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

MY LONELY ISLAND MUSIC

MY LONELY ISLAND MUSIC

My lonely island music,

already I see in your eyes, devastation in the dead zone,

skulls littering the field, autumns wandering away

weeping like windows that mistook themselves for the sky

and murdered a bird. Mystic September, vamp of this vision,

how could the moon not leap from my tongue

in praise of the world that shines through you

bathing alone in the dawn of every moment, utterly

alive, your beauty the page of a unwritten scripture

poised in the ink at the nib of every blade of grass to say

beyond the saying

what can’t be said. How unbearably sad

in this defeated hour that so few know the truth

that walks ahead of them like their own footprints

returning to the door they left by, already lost,

their houses, foundation stones of quicksand. Get it right in the seed,

get it right in the root of the eye, let the wind

take the ashes, sweep the shadows from the stairs,

and all the moons of yesterday are caravans of blossoms on the water.

Get it wrong and you’re a widow plundering corpses

for wedding rings and pocket-watches, black rain

on the open eyes of the dead. Devoid of transcendence

in the mirroring awareness, on a diet of fire,

you’ll end up combing your hair with a ladder.

Can you hear this bell of green before it rings, can you see

the painting in your blood before the brush is lifted

like a maggot of consciousness to the rose?

If you can, then check your shadow at the threshold

and walk naked into the far fields of your seeing, your feet

on the ground, your head in the stars; if you can’t,

you’re deepening your ignorance by ignoring your depths,

your light passes over itself like an eclipse or the hand

of a black magician, conjuring. Peril in the seeing.

A mask of frost over the surgical face of the heart. Understand

deeply and with authority that this dream cannot be understood,

taste this dream for yourself and look once

into the brilliant darkness that lies beyond wisdom and forsaking

and acknowledge in a crown of water

you are queen of that, your own teacherless realms.

Can’t you feel the roots of the black orchid of this space

wounding the soil with the stars of another night-sky

already opening above and below you? Rightly and brightly,

you are that opening, the sum of all the awareness of the whole of your life

expressed in the unborn no-point of a star of perception in space,

blue knowledge beyond the scope of the death-sighted.

Why study your own legends like snapped twigs on the trail

and send yourself in a straitjacket to school

when you already know by heart

the book of the breath you must live? Open your fist. Where

did it go? What’s in your hand? Do you understand? Our lives

are the shadows of birds sown like seed across the skies,

fish-maps printed on water, compasses looking for directions

that don’t exist. We are brief and we are vital, pilgrims

on a bridge of ancient zeroes, angels under every stone,

gypsies at home. Hold your life up like a match to a mirror in a dark room

to see whose face it is

then blow yourself out like an orchard

before blazing becomes a kind of blindness.

Put the world to your lips like a finger

in the black clarity of the silence. Do you see, do you see

the white songbird of the moon enter the throat of the well

to flaunt its plumage privately in an empty theater,

the roar of the ghosts of the infinite aeons for applause,

the sound of one hand clapping? Anciently, you were so

and now you are so

and tomorrow after tomorrow you shall be so, hidden

right under your own nose, calling yourself like a girl to her friend

when the game is over to come out of hiding. Most people

never understand more than a keyhole and a whisper of themselves,

trembling behind the dangerous doors of their own names

when they’re called to come out and play

with a universe that begins in every moment,

a fire-fly in a canning jar. They graze on the fodder of illusions,

domesticated by their own cupboards and cowardice,

peopling the wilderness beyond their artificial paradise

with demons that threaten to behead them in a palace coup

for the genuine liberation of an empty throne.

The blossom doesn’t know its own beginning,

nor the snowflake, its end. Can you find your true face

in this mirror of echoes,

the one you wore before the birth of silence?

I shall come looking for you like the wind

and I shall find you among trees and flowers

and among the grasses of the fields

and in the living light that breathes over the harvest

and in the water-mind of the stream that flexes the reeds

and playfully graces the ripe honey of the sun

with a sweetness unknown to the business of bees. No inside, no outside,

everywhere I step is the arrival and the walking of my blood

the whole of the way to you from whom I cannot be separated,

slipped like a letter under a door that opens, a mouth in space,

to paint the moon on an eye of scarlet water. One leaf falling,

the whole history of the world

in the way I love you by letting go; in the way

when you are closest, your heart, the thunder

of subtle intimacies in a lost well,

I drown in the vastness like a bird in the reflection of the sky,

happy refugees all along the side-roads of my nerves,

my mind, a fool of the moon, all parade and passage.

Do you understand? Not different, not the same,

we are rain on a window, faces beyond

the blindness of mirrors that use our eyes to see.

