IF YOU’VE COME THIS FAR

If you’ve come this far

by the very fact you could

your solitude is marked for exile.

Those who sustain

are threatened by those who enhance.

There’s a soft night breeze

blowing through the open window

and a chandelier trying to teach a mobile to dance

and a man looking up at the stars

into the abyss beyond

wondering how to be grateful

that chaos took advantage of random chance

and he’s here

amazed by the accident.

Being without intent.

Meaning without a basis in fact.

And a passion for darkness that surpasses the stars.

His longing must have reached them by now.

His compassion must have brought them to tears.

Wavelengths of insight can burn for light years

like fireflies with astrolabes

trying to get a fix on their event horizons

as if their own shining

were the only lead they had to go on.

A mirage in a desert of stars

when you’re lost

can give you a sense of direction

to the watershed of your radiance

as well as any other approach to the vastness can.

He picks a few yellow leaves off a green plant

in a bone-dry apartment

and for a moment he’s Adam in the garden again.

He realizes that promoting life

is his way of cherishing his own.

And then he ruminates on its perishing

on his way to the garbage can

to dispose of the heart-shaped leaves

like phases of the moon

on the pages of an obsolete calendar

with pictures of the scenic past

inviting you to come and visit.

What’s a guest to do by himself

when there’s no one else

in the light house

to play the host

but the ghost of God

wandering like smoke along this lonely coast

trying to make the sea stand still

knowing that’s the one commandment

it can’t fulfill

and probably what got him killed?

Prayers are more sincere at a seance

than they are at church.

Widow watch in a dark tower

long after the search has been called off.

He lights a candle.

He blows it out.

He sits down at his desk

and listens to the raging rant

of a heart-broke drunk outside

smashing the love letter he meant to write

like an empty whisky bottle

in the indifferent street light

on the rocks of a lip-syncing mermaid

who’s just jumped his shipwreck

for a lifeboat that likes her singing.

He gets the message.

He’s not one of her new friends.

The man at his desk

reassesses his loneliness

and decides one bodymind

a lifetime

might be a brighter lamp

than any two a genie could wish for.

New lamps for old.

But the fire doesn’t change.

Desire takes root in its own ashes.

Two birds perch like hinges

on the door of a grand entrance

to a Janus-faced New Year

though it’s only August

that looks both ways at once

at the valley its just passed through like a death mask

and the view from the peak

of the mountain it’s on

speaking to God face to face

as if there were no come down to the future

of its unhinged celebrants.

Is love the long binge of a periodic alcoholic

who can’t remember

the damage he’s done

to the weather of a loved one?

Or is there something more to it

that greets the heart

with everything that’s missing from the mind?

An inexplicable mystery

that reveals a starmap

of fireflies for the blind

that no one can follow

like the white cane of a tall ship

witching for water in hell

like a lightning rod.

And in heaven

a bloodline that isn’t wounded

by a grail of sad heavy wine

that cures the ailing kingdom of its symptoms

but not the longing of the disease

for the delirium of the dream

that broke it

like a water clock with a fever.

More heretic than believer

a crow balances

like a black umbrella

on a power line outside his window.

Looking at it

he sees an eclipse of the moon.

Total.

No exit

but time

maybe time.

Even the darkness must pass.

He takes it as a sign

that if he’s come this far

the future is well behind him.

He’s a star beyond shining

and there’s no way

even if he’s recalled from exile

even if he receives a look from someone

he can return to

they’re ever going to find him.

PATRICK WHITE

THINGS MIGHT BE DRIFTING AWAY

Things might be drifting away

like an empty lifeboat

with nothing left to save

but the memory of moonlight

on the rush of a wave of the heart

that rose and fell

like a bell of insight on the night watch

that said all’s well all’s well for the night.

And so it was for a while.

Time might seem

that it’s overstaying its welcome

and you’ve become the estranged guest

of a bad dream

in your own bed

in the thirteenth house of the zodiac

where the dispossessed

shack up with the misbegotten

and the ghosts of everything you’ve forgotten

don’t give you any rest

until all that you’ve cursed

out of anger and need

has been immensely forgiven and blessed.

And perhaps it appears

you’ve been the rogue star

of a sign in long exile

far away from now

and that might account

for your misplaced trust in mirrors

and your lack of confidence in star maps.

