TOO LONG IN THESE DEPTHS

TOO LONG IN THESE DEPTHS

Too long in these depths, sullen and sublime.

So dark you’ve got to be the light

if you want to find your own way around.

No moon. No colour. No star. No sign.

And even my presence doesn’t help

to humanize the place. No day. No night.

In this space eyes almost seem redundant.

No seer, no seen, just this seeing deeply

into a dark mirror you have to drown in

if you want to see your whole life

flash before your eyes like a school of silver fish.

Even the ghosts of the dead candles

don’t linger here for long

and the brittle sticks of incense

find the lack of smell here

a fragrance too strong to be borne.

Almost muggy, a viscous summer night,

when you can almost hear through your skin

things humming to their own ripening

like iron on the nightshift being poured

out of the igneous crucibles of earth

into the shapes of the fruits by which

they shall be known. Pear. Apple. Apricot.

Wild wrought iron grapevines and blackberry laurels.

And there’s always a death shroud over the face

of someone who’s about to be revealed

on the other side of your eyes

where the sacred wounds are sealed in blood

and concealed like dice in a bone-box.

You can feel worlds yet to come

resident within gargantuan transformative power

like lightning at peace with itself in a gathering cloud.

The pressure gets too much. The darkness

too smothering. The solitude too overbearing.

And once you realize there’s no object

to the search, nothing to achieve, attain, find,

except your own way back to the surface empty-handed,

time to catch a ride on a bubble up to the top again

where the water teaches the moonlight

how to dance lasciviously for salvation and rain.

Where starfish are elected to constellations

and expected to shine, and the fireflies

refuse to be governed like blips on the screen

of an air traffic controller in a lighthouse on the moon

keeping an eye on things like Big Brother.

Time to bask in the extraordinary ordinariness of things

like ants on a blade of stargrass, willows

that left the dye in their hair a little too long

and now they’re strawberry blondes

waiting for their roots to grow out down by the river.

What a marvel of domestication a bath is

and what a joy to collapse into it like a bridge

and just think of how mystically amazing,

what a holy ablution of birds in a fountain,

the mere act of washing your hands must seem

to an aqueduct that carries water

all the way from the mountains of the moon

but has only ever known the rain to compare

with what it must be like to feel

so spontaneously lavish with it.

Time to aspire to a medium I can play in again

with the dolphins and the flying fish

running before the prow of the moon

with a painted mermaid ploughing the waves

like a marine fertility goddess without seeds

raising the skull and crossbones

flying from the masts of the shipwrecks below

higher than the supernovas or surrogate angels

have ever been hung like dreamcatchers.

above her immaculate conceptions

of what her innocence might be like

when it’s in on what there is and is not to know.

PATRICK WHITE

AND YOU SHALL FOREVER BE

AND YOU SHALL FOREVER BE

And you shall forever be

all that could not be said of me

though I spoke for myself as long as I could

to answer your absence in paint and words

like this night creek talking in tongues to itself.

I see the maple leaves rotting in manuscript

like the dead civilization of a mummified language

that never made it into print.

And though I know every name

of the wildflowers that did, and of the stars,

their perennial myths of origin,

and of the fireflies, their efflorescent haikus,

tonight I walk among bones and pelvises of ice,

the desecration of forms, limbs lobbed off

like the right arms of offended trees and the eyes

of small skulls plucked out like stillborn moons

that never made it through the winter.

Alone with this emptiness which yet remains

the biggest clue I’ve ever found

to the whereabouts of myself,

I am not estranged by my usual compassion

for outcast things with no voice of their own.

There is no pillow of snow over the mouth

of what can’t be said without me.

The dead don’t hold their fingers

up to their lips to bid me keep silent.

They’re all dancing wildly to lyrics of their own

in a winter carnival of deathmasks

that have shed their bodies

like the hags of the withered waterlilies

trying to wash the brown out of their gowns

like sunspots from the memory of the stars.

