COSMOLOGIST WITH TWEEZERS

COSMOLOGIST WITH TWEEZERS

Palace after palace of blood I feed my idiot heart

to the fish and the cannibal stars

from a barge of funeral swans sullen as books.

I told myself not to look for this death when I dropped it

the day I was born, to leave it lie in the violent grass,

a key to a door that doesn’t exist yet,

an insect crushed between the pages of the sky

that reads like the failing eyes of an ancient astronomer

compiling an expanded preface

to an encyclopedic suicide note. O I can say anything

when the mirror is having an affair

with the moon’s oceanic face.

I can put lipstick on the corpse of a rose

and die for the whole cemetery like a callous messiah

sick of being resurrected at the take-out window.

My love forsaken, a beggar reaching into a serpent’s nest

for an egg that longs to be turned

like the handle to a door

that might be a way out, I consult

the crazy wisdom of the crows,

and a sage of the black night

to find my way back to a grave

that has not forgotten the taste of the dream

that was blood and wine and light.

This is a shabby afterlife, an unworthy war of mistakes,

where the orchids are raped on their wedding nights

and a peace treaty is chalk on the sidewalk

around a murdered mailman.

It would be a lie to say I wasn’t wounded,

it would be a falsehood to say I was.

This pain is the blundering apprentice of a mystic knife.

This agony is stupid and futile and vain, this sorrow

a brothel of homesick nuns.

I give my tears the address

of a man I know in Boston, a bibliophile

who might take them in as a first edition

of a bride who was published posthumously.

I give my heart like a fire-alarm to two women

waiting by the bus.

My skull begs for campaign funds

to run as an alternative planet

to the one I’m walking on,

but the terrorist behind the door

with his redressals and reforms, his ancient future

strapped to his waist like a broken promise

has already ruined my vote

by killing off the candidate.

I confess to a puppet government

with the excrescent sickle of the moon at my jugular vein

that I have always been, even in eclipse,

an avid fan of significant absurdities.

They accuse me of consorting with swans

and I give up smoking

in front of a firing squad.

The sun comes up like an afterthought, an iron rose

or a bullet hole through the troubled forehead of dawn.

“Is there no end to the wonders of God?”

cries a highschool prophet on a diving board

while his seeing-eye dog runs off

with a shoe full of massacred dice.

And this is the meaning of life,

and this is the meaning of life,

chants the scorned heart

pulling stitches out of a scar,

a cosmologist with tweezers

who bleeds to death

every time he opens his mouth to heal.

PATRICK WHITE

THE SNOW GREY VIOLET IN THE GHOSTLY YELLOW MOONRISE

THE SNOW GREY VIOLET IN THE GHOSTLY YELLOW MOONRISE

The snow grey violet in the ghostly yellow moonrise.

Glazed mirrors of crude ice on the south side

of the metallic waves that faced the sun all day.

As if the white were the dark negative space

and the Prussian blue shadows of the cedars

had more substance than the light.

The burning clarity of -20 Celsius

when the Dutch elms and the basswood trees

and the oak on the hill

that keeps dropping its twigs

like frost-bitten fingers

groaned and cracked like a vice-grip of ice

crushing Frobisher’s ship

like a black walnut between its teeth.

And everywhere you walked

was like walking on the roof of a greenhouse

you kept putting your foot through.

Your breath growing stalactites of ice in your beard

so whenever you breathed out

it looked like smoke coming out of a cave.

I’d stand in the spent garden

among the bare tent-poles

that the summer had carried

like the fire of the scarlet runners

all the way up the burning rungs

of a ladder to heaven

that now stood out in the snow

like the skeletons of tipis

and abandoned easels

in a deserted native village.

The locust tree thorned like a bird of prey.

My tiny, tiny heart

like a solitary lightbulb in a well housing

trying to keep the pump from freezing up

as if I had stage fright

in front of all those stars.

Or I was a comma-sized deer mouse,

all ashes on the outside

but warm embers within,

standing in a splash of juniper

looking up at the moon like an owl

with a cosmic wingspan

and blood on its talons.

Far off, the barking of a farmyard dog

investigates the predatory silence

by throwing down the gauntlet of its voice

to hear who answers the challenge.

The coyotes lift their heads and snarl

and curl back into their body heat.

Too cold for man or beast.

