POETRY USED TO LIVE IN A FORBIDDEN STATE OF COURAGEOUS GRACE

POETRY USED TO LIVE IN A FORBIDDEN STATE OF COURAGEOUS GRACE

Poetry used to live in a forbidden state of courageous grace

but now it’s palpably culpable of cowardice.

Paper-mache lifemasks with all the characteristics

of a gaping sin of omission. As F.R. Scott said of E.J. Pratt

in his poem about the building of the CPR

where are the coolies in your poem, Ned?

The ten thousand that died lining and tamping track.

Now the real subject matter of most works of art

is not what was put in, but what was left out,

where’s the heart, the soul, the imagination,

where’s the grief and the longing that slowly matured

into the black flames of the charred roses

that immolated themselves in their own fires

for the love of someone they couldn’t live without

like the other wing of the song of a bird

maimed by the oversight like a tree in chains.

The applause of trained seals isn’t praise

and celebrity isn’t fame. Everyone’s good

at divining the well, but who takes the time

to dig one any deeper than their own shallow grave?

Maybe there’s a sleeper out there who’s fighting

for his life in a dream, enduring excruciating transformations

as experience shapeshifts his voice into poems

we’ll get to overhear one day after he’s dead

like the sound of distant water in a mindstream

or the ashes of an unknown soldier

that couldn’t be contained by a broken urn

or buried under a monument to anonymous violence.

A hero or a heroine who didn’t play to the crowd

like an acrobat of words faking it as a wizard

in a literary scene of very unsacred clowns.

Tiger-striped arsonists that couldn’t burn

their way through a matchbook. Where are

the thieves of fire, the Promethean criminals,

the fore-ordained demons of nihilistic doom,

the mad who used to sacrifice their shadows

on the altars of the mountains of the moon

and came down into the valleys in tears

with a message like an avalanche of the underwhelmed?

Are there no more Druids? Is the bloom off the mistletoe

of myriad moons that have lost their atmosphere

to the bright vacancy of the vacuum on the reflected side of things

and forgotten the dark abundance of the occult originality

of the true face that’s turned away like a perennial eclipse

of the black sheep of a severely depleted family

that doesn’t want to talk about such things in public?

No more shamans risking death in the cradles of the treetops

at the hands of the visions that cut them to the bone

to see if they’ve marrowed suffering into lunar gold

they scatter on the waters like feathers and bread?

Even the deer miss their hunting magic more than they realized.

Now the flies stalk lions in zoos that know better

than to fight back. And poetry reads like a tourist trap

for expired prophets glad-handing their coveted awards.

Bleed a bit, damn it. Weep like a mountain. Write a poem

like an amputee in a straitjacket with the pen in your mouth.

Pour the ocean into a seabed, not a teacup

that tastes vaguely of life, and down a deep draft

of your own blood in a single gulp from the vessel of your skull,

then wipe it from your lips like the petals of a rose

that knows how the heart feels when it’s sealed

like a blood bank and the hungry ghosts of ideas and ideals

have been summoned to it like a seance of vampires in lieu

of the living metaphors that animate the lives of real things.

I’m not saying that the morning is without singers,

or that one should only listen to the night birds

or that the old stumps aren’t sprouting tender green branches

out of their Medusa-headed roots. There’s fire

in every generation if you get close enough to it

sufficient to singe your eyebrows on or at least

walk toward on a cold night in a cruel landscape

to spread a few stories around to scare the children

into listening to their imagination unbound

from the usual lullabies that keep their parents lyrically young

in a state of arrested development. Where are

the dangerously dissociated ones who yell Merd!

at the choirs of cant and stab an established

pigeon of a poet through the hand like an osprey

then walk off the stage into oblivion as if

a mediocre morality play were beneath his felonious dignity?

