ALL DAY THE SUN

All day the sun ripens the grape;

all night the wine ripens the cup,

a carrying forth into a carrying forth

of fruit into fruit, sun to grape,

grape to cup, cup to mouth,

life into death, you into me,

and everything drunk with transformation,

and everything crazed with flame and fury

as if the lips of the night were bleeding

as if there were eyes on the limbs of trees

that were nudged by the wind

to let go of their chandeliers

and the fire wanted a creekbed of its own

that could weep its way to the sea

and the wind shook the window

it wanted to be. And there are shoes

that were once the barges of men,

and roads that mistook themselves

for a journey, and hearts in the grass,

hardly distinguishable from other boundary stones

that once were blazing meteors,

gashes of demonic iron that could change the earth

in the reflex of their igneous agony,

and faces in the orchards

that admired them for their blossoming,

now, all, utterly changed, transformed,

like the reasons for water or God.

And night after night it goes on like this,

swans in the ashes of burnt guitars,

and women with hysterectomies,

and a pearl on the tongue of the eloquent oysters,

and fire hydrants coming home from war

like amputees, and the lovers

behind the auroral curtains over the hills,

clouds in an hourglass

with lifeboats of sand for mouths,

and floral yokes of bright farewells

on the spinal wharves of their longing.

The sea became waves

and the waves became snakes

and the snakes washed up on the tide

scaled the ladder into feathers

and flew. One can become two, but zero

never empowers anything to change

except to be more of itself,

that’s why it’s cool to be nothing

and enlarge without limit

the infinities in the grain

of a human heart into a cosmic silo..

There’s enough space

in the tiny blood-drum of a shrew

for an eternity of zeroes to shine through;

and that’s what the stars are,

nothing shining down on nothing

so that everything can exist,

me voiding myself like the silence

I feel like a child before you,

so I can hear you

making nothing of yourself to see

who I might be

in the empty mirror without you,

because there are lamps

that feed on the darkness

shadows brighter than noon,

that make the darkness darker

so we can see the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

ALL DAY LONG

All day long,

painting the moon in daylight outdoors

on the patio of a hive replenishing its casques of honey,

the whiskey zoo of ancient wheats, grapes, hops, rye,

fish, flesh, and the chickens of gradeschool, barnyard readers,

the windfall of a ready-made orchard enticing the wasps

with a keyboard of appetites, blossoms hired to serve,

little cups of the moon filled with the black wine of the bean,

and all the ants under the tables of one mind,

the functions of breadcrumbs and roadkill french-fries,

and the braver sparrows jesting with the customers for survival,

all of one reflexive conclusion, but the people,

the frayed threads of distant lightning over the hills,

fusing the mudball philosophies that keep rolling back down upon them,

insert, parry, thrust, stab, suggest, understate, insinuate

the power of the bone that beats on the inflated siloes of their ignorance,

trying on each other’s mouths like shoes,

like hooves of rocking-horse thunder,

blood mouths, chalk mouths, ink mouths,

all the razorwire conversations

of baffled humans

shouting between oracular watchtowers,

greeting each other with weapons in their hands,

wallets, women, the last planks

of a shipwrecked sense of humour,

and the women mending the torn nets

of the snagged silences

with the eyes of their supple needles,

the bleats and squeaks of agitated dolphins,

no more disappointing than people anywhere

defending the postage stamp to the death while ignoring

the love-letter that surrounds them like oxygen.

What a lonely secret life is;

what sad ashes in a flower of wine;

the human heart kindled like a guitar

to start a fire that inspires nothing but smoke.

PATRICK WHITE

AFTER YOU LEAVE

for Tonya, with love, on her thirty-second birthday

After you leave, a bell

deeper than the sea strikes once

and my blood thinks it’s a ghost of fire

and tries to evaporate; gusts

of the most graceful emotions,

eloquent clarities of the heart,

shake me free of myself

like leaves and petals and pages,

the tender radiance of nightskies,

and I am astounded in the openess

of an embrace without limits,

of boundary stones being hurled delinquently

through the windows of ice-age mirrors

that have wept so long and slowly

over the silver river locked in chains.

