O, AN OASIS IN A TARPIT

O, AN OASIS IN A TARPIT

O, an oasis in a tarpit when being alive

is more than enough, and happiness doesn’t scare me

half as much as it used to. It’s only an eyelid,

an opening and closing of doors, a Cepheid variable,

the blinking of the moon, blue chicory

among the stinging nettles, not the horrific beatitude

it used to seem when I was too young---

When was that? Yesterday?---to let it come

and go. A waterlily of joy, it blossoms among the stars

but its white fire is rooted in the lowest detritus

of the swamp that lives on its own perishing.

Happiness isn’t a reason to live. It’s living

beyond reason, unreasonably. Life without a buffer zone

when you can walk skinless in the moonlight

like a smooth stone in a medicine-bag of stars

that sends you skipping out over their reflections

in a lake without a name as deep as the mystery of life

and then you sink as if you’d been looking Medusa

in the third eye. And what are you, then, if not

a lifeboat of a fish swimming through the nightsky

of a bejewelled underworld resonant with soft laments?

I feel the effervescence of the Pleiades

carbonating the waters of my life. A great blue heron

flaps off like the headlines of yesterday’s newspaper,

or the first draft of another poem inspired by the abyss,

and I’m not unmindful of the sorrows of the world,

and that this is recess, a sparkle in the eye of eternity,

the exuberance of a boy on a dolphin in a great night sea

of perilous awareness, not lightyears of bliss

shed by a firefly that came looking for me in the dark.

I haven’t been rescued from anything. The depths

and the surface are one for the moment,

the highest and the lowest, the silly and sublime.

A dragon. A plumed serpent with a circumpolar outlook

a peacock of a dinosaur flaunting its boas

like a Fauvist painting of sex in the eyes of love and death.

A ghost dance, of sorts, where my beginnings

partner with my ends and together they make

one bird, one candle in a cowled plumage of flame

that took a vow of poverty but has the flightfeathers

of an heretical phoenix to spare just the same.

The nighthawk is riding its own thermals, the owl

isn’t encumbered by its wisdom. I’m free inside.

All the aviaries are empty and I’ve got an open door policy

on my voice-box. The chimney’s mellifluous

with bluebirds in the morning, and by nightfall

even the most feeble sparks of insight are exalted

by the constellations of the Eagle and the Swan.

No companion but my solitude is pleased with itself.

Everything I see and hear, down to the smallest

pale-green frog chirping in the cattails, silvered

in moonlight and water as the black snake tastes it

like a ripe strawberry on the warm, summer air,

is ancestor, bloodline, wavelength woven into

a flying carpet of picture-music I’m riding

like the multiversal destiny of my membranous mindstream

and because I love starmaps and leaves, I’m riffing off

the leit motifs of the stars, I’m writing poems in the glyphs

of the scars like birthmarks on the bodies of good guitars.

PATRICK WHITE

I HAD TO WALK BESIDE A LOT OF RIVERS

I HAD TO WALK BESIDE A LOT OF RIVERS

I had to walk beside a lot of rivers,

miles, lightyears, trying not to impale myself

on a mace of dead trees or be swept

down a bank of slippery starmud

like an otter overconfident around the water.

I wasn’t breaking trail for anyone to follow.

A broken trail is where we all end up.

Poor Medusas. The toppled roots of snakey trees.

Frog spit on the stargrass and the trees

and the wet leather of last year’s leaves.

Dung, duff, and detritus. Sounds like

an epic poem. How burlap fell in love

with the aristocratic velvet of a rose.

Is that how it goes? Then let it.

With this proviso. That it never ends.

Misery and finesse were never friends.

The nightbird doesn’t begrudge the bell

its one note, and I drop anchor these days

like the moon going down behind the Lanark Hills,

just for a night or two, until the wind

can mend my sails like broken ear drums.

The chittering squirrel tries to have

a conversation with me but I’m sick

of the busy colloquies of hack writers

who think they’ve got a fix on the dark matter

of the mind in autumn, bluing

the post partum depression of the harvest

with shades of the moon that just came

to say farewell. The waterbirds have already left.

Homesick starmud exiled from death awhile.

The black walnuts in their jowls

are about as big their skulls, and it’s hard

to imagine anything larger than a chokecherry

for a heart. A drop of blood. Nuts

stored in trees like gravegoods in a library.

I’m imbued by the silence of the afterbirth

of the sacrifice that still wonders if it was worth it

to unburden its heart like an emergency exit.

