I STILL BELIEVE IN THE PURSUIT OF AN EARTHLY EXCELLENCE

I STILL BELIEVE THE PURSUIT OF AN EARTHLY EXCELLENCE

I still believe the pursuit of an earthly excellence,

not in name alone, but in the act of elucidating

even so much as a firefly’s insight into the darkness

to add your experience and confusion to the abyss

like a myth of origins in progress, is a noble calling,

a privilege accorded by the moon to wear the hide

and head of a wolf when the spirit howls in longing

to lift the agony of humans up to the stars as if

there were no greater sacrifice we had to give than this

that makes us peers of those fires, eye to eye, mirror to mirror

as above so below, the jewel of compassion in the slag

of our suffering, the beauty of the rose in the midst of its thorns

weeping holy blood on the skulls of her prophetic children.

A poet among people, a voice, a hermit thrush or an owl,

a red-winged blackbird on a dead branch or a crow

on the cabled bridge of the green blackberry,

or an indigo grackle, the eclipse of the mourning dove,

regardless of who or who isn’t listening to the wind

rasp over this desert of stars in an hourglass

like the wavelength of a serpent of fire as a sign of intelligence:

Say what is uniquely human about you so that

others might recognize themselves in the music.

Mourn as you must as if it were your funeral

you were going to as one day it will be,

your ashes in the locket around a loved one’s neck,

and break trail along the way as you explore

the wilderness of your loss so that others might follow,

assured by the dolmen of your presence in their solitude

the dangers of the journey are humanly surmountable.

A poet among people, that’s what you can say to yourself

on your deathbed and mean it in gratitude with a smile

at whatever shape of chaos you’re worshipping at the time,

you had a summons to suffer, praise, rejoice, mean and go mad

on behalf of other people, you, a self portrait of them.

Your love of them voluntarily going into exile,

or driven into it by the very ignorance you’re dying to overcome,

to know their homelessness as if it were a threshold your own,

to sow the available dimensions of the future

with metaphoric weeds and wildflowers in the starfields

so we don’t forget what all the fuss about enlightenment

means to a species rooted like a waterlily in its starmud

as if that were the dark genius behind all that shining,

the apex, the acumen, the anthos, not the denouement

of our flowering, and no future habitable that isn’t freely human

to express its awe and wonder at being imaginatively alive

like a purpureal crocus under an eyelid of opalescent snow.

Poetry is the discipline of a crazy person

who walks wisely among people half-fearful

of how fiercely vulnerable you must become to love them

as if there’d never be anything in it for you,

the most indefensibly human of them all

o so much more substantial than your dream figures

once you wake up, stubbing your heart on the rock of the world,

a razor blade to the artery of the rose that bleeds

just a profusely as you do when death cuts obliquely

into the stem and presents it like the ear of a bull

to the moon in a sacred brothel around the corner

opposite the Iseum where they make the partial whole again.

Incited by life to be demonically playful in the darkness,

angelically withdrawn like the stars and shadows at noon,

cherish the inconceivable nights that are not rewards

for anything you could have done or earned, as love

and inspiration aren’t, and marvel the more

at the strangeness of the miracle that things are this way.

Exhausted mid stride between the noon and dusk of your life,

don’t underestimate the mysticism of action

in the mundane labours of the day responding like bees

to the floral opportunities of tending the larkspur

like a voice coach pinging a tuning fork on their stamens.

Work at nothing that isn’t a form of worship

that demands your passion. Not to be fascinated by your life

is a child labour sweat factory of human enslavement.

The petty won’t brave their own happiness

nor that of anyone else, but the generous will

who understand that happiness is a grace of the heart

that happens to you from the inside out like a fortune cookie

not a law of causality misery is endlessly trying to repeal

beyond a reasonable doubt of ever coming true.

But seldom a joy without a bruise for a poet

whose bell of sorrows depends like most humans

as much upon the rain as the light to ripen

into the warm sugars of life like wild apples at sunset.

The eyes that look the deepest are usually the saddest

like housewells anyone’s free to draw from

but god, what poignancy of light smiles favourably

upon the faces of the tragically fulfilled

who lived out their singular prophecies

to purge everyone’s terror with empathy for their fate.

