THE RAIN'S FALLING UPWARDS

THE RAIN’S FALLING UPWARD

 

The rain’s falling upward

and I’m rooted in the clouds.

I’m rifting with the greening of my leaves

without a flute, letting my thoughts grow

like musical serpents each

according to their need.

It’s the snake’s turn to charm me,

to entangle me in its form

like forbidden fruit

swaying from my highest boughs.

In the chalky, moist grey air

I’m scraping my fingernails

down a blackboard like crows

because my desires are vaguely out of reach

and my mind is a teacher with nothing to teach.

I want nothing more

than the freedom of my own humanity

thumbing its own heart

like a well-read book

or a worn guitar I taught myself to play

when no one else was around

to hear the sound of one hand clapping.

If my mind brings forth an abyss

like a vast womb where there’s only room

for my solitude

I’ll slip into it

under the reflection of the moon

on the unwitnessed side of my eyelids

without abandoning the boat of my body

and drift like stars across the timeless spaces

of anywhere the light doesn’t taste like physics.

Being is Knowing. I don’t need a web

to prove I’m a spider

and I don’t need a constellation

to shine out like a star

when I’m not being humbled

by the blind insignificance of it all.

Even when I mean bees and earthworms

too often my voice

is an urn full of dead fireflies.

Yesterday’s astonishment before the stars

in the open-mouthed fields

comes down today

like chandeliers of mystic trivia

 

on a scarecrow who lets the birds

in on the joke

that everytime he begins to burn

in his fireless martyrdom

his tears fall like an ice storm

to put him out.

But I don’t always want

wisdom oozing out of everything

like the sententious candle

of its own enlightenment

even if I am wounded by the compassion of it.

Sometimes I am content with the futility of things

just as they are.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE LILIES WERE OUT

THE LILIES WERE OUT

 

The lilies were out just a moment ago

but they’re already wilting like parachutes

hung up in their own powerlines.

They’ve gone underground

into the skulls of their bulbs

with thoughts of resurrection.

Beauty thaws and is gone in a vapour

and all that is left to attest to the passage

is an ambiguous lament on brown paper.

You can’t cry, eat, drink, dream, laugh, think,

drug, con, deal, steal, fight or fuck your way out of death.

And no matter how many times

I’ve tried to look death straight in the eye

I was always the first to blink.

No more wine of awareness to drink up

your body lets go of the cup

like a moon that’s turned its last page

or the open hand of the drunk slumped in the alley

where his fist disappears,

or your heart stops by the roadside

like a shoe that’s been missing for years.

Lately I’ve been cultivating a feel for emptiness.

Not the something was there and now it’s not kind,

and now I’m lethally depressed

by the postpartum effects

of an ontological miscarriage kind,

but looking deeply into space

as more a mirror of my face

than the light and the dark

that play upon it now

and realizing

the mindlessness of mind.

Somedays I carry the ashes

of my old self around

in the urn of a my skull

just to be respectful to the dead,

or I scatter myself on the wind, on a wave

from the precipice of some microcosmic abyss

and let the long sentence of the last word

disappear into a blackhole.

I’ve lost count of the worlds I’ve passed through

only to slough like the skins

of this serpentine dimension

whose chameleonic physics

makes my eyes break and run

like drops of water

leaking from the lenses

of an enlightened telescope.

And then there are times

I turn into a divining rod

just to taste the lightning

on the tip of my tongue

as if I were horned for it

by the crescents of the moon

to harmonize a mystic snakepit

with a heart that’s out of tune

with its own string theory of everything

like the dunce of a guitar in the corner

that hasn’t been played in years

because no one has the ears

to listen to the light.

I imagine myself after I’m dead

out there in the night somewhere,

invisible and aware,

mingled in the darkness

like salt in the sea

or stars in an eye

that’s given up looking for me.

Could be a ferry, an ark,

could be the pharoah’s moonboat

or the Flying Dutchman

or a raft of bones

that doesn’t float,

the black sail of a lunar eclipse,

or maybe even a sunken wreck

that makes it to the other side

but the only ship of death

I’m clinging to these days

is the solitary plank of a scuttled compass

drifting through the fog

like an empty lifeboat

toward a voice

that’s stopped calling

like a bird on a hidden hill.

