THE SERPENT

The serpent sits enthroned

at the top of its own stairwell,

helically reposing in its own empryean

like an August hawk

coiling up its own thermals;

its fangs, a stargate

to an unknown afterlife, emancipation,

and the jewel of its head,

the first stone thrown,

a small planet without

the eyelid of a sky,

a nugget of mystic uranium,

looped in a turban of orbits,

a sacred arrowhead

that flys from itself like a bow

drawn back long before the wind

knew its first feather.

Lethal healer,

the sword that kills is the sword that saves.

This morning,

the drubbing of the rain on a tin roof,

the hiss of traffic

flaring like matches down the sleek asphalt,

if I were to say

I want the emotional life of space,

I don’t know if I’d mean it,

but I’m so weary

of being this slow crisis of a bird

mesmerized by the swaying eyes

of the black lightning

that has caught me in the net

it weaves of my own nerves,

I want to douse my heart

in the next providential tide of tears

like a torch I put out in the night

to see better in the dark.

I asked for wings

and my spine was adorned with fire.

I asked for water

and I’m a fish on the wind.

and now this desert I hoped to remain,

a craze of sand,

has grown teeth

and is overgrazing the starfields like pyramids.

I don’t think

I will ever recover

from the wound I received

like the hidden twin of the moon,

trying to love the world, myself, women, people.

Every word was a road, a pulse, an eye,

a drop of blood

I could ride to the end of and beyond

into the implacable subtlety

of my own empty, ageless temples

where even the silence isn’t ghost enough

to conjure a medium

to jar the table as a sign,

and death is buried in its own vacuity

like an embryo in a mask without eyes.

I was bound by my own boundlessness,

my nerves, wicks in the abyss

that enhanced the darkness

by cleaving me like a tree

vision after vision,

another world

with every blink of the eye

that wiped the mirror clean of me like an ax

until I understood

that even the most enlightened watersheds of wisdom

are just a smear of perception

on the least drop of that splendour

I went looking for like a cloud

saturated with the ancient seas of the moon

that was covered by my own looking.

I lay at the bottom

of my oceanic odyssey,

trying not to sink,

but I wanted to give something back

for what I felt I had received;

not an ethic or a metaphysic,

but a spontaneous action of the blood

that remembers it was once a rose.

I wanted to return spring like a water-key to the moon;

I wanted to harvest the shadows

of my own non-existence

and break bread

with the famine of ghosts

that came like royalty to beg food from their servant,

blind doors standing on the thresholds of awareness

asking me to address myself

to the terrible openness

of their unanswerable need.

I have eaten my own ashes

in the furnace of every star

I have ever looked upon.

I have drowned in the wells

of the faceless, fathomless mirrors,

and every woman I have ever drunk from

was a grail with an enigmatic black pearl in it

lustrous as the moon in eclipse.

O promises of bliss

that tuned the webs of the spiders

like a guitarist with perfect pitch

to the frequency of my spinal cord

that I might entangle a star

in the silk of my conceiving;

that I might seize a firefly

in the fangs of my thought

and taste the honey of the lantern

that lit my dark corner

in the era of the moment.

O sweetest of lies to ripen with longing

like the eyes of a child in the darkness

far from home.

I was trying to find a road

that fit my walking like shoes on a mountain;

I was trying to walk on water with mystic crutches;

I was looking for an arrow

dipped in the blood of a serpent with wings,

set aflame by a demonic star

and feathered by spiritual fire

to restring me like a bow

severed like the branch of a sacred grove

by the oracular blade of the moon.

I was too deeply sheathed in the truth

to appreciate the arcane sagacity of my lies.

I stood like a shadow in the burning doorway of my own fire

and looked deeply into the night

to answer my own knocking

like the echo of a stranger in the darkness,

walking away from someone who didn’t know

how to greet himself.

I was a tree crucified on a man,

a vandal in the shrine of the moment,

bleeding like stained-glass,

a rosary of vertebrae and skulls

reconstructed in the future museum of now

I played myself into like a funeral plan.

Now everywhere the wind is a pilgrim,

I leave my heart like a shrine

I will never return to.

And the sadness, and the solitude

and the vastness of my insignificance

is the shadow of a bird on a cloud.

