THERE ARE NEON VACANCIES

THERE ARE NEON VACANCIES

There are neon vacancies in our squalid eyes

and letters missing from our garish names

that eloped like snakes in the night

with a bridal catalog of juvenile trains.

For once in our left-handed lives

let’s concentrate on the salted cities

of the nightshift snails in the wounded factories

that scald the bolts on the cannibal cornucopias.

Let’s chalk our bodies to a sidewalk somewhere

and pretend we’re Renaissance artists

trying to put our pillars in perspective.

Let’s stop flogging the moonlight with razorwire

for rhetorical misdemeanors of mud

and see what the drowned man wouldn’t let go of

when they fished him out of the mirror:

O my love, you are nightwater and torn mushrooms,

and there are chandeliers of ruined cherries

that stain the light that sleeps in the seed

on the shores of your abandoned kisses, and your intrepid flesh

is urgent with the chlorine lanterns of the fireflies

you saved from the urns of your secret laments,

and in a fury of tangled starfish

that array their constellations

on the bottom of shipwrecked seabeds,

we have bestowed upon one another again and again

like thieves on the nightwatch among our captors

the passionate wealth of the long, delinquent voyages

that dreamed among the islands of never making it home.

PATRICK WHITE

THE WIND WILD

THE WIND WILD

The wind wild with jubilation at its escape from the asylum where it’s just killed all the windows, but not a flower moves, not a leaf is shed. Come this far, you should know what hour it is, what stars time sifts through its fingers like sand and gold. And though you’ve stepped away from your face in the mirror, you’re still inconceivably reflected in everything, oilslick and orchid alike. And how strange it must seem to touch your own skin and everywhere caress the sky, all wonderful, all a dark radiance without obstruction, a secret night of silver feathering the moon with the cool fires of a forbidden wilderness. And yet this isn’t free enough, this isn’t yet pouring out the sea to breathe in the light, this isn’t eating the dark with your water-mouth and spitting out worlds like seeds. Do you see everywhere around you, now, the worlds? Who but you could they have ever been? And, yes, you have selected a destiny, in assent to this one spontaneity, this one act, a letter in the mail, set all the axes of the planets spinning like a dealer at a roulette wheel. In one drop of water, the Nile; in one death of potential, birth into a universe that didn’t exist before you adopted this exile from yourself into a rage of becoming, whether ashes or gypsies on the moon bathing in their own shadows. Wherever you walk is the way; whatever you say, a school.

Leprous the white fire of the lotus, a pale fire, until it’s touched by the wand of the dragonfly, until you drink from the black mirror, the night-well that has never shown anyone their face looking back. Drink deeper than you’ve ever drowned before, and take the stone embryo of the delusion in your womb to an abortion clinic run by ghosts. At this point all percipients go insane, trying to save the seer and the seen. And the demons that had made a shrine out of every muscle of your body, reflexively catechizing every thought and emotion until you were bound by a theology of yourself, interred in the garbage of your own sanctity, spontaneously understand the invincibility of the sword in your spine, and release hell into effortless obedience to the void, falling, out of joy, to the sky. World disappears, seer disappears and all that’s left is a pervasive, unbounded, eyeless seeing, the moon flowing in a dry creekbed. This is the unending return to the source, the unborn cosmos that is the mother and afterlife of itself, all childhoods and every coffin, flowers and fish. Emptiness and form make one hourglass; overturned are they two? What arms to receive the worlds like sand if not this vacancy, this generosity of space being nothing at all? Now, tell me, what hour is it when a clown strikes a bell of water and the sun at midnight shines alone on you?

PATRICK WHITE

THE SILENCE OVERTAKES ME

THE SILENCE OVERTAKES ME

The silence overtakes me, I had almost forgotten,

and I am disembodied again, awareness

with no fixed abode, and it’s sweet and sad

this passage of the mindstream through the darkness.

