NOT JUST THE NATIONS

NOT JUST THE NATIONS

 

Not just the nations

but the whole planet

is reaping and eating

a perverse harvest

of hot coffins for cool people

like the indigent fire

of the crematorium next door.

I don’t think the sky’s going to fall in

or accept every invitation

to the backyard barbecues

of all the apocalyptic chicken-littles who do,

but I do think the air’s

going to cramp around our fat throats

like merciless hands 

when we’re dragged

to the chopping block

to be severed like the split ends

of a short circuit

that mistook itself for intelligence.

And as for our humanity.

Imagine. Two thousand years

of Christianity

and Christ is still being greeted

like extraterrestrial life

scrolling down from the sky

like a search engine with all the answers.

And there are spiritual snake-oil salesmen

pimping out the constellations

like hookers and websites

all along the Milky Way

only too happy to sway with the flute

of your weeping pleading and prayers

by taking you by the hand and the wallet upstairs

where sin begins your undoing

by teaching you how to fall

toward paradise

like something serpentine

in the gathering voice of the divine.

Fanged oracles with lightning tongues

like witching wands

looking for signs

in a tatoo parlour.

The amends doesn’t justify the ends

and eternity swallows its own tail

up to the head

and in a single, final gulp

disappears.

But it’s as easy as water to see

that it’s always this moment

and this moment

is all you ever were, can, and will be

out to the furthest stars and beyond

and down to the frenzied nano-heart

of the tiniest gnat of an atom

trying to patch space

like a mad seamstress

in the sunset air

when the past isn’t missing

and the future isn’t yet to come.

And this moment

is not younger or older than that moment

because you can’t say where it ends or begins

and space is not volume enough to fill it

and time can’t root its theme in it

and old men don’t sit out

in the shade of the summer trees

as if they were washing

the dust and stars of the world off their feet

at the end of the long road

in unknown tides of deep thought

about what might endure

and what might not.

Isn’t it clear

after all these thousands of generations,

and the pyramids and the churches and the prophetic skulls

and the brides of the living who annul them,

that the only place you can live forever is now

in this very moment just as you are and aren’t

and that there’s only one flower in paradise

that blooms alone like the moon at night

and roots in your eyes forever?

Sometimes it burns the heart

to turn the jewel of being in the light

and taste the anguish of your own death in its fires

and feel the mute, bell-weight

of the moon under your tongue

like the unassessible agony

of the dead that endure

without a rite of passage

like roots deeper than truth,

the brevity of the living

in the old fountains of youth

that no one goes looking for anymore.

And it may be that death is merely a shadow

that’s wandered too far from home

as night comes on, and life

a little radiance in a huge darkness,

the last star of the morning 

washed out of our eyes

by the light of the dawn.

But the masks you put on

like views of the world

to accessorize your feelings

never wear the same eyes twice.

And if you were to ask the nightstream

that flows by your feet

what it was looking for

it might answer

in an ancient dialect of water,

water, just as the mind

is a longing for mind

that pours out of itself

to search the worlds within worlds

that it creates as a sign of itself in its flowing

like lilies and willows along the bank of a river.

Everywhere in its shallows and falls and depths,

its passage is the threshold

of the homelessness

deep in the heart of all forms

that array their worlds for awhile

like stray concessions

to an inexhaustible longing

they know will never be fulfilled.

If you want to know

what my mind looks like

from the inside,

or yours, or hers or his

look at the world just as it is.

Scrape the faces you keep

painting on the mirror

hoping one day one might

accidentally mistake itself for you

and seduce you away

from the evolving agony

of not knowing who you are.

Let the paint flake away from your eyes

like autumn leaves 

down to the heartwood

of the tree that has stood

like a many armed traffic cop

trying to redirect the wind

like a vagrant violin

and listen to your seeing like music.

Picture-music bluing the distant hills

like the secret emotions of angels

hovering over an unknown grave

they’ve kept coming back to for years

like the ghosts of unsummoned oceans

gathering in tears,

true to their hopelessness.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOT JUST THE NATIONS

NOT JUST THE NATIONS

 

Not just the nations

but the whole planet

is reaping and eating

a perverse harvest

of hot coffins for cool people

like the indigent fire

of the crematorium next door.

