FROM THE TREE TO THE GROUND THE SEED IS UNBOUND

FROM THE TREE TO THE GROUND THE SEED IS UNBOUND

From the tree to the ground the seed is unbound

as a bird in a space capsule re-entering the earth’s atmosphere

like an apple at splash down withering like a parachute.

Or the wind uplifts you like a lion with the mane

of a solar corona, and you roar in the abyss awhile

and then it lets you down like a dandelion

in a windfall of paratroopers crossing the Rhine.

Rags of the flags of last year’s nation of leaves

stuck together like the pages of a wet history book

made sacred by the earth I’m walking on bathed in blood.

Nature red in tooth and claw as if the hot passionate colours

that advance to the foreground were more violent

than the more distantly passive violets, viridians, and blues.

Chill out means stop aiming at everything as if

you were a sniper in a belfry with a machine-gun

looking for God with your third eye laminated to the lens

of a high-powered telescope that’s got you in its digital crosshairs.

I’m not seeking freedom to not have to look for anything.

I’m not turning over every stone to see where the angels

keep their ancient places as a junkie-poet once said

in the gutters of Victorian London, or peeking under every leaf

to see where I left my eyes like reading glasses

under a sheaf of poems packed on my desk

like the layers of the Burgess Shale after the first good snowfall.

Things come of their own accord out of a time-zone

that’s unique to them, and delight in their reception

like strangers in the doorway of an open heart,

every step of the way the threshold of a journey

that would never depart like the bloodstream of a ghost

evaporating from the palace it built in the salt flats

if you didn’t give the flowing a purpose, a destination,

the drift of your circuitous blossoming something to find

when you arrive at the place you lost it like an exit

at the front entrance of your mind. Peace isn’t

the consolation prize of a new pair of eyes

trying to make up for the loss of your happiness.

It’s the only cornerstone of the stars

in a desert of quicksand saturated with the mirages

of the tears you keep sinking in like the delusional oceans

of the moon, in a tidal pool of unsalvaged shadows.

Black walnuts all over the ground this year

like incinerated solar systems from a Rumi poem

lying at my feet like unracked cue balls that didn’t break

but I don’t take them as signs of things to come

because things to come come quietly in the night

without making the grand entrance of a moonrise

or heralding their farewell with the garish sunset

of a trumpeter swan. They come on small feet

that barely make a whisper through the grass.

And then they’re gone like a bubble in a mirror

that breaks into ripples on the surface of the mind

once it makes contact with an atmosphere vast enough

to contain it like an enlightened vision of the wind it rides

to ends of the earth like the breath of life within us all

from birth to death, the mysterious door left ajar ahead of us

and the one behind, opening even wider in our wake.

PATRICK WHITE

RAIN AT FIVE IN THE MORNING. CAN'T SLEEP.

RAIN AT FIVE IN THE MORNING. CAN’T SLEEP

Rain at five in the morning. Can’t sleep.

Too many shards of broken mirrors

of the way things are in my mind.

Not enough windows to look through

for a star or two between the clouds.

No one on the streets. And the doorways

keeping their thoughts to themselves.

The pipes of the gas furnace creak

like an octopus with arthritis

and the aquarium filter leaks

like a mindstream on the rocks

not the lyrics of a fountain with a dolphin’s mouth.

My eyes observe the protocols of seeing

into the sturm and drang of my awareness

like a lighthouse, but the dragon’s awake

scalding my heart until my blood seethes

like the toxic glands of a cold-hearted reptile

in a cauldron of volcanic mistakes

reversing the spin of the spells I cast

that had more of an air of forgiveness about them

than is seemly for a curse but still too much

the smouldering of the Druidic glais

dedicated to the ashes of the Burning Man

to be a blessing in the eyes of the beholder

who sees his own features in it, good or bad,

depending on how raw or cooked he is.

My subconscious mind surfaces

like the dorsal fin of a sundial

to circle the lifeboat I’m in

like a prophet in the belly of a killer whale

trying to knock a seal off an ice floe.

