PURE INTENSITY

PURE INTENSITY

Pure intensity. The point of a star. Blue acetylene

to burn out the slag of the soul and burnish the gold

that pours from the ore like the full moon out of the new

without any fear of ever growing old.

Give up it all up like nothing less

than everything all the time

until there’s nothing left for death

to get its hands on. Nothing to curse. Nothing to bless.

But you can’t always tell which is which

as the witchdoctor minimalist

at the back of the wax museum

steps out of the shadows of his spider-web

and says less is more and more is less, more or less

as the crow flys. But there’s deceit in his eyes

and you haven’t got time to consider all that

when your hair is on fire like a tie-dyed comet

and everyone’s mistaking you as a sign

of their second coming, when all you want to do

is plunge your coma in the sun that shines at midnight

in every third eye of dew on the enlightened stargrass.

Everything passes, it’s true. But if you pass

fast enough, time stops, and that grave in the closet

you’ve been hauling around with you for light years

becomes as huge as a sky burial

at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, or the pyre

of your own skeleton stoking the fire

that’s boiling the marrow out your bones.

Stay inflammable like orchids and carnations,

waterlilies imported from your

igneous passion for the moon.

Don’t ever let the gods chain you to a rock

in the Caucasus for a theft of fire

they didn’t even bother to prove

before they put your liver on the daily menu

and sent vultures to peck your eyes out

like hors d’oeuvres. It’s ok to be a wildflower

and bloom in fire once every seven thousand years

like the return of a Buddha in an urn of ashes.

But never lend your third eye out to an arsonist

who says he’s having trouble focusing

and uses it as a lens to burn a black hole

in the middle of a poem that’s been taken

out of context like a table of contents.

We’ve got the stars for that, and who needs

another epilogue to keep the fire going

long enough to be the third man on the match

for a bullet you didn’t see coming like a space craft

because you were blinded by your own blazing?

Climbing the stairs to Joan of Arc’s place,

she was conditioning her hair with a fire extinguisher

and getting ready to pull up stakes

and move back to the country where you can see

six thousand stars with the naked eye

or you can jump through the fire

like a witch without being burned

by the Burgundians for reigniting France

without a permit in a month of unbearable heat.

Even though hagiographers prefer

the fragrance of their saints in urns.

PATRICK WHITE  

MOSTLY SAD

MOSTLY SAD

Mostly sad. Long dolorous drops of molten bells

tired of calling the faithful to prayer

and the cannon getting all of the attention.

No particular beef with life and only a few in it.

I’m reading poetry on my sixty-fourth birthday Saturday night

for my supper and the Canada Council.

A sticker for my license plate so I don’t get taken

off the road by a cop at a traffic stop,

and maybe, though it’s doubtful,

a free day or two to write without,

at this old stump of a desk like a snow hare,

the ferocious exigencies of an underwhelming reality

they haven’t found on the grid of their corporate greed yet.

Always try to put my heart into it

but right now I’m using my three and a half pounds

of cranial starmud as a doorstop to all my stargates

and I don’t really care whether or not

communication is blocked between me

and the fire hydrants sitting along the street

like squat little walk-in gurus with nothing else to do

when the Sky Dragon Restaurant isn’t setting itself on fire

but meditate full lotus while the heritage lamp posts

pray with their heads bowed like narcissi and daffodils.

And if you were to ask me how I was feeling

I’d probably say, today, all my emotions

are smoke without fire. Candle wax in daylight

with a little black wick in the middle

disgruntled it isn’t a fuse that’s lighting anything up.

Wonder if anyone else ever feels sometimes

their life’s a consolation prize that doesn’t console?

A rare singularity at the bottom of a black hole?

One of four prizes at the bottom of a crackerjack box?

Today stale bread has more character than I do

but, hey, it isn’t time to start feeding the pigeons

in Stewart Park yet, or filling a bucket of wild oats

I’ll still be sowing in the grave, to feed

Ian Miller’s big brass statue of Big Ben

leaping through the spotlight of a prime time moon.

Got one friend I can openly talk to in this town.