Where are the black-robed, outlaw, poet priests,

the sybils, oracles, witches and warlocks,

the vatic rebels hiding out in caves to amplify their voice

like the anarchic mountain they’re trying to bring down

on everybody’s heads like a meteoric shower

of portentous space junk in a degenerating orbit

that cremated their body parts separately as if each

had nothing in common with its fellow asteroids

except they couldn’t keep their cornerstones together long enough

to establish a small planet they could live on in anarchic accord.

I can remember when poems were written in blood,

not bleach and fabric softeners. Not anti-bacterial detergents

that shoot at their own troops over the heads of the enemy.

And how the poetic toads that hibernated for seven years

in the dry creek beds suddenly woke up one day to a flash flood

and started singing sexually naked in the downpouring rain,

not these isolated ripples and trickles of acidic dewdrops

that burn the tongues of the flowers with trademarks and name brands.

Where the savage mystic who wanders in out of the desert

reeking of stars and the wisdom of a snakepit

that could make a whole village stop work, and listen

to the unexpurgated desert wind that spoke through him?

Where are those who ennobled the miseries of life

by living their way through them like diamonds in a black lung?

Now it’s the association of the sensibilities into elitist cliques

of enculturated memes with homogeneous life themes

that never leave home to save their children, as Rilke rightly observes,

from having to do it for them. Domesticated lapdogs

never very far from the begging bowls that feed them

like the awards and grants of an institutionalized paternalism

that lets them know when the silver-tongued should be heard

at the table, each in their proper place, and when

Skinnerian censorship, like repressive tolerance, is golden.

Poetry’s as old and as dead an art as prostitution.

It’s been dying since the first shaman

imitated the song of a bird with its feathers on fire

or the first stripper teased her nakedness with boas.

Or the first wounded wolf let out a warcry

that chilled the moon with its unwaning sincerity.

And the ultimate angle? To be the thing itself

until it breathes you in and out like a way of life

the petty won’t risk aspiring to for fear of falling

and being found out like a candling parachute

tangled in its own life lines like a labyrinth of axons

that have lost their nerve for heights. Twenty-five million

children dying of starvation every year on the planet

and you’re lying in the lap of the luxury of literature

writing about the rustic quaintness of making home-made jam,

the same way they turned totem-poles into telephone booths

and minor domestic tragedies into recyclable myths of origin.

Let the stars burn deeper into you. Befriend the darkness

like the largest room in your house. Salt your tears

with oceans where your sorrows can learn

to swim like fish without ever swimming out of your eyes.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is it, this onceness,

of the dirge and the lyric you’re never going to hear

the same way twice, this mystic specificity

that encompasses us wholly in the mystery

of what we’re doing here, what we’re saying

and thinking and saying and feeling and shrieking and seeing here

in the presence of each other bearing witness everywhere

as if even the void we flash out of like the morning dew

and return to with the dust of the sunset all over us

were also in some inconceivable way, though

we can’t put our lips to its eyelids, sentient

and playfully absurd, but never frivolously recognized.

Don’t live like the dress rehearsal of a play you didn’t write.

In the pursuit of an earthly excellence that expresses

our human consternation of who we are and are not,

neither this, nor that, say deeply what you mean

so that we can all draw water from it like the sun.

So there’s lightning in the clouds of your depression

and the fireflies take over where the starmaps leave off.

Be a great high priestess of the sacred syllable

and when you enter your venerated groves

like the night wind among the crowns of the trees

be at least as engaging and beautiful as they are

and as at home among warriors as you are homeless among saints.

Awake and alert in the unsayable silence. Wait.

And the metaphors will come like bridges that burn

and go up in flames like an orchid and bridges

that collapse under their own weight into the river

they were trying to cross to the colder, lonelier shore

where purity’s just a long, slow annihilation

of everything you still insist upon cherishing.

Let go. Fall. Revive. Return. Go up the mountain.

Find the mother lode. Bring it back down into the valley

like a strong river brings its knowledge of gold within.

Behind every explorer is a child who likes to discover

and share things. So what’s worth finding that you can’t?