You can’t turn death’s eye

like a jewel in the light

the way you can life

and expect to find your way back

over the last event horizon

that just blew you out

like a birthday candle

with your first breath

but I don’t blame anyone

for letting their eyes relax

until they stop looking at things.

Sometimes the facts are blood

on one too many blossoms

falling like ruined eyelids

and skies torn off the branch

who weren’t up for the dream

and couldn’t contain the scream.

It’s not much different from being born.

Still, I like to bite deep into the apple

not to enhance some original perversity

I yearn for like a heretic

his unwitnessed martyrdom

in the sacred fires of the night

burning like a religion he hasn’t grounded yet,

but to hasten the glow of life in the gathering sap

by adding my eyes to the mix.

I want to taste clarity

like an intimate dimension in everything.

And even if I am as lost and startled

as anyone ever has been,

still, what’s that

if not a chance to explore

the mysterious fear

of standing before an open door?

Who knows? Maybe it will be me that answers.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOU READ MY POETRY

YOU READ MY POETRY

 

You read my poetry

and you need a locus,

something to hang on to,

a familiar milieu, a focus,

right ascension and declination,

a starmap and astrolabe,

and the usual pictures painted

on the lense of the usual telescope.

If I had wanted you to follow me

I would have dropped breadcrumbs,

I would have spray-bombed the trees

an adolescent cadmium red

to show you where the road goes.

I may have been pulled like a weed

from the garden of Eden

and tossed to the wilder side of things,

a meteor among boundary stones,

but that doesn’t mean my darkness is tar,

or all these stars are a kind of quicksand

you’re sinking through like a sculptor

swimming through stone

with a chisel in your hand.

Maybe you’re just the wrong tool for the job.

Maybe you’re trying to follow the music with a map.

Maybe you haven’t come to terms

with eleven dimensions yet

and you’re still standing at the gates

of your own singularity, hat in hand,

waiting for a passport

incommensurably as pi

hoping for refugee status.

Maybe you don’t know

the whole universe

begins with a kiss

between the lips

of two membranes

in an ocean of dimensions

beyond the reach of your sensible wave

and the big bang

is not the beginning

but the afterbirth of the matter.

It’s hard to believe that your mind is free

when you’re standing there

with chains in your hand

counting rosaries like vertebrae.

It’s hard to know what to say

that might amuse you

outside of convention,

but that doesn’t mean

I’ve spent my life

trying to find

a new way to confuse you.

If I revel in the simulacra

like a kid in the fall playing in leaves,

if I kick a stone down the road like the earth as far as it can go

or use the moon to plumb the well

of my raindrop depths,

or try to walk on fire, stars, water,

hoping my feet are better lifeboats

than my migratory reasons are

birds for all seasons,

or I’m kind to the illusions

I had to leave along the way

like roadside flowers

closing in eclipse,

it may well be

the playful compassion of fools

that exempts the wise man

like a hard rock on the mountain

from the avalanche

of cornerstones and schools

you keep bringing down upon yourself like an echo.

You might hear a pair of morning doves in the trees

and the bee in the burgundy ear of the hollyhock

and all the key frequencies of string theory

and know how to finger them masterfully

leaping from fret to fret

like balance beams

and well-worn thresholds

up and down your neck

like serpent-fire through your open chakras,

but to judge from the way you look at me

you’ve never once

cupped your hands

like a lifeboat in the mindstream

and washed your face off in the music

so you could see.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AND I TELL MYSELF

AND I TELL MYSELF

And I tell myself

even when the windfall under the apple-tree

is not gathered up and tasted,

even when it’s left to waste

in its own sweetness,

without even so much as a thought

of its being a gift, a donation,

or lamenting its degeneration,

without purpose or compliance

it goes on bearing.

What is it being effortlessly true to

if not water and sun, leaf and soil,

the labour of worlds and atoms and stars,

not the work of a single hand,

nor the toil of a definition

but the creative collaboration of everything

in the expression of a form

that is the first and last word

of a language that puts its finger to its lips?