The vole and the shrew and the mouse

sleep under the snow

in little igloos

lined with a few dry leaves

and a cache of seeds

that will get them through the winter

if they’re not crushed to death by snowmobiles.

Everything fixed, crystalline, structured

except for the black water of the creek

under its corrective lens of ice

as if time itself were held in abeyance

and decay were a thing of the past

and change that brings so much suffering

was put on hold like an abandoned barn

with the names of Irish immigrant kids

carved into its rafters,

scuttled like an ark on Mt. Ararat

that had unloaded all its occupants on land

escaping the 1848 Irish potato famine.

Time stops and there’s no pulse to space.

There’s no death or birth

in the void of the moment.

No movement to the wind

and even the ghosts

of the immigrant kids

are trying not to freeze their tongues

to the shrinking dime of the moon

as it adds more silver

to the copper of its coinage

rising toward zenith

like the cost of a chocolate bar.

I’d stand there stomping my feet

in a slow snow dance

around the small fire

that flared and embered in my body

a firefly shy of going out

to keep from passing out from hypothermia.

Smell of smoke pluming from the Selkirk chimney,

the windows of the farmhouse

shedding the petals of black-eyed Susans

like warm panels of light

spreading something flannel

over the cold bed of the snow.

All the cats, all the dogs in for the night

stretched out anoxically upon one another

in the igneous glow of the black airtight

that stood in the middle of the living room

like a black rhino

with a bent chimney pipe for a horn

in the middle of three hundred acres of snow

it wasn’t going to give in to

like a local ice age

it had already been through.

Everybody in but me mesmerized by

the uncompromising beauty of the scene,

as the stars burned like bridges in the abyss

and everything that lived under the sun by day,

surviving every which way they could

shared the same exact cause of death

by the time it went down

and the cold was one law for all

with no exceptions, no mercy, no malice,

no regrets for the blue-jay

that didn’t eat enough sunflower seeds

to keep from falling from its perch

like just another ornithological statistic.

And you couldn’t say with a straight face

even indifference

because there was nothing there

to ignore in the first place

and to shake your fist at the gods

as if there were gods

that did and didn’t give a shit

was to miss the point entirely.

A cosmic view through a local window

of eyes, flesh and blood,

without a frame of reference.

A man standing in a dead garden

in awe of the unearthly radiance

of the moon on the ice and the snow

looking upon the uneventful beauty

in the stillness of death

that would overtake many in the night

as he added his own ghost of breath

like smoke from the chimney

to the sublime inconsequence of it all.

Regulus in Leo going down in the west

like a toppled sphinx.

Twenty-five years of license plates

from 1939 to l964

nailed to the barn door

like some kind of helpless calendar

that ran out of cars and time

and seemed to imply

1965 was the year

life let go of the farm

and wandered off into the abyss

like a man no one knew existed

and only a very few would miss for awhile.

PATRICK WHITE

THE ISSUE

THE ISSUE

I see the sadness in the world, the malevolent madness

of the dogs of pain snarling at the moon in the tree of life,

the way people cut and claw and desecrate each other

and walk away as if there were a victory in the slaughter, a hero in the butchery

that hacks and packs the corpses in the shrieking streets,

the raped daughter, the man on his knees who bleats for mercy

from indifferent gods whose thunderbolts have changed to cattle-prods.

Little, petty people everywhere, runts of the heart and mind,

wee weak ones with the poison syrup of your smiles

distilled from killer bees, you who like to grind your heel into the human face

and celebrate your hydrophobic power as a state of grace,

I ask you here on planet earth, this dirty tear among the stars,

in this horrible hour between birth and death, are you a race

of vicious, midget, spiritual pygmy, or emotional dwarf,

when you were given breath and blood and light,

were you an atrocity of genetic reciprocity, did you wince at the sight

of yourself in the mirror, repulsively wierd and full of fear,

did your mother abandon you on a stone to rot,

give you to a circus, an abortion clinic, a church step, a garbage bag;

are you angry for all the things you know you’re not; do you gag

on the beauty of others, their gifts, their truth

and plot a coup to overthrow anyone who isn’t you, your puny proportions

the prototype of all your replicant distortions

until the earth is filled with ugliness and grief,

and even the strongest are consoled by the fact that life is brief?

What hideous art scars the bitter apple of your heart like a worm

and thorns and norms the form of every thought with malice?

