Thursday, October 31, 2013

I LOOK FOR A STAR THROUGH THE WINDOW

I LOOK FOR A STAR THROUGH THE WINDOW

Day One

I look for a star through the window but there’s none out.
Bad day for me, and great, I went to the Perth
War Memorial Hospital because I was walking
like a drunk, though I don’t drink, I was forgetting
things and the names of people I shouldn’t have
forgotten. I was having a real difficult writing cursive script
or even for that matter spelling in large caps.
I had to cross my name out on a new book I autographed
and start again. I was inexplicably embarrassed.

I thought about the farm boys on that metal plaque,
the lives and women they might have had
before they went off to die, some expecting
they might, others surprised by the wreath
of autumn colours in the rain someone places there now,
soldiers who peopled the First and Second
and the Korean Wars with their corpses. I wonder
if the living see into their hearts now. I thought
I had a muscle strain from too many crunches.

I saw a pretty girl with sex, style, danger
mystery and holes in her jeans. She was reading
a popular novel. My mother always said
I should write a novel. I’ve written two
and put them in a drawer knowing I’d done
what my mother told me to. She ought to know.
She’s read enough of them. But her son went on
writing poetry. I might have approached the i
if I were waiting for someone. I’m a writer too
Love me if you can. I’m intense but I’m lonely.
And there’s no one here but you. And the doctors
who blew a large plug of wax out my right ear.

I still wobbled like a drunk. I laboured to go straight
in the emergency parking lot
where they let me smoke nine metres from
the entrance. Maybe that was my last chance
as I waited hours for an ambulance to take me
to Smith Falls for a cat scan. The one driver
young and the world ahead of him, the other,
older, in love. She’d pick him up at five.
He’d been hurt by love before but was hoping
maybe she’s the one, half daring to believe it.
I was afraid for his sadness, how fragile
he seemed though he’d been picking up bodies
for twenty three years. Close to retirement
but two kids in school he’d work on to support.

I pissed the iodine for contrast out into a plastic bottle
he gave me and told me to leave on the stair
of the ambulance. I got most of it in the container
despite suffering from vertigo as the ambulance
moved along back to the Perth Hospital where
I thought they’d tell me I was ok and send me home
with a prescription for the four weeks
of migraines cervogenetic like a pain your neck
but nobody on Google was sure of themselves
and the connection hadn’t been empirically made
though a lady at the check out counter at Giant Tiger
told me when she had migraines she lost her balance as
I was. Instead I had a tumour on my brain,
and the doctor, wanting to know where it came from
had an x-ray taken of my lungs, and there it was,
another tumour, and tomorrow, if I can arrange a ride,
thirteen miles, eighty bucks round cab fare,
another cat scan to see if I’ve got tumours
in my stomach, indigestibles that grew faster
than I could eat. I recalled Napoleon teaching
his army how to march quickly, divide and conquer.
Is it Elba or St. Helena?Can I ask to be palaced
like a quarantined emperor in England, or the Kaiser
chopping wood as if he were doing something
more useful than horned helmets and uniforms.

Is it a death sentence I asked the doctor as he said no
but it’s complicated in your case as if I wasn’t sure
I was about to leave someone. Later tonight
I widow-walked a sloppy orbit up
to the Shopper’s Drug Mart on the highway
to have a prescription filled immediately.
PMS-Dexamethasone, Tecta, Pantoprazole Magn.
Short for magnesium? I’ve taken my first two pills
on a full stomach and I can’t sleep. Like Baudelaire
who saw sleep all his life as a big black hole
he was terrified of, then died totally aphasic.
I saw a pretty girl. The kind I could perish for.
I looked for a star through the window but there was none out.


PATRICK WHITE

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

THAT ANYBODY SHOULD KNOW

THAT ANYBODY SHOULD KNOW

That anybody should know. Do you really
think it enhances and expands their humanity?
Ring one bell, you hear a thousand different
songs, a thousand different funerals and weddings.
Listen to one nightbird. A thousand different
longings answer back like stars. One skull
like the new moon in the moist earth
or charred by the fire, consulted in earnest
and everyone’s life is either a burnt seed
that boiled in its own beginnings, or a pine cone
that opened its eyes like a tree in flames.

