I HAVE NEVER SAID

I have never said to anyone that I loved them

and not meant stars, not meant soft green lanterns, not

meant the light coming out of the dark

and fireflies on a windy summer night by a black lake

or the lamp that draws the doe out of the shadows

or the moon drunk quicksilver in the inebriated window

warping its image through the delusional weeping

of dirty winter glass signed like a guestbook

by everybody’s tears, inside and out, and this

still the case though I’m old enough to know

all that crying never turned into a single chandelier

and sad ink’s a bigger liar thread for thread

than the dyes of joy that colour the whole head hopeful.

And I have lain like an island of flesh in a coven of candles

beside cool dolphins with seabird hands

off the coast of my longing, and marvelled

at the amazing bridges of their bodies

and how they nudged my shipwrecked heart ashore.

I have never said to anyone that I loved them

and not meant the mountain ribbon of a bloodstream

that could fill to the brim the infinite cosmic goblet

of an eye, emptier than a telescope dying of thirst

in a desert of stars, with the wine of its endless flowing;

never said I love you to a tree or a door or a cat

or the chain of footprints I drag through the snow like the past

and not meant some era of a woman

who came and stayed awhile with me

in the desolate shadows of a late afternoon apartment

like the first rising of a second moon

I could live on alone in a garden of skulls and fountains.

And even when I draw the suicidal hypotenuse

of love’s last crescent across my left wrist

to bury myself in an alma mater of unsanctified ground,

having given a hand to the death of a savage passion,

or swept my continental vision off the table

back into the coffin like an archipelago

of missing jigsaw pieces, 
more vacancies than a honeymoon hotel

everytime I try to assemble it, I still know

even if it isn’t vouched to me,

that love is life, and life is a bride

that walks to the altar of her mysterious sacrifice alone,

trailing her ancient veil of stars

along this endless road of ghosts, and somehow

even when I’m the corpse of a fox in the ditch

among the white, sweet, wedding clover,

having been struck from the glare of her highbeams,

it is always somehow strangely okay

and foolishly worth it.

PATRICK WHITE

AND THE ROSE

AND THE ROSE

And the rose of someone else’s dawn,

a warning to drowned sailors,

mingling in the shadows and the leaves

just beyond the bay 

of the window where I stand

with my last afterlife

like a star in a shoe.

And there are voyages I’ll never make

and ones I have

for the sake of the going,

for the islands and the witches, the sirens

and the green flames of the fairies

that crept out from under

the stone of my heart

like a crown of petals, eyelashes,

cool palings of fire.,

and danced for the honey and the gold

from the paper hive

softened from stone

they had made of my life in ashes.

And there’s not much difference

between a sky and a sea,

no two wardrobes ever the same,

an expanse of space and skin,

wide palms of water,

and the confluence of lifelines

the deltas and the rivers,

the arteries and veins

the lightning and the branches,

weeping on a windowpane,

the fossils of leftover tears

that winced like an eye

in the hair of the jellyfish

that washed up out of their agony

like rain. And there are fools I’ve been

that don’t remember me

and lighthouses on the moon

that didn’t heed their own advice.

But there was always something

truer in the absurdity,

a mystery or a jewel, the memory

of a face I’d never seen,

some annihilation

with a threshold of stars

I’d never crossed, a whisper

of light, a fragrance, a voice

singing to itself in a lonely place

that put my caution to shame.

And it’s been my life to go,

to cross, to enter, to know

the lostness as my own,

and the darkness and the solitude

where I begin and end

like water taken from the river

and the river returned

as the moorings of the emptiness

I took for a boat

like a face

between the pages of my hands,

and all in the name of some nightbird

some shadow of a wing

that covered my heart

with such a quick eclipse

that no one even noticed I was gone.

Poetry, love, life; the shore is one thing

but the sea another,

and it’s not that I was brave

or thought I could walk on water

or had a secret starmap,

wiser than the rest;

I looked into the abyss with a shudder,

as if I had to kiss

a cobra on the head

or enter a spider’s womb

without being caught,

for the terrible acceptance

of what I sought

beyond the starless gates

and moth warnings

of the usual taboos. Every terror

scales a treasure, and the dragon

masks its secret,

not meant for the circumspect,

in risk. The sane prefer heaven

but heaven isn’t for the sane

who don’t know how to die enough

to answer the sphinxes and grails.

And it’s made me

a heretic of the heart,

a rogue star, a poet,

to live this way,

drinking the black wine

that was offered me

from the skulls

that lined the mouth

of the mysterious death

in the doorway

of every true entrance.