There’s a sad equilibrium to what I become

in the fall like water finding its own level

because nothing much is going to bloom now

under the changing guard of the cold, cold stars.

I could cry my eyes out but the roots won’t

make flowers out of my tears until late next spring.

I could sing arias all night like a thirteen century

troubador in the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine,

but there’s no one at the window of the heron’s nest,

and the crows roost when they should be on nightwatch.

I walk in the ruins of all I tried to attain

like a warm summer rain that had washed

the corpse of a human the night before

and felt the abyss of what it is to be no more

and throw a few cornflowers you grew yourself

into the grave like metaphors of what you hope

might come of them, or, at least, might

speak for you like the proxies of an everlasting silence

when death sees what’s it’s done, and lies about it.

Odes of rosaries around the skulls of the firepit

that hung itself from the rafter of a shedding oak

in one last attempt to come to fruition

like mistletoe for the lovestruck, and acorns

for the feral pigs with the tusks of the moon.

Too lush, too cold, the grass greens the husked fields.

The cattails explode like upholstery.

The cedar rail fences are slimey with archipelagoes

of orange mold. The bracken Jurassic in nature.

Eras roll by like oceans playing musical chairs.

The rat snake slows as its blood runs cold.

The waves flap like wet laundry on the line.

The inconceivable goes on forever, but it starts

long before we’re born and and goes on even longer

after we die and die and die and die

as if life held a grudge and couldn’t kill us enough.

Sixty five autumns have I seen. And the spring

begins where life left off at the first snow as if

everyone had to live November all over again.

Life’s a catacomb trying to build a water palace

out of uncashed pop bottles. Death’s

a pale young man on a crutch that isn’t

going to let the surgeons take his other leg off.

Or an Aztec conduct a heart transplant.

Must all living things suffer what they love most?

I hold a child in my arms and life is

perilous and good. An old man cries

like chrysanthemums for a woman who

once ran like a river through his dry heartwood

and though there’s no argument that time

can’t abide humanity, life is torturously beautiful

to no purpose in the damp solitude

of an old man’s eyes humbled by a second innocence.

The white meteor of a salt lick for the deer.

PATRICK WHITE

ANYTHING GOES AT THREE IN THE MORNING

ANYTHING GOES AT THREE IN THE MORNING

Anything goes at three in the morning.

I’m dogpaddling in the salvage of the day

after the sun went down like a shipwreck

with all hands on board. A train whistle

mourns its lonely mile and I’ve known

since I was twenty six, the night is not a reward.

And the heart not a starfish you can easily drown

to keep from shining as if it had

a sense of direction all of its own

even if its just a momentary flashback

of a life you’d forgotten on your way down.

The darkness bruises my solitude.

I bleed like deadly nightshade

and talk to myself and the stars, the lamp posts,

the glassy-eyed windows with smut in their eyes

like the rose of life with a wounded mouth.

Trying to express the silence through the afterlife

of my voice, as if I were the ghost in the machine

of a transfixed medium you could get your bearings by

like a candle at a seance that suddenly goes out.

Or maybe I’m just the smoke of an old demon

who feels more like an exorcism sent into exile

like a scapegoat for things I might have done

if they hadn’t been done to me first by the sanctimonious

to purify a long winter of soot, incense, and snakeoil

like an oilslick contaminated by hypocritical rainbows.

But I mustn’t grow bitter. It’s moonrise

and the windows across the street, dirty

as these I’m looking through, seem sublimely elevated

to be used like a lake or a drop of water

when it isn’t raining, to reflect so much beauty

with a moondog for the iris of a third eye

that’s always urging the mindstream

to take a look for itself to liberate its seeing

from a purple passage in a bad dream that doesn’t end well.

The raccoons and feral cats are giving the dogs

something to bark about as they entangle their hind legs

like Houdini in a labyrinth of chains

to keep from running the deer to death at night.

Strange place, this earth. This starmud

that’s an alloy of blood and passion and mind

trying to second-guess where its presence comes from

as if everything had to be derived from something else

to lay a claim to the mystic specificity of its cosmic origins

and to understand that originality’s most unique feature

is that it shares its characteristics with everything else

so the more a human embodies what he perceives,

in his confusion, his horror, his bliss and sorrow,

that forms don’t appear and disappear for him to believe in,

that their passage isn’t a work of time, but the way

life shapeshifts from one dream figure into the next

without leaving the hands of anyone’s who’s ever

grabbed it by the throat and hasn’t let go

like a snapping turtle that’s just got hold of the moon,

its beak full of the flightfeathers of a waterlily

rising off the lakes of the windowpanes as unconcerned

as Cygnus flying over the tarpaper pigeon coups of the rooftops.

