THE BIRTH OF RAIN

THE BIRTH OF RAIN

Drifting on a drab Sunday in Perth among the ashtrays and leftover sublimities of the church bells. My studio window above the rooftops a smear of willow and wet pine undulating gently in the stillness that followed the rain. Wolves on the easel, waiting to pay the rent. May of the fifth year into the twenty-first century, fifty-six, I sit in a blizzard of tobacco crumbs because I’m too poor to buy tailor-mades, coughing at the computer, wiping small drops of water like pygmy tears from the Cyclopean eye of the screen that glows with the same effulgence as the dirty sheet of the sky. The main migrations are over, but maybe these words are rosaries of late-returning birds. Two anthracite, boat-tailed grackles on a branch just beyond the grimy glass and a gust of sparrows chirrup like squeaky alternator-belts, manically elated in the wake of the storm that has just passed. My freedoms are more sober, my resurgencies probably less profound than the gray roses I give birth to here at my desk, waiting for one of these terminal urgencies of insight to sway me like a bell.

Maybe Louise later today with her Cola and cassettes, and her rough, voluptuous, laughing humanity scorning the random acids of the vulgar world that schools her, a muse who doesn’t take requests, a generous longing that’s been through a lot. So I sublimate the root-fires of my leafless batons into an auto-de-fe of white canes tired of trying to tap their way through a maze of sexual creeds, blind. The result? A novel and dozens of poems apples above the worms. And I keep her cats, Morgan and Rain, mother and kitten almost fully grown. There are no humans Louise loves more.

The kitten was born beside me on the couch at one-thirty in the morning while Louise was in the hospital and I read La Mettrie, d’Holbach, Diderot, d’Alembert, Voltaire, Rousseau and Helvetius, eighteenth century French les philosophes. Two days ago, remembering, she asked me to write a poem to celebrate the birth. And it’s two hundred and fifteen years since the French revolution went into convulsions and mothered daggers out of its wounds, and we are neither free, nor equal, nor brothers, and the birth of Rain, by association, is only the smallest of iota subscripts below the voluminous pretext of that slaughter, hardly, if at all, a mote that matters; but in a way she was born while the peasants stormed the Bastille, and time sent corpses and ideas floating facedown on one of its more famous rivers of blood all the way to the embryonic comma of this tender, contrary event. And there was honour in being a witness when Morgan jumped up beside me

and lay her head upon my right arm as a pillow, the great red text

with ivory pages open to the public like the Vatican before me

as the soft, gray satchel of her body shuddered with the natal lightning

of a different storm, the quickening eruptions of a different riddle

than the one that dropped its answer like a blade

on the necks of the cropped carnations as I kept on reading, thinking

to run for a towel before deciding not to disturb her,

that a little blood on the couch wouldn’t hurt anything

compared to the streams of gore that caked the pages of my book.

And there was a humility in the act of watching, and a trust,

as if a great secret were demanding something of her

she was willing to go through hell to give. And my heart

laboured with her like a sympathetic strawberry, convinced of a miracle,

and even the colder lizards of my mind were awed

by the conception of the material immortality achieved

by the platitudinous genius of replicating genomes,

and who among temples and havens and research labs

could hold a candle to that, and what have I written, or felt, or thought,

that even comes close? And there wasn’t a manger,

but the whole of the vast, star trailing night

crowded in behind the adoration of the angel-winged lamps to observe

genesis in the portent of its light

as Morgan rose like a violent squall

and squatting let slip with a howl of wounded passage

a black, sleek pickle of life wrapped in pink ribbons

tied to the tongue-sized kite of a pink placenta

with nothing left to say

while the French Revolution lay open on the table,

crazed with vertical caesarians. Two minutes more

and the afterbirth was eaten, Rain, because she’s rippled, blind

because her eyes were queered by the living room light,

groomed and heading for the tit the way

a baby turtle waddles out of its cosmic egg with the world on its back to the sea,

her three-toed paws not yet the heavy seals of tigers,

and stumped by the impasse of continental plates

between the cushions, her first obstruction, tried, but insurmountable, I

appointed myself a force of nature as good as any

and gave her a boost to the bottle, Morgan,

a cat that seldom purrs, purring like dough

at having the cleat of her nipple kneaded into milk.

Two and a half hours I walked and waited to see if she would live;

window to window, through doors and back again, two and a half hours

to ascertain if the uncertain droplet of her heart

that reflected the hidden glory of the living

pulsed to a martial strain or the beat of a funeral drum,

or better yet, fell like music from the eaves. Everything

was given, as black cherries are given

and fingertips and stars and saffron orchids under eel-skin leaves

and drunken voices in the street proclaiming imperious ecstasies

and names and gods and dragonflies

or the silence coiled in the throats of overgrown wells

like the psalms of sleeping serpents older than the rocks is given.

