AND IT’S FUNNY HOW

And it’s funny how we carry each other

within ourselves like mingled waters

that taste of the moon,

that taste of bruised orchids

in the shadow of all those glass greenhouses,

Eden in a masonjar,

that learned to throw stones,

and mysteriously engaging

that we go on creating each other as we have

forever inseparably each on his own

alone together with everyone

wondering why we exist

to know one day we won’t.

Gates and roads and miles and whispers away

and a longing that can only be measured

in the lightyears of a star

and all the eras, all the trances of time

of passion and extinction,

of despair that turned on hope like a toxin

and hope that flared like the third man on a match

learning to brighten the stars

by deepening its darkness,

I have lived from eclipse to eclipse

like an unintelligible abyss who misses everyone

for the quality of breath and death and emptiness

that makes me me

when I want to be impossibly alone

and the memories have issues and agendas of their own

like a dead branch trying to witch for water at a window.

Where are you now?

Who were you?

Have I survived?

Whose ashes are these?

Now I am the tree. And you are the wind

and the pursuit of nothing flows on endlessly like life and water.

And all the lovely deserts that enhanced the moon

and coaxed me out my old delirium

into a deeper one

by drinking the viper in the grail

they lifted to my lips like a gate

that everyone comes to like a stranger

prodigally returning to his own homelessness,

following the wind like a siren of sand

have slipped through my fingers like music,

though my voice still tastes of them

when I drink from their reflections,

not knowing whether I have become

a darkness in the light
or a light in the darkness

but grateful for the grander perspective

from the bottom of the well

where they showed me their stars at noon

and the sun at midnight

and how the fires that nourish love

cannot be put out like torches

in their own shadows

anymore than a bird can fall from its feathers.

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOT AN OPINION, NOT A LIE, NOT A TRUTH

Not an opinion, not a lie, not a truth,

blood that clings, blood that sings like a whip

in registers of pain that not even the angels could screech,

I wake up this morning wearing Darfur like a straitjacket, like a burn

as if the stars had been poured into a gash

or the moonlight talced my corpse with powdered lime

and I feel another’s wound as if it were not mine

and realize how much seeing can be an asylum

from feeling it as if it were

and there’s a reek of obscenity

under the subtle cologne of my cynicism

that is amused by the polymorphous perversity

of an empathic innocence it hadn’t suspected.

How many doors and walls and windows and gates and countries there are,

how many ingratiating perspectives,

how much luck of the delusion

and credit cards and passports and bureaucracies away I am

from the roar of the slaughter I read about

in the volcanic shales of hell,

opening the morning paper of my heart

like a refugee tent in Darfur.

So let me be clear. This poem

is not a loaf of bread that can be broken

to feed the distended planet of a child’s belly,

not a messiah of medicine anointing with a syringe,

it feeds nothing, it cures nothing, it kills nothing

that needs to be killed

nor brings the dead back to life

and it despises itself

that it’s not an ambassador or bubble

you can find sanctuary in

bobbing irridescently on an ocean of rabies,

that it isn’t lowering arks over the side of the planet like lifeboats

or sinking wells on the moon like mothers to drink from.

It’s as irrelevant and stupid and vain as most of us here

preening rainbows on the palettes of our feathers

like pimped-out parrots nipping at ideological lice

while a young woman is trying to learn to walk normally again

in front of her stigmatized shadow

after being ideologically raped like oil.

And should I subsume the expedience of her violation

under the necessitous tolerance of collateral atrocities

in a shifting global market

that arrays its statistics like maggots?

What is it that we find so difficult to admit

when we look upon a young black boy, four years old,

starving to death, and it isn’t sadness in his eyes

that have given up imploring, not anger or blame

as he sits like a big-headed buddha in his own filth and vermin,

as if the silent ucoiling of his Darfurian genes

had written his destiny on flypaper?

