GARBAGE BAGS ON THE STREET AT DAWN

GARBAGE BAGS ON THE STREET AT DAWN

Garbage bags on the street at dawn

as great fronds of light unfold.

Venus washed out of the Hyades in Taurus

near Aldebaran, but Jupiter the first to go,

first casualties of the new day,

somnambulists outwalking their dreams.

The honking of Canada geese overhead

like ninety-twenties cars. Rites of passage,

thoroughfares of destinal traffic.

Me here, the sleepless witness

to the untimely birth of the morning,

ashes in the urn of the new day

I scatter like pigeons and doves

from the roofs of the unearthly buildings,

a wraith late for the grave, and the rest,

the unlabelled waste of a good beginning.

Bad spiritual protocol for a ghost

to haunt the cradle, to outlive the candles

of the night before, writing suicide notes

to the cults of the stars that don’t really care

I’ve lived for eras alone with the estranged insights

of a native exile longing for a home,

hovel, habitation, palace of space

that doesn’t rest on the cornerstone of a planet.

A changeling on the stairs of the abyss,

I address the indifferent windows

cloaked in their chronic transparency

and ask whose child is this

that no one claims as their own?

Not unmindful of how the world shrugs

the stars off like eyes of dew in the grass,

I am born into this emptiness without a lifeboat

and it’s a long way to swim from here to the moon,

a long way to fall like a feather cut loose on its own.

PATRICK WHITE

A MOMENT AWAY FROM THE WORLD, PLEASE

A MOMENT AWAY FROM THE WORLD, PLEASE

A moment away from the world, please.

Denude me of this coat of killer bees.

I have endured its agony long enough

to know there’s not much honey in a stinging nettle.

This kind of pain doesn’t break into flowers.

The stars have been telling me that for years.

The darkness doesn’t ask for a sacrifice

and you can tell by the New England asters

the light doesn’t treat them like martyrs at a crossroads

between the high and the low. You just have to look

at how wide-eyed the day lilies are

even when they’re dreaming to see

the sun doesn’t burn their eyes out with its blazing

and their tangerine goblets are always full.

Drain these toxic squint-eyed metals out of my blood

but don’t ban me to the slogans of a religion

when what I need is an environmental protection agency

with soul, instead of being buried under

this avalanche of pebbles in a gold rush of cornerstones

like a seven thousand year old skeleton

of an adolescent Archaic Indian by the Straits of Belle Isle,

as if everyone in the world had lain their head on my chest

as a place to rest, or they were looking for a heartbeat,

or they wanted to make sure I never rose from my grave again.

Free my metaphors from these chain gangs of d.n.a.

I’ve spent most of my afterlives here

and I’m not looking to be paroled or escape,

I just want out. Make a chrysalis out of a fortune-cookie,

not a straitjacket, and free me of all this spiritual punctuation

as if thousands of dragonflies were drying their wings

on the eyelids of the waterlilies without any regard for grammar.

Let me flame out like a meteor in the upper atmosphere

as a sign of what I was dying to say and if

you’re going to embrace me because you love me so much

do it like space, so I’m never out of it, but there’s

lots of room for the galaxies and I swear you do that

I’ll open the lockets of the black holes

in the inner core of their hearts, and show you

whose picture is inside of them. Leave me alone

with the inconceivable awhile to listen to the musings

of the unnamed as she washes her hair like a lyric

in her own tears, and sings to herself like a willow

that has been made beautiful by suffering

that has finally lifted its heavy veil of tribulation

from the unmapped mystery in the eyes that remind the stars

of why they’re shining in the first place.

Amor vincit omnia. It said in big gold letters

on a baby blue banner tacked to the wall by doves

above the minister’s pulpit in the First Centennial United Church

I was pressed into for ten bucks a month when I was a kid,

one of the myriad ways, my ingenious Catholic mother

kept us fed. Love conquers all. I suppose.

But then I was never on a crusade against it to begin with

and though I’m an infidel, I’m not religious about it.

And I’ve never lived my life as if

I had to close the gates of the city at night

and if love ever wanted anything from me

all it ever had to do was ask, regardless of the recipient.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not infernal enough

to know how to hammer swords out of the bell-towers of my defeat

whenever anyone speaks to me about conquest.

Free. Free. Free. Freedom deeper than sorrows.

Freedom more expansive than bliss. Freedom

the invisible gift we’re all born clutching in our pudginess.

Like a butterfly that lands on your finger.

A shooting star with your name on it that took aim

and missed. A poem that lands in your lap like a maple key.

Or comes like words to the tree like birds in the morning.