Everything you see is keeping the same secret

closer to its heart than life

even though its very existence

gives it away.

Apple. Star. Moon.You. Me.

Not signs aligned by the hidden grammar

in the voice of God

commanding a world of nouns to be,

but the transformative clarity of unending verbs.

The Alone expressing the Alone to the Alone

in its native incoherence.

Shadow-water on the moon.

The light falling like eyes of rain

to the roots of the brain

that flowers into awareness

and not a leaf on the stream

that was taught how to write.

Autumn burns like the libraries of Alexandria.

You can read books about it

by the light of the stars

in an hourglass

late at night

suspended in time

like a homey window,

or you can dare your own freedom

and live like a jewel of water in a desert.

You can gather stars around your fire

like eyes out of the darkness

deepened like sacred wells

by the secret felicities of night,

and gratify the sky’s appetite for stories

when your voice flares up like the wind

and it isn’t the air, it isn’t the tree,

it isn’t the leaves,

it’s your own mind singing

as it carves guitars

out of its ageless heartwood

that anyone can play

from the inside out

as easily as they play their own body.

PATRICK WHITE

NO END

NO END

No end of the desecrations and devotions

that afflict me like your eyes.

I don’t need a theory of parallel universes

to convince me I’m born in one, die

in another, and never existed in the next.

I’ve had to juggle more worlds than that

just to maintain my balance in an unalanced context

whenever you’ve walked into the room

and I was an awkward ship far out

on the nightsea you were

on the dark side of the moon.

Now I seriously doubt if I’ve ever known

what world this is

or what quantum of karma

elaborates me in it like a wave on the move.

It takes a dark wind to blow dark things away

and shed a black deathsail like an eclipse

to let people know you’re still alive from afar

like a star before the arising of signs,

always a night ahead of your own light.

Aligned with you, all my compasses lied to me,

and my planets wobbled axially like drunk tops

stumbling along the white line

unspooled like a standard orbit

by testy cops at a roadside check.

In that world and in several since

you have been a mysterious intimacy of space

that touchs me like the whispering skin of a cool breeze

in an open field under the stars

deep into my solitude

and late, later than the last fruits of autumn

into my life.

And even when I remember you now

in this affinity of dimensions

without a threshold

my heart overflows its own cup

like rivers and wine

to adorn the passage

of love through time.

PATRICK WHITE

I SEE MYSELF HAPPENING

I SEE MYSELF HAPPENING

I see myself happening

in the flight of a bird across the moon,

in the appearance of the leaves

and the leftover flowers

that have gone on blooming

in the corner of the yard

longer than anyone ever thought

and in the light of the star

through the branches of a tree

that’s rooted in me like an emotion

that’s grown beyond its rings.

For a moment the moon

holds the spring leaves up before her

like the cards of a new hand

to make sails and water of their shadows

and I am all arrivals and tides and departures,

the skeleton of a battered ark

scuttled in the mountains of the moon

after the flood receded

and everything was land

and I was the two of every kind

that disembarked like a mind

to elaborate itself through a bloodline

that wound many threads

into one strong rope

that might bind me like a spinal cord

to a place in an empty lifeboat.

We all have our protean myths of origin.

The wounded lies we use to exempt

our intimate extinctions

from the obvious suicides

who trusted death not to judge.

One voice says it’s merely a witness

while another tries to interpret

the meaning of the life that’s going on

without consultation

and another scoffs at them all

as if bitterness could save you from being a fool.

And tired of having my teachers

interrupt my truancy

with rational voices

that always knew better,

I suspended the school

with an unfinished loveletter

that got things off my chest

like baby crows in a nest.

No rule, no fool. And now I’m free

to taste the moon for myself

and know it tastes like scars.

And there are commotions of life in the grass

that don’t violate

the incredible privacy of creation

by trying to assert what they are

to the secret that gave them birth.

What child was ever of no worth

in the scales of a grieving mother?

