Friday, February 24, 2012

MY SECRET PLACE


MY SECRET PLACE

My secret place down by the Tay River.
I deer-bed down among the autumn grasses
and last of the New England asters
half-lotus in cowboy boots
with a clear view of the stars
dancing on the water.
The waterlilies have perished.
Jupiter.
And the moon at last crescent.
No one knows I’m here but me.
I’ve never come here with another.
A place where I talk to the universe alone
as if it existed
more personally
than the mere immensity
of a cosmic intelligence
super-saturating time and space.
Belief’s a bad habit of mine
and sometimes I want to be deceived
into believing someone’s listening
even when I know they aren’t
and that the worst always happens for the best
even though I know it doesn’t.
The sky’s a windowpane I can fly through
without breaking my neck on delusions
and the moon feels like
a cool poultice on a hot wound.
I watch a spider repair its dreamcatcher
and say good luck.
And the stars don’t really give a damn
how they shine deep in my dark inner spaces.
Everything is so perfectly entranced with being itself
I wonder what it is about a human
that has to take time out like me
to reconsider what I’m doing here
wandering around on the earth
without any certain purpose
other than the ones I make up like poems
to spin bedtime stories out of my nightmares.
A birch leans out over the water
like a woman washing her hair in the river
and I sense there’s an inevitability about a tree
that isn’t like me.
I can’t find a fixed reality
to be in harmony with.
I have no doubt the rocks along the shore
are getting it right
but with me consciousness is a light
that contradicts its own clarity
the moment it reveals itself.
There is no path to follow
no way to flow
no aspiration to fulfill
that isn’t pure folly.
Or just another way of running out of myself
like sand in an hourglass
piling up pyramids
until I’ve exhausted myself like Sisyphus
rolling stones uphill.
And then I’m overturned like an empty shotglass
to begin again
or just sit here by the river like an amphibian
and let the universe do what it wants to my brain
without assuming it wants to do anything
or that the damage hasn’t already been done.
A new way to be partially whole!
Flesh and blood with a mineral soul!
Prophetic tents full of snakeoil salesmen.
But I’ve never been tempted
by things I couldn’t give my heart to
and the curse of spiritual valium
is the same as it is on earth.
The withdrawal is as dangerous
as following the addiction
all the way through
to the emergency ward in heaven
that handed out the prescription in the first place.
It isn’t the soul of a butterfly I see
when I look the money-maggots in the mouth.
I’m not praying for an afterlife that’s worthy of me
as if anyone knew what that amounts to.
What would you suggest
for an agony of snakes in a bag of skin
that’s got nine holes in it?
The tears I’ve wept for the world
have all turned into serpents.
The tears I’ve wept for myself
watered the roots of a mirage
in a desert where the stars
burn your eyes like sand
and turn your blood to glass.
I wonder if the birch knows
what’s passing it by.
If the river is its mindstream.
And then it comes to me
like a message in a bottle.
Maybe my sole purpose on earth is passage.
Maybe I’m just time looking for a reason for itself
to go on like a season that’s known by the way it changes
by always being estranged from itself.
Maybe I’m the more-than-me I can’t conceive of.
Maybe all these things seem
self-possessed in their tranquility
because I’m a mess.
Maybe my being as screwed-up as I am
helps get them through it
and all my pain and turbulence
all my preposterous longings
to be well-meaning and beautiful
all the black elixirs of the ruthless mystery
I’ve drunk from my own skull
held up to the gods
like the begging bowl of the moon
when it’s full
just to see if the darkness tastes of light
the way a lump of coal
foreshadows diamonds to come
after aeons of excruciating transformations
and if there’s more room for chaos on a calendar