We glean the same garden. We celebrate
on the same wind-locked gate. Until
something opens us up like the night sky
and we fly away never to be seen again.
The air leaves no traces of what it tried to explain
in the chalkdust of the Milky Way.
So many stars to be lost among like ghosts
of what they were. Firewalkers that didn’t
make it to the end of themselves. And never
would. Roadkill by the side of the road
when they lay down like a corduroy forest
built on an old Indian path for the mail lady
when she travelled with a horse and buggy.
Her bones stick out of the earth when it thaws.

A beached old whale of a store, at one time,
now empty when we moved in, poets and painters,
with five acres, and a lake that came with it
and the place I wrote in, cold and desiccated
as new dry wall and the studio as big
as I could want it, but empty and alone
even with you there to compensate for the silence
for throwing the jam and eggs the neighbours
greeted us with all over the kitchen floor
it was impossible to walk on for a week
of black ice between us for reasons I forget.

Does it help anyone to remember that?
Is the evil that genetically modifies their soul
made any less ingenuous than a retired
hunting and fishing guide that’s always
on the look out for anything to drink
even when it’s smashed Polar Ice
in someone else’s Arctic Cat’s saddle-bag?
Voldemar the Latvian tailor alcoholic
would think it was cologne, a cheap buy,
with an ice storm of a chandelier,
powdered glass in it like the staff of life
as the sheriff heaped his furniture
out on the boulevard where everyone gawked.

And the landlord’s wife telling me I was
Satan as I painted wolves for a living
every Sunday night after she got off church
coming to the door, a hypocrite whore
later to be discovered by her angelic son
doing porn on the internet. Survival skills
in the topsoil of the clearcut fields
that wasn’t good for farming except for pheasants
grown and slaughtered and flown all around
the world. People lived on fishing permits
but shot deer out of season, the occasional
black bear. Everybody owned a gun
but me. I grew flowers only the bikers
ever stopped en masse to admire the colours
of the zinnias in contrast to the white Shasta daisies.


PATRICK WHITE

THINGS FREEZE IN TIME AND AWARENESS

THINGS FREEZE IN TIME AND AWARENESS

Things freeze in time and awareness
more often than they used to. I stare
blankly at the candle-holder and the easel
and there’s no waiting, no space
for conscious intervention of any kind.
No comfort from love affairs I’ve mined
for jewels in the ashes. Halos reforged
from horns as ploughshares are from swords.
An existentialist would call this lack
of mystery, bleakness, and there’s no doubt
only a few flowers remain to the fall,
but I’m alone with things as if
they weren’t trying to hold back the universe
from anyone who wants in on the secret.

Five a.m. It’s still dark out. There’s
a red glow in the sky. Until her boyfriend
with decorative cab lights on his truck
drops the young waitress off to open
The Hideaway across the street. He leaves
and she walks right into the darkness
unafraid not giving a second thought
to what might be lurking inside at this hour
as if she’d been making serious love
all night. She’s the first bird to come back
in the spring, though winter’s coming on,
and death lets go of Foster Street like a spell
I’ve been observing, stillness through
the window, the imperturbability of things
at rest while the town dreams beyond
its explanations for how life is for those
who watch without memory or preconception.

To be alive simply and cleanly, sixty-five,
watching the heritage lamp-posts cast
static shadows on the parking meters
that never move like sundials or bloom
like galaxies flaring up from wooden matches,
(I’m writing this after the fact, so this
is the history before it gets to you
like the light of star, or the pictogram
of the Pleiades, Perseus holding the Medusa’s
ghoulish head in red Algol) and know
like a leaf whenever there’s this much shedding
something is revealed even the darkness
couldn’t anticipate after all these lightyears
this dead end, the gateway to an unspeakable freedom.

Cut free, somehow, of many things that
gave up on me. Disproportionate to my humanity.
The overworked apprentice free to play
hookey for the rest of his life as if no one
cared whether he showed up for work or not,
to explore the world as it comes to him
and not be looking for anything in particular
in the blue boxes stuffed with startled cardboard
that doesn’t contain anything anymore
it can’t throw out at aeons and eras of notice.
To see the dawn in the dingy blue ripening
over the rooftops and greet the day like a ghost
that’s beat death to the grave like a bet I intend to collect.


