O WHAT DO YOU DO NOW?

O WHAT DO YOU DO NOW?

Day 11: Thank-you for the sunamic outpouring of love and affection

I received from everybody yesterday. Plank after a shipwreck I could

cling to to keep me afloat, and, man, it felt better than a door. I’ve been

trying to respond to you each individually with a syllable of something real

and tangible behind all these pixels and bits. An indefensibly, imperfectible

human constituted of starmud, flesh and blood. Definitely a heaviness

going through all this. But one of the great, lingering sadnesses for me,

and it might seem small and trivial to someone who isn’t a Virgo, is

the compulsory neglect the disease imposes upon me in terms of

the energy I’ve got to spend on the poems, the rush, the intensity, the meds

they’ve got me on, the wonder, the horror, the intrigue, the death,

listening to a good, sensitive man who’s got healing in his blood,

it’s cellular, a calling not a career, the way I’ve got poetry in mine

as he’s trying to explain out of compassion how if the cancer

metastasizes to your liver it’s relatively easy to scrape that off

surgically, and it’s all bizarre and weird as you try to figure out

how some artist you can relate to, because he was you just a few

thousand million years ago, got the effect that he did in a small

painting above the clinically starched bed where they ask you to lie down

on the raspy clean sheets that feel as if you were sleeping with the bride

at a wedding of leaves. And you’re nervously, peculiarly jovial,

laughing at everything with Zhuangzi in the autumn leaves

that are shedding their way into eternity outside the soft lustre

of the small window that let’s you see the light as if there were

some meaning to all this you haven’t discerned yet, that might come clear

if you stayed calm and quiet, cool and continuous enough.

I have all my life given nothing less than everything all the time

to poetry. That’s what I am. A poet. So it’s never been charity

or heroic in my mind to do so, but a reflex inflection of my very nature

to be myself, whatever that really is, even if it’s nothing. What else?

And the way I’ve lived my life is precisely the way I want to live my death.

Giving nothing less than everything all the time to my art.

It’s my joy. It’s my immensity. It’s my intensity. It’s my heart.

Best part of me, in my estimation, if I can say it without colluding

with an ego delusion that’s on the verge, never known one

tentative day of life on earth when it hasn’t, of threatening to prove

to me, what a fool I am. And it might well win the argument yet.

But I’m the kind of seahorse that rides off into the moonrise,

not the sunset, fortunately born too stupid to be a cynic. So I go on

dooming myself to trying to attain the unattainable, knowing

it’s not something you perfect through your craft, but you might

just reflect a little bit of it if you get lucky, and stay circumspect

enough to slip under the fence.

Literally wrote myself into an oblivious stupor last night until

five in the morning, so I didn’t have to flip through the drastic

album of pictures alone in the dark, curled on the futon before I slept.

Knowing I needed sleep but couldn’t. And there’s an element

in writing all these poems that is undoubtedly therapeutic for

a person like me, but over and above that, there’s a poet like a nightbird

trying to pour his heart out to you without singing mere documents

of hysteria. So the poems, as rightly they should, ask a lot of me

and I give it to them to the best of my abilities. Zorro on a burrow

sometimes I’m sure. And when I’m not him, I don’t know who I am,

but it’s beautiful and fast. I’m watching the way it moves in the grass.

Fire alarm. Strange reversals of words and suffixes, swarms of blackfly

typos like learning to walk all over again, I’ve been sending good gangs

of outlaws after to hang them like a posse of mistakes. Think it’s

the pressure of the tumour putting pressure on my brain, or the effect

of the meds, and I’m sure some of it must derive from pure exhaustion.

Realized when I was wobbling my way up Wilson Steet the other day

like a drunk in a public place, to fill my first prescription, I’d been

consciously placing my feet as if I were following

the painted footsteps on a Fred Astaire dance floor

for eleven blocks, and instead of listening to the conversation

the crowns of the trees were having with the sky, all I was doing

was dancing with cement. Poor me. But just the same it’s

sad and frustrating, not wholly debilitating yet, to have to practise

a vigilance over these things that yesterday you didn’t have

to think about, it just came naturally because you’ve done it

all your life. I’m being honest with you here because there’s

no point to any of this if I’m not. So if you would be so kind

as to let me lean a little on your good minds and eyes to point out

a spelling error or a typo that got by me, I would be deeply appreciative.

