ARE YOU BORN YET

Are you born yet, you who will understand this
when I have receded like a wave into the foam
of oncoming stars, no more than a cachet
of this remote flowering in the darkness,

one man’s indeterminate attempt

to carry the cherished fire

of his own indefensible humanity

like lightning in a battery

with umbilical cables and fangs

to jumpstart yours in a dark, cold time

that hasn’t happened yet? Are you there sometime

up ahead beyond this boundless falling

ignorantly pure and ferocious as I was

springing out of the nebular hypothesis of your own breath

like a tiger of light on the jugular of the judas-goat

life chains to a wounded cross of southern stars to catch you,

the crux australis of the issue? How many times

have I pictured you in the albums of futurity

tracking these words of mine back to me

in the lair of this particular day

trying to anaesthetize its own wounds

with the cleansing pyre of an antiseptic tongue?

This very moment that’s already gone

I imagine you glaring out of an overgrowth

of brindled shadows, arrogant and uncompromising,

the brutal judge of your own earthly excellence,

hunting alone, or trying to unmarrow

the message in the bones I’ve left

like gold in a bottle of ore, fireflies in a grave,

or a constellation in a folder of night skies

stamped for the black crescents of your eyes only,

these prophecies of chaos that only you can true

to the book of changes I leave you.

If you are young when you come to these skulls

like rain to the headstones around the ashes of old fires,

respect what must be you in time as well

as if it were your own reflection erased like a phoenix

from the gaping mirrors of witless carbon

that are all that remains of anyone’s renown,

the black dwarfs of a critical collapse of light.

But if you are old and marooned

on a glassblown island in a barefoot desert

when you stumble across these shoes in the dark

I’ve sent on ahead like the footprints

of who and where I might have been, don’t hesitate

to put them on like an urgent journey

to the circlet of the western fish

and dance your way back upstream

into the star shed of the oasis eyes

that spawned you from a dream,

your gray flesh restored, as it is today,

to the salmon rose of dawn, to the secret spring

of the key I buried like an equinox in Pisces

as an antidote to my own September crisis.

PATRICK WHITE

FLYAWAY WOMAN

Flyaway woman with a blue ladybug for a heart,

I am not your firetruck, or the glass wishbone you break

in case of an apple emergency when you split

like the seedcase of an eyelid into the angelic smear

of an orchid of smoke with dangerous doves for hands.

Leave me alone to the night that goes on in the depths

of the praeternatural river that threads the eye of the bridge;

and the fish that brain the darkness with the constancy

of thoughts and emotional lightbulbs

that keep tripping over their hairtrigger traplines

trying to illuminate their destiny

in the palm of the sceptical lightning

who does a bad imitation of God. Flyaway woman,

I could love the way you smile as if

you had a mouthful of coffin nails

and wanted to board the world up with plywood

so you could live like a rose in a hurricane

without blowing the sandbox cities

of the peninsular children away. Flyaway woman, tell me,

is your heart an orange in the fridge with green sunspots,

your body a ship that left yesterday

riding low in the water with a hold full of broken jewelry

to trade with the illegal immigrants

who would sell you a continental gram

for a single bead of rapture? Flyaway woman,

why keep the past alive in an album of angry mirrors,

and grieve like a wounded doe

all tangled up in a constellation of razorwire

waiting for someone to put you out of your misery,

when there’s more silence

in one of the moist plums of your accusing eyes

than there is the space the galaxies

douse their torches in? Flyaway woman,

I am not an arsonist in heat

with a bouquet of wooden matches

and a ragged doll of gasoline,

standing on your threshold with the smile

of a late-breaking headline. There’s no doubt

you’re a foreign queen

in a tormented hive of black honey, but I am not

the sticky bear that’s come to maul your secret bees.

I have my solitudes and voices that speak to me

like cemetery shovels just like you; and I know the terror

of being suddenly overturned by a sudden squall

on an ocean of seaworthy love-letters just like you.

