THE SNOW A SILENCE WHITER THAN LAST NIGHT

THE SNOW A SILENCE WHITER THAN LAST NIGHT

The snow a silence whiter than last night

and the sky, a red violet. A mysterious rose.

As if the night were blushing at something said

that wasn’t meant to be disclosed.

I feel cramped without the stars, embedded

like a hibernating frog in my own starmud,

my bloodstream reconfigured as the thin thread

of a red alcoholic thermometer, though I don’t drink.

Nocturnal solitaries huddle their way through the night

like dark comets past the unwary mirrors

of the nightwatchmen working on their novels

as if nobody were watching. I people the abyss

with my life and let my mindstream decide

where it wants to wander through its own timelessness

as if the past, as well as any future I could imagine

could take the lead at anytime from compliance

with the present, and it wouldn’t make

the least bit of difference. Three waves

of the same oceanic awareness. Three talons

open like the triune esoteric crescents of the moon

and one hawk blooms like a poppy in the snow.

My imagination isn’t a cry I follow

deeper into the woods of a hidden mindscape

as if it were mapping my eyes like stars

it had never seen before and was wracking its brains

to come up with names that made it feel less homesick.

It is me. Like a nightbird is the child of the wind.

Like a song whose dark secret is a longing to live.

Like the heart of a stranger is the hearth of his homelessness.

I am the evanescent foundation stone of my own fire.

Like the moon, a lantern in the arms of my own journey.

I gather the fruit of a rootless tree and it tastes

like the voice of the sun and the moon waxing lyrical

as the water and light of the alpha and omega

of sacred syllables, with the third extreme

of the earth in between shining in the middle intensity

of the three wise men in Orion’s belt

just before the dawn pales the seeing-eye dog

of blind Osiris blazing like an underground root fire

set below the treeline of cedars ageing on the hills to the west.

I remember the lovers I carried both ways

across the thresholds of a burning house,

and what I’ve made of my sorrows are wildflowers

that bloom for a night in a garden that tends to itself.

If my children are lost to me as they are,

I don’t ask my imagination to explain why anymore.

I let it drink its fill of compassion from my heart

like a bottomless well deeper than the stars are high

and I leave my door ajar for the dead who still call me friend

to come in, whatever the hour, as often as I open it

to the apparitions of the living I greet like dream figures

who have just stepped into my intuitive vision

of not needing to wake them up until I do because

as I keep repeating like the riff of a mantra on a blue guitar,

mark one jewel like the third eye of Venus in the dawn

and they’re all marked with the same morning star.

I invite the darkness to enfold me within the pages

of its imageless book like the godhead of the great void

revealing a story that keeps growing in the telling of it

as the mindstream changes the tempo of its narrative theme

from a pulse, to the merest fragrance of a melody

expiring like the last breath on the deathbed of bird-bone flute.

I am all skulls. I am all shepherd moons. I am space

that exculpates gravity to bend and relent at a black mass.

I refuse to imprison my enlightenment in a church

and get by with finding my way by a candle

that casts as many shadows as it illuminates.

I put my hands up over my eyes like the wingspan

of an eclipse over a full moon, instead of folding them

like birds roosting in a dark wood, praying for light,

and the stars that fire the eyes of the Queen of Heaven

grow brighter than I’ve ever seen them before.

PATRICK WHITE

QUIETLY AND LIKE A THOUSAND OTHER TIMES

QUIETLY AND LIKE A THOUSAND OTHER TIMES

Quietly and like a thousand other times,

I want to go. I don’t know where. It doesn’t matter.

This moment now is as homeless as it gets.

You can have all the entrances, I’ll take the exits.

Been so long I don’t trust what happiness

would turn me into now, though I think

it’s just as stupid to despair. I’ve let go

of the crows and doves of my emotions,

the quantum insanity of my thought experiments,

and if I ever had dreams, they’re lost atmospheres by now

like a childhood among the asteroids

that happened astronomically to someone else.

I started out on a qrailquest, a maculate clown,

a partial fool, and though I stayed in the shadows

of my right-brained peripheral vision, more

a magic circle than a halo, I kept my third eye

out for it in passing. Strange how time mutates

the journey without losing the narrative theme

of the original psychodynamic. Now

I’m drilling for oil on the moon like the watershed

of a full eclipse and I’m no more averse

to the darkness as I was to the light. Either way

there’s more sincerity in being lost than in being

insufferably found. However rough the storm

who ever comes to the aid of a lighthouse

with a heart as empty as a lifeboat and says

hey, get in, we’ll be swept out to sea together

where the earth can’t threaten either of us anymore?

