POETRY

Poetry isn’t a talking fly

on a one way street in a lightning storm; isn’t the orchid

that issued from the sword in the snakepit

that penned whatever it saw in stone. What does this mean?

Forty-one years of trying to push

the singularity of the universe

through the eye of a needle as large as the reasons why

without twisting the thread of the original theme,

without shrinking the sky to an umbrella

in a glass skull freaked with insistent translucencies.

Poetry isn’t breast-fed by a doting Medusa

who will excuse your wailing with a pat on the back

as you try to configure your verbal relations; it’s not until

the lantern’s overturned and all the stars and fireflies go out

and your mouth is stitched shut like a wound

that will never heal, and the flowers latch their honey-gates

in a surprise eclipse, and even the worm is a lonely comet

in the eye of the rose that called for your annihilation,

that the wonder of having nothing to say for no reason

begins to gather like light in the wishbone of a harp

and sings to amuse the silence

with the posthumous profundities of its own retraction

like a drop of water crying down a mirror

that didn’t know it cared. Free yourself

of what you think you have to say about anything

to hear the urgent fountain-mouths of eyeless dawns

that write with the beaks of frenzied birds

that have absorbed the night like ink. Live

on the underside of the leaves that never fall

from the unpruned tree on the moon

if you want to know the nightmare of the spider

webbed to the morning like a poem

between two blades of stargrass.

There’s a storm with a candle in it

that isn’t a leftover star, more powerful

than the black-outs of the lightning

that seizes the heart like a hawk

and slashs it open,

a love-letter to the world with a knife,

to see what’s truly phrases your blood to the moon.

Do you understand, do you truly understand;

there’s a firefly in the grave,

a soft, shy light like the glow of a distant city

pearled on a blind horizon, a black mirror

that absorbs the faces it reflects like death,

so much brighter than the white hole

of all that you’ve been saying

that even the stars are maggots of light,

commas in the wake of summer swans,

compared to the oceanic radiance of that shining.

Drown your paper lifeboats in that,

add your grief like a river to the nightsea

you’ve been walking on like a messiah with a map,

and let go of yourself like an apple from a bough.

Do you see the blossoms of the orchard

swept up in the gutters of the busy world

working hard at its own extinction; those

are the withered eyelids of poems,

the useless sails of spineless foolscap

lined with blue horizons

that asked you where you were going

and because you answered like a compass

left you breathless at the equator, junk-mail

on the doorstep. The world has been discovered,

the metal capitals starred like jewels;

the real estate offices crammed with valleys and lakes.

Sink like a continent that can’t be colonized

and show me the thresholds you’ve sloughed like skin,

the footprints of your transformations

where you jumped from the tree

that swung you like a bell

and walked away deranged

by the solitude of your dangerous humanity.

Look for a door with a broken hinge and enter.

Stop carving your name on your bones

like the prows of old shipwrecks, dismiss that harem

of painted figurines you’ve bound

to the mast of your bow like a pen

and learn what it really means

to be destroyed by a living muse,

to hear the sirens singing you to death.

There’s a ram and an altar on the world mountain

waiting for you to drag yourself up there

like an avalanche of dead meteors

and plunge the last crescent of the blood-crazed moon

through your heart like a sacrifice

in the name of nothing at all

if you want to true the wind

to the womb of your ghostly poems

with embryonic whispers of “I am. I am. I am.”

PATRICK WHITE

LONG AGO

Long ago I learned to forgive

yesterday’s shadows

like the daggers of a dead assassin

I melted down into bells

without occasion to sing.

I was tenderly adamant

about the need for compassion

and hung them from the loftiest towers

like iron fruit or rain frozen in its descent.

Only the conceptualists

indulge in perfect virtues

and mine, at best,

are improvised approximations

of the dark whispers

of the blind fish

that swim in the watersheds of my heart.

And there was no other way

of pouring the infection out of the wound

except by inviting the maggots to the feast.

I reproached them all

with the wisdom of a mirror

for relishing the worst of me.

It’s hard to remember sometimes

that even flies have a dignity of their own,

if no honey,

and even the city rose

turns into an old, well-thumbed book eventually,

an index of celebrity desecrations.

I kept my eclipses and dragons

up my bounteous sleeves

and took the trembling stagefright of the stars

cowering behind their cardboard hills seriously.

Whatever the mind realm,

whatever facet of the jewel turning in the growlight,

whatever feather of the spirit

soaring overhead with a twig of fire

or groping below like a star-nosed mole,

my heart turned into a lifeboat, a well, a telescope,

and I hauled everyone up and in and out of themselves

until the moon began to look like a pulley

and there was an echo in the siloes

of my exhortative sufficiency.

