DON'T APPROACH ME

DON’T APPROACH ME

Don’t approach me with your cozy round gratuities of old age

exuding geriatric sophistry

as if time had worn all my thresholds down

like old sway-backed stairs on their way out.

Vast space behind this blossom of my face

this bad moon

still clinging to my spine

and the night is not young or old.

Since the day I was born

I’ve been off the clock

like some illegitimate hour

no one ever talks about

and I’ve got a salmon-nature

that keeps swimming upstream

against the flow of things.

Saccharine ghosts of cotton candy

handing themselves out

like new hairdos of hovering kindness

to the kids on a derelict midway

missing a lot of lights

and if it isn’t that

it’s missing the point entirely

like bullets in the attic

trying to remember who

they were supposed to be shooting at.

Don’t pat me on the back

as if we were the same as one another

because we’ve outgrown our experience of things

and there’s this wise sunset glow

that wraps its light around things

like the golden skin of a sage in autumn

or an apple just before it goes rotten.

I was a fool then.

And I am a fool now.

And I will be a fool tomorrow.

And my life has been more of an anti-scripture

I’ve kept writing to warn people away from me

than the word of an abiding god

looking for followers.

The book of an idiot

though it took eighty years to write

though its falsehoods be fossilized

in pages of shale

like the lost diaries of time

confiding what really went on

is still just the prelude to ignorance

that reverences its own stupidity

by quoting itself lavishly

about evolution gone wrong.

We’ve all heard these brass knockers before

talking through the door

about what life’s taught them

and how you should live

if you ever want to see

through their window on the world

in a home of your own

what it means to look and never be

the stone that shatters the past like the moon.

The buddha rides the back of a braying buffoon.

A clown milks a judas-goat for cheese.

There was a man standing here a moment ago.

Now he’s on his knees in his own abyss

shaking his afterlife at the gods like a fist

as if he were always dying for someone else

the gods woke with a kiss on the palms of their hands.

As my friend Charles Fisher called them

dusties and mumblies whinies moanies

and weekend croanies

greeting each other like bookends.

The dust of the road may settle like vision

in the eyes of the dew

and the stars that once burnt so furiously

to be let in

gather like dead flies

on their potty windowsills

where all their cute trinkets lie about things

as if they were butterflies in the web

of a spider with wings

they were teaching to fly

but I like the demons who flock

to my states of grace like refugees

who’ve burned the bridges

of their homelessness behind them

and know there’s no way back to bind them

to any path but the one they’re on.

So it was in the beginning.

So it is now.

The road grows old before you do

and the body begins to fall apart like a weary shoe

that walks as if it knew its own way home without you

and the spirit can’t remember

all the names of God

it’s been beading for years

like a rosary of skulls that just keeps getting longer

and though you advise everyone not to

the world keeps making the same mistakes you do

even as the brahmins of desire succumb like autumn

to the ashes of the pyre

to get closer to the stars

like smoke from a dying fire

giving up the ghosts of its past lives

to animate something inestimably higher than sex.

But when it rains like a woman crying over my grave

it’s not the blossom that craves to be enlightened

by the firefly mystics in the valley of her sorrows

it’s my roots that want to possess the truth

like a woman in the prime of her youth

like a summer on earth

without giving a damn how it flys in heaven

or who it is that’s firing up the oven

because when I’m the starwheat

she’s the terrestrial leaven.

I’d rather cook in her fires

and break bread like my flesh with the devil

than immaculate myself

on the celestial sickle of the moon

like an old fertility king

that can’t get a rise out of anything.

PATRICK WHITE

HOWEVER GRATIFIED I AM

HOWEVER GRATIFIED I AM

However gratified I am, always I’m left with a hunger

for something more than I’ve tasted before

as if my emptiness were not perfect yet and I were

ready to let everything ride on a single throw of my skull

up against the wall just to see what falls out of its own will,

or change my species once in a while. Over-reaching

perhaps, spiritual pleonaxia, something amiss with my heart

or maybe I just don’t want to be left behind, resigned

to an expanding universe I can’t keep up with.

Things are as they are. It’s clear. My mind’s a hawk

with the blinders off. I’ve thawed the diamond.

Enlightenment flows through my heart like electricity.