You just have to look into one eye to see the history

of everything that can be seen. And when you open your mouth

prompted by a rush of stars, you sing

for thousands of dead poets who used to occupy

these green boughs and leafless branches, you sing

as if you were the last surviving member of the choir,

and the silence, the enraptured silence, was listening.

PATRICK WHITE

I MOVE THROUGH THE SHADOWS THAT HAVE THEIR FLOWERING TOO

I MOVE THROUGH THE SHADOWS THAT HAVE THEIR FLOWERING TOO

I move through the shadows that have their flowering too.

I see you blooming through the pale

of the trunks of the black walnuts

like a fire you’ve been sitting around a long time,

wondering if you’re a habitable planet

or a belt of asteroids that hang like skulls from your waist,

orbiting around a middle-aged avuncular sun

as affable as a porch light welcoming you to the abyss.

You don’t always need a beginning to get something done

or a sunset to remind you it’s getting late.

I can hear your sorrows like waterbirds

down by the lake where the raccoons drowned the coydog

by luring it out of its depths. Dead Dog’s Dream Self.

The titles of old poems invariably return

like roads that have picked up their own scent

and follow it like fog and smoke and a seance of stars

high in a darkened lighthouse full of lament.

I want to see you jump your own fire like a witch

dressed in nothing but your best tattoos.

I want to see the savage in you come out

like a rare lynx at noon when your shadows

are withdrawn like claws that could make the light bleed.

I don’t want to be sacrificed to anything anymore.

I don’t want to relate to someone’s heart through an embassy.

I just want to lie down with you in the eerie blue grass

like an astronomer with the universe in his arms

and be totally ignored by cosmic events

as I take your earlobes in my teeth like oysters and pearls.

Black. Because you’re a new moon. Hard

because so many dawns have been darker than the night.

Or we could get hilariously drunk on black pearl wine

pressed from the finest wild grape vines

without throwing them before the swine to trample them.

And you could ask me in the homeless silence

we both belong to like sketchy tenants, how

it came about I creatively visualized you

in the caldron of my heart over a fire that never goes out.

And all I’d be able to say you’d already know for yourself.

PATRICK WHITE  

JOURNEY

I'm on some kind of journey

but I don’t know where it’s going;

I’m growing wings and shedding them,

and I’m true to every thought in my head.

I’ve got a heart, worn down at heels,

a used voodoo doll quilled like a native,

a meteorically battered planet

that wobbles between a kiss and a fist

in the way it keeps running itself around.

I spend too much time alone.

There are no obstructions in any direction;

and barefoot, I’m walking on stars and poppies,

talking to myself like a candle,

weaving my way among the shadows

like a fish through the supple harps

of the silver river reeds. I see

that I’m taking a bath in my own grave

to wash the soiled skies of the painted world

off my eyes, to behold

the brief career of the leaf of life

and how the light gusts out from the windows

like curtains and bird-nets. Life is short,

and the new temple never gets further built

than a hole and a single cornerstone, the rest

left to the business of the earth,

all that beauty and magnificence,

unravelled among the mud weavers.

I was inoculated against death

by a splinter of the moon;

by how little time there is for love,

for the root to get drunk

on the fruits of enlightenment and compassion,

by how little I will ever know

of the road to the doorway I stepped through

to stand in awe before the moon spill

on the raven blue waters,

and to look so deeply into the eyes of a woman

who has just conceded an island in her passage,

and the fragrance of unheard music

that I am a pillar of wonder

before the unsayable

as she lets drop her shadows and feathers of light,

and the blood-god assumes

his flowering crown of fire

to enhance the splendours of his courtly intensities.

What I have lost in the river

I will find in the river

and what I have taken from the sky

I will give back to the sky,

and there shall come a day

when the eclipse will be the brighter mirror,

and the darkness that overtakes me now

will be a gate of stars to a water palace

where the dragonflies and waterlilies

are the scepters and crowns of a human divinity

that will endure like a whisper of radiance,

a more haunting taste of light,

the rumour of a black rose

that outshines the angels

that coax the lanterns out of the night.