than there is space in the scheme of things for thought.
But there I go again.
You see what I mean?
Fish jumping out of the stream at the stars
that lure them up out of their depths
like low-flying insects
to take one great leap into a new medium
out of themselves
like an arrow through the back of a bulls-eye of ripples
it didn’t know it was aiming at.
But things are getting too elaborate
and at this rate I’ll soon be speaking in voices
like some right-brained polyglot in a rapture of saying
going on like the Rosetta Stone
as if I weren’t sitting here alone
like the misbegotten seventh son of zero
trying to come to terms
with a formless reality
I keep stubbing my heart on.
Mahaprajnaparamita.
Great wisdom for the further shore.
Gone! Gone! Gone!
Altogether gone beyond.
Isn’t that what the Buddha said
in his secret place
when he went out of his head
trying to stare the world in the face
and all he could see was Venus in the dawn?
Desire and its afterbirth
at the beginning of nothing at all?
An insight into what’s unearthly about the eternal
or just the way the light’s bent by an atmosphere?
To those who can’t let go of things
and to those who cling to letting go
impermanence is suffering
and the only way to cure that
is to pour yourself out upon the earth
like the bitter cup of the moon
when she’s had enough of herself
and find peace
in the sweet potential of your emptiness
to be filled up again.
To sit here in a secret place
like I do
tangled in my human roots
with waterlilies on my brain
strung out all the way from earth to Venus
like a chain of thought
severed in the distant past
we had resolved would never come between us.
Where is the peace?
Where does that flower bloom
that’s rooted in blood and starmud
if not in the solitude of a human heart
that’s wandered this far from home
along the shores of its longing to return?
Why does my heart argue
against the will of the world
like a salmon swimming upstream
on the down slope of a cosmic mountain?
I’m not trying to scheme my way out of
my dream of this
like someone who turns his back on his eyes.
I’m sick of lies.
I’m sick of universal truths.
I’m sick of how blithely everything obliges death
with every second breath.
I’m sick of the grailquest.
I’m sick of the hypocritical crusades.
I’m sick of Aztecs and Christians
with the blood of gods and children on their lips.
I’m sick of atheists who claim it’s lipstick.
The lightbulb in the well on the moon
to keep the water from freezing up
has gone out
and I’m sick of the way things don’t flow anymore
like a tide in a sea of shadows
like the road of ghosts
through the cold dark vacant interstellar spaces
of an enlightened lunatic with a creative abyss for a heart.
I’m sick of the bitter black ghost bread of my art
that tastes like the futility of burnt paper.
I’m sick of trying to understand
what isn’t understandable
about my own and human nature.
I’m sick of all these long incommensurable interminable questions
I’ve walked all the way to the end of time and again
only to return with an ambiguous answer
that’s rarely communicable through form.
In all humility
take the low place like the sea
and the sewage of the world runs down into me.
Take the high like the open sky
and the mountain turns into a mudslide.
The best is to be here right now as I am
with all my dilemmas answers contradictions
insights questions and aspirations,
all the paradoxical sorrows that have come
of my physical assurance that life is joy
and ultimate unity is bliss
without the oxymorons
and love’s a deeper insight into life than death
if only by a breath
and though why we’re here in the first place
is anyone’s good guess
intelligence is not the anti-Christ of chaos
but the genius of dark matter becoming aware of itself
like a hidden secret that wished to be known.
What is dark will appear light
if you surround it with something darker
like a star shining in daylight
no one notices
until the night reveals it
like a wolf that lies down with the lamb.
And the best is to be wholly here right now as I am.