And it’s not the lies

that kill you,

nor the truths,

or looking through

a hole in the fence

at things you were never meant to see,

the medusa making love

to an apple-tree,

or Isis naked behind her veils

that no one’s ever lifted;

it’s returning

the way you came

from the wells

of the transformations,

the mountains of the muses,

the islands and the trees

of seduction and death,

unchanged, your tears still tears

not jewels of the blood,

and your voice,

not the fire of poison-tipped spears.

PATRICK WHITE

TIRED OF SUPPLYING THE STARS

TIRED OF SUPPLYING THE STARS

Tired of supplying the stars their skeletons,

or webbing them into constellations

like love-letters written in prison,

or dusting the hieroglyphics of their fossils

pressed between the pages of nocturnal shale,

looking for signs of original life,

this brevity of perilous confusion

that sits on a throne of fog,

its quicksand foundations

the filth of fanatics and fools, my skull

a paperweight in a laurel of razorwire,

and every gesture of purity, every

symbol, emblem and image of light,

every effort to labour for greener domains

heart by heart, just

another mode of murderous betrayal,

lipstick on toilet paper,

a bullet hole in a swan, I long

for the clarity of mornings that don’t exist

to assure me I haven’t wasted my life

trying to feather a human out of coal.

I want a future that isn’t already a ghost,

I want to know at nightfall, bloodfall, eyefall,

that the available dimension of tomorrow

isn’t just another stalling tactic of today, isn’t

just more vinegar

bruising its eyelids with wine,

the slash of a thin smile greased with cherries.

I want to know that I haven’t been planting

apple trees on the moon,

that somewhere in September on earth,

a bough bends under the weight

of a windfall of planets

wrapped in thin-skinned sunsets

ripe with sugars and seeds

ready to fall to the living root

of their own beginnings

like cupfuls of water and light

returned to the river I took them from,

but sweetened by the spirit

that cherished them like gifts

I made of the gift that was given to me,

this diamond devotion to orchards and oceans

and the wounded humans that walk beside them,

their hearts unharnessed like ploughs.

Tired of having my jaw wired before I’m dead

to the remnants of myself,

these reconstructions of teeth and vertebrae

in the puppet-master museums

that put the future on display

before it’s born, my heart

a black embryo in formaldehyde, a ghoul

in a circus of interrogative clowns

that conjecture on what I might have been

had I devoted myself like rain

to different bloodstreams, had I

not disavowed the old, cracked creekbeds

to make a river of my own flowing.

I want to sit down like a lottery

with a choirmaster in a cemetery,

with a gravedigger on the moon who longs

for the probable impossibility

of knowing how many legs are on a snake

as he tries to reinvent himself from scratch;

I want to sit down on the hilarious ground

at the end of a long apprenticeship

and laugh until I’m sick with certainty

at the accomplished absurdity

of recognizing my best work

in the last phase of a lifelong eclipse.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT DO WE KNOW?

WHAT DO WE KNOW?

for Simon and Samantha

What do we know, what does all our knowledge amount to

in these infinite spaces of ours, within and without,

if not less than nothing, perhaps a single hair

in the endless vastness of these abysmal depths

that keep on blooming within us black rose after black rose,

moon-face after sun-face?

And in these realms of transformation

where everything is once, once only for everything,

no second thought, no second person, no witness

or revision, no retrieval once held like water or sand in our hands,

and gone, implacably, purely, time flowing into time;

in this dream without bridges, what

does all our feeling, all the ore we haul up out of our secret heart-mines

and refine in the fires of our desires and longings

over the long labour of a lifetime amount to

if not the flaring of a match in aeonic fathoms of darkness?

Isn’t this life, for all that we say in silence and words, unsayable?

And when we reach for one another, strange auroras

of light and love coursing through our blood

like the mystical horses that graze in the pastures of the moon,

don’t our hands always turn into water

and the radiance that filled the empty bag of our hearts

like August sugars in an apple orchard

leak out of our exaltations,

a refugee line of dead stars pouring out of a defeated country,

sand from a cracked hourglass?

What can we hold here of one another,

even if we become the high priest of the holiness

that shines in the shrines of another’s eyes; even if

we lay our lives down like a patched robe of blood

on the stairs of the temple, small religions to one another

and walk naked and unmasked down the world mountain

back to the crude hovel of a valley heart

that has spent itself completely; what have we achieved

that is anything more than melting snow and mountain streams

washing themselves clean of themselves?

We can whisper like the sea in another’s ear

vows of forever that are written in water by the wind;

or under the closed eyelids of our private skies,

drunk on the dream-wine, replace all our own most intimate stars

with the bright constellations of another’s being

to live in one house of fate together, abdicating our own

like a northern crown. We can do all this and more, so adept

have we become in our grasping and rejecting,

so ingeniously desperate have we grown over the millennia

at weaving moonlight on the black waters of the lake

into the most elaborate tapestries of delusion,

or hiving sunlight out of wildflowers into white gold

to marry a world that keeps slipping out of our immaculate rings

into a blind, mute night so remote it eludes

even its own shadows and echoes. Constantly

offering ourselves like gifts to love, life, destiny, leaves on the wind,

risking annihilation and immaculate ashes,

why do we keep on waking up, returned to ourselves,

address unknown, slumped across own lonely thresholds?