I will evaporate like the flaring of fireflies

on the windy shore of a trembling lake,

like the blue hat plume of smoke

from a gallant winter chimney

into the vastness of my own mind

like a waterbird without a trace into a sweeter, wilder solitude.

And these words will come and go

like the tides of the ocean I was,

like the providential leaves

of unfurling fortune-cookies,

like an avalanche of gold

washed down from the mountain upstream.

I write them in flowing diamond,

I write them in auroras of blood,

in dawns bluer than the iris of a peacock’s eye,

in fire and water and the mystic inks of the night

in the fleeting, indelible dream

of doors and hands and moons,

in warm breath on a cold window,

in a halo of comets

smeared into light by the sun,

in the sidereal wines that bled from bitter wounds,

I have said what it was mine to say

on a page of the wind

that whistled through me like life

greening the sands of the hourglass

with visions that ripened the bell of blood in my heart

to fall like wisdom from its tower

toward a fallible paradise

that won’t leave me as I am for long.

And I will jump again

into this cauldron of joys and sorrows

to string my spinal cord

over the abyss of the guitar-shaped universe,

walking upright

to plead with my own answers

to thaw like a mirror

estranged from the world it reflects

in the self-effacing flames

of the passionate gardens that dance on the wicks.

The awakening seed

echoes these flowers of fire

in the valley of a voice in the furnace

that lies down in the cool grass

by a stream of idle stars

and arrays its vagrant heart

like a breeze of blood in the dust

to the refugees in the shadows.

They move like eyelids
through all the phases of the moon
from an unspooled well of darkness

to the slash of a razor of light

to the threshing of the full harvest

in the siloes of the nightwind

enthroned like a breath of life

in the midst of its own dispersal.

PATRICK WHITE

EVERYTHING ON THE GARBAGE DUMP

EVERYTHING ON THE GARBAGE DUMP

Everything on the garbage dump

like the picked over pyre of an unholy death.

The rubes seeing through the ruses of the rich

straight into their computerized living rooms

behind the razor wire and grapevines.

Bad mistake. The poor begin to compare,

and where they wanted to be elite yesterday,

today they smoulder like a root fire

at what’s been done to them

many days before by what goes on under

the cornerstones of our quicksand institutions

imploding under the mass of corruption at their core.

Lies so immense, even the media can’t eat them,

and scum-bag politicians wallowing in what

they don’t want anyone else to have. A cure

for a child that’s dying, after having lost her hair,

a bed for a homeless man who’s off his meds,

a job for his son and daughter, open-handed economics

where the destitute aren’t eating the scraps

that fall off the elemental table of the obscenely overfed.

And this is to put it as mildly as I can

so as not to bully anyone with the truth,

but I grew up at the bottom of a garbage can

and I know who’s sitting on the lid of a buried i.e.d.

that’s about to go off like a volcanic toilet-bowl.

The black dove cries to the burning heavens

and earth’s about to show us why you don’t

steal from your own crib, or piss in your own womb.

The flesh-eating disease has gone too far.

There’s smog in our children’s hearts and eyes.

The wealthy come into a focus on a gun sight.

Revulsion deepens. Everyday you can hear

the backbones of people’s wills breaking

like the great boughs and small twigs

of an old growth forest in an ice-storm.

People close up like stores and the candling parachutes

of the daylilies who stay in bed all day,

grateful for twenty more minutes of hallucinating

an oasis in a desert they know they’re going to die in.

Bad meat down the well. Corporations

with more of an identity than your daughter has,

but ask any drone who she is

and there’s a databank somewhere

that would be happy to tell you for a considerable fee.

She’s nobody that concerns us yet. But the time,

and I mean it more today than I did yesterday,

is coming, that nemetic moment when the guillotines

are brought out like garden shears pruning roses

of their buds, and Wall Street ticks swollen with blood

of their heads. One after another. The regenerative hydra

clear cut like the trees and the tribes of the Amazon jungle.