PATRICK WHITE
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SOME PEOPLE GO LOOKING FOR HAPPINESS


SOME PEOPLE GO LOOKING FOR HAPPINESS

Some people go looking for happiness.
Some prefer power or beauty wealth and fame.
Some crave intensity.
Some seek peace.
Some search for food and shelter.
Some want to die with a good name.
Everybody takes their lead from the way they came.
And everyone says they’re looking for love
though no one knows what it looks like.
They try to fit their thoughts to their words
like skin they can touch
that doesn’t scar like the moon
or shed like a petal too delicate for the senses
but most just end up trying
to mummify the mindstream
by laying thousands of years of starmaps
down on troubled waters
like autumn leaves
that don’t know where they’re going.
Eventually everything’s swept away
in the undertow of a dark ocean
that only smells sweet from a distance.
And longing shifts like infra-red into the blackness.
And bones on the moon are the only signs
that life once perished here.
Orphic skulls whose jaws dropped
like gates before their own gaping prophecies.
Time flows like a non-existent future into us
and it fills us with a hunger
for everything we’ve lost
or feel somehow was always missing.
One of the cardinal features of the emptiness
we are conceived again and again out of
is there’s nothing behind its face
you can fix like an identity to space.
For fourteen billion years
the universe has been nothing
but one long beginning without end
making everything up as it goes along
out of nothing
like a man whistling down a long road
far from home
late at night
to let anything that might be listening in the darkness
know he’s there
so nothing can take him by surprise.
And every step he takes
he steps across a threshold like a star
just coming into being
whose light goes off in all directions
looking for blind water it can turn into eyes.
Bosons hadrons leptons neutrinos wimps and quarks
the deeper you look into the matter
the more you realize
out to the furthest galaxy and beyond
seeing is being
and being is all fireflies.
And every one of them
is true north of nowhere.
Some people follow their own beginnings
like laws into the future
hoping to become someone else
that doesn’t recognize them anymore
for who they were.
The peduncle’s lost in the ensuing phylum.
Their future’s rich
but their past is always poor.
The planet doesn’t spin on its axis for them.
It’s hinged like a door
that only opens one way
though it’s a two-faced god
that begins them like last year.
But the leaves of autumn
aren’t the laundered money of spring
because if our fulfilment
weren’t already behind us
we wouldn’t be here
trying to true the last to the first
of an unfinished multiverse
like the best to the worst
as if red were the past of blue.
Stop thinking birth is the past of death
or spring is the future of winter
as if they weren’t the same breath
and one breath of life weren’t enough
to keep the fireflies glowing in your ashes for eternity
and everywhere you look
you will flower like a vine
that divines its way to the wine
by ripening the grapes of gratitude.
You will understand
for all that you have grasped
and brought to fruition
your most exalted aspiration
is a heap of dead branches in the spring
burning like leaves of fire
still reaching out for the sun
and you will hear the mind-mirror whisper to itself
like the wind on far off waters
Narcissus is drowning in his own reflection
like the flashback of a life he left unlived
but everything is immersed in me
like a mind
like a sea in a fish that ran aground
on the uncharted landfalls of its own teaching.
And the wine will flower in your mouth like a grail
that’s given up preaching
and finally found its own voice
like a bird returning to a tree at nightfall
to call out in its solitude
to the stars as they appear
we are here we are here we are here
where we belong
at peace with everything we’re missing
everything we long for
everything we are and are becoming
that overtakes us like music from within
transforming the silence into song
the water into wine
small beings into a big space
looking into the passing face
of everything’s that’s mortal about us
with our eyes fixed upon the divine
not to see it in any one place
but with the presence of mind
to be wholly and impurely not that not this
without anywhere a trace of ultimacy
in this world that we take for a sign
we are here we are here we are here
and things are as they are
not as they must be.
Nothing got here legally.
What’s the expanding universe
if not a refugee in its own country
somehow exiled from itself for reasons
only it can express?
Citizen Universe
show me your papers
your paintings your poems
show me how you dance on your own
show me how you put your children to sleep
show me how you bar an F chord
show me what you weep for
what you delight in
what you esteem
what you despise
what you ignore
what darkness of yours
feeds that inferno of stars above you
burning its constellations like passports
that aren’t going anywhere
show me the black mirror
that says you don’t belong here
like some misplaced night of the full moon
not marked on any calendar
show me the law of being human
that says this little piggy has one
and this little piggy has none
show me where it’s written
the guest shall turn strangers away
from his host’s generosity
like a dog at the door
that bares its teeth at the table
show me the home-made honey
of your wisdom
show me the dead lamps
of the apocalyptic fireflies
that designed your chaotic cosmology
by plagiarizing the light
to prove the stars
don’t reserve
a space in the universe
for any insight of yours.
Nothing got here legally.
No one followed a coyote or a law
to cross the border
into this insurgency of being
no one checked the colour of your eyes
or profiled the light
to see if they were fit for seeing.
You don’t need a constitution
to verify your liberty.
Well before you were born
you were free and ever shall be
to belong here as we all do
to pursue what makes us
sad mad bad or happy
the way we all got here
the way we all get through
the way we’re all alone here together
with one another as we are with you
as we are with her and him and me
as we are with everything
as we are with ourselves
when we don’t know who we’re becoming
when we don’t know the stranger on the bridge
watching the water flow
that’s waiting to greet us on the other side
in the only way the unblighted heart of reality
we’re all looking for
like blood on a grail-quest for our humanity
accepts the darkness that seeks us out
like a miraculous elixir of insight
so the kingdom won’t fail
so the garden doesn’t ask us
for a green card to know and grow
in the only way we truly belong here
in the only way we know how to be
so the lifeboat we’re all in
like the same boundless mind
is always as full
as it is empty
so no one gets left out at sea
like a wave that couldn’t be saved
and no one gets in
who doesn’t know how to swim
the way we all got here
and continue to be
all these thresholds of the sea
that steps across us
even as we move like waves
breaking discipline with our own continuum
creatively.
Just to be here.
Just to crawl up on the shore of a new medium
like a refugee planting flowers
we brought from home
hoping we’ll still be here
to watch them bloom.