How easy in this solitude

to declare myself to you,

to undo the delusions and the fears,

to flip through the chapters of the onion,

take off this last layer of skin,

and shed the final masks of snow

in the warming recollection of your presence,

in the way your beauty exhilarates me

then thrusts me like a torch into a deep silence,

and my heart sets out by itself toward you

scintillant everywhere, gold

flowing out of the dark ore,

as if the moon rinsed out its own reflection,

the legend of a secret constellation

behind the vital starmap of fireflies

that makes me want to shine for you so intensely

in this dark doorway of pain and passage

that the light hurts with the poignancy

of its longing to fall like a key

from the spirit’s lost and found

upon your planet;

to open gardens that have no word

for fence or gate,

to bridge your streams

with the pillars and roots of inspired stars.

My heart sets out for you all by itself

like a lantern on a road

that unspools with arrival at every step.

After you leave I am possessed of the will

of an anvil and a forge

to become a chalice for you, a sword,

an axle and a plough, a strong bolt

against the miscreance of battering circumstance.

I raise your reflection to my lips

like a cup from a watershed of wine

and in every single sip

swallow an ocean like a potion

from the tears of the moon,

knowing how dangerous it could be

to miss you, to become

an addict of your light at the first taste,

to wait for eras for the return of the dawn

that unravels even now like mystic lightning through my veins.

No more than the sun from the vine,

the moon from the dreaming apple

the stars from the ripening vowel of the apricot,

could any torn net woven of knotted lifelines

undo the vision you have already mingled

like a nightrose of fragrant fire in my blood,

Not to drift again alone

like an empty boat

ferrying the corpse of the ferryman

through the fog to a cold shore

now that I’ve been washed up on your island

like the voice of a salvaged star in a bottle,

a frenzy of light and love in your tides,

a drowned lighthouse

coming to life in every wave of you.

I want to be brave enough

to risk the possibility

of listening to the night together

with the unveiled bride of the moon

in the bay of my arms,

I want to be the sail, the flame,

the gull of her breathing,

the blue dolphin off the coast of her mouth.

I want to swim like a mirror

the sea holds up to her face

to do her hair up with starfish

she tresses like galaxies in the depths;

I want to devote myself like a candle

to the shrine of the September moonrise

that saturates the far sky over the sad hills

like a warm breath glowing on chilled glass

when she smiles

like the wind over the abundant harvest

of the ashes I’ve stored against

this famine of passion

in the silo of the blue guitar.

I want to place my life

like a feather of fire

on the mysterious altar of lunar rain

that splashes like stars everywhere

in the telescopic silvering of the well in her eyes,

and turn these deserts of space and time

back into grasslands

crossing her thresholds

in whispers of pollen and dust.

She walks into the room

to help me paint the bedroom walls,

as I try to cover the grafitti

of my vandalized soul with white,

and a dove in a cage

panics at her approach

before an open door.

She climbs the ladder in rags with a brush

like the moon over a lake,

behind a cloud,

through the branches of a leafless willow

and everything in the room

is enhanced by her shining

and I’m rolling new skies over

the scars and fossils of old stars,

worn faces with plaster patches

to rewrite the shepherding lies,

the myths and symbols of my solitude

in the sidereal headlines of her transformative light.

Now it’s four a.m

and I’m pacing from empty room to empty room

like the pendulum of a heavy clock

that aspires to be a bell,

threshing words like wild rice

under an eyelid of peacock blue

to fill the empty hold of a buoyant heart,

the small boat of her hands,

with the eyes of a precious gathering.

And the tender snow falls quietly outside

on the crow limbs of the winter trees

like flesh returning to the bones of the dead

in a silent resurrection

more unsayable than a veil of white

that puts its finger to its lips

like an arrow of fire to a bow of blood

to hear what the hidden nightbird

under the eaves of a burning house is singing.

PATRICK WHITE

A LABYRINTH OF MASKS

A labyrinth of masks,

a first draft of the flawed flowers

you exorcise from your darkness

as if your heart were coal

before the discovery of fire.

No one likes a real dragon,

but you’re fascinated with your own cremation,

your history of pyres,

and play with random ignitions,

throwing parts of your body at the beast,

your apartment the lair of a cat

and your generosity full of chains

and your eyes a question

you put in jeopardy of being answered,

and even the snake

that flows between your legs

to turn my dick to stone,

embarassed by the ploy,

and the little pink mice you breed

to be devoured

as you want me to take you,

not a diet I could live on for long

as you grew more curious

about why the black mirrors

that hover like a whisper of scales above my skin

disdain to destroy you.