Memories of childhood, collecting bruised potatoes

fallen off the conveyor belt of the vegetable factory,

thousands of muddy spuds like asteroids in orbit,

being rinsed off by fans of sharp-edged water

spread out like the wings of translucent birds,

smell of wet burlap bags and how proud

I was as a kid of seven to be a good hunter for my mother

and haul a bag of potatoes home as if

I’d killed and skinned the carcass myself.

When you’re seven you’re still a wolf-pup

and the game isn’t quite as dangerous as it will be.

The faces of past lovers bloom on a midnight lake

and then the wind scatters their petals. Or they glow

by the light of a fire lotus burning in the window

of a Napoleon airtight on a snowed-in winter night,

musing and caressing the cats dozing under it soporifically

as the flames dance in their dark eyes like the corona of the sun

at full eclipse, and you realize how lyrically vivid

images you glimpsed out of the corner of your eye

at the time, written indelibly upon your heart,

but barely noticed, are when they move front and center

like a star into the iris of eternity. Lachrymose and beautiful

as if a deeper union than the one we thought for awhile

was ultimate, had come of its own accord spontaneously

as if separation and solitude had become the cornerstone

of a palace of water that had gone on flowing on its own

and had made the sea, and once and awhile,

a heart made big by sorrow and the silence that holds it out

like some strange kind of lantern, is there to witness it,

not outside the moment, looking in, but from within

where it lives forever unfolding like ripples in a jewel.

There’s a soft elfin frequency in the air, and an unforced smile

on the spirits of wounded things resigned as scars

to the phases of the moon that first tasted their blood.

I don’t know who they are, but I throw another log on the fire

like a threshold or a burning bridge if they want to

step out of their shadows and cross one for the homeless alone

and say with my eyes let’s all live around this for awhile

as if it were the last house of the zodiac with its lights on,

or that rusty oildrum where we used to roast the potatoes

on the branches of young maple saplings bubbling in the heat.

A riverine intermingling of vagrant hearts

addressing my mind like a star chart of fireflies

buffeted about like the Brownian motion of a playful breeze

gusting the constellations like dust before the witchbrooms

of the black walnut trees exorcising their leaves

to get on with the next chapter of their manuscripts,

ghost writing their own immolations, heretics

trued by the fires they burned in like sumac

on the pyres of their boughs, sky burials in lyrics of smoke.

Time, the sacred clown, reliving the ashes

of its own tragic-comedy as if the encore

were more profoundly sad and absurdly beautiful

than the first aspirations of opening night.

Everything in commotion then that now

moves me more deeply with the stillness of its passage

as if all the eras of my life presaged this one moment

with no birth or death in it, this farewell that never ages.

PATRICK WHITE  

ARE YOU BORN YET

Are you born yet, you who will understand this

when I have receded like a wave into the foam

of oncoming stars, no more than a cachet

of this remote flowering in the darkness,

one man’s indeterminate attempt

to carry the cherished fire

of his own indefensible humanity

like lightning in a battery

with umbilical cables and fangs

to jumpstart yours in a dark, cold time

that hasn’t happened yet? Are you there sometime

up ahead beyond this boundless falling

ignorantly pure and ferocious as I was

springing out of the nebular hypothesis of your own breath

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

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

the crux australis of the issue? How many times

have I pictured you in the albums of futurity

tracking these words of mine back to me

in the lair of this particular day

trying to anesthetize its own wounds

with the cleansing pyre of an antiseptic tongue?

This very moment that’s already gone

I imagine you glaring out of an overgrowth

of brindled shadows, arrogant and uncompromising,

the brutal judge of your own earthly excellence,

hunting alone, or trying to unmarrow

the message in the bones I’ve left

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

or a constellation in a folder of night skies

stamped for the black crescents of your eyes only,

these prophecies of chaos that only you can true

to the book of changes I leave you.

If you are young when you come to these skulls

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

respect what must be you in time as well

as if it were your own reflection erased like a phoenix

from the gaping mirrors of witless carbon

that are all that remains of anyone’s renown,

the black dwarfs of a critical collapse of light.