No more listening to the Lord of Flies brainwashing us

into believing its maggots are butterflies. No more

second, third, fourth, fifth innocence, reborn or otherwise,

for the retroactive alibi that tells us how sorry

and concerned he is that others don’t follow

the same psychopath that he’s making money off,

even if it’s been going on since Uruk and Ur.

Even religion being rendered unto like Caesar.

The shepherds of the black camel build tall buildings in the desert.

No birds sing in the eucalyptus trees of Israel

that spring up like political spin over bulldozed Arab homes.

And the last man born on earth will grovel in the dust

at his sister’s feet. Signs of the end times articulated

by an annihilated Sufi in a zawiya of the thirteenth century.

Who born among us today, doesn’t know exactly

what he was talking about? As we run out of water,

breathable air, edible food, futile hope and dangerous inspiration.

Mineralized humanity fossilized in the Burgess Shale

of a virtual reality exploding into millions of alternatives

to evolution in the Pre-Cambrian Age of mutative technology.

And people will gather according to rule and ask for change.

But their shepherds will only shorten the chains

and tighten their grip on their hearts like a man

in a strip club keeps a grip on his wallet,

but the intensity unvented will supersaturate the air

and mount the event horizon like the anvils of thunderheads

and much will be struck down in an atavistic replay

of the polymorphous perverse trying to figure out

what shape it should assume so the cure remains

more plausible than the disease that the ideological scalpels

just cut out with no distinction made

between a human heart and a tumour.

Beauty and intelligence will become suspect

to the mediocre and ugly, and the ethics of the day

will be the stage directions of a bad morality play

as the captains of commerce and the nabobs of worse

thresh the salted earth like necrophagoi

watched over by the scarecrow of a c.e.o.

I can hear the karmic atrocities of the sorrows

that have muscled the birds out of the trees

with hortatory elegies for the windfall of sour bells

that were cut down like the fruit of a noose.

Injustice will redress injustice with mob sentiment

adamant about the rabid obscenity of human lovelessness

that has been perpetrated like a myth of origin in their name.

Things will still burn, but not in a flame as they used to,

but in a scalding acid bath of eyes learning to read

the graffiti on the wall as if it were written

on their own gravestones. Sybarites with desecrant sensibilities

will destroy without creation anything that reminds them

of who they are not. Art will become

the artificial antiseptic to the toxin of life

and there will be more joy in cynicism than there is

the natural love of a man for his wife and children.

But the litany of metaphorical omens is perilously long

and eventually even Lao Tzu rode out of town on an ox

into the available dimensions of a future in the hills

to die alone among the doomed wildflowers undistracted

by the human race. And Jesus had his wilderness.

Buddha, Venus and his Bodhi Tree, Moses, his desert,

in lieu of the Promised Land, and Muhammad, his cave.

Everyone of these enlightened masters had to get away for awhile

to receive what was given to them to believe.

That all the threads of the strong rope

would come undone in time like spinal cords

and all a decent human could do, when life

oversteps its own bounds into unconditioned chaos

is drive a small herd of goats up to the mountain top

to get out of the way of the avalanche of prophetic skulls

coming down in a rush to avoid their own warnings.

So, yes, if you really care, if you’ve cared all along,

don’t crowd into the shrine of your third eye

to escape the approaching storm, expecting shelter

from that sense of goodness that hovers over you

like an angel using drones. As Muhammad said

the red-haired, one-eyed liar will amaze you

and many now lustrous, but empty, will succumb to its power.

And trivialities will cat walk in the robes of the sublime.

And only branded cattle in the abattoirs of a violent education

will learn the true power of a name. The arks of yesterday

will save themselves like luxury lifeboats

that jumped the ship of state, on its way down,

when it turned into a hospital barge on the rocks,

full of the body parts of abandoned children

who didn’t live long enough to learn how to sink or swim

before they were shucked like baby turtles by seagulls

and the undertakers came, like parasites, to finish off the rest.

