Saturday, July 31, 2010

THE WORLD IS ONLY AS BIG

THE WORLD IS ONLY AS BIG

 

The world is only as big

as the size of the life going on in me.

If I wanted to take the full measure of the sky

what could that be

compared to the lightyears it takes

to get from one side of my mind to the other?

And look how huge the darkness is

that can be cast by one star

like the negative of its shining.

And what road has anyone walked

that was ever longer than their shadow?

Eternity’s just another way of saying

you’ve run out of space for time.

I don’t think I’m going to live forever

but my life will go on without me

just as it always has.

I’ll get up in the morning

like the ghost of someone I can’t remember

and I’ll have a coffee and a cigarette

as I wait for the obscurity to clear

like steam on a bathroom mirror

to see if I can recognize

anything about me

that was true yesterday.

Will I feel as I do now like a leftover

from the night before

pushed to the side of the plate

as everything in the room

reviles me slightly

and gets back to the silence

they were engaged in

before I interrupted them so impolitely

I smeared their meditation

with my intrusive incoherence?

They all seem to be waiting

for someone to make an appearance

but it definitely isn’t me.

It’s beautiful outside

but when I look

I’m always looking at the beauty

of someone else’s bride

and I turn away like night from the orchard

as if I were always the best man

at the wedding of Adam and Eve.

Eden.

In clay-bound Sumer

from the word Edin

meaning the southern marshes

of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers

whose mouths were always full of food

and the living was easy and good.

Same garden.

Same tree.

Same apple.

Same suggestive serpent.

But I’ve always understood

from the first bite

of self-knowledge

the baffled man in me

eats the apple to know things

about the lucid woman in me

who eats it to grow wings on a snake

to raise that up high

which has been cast down low.

Now all gods and dragons are estranged oxymorons

and Nicholas of Cusa’s Coincidence of the Contradictories

is the yin and yang

the lingam and yoni

of a grand biodynamic plan

to sow clarity in the heart of confusion

to see what kind of chaos we can make of it

that might randomly advance

the creative mischance of evolution

happening everywhere the same

to everyone all at once.

Though to think it has balance and purpose

is to build two retaining walls

in the corner of the one dunce.

It’s the kind of war

where you go to peace against the other

and there’s a commotion

in the heart of the stillness

that is distinctly human.

Something stirring

about the enduring effect

of love and compassion

when it happens without a cause

and the mirrors don’t look through the laws

of iron bars

like skies in captivity

deprived of stars in their solitude

or words to lighten the mood.

Of course it’s absurd.

Life’s only playing at being serious

and a childlike madness

a crazy wisdom

that isn’t imperiously innocent

of its own experience

is the only way to express

the lucid triviality of what’s sublime

about its creativity

like stars in the daytime

lost in the lightless depths

of an expansive mind

that’s come to the limit of things

like a Martian rover

by realizing

there’s no edge to go over.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

sisters raise flowers against their brothers 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Wednesday, July 28, 2010

SOFT EASY TEMPERATE MORNING

SOFT EASY TEMPERATE MORNING

 

Soft easy temperate morning.

The black walnut trees

are laid back in themselves like idle guitars

as their leaves pick out random notes on the wind

like the ghosts of old songs

they wrote a long time ago.

Bliss is joy with just a touch of sorrow

to deepen the taste of happiness

like two sisters of emotion

sharing the same spirit.

One a river.

The other an ocean.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 


YOU'RE SO INTENSE

YOU’RE SO INTENSE

 

You’re so intense you said

as if my whole being

were some kind of behavioural offense

but all I could say back was

you’re definitely not.

You hate it when it’s hot.

You don’t know where to look

to find life or water on Mars.

And whenever it gets too deep or dark

you huddle like a candle in the shadows

of a hundred billion stars.

I know fireflies and chimney-sparks

that don’t need a window to burn in

the way you do

like a lamp in a cowl of soot

a canary in a cage in a coalmine.