I don’t think the sky’s going to fall in

or accept every invitation

to the backyard barbecues

of all the apocalyptic chicken-littles who do,

but I do think the air’s

going to cramp around our fat throats

like merciless hands 

when we’re dragged

to the chopping block

to be severed like the split ends

of a short circuit

that mistook itself for intelligence.

And as for our humanity.

Imagine. Two thousand years

of Christianity

and Christ is still being greeted

like extraterrestrial life

scrolling down from the sky

like a search engine with all the answers.

And there are spiritual snake-oil salesmen

pimping out the constellations

like hookers and websites

all along the Milky Way

only too happy to sway with the flute

of your weeping pleading and prayers

by taking you by the hand and the wallet upstairs

where sin begins your undoing

by teaching you how to fall

toward paradise

like something serpentine

in the gathering voice of the divine.

Fanged oracles with lightning tongues

like witching wands

looking for signs

in a tatoo parlour.

The amends doesn’t justify the ends

and eternity swallows its own tail

up to the head

and in a single, final gulp

disappears.

But it’s as easy as water to see

that it’s always this moment

and this moment

is all you ever were, can, and will be

out to the furthest stars and beyond

and down to the frenzied nano-heart

of the tiniest gnat of an atom

trying to patch space

like a mad seamstress

in the sunset air

when the past isn’t missing

and the future isn’t yet to come.

And this moment

is not younger or older than that moment

because you can’t say where it ends or begins

and space is not volume enough to fill it

and time can’t root its theme in it

and old men don’t sit out

in the shade of the summer trees

as if they were washing

the dust and stars of the world off their feet

at the end of the long road

in unknown tides of deep thought

about what might endure

and what might not.

Isn’t it clear

after all these thousands of generations,

and the pyramids and the churches and the prophetic skulls

and the brides of the living who annul them,

that the only place you can live forever is now

in this very moment just as you are and aren’t

and that there’s only one flower in paradise

that blooms alone like the moon at night

and roots in your eyes forever?

Sometimes it burns the heart

to turn the jewel of being in the light

and taste the anguish of your own death in its fires

and feel the mute, bell-weight

of the moon under your tongue

like the unassessible agony

of the dead that endure

without a rite of passage

like roots deeper than truth,

the brevity of the living

in the old fountains of youth

that no one goes looking for anymore.

And it may be that death is merely a shadow

that’s wandered too far from home

as night comes on, and life

a little radiance in a huge darkness,

the last star of the morning 

washed out of our eyes

by the light of the dawn.

But the masks you put on

like views of the world

to accessorize your feelings

never wear the same eyes twice.

And if you were to ask the nightstream

that flows by your feet

what it was looking for

it might answer

in an ancient dialect of water,

water, just as the mind

is a longing for mind

that pours out of itself

to search the worlds within worlds

that it creates as a sign of itself in its flowing

like lilies and willows along the bank of a river.

Everywhere in its shallows and falls and depths,

its passage is the threshold

of the homelessness

deep in the heart of all forms

that array their worlds for awhile

like stray concessions

to an inexhaustible longing

they know will never be fulfilled.

If you want to know

what my mind looks like

from the inside,

or yours, or hers or his

look at the world just as it is.

Scrape the faces you keep

painting on the mirror

hoping one day one might

accidentally mistake itself for you

and seduce you away

from the evolving agony

of not knowing who you are.

Let the paint flake away from your eyes

like autumn leaves 

down to the heartwood

of the tree that has stood

like a many armed traffic cop

trying to redirect the wind

like a vagrant violin

and listen to your seeing like music.

Picture-music bluing the distant hills

like the secret emotions of angels

hovering over an unknown grave

they’ve kept coming back to for years

like the ghosts of unsummoned oceans

gathering in tears,

true to their hopelessness.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IDLING LIKE A PENDULUM

IDLING LIKE A PENDULUM

 

Idling like a pendulum in the abyss

or the moon on a locket,

a lingering kiss,

a sunny afternoon

in timeless childhood

where I’m still swinging on a gate

looking down the back lane,

a ribbon of dust and defiant weeds,

waiting for you to return

like my next breath

but you never did.

In the years since

I’ve sat on the curbs

of the fiercest cities

waiting for parades that never came

though I can hear my heart

warming up in the distance

like the thunder of an approaching drum.

