WON'T MEET MOST OF YOUR IN A LIFETIME

WON’T MEET MOST OF YOU IN A LIFETIME

Won’t meet most of you in a lifetime

and know there are six billion of us

and more coming all the time, each trying

to interpret the sign of their own star,

you know, the one that nobody else can see

but for a few rays of light breaking

through the clouds here and there,

that says, this is the way to shine,

this is the way to shine, and that includes

black holes everywhere as well.

Whether you can see through it or not

as a plagiarism of water and sand

every mirage has its own meaning,

every star belongs to a different zodiac,

each with their own totems, mandalas,

and shapeshifting constellations, each

their own houses of worship and disrepute,

we’re all wearing on our foreheads

written in between the lines of fate

like a sidereal bandanna, each

a meme of one we’re hoping will allow

someone to recognize us in isolation

like a prison tat that says we’ve paid our dues

for the last thousand lifetimes without parole

and have a right to be here as well as anyone

because we’ve done our time standing up

just to be alive, whether you’re running from it

or not. Everyone’s got a different approach

to their own departure, and though

there is no gate they must go through,

there’s a garden they must spend

some time in for awhile, telling

the flowers what the roots of our names mean

each as unique as a snowflake

on a petal or an eyelid or a furnace.

Each a theme of their own picture-music,

our lives are not sub-plots of the main narrative.

There’s a whole symphony in the tintinnabula,

like a drop of water reflecting the entire universe

just the same as there is in the first violins.

And everyone brings their own instrument to the jam

whether it be the wind in the silver Russian olives,

a tuba, a burning guitar, or the fossil of the lyre

that used to sing the dead up from hell

to a day of show and tell, and it doesn’t matter

what kind of music you make, whether

its the choral riot of your favourite nocturnal animals in a zoo,

or the distant plectra of a hidden nightcreek

playing solo on a harpsichord in a lonely sacred grove,

or you’re riffing on futuristic mystic mantras

like Tibetan prayer bowls that used to sound

like a waterclock of urns, as long as you’re adding

your singularity like the longing high note of a nightbird

to the dendritic staves of the trees. Even the silence sings.

And what is it we’re all really longing for

in the solitary labyrinths we’ve made

of the complexity of our desires,

if it isn’t a world elaborated from

the prime fractal of our love,

as if it fell to each of us now, not god,

that weight was removed from her shoulders

the moment our cosmic egg hatched

and we took to our own wings,

eagles and fireflies and Icarus alike

to provide the image of light upon light

like a masterpiece we leave behind us

that’s everybody’s signed like a self-portrait

of who we were to each other for awhile

when we stood in wonder and awe

at what was arrayed before us knowing

it’s the exact likeness of everyone,

and the star in the eye that’s turned toward us

as if each of us were the direction of prayer

is the same one we’ve been following for light years

like the magi seeking the source of their own radiance,

candles in the dark wondering where

the light’s coming from in billions of creative mirrors

falling on everyone alike like rain and eyes

so that before we close them

like two dew drops of stereoscopic water

falling back to our roots like our last words

from the tips of the tongues of the stargrass

to dream up new blossoms in our sleep

like new moons budding on a dead branch,

we each realize that we’re the myth of origin,

the alpha and omega of all things that begin and end

as well as the unattainable for which there is no metaphor

placed well within the creative reach of everyone of us

though if I were to give it a shot as a poet, I’d say,

knowing what I know of this life in the arts,

like the habitable planets and ripening desert moons

of the low-hanging fruits of our hearts.

PATRICK WHITE

A LITTLE THOUGHT IN A BIG SPACE

A LITTLE THOUGHT IN A BIG SPACE

A little thought in a big space, I’m falling

through my own immensities here at my desk,

one of my Icarian propensities for plunging into things.

My voice intimidated by the violence of the silence within.

I’m on the dark side of my eyes.

No one’s ever been here before.

No window, no wall, no door,

I’m on the threshold of my homelessness again.

I’m looking at stars, but I feel like rain.

I’m talking to ghosts that I don’t remember.

Might be the wrong medium, but it’s the right seance.

I don’t even know what I’m doing here myself

but it seems I’m free to go or stay as I wish.

I’m wearing my shadow like a candling parachute

that didn’t step back from the edge in time.

No point in pretending you’re an airborne dandelion

when you feel like a rock with a message

someone just threw like the moon through a mirror

disguised as a sky the night birds keep flying into blind.

No one asks your name here on this pyre of a sky burial

if your birth certificate says you were born in fire.

Desire anything you like. It was all written in smoke

before you came. And these words that are saying me here

have been out of the aviary of the lantern for light years.

Who knows where the light goes or what if falls upon?

Trying to shine in a dark time without taking anything away

from the lunar eclipses that aren’t in need of enlightenment.

Don’t know if I’m a solar flare, a firefly, a matchbook,

or a lightning bolt that keeps stressing my starmud out

by sneaking up on it from behind and overdoing things a bit.

If you find yourself trying to pry the flowers open

with a crowbar or a koan, and it’s nightfall, it’s

time to turn your hourglass in for a waterclock

and see how the stars emerge out of nothing

as soon as you deepen the dark with a more acute sense of timing

that let’s everything happen spontaneously by itself.

Even if you’re the lighthouse of your dreams

that doesn’t mean you’re the nightwatchman

keeping his third eye on you in the shadows

like a theft of fire you can get away with

this second time around with only a warning.

If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.

And if you did, whining about it in your sleep

isn’t going to help and who’s Spartan enough these days

to stash the fox under their tunic to keep

from being caught while it eats them alive?

If you want to be a dragon you’ve got to learn

to swallow people’s hearts like hot coals as if they were chocolates,

without wincing. The stars don’t come out

like emergency candles you’ve been saving

for exactly this kind of situation. And if

you really want to know the truth about illumination,

try and blow one out. Quick, now, look

and see immediately into the clear light of the void

what it’s like to shine without a metaphoric reflection.

The stars here don’t hide their nakedness under a cloak

of black holes and dwarfs that take it all in

but give nothing back like the second hand clothes

of serpents shedding their skin. One size fits all

like a bubble in a watershed of dark worlds

dazzled by how much a single eye can contain

whether it’s hanging from the lip of a flower in the fall

or going down the drain in spring. I know

you hit it like a snowflake on a furnace

and do your damnedest not to cry. Thing is

as unique among billions as you think you are,

there’s not a star in the sky that isn’t a rite of passage.

PATRICK WHITE

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