PATRICK WHITE

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

HOW STRANGE TO RECALL CHILDHOOD AS AN AGING MAN

HOW STRANGE TO RECALL CHILDHOOD AS AN AGING MAN

How strange to recall childhood as an aging man
as if nothing had changed for the last sixty years
you’re watching yourself as a young boy
from a point of awareness somewhere in the air
above him like someone he couldn’t have foreseen becoming,
looking back upon him with great tenderness
that I’m what I made of his future as he
tries to reverse the bike chain he caught
his pant cuff in, and I can do nothing to help him
at this remove, except love him as someone should have then
when these strange tears didn’t taste so much of time.

Who could have guessed it would take all these years
to fill the absence in his heart up by becoming
the intimate familiar of the solitude of a child
who could befriend anything that was as lost and wild
and wounded as he was and yet could dream
of doing great things up late in his room at night
to prove he was at least as loveable as any achievement.
He was off to fight a holy war of one with himself
like a single infidel against the whole of Christendom
that I’m the living ruin of because sometimes it’s wiser
to be defeated than it is to prevail supreme
against your own dream of being worthy of love.

Time ripples in the growth rings of a tree
echoing the song of a well-seasoned nightbird
in the heartwood of a shedding maple
that remembers all the lyrics of longing and lament
it sings to itself at times like an arrow, a burnt guitar
struck by lightning, or one of the strong rafters
that uphold the soul like the keel of a lifeboat overturned
on the great night sea of a death in life
it drowned in more than once like moonset
among the corals that tore the bottom of its hull.

And how many cold nights did it take
before the syrups began to run sweetly in spring
and the new leaves forget the history of their roots
as I tried to abandon the child that I was
by the side of a road that led him away from me
because I thought one of us had to go homeless
in order to survive the firestorms of his outraged innocence
and the unaccusing guilt of mine as I grew up
letting him down in ways that only he can imagine
as I spread from one burning building to the next
like a new religion that wasn’t looking for converts?
But if you were to ask me now, I’d say it’s funny
how he turned out to be the Buddha sitting at the base
of the Bodhi tree of my spine, and on a good day,
at my best, before the fall, I’m Lucifer leading
the sun up at dawn like a child guiding a blind prophet
by the hand long before the morning star appeared
like Venus to those who were seeking enlightenment
without me or themselves to witness what neither of us
had attained like the key to the mystery of a universe
that had no locks on it to begin with to shut anybody out
or keep anybody in. The man in me doesn’t blame the child
for existing the way I do now trying belatedly
to embrace his rejection as a way of life
I can make up for by sharing this wounded solitude with him
like an injured animal he can see himself in
as a potential friend he could identify with
as if what had happened to me had once happened to him
and we could both approach each other with compassion.


PATRICK WHITE  

BARED OF ITS LEAVES LIKE NATIVE PEACE TREATIES

BARED OF ITS LEAVES LIKE NATIVE PEACE TREATIES

Bared of its leaves like native peace treaties
with the westerlies who never kept them,
the last red planet of the chokecherry falls
into the claws of a black squirrel eyeing it
like a space rover looking for life on Mars.
O the myriad worlds you can see in a single mystic detail.
Bring me a hair of God and I’ll pass through it
like a wormhole into the dark matter of the mind
going on behind the light like vital events
that are deeper than skin and blood on stage.

Just count the number of pathways through the woods
compared to the roads to know whether
you’re in a good space or not. If people
wander to work in their own good time
or rush from one abyss to another
trying to get ahead of an ion waterclock.
Take the solitude out of society
and there’s not much left worth talking about.
So I enjoin the silence to keep the acuity of my wonder
sharp as the thorns of a heart with nothing left to guard
after the wild rose ran off in one of her phases with the moon.

I have long conversations with the stars
without a word or a gesture of grammar being said
in either of our mother-tongues that can’t be understood
immediately, without the intermediary of a metaphor
or a dictionary that gets to the roots of things
like a star-nosed mole with no flowers in its soul.
No end of the distance between us when you measure it in miles
but insight travels faster than the speed of light
and both of us are shining in the same dark space
like an eye looking back at itself from a long way off.

