NOT ELATED WHEN YOU'RE UP

NOT ELATED WHEN YOU’RE UP

Not elated when you’re up,

not in despair when you’re down,

your joys like oxygen

and your sorrows eyes in the night,

the moon’s half shadow, half light,

breathe yourself deeply and darkly in

out of the cool bliss of your life

as if every breath were the summons and the ghost

that comes like a spirit to a seance

when creation asks if you’re there.

I couldn’t really see the orchard in bloom

and apples on the moon

until I learned to shed my face,

and there are orphans beading rosaries

out of the eyes I’ve worn out on the seeing

like waves that have drowned in the swimmer

just to remember the names of God I’ve forgotten.

One lifetime doesn’t wait upon another

like gladiators in the arena of the clock

or letters in the mailboxes

of the houses of the zodiac around the block,

or one generation precede or follow another

like footprints down to the shore

where the angels have fins

and the demons have wings.

Is the caterpillar old and the butterfly young

when it emerges like the moon from its cloud?

I’ve looked through the eyes

of everyone who has ever existed

as they do now and will

as intimately as any I used to call my own

and not once have I ever seen myself as I am

until I realized there was no one

to look for or through

who wasn’t moonlight in a drop of dew

seen from the inside like autumn geese in a nightsky

and that there are some mirrors even the stars can’t look into.

Most long for happiness, and a few, fulfillment,

but if you go looking for happiness in a war

you’ll turn it into a weapon, a victory,

the quicksand cornerstone of loss

and again, there will be tears.

It’s much harder to win the peace than the war

and the discipline of the warrior lover

is beyond the finesse of the conqueror

who doesn’t understand

that happiness is the muse of peace,

not something that can be earned or won

anymore than inspiration can.

And it’s noble and brave and necessary as water

to explore the darkness and the mystery,

but how few have dared the dangerous wilds of their joy,

the unwalked high fields of their happiness

where paradise is always this before you now

hung like a perilous jewel from the end of your nose

you’re trying to catch with your tongue?

And it’s true, one taste of that and you’re done,

and the serpent in the tree that swallowed the egg

flies and sings with the bird

who can read the serpent like music

and look where you may

among all the amazing myriads in the whole of the eye-gaping sky

and you will not find one star opposite another.

PATRICK WHITE

IF YOU COULD SEE

IF YOU COULD SEE

If you could see into the nature of a single thought,

what it really is, though you think you know already,

if you could for one moment as old as the world

stop casting all these handshadows on the moon

as if they were the birds and bedrock of your intelligence,

as if the waves hauled the sea around in chains,

as if the leaves were a language without roots,

you would stop reading yourself like a prophecy in your own bones,

and be brought to your knees like a bull

penetrated by the seven swords of insight

and realize the unwitnessed clarity of the emptiness

that suggested you to you out of its dark abundance

is also the bright vacancy of this world that keeps you company.

All these intimate secrets of yourself

you keep posting to the sky like stars

or the single shoes and milkcartons of the missing

when you go looking for yourself like knowledge

in the eyeless spirit’s lost and found;

why don’t you, just for once and ever,

treat yourself to a season of your own, and shed them;

open your fist like a tree and let them go into the big O of omega,

hold yourself up like a candle to a black hole

and see what’s deep inside

when the world’s turned inside out

like a gallery at night without pictures?

If you listen, if you learn to listen deeply

with your eyes and your blood

with the intensity and focus of a hunting cat,

you can hear the crazy keys to freedom

jingling everywhere like flowers jailed by the rain

or the sun held for ransom in the siloes of the brain

the moon ploughs

and thought seeds with its shining.

Once you stop looking for continuity in the emptiness

you’ll come to realize that emptiness

is the fountain-mouth of its own theme

and it’s the dream not the dreamer that’s in play

when a fish suddenly jumps like a thought

and there are ripples on the moon.

Who comes like an explorer without a flag

before an undiscovered sea of light

and stands before it like a spoon?

Raise the well of your darkest night up to your lips

and drink it drier than the eyes

of the lover who gave up crying over you

once she opened up like the mouth of a river

and entrusted herself like an aimless thought to the sea.

Hold yourself up like the Hubble

to the vastness of the darkness and the shining

to the largesse of the night in its open-handed radiance,

to the imageless wisdom of the mother you don’t know

who abides in your seeing like a compassionate shadow

and the intangible mystery of the mother of forms that you do,

and drink yourself down to the last star

to ever lay eyes upon you.

PATRICK WHITE

EVENTUALLY

EVENTUALLY

Eventually you have to make room in your heart

for everything

because if any part is left out

the whole of it is as well

and the absence is astounding.

No more border guards

checking the passports of the stars

like autumn constellations,

no more anything out of place

like the right dream under the wrong face

or this a jewel and that mere stone.