Happiness just happens

like good luck and grace

and the creative inspiration

to rejoice in your time and place here

as if the purpose of your voice

were always to praise

even on the darkest of days

when the only thing

that shone in your eyes

weren’t the stars you kept

locked away in your tears

like the face paint of clowns

or the crown jewels of the Pleiades

but a bitter farce of black holes

in the veils of the mirage

that eclipsed your enlightenment

with a starless night

it’s impossible to get beyond.

And so it may well be

for those who’ve been

as far gone for as long you have.

But even the blind are shining

though they can’t see it

and the deaf are still singing

though they can’t hear it

and the dead are still living

though they can’t feel it.

And those who have given up seeking

still find what they were looking for

like a loveletter with a return address

and an open door that recognizes them

like the prodigal threshold

of a homeless human

about to cross one more

like the last step of a long journey

that lost its way back in all directions

like the radiance of a star in space and time

that never took its eye off the past.

We cherish the flowers of summer that bloom last

more poignantly than those of the spring

because we feel our own hour of farewell

in the progress of their passing.

The sadness of an earthly excellence

fulfilled and surpassed

we see in the shedding of the aster’s petals

and in the lowering of the wild rose’s eyelids

and in the lengthening of the black walnut’s shadows

that move like cool water

across the dry grass of a late afternoon

signs of the same night approaching us.

And we know it will be dusk soon.

We’ll look up at the blue moon in late October

and whether the silos are full or empty

wonder if every harvest

wears the same death mask we do

with the smile of a scythe on its face

or if the goddess of the grain

bears true witness to

the perennial innocence of death

in the way she enhances

the white spectre of the first frost

to shock the garden down to its roots

with the same koan she uses

to enlighten the dew on the stargrass.

And you might dread the coming excruciations

of the scarecrow immolated on the pyre

of its own substance

like the short straw of flesh

that once sustained it

lost in a draw with death.

And come to scorn your heart like an urn

filled with ashes in the aftermath

of the same fire that once filled it

so full of desire to bloom

it could no more contain itself

than a seed can keep a secret from the spring.

You could see it that way.

And who among those clinging

like a blue atmosphere

to this homeless grain of dust

in the vastness of these sidereal immensities

within and without

that animate us like starmud

to join in this dance of life and death

like a legacy of shining

that can’t be washed out of our eyes

though tears have fallen for lightyears

on the root fires of what we’ve loved and lost.

Who among these

could say you were wrong?

Because no river’s flowing

the wrong way to the sea

in this reunion of arrivals and departures

at the stations of our afterlives

on this wheel of birth and death.

We’re all going to make it back

to where we came from

one way or another.

Some like rain.

Some like ice.

Some like snow.

Some like the lingering ghost

of morning mist on the lake

that’s gone before noon

and some like water on the moon.

The flowing of the river

summoned by the sea

to the source of its coming and going

is the calling of life everywhere

to transcend itself

by passing into the unknown

like the available dimension of a future

that’s no further beyond us

than the past is

in the light of distant stars.

The sword doesn’t wound itself.

Fire doesn’t burn itself.

Water doesn’t drown in itself.

And life doesn’t bleed out of itself

like the dream of a fortune-telling poppy

or a water clock that’s run itself to ground.

The eye isn’t the seeing.

The ear isn’t the hearing.

The tongue isn’t the tasting.

The skin isn’t the touching.

The voice isn’t the saying.

The brain isn’t the thinking.

The heart isn’t the feeling

anymore than life

is the carrying in

and death is the bearing out.

The darkness isn’t a lack of light

and the light isn’t the absence of night.

Death is unborn.

Life is unperishing.

Formless in a world of forms.

Two wavelengths of the same awareness.

You say you can see night gathering

under the door you’re afraid to answer

long before anyone knocks

and though you dream by your own light

you don’t know who’s casting the shadows.

Is sorrow any younger in the heart of a child

than it is in the memory of an old man?

Joy any less vivid in the eyes of an old woman

attending to the flowers in her garden

than it is in a girl having tea with her dolls?

Is this day not as new to the widow

as it is to the newly-wed?

Experience is the capstone and dunce-cap

of the sum of destructions

that made us who we are today.