PATRICK WHITE

GREY INSIDE AND OUT. OCTOBER RAIN

GREY INSIDE AND OUT. OCTOBER RAIN

Grey inside and out. October rain.

How much darkness can a room contain?

Not much left to let go of. The glory

of the yellow elm across the street

revelling for one brief moment

in the eyebeam of the sun, naked

as a cobweb in the doorway of a cold furnace

the next, as if it had given some kind of offence.

Black bones of a bird that burned

and shed its feathers like a boa

on the playbill of an opening act in vaudeville

featuring one night tragedies with slug lines.

Only so many times you can rehearse

what went wrong with your life before

you begin to catch on to your own spontaneity.

Nothing happens for a reason. Relax.

It’s all out of control. Shallow-bottom

river boats without a rudder and only the leaves

for down to earth starmaps. Venus, Saturn,

Jupiter, the moon, I remember last night

when things were clearer than tears

how beautiful everything appeared

as if there were a sacred dance going on

and you could hear, even at a distance,

music coming out of the windows

of the broken-hearted darkness

that gave voice like ore to their shining.

Mortal. I don’t mind sitting this one out

while I watch the lords and consorts of life

weeping like mandarins geishas in the shadows

of the willows who’ve gone savage

over the last two unmannerly months.

The boy plays with fire. An old man

walks his mile scattering his ashes

before him on the pathway to senescent solipsism

or the possibility of being enlightened

accidentally by the appetites of Thracian women

for Orphic prophets that sing in their sleep.

I’m a waterbird in mourning on an abandoned lake

where all the canoes that once drifted freely

like moonlight among the stalks of wild rice

are in chains on scaffoldings above the waterline

and though the indignity still raises my ire

volcanically, I’m as apt these days to fall

into the caldera of a depression in a fuming firepit

as blow my top like the war bonnet of an ageing eagle

soaked in the rain like the flaming flightfeathers

of the staghorn sumac going out in a blaze of glory

like a wet matchbook trying to keep its pyre alight.

I’ve been saving my last blessing like a needle

when it’s asked for to reinforce the unravelled threads

that have spread across the palm of my right hand

like fossils of lightning tinkered out of the Burgess Shale.

One of the great advantages of having a longer fuse

than you’re ever going to live to see go off

like fireworks above St. John’s High School

is the creative freedom not to care if anyone

comprehends what it is your protesting

with a celebration of the lives of inflammable heretics

who died in agony still believing life was good

despite its reputation for being misunderstood.

Black walnuts, crushed like new moons,

eclipses, chimney sweeps on the sidewalk

as if a whole solar system had come to grief.

The amphorae of the milkweed wombs

more the urns of ghosts they breathed out

like a gust of parachutes on time-released

space capsules crash-landing like collapsed umbrellas

on rock and skull and good soil alike

as if the living were summoned to a habitable seance.

No more worrying about the buoyancy

of your swim bladder when you’re the shipwreck

of the first submarine on the moon to go down

like a fathomless windfall into the depths

of a life that doesn’t depend upon light at all.

Infernal fumaroles of Titanic smokestacks

belching like foghorns in a sunless atmosphere

longer than six months of midnight at the north pole.

Neptune’s off its axis. Must have been a fly by.

Or it’s bobbing for apples like shepherd moons.

No one in my life to leave myself to.

I’ve got kids. But I don’t think they’d know

how to relate to the paternity of a dead poet

who hung his catkins from their earlobes

like a do-it-yourself kit of home spun chromosomes.

Should I eviscerate myself like an Aztec sacrifice

of the heart to an unfeeling moon goddess

that’s never tasted the severity of her own knife?

She bathes in mother of pearl. I wipe the gore

of my starmud off in my grave and come up for air

like a white voodoo whale of unsinkable harpoons.

I doubt at this late remove we’ll ever see each other

again in this life quite the way we did once,

but if it means anything that can’t be doubted,

I still love her like a lighthouse that went

swimming alone in a storm without warning anyone.

