WHO ISN'T TRYING TO LIVE

WHO ISN’T TRYING TO LIVE

Who isn’t trying to live

as they vaguely hope they are

whatever extremes

of moderation they’ve gone to

behind all the masks and fraud?

Crosswalks and bridges of fire

trying to get to

the other side of themselves

like the promised land, or God,

ladders up to heaven

like vertebrae and ribs,

and ropes like spinal cords

down a well on the moon

that hasn’t enthroned hell in her depths yet,

everyone’s trying to put a face on chaos

they remotely hope is their own.

One by one the plum blossoms

fall to the nightstream

like loveletters

from the branch of the tree

that read them once and then let go.

No one knows where they’re from

or where they’re going.

Some give their wings up

like graduate degrees to the ants

and others are raising their sails

like the flames of a great fire

that consumes the prophet

who wanted to hold his arms up

like a wishbone to the lightning

in the revery of his desire

until everything is ash and nails,

and others who think they’re

the rudders and keels of the flowing.

Sometimes I am nothing more

than this terrible inevitability

of flesh and bone

alone in the vastness of my unknowing

where neither ignorance nor wisdom prevails

and then it’s as clear as stars

on both sides of the window

that everyone’s everyone else’s good guess

as they encounter one another

passing the time

in a crumbling game of graveyard chess.

I don’t know why what’s wise about me

always ends up listening to myself

like a fool’s confession

but I’ve run out of rosaries

like habitable planets

and my homelessness has exposed

the ruse of divining purity

in the afflictions of compassion

as if everything had evolved in sorrow

like a heart-bending occasion for tears

as the mountains that fell

like an avalanche of cornerstones

into the valleys they’ve dug

like pyramids and graves over the years

abide like salt in the eye of the sea.

Intelligence might be

an elaborate mode of paranoia,

but eased into the wonder

of being here at all

with trees and stars

and the midnight rainbows

on the necks of the grackles

and the hectic butterfly

among the grape hyacinth,

since I was enlightened

by my absolute uncertainty,

I have gathered all my voices together like leaves

and burned the old texts of myself

for not being much of a liar.

Five petals opened

and one flower bloomed

like a good laugh.

Now my awareness

is a kind of playful fire that doesn’t burn

what it consumes

though the light

still tastes of the jewel

and even as the good-byes deepen their voices

like echoes in wells,

because I’ve grown older

and autumn keeps shedding its choir,

the hellos still take on a life of their own

as if nothing had changed.

An illuminated clown

I am astounded by the profundities

in every jest of being

revelling in the creative hilarity

of its mystic specificity

and how everytime

I get serious about something

as if I had just remembered myself,

I bring the house down.

Only a hypocrite is humble enough

to underestimate his own irrelevance,

and go sorting through himself

like a cellphone in the ashes

but for those who have become fire,

aspiration is achievement

and fulfilment and desire, one breath.

In every event

there’s nothing to be

further than you can see.

But that doesn’t mean

take a harder look

as if your life were a book

you were learning to read

or a mirror you had to stare into

until your eyes bleed

to know who you are.

When you stop thinking

every perception is a clue

to who you are

you’ll shine out like a star

ahead of its own light

and stop trying to recognize God

through the featureless eyes

and vigilant simulacra

of a stolen identity.

You will be neither partially

nor wholly yourself

and before and beyond

will not seem

the unending extremities of now

rounding the skull of a clock

that’s lost its way home.

Your seeing will grow deeper than eyes

and you will stop sending

your reflection out

like the moon’s last lifeboat

to haul you up out of the abyss

like a fisherman gilled

in the tangled mess

of his own s.o.s.

You’ll let go of the oars

and breathe easy like the sea

that takes the low place

and in every blossom of being

you will taste the whole orchard

drunk on its knees in laughter,

not knowing where to begin.

PATRICK WHITE

A HAZE OF DUST ON THE WINDOWS AT DUSK

A HAZE OF DUST ON THE WINDOWS AT DUSK

A haze of dust on the windows at dusk,

cataracts glowing in the epiphanous sun

that leaves the night coming on like a door ajar

for the light to get out on its own like a cat.