And what could I do as life divined the outcome, the wyrd

of a beginning innocent as whiskers, but live the history of everything

in the mystery of the moment and wait with the wind and the trees

as others had waited for me to pull the ore from the stone

and crown my own existence? And I thought of the children

of the French nobility, I thought of Lavoisier and Buffon

who loved animals and plants and oxygen,

and fifty thousand pikes forged for the Paris militia, and Goethe

who affirmed the auspicious aspects of the sixteenth Louis’ reign,

and the train of death carts that creaked toward the guillotine

with their saloneries of elegant women shaved for death,

and of all those who had been bled for centuries by the lies

of the mitre, the robe, the sword and the crowns of luckier stars,

wasps who laid their eggs upon a living host constrained to entertain

their vicious myth of origins, and it seemed to me in passing

that this simple birth of a common kitten

in the smalltown hours of a bird-freaked morning on the verge of dawn

washed out the blood of millions in their indistinguishable graves

at the first sign of this feline gesture of primogenitive rain.

And born a Leo, flame in the tinder enough, equal to her claws, a gift,

she lived and suckled and slept in the bay of her cloudy mother

as I went off to bed, my nightwatch ended, more enhanced

by a single birthstain on the couch, her watermark,

than the thousand pages of bloodshed that drenched my weary head:

And I dreamed, a marvelous dream, a crazy blue dream

as if Bast, the Egyptian goddess of cats slept at my feet commingling

her visions with mine, images and symbols and the strange arcana

of things released from time and sequence and history

to dance freely with the dead who lived again emphatically

beyond the clamour of their chains and violated thresholds,

and it seemed to me their eyes, their incredible gold-flecked eyes

were slashed by black crescent moons that waxed and waned

like cups and flowers, like tides and the improvised hours of childhood

as if each were the pearl and the lens and the seeing

of a vast ocean of a living liquid light that fed

the umbilical rivers and womb-waters of all it called back from the night

like the words of a wounded song. And slowly as my mind

adjusted to the subtlety of the nurturing glow, I realized

this fathomless reservoir, deeper than any idea, wider

than any feeling, was the watershed of my own frail knowing,

the nacreous mother of all, older than beginnings, creatrix of all,

whole and unbounded in every atom, star, leaf, cell, skull, tear and firefly,

the fountain-mouth of form and time, nights and mornings,

everything the issue of the bell of her being, storms, bones, dreams,

suns and their planets, starfish and leopards, heroes and snails,

the thief in the window, and the burnt salts

of the excruciating murderers who cut out their own tongues

everytime they kill, spiders, fish, wheat and poppies,

and the blackholes that are the engines of other universes,

all the language and the lyric of her substance, the birth of time

in every heartbeat, chaos and cosmos in every pulse that shakes the void,

space, her skin, intelligence, her eyes,

and the wavelengths of her wild hair, the fragrance of ancient nights

that ripened like apricots, everywhere curled into galaxies,

and all, forever, without exception,

the auroral transformation of her vital radiance, and she,

without dimension, the broad canvas and inspiratrix of life.

And in an instant I saw the shadows of the generations,

billions of men, women, and children, maligned and celebrated alike,

the cursed and the blessed, the beautiful, the wise, the athletes

and the cripples, the criminals, the tyrants and the saints,

moving like the sloppy surf of autumn leaves through the darkness,

dry, used-up things, heavier than the sorrows of coal, tears of coal

and the torn pages of banished books

ushered by a wind that seemed the breathing of time itself

toward her lavish shores to drink from their own reflections

and be restored, not saved, because nothing can be lost,

like flowers to the luminous wines of life

that poured into their desiccated creekbeds like rain, like roots,

like trees and the dendritic boughs of space, like bloodstreams

in the hazardous course of tumultuous histories, each, like anyone,

like me, like you, like Louise, Morgan, Rain and Voltaire,

because the whole of the sky, the moon, the stars

are mirrored in every eye, shine in every eye like being itself,

and from every tear, every droplet at the tip of the stargrass,

from every berry of blood that stains its own seeing,

from the tiniest womb of water that falls into life through the night,

Egypt and the Nile, France, kittens, dreams, insight.

PATRICK WHITE

I SHOULD LIE IN THE SUN AND MELT INTO THE GRASS

I SHOULD LIE IN THE SUN AND MELT INTO THE GRASS

I should lie in the sun and melt into the grass.

I listen to the bikers throttling up like chain-saws.

I sit here urgently trying not to pollute time.