He’s a carpenter-cook and brings me dinner

when I’m down. He’s a man of the people

and I’m a somewhat embittered not so sacred warrior clown

surrealistically committed to writing things down

like a waterclock from one window to the next

as if my seeing were shapeshifting time

and I could take Arcturus going down

over the tarpaper rooftops of Perth

and burn it into my hard drive like an asterisk

on the computer screen of my third eye.

Live behind windows most of the time

like a deus ex machina with my three goldfish

in an aquarium because I don’t want

to be estranged by the conciliatory looks

on the faces of the workaday people’s souls

as I explain how hard I work like a madman

for half a century now, at not making a living.

And they all say, don’t worry, because they’ve

seen the movie of the agony and the ecstasy,

you’ll be rich after your dead, and it feels

like a community slap on the back of a corpse.

I don’t try to pour the ocean into a teacup anymore

and intuitively take the measure of everybody’s skull

like a phrenologist looking for the brim of the brow

to determine what’s full for them, and to each,

like a vapour of mist rising off a morning lake,

or a sunami of stars like the Milky Way, I pour

Zen tea out like a Japanese Chanoyu ceremony

and talk about how you can turn anything you do in life

from making a chair, to raising a baby, or driving a back hoe

into the do of an enlightenment path. Nor is a calling

a job or a career you could marry to your daughter

and be happy about, though way too many poets

seem to have forgotten that in the pursuit of their hobby.

If you’re not dying or living for it like a junkie, you’re a liar.

Insincere. Sine cera. A bust of Caesar made of wax

because there wasn’t time before the triumph

to finish it in marble. And if you get caught,

it would be wise to make him laugh at your duplicity

or your effigy could be next. Just a thought.

PATRICK WHITE

LOOKING FOR A LITTLE BLACK WATER AFTER THE FURY OF THE WHITE

LOOKING FOR A LITTLE BLACK WATER AFTER THE FURY OF THE WHITE

Looking for a little blackwater after the fury of the white.

Dark energy after the light as peace

settles down gently upon me,

the sediment of the eras and rivers of my life.

And this cool night in early autumn,

a woman in a dark cloak and hood

I could almost caress if I could just breathe

a little more deeply than the abyss

I’ve been dogpaddling in because

there’s nowhere else among all these stars

I can swim from the shallow end of myself

into the watersheds of my last drowning.

And there’s an unprescribed silence,

a herb of the moon that’s salving the wound

of the lunar thorn I just pulled out of my heart

delicately with my teeth. I’m trying

to tune my spinal cord to the guitar string

of the Tay River, so I can resonate in harmony

with the flow of things. Starfire walking

on the water of the mindstream without

the crutch of a miracle to help bear me up.

It’s not so much a matter of power or self-discipline

as it is well within the spontaneous capacity

of everyone’s emptiness to do so because,

labour exhaustively as we do just to find the path

let alone stay on it, all we’ve had to do

right from the start, is to let life

give us a narrative of our own we can be true to

as it makes you up going along with it

like a lonely survivor singing to himself in a lifeboat

at the last watch of the night. Arcturus

at the tip of our eyelashes, enmeshed

as it sinks in a western treeline of beached shipwrecks.

Reach out, but don’t grasp. Accept and let go.

Scatter your blossoms, even when you’re

down on your luck, like ripped up lottery tickets

whether they end up in the gutter

or on an impressionist table cloth somewhere

playing checkers with a patient still life.

I’ve seen whole Japanese plum trees in blossom

be brushed aside like perfect haikus

by a street sweeper at three in the morning

when no one else was watching but me and Basho.

My blood is saturated by an overdose of stars

and I can feel a light from deep within

rooting in my limbs like nightfall

as my awareness is enhanced

by how much unknown compassion

there is the silence, love in a dark time.

Blue moons on the wild grape vines,

approaching the autumn equinox in Virgo

as if they could read my mind like a purple passage

intoxicated on the wine that can be pressed out of its own decay.