They give it all up to the night.

They shine.

They bloom.

They burn with insight.

They’re the nightlights in the long dark hall

that seems to go on forever

like that narrow mind

you’ve been walking in your sleep

past the admiring portraits

of the artificially blind

who dream in braille

of eclipses yet to come

that will weigh like stones upon their eyelids.

Intense?

Too intense?

What does that really mean?

I take my delusions too seriously?

I’m a child?

I’m immense

and there’s a dark energy within me

that’s still expanding space at an accelerated rate

that puts the whole universe

like a petal to the metal

in a game of chicken

with a precipitous abyss

that urges creation to take the risk

win lose or draw?

If I don’t come on

like the unified field theory

of a universal law

that can be summed up

in a beautifully simple mathematical formula

it’s not that it’s not in my nature to fit.

It’s just that I fit in like a heretic

and there’s never much room

for someone who blows blackholes

in the space-time continuum

that can’t account for the dark heart of black matter

that outweighs the white feather of light

they put on the scale of dead things

like the wingspan of phoenix fledglings.

How can you measure the intensity

of the half-life

of a radioactive underworld?

Is oxygen less intense than plutonium

or water any more

at peace with itself than fire

because its hydrogen isn’t flammable?

If I’m not waiting for enlightenment

to take an intense delight in the world

just as it is

shining against a cool background

of universal bliss

just as happy over there tomorrow

to be alive in that circumstance

as it is now here in this

what’s it to you

what’s it to me

if I can see the Taj Mahal in a hovel

and all you can see is a shovel?

I’d rather be passionately deluded by the mystery

of being here at all

and drown my sorrows

like torches I put out

in a sea of stars

to see them more clearly in the darkness

than stand like a lighthouse all night long

on the coast of your personal history

among all those shipwrecks waiting for dawn

on the bottom of an artificially lit aquarium

with the instincts of a fish on life-support.

You advance cautiously through life

like a sacred syllable

that’s looking for the right mouth to say it

but I dance on my way to war with the angels

who never kill you deeper into life

with the same sword twice

for having enough wisdom

to ignore their advice

and that’s what you hate me for.

I can walk on fire like a phoenix

who can speak to the demons like friends

in a language far from home

that everyone understands

is the mother-tongue

of what an exile in ashs says to himself

when he’s standing in the dangerous doorway

of stranger things to come.  

I just don’t sit there on the sidelines and suffer.

I’ve learned to overcome my fears creatively

by pulling the sharks into the lifeboat

to save them from the humans

who can smell them

like shark fin soup in the water

from miles away.

When my voice isn’t scattered

like ashs from an urn at sea

it’s a burning bush

a prophet in a furnace

trying to keep his cool

a black spider in the bottom of a poppy

trying to read its fate in the dispassionate lees

of a goblet of fire

it drinks to the bottom of things

like a rare butterfly with scarlet wings.

Worlds within worlds within worlds.

Irridescent bubbles in the multiverse of hyperspace.

Parallel lives simultaneously happening

like the perfectly inter-reflecting jewels

in the cosmic net of Indra.

Mark one jewel and they’re all marked.

And at the slightest gesture of a thought

they’re all estranged from one another everywhere

like the stars that have followed them into exile

without ever knowing if they’re ever coming back.

All our impossible choices actualized

whether we make a decision or don’t.

Are you not amazed?

Are you not astounded

down to the last sorry bell of your soul?

Doesn’t the wonder sometimes get so deep and sweet it hurts?

Who wants to live like the leftovers

of the things they think they know

when they could put their lips together

like membranes and bubbles in the abyss

and kiss whole new worlds into existence

where you could live in one

flatlining like a star in the Arctic

without an event horizon

and I could live on the further shore

of some poetic mindstream somewhere

and burn like a black sun

that could open your loveletters

like alien flowers with sidereal perfumes

that inspire the fireflies

to get carried away 

and turn the lights on

in all the rooms at once

in this house of life without a return address

where everyone tries to stay

very quiet and still in the closet

like old shoes

that came to a dead end

when they lost their feel for the road.