I’m shining. I don’t need a star to find my way home in the dark.

I can look upon the earth demonically.

I can see it through the eyes of the angel.

But the fireflies have taught me all they have to share.

And the lightning looks like a slacker compared

to the discipline I exact from myself just to

shock me out of the old growth forest in my heartwood

like a chainsaw, despite the nails I’ve hammered into it

like a crucifix without a saviour, an ark without a sail.

Though I’ve beamed like the full moon out over the harvest

the bounty of life never quite fills me all the way up to the brim.

I’m always a drop shy of my longing for completion,

as if there were always a crack in the cup I drank from.

And this agony has summoned me for years

from as far back as my beginningless beginnings

like a bell that swings both ways between sex and death

and though I answer it like the s.o.s. of a lapwing

by the time I get there, it’s irrevocably gone

as if it were just a ruse that were leading me on.

Deeper into life? Though what I make of it, like the stars,

I make alone? No trysts on the rainbow bridge at midnight?

No god to rejoice in these works of love within me?

No abyss to delight in the sheer absurdity of it?

A gleeman, a jester, a sacred clown, a morose fool,

a mystic, a scholar, a sailor that went down with the ship

just to stay true to the spirit of the storm within me,

an open doorway for the dead to come and go as they please,

an astronomical prodigy, an optician of mirrors and prisms,

a cowboy Zen master who rode into town on a seahorse,

a poet living on the edge of the word that thrives like weeds

around the graves in the cemeteries of the dead metaphors

I’m always digging up like a dog who buried a bone.

A gardener on the moon, an usher of history, a lover

who learned to sing like a martyr in the flames

of a gnostic heresy that gave up all its claims to knowledge,

a triviality that mentored the grand scheme of things

in the mystic specificity of not just the cosmos,

but the chaos under our noses as well, and all these avatars,

this pageant of characters I look back on now

like a children’s crusade, consumed like straw dogs

in the fires of their adoration, and the smoke they left

like a script on the air, unencompassed by any direction of prayer.

A lunar mirage behind a veil of heat, a delusion of water

I raise to the lips of the man on the moon to drink slowly

from his own hands, and the mouth of the man he sees in them.

I hang on a hook through my gut in the air and speak

in tongues of pain nemetic forecasts of the New Year

as a volunteer for the mystic excruciation of agony into bliss,

without insisting that it should be so, and each time

I say next year that’s going to be effortless, but it never is.

I’ve tried denying it to win its affirmation.

I’ve tried affirming it to have it issue a denial

and still it haunts my solitude like a mute siren I can’ t resist.

And don’t want to hear. And don’t want to listen to.

This undemanding imperative to live more deeply, more darkly

than I ever have before such that all my dragons

are diminished into fireflies at a distance by comparison

trying to burn their way out of the blackholes

I enter like a rite of passage I can’t do anything but trust

to the other side of why I risk so much to be here.

I can hear the wind howling through me like a wounded wolf

cauterizing its heart with stars. No mercy on the mountain,

I steel my blood cells with the carbon of old extinctions

and eat the pain, gnawing on a bone in my mouth.

Praying to my own echo for silence, cessation, release,

without taking a step backward over the edge of where I came from.

Let it come, let it come, let it come, encounter or collision the same,

exit or entrance, gate, wall, consummation or the upper limit

of it all just before it turns into a windfall of beginner’s luck

and I’m the chance it takes I’m not playing dice with the universe.

That there’s more to learn from a curse than a blessing.

That all this isn’t just an agonizing farce of humourless shadows,

non-spatial impersonalities slowly being humanized

by life masks of scar tissue as a way of facing up to things.

That a calling isn’t just a matter of putting up a plaque

to commemorate the garden life was first introduced to time in.

That humans weren’t just born to be sundials of the flesh.

That suffering is a dark enlightenment that’s mother of the stars

and compassion tastes of the tears of the tree it ripened on.

That ego isn’t the king of thorns in a world full of balloons.

Or if so. A rose is a mere rhetorical device of the blood

and there’s nothing beautiful about a puncture wound

to a mythically-inflated universe waiting for a heart transplant.

