WHO ISN'T TRYING TO LIVE

WHO ISN’T TRYING TO LIVE

Who isn’t trying to live

as they vaguely hope they are

whatever extremes of moderation they’ve gone to

behind all the masks and fraud?

Crosswalks and bridges of fire

trying to get to the other side of themselves

like the promised land, or God,

ladders up to heaven

like vertebrae and ribs,

and ropes like spinal cords

down a well on the moon

that hasn’t enthroned hell in her depths yet,

everyone’s trying to put a face on chaos

they remotely hope is their own.

One by one the plum blossoms

fall to the nightstream

like loveletters

from the branch of the tree

that read them once and then let go.

No one knows where they’re from

or where they’re going.

Some give their wings up

like graduate degrees to the ants

and others are raising their sails

like the flames of a great fire

that consumes the prophet

who wanted to hold his arms up

like a wishbone to the lightning

in the revery of his desire

until everything is ash and nails,

and others who think they’re

the rudders and keels of the flowing.

Sometimes I am nothing more

than this terrible inevitability

of flesh and bone

alone in the vastness of my unknowing

where neither ignorance nor wisdom prevails

and then it’s as clear as stars

on both sides of the window

that everyone’s everyone else’s good guess

as they encounter one another

passing the time

in a crumbling game of graveyard chess.

I don’t know why what’s wise about me

always ends up listening to myself

like a fool’s confession

but I’ve run out of rosaries

like habitable planets

and my homelessness has exposed

the ruse of divining purity

in the afflictions of compassion

as if everything had evolved in sorrow

like a heart-bending occasion for tears

as the mountains that fell

like an avalanche of cornerstones

into the valleys they’ve dug

like pyramids and graves over the years

abide like salt in the eye of the sea.

Intelligence might be an elaborate mode of paranoia,

but eased into the wonder of being here at all

with trees and stars and the midnight rainbows

on the necks of the grackles

and the hectic butterfly among the grape hyacinth,

since I was enlightened

by my absolute uncertainty,

I have gathered all my voices together like leaves

and burned the old texts of myself

for not being much of a liar.

Five petals opened

and one flower bloomed

like a good laugh.

Now my awareness

is a kind of playful fire that doesn’t burn

what it consumes

though the light

still tastes of the jewel

and even as the good-byes deepen their voices

like echoes in wells,

because I’ve grown older

and autumn keeps shedding its choir,

the hellos still take on a life of their own

as if nothing had changed.

An illuminated clown

I am astounded by the profundities

in every jest of being

revelling in the creative hilarity

of its mystic specificity

and how everytime I get serious about something

as if I had just remembered myself,

I bring the house down.

Only a hypocrite is humble enough

to underestimate his own irrelevance,

and go sorting through himself

like a cellphone in the ashes

but for those who have become fire,

aspiration is achievement

and fulfillment and desire,

one breath. In every event

there’s nothing to be

further than you can see.

But that doesn’t mean

take a harder look

as if your life were a book

you were learning to read

or a mirror you had to stare into

until your eyes bleed

to know who you are.

When you stop thinking

every perception is a clue

to who you are

you’ll shine out like a star

ahead of its own light

and stop trying to recognize God

through the featureless eyes

and vigilant simulacra

of a stolen identity.

You will be neither partially

nor wholly yourself

and before and beyond

will not seem

the unending extremities of now

rounding the skull of a clock

that’s lost its way home.

Your seeing will grow deeper than eyes

and you will stop sending

your reflection out

like the moon’s last lifeboat

to haul you up out of the abyss

like a fisherman gilled in the tangled mess

of his own s.o.s.

You’ll let go of the oars

and breathe easy like the sea

and in every blossom of being

you will taste the whole orchard

drunk on its knees in laughter,

not knowing where to begin.

PATRICK WHITE

MEANDERING AFTER THE LONG THAW

MEANDERING AFTER THE LONG THAW

Meandering after the long thaw

through whatever landscape my mind

creates in its flowing, karmically disposed

or not, I unscroll like emotional water

playing with the quick otters of my thought

and no meridians or parallels on the loom

that snares the stars in birdnets,

and no horizons, no ports

of arrival and departure,

no hellish red of emergency exits

out of the darkened theater,

I revel spontaneously in the freedom

of not having a clue about where I am going,

and go off in all directions at once

like the moon on the waves

like light through the homeless abode

of the only place I’ve ever stopped like space

to admire the road without beginning or end

that leads everywhere and nowhere at once.

