IF I WERE TO SAY MY HEART AND MIND AS I WOULD

IF I WERE TO SAY MY HEART AND MIND AS I WOULD

If I were to say my heart and mind as I would,

no difference between the picture-music inside

I’m singing to myself, I’m being sung by,

and the world as it is when I look under

the stones of my eyes, amazed by how much life

goes unregarded, as if, ultimately, it were

none of our business whether we know about it

or not, but verbal expression is not thought.

Seeing is not the same as saying what you saw.

Life isn’t a state. Death isn’t a state. Being

and existence, and their opposites, are conditioned

by the authorship of those who try to define them.

If you beat the pinata long enough manna

falls from heaven, or the rain cools its lightning roots

with tears the wind will cheer up with a windfall of apples.

Why not? Life’s the engine of every move you make,

not a thing, not a force, but the indefinable

once you get past looking at your corpuscles

as if they were not yours, or worse, your source.

I live as if there were a sight in end to what

I’ve been vaguely labouring toward like a kid

swinging on the garden gate of my hapless beginning.

Chaos built the Taj Mahal. Give it an order

and it’s doomed to fall. Where did the flowers go

that were a moment of who I was for awhile

in this dream that never stops masking everything

in terms of something else. Say one thing, anything,

like a black walnut on the sidewalk that reminds me

of Rumi’s poem about a scorched, black future

where everything’s incinerated in a black hole

or a nuclear holocaust, and you elaborate a world

through the translators of Rumi’s words, not Rumi

as he knew himself before he went on changing.

Be a desert with the choicest mirages

your housewells and hourglasses ever envied

or wrap your mouth in mummy cloth

until the star storm blows over and you’re

not blinded by the blazing anymore

and you’ll start whining like the ubermensch

about nobody listening to Zarathustra

trying to enlighten everybody with his lantern

in the market. If you can’t see the supernova

in the candle-flame, adding more pixels

isn’t going to do you any good. Everybody

set themselves on fire. It’s Arab spring

in the middle of autumn. The nightingale’s wings

are the cage it defends like its freedom to sing

what it wants about the impositions of the deranged.

I’ve come back from a lot of holy wars I’ve lost

and won, that didn’t mean a thing, and what

have I got to show for it but a lost earring

and a child’s shoe? Horror is as intimate as love.

There are snakepits you fall into like a bird bone flute

that has to weave myriad wavelengths

into a flying carpet of picture music if you want

to get out without being bitten by a downed powerline.

Radical changes whose time may or may not have come.

So the year begins in the middle of an ice age

and breaches the Arctic as a sign of global warming.

I take my sleeve and wipe my breath off the window

to polish the stars like gold burnished by fire.

I imagine thrones because I’m a peasant who toils

with his hands in the starmud of his mind.

I wear rubber-boots like an insulated pair of plyers.

If you were to speak your heart and mind

as clearly as it’s impossible, would it make

any sense, even to you? You can make a seabed

on the moon, or you can step out of the crumpled sheets

like Aphrodite who associates sex with

the bloodstream of an earthly tide when the moon

crests like a lunatic with gravitas at a distance.

What did the man say? Intense heat, unusual sprouts?

Are there pilot lights on the stars? How far

to the next stone in the Milky Way do we

have to jump before we realize we’ve cobbled

the way with our prophetic skulls, that our lifeboats

are the ships of state that navigate the whale roads

hoping Moby Dick doesn’t sound like an ice-floe

and pull us all under because we stabbed it in the heart

like the albino eclipse of a utopian third eye?

Waking and dream are so quantumly entangled

in the net of Indra, dolphin drown with their gills

caught in the interstices, when you’re not asleep

and you’re not awake, and it could be

a mandalic spider web, the aura of a magnetic field,

a dreamcatcher, a boring starmap washed in

by the watercolours of the northern lights,

or the collateral damage of fisherman making

a living by walking all over their own tears

at the expense of the sea that sustains them.

My heart doesn’t beat for me alone.

My eyes don’t see a name on the book they’re reading.

I write but my mind speaks in the accent

of everything I do like the Tower of Babel.

Every wildflower in the field is a definition of life

in its entirety. What’s been said? Once you’ve realized.

PATRICK WHITE  

PINE GROVES ON THE BATTERED HILL

PINE GROVES ON THE BATTERED HILL

Pine groves on the battered hill

giving birth to a bell on the nightwatch

as the moon rises like a midwife with a clean towel.

Pine cones like pagodas enlightened into life

like the eyelids of a fire that passed through

this summer like a poet with a seed bag

of first drafts. Ancient melancholy, lachrymose

secret, I can feel the ghosts of things

I don’t understand, slow tears at the edge

of the grasslands they’re lost in at the river’s edge.

Should I care for a darkness I’m not meant to know

as the bears are stuffing themselves on town dumps

and windfalls to fuel the winter in their layers

of candle fat as if they were still worshipped in caves?

I sit around the lotus of my many-petalled fire

blooming in mythic shadows enlarged

by the coven of trees they’re dancing with.

Here evil isn’t deliberate, and violence is innocent.

The thieves take what they need to live

and leave the rest. I’m afraid sometimes,

but the beast in my blood is in accord with the risk

and the cold air smells engagingly dangerous.

A warm rose spills from the throat of a quick kill,

the only mercy available to a snow owl that has to eat.

There’s more integrity in dying alone

in the woods at night for indiscernible reasons

with perfect timing than there is in dying en masse

in a drone strike as collateral damage.

It may be preyed upon but the white-tailed buck

doesn’t feel victimized by the unlicensed culls of the wolves.

Nothing can happen to me out here

that the beaver and the muskrat don’t

have to live with as well where skulls

are flowerpots and the ants mulch the Monarchs

too old and late to make the trip back,

that sipped on milkweed unfouled by pesticides

until they pressed themselves, intact,

between the covers of a collectible chapbook.

I like poems from the heartwood

with the bark still on them and a growing edge

more than those that have been pulped and milled

through a creative writing school

that sits in the corner like a piece

of erudite furniture meant to impress

more than unjam a logboom with the pike of a pen

or offer anyone a chance to take a load off.

I sit on a glacial rock and it feels like

the throne of the Stone of Scone returned to the Scots.

I hear a twig break like the wing of a tragic nightbird

in something’s teeth, or the dead are walking

the way the Algonquin used to along this riverbank

without ever imagining someone like me

camped here painting their features in smoke

as if all we had left of our common humanity

were the stars that looked down upon us

with the impersonal compassion of the tears

of the pines in their eyes hardening like a river

in the approaching cold of the dragon that shed them

like incense over the pyre of a coniferous miscarriage.

PATRICK WHITE