You’re too wealthy

to have anything to steal.

PATRICK WHITE

A FLUCTUATION

A fluctuation in the cosmic void,

a wink of atoms,

a fallen eyelash of light,

the seeing of a lifetime

nothing but candle vapour,

ghost-water on the moon,

the exhalation of a vagrant star

looking for its lost constellation

like a berry or a gem

that had wandered offroad

from the vine of a crown.

The eye that regards all

as it rises like a blue mystic sun

over the morning eyelids

of the remote hills

waking up in the arms of their shadows

demands exposure of the sky,

a clarity pure enough for stars

as it turns the day over

like the palm of a hand

to reveal how our lifestreams

join and break

at the junction of sacred rivers.

And the vision,

the illusion of the way I see life,

the romantic intoning

into the bell of the abyss

for a hopeless beauty that died like a bird,

the lostness and the loneliness,

the unknown sorrow

that seems to bleed out of the air

like a black rose born to grieve

for the separations of long ago,

and the child in the brutal fire

that pleads at a window

weeping in the heat

for rescue from an afterlife without salvation,

all that the heart features

in the deepest silence of the night,

nothing but the auroral trash

of an overionized mind

trying to touch its own burns tenderly.

Until I became the knowing

even my own ignorance

didn’t recognize me.

Until I vastly improved

the integrity of my lies,

every mirror I looked into

like a woman’s eyes

was corrupt,

the prelude to a death certificate

in lipstick, a thorn of honey

that dripped like the fangs of the moon

with mysterious toxins and elixirs

that could scald and bleach the heart

or restore it with the kiss of a silver herb

grown in the garden of a cool eclipse.

My bitterness and fear

have made me less susceptible

to the empty boats that arrive

to take me on like some kind of foreign export,

a cargo of ashes and stars,

the bodybags

of the casualties and refugees

that perished in an unknown holy war of one

that I can’t stop waging

against a universe that won’t let me in,

but my solitude

could defeat me with a feather,

could shock the fool I am to hide

with the shadow of a wing

breaking the spell of this birdless sky

that seems to go on forever beyond the wind

like a caravan of rain

that’s outwalked the longest known road

into a wilderness

of rootless trees in big city back alleys.

When the rose

has been stripped down to its claws and horns,

how few have the eyes

to keep yearning.

Let me drown in tears of fire,

in wells of thoughtful quicksand,

rack me on the iron in my blood

and stub my cherished stars out

like angry pincers applied to my feet

like a firewalk through a snakepit

and I will confess to nothing

but an earnest ignorance,

I will not betray the abyss

where I buried myself like nuclear waste.

I will remain true

to the merciless emptiness

I uttered to myself like a vow

I didn’t know if I could keep

four decades ago.

Now I lay my head down to dream

on a stone pillow full of stars

that shine like rare metals in the night,

and when I wake

I seem to know less

about everything it took me a lifetime to master

than when I first

abandoned my eyes

like oceans on the moon to see.

PATRICK WHITE

A DAY OF WRITING

to Alysia, myself, Alysia, to the night rain,

trying to hang the universe on the tip of an eyelash

without blinking, pulling handfuls of the stagnant dimensions

of my apparent magnitude off

like the dead undergrowth

of a plausible star to try as an antidote

to the junkmail perfume samplers

that keep heaping themselves up on my doorstep

like the fake leaves of a tree somewhere on acid,

mini-nirvanas that reek in the dark of enlightened snake-oil.

Tonight I like the windows black, starless,

but keep the company mellow with my rendition

of musical lamps, one lightbulb less everytime

someone asks me what I feel most when I write.

I look at the trinity of faceless wolves on my easel

that accuse me of eyes, and punish myself by taking note

they’ve moved since I last looked at them,

and there’s a poppy of blood on the snow that’s atavistic.

O Nietzsche, how wrong can you be, though

I like the way you sublimated your rage

into the colic of apoplectic, apocalyptic prophecy.

I don’t know if the world’s bad enough to deserve you,

or if chaos has miscarried at the birth of your dancing star,

but blessings on your head and house, anyway, wherever you are.