The waterlilies are gone with the fireflies,

and the reupholstered cattails are beginning

to show signs of wear already. And soon

the Canada geese will be flying high overhead

bearing the souls of the dead to new latitudes of seeing

where the starmaps fall from their hands

like the feathers and leaves of being

flowing along with the mindstream

like the wiverns, wavelengths, and water sylphs

playing on the shores of the Milky Way

with as many burning bridges,

as there are flames on the phoenix

in the immolated sumac, as there are eyes

to see across these circuitous waters

to the other side of where we’ve always been going

alone together with everyone who’s ever come aboard.

PATRICK WHITE

WANT TO BE BRILLIANT, WANT TO SHINE LIKE A BLACK STAR

WANT TO BE BRILLIANT, WANT TO SHINE LIKE A BLACK STAR

Want to be brilliant, want to shine like a black star.

Trying to bend space with my mind. Trying to stop time

with my heart. Counting moments like beads on a rosary

of skulls, or shepherd moons on an abacus of gravity.

Though I know they’re not all strung out like that.

Asteroids on a wavelength of light, or a spinal cord.

Or maybe I’m just trying to bead a guitar string

with a great black hole, or is it a lunar pearl,

in the center of a lyrical abyss? Workaday world

in a small town, who spends their time like this?

Not fortunate enough to have been born a carpenter,

I’m a mystically surrealistic, poetic astrophyicist

trying to come up with a new grammar for the stars

so all they have to do to express their shining,

is say, Metaphor, and as it is in the abyss, so it is everywhere.

Because I miss you like the main clause of my relativity.

The focal point of all my wavelengths. You’re the radiant

and I’m the Martian meteor shower that’s dying

to bring the gift of life to the Antarctic like the Leonids

did in the first place as I look at my face in the mirror

and think it’s time for a change of species. Sometimes

it’s crucial to sustain a few pathetic fallacies about yourself

so when you’re under the moonweather of an estranged planet

and a black star breaks through the clouds like the anti-matter

of a waterlily, so do you. Funny how the flowers close their eyes

because none of them wants to miss the eclipse.

One of them said we’re all looking through a glass darkly

but I don’t see any soot on their petals,

and none of the telescopes are wearing shades.

I like to keep things clear in the light of the void.

I’ve come along way from the coal mines of space

to shine through your diamond so you can feel

a different kind of translucency that’s eleven parts cheap thrill

in all the dimensions I can see you in, and one,

not even you, has discovered yet, that’s the orphan of an exile

singing to himself to people the dark in a desert of stars

like a gnostic gospel in the mouth of a cave

to keep the evil jinn and bad spirits away

from the watersheds of my wishing wells

where the angels gather to mingle with the demons like water

they’ve just turned into wine. As for the other eighty-nine

realms of seeing and being what you see, they’re shrines

I’ve devoted to you, swearing in blood and devotion

on the sidereal plinth of my sword, as I dedicate

all my prophetic skulls from the dark side of the moon

where the crows are wiser about lunar things than the doves,

to the enhancement of your radiance, your love and your art,

by deepening the dark, with a full heart, with things to harvest

that will make the abyss seem like a silo of stars you can break like bread.

PATRICK WHITE

HE DOESN'T REALLY KNOW WHAT IT ALL MEANS

HE DOESN’T REALLY KNOW WHAT IT ALL MEANS

He doesn’t really know what it all means,

but he gives it access to his heart, free-range of his mind.

Not expecting an answer to the mystery of life

because it isn’t petty enough to have one,

he explores its horrors and wonders along the way

making small discoveries like rings and keys in the grass.

He doesn’t look at things darkly through a glass anymore

since his binoculars turned into the third eye

of a mandalic kaleidoscope that has a way

of turning his chromatic aberrations into enlightenment.

And if he does it’s usually a nightsky squandering stars

on those with the eyes to see them in the starmud

of their flesh and blood, in everyone of their insights,

an intimacy with billions of midnight suns all shining at once.

Mind includes the brain but the brain doesn’t include the mind.

Just the way love includes the heart, but the heart

is a mere nugget of love, compared to what there is of love

it takes more than the measure of a universe to contain.