Might seem like a funny favour to ask, but, believe me,

in the way I see things, it would mean a lot to me. And you’d

have my heartfelt thanks for it. You don’t want to go out in public

looking so cool with a piece of toilet paper sticking to your cowboy boot

like a comet from a bevelled heel. lol There. There’s an antidote

to an sos. I feel better already. So little time it seems to say it all in

but trust me, it’s all there in these one or two little sacred syllables

we rely upon to express what we really feel. Thank-you for caring.

And the way you touch.

O what do you do now? Sit here in the loveable deep shadows

of the mindstream with the other fish all over the world tonight

wondering if they’re a wavelength, a widow-walk, or a river reed?

Go tell a parachute from a milkweed pod to go find

a Monarch butterfly and try not to poison it if you can?

How much of this is a drug singing to you, how much is a tumour,

and how much is a man? Hard to assess, but I’ll

keep an eye on it for you if I can. Duress. Excess. No.

Let’s sit down on the ground somewhere and have a good laugh.

It should end in laughter, if the laughter really ends,

and to judge from the amount I’ve been laughing lately,

I doubt that it really does. You want a nice thought.

Try this. A demonic firely with the soul of a star in its heart.

Power with a switchblade knighting flowers. There.

That’s nice. Going to keep that. Like a pair of cowboy boots

I expect to be buried in among the waterlilies when I die.

Don’t want to make anyone cry. Want to make them laugh.

What else am I supposed to do with this? Laugh, laugh, laugh

at how silly it all is, and profound and eternally enduring

to have pulled this off out of all those atoms. To be

a human, I hope I have, among humans in the same lifeboat

of a heart that’s been calling to us for a long time now

from a foggy hill. Over here. Over here. Maybe we should listen.

Or what were the sixties all about? You soaked your jeans

in bleach all tied up in knots a little too long this time?

That was my seed-manger. This is my flower, though

that makes me feel a bit like a little teapot running off

at the mouth again at a Japanese tea ceremony where

they mend the cups that have fractured with gold. Wonder

if they can do the same thing with this skull I’m drinking from?

Here is my handle. Here is my spout. Aquarius

with all the stars pouring out as if somebody were

preparing a bath for someone they cared about.

The candle. The flower. The water and its shadows,

and the bubbles, yes, the bubbles that broke like hearts

of quantum foam, and the dolphin you look at

in amazement because it looks like a human that’s gleaming

naked in a bathtub as you add the wine. Nice touch.

PATRICK WHITE

THIS IS ME BEING BEAUTIFUL

THIS IS ME BEING BEAUTIFUL

A mystic dimple in the middle of my chin.

Courage, the Arabs tell me. Hope I’ve got some.

This is a long, dark, strange, radiant journey

I’m never coming home from again. Pain. Pain. Pain.

And the night so quiet, and me in it like river fish

listening to the town breathe, cars out on the highway,

hush. You can just barely hear them now.

The rush of surf on asphalt. The interrupted silence.

The sweetness of life on earth as it sleeps,

and the trees I keep thinking about in Stewart Park.

The trees, lovely, the trees, even after

the ice-storm spoke. The trees. The trees. The trees.

And water and light and air as the chimneys

hold their seance, and the ghosts bite their tongue

whenever anybody’s talking about smoke. And fire.

Now that’s a mouthful. Almost as powerful

as a woman who’s attracted your attention like a star

you can’t name. And you’ve never, ever seen

her anywhere before. And you won’t again,

but she was there once, she was there, I swear

like wild rice in the moon as the mist lifts off the lake

and you think it’s a wild swan heading south

and you want to go with it, but you live here, and you can’t

until your bones are dust in their medicine hut

and then you go west, in the urn of a Canada goose.

They bring you tobacco and berries, choke cherries,

and they adjust the feathers on your war bonnet,

three if you live out east. One for the dream of a totem.

One because you fed somebody somewhere once

and you’re thought of as a mighty hunter. And the last

because you were ready to stand up and fight

for something real you didn’t know if you really believed in

at the time, but it was hopeful. It was just. It was free.

It was sublime. And I liked the way people adjust.

Look at me, Maw, no hands. I’m supercharging

reality with significance. Or is it all just a bad dream
I’m gaining elevation in but it’s all going to come down

on me any minute now like a mountain of gravestones

in an avalanche? I’m a weather balloon. But I was trying

to be beautiful, useful, dance. I was going with the wind

there a while ago. See. I’m gone. A winged samara

on the back lawn. Float plane. That’s me. Or maybe a maple tree.

