SPOTS ON A PAINT RAG

SPOTS ON A PAINT RAG

Spots on a paint rag trying to figure out

if they’re part of a larger picture.

Daubs and smudges and smears of black and red.

Topographies of dry thick ridges of blue acrylic,

peach-coloured mesas bruised

by the encroaching violets of dusk in a painted desert.

Are these the wanna-be windows of life

who failed to achieve a whole and harmonious view

of what they’re doing here swiping off knives

thick with the gore of cadmium red,

cleaning off brushes that get to go out

on the field to caress and poke

stars and trees into being? Waterboys, not players.

I say the word, life, and I feel tonight like

the heaviness of a bell that’s supplanted my heart.

The right root, but the wrong blossom.

Even though I’d melt that bell

back down into raucous cannon

to defend the concept to my very last breath.

But tonight I’m tunnelling under the foundations

of the cornerstones of life to bring

the walls down on top of my head,

like an avalanche of prophetic skulls

to just get a peek inside the grand paradigm,

the white light of the gessoed underpainting.

The secret garden with low-hanging fruit

on easy street with the sacred whores of Babylon.

An existential sadness, deep as a death-wound,

as if I’d just been stabbed in the heart

by the hands of a clock that mistook me for an intruder,

undermines me from below, a pyramid built on quicksand.

As if all those who had drowned in life

like fish up over their gills in water

were swimming in the watershed of every tear

that almost makes it up over the top of the dam

I try to throw up like a manly front to what

I know I won’t be able to hold back for long.

And there go the villages in the flooded valley

I tried to live among like a neighbourly mountain

come to Muhammad on the way up and down.

It’s cold and lonely and the air is thin

at the peaks of experience, with only

a star and a cloud for company.

The hard diamond in the rough I used to be

has grown mushy over the years. Tears.

Imagine that. Warm, salt seas with undulant tides

of emotion coursing in and out,

the way we breathe, the way we live and die,

unite and separate, pour our shining

down an inexhaustible black hole

like Parthian gold into Crassus’ mouth

in the hope of efflorescing like the bird fountain

of a better world on the other side of hyperspace.

Armed with some decent human attitudes,

and a few that are wholly out of bounds,

no reason my mind can catalyse out of chaos

that I should feel the sorrows of the discarded colours

on a paint rag like the afterbirth of the universe

that’s gone on to greater things than road kill.

I feel the deep grief of widowed eclipses

and the creeping shame of sunspots

that were born into a maculate caste

of estranged birthmarks on the forehead of a lighthouse.

Space is warped like water by some unknown

disturbance in the pond. And I can’t discern from here

whether it’s a crack in the dam

or a birth sac ripe enough for its waters to break

and wash me out to sea like

the flotsam and jetsam of a shipwrecked lifeboat.

I hear the lilac whispering into blossom.

I see the starlings building their nests

in the corners of my third eye and the spiders

weaving mandalas between the witching wands

of the aspen saplings trying to transcend their roots.

Still, time seems studiously impersonal

and more matter-of-fact about suffering

than perhaps it really is. The mind is an artist.

Able to paint the worlds. As they say in Zen.

And I can see so clearly even through this cloud of unknowing

the kind of world I’d love to live in,

giving it my full assent in peace and contentment,

as long as I never lost the hunger that desires these things

and no one else had to live like a ratty old towel

abused as a paint rag by the shroud of Tourin.

Yet I can’t help feeling I’ve spent

my whole life trying to piece a lost constellation

back together again from leftover stars

that don’t have a clue what they’re shining amounts to.

In the stained, marked for life, castaway things of the world,

in the eyeless dreams of aborted inspirations,

in the twenty million dollars an hour we waste on war,

in the eyes of the twenty-five million children a year

who are starving to death globally in civilizations

based upon agriculture, I’m looking

for the trashed masterpiece of a paint rag

soaked in the blood of hemorrhaging roses

that might have parted our eyelids like the Red Sea

or a gallery on opening night to a vision

of what they might have done had they lived

to do things differently and their genius and beauty

not been squandered like blood for oil

or the waters of life learned to mingle more olaceously

with oil slicks in the womb of the dark mother

like an alternate medium of creative expression

that wasn’t shunned like the evil skin of a shedding rat snake.