Sometimes the galaxies 

were easier to save than the candles,

but I applied my whips and swans lovingly

I was a good oar on a seaworthy vessel

and eventually my heart turned into a rudder.

I launched every pulse in the name of the unknown

and soon found myself a stranger

in the eyes of the people who had climbed to safety

up the nets and rope-ladders

I learned to fashion from my spinal cord.

I wasn’t a rudder on a lifeboat anymore;

I was a dead shark, dorsal down,

lethal, a meat-plough.

Nobody knew me as I was.

I struggled deeply within myself

to assume the throne of my isolation,

my heart freaked by the hazard 

of random lightning strikes,

challenged by demons

I could not win against,

crescent moons that broke off 

in my throat and voice like teeth.

I became the nightwatchman

of pleading shadows laid out

like corpses in a morgue,

a lamp in the arms of its own journey,

while their bodies walked around delinquently.

And the shining was black, the light,

an eerie pollen of the night,

an indelible soot lasered like destiny

on the sheets and sails of a soul I could never wash out,

a luminosity that just didn’t open

the moths and flowers like letters

but rewrote them, a transformative mirror,

an eclipse of the sun

that rises within at midnight,

an illumination that didn’t just reflect

but imagined the things of the world into being

and went on changing them,

mutating them,

seer and seen alike

on the same side of the mirror

that suggested them into existence inconceivably,

though there was no existence

or non-existence

to exit or enter by.

My seeing grew cold and impersonal,

space, a straitjacket of glass,

my heart, an ancient ice-berg on the moon,

and with a shriek of mouthless perception

my blood was blanched into flowing diamond.

I dared to look upon suffering,

my own and the pantomime of others,

as the flaring of a brutal creative fire

that wracked the world in an unwitnessed dream

lonelier than the wind without a star or a candle.

And I knew it was saying me

behind the mask

of every hopeless word I uttered.

And I saw at the dark gate

that reason was only another peer of the realm,

and there was an infinitude 

of skys and windows beyond

that my eyes hadn’t grown into yet,

flying like a bird into the vision

until only the vision remained,

and there were intimate metals in every rock

that had been confided into being like a secret.

Reason was merely a prim shadow

in the cosmic fire-womb

of the original madness

to make the hidden known,

whispering the world

into its own ear like a blasting cap.

Everything exists to know the hidden

as a robe of its own blood,

the taste of stars in the sap 

of the sugar maples in spring,

whether the cool mushrooms of her lips

that she offers up in the night

under the evergreens

are dangerously hallucinogenic,

or tenderly toxic, white angel or fly agaric.

I found it important to learn

what doesn’t make me happy,

and then to learn

that there isn’t anything that would

as I long as I persisted

in looking for the meaning of my joy,

the replicable reason

that would let me breed it

like a butterfly or a silkworm in captivity.

Now bliss comes when it does

naked and adorned,

impoverished and squandering,

and my heart is more of an empty, open hand

than a fist clenched around

something it feared to lose.

Haven’t you noticed the sad drinkers

in the all night taverns

who age faster than the wine in their glasses

as soon as they start

to con the god into staying,

make a cage of the tree

to snare the elusive nightbird

that enhances their darkness

with a voice hinged to a doorway of light?

And the theorists trying to sweep

the ashes of stars

immolated in their own light like moths

off their thresholds with tweezers?

And those who live like pharaohs

under pyramids of quicksand

they’ve made of their heart

anticipating afterlives

that look a lot like this one

when the bandages will come off

like the brittle eyelids

of a shedding rose

and the bull harps will seed the moon again

and the echo at the end of the dream

won’t be just the voice of another used beginning.

PATRICK WHITE

THERE, YOU SEE, I LET YOU GO

THERE, YOU SEE, I LET YOU GO

There, you see, I let you go, just like that, open my hand

like milkweed, like dandelion, a grave full of ghosts

and let space take the parachutes and parasols,

chimney-sparks and fireflies in a gust of wind by a dark lake,

and I wonder if the stars, too, are a way of saying good-bye,

if the blood drapes its lanterns in black

after the light has fled

and latches the gate with a question, if

the sun dies in the apricot after it falls,

if the branch is sadder by the weight of one bird

or if the fruit it bears like tears is enough

to go on conducting the requiem of your absence,

because we are just an eye of water at the end of a leaf,

a match plummeting down a well,

a tiny fury of seeing that scalds the watershed

with the hiss of a cat, a feather of flame, and dies,

the dreary slag of a dwarf moon, a black, pitted skull.