The only way to perfect my defeat

was to sit at the feet of my most cherished delusion

like a rootless flower watching over a coffin,

then rise like the wind

from the rubbish of the shedding,

the loneliest pillar and sole cornerstone of the sky.

Now my apish profundities

no longer crack fleas of light like stars

I picked out of God’s burning beard

with the forceps of the moon.

Now I am infested with constellations.

I no longer turn the pages of the waterlilies

like the holy books of an inspired swamp.

I no longer seep down to the river

to drink from the moon

like a serpent at the water’s edge

and watch the panicked angels jumping

from the reflection of an uncrossed bridge

that collapsed like a covenant with hell.

I no longer shred my heart

like a secret document

in an abandoned embassy of swans

looking for asylum further south,

tormented by the unattainability

of a woman’s beauty,

looking for sanctuary

in the ashes of a black sail

that flared like a poppy with passion

at every gust of desire

that silvered the trembling grass

with sidereal aspirations.

Why bother to laminate your lovers, your legends?

Let them go like autumn leaves and smoke,

the last breath you took

before you were interred

like a scream in the larynx of a deaf-mute,

a foreign currency you can’t spend at home.

Naked is the only way to dress for the rain,

but it doesn’t matter which

from the wardrobe of all your many lies

you wear to the fire that waits for you

like a fledgling waits for its plumage.

And this is a long river

and this is a long day and a night

and maybe only the silence is listening

to what the stars are preaching

from the pulpits of the flowers,

and this that says me now

is just the promo for the intensive care ward

of a new religion

the founders are always the first to betray;

but when I truly let go

it was my falling

that taught me to patch my shoes with the sky.

And have you come this far,

passed through this many gates

for wisdom, compassion, freedom,

wandered aimlessly until you could not tell

the stars from the sand,

the journey from the arrival,

suffered worse than all the things you cannot say

until you forgot what you were looking for

in the first place, until

you despised what you craved the most?

I don’t remember how long I slept

before my dreaming woke me up

and I realized

no fool could defame my solitude

and that life

was only the story of a scar

looking for the knife that inflicted it

like a shadow

in the forsaken valleys

of the mountains of the moon.

Looking for a pearl of light

I had to plunge into a darkness

deeper than anything

my eyes had ever given birth to.

PATRICK WHITE

SINCE I WAS A CHILD

SINCE I WAS A CHILD

Since I was a child, this longing in my heart

for something I can’t even name, but keeps

drawing me into it like a unfulfilled abyss,

unattainably alluring, but the space

saturated with pain as if time itself were grieving

like the white noise of the cosmic background,

or the love of a created thing for this that has come

would always be left unanswered and unrequited.

Times I’ve thought the emptiness, because

nature abhors a vacuum, was life’s way

of enticing me into the available dimensions of the future,

a furtherance of me as a means of achieving its own ends.

I could blunder my way toward it as the labour of my life

in pursuit of an earthly excellence radiant with stars,

sublime as a root, with the dynamic equilibrium of a tree

that had weathered many storms in the name

of a beautiful absurdity that adorned the heart

with the tenderness of fireflies without losing

any of the impact of a life-changing meteor shower.

Maybe I’m just chasing ghosts of the unborn

who should have been and my longing’s

a kind of mourning that confuses the past

with what’s missing when it’s really the future

that’s suffered a miscarriage, and the way

a woman’s body grieves like a planet

for a shepherd moon that’s lost, I sense

the devastation of the coming years and my heart

aches with compassion for what is yet to be lived through

and all I can do is retain a future memory

of the bloody rose I can see in the bedsheets

of a spiritual hemorrhage we’ll wake up beside

one morning like a shattered window

into the souls and hearts and minds we denied

any possibility of life to because

we hoarded our potential for love so lethally.

Life keeps its balance by constantly adapting

to its growing awareness of what it’s made of itself

as do we making it up as we go along approximating

the probable concourse of affairs spontaneously.

You might say consciousness, the light that each

has been given to go by, is what evolution

looks like on the inside, urgent with creation.

The gathering. The mingling. The dissipation.