And the next moment all the eyes

that were on the road to Damascus

blinded by a revelation are returned

from the darkness of their clarity

to their normal muddy mundane vision

and I can see the birch groves from here

upping their quota of white canes on the nightshift.

And isn’t it strange how things emerge

from one mindscape into the next

like a serpent shedding its skin

like a sky it’s been consulting about wings,

or the effortless birth sacs of the dragons

who have made the same transition

from the lowest of things to the highest

like a flying doctor bearing true north?

Polaris and Draco wrapped around

the tilted axis of the earth as if it were

the sign of a caduceus in the hand of a messenger

that says night is the best time to heal

and leaves us to the moonlit herb gardens

we planted in the spring of our dreams

when wild crocuses where just beginning

to poke their innocent noses through the snow?

Now the dark when the magicians come out

and the bats and the stars, and the fairies

are enthroned on their mushrooms and sacred stones

and retinal responses to reality

turn visionary in their pursuit

of an earthly excellence of their own

that doesn’t belittle them again

as the gods and goddesses of a world of their own.

And me, I’m sitting here alone

wondering if I do empty myself of myself

so perfectly there’s no one left to tell me

I’ve finally become no one fit enough

to lift the veils of Isis without expecting

to find just another starmap in hiding.

Or if I’ve rinsed myself clean enough of myself

to be washed from her eyes in tears

that fall like mirrors of mercury

in a fever of mystic thermometers

stuck under my tongue

like the silver bird bone flutes

of the perennial theme songs

I’ve been offering to ferrymen

in lieu of the obol of the full moon,

my penny in a wishing well,

to pay for my passage into death and back

like an enlightened return journey of a poet

who knows how to find his way home on his own

like a prophetic Orphic skull.

Ride the dragon. Play the flute of fire.

Cast a spell on the winter sunset

and take it off again in spring. O

inestimable nothing

what could I ask of the flower

that I didn’t receive from the leaf?

It takes a rootless tree

to show you the way home.

But it doesn’t take a road to know you’ve left.

I can hear my eyes weeping behind a deathmask.

Early wood sorrel under a leaf of duff.

Venus is in my rain washed window,

closer than blood could ever be.

The sky thinks it’s a strutting peacock

but I know I painted that window

well over a year ago when I grew weary

of being myself like a stage without a play.

Do you know me yet? Can’t you tell

when the roses bloom in the palm of my hand

like the stigmata of a starfish on the moon,

I’m the lost cause of a shadow

demanding more of the light

than a sacred clown on a burning ladder

could possibly know what to do with?

Meagre, meagre me. What immensities

I aspire to with a broken bouquet of arrows

like stalks of wheat in Virgo after a hailstorm.

I am not the slayer. I am not the slain.

I don’t hold the crescent moon up to my jugular vein.

Or cut the throats of poppies to milk the dream.

And I don’t care a hair for the difference

between the enlightened and insane.

I look at Venus through my windowpane

and the window’s clean. Burn white. Burn silent.

Express yourself, but don’t ask it to mean

anything more than you are to yourself

when no one’s home, including you,

and you’re shining for someone else.

PATRICK WHITE

DEMONIC SPIRIT AMONG THE NUMB

DEMONIC SPIRIT AMONG THE NUMB

Demonic spirit among the numb,

you here with me again, fire, familiar,

looking for someone among the dead as I am,

blue cyanotic corpse, skull-harp, anyone

who might remember you from years ago

when glass was an ice-age and you wept

like honey in a blast furnace of killer bees?

Redemption or genius? We both agreed.

No one was waiting for us on the other side

with gates and doors, weathervanes and smiles

for the creatures we always wanted to become.

One real tear would have been enough,

but nothing, nihil, nada, nix,

for all those unforgettable moments in hell,

isolation in an abandoned prison

when I was a lighthouse with a shattered eye

and you had no interest in a cell

that wasn’t interested in keeping anyone in.

Guards gone. Angels with flaming swords.

The place was useless. The air agony.

