NOT TO TRANSLATE

NOT TO TRANSLATE

Not to translate the mysticism of contemplation

into the mysticism of action

is to think the baby is so beautiful in the womb

you never let it out to have legs and arms of its own.

At the second full moon in October

the dragon swallows the buddha

but the buddha doesn’t mind.

And there’s a soft warm wind over the wheat

and the road is dusty with stars

that used to be people

and the white sweet clover

raises its wings like a fragrance in the moonlight.

And it isn’t as if you can swim like a fish

through a lull in time like a hole in the net

and get through another constellation

like a fear of life you’d like to forget.

You walk up to yourself

like a gate to a stranger

and drop the latch like a trigger,

your body a sandbag to keep the ocean out.

What do you hope to build

on these cornerstones of doubt

you keep hurling around like meteors

that mistake your eyes for windows?

If only the nod of a random assent

if you weren’t meant to be here

you wouldn’t be

or why when I suggest suicide

do you always prefer apocalypse?

The trouble is, despite appearances,

you’re not dead enough to know

how you’ve always been taken in

by your next breath

and then let go.

The trouble is

you don’t know how

to drink out of your own skull

in the name of anything

without getting a hangover.

The trouble is

you don’t fit the road like a foot

so nothing about you knows where it’s going.

And drifting like smoke

is not the same as lighting the wick

and blowing everything out

to see better in the dark.

The trouble is

there are no eyes in your blood

that shine like the tears of the stars

when they look down upon human indifference

like the obscene afterlife of their light

and turn themselves inside out

not to be what they see anymore.

PATRICK WHITE

AUTUMN, THE WAY

AUTUMN. THE WAY

Autumn. The way a relationship dies

leaf by leaf, rooted in the earth

and everywhere reaching for nothing

like the delinquent light of unbeseechable stars.

There’s more dignity in the darkness

than folly in the light

and for some reason among humans

tears are more indelible than laughter

though it takes both to open the heart like a bird

and sing like a downed powerline

gone snakey off its cross.

Why long backwards for things that have passed

or addict yourself to a junkmail emotion

now that the sale you thought would never end

is over and the leaves, the spent leaves

are falling like flyers, rain-cheques, coupons and receipts?

The moon pops up. You delete it like spam.

Does it matter who

stepped off into the darkness of the great beyond

espousing a sidereal future

and who stayed alone by the fire with the past?

When was it your rosaries turned into chainsaws,

do you remember the night, the precise moment

you went under your next breath like an anaesthetic

and the moon removed your heart like a scalpel

and the gaping emptiness that was left

struck you like the dark satori of a wound?

You’ll never get over it.

You’ll never be the same again.

You’ll watch the leaves falling

and won’t know who to blame.

PATRICK WHITE

I LOOK AT YOU

I LOOK AT YOU

for Alysia

I look at you

and you are the indiscrete genius of night

that makes the muses burn like diamonds in my eyes

and there’s a depth to the longing that awes me

and the silence of something eternal

almost a wound

that wants to be elaborated in words

that have never moved among the living like lies that can heal.

It’s mercurially redundant to try to be real

but every poet’s a holy clown

packed into the darkness of a sacred cannon

cocked to go off like the beginning of the universe

because it’s easier than dying all the time.

And now that I’ve declared my intention

who could take me seriously?

See what I mean? I’m always

an inconceivable intimacy beyond myself

as if the flowing threshold of this long road I’ve taken like a lamp in a high wind

doesn’t want to know what’s going on at home

as if the shining wanted to outrun any news of the star

and it was cooler in these shadows with you.

Bright, clear, blue autumn morning in Perth,

and you in Kamloops, three hours behind

and mountains away, asleep.

It’s as important to know where you are sometimes

as it is to know what hour it is,

plant the lightning, see what blooms,

go panning for stars at noon, get up

and trampling your teachers under your feet,

declare yourself like the heresy you’ve always been for once.

I look at you

and I’m the understudy

for a random constellation of autumn

no one’s ever identified

and the last waterlilies to open my eyes like enlightenment

fly off like wild waterbirds without a trace

to destinations of their own

and what I am left to see by is you

and you are a siren and three sphinxes beyond the light

and I’m one of the things that come out at night

all stars and Mars and mushrooms.

But you’re the mystic hallucinogen,

the tree on the moon sipping from its own dark grail,

the face behind the phases and veils

that’s always turned away like a valley

that doesn’t want to show you its scars.

When I’m with you like this on the nether side

I don’t have to look into your eyes

to know what season it is

because everything I muse I might be

sheds me like a calendar,

shakes me out like birds

from the rootless tree I am

and every thought of you is a winged seed

that doesn’t know where I’ll land.