There’s an expanding emptiness in my heart,

a vacuum nature abhors like a miscarriage

of what I hoped to wake up to the day after tomorrow

like the smile of an enigmatic Mona Lisa

that didn’t die in childbirth married to a banker.

What faces reside in a paint rag

I might have fallen in love with at first sight,

what mind, moon, sea, sky and landscapes

might have sat on my easel like windows in space

that might have shown me a way out of here

like the eye of a hurricane at the end of a telescope

that made things at a great distance appear

larger and more astronomically intimate than they seem

when no one’s trying to paint the other end of the lens

by wiping their glass slippers off on the grass

as if the princess just stepped into a mess of Hooker’s green.

Disoriented hues of colour blind rainbows, who knows

how many faces have been wiped off on a towel

with the big, sad, musing eyes of luminous gazelles?

How many cardinals nesting in red cedar trees

were wiped off the canvas like lipstick on the moon

when the sun went Puritan, midnight at noon,

and scourged the scarlet letter of the kissing stone

until nothing was left of humanity

but the purged shadows of an abstract divinity

that burned a hundred thousand women

foxed out like witch hunts in the seventeenth century

at the stake of a principle that stood up to the flames

like the backbone of a heretic

with a streak of Payne’s Grey in her nature

slashing at the orange sunset

with a painting knife in her hands

at those who resented the concupiscence

and dark innocence of her sacred body and soul

and saw her go up in flames

like a bouquet of sable paintbrushes

stacked at her feet like the pyre of the phoenix to come.

Sooner transform the emptiness into something

as absurd as it is meaningful, than ponder the waste

of a good mirage trying to look

for real water down a wishing well.

Sooner try to patch the tear in the sky

that rips me open under full sail running before the wind

and lets all the stars come pouring out

I was saving for a rainy day, with a paint rag,

a discarded face towel sadder

than viridian pine trees in the distance

with an aerial perspective of pthalo blue

gentled and blanched by the intervening atmosphere.

That said and done until the sky drys

I’d rather wear the patches of a compassionate clown

like paint rags on the Sufi blue of my cerulean robes.

I’d rather walk in a pauper’s clothes to show

my solidarity with the cast offs of creation,

not just finished canvases with artsy attitudes

in stiff upper collars and colours

that match the wallpaper like seasonal mood swings.

Sometimes it breaks my heart from the inside out,

it guts me like a tube of alizarin crimson

to see all these fledglings strewn at the foot of my easel,

my tree, my loom, my lean to, like the paint rags

of crumpled, ruined, leftover lives

that couldn’t quite make it as flying carpets.

But I’m not going to forget the ashen sorrows

and habitable earth-tones of starmud

under the winged heels of inspiration.

As for me and my zodiacal house of ill-repute,

my renegade observatory on the wrong side of the tracks,

I’m going to ride this wavelength of light out to the very end

where the wildflowers open

like the complementary loveletters

of a colour wheel, a rainbow come full circle,

unbroken just for them.

The donkey looks into the well.

The well looks back at the donkey.

Art. Life. Zen.

When the line turns round

the donkey at the end is in the lead.

Yesterday’s bleeding paint rag.

Tomorrow’s aesthetic creed.

PATRICK WHITE

I GENTLY TOOK THE STRAWBERRY HEART

I GENTLY TOOK THE STRAWBERRY HEART

I gently took the strawberry heart

of the bird with the broken neck

and buried it in a shrine of leaves and grass.

And in a low voice, whispered a blessing.

Under the window of an illusion

like a song you can only hear once

and it’s good for a lifetime of listening,

I buried you with your wings together in prayer.

And I prayed to know what to pray for.

I prayed to know what to ask that could ease

the burden of the earth on a nightbird’s journey

flying solo deeper into the dark

than even the stars or these eyeless words can go.

And I know death returns even the worst of us

to our innocence again, though our bones

come crashing down like childhood kites around us.

