A THOUSAND YEARS FROM NOW

A THOUSAND YEARS FROM NOW

A thousand years from now

who will remember me

once I’ve disappeared from this windowpane,

a vapour of breath with awareness,

a nebular stain on the clarity

that will wash its hands of me

like a scar of water that has clung too long?

I’m not trying to embalm

the elegiac content of these obvious sunsets in words,

and it’s hard to shake honey out of these mordant bells

that lie like duplicitous lifeboats to the gullible compasses and maps

that keep crashing like doves that don’t have the wingspan

to come back with news of land

to this museum of DNA, two of every kind,

I keep scuttling like an ark on the top of every wave.

And what is a grave if not an abandoned embassy

that didn’t have time to shred its dreaded secret?

And sometimes, when the emptiness and the silence

are beyond bearing,

I hold myself up like a passport at the panicked gates

that have made me an exile and a wounded threshold in my own home

and clamour like a continent

to be repatriated anywhere

that isn’t a country whose borders are stretched out like refugee lines.

But it’s a foolish wish.

And if there’s a dragon to slay,

I realize it’s only more shadows and swordplay,

and I think of the return of the rain lifted from the sea

and how the sea never feels anything is missing,

and everything is passage without arrival or departure

and how the arrow never leaves the hand of a good archer.

It’s human nature to understand,

a sacred mode of disobedience

to look into the eyes of our worst fears

even if it’s just to flare like a star without rescue

and scream out in light a moment against its own extinction.

But who or what or nothing is ever there to listen

as we go out like flies and stars in a toilet bowl?

And a love of laws is not the law of love

and there have been so many dragons

left out of the chrysales of their questions like answers

that the heart is not sustained by the impersonal blessing

of ubiquitous entropy in a long, lab coat

as the spirit longs for transformations

a star and a night beyond itself

that might astonish a human

with something enduringly human

like a next breath that can’t be smudged by death

or something drastic in the dust that remembers us

when we were stars

that thawed through the windowpane

as if we were looking through the lenses of our own eyes

to discover everything we live is how we die

and we’re always a plight and a plea away from knowing why.

Imagine, one night, looking up at the sky

and there were no death to raise the moon

like a calendar above your neck,

and everything you saw around you,

crows, kites, keys,

last year’s pine cones on this year’s trees,

were not denuded of their mystic specificity

in this mortal profusion of origins

that ends where it begins. Imagine,

one morning, not getting up from the dream

to pan the mindstream for the nugget of a skull

that might be gold, and the luster of the radiance

never grows old like the taste of the moon in your mouth.

Wouldn’t this onceness then be eternal,

and what I’m saying now, indelible

as the space that prompts the stars to shine?

Learning wisdom is learning the universe

as if it were your own face, on the inside,

and you were its only eyes,

disappearing from view so that all that remains is you.

Birth, a breathing in; death, a breathing out,

before the first and after the last, this pulse and suspiration,

muses around the wellspring, witches around the cauldron,

planets fluttering like moths

at the windows of the constellations. Like the moon

I pass my hand over like an eclipse as if it were my own skull,

I have been creatively maintained from the start by my own expiration.

Are there no orchards in the hearts of old women?

Are there no graves in the eyes of a child?

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN YOU LISTEN TO A BIRD

WHEN YOU LISTEN TO A BIRD

When you listen to a bird

you should hear the whole of the sky

just as when you look at a star

you should be a fountain of eyes.

Because you cannot see,

the darkness is not blind

and your consensus of conventional abnormalities

is not reality, is not the source

of the hidden halo of comets that afflict you,

nor the crazy constellations of the fireflies that bless.

I don’t know if I speak for anyone other than myself

but that’s enough to reflect the moon in every drop

of this unvoiced delirium

that surpasses enlightenment and lunacy like old shoes

to walk barefoot across the stars

as if they were no more than cool sand in a desert at night

that’s never been bound to a road,

though every single grain is the cornerstone of the world.

How unsayably me I must be

that so many thoughts and emotions,

so many vital themes of blood and time,

years that have returned their fields to the wild,

have enshrined my namelessness

in this abandoned palace of shadows

I’ve pitched together like a chrysalis out of words.

A true muse is a well

that finds its own way to your mouth,

and I accord mine the perfect freedom to be me,

and drink deeply of the night she pours into me,

until neither of us knows who the other is

though we whisper like leaves on the same tree.

What’s crucial is not to offer yourself up

like a tourist map to the wind

but to let go. To find out where you’re going

not by giving up everything that you know,

but the knowing.