Time has pulled the fangs of the storm

that used to strike

the tree like lightning

and the hidden serpent

under the shuddering leaves

it used for eyelids

is a now a toothless flower

gumming the air like a spent wick.

I have endured

the extremities of your absence

as if I had been born without eyes,

waiting for the dark side of the moon

to turn around and look at me.

I have broken bitter bread

around the oil-drum crematorium

that became of my heart

when the fires of my anger and desire

flared up like volcanic lilies

and consumed everything

and everyone I ever thought

I could not afford to live without.

I have stood around the lean flames

of demonic communities,

more shadow than man,

shaking in the cold,

and understood

the sympathetic ambiguities of evil

and the internal subtleties of the snakepit

knotted together like a fist of ice

in the face of a cruel winter.

Your absence was space without gravity

and perhaps I should have known

there was no way

I could become a stranger to myself

and escape you by breaking

through the black mirror you left behind

like the last thought of a homeless mind

as a sign of nothing.

You went off chasing visions

and I’m still looking

for the source of my eyes.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I STAND LIKE A TREE

I STAND LIKE A TREE

 

I stand like a tree rustling its leaves

among all these voices

that gust through me like winds

that don’t know where things

begin or end

like the smoke

of forgotten candles.

I’m still asleep,

deep in a dream

alone with everyone else

but me,

and my absence

tastes like space.

I’m drunk on the wine of enlightenment

that spills from the grails of the black holes

like accidental haloes

I can hang on my horns

like the rings of a tree

or the water ribs

of the target I made

with a great splash

the last time I jumped in.

Thirty years ago

I took up bull-vaulting

between the crescents of the moon

and enjoyed the quiet eloquence

of the scars I won

like a language of my own.

I can’t remember the last alphabet

that invented me

like a periodic table

of elements that had

never been seen before

and a few that were crucially missing,

but now, if I’m included at all,

I’m written into things

like a river at night entering a sea

that not even the stars can cross

because it’s as wide as the mouth

of the whale of emptiness

that lives on the krill of their light.

I wasn’t enjoined

to deliver a message to anyone

when the abyss rose up like a comet of water

out of the darkness

and swallowed me whole.

And I’ve been making up stories ever since

in the hopes that it will let me go.

These days I vandalize it from the inside

under the bridge

with spraybombs of cosmic graffitti

that are a lot more honest than my prayers.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IF I'VE BLUNTED MY EDGE

IF I’VE BLUNTED MY EDGE

 

If I’ve blunted my edge over the years like the moon

I want you to consider the fact

deep inside yourself

where the ocean hides its harvests,

it’s from use, not corrosion,

and feel how indifferently the moon

draws its blade across your jugular

like any other horizon on earth.

And if you look openly into my eyes

you’ll see that they’re just holes

I’ve cut in space

I’ve pulled down

like a balaklava over my head

to disguise how shy I am on camera

when I’m trying to look my best

at cosmic events.

And you can see in the beatings

that I’ve taken, in the craters of my eyes

and in the ageless fangs of the mountains

I’ve bared at the stars, in my scars

and in the way I voice my shadows like sails

off your unguarded coasts,

that’s it’s been ages 

since I sheathed my skull like a sword

in the scabbard of a permanent eclipse.

But the sap hasn’t run from your weapons yet

like the lost seas of the moon

and your lighthouses haven’t learned

to find their own way in the dark

when they realize

that enlightenment

like peace, or a star,

or a storm,

water, wind or a woman

is not indelible.

You may be a vigorous night

around your own campfires

laid out like a campaign of constellations

but you don’t have the hinges

to embrace both sides,

to wear the two faces 

of the same war at once

as if they were your own eyes.

The moon sharpens its sword

on the skull of the stone

that bled like hot metal

to pour it out demonically

like the souls of a thousand lethal snakes

that boiled away her oceans

like eyes of dry ice in space

and holds it up against the darkness

and runs your tongue along the edge

to test how it cuts the breeze

like lightning forks a tree

that went witching for fire.

There. You see? Now

that your head’s off

there’s a gap in your ranks

that I could drive a world through

you never knew existed

until it killed you into life.

Now what’s to win,

what’s to lose

when ultimate victory

celebrates the wounds of its own defeat

like a tree lets go of its leaves in the fall

or the moon embeds itself

like a blade of wisdom

in the eyes of a snake

that sheds its scales like blossoms?

 

PATRICK WHITE