Feels like a three ring freak show black clown circus

on tour sometimes, but this is my Zen death song

and I’ll sing it with you like a birch bark canoe

gathering wild rice in its prow if it were my mother

in her apron, and you can be the cowboy this time

and I’ll be the flower. Black dog. Blue flower. He’s back.

That means I’ll have the power of a black dwarf at my side.

I think that’s good. But it’s not as beautiful as I want it to be.

Let’s get back to the trees. I painted them once, broken,

fractured, shattered, plinths of chandeliers and stars

all over the place, misspoken candelabras of the twigs

trying to remind themselves of their unhierarchical place

in the scheme of things to come, thump, thump, thump,

like a flat drum roll. Spare me the timpani and drums.

I’m trying to be beautiful here. There’s a moon

out on a lake above the pagodas and totems of

the pine trees and the water’s slowly willowing

with the fish, an elegant black undulance on the water

that reminds you of a woman’s flesh you caressed once,

and you still want to touch it with your fingertips

full of farewell, but you can’t, and you know that,

and it still hurts. My muse was as lovely as any

running doe. And you hope it fits the scenario somehow

of me being beautiful, for her sake, at my own expense.

And I’m not looking for anyone to thank me for that.

Not even her. The wonder was bountiful and holds me

in good stead now. Bright vacancy. Dark abundance.

It was her. And I’m sure of it now. The wind is rising

out on the lake, and the mist is a veil that’s lifting

off her face. She wants to show me something

I haven’t seen before. You can’t see. It’s an art to love.

And you can’t ignore. But trust me, she’s beautiful and pure

and dangerous as a watersnake swimming beside you

in the feathers of the moonlight I mentioned before

to be beautiful as the cars are out on the highway tonight,

and my occult philosophy of trees as they were seen once

writing poetry about how badly wounded they were

and yet so beautiful, aren’t they, in the way they bleed stars?

PATRICK WHITE

YOU LOOK AT YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR AND YOU SAY

YOU LOOK AT YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR AND YOU SAY

You look at yourself in the mirror and you say

I’m dying and he is too. Kind. Blind. Bliss.

Two in one. One in two. What does that

add up to? I forget. I remember. I regret. I rejoice.

Think I’m going to share my voice with him

if he’s got anything to suggest. Horrid world, rest.

At least for tonight. Lifeboats in their nursery,

Crows in their nest. Does that feel real? Your guess

is as good as mine. But it’s quiet now. I

can hear the night breathing in the dark souls

of the tenants next door. River move me. River flow.

The stars are whispering something in their sleep.

It’s deep, but that’s a cheap rhyme to live up to.

I’m being focused by death on the window.

One fly woken by the furnace from death, one

star still trying to take my breath away, and it has.

Big space out there. When you die do you dwindle

or expand? The kind of question a child would ask.

It’s so simple nobody has to guess. Let it pass.

PATRICK WHITE

O THIS IS HARD, THIS IS HARD, THIS IS HARD

O THIS IS HARD, THIS IS HARD, THIS IS HARD

O this is hard, this is hard, this is hard. I pulled

the mandrake out. I heard it shriek. Ginseng

does the same thing out in the woods in spring.

It tries to sing but it loses control of the words

that come out of its mouth. You rub the genie

in the lamp after it’s put the kids to bed and it’s given

them what they wanted that won’t hurt them

as you wait to see, by God, you do, what happens next.

Hey, I think you just got included in a poem

dogpaddling in infinity here with me a bit but it’s ok,

we float. Sting like a butterfly. Dance like a bee.

No my tumour hasn’t reversed that. This is me.

This is what makes Muhammad Ali truly great in my mind.

He showed you his victory. And his effortless defeat.

Like a pulse on an electrocardiograph you can trust.

It’s his. Not mine. I’m not so sure about mine,

but I’m trying, and that’s all you can really ask of a human.

Bubbles and candles and wine. And a dolphin

from time to time. I’ve had mine, and it was beautiful.

Sublime as the moon in the birch tree groves

as if you were listening to an echo of the Druids

shine, shine, shine out in fireflies and lightning bolts

that are keeping the fire fed for the night

as you throw pieces of your life into it like salt

to watch it flare up green. Robin of the Hud,

and his merry men. Brief spirit of my solitude,

a flash in the pan. Or as Dogen says about as much

as you can say about life and humanity, no more

than the moon reflected in a drop of water

hanging from a heron’s beak in the dark and the light.

I added that last part because it’s the way I speak.

Are you listening to the same picture music I am?