I let my thoughts follow the path

of a snowflake in a blizzard

until they melt like eyes on earth

to show my roots how to flower,

this one a waterlily opening

like a diploma in a swamp,

and that, the devil’s paintbrush.

Should it be otherwise?

Can you turn your eyes back like a clock

and unsee the things

that have looked so deeply into you

the skull of an impersonal space

wears the atmospheric intimacy of your face

like the ghost of an unknown planet?

I have felt poppies of blood

hotter than any prophetic furnace

rend my flesh like starving lions

for things I never knew I believed,

for the heart I laid down like a sword on the altar

to the inexplicable gods of the misconceived,

when I realized that not even my homelessness is shelter

and the only country under the flag of my blood

that might have claimed me as its own

has caged me like an undocumentable alien

in a holding cell of bone.

But it’s foolish to look for passage

when nothing’s in your way,

or seek enlightenment with a candle at midday,

not knowing you’re only washing a mirror with shadows

and handing out wicks to the stars.

And what’s the sound of one hand clapping?

Be compassionate. Be generous. Be kind.

This is the only way to forgive your mind.

PATRICK WHITE

EVERY MORNING OF THE MOMENT, A NEW CREATION

EVERY MORNING OF THE MOMENT, A NEW CREATION

Every morning of the moment, a new creation,

the distillation of the dreams of the night before

when the moon was as fertile as the dew we were born from.

I start out each day with a new face. By nightfall

it’s just another phase of the same old ageless deathmask,

heavier than a bell that’s been talking through my mouth

for more light years than I’ve got tears to measure in mirrors.

That’s usually when I start thinking like a potato about stars.

Blood sugars in my mindstream ripening me like a vision

I’ll only ever get to see backstage like a forlorn clown

trying to hang on to his faith in laughter.

You can pursue happiness, but it will only

run from you like the light, or you can cover your eyes

and try to avoid it for fear of losing it like the last time,

but when you turn around, it’s right behind you,

flirting with your shadow. Better to let it come and go

of its own accord, like a waterbird in a moonrise

reflected on a lake. Then when you speak of things

you increasingly know less about the more

you’re intimate with them, your voice isn’t

a bird net trying to cage words on the fly

but an aviary as open as the sky when

Cygnus and Aquila are up, and the Lyre’s

a larynx for the asking. And you’re free

to sing your heart out as if no one were listening

but you and the trees and the stars you hit like high-notes.

Or shriek like a rabbit seized by the coydogs

if you run out of lucky feet and that’s what comes up

like snake eyes. Lap the experience out of the bone

until there’s nothing left to eat but your appetite itself

and among the myriad flavours of life you’ve exhausted

that will taste the sweetest of all to that emptiness

that harvests the world like a blue moon that’s never full.

Is the moon not the equal of its waxing and waning alike?

Is it trying to enlighten its dark side?

When the candle goes out, does the light have any trouble

handling it? Fear returns to what it knows the best.

It hugs the shore like a tidal pool beside the sea,

a dead starfish or two it can get its arms around

like a worm’s-eye view of the galaxy, and the shell

of a red sunset in the morning on the carapace

of a crab that left its hovel for a house in

a more upwardly mobile zodiac. Sometimes

it comes down to that. Quantum level gravity.

A gravitational eye with myopia that bends the light

like a stick in the water, a mirage of sand in an hourglass

that’s afraid of being swept out to sea

with nothing to hold onto but the lifeboat

of a shucked clam Venus just stepped out of onto land

to have sex in a new medium like an artist

who’s just switched from water colours to oils.

You’ve got to accept the down times as all part

of the same wavelength you’ve been riding

like a snake scaled in white caps of light

that break on shore in a turmoil of kelp.

The cosmos doesn’t need to be put in order

and chaos doesn’t need any help. Listen to your sorrows.

Summon them to a seance of yourself

and apologize to their ghosts for not having the voice

to let them speak through you about

learning to swim with the stars further out of your depths

than you’ve ever been before. First you drown

in the fathomless immensities of even the smallest detail,

and then you bubble back up to the surface

of a multiverse with an oceanic awareness

of what’s been hiding under every eyelid of a wave

like a overturned lifeboat that’s waking up

to the fact that everything floats like the moon

in the reflection of its own mindstream.

And whatever sail you spot coming up over

your event horizon, whatever constellation

or black hole you take for a sign of salvation

or salvage, it first had to sink

before it could rise to the rescue.

PATRICK WHITE

PUTTING IT DOWN TO SOME IMPACT ON MY HEART

PUTTING IT DOWN TO SOME IMPACT ON MY HEART

Putting it down to some impact on my heart

in my sleep, this sunny afternoon edged

with cold anger like a residual hangover

from some dream I don’t remember having.