Are you a fly in the chalice, a maggot, a convulsion of dirt;

are you washed clean of yourself by the tears of those you hurt?

Everyday a hundred species disappear, oil and faeces

smeared across the living face that’s mirrored on the waters,

and the moon repelled by the odium of what its light must shine upon.

Lucky the stars that burn so far and furiously away

from this disgrace of molecules and ghouls that only the fools

in schools for the deaf and blind look for reason in the treason,

error in the terror that you wreak. You see birds,

you learn to fly. A century later whole cities die in a flash of light

at the end of your quest for flight. You’re born with a tongue,

you learn to speak, and you say the rich must have what they seek

and the poor will bleed until their hearts are withered by need.

You’re given eyes and clear night skies and a mind behind it all

in a world of revelations, and you learn to see and name,

and by the time you’ve festered into maturity

the vision is grimed by the smog of your vain obscurity,

nacreous cataracts the skies that fog your eyes,

and you’re laying the blame on the picture frame

that holds nothing but the death mask of you, eyes closed,

and yours the signature of the artist for whom you posed,

but nothing of insight, nothing of character disclosed.

Brutal monkey, murderous ape gland, prenatal purge,

is this the world you planned as a gesture of spite,

this jest and riddle of misery on the verge

of serial catastrophe to gratify your calamitous urge

to indict existence for your devolving plight? Here among mystics, lovers, poets,

painters, sinners, saints, singers, astronomers and clowns,

mesmerized by night, or useful as day,

what embodiment of pain justifys the febrile tides of hate

that animate your imagination for decay,

the treachery of the cannibal heart that leeches its own clay?

There must be a hell for you if nothing more

than to meet yourself as you are

behind every opening door, in every house of pain,

in every abattoir, scrying the gore on the bestial floor,

to discover your own features

in the severed eye and lifeless hand of a hundred million creatures.

You’re insane. Every thought, a blister of the brain, a scar too far.

These were your teachers, and everytime you applied your iron rule,

and raving in your dementia, or rationally composed, killed one,

you liberated another buddha from a fool, another sky, another jewel

from the treasury of your own lie,

the one that beats on your heart like a drum

and never lets you forget

that for all the noise you make in the empty silo of creation,

you’re not the harvest, you’re the crumb.

PATRICK WHITE

AND I THINK I MAY BE HALF CRAZY

AND I THINK I MAY BE HALF CRAZY

And I think I may be half crazy, half desperate,

half dead and wholly alone in the dark

with the ghosts of things I could not save

from drowning on the moon, the collapsed bridges

in the accusing eyes of large, wet promises

that died like worms in a hopeful rose,

commas and kisses that ate through its eyelids

into a dream that never grew wings. I am

bent weird like the bruised radiance

of a ray of light chromatically startled

by the return journey of the mirror,

the odd deflections in the pyrex eye

of a telescope that never crys, a white madonna

in a mountain shrine of stars

that stares at the heavens blankly, well beyond

the graphs and passions of her grave ascensions.

And I don’t know where I am,

and I don’t know what to say, and I can’t tell

if it’s always been this way

and I’m just discovering it now

having fallen into some kind of black hole

that we’re all in alone with everyone

believing it’s just another ordinary day,

though it’s never been this day before, so it isn’t;

or if I’ve become the warden

of a private horror locked in himself

like a skeleton in a straitjacket

trying to placate its loss of focus

with the physics of indeterminancy.

Every day I’m at the empty foodbank, every night

the lost and found of licensed lives

that dropped like wallets in the grass,

asking if anyone has seen me lately,

if anyone can recognize my voice.

A million stars return me

like a foundling

to the stairs of my own house

and a dreadful silence walks away

leaving me like a language I don’t know how to speak.

And the hours are eerie and wounded and vast

as if I blundered into the mass grave

of all my former selves and asked the doll

under the arm of an exterminated child

who did this to us. Was it suicide,

Jonestown, black cool-aid,

or the lime of an unknown hatred?

Why am I alone among the missing

in this iron-handed darkness

that makes an oyster of the sky

and grows me like a pearl or the moon

of an uninhabitable planet battered like a bride?

I want to get things off my chest, confess

like a homely cousin of uranium

that I’m really lead at heart, a stable element

that won’t irradiate the dark with refugees

or the brilliant declensions of genius.