And in life it’s the brilliance of our failures

that throws more light on the dark matter

of the issue before us

than all the star power

of the blazing successes

that blind us to our own shining.

You step out of a backlit doorway

into the dark

and slowly the darkness grows

the eyes you need to see the stars.

And maybe death is like that.

Nothing to look at but black

until we blow the candle out

that’s been misleading us all the way.

Maybe that’s why the jaws of skulls

are always caught gaping at something

that’s more than they can say.

But look at the expressions on their faces.

Maybe their eyes

are too overwhelmed by what they’re seeing

to want to get in the way.

You could see it like that.

You could see it through the eyes of the rain.

You can taste it on the tongue of a candleflame.

You can read it from right to left

in the Kufic script of the wind.

You can hear it in what the stars are whispering

through the keyholes in the pyramids.

You can feel it all around you

like bubbles of skin and air.

Like empty rooms with atmosphere.

As many ways and roads and rivers as there are

that flow into it down the world mountain

back to the sea

back to the same undifferentiated watershed

of these myriads of mystic specificity

and who could number them all

as many as the stars

or all the grains of sand

of all the deserts and beaches on earth

as many as the dead of every kind who’ve come and gone

all that blood mind passion dream and imagination

all those tears all that despair lucidity and apprehension

love and familial affection

all that waste and hatred and emotional sewage

dissolved wholly back into the sea

like a watercolour left out in the rain

like a name written on water

by a poet who died young

in a foreign language far away from home

just as birth arrays the universe before us

and says make of it what you can

so death approaches no less a peer of life

than we are in our relationship with all things

and offers us

the same great creative opportunity life does.

Green bough.

Dead branch.

Sunset.

Moon rise.

The hidden night bird alights

on either alike

and folding its wings

like gates and books

and the eyelids of those who dream

at the beginning and end

of a long dark radiant journey

sings.

PATRICK WHITE

IN PERTH ONTARIO TONIGHT

In Perth Ontario tonight the willows are drying

the new born pearl of the moon with their hair.

A small town in the dark is feeling smaller

in the enormity of the universe

that reveals its mystic intimacies

and then just as sublimely ignores it.

An East Indian family

is arranging the all night fluorescent lotus

of Mac’s Milk at four in the morning

the way I’ve seen ants

supervise the budding of white peonies.

Fuzzy’s ghost is scrutinizing

the sidewalk and parking lot

outside the Imperial Inn

looking for lost wallets

cash drugs earrings and watches.

He once amazed me before he died

with what he’d found after the bars close

and I could tell by the intelligence and passion

he infused into the search

and the revelation of how good he was at it

and how lucrative and lucid it was

to be a scavenger

that he was incorrigibly nocturnal

and this was his enlightenment path.

A long train whistle like a bawling calf

stuck in starmud down by the Tay River

where the loosestrife and goldenrod

fight it out over the wetlands

like complementary colours.

The smell of autumn stars on the wind.

The brittle petals of beer bottles smashed on Devil’s Rock.

I rejoice under my breath

in the bleakness of my solitude

as I make my way through the arsenal

of wooden pikes

and the masts of toppled birch

shipwrecked along the shores of the river

scouting out the best places to paint and stargaze

because it always makes me feel

one step closer to the absence of God.

Eyes gleam in the darkness

like arresting flavours of light.

Racoons muskrats and feral cats.

We have no business with each other

but we’re aware that the other’s there.

We freeze in a moment of mutual apprehension

and then get on with it.

The seeking and the need.

This emptiness that refuses to be full

in the midst of so much it could hunger for.

PATRICK WHITE

HONEYSUCKLE AND WILD RASPBERRIES

Honeysuckle and wild raspberries.

Enclaves of sap green shadows

where the grasshoppers take shelter from the sun.

Cerulean blue chicory by the side of the road

and star clusters of New England asters

thrust like a bouquet of constellations

through the broken down stave

of a cedar rail fence

that’s past caring

whether it keeps things in

or lets them out.

Here once

many years ago

I tried to live far away from pain

and here again

though I know better now

than to think paradise

is any kind of anodyne

my eye is caught off guard

by every manner of earthly excellence

that isn’t ambivalent or deceitful.

I once walked this dirt road

for five miles one night

followed by what looked like

a black wolf with ruby eyes

that flashed like an ambulance in the moonlight

every time I turned around

to see if it was still there

or if it were closing on me.