The night is lonely, cold, and ageing but there’s a fire
blazing in my heartwood the trees huddle around
as the shadows of the flames dart from trunk to trunk
with the alacrity and cunning of a wolf
that knows it’s the last of its kind in these darkening hills
to embody the magic of its elders in its way of life.
Fear is the mind-killer. So I stay enthroned
by the stone navel of my firepit flowering
all around me like the corona of the sun at midnight
just to say I know the protocols of being as well as the rocks
when I rise to embrace strangers in my solitude
as the new spiritual familiars that will accompany me
on my long firewalk to the stars that are never
any further away than my future is from my past
or now is from here to there every step of the path

The stars spin their webs in the crowns of the trees
into dreamcatchers with mythically inflated origins
that answer the paradigms of the constellations
by connecting the dots like wild grape vines
to the shapeshifting starmaps of the mind
I keep shedding like leaves and feathers and scales
to understand the underlying scaffoldings and skeletons
I climb up on like monkey bars
to repaint creation in everybody’s image
but my own. My fire. My heart. I’m the host
of an expansive space that’s generous enough
to embody it all without standing in jubilation
like an angel in the doorway as if there were
somebody home no one could account for.

A stranger in the thirteenth house of a misbegotten zodiac
of birthmarks driven out into the wilderness
like maniacs, prophets, poets and astronomical wise men
as scapegoats for the fate of upper class tattoos
that don’t wash off any easier than the wind
teaching the stars that have just learned how to print
this cursive script I’m writing in like a mindstream
punctuating its passage with toadstools and pine-cones,
chokecherries, black walnuts, wild crab apples
and shepherd moons in decaying orbits around
the black hole at the center of the universe
we’re all attached to like hinges to a gate
that only has to swing open once to everything
and it’s good for as many lifetimes as you want to go through
like a labyrinth of exits leading into a clearing
deep within your heart where nothing exists
and yet inconceivably everything insists upon shining.


PATRICK WHITE

Monday, October 28, 2013

I LOVE THE WORLD THE WAY A MOTHER LOVES A DEAD CHILD

I LOVE THE WORLD THE WAY A MOTHER LOVES A DEAD CHILD

I love the world the way a mother loves a dead child
and sees its ghost everywhere.
I look at the stars and more and more
I see the disappointment in their eyes.
We waste each other like clear cut forests.
In the sacred groves where the priests
are the birds of death, you’re either
a chainsaw or a nail protesting a passion play.
Ever since the last lyric died an agonizing death
poems have become gadgets
in the hands of inventors without fingerprints.
No growth rings in the heartwood of a dead tree.
Tone-deaf door-knockers who write poetry
as a kind of white noise to drown out
the shrieking of the innocent in their crawl spaces.

Chronic renewal of one-eyed overviews.
Most people’s lives are just big enough lies
they’ve told themselves often enough
to believe there may be something to it.
Wounded earth, I weep for you like a slayer
weeps for the slain. You were not my mother.
You were my child. Nemetic humanity
raises its own assassin in paranoid despair.

Measure of the mighty in the power of a dam,
how easy it is to forget the omnipotence
of a drop of rain. It’s still possible to open
cosmic gates of the aviaries and let
all the winged horses fly free and riderless
like the silk paratroopers of the milk weed pods
or the albino umbrellas of smouldering dandelions.
For the most part beauty and truth lost heart long ago
and were turned out like fashionistas
on the celebrity catwalks of surrealistic irreverence
and now the peony is wearing the thorns of the rose.

I still go out at night far from town by myself
to amuse the stars with my humanity,
the dents in my shining, the legends of light
I turned into black farces of self-righteous fallibility
as if I had acquired the power to reverse
a diamond back into coal. The mourning dove
studies the occult magic of the crow
and the sacred clowns look for enlightenment
in their shame, in the irrelevant antics
of the painted tears that fall from their eyes
whenever they address themselves
like mirrors in a green room putting their make-up on.