Thought-years away from my last death

and the nebulous rain of the sidereal breath

I took once and held forever,

waiting to grace my stars with flowers

when words don’t interrupt the silence like pyramids

and the desert is free to speak for itself

to itself about the flower

that flows like an eye through its depths.

One eye, being; the other, non-being,

and a third that is beyond both,

I don’t know what it is I’m looking into,

but I keep rising and falling

like a wave of my own seeing

casting shadows on the water

like the voices of the things I write,

the new moon like a dark coin

under the tongue of everything in the light,

and the valley voices and the mountain voices

and what they say to each other in the night

when they draw near to a fire

no one else is awake to overhear.

I may be a bull in the labyrinth of my own fingerprints

unspooling my blood along the way

so that someone else can find their way out,

an evangelist on the moon with my head in my hands

telling the stars not to fret

if they’ve forgotten the last prophecy

because eventually even the lies will come true.

My wild ass compassion wants to break the jaws of circumstance

that eat so many like thorns of the moon in the desert

when the cactus blooms and the viper strikes like a flower,

but I don’t send my emotions out to judge events

like hysterical lipstick smeared across the mirror

or let my thoughts stir the mud in the puddle

to make things clear to the clouds.

One meaning for the whole of immeasurable life

is facepaint on a clown that’s seldom funny

or a spiritual ideologue whose only expression of grace

is a frown like a knot in the wind

that dances all around him, abusively free.

But the life of meaning doesn’t need

a seeker or a teacher flipping pages like a weathervane

for the stones and elixirs and grails of life,

as if you had to struggle to attain what you already are.

The star in your eye. The tree in your spine.

The bird in your voice. The moon in your heart.

The wind in your lungs. The light in your mind.

The sea in your blood. The earth in your flesh.

It’s not hard to know who you are

when you’re breathing alone in the darkness

that sheds you like the oceans of the moon

and the manes of the lunar lions come undone

like white peonies on the flowing of the nightstream.

However you look at it, your nose

is the hypoteneuse of a right-angled threshold,

your own personal event horizon

that’s crossed with every breath you take

and your skin is a contract with the world

that begins at the tip of your nose

like an available dimension of forms and events,

experience after experience

that keeps on happening all the way back to you

like the singularity at the bottom of a black hole.

But what’s the point of looking for yourself

like a black sail on a night sea

or erecting a monolithic I like an oil derrick

or a misguided lighthouse

to drill for light

when you’re already swimming through it

and the world is arrayed clearly everywhere like eyes?

Everything you see; everything you can be

is the expression of everything else.

A star gives birth to your eyes and water

organizes you like a neighbourhood

and a genius of mud lays a scarlet cloak

of flesh and blood across your shoulders

strong enough to uphold the earth like a head

and space readies itself like a sensitive room

where you can stay up late to watch your eyelids bloom

like waterlilies coaxed out of hiding by the full moon.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETHING SAID SOFTLY

SOMETHING SAID SOFTLY

Something said softly in the night

like a tendril on a windowsill

tasting the moon, a whisper, a word

that walked in the light without

abandoning its shadow,

a phrase with wet wings

dreaming itself out of its chrysalis

not knowing whether it’s a leaf or a dragonfly

until the whole tree wakes up beside it,

something sought but rarely said

saturated with the meaningless life of meaning

that could touch space like flesh

and make it feel the thrill of new eyes

running down its arm like tears.

And it’s not that I want

to unsay the night or God

to define myself as a human,

and it’s of little moment to me,

seed on the wind,

what worlds are born of my words,

what ends, what begins,

what comes of what I cannot say,

but I want to say something

with the savour of time in it

that’s worth living for a little more each day

like a small tree rooted like a thought

in a crevasse of eternity,

greening the moon.

