WHEN I'M ALONE

WHEN I’M ALONE

When I’m alone

I want to be with someone,

and when I am with someone,

I’m twice as alone.

My unhappiness

is a snake-pit

I dangle my heart over

like a mouse by the tail

and when joy does show up,

a butterfly with resplendent wings,

it slowly adapts its palette

to the slag and soot and oilslicks

of the black orchard

shedding its petals everywhere

like micro-eclipses in hell.

And all the poems

I gathered like asters

from the autumn starfields,

all these skies that opened above me

as I walked down a long road alone

in darkness and light,

obedient to the wind and the shadows

that whispered move on, move on

beyond the journey and the arrival,

are merely a leaf,

a tattoo on the back

of a serpent of water

sliding downstream

like rain like mind in search of a course

that isn’t the cracked map

of last year’s desiccated creek bed.

My body is scarred, my heart

a voodoo doll

pierced by a thousand fangs

as it burns like a bee

in a rose of heretical fire

for refusing to turn my honey into venom

or conform to any magic but its own.

And there is no heaven

to appeal to as a last resort.

I endure what I endure

for the dignity

of my indefensible humanity,

knowing the pain

that sometimes turns my nerves

into stand-ins for the lightning

that keeps crackling my cosmic egg

like the paint of my last masterpiece,

also schools my blood like the wine

I pour out joyously

into the empty goblet of the mystery

whenever I host the moon.

Life is neither fair nor unfair

and the seeing, a vision, a poem

is always a bird

born and breaking free of your eyes

opening like a threshold

like a flower

like a crack of lightning,

like the world that hangs,

a veil of water,

from the ends of your eyelashes now.

Love is great, love is much, maybe all,

and the being here incomparable,

and the mystery always

whispering in a field beyond its own compass,

and the wind that tastes of birds,

and the light that tastes of flowers,

and the fountains of darkness

where God washes the stars off her face,

will always urge the extinguished branch

of an astonished pen

to blossom into a poet.

Are the dead any less creative

than the living?

If they don’t come from anywhere

how can you ask where they go?

If everything is the unborn energy

of a dancing god

with worlds in her blood

how can even a blade of grass perish?

This world, this life,

this ungraspable now of awareness

is the passion of a goddess, not a passing thought.

Beyond this riot of blessing and anathema,

this racket of loss and acquisition,

of birth and murder,

there is a silence

deeper than the space

between breaths,

an abyss without longing

that knows you from within

as the fire knows the flame,

or a woman,

the haste of her lover.

If you think you know something,

cast the thought down

as you would a venomous serpent

or let it strike;

even the poisons

can unspool you like wine

in this delirium of life.

And isn’t it more than could have been asked for

just to be here

under a sky

spun finer than the silk of diamonds,

breathing the stars in and out

like trees?

I have been silently and eloquently

stupefied by the wonder

all my life;

and urgently moved to explore

the great ocean of awareness

that intrigued me to experience myself

as the world,

I put to sea with a leaf for a sail.

We must become

more intimate with our vastness, learn

to listen to the whisper

that has always been us

in our own depths.

We have depleted our preludes of awe,

the spirit slags in the pit mines

of our complacent arrogance.

Our own creations

amaze and lull us away

from the sustaining abundance

of what was given spontaneously.

What do we know?

Why water?

Why stars?

Who is it that asks the question?

The fluid continuum of the mystery

is a waterclock

and every receptacle, an era.

And science can advance the shadows of life,

but the answers eventually fall like leaves

and no one knows how to account

for the stars that root in the duff.

What each of us sees

when we see deeper than blood

over the course of a lifetime

are the eyes of the goddess

when she looks at us.

What we are is our own creation,

curse and blessing alike.

You created heaven.

You created hell.

Experience is just the metal

shaped on the anvil of our hearts

into edges that kill like life,

the plough drawn from the stone,

not the sword,

or blades behind the door

that wound like serpents.

You can enlighten or eclipse

the iron in the ore

by pouring it

into a heart or a bullet.

You can make a nail

and build a house

or crucify a teacher.

PATRICK WHITE

THE NIGHT'S A BLACK HOLE OF A BEGGING BOWL

THE NIGHT’S A BLACK HOLE OF A BEGGING BOWL

The night’s a black hole of a begging bowl

that doesn’t know what to ask for anymore.

Shall I throw the new moon of another beginning in

like good coin of the realm, in passing,

or bite the bullet of a counterfeit eclipse

in the silver silo of the dark abundance

I’m trying to trigger into stars again

like apocalyptic insights going off in my brain?

The heavens roll like an old thirty-eight

I raise to my temple for old times’ sake.

But the gate I used to close behind me

in the high starfields to keep nothing in

is hanging on like a lapwing by one rusty hinge

to the wing and the prayer it’s dragging on the ground.

It’s getting a little late for suicide. The timing’s

overtaken the importance of the content.

And this close to the end, it would be a shame

not to see yourself out like friend in the doorway

saying farewell to yourself as you say in return

I’m glad you came to the stranger whose threshold

you crossed like a star in transit at zenith.

My pulse is still hammering swords of light out

on the anvil of my heart for me to fall upon,

but lately I’ve been bending them like horseshoes

to put them out of use and return them in tribute

to the water sylphs in the sacred pools of my mindstream.

Inspiration ages into crazy wisdom that still

doesn’t take its own advice but never fails to sing

in a voice worthy of a wolf or hermit thrush at moonrise.

I’ve been firewalking my way through this

long, dark, strange, radiant dream since I first

opened my eyes and the stars began to shine

but I’ve never lived the same thing twice.

Though the morning star falls like Lucifer

in the false dawn of enlightenment, the abyss

cannot be bridged by anyone’s trajectories

however high we ascend, how ever deep we plunge,

until we’re burning like maple leaves and shooting stars

in the second innocence of our return journey back to earth.

Fletched arrowheads of the sky, even the birds

falling short of the unattainable miss the mark

and return to the green boughs of their beginnings

just like the flight of these words in the sunset

as the night overwhelms us all unspeakably

with the proto-nostratic of the stars

like a mother-tongue of light that leaves nothing unsaid

in the autumn darkness fragrant with the decaying dream grammars

of the dead slipping their shadows like secret messages

under the door of the book we’re writing between us,

the beginningless prelude of the endless epilogue

of the memoir of the love life we had with Venus in Virgo

when the new moon was in the claws of sensuous Scorpio.

Big, red-hearted, archaic Antares

threshing the green wheat of Spica

as if the harvest had been achieved before the seed was planted.

Just because we die doesn’t mean that life

is finished with us like the draft of a manuscript

we threw into the bonfires of the maple trees

to inspire our ashes to rise out of the open urns of our firepits

like the feathers of a dragon enflamed by the wind

so our spirits could ride their own legends a breath

higher and closer to the stars every time we open our wings

to re-read the lyrics it took a lifetime to write in scars

like thorns in defence of the mystery of the black rose

we were happy to bleed for as if our blood had no other use

than the ink in the pens of these leafless woods

dreaming of new foliage in the spring returning

like the plumage of eagles to the lonely flight feathers

of their skeletal quills. Fossil constellations

in the darkness that whisper between the lines

of the alpha and omega of the life themes that once ran

like purple passages of the mindstream

that can still shed light on our afterlives in a book of shale

long before we had eyes to read what we were writing

like loveletters to ourselves on intimate terms

with the inconceivable solitude of this distant future

we’re all living now in celebration of yesterdays yet to come.

PATRICK WHITE