All the eddies and currents of thought and emotion

writing on the mindstream sometimes in Kufic script,

sometimes Irish kells, or maybe just heavy-hearted bells

that like to write their own songs and sing them

to no one but themselves, as if the mystery

of their sadness were sweeter kept than told.

I came like a stranger to the burnt gate

of my unsurvivable longing, and it was open

as if it had been waiting for me, and I walked barefoot

in the ashes of the flowers that were being emptied

like the urns of many past lives on the wind,

until I came to one that bloomed like a waterlily of fire,

a blossom of enlightenment, a sun that shone at midnight,

and for awhile, as still happens from time to time,

I walked in my own profusion like a garden again

so alone with a blue moon in Pisces only

the most courageous of lovers could enter my solitude

like the fruits of the earth, like a windfall of stars,

like a gust of fireflies out to make constellations of us all

that evolve, as circumstances change, into intimate zodiacs

that keep us all fire walking on our mindstream

like maple leaves in an autumn that just won’t go out

like inspiration and life and longing, the mystery

in the beautiful eyes of the muses of crazy wisdom.

PATRICK WHITE  

WERE THERE STARS

Were there stars in your hair that night?

I cannot remember,

so taken with your face

and the mystery and the silence and the sorrow

of the tender bell in your eyes

that could summon ghosts

of yesterday’s embodiments to the fire

of any passion that lost itself prophetically

at a rave of shadows among the trees.

You eased out of your wardrobe of rivers

like a snake on the moon

sloughing its skin like the eclipse

of a far more vulnerable shining,

and I couldn’t tell if you were

a doe or a lynx

stepping out of the alder groves warily

to lap the moonlight

that flaked the shore

with the silver petals of an undulant rose

older and darker than nightblood.

I could feel the danger within you,

the abyss of the early grave

that waited for you like a key

to come in out of the pain

that bled you like a shadow

pouring out of an open wound

that whispered to you like a secret scream

only the dead who owned you could hear.

Your hunger desperately sought salvation

from the eyes

that pleaded with you

to blow yourself out like a candle,

cancel the inevitability of your suffering

with the shudder and sigh of sex.

We lay down naked together

by the willow-stained waters

in that summer of flesh

and sought oblivion from each other

like two compatible cremations

that concealed a ravenous phoenix

ending its fast of fire.

Purified by the depth and darkness

of your intensities,

I burned in you

and felt the flames

of a dangerous angel

who had broken her afterlife like a curfew

flow over me

like dawn at a keyboard of feathers.

Your breasts still come up overnight

like supple mushrooms against my chest

and the moist heat of your mouth

throbbing with flowers like July

as you seized your joy

from the agony of the roots you tormented

to give up their dead

like bruised cherries.

I have never died as fully since

at the insistence

of any woman’s appetite

nor known a night so final,

so brutal with time and beauty

as the pendulous moon swung

like an executioner’s ax

over the nape of its own reflection

swanning on the waters.

We made love as if

we were both defying

the truth we didn’t need to say.

I wanted to plead with you,

I wanted to call out into your emptiness

like a beseeching bird

disappearing into a dark valley,

but my voice ran ahead of its echo like light

and the things I would haved asked you

not to do

had already been achieved.

Heroin, your asp,

at the funeral I stood back

beyond the baffled wreaths of flowers

and the ambivalent silence

of the modest gathering that mourned you,

maculate in the shadows

of the Japanese plum tree

we once made love under

and I kissed the rose of your blood

shedding in mine

like a wound

my love was never sword enough to heal

as they closed

and boarded you over like a well.

I spent the night like an empty vase

beside your grave

until the stars that bloomed above you like wildflowers

thawed my tears in the morning light.

I walked out of the cemetery

through the hard harps and spears

of its iron gates

and I have never been back.

The years since have been

chameleonic as a hooker

who plys her art

on the stairs of a temple

even the priests of my lust

are forbidden to enter,

but as you said I would

as you lay with me that night

like a knife beside the sea,

I have returned to you over and over again

like a witching wand

looking for water in hell,

like a cult of one to a lost island

that holds you like a secret

and wept like a candle of honey

in the dark hive of your unasnwerable silence,

intoning the names

of an impossible god

on a rosary of black suns

until my heart hangs like a bell

dumb with grief

looking up at the stars

you rinsed like a tide from your hair.