Arete, excellence. Aristos of merit. Beauty of soul, mind, body, heart,

the quality of your awareness, the largesse of your experience,

the natural humility of the bow you return to the mystery

of a tree in bloom, and the wisdom of an old stump,

not in the way of perfection, but the brilliance and courage

of your failure to attain the unattainable, enlightenment

the ultimate defeat for the benefit of all because it’s never complete

even when the Buddha goes straight to hell like an arrow.

Not void bound, bless the intuitive disobedience of the poet

who burns in the flames of her most sacred heresy,

savagely curse with compassion the erosive injustice

of the greedy legislating impoverished standards of living,

raise your voice when you see murder being done

so your silence isn’t complicit and the power of your rage

mollified by the slag of association that blunts

the edge of your sword when the only mercy is a quick kill

with a sharp blade and you go to it like your own execution.

I don’t care if you’re a junkie sleeping on a car seat

on the back porch of a crack house in the summer,

wondering in a moment to yourself if the stars ever weep for us,

or an associate professor of English at the University of Victoria,

cherishing a pair of thin leather gloves some raving beauty

left in your office and though she never returned

to reclaim them and you as for years you hoped and hoped

still rot like black banana skins on your windowsill,

a divorced housewife doing investigative forensics

on what happened to her life at the kitchen table,

share whatever starfields you’ve sown with tares or wheat

as if there were always enough bread to break with everyone.

Take the gold coin you call a career from under your tongue

like a false moonrise and washing your corpse

in your own grave, take the edges off your sphericity,

average the crucials out like a pebble or a planet

in the great tides of life you’re immersed in

like a human panning their own starmud for a little more light

to be shed in the depths of their oceanic awareness

than there was before you showed up like one bright fish

and lit your cells up like votive candles dedicated to the dark

and started seeing things by the light of your own life,

not the Rosetta stone of three dead languages

that never spoke from the heart about the ruses

of being human that get us through the darkest nights of ourselves,

so when someone takes a greasy volume of poems

down from the shelf, the cover worn off, the glue

of the perfect binding crumbling like dreams

in the corners of their eyes as they wake up,

and they’re shuffling loose pages as if they were

paginating a deck of cards, or trying to keep

the leaves of an autumn tree together, though you’re dead,

though your tongue is a leaf on the wind

and your eyes are clouds, your breath gone proto-nebular,

and it’s three in the morning, and the solitude is withering,

and insanity is grinning in their face as if to say

you always knew this is what it would come to,

and they reach for you like a home-brew of magic syllables,

yarrow sticks and tea leaves, liver spots and fossils

in a bonebox at the bottom of your skull cup,

write in such a way they don’t just read what you’ve said

but sit down on the ground with a friend they can share things with

and break your book open like a loaf of bread

spiritually cooling on an open windowsill as fragrant

as white sweet clover growing along the roadsides of paradise,

but as substantially nurturing to life as compassion for the flesh.

PATRICK WHITE  

YES, I LEFT YOU, CRYING IN THE NUDE LIKE INSPIRATION

YES, I LEFT YOU, CRYING IN THE NUDE LIKE INSPIRATION

Yes, I left you, crying in the nude like inspiration

at the end of the driveway while the trees

were tearing up a manuscript of leaves

they’d written like silver Russian olives for the moon.

I could hear you trying to smudge my name

like the misbegotten house of the zodiac

from the blackboard of your teaching starmap

several Magellenic Clouds down the dirt road

swearing my first magnitude stars were all tinfoil

not worth the light they were confederately printed on

as I drove away like a space probe into the dark,

trying to keep ahead of my own prophecy

and never come back, no, never like a chimney spark

to that smouldering fire that never broke into flame.

I wept in the smoke of your acrid oak

that hissed and bubbled like spit from a cobra’s mouth

long enough. Go, little woman, like a landmine

that thinks everybody’s dying to step on you

all the time and have their arms and legs blown off

listening to you apologize for not recognizing me

even though I called out that night’s pass word,

love, love, love as if I weren’t behind enemy lines,

as you stitched my body parts back together

like a prickly pear or spiny sea urchin with a defensive attitude,

trying to shine your best light on it like a candle

in a concentration camp you held my feet to

like birch bark and a funeral pyre of kindling

to the heat of your fireproof desire to be inflammable.

Yes, I left you, with your mouth gaping with incredulity

like the larger land mammals at the end of the last ice age

glorying in the freedom of their new found extinction

like a Dyer wolf pack tired of howling at the moon

that kept turning her back on them like lunatics

that couldn’t carry a tune like that chip of a bluebird

you carried on your shoulder to piss the world off.