That art’s just the phoney climax of an unbearable impotence

that breeds cunning and guile as an antidote to spontaneity

and it’s an indictable offence to bear true witness

to the untenable relationship between the fiction of beauty

and the delirium of meaning that follows in its wake

like gulls behind a river barge of surgically removed body parts

being dumped out at sea like bad meat down a neighbour’s well.

Anomie. Ennui. Menses and memes of homogenous angst. Normalcy

of reflexive desecration. Solipsistic nihilism. Home-grown anarchy.

Gnats in the dusk. Frenzied star clusters. Saddles without horses

lined up seriatim along the fence like the pelvises of extinct animals

waiting to get asked to the dance by a water ballet of wheelchairs.

Schools of thought slyly amended by X-box.

Heavily armed poets buying bad ammunition for their books

and the clarity of a life that was never there to return to

going through violent paroxysms of withdrawal in de tox.

Locusts dying in the starfields they swarmed like civilization.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

I’m out here in the weeds, ploughing the moon back under.

Let the seeds fall where they will on any night of the calendar.

Intense heat. Unusual sprouts. I’m not a hunter, not a farmer.

No ploughshares beaten into swords, no swords into bells.

I don’t read meanings into what I sow like dragons’ teeth,

open gates to let things in and out or through.

I was an exile in progress the day before I was born

to be returned to my solitude like a waterclock

of siloes and urns on the moon scattering my ashes

among the stars that bloom to be consumed by their hunger,

as it is becoming increasingly clear to me I do

like a salmon leaping upstream against the flow of time,

to spoonfeed the abyss an elixir of remedial eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

SISTER LUNACY

SISTER LUNACY

Shall we dance, shall we spin and wheel, hesitate, advance,

stall and recover, whirl like maple keys, and blow

the ashes of the starmaps we burned like passports

out of the palms of our hands to shine like dandelions

on an eye to eye level with the light they bloom in?

Sister Lunacy, I watch you uprooting your garden usefully

and shaking the stars out of the clumps of grass

as if you caught Medusa smuggling diamonds in her hair,

and I say such is woman when she forgets to be aware of herself,

and the goddess comes down to earth with dirty fingernails,

a gazelle in rubber boots. And no flower of the field,

no planet in the sunset, no eyelash of the moon over a barn

quite adorns the twilight the way her numinosity does.

And I want to take her by the hand like a binary star system

and circle one another like two hawks in the sky

until the night cools and the loons pack up their keyboards

and the stars work the graveshift on into the early hours

of the forthcoming dawn as if the end of all their labour

were extinction in a deluge of light

that doesn’t recognize any of them by name. Shall we dance,

shall we let the picture-music carry us away

like a word that hasn’t hurt us in a long time,

shall we gather wild rice in the holds of our birch bark canoes

as if we were threshing jewels on the shallow end of the lake,

or do you just want to walk the Road of Ghosts with me awhile

and see what blooms along the way, sunflowers and waterlilies

opening up like observatories and prophetic skulls

with a penchant for looking at things the same way?

Sister Lunacy, be kind to the mandalas and paradigms

I bring you like dreamcatchers woven of spinal cords

like tree rings of heartwood, ripples of rain, the net of Indra

where you mark one jewel and they’re all marked.

Or as Jesus said, insomuch as you do it unto one of these,

you do it unto me, and everyone thought he was special.

As if he owned gravity and everyone had shares.

It’s a radical act to come like a sweetness to ripen

the heart of a human that’s stayed green too long.

Just as you and I know madness is the quickest way

of never getting it wrong and if you’re going to argue

do it in song, don’t exorcise the answer

out of the person who possesses it and bid it be gone.

You can’t post a bond against a ghost.

Myriad guests of the mind, but seldom a host to speak of.

And Sister Lunacy you speak as if you were letting

a thousand voices all at the same time use you

as if they had no other mother tongue of their own,

and somehow it comes across as what you had to say.

So I’m asking you now. Do you want to dance,

do you want to bend space the way a body moves,

reshape the universe in its own image, abberate

a few wavelengths into falling out of synch like damp hair licks?

And I’d remember to remember that only horses sweat

and read your aura by the glow of the hot dew on your face.

After the last lifemask comes off, nothing but space.

Nothing but imaginative room to move as if there were nowhere

we needed to go and we didn’t feel bad about it.