Or shovels you like coal into the mouth of a dragon

brutally wise in the ways of diamonds, and in its claws,

the mercy of scalpels. The compassion of rain

from an ocean of awareness. Free to change

as life would have it without any notion

of betterment or reform. Each as they are, unmaimed.

Freedom the only holiness. Not a state of mind

at absolute Kelvin, motionless entropy,

but dynamic energy creatively shaping

the world out of itself like a child making up a game

when she’s alone, to amuse herself when no one’s watching,

whisper secrets she confides to her own ear

like the sea to a shell on a deserted beach

without a lighthouse demoralizing the mermaids.

PATRICK WHITE

EVEN WHEN THE ROAD IS MISSING

EVEN WHEN THE ROAD IS MISSING

Even when the road is missing

like the absence of God, or a woman I love,

I praise that emptiness for the freedom it accords me

to create a way of my own like a river of stars

and for the universe it’s left me

like a travelling companion I couldn’t improve upon.

The gate shut, the door closed, the window locked,

I slip a key to a poem under the welcome mat

and say my house is your house anytime you call

and then go get drunk with the moon down by the lake.

And after awhile we’re laughing at ourselves,

rolling in the leaves like the groundswell

of two happy vagrants with homeless hearts

making off with our lives for free as if

we’d just pulled off some cosmic B and E.

without leaving any sign of culpability behind,

except for the joy of our felicitous crime.

And when my moonboat’s in port for repairs

like bedsheets in a backyard fleet of laundry on the line,

I don’t mind being land locked for awhile.

I just take a walk along the shore of the lake

and gather moonlit feathers

from the scales of the waves

that have evolved from raptors into swans,

and binding them together

like Daedalus did for Icarus,

take a joy ride into the sun at midnight

not really caring too much about whether

I’m at zenith or nadir as long

as I’m transiting something akin to a threshold.

The sun can hold Venus on a short leash,

and me on the chain of my spine

like a barnyard dog barking at wolves

trying to tempt it deeper into the night

but the last crescent of the moon

will cut right through them both

like the umbilical cords of a new life

where we can both roam free

like rogue planets from star to star.

Empty-handed and full-hearted I come by day

to a low place looking for fire

from the daylilies with a bucket and an urn,

because I’m so tired of what I’ve had to do

to stay alive for the past fifty years as a serf of poetry

to keep it a calling, instead of a career,

and suffer the consequences of not attending to it

as a business that makes a profit off the stars,

but by night I’m a starling of creosote in a chimney

singing my heart out as if I wanted to eat it

because it has all the virtues of a noble enemy

and there’s no poetry or protein in the junkfood of fame,

though I think that might be a trifle ingenuous.

Impoverished Druid, you lean on a crutch for a tree,

as a flying buttress to your sacred folly,

and running out of time to avoid

a head-on collision with eternity

all your devotions the ghosts of yesterday,

you kick the stool from out under your feet

and garotte yourself from the bough of an oak,

like the berry of a single moon of mistletoe

and the last crescent of a golden sickle just out of reach

of the harvest season of the King of the Waxing Year.

Poor heart, what a battered shoe

of a vital organ you’ve become, a bone box

for the sacred skeletons of hummingbirds and elephants,

a Burgess Shale for the creative fossils and footprints

we both had to evolve through to come to this

inconceivable moment without a time scale

to measure how far it is from then to now

like the last leap of faith of the waterclock of life

into the abyss without a bucket for a safety net

or any deep assurance of even having a bottom anymore

to fall out of the ongoing over the edge of a precipice

as if even the rivers of Eden sometimes

had to seek release from it all and fall

even without a parachute to candle

like an exclamation mark all the way down,

a descent into hell creatively much to be preferred

than stagnating in paradise with nothing but apples to eat.

But still you know you won’t do it, given

the number of times now I’ve come running

with a chair and a rope to let you down

out of the window of a burning building

not knowing whether we were committing suicide

or I was running to your rescue as I always have.

Your daring has always said feathers and falling

has always taken wing like Pegasus before,

and what a wild strange radiant white water ride it’s been

across the high unbounded starfields of the shining

with Vega and Deneb goading us on

ever further like spurs of Spanish silver

just you and me, my blood brother, together

in the vastness of a mutual solitude.

My God, when I think of the flights we’ve taken.

When I think of the things we’ve seen,

and the orchards of sorrow that found more bliss

in the fruit than they did in the blossom.