And it’s true that life is often an S.O.S. in a soggy bottle

the keeps washing up at your feet in the morning

like a dead octopus in a kissing booth,

and there are watermelons full of razorblades

who come on like the dawn

and toads of lust who ask you to lick their backs

to craze you with a vision of angels rotting like sheets.

I can’t deny the world’s a house on fire

and there are slimy organizations of algae

that go from whore to whore,

asking you to write off your life

as a charitable donation

to child pornography; I cannot say the world’s a nun,

or there aren’t scars and skidmarks on the moon

from previous landings, forks

that strike like vipers at the olives in a nest,

but, flyaway woman, I am not your nemesis,

I am not the intellectual coathanger

that wants to tear the embryo out of your belief in me.

I live in the dark with terrible imaginings

and a raped ambulance that asks me

to get the lily of her siren to the hospital

for a blood test to prove we die in jest,

and I can’t recall how many dreams ago

the surgical swans and torn peonies

last came for a change of dressings,

the effusions of neglected roses

bruising the return addresses on their unbound bandages,

but flyaway woman, there’s an eclipse in my chest,

a crow in a furnace

trying to peck its way out like a spear,

and small scorpions of doubt

rehearsing requiems of bleached fire

on the keyboard of my feelings like treble clefs,

and I am without wings

in the eternal pause of a comma

that wants to create the world anew from a maggot of light.

PATRICK WHITE

I HAVE NEVER SAID

I have never said to anyone that I loved them

and not meant stars, not meant soft green lanterns, not

meant the light coming out of the dark

and fireflies on a windy summer night by a black lake

or the lamp that draws the doe out of the shadows

or the moon drunk quicksilver in the inebriated window

warping its image through the delusional weeping

of dirty winter glass signed like a guestbook

by everybody’s tears, inside and out, and this

still the case though I’m old enough to know

all that crying never turned into a single chandelier

and sad ink’s a bigger liar thread for thread

than the dyes of joy that colour the whole head hopeful.

And I have lain like an island of flesh in a coven of candles

beside cool dolphins with seabird hands

off the coast of my longing, and marvelled

at the amazing bridges of their bodies

and how they nudged my shipwrecked heart ashore.

I have never said to anyone that I loved them

and not meant the mountain ribbon of a bloodstream

that could fill to the brim the infinite cosmic goblet

of an eye, emptier than a telescope dying of thirst

in a desert of stars, with the wine of its endless flowing;

never said I love you to a tree or a door or a cat

or the chain of footprints I drag through the snow like the past

and not meant some era of a woman

who came and stayed awhile with me

in the desolate shadows of a late afternoon apartment

like the first rising of a second moon

I could live on alone in a garden of skulls and fountains.

And even when I draw the suicidal hypotenuse

of love’s last crescent across my left wrist

to bury myself in an alma mater of unsanctified ground,

having given a hand to the death of a savage passion,

or swept my continental vision off the table

back into the coffin like an archipelago

of missing jigsaw pieces, 
more vacancies than a honeymoon hotel

everytime I try to assemble it, I still know

even if it isn’t vouched to me,

that love is life, and life is a bride

that walks to the altar of her mysterious sacrifice alone,

trailing her ancient veil of stars

along this endless road of ghosts, and somehow

even when I’m the corpse of a fox in the ditch

among the white, sweet, wedding clover,

having been struck from the glare of her highbeams,

it is always somehow strangely okay

and foolishly worth it.

PATRICK WHITE

AND THE ROSE

AND THE ROSE

And the rose of someone else’s dawn,

a warning to drowned sailors,

mingling in the shadows and the leaves

just beyond the bay 

of the window where I stand

with my last afterlife

like a star in a shoe.

And there are voyages I’ll never make

and ones I have

for the sake of the going,

for the islands and the witches, the sirens

and the green flames of the fairies

that crept out from under

the stone of my heart

like a crown of petals, eyelashes,

cool palings of fire.,

and danced for the honey and the gold

from the paper hive

softened from stone

they had made of my life in ashes.