PATRICK WHITE
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I WISH EVERYONE IN THE WORLD WERE AS MAD AS YOU ARE


I WISH EVERYONE IN THE WORLD WERE AS MAD AS YOU ARE

I wish everyone in the world were as mad as you are.
I wish everyone in the world talked the same nonsense you do
and meant as much.
Stop crying.
I wish everyone in the world were as good as you are
and didn’t lie to anyone else
other than themselves
about what the truth is.
You shape chaos to your mind
like light to space
to make a habitable planet you can live on
and if it isn’t round sometimes
and O doesn’t always cast the same shadow
that the others mimic with theirs
I wish everyone could put on your kind of airs
and be as good to life as the kind of atmosphere you are.
Come on now.
Here.
Dry your tears with this.
All those constellations you made up
out of the stars in your eyes
are your own private myths and mandalas
and you’re free to change them as you will
and I wish everyone made as much
of the light they were given to go by
as you have.
I’m too much of a thorn
to paint the delicate iridescent watercolours
I see smeared on your tender bubbles
like original pictures of the universe
from a thousand spaced-out Hubbles
but I wish everyone in the world
had your kind of genius for vulnerability.
You hold up a single feather of light
like a candle among stars
like a green leaf in the middle of winter
and the world that is inured to three dimensions
for infinitely tedious reasons
would rather put its eyes out
and gape like blackholes
than see as you do
that there are countless seasons to the soul
that burn like a phoenix
and there’s nowhere you can point to in the darkness
that isn’t an equinox of love and understanding
when the sun shines at midnight
and spring harvests what the autumn sows.
Having a deep cosmic insight
like a stranger beyond lucidity
into the windows of the houses of your own zodiac
might make you look like a maniac to the neighbours
who keep watch in their asylum
against any kind of freedom
that might release them from their lighthouse
like a geni from a lamp
that doesn’t conform to anyone’s wishs but her own
but I wish everyone had the courage
you have not to be them.
Life isn’t fair or unfair.
Life isn’t kind or cruel.
It isn’t half-Buddha and half-fool.
Neither impersonal
nor sentimental
life isn’t a kind of obedience
to its own rules
as if it were bound like God to keep its word.
Or what?
Who else is there to answer to?
All the taboos want to be thresholds
and all the thresholds
want to run away from home.
Could be a curse.
Could be a blessing.
Could be just more idle words.
But you’re not like that.
You’re not a fountain mouth
that mistakes alphabets for birds
and holds them to the letter of the law
in a world full of music.
It’s enlightenment to sing to a window.
It’s ignorance to sing to a mirror.
But you don’t sing to either
and your song is clear as running water
all the way down the mountain.
The picture-music
of your eyes and your ears
can already hear the ocean from here
that gathers to receive the flowing
like the heart receives blood
like the mind receives your thoughts.
Look out at the world.
You’re the host.
Look inward.
You’re the guest.
You can break bread with the dead
without being a ghost.
You can drink wine with the living
and it’s the wine that gets high on you
flowing into a seabed of shadows on the moon
that hasn’t touched a drop for years.
Don’t believe what the cynics say about innocence.
They have the sensibilities of blackflies
trying to draw blood from the Mona Lisa.
Don’t grieve if you’re a butterfly
that can’t follow the flightplans of the maggots.
There’s only a slight difference in wingspan
between a waterbird and a phoenix
but it would take lightyears
to measure a single feather of yours.
There’s no cult of the rose
that insists it fall upon its own thorns first
or the moon draw first blood
on the blades of its own crescents.
You don’t have to scar
your own deathmask with experience