Did you visit me again last night like an albino nightmare?

Was Venus in Virgo? Were we unaligned?

Was I talking through a window embedded

in heritage brick? Did I mutter things at the sky

that were indignantly unjust without meaning to?

I wonder if the stars after all these light years

they took to get to my heart, are completely happy

with an afterlife without flowers or hermit thrushes.

Who knows why anybody looks back on their past

and risks turning into a pillar of salt,

or returning to the dead by default

but did you let go of my hand again last night?

I’m sick of your absence always being the prelude

to my dismemberment. And those eyes

that always rebuke my poverty as if they’d

been bathing in jewels. Those spiked stars

you bait like red meat you leave out for polar bears.

The brittle sensibilities of a neglected ice age.

Did you break your windows again like a frozen lake

to get at the waters of life in your mindstream?

I hate it when the light goes unappreciated

but this soulless blue of a late autumn afternoon

is beginning to get on my nerves

like a Hallmark greeting card that’s chewed

all the real flavour of life out of its feelings like gum

masticating its words for public consumption.

I feel I’m letting some prophecy down somewhere

as if I were misreading the tea leaves at the bottom

of the moon cup of my prophetic skull.

The gash of first crescent early this morning.

A lunar hair on the shoulder of the dawn that swears

it wasn’t untrue to the sun the Luciferian morning star

is leading on as if a new fool were born every day.

No matter. By the time I was ready for sleep

I expected a lot less of you than anyone’s ever delivered.

And I’ll be ok in a while, and you’ll hate me for it

when your heart turns into a toxic arrowhead

that didn’t have any effect. Just this Clovis point

to say you’d been here once and been wiped out

with the larger mammals of North America

in the dust bowl of another sudden flash freeze.

PATRICK WHITE

HAVEN'T SEEN A STAR IN FOUR NIGHTS

HAVEN’T SEEN A STAR IN FOUR NIGHTS

Haven’t seen a star in four nights

and the windows are pining for more than lamplight.

It’s darker in than it is out, but suddenly

through the breaking clouds, hey, there’s one

and I’m momentarily thrilled by the delight of a child

spotting her first firefly rising like a chimney-spark

above this ashen town on a cold, autumn night.

Small pleasures in the aftermath of great intensities,

the immaculate focus that burned eyeholes

in the sockets of my crystal deathmask

that left me feeling like wounded glass

thawing into the long slow tears I carried back

from the wishing well like the empty buckets

of a waterclock that acts like a volunteer fire brigade

that never put anything out before it was too late.

Wouldn’t be the first house of the zodiac to burn down

and probably not the last, but, at least,

it’s not a plague door to the past facing east.

It’s not blood leaking out of the nostril of a bell,

but who knows? You can never really tell.

Anyone here ever go through a transformation,

emerged from a chrysalis of solitary despair

like a dragonfly with a retroactive message of hope

shining like Venus in the false dawn

of a real enlightenment experience? Do you see

how the light breathes on the darkness

and it’s morning everywhere at midnight?

I’m off to the woods to listen to the laughter

of the falling leaves abandoning their dissertations

on the nature of perishing as if the answer

had always been a breeze of effortless effort.

Truth is just the sound we make for something

we’re never going to stop looking for.

In the company of birches and the ghosts

of lake mist Druids it’s easier to sit still long enough

to recognize it. Let the starmud settle in the puddle

as if a vapour of metal were silvering a mirror

like dew in the night, a silk cloak of auroral insight,

without trading your eyes in for a Zen telescope.

To a dead man, is it folly to hope?

To a live one, is it wisdom to despair?

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETHING DEEPER THAN TEARS

SOMETHING DEEPER THAN TEARS

Something deeper than tears to weep for you.

I weep blood. I weep the silence

on the backstairs with the screen door

that bangs like the sound of one hand clapping

all through the night at the slightest gust of wind

as if a constellation were trying

to strike up a insightful conversation

with a wet match, the sceptre of a spent blossom.

I need a moon deeper than water to drown in.

I need to dance the pain away

in a sword dance of serpents

that know how to carry a tune

like a well fledged arrow, a beautiful toxin,

straight to the heart of the mysterious apple

that’s sitting on top of my head like a prophetic skull.

No flower can say. Not any number of song sparrows

returning to the budding tree in spring,

no green leaf of an innocent tongue,

not even this dry leaf of mine in autumn

writing lyrics on the wind no one can read,

not even among ghosts, can find a voice

that isn’t already the dead language

of an absence that can’t be adorned

by a seance of words.