We just went off into the ongoing like everything else

that’s looping and coiling its way through time,

a fragility of the air, caterpillars swaying in the wind

at the end of a fishing line tied to the allure of a butterfly.

Don’t be fooled by the vertebrae, everyone’s flying kites

at the end of a long spine when the air revs up.

You can see them tangled in the powerlines of their ancestors.

Sky burials without altars. Road kill. Cheap cremations.

The whole panoply of the tragically absurd.

But here, sister, here volcanoes still strew

islands in their wake and the birds keep arriving with seeds

and coconuts still wash ashore like prophetic skulls

you’re free to believe or not, and the air tastes like emeralds.

Here you could mentor the stars in their myths of origin

as you made them up to honour some quirk in your character

and they began to speak of you as their dark mother.

And nobody need know what you mean when you spoke to me

about those things that encroached on your silence inside.

I know how to listen for dissonant sounds in the night.

I can hear the falling of a single eyelash of light

when the moon goes out, the footfall of a spider on the stairs.

Sister Lunacy, should I take your hand, shall we dance

to the picture-music that overtakes us unawares,

you with your dark tears, and mine so far in arrears?

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETIMES THINK

SOMETIMES THINK

Sometimes think I’m always

a life too late

to catch up to my own

walking away weary of waiting for me.

Or I’m a star too far ahead of my own shining

and that’s why it’s always dark.

I know the agony

in the stones of an abandoned bridge

that shoulders the world for nothing,

upholds nothing but its own mass

and waits for things to pass.

And even when I fall into the river

to flow along with my own mindstream

without consulting the leaves like maps

I still can’t get the moon off my back.

Look at all these orchards

littered along my banks

from the tent of a single blossom.

And there are nights

when I can smell snake on the wind

as if everything were about to happen again

and I still haven’t milked the fangs of the moon

for an antidote to the pain

or put out the third eye

of the irrational surveillance camera

that oversees the sorrows of the insane

when it’s full.

I like my perfections whole enough

to include what is not

and if I am immoderately empty

it’s so I can make space for the world

like the blood-sea of the rose

that flows out of nothing

into tides that shed their waves

like the eyelids, brides and petals

of a human heart.

My breath is silver.

My breath is gold

I’ve mined from the mystic mountain

that got in my way

whenever I tried to cross

the valley threshold.

I had to evaporate to rise to the top;

I had to get myself together like a cloud

to transform my own delusions

into a glimpse of the other side

that didn’t take a scapegoat for a guide.

Now space is my only familiar

and the being behind the face

of who I was a moment ago

is just another snake in the furnace

of this star that sheds my skin like fire.

Streams of insight

that are not predicated like mirages

on deserts of thought

trying to spin themselves

into mirrors and silks of glass

like a new religion

sweeping the world like sand

advance the gardens

of the water-givers underground

who teach the flowers how to bloom

and drown like stars

in the infinite opening of their eyes.

And I’ve mauled the nets of the constellations

like a man in the morning

walking through a high field

radiant with spiderwebs

and if there’s anything

left hanging in the wardrobe

that used to house my masks and cloaks

they’re veils I’ve torn from the light

to better see into my darkness.

I’m still looking

but nothing has appeared yet

and no sleight of mind

that’s ever mastered me

has ever taught me how

to realize the inconceivable

except in the proportions of a human

whose mere existence is utterly unbelievable

whenever I turn the light around

and discover the dispersing stars

I have followed so long and far

into the unborn darkness where I begin

shining within.

PATRICK WHITE

OUT OF NOTHING

OUT OF NOTHING

Out of nothing, out of space, the abyss,

out of thin air, the fluids

my mother and father were

at the sacred junction of two rivers,

out of the vital organs of distant stars

empowering the darkness

like kingmakers,

out of enlightened delusions

and deluded illuminations,

out of the sea-wrought passions of an island

and a tragic propensity

for the more romantic

desecrations of originality,

and a natural Virgoan capacity

for truing the lies that others told,

shouldering the swamp

in a robe of the sunset,

I am ecstatically baffled by everything.

