ALL THESE BOTTLES WITH S.O.S. INSIDE

ALL THESE BOTTLES WITH S.O.S. INSIDE

All these bottles with s.o.s. inside

but not a genie in a lamp among them.

Occasionally the Cutty Sark

in a forty pounder of whiskey,

but the masts snap like matchsticks

whenever I try to pull them out

as if I were trying to give a caesarian

to the chrysalis of a dragonfly

that got turned around somehow. Too often

a viper body surfing the dunes of the Sahara

in the hourglass of a gamma ray burst.

A lot of starfish that have quit shining

that I pick up off this sad, far shore

and bury them in the starfish cemetery

each in their exact place in a starmap

that replicates the constellations perfectly.

It’s what the enlightened do when they’re bored

and there hasn’t been a word

they don’t want to hear from anyone

for lightyears. All the sages

have left the house with Elvis

and Morrison’s just turned the lights out.

Raw solitude underneath such thin skin.

Hush, the flatliners are meditating.

They’re putting transalpine creases

in their theta waves, hoping to levitate

like a lifeboat up off the rocks they’re scuttled on.

Neap tide in the affairs of providence

for barges and schooners alike I guess.

Met this man once who said he was homeless

then gave me his card with a name

and a home address, so I asked him

if he could spare any change for postage

and after that, his mail never came here anymore.

Just thought I saw a ghost, but now

I’m convinced it was only a reflection

on the rim of my chromatically aberrated glasses.

O, ya, or maybe they’re the magic circles I draw

around my eyes empowering me to exorcise

the apparitions as I please, or spiritual junkmail

that lavishes way more on the promise

than it budgets to spend on its fulfilment.

Whenever I want to remember how the truth feels

I run the blade of the moon along my tongue

and sit in a sacred place where two rivers

of lightning join to split the oak, and if the truth heals

hope it isn’t cruel to realize, even to myself,

that most of us are the unrealized simulacra

of things in accord with the contradictions

of what we once wanted to be. The palettes

of the lichens that mixed lunar blues and greens

on the rocks, are scattered all over the place

around here like folk art in a Zen gallery of minimalists.

What’s important, crucial, in fact, when things turn infernal

is to observe the protocols of hell if not the content

with unparalled grace and distinction. Demon up

until you’ve burned all the slag out of your field of view

like asteroids trying to make a big impact on you

like a swarm of blackflies buzzing all around you

like spy satellites and semi-colons. Until

their radios short out. And I’m awash again with stars

in the cooling silence of my dispassionate clarity

with a wry slash of a smile on the deathmask of my face

it would be uncharacteristically ignoble of me

to let anybody else see, even if they had

the eyes and the mirrors for it because

I didn’t abandon all hope when I entered here.

I transcended it. I got real wicked. And clear.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN I GET TO THE ROOT OF WHAT I REALLY WANT

WHEN I GET TO THE ROOT OF WHAT I REALLY WANT

When I get to the root of what I really want

it all comes down to the nothing that I’ve got.

If a mirror were to publish me the way I really look,

I’d look like a rootless tree, scattering all its leaves

and dropping its fruit like tears that got too heavy to bear.

I look at a beautiful woman now as if she were art,

a Caravaggio in a gallery, as my eyes are

just as happy to see, as my hands once were to touch.

Noli me tangere. Because I don’t love anyone,

not even myself. Love is a double-edged sword

that can’t dance solo, and my longing’s been

a wandering troubadour for so long now, I can

mark the eras of my life by the number of windows

I’ve stood under singing to the waxing moon as it opens up.

I’ve always been a foolish dream weaver

trying to make a waterbed out of a snakepit for two

knowing how long it takes for the flying carpets to wear through.

I’m Pictish enough to live with a blue body

covered in lunar tattoos, or play the sacred clown

so I can use my absurdity as an alibi for the loss of my innocence,

and everybody’s innocent at the beginning of love,

as if the moon were renewing her virginity in you.

I’ve lived with a lioness, two witches, an apostate madonna,

a beast mistress, one demon with juno, a couple of butterflies

that landed on the tip of the split dragon’s tongue

divining for water in hell a moment or two

before their flightpaths got so erratic I couldn’t keep up

and not wanting to fly wingman anymore,

tilted my wings good-bye, and banked back

into the depths and the heights of my reptilian solitude.