A poem’s got one foot on shore and one in the boat.

Let Atlantis rise or sink as it will. I can wait.

Even when it’s calm, my heart is an idling storm

and every third thought is a voodoo doll

as it sees itself on the inside

behind the eyelid of a visionary eclipse.

Nothing to worry about. I’m not going to put

the eyes of the telescope out for looking at Lady Godiva.

Look at me tracking myself all over this paper,

mouse and bird letters in the snow at the base of a juniper.

How human it is to forgo yourself for a future that doesn’t exist.

God, I wish there were more fireflies in my life than street signs.

Do you see the lack of meaning in how things are understood?

Thought will get you as far as a frog on a lily pad

but once you get there it’s easy to see it’s the lily that shines

in a whole other realm of language

that everyone understands but no one can speak.

I watch the honeysuckle burn the gate I came through.

I note the blue eye shadow of the damselfly

applying herself like a cosmetic pencil to the heavy petals

of the wild roses tangled in the fallen birch.

What a shock it would be if I were to take off my lifemask

and you were to discover me infinitely closer to you

like a dimension you hadn’t detected in your awareness

than the light is to what you see when

you’re sitting up in bed alone in the dark at three in the morning.

What a world, hey? What do you make of it?

The marvel and the horror and the mystery

and the way destiny manifestly unrolls like a lottery

for every living thing on a planet that occasionally plays

Russian roulette with the asteroids, and our tiny part in it all,

this mere speck of nothingness that can embody

in its formless spaces within, the superclustering of galaxies?

And the pain and the anger and the sorrow and the fear

and the way things change and disappear

as you look for the forms of your expectations everywhere

and everything’s either an approximation or consolation

of what you can see so clearly, it burns the air?

I should lie down in the sun and melt into the grass,

but forgotten among buildings here, I am unbound

and not even the dead are as free as I am right now.

The whole universe is one big solid insight

where inanimate things are just another mode of motion

sitting in the room like Latin, dogpaddling in space and time,

and I’m tucked under your eyelids like a loveletter

you weren’t expecting in a language that could read you

like any one of the seventy-two scholars of the Septuagint.

I’ve been listening to you for lightyears like leaves

listen for the wind and the rain and the moonlight

and what you have felt about being alive

to say hello and sing farewell, has been my feeling,

and when you have wept at the intransigence of angels

and the generosity of their expansive interventions,

I have been humbled by the eyes of my own exaltations.

And my feet swept out from under me

like an undertow of shadows on the moon.

Sister Lunacy, who can stand in the light

of these intensities and immensities for long

this vertigo of stars and skulls, bells and scars

without reeling in the delirium of simply being here

to witness them as if they somehow depended on us

to embody them in our hearts and minds and voids

as if they were no different from us than we were,

all waves of awareness the wind blows up on the ocean.

The imagination transforms everything in to us.

The stars reek of the eyes that have gazed up at them

like pyres and telescopes and censers, it’s

in the hair of a comet like the smell of a lover,

it’s what makes the meteorites as kissable

as the head of a snake to the lips of a gentle enemy.

Sister Lunacy, my heartfelt muse, my dark-side dakini,

what have you been dancing for all these years?

Have you been pearldiving among the castanets

for a moonrise in the mouth of a seashell

that could sing to you like the ocean you’re lost upon?

You’re the station every seeker gets to

on a pilgrimage he doesn’t know he’s taking

where he damns the consequences and blessings alike

and enters into the spiritual life as a rebel of compassion

as he addresses himself to what’s arrayed before him

as if there were only one voice between himself and another

like a bridge that flows, like a star

that doesn’t drown in your eye like a firefly.

And if there were anything I could ever say I was

it would have to be this just as it is, this

endlessness I keep being poured out into

as if my heart were the only waterclock I could live by

and disembodied space the only medium

that could accommodate my shapeshifting adaptations

like goldfish coming to the surface to feed on the stars.

Sister Lunacy, the moon reaches down to the roots of the river reeds

and the catfish thrive among the wild rice in the shallows,

and eyes in the darkness high overhead, as if

someone shattered a mirror into a billion bits of awareness

see you standing on your barren precipice

and long to know what it is you’re thinking.

In order to understand you must become the thing itself.

You must abdicate your own presence to be

remotely at peace with the world, it’s a strawdog anyway,

and it burns too fast to be much of a lighthouse.

And o my darkness, there are so many skins you have yet to shed

like the moon trying on a wardrobe of water

laying her gown across the lake like an early frost of sequins.

I shall come to you at first as a premonition

as lightly as a cloud touches the mountain, an aberrant insight,

a synchronistic intuition of our simultaneity,

and in your breath my breath shall be an atmosphere

and in your eye my eye shall lavish the most intimate of stars,

and in your blood my blood shall be the poppy and the rose.