Late at night, in the darkness,

while the silence is off preserving something,

and all I can hear is your breath

off in the distance like an ocean,

I want to unpack my vagrant heart

like a patched guitar-case,

a grave-robber in a pyramid,

and attune my afterlife

to the key of this one

in such a way

I can play like a new star in Orion

to all the sad, beautiful fireflies of the moment

that hover over us like living constellations of our own

not bound to any paradigm of light

that can only be touched by a mountain of stone.

I want to paint something

that feels like the flower

that just brushed against your hand,

I want to be inspired by the mystic blue of midnight

like window glass fired in the kiln of a star

that has looked upon the suffering of humans for so long,

their atrocities and deprivations,

their terrors and wrecked joys,

compassion has turned it into an eye so clear

you can sip water from it like tears

that taste of the history of blood and wine

that danced alone like a vine at its own wedding

with a bride of rain that unveiled herself

like falling chandeliers.

Unfailingly, absurdly, obsessively human

in the shadow of thundering magnitudes

that feel like the extinctions of gods

that time has wheeled out

to the enormity of the gravepit

that limes every abyss of the heart

with the stars of a new universe,

I want to add one candle to the shining

in a folly of insight so illuminating

even the earliest galaxies

forever entering the darkness

on the threshold of their first shedding

could see it, something

so profoundly vernal and intimate

even I can believe in it.

PATRICK WHITE

WALKING ON STARS

WALKING ON STARS

Walking on stars,

walking on skulls,

walking on myself, water,

giddy suspension bridges

swaying over windy river gorges

playing chicken with my heart

to see if it’s just another mini-blackhole

or a real abyss,

one foot where I’m coming from,

the other, where I’m going

it’s all the same road

my feet make with their walking.

I don’t know what impels me to keep going,

but it walks me where I will

over the quicksand and tarpits,

the improvised explosive devices,

the lunar blossoms of the tree on the moon

that keeps sprouting out of the stumps

of my clear-cut emotions.

Inside and out, I may be space

but even space sometimes get sick of its own distances

and longs for homier stars,

lamps in the window

to draw it out of the vastness

of the huge night of its crucible,

its chrysalis, its galactic cocoon,

like a moth or a dragonfly

or a man with nothing but time in his eye

to cast himself like a spell or story

into the flames of a deeper intimacy

with the voiceless fire

that listens to everything

as if the saying and the not said

were two flames of the same pyre.

You need the wisdom

of a Solomonic serpent or a river,

the intuition of a witching wand,

to know how to split your tongue oxymoronically

between the living and the dead

to speak of the unsayable

as the moon raises its sword

above your head

to cut the cord

and unbind the word

from the lesser magic of your grammar

floating like an empty boat on an infinite sea

as if that were all there were to say.

For years I’ve winnowed the stars

to sort the thistles out of the grain

like dead metaphors among the simulacra

but ultimately, likeness, like a mirror

can find no likeness in anything

though everything elaborates

its mystic affinity with everything else

because we’re all born of the same darkness,

of what was not said

on the first day of creation

when the word was already

the past tense of the beginning

and God said, Be. And nothing happened.

There’s nothing in a state of being

that can be misconstrued as an event

though we like to think of ourselves

as the children of a happy, ongoing accident

the multiverse isn’t expanding

into the hyperspace of its own extremes

or entropically cooling to the idea of a private cremation.

A compassionate pragmatist with a mystic bent

light-years of elation from home

that keeps saying hello and good-bye

on the same threshold

like the needle of a compass

pointing both ways,

with a heart that is rarely more

than a full moon away from forever,

I’m riding the tide of my own resurgency

like a wave of illumination

thriving with eyes

across the deep seabeds of my skull

toward an emptiness that is always full

of the same reverberating echo

returning like geese in the spring,

a sail to a bay,

a loveletter that went missing for years

like the prodigal word of a bloodstream

to the voice on a hill above the valley

that keeps calling out my name

without expecting an answer.

PATRICK WHITE

THE MOON DRAWS ITSELF UP

THE MOON DRAWS ITSELF UP

The moon draws itself up

like a bucket from a well

but there’s still no water.

The gate is shut.

And no one’s home.

So I turn away knowing even if

I take the road back

no one ever returns

the way they came.

You can’t leave

through the same door twice

and even after you’ve said

all that you meant

it’s still not the letter you sent that arrives.