I want to be the stuff of aqueducts

and revel in my arches for millenia,

irrefutably benign and useful

from the mountains to the city on the plain;

I do not want to be this farcical Chernobyl

that burns like a brain that melts

before it shines

and kills the birds for centuries around;

I do not want this torment of a half-life.

I do not want this thirteenth house of stars

eager with evictions in the hands

of campaigning landlords

that lie a lot like me. Someone close the door.

Someone lock the window. Someone

tell the ardent stranger at the gate

that he’s come a bell too late

to answer the ad in the local constellations,

I’m down for the night behind a hill

of foreign flags that died like vapid candles,

I’m overseas; I’m off my hinges

and it will be continents yet

before I rise with Mu and Atlantis

to look for a northwest passage

around all the kings in my way.

And I don’t know how it happened

or what precisely has

but a thousand faces aren’t enough

to express me as I am. What net

could catch me on the fly?

And where are the urns

that once enthralled my ashes,

and if I’m now in exile

and this is not a country with a mouth

where are my thresholds now, where

the golden skulls of my forbears

that I drank to the lees

of prophecy and light? Where

is the now and here of my last address

and who is this

who ages backwards from the future

like a star that’s pauperized

its abdicated shining,

and doesn’t exist

beyond the eye that heeds it?

And when I listen to myself

fumbling for keys in the hall

why is it always a thief

who walks in

and asks me what I’m doing here?

PATRICK WHITE

FOR EVERYONE IN PERTH UNDER TWENTY-FIVE WITH A FEW SPECIFIC EXCEPTIONS

FOR EVERYONE IN PERTH UNDER TWENTY-FIVE

WITH A FEW SPECIFIC EXCEPTIONS

Crazy children, willful as broken glass,

Your hearts, at best, burning arks

Of extinct animals; at worst, bad meat

Down a fresh water well: where are you going

Under so many true norths? You stumble

Like drunks off your own living roads

Into the stagnant ditches of your reeking delusions.

Perhaps I should be kind, talc your mental diapers,

Change the dressing on your festering emotions,

Abide the radiant honey your orchard hour

Pours over the dog-shit to convince yourselves

There’s a better, holier world than this

You can find no branch in, living or dead,

To perch and rest your failing wings.

Spare me the apology for your hourglass apples;

I expect more of you than most of you can bear.

Learn to fly the dragon in your own abyss;

The furious intensification of your own vital bliss.

Let the mud settle in the rain mirror.

Stop judging. In all directions from the center

Of the mind-star, it’s nothing but you,

Time, space and the dead ant on the black rose.

Is the left less than the right, the dark not

Mother of the light? Not good, not bad, not two,

How cool can you be in a used straitjacket

Even if you embroidered it yourself

And call it a pillowcase? Wake up

From the dream of your vicious isolation,

Your chronic lack of a world. What’s this

That hangs from the tip of your nose

Like the bag of dew that holds the whole of the sky

And the whole of the moon at the end

Of a hunting heron’s beak? You are

Creation; you are destruction; for you

In the time of yourself, the white stars

Array themselves as the climbing constellation

Of the wild clematis; the moon lays down

A ladder up and dead seas are sexed with fish.

Stop pretending your life is not you in all

The terrible blessings and doomed verses

Of yourself; in every event and detail, you

Meeting you, turning the pages of yourself.

All the pages, one book; all the waves, one

Emptiness, one sea; all the petals opening,

One flower; you, thirst and wine, bread

And hunger swallowing the galaxies like space.

When will you ever live up to yourself

If not for now? One night

You will drag death over you like a landscape

And blow the stars out like funeral candles

And enter the dark ageless depths of yourself.

Why not now, while this luminous body perceives

Infinite eyes blooming in the sky-fields

Of your radiant blood? Why not die now

To the lie that’s been devouring you like a serpent

Swallowing a bird’s egg long before you were born?

Show me your sky-face; show me your star-face.

Why cramp your wings inside a skull?

Get out and see how vast the sky is, you are.

The other side is this side. You can’t get from there

To here by hobbling around like a bridge on crutches

Trying to leap the mind-stream. You can’t even get

From here to here, shaking your feathers in a shell;

Even the wind, even the freedom of flight,

Until it’s released, an embryo of seeing,

Is a farce of phantoms painting dream-veils,

Not the star-bread and night-wine of real being.