Sister Lunacy, even after the house has burnt to the ground

my passion stands like a blackened doorway in the rain

and though I look at you through a broken window,

the moon is whole, and the sky is not torn or bruised.

PATRICK WHITE

UNLOST WHEN I'M WRITING

UNLOST WHEN I’M WRITING

Unlost when I’m writing, the going’s enough

and any path will do for the shining. Everywhere

space for the mind to move of its own accord,

dead bodies in the tide, waterbirds returning to the lake.

The pictures crowd together in the flames

and a flower blooms in the fire the fire cannot burn

and myriad themes are mingled in the same fragrance.

How else say it? I’m an alloy of stars, a weld

of metaphors that healed stronger than the original wound.

I don’t wholly understand this, but I’m changing

bodies on the fly, dying even as I grow,

and the more radiant I become the less visible I am.

The mindstream in its flowing is a flying carpet

woven of eddies and currents, of thought, of feeling

the heaving, fall, and rush of many waters

animated by the going, inspired by the approach,

and some bring an easel, a loom, a telescope

and when the moon is shining, there are feathers

scattered on ten thousand lakes at once

as the night writes starmaps on the eye of the seeker

all but the most middling minds follow like a dancer.

I live between the coming and going like a gate,

like the breath in my throat, the systole and diastole,

the ebb and neap of my heart, between the open sky

and the canning jar of a telescope full of fireflies

like a prism in a spider mount bending light through my eye

like a goldfish in water. The full moon, a coin

lost in the river that cannot be retrieved from the river

unless you grasp it without using your hands.

The way a bird on the wind enlarges a space within

and you can hold it a moment like the sky it disappears into.

Comes a swallow at dusk and a nation at noon

and you feel the easy parity of the two as if

they were both of the one intangible fleeting substance,

a birth-sac of dew about to let its water break

and bring forth the world as the youngest child of all.

An abacus of tears, worlds within worlds,

oxymoronic unions dispersing like somnambulant bells

into more inclusive realms of understanding

where every grain of sand is the cornerstone

of the cosmos elaborated out of it as if

neither small nor large, partial nor whole

one word is a myth of origin, and two,

the whole of its long history without end.

Transformative stillness, kinetic mutability,

I refine the ore of an old wisdom

in the crucible of my heart and pour it out like stars

into the available vacancies of space and time

waiting like a waterclock of begging bowls

for their emptiness to shape the tools they’ll use

to plough the moon with a sail and a rudder into fish.

How life gets around is the way I’m moved to think

in fireflies and maple keys, nebular intuitions

of the Pleiades rooting like rain in clouds

and clouds of unknowing where there’s nothing

to take on faith but the small voice on the hidden hill

calling out to you like an empty lifeboat

drifting through the autumn fog an eerie morning.

I lay my madness bare and offer you a scalpel

like the bud of a narcissus, and say cut here, cut there,

slash at me like a corpse in a surgical theater,

remove my skull cap like the lid of a cookie jar,

break it open like a fortune-cookie or a surrealistic lullaby,

a lottery you couldn’t lose, or American pie,

and don’t say anything teleological to me

about what you find, if there’s anything to find at all.

And then add me to the sum of educational body parts

on a river barge that’s going to scrape them off the plate

far out at sea in a feeding frenzy of marine life.

Star meat, my flesh, I’m adorned by the mud of the earth,

and my mind, who could find that, when

there’s so many more places to look than to hide?

Lightyears back I blundered into the open

like a tree on a hill in a field, running from something

ahead of me, when I discovered in a flash

of Druidic tragedy just how vulnerable words were

to the emotions I invested in them like ashes in urns.

Great dragons of passion that imploded on themselves

like caldera and women and meteors on the moon,

kissing stones subsumed in their own wombs

like nanodiamonds of insight into the impact.

And I might seem a lot gladder than I used to be

but there’s still too much to forget to be happy.

And I’m not truly certain I have the right to flaunt

the strange gifts that have given me the most joy

when the night comes on like the pheromone of a firefly

and I hear the unmighty groaning in their rooms to endure.

No trick to this. No elixir, no potion, no Latinate abstraction,

no apprentice, master, or skill, I could be making

straw hats among the enlightened conifers of Japan

on a mountainside where the old stones break into laughter

and the samurai class of the grass wants me to teach it

how to fight without regard to winning or losing

no matter how many times I’m killed unceremoniously

like the Buddha in the way of some fool’s redemption.

