing if it’s the beginning of a new day
or the end of a dream it was having about flying away
forever forever forever free as a shadow on a cloud
before it ruins the radiance of the dawn shining in its blood.

Blood Drop. Cardinal? You push the limits of scarlet
way over into the infrared redshifting into a total black out
during a saturated firestorm of British Lancasters
over Hamburg trying to sow the whirlwind with incendiaries.

For a little flag you go way too far with the banner oriflamme
of dragon fire heating up the furnaces of your heart
with prophets and art and burnished gold as white
as the eyes of the diamonds looking out from the coals
with tears in their eyes they’re so happy to see you
so clear and adamantinely insistent upon staying fluid as tears.

I waited three years once looking out my studio window
in winter at the slim lone candelabra of a tree with a bird feeder
as I painted for you to come to the candle and assume
your proper place as the flame. Even wrote
a ten page poem about it. The Writing Lesson.

How to take a little spark like you and start a forest fire
with someone who’s distantly related to the stars
and the chimney sparks in a high wind that keep flaring
incendiarily against the pines as if they were lashing them
with whips of fire with stars for barbs like the rainmaker Pleiades
at the end of it all. Star shower. Phosphorus power. Cocked spur.

The ability to shine underwater as if you were burning
it was that hot and you had nothing to cool off your blue stars with
like Fukushima trying not to kill the fish or evacuate Tokyo
or curtail the tinny blue fish tin business on the west coast
with laving tides of radiation to counteract the filth
of having tumours to contend with when all you want to do
is fly off into the morning with an intense infernal glee
your shadow comet and you are immensely free.


PATRICK WHITE

I'M DROPPING ASHES ON BUDDHA PINOCCHIO

I’M DROPPING ASHES ON BUDDHA PINOCCHIO

I’m dropping ashes on Buddha Pinocchio.
Brushing them off his lap, sweeping them off the desk,
trying to keep urns of them away from the keyboard
with a stubby little brush that looks like Hitler’s moustache.

Or Goring’s toothbrush. So much soiled purity.
In the acts of love we attend to. So much swamp
with the waterlilies. So much ore with the gold.
So much rain in a glass of trees. So many ashes to scatter
like a dead storm that’s snuffed itself out on a grey wind
that rises like a smoke bandanna over the sun on the horizon.

Cherry red. Like a tumour. But enough said. It’s not
about that eraser head. Pink nibbling nipple.
It’s about lunettes and nibs like spearheads that penetrate
your heart like Clovis points flint knapped plalanged in Solutria
as they inched around the ice age page
by snow white page by page by glacial ice sheet
to make it all the way to North America
in time to disappoint the natives in the Bering Strait
as founding peoples of two entire continents
with what a dust storm induced by the Younger Dryas ice age
can do to wipe people out with most of the larger animals
buried whether they lay down for or stood up to the dust.

Whole two continents kissing an hourglass isthmus
just like an image in Buddha Pinocchio’s blind mind.
You’ve got to attend to this as if you were responsible
for the death blossoms of his pygmy apple trees
and Japanese plums losing their eyelids to squanderous visions
that rain back down to earth volcanic down
like Pompey and Herculaneum sculpting dogs in agony.


PATRICK WHITE

Thursday, November 14, 2013

DAY FOURTEEN:

DAY FOURTEEN:


I keep waiting for some mountain of gravestones to fall on me and bury me in the valley of death, but it hasn’t happened yet. I’m not terrified or paranoid about it, which may be folly on my part, but I’ve been a poet all my life and so the habit persists of seeing and being this way, buttressed by my almost hallucinogenic fascination with the light as it flowers in astronomy and painting. There is no way in the world I would ever discard my emotions, like trying to cancel the weather of an ocean to save it from drowning as far as I’m concerned, or to alleviate it’s fear of drowning in itself. I entertain no boyish pretensions of cocksure, unambivalent heroism about all this, but I do earnestly hope and am endeavouring to walk this last green mile like a man, like a peasant king, like a poet. You, see? Death hasn’t knocked the playfulness out of me yet? Or I’m flirting coyly with it. There’s a transmorphic aspect about its gender, nothing psychological, but in the way all the abstractions about it metaphorize into a body of feeling-thought in my mind, and in the way I perceive it, and look into its eyes. It’s sometimes as remote as a terrifying father, but more delightfully and more often, seems to manifest as an allurement I can relate to. Unaccusing, unjudgmental, engaging. I think of Odysseus and Circe more in this regard with a touch of mermaid just to keep my attention. And no, I’m not tying myself to any mast this time, not that I ever did much of that. I want to hear. Of course, you wonder, and I do, if there’s some kind of subconscious death wish in all of this I’m overlooking, and the last, cruel last laugh will be on me. If it is, let it be, I’m still going to look. Habit of mine to stare dragons into the eyes straight and see what’s there. Kiss your dragons back into princesses Rilke says somewhere. Think it’s got something to do with looking into a lifetime of telescopes. Pointing them at the stars, my heart, my soul, my poetry, gardens that came up in the night while I slept. Watching the mind walk its own waters within me. Beautiful even when it’s horrible sometimes, eerie or alone. I feel a bit like Chauncey the Gardener here, I like to watch, and so I do, because for the life of me, I have not been able to find any other mindstream within to sit beside. Nor am I about to ask this great sea of unbounded awareness to pick out its favourite waves and streams or direct me to those that are more important than others to keep an eye on. Form through matter. Within. The way a seed manifests a flower. I don’t impose it, and I sense we’re all shapeshifters anyway. Vertumnus, Morpheus, where the river turns. I’ve been meeting my life at one bend in the river after the other for lightyears now. Good place to write in while I’m waiting, musing on the stars, as Dylan sings, watching the river flow. Deepening my relationship with the moon. Peaceful there, though not always, calm most of the time, though I’ve known it to roil as well. Let it. I never ask for anything, so it’s somewhat of a falsehood to me to ever feel disappointed. This experience is akin to that, or perhaps more of the same. Few clouds passing across the moon, but they’ll pass at their own pace, and I’m used to that. Cowboy clouds, you loosen your nervous system, you tighten your spine like a bow some friend taught you to use when all the cowboys and Indians went Zen, and you watch, perhaps that’s all you can do. Watch. Calm, continuous awareness. Sometimes minutely, the mystic specificity of the world, the grain of sand that contains the whole of the universe in each detail. And sometimes macrocosmically when your eyes want to be enlightened starmaps. Not an agenda, a menu, or an expectation. The world like the flowers blooms of its own accord. I let it sleep, if it dreams, and go on quietly contented to work in an adjoining room, pursuing, as Blake so eloquently expresses it, my persistent folly. Surprise it with a poem when it gets up. Even the fool would grow wise if he would persist in his folly. That’s Blake’s line, not mine, but isn’t it true? Once you’ve got your hydra-headed ego delusion out of the way even for a moment, a glimpse, a nanosecond, isn’t it clear every nervous system, tree reaching up to