As if there were an eloquence

in the radiance of their rags

that overwhelmed the silence

with the sacred syllables of a mother-tongue

that has no word for time or death.

No word for life that distinguishes them from me.

Not just moonlight on the barkless limbs of mannequins

that have shed their skin seductively.

Not the dead of a northern Pompey

frozen in ash and ice and snow

catastrophically posed for generations to come

but the hymns of the homeless

who’ve finally found common ground

with the tent cities of the stars high overhead

and the gypsy moths in the Dutch elms.

The long vowels of the living joining hands

with the skeletal consonants of the dead

to make one whole word we can say in our sleep

like a secret we keep between ourselves.

And for the moment I feel almost complete here

like the first draft of a book

that the dead have yet to rewrite.

And though I’ve said it thousands of times before

in as many ways as I was inspired to,

like a fire that reared up at the mere shadow of the whip

to outrun the starlight for the sheer spirit

of challenging the will of this body

dug like a spur in its own ribs,

it was clear from the very beginning,

as clear as poppies and marigolds

in the summer of their oral traditions,

no more can be said in the dead of winter

than can be said by the living

to coax the wild crocuses out in spring.

You might be a lone night bird

that inhabits the woods like a magus

with too many stars to follow

to follow any one of them

and gratify your life by stargazing

and calling the faithful to prayer

like a muezzin in the morning

with the voice of an underground river.

And for all your lucidity you might never find

the long shadows of your ancestors

erecting the waterlilies of their tents

along the riverbanks of those rivers and lifelines

you keep returning to every year like waterbirds.

Or you could find no sign of anyone

for light years who could recognize you

for who you are even as you change time-zones

like a child with ageing eyes

who was raised by the alone with the Alone

in an incomprehensible solitude that included everyone.

Here where distinctions break down

and the dead and the living both draw

from the same source as they’ve always done

each is known to the other

by attributes that neither of them have.

The warm heart of a black rose

looking back over its shoulder

at a bend in the night creek,

the moon rising up over the valley,

a pearl in partial eclipse,

taking one long, last look

at the broken cages of ghostly tree limbs

and shattered ladders of lifeboat wing bones

that drowned on the way to their own rescue.

Is one side of a window truer than another?

Inner and outer, I and the other,

truly separated by this mere hole in my eye?

Do the stars streaming through my mind

feel a subtle change in the nature of the sky

when they do, a different feel to the darkness,

something strange about the flowers

they open like loveletters, sensing someone

has been tampering with their mail

as if the message were still the medium

but with a different return address?

Is my absence any less baffling than my presence?

These with the hearts of departed things

any less whole or real or displaced

or death any less of a prelude to time

than any other point in its passage is?

Even in death, even when the sun

shines at midnight it’s always dawn.

The waterbirds go. The waterbirds come back.

Like an ongoing dialogue in an hourglass

where content is the same as timing

and the most enduring of things

are the things that most readily pass

between the bright vacancy

and dark abundance of life

like the moon that keeps growing

without coming or going like a journey

standing in the doorway

of its own vastly expanding threshold.

PATRICK WHITE

I REMEMBER LOVING YOU

I REMEMBER LOVING YOU

I remember loving you.

You turned my heart into a koan I haven’t cracked yet.

You were a muse of dark matter.

A Mayan phase of the moon

that kept your predictions to yourself.

You were the unified field theory

that made me feel I knew why I was here.

That my abysmal ignorance

was the ore

of infinite enlightenments to come

each one a world of its own

we were free to start with each other.

I remember touching your skin

as if I were reaching out to a ghost

to see if it was real.

Even now after all these years

I can recall the sensation

as if I were holding

a first folio edition of Shakespeare

that no one knew anything about.

A kind of preternatural reverence

for the profound and rare

so intense that whenever we were together

I was always in the presence

of something more than real.

I saw extraordinary beauty and power

in the most ordinary things you said and did.

My will wasn’t so much

bent to yours

by force desire or cupidity

as made irrelevant.

And I remember being astonished

to see how little effect

gravity had around you.