Do you see that numbness in his eyes

like an eclipse with nothing to cover,

an unholy nakedness deeper than skin,

and the concession of impotence beside him

that was once his mother, more accustory

than Amnesty International or the U.N. or CNN

because she doesn’t accuse? Do you feel

how the moon has been ripped from the bride

and hear how she breaks like the limb of tree,

and understand how her every step and breath and pulse

is an exhausted intimate of horror

that took her like gangrene on her wedding night?

Do you know she lies in your driveway like roadkill?

Did you wake up this morning as I did

feeling as if I were living her honeymoon?

PATRICK WHITE

THE DELUSION IS NEVER COMPLETE

The delusion is never complete, but, then, again

neither is enlightenment

so the whole issue is inexhaustibly irresolvable

and it’s better to pass beyond both

as seeing exceeds your eyes

or shining exceeds the star

and scuttle that skeletal liferaft

you’ve been making for years

of whatever thresholds the tide washed up.

And some of us are living like secret islands on the moon

thinking one day soon, we’ll be amazed by water,

as the stars that never fall

look more and more like rain.

Or maybe you think the mind is the brain

and you’re nestled into it

like a hibernating toad in the mud

waiting for a flashflood of awareness

to wash you out of yourself

like jewels from a stone crown

into a climacteric of copulation when you are.

And there are doors that long to turn back into trees

and windows that regret

having clarified their supple deserts into glass

and people that have fallen in love like apples with the earth

and give their hearts up like green stars and seeds

to be crushed complicitly.

And words must be said

like blossoms in the root to be heard

but there are people who approach the dark mother

like evil rumours in another room

and burn like antiseptics in the night

to quarantine the light

and keep themselves from catching the cure.

And their lies are born without eyes

though the darkness doesn’t disdain them.

But the radiant point is in all directions

life might be a lonely topic without a mouth

but it’s still the only conversation around

that knows what’s in a name.

And there are great trees

that only put out a single leaf in spring

as if all they had to speak with was a single tongue

one bud for a word

one native language

and they’re hoping to get through another autumn

like you, standing in the doorway,

with everything to say, and no way to say it

like a kidnapped choir.

PATRICK WHITE

WHY LIVE LIKE A WRECKED SHIP

Why live like a wrecked ship

running around giving lie-detectors to lighthouses

on the battered coasts of your lunar indignation

to see if they’re telling the truth?

I can see your skull from here

rising like the moon

not waiting for anything

like an abandoned throne.

It doesn’t remember the lies you told

like distress calls in the night

to prove that nobody loved you,

it doesn’t remember your heart like an ambulance

that never delivered anyone alive on arrival.

There was a stairwell, remember?---

in a palace of water

that tasted of fireflies and bells,

and fish that swayed through heavy curtains of blood

like the afterlives of mystic oceans

that have long forgotten they never had names

and you were the kind of homeless music

a man can only dream he’s heard

when I first saw you upon it, descending.

Beauty is not a word

things say often and mean

but you were the first time

I ever understood

how the light saw itself

when there were no eyes

to frame the limit of what could be seen.

I’ve run out of wisdom and spirit and night

trying to make you happen again

in the deepening silence

like a tide that pulled me under

to undo the moon from your nets.

And I still can’t tell if I’m an urn

or a lifeboat full of ashes

but my heart is a gate

I’m always closing behind me

as if I don’t want to be followed.

PATRICK WHITE

DON’T WANT TO GO THERE

Don’t want to go there; don’t want to get into that again,

Once was enough for a lifetime if you made it through

and I’m still not sure I have.

I don’t charge my hallucinations overnight anymore

and expect to wake up to an enlightened morning

that will reveal who I am

in this mess of a person I’m living

counter-intuitively against my better judgment.

You could have been me as far as I know

or I could have been you

or there was another dream

where we met in the middle between the two like a razorblade,

but you couldn’t see the crazy wisdom of it all

when the moon chalked the clouds

like a smudge on a blackboard

to show you how

and things just got darker.

Now the windows are not so insistent

and I can swim through myself for eras

without coming across any sign of myself or you.