the stars, dendritic notion of evolution and dark matter, empties into a great, vast sea of unknowing, call it the godhead, nirvana, the clear light of the void, dark night of the soul, fana, baqua, the plenum-void, a dream, nothingness manifested as being, or just a bad molecular joke some random, impersonal, indifference played upon you without meaning to, whatever metaphors you’re most comfortable in because they’ve broken you in like a pair of comfortable boots you’ve walked a long way in, listening to the stars jingle like constellations at your heels, for the musical effect on dark nights that make you nervous enough to whistle in the dark, not goading or spurring so much, if you’ve got a good horse, and I fancy I have, you don’t need to do anything but watch it work the herd, be they words, or thoughts or emotions, loosen the reins so you don’t end up making a noose of them and hanging some innocent man or woman in your despair. Not a philosophy, but my bumbling, approximate approach. More intuitive than precise, but things keep appearing out of the mist in the valley the moon’s saturating with light, and I’ve spent a lifetime of agonizingly, intensely, delightfully, mesmerizingly, radiantly, darkly, abundantly, brightly, beatifically, demonically, vacantly watching these fireflies of insight trying to make earthbound constellations out of white-tailed does that step out from behind those veils. Usually after a thunderstorm. I still can’t think of a better or more blessed way to spend my time here. Alone with the Alone, as Plotinus phrases it, but alone together with everyone else the Alone flowers in. That’s you, darlin, you’re on. What’s this? Outside the green room. Forgive the impertinence of my nomenclature, I like to pretend sometimes I’m Gus in Lonesome Dove sometimes. But I hope I’ve made the point clear. What’s this? Angels can’t answer that question without being told, demons have more proficiency because they’ve usually seen more, they’ve been to both places, heaven and hell, but I’m still of the persuasion, that question belongs to humans, indefensibly, imperfectible as they seem they are sometimes, and even just to ask it is answer enough. See Montaigne’s motto carved into his rafter. Que sais je? Perhaps nothing, but you know it, and that nothing is human. A lingering cachet of us, a flavour, a taste, a fragrance, a bouquet, a ghost as it pursues its aimless, musical path among the stars as if they could hear a whisper of flowers singing sweetly to themselves within it that reminds them of a garden they used to tend like a woman as the sun goes down. And the song she’s singing to herself. Alone with the Alone. Is it scary, sometimes, you bet it is, almost inconceivably so, but then so have a lot of things that have occurred in my life. And you know what? The dark shines. I’ve always said so, and more than ever, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I see that more than ever now, in a soggy cigarette butt someone flicked to the side walk, and in the roaring black hole engines of the galaxies. You want to see a star. Look into the darkness it’s emerging from as if someone just handed you a flower, and you’re wondering where to fix to your hat. Put that rose in the skull of your rattlesnake hatband. Between the fangs. Make it a wicked flower pot. It’s oxymoronic, isn’t it? Union of opposites. Two wings on one bird. Actually there’s a third, but we won’t get into that. But include it all, no part left out as some Zen mendicant realized one day watching the moon and the sun at opposite ends of the sky. Moonset, sunrise. The way we breathe, the way we live and die. Do you see a discontinuity in it? I don’t. What do you do with your life then? You celebrate it, you say thanks, even if you don’t know what form of a host you’re addressing in the doorway as you leave. I hear God doesn’t have any characteristics. You might want to think of lending him or her a few of your own. Thanks. That’ll do it, but you say it with your blood and your eyes, and your mind and your heart and your soul. Thanks. Quite a show. And the ticket was free, unless you got more glee sneaking under the fence. But que sais je? What do I know? This is my good guess. What’s yours?