And dragging the lake

for the body of a drowned poet

who went skinny-dipping

alone with the moon

still doesn’t make it the Pierian Spring

even if his death turns out to be

an inspiration.

To wake the sleeping dragon

you must dig deeply enough

to draw fire from the well.

And to speak as if

you could taste the vision

with your eyes,

you must have a tongue like a snake

that listens like a witching wand

to the tang of its own opposites

whispering like waves in a watershed

about a dream they just had

of the same urgent river.

It’s one thing for a star

to extinguish itself in a fury of light

but it’s another

to make it through the night as a human

trying to divine yourself

in your own shadow

by sticking white and black pins

through a voodoo doll

you mistake for a constellation,

an effigy of your creative origins,

the imperious vocables

of the collaborative lie

you call a beginning.

I can sympathize.

I’ve drunk from the same eyes

to the bottom of my skull

until I was as blind

as the sun at midnight

to my own shining

and what had seemed full

was empty.

And how the dead

can wake the living

is even more of a mystery

than the sack of my personal history

I keep shedding like skin

that’s been through enough.

I sluff myself

like phases of the moon

and slide away like a new religion,

more wind on the open sea

than breath in the sail

time keeps taking down

when a wave is as good as a boat.

Look beyond yourself

into what isn’t you

as if you could skip your eyes

like stars out over the sea.

Don’t leave this world

but look at it from the inside as well

as if you were a star at noon

and be mindful of the cup

you’re drinking from

and wash yourself out of it

when you’ve got to the bottom of things.

Like the moon when it bathes

in your eyes, your tears,

in lakes and seas

and every single drop of water

hanging like the cameo of the world

without end or beginning

from every blade of grass

rise from your immersion

without leaving rings.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU ASK ME UNFAIRLY ABOUT GOD

YOU ASK ME UNFAIRLY ABOUT GOD

You ask me unfairly about God

and I say God is formless,

mind is formless;

where’s the distinction?

Two waves of water.

Two mountain walls

of the same valley.

Why get in your own way

and trouble your house

with being and non-being

looking for reasons to exist

you could wear

like those bracelets on your wrist

that cover your scars

like tree-rings around

the dead heartwood

that keeps you standing?

Two eyes. One seeing.

Two wings. One

flight of the bird in the night.

How could the darkness say it?

How could the light?

It’ important not to want

to be impossible.

Listen to your own voice

without words

as if it were the silence in music

ingathering you like the sea

picking up the pearls

of a broken rosary

and stringing them together again like moons

everyone of which in all their moods

reflects your face

on your own effulgent waters.

I can see the stars through your skin

and even though the window’s shut

swaying curtains of blood in the wind

when your heart turns auroral

and burns like the dawn,

morning at midnight

like a rainbow on an oilslick,

a rainbow on a grackle’s neck,

a rainbow on the wing of a dead fly,

or the one you can’t get out of your eye

when you realize you’re not indelible,

that your glaciers run

the same way that watercolours do.

You’re not the ruin of an ancient temple

overgrown by the constellations.

Ask any mother.

Arrival is departure.

So who needs to consult their feet on time

to go anywhere

and where can you go

that you haven’t just left

even if you slash your wrists a thousand times

like jungle vines

to uncover yourself

like an abandoned shrine

what have you severed

that isn’t your own umbilical cord?

And how are you ever

going to pop all the bubbles

in the eyes of the seafoam

that surround you like space

without expanding the place

by releasing the universe

like a wild maenadic bride

every time you blind the hymen of an atom?

Cut yourself as you will

you’re only delivering the moon

by caesarian

from every drop of water,

every drop of blood

every drop of light

you might spill.

Midwife of the moon,

mother of nations,

you can heap yourself

like wounded, straw dolls

on the skeletal pyres

of your riverside cremations

but even the water can’t put you out

when you plunge like a torch

into your own pain

like a junkie that’s just found

the last available vein,

trying to saint clarity

in a voodoo universe.

But listen:

the sea’s been trying to teach you for years

how to endure your own weather

without stars or a teacher to guide you,

and when has the wind ever not

carried you like rain and seed

through your own vastness

without a sail or a sky

to haul you up

or take you down

and yet not once

have you ever fallen on barren gound

even when you snuff yourself panspermically

like a Martian meteorite in Antarctica

when you show up

as you have tonight

like a punctuation mark,

a black period

in a negative starmap

when space turns white

and all your blackholes shine

like something dark and divine

that enters through all your exits,

all your doors and pores

without a sign.

