I DON'T KNOW WHAT THIS IS

Day: 13

I DON’T KNOW WHAT THIS IS

It’s a hole, it’s a dread, it’s a gate, it’s a door, it’s a garden.

It’s a calender of labyrinths on the moon with my

fingerprints on it. It’s nothing, it’s everything, it’s oblivion.

The long forever with a tide that keeps going out

like the red wavelengths of the veils and the death shrouds

that hang like the spider webs, mandalas, and dream catchers

in the windows of the nets of wonder and allurement so the eyes

in its blood can mark the night with stars as if

the waters of life were forging swords in the moonlight.

It’s a threshold we put there to step across

into the vast night ahead of us like a firewalk with ourselves

among the wild irises when the obsidian water snakes

are hunting the eggs of the frogs among the wild irises.

Everybody’s got a window in their heart with a name on it.

Everybody’s got a tree they sit under with a god

that intrigues them with its silence, its solitude,

its chaos. An abyss that sprouts quail in the burning underbrush.

A conflagration of daylilies started by the pilgrims

lost in the valleys of the rootfires of the holy ghosts

of the cedars and the birch trees, worshipping smoke

that reeks of oak and mistletoe. Lonely nightbirds

who’ve given up waiting for an answer to their prayers

and just sing in the ear of the silence that’s unattainable

with longing made fair by the intangible moonrise.

A bubble, a lightning bolt, a firefly, a hungry ghost, the mist

hanging on a blade of stargrass like the pearl

of a sacred syllable that spoke like water of darkness

and light, equally alike, without staining the mind

with a choice it didn’t have to make for itself to stay outside

and keep a firepit it was in love with company for the night

as the wind and the dawn appointed windfalls to the stars

like shepherd moons and planets they gathered

like a rosary of prayer beads that had forgotten

what they’d ask for in the presence of a magnificence

that already knew them. La, la, the lives one sing in lonely echoes

of the waterbirds and hills across a gulf of dread

as empty as the urns of the dead that were scattered

across the rootfires of the stars and the ashes of the roses

that adored them. Never let it be said the wind

didn’t know the weight of our wings, or the sun

didn’t cradle our faces in the hands of the light

and look upon us like a child that had done something

right for a change of heart toward the darkness

that surrounds us like a window with a name on it

blithely perishing into its own blindness like a candle

in the morning light of a chimney where the birds

are singing brightly to the angels that awoke them

from the dreams of the locust tree that slowly died

on the nightwatch of the moon that softly cried

in the shadows of providence foregone with time

in a tide of bells and watersheds and housewells

that closed their eyes like the brine of a memory

that hurt because it was so beautiful it was wise

in the ways of the remote like a secret it kept to itself

among the leaves and the unsigned loveletters of an event

so spectacular that silence put a finger to the lips of solitude

and said speak no more of it as the words descend like snow

through the lamp posts of what was not disclosed.

PATRICK WHITE

PEOPLE, YES, PEOPLE

PEOPLE, YES, PEOPLE

People, yes, people. Here comes a rush. A gust of stars.

People will break your heart and then they’ll mend it again

and if you’re lucky, they’ll mend it with a gold sunset.

Me, I like moonrises of the beautiful and mysterious.

That’s what I saw when I was looking through the windows

of a woman I loved as if I were staring straight into

the face of God, and the Queen of Heaven took another veil off.

Be nothing so you can be influenced by everything.

And I’ve always been grateful like the sea or an apple orchard.

I’ve been blessed. I’ve been cursed. I’ve avoided the obvious rhyme.

Most of the time came in through the backdoor but then

so does the moon like a dark, romantic, pale thief

returning Ryokan to his window. What does it mean?

Summations, anybody. Beats me. I don’t know.

I’ve doubted and affirmed, celebrated and cursed

it all my life as the only way I had of exploring it

because it fascinated me to watch my mind walking

its own waters with nothing to save or give away

but what it wanted to and when, fireflies of insight

into the significance of being alive to know it. It’s a gift

that found you on the threshold of the labyrinth

of morning glory you entered to learn to distinguish

the difference between a womb and an empty bucket.

Managed it yet? Or are you still working on eclipses

and sundials with occult philosophies of crickets

to their credits, or castanets by now? Chance it, lady, chance it.

Teach your skeletons how to danse macabre with you.

Sit around a firepit of prophetic skulls and watch the flames

as if it were your first visit to Stonehenge

or Orpheus were being dismembered all over again

by the brutal mystery of the women that he’s slain

deeper into life by going down into death

like a well that could sing to the shadows

under their breath like the waters of light and life itself

when the moon was making its way across the narrows.