I’ve disciplined my karma like a martial art

but my heart is a miasma of provisional compassion.

Dead dog’s dream self snarls like a junkyard

of bad performance poetry behind an electric fence

I wove out of the optic fibres

of a discarded dreamcatcher

hanging from a rearview mirror

in the middle of a windshield

swimming against the flow of things

like a salmon up the mountain

in the slipstream of its own wake.

I keep my rage on a chain and a muzzle.

I keep my sorrow to myself like a child

I never wanted to grow up to be me.

I can be a heretic devoted to the freedom

of my own creative apostasy

as a decultified mode of poetic disobedience

but there’s a gleeful buoyancy

in the experience that bubbles up

within me like a tar pit liberated from itself

that says touch even this lightly

in your passage through here.

Listen to the wind in the trees

with your nose as well as your ears

but follow the stars like a shepherd of wolves

hunting in the same high fields

their fires graze upon themselves,

not the wheeling of the world’s wavelengths

in these earthbound coils of renewal and extinction

crushing the life out of me like a beached Leviathan

suffocating under its own weight, or oracular pythons

with their tails in their mouths like the last word

of anything left to say on their deathbeds.

My despair is still contaminated with hope

and the lucky long shots that ricochet off chaos

but still hit the target like the master stroke

of a random God particle, haven’t done anything

to improve the aim of my hadron collider.

The secret of life is confided only to those

discrete enough not to tell it to anyone else.

They wear it on their sleeves like silence.

Their tongues are not candles in the niches of their mouths

they keep blowing out with every breath they take

looking for emergency exits in the fire traps of their shrines.

And woe to the hypocrite that tries

to love me unconditionally as if I didn’t have

a mind and a heart of my own to see

what a ploy it is to climb a burning ladder

up to heaven, only to let people down conditionally

like a fire-escape in a cheap hotel

that stops half way to the ground.

PATRICK WHITE

MUSKRAT SKULL, ALBINO ASTEROID, CHUNK OF THE MOON

MUSKRAT SKULL, ALBINO ASTEROID, CHUNK OF THE MOON

Muskrat skull, albino asteroid, chunk of the moon

fallen to earth, ivory doorknob picked clean

by ants and wolves, half your teeth stacked like books

on a shelf behind the crescent moons of your fangs

and their reflections, as above so below,

that don’t quite meet in the middle of the bridge

you’re building like an engineer with overbite.

When I look down upon your cranium from above it’s

a beautiful amphora, handles like arms at its side,

a woman hoisting her long skirt up to cross a river.

Musquash, you must be a holy food if they let the Catholics

eat you at Lent in place of fish because you spend

so much of your time aquatically. Do the wolves,

the owls, the foxes, the mink, the hawks, the fishers,

the feral dogs know they’re enlightened

by the flesh of your body? You, alone, of all

the animals who tried and failed, the Gabriel

of the native creation myth that touched bottom

to bring back the starmud that made the earth,

the Gilgamesh of these Canadian wetlands.

Did a rat snake steal your herb of immortality

from the shrines of the cattails you build

at the water’s edge, the bigger the harsher

the winter to come, like siloes you can take shelter in?

Little rodent, here by the river tonight, where

I’m sitting with my heart as skinless as yours

under the stars whose light feels like thorns of insight

piercing my blood, you are my only companion.

I look into the gaping sockets of your eyes

glacially excavated like most of the lakes around here,

though my third eye is aloof and impersonal

compared to the other two, and I realize

how ruthless enlightenment is, still, little guru,

I want to cry like a river that’s come to rest in them

because I can see in you, like a locket of bone,

the same image of life, the Beloved,

I carry in the moonrock of my own prophetic skull.

Did the wolves do this? Did the pike eat your young

and cousin of the vole and lemming, you achieved

your climacteric like stars at the zenith of a precipice

and commit suicide at the atavistic urging of ancient enzymes?

Or did you die naturally like moonset in its crone phase,

the light slowly seeping from your eyes? Best fur

bundled up in yourself for the winter, your tail had scales.