The moment you affirm you exist, you don’t;

and denying you do won’t do either.

In a single scale of the fish,

the whole ocean

and in a feather, the sky.

Sometimes reality hangs

like a tear from an eyelash

or a drop of water from the tip of your nose,

reflecting the entirety of the world

and sometimes it’s a grain of dust

that humbles the mountains.

The moment you go looking

for the meaning of things

you pry the jewel out of the ring

and all that’s left is the eye-socket

of a skull full of fire ants.

No exit, no entrance,

no inside, no out,

isn’t it obvious by now

there’s no theshold, no door,

no far shore

no road to follow or not

no passage to anywhere

no aspiration or desire

no sage or liar

no mirage on the moon

or shadow born again

in the fires of the sun at midnight

pouring itself into forms

to ensnare you like love and war?

There’s no need to air

your private or public ordeals.

Just realize your formlessness,

your lack of beginnings and ends.

Mind is space. What’s to liberate?

Nothing gained, nothing lost,

nothing large or small,

nothing wounded or healed,

full or empty, bound or free,

and yet nothing is ever missing

because time and mind and space

are three echoes of you in the same empty well.

Why struggle exhaustively

like a wave that takes up arms

against the sea

or a light at odds with its lamp,

a flame that sobs in the ashes of its fire,

or a breath that holds itself aloof from the wind

stringing yourself out like beads

along the spinal thread

of your hydra-headed rosary,

trying to pry the pearl of the moon

out of every drop of water

that falls from the tip of your tongue?

If you think your life was attained at birth

then surely you will lose it when you die,

but when you realize

that origins and ends

are both eyes

of the one seeing,

the same breath

on the threshold of now

without an eyelash in between

like the moon on water,

everything you’ve ever looked for

asks you

where you have been,

and what, if anything,

among the inexhaustible answers

you might possibly mean.

You’ll finally realize

though you’ve looked everywhere

on worlds as numerous as grains of sand

and plunged through the darkness

like the only fish in an infinite, eyeless sea,

and cobbled the road

you hoped would lead you home

with the prophetic skulls

of all your past lives,

and pondered your purposeless beginning

like a funeral bell that never knew you well,

the source of the mind you look for

is as close as the lamp in your hand

and everywhere your eyes inspire the light to dare,

you see the black squirrel in the blue patch of grape hyacinth

watching you watching it

and thought-years beyond the exhibits of meaning,

you understand.

PATRICK WHITE

IF THE DOOR'S LOCKED

IF THE DOOR’S LOCKED

If the door’s locked and no one home

I just wander off somewhere inside myself

wondering if it matters

I so frequently now

catch myself on the sly

beginning to enjoy my own irrelevancy.

The more I suspect I am nothing

the more I feel fulfilled

and in the far field

on the other side of the hill

that loosely holds the road

that leads away from your house

like the slack string of a kite that doesn’t fly,

it’s bliss to be no one again,

and peace not to have to try.

I lie down in the cool grass

like an empty boat on a farm

and there’s no other side to get to

that isn’t already under my feet

that can’t tell if they’re walking

on water, fire, or stars

or sprouting wings on their heels

like maple samara

taking the fall for autumn.

Unwitnessed reality

doesn’t train a teacher

to open anyone’s eyes

to what is and isn’t there

like the yesterday and tomorrow of a star

that puts out both torches

in the eye of an ocean of night

to salt the earth with a light

that can’t stop things from growing.

Irony misses the point

when it doesn’t understand

the transoxymoronic hilarity of creation.

The opposites just don’t engender one another,

they celebrate each other’s birth.

First silver of the moon

on the greening willow

pouring out its heart to the stream

and emptier than my eyes above me

as if space had o.d.’d on a hot shot of stars,

auroral mirages in the vastness of my dissipation.

Because the dark mother

in the abundance of her timelessness

has never stopped giving birth to everything

it’s as impossible to be born once

as it is twice.

Because there is

no inside or outside

to the inexhaustibility of emptiness

her darkness teems with the unborn

who have never known the thorn of perishing.