It doesn’t matter. Get into it, her, him, whatever

gets you through the night as if it were special,

passionate, blameless, thin as the moon when

it’s playing Zorro with your heart and a masked raccoon.

This isn’t Venice. It’s a cosmic frontier. Conduct

yourself accordingly, walk like a human who cares.

O no doubt it isn’t all fireflies trying to make constellations

in the summer of white-tailed does stepping

out of the mist of their nebularity in the valley

into an apparition made of light. Beautiful. Don’t miss that.

Don’t deprive yourself of your eyes. And keep

the thorns on the roses, especially if they’re black eclipses

in a school for mystical mirrors that are learning

how to dance with columbines. Drink your own

blood out of the skull of the moon, and drink deep.

Let the night wear your bloodstream for a change

and don’t be afraid of the mysterious when a black

hole shows you your face in a dark mirror

and there’s nobody there you recognize. Smile

as if you were glazing the starmud bricks of heaven

to build a temple outside the the lion gates of Babylon,

or bulls if that makes you feel any better. Existential

effervescence. Keep it bubbly as a galaxy of quantum foam,

touch it lightly, touch it lightly, touch it lightly

with your fingertips forever full of farewell

as if the moon were putting her kids to bed and kissing

them on their foreheads as if they were silos full

of butterflies from worlds beyond born in the mouth

of dragon stars. And don’t be feeble about it.

Look it in the eye directly. Have the guts of an arrow

or a sparrow hawk. Make flying carpets out

of the yarn that unravels out of the mouths of lunar toothpaste

that gone’s mad with the taste of itself. Go crazy

but do it human way. Make love to each to each other

and I’m not even going to go there, but you know,

don’t you, you know how much silence there is

in a single, sacred syllable of water and fire and light

and the blue air overhead like an eyelid that just

got French-kissed by a snail that tracked in the Milky Way,

as if your mouth were a garden for thieves and nightbirds.

You hear that. I do. That’s you being a lonely waterbird

among the Lanark hills trying to convince the stars

you’re not an echo of anybody else you ever knew.

Walk beside a candle most of the days of your life,

and when the fire god comes to set fire to your orchid

show him what you can do with moonlight

if you wanted to, but you don’t, because you

just wanted him to see how silk can burn like ice

when it dances with its eyes as if it weren’t looking

at anybody else. Fail if you have to. Just

don’t be mean and mediocre about it. Fail

in a vast attempt to be more than you’ve ever been before,

fail trying to attain the unattainable forgiveably

so you help people on the same burning ladder

up the stars as if they were scarlet runners

with wild aspirations of becoming pilot lights

that put out to sea, full of awareness and dread

but convinced there’s something out there beyond

the starmaps and chandeliers that’s a dark mirror

that clarifies things as deep as you want to take them

seriously in a playful kind of way because I told you

earlier, touch it lightly, touch it lightly, touch it lightly

as the witching stick of a dragonfly on the lip

of a waterlily that’s just discovered

someone’s spiked the waters of life with starmud

and she’s terrified of how much it matters

exquisitely to celebrate the fact with praise

and unlimited joy, though later in life that

will turn into a background noise of cool bliss

summing it all up like a windfall of autumn

as if it’s never been as rich as this before.

Yes, the crows, the shadows, the matriculation

of perfection in the crone phase of the immaculate moon

that takes your breath away, like your life, your love

your wisdom and your ignorance of what it’s all about,

and leaves you with a mystery in a small black box

you haven’t opened yet to see what’s inside

the darkness that shines so you can see the light

and know for yourself if it tastes of fire and ashes

or sumac in the spring in the tender new plumage

of its flightfeathers to get out of the nest

like the sky burial of a starmap and see how big forever is.

PATRICK WHITE

BUDDHA PINOCCHIO

BUDDHA PINOCCHIO

The more he tells the truth, the longer his nose grows.

Buddha Pinocchio steps out from behind his slapstick

veils of paint and poetry to take his black clown masks off,

throw strawdogs on the fire now that the ritual

is over, everything tumours and black walnuts,

the desolate autumn leaves, hungry stray dogs

in the cold-hearted wind as I let my shadow lead

as if it were its turn for the first time in my life

and it seems fair, turn and counter turn, stand,

we’re waltzing and walking together as if we were

friends, Blue Flower, Black Dog, from years ago

I don’t remember when, but the dark, cold air

of farewell on my skin is a fathom more than

I wish to sink, and the lights of the hospital

don’t wink at me anymore through their skeletal

keyholes, and there’s no mercy in the window

with the x-ray geranium on the fire-escape

that isn’t an exit anymore from anything more dangerous

than this beautiful, beautiful world for all

its gruesomeness, trying so hard to think

of something more uplifting than good-bye

to me and my broken arrow of a shadow

out there somewhere, or is it maggots

and a poultice of leaves to draw me out of the earth

like a fever or a thorn of the moon from my dream?