The buzzing of innumerable onomatopoeic Tennysonian bees

isn’t a guarantee that your locust trees are full of honey.

Or the bulb of the moon you buried in my starmud

like a prophetic skull you never wanted to listen to again

was always the best judge of the daylilies that kept

breaking into flame between us like a rootfire of unquenchable sex.

Even when my lighthouses were turned thumbs down

on the latest of our famous west coast shipwrecks

I was only ever trying to put the torch of stars I bore for you

out in a tarpit with the eyes of a volatile dragon

to get you to spread your wings like a field fire

that knew how to green the short straws of a scarecrow

at a ghost dance that could rain on the ashes of everything

we wanted to bring back to life again and again and again.

Because when you said yes to being loved, firefly,

your light was inextinguishable and I could feel in my blood

as I approached you like a heretic the axis mundi of the stake

he was happy to immolated at like a Luna moth driven mad

by a female jinn enflamed by desire without smoke,

a thousand buddhas regretting they ever escaped suffering

by refusing to climb a ladder of thorns for the sake of the rose

they uprooted like three wishes any one of which

could annihilate you in joy wholly absorbed

in the false dawn of nirvana the distinction was lost upon.

You could overwhelm my body at will from the inside out

with the spell you cast on my blood like a hunter’s moonrise,

a lotus unspoiled by the slum she was rooted in

like enlightenment in a swamp of delusion

where the snakes swallowed the frogs like koans

head first until all their cannibalistic taboos

reversed the course of the curse and started

speaking in tongues of serpent fire like kundalini haikus.

I bent the blade of my sword in tribute on the waters of life

I had tempered it in like an igneous alloy of carbon and iron.

Night and blood. The mysterious appeal of a woman in hell.

Not so much dangerous because she was beautiful.

But beautiful because she was a risk I had to take

as she, for her sake, so an angel could fall from paradise

and a demon could rise from the underworld of half-lives

that could look the light straight in the eyes

like a black hole or full eclipse that was never the first to blink

when she spread her cowl like a Venus fly trap

and began to dance like a wavelength for my prophetic skull.

More Orphic, I think, than Judaic-Christian served on a silver platter.

I’ve always preferred to wane gibbously past my prime

like a ghost returning to the scene of my lyrical dismemberments

to add a few light touches, metaphorically, like star sapphires

to the mystic ferocity of the dark desires in the eyes of the myth.

PATRICK WHITE

WILDER TIMES THAN WE THOUGHT THEY WERE IN THE MOMENT

WILDER TIMES THAN WE THOUGHT THEY WERE IN THE MOMENT

Wilder times than we thought they were in the moment,

savage intensities cultivated in the name of art,

the children of the bourgeois afraid of violating

the mystique of genius as if there were a lumpen proletariat taboo

like a magic circle drawn around it, cordons of spinal cords

at a premier of the polymorphous perverse

melting down like emotional nuclear reactors

irradiating Pleiadic insights of white phosphorus

like jelly fish trying to plug into the scene.

First magnitude stars that weren’t quite sure

whose legend they were shining in

as long as there were something Icarian about it

and infallibly tragic, as if to be destroyed by your gift

were certain proof you were a snakecharmer

with a talent dark enough to curse your own blessing

in the sacro-sanct way sacrificial heroism

is a judas-goat for the gods to coax them out of hiding.

What addictions, what madness didn’t we tolerate?

No weirdness, no twisted perversity of fate

unacceptable in order to keep up the morale among ourselves

that our own derangements were liveable humans.

Stoic sobriety with a touch of the infernally noble

as long as there were enough star power

to be derived from it extemporally to fool yourself

you’d been to hell, you’d conversed with the gibbering ghosts

in the underworld, and now you were ascending from Hades,

empty-handed, except for an abalone inlaid guitar,

a voice, a repertoire of songs you used to sing

from coast to coast like a ghost at your own seance,

or if you were a poet, three books under your boa skin belt

like wampum, a wounded heart channeling Horatian odes

to staunch the bloodflow like a hemorrhage of fire.