A fire walk of fear.

I won’t say I found courage that night.

I would say I was unscared.

The moon weaves silver dreamcatchers

for the spiders

and even the low growl

of a wilderness that’s grown curious about you

can be a liberating mantra.

I approach this place

like the creative imagination of a good teacher

unfurling the sails of the morning glory

like spare parachutes

to catch the wind

and sail all the way down the Yang-tze River

like the swans of anonymous loveletters.

Violet loosestrife and goldenrod.

Flowers are what

complementary colours look like

when they’re dancing.

And here I learned

picking up the skulls of squirrels and groundhogs

as if they were pinecones

and watching the bewilderment

of a wounded doe

try and fail to clear a fence

that would have been child’s play to her yesterday

and the two children

buried before they were four

at the turn of the century

up on the top of the high hill

under a shipwreck of an oak

that’s never put to sea

how death is as equally acceptable to life

as life is to death.

The wild grapevines

are writing their own kind of music

drunk on whole notes

and the dragonflies are coming down

like C.I.A. drones

on cells of terrorist mosquitoes.

Though I’m cellularly immersed in it

there’s a gap between me and nature

that isn’t so much the space between

one thing and another

as it is a bubble of thought and passion

in a great sea of vivifying awareness

washed up on the shores of consciousness

like a bottle from a faraway place

with no message inside

except light years and light years of longing.

Nature is the midwife of a serial killer.

Nature is the dark mother that gives birth to all things.

Nature is a metaphor for me

as I am for it.

A coincidence of the contradictories.

Closer than a face is to its own reflection.

Closer than the sea is

that wraps this airy nothing in a skin of water

and then treats it to the tattoo it’s always wanted

on its birthday

like the sign of the house it was born under

in the black stars of an unforgettable constellation.

Someone once said

that death was self-containment.

I disagree with that.

Life is a bubble.

And poof !

In the twinkling of an eye

there goes the neighbourhood.

Death is rapid expansion into the open.

Life toes the threshold

but it’s death that crosses it

and enters its homelessness

like the primordial atom

on the road to nowhere

that isn’t here and now.

Down to the swamp

to check out the water lilies.

I painted down here for years

with a French easel as shaky as a fawn

getting up on its folding legs for the first time.

A blue heron snaps the air like a wet sheet

and startles the frogs into popcorn.

Life soup.

Green scum.

A deer path

and a beaver

repairing a mud hut

that would have turned into civilization

if it hadn’t harvested trees

instead of grass.

You can hear the silence

of a watchful presence

over and above the sounds

of life going on all around you

when you’re alone in a marsh like this.

You can smell the transformation

of the duff and decay

into the beauty food of the waterlilies.

You can tine the air like the tongue of a snake

and taste the cauldron brewing

the eye of the newt

and the one-legged frog

into the ambrosia of water hyacinths

as blue as Raphael.

I feel like the sorcerer’s apprentice

the first day on the job.

A praying mantis.

A Vietnam of dragonflies.

But what I saw here day after day

through all four seasons of the year

I’d come down here to paint

showed me nature is nurture

and life suckles at death’s tit.

But you can’t tell

who’s being raised by whose assassin.

Who’s the exit.

Who’s the entrance.

Because there’s just one big open gate

hinged like birds to the sky

with nothing written above it

as a sign of welcome or warning

and you’re greeted by nothing but your own presence.

And I’ve sat out here by myself

until the first light of morning

just to look for clues among the stars.

But the mysteries don’t answer you

like questions it occurred to you to ask

They go on and on forever

like wounded joys

the radiance and the wonder

cut so deep

they never want to heal.

You can appeal to the stars for clarity.

You can look for small suggestions in the grass.

You can get a feel

for where the wildflowers

like to gather in abandoned fields

and where the pioneers

who grew them in gardens

just behind the summer kitchen

like Bouncing Bet

whose sap they used for soap

buried the tiny children

who died of scarlet fever

under the crude grave stones

of the Canadian Shield.

And the hills they chose like nannies

to watch over them

with beauty and affection.

And the silence and the sorrow

of the long sparse walk

back down to the farm without them.

And when you put your ear up to their abyss

you’d swear you could hear their voices

asking you the same questions

that they asked of themselves.