How can you miss it; the truth is written

On the inside of your eyelids like a hand print

On an ancient cave wall. Not hidden or subtle

In its openness, beyond dusk and dawn,

Though the morning dove is swept by the wind

From its spring willow, and the gravedigger

Sings while he buries the bones of the sun,

Heaven, a ghetto of sinners, hell, the fire of saints,

Beyond acceptance and rejection, not two,

The whole of the unattainable truth in all

Its flawless perfection is everywhere and always

Only you, not so much as the moon on water apart

Or the waves of fire that play your cold auroral heart

Beyond this madman’s silence or that raving sage’s art.

PATRICK WHITE

I WANT TO TAKE THE MOON OUT OF THE SKY

I WANT TO TAKE THE MOON OUT OF THE SKY

I want to take the moon out of the sky

like a cup, like a rose of black wine

and drink it down to the last shadow of a mountain,

the last, lost eyelash of the light

that floats on the surface, the final crescent.

If I could inhale fire, or snort the stars

like a rail of radiant coke on a black mirror

and pull the darkness up around me

to keep me warm in the night

against the cold drafts that barge through the window,

if the darkness were a woman

I could throw my arms around

and hold her back against my chest in the bay of my body,

a shore I liked to wake up on

still drunk on the moon

and walk in the morning as she

dazzles me with her nakedness and veils,

the litter of the broken jewelry

she arrays in the sprawling waves, I would, o

believe me I would. I would

take this paint rag of a life

this hard, dirty smear of leftovers on the plate

of so many paintings, this injured towel

that has wiped the blood and tears and clouds,

the wounded sunsets from so many faces and rivers,

from so many brushes and knives and tongues

leeched off the rotten rainbows, the flags,

the bad water in the dark well, I would

take this skin of dirty flowers,

this Joseph’s coat of colours,

this blighted, blotted pelt of soiled skies

and corrupted trees, eyes that have dried

into blisters and scabs, lips

that crack like dry peonies, I would take it

and give it a decent burial, already

the poor, leather shirt

of some archaic Indian from the book of changes

lying in the yarrow of his scattered bones.

Or maybe I could acquire the thunder

of a large, rusty oil drum and burn it at night

in the backyard, cremate it and smudge

the evil spirits out of the house

of my prevailing stars, smoke

the adulterous virgin’s disease away,

like clothes after someone’s died of the plague.

There are days, and this is one of them,

when life seems kinder than I thought

to everyone else but me;

mornings and afternoons, but seldom the nights,

that seem like dead dogs

lying at the side of the highway,

ants in their eyes dissolving like soap

and turkey vultures unravelling

their organs and tendons

like the yellow and scarlet yarn of old sweaters

that will be reknitted into something else

that doesn’t fit, days

when I realize I was born middle-aged,

how homeless my heart is,

and how my voice,

though it’s been hurled into the dawn for years,

is such a lonely bird, not even an echo

disappearing into the silence

of the vast, unanswering spaces that overwhelm it.

I write in the air with the wind for a pen

like a madman who gestures at things

no one else can see, believing against belief,

he’s doing his part to better the world

though it comes with asylums

and bills to his door, demanding

mechanical birds on iron boughs,

and revisions not his to give.

I feel like a cinder in someone else’s eye,

a crumb of sleep shaken out of a dream,

a thread of smoke that stings people

into rinsing me out with anger and tears,

the stone of the new foundation cast away

though all I wanted to do

was astound the blind with stars,

make the dark flower with the wild orchids

of a more luminous fragrance,

arrive with islands of wheat and roses and wine

and lay the cool sage of the moon down

like a silver herb on a scalded heart.

I’m a brilliant hoodlum from the late sixties

as one of my ex-wives called me, leaving,

and we thought we could heal the world

with love and music and art.

Hearts change, times change, and maybe

I’m the casualty of a slow accident

and this is my coma, these days I spend

witching for water in hell,

for signs of life among the corpses

that fell en mass from a terrible height,

going from one to another,

lifting up their pale arms,

the limp necks of broken swans, looking

at my watch to time the indifferent heartbeat

of the pulsing cursor on the computer screen.

I’m a habit of buoyancy

drifting through dense fog,

an empty lifeboat crying out

to a ship that may have gone down years ago:

“Is anyone out there, is anyone alive?”

And no one answers

but the gargantuan vacuities

of the atomic distances between us.

PATRICK WHITE