But if you are old and marooned

on a glassblown island in a barefoot desert

when you stumble across these shoes in the dark

I’ve sent on ahead like the footprints

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

to put them on like an urgent journey

to the circlet of the western fish

and dance your way back upstream

into the star shed of the oasis eyes

that spawned you from a dream,

your gray flesh restored, as it is today,

to the salmon rose of dawn, to the secret spring

of the key I buried like an equinox in Pisces

as an antidote to my own September crisis.

PATRICK WHITE

LOOKING AT THE SKY

Looking at the sky from the bottom of a well,

midnight at noon, a firefly

or a musical note deep in a flute

waiting to be played, ore in the mine,

I can see like a painter

holding up a mirror

to check for flaws in a portrait,

I’ve got all my stars on backwards,

I’m wearing my eyes inside out,

the punchline happens before the joke,

and there’s a corpse at the bus-stop

waiting for a coffin

draped in a patchwork flag of advertising.

The mind is the world,

my passions nest in trees,

my insights shatter

on the hard eyelids of the water,

and my heart is a succession

of boundary stones

that groove like sullen planets,

heritage jewels in antique gold.

The pathetic fallacy is not a fallacy

so when I cry

it’s not just my roots

that are drunk with emotion,

or the dykes of a deepening darkness

that hemorrhage on the moon.

There’s something sad about being a human,

an old sorrow,

as if the heart were a rock

recast by breakers of blood

into a bell that can no longer tell the difference

between a wedding and a funeral

one pulse to the next. Marginal seabirds,

humans live off the coast of everything,

continents, God, reality, ourselves.

Generation after generation,

we drag our dreams to the grave

like chains and withered lilies,

and there is so much longing in a hole,

an ocean in the vulva

of a dawn-coloured shell

turned like galaxies and sunflower seeds,

one golden ratio for all,

grief comes in like a tide

with a pod of misdirected killer whales

who will die nobly

under their own weight

like a religion, or a brotherhood

of tonsured priests, Jesuits

banished from the ear of the king.

Some days I’m a logger with a chainsaw

snarling through the trunk

of the tree of knowledge

despite the spikes of the protestors; others

I’m handcuffed in the upper branches

like a shaman in a cradle

nursed by flying serpents. But there’s no point

in clear-cutting the slope

of the mountainous library,

intercalating the growth rings of the heartwood

or raging through paper like fire,

an environmentally approved arsonist,

lightning flicked from the flint of a zippo.

I’ve read all the poets,

I had a mother and I know

there are swallows under the eaves,

wild poppies along the highway,

and a beautiful face

singing in the sunshine

that poses for everyone

like the moon on a lake,

that love and friendship sway the world

like powerlines and suspension bridges,

and goodness exists like oxygen,

the silent partner of the flame.

You needn’t try to convince me of the wonder,

I’m a savage mystic

who’s been washed up with more dead starfish

on the shipwrecked shores

of the eerie islands of night

than there are the names of lost lovers

in the dead letters of a sacred alphabet.

It’s just that the pain

of averaging out the crises

and astronomical catastrophes

into the sea-worn roundness

of a planet I can live on

sometimes overwhelms me

with a morning, a thought, a spear

that pierces my heart

like the axis of a wheel

that keeps coming home,

a seasoned traveler,

to the beginning

of a journey, a road, a voyage

that always ends in the going,

the flowing away,

right where it stands

in the shadowless afterlife

of a sundial in the moment,

this passage of waters

from abyss to abyss, mouth to mouth

neap and ebb,

and the paper boats that fail them

like drowned sailors

poured out of the urn, the amphora,

cinders from the eye of the sea

like the ashes and wine

of abandoned poems

that always lead back to me.

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,

unraveled 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

AND THERE IS ONE VOICE

And there is one voice among many,

one I remember as mine

among so many drops of rain, so many stars,

so many leaves, flames, feathers, flowers,

and the teen-age girl in so many corners of the darkness

skeining her pencil webs across the page

to catch something, a butterfly hunting spiders

that won’t understand her,

and the lovers that have sifted downstream

from the radiant watersheds of their mountain plateaus

like silt over the laryngeal deltas of my saying,

black pollen of extinguished stars

I carry around in the medicine bag of my afterlife

like mystic winds to keep the sails up

like the eyelids of a blind rose.