Space twisted into a gravitational eye

that insisted on seeing what it wanted to,

the light imploding back into itself like a heretic

of flowers and stars, trying to get

a good look at us, homeless mutations

chained to the same chromosome for life.

No shepherd moons for us, casting shadows

like dice on conventional equators

that didn’t have the chaos to be a star

and shine by itself alone, take a blue-eyed risk,

white phosphorus, get out of itself somehow,

all those long languishing radio waves

and take a peek through the eye of its own

three hundred year old methane hurricane,

instead of painting carnelian on your forehead

starmud and ashes from the inexhaustible urns

of all those dragons that let the sun down

by offering a library of matchbooks

for elucidation and companionship

and more ghosts than you can throw beans at

to keep them away like a hailstorm of asteroids

shrieking like atmospheres in a burning morgue.

For years I expected you to turn on me

like the flipside of a teaching sword

with the stamina of a forge, and an edge

so clear it would have been inhuman to blunt it

with the mirages of the lies of mercy that spare no one

crossing this desert like a caravan of waterclocks

and I offered you my throat willingly and said

let’s do it in the name of nothing, or, better yet,

let’s dedicate it like a direction for those

who’ll come after us as lost as they are alone.

I’ll be the exiled vagantes at the diamond crossroads

and you be the milestone in the middle of nowhere

that evaporated upon impact like the last of your species.

Yes, and I breathed you in like a nuclear winter

and ever since we’ve been indistinguishable

in the way we’ve climbed our burning ladders

of evolution up out of these august heights of a black hole,

totally siderealized by black matter breaking into light

backstage where nothing but the business of the world

goes on late into the night. One broken heart

after another accusing the finest passion

they’ve ever known in their life of amorous treachery

as if they were the latest recruit in the fraud squad

so they didn’t have to be the victims of the truth.

At least we can look at things like an hourglass

that didn’t quite make it as a telescope

and tell a harmless mirage from a lethal dose of stars.

I can even take pity on you sometimes

when you’re off in your own space like a mirror

trying to picture something of your own

that isn’t a reflection of me on the dark side

of my own eyelids trying to bloom in Braille.

Suicide to sacrifice. It’s a hell of a leap of faith,

and there was no asylum in the abyss to catch you

when you fell from paradise to Pandemonium

and not a single siren went off, and the parachute candled,

and you looked more like a daylily at dusk

than you did a comet that was trying to tell me something.

The messenger got a message. But there was no one

to tell it to. And everything’s been clear ever since.

We can look at the willows down by the lake

and say, o, yes, beautiful, blithe adolescents

lingering in their sorrows like the eyes of young gazelles.

And I can run my tongue along

the first crescent of the envelope of the moon

to blood that sword in sacred syllables of the east

with the power of heart-stopping cobras

in the medicine bags of their fangs

and have everybody ask for an encore

like an unpredictable eclipse at the back

of everyone’s star-struck eyes

through the buffer of a tinted lens darkly.

Indeed, is it not absurdly marvellous in our eyes

that we exist as we do like the longing

of someone who died light years ago,

fire in its own smoke, a poppy in its red cloak,

a star that ate its own ashes, time

with its tail in its mouth about to

swallow itself whole as if it had two heads,

though a single dream were pillow enough for both.

Not two. And the koan is broken.

And you can hear the applause of a single hand

startled into believing we neither know nor don’t know

what we do and we don’t understand.

PATRICK WHITE

APPARITIONS OF THE MUSE

APPARITIONS OF THE MUSE

Apparitions of the muse

hanging her stars

from the end of my nose

like an exotic fragrance of night

more revealing than the light.

There. That’s mine.

The constellation of the donkey,

and there beside it, do you see

that red-haired star

blazing like a woman with a carrot?

I’ve followed that star for fifty years

always a mountain away from the valley

like a passionate Sisyphus

rolling the earth up a hill like a stone

happy with my own absurdity,

happy to go mad for her sake alone.

Elixirs of moonlight

mingled with strange waters

and I drank until I drowned

in the ferocity of my own delirium

like a myth that’s forgotten

which stars it belongs to.