Take a break. I know how bilious a heart can feel

eating a spoon of ashes a day from the urn of the world

as if you had nothing left but your spiritual ancestry to live on.

Change your diet. Eat the buds of day lilies, eat

the purple pagodas of the stag horn sumac before

it immolates itself in the fall. Grow yourself a new tail

to replace the one they tried to catch you by, skip your koans

out over a large midnight lake like water birds taking to flight.

Buff the horrors with wild raspberries and the overnight sensations

of mushrooms as big as a skull or the moon emerging from death.

Rejuvenate. Restore. Let the shoemaker tack new soles to your cells,

and reattach the flight feathers to your calloused heels.

Let the wind blow the stars through your hair like the willows.

And the moon hang awhile like dew on the mandalas

of your musical spiderwebs. Learn how to carry a tune again

like water in the bucket of your larynx

or the fire in your gut that once could weep like diamonds

that cut through your tears without doing any damage.

Breathe in and forget that long or short every breath

is infinitely intimate with everything that’s ever lived.

Detached. Disconnected. Cut off. Unplugged.

Renew your erotic affiliation with your body

and see, though bruised, how the starmud still shines

even after you’ve taken a bath in your own grave

and the water runs off your skin like moonlight.

Do this for yourself without throwing salt

in the roseate wounds of your conscience.

Do this in a solitude that doesn’t try to cram the mystery

into the small locket of the human heart

that carries your counter-intuitive likeness

of the way things ought to be in the better world behind us.

Do this to remind yourself of the bliss of what it is

to be a human alone with stars, so you don’t forget

the experience you’re trying to convey to the unmindful and lost

must be renewed from generation to generation

like a dragon breathing into a tinder box of flammable emotions.

And then even if it’s just for the dignity of a lost cause,

or merely the preference of this absurdity to that,

or enlightened self-interest with too much intelligence

to have completely transcended itself inconceivably,

return to the maelstrom like the cult of a contemplative

that’s at least an initiate in the mysticism of action

who doesn’t mistake a sword that kills you back into life

for the wishbone of a harp that pleads with hell for the dead

who will always double-back on you

like the retrograde motion of Mars as you overtake it,

an orbit with an inside track on the sun that naves the wheel.

A habitable planet with a genius for life and love that’s real.

PATRICK WHITE

EVERY STEP I TAKE

EVERY STEP I TAKE

Every step I take either a crossroads, an impasse,

or a dubious suspension bridge that looks like

the work of spiders swaying over an abyss.

Eerie thresholds that don’t scare me the way they used to.

I take them now as if I were dancing

with clear-sighted surrealistic suicidal abandon

and what used to threaten me so deeply

I laugh at now as if it were just another buffoon

that overdid it, and turned its legend into a farce.

The furies that swarmed me once for things

I couldn’t even imagine doing at my most bitter

have mythically dwindled into black flies of the mind.

Now I smile at them like a miniature Pearl Harbour

dive-bombing a rotten piece of fruit. Malignant pests.

Even in my homelessness, kamikaze pilots

drunk on sake, bad house guests binging

on a divine wind that sweeps them all away

from the brittle sky above the windowsill

that fakes them all out eventually, though it’s sadder

on the other side, to witness the death of birds.

Once you accept you’re going to lose everything

you’re inestimably freer to spit in the eye

of your tormentor, and in that moment of enlightenment

the power and superstition of a madman in the joint

that could scare even Joe Frazier like Muhammad Ali

losing it at a weigh-in, overcomes you as if

your death were already behind you, inconceivably achieved.

You learn to stay ahead of the past, like a star,

shining down on the future history of who you are

even when you’re convinced you’re not anything

whether you win or lose and everything you do

is a risk you must take to keep on deepening your solitude

without shaming the eagles by living like a maggot

who sees a rainbow in a drug-induced mirage

and dreams it’s turning into a butterfly

with the dead-eyed instincts of a bird of prey.