Seek. But don’t make a big deal out of it. Take your time,

look around, find a place to sit down. Make yourself

at home. But you put the next pot on if

you’re lucky enough to get the last cup.

Bathroom’s over there beside the starmap.

Drink up. There’s more where that came from.

A whole pot. Remember the gold scars I told you about?

They mean a lot. Root fires screaming in a choir of ginseng.

Soft, gentle things like the fragrances of time

from a flower with a tumour in the dark trying to bloom

with the music and the moon as it always has.

PATRICK WHITE

THE SMELL OF MY BODY IS SWEETER THAN BACON TO ME

THE SMELL OF MY BODY IS SWEETER THAN BACON TO ME

The smell of my body is sweeter than bacon to me

like walking into a room and recognizing an old friend

by the smell of his armpits. OK. Cachet. Odiferous.

It’s my side of the bed. My pillow. Saturated

like a salt lick with the fragrance of my hair.

How many nights have I drooled my dreams away here?

Went to bed expecting black swans and woke up to pigeons.

To poultry. To pheasants being murdered on a pheasant farm

to grace the tables of Paris, the hats of Berlin,

Robin Hood, Shakespeare’s pen, with plumage?

Do glaciers have skidmarks on their underpants when they die?

Runic striations, tree rings, shit scars? Doctor’s tomorrow.

I’ll take a bath tonight in the stars. Old spice pure sport.

I’ll put a tie and suit on my smell. Or a crease in my jeans.

I’ll have my catcher’s mitt reeking of rose. I’ll put

a clothes peg on everybody’s nose like I’m hanging

laundry on the line, or pinatas of killer bees

like Christmas decorations I’m hanging from Christmas trees.

Sea breeze my skull and crossbones.

Virgo. Supposed to be clean. I want to be groomed for bad news.

Just in case. Just in case. Just in case an emergency fire ax

tells me I’m going to rot. In the meantime

I take a good whiff of the sunset I am, crepusclar smell,

and I swear there’s something sometimes, in the duff

and detritus, the xylem and the phloem, the flotsam and jetsam,

see what I mean, twins again, in the fragrance of being

that makes the compost sweeter than the flowers

it’s being spread upon. Smell’s a fingerprint

of the labyrinth in my nose. Trust your instincts.

Or it’s a shameful waste of good pheromones.

Think I’ll make a waterclock of burnt-out half cut

whiskey barrel armpits and sell it to the town

for them to plant coleus and petunias in along the sidewalks

to show the tourists we’re bumpkins with style.

We smell like apple piety. Our bread stinks like a butter urn

in a bonnet with a blue ribbon. My dad designed

the package somebody told me a long time ago.

But it was margarine. Rank. No thanks. Let’s keep it clean.

I don’t ever want to smell him released from jail again

after a diarhettic drunk. What runs from my mouth

when it does is enough. Maybe I should get a rheostat.

Or a monostome that shits out of the same mouth it eats with

like a politician. You want to wash filth and blood

off your skin today you don’t use water you use a spin doctor

with wind power. Solar will do. Blazing is a kind of blindness.

This is the way I used to write when I was sixteen.

I’m looping again. Goofy planet. Everything is. It’s

daunting as handcuffs of rain. But I think it’s great I might

be getting a conditional discharge, a summery summary,

or absolute, between the first and last crescents of the moon. All of life is in

parentheses. Where’d ya get those crowns? Her teeth are stars,

they come out at night, ha, ha, see, I think I just lost

a couple of years more? But it’s always amused me somehow

to think about it and giggle about what we’re not

ever going to be again, once, once, once, here comes Rilke

all over again. Amazing man, talk about class.

A little fiercely German for me. Neitzsche scares me too.

But wow what a man, I mean it. Mongol bows

with an encore. Deadly child enthroned on the moon

lonely as a lighthouse. I would have been your friend.

I would’ve understood feeling like a funeral home

for aristocracy. But I’m not half the matador you are

when it comes to roses. I do deadly nightshade and mariposes.

And, man, you should see what I can do with a waterlily

when it fires me up like stars. Rope tricks with

the most beautiful evenings on earth I’ve ever spent.

You may be a merman but you’re not a metrosexual.

Keep your eye on that lily in his hand when

he was practising dying in Vienna. Look real close.

Real close. That street globe of a lily meant something even

way back then. I think there’s a crystal skull underneath it

that punishes you like a Medusan jellyfish for letting

you see things like a knife on an altar that doesn’t know

what you’re being sacrificed for but it’s got it to mean something

if it’s going this far, but I don’t want to hear about it.