And what did we ever write about all those stars

that didn’t declare how impossibly illiterate we are

compared to the lyrics of light and time and wonder

they’ve been singing all these lightyears

since I first opened my eyes to why I’m conceivably here,

though here can be anywhere by now like a bird

that loses its bearing under the stars everytime

it tries to get a fix on where it’s going like a photon

jumping orbitals like tree rings in a flash of insight.

When you’re light, when you’re foolhardily alive

you don’t need to pay heed to where you’re going

because there isn’t a single stage, place, or phase

that isn’t the destination of what you’re shining up at.

And I never thought the day would ever come

when sadness would sweeten into wisdom enough

to take pity on the mirrors like the eyes under our lifemasks

when we went down to the river to drink

our own reflections like faces from the lifeboat of our hands,

like a rain of mercy far out at sea far from the sight of land,

when we first began to understand how clarity like unity

can be broken down into little pieces of sand

that reflect the whole universe as readily

in their mystic particularity

as the stars and the sun and the moon do

when they lay their swords and feathers

and flying carpets like wavelengths of light

down in tribute to our third eye weeping its way to the sea.

And you were surprised, admit it, weren’t you,

to find so many white horses like you running ashore,

mustangs from the waves, to check out the new guy’s wings.

And me standing there like an avalanche of winged heels

wondering why I didn’t make as big a splash

and if all we walked away with was a detailed starmap

who could say the journey really wasn’t worth it?

Let the shore-huggers do what they want with it

to find their way around in the dark like fireflies.

Leave it to them. We were ever explorers

from the beginningless beginning to the endless end,

and we’ll rise up again on a gust of stars

caught up like a dust-devil at the crossroads of earth

and ascend on a thermal of the sun, the stairwell

of a star-studded chromosome that could

take a coil of flypaper and turn it into a poem.

PATRICK WHITE

FLYAWAY WOMAN

Flyaway woman with a blue ladybug for a heart,

I am not your firetruck, or the glass wishbone you break

in case of an apple emergency when you split

like the seedcase of an eyelid into the angelic smear

of an orchid of smoke with dangerous doves for hands.

Leave me alone to the night that goes on in the depths

of the praeternatural river that threads the eye of the bridge;

and the fish that brain the darkness with the constancy

of thoughts and emotional lightbulbs

that keep tripping over their hairtrigger traplines

trying to illuminate their destiny

in the palm of the skeptical lightning

who does a bad imitation of God. Flyaway woman,

I could love the way you smile as if

you had a mouthful of coffin nails

and wanted to board the world up with plywood

so you could live like a rose in a hurricane

without blowing the sandbox cities

of the peninsular children away. Flyaway woman, tell me,

is your heart an orange in the fridge with green sunspots,

your body a ship that left yesterday

riding low in the water with a hold full of broken jewelry

to trade with the illegal immigrants

who would sell you a continental gram

for a single bead of rapture? Flyaway woman,

why keep the past alive in an album of angry mirrors,

and grieve like a wounded doe

all tangled up in a constellation of razorwire

waiting for someone to put you out of your misery,

when there’s more silence

in one of the moist plums of your accusing eyes

than there is the space the galaxies

douse their torches in? Flyaway woman,

I am not an arsonist in heat
with a bouquet of wooden matches
and a ragged doll of gasoline,

standing on your threshold with the smile

of a late-breaking headline. There’s no doubt

you’re a foreign queen

in a tormented hive of black honey, but I am not

the sticky bear that’s come to maul your secret bees.

I have my solitudes and voices that speak to me

like cemetery shovels just like you; and I know the terror

of being suddenly overturned by a sudden squall

on an ocean of seaworthy love-letters just like you.

And it’s true that life is often an S.O.S. in a soggy bottle

the keeps washing up at your feet in the morning

like a dead octopus in a kissing booth,

and there are watermelons full of razorblades

who come on like the dawn
and toads of lust who ask you to lick their backs

to craze you with a vision of angels rotting like sheets.

I can’t deny the world’s a house on fire

and there are slimy organizations of algae

that go from whore to whore,

asking you to write off your life

as a charitable donation

to child pornography; I cannot say the world’s a nun,

or there aren’t scars and skidmarks on the moon

from previous landings, forks

that strike like vipers at the olives in a nest,

but, flyaway woman, I am not your nemesis,

I am not the intellectual coathanger

that wants to tear the embryo out of your belief in me.