Doesn’t happen. Much. There’s something fatuous

about security that takes your edge off like a keel

and leaves you bobbing on an inner tube way out

of your depths and your legs dangling

like participial jellyfish out of the mouth of Satan

like Brutus in the coldest ditch of Dante’s Inferno.

For lightyears I’ve practiced the furious discipline

of a purposeless art, and betrayed myself

in the name of compassion for the beautiful absurdity

of celebrating the immensity of my own impoverishment.

I passed the test I set for myself like a stranger

at a dangerous gate to prove I was still sincere

in my own eyes. And even when I suspected a trap,

still, I was a wild shepherd of wolves in the wilderness,

and I hopped the fence. Intense as a wounded exile.

As soon as anyone starts explaining themselves to me,

I immediately hear the bells of faithful alibis.

Unfamiliar demons arise like infidels of the truth

and I’d rather follow last night’s wolf moon down

below the treeline, than cry over another fool’s lies.

Not bitter, not overjoyed, my curiosity amused,

given how little hope there is for any of us,

I’d still rather err with the largesse of dragons

who know more about shining and burning

than the fire blossoms of a thousand Chinese box-kites

looking for the ley lines on tinfoil starmaps

that never lead anyone astray creatively, least of all,

stop longing for the more subliminal phases and shadows

of Venus on a moonless winter night at perihelion.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference

between artifice and a genuine sacrifice

but it’s a matter of taste whether you want

bubbles in your poetry breaking the surface

like effervescent sacred syllables at a seal hunt

coming up for air, or add your breath

to the nucleation of new worlds in hyperspace

by going along with the drift, the gist, the flow,

the probable concourse, the aniconic fractal,

the supersymmetrical elaboration of the rococo,

loading every rift with ore like John Keats,

or the wound of a rikku teacup at a Chanoyu

ceremony for the taste of Zen with mended gaps of gold.

If you’re still too distinct to tolerate life with a smile,

at least try not to wince, and pray for a day

when your facial expressions are not in the name

of trying to better anything that isn’t spontaneous.

You can call it mind, form, matter, and then,

you can reverse the spin into the opposite

thought, the annihilant emotion, and achieve

spiritual immolation in a rapture of nirvanic self-destruction.

Nihilism when it isn’t in vogue as fashionable sentiment

looks at the world and says it’s empty as if

something were there that isn’t anymore, an absence

that let the meaning leak out through their pores.

The little green apples of disappointment are sour

but if you hang around long enough, the return journey

is sweeter than the first, and disappointment

gets drunk with the wasps in the decaying taverns

plying the windfalls of dusk with nectar and ambrosia.

When things go supernova creatively, it’s not the end

of anything. It’s just one prelude over the line

like the Big Bang before it was wired for sound

like one hand clapping and all the lights going on

when you enter the house of life late at night

like a stray thought in your mother’s head

that nudges one stray photon into a collaborative avalanche

of interdependently originated genetic chain reactions.

You can be an inert gas and light up like a flavour

of neon or argon, with a fixed address

at the candy store of a highway motel, or more

significantly radioactive like a heavy metal

you can shine like an enfant terrible orphaned

by your own catastrophe in the name of art

as the potted plants wither on your lethal windowsills

for the lack of deuterium, and the waterclock

glows in the dark like a small zodiac on a stopwatch.

There’s no lack of fraudulent embassies ready

to forge a false passport with a name and a face

into countries that don’t exist without a border and a map,

but in all the years of my transits and zeniths, nadirs

and pain thresholds, gates, doorways, taboos,

dares, taunts, threats, holy wars and peaceful defeats

without any regrets, I’ve secured my passage

by exploring spiritually poetic realms without

a lack of identity in a universal mindscape

that doesn’t have one separate from everything else

for fear I’d give myself away as an imposter.

Why sip from the waters of life when

you can gulp the ocean whole in every drop?

Quick, quick, said reality to the passenger pigeon.

Humankind cannot stand too many birds.

PATRICK WHITE