What happened to them? Were they feathered

like dinosaurs into the boas of vaudeville strippers

that teased you with the mystery of their nakedness

and yours, by holding something back from the revelation

so there would be something left to dream on next time

like this amulet of your skull cradled in my hands?

Nocturnal janitor of the pond after all the lights

were turned off and the raucous business of the crows

had gone home for the night, what stars did you sweep up

like fallen blossoms and waterlilies trashed on the shoreline

like the first draft of origami swans

that couldn’t swim in the heights with Aquila and Cygnus,

attached as they were to the earth like kites

at the end of their spinal cords, until the stars took pity

upon their lunar aspirations and landing like waterbirds

on the pond, came down like bodhisattvas

to teach them how to fly when five petals open

and one flower blooms from a seed of fire

that travels on the wind? Undertaker and midwife

what did you bury under the root fires of the hearths

of the bronze age barrow tombs you lived in with the dead

from one equinox to the next standing on your threshold?

Ubiquitous creature, materfamilias of the litter,

or randy male, lingham in the yoni of the yellow lotus,

Muscascus, it is red, your Algonquin name,

what spiritual immunity did evolution bless you with

that you could live in the sulphurous streams that ran

from the eyes of the coal mines smearing their mascara

at their first sight of hell they tunnelled into,

rooting for diamonds stashed by the star-nosed moles,

and thrive in the same polluted waters that killed

people, frogs and fish? Teach me that, if you can.

I’m an island of a man in the middle of a dirty river.

I’m a human on a barge of the moon that’s dumping

the garbage of my species into the gutter of the sea

that returns like high tide to the bay

in the waters of the womb I was born in

like a salmon to swim upstream against

the effluvium of the tomb that washed me out

of my vision of life like something that got in its eyes

or one of your tumuli in the spring run off

when the river ravens with the wolves along its own shores

sweeping the baskets you weave of reeds

for orphaned prophets far out to these oceanic nights

among the wavelengths of life and death I share with you.

Millions of leaves on the ground like the fossils of flames

snuffed out on the candelabras of the trees of life,

the stars may have their crystal skulls,

but yours and mine are mineralized calcium phosphate,

fire and milk, the moon among the corals,

where the living and the dead cohabitate

like collagen turning to concrete in an underwater reef

that will rip the keels out of our driftwood lifeboats

like the envelopes of unanswerable loveletters

cut open from the bottom up. But no shelf

of exotic curiosities in the lost and found of my studio,

no bauble of death to alarm the sedimentary books

above my cherrywood desk for you my friend.

I leave you where you lie upon the earth

on the banks of life beside my mindstream,

nightwatchman of the pond, nurse on the nightshift.

I circle you three times like a spiritual orbiter

a Zen master in bloom, your skull, not

the spent canister of a milk weed pod,

but a wild orchid supple as moonlight

even in death as in bliss, attending

to the business of nirvana like a passing cornerstone

in a clearing of this floating world you weeded

like the empty cup of your eye socket

I look into like a despondent stranger into a black hole

and feel the passionate insight of your eyebeams

shining up at me like stars reading

the Braille of my face with fingertips of light

to see if I’ve understood yet that life in its passage

is an enlightened message, not the frightened warning

that ushers the dead back to their graves before morning.

PATRICK WHITE

BARED OF ITS LEAVES LIKE NATIVE PEACE TREATIES

BARED OF ITS LEAVES LIKE NATIVE PEACE TREATIES

Bared of its leaves like native peace treaties

with the westerlies who never kept them,

the last red planet of the chokecherry falls

into the claws of a black squirrel eyeing it

like a space rover looking for life on Mars.

O the myriad worlds you can see in a single mystic detail.

Bring me a hair of God and I’ll pass through it

like a wormhole into the dark matter of the mind

going on behind the light like vital events

that are deeper than skin and blood on stage.

Just count the number of pathways through the woods

compared to the roads to know whether

you’re in a good space or not. If people

wander to work in their own good time

or rush from one abyss to another

trying to get ahead of an ion waterclock.

Take the solitude out of society

and there’s not much left worth talking about.