How I bounced around

like a helium balloon

on the ceiling of any room you’d walk into.

How every time I saw you

I could feel my eyes evolve

to accommodate the vision

and see deeper into the dark.

You were such an intriguing planet

if I’d been Jupiter before I met you

I still would have gladly

abdicated from the solar system

just to be your orbiting telescope.

You were all those species of life

the Amazon keeps a secret.

Cures for diseases

I didn’t even know I suffered from

until I met you.

You were the mystery made tangible.

You were the lightning insight that cracked the mirror.

You were the perennial avatar of woman

in every universe

that was worth returning to.

I remember seeing you in the late sixties

sitting in a windowsill

with nothing but a gun and slip on

as the song Spoonful by the Cream

blared out from the heavy hippie drug house

at the top of the hill

over the whole despairing neighbourhood

like an anthem and a challenge all in one.

You smiled like the Mona Lisa

with a midnight special

enigmatically bored with the adoration

you commanded from the blind

who’d never seen anyone like you before.

You looked at me like a silver bullet

but the silence was crucial

and I knew it wasn’t time to go off.

Someone told me your name

as if they were trying to frame

a dangerous alias

but I knew you knew way back then

I could see through them

and the best way to be your friend

was to stay a stranger to the end.

Eight years later in the mid-seventies

I was invited to a field-party

that turned out to be

a snakekpit of holy rollers

baptizing the faithful with a dirty syringe

as they tied you naked to a stake

to burn you like a witch

because you were the most flammable woman in the room.

But I knew you were safe

because fire doesn’t burn fire

water doesn’t drown fire

and danger isn’t afraid of itself

but I broke a few glass fangs

like toxic chandeliers

that had gone into a trance

just in case of an emergency

to cover your back

as the whole place went up in flames.

You said I guess you expect me to say thanks?

And I said no

I don’t run trap lines

to lure my friends

into cages of gratitude.

Put your clothes back on.

I’ve got nothing you want right now.

And it was three years until I saw you again.

And it was then we connected like stars

in an occult constellation of two

and I made love to you

as if we were both on death row

for the same heresy at last.

You were the first

to reverse my spin

in a charged particle field

and show me that love isn’t perfect

until the annihilation is rapturous.

And look at me now

wherever you are

laughing or in tears.

I’ve been singing in those flames for light years

and I haven’t recanted yet.

PATRICK WHITE

CHEWING ON MEMORIES LIKE BROKEN MIRRORS IN HER SLEEP

CHEWING ON MEMORIES LIKE BROKEN MIRRORS IN HER SLEEP

Chewing on memories like broken mirrors in her sleep

tears of blood run from her eyes.

She doesn’t know I’m watching

but I’ve got windows everywhere.

But for her

just for her

because nobody else cares

third eye satellites with unlimited airspace

in her choice of skies to match her eyes.

A haemorrhage of sunsets.

Fly little bird fly

as if you weren’t the shattered sparrow

God took his eye off

when you fell.

Sometimes the mystic oversights

have more to say

about the great revelations of the world

than all the burning bushes in the valley of Tuwa.

Rumours and news.

Fly little bird fly.

Be an apostate waterbird

and let your skull skip out over the lake

like the moon through a glass house

that’s been asking for it for years.

There must be stars

that haven’t bloomed yet

somewhere in the corner of a leftover garden

that no one’s trampled on

like moon rocks

on a firewalk with a spoon

that hisses like the head of a viper

boiling with venom

at the tip of the tongue of a Zippo lighter.

Fly little bird fly

into a state of grace

that isn’t tainted by your experience

of the taste of humanity

that threw you like bad meat

down your own wishing well.

How they pried your innocence out of you

like a flower before it was ready to open

like a keepsake from a locket

your mother gave to you on her death bed

like a silver bullet that would keep you safe

from the grave robbers

the moment you used it on yourself.

Fly little bird fly.

