EVERY LEAF, EVERY PAGE, EVERY POEM, A PATCH

EVERY LEAF, EVERY PAGE, EVERY POEM, A PATCH

Every leaf, every page, every poem, a patch

that’s been ironed on to a leak in the mindstream

I’ve been watching from the stone bridge on Gore Street

while the Perth Water Tower stands astride the Tay River

like a Martian colossus out of the War of the Worlds,

its reflection wavering like the dissipating wavelengths

of watersnakes as the moon ascends like a pearl

above the ragged willows pouring their hearts out

along the shore where a long overhanging veranda,

an iron stairwell and several backyards end at.

A commingling of poetry and prose, I’ve got

to walk several miles out of this sleeping town

before a Zen cowboy can take his spurs off in the wild

and wrestle his boots like sections of chimney pipe

in exchange for a pair of winged heels that can fly by night

like an autumn waterbird. Let my life flow on without me

like a spinal cord I’ve been hanging on to

like a rope I used to try to climb up to heaven on

like serpent fire entwined around the axis of my backbone,

on the flip side now, an anchor chain of chakras

tied to my body like a lifeboat my heart isn’t in anymore.

I lament the dry paper that became of the orchids

and waterlilies, the skin of weathered women

or an aging snake that slipped out of itself like a condom.

Autumn in my earth mind, I’m consoled by the stars

gleaming through the leafless trees of my emotions.

The whole forest floor, a sodden library underfoot,

trying to get to the roots of things like etymologists

reverentially deciphering the cartouches of dynastic words

that were once as common as the Huron all through these woods

until smallpox, the Jesuit, and the decultifying schools

that savaged their magic with white, and taught them

to turn the other cheek to the dark side of the moon,

brought on an onslaught of the Iroquois who finished the job

a few beaver pelts, an arquebus, and Champlain

in a war canoe, without really wanting to, had begun.

Somehow their ghosts in the birch groves

make everything seem more human to a trespasser

that responds more like a guest at a seance

than the host of the exorcism that drove them

from their lands. The moon’s not a swan

and I’m not laying traps like a snapping turtle.

Nothing heals here, but the wounds seem more manageable

and death isn’t a dirty secret sequestered in a hospital.

Everything out in the open you can even

have sex with the stars and nobody’s eyelashes

are going to fall off like a haystack of pine needles

that blinked once too often at what they couldn’t believe

they were seeing without their death masks on.

I like the symphonic chaos of the place as life

over writes itself like wild grape vines climbing

a trellis of deer ribs like the palings on an unhinged gate.

It’s really just a matter of taste what you prefer

to furnish your solitude with. I like to spend my time

in the company of things suffering the same fate I am.

PATRICK WHITE  

A FEELING IN THE HEART THAT OVERWHELMS THOUGHT

A FEELING IN THE HEART THAT OVERWHELMS THOUGHT

A feeling in the heart that overwhelms thought.

Can the stars feel our pain like distant neurons?

Thorns blunted in moments like this, the hands of time

almost folded in prayer like the wings of a nightbird

whose lament has seized the air with something

so sad and true, everything that lives,

and everything lives, can sense it,

even though they can’t think it or say it.

The vigil of sentience is arrested by the same

mysterious note of suffering that binds us to everything

in the courage that it takes to live it beautifully

by burning with insight to flower compassionately

in the midst of the heretical flames of our own damnation.

The presence, the friend, the blaze, an affable familiar,

enlightenment or an expedient delusion of an hour or two

when pain isn’t the personal possession of anyone,

and a vision emerges that supersedes empathy

when even the demons cry alone for things they can’t explain,

too deep for tears, though they’re never far away,

when a kind of peace overtakes you from behind

and there’s heart break in the clearing of the clouds

and you know you haven’t lived humbly enough

to see it without fear, but you open your eyes

and look anyway and they’re seared

by the dragon of awareness looking back at you

as if you could feel every mystic detail of hurt in the world,

time past, present, and to come, all at once,

a bolt of black lightning splitting your bones open

like an oak to expose your heartwood to the stars

as if the scars just fell off a chronic wound that never heals.

And there’s no injunction behind this devastating insight

into the pervasive depths of the grief that must be endured

as one of the terrible conditions of life if for no other reason,

and reason’s always a small guess, than to live to be aware of it

and try to love one another better than we’re capable of.

To fail at what we’re trying to attain from the unattainable

because there’s no love in the acquisition of anything

we can get our hands on in a world of forms and dream figures

that are always passing away from us like roads

that leave us walking alone with the moon

for our only companion, wondering where the others went

who used to chatter in the trees like homing birds

about whether you were a threat or just another lost soul

going anywhere in the defeated hope that he might be found

even though what he seeks is doing the looking

and there’s nothing retroactive about our eyes

that can creatively repeat the immediacy of our seeing.

Eternity wounds the children of time like wild flowers

at the end of autumn, and the harvest dance is ruined by death.

And whenever and whatever we celebrate, it’s as much

of a protest singing through our tears like light

in the false dawns of our candles and chandeliers,

as it is a party. If we act happy, maybe that’s half the proof

we were born to be, even alone at night in the woods,

saturated with decay, trying to convince ourselves

all passage is the prelude to the renewal of a recurrent dream.

And may it be so. May it be imaginal and necessary.

May delusion always be the cornerstone of enlightenment

and the impact of meteors always splash us in diamonds

like the tears of the fires of life that don’t wash off.

May what’s already been given to you always outweigh

the reward of what you think you laboured for

so your gifts perpetually exceed the limits of your just deserts,

and the praeternatural walk beside you like the dark sage

of everything that remains to be known but can’t be

until you learn there’s nothing to master in the stillness.

In the silence. In the essential grammar of the abyss

which is us trying to express ourselves like mediums

of our own minds with these nouns of sorrow, verbs of bliss

of the whippoorwill, the hermit thrush, the barred owl,

the starling and the mockingbird singing without meaning

anything to anyone but themselves like an artist or a child.

The heart of the petty is always a compass needle

Zen-duelling over the proper direction of prayer

as if it were swinging a sword over your head,

but among those born demonically blessed enough

to be self-defeatingly great in the name

of a few noble absurdities they’d prefer to live than explain,

this feeling that flows through you like electricity

through a glacier, that fills you like a silo of suffering

is the spear head that’s embedded in the starmud of your heart

you can’t pull out and you can’t push through

given there’s no exit, no entrance on the enclosures of life,

whether it be a secret garden, or a famous grave,

or you just want to be let off your leash like a playful dog

to chase the nurses like gulls on the terminal night ward,

or not cry out in pain to prove you’re a Mongol of the soul,

this emotion that makes you feel so empty

in the light of the truth of the enormity of the pain

that’s been overcome by life through the agony

of everything that’s been endured for no one’s sake

to vitally accommodate the unassessible transformations,

of sentience adapting to its cruellest mutations,

and so surfeited with it all in the shadow of a lie,

this is the birthmark of that counter intuition

that makes life worthy of being lived against the odds

of ever being able to justify it to yourself or God, the zeitgeist

or anyone else in need of a proxy or a paraclete

to moderate the human divinity that’s been bestowed upon us,

at the very least, by virtue of our suffering

and the unknown voice in the void of its release.

PATRICK WHITE