If things aren’t perfect after you get over the shock of moonrise

believe me, the night you stop blaming

the flaws in your telescope

or the cinders in your own eyes

and realize how much dark ore it takes

for a nugget of gold to cast it

like a mountain of shadows behind it,

you’d make a much better astronomer than you are now.

You’d be able to relate to the asteroids

as easily as you do the radiant rings and shepherd moons

with their alluring promise of a mysterious life

just under the eyelids of their ice-caps,

as you peer through the cracks in their cataracts.

My heart’s been savaged by firestorms of stars

sweeping across deserts of volcanic ash and pumice

by thousands of delusions arming themselves like mirages

to wound the very water they depended for their lives upon

because they didn’t think there were enough bubbles in the hourglass.

You wake up one morning and find the skull of the moon

polluting your wishing well, it’s time to pack up

and take your lute on the road again like uprooted rain.

Try for a graceful exit but if it’s a little more brutal

than your entrance, do the best you can one abyss at a time

so that when you’re on your death bed reviewing all this,

you won’t have to wince too hard

at all your futile attempts to remain indefensibly human.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN GRIEF GROWS SAVAGE AND THERE'S NOTHING TO HUNT

WHEN GRIEF GROWS SAVAGE AND THERE’S NOTHING TO HUNT

When grief grows savage and there’s nothing to hunt

and all your mandalas are turning back into cave paintings

running down a limestone wall like spears

in the tears of weeping shamans, and you want

to tear your heart out and eat it to nourish your emptiness

but you’re not sure if it’s still the noble enemy it used to be,

or if the power of its sympathetic magic has past

the expiry date, and you think you might be

the last of the big mammals to go extinct in the ice-age,

time to sit down on the ground and have a good laugh

at how the things we take most seriously in life

make sacred clowns of us all in the last analysis

just before enlightenment. Put your lifemask on again,

coax a star or a firefly out of the tinder of that nebula

you’re blowing on until you’ve got a good blaze going

then throw all your grave goods on it as if

you were sending them on ahead of you

while you danced the pain away like the sky burial

of the ghost of another age that’s been haunting you

like a glacier that’s slowly beginning to wash itself clean of itself

as the numbness in your heart thaws like a baby mammoth

that fell into a crevasse of ice, and your fingertips

are melting like elk horn candelabra at a native exorcism.

And, yes, it stings for a while just as things are starting

to warm up, but that too will pass like a wet snowfall in April,

when your blood will begin to flow again

as if it were teaching the wild columbine and gypsy poppies

to waltz to the picture-music of the wind without banshees

howling and scratching at your eyes like dead branches

as if they were raking their fingernails against the glass

of a cold, crystal skull disappearing like an ice-cube in a night cap.

Sit down on the ground and have a good laugh

on the tab of everything that’s ever wounded you

and you just watch how easy it is to wipe

that gruesome grin off the face of the moon

like the sabre-toothed Smilodon that mauled you

and replace it with the smile of a Chesire cat

that just ate the canary in a coal mine of fossilized constellations

because grief can intensify the darkness into diamonds

that can see through the translucency of the tears in your eyes

new stars breaking out all over like waterlilies in the night skies

waiting for you to name them and give them myths of origin

derived like starmaps from the legends of your own shining.

Eventually the jesters of crazy wisdom will come to us all

and wipe the tears from our eyes and paint stars in their stead

we can point out to the cloaked ones

under the covers of their death beds

as if the deeper and darker the night the better to see

trillions of fireflies flung off the wheeling

of the celestial spheres like compassionate insights

into what we suffer for, what we lose whenever

we try to possess forever by trying to pour

the universe out of the universe like a waterclock in Aquarius

when we’re already swimming through eternity

like Pisces and there’s never a moment that passes in life

that isn’t a vernal equinox in a locket we hold close to our hearts

that doesn’t bloom in the fires of enlightenment

like star seeds hidden under the eyelids

of last year’s dolorous windfall of pine cones

because however the wind screams

through the broken wishbones and harps

of our shattered limbs, our torn dreams,

the eighth time we get up from our seventh time down

we get up and stand our ground like evergreens in the starfields.

PATRICK WHITE