So many skies have enthroned themselves within me over the years,

so many waves and planets and legends of darkness

and the shipwrecks and shores of the weather,

and the storms and the birds, and the shriek of the lightning,

so many dawns and sunsets

and the strutting peacocks in the twilight,

and the sumptuous nights with their illicit luminosities,

so many banners of burning straw

as I look for the one needle of light

that was the gate and the eye and the mouth and the voice

of what most closely resembled me for awhile,

before I learned how to slough my skin

and the hauntings of the black poppies who long to be clear began,

and what was one threshold for a poet in solitude

turned into a palatial labyrinth of doors

that swung on their hinges in space like birds and tongues and bells

all the homeless whose last address will be a gravestone,

all the hapless, broken wretches

who keep trying again like losing bottle-caps,

and the women who came to the mike

to sing like an ambulance,

and the atrocities, the murders, the obscenity, the weeping,

that grabbed at my throat like severed hands

to scream of the horrors and sorrows

in the bloody braille and crippled signage of slaughtered flowers.

There was a boy. He was sixteen. And a prelude

that grained him out of a black cloud

that swirled around his feet like a snakepit

and pearled him into an eclipse

that time held up to the moon like a crow,

like a telescope silvered by the eyes of the night,

a black mirror that parted the veils of the obvious

like a woman’s legs

and went looking like a silo of infinite space

that echoed like a famine

into what he was the name of.

And he discovered he was nothing but the shadow of the world,

deaf mailmen, reluctant debutantes, car thieves

with the souls of hunted deer,

hookers whose blood glowed like neon

to fill the pleading mouths of a nest of empty wallets,

and the arrogant, the boring, the vicious,

the scholastic tidal pools who conjectured

about the existence of the great sea of being

that overwhelmed them day and night,

and the arsonists who walked in the rain of their distant exile

playing with their hearts like matches,

and the bruised violets who hide their eyes

under the sodden leaf of an autumn journal

that reads like the last ocean on the moon,

and the treacherous, the bitter, the liars

whose quivers of feathered asps

broke like arrows against the stone lions of the truth,

and the assassins who waited

like the thorn of a sundial to blood their shadows

in the eyeless witnesses of the crimes of noon

and the reformers who wanted to cover the earth in leather,

put shoes on the world

and wore out like flying carpets,

and those who were born to salt the field

and those who were born to sow,

and the rootless wildflowers

that gathered on the corners of concrete cities

like fire on the wind

only to be threshed by the blades of the moon,

cut down by the scarlet scythes of harvest squad cars.

And he has lingered among the opals and sapphires

and on the stairwells of water

that coiled like rivers and women

through the hovels of fire and ash

that consumed him like the memories of a phoenix

that had gone out like a pilot light,

and drunk the stars and eaten the radioactive meat

out of his own skull

like an enlightened begging bowl,

and come undone like a bell of wine in space

like a drunk shapeshifter, a staggering compass

on the high wire of his spinal cord

when his locks were moved by one of the keys of the mystery

that attuned him to the voice of his freedom

in a vast, starless abyss

that wiped the universe off the mirror

like the last breath of the light

to prove he was irrevocably dead.

And through all of this he has been a podium, a stage,

the gaping ellipse of the clear light of the void

auditioning another dream for the talent show,

an advance scout in the night

following rumours of stardom

across the appellant deserts of the moon

like thought chains of migrating geese

trying to remember their lines

like the secret names of God

on the rosaries of their long farewells,

and the only way to be anything

when he turned the light inward

was to agree that everyone had the answer but him,

that even the darkness that dyed

the clarity of his waters with night

to detonate the fireflies like blasting caps

wasn’t a robe of his own

but the nocturnal paint rag of the sky

that has been making him sit for his portrait like space

for the last forty-seven years

of writing shadows on the road like poems.

And I haven’t stopped crying for him since.

PATRICK WHITE