And I lean on the crutch and the crook

of a shepherd’s question,

looking everywhere for you

like the wind

sweeping the shadows of fireflies

like the fall of hair from your eyes

that night you tore yourself away from me

like a veil of blood and sorrows

wounded by the terrible light

of the black pearl

that ripened within you like the skull

of a full eclipse.

O my poor, broken angel,

you might have been fat and frumpy by now

if you had lived.

I could have watched your beauty

shed like the moon over the years,

and smile like an island

to remember how lost I was in your tides once,

a constellation of starfish

tumbled like dice in your dark undertow,

trying to shine, god, how

I tried to shine for you, how

I ached to embrace your planet safely

in the mandala of an empowering radiance

that could show you

I was worth living for

if nothing else.

Given the freedom

of the emptiness that engulfed us both,

we could have lived within each other,

we could have evolved our own atmospheres,

appointed our own stars,

written our own myths of origin

on the black pages of that journal of skies

where you scribbled down the events

of your pre-emptive afterlife

as if you wanted to make your ghost indelible.

As it was, the only thing I could do,

was take you in

like the last breath of a summer night

I could never let go of

without following it

like a shadow of you into death.

I haven’t wished for much over the years,

and the dreams have come and gone as they will,

and my hair has gone gray

and my eyes are looped like powerlines

and the sad bells of a heavy solitude

that has yoked me to the grindstone of the turning world

to mill the stars like a tide

on the bloodwheel of a worn heart.

I finally burned and broke all the weeping mirrors

I consulted like half-assed mediums

to see if I could restore you somehow

to the more intimate shining of that last night

you turned and ran back,

your shoes in your hand,

to make sure your final kiss would endure like a temple.

You pitied the agony of shapeshifting

you knew the black water ahead

was about to go through

as it smashed like goblets and crystal chandeliers

on the roaring skulls of the rocks.

You pitied me because you knew I loved you,

because you knew you were already

a future memory

and I was a prophecy from the past

that had ridden beyond itself like light

to illuminate nothing but your absence

measured in the filaments and lifelines

of eyeless oceans

like a seabird

circling a blind lighthouse on the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

WEARY OF THE WORLD TONIGHT

WEARY OF THE WORLD TONIGHT

Weary of the world tonight. Can’t stand the lies.

Some drunk loud-mouth out on the street

wants all the girls to know he’s there,

My noise is bigger than your noise.

Someone playing a guitar badly in a doorway.

A homeless cat cries, lets out a howl

of torment as if its sinews were being keyed

as tight as guitar strings about to snap.

Out of the window that hasn’t said anything yet:

you touch that cat again, slugger,

and I’ll be right down with an axe

to give you a gender change. He looks up

startled. But all bullies are cowards

trying to deny it to themselves

while wearing their sister’s underpants.

The cat makes a quick getaway

through a dark heritage alleyway.

Supercharged like a fire hydrant full of blood

throbbing through my temples, and demons

I haven’t seen in years smiling darkly in the mirrors

my shadow always regretted like left-handed virtues

that got the job done. Demonic compassion,

colder than intelligence, with a deep

poetic sense of of infernal irony

whereas a muse ago in this specious present

I was longing for a small hobby farm

on the dark side of the moon, now

I’m a dragon eating waterlilies down

by the banks of my mindstream

quietly letting go of itself

like an unmoored lifeboat full of emptiness

drifting no where in particular I want to be

except here where I can shed my humanity for awhile

among the living and the dead

who don’t care what I am and am not

as long as I’m not a threat to them.

Darkness, my solace, moon, my longing,

Star, warmer than any fire I’ve ever

sat around to exorcise my ghosts,

you, who’ve danced like my third eye

with the other two still chained to their irises,

the poetic lucidity that mentored me

in the ways of light and taught me

the creative rapture of the fish

that still swam like flashs of insight

to the surface of my oceanic tears,

I don’t know how many light years

either of us have yet to shine or cry over,

but tonight, come down from your unindictable heights

and sit with me like the intimate stranger of a candle

in my eyes, in my soul, in my blood,

be the small flame that trembles in my breath for awhile,

be the sole illumination of my spirit for awhile,

ease my bodymind with the elixir of your radiance

emanating from the inside, and let me

be born again of that fire that burns within me,

purge my starmud of these urns and bones and black dwarfs

that weigh me down like disappointed bells

and feisty mastodons in the tarpits of my heart

that sink deeper the more they struggle to get out.