Buddha Pinocchio. The more he tells the truth,

the longer his nose grows. But I’m not lying about anything.

I’m trying to be real, real, real clear about everything,

cross my crossbones with a confederate X of stars.

There might be some redemption in it I’ve overlooked.

I’m a union man. Workers and officers. Don’t even

go there. It’ll start a fight. Wrong is wrong. Right is right.

I’m enough of a mystic by now to know. A journey man.

Nightwatchman on the moon in a grave yard shift.

Dark, dark, dark, they all go into the dark, but, man,

could that banker write. But you’re a lot more deadlier.

Seductive child. Wounded by the mirrors of the mysterious

as if you had to have thorns on your roses,

or it didn’t count. You weren’t really in the bullring

with the moon or the roses with no one keeping count

of the moonsets you were made of when you were being yourself.

Praise. That’s it, praise. Whether you’re spitting in the eyes

of something like a righteous cobra, or the Taliban,

or looking at willows with cold-hearted stars in their hair

along a river I’m beginning to feel like a sentry

for a waterclock in the grove of Diana, tick tock tick tock

with a little sword in my hand. Who goes there? I’m an alarm clock.

And I’m going to comb my hair with a comet or two.

Skulls like to look good, too. That’s a joke. For etymologists. Ha, ha.

PATRICK WHITE

TURN TOWARD THE STILLNESS

TURN TOWARD THE STILLNESS

Day 10: Months. In all probability. Cancer appears to have

metastasized. Biopsy in Kingston soon. Long shot. But one in a million

my very good doctor and friend informed me. With a very remote

possibility, at least, they’re going to try to extend my life expectancy

as far as they can. Not going to take it for granted though

and make hope a kind of mental comfort food. Don’t want to die

a fat-minded man. The odds aren’t good, but I’ve been running bad odds

most of my life just to keep the show on the road as a painter, a poet,

and my small boy’s notion of being a man. All I want to do, as I said

somewhere else here on fb recently is look this dragon in the eye

and see what there is to love about it and keep enough

of my wits about me to sing it lullabies at night which I will,

no doubt, post to fb each day for as long as I can, because

it helps, it really helps, never doubt it, to know you’re there.

We don’t live our lives in isolation hough I’m sure many like me,

have convinced themselves they do, at times. Born unloveable or something, which, of course,

especially from what I’m learning these days, in all humility,

release, shining and deep appreciation is not true. Impossible.

The way we’re connected to each other here, the way all life is,

who can deny it, holy. Blake’s right. Everything that lives is holy.

And I would add, without presumption, everything lives. Rocks, too.

But I’m not running off to church. This sad, this is heavy,

and I know I’m your brother more than I ever have before in my life,

and as we neither live together here alone in the world,

nor do we die alone, so, to varying degrees of imagination

and depth and experience, in a sense, I know and feel acutely

through your many loving comments and outpouring

of compassion, love, and empathy for the situation I’m in here

in front of this firing squad of stars, trying to figure out

who they’ve given the blank to, lol, this is just not my death alone

but everyone’s property as Rilke would have, and did put it.

And though I have no right to, I ask you of those who wish

to live it, not die it here along with me, and if you can’t,

or you don’t wish to, that’s ok that’s ok that’s ok, too.

Doesn’t change a damn thing. I still love you. As Dogen Zenji says

so beautifully somewhere, not all the flowers open at the same time,

and once I grew up enough to understand that, certainly

haven’t tried to pry them open before they’re time.

Green bough.

Dead branch.

Same song.

Blossoms once.

Blossoms gone.

The moon blooms in winter.

It took me twenty years to write that. Finished it last night

at five in the morning sitting in the dark

feeling things.Who says I can’t write short poems?

Which, course, I can. You just haven’t seen them yet.

Turn toward the stillness. Sapphire lady of my soul,

let go, let go. The fire descends. The wind’s stopped for awhile.

Gusts. Gusts of stars. As Rilke says. About nothing

but in that nothing all the rivers, all the deserts, gusting

like stars again. It’s a kind of dance, you can feel it that way.

Things sway as if they were on a swing, a spider web,

a suspension bridge, a branch. Can you feel that just a whisper

and a wavelength away? The solitude of a snake with

melancholy? Sad snake. Willows. Willows are good at this,

much better than waterfalls that don’t sway as much, move

in the groove with moshpit waltzers, funny thing to say

but it’s true. Think of all the things you’ve said

you’d love to in your life, and they’re swaying, their swaying, I swear.