In every feather, in every leaf, in every flight of the word

ten thousand dawns, all of the earth,

this emptiness within emptiness singing to itself in the void.

PATRICK WHITE

A WHOLE GALAXY LIGHTS UP

A WHOLE GALAXY LIGHTS UP

A whole galaxy lights up for the sake of a single planet; for

the sake of a single flower, the entire earth turns itself

into a loom and weaves for a million years.

How many oceans have died to hang one drop of water

at the tip of a blade of grass; and can you see in that blade

the untold dawns and sunsets that have risen and fallen like bread?

How many skies have bloomed and shed themselves

like the petals of blue roses

and how many birds have expired in their songs and wings

and fallen to earth like broken harps

to open up the space and voice within you? Have you

ever considered the endless generations of faces

that have come and gone, weeping themselves slowly into oblivion

like the crying glass of windows

just for the sake of one of your fleeting smiles;

or the billion nights that trembled in their dreams

for the colour of your eyes? And your blood

that is sweeter to you than any wine and floats

the boat of your heart down the rivers of its infinite flowing;

have you ever listened, deep within yourself, to the echo

of the hammers on the anvils of the aeons of volcanoes

that laboured like sacred smithies to pour and purify

all their skill and metal into your living iron? How are you not

in the least pore of your being

this miracle of so much? But tell me, you who can instantly travel

to the ends of the known universe and forever beyond

without leaving yourself, even

as you sit waiting for a bus, or brushing your hair;

what vastness of space and silence

has honed itself to a non-existent point

and entered like a gracious guest the tiny house of your bones and skin

and laid out all these thoughts and passions,

these clothes and jewels like gifts? And there

in the resplendency of the black mirror that illustrates your soul

and holds it up to you like the moon to the moon on midnight waters,

isn’t that the universe you’ve just pinned like a rose to your hair?

Beloved, I have lived ten thousand lifetimes

and discarded them like worn-out shoes,

fallen and risen from the dust of the road over and over again

just to make my way to this moment of you. Eternities have passed

and time itself has grown old and been forgotten

gods and civilizations, known and unknown

have worn away like stones like wildflowers since I first set

my vagrant heart on you, my every step, a grail, every breath,

Jerusalem, following you through the days and nights,

every sea, sky, and desert, your footprint, until I could bathe,

washed clean of myself and the journey

in the resurgent light of your beauty, that fountain

that has turned every atom of my being into a pilgrim

as if a million worlds went off in all directions like rays of light

or fingertips

to touch God’s face

as if they had raised a hand up to their own. Beloved,

where are you when I am so lost

everything looks like a strange home you once slept in for a night

and then abandoned, even the dishes, even the light,

even the small keys to your presence

you keep dropping everywhere like tears

that lock nothing in, nothing out; where are you now,

as I write this, longing for you, turning this beggar’s agony

into words that might rise like a glorious new constellation

full of grace and destiny

over the beautiful dark hills of your seeing

that are your eyes and the woods I wander in. Beloved,

I am your shadow; I am your ghost, coming and going from you

like a gate that yearns to be a wing

on any bird hurled, singing, into the dawn of your smile,

even if it be reflected on a windowpane. You, who are my life,

though a hair’s breadth seperate us, though

no more than the depth of the moon’s reflection keeps me

from drowning in your mysterious waters, I am nothing

but unheeded suffering outside your garden walls, nothing

but a phantom caravan in a desert of worlds outside

waiting to enter with gifts from a distant spirit

for the queen of the city. Beloved, look over your walls

like the moon walking its own heights

and gaze down upon the passion of my tents and fires

as if they were the flowers of the starfields

that snag in your veils of light, happily torn from their own shining

so might they adorn your passage. In your presence,

I am the mystic wind that wants to sport in your hair

and sweep through the valleys and along the curves of your body,

caressing every flute, shrine, and bell of your being

until all of you starts ringing, crazy with joy,

and all your leaves, all your secret lilies,

shudder silver side up in the sunlight after the storm.

Beloved, grant me freedom. Assent. Put an end

to the eloquence of this divine poverty

by blowing me out like a candle flame

that has danced on its own dying long enough. Without you

all my seeing and saying

is a rose and a word I’ve placed

on my own dejected coffin, drifting like an empty boat.

Beloved, open this door of darkness like the first crescent of the moon

and make an end of me in you as you have

so many stars and asylums and longings before me; let me

cross your threshold like a tide you have raised and sent

rushing up your slopes of life within, and when I am spent,

draw me back into yourself like a wave or a breath or a world,

or, deeper yet, this ocean of shoreless oceans that has swayed me into being

without beginning, end, or separation,

this extravagance in the form of the man who loves you.

PATRICK WHITE