PATRICK WHITE

MACULATED MIRRORS

MACULATED MIRRORS

Maculated mirrors in the funeral home parking lot,

serene as eye-water in the presence of the moon.

Spring rain. And the grass greening

as if one colour were truer than another,

the morning sits at a desk

and bends its neck

to look sideways out of a window

still slightly dazed by the hangover of stars

that went a little too far last night.

Soft grey light. Peace in my tears.

I sit in my body like the sea in a diving bell

getting ready to descend

through my own depths

when the bottom of the bucket falls out

like a false eye

and I am unspooled into rivers everywhere

like the serpents of Eden

before they learned to bite.

I confide in myself

like the mysterious innocence of autumn

under the tongue of the spring

like something said off in the wings

among the Chanadoxa and crocuses.

I approach everything like water

overflowing the old grammar

of a forgotten creekbed

with a faster magic than rain

because I’ve got beginnings on my brain

that have pulled me out by the root

like an overclocked tree of pain

the lightning knocked over.

I edge the agony of the stone

until its metals are poured out like a sword

and what the fire has wounded,

the fire heals.

The wine is no longer shaped

by the emptiness of the cup

and beyond the primeval atom,

in the Bulk, in hyperspace

muscled with multidimensional branes

that lift the freeweights of the worlds

up to their shoulders like cosmic bubbles

every thought and anti-thought

nudges a new universe toward nuclearization.

And when one world kisses another

they leave bridges and black holes

all over my auroral skin

like pores I can pass through

like a bird through an open window.

Or I wake up like a waterclock

from one dream to the next

like the hidden grammar

of the first word

and everywhere I look

I am the mystic psychology

of a new physics

that’s lost its mind

in a theory of everything

like a chalice of salt in the sea.

Everywhere worlds roll like water

from the tongues of the tender leaves

waiting like wind and waves

to taste the sails of their flowers.

Everything in existence

is the leftover umbilical cord

of the Great Unmooring

that poured out of its own mind

like boats full of moonlight and rain

or bubbles out of the bay

that each is to itself

until its water breaks

like a tree into bloom

or a man immersed

in the intimate immensities

of a small room.

So now that we’re all out of the womb

where did everyone go?

Or is the addition of one to another

certain to make us lonely?

Or merely another theme

that makes its way

like a snake that just woke up

through the chilly grass

like a thought that unravels

the heater of an idea

like smoke from a cigarette?

I try to mean what I forget

and not seek oblivion in the obvious

but the obvious is not the obvious

and, ah Faustus, why this is oblivion.

Nor are we out of it.

The logical palaces of the salt sea

that has become a graveyard of rivers.

So I swing free of the trend to abide

when everything else is in diaspora

like the tide of the dark-side sea of the moon

that went out once

and kept going.

You can if you wish

see fish swimming through the trees

and collect honey from the stars

just as you would the bees.

Or no less true

to the joy of the white

the spring is full of black brides

whose grief is deepened

by the nurturing light

that is opening the flowers

all around them.

And it’s profound not to confound

a black hole with an eclipse

or mistake the tatoo on your lips

for all there is to say

by drinking an elixir of ink

like black cool aid

as if you’d just downed

a watershed of knowing

and couldn’t handle your liquor.

But I’m not into oilslicks

so I don’t sit here

like the cornerstone

of another spring

that I’ve just laid

like the tarpit of a future library,

drowning tigers like torches at midnight.

It’s clear to me

that everything is already here

and always has been

and that death can never be achieved

by a birth that is a work in progress

so what could ever be fuller

than the moment

just as it is now?

Intelligence isn’t a smudge on clarity

just as a wave is not a cataract

on the eye of the sea

but if all you’ve ever done is see it

may I suggest this spring

as good a time as any

while the stars are reluctant to go

and anxious to stay

to turn the light around,

your feet in the stars,

your head on the ground

and look deeply into the emptiness

until you’ve finally got the eyes to be it?

PATRICK WHITE