So much I wanted to be, achieved, but blindly.

I should have been more gentle with the mirrors.

I shouldn’t have laughed, ever, about anything

without a tear in it. And an antidote. Elixirs and eclipses

happen all on their own but the calendar thinks they’re predictable.

Could be so, but that’s not been my experience.

This is. Shining in the dark with stars, candles and fireflies

that look like the women I’ve known like vases and urns

you can’t plant flowers in you can ever give back again.

More of a gift than anything I’ve ever earned before.

I’m learning to sway with rain river reeds, little pills

and supernovas, seastars and the Circlet of the Western Fish

as if we were all learning to play the guitar together, every man

and woman for himself, together again, pain or no pain,

or a promoter of health that’s discovered it’s all healthy

even when it’s terrible. Every blade of stargrass. Herb.

And, yes, even the carnivorous moon with her royal flush

of talons and a torn bird. Be good. Be bad. Be inquisitive.

Be kind. Be still. Be silent as the wind blows through the cave

and you’re sure it’s a spirit. Don’t teach the trees sacrilege.

You get the point. There is none. You have to make one.

And stick to it like the capitol of a country somewhere

in your afterlife like the future memory of a prophecy that came true.

Me I like the trees swaying, cold aspen leaves, flames

of the sumac singing phoenix songs around a fire the ghost dancers

will tell you had nothing to do with it. But they could be wrong

about that. I’ve known root fires sing the same song

until an apple blossom came along and knocked them off their feet.

Got to say it, too sweet for me as I aged, more isolation

in the cellar, and the dreams heat up and blood grows darker

than any night it’s ever known before. But the stars,

what could even Buddha Pinocchio say about the stars

without making a fool of himself he intended? The blood sees

what your nose smells and you can trust it. You’ve got to

percolate the wine sometimes. Put bubbles in it outside around a fire

you really need. Give the dragon some respect. Dragons

bleed sunsets with no regrets that aren’t true. Lizards

are another matter, but it’s ok if they’re blue and they’re swaying.

PATRICK WHITE  

YOU KNOW WHAT A SEA OF POEMS IS LEAKING OUT OF ME

YOU KNOW WHAT A SEA OF POEMS IS LEAKING OUT OF ME

You know what a sea of poems is leaking out of me,

maybe it’s a hemorrhage, or the road’s just flooded out by the beavers

for every raindrop I can catch with my tongue?

Blackberries are saturating a butcher’s apron

like my mother’s wound I’m bleeding for inside.

Carried it all my life like legal scar tissue

I hid like a switchblade in my boot. What happened?

Did we live through it or is this just the black box

of the wreck? I wanted nightingales for you

but the creeping finality of this conversation is just going to have to do.

Like everything else. Demolition rainbows. Isn’t that a clever thing

for your smart ass literary son to say? Cause it hurts

so bad I don’t know what else to do. What do I do, Mum?

It seems I’m a sixty-five year old man with cancer.
What other patinas of time can I hide behind like a Parliament Hill

copper roof trying to green the bloodstains away

as if they weren’t ripe enough to eat yet? Bitter pills.

Are you still sawing flower pots out of plywood

for the umbilical cords of the yellow roses

to cover those shabby brown shingles of a house

coiled like a brown snake in its scales on your pillow back

in that secret garden you kept stashed away in your mind

like Eden in Stanthorpe? Or was it a refugee camp
I used to watch you sneak back into through

a hole in the fence, and I never asked to come. Not once.

They were your blackberries. Your jewellery box.

Or all those Evening in Paris perfume bottles I used to bring you

for a day that never came, stuffed away in blue steamer trunks

like amphorae at the bottom of a classical shipwrecked cemetery?

Were you trying to strangle it in the womb with a noose around its neck?

Were you trying to make a snake bloom? You can’t

train snakes to bite other people, but you already know that.

The equanimity of your silence condemns me, how ancient it is,

like a sphinx at a lion gate of Sekhmet whose

been looking at things a long time now, come and go,

like life and sons and landlords, social workers, cops,

ambulance staff with mobile emergency signs

screaming like banshees back to the hospital

you just came from to have your thyroid out

when the scalpels slashed you across the throat

like a big, happy face with stitches. Me, I’ve got

tumours with diaper rash. Remember the blackberries

where the beer bottles were buried in the Sikh woodlots

oceans of wood away we sailed like wood pile pirates once

among the deflated liferafts of the used condoms?