And the flight feathers of the aerial acrobatics

of our love lyrics run out of ink

when there’s no one in the dark

to sing for anymore, no stars

to chart where you’ve gone,

no sign from the heavens you’re not alone,

no ghost of smoke from a distant fire

I can summon to a seance of lingering desire

that would console you in the flesh again

like a candle in your solitude reaching out

to the pain of a stranger in the shadows

to make your wound cry out in bliss

as you once did from a greener bough

than this dead branch I sing from now

when we thought blossoms were the answer

to everything we didn’t understand at the time

that could befall us like fledglings in the spring

who didn’t know what autumn would bring

like an ice-storm in its wake

to things that break against the sky

like the cold-hearted lie of a window

that wasn’t open and didn’t go on forever.

And though I ask the weather for news of you,

if the wind might have heard

a word or two in passing, all

the silence does is deepen your absence

and teach me not to cling to things

like birds and flowers on the wing.

But if grief is all I can know of you now

I’ll console myself with sorrow.

I’ll hold onto it like the string of a kite

soaring among the constellations.

I won’t let go. I’ll play the line out

like a flying fish I caught in Pisces

and hauling it into a lifeboat with a net

I’ll take the hook of the moon out of your mouth

and throw you back into the depths like a muse

swimming among the stars like a siren

that keeps calling me to the rocks

like an astronaut to these mountains on the moon

I keep hurling through this earthly view

of a window from the inside out

that breaks just like the shell of a cosmic egg

unfolding a loveletter with a wingspan of light

that penetrates this dark forever

like the third eye of a needle in a haystack

of begging bowls I won’t abandon like the nests

of nightbirds with flightplans

that feather our falling into the abyss

of the unbelievable with starmaps

and the beacons of homing metaphors

that make our disappearance inconceivable.

I’ll live like the return address on an envelope

with a mouthful of silence for a voice

and wait for you to answer me again

like a songbird at the spring equinox

through a broken window in a house of pain.

And though it hurts worse when the candles go out

I’ll refuse to turn my heart away

from your reflection in everything I see.

Everything I hear and do and say.

Everything that was as true as a night sky about you.

PATRICK WHITE

DON'T KNOW WHERE I'M GOING

DON’T KNOW WHERE I’M GOING

Don’t know where I’m going.

Don’t care who I am.

No place I need to be.

No face I’ve got to see.

Don’t care if I’m loved.

Don’t care if I’m not.

What arises arises mindlessly.

What business has it with me?

Imagination’s just another word for free.

Free, free, free at last

I’ve let my people go.

I walk without a shadow.

There’s nothing about tomorrow

that hasn’t already passed

and yesterday’s a prophecy

of what isn’t waiting to come.

One thing suggests another

and worlds are arrayed before me

like the stillness

of the lost feather of the moon

on running water.

I endure my own weather like the sea.

The lightning strikes itself like a match

to take a look

but there’s no one to witness the clarity.

I don’t taunt my ghost like a man

who’s going to live forever.

If I flower I flower.

If I shine I shine.

Whatever appears

in the black and white mirrors

of the infernal or divine

may or may not be

the meaning of my roots.

My affirmation refutes

what my denial ordains

and the cause doesn’t

account for its effects.

I am the perfection of all my defects

so enlightenment and ignorance

are two waves of the same awareness in me.

The fool and the sage speak with the same voice.

Desire beatifies my heretics

like lies I’ve told to the stars

but their election was never a choice

and my wounds don’t seek the truth

in the afterlife of my scars.

The old man does not say I am old

nor I am young, the youth.

Autumn is not older than spring

and spring isn’t apprenticed to fall.

I can hear my own footsteps

coming down the hall like time

to meet me after all these years of looking

through everyone else’s eyes

but even when I take my face off

at the end of the day

like a tired sky

and point to the stars the light concealed

my self-portrait is always a disguise.

And nothing is revealed.

PATRICK WHITE

LIGHTING IT UP AND BLOWING IT OUT

LIGHTING IT UP AND BLOWING IT OUT

Lighting it up and blowing it out

I try to make my way through the dark

by beginning at the end

as if the coming and the going

were the same door

or good-bye were the first thing

you would say to a friend.

I approach things like a night stream

as if my death were already achieved

and behind me.

And all the atoms of my being

dancing like frenzied gnats

in the sunset glow of a last eye-beam

are certifiably primordial

and any one of them

when they lose it in the light

could begin a world.

And what can you say more of a life

that dreams of what it is

than it’s the taste of the same wine

in many different cups?