To be alive among birds and stars and trees,

to watch the moon smearing its way

across the bedroom window

as if it were a snail

undoing itself like a ribbon of silver

and know and feel and witness

in your blood

how strange and extraordinary

the naked awareness of the moment is,

life silently enraptured

by the vital mesmerism

of its own reflection;

and that reflection the whole of you

almost always drunkenly staggered

by the incredible specificity

of your own empty vastness

making you and the world up

as it goes along

like an intimate stranger on a country road at night

improvising a song, a chrysalis,

out of the random detritus of his life,

to announce his presence like a shy warning

and keep the dark at bay

by pretending he’s alone and happy.

Billions before me, billions after,

and not just humans, not just

what we can recognize of ourselves,

the biophobic homogeneity

of our cellular singularity,

but microbes and waterlilies and wolves,

all the arrays of life

that have rooted in water and sky,

or bound themselves to the Promethean agony of a rock,

generation after generation,

autumn after autumn,

bell after bell of the tide coming in

and going out,

as if someone were breathing,

as if there were a dark intelligence

more subtle and refined than light or water

saturating everything like the night,

summoning eyes out of its own torrential abundance

to greet the stars in wonder;

as if there were a single pulse to everything

that birth after birth

has authorized worlds within worlds,

to risk the dangerous beauty

of their own brevity

and overcome it

by realizing the astonishing perpetuity of change

is the unknown road

that leads them back home

to their own feet

like the only two cornerstones of here and now

that were fit to make the journey. Billions born

and billions dead

and still I am as dumfounded as the sky

after all these eras of living and dying

to say what the dawn is,

what the dusk might be

and who am I to inquire

if the night can know its own stars.

Sixty-four in another year,

I can feel myself expiring,

all my diamonds sublimating into vapour,

and fewer and fewer birds

returning every spring to the pond.

It would be an insult to the face

of the ambassador of the obvious

to try to deny it

and like the moon

my face has been insulted enough

to plead for accuracy as a last resort

and go on waning through my phases.

Say it. With a little wishful thinking,

two or three decades left

and those arraigned

by the law of diminishing returns,

and I’m either ashes or in a hole.

But to me

death has always seemed

an absolute constant

faster than the speed of light

because it devours time as well,

it eats the clocks

and the eyes of those who consult them

and the hands of those

who wind them up again

like babies and genomes and galaxies.

And who could deny,

observing the armies, the famine, the hatred, the disease,

the incessant tearing of flesh,

that the true business of government,

the deepest concession of civilization,

those we marvel at under our feet

and those in bombers overhead,

is an inept attempt

to manage death,

that death doesn’t litigate for the living?

In a hundred years

almost everything alive today,

this living weave of myriad forms,

these threads of blood

shuttled by a heart

on the loom of the moon,

will unravel like the smoke of a snuffed flame,

disappear like the compass of waves

in the enlarging wake of a waterbird

into an uncircumscribable openness.

The facts of existence today

are the rumours of the augurs of tomorrow,

and everything we lived as indisputably us,

the very ground and watershed of our being,

the love and the grief,

the wonderment and the terror

and all that we wrote in fire and tears and acid

like homeless delinquents under a bridge,

will swallow us incrementally

like a gaping serpent of quicksand,

unlock its jaws

and receive us like the obsolete keys to oblivion.

Turn away if you must. Change the wallpaper.

Tear down the windows and the view

like the closing night playbills

of a long-running comedy

with an unhappy ending,

or fuss over your afterlife like a pyramid,

or shout out in the darkness

across the boundless sea of this abyss,

believing there’s a lifeboat

drifting out there somewhere,

a new body

you can be hauled into,

a universe that’s still got room for you,

but carry the bride of your life in your arms

however you will across the threshold

on your wedding day,

tomorrow the only emergency exit

will be the flame

that leaps up to catch the bouquet.

PATRICK WHITE

I WOULD MISS YOU IF YOU WEREN'T SO DEEP INSIDE

I WOULD MISS YOU IF YOU WEREN’T SO DEEP INSIDE

I would miss you if you weren’t so deep inside.

I would send the fireflies out like a search party

to beat the bushes and the stumps to see where you hide

were you not the stars within that lead me home.

I would cry out in anger and tears, World, you are not fair,

were you not the mystic intimate of my indignation.