And if the king comes to your house, don’t

put out a serving, put out a feast, and move on

empty-handed as a man who’s given it all away

just to spite the keepers at the gate searching your exit.

You can buff a Druid into a gleeman like cut cocaine

and then you can step on it again like a court jester

and if you really want to feel sacrilegiously holy

you can burn him like a martyr at the stake of a cause

that accuses him of going to extremes to avoid the law

and then invite him to a reading to scatter his ashes on the wind.

And then beatify his spirit like a white stag you hit with an arrow

fletched by sparrows with the charisma of crows.

And that’s an end of what was so mysterious about him.

That’s an end of his ambiguous glaises, alphabetic trees

and golden sickles castrating fertility gods so there

was dew on the grass in the morning when the moon

gave birth to a swan in heat before the wheat

could turn from green to gold, and the Fertile Crescent

was fecund with dismemberment and bleeding mistletoe.

Death of a poet. What a small shadow among the gloom.

The eclipse of a lunar pearl in a coalpit.

And the greatness of the perennial mystery

that seeped into his blood like the effluvium

of the dark mother’s afterbirth, merely the cosmic hearsay

of what he hoped it would be, up close and intimately.

And his star, now, a cold furnace, and all the warmth

of his violated human nature, a curious atrocity

of the times that are these times just as readily.

I salute the madman addled by creative chaos

like a spear of light in a storm, like a spiritual warrior

who fell upon his own heart like a hand grenade

to save some ingrate his delinquent day of reckoning,

to temper the karma by rounding out the crucials

with compassion and liberated tolerance

as swiftly as his savage indignation killed

the nude empress of pornographic frogs with a kiss

back into her old life in the nunnery of a neurotic narcissus.

And he looked for the moon in a window of a room

in a brothel of experienced muses who didn’t

beat around the bush when it came time to ovulate.

St. Francis dances in the dust at the crossroads with the Sufis,

talking to the birds like David, and consulting the wolves.

Rasputin gorges on the flesh of the rainbow light body

glowing in a mystical aura of sex and death

like the dark rapture that embraces him

in the circular bow of the angel of infernal revelations.

And his accusers whip his eyes

like bi-valved goose barnacles

flagellating their feather dusters in the corals.

But there are some things that move inevitably like glaciers.

PATRICK WHITE

A THING IS ADAPTED TO ITS FATE

A THING IS ADAPTED TO ITS FATE

A thing is adapted to its fate. Not a hair’s difference between it and what happens to it. No distinction. Not so us who have eyelids. No perfect equanimity in our stillness. My empty blue glass skull on the windowsill pities the oceans of commotion in my head. The way, when I ruminate, it’s always as if I’m living out of a suitcase full of dead flowers. And now you come to me unasked with your platter of poetry, your feast for the dead, and even among spirits you enforce your evangelism about tobacco, and all I can see on the snow plains of your plate, is a few clear cut shrubs of parsley. What did Horace say, Terence, this is stupid stuff. Lettuce-soup. Holy water from the aquifer of the last blister you had a bad love affair with.

And I see you’ve gone and educated your indifference at a higher institution of learning. Did you get a nose bleed in the ivory tower? Did the capitalists poach it on the way to kill an elephant and saw through the tusks of the moon like a logging company? Did you gather around the death bed of distinguished shipwrecks and pluck the gold earrings from their lobes like heritage jewellery they wanted to be buried with? Was that a seance or an exorcism? More an exorcism I should think, because even the ghosts have been driven off by how antiseptic everything you write is. So many poets like that these days, they lay out their lines like scalpels, mirrors, mouthwash and toe-tags, all unwrapped from a Dead Sea Scroll of clean cotton, a page of twenty-pound number two book paper, as if they were about to perform an operation, but these surgeons can’t stand the sight of blood, so nothing ever happens. No one ever gets cut, healed, mended, or pronounced dead. Or even a scar worth buying someone a drink for.

Were you writing a poem, or were you trying to splice a movie together out of the duct tape you wrap around your mouth when you’re inspired? Were you consulting the prophetic skulls of star-nosed moles gnawing radically on the roots of things, or did you get another tinkling idea for a poem from the wind-chimes your cat on the windowsill was pawing? And is it true? There are still people who think they can come up to you and blow moral oatmeal in your face out of a communal sense of self-sanctity that oozes like bad yogurt, toothpaste, and the lack of a sexual life? I don’t say a word I just enter their lives like a force of nature and pull the trigger of the moon on them. No regrets. Blackflies of the mind. I don’t mind wolves packing, but I’ve got no time for people who swarm.