And there’s not much difference

between a sky and a sea,

no two wardrobes ever the same,

an expanse of space and skin,

wide palms of water,

and the confluence of lifelines

the deltas and the rivers,

the arteries and veins

the lightning and the branches,

weeping on a windowpane,

the fossils of leftover tears

that winced like an eye

in the hair of the jellyfish

that washed up out of their agony

like rain. And there are fools I’ve been

that don’t remember me

and lighthouses on the moon

that didn’t heed their own advice.

But there was always something

truer in the absurdity,

a mystery or a jewel, the memory

of a face I’d never seen,

some annihilation

with a threshold of stars

I’d never crossed, a whisper

of light, a fragrance, a voice

singing to itself in a lonely place

that put my caution to shame.

And it’s been my life to go,

to cross, to enter, to know

the lostness as my own,

and the darkness and the solitude

where I begin and end

like water taken from the river

and the river returned

as the moorings of the emptiness

I took for a boat

like a face

between the pages of my hands,

and all in the name of some nightbird

some shadow of a wing

that covered my heart

with such a quick eclipse

that no one even noticed I was gone.

Poetry, love, life; the shore is one thing

but the sea another,

and it’s not that I was brave

or thought I could walk on water

or had a secret starmap,

wiser than the rest;

I looked into the abyss with a shudder,

as if I had to kiss

a cobra on the head

or enter a spider’s womb

without being caught,

for the terrible acceptance

of what I sought

beyond the starless gates

and moth warnings

of the usual taboos. Every terror

scales a treasure, and the dragon

masks its secret,

not meant for the circumspect,

in risk. The sane prefer heaven

but heaven isn’t for the sane

who don’t know how to die enough

to answer the sphinxes and grails.

And it’s made me

a heretic of the heart,

a rogue star, a poet,

to live this way,

drinking the black wine

that was offered me

from the skulls

that lined the mouth

of the mysterious death

in the doorway

of every true entrance.

And it’s not the lies

that kill you,

nor the truths,

or looking through

a hole in the fence

at things you were never meant to see,

the medusa making love

to an apple-tree,

or Isis naked behind her veils

that no one’s ever lifted;

it’s returning

the way you came

from the wells

of the transformations,

the mountains of the muses,

the islands and the trees

of seduction and death,

unchanged, your tears still tears

not jewels of the blood,

and your voice,

not the fire of poison-tipped spears.

PATRICK WHITE

TIRED OF SUPPLYING THE STARS

TIRED OF SUPPLYING THE STARS

Tired of supplying the stars their skeletons,

or webbing them into constellations

like love-letters written in prison,

or dusting the hieroglyphics of their fossils

pressed between the pages of nocturnal shale,

looking for signs of original life,

this brevity of perilous confusion

that sits on a throne of fog,

its quicksand foundations

the filth of fanatics and fools, my skull

a paperweight in a laurel of razorwire,

and every gesture of purity, every

symbol, emblem and image of light,

every effort to labour for greener domains

heart by heart, just

another mode of murderous betrayal,

lipstick on toilet paper,

a bullet hole in a swan, I long

for the clarity of mornings that don’t exist

to assure me I haven’t wasted my life

trying to feather a human out of coal.

I want a future that isn’t already a ghost,

I want to know at nightfall, bloodfall, eyefall,

that the available dimension of tomorrow

isn’t just another stalling tactic of today, isn’t

just more vinegar

bruising its eyelids with wine,

the slash of a thin smile greased with cherries.

I want to know that I haven’t been planting

apple trees on the moon,

that somewhere in September on earth,

a bough bends under the weight

of a windfall of planets

wrapped in thin-skinned sunsets

ripe with sugars and seeds

ready to fall to the living root

of their own beginnings

like cupfuls of water and light

returned to the river I took them from,

but sweetened by the spirit

that cherished them like gifts

I made of the gift that was given to me,

this diamond devotion to orchards and oceans

and the wounded humans that walk beside them,

their hearts unharnessed like ploughs.