PATRICK WHITE

WHO ISN'T TRYING TO LIVE

WHO ISN’T TRYING TO LIVE

Who isn’t trying to live

as they vaguely hope they are

whatever extremes of moderation they’ve gone to

behind all the masks and fraud?

Crosswalks and bridges of fire

trying to get to the other side of themselves

like the promised land, or God,

ladders up to heaven

like vertebrae and ribs,

and ropes like spinal cords

down a well on the moon

that hasn’t enthroned hell in her depths yet,

everyone’s trying to put a face on chaos

they remotely hope is their own.

One by one the plum blossoms

fall to the nightstream

like loveletters

from the branch of the tree

that read them once and then let go.

No one knows where they’re from

or where they’re going.

Some give their wings up

like graduate degrees to the ants

and others are raising their sails

like the flames of a great fire

that consumes the prophet

who wanted to hold his arms up

like a wishbone to the lightning

in the revery of his desire

until everything is ash and nails,

and others who think they’re

the rudders and keels of the flowing.

Sometimes I am nothing more

than this terrible inevitability

of flesh and bone

alone in the vastness of my unknowing

where neither ignorance nor wisdom prevails

and then it’s as clear as stars

on both sides of the window

that everyone’s everyone else’s good guess

as they encounter one another

passing the time

in a crumbling game of graveyard chess.

I don’t know why what’s wise about me

always ends up listening to myself

like a fool’s confession

but I’ve run out of rosaries

like habitable planets

and my homelessness has exposed

the ruse of divining purity

in the afflictions of compassion

as if everything had evolved in sorrow

like a heart-bending occasion for tears

as the mountains that fell

like an avalanche of cornerstones

into the valleys they’ve dug

like pyramids and graves over the years

abide like salt in the eye of the sea.

Intelligence might be an elaborate mode of paranoia,

but eased into the wonder of being here at all

with trees and stars and the midnight rainbows

on the necks of the grackles

and the hectic butterfly among the grape hyacinth,

since I was enlightened

by my absolute uncertainty,

I have gathered all my voices together like leaves

and burned the old texts of myself

for not being much of a liar.

Five petals opened

and one flower bloomed

like a good laugh.

Now my awareness

is a kind of playful fire that doesn’t burn

what it consumes

though the light

still tastes of the jewel

and even as the good-byes deepen their voices

like echoes in wells,

because I’ve grown older

and autumn keeps shedding its choir,

the hellos still take on a life of their own

as if nothing had changed.

An illuminated clown

I am astounded by the profundities

in every jest of being

revelling in the creative hilarity

of its mystic specificity

and how everytime I get serious about something

as if I had just remembered myself,

I bring the house down.

Only a hypocrite is humble enough

to underestimate his own irrelevance,

and go sorting through himself

like a cellphone in the ashes

but for those who have become fire,

aspiration is achievement

and fulfillment and desire,

one breath. In every event

there’s nothing to be

further than you can see.

But that doesn’t mean

take a harder look

as if your life were a book

you were learning to read

or a mirror you had to stare into

until your eyes bleed

to know who you are.

When you stop thinking

every perception is a clue

to who you are

you’ll shine out like a star

ahead of its own light

and stop trying to recognize God

through the featureless eyes

and vigilant simulacra

of a stolen identity.

You will be neither partially

nor wholly yourself

and before and beyond

will not seem

the unending extremities of now

rounding the skull of a clock

that’s lost its way home.

Your seeing will grow deeper than eyes

and you will stop sending

your reflection out

like the moon’s last lifeboat

to haul you up out of the abyss

like a fisherman gilled in the tangled mess

of his own s.o.s.

You’ll let go of the oars

and breathe easy like the sea

and in every blossom of being

you will taste the whole orchard

drunk on its knees in laughter,

not knowing where to begin.