And I don’t even care if you’re the last firefly

to transcend my cosmic solitude like a wavelength

of the transmorphic singularity at the beginning of time

that woke the valley up with the roar of a dragon

in that elemental morning of mad genius

that’s be the dawn of every moment ever since

in this chiliocosm of energies and forms

flashing out of the mystery of the questions we ask

about the inconceivability of being here to ask them.

No purpose. No meaning. Except the one

we all live vaguely as ourselves like a nebularity

out of which we might precipitate stars

of a different order of shining beyond what we can see.

Sit with me awhile as if we both had the same nature.

And you can look at the world and me through my eyes

and I’ll look at you through yours as if I were seeing you

from the inside out, and there were ashes in my heartwood

even before I began to burn, as in yours,

there were the urns of heavy elements even

before they were born of their own afterlife.

Be that moment within me when time breaks into light

and even the shadows, like sunspots, shine

in their own right, and nothing is disturbed,

not even the silence that is intensified when the fish jump

or a dog is barking hills away at what approaches

out of the dark, and the waterbirds in their onceness

might seem to fly away, but have been here from the start.

Fill my life with the unimaginable splendour

of all those nights you’ve looked down upon the earth

and witnessed the horror and the wildflowers

in the same breath on a cold windowpane in winter

etching the light like an artist with an eye for life

or the praying mantis of a small telescope in the summer

its legs spread like a doe about to drink from her own reflection

or one half of a collapsed bridge to the other side

of everywhere at once. I don’t ask for bliss or enlightenment.

Just show me how you make the shadows luminous again.

Even on a starless night, how to mourn like the eyeless rain

even as it renews the leaves and roots of the constellations

of the wild asters with their violet plinths and yellow suns

burning fiercely as a distant relation of your myriad myths of origin.

Do that for me and I’ll show you how to intensify

the darkness into a diamond chrysalis of transformation

like a deeper mystic bliss in life, enhanced by the ores of pain,

as your light is by the night, or the flying stickshifts

of the dragonflies put the waterlilies in park for the night

as if they’d just got out of a car by the side of an unknown road,

not to find out where they are, but just

to gape up at the stars in the midst of decay

and let the wonder of it all heal me as it always has

by showing me how to make a cradle out of a grave

or the long, slow art of a human out of a wounded heart.

PATRICK WHITE

PAINTING NATIVE MASKS ALL DAY

PAINTING NATIVE MASKS ALL DAY

Painting native masks all day. Concrete.

Poured into a mould, their supple souls set

into the permafrost like a mammoth’s skull.

I don’t know what they were the gods of,

two of them. Could be a life or a deathmask.

Possibly Nootka, Salish, Kwakuitl, Chinook, Cowichan

Fossils, their faces, ferocious and threatening

though I doubt I’ve got the good sense to be scared.

Red for blood. Green for always. Black

for the night they were absorbed back into

like crows a moment in the moonrise, then gone

to some grove where they’ve driven the squirrels out

of their rookery. There but anyone’s guess where.

Terrorist hyperbole, or totems from darker realms,

one, perhaps, more human than the other,

an eagle shaman with a salmon moon in its talons

and the other, bucktoothed, like a nasty beaver,

but almost sacred clowns, as if they were designed

to scare the children like grandfathers

making monstrous faces without meaning

to make anyone cry. And I take it as a sign,

given the inconceivable atrocities of human obscenity

tearing at its own flesh in a high-minded rage of hatred

that threatened our own childhoods since these were made

to protect the innocent from their own nightmares.

Do ut abeas. I give so that you go away. A sign

that the nightmares have grown astronomically catastrophic,

and even though a hundred million people died

in the twentieth century, that’s still not enough

to satisfy the hearts of the generals, evicting

entire peoples and nations from the house

they were born into before they were driven

into an exile of violated thresholds and broken taboos.