The moon blooms in the soil it’s planted in

and I’m a windfall of forbidden fruit

as my blood slides through me like a snake

and my haloes are playing ringette with my horns.

How I wish I weren’t wise enough to know

the universe is an open hand

and I can’t possess you

except in flight

when I listen deeply to the sorrows

that sing like nightbirds in your eyes.

I look at you

and my voice starts speaking in tongues

about what my spirit is whispering to my body

in a secret language of wells

and you’re the firespear of a wound to the heart

that never wants to be healed or holy.

Right now I’m in a large, dark, abandoned theatre,

an abyss lonelier than my last soliloquy

making a gracious bow to all these empty seats

left speechless by my final word

as if I weren’t the end of anything,

and you come upon me like the encore

of one hand clapping

and my love of you is held over by popular demand for another night.

I look at you

and you’re a vamp and a sybil and a sorceress

and I’m coiled like the python around your arm

that knows how dangerous prophecy can be

until it comes true

and there’s nothing left to ask of the gods

when they answer me like this with these revelations of you

that make the world seem by comparison

just another sudden flashback of a junkie

shooting the afterlives of the ghosts

that buff the jewel of his seeing

eclipse after eclipse

until the filament burns out

and the weathervane tells the lightning where to strike.

It’s not a real poem

if one wave waits upon another like a conclusion

to sweep all the others away

or one breath waits upon another

like the stranger at the gate

who shows up like a lover

you didn’t know you had,

to stop and say good-bye.

It’s just the neon bloodlight

of another electric motel muse

painting the moon like her toenails after sex

if the sea doesn’t take down all your sails

and untie you from the mast

and smash you like a lifeboat up against the rocks

and snuff the star you steer by like a kite

to hear what the sirens are singing

when a man grows tired of listening to himself.

I look at you

and you are a theme of light

that runs like a bloodstream through my life

when there aren’t enough eclipses to cover my eyes

or stars over Bethlehem to follow.

I look at you

and the Taj Mahal turns into Atlantis

and sinks like butter into its own melting

and I’m left facing you like a compass in all directions,

the meteoritic kissing stone in a Kaaba of quicksand,

cast out of myself like the long shadow of a desert nation,

an exile of water

that’s learned how to bloom

like a nightbird on a dead branch

in a garden on the moon.

I look at you

and the silver leaks like a broken thermometer

from all my mirrors and mirages

like poems I haven’t begun,

things I haven’t done,

men I’ll never be,

knowing how close the river is to the sea

when time takes its own pulse like a bell

and concludes its only prognosis is incurably me.

I look at you,

I look at your mouth and your eyes,

the sweep and fall of your hair,

and I look under the loveletter of your skin

where all these stars begin

like a planet reading the new constellations that come up dancing

over the horizons of these skies you keep sending me

like photos exposed to the eyes and fires and furies of love,

these horizons that keep bending me like the earth toward you

as if I were an ark or an apple,

or a star that could run down your windowpane

a finger a breath a feather

or a drop of luminous rain

like the eye of the needle

or the buddha letting go

or me

when it’s imperative to let you know

that through all these passages and tiny deaths

as even now, I can taste your eyes in everything I see,

in the soft stars flowering in the hair of the willow

like the elder illuminati of the wild asters

when I live like a river with you in the spring

and in the full moon under my tongue

that is always you in the autumn when I die

like a happy bird disappearing into a generous sky.

PATRICK WHITE

MY HEART'S BEEN DOGPADDLING

MY HEART’S BEEN DOGPADDLING

My heart’s been dogpaddling in its own blood for so long

it’s hard to tell whether I’m drowning

or waiting to be rescued.

Some stars are salt, and some are sweet

and the rivers flow back into the sea like living languages

back into their mother-tongue

in a mingling of eloquent pilgrims

and dragons don’t linger long in stagnant waters

and the autumn wind might have a few leaves

to say something wise and enduring about it all,

and the mindstream clarify itself in its running,

but I like to linger among the lilies

still tucked here and there behind the ears of the shore for awhile

as if each were a woman

or an enlightened lifeboat

tethered by my spinal cord to the bottom of things

like a star always is to its dark mother.

Whatever that means. Honestly,

things get away from me sometimes like fire and doves

as forms of thought slide out of their thawing like butter and snakes

and the best things I’ve ever said

were in words that completely ignored me.

And there is something metaphysically Chaplinesque

about the way my most cherished profundities,

the ones that make my eyes fall silent

always seem freaked with gestures of pain

as if I hadn’t learned to love my loneliness perfectly yet.