And who would believe such a desolate thing,

was once a red bud on a paper stem, dreaming of flowers,

imagining the dawns that would come of its flaring,

or the constellations that might recruit its shining;

now the head and thorax of a dismembered insect,

a pygmy matador robbed of its scarlet cape,

its anonymous corpse, the only gravestone

to say it once existed among the radiant, a meteor, a comet,

a star doused in the morning light, an orchid of fire

at the end of an exclamation mark that shocked nothing

by its Luciferian fall from grace, no more than a wounded kite

that mistook itself at the end of its tether

for a phoenix with other lives. And the spring is green

and the rain trips delicately off the plectra of the leaves and petals,

and everywhere there is the frenzy of growing things,

blue carillons of liberated bells, but I am alone

with the battered asteroid of my own insignificance

far from light and water, in a straitjacket of space,

a minor bead on a rosary of greater planets,

a nugget of injured iron in the gold-pan gleanings of the sun,

the seed cast away, the extinguished stone

of a directionless house of worship

with nothing in my loins but the ghosts of the evicted poems

that once lived there, the pride of the desert tribes

before the nations of faith revised the unsayable silence

your eyes have left me like dry wells in the starless dark.

PATRICK WHITE

SWEET ONE, SAPPHIRE LAPWING

SWEET ONE, SAPPHIRE LAPWING

Sweet one, sapphire lapwing, killdeer, comet;

how haven’t I seen you in everything, casino stars,

the high fires on the mountain that bloom in the snow,

and the tangerine daylilies like the tents of the street lamps

watching the streaming serpents flow over their roots,

even the razorblades, paperclips and bicycle pumps

have signed your guestbook,

and the rose and the rose and the rose

I left for your poetry, on the grave of your soft eclipse.

You were so gentle about it; the way your words

slipped over and off the light, and your anger

that glowed like igneous subdued cherries, always

just a planet away from the darkness,

and the flaring emergency exits

that soaked the air with poppies:

you moved easily through yourself, kelp in a tide,

trailing your soft blue whips behind you

like the little threads of the stream where it meets the sea,

and something in you ends, and something else begins,

and you were grey and sad as an overcast Sunday morning

blue-greens of pagodas and pines,

and the mist that concealed your shrines.

And I realized I had to be water if I wanted to hear your voice,

and a few fireflies more, and I could see you alone in the haze

you wore like an ashen negligee, or a milky window.

Your life was all islands, and tulips clipped to butterflies,

Voices out of the dark, and the white birds that circled

the gaping mouths of your abandoned towers, like words

you’d left behind to remember the place.

And I recall thinking as I read

how much you drifted through your poems like a capsized boat,

and of all the life that goes on underneath the silver leaves,

and the things that take shelter there from the rain,

and who was in the boat when it overturned.

And I wonder who the woman was under the eyelids that felt

like big, heavy drops of rain where the stars

swam away from their pain, not fleeing

but moving off in easy schools of lantern fish.

You were a lens, a dark translucency,

but you washed things deliberately out of focus like fog

that veils everything in its water skin.

You marveled in shadows,

and there was a fire, a smudge of cedar

somewhere on a lonely beach with starfish,

a small bouquet you were trying to uphold in the wind,

and your life depended on that, that was the part

that couldn’t go out, and I think it was your heart.

And I heard the canary in the collapsed mines

trying to warn the miners to get out

but the warning always seemed to come too late;

And I began to wonder whether you

were coal on its way to diamond

or an ore with the moon inside

but it wasn’t until I stumbled across the smile of a knife

with your fingerprints all over the ivory handle

that I finally understood

that there had been a sacrifice, not a murder,

that you bled in the name of a lamb you once cherished,

and you must be young, or it would have been a goat.

Your poems were quick, impressionistic sketches

of a girl jumping from stone to stone across a creek

with an affection for her loneliness as if

all the dandelions had gone into exile.

I wasn’t quite sure what came out of the silk cocoons

you hung everywhere on the wet branches of your poetry,

sometimes I thought it was just you wrapped in blankets

and other times, dragonflies and violet fairies,

and there was hot honey in the sexual hives of your bees.

And I think I fell in love with your ghost before I did you

when I realized that every poem was the next bucket

of a waterclock that was trying to get something off its skin,

each a small pond where you renewed your virginity

by bathing in mirrors, and that was how you knew

what time it was, and where you had been,

by all the swirling faces that floated downstream.

And now, something has changed,

you open the windows wider

and let the world in, your grey blue-green lichens

are no longer the masks of the moon, and your poems don’t end

with the flags of who you are

flying at halfmast as much anymore,

though I can still hear the odd sparrow

brain itself to death with a thud against a glass sky

and I like the new depth in the guest dimensions of your seeing.