Alysia, willow, Druidic trees, the French river Alyse in Arles

where Van Gogh sliced off his ear in self-disgust

and gave it to a hooker like a premature embryo

swaddled in a gesture of genuine tenderness

and when has it ever not been this way,

brothels and asylums and expressionist reliquaries

shredding their smiles in the spokes of a cosmic wheel

like a last-minute embassy over-run by the radical passions

of a fashionable artistic solitude, the whole world with a headache

or on the rag, and even the flies that could cover the earth

forty-seven feet deep in flies every breeding day of their lives,

not in the mood for all that generative commotion.

Genius is a different kind of lonely, the third wing on a bird

that doesn’t know what to sing to the dawn or why,

when the other two are getting by just fine

in the usual sky that hurls them into the usual ecstasy,

the esteemed feathers of the coincidence of the contradictories.

The important thing is learning how to rewire your eye

to your heart, not your brain, so when they ask you

what you were writing about before they came

you can hand them a black, tight-lipped envelope

sealed with the impressionable bloodwax of your pain,

captioned by the resident emptiness of a paper airplane

so that they can go away deluded and delighted

that you’re the one that’s insane, not them,

and that for once upon a time as long as life

they’re the ones who aren’t living their death in vain

and yes you can use rhyme in a poem if you want to.

But what a price for such a little kindness;

refusing to endow your wolves with eyes

so they can spot the typos in their blindness.

PATRICK WHITE

0 NEW MESSAGES

0 new messages, eight-six in the box,

write the fury out, write the fire another love-letter,

train the crows to preach

in a snakepit of downed powerlines,

euthanize a stamp by holding it down under the wavelengths

of an approving postal service, its gravestone

a passport to delivery, it’s date of death on record,

and the radiant message it carried out of the past,

the light of a remote star

trying to make contact with similar forms of life,

luggage and a toe-tag, wind in the ashes

of dismembered dolls. And there are

disappointments so grievous, careless mishaps of the heart,

wolf-spiders wince and close up

like startled flowers under hot match-heads,

delinquencies of feeling that prowl the shopping-malls,

and wounds that bleed out of their mouths

acidic rivers of red army ants

that scald their way through the grass to enslave

the gentler colonies of another midnight without you.

And I’m here alone in the plundered tomb

of an evicted house with bad water,

clinging to the planks of my shipwrecked bookshelves,

waiting for doves and lifeboats

in a regata of sharks circling this drenched bouquet of sodden galaxies

I’m holding out to you above the sloppy waves

like flowers and flies I saved from the drain,

and your tiny sin of omission, the broken blade of your avowal

to never intentionally hurt me

is blood in the water, the fuse

of a feeding frenzy, of haemmoraging roses,

and my heart’s a lousy sump-pump for the pain

of being nicked like this by the petal of a daisy razor-blade

that loves me not. And I could be cool and noble, easy

to lie about the flaring poppy that immolates my art,

hoping for other rescues in the vicinity,

breeze over the burn like an ashen firepit, and poetically forgive

the arson of your oversight as just

another seasonal meteor shower out of Leo,

just another falling star to wish on, but it lights me up

as if my bloodstream had turned to gasoline,

and I’m not much of a monk when it comes to cremations

or emergency fire-alarms that no one answers

or the one-runged crutches you tell me to climb down like fire ladders

from the glass dragons of these melting windows

and huffing supernovas reaching critical mass like blasting caps

in a beaver dam. I can be October sumac

and set my wings afire like a phoenix all on my own,

and I’ve been burning for you like white phosphorus for weeks

to give you something to read by in a black-out,

and I’ve been cooked in the fires of separation before

like a good-natured steak tenderized in the wines of hungry women

trying to please capricious palattes

over the igneous briquets of a glowing heart,

and I’ve been happy to do it, happy to let them carve my tongue like meat

and chew till their jaws fell from their hinges like weary gates,

just to see them pleased and full, their bloodlust satisfied,

and I’m tiger enough in my own stoked fires to do it all again,

but if the chimney sparks are fireflies that want to flirt with the stars,

so the whole wilderness has to go up in flames

before anything can grow,

I’ve got a message from Mars

and a dove, with a Zippo.

PATRICK WHITE