Maybe I’m wrong after all these years

and the error has gone on elaborating interminably as me

but I still think it’s better not to be understood by a buddha

than severely articulated by a mob

even when I make a mess

of my delusions of you.

Would you have trusted me more

if I had told you not to?

Would you have loved me any better

if I had said I didn’t love you

and tried to mean it as long as I could?

MY HEART'S BEEN DOGPADDLING

MY HEART’S BEEN DOGPADDLING

My heart’s been dogpaddling in its own blood for so long

it’s hard to tell whether I’m drowning

or waiting to be rescued.

Some stars are salt, and some are sweet

and the rivers flow back into the sea like living languages

back into their mother-tongue

in a mingling of eloquent pilgrims

and dragons don’t linger long in stagnant waters

and the autumn wind might have a few leaves

to say something wise and enduring about it all,

and the mindstream clarify itself in its running,

but I like to linger among the lilies

still tucked here and there behind the ears of the shore for awhile

as if each were a woman

or an enlightened lifeboat

tethered by my spinal cord to the bottom of things

like a star always is to its dark mother.

Whatever that means. Honestly,

things get away from me sometimes like fire and doves

as forms of thought slide out of their thawing like butter and snakes

and the best things I’ve ever said

were in words that completely ignored me.

And there is something metaphysically Chaplinesque

about the way my most cherished profundities,

the ones that make my eyes fall silent

always seem freaked with gestures of pain

as if I hadn’t learned to love my loneliness perfectly yet.

Maybe I’m wrong after all these years

and the error has gone on elaborating interminably as me

but I still think it’s better not to be understood by a buddha

than severely articulated by a mob

even when I make a mess

of my delusions of you.

Would you have trusted me more

if I had told you not to?

Would you have loved me any better

if I had said I didn’t love you

and tried to mean it as long as I could?

I'M NOT COLD, OR ALOOF, OR INDIFFERENT

I’M NOT COLD, OR ALOOF, OR INDIFFERENT

I’m not cold, or aloof, or indifferent.

I can hear you crying. It’s just that

when things get deep they stop moving,

the tree loses its voice along with its leaves and birds

and there aren’t enough stars in my eyes

to make much difference in the darkness.

Naked pain clothed in itself like the sky

doesn’t need another skin from me,

and besides, where would I put the tatoo

if I could say anything

and what could it mean

that might keep us up at night

looking through each other like telescopes?

And we’re both in the room

but the silence is the sound of one hand clapping

and when you ask me what it means through your tears

I say: Listen. You can hear for yourself.

But you want to sip the night

like an elixir from a spoon,

pull swords from the stone,

ask how many legs are on a snake,

and throw yourself like a bird against a window

when you don’t get an answer.

You’re looking for the return address of a shipwreck

like a lighthouse in a lifeboat

drifting through the fog,

an enlightened pariah in a manger of stars,

and I’m throwing black holes up against the wall like dice,

but you don’t want to hear that.

You want to apprentice yourself to the lightning

like the impious revelation

of an alternative universe

and start something that shines,

and when it doesn’t,

deepen the darkness to make it impossibly brighter

by putting out your eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

INTIMATELY ALONE IN THE ABYSS

INTIMATELY ALONE IN THE ABYSS

Intimately alone in the abyss

equally ashes and shining

there’s a rootless man

walking around on the earth

being introduced and accepted

as knowable and known,

who thinks he’s me.

He suspects he’s a crosswalk

but I know he’s a ladder

a rung shy of rescue.

There’s never been any security in security

and you don’t have to be a full moon

to agitate the asylum

or much of an autumn to lose things,

people included, so he gets up and goes to sleep

and eats and shits and walks and sits like everyone else

who live like unopened loveletters among the bills

with no return address.

Every step he takes is a one-way threshold

and he already knows the value

of everything he seeks

before he’s found it.

Now the stupid think

there’s only one mode of seeing through their eyes

but I know the seeing of the dragon

is not the watching of the flies.

However they cluster like constellations.

Now here a lot of people

will start to worry about

what the stupid think

but I wouldn’t advise it

because that’s what they do.

The less it means the more it can be

and the rest is written on flypaper.

Everywhere I look

I see the north star shining above me

but I don’t mistake my spiderwebs for maps

to the spirit’s lost and found.

Not lost, not found, not bound or free,

my eyes don’t dilute the darkness

with the clarity of the blind

when there’s nothing, really nothing to see.

I’m sixty now. More a mystic statistic

of the jewel in the dreamcatcher

that keeps me away from myself

like the beginning of a recurring nightmare

than a scarecrow playing with matches,

but I’m still a mirror you don’t want to look into.

PATRICK WHITE