PURE INTENSITY

PURE INTENSITY

Pure intensity. The point of a star. Blue acetylene

to burn out the slag of the soul and burnish the gold

that pours from the ore like the full moon out of the new

without any fear of ever growing old.

Give up it all up like nothing less

than everything all the time

until there’s nothing left for death

to get its hands on. Nothing to curse. Nothing to bless.

But you can’t always tell which is which

as the witchdoctor minimalist

at the back of the wax museum

steps out of the shadows of his spider-web

and says less is more and more is less, more or less

as the crow flys. But there’s deceit in his eyes

and you haven’t got time to consider all that

when your hair is on fire like a tie-dyed comet

and everyone’s mistaking you as a sign

of their second coming, when all you want to do

is plunge your coma in the sun that shines at midnight

in every third eye of dew on the enlightened stargrass.

Everything passes, it’s true. But if you pass

fast enough, time stops, and that grave in the closet

you’ve been hauling around with you for light years

becomes as huge as a sky burial

at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, or the pyre

of your own skeleton stoking the fire

that’s boiling the marrow out your bones.

Stay inflammable like orchids and carnations,

waterlilies imported from your

igneous passion for the moon.

Don’t ever let the gods chain you to a rock

in the Caucasus for a theft of fire

they didn’t even bother to prove

before they put your liver on the daily menu

and sent vultures to peck your eyes out

like hors d’oeuvres. It’s ok to be a wildflower

and bloom in fire once every seven thousand years

like the return of a Buddha in an urn of ashes.

But never lend your third eye out to an arsonist

who says he’s having trouble focusing

and uses it as a lens to burn a black hole

in the middle of a poem that’s been taken

out of context like a table of contents.

We’ve got the stars for that, and who needs

another epilogue to keep the fire going

long enough to be the third man on the match

for a bullet you didn’t see coming like a space craft

because you were blinded by your own blazing?

Climbing the stairs to Joan of Arc’s place,

she was conditioning her hair with a fire extinguisher

and getting ready to pull up stakes

and move back to the country where you can see

six thousand stars with the naked eye

or you can jump through the fire

like a witch without being burned

by the Burgundians for reigniting France

without a permit in a month of unbearable heat.

Even though hagiographers prefer

the fragrance of their saints in urns.

PATRICK WHITE  

MOSTLY SAD

MOSTLY SAD

Mostly sad. Long dolorous drops of molten bells

tired of calling the faithful to prayer

and the cannon getting all of the attention.

No particular beef with life and only a few in it.

I’m reading poetry on my sixty-fourth birthday Saturday night

for my supper and the Canada Council.

A sticker for my license plate so I don’t get taken

off the road by a cop at a traffic stop,

and maybe, though it’s doubtful,

a free day or two to write without,

at this old stump of a desk like a snow hare,

the ferocious exigencies of an underwhelming reality

they haven’t found on the grid of their corporate greed yet.

Always try to put my heart into it

but right now I’m using my three and a half pounds

of cranial starmud as a doorstop to all my stargates

and I don’t really care whether or not

communication is blocked between me

and the fire hydrants sitting along the street

like squat little walk-in gurus with nothing else to do

when the Sky Dragon Restaurant isn’t setting itself on fire

but meditate full lotus while the heritage lamp posts

pray with their heads bowed like narcissi and daffodils.

And if you were to ask me how I was feeling

I’d probably say, today, all my emotions

are smoke without fire. Candle wax in daylight

with a little black wick in the middle

disgruntled it isn’t a fuse that’s lighting anything up.

Wonder if anyone else ever feels sometimes

their life’s a consolation prize that doesn’t console?

A rare singularity at the bottom of a black hole?

One of four prizes at the bottom of a crackerjack box?

Today stale bread has more character than I do

but, hey, it isn’t time to start feeding the pigeons

in Stewart Park yet, or filling a bucket of wild oats

I’ll still be sowing in the grave, to feed

Ian Miller’s big brass statue of Big Ben

leaping through the spotlight of a prime time moon.

Got one friend I can openly talk to in this town.

He’s a carpenter-cook and brings me dinner

when I’m down. He’s a man of the people

and I’m a somewhat embittered not so sacred warrior clown

surrealistically committed to writing things down

like a waterclock from one window to the next

as if my seeing were shapeshifting time

and I could take Arcturus going down

over the tarpaper rooftops of Perth

and burn it into my hard drive like an asterisk

on the computer screen of my third eye.