PATRICK WHITE

MEANDERING AFTER THE LONG THAW

MEANDERING AFTER THE LONG THAW

Meandering after the long thaw

through whatever landscape my mind

creates in its flowing, karmically disposed

or not, I unscroll like emotional water

playing with the quick otters of my thought

and no meridians or parallels on the loom

that snares the stars in birdnets,

and no horizons, no ports

of arrival and departure,

no hellish red of emergency exits

out of the darkened theater,

I revel spontaneously in the freedom

of not having a clue about where I am going,

and go off in all directions at once

like the moon on the waves

like light through the homeless abode

of the only place I’ve ever stopped like space

to admire the road without beginning or end

that leads everywhere and nowhere at once.

Thought-years away from my last death

and the nebulous rain of the sidereal breath

I took once and held forever,

waiting to grace my stars with flowers

when words don’t interrupt the silence like pyramids

and the desert is free to speak for itself

to itself about the flower

that flows like an eye through its depths.

One eye, being; the other, non-being,

and a third that is beyond both,

I don’t know what it is I’m looking into,

but I keep rising and falling

like a wave of my own seeing

casting shadows on the water

like the voices of the things I write,

the new moon like a dark coin

under the tongue of everything in the light,

and the valley voices and the mountain voices

and what they say to each other in the night

when they draw near to a fire

no one else is awake to overhear.

I may be a bull in the labyrinth of my own fingerprints

unspooling my blood along the way

so that someone else can find their way out,

an evangelist on the moon with my head in my hands

telling the stars not to fret

if they’ve forgotten the last prophecy

because eventually even the lies will come true.

My wild ass compassion wants to break the jaws of circumstance

that eat so many like thorns of the moon in the desert

when the cactus blooms and the viper strikes like a flower,

but I don’t send my emotions out to judge events

like hysterical lipstick smeared across the mirror

or let my thoughts stir the mud in the puddle

to make things clear to the clouds.

One meaning for the whole of immeasurable life

is facepaint on a clown that’s seldom funny

or a spiritual ideologue whose only expression of grace

is a frown like a knot in the wind

that dances all around him, abusively free.

But the life of meaning doesn’t need

a seeker or a teacher flipping pages like a weathervane

for the stones and elixirs and grails of life,

as if you had to struggle to attain what you already are.

The star in your eye. The tree in your spine.

The bird in your voice. The moon in your heart.

The wind in your lungs. The light in your mind.

The sea in your blood. The earth in your flesh.

It’s not hard to know who you are

when you’re breathing alone in the darkness

that sheds you like the oceans of the moon

and the manes of the lunar lions come undone

like white peonies on the flowing of the nightstream.

However you look at it, your nose

is the hypoteneuse of a right-angled threshold,

your own personal event horizon

that’s crossed with every breath you take

and your skin is a contract with the world

that begins at the tip of your nose

like an available dimension of forms and events,

experience after experience

that keeps on happening all the way back to you

like the singularity at the bottom of a black hole.

But what’s the point of looking for yourself

like a black sail on a night sea

or erecting a monolithic I like an oil derrick

or a misguided lighthouse

to drill for light

when you’re already swimming through it

and the world is arrayed clearly everywhere like eyes?

Everything you see; everything you can be

is the expression of everything else.

A star gives birth to your eyes and water

organizes you like a neighbourhood

and a genius of mud lays a scarlet cloak

of flesh and blood across your shoulders

strong enough to uphold the earth like a head

and space readies itself like a sensitive room

where you can stay up late to watch your eyelids bloom

like waterlilies coaxed out of hiding by the full moon.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETHING SAID SOFTLY

SOMETHING SAID SOFTLY

Something said softly in the night

like a tendril on a windowsill

tasting the moon, a whisper, a word

that walked in the light without

abandoning its shadow,

a phrase with wet wings

dreaming itself out of its chrysalis

not knowing whether it’s a leaf or a dragonfly

until the whole tree wakes up beside it,

something sought but rarely said

saturated with the meaningless life of meaning

that could touch space like flesh

and make it feel the thrill of new eyes

running down its arm like tears.

And it’s not that I want

to unsay the night or God

to define myself as a human,

and it’s of little moment to me,

seed on the wind,

what worlds are born of my words,

what ends, what begins,

what comes of what I cannot say,

but I want to say something

with the savour of time in it

that’s worth living for a little more each day

like a small tree rooted like a thought

in a crevasse of eternity,

greening the moon.