I imagine them carved in rainproof cedar, red or yellow,

and just as a medicine wheel has to be blessed

by a real healer, so I wonder if the hands of those

who shaped these out of the uncarved block

of their heartwood ringed by halos of rain

were invisibly sanctified by the medium they worked in

as sometimes mine seem when a poem

circles overhead like an osprey for the pure joy of it,

or a painting suddenly breaks into life

in a limestone cave of hunting magic

that enchanted its prey in a trance

of holistic identification with the mystery,

not of how life takes life to survive,

but how life gives itself to itself like a gift

that thrives in the hands of those who do the giving

and multiplies the grazing herds of the stars

and rivers you can walk across like a messiah

on the backs of fish, without overextending

your supply line the way Napoleon and the Nazis did

when they tried to live off the land

by treating the people like retreating buffalo

or realizing, a nemesis too late, you can only keep,

conqueror or not, what you’re willing to give away

with an open hand. And the rest is just a map of smoke

on the Road of Ghosts, beaten armies

dragging their weapons behind them

like their mythically-deflated ambitions,

wishing they’d defended their pre-emptive ideas

with tools instead of rifles, a paintbrush or a knife

to fashion their own unlikeness into the divinity

of a lifemask you could wear among the gods

without losing face as a human that you haven’t learned by now

when you reach Moscow, this way, self-destruction,

that way the pathless path, the gateless gate

to the old growth totem poles of creation

collaborating imaginatively in their own interpretation.

PATRICK WHITE

YOUR FACE WAS A MOON I HAUNTED

YOUR FACE WAS A MOON I HAUNTED

Your face was a moon I haunted, and your body

twisted me into agonies of sexual driftwood

that wanted to burn at midnight under the stars

like the last signal fire of an isolated survivor

high up on your affluent shores.

I wanted to do dark things with you

in the shadow of eclipses that put their hands over

the eyes of the flowers and sent the birds to bed.

With you, I would have asked for closure

from the spring constellations swarming overhead

like free radicals paroled to the wind

tuning up the larnyx of the birch-trees,

I would have lain down with you in the bedlam

of a thousand cares and zirconium delusions

and lived beside you like an island and a telescope

drunk on the wine of your circus mirrors

that crash before they talk; all night, all night,

wave after wave, I would have caressed

the famous reflection of you in black carnation panties,

and lavished the wealth of the sea on your ears.

And we could have built a little shelter among the shipwrecks

or lived rent free with the swallows

in the silo of an aging lighthouse,

listening to the foghorns bellow like slaughtered cattle.

And it’s sad and lonely and fearful

watching the sky fall on the swords of its own horizons every night

and no one to mourn the sunset

that unspools from the wound like a bewildered snake,

and it’s dangerous the way I go erect as a symphony

around the hives of killer bees

still swinging from the old steeples believing

they’re just a misunderstood form of fruit.

And I’ve tried to master the dictionary of razorwire

that’s propping up the blase window, but I don’t like the way

I’m always a rose short of blood at the end of the day,

and the bouquet of startled flashlights

you placed on the nightstand keeps blacking out

like the eyes of dying bees in pollinated coffee-cans

and you keep looking at my balls

as if they were always nesting pelicans with something to eat,

and I haven’t talked to you about

dismemberments and Orphic skulls

in a good all-night asylum for years. What a shame

I won’t get a chance to toke with your firing squads,

or be secretly committed to one of the volunteer rehab centres

you’ve franchised like a brain selling straitjackets to lightbulbs

suffering the opprobrium of their maladjusted shades.

There aren’t more pages in the book of sorrows

or ghosts on the moon compared to the cults of the silver tide

I would have filled you with

like dolphins swimming ashore

to get their landlegs back. And think of the horns we’ve missed

charging through the labyrinths of our blood enraged

by the stungun behind the cape of the corrupt matador

gored and trampled like a bat in a blaze of honesty; how

some conversations would have hung in the air for years

like the get-well elegies of postcard suicides.

And maybe worse, because sooner or later,

I would have been compelled to confess

three mountains I didn’t name after you

to honour your breasts on the last lunar landing I made

to read the fine print between the lines

of the pre-nuptial tatoo of the anniversary spider

I signed on your chest

when you took your bra off like an hourglass

and there were questions just too momentous to ask.

PATRICK WHITE