And laugh about it, didn’t we? At how

we had to survive like Roumanian Roma in Europe,

laugh at ourselves like Picasso’s Les Saltimbanques,

forlorn, but sometimes we were, weren’t we,

we were, we were, gleeful and together for awhile

just to have gotten away with it? Forget about the hampers.

Any well trained mutt can learn to appreciate dogfood.

I wanted poetry for you. That’s why I never wrote a novel,

unless you asked me to. Wrote two and stuck them in drawer

to give back to the church so we didn’t owe them our souls

like any other debt collector at the door with his big, red paintbrush,

and the letter X. Rejects. Plague year. 1348.

Enough of that. More to come. Give it a break.

Thanks for all the loggers knees you ever sat on

for milk for me. Thanks for not letting me go

when you had a chance to. Thanks for snarling

in the face of pandering reasonableness while

you were giving suck to Rome. Thanks for

turning the fury of a bitch wolf loose on the Sunday school teacher

who stabbed me in the back with a pitchfork

for staring at him while he weeded the garden

through the third eye of a knot in the fence

that turned out to be a black hole into the heart

of a man who thought he was good, but wasn’t much

of an example. Seig heil. Onward Christian soldiers

marching on. That’s mean. The damage done at Nuremburg.

Thanks for the cool new clothes you bought me

in grade ten when I started school again. I know what that cost.

Can you still understand me, Mum, or do I still have a way

of standing things on their head like an hourglass

timing cosmic eggs? I want to be clear with you, so clear.

No more blood eagles as if I were a Viking or something

playing with lungs. I want to fold you in my arms

and just cry. Just cry. As if we were still sitting at the kitchen table.

Cry for all the agony and pain of what it takes

to be human here with twenty five bottles

of Evening Perfume in a blue steamer trunk in the basement.

Hope chest. Birthday cake with a file in it. You got

any clean sheets among all those mothballs in there

I can borrow for my next attempt at circumnavigating

membraneous hyperspace like the Magellanic Clouds?

I want to be close as a ghost of a son to you as I can be

with a southern cross, because you lived there once

and to hear you tell it, when I looked deeply into your face,

it made you happy. And God, that’s all there is,

or ever will be. Blackberries here and mangoes and magpies there.

The silliness of a son trying to tell his mother he loves her.

Let’s not say folly for a change. I’m sick of wisdom. Time for a pill.

PATRICK WHITE  

COUNTING THE HAIRS IN MY FIVE-TIERED, TERRACED RAZOR BLADE

COUNTING THE HAIRS IN MY FIVE-TIERED, TERRACED RAZOR BLADE

Counting the hairs in my five-tiered, terraced razor blade

trying to decide if this is the hanging gardens of Babylon

or life among the Incas at Machu Picha. Second hand

increments of time I’m threshing like a big, old paddlewheel

that’s a legend on the river of its own mindstream.

Maybe a wheat field. This one’s mine. It’ll do fine.

Good crop of sundials this year. And then the lean

silo of dreams that leave you as empty as one of the plagues

of Egypt. Black dwarf. Dark halo. Evil gill of blades

on a grey nurse and a thresher shark. I’ll lead them

across the desert to the Red Sea like a feeding frenzy

and drown them like pharoah’s chariots in their own blood.

How do you make a glacier part? Ice pick through the heart

like Trotsky in Mexico, or shave off some ice

with my new Fusion razor blades like Freddy Krueger

with his switchblade bouquet of pentagonal hands?

Time, ekaksana, the sensation of a gap between

thoughts. What’s in there? Just thought I’d ask

because I just think I slipped through the cracks of one

like Castor and Pollux jumping into a chasm to save Rome.

Leucippus and Democritus, Romulus and Remus, Castor and Pollux?

God, there are a lot more twins in the world than I thought.

Things are a lot quieter now. Diesel percolating the coffee

outside my window while a trucker walks into a bank.

If you learn to play with your delusions correctly,

and Isadora Duncan in her fragrances of silk and northern lights,

or better yet, feathered boas, flying snakes, her veils, her veils, her veils.

Janis Joplin when her plumage was a flamingo on heroin

will back me up on this. Separation, not money

is the root of all evil. Evil doesn’t have a root on it.

That tree bears nothing but leaves. No fruit.