just to prove you knew
how to eat the pain and bleed.
You don’t have to wear your face in public
as if it were something you kept up your sleeve.
Dice might be the foundation-stones of the lost
but that doesn’t mean
you have to go pearl-diving
for the moon in quicksand
or change your song like a jukebox
playing the slots
when you’re a mermaid on the rocks.
I wish everyone had the same chance
to risk it all as you do
and win back their lives
like eleven come of seven
insteading of seeing everything
as if they were jinxed by inasuspicious birds
turning the wrong way on a prayer-wheel
that keeps coming up snake-eyes
with every roll of their skulls.
You can’t heal the luck
of a wounded Nazi
by turning his swastika the other way.
You can’t teach snakes to bite other people.
And you don’t know enough
if there’s anything left to say or understand
and even then there’s a silence
that still longs to be heard
like a humming bird sipping honey from your ears
or deep in a telescopic wishing well of stars
burning in a dream of mirrors
they walk across
like fire on the water
or the distant blue notes
of the hidden nightbird
that echoes your tears
as if it were crying out in the darkness
from the safety of a secret place
for the same reasons you are.
As if it were trying to befriend its own sorrow
and weep for tomorrow as you do
for all the things of the past
it won’t even know it’s missing.
I wish everyone in the world
could live the future as you do
as something that is already happening now.
Even when you’re crying
because you don’t think you’re brave enough
not to.
You’re not a lame princess
that anyone needs to rescue.
You’re a dragon bringing rain.
And if the snakepit hisses at you
like a social structure
and calls you insane sometimes
because you have wings
and they still hug the earth
all tied up in knots
taking their poisons out on each other
to keep from feeling anything
it’s just their way of defining sanity
by the standards of the numbest.
It’s not you that’s crazy.
It’s not you that’s the dumbest.
I wish everyone in the world
were as warm-blooded and wise as you are.
When the serpent fire at the base of your spine
has passed through the doors
of all your chakras like vertebrae
and you’re already a circumpolar constellation j
just a little off true north
shining like Draco
why worry if you’re no good
at the game of snakes and ladders
they play like politics and religion back here on earth
to see who gets to be the pillar
and who the quicksand.
You understand way more than that.
I can tell by the fire in your eyes
that you’re a phoenix among stars
and you’ve transcended the eagles and the houseflies
that can’t even begin to imagine
the kind of heights you can reach to
or the depth of the view below you
when you’re riding your own thermals
like beautiful helices in the mindstream
for the sheer joy of being only you.
Even now.
These tears
that run all the way down to your lips
as if water had fingertips
what are they
but the way you cry for things
that everyone else didn’t?
I wish everyone in the world could be like you.
I wish you could teach us all
to stop living a spiritual lie
on the deathbed of an earthly truth
as if that were the only way
to foolproof ourselves
against reality
like a stranger looking through our windows at night
who doesn’t recognize herself in us
because most of us aren’t as brave and free as you are
to leave the door ajar
and let whatever wants to come in
come in.
Some track in mud.
Some.
Stars.
And the mud flowers in light.
And the stars bloom in fire.
And one looks up
and the other looks down
on each other’s likeness
reflected in the other
as if they were engendered by the same being.
Sight is a kind of love
and I wish everyone in the world
were inspired by the mystic dimensions
and intimate clarity of your kind of seeing
that even through these tears
that I’m not having much luck in wiping away
can comprehend a world
that’s more wonderful than it thinks it is.