And if I don’t take a stand

on the quicksand foundations of the known world

or prefer the emotional life

of a cornerstone

that’s trying to keep it together

in an avalanche

down the world mountain

it’s not a dress rehearsal

for a sexual advance

that doesn’t stand a chance.

I’m not trying to decide who you are

by taking account of what you’re not

by buffing the stars with black matter

to explain the mass of your gravitas.

I may be a comet

in a dark halo

far outside the solar system

but I’m not trying to make a pass

that will light me up like angel

that shines by a reflected glory.

Some stories are better told at night

than they are by day

and I’m not the red sky in the morning

that comes with a warning

that leaves the sailors with nothing to say.

I’m not channeling echoes of my next life

through a wormhole

in the space-time continuum

of past events that deranged my galactic core

in such a way

I can look forward to yesterday

as if I were remembering tomorrow

from far away.

I can see all sides of things simultaneously

like water in a river

that knows how to bridge the opposites

by flowing past them with a mind of its own

that doesn’t follow the dead maps of the fallen leaves

like rootless trees into the unknown

looking for a new place to call home.

But a biodynamic peace

with the way things never are twice

that leaves lots of room for change

is not the same thing as a truce

with the still-born children of entropy

who never talk in their sleep

about a day to come

that will wake them up

like an earthquake

shaking the bedrocks of chaos

like pebbles out of a shoe

that died by the side of the road

without ever having left home.

I’d rather fly alone through my immensities

than try to swim through your densities

like a fish made of stone.

I may be an alien event horizon

on the wrong side of town

but I know how to read between the lines

when the sun’s going down on the colour blind.

Nature will always reflect

any law that stares into it

long enough

to believe it’s true

but the best you can say about anything

is

not two.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So even if I shine alone

in a sunset that’s lost heart

in what it had to live through

so a few stars in the immeasurable dark

can settle old scores of the heart

with new reasons

to change with the seasons

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


YOU'RE SO INTENSE

YOU’RE SO INTENSE

 

You’re so intense you said

as if my whole being

were some kind of behavioural offense

but all I could say back was

you’re definitely not.

You hate it when it’s hot.

You don’t know where to look

to find life or water on Mars.

And whenever it gets too deep or dark

you huddle like a candle in the shadows

of a hundred billion stars.

I know fireflies and chimney-sparks

that don’t need a window to burn in

the way you do

like a lamp in a cowl of soot

a canary in a cage in a coalmine.

They give it all up to the night.

They shine.

They bloom.

They burn with insight.

They’re the nightlights in the long dark hall

that seems to go on forever

like that narrow mind

you’ve been walking in your sleep

past the admiring portraits

of the artificially blind

who dream in braille

of eclipses yet to come

that will weigh like stones upon their eyelids.

Intense?

Too intense?

What does that really mean?

I take my delusions too seriously?

I’m a child?

I’m immense

and there’s a dark energy within me

that’s still expanding space at an accelerated rate

that puts the whole universe

like a petal to the metal

in a game of chicken

with a precipitous abyss

that urges creation to take the risk

win lose or draw?

If I don’t come on

like the unified field theory

of a universal law

that can be summed up

in a beautifully simple mathematical formula

it’s not that it’s not in my nature to fit.

It’s just that I fit in like a heretic

and there’s never much room

for someone who blows blackholes

in the space-time continuum

that can’t account for the dark heart of black matter

that outweighs the white feather of light

they put on the scale of dead things

like the wingspan of phoenix fledglings.

How can you measure the intensity

of the half-life

of a radioactive underworld?

Is oxygen less intense than plutonium

or water any more

at peace with itself than fire

because its hydrogen isn’t flammable?