So I enjoin the silence to keep the acuity of my wonder

sharp as the thorns of a heart with nothing left to guard

after the wild rose ran off in one of her phases with the moon.

I have long conversations with the stars

without a word or a gesture of grammar being said

in either of our mother-tongues that can’t be understood

immediately, without the intermediary of a metaphor

or a dictionary that gets to the roots of things

like a star-nosed mole with no flowers in its soul.

No end of the distance between us when you measure it in miles

but insight travels faster than the speed of light

and both of us are shining in the same dark space

like an eye looking back at itself from a long way off.

The night is lonely, cold, and ageing but there’s a fire

blazing in my heartwood the trees huddle around

as the shadows of the flames dart from trunk to trunk

with the alacrity and cunning of a wolf

that knows it’s the last of its kind in these darkening hills

to embody the magic of its elders in its way of life.

Fear is the mind-killer. So I stay enthroned

by the stone navel of my firepit flowering

all around me like the corona of the sun at midnight

just to say I know the protocols of being as well as the rocks

when I rise to embrace strangers in my solitude

as the new spiritual familiars that will accompany me

on my long firewalk to the stars that are never

any further away than my future is from my past

or now is from here to there every step of the path

The stars spin their webs in the crowns of the trees

into dreamcatchers with mythically inflated origins

that answer the paradigms of the constellations

by connecting the dots like wild grape vines

to the shapeshifting starmaps of the mind

I keep shedding like leaves and feathers and scales

to understand the underlying scaffoldings and skeletons

I climb up on like monkey bars

to repaint creation in everybody’s image

but my own. My fire. My heart. I’m the host

of an expansive space that’s generous enough

to embody it all without standing in jubilation

like an angel in the doorway as if there were

somebody home no one could account for.

A stranger in the thirteenth house of a misbegotten zodiac

of birthmarks driven out into the wilderness

like maniacs, prophets, poets and astronomical wise men

as scapegoats for the fate of upper class tattoos

that don’t wash off any easier than the wind

teaching the stars that have just learned how to print

this cursive script I’m writing in like a mindstream

punctuating its passage with toadstools and pine-cones,

chokecherries, black walnuts, wild crab apples

and shepherd moons in decaying orbits around

the black hole at the center of the universe

we’re all attached to like hinges to a gate

that only has to swing open once to everything

and it’s good for as many lifetimes as you want to go through

like a labyrinth of exits leading into a clearing

deep within your heart where nothing exists

and yet inconceivably everything insists upon shining.

PATRICK WHITE

HOW STRANGE TO RECALL CHILDHOOD AS AN AGING MAN

HOW STRANGE TO RECALL CHILDHOOD AS AN AGING MAN

How strange to recall childhood as an aging man

as if nothing had changed for the last sixty years

you’re watching yourself as a young boy

from a point of awareness somewhere in the air

above him like someone he couldn’t have foreseen becoming,

looking back upon him with great tenderness

that I’m what I made of his future as he

tries to reverse the bike chain he caught

his pant cuff in, and I can do nothing to help him

at this remove, except love him as someone should have then

when these strange tears didn’t taste so much of time.

Who could have guessed it would take all these years

to fill the absence in his heart up by becoming

the intimate familiar of the solitude of a child

who could befriend anything that was as lost and wild

and wounded as he was and yet could dream

of doing great things up late in his room at night

to prove he was at least as loveable as any achievement.

He was off to fight a holy war of one with himself

like a single infidel against the whole of Christendom

that I’m the living ruin of because sometimes it’s wiser

to be defeated than it is to prevail supreme

against your own dream of being worthy of love.

Time ripples in the growth rings of a tree

echoing the song of a well-seasoned nightbird

in the heartwood of a shedding maple

that remembers all the lyrics of longing and lament

it sings to itself at times like an arrow, a burnt guitar

struck by lightning, or one of the strong rafters

that uphold the soul like the keel of a lifeboat overturned

on the great night sea of a death in life

it drowned in more than once like moonset

among the corals that tore the bottom of its hull.