PATRICK WHITE  

ETERNITY IN A WING FLASH OF TIME

ETERNITY IN A WING FLASH OF TIME

Eternity in a wing flash of time, touch

people’s hearts as if there were a housewell

in every drop of rain, in every tear

frozen on the moon, a sea of tranquillity,

an elixir for a thousand ills, in every eye

more sky than a bird could ever fly out of

or a star see to the end of. Silence

should leave its fingerprint on the lips

of a rose, no, not should, but sometimes does

when one word by itself would make

a racket even the dead couldn’t blend with

like the white noise of languorous bees

on a purple afternoon when the trees

are steeping in sunlight. Full measure

and the world beside. Let it slide

from your hand like a ring you dropped

into the theatrical hat of a street musician.

Immensify your deepest intimacies

with metaphors that identify with everything

like a bridge with its reflection

in the mindstream that even when the stillness

of the moon is upon it like a swan

in Renaissance luxury, or the face

of someone blind lips could read

by the light of their eyes, flows

as if there were no abiding place

for time or life, love or art to rest in.

No ventriloquist of suffering, shriek

in your own voice, cry with your own eyes,

and if heaven mends what hell slashed open

like a loveletter meant for someone else,

don’t shrug it off as if one wound fits all,

or eat your agony as if it would do anyone else

any good to digest what can only nourish you

like milkweed suckles Monarchs, or spit it out

as if you had an antagonistic mouth

with intolerant taste-buds. Let it kill you

beautifully like a matador gored by a rose,

a scarf of blood in the eyeless sand as a sign

from a dark lady she was a nocturnal mirage.

And whether it was a tragedy or a black farce

conduct yourself accordingly like a new moon

on a widow walk devoted to waiting for someone

who’s never coming back. Uphold the integrity

of the emptiness within you like a deathbed

you’re never going to dream in again.

It’s the canvas, not the master, that’s the recipient

of beauty and the truth’s not much of a consolation

for the lost delight you laboured so arduously for,

but don’t indict the medium because the message

wasn’t for you. Life is not a reward. Death

isn’t a punishment. Whatever you’ve been convicted of.

The mind is an artist. Able to paint the worlds.

With love. In starmud. In eyes you boil

like the phlegm of snails for their purpureal irises,

or the lustre of old brass moondogs gingering the clouds.

PATRICK WHITE

MOMENT TO MOMENT, IS THIS MY AFTERBIRTH OR AFTERLIFE

MOMENT TO MOMENT, IS THIS MY AFTERBIRTH OR AFTERLIFE

Moment to moment, is this my afterbirth

or afterlife? Old, or sixty-five years young?

What nebulae does my breath make

on the window of life, cold and diminishing?

Pre-partum depression perhaps, the apple

falls at the moment of consummation,

and the long labour of changing the rain and the light

into a time capsule for a material kind of eternity

is over. Have I fulfilled my emptiness? Or come

to the end of a useful delusion I grew fond

of believing? Whizzed past forty, made

a pitstop at fifty to check the oil and tank up

but sixty-five’s some kind of broken wagon wheel

on a black prairie after a grass fire swept through

the night before. Adequate to all the other

eras, ages, and nightwatches I’ve kept

oceanically enough to ring the hour and shout out

to the stars that couldn’t care less overhead

all’s well, I’ll stare this estrangement in the eye

be it the mood of the fire, or an urnful of dragons.

Let it turn me to stone if it has to. I have

warrior eyes and courageous wounds that made

a fool out of me like Don Quixote charging windmills.

A habit of turning skulls over to see what’s

on the other side, however beautiful the moonrise is.

I was a boy. Now I’m an old man. Is one really

younger than the other and this sad, medicine bag

of a body, the elder of a cult of one? My bones

are firesticks. My heart a cold firepit where

the Council of the Three Tribes used to sit

at the meeting place where the sacred rivers join.

So many friends, ex-lovers, objects of gossip

have died over the past ten years of probable odds,

you can’t help counting the number of springs

and autumns left to you on the abacus of new moons

that can be numbered on your fingers and toes if you’re lucky.

More declination than right ascension, I’m conjugating

time like a Latin verb, sum, es, est, though soon enough,

eram, eras, erat. Fact. Why deny it? This

is what it’s like to die as if your fingers were

being pryed open to make you let go of things

like flowers. My eyebrows are trying to

gently persuade me my eyes are going the way

of blackberries and dusty blue grapes in early October.

My seeing’s beginning to realize how organic it is.

The telescope rots. The lens fogged in by snow.

The heart’s a benign terrorist and cancer’s moving

further east like a Mississauga rattler under

the rose-hips of the cold sores on your lips

though you haven’t had a pimple in thirty five years.