We lived as if we were always spitting into the face

of librarians moved by poetry enough to write about

making raspberry jam in their amazingly savoury kitchens

and that wasn’t very right or nice of us, regardless

of whether they deserved it or not, but it would be

less than frank not to admit how alarming it would be

not to be able to muster a cobra of spit the same way now

to punish the eyes of the snake-oil salesmen

with a taste of their own medicine for fouling

the housewells of the muses with all that bleach and brine

they scour their poems with as if they were keel-hauling them

on the hull of the moon out of fear of drinking

from the same skull cup as everyone else on the nightshift

deep in the mines of their starmud working with

a candle and canary to bring the occasional jewel to light,

out of fear of getting some life under their fingernails

or contaminating their lips with human elixirs.

At least we killed like tigers, not tapeworms,

though needless to say, because that’s the way the world is,

we did more damage to ourselves trying to stand out

like someone real from the mob of the middling and maudlin

to suffer the black farce of our former radiance

lightyears later in this ventriloquial dawn

where wooden dummies have mastered the art

of throwing their heartwood around like the voices

of decoy waterbirds in front of a hunter’s blind

trying to bring the words of those who can fly

down to their level of poultry and pettiness.

Every quarter asked, every quarter given,

a disastrous expression of compassion,

but when you’re trying to live with largesse

as if you had a soul that was more mammal than reptile

of course you’re going to err on the side of generosity,

your winged horse spurred on by pussywillows and burrs

until you’re thrown off by a star under your saddle,

the dupe of your own unaccountable gesture

as you ride off into the sunset with Don Quixote

feeling like Sancho Panza tilting at the futility

of counter clockwise windmills on lifelight savings time.

Too many swine. Too few pearls unwilling to be trampled

like the grapes of wrath getting indignantly drunk on us.

Don’t offer your tears and sacred oils to someone

with a drinking problem. Though I encourage you

to ignore my advice so you can be what I mean for yourself.

Incandescent ingratitude. As if genius

took its tragic lifemask off, stepped out of its skin,

tore the curtains off the windows like the northern lights

and showed you the blackhole of the ego in the spider web

that spun a myth of origin like a starmap that knew

only a few chords and barred its Fs as an excuse for music

that maintained the world began with an arachnid

but kept that fact hid from the frenzy of friends

around the streetlamp of a public image on the radio.

Ego. That paper dragon that likes to play with matches

creatively, a brush dipped in paint, a nib in blood

that flared up like a bouquet of sulphurous little chapbooks

straining to convince you their personality is black magic

once you get past the alibi of words that smack

of saccharine and formic acid, ants and stinging nettles,

and taste how shallow and unclever a cynical lack

of sensitivity to things ego doesn’t understand is,

to that mess of neurotic avarice that sticks like gum

that’s lost its flavour in the tresses of a flypaper muse

as it lackadaisically strums the guitar like a Ferrari

warming up, to disguise the fact, if you go by the work,

it can’t really play and the wheel hasn’t been invented for it yet.

Dramatic brawls at midnight, out on the street,

at the top of our lungs, embodiments of nemetic karma

defending principles willing to settle the score here and now

if you were crazy, drunk, or daring enough to risk

losing more than you ever had or intended to give

to substantiate your reality with fists that would later bloom

like bruised crocuses and waterlilies lyrically inclined

to deadly nightshade and moody orchids in an eclipse.

But most edged the Texas toe of their cowboy boot

up to an unseen line drawn in the stars like a Tropic of Capricorn,

that said for all your talk of figs and horns, a coward

goes this far and no further for self-preservative reasons

that have been canning him like jam since childhood.

More than one night I lay in the dark sobering up,

proofreading my name in the sooty contrails

of bic lighters on the ceilings of Ottawa city jails,

Orphically exalted to have left my mark

in an underworld anthology that didn’t depend

on a political jury of friends who elected things into print

as if they were pensioning off candidates for the senate

with two free copies, fifteen minutes max

at a mass reading, a minute on the local news

and enough notoriety to incrementally con

a few more false friends they might have been

wrong about you, and accordingly adjust

their parallactic affiliation with your twinkling.

My elders, the ghosts of older owls, the afterlives

of stars that had burnt out romantically on alcohol,

who spoke like legends of themselves in a refugee camp

for broken chandeliers and abused constellations

performing off Broadway like the loveletters of a mailman

who delivered them like the wind in a tree in the autumn,

since imprinted like the cambium of last year’s spring

in the hall of famous tree rings that have stopped growing.

Honoured with urns. But for awhile, precociously,

peers of mine, fish dying of thirst beside a freshwater lake,

artificial respirators crying out for back-up parachutes

because they thought it was poetically cute

to always be the one who was rescued from themselves.