Compassion isn’t the mirage a white flag you hang

like a bed sheet outside the window

to surrender your ego like a weapon.

Like a flower, it’s a sign of resistance that begins

deep underground in the blood roots

of a cult of rain and light that death cannot suppress.

It’s a compact with pain that enlightens the way of the other

by taking the egg-laying turtle of the world off the road

or using your own backbone to splint the broken rafter

of a house of life that could not stand without you,

one light enjoined to another like honey in the heart of a beehive

buzzing with stars. Not an alchemical crack house

freebasing its own mythic inflation like a dealer

tripping out on his product in a riot of vacillating ideals

that wobble like uninhabited planets losing their spin.

Compassion is a warrior. Not a martyr of circumstance.

Or the short straw of the last chance to be someone

on your deathbed like a sword between you and what you loved

as you lay side by side together and dreamed

your courage away by hesitating in the moment.

Sometimes mystic disobedience is a greater sign of love

than all the echoes and shades of our oaths and vows are.

Compassion’s a candle with the heart of a dragon

and it roars into the silence of its imperious empathy

like a black czar at the wedding of the waterlilies,

raising them up like paupers and constellations

or the crystal palace of the Celts wheeling in Corona Borealis

like a Sufi dancing with the dust and the wind at a crossroads

to celebrate his own annihilation in the rapture of his wisdom

to leave every room in his heart open to everyone else

as one of the fundamental conditions of intelligent space.

Not to fit the uniqueness of the human face to a life mask

compounded of enculturated delusions of its just proportions,

but to see in every one of its tears, a locket with the moon inside,

like a ripening lyric to the beauty of longing fulfilled,

a windfall shaken down in a sudden squall of stars

that fall to earth like the seeds of urgent cherry blossoms

to make way for the vital fruits of their unspoken exile.

PATRICK WHITE

IF YOU WORRY ABOUT WHERE YOU'RE GOING

IF YOU WORRY ABOUT WHERE YOU’RE GOING

If you worry about where you’re going

before you go, you’re not worthy of the road yet.

If you’re not having some black-hearted fun

with your worst nightmares, because they’re

just as surrealistically absurd as the bliss

of your most recurring dreams are, how

are you ever going to avoid taking yourself literally?

If you’re not crazy enough to wander

through a cemetery saturated with the moon

in the early hours of the morning, trying

to organize a choir of singing gravestones,

how are you ever going to recover a voice of your own?

That dowdy wren you let go of when you first discovered swans?

If you ever want to sweep across the lava plains of the moon

in a rush of emotion of a homecoming ocean,

but you can’t feel the tide in a single drop of water,

you haven’t cried enough yet to drown in your own sorrows

and see everybody’s life flash before your eyes

as you go down in retrospect, wiser than bubbles

in the way you descend like feathers trying to smile.

O, it’s hard here, isn’t it. Isn’t it brutal at times?

All your beautiful teeth knocked out against a concrete curb?

Inoperable cancer. The savage inexplicability

of the death of children it would be sacrilege

to even think there was an acceptable answer

to appease the loss, to satiate the grief. And I know stones

I’ve turned over I wished for years I hadn’t, things I’ve seen

that make me wish I’d never been born with eyes,

that have rendered my nemetic courage dysfunctional,

estranged from the Pleiadic radiance of my seeing

as if it were a black farce on tour in Taurus.

But if you want to shine like the fire of a pioneer star

in the clear light of the void, as I keep reminding myself

like a mantra over and over and over again,

you’re going to light up the intensity of hell

as readily as you do the cruel immensity of heaven

when it terrifies you with joy. Be a brave boy, I say to myself,

resolved to live all the lives of the Tarot Pack

and then go looking for the cards the Sufis say are missing,

just to say and smile at the end of time, if only to myself,

yes, I played all the stations of my life

as if they were the winning hand of an inveterate gambler

calling my own bluff in an unbeatable casino.