Now it’s a matter of cracks and creases as the air

slowly leaks out of the bladder of skin you hoped

would keep you afloat like Bouncing Bet, or Lady at the Gate.

I chafe like a feral dog at the short leash my body

chains me to. I’d rather burn the kite than

haul it back in like some fish I trained to obey me.

Things have come to mean so much it’s suicide to care.

Kids have jumped ship. Women have thrown

a lot of rings off burning bridges, achievements

have grown no less ambivalent, and awards are filth.

Freer than I’ve ever been, within and without,

but the isolation is galactic in scope, and o

the lavender lies that cling to the light

like a patina of soap, bubbles in a hurricane

of thorns that swarm in plagues of killer bees.

The toybox is empty. The cupboard almost

as much fun. The government finally pays me

for being who I am, though I still don’t feel

I’ve ever been approved of. Did you love me, Mum?

Or did I remind you too much of my father?

Still a poet after fifty years. That might count

for something. Never wanted you to be disappointed

by what you gave birth to. Might be unlovable

but I’ve mastered the art of being dangerously wise

as a broken window with a liberated field of view.

I got out of the egg. I know how big the sky is.

Might be people I’m dead to, not yet born,

will look upon me as an eyesore they couldn’t

get rid of, they’ve stared at so long, given the way

things turn around, they begin to accord me,

as strange as I seem, an air of original charm.

My heartwood might have been a pulp mill

but my poems all have tree rings and birds

in the branches, and even in winter, the full moon

for a blossom of apple bloom in an ice age.

PATRICK WHITE

PRECIPITATE WOMAN, STAR SAPPHIRE

PRECIPITATE WOMAN, STAR SAPPHIRE

Precipitate woman, star sapphire, crystal elixir

distilled from the nebularity of your saddest disguises

when your eyes weep like lonely windows

from your doe-skin medicine bag. Is your heart bad

or just bruised? Fire-sylph languishing in the ashes

of your deepest desire, or disappointment taken

by surprise you’d have to sink bells deeper

than you have to sing like a drowned mermaid

to the lovers you left dog-paddling in your wake

still in denial you didn’t swim back to rescue them?

Male. I am. Fool? Only by my own hand. Born

to succumb to the female principle of the world

I’ve built no temples in my honour beyond

the occasional gravestone to mark the miles

I’ve endured this dream of mine to love

and be loved, though you can’t say that without

feeling kind of hokey, nevertheless, it’s a doorway

to a good guess. I’m an unsigned loveletter

without a return address, sealed in blood and roses

and a harvest of thorns in eclipse I threshed

with my heart like a matador tearing his cape

on the horns of the moon because only

by their fruits can you know them like wine

trashed in the sands of an hourglass that smashes

like the Pleiades against the skull of Taurus.

I’ve been watching your eyes lie for hours now

as they had to without harming anyone, from

the other side of the room and I know you’re dangerous.

You know how to keep the dead in their graves

and somehow make them feel relieved about it

as if their lightning wasn’t up to the storm

though you were amused by the way they thundered

like a distant windfall of ghost dancers at dawn.

I was many lightyears out at sea before

a pink morning warned me I was out of my depths

as the waves rose and fell like the breasts

of a woman sleeping beside me oceanically

on the moon, her hair like a willow on the edge

of a precipice where lovers leapt to their deaths

as the lesser of two consummations of suffering.

I see the infernality of your avatar in an orphanage

of forlorn voodoo dolls, and the mistrust

of your longing to traffic in lust for the sake

of a taste of love that might still blossom

in the heart of the apple that fell to the ground,

the taste of stars in the fertile crescents of sex

that open gates of mud brick glazed with lapis lazuli

and towers that stand like lighthouses in wet deserts.

Moonrise in the black lace of the treeline, I’m

not immune to the persuasion of your lunar mirages

but now that I’m older, fire-master of the dragon

I used to be, I’m a distinguished pyre that doesn’t

burn easily for anybody that can’t steal me

like fire from the gods I’ve neglected to worship

for the better part of a life I’ve lived as if

I were chosen to thrive in exile like a noble pariah

that placed no faith in the religious superstitions

of his long fall to paradise without a shadow of proof

to show for it except these nightshifts of solitude

where I hammer out stars on the anvil of my heart

into a bestiary of extinct zodiacs, sundials

like lapwings and swords of moonlight I mean

to give back to the waters of life in due course

they were once wounded by without spite or remorse.

PATRICK WHITE