And there are stars showing up everywhere like migrant candles

in all the nebular nests of your being.

And I’ve stood here a long time now

and watched you rise shyly out of your poems

like the orange dancers in the forest who leap like flames

or the starmap of a mysterious constellation

I couldn’t identify above the hills of your body

until I saw it was the nightly journal of a blue panther

who had crept up on me in the invigilant silence from behind

as if two shadows had met in the dark like eyes and grapevines

and tangled up in each other like kites,

neither knowing where they began

or how they would end, if ever,

confessed to the webs and the wines

that they were in love with each other,

that there was lightning in the powerlines at last,

and transformers everywhere going off like landmines

and a voice in the shining, that knew, without a word,

that they were the sign of legends who woke without a past.

PATRICK WHITE

AND THE POEMS SIT THERE

AND THE POEMS SIT THERE

And the poems sit there on the tracks,

on the shadows of serpentine ladders,

without engines, though moving, without diesels

to drive them, chain-letters to the world,

to a moment with nothing else to do,

to lonely abuses huddled by the flowering lamp

like fairies in boxes of shy plaster,

to broken windows who rage at the stars

for not accepting their jagged black holes,

to lovers who spend too long in the shower

pruning their gardens,

every ray of light in place

as they go out to pale their shining in the sun,

and the poppy girls with spider tongues

offering little green crowns to the bees, sit there

without moving, though moving,

pulling their hearts on long lifelines out of the void

that fuels their furnaces with crows,

that rescues drowned sailors from the rose of the sea,

that fangs the old lions with light

to pluck the one-stringed jugulars of radiant gazelles.

Two cobras dancing, the hold of our hands,

and the swans revealing their lizard roots,

and the rain a small violet in the rusty passions of the coffee-can

I don’t want to trade blood with the sour wine of the snails,

I’ve always had my own skull to drink from, and the water

of the dirty windows weeping in the morning,

and there are faces I can lap like mirrors for a taste of stars,

and bodies that unfold like single futons

patched with small maps of nocturnal sugar

that glow like prophetic ores from somewhere deeper in the mine.

Every morning I take my eyes out like contacts

and rinse them in the grave, wash off the residue

of yesterday’s visions, the smog and the dew and the soot,

the stagnant waters that cling to them like skies and skin

and the little rivers of blood that show you

an aerial perspective of the lightning, fireflies, stars, dreams

and the cinders of oil drum fires under all-night bridges

and the black commas of what’s left

of the butterflies in midnight webs. And there are cocoons of birth,

of transformations with wet wings emerging among the water hyacinths

and then there are the cocoons that hang like pendants

from the trophy lines of fat arachnids,

webs dripping under the weight of their hourglass stones

like torn suspension bridges and swaying spinal cords.

And it makes me so sad to see a door burn, a helical stairwell

straighten itself out to belong to a fire-truck,

and there are other things, sadder things,

ants with pruned antennae, dreams who think like used stamps,

the rainbow fingers of painted children

washed off under a cold tap,

and the breast of a pigeon undone like a pillow by a hawk,

the sad, abandoned look of heroic fire-hydrants

ready for action, that sigh like empty watering cans

as they pour their newly-enameled transplanted hearts out all over the street

like a wedding rehearsal that stood in for the bride

who’s burning in the walls of the groom like a flower of fire

in the lapel of a black tuxedo; so sad, so indefensibly stricken by grief

to know the paint rags are a better likeness of their sitters

than a face is, that there are tiny screams in the grass for mercy

that are only answered by a praying mantis,

and agonies of crushed centipedes that die like eyebrows

and the hides of mangy crosswalks thrown down on the street

like zebras; so unbearably sad in an avalanche of tortoise shells

excavated for their meat like raped bells with their tongues cut out,

my mouth turns into a wound,

and every word’s a galaxy of salt.

PATRICK WHITE

NIGHTBIRD ON A WINTER BRANCH

NIGHTBIRD ON A WINTER BRANCH

Nightbird on a winter branch.

Dark blossom of the new moon,

Last kiss on the eyelids of the dead

As the snow falls like apple bloom.

I see you’ve left the door ajar:

The backdoor of an eclipse

To let the first crescent of the light out.

The sacred syllable of the mistfits

Lost in the silence and the solitude

You raise like heretical mystics into songs

That only you alone can sing

So that each in their homelessness belongs

To the false dawn of the same secret

They weep over like empty lockets

That stole the moon from their windows

As they burned at the stake, rockets

Martyred in the fire of the holy books

That inspire them deeper into exile

This late at night far from anywhere

Distance is measured by the mile

And not the wingspan of the light-years

It’s taken me to write this.