PATRICK WHITE
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I TOOK MY DEATH MASK OFF FOR YOU


I TOOK MY DEATHMASK OFF FOR YOU

I took my deathmask off for you
to show you the naked absence
behind the past of everything I’ve ever been.
Real, you said, and meant something squalid.
And I autographed your holy book
with green ink the same colour as your eyes
with a fountain pen that didn’t
step into the same poem twice.
Let’s be real, you said, but you meant solid,
so we pushed your single bed
over by a window full of stars
and pulled the blind down on enlightenment,
cataracts in the eye, flowers in the sky,
and made love to the picture-music of a candle,
jealous of my gold-nibbed fountain pen
trying to prove it had a voice of its own
and could bleed as easily I could over nothing.
And I remember how you liked to sing to me
with that old cat-scratched guitar
you kept in the corner like an emergency lifeboat.
And I’d listen like a lighthouse
just to bug the candle
for being so competitive
any gust of stars could blow it away in jest.
And I heard the music of shy spiders
spinning the lyrics of their silken sorrows
on the looms of their guitars like webs.
And you could tell by the way I looked at you,
I wanted you to take off your veils and dreamcatchers,
that serpentine boa of apricot orchards
feathered between your breasts, get naked again
and go swimming with me
like two dolphins on the moon
in your deepest, darkest watersheds
where you weep black pearls
like the broken rosaries of past eclipses
that portended the end of the world
for all those one-eyed lovers as they knew it
who tried to patch the wounded rose
with one of her own petals like a bicycle tire
and blew it big time on the downslope to nowhere.
And if I was autumn
with my whole future behind me
then you were spring
with your past up ahead.
Though we both knew
time was just a rumour
some snakeoil salesman
was trying to spread
like a cure-all for everything.
And there were times when we bumped hearts
like two soft rocks of coal playing with fire
I swear I saw meteroritic nano-diamonds in the sparks
anyone of which could have been the beginning
of a new religion I could have given my soul to
if I wasn’t already the prophetic heretic of one of my own.
And you’d end up burning me at the stake of your guitar
for breathing life back into the dead words
that expire like caged birds
in the chimneys and lockets,
of your spiritual metaphors,
new lamps for old, new wine
for the old wine-skins of the new moon.
I never wanted to see Mary Magdalene
stoned among the asteroids
like a sacred whore defamed
by everyone else’s vices
because she dances unashamedly
naked as a snake in the temple of Isis.
Besides, why make confession like graffiti
written on the concrete underside
of realistic overpasses and burning bridges
as an urgent sign of the times
even in these urban shrines of futility
where we speak in forked tongues when we pray
for things we don’t even know if we want,
in pictographic hieroglyphics
for illiterates with dangerous spraybombs
that shake their tails like rattlesnakes
that don’t want to be tread on when they’re empty.
And for those who’ve mastered
the writing on the wall
as if it were their mother tongue,
the ambiguous eloquence
of these blessings and curses,
this Delphic ambivalence of Pythian oracles
split down the middle of what they meant
like the witching wand of a fire serpent
or a tuning fork looking for the G-spot
on the lunar body of a shapely guitar
trembling like a spider in an hourglass
everytime the world gets turned upside down
like moonset in the morning of a mirage.
Why crack another perfectly good mirror
just to hatch another eclipse
out of a cosmic egg
when it’s just as easy
to teach people to see in the dark.
And, besides, you being the singer you were,
I didn’t think a nightbird needed a voice coach
and I’m nothing, if not a man of my word
though I know it sounds
too sophisticated to the foolish,
and to those who know
way more than I care to, absurd.
But I don’t trust any kind of wisdom
that takes its craziness for granted
and starts putting bars on the windows
to keep itself out of the asylum.
This is this. And this is that too.
And whether I’m looking
deeply into stars or fireflies
from either end of the telescope
at a feast of light, or the crumbs
of a dream in the corners of the eyes
of the last famine of seven lean kind,
alone with myself in the night
beauty is always an ocean of bliss
tinctured with a mild antidote of sadness
so this doesn’t overwhelm that
in a delerium of epiphenomenal madness.
I don’t know if you’d call it spiritual or not
but when it comes to divining the undefinable,
I know that similes share a lot more of themselves
with a world that doesn’t cut itself any slack
than metaphors that insist on exacting
false identities from refugees along the road
with whom they have nothing in common
but exile and the longing
of a candle in the window
who doesn’t know who it’s waiting for
to write someone’s name again in fire
like a fountainpen talking to birds
in a dialect of being that’s older than words.
And the Sufis say you begin to take on
the characteristics of anyone
you’ve been around more than forty days.
And we made it a bit further than that.
You so much like the nightsea
of starless rain in me by the time we parted
and me the unpredictable spiritual weather
in the third eye of your emotional hurricane
looking for landfall with ravens and doves
in an exchange of transcontinental loveletters
with black and white feathers.

PATRICK WHITE
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