And as any fox knows

the grape is always sweetest

when you can taste it with your eyes.

Though why foxes eat grapes is anyone’s guess

but life makes itself up as it goes

like music in a fish’s earlobes.

It feathers its themes in fire and light

and goes up in smoke

like the ghost of a tree

looking for habitable planets among the stars.

New wounds with innocent root-room for old scars.

Chalking the cue to bank the long shot

you’re trying to spin off into

the deep, dark pockets

of your game-winning afterlife.

And I don’t believe in much anymore

though that hasn’t stopped me from crying

like a slow window trying to keep

the stars from leaking out of me

as if there were a black hole

somewhere in my heart

waiting for an iris to make it an eye

whose seeing might be a new way of healing

what can’t be healed.

Once here. Here forever.

But whether we’re the eternal children of forever

or just another breath on the night air

that doesn’t even know we live,

even death is just another way of killing time here.

When everywhere’s the center of everything else,

the centre holds,

things don’t fall apart.

They disappear.

And that’s the mystic art

of knowing how to make the most out of existence

by offering no resistance

to the rocks in your own mindstream

that part the waters like the thoughts

of an exile in the promised land

who can’t go back the way she came.

The river can’t step into the same you twice.

And in every direction

your eyes have ever burned like stars

you can see the dark jewel of your own life

from the inside

before it breaks into light.

Sometimes I’m the lonely sign

on the only path to nowhere

and others I’m positively amniotic

with the schools of my blue lucidity

the albino dolphins of the moon leap through

without a chance of changing their colour.

A flower of prophetic blood bleaches my skull.

I swallow the snakefire of my last eclipse

like a lump of coal

I’m trying to turn into a diamond

that doesn’t burn

and never sloughs its skin.

Reality isn’t a religion or a science,

or the back and front of a mirror

that doesn’t know whose eyes its looking through.

Religion: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

Science: how many pins can dance on the head of an angel?

Totem poles on a telephone booth where no one ever picks up.

Voodoo dolls that hex the cause of their effects.

The apple bloom on the tree of knowledge

lets go of its flightless wings

and follows the wind

like the eyelids of unfeathered angels

who opened their eyes like flawless fruit

as they fell toward paradise

without a parachute of smokey virtue

or the scale of a snake for a vice.

Emergence into the open

like a hidden secret revealed

is the engine of evolution

that empowers the dark matter

of this incorporeal starmud

to arise like the high note of a bird

that’s flown beyond the night in its voice

like light beyond its myth of origin.

And the peduncle is lost in the ensuing phylum

as a madman is lost in the scream

that woke up the asylum,

or a god is lost in his own creation.

And the mountains listen

to the holy voices

in the valleys of their shadows

they deepen as they arise

like the guests of an echoless calling

to greet the unknown host.

It’s what the moon feels

when she fondles her locket of water

and memories pull at her heartstrings

like tides on earth

and music is the way she recalls

the sirens that used to sing

like the brides of empty lifeboats

that prayed like smashed guitars

for the night to sow the seedless sea with stars.

And in every fish that swims through fire

like the sacred response of life

to the longing in its own desire

she knows they got their wish.

Fireflies in the ashes of the phoenix tree.

And the eggs of cosmic words

like serpents in a bird’s nest

learning to fly like dragons

that have just swallowed the moon.

And it’s one thing to pull the sword from the stone

but it’s a greater power than magic and proof

with no urge to rule

that summons the butterfly from its cocoon

by giving the fool who inches toward the truth

along the green branch toward the apple-bloom

that already tastes like the forbidden fruit

of some radical insight

the whole orchard in a pair of wings

and more than enough night and light on its palette

to start a revolution in seeing among the flowers

who still labour in the chains of their roots

to turn their earthbound lucidities into stars

who might look back for a change

with eyes that have gathered like water out of the shining

and taste the light in the honey

that kissed their eyelids into gold

long before the night was old

and it wasn’t enough just to see them.

When you opened your eyes

in the burning clarity of your lone vision

before this matrix of space and time

gave birth to the world

you were free to be whatever you could see.