And how many cold nights did it take

before the syrups began to run sweetly in spring

and the new leaves forget the history of their roots

as I tried to abandon the child that I was

by the side of a road that led him away from me

because I thought one of us had to go homeless

in order to survive the firestorms of his outraged innocence

and the unaccusing guilt of mine as I grew up

letting him down in ways that only he can imagine

as I spread from one burning building to the next

like a new religion that wasn’t looking for converts?

But if you were to ask me now, I’d say it’s funny

how he turned out to be the Buddha sitting at the base

of the Bodhi tree of my spine, and on a good day,

at my best, before the fall, I’m Lucifer leading

the sun up at dawn like a child guiding a blind prophet

by the hand long before the morning star appeared

like Venus to those who were seeking enlightenment

without me or themselves to witness what neither of us

had attained like the key to the mystery of a universe

that had no locks on it to begin with to shut anybody out

or keep anybody in. The man in me doesn’t blame the child

for existing the way I do now trying belatedly

to embrace his rejection as a way of life

I can make up for by sharing this wounded solitude with him

like an injured animal he can see himself in

as a potential friend he could identify with

as if what had happened to me had once happened to him

and we could both approach each other with compassion.

PATRICK WHITE

AND WHEN YOU GET WHAT YOU WANT, IS IT WHAT YOU DREAMED?

AND WHEN YOU GET WHAT YOU WANT, IS IT WHAT YOU DREAMED?

And when you get what you want, is it what you dreamed?

Did the mirage live up to its reputation, did it exceed

your expectations or is there another award beyond this one?

O endlessly hungry one, pleonaxic emptiness, were you born

like a black hole on a midway of blazing radiance,

a blinding light that serves as a guide to star-nosed moles?

Fulfilment or doom, depression, disappointment, as if

some clown had washed his face off like a painted tear

in a green room mirror, and discovered he was still crying?

You grasp it like the garment of a passing ghost,

sand, water, cloud, and it changes shape in your hands

like the nature of a bird when neither of you understands.

We all wake up to spend the wealth we hoarded in our dreams.

We even greet death with money under our tongue.

In Zen they’d say we’re all stealing the Buddha’s purse

to buy the Buddha’s horse one way or another

whether we can ride it or not, and if today you’re disappointed

you’ll be mesmerized by something else tomorrow,

a junk dealer going through a widow’s private treasures.

You’ll open your mouth again like an oyster farm

trying to breed pearls like the philosopher’s stone

labouring to turn all these new moons of pitted ore into gold.

Good luck. Hope you’re the wiser for it. As for me

and my house, I’ve never been disappointed

in my wonder at the world, and what I’m doing here

being aware of it all as the world tracks its starmud in

across my homeless threshold and all these ancient footprints

are dance steps back to a self that’s just a tic of the emptiness

I catch once and awhile out of the corner of my third eye

abrogating credit for a dream it had nothing to do with

because that’s a bird still flapping its wings in a shell

thinking it’s being upheld by the wind until someone

cracks it open like a brittle atmosphere and all that space

comes rushing in and you realize with a cosmic sigh of relief

like a sunflower bowing its heavy head, what a great debt

you owe to the nothing that you are that can’t possess anything.

You’re standing there in all your spiritual bling,

gold necklaces around your throat, chakras and chains

looped like nooses in knots at the end of your spinal cord.

What did you do? Bind yourself to the axis of the earth

to be mistaken for a saint or a martyr, the wobbly snake

of an inebriated caduceus, but where’s the fire, where’s

the heretic, the apostate, the dragon singing in its own flames,

where even one firefly of insight that consumes the universe?

Or are you just another photo op with mermaids

calling you to the soft rocks of a popular song?

A straw dog in the rain smouldering like methane

on a compost heap after another ritual performance?

You’re greedy for joy. You’re greedy for illumination

in the spotlight. But bliss is one of the spices of life,

not the main course. And to want more than this

is to declare you’re a glutton with lousy spiritual manners.

And O yes I know, you think this is like blooming

and having someone throw acid in your face

when you were anticipating rain on your plum blossoms.