Tired of having my jaw wired before I’m dead

to the remnants of myself,

these reconstructions of teeth and vertebrae

in the puppet-master museums

that put the future on display

before it’s born, my heart

a black embryo in formaldehyde, a ghoul

in a circus of interrogative clowns

that conjecture on what I might have been

had I devoted myself like rain

to different bloodstreams, had I

not disavowed the old, cracked creekbeds

to make a river of my own flowing.

I want to sit down like a lottery

with a choirmaster in a cemetery,

with a gravedigger on the moon who longs

for the probable impossibility

of knowing how many legs are on a snake

as he tries to reinvent himself from scratch;

I want to sit down on the hilarious ground

at the end of a long apprenticeship

and laugh until I’m sick with certainty

at the accomplished absurdity

of recognizing my best work

in the last phase of a lifelong eclipse.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT DO WE KNOW?

WHAT DO WE KNOW?

for Simon and Samantha

What do we know, what does all our knowledge amount to

in these infinite spaces of ours, within and without,

if not less than nothing, perhaps a single hair

in the endless vastness of these abysmal depths

that keep on blooming within us black rose after black rose,

moon-face after sun-face?

And in these realms of transformation

where everything is once, once only for everything,

no second thought, no second person, no witness

or revision, no retrieval once held like water or sand in our hands,

and gone, implacably, purely, time flowing into time;

in this dream without bridges, what

does all our feeling, all the ore we haul up out of our secret heart-mines

and refine in the fires of our desires and longings

over the long labour of a lifetime amount to

if not the flaring of a match in aeonic fathoms of darkness?

Isn’t this life, for all that we say in silence and words, unsayable?

And when we reach for one another, strange auroras

of light and love coursing through our blood

like the mystical horses that graze in the pastures of the moon,

don’t our hands always turn into water

and the radiance that filled the empty bag of our hearts

like August sugars in an apple orchard

leak out of our exaltations,

a refugee line of dead stars pouring out of a defeated country,

sand from a cracked hourglass?

What can we hold here of one another,

even if we become the high priest of the holiness

that shines in the shrines of another’s eyes; even if

we lay our lives down like a patched robe of blood

on the stairs of the temple, small religions to one another

and walk naked and unmasked down the world mountain

back to the crude hovel of a valley heart

that has spent itself completely; what have we achieved

that is anything more than melting snow and mountain streams

washing themselves clean of themselves?

We can whisper like the sea in another’s ear

vows of forever that are written in water by the wind;

or under the closed eyelids of our private skies,

drunk on the dream-wine, replace all our own most intimate stars

with the bright constellations of another’s being

to live in one house of fate together, abdicating our own

like a northern crown. We can do all this and more, so adept

have we become in our grasping and rejecting,

so ingeniously desperate have we grown over the millennia

at weaving moonlight on the black waters of the lake

into the most elaborate tapestries of delusion,

or hiving sunlight out of wildflowers into white gold

to marry a world that keeps slipping out of our immaculate rings

into a blind, mute night so remote it eludes

even its own shadows and echoes. Constantly

offering ourselves like gifts to love, life, destiny, leaves on the wind,

risking annihilation and immaculate ashes,

why do we keep on waking up, returned to ourselves,

address unknown, slumped across own lonely thresholds?

If the world today, if this little wink of eternity

seems so often like a small black match-head

curled into the charred monk of a question-mark

that has swallowed the dancing flame of its own answer;

if people and events seem vicious, greedy, and ignorant,

junkyard dogs posted around heaps of corpses and cars,

the sprawl and scrawl of wreckage and disappointment,

the litter of flies on a winter windowsill

that exhausted themselves against the ice and glass,

looking for an opening; what is it all,

the violence, the drugs, the indifference, the subtle poisons,

the corporate leeches, if not the desecration

of the unattainable, acid-rain hissing on the rose-fire,

the obscenity of human lovelessness?