Seven come eleven, I’ve rolled my prophetic skulls

up against the wall like a printer in inky coveralls

in the back alley delivery entrance of a cosmic newpaper

on its lunch hour, throwing snake-eyes around

like the fang marks of a prison tat turning to Braille.

If you haven’t blooded your sword by falling on it yet,

and hemorrhaged by a river wild blue irises, just to add

a little Zen beauty to your death in life experience,

if you haven’t felt love slash its nadir across your wrist

and worn it like the talismanic bracelet of an unmentored initiate,

how are you ever going to transit zenith

as if you were crossing the threshold

of that thirteenth house of the zodiac

you raftered with your bones to accommodate your heart,

to cherish your own ashes like the mystery

of the afterlives you had to live through

until you burned like a star that had learned

the art of shining is the art of inexhaustibly letting go?

More doubt in our joy than in our pain, if

you don’t learn to ignore your certainty to the point

you disappear into the abyss of an expanding universe,

giving no second thought to whether you exist or not,

with no nostalgic attachment hovering over your emptiness

like the halo of a black hole, how are you

ever going to evolve the mystic green thumb you need

to root sunflowers in the darkness like neighbouring galaxies?

How are you ever going to adapt to the things you cherish

if you can’t endure the transformations that come with them?

If you skip the cocoon and go straight to the butterfly,

all you’ve really done is traded your birds in for a kite

that doesn’t know how to sit or sing on the power lines

it’s entangled in, nor how to negotiate the wind with wings.

You may glimpse the unattainable, yes, like a moth

at a closed window, wondering what it must be like

to be annihilated in a candle like an old love poem,

but the vision’s not sustainable as a way of life of your own

until you’ve set fire to your own antennae like wicks

that are not consumed by the flame, or extinguished in the rain.

Spiritual diamonds don’t forget where they came from,

their perishable beginnings, and though they can shine

like water and rainbows, their clarity smeared

by the chromatic aberrations of their colour-blind telescopes,

they haven’t forgotten how to burn like bituminous coal

in a basement furnace, or melt the intensity of their emotions

like a glass river making its way to the sea or how to use

a meteoric explosion as a way of sowing adamantine insights

like seed stars in an immaculate ocean of enlightened awareness,

the life-mask of the inconceivable assuming form

to express itself as an event in time that outgrows itself

transcendentally without a revolution or message for anyone

but itself, thereby ensuring, given our inquisitorial nature,

that everything from stars to rocks to apple trees to humans,

overhears it as a revelation of angelic gossip

waxing the long after-hour halls of a demonic institution

that was founded synarthritically on the cornerstones of our skulls.

Zen might be the taste of tea. But if you’d rather spice the water,

do it with all the flavours of life, dip an eclipse

in the full moon of your cup now and again,

and let the darkness work its cure upon you like a spell

deeply steeped in your imagination like a school bell.

Attend to your shadows, not as a theft of flowers,

or the clone of a brighter garden you’ve lost your way back to,

but as mute voices with a grammar all of their own

deep enough to show you the stars you wish upon

from the bottom up of a well with fireflies caught in its throat

it articulates like chimney sparks, even at noon,

or when the black sun shines at midnight

through a clearing in the tree-line of the starfields.

The snake that takes your life grows wings

and turns into the bird and the dragon that uplifts it

with oxymoronic lyrics of fire and rain that are as real

as any symbolic gesture that plays suggestively with your heart

in the cauldrons and fountains of being

that elaborate you as you are, slack water in a mirror

that neither ebbs nor neaps, as the tides reverse direction

like a heartbeat or the flow of your breath.

This mysterious third extreme in between life and death

where everything you sought among the mountain peaks

finds you at the moment of your withdrawal

from your circuitous passage through the valley of longing.

And in every emotive thought, the serpentine wavelength

of the immensity of the transcendent silence

overwhelms you with the intimate impersonality

of its approach to you in every risky step you take toward it.

PATRICK WHITE