Ego grease. Black farce of a circus on tour

with drugstore carnies, clutching at straws

like the rungs of a trapeze someone was always

falling from like a star you caught and put in your pocket

like a safety net that counted on your friends’ sense of timing

to save you from your own web like the spindle you made of fate.

Metamorphic larvae in the coffins and cocoons,

the lifeboats and chrysales these shepherd moons

moved into as if they were on a grand tour of the zodiac.

Pageants of wrecked talent showing up like queens

of stage and screen, who adorn your table

by letting you sit at it with them below the salt like a foodbank

as they told you lies about the famous fireflies

they used to cavort with like radical root fires.

Memories of the last literary scene I ever wanted to be in,

eyeless images of overcast dreams, the business

of art spinning the lack of imagination into

some tear drop of a bauble for public consumption

that made evaporation look deep by comparison.

Treacherous metaphors. Nasty similes

that thought they were teaching you a moral lesson

through petty betrayals of the trust you placed in them

against your better judgement, only to ignore

with Olympian indifference the kind of dung heap wisdom

that tried to disenchant you from ever trusting your likeness

in another again like the alienable bonds of mutual opportunism.

Old men now, many dead at the hands of their vices,

nine dog paddlers for every synchronized swimmer, prima ballerinas

that could really write and paint, sing and dance once,

crucible steel hammering out the slag of their impurities

like sparks that shone for a moment like starclusters

that hung in the air and then disappeared

into the great reservoir of one-eyed mirrors.

I can remember when that bag lady was a rose.

I can recall when his charm partially concealed and compensated

for what is so obviously feeble about him now

as he waxes mellifluously nostalgic, trying to squeeze

a drop of honey out of his stinger like the good old days

when he used to hang himself from the green boughs

and dead branches of poetry like a pinata of killer bees

coming on like a kite or Black Hawk sneakers tangled

like bolas and medicine bags in personably contemporary powerlines

you can still hear humming and hissing

like a red shifting snakepit gone long in the tooth

whenever it rains on the ashes of a smouldering guitar

trying to serenade the moon under her Medusan window.

PATRICK WHITE  

AFTER THE LONG LABOUR OF ASHES IN THE RAIN

AFTER THE LONG LABOUR OF ASHES IN THE RAIN

After the long labour of ashes in the rain

the phoenix is shrieking like fire into life again.

I can hear it in the valleys auditioning the mountains

like a voice torn out of the heart of pain.

My shadow is in complete empathy with the ghost

I cast like an imaginative projection of myself

into the emptiness of my crowded solitude

where everyone is recognized by the inside of their faces

in the light of the return journey to the seasoned innocence

of my homelessness beyond the gates I’ve passed through

like an earthly garden blooming in the star fields.

Singing again, as if the stars knew all the lyrics to the song

long before I opened my mouth to swallow their fire

without setting myself ablaze like a funeral pyre

gone supernova in a neighbouring galaxy.

As if a lighthouse off the dark coast of the shipwrecks

knew that timing was the medium of the message

and it was time to rise again on the updrafts

of these buoyant adagios of picture-music,

like a heart immersed a long time in the depths

of its own crazy wisdom abounding

in the bliss of an unknown treasure

rising like a lost continent that drowned in its sleep.

And even in the weeping for things that have passed

through the immensity of the solitude I was the last to leave

like the captain of a lifeboat going down on the moon,

an undiscovered joy in the way I learned to breathe underwater

in the ocean of sorrows that overwhelmed me

like the beauty of a rose that burned

like a torch of blood in the rain.

I’ve given up trying to save the world like a moral ransom

I pay to the one-eyed pirates of circumstance

for the redemption of a self that was more a mirage on the moon

chained like an empty cup to a wishing well

than real water that flows like the tears

of diamonds thawing like glaciers from my eyes.

And may all the wildflowers of this circuitous blossoming

astound the nostrils of God like a fragrance of music

growing like white sweet clover along the roadside.

May every firefly and lightning bolt of insight

illuminate the whole universe like the flaring of a single match.

Let the dead whose souls I bear toward the south

know that I remember their names like loveletters

I’ve sent on ahead like the return address of the future

that waits to encounter them again like birds

that came to the windowsill of this burning house of life

like the notes of a song from a voice well beyond

these spinal cords that bind us like kites to the sky.