If I’m not waiting for enlightenment

to take an intense delight in the world

just as it is

shining against a cool background

of universal bliss

just as happy over there tomorrow

to be alive in that circumstance

as it is now here in this

what’s it to you

what’s it to me

if I can see the Taj Mahal in a hovel

and all you can see is a shovel?

I’d rather be passionately deluded by the mystery

of being here at all

and drown my sorrows

like torches I put out

in a sea of stars

to see them more clearly in the darkness

than stand like a lighthouse all night long

on the coast of your personal history

among all those shipwrecks waiting for dawn

on the bottom of an artificially lit aquarium

with the instincts of a fish on life-support.

You advance cautiously through life

like a sacred syllable

that’s looking for the right mouth to say it

but I dance on my way to war with the angels

who never kill you deeper into life

with the same sword twice

for having enough wisdom

to ignore their advice

and that’s what you hate me for.

I can walk on fire like a phoenix

who can speak to the demons like friends

in a language far from home

that everyone understands

is the mother-tongue

of what an exile in ashs says to himself

when he’s standing in the dangerous doorway

of stranger things to come.  

I just don’t sit there on the sidelines and suffer.

I’ve learned to overcome my fears creatively

by pulling the sharks into the lifeboat

to save them from the humans

who can smell them

like shark fin soup in the water

from miles away.

When my voice isn’t scattered

like ashs from an urn at sea

it’s a burning bush

a prophet in a furnace

trying to keep his cool

a black spider in the bottom of a poppy

trying to read its fate in the dispassionate lees

of a goblet of fire

it drinks to the bottom of things

like a rare butterfly with scarlet wings.

Worlds within worlds within worlds.

Irridescent bubbles in the multiverse of hyperspace.

Parallel lives simultaneously happening

like the perfectly inter-reflecting jewels

in the cosmic net of Indra.

Mark one jewel and they’re all marked.

And at the slightest gesture of a thought

they’re all estranged from one another everywhere

like the stars that have followed them into exile

without ever knowing if they’re ever coming back.

All our impossible choices actualized

whether we make a decision or don’t.

Are you not amazed?

Are you not astounded

down to the last sorry bell of your soul?

Doesn’t the wonder sometimes get so deep and sweet it hurts?

Who wants to live like the leftovers

of the things they think they know

when they could put their lips together

like membranes and bubbles in the abyss

and kiss whole new worlds into existence

where you could live in one

flatlining like a star in the Arctic

without an event horizon

and I could live on the further shore

of some poetic mindstream somewhere

and burn like a black sun

that could open your loveletters

like alien flowers with sidereal perfumes

that inspire the fireflies

to get carried away 

and turn the lights on

in all the rooms at once

in this house of life without a return address

where everyone tries to stay

very quiet and still in the closet

like old shoes

that came to a dead end

when they lost their feel for the road.

And if I don’t take a stand

on the quicksand foundations of the known world

or prefer the emotional life

of a cornerstone

that’s trying to keep it together

in an avalanche

down the world mountain

it’s not a dress rehearsal

for a sexual advance

that doesn’t stand a chance.

I’m not trying to decide who you are

by taking account of what you’re not

by buffing the stars with black matter

to explain the mass of your gravitas.

I may be a comet

in a dark halo

far outside the solar system

but I’m not trying to make a pass

that will light me up like angel

that shines by a reflected glory.

Some stories are better told at night

than they are by day

and I’m not the red sky in the morning

that comes with a warning

that leaves the sailors with nothing to say.

I’m not channeling echoes of my next life

through a wormhole

in the space-time continuum

of past events that deranged my galactic core

in such a way

I can look forward to yesterday

as if I were remembering tomorrow

from far away.

I can see all sides of things simultaneously

like water in a river

that knows how to bridge the opposites

by flowing past them with a mind of its own

that doesn’t follow the dead maps of the fallen leaves

like rootless trees into the unknown

looking for a new place to call home.

