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