NOW NOTHING. THE DREAM FIGURES HAVE GONE TO BED

NOW NOTHING. THE DREAM FIGURES HAVE GONE TO BED

Now nothing. The dream figures have gone to bed.
The painters have have entered their dreams as if
everything were better said in the morning and they’ve
left their half-finished paintings of muscular women
into Tae Kwon Do sex on their easels, and they come
and they come and they come to nothing with
a pretty little idea of the flower in their head
blooming like ball lightning in the rear view of the night.

Peace. Relief. Poof. And it’s gone as the mirages
come on for more. Something settles. Is it dark?
Is it dust? Is it light? Are there stars on the tarpaper roofs?
Quiet. You can hear the silence breathe. Me wheeze
softly with death and ashes on my breath. God
I wish there were stars on the tarpaper roofs.
But that’s the way of it. Does anybody need any proof?

There are memories that recoup the moment.
Birch trees and gardens shaped like icons of a woman
I knew once I was trying to please. Elecampane
and eglantine, and always, always, always
the wild grape vine. Locust and apple trees. The moon.
When it’s up. The way I’m edging this like a fluid
jeweller with my tongue to make it run. So nicely
it almost seems like compensation for taking
my breath away. Ting. Ting. But it’s lower than that.

The hospital ward is absorbed in it on the nightshift.
Soft-shoed silence. And the musings of the dead
in a hospital bed on what they’ve lived, what they’ve loved,
what they died for. My turn. I’ll try to be their equal
not peer of anything. Maybe a fun companion at the end
to help relieve my suffering with their laughter. It’ll work out.

I’m almost sure. I can bumble my way through this
black out with a kiss on the forehead for good luck.
Full stop. No more birch trees. No more gardens.
No more full stops. Isn’t that ridiculous? No socks.

Is it brutal as a snowflake? Does the soul leave
the body when it dies? Have I got one. Do you?
Is it bearable, durable and wise? Does it lie to you?
Mine does sometimes. I wonder about that. Not much.
But some. This is creation. Who knows what to come?

Court jesters in a heavenly kingdom? Or sunflower angels
with deadly nightshade in their eyes to make up for it?
See? It lies in the way it tries to make me feel better.
It doesn’t have to try so hard. I’m mellow as a bride
of the lamp posts outside. I’m wise as a blade saw
that knows how to cut its own umbilical cord. Midwife.
Not trapline I’ve got to eat my way out of. Or be eaten alive.
But that’s another matter. What’s everything for now
is looking into this while the night surrounds me
as if I were a gold fish in the submarine pens of my aquarium.

Digits of time. Thumbnail sketches immersed in it.
Should I say the waters of life? The evanescent
exit and entrance. You breathe it in you breathe it out.
And then you die. No trick to it if that’s all there is to it.
I’ll try. Take a good run at it and fly like a waterbird
with nothing on my mind but taking off on time to go blind
or enter another space, maybe a lot like this place
where I’m fine for the moment unlocking the sky
like a diary of stars way back in the woods of my mind.


PATRICK WHITE

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

EPISTOLARY FACEBOOK MESSAGE NUMBER THREE

EPISTOLARY FACEBOOK MESSAGE NUMBER THREE

No pennies on my eyes this morning. But I slept with these
on my eyelids like bells, like moons, like kisses on the forehead of a bruise,
as I fell through a mist of pharmaceuticals in a cloud of unknowing,
weightless with both my children in my arms like shepherd moons
and tumours. Two poems, two hills, two tombs, listening
to the anapestic trill of my mindstream hair braiding its way
through the woods. And the silence and the silence and the silence
that scans. When I see a skull there’s always a flower in it
and a star that wants to start a constellation in my eyes.

Shaking like an aspen in the rags of its last leaves in a frosty wind
hoping this chassis of a body can live up to its engine. Time
to look under my tongue. So I can tell the morning
how grateful I am to be so warm inside here with everyone
like a cat or a bird or man in the pewter lustre
of another morning on earth. Where did all the flowers
come from? I swear, Gus, I love the way the things of the world
are always getting out of hand. And the silence, and the silence
and the silence that scans.

You can’t imagine how much love there is in my heart
for you right now. All of you, though I’ve known many of you
since I was an upstart. New friends in the schoolyard, all of you.
I’m going to see what my mother packed for lunch.


Love, Patrick

DARK SHEDDING

DARK SHEDDING

Dark shedding. Translucent shadows of the leaves
on a lake without a name you once made famous for nothing
because you saw it dance in your awareness of enough
and touched it with your eyes like a secret that was meant
to be kept like the silence in the roots of the bracken.

Regrets? What was there to cry about that didn’t bloom
in retrospect? Did you miss the moon? Did you run
to the window in time? Have you seen it yet
through the rain and the smoke? Do you see a woman
or do you see a ghost in the garden that reminds you
of someone you knew when were young among
the sunflowers you grew? And the moon and the locust tree
you hung from like someone pendulous and blue
as time on the air of the unweaving hills? Is that
still true as a road that goes nowhere without you
like the sumac in the fall when it fails? Do the gates
still open as if they recognized you by the grace
and the colour of the bouquets you made of your skelton keys?