The night doesn’t sing to me in its linear B

of stars. This is too eyeless. Where are the Pleiades?

A democracy of pulchritudes among the store front

mannequins. How lucky they are to not have

to feel their way through this with me. I never asked

for anything I wasn’t prepared to give back

full measure and a bit beside. That made them cry.

And I’ve almost kept my word. What do you say

to the people with Chinese lanterns for hearts,

everybody trying so earnestly to show you a way

out of this, as if you were a wounded emergency door?

Is this great poetry? I can’t tell anymore. It hurts

to go there as I see scalpels on my grave laid

like bouquets of wildflowers, poppies, starwheat,

and the laurels of abandoned changelings I forgot to bathe.

The art of life is long and brief. It’s true.

An arsonist of roses in a volunteer fire brigade

that seldom makes it to this house of life on time

for anything but foundation stones. The Taj Mahal.

The black one. The dark mirror. Waterlilies

and the moon. Unassuagable lovers building tombs.

But o the miracle, not how, not why, not when,

but that we are here at all. That we’re here, though

the firefly eludes us, though the lightning branch,

the strong rafter, the ladder walking beside us

like a shadow with one rung no higher than we can

lift it to save ourselves, though we meant to save

everyone else first. Dark shedding, I could teach

these leaves a thing or two about letting go

but I save it for another day that’s never going to come.

Let’s look at it that way. The quiet doesn’t stain

the silhouettes of the maple leaves reading yesterday’s paper

as if it were news of the day on grey, grey, grey cement.

It glows with a light that’s happily bemused with itself

but you can’t tell if it’s a candle or a tunnel or something else

nobody’s ever guessed before. And my body so full

of strangers trying to party with death in the nude.

If not now. When? There’s a new exactitude

in life and it’s got a friend with a scalpel

that looks like a crooked, little smile with a twist,

almost a clown with a smirk that’s pleased with itself

it’s done its work. It’s done it well. And it’s done it fast.

Could almost admire that if it were human.

Shining, yes. A motherlode of blind pearls

at the bottom of a hopeless sea of shipwrecks.

That’s not despair. That’s seeing it straight. It’s dark

out, less so inside, and I’ve passed by these windows

many times before. Life inside going on

like mystic crosswalks that have grown lazy

labouring at not believing in themselves enough

to make it shine, even when they cry like I do,

though it’s not required. The drugs have spliced me

into their circuitry to put a smile on the world

they’re not faking this time. No migraines

and I’m not wobbling like a drunk in orbit

as the violins take to the stage like Jerusalem artichokes.

Fiddleheads of death. From Kaladar to Calabogie.

It’s ancient enough to dance to for a man facing

his own exit, both doors open, with a silhouette of himself

projected ahead as if we both knew where

we were going in black cowboy boots with

bevelled heels and Texas toes. Life was

an arduous guest we taught to shut the cupboard doors.

O, more than that. O so much more than that.

I was a happy arduous passionate apple with a star

for a heart, believe I was, condemned to be demonic and blessed,

or silver Russian olive full of hermit thrushes and nightingales,

peacocks and stars, trying like the sea when it labours for the moon

to say it, page by page, leaf by leaf over the years.

Minding the shedding. Minding the budding. Minding the threshing.

Not minding anything at all as if it were a long lost art not to.

My light burned late into the night as if someone

were still awake, doing something, who can say,

he believed in as if the stars depended on him to get it right.

Reduced to what you are, black dwarf or supernova

in the galaxy next door, you drank eclipses

from the eyes of beautiful women who thought

they saw something in you worth living for awhile.

It was a gift not to have to convince them. And you didn’t.

The full moon, and the lake, and the farmhouse

and the stars, o yes, the stars and their apprentice wildflowers

with the winding road took care of that for you.

Animals in the night, wary of their severities on sight.

Not numb. Not resigned. Flashing a little attitude

at time like an angry star on the horizon

of a cold bath in your own grave with no one

to scrub your back again to get the dust of the stars

and the gardens and the flowers you walked among, off.

And the poems, and the paintings, all the craziness of love.

As if it mattered you didn’t know why or where.

You were there. And that was more than worth asking for.

PATRICK WHITE