And this body part here, about your boyfriend, where you try to smile like a photo-op at a nasty wedding, was that spontaneous, or did you hold a gun to your head? And I love this bit here where you say the world would be a better place if more people made bisexual raspberry jam and then licked it off their fingers in a poem. What? You get an award for that? Embroider it on your pillowcase and pray for a decent nightmare. Cameras freed poets and painters from thinking photogenically in an emergency darkroom of ambulatory wavelengths, no more bankers, elks, and beavers on the coinage, the artist unchained like Prometheus from replication and aesthetic vulturism. But I swear, when I read this tripe, and it’s everywhere, I’m looking for the shutter-speed on a camera with something in its eye, crying on cue like a consensus of sorrow. You’ve got an ingenuous heart like an old-fashioned jukebox that always thinks that Venus keeps her jeans on.

No rapture. No exstasis. No apocalypse. No apocrypha. No synteretic spark at the intersection of time and the timeless, just this miserable traffic light always on red. You ever had a feeling that wasn’t a mythically inflated weather balloon that didn’t pass out from lack of oxygen? And yes, I can sense here and there the earth throbbing with urgencies where you’ve stubbed your big toe on the rock of the world? Must have hurt like an Ethiopian? Must have stung like a mother who watched her child starve to death in a civilization based on agriculture? The relativity of horror. The world is on fire, and you add your little bit of flavoured spit to put it out. By God, it’s a start. Let’s celebrate the beginning of another feel-good distraction by tarring and feathering ourselves in honey and doves. Why is it all your highest ideals smell like soap?

If I were to ask you what you would die for, would you hand me, a menu? Would you bleed for the hors d’oeuvres? You want to create without destruction. You don’t revile yourself enough to be trustworthy. You defang the moon so the kids can play with snakes without getting a booster shot. Of all the lustrous stones and stars and jewels of poetry, of all those nocturnal waterlilies that transformed the festering of all those enflamed waters, all that rottenness, circumstance and pain, the soggy duff of leaves and leeches, the broth of witchy history, the arcana of secret tears, the encyclopedic soup of eyes and worms and frogs and snails, three teeth from the jaw of a dead wolf, and a hair of the muskrat it trapped in the cattails, of all those orchards blooming among the stars, those towers of rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and diamonds, each the insight of a human creature suffering for nothing more than the freedom to scream beautifully, I read your poetry and that of your friends with no more preconceptions than a lens, and though I know you say you live in an amethyst village enlightened by violet sages, I’ve walked through blizzards of this stuff down your cold, short-winded avenues, and though I know you meant to shine for the best of intentions, all I can see is cement. Pancaking like parking lots.

And there are so many like you in this socially dalliant creative day-care. You start out writing like an ambulance and leave like a well-plumed hearse made out of second hand violins that have been repossessed. You’re all starring like thumb tacks in a new literary life support system. Clever, trivial, irrelevant, echoed, doesn’t occur to you. You’ve never gone slumming in your own mendacity. Your work, like your cosmology, is as immaculately clean as a papal confession. You’re all living in emotional tents with the rest of the homeless, but you all come on like the cornerstones of literary events. Corrupted by the awards you confer on each other in turn, once you lose. Readings where everyone talks through you like an isolation cell of occult ventriloquists holding a seance in the Tower of Babel. Gibbering ghosts as boring as gibbous moons. I can remember when poetry readings were sacred asylums with mystical pools designed by Ummayads on the moon and eyes as big as telescopes where the mad got together third Friday of every month, and though everyone was a carnie off the nightshift of the circus, everyone greeted one another with compassion, and crippled or mad the same, articulated the daily content of their lives with such passion God may have been the burning bush in the Valley of Tuwa, but poetry was the flame.

And how do you expect me to plough myself under now that you’ve salted the moon? I marvel at the quickness of the silver fish in your shallows, but a raindrop running down a windowpane is not a northern river or a tide. Not even really a tear. Come on, now, do the right thing, grab a shovel, dig yourself up, and stop writing cemeteries of these relics in a bone-box. Nobody really cares, lady, if you shave your head or not and save the bucolated clippings as haikus. This is the Age of Desecration because everything catches on too fast to be sensitive. To let the wine sleep in if it wants. To drift with the river as if you were jamming together. To have a brace of dragons eating the hearts of your enemies out of your hands and the swords of their surrender hanging from your window like icicles. You see a damselfly sipping at a blue hyacinth. I’m thrashing through the enraged woods like a wounded bear. You canter a winged horse through a slum. I’m running my tongue along a piece of broken glass like a suicidal atlas just to blood the sabre of the moon in a toxic sunset. Spare me your alibis, the dead bird under the window doesn’t sing like the live one in the tree. I’ve seen my name on poetry posters in large letters, but that didn’t make as big an impression on me as my name on an arrest warrant. On books that have grown famous by being ignored, but, sweetness, put that up against your gravestone or a pair of Rebok runners tangled like a bola in a powerline, and what are these little dry flowers beside that?