Gardens of scars in your eyes. Did you leave the stars
to the sage when you wept like smoke at the feet
of everything it didn’t say but you could foretell
by the silence that befell you before and after that you
heard it anyway like the flight of a homing heron
to the shrines of its sacred syllable in the heart of time,
in the eye of the light, in the mouth of the wind,
in the crowns of the fire, in the flowers weeping
on the dark waters within as if you’d been their only friend
to understand their solitude as a gift from their wayward ends?


PATRICK WHITE

I TOUCHED THINGS DEEPLY TO REMIND MYSELF THEY WERE NOT MINE

I TOUCHED THINGS DEEPLY TO REMIND MYSELF THEY WERE NOT MINE

I touched things deeply to remind myself they were not mine
but the fingerprints and echoes of time the way
the mind seizes whatever it befriends,
a handful of nothing that clings to the wind,
the ghost of the moon when its bones are dust
and the juniper weeps at the eastern door
of a stranger’s burial hut deep in its heart
and love, love must come and depart
like a curse and a blessing from the miraculous occult
and wonder is the atmosphere we wander in
wounded by the blessings of a hurt metaphor
that waves its crutch to the silence and says farewell
to the candle in the lantern with the wick of midnight
still in its spell. You don’t have to doubt it anymore, you can tell
as the words fall sweetly from the urn and the bell.


PATRICK WHITE

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

WATCHING MY MIND WALK ITS OWN WATERS

WATCHING MY MIND WALK ITS OWN WATERS

Day 13:

Two hours sleep out of the last twenty-four. Exhausted. Blurred.
Even the smudges have medicinal value. The lightning definitely
hit the transformer yesterday. Here are the fireworks. Ignore, read,
scratch your head, speculate on the comparative creative psychodynamics of
Sisyphus and Chernobyl, whatever you want to do. Ok with me.
Read them serially like a totem pole. Or pick them up individually
like an occasional interesting leaf you findd at your feet. These
poems feel supercharged with a significance that seems to be
resonating throughout out everything I say, do, love, write, think and feel.
Pages turning, but the book’s a tree. Given the number of poems
from yesterday I’m about to post, and how taxing and time consuming the act
of posting them seriatim en masse is, I think from now on, I will post them
as they’re tentatively finished. Easier on you, that way. And easier
on me. Matter of husbanding chores and energies. Also think it’s more
open that way for both writer and reader. Puts more unbounded sky
into each flightpath and gives them room to shed, flap, fly. Or decide
they’re not a bird, they’re a tent. Doesn’t monumentalize the air with an avalanche
or meteor shower of gravestones at a bingo of extinction events, keeping,
in mind, we owe one them, at least, partially, our own mammalian proliferation.
Solar flaring, then, not publishing. I’d love to hang on to a fat head. Carry it
around with me under my arm. Consult it at parties like a Ouji board. But, I
don’t have the space for it. And if it starts to develop an ego where am I going
to put it? Lot of space out here, but I’m not sure about the living room yet.
Little tight I’d say at this point for an ego. Letting the light go. Though
no less care I assure you goes into writing one of these than has gone
into anything I’ve ever written. Possibly more because I am surgically
curious to know how deeply the meds have dug down into Mt. Helicon to establish their own wellspring, inclusive, but separate from the others I’m used to drawing upon. See if
the pharmaceuticals are fracking my good housewells. Good. This part done.
Never thought I’d ever be so happy to see prose on daylight savings time again. Lol

Nurse called. Pulmonary esophogeal biopsy in Kingston on Friday. Feel like
Dorothy skipping down the yellow brick road to defrock the Wizard of Oz
in a strange kind of way. Possibly a black lightning bolt from the brain pan
of the Sahara. But I’m staying as open and alert to whatever comes next.
Till then plan to use the unperturbed time in between as wisely and vividly
as I can. Write poems in the eye of the hurricane happy as a bird enthroned
as a peasant king on one of his own thermals. Ride the bannisters. Love, Patrick.