I would look upon the illuminated world

thriving in its garden, and accuse the sun of being blind

did I not see more in your eclipse, the abundance

of your darkness, than I do by the vacant light of day.

Let others bathe like birds in the fountainmouths

of happier lyrics, I drown in your watershed,

a starfish on the moon, and the darkness shines

like a nightsea the colour of your eyes. And there’s a sky

full of shipwrecked constellations without lifeboats

that went down into fathomless time with all hands on board

like a cargo of bones that reached its destination

by giving them all up to you, like yarrow sticks

to the Book of Changes, whether you read them as such or not.

Nine in the fifth place. Enlightenment in hell.

I am the nightwatchman with the moon for a lantern

that strikes the bell of his heart three times and says

all is well, all is well on the bottom of the sea.

I would be planting supernovas like a terrorist with i.e.d.s

in the Milky Way by now to add to the chaos

were you not the black hole of a galactic inspiration

that’s mastered me like a magic latent in the heart

to burn the sum of all my destructions in a blaze of insight

by which the light is known to the light, the way

a tree is by a breeze, or ashes know the fire’s out.

How could I reach out to you except with your own hands?

How could I speak to you in any way you’d understand

did not your voice coax the words from my mouth

like a dream grammar of sacred syllables betokening

the things of the earth like the echo of a prayer we forgot?

Too intimate to be the principle of anything

and yet your impersonality can only be approached

with tenderness, like a feather floating through space,

or the cloud that grounds the mountain like the cornerstone

of a temple to the emptiness it floats upon.

Were you not the valley my grieving shadow wanders through

like the lachrymose theme of another lonely psalm

trying to palm itself off as poem, how could the eagles

shriek eureka in the heights at the very next insight

into the nature of your vulnerability moving down below?

We might both dance to the same music as if it were true,

but you’re the silent witness when I listen to the wind,

you’re the charmed locket of darkness the light conceals,

you’re the secret jewel that’s wholly transparent

to all the eyes in the universe that have spent their lives

looking for you like a sky that’s been hidden from sight

right over their heads and under their feet

like an atmosphere and ocean that never left the moon.

Even here on earth, the silver fish are frenzied in your tide.

Lunar horses graze like waves on your seagrass

and run wild when you spook them like an ocean

with a bit in your hands, and the look of an angry teacher.

If your absence were not deeper than my solitude

how could I resist the consolations of oblivion

and carry on as if I’d never missed you? Who

would I long for to affirm my presence in this emptiness

that engulfs me like an eye with something in it

like a star that can’t be washed out? I was not

born a warrior to surrender to anyone less than you.

I do not open my heart and my mouth to sing

lullabies to houseflies growing dozy on the windowsills

as the cold comes on like the sheet music of ice.

Who would I dedicate the works of my nightshift to

like the journal of a dark demon writing to himself

about the spiritual intricacies of jumping from paradise

just to meet you naked in the garden again

as if we were born to be exiled together by the pain

that is visited like swarms of killer bees upon those

who break taboos like white canes over our knees

and throw their cornerstones around like dice

to entice blind luck into taking a chance on their disobedience?

Who would inherit the crazy wisdom of my human divinity

if I did not know how many lives you’ll outlive me

like the randomness of an alibi based upon a truth

that reprieves everyone from death on desolation row

by undermining the limits of our culpability with compassion.

You, the sorceress of meaning, you, the beast mistress

of my savage emotions, you, the fire sylph at the hearth

of my homeless wandering into these evictions of self

that bury the days with no names on their graves.

You shake the lightning like a spear of fury in a lion’s skull.

You wake the dragon from its dream of lotus fire

You touch me on a night when nothing else will

as if I were real, and the solidity of my atoms sublimates

like a ghost of dry ice into a mirage in space

so I could see in the grand paradigm of things

even the most enduring pyramids in a desert

are the work of the wind when the mind is inspired

to move things around like the grave goods of the heart

in the hands of a tomb robber that frees us of them

to travel light without baggage through the gates of Orion.

The past has no need of any other afterlife than the present

nor the future the prelude of a promise of better things to come.

Born into a life with a ferocious childhood for an introduction,

I have grown young again in the ashes of those fires,

like a skin transplant of flowers over a burnt face

to hide the scars, and give the stars some space.

PATRICK WHITE