DON'T COVER YOUR EYES

DON’T COVER YOUR EYES

Don’t cover your eyes when the stars begin to fall; don’t

orphan your fire in a well. Your heart is not a museum of roses,

your love not a misdirected airdrop over a refugee camp.

Friend of these sidereal affinities we spread like table-cloths across space,

friend of these lonely silos in my eyes and this blood that breaks like bread,

still, you are the flower in the vase, impassioned, an urgent poppy.

All the blind librarians of the morning star agree

you are not who you say you are

when you show the shadows of authority your passport rainbow.

Sometimes the tongue of a forsaken seer dances like a drunk at a funeral

down the liberated allies of a sleeping ghetto

while the moon watches like a cat on a windowsill

high overhead. Shy bird feathered by your sudden flaring, your heart,

young and quick, darts easily from branch to branch

barely a presence behind the green jubilation

of a million silver leaves trembling with rain on the reborn tree.

Before the bird sings, we hear it. Before the star shines,

the night is fully enlightened. And home is always a bridge

where we wait to be rescued from hurling ourselves off

into our own desperate reflections. Let the fall save you.

You are the priestess in the shrine of mysterious apples,

sybil and empress of opulent oranges. No matter how many alphabets

enshroud the fairies in the legendary brilliance of ancient skies

and over the telephone cancel the sacred islands in their eyes,

your blood will bind them to this vital afterlife of now like fish

swimming through the flawed water palace

of a drowned engine. You can bet your lies on it.

Your sorrows are not the face-paint of weeping clowns,

nor your natural humanity a moat around a zoo for dwindling dragons.

When you sprawl like a wave of wine across the living room floor,

unspooling the honey and gold of your body’s flower-mine,

I see orchards in your guitar, wheat fire,

the landscape of a small, borderless country

trying to decide which of all its trees should form a government.

Compassionate zero, water your only foundation stone,

you string a harp between your fangs

between the unblooded crescents of the moon

and sink your music deep into the heart of your astounded prey.

Little killer, don’t you know, little killer,

let me tell you,

the saints are crueler than the sinners, the virgins

cheaper than the whores, and reason in its nest of crows

a bird that never soars. Through dangerous doorways, under

lethal skies, the ghost dance of the blind tiger, the white faun

while the widows of light pawn their eyeless rings

in the brutal crucibles of dawn. You want some advice?

Only the great fools who plead for nothing

know all the words to the song.

PATRICK WHITE

INNOCENT AS GRAVITY AND IT'S RAINING

INNOCENT AS GRAVITY AND IT’S RAINING

Innocent as gravity and it’s raining.

Trying to paint a Monarch butterfly into a starscape

where all the wavelengths have been woven

by a third eye into a spider web. This morning

the left and right hemispheres of my brain

are separated like an hourglass undergoing

the meiosis of galaxies whose lustre’s greyed

by the senile pearl of the sky. I want to play

aspirationally like fireflies among the stars,

but a gust of shadows has snuffed all the candles

and if I’m seeing stars at all, it’s like a rainbow

wearing a Joseph’s coat of colours

at the bottom of a well that hasn’t granted a wish in awhile.

My heart’s a loom of dissonant wavelengths

trying to weave my bloodstream like a carpet

it can fly away on braiding all these weak threads

and the light of all these images they carry

like the genomes of the souls of the dead

into the d.n.a. of a stronger spinal cord

I can use like a rope to climb up to the sky and beyond.

All my gravitational lensing has turned into bells of glass

and I’m walking on the splinters and plinths

of things that have come and passed, bearing these urns

transmigrationally like amphorae on a shipwreck

to the bottom of a subconscious watershed.

More sad than depressed, but dark just the same

as if all the dazzling suns and lapidary moons

with stars in their eyes that went into the wine

had just closed them in eclipse. Gone back to sleep

as it seems so many flowers to dream a better dream.

What need of my acceptance of what comes or doesn’t

when my denial or assent are absorbed in its presence?

As if I had a say in my own solitude. Or the birds

could get in the way of their own singing. Or the rain

could choose the window pane it wanted to look through.

However I labour to refute it, my awareness

is as spontaneously inclusive as time and space,

or closer to home, the sea its own weather, foul or fair.

I can’t extinguish the desert that burns within me

in a mirage of water, nor drown the stars in my tears

like the tiny insects that sometimes fly into my eyes

that wash their wings out like sodden punctuation marks

uprooted like sprouting seeds in a sudden flashflood of insight.

I can’t catch up to the light. And I can’t run from it.

Whether it stings like a nettle or soothes like an aloe

it’s always the muse, the mysterium of here and now, as it is,

firefly, or dragon that brings the rain, that I follow

in this discipline of disobedience to what I know and let go of

so that it rains just as often from below as it does from above.

PATRICK WHITE

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