I’ve never been much of a martyr

and bored with lies

I’ve always been two hells shy of a messiah

but I have fallen on the thorns of the moon

more than once

after my long descent

down the burning ladders

of God’s last word on the matter,

so there’s no splinter of the true cross

to needle the issue

like a compass or a crucifix.

And it still puzzles me

why it’s always my blood

that rushes to the end of my pen

like a volunteer army

but it’s always somebody else’s flag

that gets raised above the rubble.

Pyrrhic victories at best

when I’m not feeling cursed or blessed

by any kind of mystic meaning

convincing me I can firewalk

barefoot on stars

when I can’t even get

this blue pebble of a planet

out of my heart like a shoe.

But even letting go of all their leaves

like loveletters home and refugees

the trees can only go so far

as the wind and streams will let them.

And then there’s a darkness

that doesn’t taste of stars.

And decisions that cut

like the smiles of broken mirrors.

And turmoil in the snakepits of desire

that are thrown like angry acids

in the eyes of the seers

who saint the rain with their sorrows

like old calendars the abandoned houses

of crossed-out tomorrows

playing x’s and o’s with the moon.

It’s a freak of enlightenment

to turn love into a discipline

inspiration into a law

and godless wonder into superstitious awe.

So I listen and say nothing,

see and don’t reveal,

understand but never think I know

the gates that pass through me

when you call to the wild geese in the fall

and I am startled by the loneliness of the answer.

I’ve seen you in the nightstream

down the mountain,

the river and the sea

that sits below the salt

at her own table,

and I still suspect it was you

that turned my bitter tears

into the brittle chandeliers

that fell like ice-storms in a fountain

to silence the voices of the mirrors

the birds kept flying into

like windows at war with the sky.

I was out of the egg.

I was out of my mind at last

like a gift I didn’t deserve

and the universe was full of your absence

because you were the embodiment of my longing,

the darkness in the light

that stood aloof from the meaning of everything

as if your only proof were your eyes

and that were enough

to answer the empty skies with stars.

You may put on flesh and blood

and in your human proportions confess

you don’t believe this,

but you can never be attained,

never be embraced

never be contained

by any avatar of who you are

because like space in all directions

you are limitless

and even time is consumed

in the root fires that grabbed you by the ankle

and pulled you underground

to dress a goddess of light

in the nocturnal jewels of the dead.

And it is not a perogative of the beatifically born

to be demonically wrong,

but I have heard the skulls in the song

that allures the unwary sailors

to the lunar horns of your fishbone harps

to smash them on the rocks

as if you took a tragic delight

in the sheer delinquency of your power

to arouse and extinguish desire.

Anyone can come up

with a meaning for life

but you are the muse

of meaning itself,

the meaning of meaning

when anyone asks

without expecting an answer.

What woman that I’ve loved

like a river reaching the sea

have you not been

over these long, intense years

of radiant tenderness

and creative commotion

and an ominous darkness

out over the ocean

when the moon turned around

like a bride in bed

and revealed the far side

she kept to herself like stars?

And it’s still a shock and a marvel to me

when you disappear into the air

like a breath someone neglected to take

when it bloomed on the window.

I don’t doubt your capacity to devastate

and I have the urns and the burns

and the ashes to prove it

and know on a whim of your arrogance

you could leave the phoenix out in the cold

and douse the dragon like a torch

in your fire-proof waters.

But lately, out of the flesh,

I look for you behind the eyes

of every woman I meet

and it’s rare that I find one

whose blood and passions

you’ve worn as your own,

whose mind is a jewel of yours

that flows like a star sapphire

down a dark mirror

older than the meaning of life

that relflects you in the light of a black sun.

And I know enough not to ask

about those lockets of blood

you hang like thorns

around the neck of your mystic rose

like the first and last crescents of the moon.

I opened one once to see

whose picture you carried inside

like a butterfly you were working on

or a loveletter in a bottle you never sent

and I’m still not certain

I was demon enough

to survive the miracles

you released upon me

like a hive of angry angels

but I came to know

what the loss of heaven meant

when I ran from the garden

through the closing gates

of your wishbone,

on the short end of the stick I write with.