Late at night, in the darkness,

while the silence is off preserving something,

and all I can hear is your breath

off in the distance like an ocean,

I want to unpack my vagrant heart

like a patched guitar-case,

a grave-robber in a pyramid,

and attune my afterlife

to the key of this one

in such a way

I can play like a new star in Orion

to all the sad, beautiful fireflies of the moment

that hover over us like living constellations of our own

not bound to any paradigm of light

that can only be touched by a mountain of stone.

I want to paint something

that feels like the flower

that just brushed against your hand,

I want to be inspired by the mystic blue of midnight

like window glass fired in the kiln of a star

that has looked upon the suffering of humans for so long,

their atrocities and deprivations,

their terrors and wrecked joys,

compassion has turned it into an eye so clear

you can sip water from it like tears

that taste of the history of blood and wine

that danced alone like a vine at its own wedding

with a bride of rain that unveiled herself

like falling chandeliers.

Unfailingly, absurdly, obsessively human

in the shadow of thundering magnitudes

that feel like the extinctions of gods

that time has wheeled out

to the enormity of the gravepit

that limes every abyss of the heart

with the stars of a new universe,

I want to add one candle to the shining

in a folly of insight so illuminating

even the earliest galaxies

forever entering the darkness

on the threshold of their first shedding

could see it, something

so profoundly vernal and intimate

even I can believe in it.

PATRICK WHITE

WALKING ON STARS

WALKING ON STARS

Walking on stars,

walking on skulls,

walking on myself, water,

giddy suspension bridges

swaying over windy river gorges

playing chicken with my heart

to see if it’s just another mini-blackhole

or a real abyss,

one foot where I’m coming from,

the other, where I’m going

it’s all the same road

my feet make with their walking.

I don’t know what impels me to keep going,

but it walks me where I will

over the quicksand and tarpits,

the improvised explosive devices,

the lunar blossoms of the tree on the moon

that keeps sprouting out of the stumps

of my clear-cut emotions.

Inside and out, I may be space

but even space sometimes get sick of its own distances

and longs for homier stars,

lamps in the window

to draw it out of the vastness

of the huge night of its crucible,

its chrysalis, its galactic cocoon,

like a moth or a dragonfly

or a man with nothing but time in his eye

to cast himself like a spell or story

into the flames of a deeper intimacy

with the voiceless fire

that listens to everything

as if the saying and the not said

were two flames of the same pyre.

You need the wisdom

of a Solomonic serpent or a river,

the intuition of a witching wand,

to know how to split your tongue oxymoronically

between the living and the dead

to speak of the unsayable

as the moon raises its sword

above your head

to cut the cord

and unbind the word

from the lesser magic of your grammar

floating like an empty boat on an infinite sea

as if that were all there were to say.

For years I’ve winnowed the stars

to sort the thistles out of the grain

like dead metaphors among the simulacra

but ultimately, likeness, like a mirror

can find no likeness in anything

though everything elaborates

its mystic affinity with everything else

because we’re all born of the same darkness,

of what was not said

on the first day of creation

when the word was already

the past tense of the beginning

and God said, Be. And nothing happened.

There’s nothing in a state of being

that can be misconstrued as an event

though we like to think of ourselves

as the children of a happy, ongoing accident

the multiverse isn’t expanding

into the hyperspace of its own extremes

or entropically cooling to the idea of a private cremation.

A compassionate pragmatist with a mystic bent

light-years of elation from home

that keeps saying hello and good-bye

on the same threshold

like the needle of a compass

pointing both ways,

with a heart that is rarely more

than a full moon away from forever,

I’m riding the tide of my own resurgency

like a wave of illumination

thriving with eyes

across the deep seabeds of my skull

toward an emptiness that is always full

of the same reverberating echo

returning like geese in the spring,

a sail to a bay,

a loveletter that went missing for years

like the prodigal word of a bloodstream

to the voice on a hill above the valley

that keeps calling out my name

without expecting an answer.

PATRICK WHITE