I scatter my cremations like ashes on mirrors of ice

for those who would follow me to ground

like the cornerstones of a tent

pegged to the wind like a flower.

I gnaw on the dice of my bones

like a wolf above the timber line

mining the white gold of a motherlode of marrow

and I let tomorrow sing of the things tomorrow brings

like hungry lovers to the round table of feasting stars.

And bless the sword that guts me like an envelope

that bleeds like a wound of love that never scars

the words that are written on a magnanimous heart

that doesn’t pace the rate at which it gives itself away

like a poppy dreaming in a field of leonine dandelions.

And though I fall like an oak on a hill in a lightning storm

let me not live on my knees dumbstruck by the revelation

that burns in my heartwood like a calendar of fire

where somebody’s fixed the dates of spring

as if they didn’t want to forget how to be taken by surprise

like a scholar that can’t bring himself to believe

in the chameleonic nature of his own eyes.

Though I fall like a waterclock of rain from the sky

into the deepest blackholes of time, let no root say

it was ever denied access to my watershed

that even the dead were the guests of a living host

that welcomed them like the voices of a familiar solitude.

Uplifted by spirits of fire, stone, and water,

I’m flying through stars with my wings ablaze

like a comet that exalts in jumping for the sheer joy it

from the black halo that encircles the beatified sun

like the prophetic zero of the final outcome.

And I shall not set my circumpolar throne

on the hills of the skulls of my traditional enemies

nor abide by the jinx of the birds on a prayer-wheel

turning in the direction of cosmic destruction

like an ill wind fouled by the contagion of time.

Every moment of the day, every era of the night

I shall remember the infallible atrocities of blind religion

that gouged the eyes out of the light like gravediggers

cooking rocks in the shovels of the backhoes

rummaging through the remains of the resurrection

for the relics of the names on vandalized gravestones

weathered by the acidic rain of the great desecration.

A little bit of joy balancing on a perilous precipice.

I know about falling. I know the risk. Not a mandate

nor anything I choose to take as if the danger were all mine.

But just a little sweetness in life, a wild grape, the eye of the wine.

A moment stolen from behind the backs of the calendars

like a man in space, with no time to reflect on the outcome

of being younger than when he left. Not listening to signs

but resonating with the hidden harmonies of myriad symbols

arranging picture music for the eye and the ear and the tongue

like dew in the night, whole notes and semi quavers

on the staves of the dreamcatchers and spiderwebs

when the shining comes to the morning as unprepared as swallows.

All my Platonic ideals, the black matter of desire

in a goldrush of the heart that can’t hold anything back

in a Zen panic to stake its claim on nothing

as the fairest jewel of all to give back

to the ocean of awareness you retrieved it from

and hope the moon among the corals appreciates the gesture.

Buddha, too, had an ill-advised attachment to the unnattainable .

I won’t starve my delusions, just to please my insights.

My mirages drink at the same well I do without condition

and it’s ok if they want to leave their veils on too.

And I’ll observe an ethical truce with society

But more goes on in the dark, inconceivably,

than even the light could possibly visualize

on a cold seeing night from a mountain top

with an asphalt road that coils all the way around

like a serpent doing research into the seven ages of man

trying to keep its credibility up with the times.

On my left palm, the star of Isis, keeps me from drowning,

and in my left ear, enough gold, if I’m washed ashore

on some galactic island after another shipwrecked exemption

to burn me down by the sea on a pyre of stars this time.

I want to ingather my ghost out of the smoke, and watch it shine

like fireflies in the fog, like lighthouses along the coast

off the starboard side, looking for moonboats

on the slopes of the swells heaving easily

like bells full of emotion swinging out over the edge

to prove it’s not afraid of falling back

to the ground it arose from like a boy

daring the devil to an apple fight

in the crowns of the trees to see who

can climb high enough to scare the other down.

PATRICK WHITE  

COMPASSION IS THE SWEETNESS THAT ENTERS

COMPASSION IS THE SWEETNESS THAT ENTERS

Compassion is the sweetness that enters

the wounded apple of knowledge after

you’ve taken your first bite out of it.

It’s not an antidote to the facts of life and death.

And you should know by now if you’ve suffered at all,

and it’s impossible not to from the moment you open your eyes,

the night is not a reward, nor the lantern of the light

that goes before you on a graveyard shift of the stars.