This is the cruising altitude of a submarine

that has spiritual aspirations of becoming a flying fish,

forgetting that love and mind are formless and without images

that can be grasped or rejected like stained glass windows,

totem poles or icons. If love were as brittle as that

it would surely break. You could lose it. You’d

need to defend it. It could be wounded like a rose

that suffered haemophilia for the rest of its fragile life.

You’d have to look for it down on your hands and knees

late at night when the grass is wet, with a lantern of fireflies.

You’d have to put the pieces back together with the binding energies

of the strong and weak nuclear forces if you ever

stepped on it accidentally like a nesting English skylark’s egg.

And if you ever ran out of it when the water palace

of the black Taj Mahal turned back into a hovel in a slum,

you’d have to beg, and that would either empower your inferiors

or open a window of opportunity as big as the nightsky

for the indefinable to be merciful to the unattainable.

But take it from the experienced astroalchemist he is

if you mix a little starmud with a splash of moonwater,

and stir it in your heart, and let it sit awhile,

then drink a great draft of it from your skull

as if you could swallow a whole river in a single gulp,

down to the last drop, this feeling will overwhelm you

and halfway between midnight and the new moon

love will lend its eyes to your mind,

like the nightsky does starlight to a mirror,

and both will disappear into the longest, clearest light year of their lives.

If not, he tells himself, it’s binary galaxies with binoculars

passing through each other like the ghosts of two starfish

trying to find a dynamic equilibrium to their maculate lucidity

like a gyroscope in a space where you don’t really need one

but for the optics of what you can see

with your naked third eye, is probably tender and wise.

PATRICK WHITE

TRYING TO INTERPRET THE SILENCE LIKE GLYPHS IN A JUNGLE RUIN

TRYING TO INTERPRET THE SILENCE LIKE GLYPHS IN A JUNGLE RUIN

Trying to interpret the silence like glyphs in a jungle ruin.

Afraid of what they might say if I cut the vines away

like a Medusa’s head of spinal cords connected to my brain,

or this octopus of major blood vessels plugged into my heart.

My dna is the long molecule of a Zen cowboy,

with the Mongolian genes of a shaman practising

hunting magic that ensnares what he loves

in the nets of constellations that do no harm

to the wavelengths of the prey. You’ve got

to keep on dying every day if you want

to be born again in the dream tree of a shaman.

This is the way you avoid taking possession of your transcendence.

This is the way you break out of a cosmic egg

like a dragon without making an aviary of your solitude.

So many voices all at once in my head,

trying to say something in the living languages of the dead

about annihilation in a time urgent with the mystery of need.

When space isn’t expanding the potential of its own medium

into the available dimensions of a future

that’s already behind us by the time it gets here

like a delinquent s.o.s. from a star we were hoping

had got a fix on us like the maidenhead of a lifeboat,

it breeds. It proliferates like punctuation. It bonds

disparate elements into oxymoronic metaphors

that leave you as elated as a vertiginous Sufi at a crossroads

knowing that ultimate union doesn’t have to be

about one or the other of infinite ways to make it through life,

you can shine like a star emerging from its own ancestral ashes

and take them all at once. Or as Dogen Zenji

said to himself one night when the moon was clear:

The place is here. The path leads everywhere.

I emerge from my own flame like a genie of fire

without smoke, and burn invisibly in my own art

like a crucible of the heart. Hermes Trismegistus,

the Thrice-Blessed, in a biochemical retort

bubbling over like the multiverse getting out of the bathtub

without leaving a ring around the womb of hyperspace.

I’ve washed so many lives off like the moon

it’s a wonder I’m not a virgin again, but the return journey

of the second innocence is better than the first

because it’s been sweetly seasoned by a universe

looping in reverse through all the stations

and excruciating transformations of my life

that don’t have the same sting in their glands

when they first struck out at me like mystic acetylene

and scaled flashes of insight into the psyche of lightning.

I’m a big boy. The acquiescent khan of millions,

the Golden Horde who would rather make love than war any day

of the Great Tectonic Year, trying to read the fault-lines

in my own skull, volcanic fissures between continental plates

and the surrealistic empires crowding my stargates.