I live in the dark with terrible imaginings

and a raped ambulance that asks me

to get the lily of her siren to the hospital

for a blood test to prove we die in jest,

and I can’t recall how many dreams ago

the surgical swans and torn peonies

last came for a change of dressings,

the effusions of neglected roses

bruising the return addresses on their unbound bandages,

but flyaway woman, there’s an eclipse in my chest,

a crow in a furnace

trying to peck its way out like a spear,

and small scorpions of doubt

rehearsing requiems of bleached fire

on the keyboard of my feelings like treble clefs,

and I am without wings

in the eternal pause of a comma

that wants to create the world anew from a maggot of light.

PATRICK WHITE

OBLITERATIONS OF BEAUTY AND WE WEEP

OBLITERATIONS OF BEAUTY AND WE WEEP

Obliterations of beauty and we weep

for what cannot long abide in us

because we, not the rose, are the ones

who are passing so irrevocably away

into an abyss that doesn’t

take the measure of anything.

The lake knows the time

by the wingspan of its waterbirds.

I note the location of the stars

in the rotation of the Big Dipper.

And there are crickets

that will yield the time as well.

Time, too, like human solitude

is embodied in the things of this world.

Time perishes when we do,

is born with us, matures,

and embraces our ends as its own nature.

Time sets its pace to the passage of us.

We are the muse, the motivator, the demi-urge

of its passion for shedding

the leaves and flowers and moon like skin.

And we’re the ones who grow infinite

at the speed of light so that everything stops

immeasurably from there on everafter.

All things returning to the one, and the one,

returning to transcendence. Which is why

I come here this late at night when the stars

are as far from people as they can be

and yet they’re still as intimate to me

as my eyes are. A mutually creative continuum.

The star makes the eye I need to see it by.

I am the fragrance of the wildflowers

and the adamantine insights of the rocks.

The singing master of the nightbirds.

The oracle in the leprous skull of the raccoon.

And my heart is one long, continuous moonrise

when I think of how the dead still animate me.

How they cling to my heart like ants to a peony

to let me know when it’s time to bloom.

The dead trees house the mosquitoes and the herons.

The fallen pine cones, the seed koans of Zen masters

under their brittle eyelids waiting for the fire

to crack them deciduously open into evergreens.

I don’t lament the passivity of the dead in my life

because I put them to good use in their capacity

as enlightened mentors who urge me

to live splendidly whatever I encounter in the world

for all our sakes. I can be the blossom and the fruit

on the dead branch, as easily as a red-winged blackbird

sings from the green and leafless alike.

Not a bush wolf raises its voice up to the moon

that I don’t feel its distant longing in my own throat

like a sacred syllable half way to blossoming among the dead

who always hear it like an auspicious beginning

to the summons of their leave-taking in the fall,

to the deeper greeting in the meaning of farewell.

PATRICK WHITE

RESTLESS WITH THE DEAD TONIGHT

RESTLESS WITH THE DEAD TONIGHT

Restless with the dead tonight.

Old friends, the gates to abandoned farms,

the roof collapsed and the wind with access

to all their windows, overgrown roads

going nowhere I can walk with them now.

Blue-green the evening sky, still,

without direction, island clouds, but unmoving.

Sparse beginnings, and sorrow in the seed.

Relying on the stars to do for me

what I can’t do for myself. Pull me out

of this black hole I keep slipping in and out of

on the rim of my event horizon, stray photons,

butterflies ducking in and out of the dragon’s mouth,

a halo of X-rays looking brutally right through me.

Down to the musical instruments of my bones.

Flutes and drumsticks. But I’m void-bound,

trying to shed my skin like a chronic illusion,

liberate the chains I can feel but can’t see,

numbed by having to say no

when all I want to do is say yes

over and over again to the picture-music

to the themes, the hints, the clues, the nuances,

the radiance, sorrow and horror of the mystery

wherever it leads, whatever occurs,

be so fully here, I don’t exist, not even

as a witness, and be nothing but the listening.

I suffer crucial impasses of circumstance.

My heart is blocked, the way isn’t clear.

The emptiness is leaner than usual, longer

than a plague of Egypt living up to a penurious dream.

Third eye of the hurricane slowly closing.

My friends at the end of a tunnel of light.

Reptilian as a camera shutter. I howl

for stars and fireflies, the accoutrements of my bliss

and the pleasure I take in the hidden harmonies

of my drifting, my circuitous blossoming.

Someone is using my skull for a door stop.

Too grounded by the shadows of the impending,

Even here by the river, the sound of distant trucks,

the occasional train bemoaning its way through the dark.

Snakes out hunting the frogs, slide and splash

back into the lake at my approach, estranged enemy,

walking in my place, face covered with ashes

of a man-shaped urn that’s avoided me for a while.

The way I like to live. Overlooked by the world.