Be the dead branch and blossom like a moonrise. Start a coven of expressionist chameleons and get over your habit of crocheting the Sistine Chapel Roof like a tea cosy. Drink paint and hemorrhage rainbows from your slashed eardrums. Cut a matador’s ear off in a bullfight between the sun and the moon and throw it to your girlfriend up in the stands like a rodeo clown on painkillers. I want to see the blood soaking through the paper you write on like a bandage to keep the sunset from bleeding out like a poppy. Try to live in such a way that if you were to leave your diary out on the kitchen table, at least a few people outside your immediate family would want to read it. And don’t try to pad the cosmic bras of your voodoo dolls with the folderol of Barbies. Cast your curse and walk on. Spread your blessing when occasion occurs and be gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond by the time they get around to making a constellation of your deleterious light. Shape space with your presence. Circumscribe time with more than a mere circle of Sumerian sexigesimals. And always know what hour of your heart it is that wanders off by itself like some solitudinous demon condemned to do some good in the world outside of the box, sitting by the river next to the wild irises, shedding its skin like a visionary calendar of new moons and enlightened eclipses, contemplating the absurdity of revealing eyeless lies that heal irremedially to the well-concealed.

PATRICK WHITE

PAID THE RENT

PAID THE RENT

Paid the rent. Roof over my head for another month.

Car bills coming up, and contraband cigarettes;

got to feed myself, provide what is needed,

address myself to elemental concerns,

keep my body clean, my clothes, the house, the sheets,

my wits about me on the streets,

and my heart wary of vagrant urgencies

that take a bride like an ambulance to an emergency

just for the ride, and ends up dedicating themselves like a bloodbank

to a wound that isn’t in the book

and won’t be healed,

though I apply the moon like a poultice,

like a scar with a dark side that’s always concealed.

Even who I thought I was,

more life behind me than ahead,

no more than a passing flaw of feeling,

gusts of birds in the groves of a sacred delirium

where the fools make fun of the saints

and it takes ages to understand

why the blood writes and paints

what the spirit sees of a world

that stains the grace of its mystic absurdity

by forgetting how to play with God, the faceless one.

And things are done that rot like bells

and torture and war and rape and winning sells

peanuts in the Colosseum

and no one knows who I am

because they’re clinging like frost

to their own faces

in dangerously intimate places.

And that’s okay; that’s okay too

because I’m just an empty lifeboat passing through

the eye of a dream that won’t wake anybody up,

just another prophetic crack in the cup

that proposes a toast to its host like a grail

as we fail and fail and fail our way through life

all the way to the top of our decline

like a parachute tangled in a powerline

that didn’t know how to jump toward paradise.

And I wouldn’t advise anyone giving or taking advice,

but I will go out and encompass the day like an accident

that didn’t happen to me,

and there will be moments like mini-blackholes

that will grain my image into the ferocious clarity

of a face that bends space like a lens

to cloak the offence of my rarity

among these others who are less

than mysteriously me.

And I will confess in lonely parking lots

that are abused like hookers

that life is a shabby affair with a disaffected angel

with one wing in and one wing out

of a censored bed on a movie-set

that can’t disarm the camera.

But why defame the rehearsal

if life goes on tour without you,

tired of the timing of the same old lines

and reruns of a mind that was never released?

How many suns, how many moons,

how many shadows cast by Venus ago

was the air sweet, and the light elated

by what it shone down upon

that grew eyes to turn the shining into seeing,

and revelled inconceivably in being

with nothing amiss in the mirrors of bliss

that had never been stained

by a suicide note in smudge-proof lipstick

before it opened a vein with a flick of the moon

to let its blood off the leash like a kiss

with a passion for going all the way?

I doubt if there’s ever been such a day,

but it will do me no good

to widow away the grief

by treating belief to a candle or two

that don’t cast the same shadows I do

when I’m trying to make sense of death

with ghosts on my breath,

and gates in my heart that gape at the fact

that none of us are ever coming back

to expose the disparity

between the living and the dead.

And the day is proving horrible

and the little light I hoped

to lamp my way along with

is caught by the wing like a star in a spiderweb

and I’m doing everything right

according to the detective in me

but I’m beginning to suspect a clause in my DNA

has defected like an eye through a loophole in felicity

and there’s no way left that even I can be me

and endure this agony that waterboards

everything I have to say

about all the things I haven’t done

and worse, much worse, to come, to unconfess

when I’m indicted like reasonable junkmail

on the threshold of the wrong address

that picks me out of the line-up like a refugee

even though the sun pulled an eclipse over its head

and rendered its blazing blind to rob the dead

who lie like bad credit in wounded wallets

trying to make the downpayment on an afterlife.