I don’t know why

people attach more of an emergency

to the exit

than they do to the entrance

but I guess you’d have to ask a junkie about that

who’s used to coming in through the back door

with a ticket to ride

that’s better than a forged passport

to Disneyland

after you’ve done business with the Pentagon.

Fly little bird fly.

Don’t lose your nerve for enlightenment.

There’s the Bodhi tree.

There’s Venus in the dawn.

And there’s all this emptiness.

Isn’t it sweeter

than a hot fix

once you’ve gone beyond

the last judgment between right and wrong

like the pick up sticks of the I Ching

into the nirvanic bliss

of discovering nothing

was your best guess after all?

Fly little bird fly.

Disappear into your own eyes

like a candle

that’s stopped sticking its tongue out at the darkness

looking for a new place to hit.

Fly little bird fly

as if you weren’t tarred and feathered like Icarus.

And may the sun that shines at midnight

find you a lot more approachable

than apple blossoms

scattered like ashes on the wind

or fireflies that can’t hold their fixed positions

like the stars.

O it’s so anatomically true

that life on earth hurts

especially when you’ve fallen

out of love with love

like a baby out of the nest of a lullaby.

Down will come baby

shaman and all.

I see your bruised body on the bed

like the embryo of some past miscarriage

that taught you how flesh

can grieve for its own death

while it’s still alive.

I see the black haloes.

I see the bright horns.

I see the butterfly feelers

that have burnt out

like the short-lived filaments

of your average light bulb

and the place where you were anointed

with holy oil that hissed.

And it’s hard to miss where the apple sat

when William Burroughs

shot you through the head

pretending he was William Tel

like your crackhead boyfriend did last night.

Luckily he missed your heart.

He should have hired a firing squad

instead of relying on a sniper.

You don’t send a single viper

to do the job

of the whole snakepit

when you take out a contract

on anything as elusive as that.

I’ve made the bed

and you can lie in it alone

for as long as you want.

I’ll keep watch over you

like a mongoose or a lighthouse

over a bird that was stared to stone by snakes

and I won’t have anything to expiate

if I see their shadows

sliding hate mail under the door.

Fly little bird fly.

No more skies that lie like windows

about what you’re going through.

No more pretending

those bruises on your arm

are rare orchids of jungle love.

When you went to sleep

tangled up in the powerlines

you couldn’t teach to dance to your flute

and the rhythm of your body

like bullwhips

you might have felt

like a broken kite on a funeral pyre

but if my magic still works

by the time you wake up

I’ll make sure

you open your eyes like a phoenix.

So fly little bird fly.

The world won’t heal while you sleep.

Your lover won’t have a change of heart.

He broke you like a chandelier

he threw down the road

in a drunken rage

on a Friday night

like a bottle of beer.

One solitude denies another theirs.

Lovers take each other hostage.

The rest is the Stockholm syndrome.

One fanatic.

One addict.

It looks like devotion

It looks like a life raft on the sea of love

but the ocean’s gone rabid and mad.

Just look at the way it foams at the mouth.

Things are bad.

Fly little bird fly.

You’re not caught in the chimney

with no way out.

You’re the genie of the lamp.

You’re the one that tunes the power lines

that are humming along with you

like Mozart with a sparrow.

You’re the silence

that times the rhythm of the music.

You’re the tuning fork

not the lightning rod

of a wanna be god

in a pick-up truck

who keeps you around

to beat on like a false idol

who shalt not come before him.

Stop pecking at the crumbs of your dreams

like the leftovers of a garden

that used to be secret

That’s no way to get out of a labyrinth

when you’ve got wings.

So fly little bird fly.

Disappear into the depths of a starmap

that breaks into flames as you approach

the creative intensities of your own shining

like sumac in the fall.

Here’s the dead branch.

Here’s the green one.

You be the moon.

You be the blossom.

You be the firefly.

You be the hidden night bird

with the faraway call

that doesn’t make the distinction at all

because you’re too far gone to tell

by any feature of the light

you can often see things deeper

in a black mirror

than you can in a white.

PATRICK WHITE