If the world today, if this little wink of eternity

seems so often like a small black match-head

curled into the charred monk of a question-mark

that has swallowed the dancing flame of its own answer;

if people and events seem vicious, greedy, and ignorant,

junkyard dogs posted around heaps of corpses and cars,

the sprawl and scrawl of wreckage and disappointment,

the litter of flies on a winter windowsill

that exhausted themselves against the ice and glass,

looking for an opening; what is it all,

the violence, the drugs, the indifference, the subtle poisons,

the corporate leeches, if not the desecration

of the unattainable, acid-rain hissing on the rose-fire,

the obscenity of human lovelessness?

And yet, even in the midst of such obvious defeat,

crippled by angels and demons alike, we go on longing

to touch and be touched, dry seas on the moon

waiting, how long, how long now, for the return of even so much

as a single drop of all the rivers we’ve lost, we go on

yearning to embrace o not just

the fragile vase of her body crammed with flowers,

or the pillar of his, adorned by passionate torches,

but the mystery of the night and the slumped hills

disappearing into the bird-voice of the distance, we go on

aching to have all of it poured insanely into us

like closet drunkards chugging the stars. No feet, still,

we’ll crawl down the coal-road on all fours for a taste of flowing diamond; blind,

yet we’ll paint worlds on the back of our eyelids

and shed them like the petals of peonies

just for a glimpse of the ineffable beloved

always disappearing around the corners of our seeing.

Excruciating razors of pain might slash us open again and again,

clear skies and all their unread, lyrical scriptures

be run through a paper-shredder in hasty evacuations of the heart,

and yet even in the grave, the green leaf of a phoenix wing

stirs, unknowingly, the ashes, so relentlessly are we infused

with this strange and marvelous hunger to love.

It’s easy enough after all these years and weddings for us

to turn the waters of being into wine, but how

to turn the wine into us so that we are always drunk on joy,

the heart an inexhaustible fountain-mouth full of singing birds

because we know, because we have always known, even

before we were born, even before the mind made the body

and we arrayed ourselves as the world,

as rivers, stars, stones and trees, that our very being, every action

and agency of our lives, every breath, every cell,

and the small, silent voice that assents within,

that offers its worldless yes to another, is love, is reality, is

the mountain that makes the valley

it falls from itself to fill. Immersed in love,

we go looking for love with our hands our heads our hearts on fire,

bewailing the futility of the looking, the finding, the losing,

pilgrim waves wandering across an infinite sea of love,

we keep breaking on alien shores in our search for love

only to be drawn back into love. Fish in water

and yet we go on crying out of thirst. How amazing!

Under the stones of ourselves, diamonds; warm rivers of gold,

and even in the clashing of our hardened hearts,

a spark, a firefly, a hundred million stars of love released

like the fragrance of a single flower, or hidden bird-song on a green bough,

love calling out to love so unfailingly

that the whole of the world to the furthest star

is created anew in every second by the instantaneous answering.

That’s what we are, have been, since before

the beginningless beginning of all things, love

revealing itself to itself in the perfection of its own inseparable being,

that’s our original face, our original home, the light-seed

of this orchard world. Do you understand?

This world is so completely, absolutely, nothing but love

that even the darkest sky bends down to kiss the dawn on the forehead,

and not an atom moves in space

but moves burning through the fires of love at the behest of love.

Why look for what you already are; why, impossibly, try

to scoop the moon’s reflection from the water,

hoping to drink immeasurably from love’s elusive madness

when you are already the goblet and the wine, the grape and the vine?

Just this once, turn the light around, and look inside yourselves

as if you were an unmarked box, a secret gift

left on the doorstep in the night by an intimate stranger

and discover for yourself the origin without end

of all your looking. Without thinking, without reasoning

or the torment of why, open yourself up like an orphan’s empty hand

and discover the dark, priceless, living jewel of love

whose mysterious shining has always been the you that is looked for

and the you that has done the looking, love

looking into its own eyes like a star

looking into a flower, or an echo returning to the voice on the branch

that gave birth to it, or here, today,

at this mingling of veils and waters

where love whispers Sam and Simon answers out of the silence, yes,

and soon we’ll all be out dancing together, married to each other unsayably,

ten thousand moons in ten thousand windows,

ten thousand brides of light

in ten thousand grooms of dew

joyfully beyond denial and affirmation

in ten thousand wall-less rooms of light

rippling out through this endless summer night

like the pulse of a single heart, a single jump of the fish,

a small drum of blood beating out in the bright vacancy, dark abundance

of these vast vivid spaces:

not two. not two. not two. not two.