That’s when the light first spoke to you

in the mother-tongue of your seeing

and your voice broke

like a secret name in the mirror

that didn’t know who you were

and the moon on nightwater

the thief at the window

your breath like stars on the cold, night air

summoned the whole of being

in every particulate shard

and radiant plinth of the mirror

to drive your shining into the shadows

so myriad things can appear as they are.

Many eyes open. Night. An eclipse. One star.

And the darkness an anti-romantic

in love with the moon from afar.

PATRICK WHITE

FLOWERS ADRIFT ON THE FRAGRANCE OF THEIR OWN FOREGOING

FLOWERS ADRIFT ON THE FRAGRANCE OF THEIR OWN FOREGOING

Flowers adrift on the fragrance of their own foregoing.

In the night that takes me under its wing

to shelter me from myself, arrival and passage of spring.

Fish nibble at the wafer of the moon on the tongue of the lake.

The wind bitter as a green apple with an innocent cruel side.

Saturn at dawn,Venus at dusk, things abide in their own good time

without knowing for whose sake they shine until the mind

can’t keep a secret anymore and let’s the heart know

what the heart has always known. Reason is colour blind.

Everything that’s hidden out in the open isn’t invisibly camouflaged

to look like God at a quick glance. Flowers don’t dance

with their deathmasks on. Things may have changed

since I last walked here, but they haven’t aged. Autumn

not an older season than spring, spring not younger than yesterday.

Water’s never heard of a virgin birth that ends in a real death.

Silence of time as it appears to the spirit in a deepening sea of awareness.

Nothing disfigured. Nothing restored. Nothing scarred.

Nothing wounded in the moonlight, pleading to be healed.

Earth pungent with the expectations of urgent ghosts.

And dust in the eyes of the stars, the cries of Canada geese

with more longing in their voices than celebration

like the wailing of a train disappearing like smoke in the distance

from a sad fire in danger of going out. Exits and entrances galore

there are as many ways out of here as there is space and time to stay.

Bush wolves on a far hill agonizing over something in the night

like blues harps of blood. And in the heartwood of every leafing tree

I can hear the first violins of a symphony tuning up to the light

as if something sublime were about to begin with the first drop of rain

pinging like a tintinnabulum beside the kettledrum of thunder at the back.

To speak now would be to conceal what I really feel in words.

Lavish with life, I reveal my voice in a rush of waterbirds

startled off the lake like a mantra of sacred syllables

that nuance the ripples they leave in their wake

with a whole new way of phrasing the light with eyes

that see things musically as they fall away from their wings

like the meaning of things when meaning isn’t necessary.

PATRICK WHITE

AMAZING AS THE STARS IN THE DARKNESS, MY EYES

AMAZING AS THE STARS IN THE DARKNESS, MY EYES

Amazing as the stars in the darkness, my eyes,

though I’ve never seen them directly, only

as a reflection I take at its word they’re blue.

And when I look a little deeper, there’s

no part of me that isn’t eventually invisible.

Everything’s like that, the seer and the seen,

so wholly absorbed in each other,

there’s no sign of either of them, just the seeing,

the heart and its feeling, the mind and its thought,

the flower and the eye, crocus, turk’s cap, tiger lily, lilac

all one spontaneous happening without distinction,

one infinitely collaborative creative event flashing

out of the dark resources of the plenum-void

to give it a name for the sake of rendering experience

communicable through a delirium of form.

If you’ve ever walked by a mirror and the mirror’s disappeared,

mercury into mercury, water into water, fire into fire,

a mother into her child, an unsuccessful lover into his longing,

that’s something like it. You’re everything

and in that everything you’re nothing, you’re selfless

to the point of not even knowing what that means anymore

except it’s of no significance whatsoever. There’s just

this star flashing out of a night it’s surrounded by,

just these dark hills where the dead buried themselves

as they did their children, as they had lived, secretly

under the leaves that covered their gravestones,

lichens, moss, growing hundreds of wild columbine

on a modest rock of ages with the sensibilities of a butterfly.

If you stand by a gate that doesn’t latch by itself anymore,

and the garden’s been left to its own inner resources,

because no one lives there any longer, as, perhaps, even you once did,

o in a dream, how long ago was that? And watch the moon rise,

as if the healer and the wound were remembering

an old love affair that’s gone well beyond the inseparable

because there never was a time, a prelude to seeing,

they were ever apart. You’ll understand passing

as a perpetually new approach to things, you’ll see birth in why

the flowers fall, and death, in why they rise again.