And who knows? Maybe there’s an afterlaugh as well

peached and primed with salt and slime for the cynics.

Or maybe I should spend the last twenty years of my life,

if there’s that much left of myself to pass on,

surfing women like channels to find one I’m on.

Or if all is delusion, absurdity, and despair

and only those too fearful not to, care,

and the air is noxious and the water obscene

and the earth too bilious to bear,

and meaning only the thorn of the facts

and the beauty of the wounded rose is treated

like just another heart attack,

and powerful leaders are seated on skulls

throwing leftovers like people behind them to gulls

hovering in the widening wake of their sterns

as the national garbage barge drifts rudderless downriver

like a corpse in the Ganges

snatched like laundry from the line

by sacred crocodiles,

why shouldn’t I dispose of myself like surgical waste

or crush cigarettes into my arm in self-disgust

until I am all sunspots and craters on the moon

or master all the tongues of PsychoBabylon

slashing drastic alphabets with cuneiform razors

into the moist, starmud tablets of my flesh

like the tight mouths of new moons

unspooling the same old shit.

Sometimes I think I must be out of it

to still be here, to hang on, not to let go,

like those autumn leaves that cling all winter

like gnostic gospels in the snow

to the only tree they know.

Time isn’t an abstract concept

when it’s happening to your face

and space is closing up behind you like holy water

that washes you off like a bloodstain

and heals itself

by vetting your name to forget you

like an unwelcome tenant at an old address.

And the day is a Nazi firehydrant on standby

in a blizzard of ashes from the chimneys of Auschwitz,

and even the fires in the mouths of the lion furnaces

are disgraced by the taste of the human deformity

that waters its womb with glass

and bubbles with eyes that are blown and cast

like fanatical jewels through storefront windows

that shatter like icestorm chandliers

and scapegoat constellations,

or the only eye-witness to a murder of mirrors,

or nations.

Who lacks so much light at noon

that they withdraw like black holes

into the bloodlines of their shadows to hate

everything their glory can’t illuminate?

The candle in the lamp can’t soil the eye

and the sun burns all day without soot

and the flowers may keep

the bees like golden chimneysweeps,

and creosote turn to honey in the mouth of the hive,

but genocide vents like money and no one is left alive.

And of this infectious darkness is the day composed

and my spirit in the background

nothing but the universal hiss

of the deaths of millions, and hardly a tear,

except for the pathetic mercy of thoughts

that come down one by one like blunt windows

and the eyelids of the quicker guillotines

that couldn’t stand to look at the horror

of what a species with a view can do to advance pain.

And there are skulls like sterile moons among the vegetables

that blight the food the starving grow to feed me

and atrocities in the bank that certify my cheque

and wash the blood off with diamonds

that shine with the lustre of rain

in the gutters of pain.

And it occurs to me in a shopping mall

in a flurry of wayward consumers

that there’s always a quota

of people somewhere in the world

who must labour and live and give and die like aphids

for every ant here chatting up the cashier like yogurt.

But those are not cherries in your cheese, my friend,

they’re body parts in death carts, crushed hearts

in the makeshift morgue of your pantry.

And the day takes an evil, surrealistic twist

like asphalt and licorice and the odour of snakes

and I don’t have what it takes

to pull up stakes

and find a new grave for the vampire

and every princess I meet has already been kissed

and every rib of the child I used to be

is the rung of a burning ladder

that hasn’t grown enough to rescue me.

And I’d put my hand on the news and swear

I’m not the man in the videocam nightmare

in the jackpot airport

with the backpack on,

tweaking his pixels with lightning

to avenge the death of his mirrors,

but there’s no end, no end, no end

to this labyrinth of bull-leaping shadows

that threads me like blood through the eye of the needle

to mend what I didn’t tear

like this day’s black sail

that spiders across the web lines of my horizons

at a slip of a stitch in time

to poison my voice with moonlight and lime.

And it isn’t as if I haven’t tried to cool

these feverish jewels of seeing

in the eyes of the dragon sages

and worn out my share of straitjackets

and picked the psychological lice

out of my golden fleece on the funny farm

as if I were panning for mountains in the mindstream,

looking for the dicey cornerstones of the lost worlds

that have slipped from my shoulders like an avalanche

or the stools I’ve kicked out from under me

when I found a good branch

to upstage the star of the posse

like the understudy of a dying art

that knows its part, and hangs on every line.

PATRICK WHITE