Is there a meaning to all this

that’s more than just a flash

of lightning and fireflies?

Anything you can say or feel about life

that isn’t always two children shy of the truth?

PATRICK WHITE

ON THIS DARK NIGHT

On this dark night one by one together or alone may these words find your windowsill like whole notes and night birds and say something soft and kind to the singing-master of your voice that’s lost the heart to raise it again in praise of the art that you’ve made of your life. You may be looking through a starless window right now but it isn’t a starless life that misses the light. Shine. And give your eclipses equal time. You don’t need to seek the eventual forgiveness of the dark when it hasn’t committed a crime. Don’t accuse yourself of an innocence that’s still strong enough to be hurt by the things you’re open to. The tree stands out in the field to greet the lightning knowing in that one moment of contact there is so much bliss in kissing the head of the cobra you realize how intensely you live when you run the risk of being destroyed and you’re not. Hasn’t it always been so with the lovers of the world who divine something in their nature that transcends its contradictions heresies and conventional convictions with the rarity of their own humanity? You are not flotsam. You are not jetsam. You are not salvage scattered along an impoverished coast that lives by stripping the dead of their lifeboats. May these words bury the drowned sailors with gold earrings dangling from their earlobes like small planets in orbit and whisper something mystically intimate over their graves. The hunter home from the hill. The sailor home from the sea.