I can take the pain. I was born for it. Raised in it.

Even if I’m deciphering my own gravestone,

brushing away the stardust like a patina of mirages

with my eyelashes for a broom, my tongue for a dustpan,

ripping away the roots like the nervous systems

of the things that cling to it like the cornerstone of a ghost.

Been alone so long in the company of stars,

raising this hourglass of time to the beauty of their eyes,

even quicksand can look like the oasis of a distant galaxy to me.

And this skull of a headstone, crumbling like bread for the birds,

not a ruin, but just another phase of the moon I’m living through.

PATRICK WHITE

WHILE THE GHOSTS ARE PUTTING MAKE-UP ON THEIR DEATH MASKS IN THE GREEN ROOM

WHILE THE GHOSTS ARE PUTTING MAKE-UP ON THEIR DEATH MASKS IN THE GREEN ROOM

While the ghosts are putting make-up on their death masks in the green room

and looking for their false eyelashes like centipedes on the floor,

I’m out on stage apologizing for a power outage of the stars

that shouldn’t be blamed on the windmills everybody’s tilting at.

And even Mother Theresa is lining up with the mermaids

on the deck of the latest shipwreck to see if she can get a bunk for the night

without any bugs or bedsores. Crackhead, hillbilly, hippie rednecks

are pouring booze over the amps of the band, and the arsonist in the corner

who hasn’t said a thing all night a lip reader could understand

is trying to short out his nerves to start a fire in the walls.

The underground circus is back in town like Cirque du Soleil in eclipse,

and as far as I can see, there are a lot of fire hydrants around

but no sacred clowns, and the audience is perched on a public trapeze

under a tent of starmaps that have never seen the Pleiades.

If you just got here, Edgar Allen Poe’s already had it out with the raven,

but nobody cares much, since it should have happened a long time ago,

and besides, Nevermore’s not much of a door to get out of

in case of a fire. Go ask the thief who left the moon in the window

and my reflection in the mirror when everything else disappeared.

He’ll tell you about the cat burglar who fell off the seventh floor

and lived to go on tour with the tale when she got crazy enough

to be wise, and put on a golden parachute that was the same size as her skin.

Have you seen Rasputin? I’m looking for my bleeding heart,

and the last time I heard of him he was in a bag in a river

with a snake that was using a rooster as a fire to keep warm

while the toxins and the bullets took effect, though all the haemophiliacs

and worried assassins said when they pulled him out, he still wasn’t dead.

Hey, you’ve got to give a man credit for not dying

when he was too innocent to float like a waterlily or an ice-berg

in a trial by ordeal that’s more Germanic than Slavic

though he should have been more subtle in his approach

to a courtful of jesters and gleemen who hate

the sound of anyone’s laughter in their midst but the king’s and their own.

And even the high priest of the Wizard of Oz

with his police megaphone and his taser baton agrees

you can’t learn the protocols of mythic inflation

unless you’re on your knees. Though I suspect

there’s a lot less behind that than at first glance appears

as Cygnus swan-dives sidereally into a pool the size of a tear

without a safety net of shattered mirrors in the land of lakes

to break its Icarian descent into the shallow end of the fools

who are watching with their third eyes closed,

and lens caps on their telescopes like the blindfolds of a firing squad

that don’t look much like the hoods of hunting falcons

with a bola of bells around their legs,

and the crescents of the moon for a trinity of talons.

But by the end of the act, the ghost of Lady Nightshade comes forth

like a spiritual toxologist with a spiritual arrowhead in her hands

to make a Clovis point of flint-knapped obsidian as clearly as she can

by plunging it through everyone’s heart like Jonestown

that’s just run out of black cool aid to bring

everything down to ground zero again as the roof blows off

in an unexpected cyclone, and we’re all left lying here

caught dead in our tracks like telescopes

and the standing targets of easels in the doe-glare

of the oncoming headlights of vehicles into roadkill

as if there were no more ripples or wavelengths in the rain

or tree rings anywhere in the petrified heartwood of the pain.

PATRICK WHITE