Watching my mind walk its own waters
like a long-legged spider off the wharf of the moon at Long Bay.
A syringe just before it breaks the skin.
The moon’s a junkie. So am I. But it’s called medicine.
Ghostly, lonely, blue aura rise like the spiritual life of milk.
Glow softly. Shine. Teach all these tears they’re light.
Veils. Melancholic solar flares bruised by the night they entered.
Marigolds among the waterlilies. Stars in the dark when they’re wet.

How easy the water pulses through its own veins like love
and a dark circus on stilts. Horror with a thorax
and a tumour to compare to. Perish the thought,
Yorik’s got better things to do than be afraid of you.
Gonna fly. Gonna fly over the whole earth
and prove there are extraterrestrials though that’s a sad joke.
Ambivalence wrecks everything like crumpled tinfoil.
Should have been a star. But I never wanted to shine like that.

Not sharp. Blunted by the heart. I took an edge off.
Looks better on me I think than all that warpaint.
How to teach scalpels to build their own aquarium.
Flowers how to make the bed. And live through the leaves.
Startling I said that like a star in the east above the treeline.
Such a small space to couch enormity in
as if it had seasons. My mother knows about this. She’s wise
as a bell that’s been crying. Me? I’m a waterbird
when I want to be. My solitude’s almost a woman.

So that’s me. I was curious. And little fella I think we’re fucked.
No more riverboats. Maybe one, but it sunk. Glad
I got that out of the way of that old, Medusan tree stump.
And got away with a rhyme that makes me look cleverer
than I am, but I think I’m going to take the bow anyway.
I’m feeling sorry for myself. You, too, if you want to know the truth.
Milky moonlight. It’s Celtic as snow in summer, beautiful
but cold as a flower that treasures its loneliness.
I’d rather sleep with a rose than a waterlily.
But I suppose that’s all over now, baby blue.

Let the feelings come through as they will
like freshwater dreams from the woods. Hey, that’s pretty good.
What am I looking at? Data. Raw data. Brutal mercy
with a quiet told you so. As if it was my fault
and I don’t care if it is. I got to see this, didn’t I?
Picture it as a kind of beautiful blue moon in late October
that sings in a choir of razorblades that haven’t
been threshed yet. Ever see a cornfield of trashed ribbons?
That’s what I’m afraid of. The snapping turtle
that unfeathered the moon. Feels a little bit like rape to me.
Am I in prison? Or is this Promethean? What do you say?
Want to look at the moon with me? Hear me expiate
on everything under the sun at midnight as if it had gone somewhere?
I sing like time got stuck in my voice like a grackle or a black box
in a morning chimney pipe. And so it goes, and so it goes, and so it goes
like a waterclock. Is there meaning in that enough
to drink from your skull cup down to the lees of your heart.

That old fortune teller with an eyepatch and a scarf
for a bloodstream. Can you see the sphinx underneath
her mascara? She’s wearing midnight with partial eclipses.
And it’s a delusion. I’m sure about that. But I think
she just winked at me like a starmap. Old bat. Imagine that.
I’m showing off. And it’s sad as the tears deep down
in the nature of things. The lachrymae dolorosae that beads
the leaves like lampshades and party clowns.
Hand me that waterfall. I think I want to drown.

Be serious. There are people around. Listening
to the shedding of the leaves that whisper something about autumn
in their ears. Eyes like the embers of an old fire
going through its jewels in the dark. Who loved you?
Did he treat you right? Or do you still carry a bruise on your heart
like a poison apple you want to give somebody as a surprise?
And miss all this for that. I’m the plague rat. You
be somebody else. And we’ll look at the moon together
on the edge of the world. We’ll resonate with our assessment
of what it is to stand here and just look. Just look.


PATRICK WHITE