Compassion is the oldest instinct of the heart

and first muse of the mind that can taste only

the blowing blossoms and bitter green apples of the spring,

gripe brain, before it ripens like a sunset in your blood.

That’s why the heart knows more about it than the head.

And I expect, on that basis, no one is more capable

of loving us who must doubt that we’re worthy of love

to live up to the truth of it than the dead who can open

the tiny koans of the seeds at the core of things

like the lockets of fortune-cookies that break

like twisted cosmic eggs in a rush to spread their wings

like waterbirds who write the lyrics of their songs on the fly.

Words for the eye. Words for the ear. Words

for the voice of the wind like black walnut trees

and kites in a storm. And if you really know how to listen,

I mean if you can hear the wavelength of a black snake

swimming across your blood like a mantra

of terrifying, beautiful wisdom that keeps its secrets

to itself, or hear the unfathomable oceans in the black rose

whose petals and eyelids are always smashing

like white eyelashes in a squall of sunbeams

against the breakwater of a white dawn that passes

like an albino eclipse in a moonlit leper colony

of extinct black rhinos. If you even remotely

hear what I mean when I speak like this sleepwalking

through a dream grammar like a prophetic skull in a trance,

words that dance like light on the mindstream

rejoicing in the clarity of the voice that expresses

the hidden message encoded in the genes of the fireflies.

You have mouths. Speak for yourselves.

Some like lighthouses along the banks of life.

Some like thieves with searchlights for eyes on a bomber’s night

when everyone is underground and the bummers are out

plundering the evacuated houses of the zodiac.

Might be the ravings of a star struck maniac talking to himself

to make sure nobody else is listening. Might be

the surrealistic lament of a Dadaist night bird

singing out loud in its sleep for things it doesn’t know

it longs for, or maybe a lunatic is waxing prophetic

in a labyrinth of his own echoes trying to sound his way out

of the mountains without end he’s being trying to befriend

like a cloud or an eagle silvered a moment

like the ore of a dream in the corner of the eye

of a moonrise coming on like a hurricane

with a black pearl in its teeth. The eclipse of a sacred lie

compassion concedes to an alibi without a myth of origin.

Compassion is the child of imagination that identifies

with its simulacra of suffering by applying the heart

like a bloodbank to the wounded eidolons of eyeless images

that didn’t know how to bleed, or breathe, or cry or see

until compassion tempered their impression of themselves

as paradigms of rationality, by shedding real tears

in an ice age of lenses that kept their illusory distance

from the stars that came out after the rain, wet and shining,

laughter radiating through our tears, because life isn’t a dry fire.

It’s the hand on the rudder of a lifeboat

that keeps you from drowning from the day you were born

in the undertow of the tides of the new moon

until the night of the full when you haul everyone aboard

who’s been swimming through glaciers of tears

like baby mammoths for the last twenty-five thousand years

afraid of extinction if they ever stopped to catch their breath.

Compassion is accepting everyone’s death as a portion of your own.

Everyone’s life as your third eye, a vital organ of your own body.

Compassion is an undisciplined action of the heart.

Compassion arises like a moonrise of inspiration

in the eyes of the older sister of the muses

who walks too much alone as if she’d devoted her solitude

to the suffering of a wounded stranger she met along the way

when she let her hair down like willows of rain

to cool the scorched earth and slake the roots of pain

until they bloomed like foxfire in the shadow of her passing.

Most poets sit around the lesser fires of their art

trying to divine the smoke of what’s burning in their hearts

like autumn leaves they’ve heaped into books

that smoulder in tears more often than they break into flames.

But if compassion turns her eyes toward you

like a star in the darkness beyond your blazing

the Milky Way runs like a bloodstream through your veins

and you see in terrifying clarity the great mystic details

in the deep watersheds of picture music efoliating

like wildflowers and galaxies, grails, fountains,

lunar herbs, and starfish raised up off the ground

to take their place among the shining, radiant with life,

in the low valleys and high fields of an imagination that heals.

PATRICK WHITE

THE GREY RAIN RIFFS ON THE WINDOWS

THE GREY RAIN RIFFS ON THE WINDOWS

The grey rain riffs on the windows

as if it’s been listening to too much rap.

Fragrance of gasoline blooming in the gutters.

People all look like daffodils in baseball caps.