The simultaneity of the life and death of all things.

How present you are in the midst of your longing.

How clear in the absence of everything you’re missing.

I’ve spent much of my life preparing gardens for planting.

Shaking out roots, rocking fields. Wondering

whose house of life the bones I dig up once belonged to,

cornerstones and rafters in arrears

to the temples they once upheld to themselves.

And come nightfall, my work finished for the day,

I’ve paused and looked to see if I could identify

through the trees, the whole of a constellation

from a single star. As if gazing in wonder at it

in the mutual solitude and hugeness

of the unknown immmensities that surround us both,

and bind us to a weary body and a still heart

leaning on a shovel in a garden, as if the silence

could look up or down, either way, were made sacred

by the poignancy of a momentary insight

that penetrated both our hearts as if time and space

were mere bubbles of awareness in a dream.

And in a differentiated union of not-two,

I saw myself shining through the eyes of a star

as it laboured over what flowers it intended to grow.

Without a thought or a feeling I could call my own

I was a desert of stars without a mirage

to keep up appearances. I was a single point of light

with infinite distances in it, and even the word, one,

had gaps in it I learned to jump like a star.

And I saw with the certainty of water, that

when one was a wave, the other was an ocean

and separation was simply the blindfold we put on

at midnight in front of an imaginary firing squad,

as if our whole life depended upon it, to watch

the stars shoot flowers at the sun like blanks

I seeded the garden with like constellations

breaking ground through the tree tops like Vega in Lyra.

Astro-flowers. The Pleiades approaching

the larkspur like bees. Honey in a new hive.

Light years of perceptions in a garden of starmud

encompassing strangers only an insight away from home.

It’s an immensely intimate universe. Go out.

Get down on your knees in the soil. Plant flowers.

And when you go in look at your hands, at the stars

shining under your fingernails as a sign

of some honest cosmic work well done.

PATRICK WHITE

NOT LESS AWARE IN THE DARK

NOT LESS AWARE IN THE DARK

Not less aware in the dark

than I am in the light

though it’s my blood

that sees better than my eyes,

I listen to my own breathing

and my heart banging

like a storm shutter in the wind,

and I wonder who it’s all for, if anyone,

and if there were stars in my seeing

before I walked myself like a telescope up to the roof

to get a better view

and if all these leafy yesterdays

that look so much like the tomorrows they proposed to be

that I’ve shed like thoughts and birds for years

to reveal the tree that follows itself like a map

into its own flourishing

were not already memories in the world

before I mistook this mind for my own

by giving it a name.

Nothing before, nothing after this night,

worlds within worlds, and light upon light,

I wipe myself away like the carcinogenic smear

of a sunspot in the mirror

tear my face down like an old campaign poster

to better elect the immaculate by acclamation

and step down from all these vacant offices of me

like spent cartridges

from the judicial chambers of an empty gun.

It’s not suicide if you kill yourself into life,

if the pharaoh’s ka makes it all the way to Orion

and there’s more delight in heaven than relief.

It may well be wrong and perverse on my part

but I refuse to sugar the rim of a black hole with belief

and live on the crumbs of someone else’s dream

in the corner of an eye

that looks down upon me

like a black lightning bolt an erratic firefly.

And I’m not saying once you’re nothing being turns divine.

I’ve always been too restless

to lie down for long with the mystics

sipping nectar from the moonlit goblets on the vine.

Life’s not a drunk or a hangover.

And I love to paint, it’s true,

but I won’t paint my window over to improve the view,

nor add my little bloodstain like a dye to the seeing

to make the poppy burn blue

just because I can’t take it anymore.

And it may be a long, hard, dirty, demonic coal road

lined with ditchwater and dutiful corpses all the way

to the diamond lucidity of an illuminated human being

but I still stop sometimes, alone with the stars

and listen to the cry of a bird in the night

unspeakably shake the darkness

with the vastness and agony of its life

as if it were a human heart in a rootless tree

whose solitude, like seeing, exceeded the expanse of its being.

PATRICK WHITE