And yet, even in the midst of such obvious defeat,

crippled by angels and demons alike, we go on longing

to touch and be touched, dry seas on the moon

waiting, how long, how long now, for the return of even so much

as a single drop of all the rivers we’ve lost, we go on

yearning to embrace o not just

the fragile vase of her body crammed with flowers,

or the pillar of his, adorned by passionate torches,

but the mystery of the night and the slumped hills

disappearing into the bird-voice of the distance, we go on

aching to have all of it poured insanely into us

like closet drunkards chugging the stars. No feet, still,

we’ll crawl down the coal-road on all fours for a taste of flowing diamond; blind,

yet we’ll paint worlds on the back of our eyelids

and shed them like the petals of peonies

just for a glimpse of the ineffable beloved

always disappearing around the corners of our seeing.

Excruciating razors of pain might slash us open again and again,

clear skies and all their unread, lyrical scriptures

be run through a paper-shredder in hasty evacuations of the heart,

and yet even in the grave, the green leaf of a phoenix wing

stirs, unknowingly, the ashes, so relentlessly are we infused

with this strange and marvelous hunger to love.

It’s easy enough after all these years and weddings for us

to turn the waters of being into wine, but how

to turn the wine into us so that we are always drunk on joy,

the heart an inexhaustible fountain-mouth full of singing birds

because we know, because we have always known, even

before we were born, even before the mind made the body

and we arrayed ourselves as the world,

as rivers, stars, stones and trees, that our very being, every action

and agency of our lives, every breath, every cell,

and the small, silent voice that assents within,

that offers its worldless yes to another, is love, is reality, is

the mountain that makes the valley

it falls from itself to fill. Immersed in love,

we go looking for love with our hands our heads our hearts on fire,

bewailing the futility of the looking, the finding, the losing,

pilgrim waves wandering across an infinite sea of love,

we keep breaking on alien shores in our search for love

only to be drawn back into love. Fish in water

and yet we go on crying out of thirst. How amazing!

Under the stones of ourselves, diamonds; warm rivers of gold,

and even in the clashing of our hardened hearts,

a spark, a firefly, a hundred million stars of love released

like the fragrance of a single flower, or hidden bird-song on a green bough,

love calling out to love so unfailingly

that the whole of the world to the furthest star

is created anew in every second by the instantaneous answering.

That’s what we are, have been, since before

the beginningless beginning of all things, love

revealing itself to itself in the perfection of its own inseparable being,

that’s our original face, our original home, the light-seed

of this orchard world. Do you understand?

This world is so completely, absolutely, nothing but love

that even the darkest sky bends down to kiss the dawn on the forehead,

and not an atom moves in space

but moves burning through the fires of love at the behest of love.

Why look for what you already are; why, impossibly, try

to scoop the moon’s reflection from the water,

hoping to drink immeasurably from love’s elusive madness

when you are already the goblet and the wine, the grape and the vine?

Just this once, turn the light around, and look inside yourselves

as if you were an unmarked box, a secret gift

left on the doorstep in the night by an intimate stranger

and discover for yourself the origin without end

of all your looking. Without thinking, without reasoning

or the torment of why, open yourself up like an orphan’s empty hand

and discover the dark, priceless, living jewel of love

whose mysterious shining has always been the you that is looked for

and the you that has done the looking, love

looking into its own eyes like a star

looking into a flower, or an echo returning to the voice on the branch

that gave birth to it, or here, today,

at this mingling of veils and waters

where love whispers Sam and Simon answers out of the silence, yes,

and soon we’ll all be out dancing together, married to each other unsayably,

ten thousand moons in ten thousand windows,

ten thousand brides of light

in ten thousand grooms of dew

joyfully beyond denial and affirmation

in ten thousand wall-less rooms of light

rippling out through this endless summer night

like the pulse of a single heart, a single jump of the fish,

a small drum of blood beating out in the bright vacancy, dark abundance

of these vast vivid spaces:

not two. not two. not two. not two.

PATRICK WHITE