I light no candles. I summon no gods.

No pretence of knowing where you’ve gone.

No black hole that’s as empty as

your ring on the table, no halo

that ever fell as far from heaven.

Good-bye’s too optimistic and farewell’s

the rudder of a grave on the rocks.

And if I were to raise the paper sail

of another poem like the waxing phase

of the funereal moonboat

that carried you away,

I’d make it black. I’d raise it

like the shroud of a black magician

that can make things disappear,

like an eclipse at half mast

and patch it with the skull and crossbones

of a different phase of the moon on the dark side.

I wouldn’t return your personal belongings

back to the morning like starlings and doves.

But there aren’t enough sacred syllables

swimming like moonlit fish

in the watershed of the silence

to open this fountainmouth of grief

like an aviary of flightless birds.

Nor would I risk having you remember me,

and turn around like a false start,

supposing you can still recall anything at all,

like a light you left on in the hall

the night you left home for good.

You were magic while you were here to work it.

You were the black nun of an enlightened cult of one.

You were the black mass of the sun at midnight

and the blood sister of the moon

that nicked your finger

on both her crescent thorns at once

so one was the cure to the other’s wound

like the eyes of a cat, the fangs of a snake.

Given how close to the moon you were

it didn’t come as a surprise

when you started writing me loveletters

inscribed in bone as if you’d just invented

a whole new language out of your claws

to make love to a poet in the nude when the moon

didn’t lay its silver sword down between us

to keep us a threshold apart from our fingertips.

And it wasn’t long before the elixir began to work

and I lost count of the number

of consensual metaphors I had for your lips,

similitudes for the night skies

that surrounded your eyes in a delirium of stars

that revelled in the crazy wisdom

of their mystically inspired atmospheres.

As just as beautiful as they were,

so were they irresistibly dangerous.

How many light years now

have I poured this memory of them

like a love potion over my roots

and waited for you to bloom in my bloodstream

like stars and blossoms streaming

through the heartwood of an ageing tree

that has as many dead branches on it as it does leaves,

and like an orchard anticipating moonrise,

knew you weren’t coming anymore,

and the night bird had no one to sing for?

But, hey, I’m still a better seance

than I am an exorcism and if you can hear me

calling the faithful to prayer

in all directions at once like a paper airplane

the boy in me has sent out to search for you

like a loveletter in a hurricane of razor wire,

dripping with clusters of blood

the size of hemorrhaging grapes,

fireflies caught in a spider-web

of starless constellations that aren’t a sign

of anything except I miss you worst at night.

If you could sense the tremor

in even the slightest wavelength of light

I’m trying to shine on the darkness to find you,

I’d write you a holy book of sacred silence

inspired by the shadows in my blood

that overtake me like strangers from behind

with an urgent message not to return home

to what isn’t there anymore.

I’d sit out here all night by myself

beside the black waters of this night creek

unravelling like a ribbon in mourning,

that’s been talking to itself

as it walks in its sleep on the water,

and I would beseech the stars with my eyes

to let me know if they’ve seen you,

and in my heart I would entreat them

with the solo of a wounded wolf

raising its head up in a wild prayer

to catch a trace of you on the chilly night air,

to give me a starmap to when and where

I can see you face to face again

and touch your eyelids in your sleep

like crocuses coming up through the snow.

Like moonrise in the apple blow of the storm

that scattered us to winds like all these poems

I’ve tried to write for you ever since

as if you were still somewhere nearby

like another pair of eyes

in my pain and my solitude

watching from the woods

the stars, the water, the moon,

under the stones in the river

that mark your grave and name

above the flowing of this endless epitaph

of leaves and blossoms and poems

as if you alone could still read them,

like the comings and goings,

of waterbirds on the moon,

the first draft of words on the wind,

maple leaves and keys on the mindstream,

and still understand what I was trying to mean.

PATRICK WHITE

STUPID, STUPID WORLD FULL OF LIES

STUPID, STUPID WORLD FULL OF LIES

Stupid, stupid world full of lies, self-deceit, greed,

conspiratorial stinging nettles, leeching bills, vampiric,

cutting off the flow of things like tiger-mussels,

hillbilly hippies beating up their girlfriends on crack,

all these egotistic puff ball mushrooms with labial gills

mythically inflated by one night’s good rain

into albino planets, people who have more keys to heaven

than they have locks on hell, abandoned school bells

that go on talking to themselves like wandering scholars

light years after the children grew old at their perennial recess

and the moths and the mice and the mildew

keep putting out books epilogues after everyone’s

forgotten how to read the signs of their own decay.