We antagonize our lives until one day they turn the darkness around on us and surprise of surprises savage us as if we worked harder than we needed to to deserve it. We punish ourselves prophetically for things we haven’t done yet. You can hear the air raid sirens of the future screaming in bedlam from wherever you are on the earth tonight. The angels are assigned to painting the plague-doors and the banshees get to howl at the windows like death masks come to fit their faces to the original. It’s not so different from now. Even what we’re living right here this moment came with a warning yesterday that we didn’t abide. That’s how you get to the other side. If you’re a great spiritual warrior you build a bridge like the Canadian Army in Afghanistan and let that do the talking and the walking for you. If you’re still more apprenticed to the truth than you are compassion. You build a life raft. And when you get to the other side you pick it up like a new religion and carry it around like a turtle on top of your head for the rest of the duration as if you’d been saved from something you knew wasn’t true. Hallelujah. You’re an ark without immigrants stuck in the Taurus mountains with no way of coming down. A lost cause is the theme song of a noble exile that has condemned themselves to solitude to keep from coming face to face with the hard bitter truth of a self-inflicted wound. It’s the lost cause that catches on like a black sheep the shepherd’s gone to look for not the other ninety-nine that won. Every act of creation is the destruction of the way things are. You wound the pristine whiteness of the blank canvas everywhere in harmony with itself with a slash of cadmium red whether you’re wielding a paintbrush or a scalpel. A rose of blood in the snow. Your passion bleeds out. Do the slain ask forgiveness of the slayers? Is the sacrificial Judas-goat the natural prey of God? When have the sins of the people not been blooded by false messiahs talking of peace with swords under their tongues? Wherever whoever whatever you’re looking for tonight banging your head on the doorframe of an empty room to keep the ghosts at bay or staring long and hard at these words just outside your window trying to make up for the lack of stars may they ease the agony awhile with cool herbs of light. May these words offer you new grails for the older ones that are bleeding out. I cast them out like spells like seeds like cures like meteors with upgraded DNA in their nickel-iron cores. I cast them like Persian violets out of the vertigo of a Sufi dancing at the crossroads of the sun because in the desert the gender of the sun is feminine. And the moon is a masculine cross dresser. I throw these words like swords of tribute into your sacred mindstream from the middle of the Rainbow Bridge here in Perth one warrior to another who knows that water is a higher path to follow than blood. I despair when I think these words might not do you any good. To be enlightened by a comet is not as good as being enlightened by a star but that doesn’t mean it blazes a trail for nothing. Make of it as you will. But make of it. Something. Your own. Without reference to anyone. A species of flower that blooms once only seventy-six years by the light of Haley’s comet. If there is a God consider the endless possibilities of what that might mean to her. A new way of looking at her own creation. She looks at it through your eyes and sees what you mean about living the way you do. Before you how could she have known? It’s hateful to be alone when you’ve already been alone too much. Make yourself up and get out on stage. Everyone’s a born actor. What are you doing sitting alone by yourself in the audience waiting for the play to begin? Let yourself in on what your heart is saying to the blind. You just took the play off the stage to play witness to your mind. But the play is less clear to the audience than it is to those on stage. Turn the page like an apple blossom a butterfly Queen Lear junk mail an obsolete calendar with all the eclipses crossed out like plague doors the last diary entry of a suicide or the Doomsday Book and whether you’re the villain or the heroine of the story express yourself to the utmost as if that were just as true as anything else in a spontaneous universe where evolution is the improvisation of a mutant not a shining example of the way things are. Be a rogue star and forego your place in the scheme of things. You don’t need to design a wardrobe for a dream out of hip high-fashion magazines. Expose it naked if you must. Expose it to art. Expose it to lust. Expose it to the shock of cemeteries and the people on the street waiting for the same long sleep to shame them back into life so they can reveal who they were to us like a spiritual kind of lap dance that expects a big tip and a signing bonus. One risk in seven has a chance of not getting snake-bit by the dice. But seven come eleven. Roll them again. Win lose or draw the danger’s not in vain. Your hands are warm and your breath is lucky. Why drop out of sight like a window when you know there’s nowhere you can hide the sky? All those stars that depend on you to keep looking at them are a dead give-away. What cause could ever be lost if the final effect is a universe that stops like a stranger at your gate and asks you for your blessing and your curse as if both resided in the same shrine like time and space and the Janus-faced hinges that turn both ways when you let someone in? Or someone out? Bliss and pain are the same breath. The same lover you turned away is the lover you summoned. He came. He went. He heard what you had to say. Saw what you had to show him. You breathe love in and then you breathe it out like roses and blood and oxygen. Worthy of joy are you unworthy of lament? Sorrow doesn’t wear a widow’s weeds or wear a veil of snakes to hide her face from the light like a black mirror that’s afraid of turning to stone. There might be frost on the sundial but that doesn’t mean there aren’t gypsy poppies deep within you in full bloom fore-telling the misfortunes of blue bloods that abuse the heart. You can mistake the prophetic skull of the moon sometimes for the lustre of a pearl of great worth and when you discover how your eyes have lied to you go diving among the corals for another that’s just as forsaken as the first. You can learn to breathe underwater through the silver gills of the moon as if you were swimming through stone. You can usher shipwrecks to their final resting place on the bottom and inflate the tales of your descent into the depths of yourself like water wings on Atlantis. Or you can make a lifeboat out of a bubble of nothing in a denser medium than the uninhibited sky you used to fly in and learn to float until you break back into your own atmosphere like a cat burglar at a second-storey windowpane. On this dark night you can be the thief that steals the moon back like the cosmic glain from the snake that swallowed it promising to make it rain on the dry sea beds of the dead. You can plant the skull and crossbones in the moonscape of your lunacy to take possession of it and go on robbing shadows of their cargo with the one good eye you’ve got left that doesn’t need to be patched by a spiritual eclipse until it’s healed under the scars of its eyelids. You can keep it open until the rest of us can see in the dark nearly as clearly and as far as you can.

PATRICK WHITE

NOT MYSELF AND NOT OTHERWISE

Not myself and not otherwise

I endure this discipline of emptiness

into the black hole singularities of my heartfelt extremes.

Rimbaud may have called out for

a rational dissociation of the sensibilities

but that’s just a Maenadic rerun

of an orthodox Orphic dismemberment.

Anti-self on the backside of the cross

asking us all to die

like an alibi

to forgive its sins.

And there are stone calendars

in the Ye Olde Cemetery

who’ve realized like Mayans

since they died out

that we all start raising the dead

the moment life begins.

The star of Isis through the veils of the willows

that lifted like rain.

The face of the Queen of Heaven

stapling posters of the missing

on telephone poles all over town

looking for her lost lover’s body parts

in the Cubist deserts of the Jack of Hearts.

Post-modern neo-deconstructionism.

But ask any asteroid or dinosaur

any hitch-hiker or tractor trailer

or the hadron particle accelerator

you’ve got to bring things together

before you can make a collision

that will tear them apart.

Union individuates.

Like koans and yokes and handcuffs

the oxymorons of the future

will be enslaved

by their reciprocal attempts

to escape the chain-gangs

of their tyrannical freedom.