You duck through a hole in the fence like a raccoon

caught pilfering corn in a garden, and you want

a Roman triumph with rosewater and slaves

for passing through the gateless gate to liberation

when all you’ve really done is barge through

the emergency exit to run from a shotgun loaded with stars

in the hands of a scarecrow trying to terrify the birds

by shooting straight up into the air until things

begin to take root of themselves, and the locust trees

are feathered with the leaves of nesting lapwings

that don’t have any further to fall though they feign

a dizzying descent of wounded maple keys

and all the shamans have to heal themselves

by ploughing the ground they were born on into bookshelves.

PATRICK WHITE

THE LAMENT OF THE LAST TRAIN WHISTLE

THE LAMENT OF THE LAST TRAIN WHISTLE

The lament of the last train whistle

has disappeared into the distance

mournfully looking for its lost child.

October night in the woods

around an old fire pit of prophetic skulls

blowing ghosts of smoke in my face

that bring me to tears, a neolithic calendar

of all the old and new moons that have passed.

So many, so much, that used to matter

doesn’t anymore. Dream figures

that shed their skins like the longer wavelengths

of watersnakes in an infra-red mindscape

of serpent fire dying like the sun

that can tell the hour by the taste of its ashes.

I throw more well-dried thresholds on the fire

like branches that used to be green with the tears

of sweeter departures and arrivals over the years.

All the light’s jumped from orbitals

of the tree rings that sag like bags

under the eyes knotted like islands

in the heartwood of their xylem and phloem.

Here where the river parts like long hair

on the skull of a stone, I sit like a demon

in a sacred place, clarified, alert, and alone

as any nocturnal animal in the woods.

The chalkdust of my bones trying

to connect the stars to their constellations

snagged in the trees like the rags of spiderwebs

on the blackboard of a starmap as wide as the sky

and deep as the subconscious of the Burgess Shale.

It’s not a betrayal to let go of your faith

when you had none in the first place

and you don’t need a parachute on the edge of space

to plunge from paradise, or a weather balloon

of a bad Christian poet to shepherd Dante

like a moon out of hell. Be yourself,

especially when nobody’s watching

except that same drone in the sky

that occasionally flashes a flake of silver off

its stone cold third eye to flint your awareness

that it’s still there in the cosmic background

like a witness to your dreams and schemes

for a luxuriously appointed life of enlightenment.

Be yourself. The direct copulative imperative

that has supplanted the light as the first word

out of the mouth of creation. Be yourself.

And then let there be light by the side of a good fire

to let you see who that is as acutely

as you can see in the dark who that is not.

The migration of the Canada geese might seem

a broken rosary of new moons calling out

the names of God to you, and one unknown,

or silhouetted against the moon they might

suggest the afterbirth attached to a cut umbilical cord

and your heart might feel reborn somewhere

in the autumn of your life, a child of the fire,

a flower in the full bloom of its solitude

dancing with its own mercurial apparition

on the waters of life in the mindstream

always out of season enough to lag behind

so it can tell the time by the widening gaps in its passage

as it’s waiting for the night to catch up to its own shining

like a thief of fire unchained from the rock

that broke the glass window of its transfixed seeing

with a meteor in the hands of an enlightened delinquent.

Or you might read the falling leaves as occult lifelines

on a Tarot deck of overlapping lifespans

like the scales of a dragon playing solitaire

beside the small inferno of a signal fire to the stars,

to let them know you’re coming faster

than the time it takes for a thought to make it

all the way to death and back to birth again

as if you were pinging your emotions

like stray wavelengths from the oceans of your awareness

off the horns of the moon the way

you used to skip rocks out over the sea as a boy

to see how long they would keep on going

like a waterclock of stone before they sank

like the flying fish of the hard, cold facts of life back into

the numinous depths of your collective unknowing

where the stars aren’t fixed to anything that isn’t

flowing along with them like the wind on the mindstream

or a small fire catching its breath in the silence and the solitude

of so much radiance, before it’s on its way again for good.

PATRICK WHITE