Like a bird that flew out of the darkness,

That left no trace of the witness

As it blew a kiss of sudden insight.

A word in passing from the dead

About who’s behind the death mask

Of the snow that’s covering my head

Like the polar ice cap of a planet

With the prophetic wisdom of a skull.

Life in the birthmark of the new.

Death in the harvest of the moon at full.

Emptiness devoid of all light.

The first sign of renewal in the urn

Of a nightbird on a winter branch.

Diamonds of ice and insight that burn

Like coal in the eyes of a snow man

With the passion of a phoenix born

A star in the cold furnace of the sky.

Where every passage is a rite of return

That hides its brightest jewels

blossoming like enlightenment on the wing

In the dark ore of a nightbird

When a deathmask opens its mouth to sing.

PATRICK WHITE

AND THOUGH IT'S DARK AND COLD NOW

AND THOUGH IT’S DARK AND COLD NOW

And though it’s dark and cold now

in this ice palace of broken windows

that don’t know whether to bite their lips

or cut their wrists like a suicide

that took it one step too far

like an eclipse that went into exile

I remember the swell and release

of your breasts in moonlight,

rising and falling like a lunar tide.

I remember coiling my finger around

the soft chestnut tendrils of your hair

as if I were dialling a long distance call

to someone I knew light years from here

who was living her dream

like the black sheep of a shepherd moon

she was giving her life up to.

You were an atmosphere on the nightshift

on the intensive care unit of a hospital

applying a cool poultice of moonlight

to the volcanic burns

of more terminal passions

than I ever aroused in you.

Or thought I ever could.

Though time stopped

dead in its tracks like a coma

whenever I was around you

and everything the good doctors

found incurably bad about me

suddenly went into remission,

I knew I was merely

a minor miracle in your life.

Intermission. Time out. One day

every four years to tune up the calendar

A blue moon in late October

after the harvest’s in

and the small birds

are gleaning the rags of a garden.

Canada geese in the cornfields

shredding the last documents

of an abandoned embassy heading south.

We were Indian summer

together for awhile both knowing

the frost would come soon enough

and one morning I would wake up

and look through the window

on your side of the bed

and say, hey, look, it’s snowing

and you wouldn’t be there.

And when the time came, you weren’t.

And I spent the next six years of my life

numb with understanding

in the snake pit of a Zen morphine drip

blessing the beauty of the knife

and the wound you left me with

like a thorn of light under the eyelids

of a new moon in full eclipse.

An eyepatch over the third eye

of an enlightened planet

that felt just like any other

starless night on earth without you.

And though I hurt like a lamp

that couldn’t see you

even when the sun shone at midnight

I knew enough about attachment even then

not to hold up hope

like a cage to the wind.

I never laid a trap line

along the path you took to leave.

I let the silence and the solitude

I returned to like a night bird

to a white-out deep in the woods

efface your footprints in the snow.

I knew I had to stay.

And I knew you had to go.

That one mile east is one mile west

like two feet going in opposite directions

down a road that doesn’t have any.

And though sometimes I look

at the moon these days

and say to myself

what a little scar it is

to cover so much

that’s dark and wounded

about the human heart,

I still haven’t changed the broken windows

I often find myself standing before

to take a long, good, hard,

dark, radiant look at life

to see if it’s still crying outside,

for a thermal-paned, fire-walled website

prophetically updating the virtual weather.

I’m still throwing stones

with loveletters attached to your absence

like the moon through the windows

of a glass palace in an ice-age

I know will thaw by itself in time

like the whirling Castle of Arianrhod,

the hot gem of Celtic heaven shining

in the afterlife of the Northern Crown

down upon these small human acts

of estranged encounters with our own kind

where we meet each other in passing

at the gate of a cosmic garden

that no one was tending at the time,

and long after the one has gone their way

and the other has gone inside.

Long after the flowers have died

that were strewn across

each others’s paths through life

like the spring on a windy night;

no matter how vulnerable it makes us

to being a prime candidate

among many with their sensible shoes on

to firewalk barefoot

on a starmap of burning thorns

into the darkness of enlightenment

to stay attached to the unattainable

the way we both were to the same stars.

Even when the morning glory

overruns the New England asters,

we leave the gates thereafter open

as if the whole heart of the dark matter

of why we love and suffer, bloom

and come to fruition

in the light of each other

as if the aurora borealis

that mystified our nights on earth

with the sheen of cool Persian silks of insight

blowing over the flesh and blood of mystic serpents

then die back into our brief lifespan

like a solar flare back into its sunspots

were still hanging

on one star

one eye

one wing

one prayer

one hinge.

PATRICK WHITE