PATRICK WHITE

I LONG FOR WORDS

I long for words that don’t exist;

I long for a light

that my eyes have never flowered in before,

but hope is a gravedigger

singing in a pit

and I removed those bones long ago

to accommodate the newly dead.

Now I conduct night-classes under a bridge

for working constellations.

And I don’t really know what I’d say

if the silence were ever

to shape the urn of my voice

into an uncontainable emptiness again;

so that every drop of dew

on every blade of grass,

while the moon rose 

through the broad-leaved basswood grove

were wrapped like a sky

in the skin of my eyes.

What can be understood

is already slurred by signs,

and the best way to hide

is to go looking for yourself.

Forgetting for the moment

that ignorant doors

are not looking for enlightened keys,

maybe I would still try to express

that first dark kiss

of the original fountain-mouth

that stepped out of the tide of an eclipse

like an island or a woman

who wore the shore of her own shapeshifting body

to walk like a watershed into consciousness.

But the light cloaks as well as reveals

and eventually the eyes

evaporate into their visions,

and the hearts of the seers

hang like drops of blood

above the cold and empty cauldron of the universe.

Time and suffering

will enlighten the profound folly

of your most sacred delusion

and in a black lightning flash

before the arising of signs

you’ll know whose signature the wind is.

How many tomorrows ago,

furious and young,

did I make a ladder

out of violated thresholds

to climb up to the window of a burning lighthouse

and rescue myself like a child

from this moment now?

Follow someone else’s road

and you walk your own wake.

Make your own

and you are everywhere

the immoveable seed

the world flowers for.

When your silence turned grey,

and your jewels

no longer hosted the light

in their darkening palaces,

and your echoes rewrote the original play

for three actors with the same voice,

and all your one-legged bridges

stood on a single bank,

longing to straddle heaven,

and you let your heart wither

until it was only a medicine bag

full of sacred dirt,

and what you once knew

without a witness,

you now forced yourself to believe in

like a sinner you thought you were

pressed into jury duty against herself

because eventually all the lies come true

and sin is just another form

of back porch enlightenment

to obviate your entrance

into the greater delusion of virtue.

Do you remember what it was like

to see clearly

before you poured 

all this snakefire and moonsilt into the well?

Now you’re trying

to wash a mudslide off

in a drop of dew,

straining to cast the shadow of a mountain

behind every grain of dust.

And you’re afraid

to be afraid that all

your goofy revelations of personal apocalypse

are cliches of other people’s wisdom

on the back of a matchbook,

that you’ve passed

through the gates of midnight thousands of times

only to find

you’re still veiled like a nun

by the light of your own passage.

The answer shows up

and you start looking for the question.

You wear your nakedness on the outside

to disguise your masks

and what kind of a lover can you be now

that you’re too shy

to undress in front of yourself?

How many skeletons

have you tried like keys

on the doors of your emptiness,

trying to get out of yourself,

only to realize

the abyss between your legs

has no inside or outside,

that the void never checks its mail

for love-letters,

that all your scars and bruises

rolled up into a ball

still don’t make a moon

with a sea and an atmosphere?

You never liked me

because I wouldn’t lie to you,

and though I ached for the oblivion

in the black fire of your lust,

and waited for you to rise from the lake

to claim my burning body,

and loved you like the death I was meant for,

I never could teach you

to swim through ashes with dragons,

or convince you you weren’t blind

when the mirrors turned their backs

to prove by the light of a brighter darkness

your eyes were your own.

You shot past me

like a near-sighted asteroid

thrown like the first stone

at a planet grown stubborn with life

the cold, igneous ore of your porous heart

could not sponsor on its own.

You took what you thought was aim

and squeezed one off

the trigger of the moon

as the hammer fell on the anvil of your body

and you recoiled like a serpent with intent.

You missed

and have gone on as you are forever,

stunned by the concussion that proved

beyond the shadow of a misfire

you’re bad ammo,

a leaky white phosphorus grenade

advancing rapidly toward the front lines

of a war with yourself

already well lost

when you came out of the tent

of your high command like a worm

with the battle plan of your next breath

and the junkie poppies

that blow like kisses between your crosses

row on row

o.d.’d en masse like a blood transfusion

rather than remember

anything about you.

Some people just make more of an impact

than others I guess.

But I haven’t completely forgotten you.

You were the pygmy empress

in the shadows of the single matchstick pillar

of your own self-renown,

trying to plough the moon with a sword

that couldn’t tell the difference

between a crater and a crown.

PATRICK WHITE