Unregarded. Obliviously free to disappear

without worrying about what I’m coming back to

or who’ll be waiting for me when I do

to tell me while the idiocy of this languor

has got its hands on my throat, I should learn

to get a grip on myself, eat the pain, swallow the bilge,

live like a bear nibbling on the edges of a garbage dump,

give up this discipline of doing nothing

as if mere being were a form of worship

though to what is anyone’s guess and why

is just the nature of the mind reveling in itself

the way the stars make me guess their names

peering through the crowns of the trees,

dissociated from the features of their mythologem.

Time with their lifemasks off to be uncontained.

To go mad and not be held to account for it

because it doesn’t excite the attention of the crowd

when you’re unattainably available to live

as if your eyes were the way the stars touched you in tears

to see how the light labours for its flowering in you.

Thought-moments and light years bringing news

of friends from the past, bats and owls

flashing through the inadvertent moonlight,

the whole of existence in every locket of my cells,

freedom born, creatively, with a starmap for a genome.

PATRICK WHITE

IF I EVER GET TO LOOK BACK ON ALL THIS

IF I EVER GET TO LOOK BACK ON ALL THIS

If I ever get to look back on all this

even if it’s just to show me how wrong I was

about so much, how much I risked for so little,

I don’t want to have been mean and petty here,

I don’t want to have lived short-minded

as if my brain never grew to its proper height

and I had to live close to the ground

with burrowing wasps and centipedes

trading toxins in the grass like slumlords.

Tried to live like a magnanimous man

with an open hand whenever my luck kept pace

with my generosity. Didn’t want to die

knowing nothing about the stars, that shining

that grew in time even brighter in the dark within.

Wanted to know the fury and compassion, genius,

the affable kindness, madness and love of humankind.

Used to say we were born to see and be happy,

and if you couldn’t find a meaning that suited you,

make one up of your own. Don’t waste

the great creative potential of the absurd

and try to fit yourself like a little polyp of sentience

into the fossilized coral reefs of the past.

Go for the galaxies. What’s to lose?

If you’re going to fall, fall from a height.

Sooner a brilliant failure than a mediocre flight.

You’d be surprised at what the timing of one comet

falling out of the black halo around the sun

can mean to millions watching down below for signs.

Sensible shoes, or starmud on your winged heels,

Icarus or Neil Armstrong using his foot

to take a big step for humankind, walk your mile

standing up as if you were scanning for leopards,

your simian continuum at a fork in the road.

Danger is a capricious muse, but it can still

rivet you with inspiration. The hunters get eyes.

You grow an exoskeleton, then rib

the walls and rafters of the house and soon

the sun decides where the windows are going to go.

The Hox genes talk, and you’re the topic of conversation.

You start listening as if

you were listening in on yourself,

all those voices and things

for words you don’t understand,

bliss, butterflies, sorrows and assassins,

the victimized heroes of egoistic tragedies,

and the poetry in the pity of unexpurgated passion.

Lovers in the last throes of unmitigated catastrophe.

The rush and turmoil of the picture-music

going on all the time, shapeshifting

from one musical scene into another

and even you with your hands over your ears

sick of listening to the cosmic hiss,

climactic cymbals in the great performance

just waiting to come together like a hadron collider

deep underground where black holes in space

are born of the impact. If you’re not already

too calculating, or mesmerized like a stone bird

by the snake-eyes of the dice, put some money

down on yourself as if you had one to lose,

and if for nothing more than the exercise,

kiss your prophetic skulls for luck and let them roll.

And when you love, don’t approach a seabed on the moon

with a spoonful of water you can both sip from.

Return like an ocean with a convincing atmosphere.

If fools rush in where angels fear to tread

the angels will follow soon enough, with blessings

on the horns of your head. Learn

every gesture of her eyes like pictographic signage,

of her heart, a grammar for two, of her mind

be the no one to lift its veils, of her body,

apprentice yourself to the genius of her starmud.

Everything that lives is a gesture of the absurd

the imagination delights in elaborating

like people with the personalities of apple-trees

or the encyclopedic prolixity of the Burgess Shale.

I am is not the cornerstone of anything.

I imagine. And the wind is the threshold of the tent

that sheds the desolation of a self like a flower

that blooms in fire. Why water a mirage? Live large.

Squander stars on your vision of this, swallow the abyss

to keep your emptiness well fed, let your wisdom

be the private life of space, your time on earth

be passage and transformation, and your heart

cherish the bliss of all, animate and inanimate alike,

who suffer the same dream of being awake that you do.

PATRICK WHITE