Sixty sometimes feels like September on the moon

and who knows what comes up

in the furrows of what I’ve sown

now that the moon is nothing but a cold stone

in a vastly indifferent sky

and all that fire and passion

charged with the whole of creation in every atom

no longer believes the rain when it shows me your eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

COUNTING THE BEADS

Counting the beads of the geese returning

as if they were the rosaries of time

as the night deepens into the mercy of its roots

and silence is the name of a god

that buffers its urgency with smoke.

I want to appeal my life like a bad trial

but the jury’s been out for sixty years

and no one ever sees themselves

with the same eyes twice

so it’s hard to know

if I’m the plaintiff or the defendant

but I put on a mask

and execute myself regularly just to be sure.

A human mind at night alone

is beyond the reach of the heart

that comes running in at the last hour like inadmissible evidence

to humanize the emptiness that appalls it.

Sometimes I look at the howl on the moon’s face

like Edvard Munch’s Scream

and feel the agony and the isolation

of the universe giving birth to itself in everything

through ordeals of transformation

that can baffle even pain

with the intimacy of its excruciations

like an animal suffering without knowing why.

Always, inside of me

this vacuity that’s never fulfilled,

this longing and taste for the indefineable,

as if I could give pain a face and a shape

that would let me know if it were blind

or could see,

and what its blindness revealed

and what, if there’s a secret to it all,

its eyes concealed.

I have drunk mystic eclipses from unholy grails

and lit candles in the shrines of the moon

as if they were the sockets of my own skull

and smeared my awareness across the nightsky like stars

and been diminished beyond brutally

like a feather the wind left behind.

There’s an art to stringing arrows to the snake in your hand

that’s eyeing you like the music of a warm target

and I’m a long way from mastering it yet,

hopeless as a bone,

and my seeing has failed me so many times

there’s a constellation of black holes

weighing the dice with astronomical odds

against the farcical profundity of my destiny

as a sidereal archer,

but I’ve grown fond of the relentlessness of the clown

in this compassionately infernal way

and rush to every emergency

like the fang of the antidote,

knowing there isn’t a cure.

PATRICK WHITE

THIS MORNING I’M HAVING

This morning I’m having a lot of lonely fun

in a vast, clear space brighter and more intelligent than silence

and older than eyes

speaking in tongues to the gravestones

before I give them their names.

It’s amazing what a shadow can achieve

when it isn’t attached to anything.

Last night I noted the advance of Orion into winter

and Jupiter in Sagittarius

tried to remember the names of all its moons

and the atomic frivolity of their mythic significance.

Things have changed since I was a boy.

Since I woke up from myself

I’ve never let a god or a mirror

do my dreaming for me

and everything is a passion beyond

what is true and what is not.

And I’m wary and bored with anything

that looks like a map.

The stars are a living language

that have whispered us into our own ears

like a rumour of their radiance,

though I don’t wholly subscribe to anything.

Sometimes I think all knowledge

for all that we make it

the quicksand cornerstone of existence,

and erect ourselves upon it like an obelisk

is nothing more than cosmic smalltown gossip.

The cartouches link up

like constellations and thoughts

and handcuffs and coral and chains

and the good guess and the lie and the weathervane

embalm the blessed in a coffin of law

and sow pyramids along the river like seed.

Like time, I keep an intimate distance

from the things I change

and breathe myself in and out

without a thought or a doubt about my beginnings

or which star my afterlife is aimed at,

or whether I’ll hit the mark or not,

knowing too much about what I don’t know

to corrupt the sincerity of my ignorance with existence.

Just the same, when I listen to space

I can hear the roar of the dragon

firing everything up like the furnace of a black hole

or the cylinders of an unbaffled Harley

that elaborates itself like the road that rides the man

and marvels that so much has come of nothing

and that nothing comes of anything

until September forgets itself

and everyone remembers

they’re nothing like they are or want to be

and everything is always fulfilled, already achieved

and to be so incomprehensibly alive

is to be so understandably dead

that life is not an agony endured without a lover.

PATRICK WHITE