PATRICK WHITE

WHO TAUGHT YOU

WHO TAUGHT YOU

Who taught you to abhor the savage

within you

as if you were

an intolerant missionary to yourself?

Or walk into the room

and sit down

like a civilization that can’t compose itself?

And what strange habits you have for eyes

like ominous seabirds off the coast

of the continent with nowhere to perch

you’ve just discovered about yourself

that doesn’t bear your name.

And o come on now

isn’t it the most grievously wounded

who cry out the loudest

in their delirium of pain

and shake their wills

like steel at the ruthless heavens

though all they’ve ever really done is heal?

And why slash out in your anger

like the moon at everyone

when you should know by now

better than anyone

that whenever you do

it’s the sword that bleeds to death?

And you say you’ve tried to live decently

in an indecent world

but it’s a shame

you’ve never walked barefoot anywhere

without your morals in your hand like shoes.

That’s just the mud and water of it

between your fingers and your toes

but I’ve never joined a Buddha

eating flowers for lunch

who would have it any other way.

Or as Solomon said to so and so,

on his way to the temple

to set an example,

half a baby isn’t the same as a whole bunch.

And then broke down in tears.

We all have our fears and illusions

but isn’t so much suffering in the world

generated by the fact

we cherish our misery

like self-inflicted voodoo dolls

we won’t let go of

because nothing else

looks like us into the void

and sees nothing that looks like us

looking back with stars in their eyes?

But what a surprise to be here at all

stepping in and out

of these coffins and lifeboats

paired like shoes under our beds

where they gape

like mouths before the open sea

that has washed them ashore

like dust out of its one good eye

we just flew into

like birds against a windowpane.

And even more of a wonder

is the day you discover

you can taste the full harvest

in every crumb of a dream

and even in the lamp

that’s gone out in the night

clarity is still faster than light.

Within you I swear

on all that is human

are worlds within worlds

like the spherical mirrors of the morning

hanging their eyes like jewels

in the webs of the dreamcatchers

that looked everywhere

through the spiritual lost and founds of the light

but couldn’t find us until nightfall

when we each came out like a star

above our own manger

and the darkness was sweet with gifts.

The blind don’t diminish

the brightness of the mirror

when they hold themselves

up to it like a shadow

and even when your eyes are open

you don’t add a feather of light to the shining

though you burn like Icarus without a starmap

by flying too near the sun

beyond the heels of your aspiration.

And even when we are crazed moths

in a straitjackets of flesh

seeking asylum in the fire,

isn’t it the Promethean nature

of every living creature

that has ever stolen from the gods

even in a state of ashes

not to be bound for long by anything

that isn’t out of reach?

It’s not the art of a petty life

to know how to long

for the impossible for years

without disappointment

knowing that if appearances

can be deceptive

then so must be the illusion

when anything disappears.

The important thing is not

to try to attain anything

by reaching out

a finger shy of God

for things like life and love and light

as if you were a dead battery

asking the stars for a jumpstart

when one of the myriad truths

of the dark matter at hand is

you don’t have to work hard

to earn your own gifts

like a beggar in a palace

that doesn’t recognize her own face

looking down upon her

like her own reflection in the heavens,

as if her eyes always had to go

in the same place either side of her nose

and couldn’t flow along

with the shoreless starstreams

like easy fish dopaddling through space.

And if you must cry out

like an insatiable mirror

for things you’ve lost

or pine at the gate

of your own homelessness

like a long sad farewell

to all those things that never came

like the sea to your feet

as if every wave

were meant to fit you

like a glass slipper,

then I suggest

with only a whisper

of night in my voice

to tempt the light out of hiding

that the next time you cry

like a wounded sword

that no longer divides

the empty grotto of the pain

that separates lovers

like two halves of the same brain,

look up at the nightsky

as if you were looking into the eyes

of your own prophetic tears

and see and be more deeply

than any kind of telescope

or wishing well

in every single one of them

the dark pregnant mother

of the billion chandeliers

that hang like stars above you.

PATRICK WHITE