Wish I wanted something enough to buy it again,

and it’s been a while since I’ve been with a woman

who wanted anything for me. I’m inside here

dethorning the intensity of the black rose

imploding under its own mass as its core

condenses in a withered star like a heart

whose light’s run out. The fire in my blood

took it all one nightshift further than red

and now I can see in the dark like a black hole.

Nightvisions in broad daylight. I can see the stars

shining through the smudged pearl of the sun

trying to glow its way through the clouds.

I can see the skulls of insurrectionist dreams

deep underground in the cults of my cells

trying to assess the direction of the bomb blast

to insure the maximum damage. Not all roads

are trying to make friends with people

who walk them like cowpaths littered with road kill.

It’s better to be lost as the lesser of two evils

when clarity scorches the heart radioactively.

Dissociation, Deconstruction, Disintegration,

I’ve evolved like a language into a grammar

of oxymorons just to keep my thoughts and feelings

together in a syntactical world of unpunctuated scalpels.

Alloys of a stronger metal are not estranged

like copper and tin from the cutting edge of the sword

by the colour of their skin or religion in the Bronze Age.

Love comes at me in the darkness of these depths

like a crossroads of light from all directions at once

by which I know the radiance that’s found me

is not just another flashlight that’s still looking.

And there are Sufis whirling like weathervanes

in blue woollen robes, and enlightened Zen masters

gently picking the fleas out of their chest hairs

and thanking the thieves for leaving the moon in the window,

and demonic demons with the insight of black diamonds

all telling me you lose control if you hesitate in the moment,

or stand up, sit down, walk, or run, but whatever you do

don’t wobble. And I plunge into the galaxy with both feet

hoping to make a big splash in the red tide of the stars

and I either drown in the light, or I end up

blowing hyperbolic bubbles into a bulky multiverse.

I haven’t turned my senses into lenses,

starmaps, and spectrographs, but I’m not blind

to what’s living under my eyelids in a chaos

of crazy-wisdom playing picture-music

in a band of clowns, just to get a good laugh

out the oracles that are prone to never

take their own advice so seriously

they couldn’t change their minds.

You can’t refit a round suggestion

into a square meaning, and it’ cruel to try.

I have long wavelengths of thought

that burn like iodine and salt in sea kelp

but I don’t whip the eyes of the tide

just to get things flowing like tears my way.

I don’t throw acid in the faces

of tomorrow’s beauty queens learning to read

the writing on the wall as just the wall’s way

of threatening you into letting it protect you.

I don’t boil kids in their mother’s milk

and I don’t practise the kind of spiritual judo

that uses a person’s best ideals against them.

Especially as I get older, I would rather be

obliterated by wonder and gratitude

that I got to be all this without any effort of my own

than have my awe underwhelmed

by petty renditions of the black farce

that welds some people’s eyes shut like

an eclipse stronger than the original bond.

But there again, if you’re happy being a scar, mend.

What could it mean to the stars

if you can’t see them during the day?

And I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again

to those of you who have taken a more radiant path,

blazing is a kind of blindness too

that keeps you from seeing the diamond in the coal.

Yesterday oxygen was alien ore as toxic

as the love apples of superstitious tomatoes

two hundred years ago it was death to eat.

And it’s poignant to remember that any ground

you plant your flag in like a flower without a root,

like a placard without a rally, is

a charged particle field that reverses spin

synchronistically like a revolution

in an hourglass relationship with what it overthrew.

Consciousness is necessarily bifurcated by its blossoms

into two points of view, but deeper down

in the bloodstream of its darkest roots

it doesn’t make a distinction between an I and a You.

Subject and object aren’t separated

by a skin of water empty as the mirage

of a bubble within and lustrous as the stone

that broke the window without. This world

isn’t happening to you from the outside

and you’re not making it up within like a lie

you can tell your children about being alive.

No one’s wholly wise who still possesses a mind.

No one’s totally ignorant if they give

a red cane to a blind traffic light to see it coming.

I don’t trim the wicks of my comets

as if they were candles at a black mass.

I can breathe fire like Draco at the North Pole,

but when I’m not axially aligned with the earth

I can look into the eyes of my fiercest dragons

and see at the bottom of a telescopic well

millions of fireflies lost in a labyrinth of mirrors

looking for an insight into the nature of life

that would true all the others like crystal eyes

caught in the eleven dimensional net

of enlightened lies where time and the timeless intersect

and synteretic sparks ricochet like spiritual eagles

off the slopes of mountainous eras of grace.

PATRICK WHITE