Squander your heart on the world if you want to make a big impression

on your bathroom mirror. Or your green room. Smooth. Clear. Aromatic

as a talced baby’s ass. But just remember you’re mowing weeds

not stargrass. Nicks and tics of a waterclock

pouring out of the hot water tap as you lather your face

in quantum foam and begin to shave like a wave

running up on the beach a little higher each time

the tractor turns around boustrophically to make

a labyrinth you’re trying too hard not be lost in

because you want to look as good and prepared

as any other corpse in Perth when you go out there.

That’s drastic. But probably true. But you never know.

Probably lets enough light through the storm shutters

of my hurricane, science fiction razor for small miracles

to show up on the powerlines like a sparrow making a pitstop.

Sometimes. Though I feel uneasy about relying upon that

because I don’t want to give any more offence to my karma

by putting out food for thought for a bluebird under the feeders

when it might be a turkey vulture unlacing an old boot of roadkill.

PATRICK WHITE  

I PAY MORE ATTENTION TO MY BODILY FLUIDS THAN I USED TO

I PAY MORE ATTENTION TO MY BODILY FLUIDS THAN I USED TO

I pay more attention to my bodily fluids than I used to.

Woodlore, paint spots, spoor. Learning to read all over

again. What does that mean? Show me an x ray

of my ancestors prophetic skulls’ hidden under the hearthstones

of the firepit I’m being consumed in like a piece of mammoth meat

that once thought it was phoenix in an ice-age.

Is it ready yet? Is it cooked? Spread it around.

Dinner time. May your crops and your colas never get bud rot.

Irish grace. Canadian style. But it’s still got

too many leprechauns in it, though, for my taste.

Ever see a red-tailed hawk wheeling and wheeling,

as if it couldn’t get a cork out of a wine bottle it was

trying to open, when, pop, the job is done, and it slides

down its own bannisters and thermals of air in a stairwell

of mirrors as if it were easier watching your blood

unravel in water because an eddy pulled it by the thread

of a rip cord on your emergency parachute. See

anything yet that looks like the moonrise of a mushroom yet?

And you watch this cinder in the sun’s eye, this crazy

flakey star that shines from the inside out

as if it emerged before Venus, of course it did,

the star doesn’t go on stage before the audience,

startling the soul over the road and the cedar rail fence

past the soft bass wood grove huddled up like refugess

against the border, birds on the powerlines,

trying to touch their mother’s fingertips through

electrical fish nets, you take it from there,

over the darkening hills at the end of the beaver marsh

with a treeline that’s putting too much mascara on.

Must be a young treeline. A whisper, honey, a whisper

of an eclipse, moonset on those eyelids of yours.

It’s a lot harder to seduce somebody with megaphone.

All those black holes. You shouldn’t have any trouble

attracting stars. But look at that hawk up there.

The way it spreads its wings out as if it were

the standard gold measure of the sun glowing down,

(Glowing. Cheap shot like the next rock in a mindstream

I jumping across, but I’ll take the risk.) Down

into an abyss where the Egyptians used to believe

it died and it was up to them with all their canopic jars,

ointments, and urns to make it rise again. Heavy burden.

Bet they were happy to get that calender of gravestones

off their chest. I can only imagine grave-robbing looters

running riot through the streets of New York

like debt collectors when there’s a black out orgy

of burning cars and smashed windows as if

they were beating their girlfriends up for having

such beautiful eyes, with bars and gates. Street orchids

booming in fire once every seven thousand years

and the fire hoses trying so hard to put them out

as if goodness and human decency depended up them

like a loaf of farmhouse bread cooling on an afternoon windowsill.

Of course, it does.As wide from horizon to horizon, as that bird up there,

stretching itself out to infinity so it can touch the sky

with the tips of its flightfeathers to see if he can fly out of it

without having out of necessity of optical misperception

as if the compass needle that runs through its heart like the axis

mundi, (God, I love the Latinate basso profundo of that

it makes me feel so smart I can almost convince myself

I’m thunder for a minute or two.) Ta da. A firefly

hits the transformer. Fireworks for a hawk. Watching it fly

as if there nothing more meaningful in the world than that.

Better stop here. I’m getting carried away. That’s

what a spinal cord’s for. To tug on a kite. Hold on tight.

Ghost of a windsock in an air pocket of the moon,

or anchored in bay with the gleaming fish hook allure

of the feminine principle of the world taking a bath in her own grave

and the merest speck of a hawk running down

out of her eye, the crumb of a dream, the bismallah

and the whole point in the mole on the cheek of what Hafiz longed for

nothing but a starmap of all there is to shining

if you approach it as if you were always on the inside of no way out.

PATRICK WHITE