Enlightened criminals.

The moon leaves out a saucer of milk

for a stray cat

wandering among the vandalized graves

like a leftover from Halloween.

The darkness is human and cruel.

The unliving molest the dead.

The air is charged with a significance

that doesn’t mean anything

though it expects to be fully understood.

There’s nothing very happy about the sin

of taking an approach toward life

as if it were a curse

you felt compelled to be grateful for.

There’s a white styrofoam cup

bobbing in the reflection of the moon on the Tay River

as if it were trying to raise some carbonized elixir

up to its cracked and dessicated lips.

Hell has its grails too.

Its river Styx.

Its next eclipse.

I look at the brick chimney

of the Old Brown Shoe Factory

and the smokeless urn

of its towering shadow

reflected upside down in the water

and I feel like the ghost of a nightwatchman

still making the rounds.

The butterflies of early nineteenth century industrial Manchester

adapted to the soot that left

the patina of an eclipse on the trunks of the trees

and on the souls of men and women

like the mascara of despair.

Taking evolution to heart

I’ve tried to evolve in the very same way

so that my species can survive me.

One man’s furnace

is another man’s chrysalis.

All the loveletters to the earth that I used to write

and burned on the nightshift

are scattered on the wind

like the ashes of black butterflies

and there’s no honey in the hive

of a bitter urn.

The song birds are all writing elegies

to make a big hit

with the turkey-vultures and the crows.

And a poet no more needs an audience

than roadkill needs an undertaker.

I’ve adapted to the way things are

but the night is a lot dirtier

and I’m further from the stars

than I used to be.

PATRICK WHITE

IF A BRAIN CELL

If a brain cell went looking for its mind

what do you think it would find?

Itself as it were transformed

like the birds in Ibn Attar’s poem?

The same I by which I am God

is the I by which God is me

to pun a little on a Christian mystic?

Would there be a grail

a fountain

a lifting of the veils?

Would I see me as I am

whole and sweet and radiantly enlightened

or just another victim

of P.T. Barnum’s dictum

that no man ever went broke

underestimating human intelligence?

Oudeis aneile peplon.

No one has lifted my veils.

So says Isis the Queen of Heaven.

But maybe the subtlety of it is

no one can

as long as there’s any I am

left about them.

Maybe there’s just a seeing.

No seer.

No seen.

What would that mean?

Spiritual optics aren’t Manichean?

Pure awareness?

But what could taint it in the first place?

We don’t think of the mirror as ugly

because it reflects an ugly face.

And this hall of mirrors goes on forever

like M theory in hyperspace.

Percussive membranes

and resonant strings

jamming with the celestial spheres

when physics turns to jazz

to express the multiverse

like Mingus playing Mozart.

If a brain cell went looking for its mind

what do you think it would find?

A lot of brain cells like it

up in over their head?

Like the Zen master said

looking for your mind with your mind

is like looking for your flashlight

with your flashlight.

It’s right where it’s always been.

The flower is red.

The grass is green.

Or maybe we’re all just watching shadows

on a cave wall

sitting with our backs to a fire

people are passing in front of

we mistake for the whole of reality

while there’s a fully enlightened mindscape outside

we conceive of as madness

as Plato wrote

should anyone care enough

for the future of human awareness

to mention it.

No news is good news

for those who are indebted to it.

Maybe we’re just tiny pieces of a bigger puzzle

and every ant heap

and beehive of our society

is just the way we muzzle ourselves

to keep from stinging each other to death.

Or maybe society’s just the big stone

we put on the chest of the living

as well as the dead

to keep them from rising again?

Why must evil not only be done

but be seen to be done

more often than good?

Why do we treat uranium

with more respect

than we do oxygen?

Is apocalypse more photogenic

or death less camera-shy

than the Big Bang

at the beginning of things?

If a brain cell went looking for its mind

what do you think it would find?

Fourteen hundred and seventy-five c.c.s

of neo-cortical laminations

etched like a Somalian famine

into the parched faces of the good earth

where the Garden of Eden

has turned into a black market

as a sure sign of an advanced intelligence?

Three and a half pounds of starmud

left here like a Martian cowpie

when the cow jumped over the moon

to graze like methane on the ozone?