Been in the tide of this night sea of awareness
so long now, I’ve developed a tendency
to round the sharp corners of the crucials
out into more spherically embrasive wavelengths,
kinder pieces of sand-blasted glass
to insulate myself exponentially from the details
as if a full moon were some kind of antidote
to its own fangs and the harvest wasn’t toxic.
But I know I’m only trying to divine my way
by white lightning on the moon illuminating a road
as wide as everywhere. And my childhood rage
is stilling tearing down gates and fences
around open fields where the wildflowers bloom
without starmaps, and the bounty of the earth
isn’t a menu that determines your place in the foodchain.

Poetry’s been the longest good night I’ve ever experienced
and life the deepest, most gracious bow
to all the people, events, and things I’ve ever cherished.
Not too hard to see the lowest common denominator
of all values has become a quantum mechanical lottery
and physics is just a screening myth
for what gets murdered along the way to the promised land.
Enculturated to our own pollution like fish,
though we swim out as far as the spring equinox in Pisces
to pour the universe out of the universe,
worlds waterclocking into worlds, still
after washing ourselves off in stars like water and sand
seeping into our graves like the mirage of an oil spill,
we’re still recognized immediately among the worlds
by the indelibility of our filth, having yet to learn
not to track our identity in after us into the house of life.

The ululation of the loons wailing like Arab widows
reverberating across the lake sounds more
like an angry plea, than a call to prayer,
but who could lament the immensity
of that kind of tragic absence in a single lifetime
without emptying their spirits out like dry wells in a desert
that navigates like a madman by the full moon?
When I was young, I opened up a night school
to explain what a human was to the stars,
but now my soul’s a lot more illiterate than it was
and it’s me that’s asking them to teach me to read.

Even if you look at it like a leather boot
that’s walked down one too many roads
not to feel the pebble of the world bruise its heel,
even though we’ve made a great mess of it,
it’s still a great mystery, yes? Give your assent
without hesitation, or the moon will know you’re lying.
The mysterium tremendum et fascinans of the Romans.
The bright vacancy in the dark abundance
of the ore of our unknowing. Even the hardest heart
bleeds like iron out of the sacred rock
transformed in the forges of the fireflies of mystic insight
into a sword of moonlight worthy of being
laid down upon the waters of life in tribute.
Even if you had to fall upon it more than once
to get the point before you returned it in gratitude.


PATRICK WHITE

RELATIVELY PAINLESS DAY

RELATIVELY PAINLESS DAY

Relatively painless day. Half sunlight
smothered by grey. Don’t expect mercy
from the way life kills without regard
for the nervous system of its prey.
Sunday in a small town with thirty churches.
Secular kindness releasing oxytocin.
Civilization, not wheat, or temple,
but the fire that gathered people
with nothing but stories on their hands
while their meat cooked for easier digestion.

Bachelor buttons in the Neanderthal grave
of a child. Prophetic skulls buried under
the hearthstones like a calendar of the dead.
When did we last consult them? Now
is the hunting ground they set out alone
to discover. Envoys to the afterlife we
enacted on their advice as if it were real.
We had embassies there with paper-shredders
that called themselves priests. A new way
to eat the body of the god buried in the corner
of the field we fertilized like a ouiji board
to yield all the answers to the randomness
of the weather. Agriculture began to reform
the consumers. From now on the vines
were on trellises. The brown, gas giants
among the planets, who couldn’t shine
by a light of their own had shepherd moons.

The executioners offered anaesthetic
to the condemned man they were about to kill
and the church handed over unconfessed heretics
to the expedient firemasters of the law
at an auto-de-fe to burn. They couldn’t
have blood on their hands and live
up to the ten commandments. Or down
if you understand how arrogant hypocrites are.
They still stone women in Pakistan
for seeking knowledge as far as a cellphone,
like glass houses that have never sinned
bruising the flesh of a miscreant with
a meteor shower, space-junk in orbit,
determined to fall from their dark haloes
and wipe out a species according to the law
that lived like they had a god under their thumb.

How long does it take a thought to travel
from one neuron to the next? Or water
need a map to find its way around
an irrigation ditch, or woman be sacrificed
at the altar of her own dark mystery,
a divinely sanctioned death, paternalistic as hell,
or murder if you think it’s got nothing to do with God.