Between the horns of the moon that’s been thrown

like a goat skull into the wishing well of my heart,

roadie spiders string my harp for me like false eyelashes

in the green room, and the nerves of the mirrors

are shattered into the frayed deltas of the ropes of hope

endangered elephants are trying to climb up to heaven on.

The thin-skinned blissed-out gardenias of Maharajji

are wilting under the eyeshadow of their Mary K cosmetics

as their rainbows grow vicious as vegan dogs

in a spiritual junkyard of razorwire and foodchains

that have overextended their supply lines like the umbilical cords

of kites and puppets and angels on the strings of arachnids.

Too pure for me. I’d be afraid of getting myself on their floors.

Tracking starmud in from the mindstream I’ve been floating down

from one neuron to the next, one town to another,

like the new moon of an origami swan in a scenic calendar

of apocalyptic moments in the life of a hand grenade

people keep pulling on like the handle of an empty fridge.

Count me among the Andalusian vandals of the delinquent dragons

who keep writing obscene truths in lampblack and terza rima

on the walls where the flamethrowers post their prophecies.

I was born to burnish gold. I was born to dry the eyes

of weeping diamonds. I was born to wire the rainbow bridges

with satchel charges of fireflies and lightning for demolition

so everybody can learn to swim through stone

like glaciers to the other side of their polarized cataracts.

And whenever I look at a house of worship built on quicksand

I’ve got to laugh like an avalanche of meteors

at the self-serving lustrations of their pretentious extinctions

as the world blazes all around them like a halo of inflammable hairspray.

I’ve got holy wars of my own to go to that won’t be disarmed

by the soft swords of their beeswax candles surrendering

to such a little flame of life at the tip of a limp wick

that trembles with every breath it takes like a feather in a furnace.

I see the mad dogs like arsonists with hydrophobia

frothing at the mouth for war, citing ancient conflagrations

from the burnt out scriptures of their sacred matchbooks

raving at the supernovas that ignore them like ingrown solar flares

that couldn’t stand up to a drought, let alone a forest fire.

What good is inspiration if it hasn’t got a detonator?

Or enlightenment if all it does is ignite a funeral pyre,

cremate a desire to live like a peer of the dynastic galaxies

you were born among with the silver spoon of a universe in your mouth

whether you use it to cook crack, take your medicine

like a human suffers an excruciating transformation,

or let the hummingbirds sip from it like syringes

flagging snakestongues of blood in celestial sugar water?

And all the warrior poets buffed like medicine bags

of talcum powder, and all the healers selling

batches of bad heroin like dealers to the high school kids

who used to steal their mother’s oxycontin from the medicine chest

so they could rail the yellow brick road like roadkill.

All the vates, seers and shamans consulting

prophetic pundits and polls as the critics

repeal the fate of the artist before she’s born,

cuckoos taking over the nests of better birds,

parasitic guests taking over the house of the host

as the journalists turn from objective observers

to political spiders weaving the webs they spin as the news

and the audience, breaking mutually consenting protocol

gets up on stage with Hamlet and turns a play into a talkshow

for the fifteen minutes of pop-tart celebrity left on their i-phones.

Originality that used to emanate from the roots up

like the light coming out of a dark universe

now seated like an air traffic controller in an orchard

like the wind assigning runways and instructions

on where to take off and land to a riot of blossoms

with pre-conceived flightpaths and well-known destinations.

Creative writing professors in the literary mills

grinding the grist for whole new generations

of mimetically enculturated oxen

to keep the wheels turning of a lucrative careers bank

that used to be the calling of the insanely inspired

too busy working in the visionary mines of their genius

looking for jewels of insight to waste their potential

on getting a job regurgitating words for baby pelicans,

masticating poetry into spiritual pulp fiction

or sipping them from other men’s mouths as if

spit were the nectar of the muse they’ve never met.

The real dragons, their spines lined with sundials,

really don’t care how many chapbooks you’ve published in a year

nor how many times per capita you’ve mentioned butterflies

just to ensure your fan club you’re still sensitive to beauty

or where you’re reading next like a matchbook

burning in the valley of Tuwa or whether your chimney-spark

expiring under the stars is an inferno of unignited creosote

caked in your throat like a callous of black matter

or the ore of the braille alphabet blocks you throw

like snake eyes in dice playing your randomness off

against the lottery of your autobiography copied and pasted

like a colony of red army ants putting your books together

like a folio of butterfly wings perfectly bound for the ant heap.

PATRICK WHITE