Live behind windows most of the time

like a deus ex machina with my three goldfish

in an aquarium because I don’t want

to be estranged by the conciliatory looks

on the faces of the workaday people’s souls

as I explain how hard I work like a madman

for half a century now, at not making a living.

And they all say, don’t worry, because they’ve

seen the movie of the agony and the ecstasy,

you’ll be rich after your dead, and it feels

like a community slap on the back of a corpse.

I don’t try to pour the ocean into a teacup anymore

and intuitively take the measure of everybody’s skull

like a phrenologist looking for the brim of the brow

to determine what’s full for them, and to each,

like a vapour of mist rising off a morning lake,

or a sunami of stars like the Milky Way, I pour

Zen tea out like a Japanese Chanoyu ceremony

and talk about how you can turn anything you do in life

from making a chair, to raising a baby, or driving a back hoe

into the do of an enlightenment path. Nor is a calling

a job or a career you could marry to your daughter

and be happy about, though way too many poets

seem to have forgotten that in the pursuit of their hobby.

If you’re not dying or living for it like a junkie, you’re a liar.

Insincere. Sine cera. A bust of Caesar made of wax

because there wasn’t time before the triumph

to finish it in marble. And if you get caught,

it would be wise to make him laugh at your duplicity

or your effigy could be next. Just a thought.

PATRICK WHITE

LOOKING FOR A LITTLE BLACK WATER AFTER THE FURY OF THE WHITE

LOOKING FOR A LITTLE BLACK WATER AFTER THE FURY OF THE WHITE

Looking for a little blackwater after the fury of the white.

Dark energy after the light as peace

settles down gently upon me,

the sediment of the eras and rivers of my life.

And this cool night in early autumn,

a woman in a dark cloak and hood

I could almost caress if I could just breathe

a little more deeply than the abyss

I’ve been dogpaddling in because

there’s nowhere else among all these stars

I can swim from the shallow end of myself

into the watersheds of my last drowning.

And there’s an unprescribed silence,

a herb of the moon that’s salving the wound

of the lunar thorn I just pulled out of my heart

delicately with my teeth. I’m trying

to tune my spinal cord to the guitar string

of the Tay River, so I can resonate in harmony

with the flow of things. Starfire walking

on the water of the mindstream without

the crutch of a miracle to help bear me up.

It’s not so much a matter of power or self-discipline

as it is well within the spontaneous capacity

of everyone’s emptiness to do so because,

labour exhaustively as we do just to find the path

let alone stay on it, all we’ve had to do

right from the start, is to let life

give us a narrative of our own we can be true to

as it makes you up going along with it

like a lonely survivor singing to himself in a lifeboat

at the last watch of the night. Arcturus

at the tip of our eyelashes, enmeshed

as it sinks in a western treeline of beached shipwrecks.

Reach out, but don’t grasp. Accept and let go.

Scatter your blossoms, even when you’re

down on your luck, like ripped up lottery tickets

whether they end up in the gutter

or on an impressionist table cloth somewhere

playing checkers with a patient still life.

I’ve seen whole Japanese plum trees in blossom

be brushed aside like perfect haikus

by a street sweeper at three in the morning

when no one else was watching but me and Basho.

My blood is saturated by an overdose of stars

and I can feel a light from deep within

rooting in my limbs like nightfall

as my awareness is enhanced

by how much unknown compassion

there is the silence, love in a dark time.

Blue moons on the wild grape vines,

approaching the autumn equinox in Virgo

as if they could read my mind like a purple passage

intoxicated on the wine that can be pressed out of its own decay.

The waterlilies are gone with the fireflies,

and the reupholstered cattails are beginning

to show signs of wear already. And soon

the Canada geese will be flying high overhead

bearing the souls of the dead to new latitudes of seeing

where the starmaps fall from their hands

like the feathers and leaves of being

flowing along with the mindstream

like the wiverns, wavelengths, and water sylphs

playing on the shores of the Milky Way

with as many burning bridges,

as there are flames on the phoenix

in the immolated sumac, as there are eyes

to see across these circuitous waters

to the other side of where we’ve always been going

alone together with everyone who’s ever come aboard.

PATRICK WHITE