Regard the chaos of extreme conditioning.
We take the stories more seriously than
the unsayable they were meant to point out
like a negative space with an affirmative voice
that wasn’t listening to what we told ourselves
before the meat was cooked. You’re going
to sup with the devil you better eat
with a long spoon below the salt. Or there’s
no purgatory for you as if you were on
probation in death. I can’t believe as a child
I was originally sinful or that I was equally
innocent in an isolation cell. I learned
to carve loaded dice out of my bones in order
to survive to pay the slumlord who listened
to all that jive, and wondered if I did too.

I sing lullabies to lovelorn razor-blades
that took a vow on the sword they’d
placed between them to conjugate the verb
I love in Latin. In public. On the radio.
So Hux Huxley, editor of Florilegium,
cousin to Aldous and Julian, wasn’t disappointed
with the dying classics I studied with him
beside the aquarium of Australian stick insects
who didn’t know that all Corinthians
were liars at heart and I am a Corinthian
can you believe that, dedicated to getting
at the truth through a spurious art
of Moebius metaphors, like snakes
that eat themselves up to the head
and then what do they do if not go beyond that
even broken, the circle remains intact
as if the rain made it, or the tree rings
make solar systems that jump orbitals
in the heartwood of a willow that looks
better by night than at the beach by day.
I take things so seriously, boy, do I ever, I play
when things get me down in a small town on a Sunday.


PATRICK WHITE

Sunday, October 27, 2013

TOOK IT TO EXTREMES

TOOK IT TO EXTREMES

Took it to extremes to see how much
people would care if they were told
it was in their own self-interest to look after
another. That feeding the poor, easing
the fever of the ill, might be the privilege
of privileges for those who call themselves healers.

If money is the root of all evil, don’t
stick your nose in flowers with tainted pollen
or you’ll go the way of the honey bees.
None of the petals love you and green
is the most perishable colour of them all. Comes
the fall and that wad of bills will shed you
like a turncoat for opening you’re wallet
like a pine cone in the middle of winter.
What you want to do is learn to bloom in fire
like the udumbara flower once every
seven thousand years. Do you see how
inflammable the tears of the dolorous conifers are?

You can make a little fire for yourself
of dry moss, twigs, and birch bark and not
let anyone else sit at it but the elect
in the board rooms of an ancient religion.
I eat you. Now you eat me. That way
we’re always full. Leavened bread
from genetically modified wheat
rises like a loaf of the harvest moon.

We can talk to the mythically inflated shadows
within the magic circle of our own
prophetic skulls in a Stonehenge of moondogs
haloed with a hint of brass on the clouds
or the aura of fool’s gold glowing at night
on the low hanging branches of an avalanche
of windfalls when the moon descends like an ax
on the nape of snakey apples in the grass.

We can remember the war bonnets we tarred
and feathered like black swans for non-compliance
with starmaps that sounded more like treaties
than a land grab. O the music of the spheres
is a celestial requiem. The lightyears are paced
like professional mourners learning how to dance
like ghosts, and the plumes on the horses
of the hearse are black as the turkey vultures that circle
and swarm the corpse of the Great Square of Pegasus
going down in the west over the Lanark hills,
slowly dying like an inspired sacrifice in
the name of humanity in myself and others
I quickly came to hate for the sake of the tribute,
not knowing if it was a comic death or
the life of the party that was hardest to believe.

I celebrated against the odds that praise
was enough to overcome the triumphs
that we suffered in a holy war where the cause
was already lost long before we took our vows
to terminate ourselves before we caught on
like a firewall that didn’t work to stop the flames.
The whole hillside is burning its slash off
like the ashes of the sacred clowns who
polka-dotted their faces they painted in the spit paste
of an urn that had scattered them prematurely
like the blossoms of a rootfire breaking into the open.