One half the world is grass.

The other half are grazers.

Control eating and you control the world.

Withdraw the food from a child’s mouth

like foreign aid

saving thirty pieces of silver

and hope that her blood and flesh

turn into the bread and wine

of the bleeding heart that’s sent to save her.

Martyrs are a dime a dozen these days.

And messiahs come and go

like the internecine factions of a holy war.

If a brain cell went looking for its mind

what do you think it would find?

A secret stash of C-four

inside the skull

wired like a nervous system

to the occipital wavelength of a cosmic detonator

attached at the waist of a judas-goat

waiting to blow the ideological roof

off a school house learning to read

the writing on the wall

as a sure sign from God

that when he embraced

an intelligent design to the universe

in the form of a human

he embraced it

like a terrorist embraces someone

armed to the teeth by the same religion.

Who could have guessed

an opposable thumb

would one day be replaced by a trigger?

You figure?

If a brain cell went looking for its mind

what do you think it would find?

Chaos in bed with the Cosmos

like Venus and Mars

making a cuckold

of high technology

with a bad limp

and horns on its head?

The Taj Mahal or Hitler’s Bunker?

Though we prize it to death

what if consciousness

is of no value whatsoever?

Without purpose or meaning or worth

anywhere in the multiverse?

Merely the slurry and foam and froth

of a creative process it plays

little or no part in

except as something that needs to be disposed of.

Something is happening here Mr. Jones.

But you don’t know what it is do you?

A shoreless thought wave

trying to break into light

on the coast of its unending homelessness.

A bad dream that kept space awake

the night before the Big Bang

said it was time to rise and shine.

If a brain cell went looking for its mind

what do you think it would find?

The rock that struck Goliath in the head?

Or the black meteorite they kiss at the Kaaba?

The philosopher’s stone

or the Zen asteroids of the Buddhists?

Maybe something heretofore unknown

so intimately precious

and immanently radiant

it eclipses its own seeing

in the blaze of its being.

Or a realm of dark boundless hyperspace

so sensorially incomprehensible

we don’t realize

that with every blink of our eyes

with every breath we take

and let go of

with every thought

with every gust of feeling

we’re making waves in spatial membranes

like fireflies caught in the curtains of insight.

Cosmic eggs that break out of their shells

like atoms and eagles

and expand their wingspan into new worlds

like the brainstorm of bubbles

that follows the flash of lightning

that sets them free to be what they want.

It’s amazing what you can lose along the way

in the ardent pursuit of something else.

Your mind for example

until you begin to suspect

that it’s your seeking

that lost touch with it in the first place

and all you’ve done since you set out

to find it

is ramble on

like a long unanswered letter home.

So much scar tissue

for such a little wound.

Maybe there’s something worse

than not being blessed or cursed with a mind

that isn’t smooth or rough

sweet or sour

light or dark

loud or silent

big or small

and resembles nothing so much

as nothing at all.

Even to be a puppet

sitting on the lap

of an unvoiced intelligence

speaking through us

to a nameless audience

that hangs on every echo

as if they’d said it in the first place

might be better than posing a riddle

that baffles the Sphinx

with the way time thinks about things

like a human with stars in its eyes

that even the most bitter tears can’t wash out

nor all the facts in the world

cast doubt upon.

Maybe we’re just a shadow of space

with no place in the scheme of things

try how we may to deceive our wavelengths

they’re the warp and the woof of the weave

and not the stray threads

of our unravelling bloodlines.

Maybe the pointlessness of our existence

means there’s no capital at the beginning

so no one can pretend

that where they started from

and where they wound up

isn’t the same open-ended theme of life

that can’t be wounded at the beginning

and doesn’t need to be mended at the end.

Maybe the absurdity of believing in nothing

is the creative opportunity of a lifetime.

Maybe one day Sisyphus

just rolls his rock up over the hill

because there’s nothing predictable about cosmic laws

and the ongoing success of his happy descent is effortless

and worth so much more in the endless effect

of finding himself free of his drudgery

than the cause would have been

if it were not lost upon him

from the boundless beginning.

Maybe longing and seeking

the enlightened fragrances

of flowers and stars

blooming in the moonless night wood

is the way life seduces us deeper

into the darkness of being

the only living witness of our solitude.

PATRICK WHITE