But a biodynamic peace

with the way things never are twice

that leaves lots of room for change

is not the same thing as a truce

with the still-born children of entropy

who never talk in their sleep

about a day to come

that will wake them up

like an earthquake

shaking the bedrocks of chaos

like pebbles out of a shoe

that died by the side of the road

without ever having left home.

I’d rather fly alone through my immensities

than try to swim through your densities

like a fish made of stone.

I may be an alien event horizon

on the wrong side of town

but I know how to read between the lines

when the sun’s going down on the colour blind.

Nature will always reflect

any law that stares into it

long enough

to believe it’s true

but the best you can say about anything

is

not two.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So even if I shine alone

in a sunset that’s lost heart

in what it had to live through

so a few stars in the immeasurable dark

can settle old scores of the heart

with new reasons

to change with the seasons

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Monday, July 26, 2010

DOGPADDLING IN THE WIND

DOGPADDLING IN THE WIND

 

Dogpaddling in the wind

with the black walnut trees.

My thoughts sway with the breeze

and whatever I’m feeling

I’m at ease with the way things are

and are not

for the moment.

But it’s a relative truth

not an absolute way of being.

I don’t expect it to last.

It’s not the kind of peace

that comes with a past

that’s rooted in anything.

Among the great perennial acts of grace

that flower like goldenrod and loosestrife

all through these abandoned fields

that have returned to themselves

like veterans of foreign wars

on someone else’s doorstep

it’s just a blade of grass.

But I’m grateful.

I don’t know to whom or what.

God’s more of a political party now than a candidate.

But a vote for one is a vote for all of them

and as the Arabs say about the secret garden

I try to enter heaven by the right gate

and for me that’s always been the backdoor.

Blueweed chicory vetch Queen Anne’s Lace

rough-fruited cinquefoil

enamel buttercups

and three kinds of clover

blooming along this road I’m walking on

like a snake flowing through Eden

as the late afternoon air settles its dust

and cools into an eye

of  blue-green peacock sky

at the first sight of Venus

taking the long way around the sun

high in the west on her own.

And a little further along the ecliptic

the first crescent of the moon

thinner than a sword-edge of Damascene steel.

An eyelash of the radiance

that fell from the night

while it was trying

to feel its way into stars

emerging out of the abyss

of an intuitive inspiration

that spoke to the light of the darkness inside

through a crack in a mirror

that once was blind

but now can see again.

Sometimes I think all the stories we make up

about the origins of creation

are just the mythical hindsight

of why we bear

the unbearable pain of living

that would drive us undeniably insane

if we didn’t have a lie or two to fall back on

even if it’s merely to marvel

that the immensity of so much

over such immeasurable reachs of time

could mean so spectacularly little.

Call it imagination

but it’s really only the genius of wonder

that pictures things on the inside

to give what’s dark and unknown

a place around the fire

like strangers far from home.

It’s a kind of spiritual hospitality

that lets the world in

like a nightstorm

through the windows and the doors

of our eyes our minds

our hearts our pores

even when it tracks emotional starmud

all over our immaculately deceptive floors.

Nothing stays clean for very long.

The meaning gets soiled in matter.

And compassion’s always been

an outrageously messy affair

that seldom picks up after itself

when there’s no one around to care.

I pick up an old hand-painted sign

that’s overturned in the matted grass

at the foot of a basswood tree

that’s hung on to the nail

like somebody’s word.

Private property.

Trespassers keep out.

Violators will be shot.

But there hasn’t been anybody

around here for years

to hear the open gate tell it

as if the woods had ears

and there was nothing to worry about.

Somebody once owned a grain of dirt

in the oceanic enormity of a place

that dwarfs the stars

like homesick bodhisattvas

with the boundless space

there is yet to enlighten

before we can all enter paradise

like gardeners bedding down with hunters.

In the meantime

life waits like a loveletter

in a mailbox full of bullet-holes

for somebody that was meant

to read it and understand it

without knowing who it’s from.

 

PATRICK WHITE