PATRICK WHITE

GREED. POLITICS. CORRUPTION BEYOND SURREALISTIC CONCEPTION

GREED. POLITICS. CORRUPTION BEYOND SURREALISTIC CONCEPTION

Greed. Politics. Corruption beyond surrealistic
conception. I’m going mad in self defence.
The delusion of insanity doesn’t look so bad
from here. How did these distortions get
elected to represent the things I stubbornly believe
I so breezily accepted in the sixties? The mediocrities
are fracking the well of the muses and the astronauts
have grown old and died of gravity that use
to float freely high, high above the earth.

There are perennial truths to our experience
of humanity, of being human, that endure,
without divine sanction, or with if you prefer,
to this very day like oxygen and water. Love
and understanding, compassion, empathy,
pity if it’s not meant to destroy someone,
freedom to say, protest, or create without
a profit margin being where all things come to rest
like autumn leaves in a gutter with an iron grate.

Fifty years, a poetic heretic, a literate demon
good for the angels’ imaginations if they’ve
got one among them left of their own. As well
as those abject modes of starmud that
have no idea of what’s shining within them.

The frogs have dressed up like cannibals
far to the east and everything is scum,
born that way like the cosmic eggs of a priest.
Is the day ever going to come, not as
a supernatural act of intervention, whether
God’s an extraterrestrial or not who sneers
at our technology, people realize they need
each other as a coral reef needs the moon
to remind the polyps they’re not alone?

I’ve had enough. I’m overwhelmed
by the termites munching in the house of life,
untimbering the heartwood of the rafters,
undermining the foundations we built
our pyres on, turning our walls to a weather front
as if the rest of us were the asteroids
of a natural catastrophe with hidden strings
like a kite that nose-dived like a puppet
into the powerlines that ignited a universal
conflagration, a good capitalist that fed
on everything it touched, Midas in a vegetable garden
looking for a golden harvest under
the genetically modified rocks that feel
more like a skull of dry ice that’s been fuming
forever it seems, sublimating itself as smoke
and ghosts since the beginning of this new fire age.

I can’t believe how the one-eyed liar can deceive
the many new ways of communicating life
and death issues with the convenience of a cellphone.
A fly on a computer screen. Even walking
beside the Tay River that never lies to me
like my own mindstream offering me a mirage
of what there is to drink from my own reflection.
I see the stems of the fallen leaves stacked
like a logjam or the wicks of clear cut candles
whose flames are single petalled starmaps
of someone who didn’t have to ask if they
were loved or not better in solitude than company.

I feel the suffering of everyone until
I can see it somewhere between the treeline
where the river winds, and the stars overhead
that made it all possible in the shining forges
of their fire-wombs, the sacred smithies who said
one half of you shall plough the moon,
the other, raise a sword against water
that can’t be wounded by the tears in your eyes.
And for the mad espionage of the war mongers
there’s always an adulterous fishing net
the dolphins, muscled as they are, get snagged in
like a spider web, a dream-catcher, a suspension bridge
on fire with the naked acts of the truth
that has no where to hide its eyes or alibis or lies.

How many gates and front doors, entrances compared
to the back, emergency exits, second-holes
of a groundhog’s labyrinth in this house of pain?
I see it in the junkie prostitute’s eyes at twenty seven
open to whatever comes though she puts
a smile on her life to gloss over it and keep
up with the Joneses. I see it in the bones
of the baby muskrat the wolves have been
sniffing around for from the day it was born.
And even the thick asphalt of the rat snake
that made its way through the grass like
a highway slick with rain. Pain. Until
it doesn’t matter anymore it tastes the air
as if it were witching for water with forked lightning.

A million hues of oxymorons on a colour wheel
turning grey as the journey gets longer
than shadows at moonrise on a premeditative sundial.
The agony of giving birth to something bigger
than a self. The impersonality of suffering
though you send it birthday cards that are
always well-meaning however absurd it is
to believe your pain taught you anything but how
to hurt as if it were teaching you to transcend yourself.
Even if you wanted to be a fountain efflorescing
like a mirage in an eyeless desert and you
turned out to be a waterclock going supernova
in the endless emptiness of a blossoming flower.
Even if you walk alone by the Tay River
as you have a hundred troubled times before
at night when the willows, in the summer
of their long green locks, or in the winter
when they open a bordello, are on
a first name basis with your business here.


PATRICK WHITE