But there’s a subtlety here

so pay attention

or you’ll end up thinking somehow

that you’ll need to revoke the patent

you took out on your impending self

like a faulty invention

if you want to stop mistaking

a galaxy for a nightlight

and bumping into things that hurt.

The moment you think to improve yourself

you’re already the scar

of a self-inflicted wound.

One part of you wants to be a lighthouse

and the other, Noah’s ark,

but the only way to keep from drowning

is to become the flood

and that you already are

like blood in the lifeboat of a star

that guides you from below through the darkness above

that can’t tell the crow from the dove.

And it’s the truest form of humility

to accept yourself as you are

and realize your wildest delusions

are just as sincere as the missionaries you send out

to lie about you to the unconverted

like waves calling out to the sea.

But even to understand that much

is just another pair of handcuffs on a cloud

you keep binding yourself to in protest

to save the rain from falling as it will

on the worst and best alike.

Why live and work like a polyp

to separate heaven from hell with a dyke

when everyone’s walking on water

and swimming through stone

like angelic marrow in a demonized bone?

Just realize that space is always like-minded

without being the nature of anything

and yet there’s nothing it doesn’t embrace

like the mind you reflect

when you hold your face up

to the mirror that breaks and polishes you to see

the perfect lineaments of divinity

in the smear on the maculate moon,

and the enlightened maggot in the eye of the star

that greets every corpse like an avatar.

PATRICK WHITE

NOT LESS AWARE IN THE DARK

NOT LESS AWARE IN THE DARK

Not less aware in the dark

than I am in the light

though it’s my blood

that sees better than my eyes,

I listen to my own breathing

and my heart banging

like a storm shutter in the wind,

and I wonder who it’s all for, if anyone,

and if there were stars in my seeing

before I walked myself like a telescope up to the roof

to get a better view

and if all these leafy yesterdays

that look so much like the tomorrows they proposed to be

that I’ve shed like thoughts and birds for years

to reveal the tree that follows itself like a map

into its own flourishing

were not already memories in the world

before I mistook this mind for my own

by giving it a name.

Nothing before, nothing after this night,

worlds within worlds, and light upon light,

I wipe myself away like the carcinogenic smear

of a sunspot in the mirror

tear my face down like an old campaign poster

to better elect the immaculate by acclamation

and step down from all these vacant offices of me

like spent cartridges

from the judicial chambers of an empty gun.

It’s not suicide if you kill yourself into life,

if the pharoah’s ka makes it all the way to Orion

and there’s more delight in heaven than relief.

It may well be wrong and perverse on my part

but I refuse to sugar the rim of a black hole with belief

and live on the crumbs of someone else’s dream

in the corner of an eye

that looks down upon me

like a black lightning bolt an erratic firefly.

And I’m not saying once you’re nothing being turns divine.

I’ve always been too restless

to lie down for long with the mystics

sipping nectar from the moonlit goblets on the vine.

Life’s not a drunk or a hangover.

And I love to paint, it’s true,

but I won’t paint my window over to improve the view,

nor add my little bloodstain like a dye to the seeing

to make the poppy burn blue

just because I can’t take it anymore.

And it may be a long, hard, dirty, demonic coal road

lined with ditchwater and dutiful corpses all the way

to the diamond lucidity of an illuminated human being

but I still stop sometimes, alone with the stars

and listen to the cry of a bird in the night

unspeakably shake the darkness

with the vastness and agony of its life

as if it were a human heart in a rootless tree

whose solitude, like seeing, exceeded the expanse of its being.

PATRICK WHITE

THE NIGHT IN THE WOUNDED MIRROR

THE NIGHT IN THE WOUNDED MIRROR

The night in the wounded mirror

is only a childhood away from my face

and there’s always a shattered window

between me and my starless shining,

and a dead bird upturned on the sill

as if the sky, too, had its quota of roadkill.

Looking back from all these

lightyears and constellations away,

on the black day I was born under an eclipse

like a flower clenched into a fist,

an eye without an iris darker than a shark’s,

I suspect there was a lot more suffering back then

than I was able to live my way through,

estranged in the corner of a kitchen

that was a feeding frenzy of knives.

I still can’t leave one out on the counter

without fearing it’s just another punctuation mark,

the claw of a comma in a long sentence of blood.

At best, it’s the silver scar of the moon

that slashed me open like a well-honed loveletter

that wasn’t meant for me.

And I still don’t know how to approach

the child I was, the child I still am

time-travelling through himself like a glacier

as if he could put a stop to evolution

or survive his extinction

by keeping to himself like ice.

I look upon his solitude and silence,

the unaccusing indictment of his face,

like a cold, brass plague

commemorating the unidentifiable victims

of an atrocity that can’t be understood.

He’s still seven and I’m looping through sixty

like the spine of a calendar

shedding me like autumn,

a picture of turning leaves on every page,

until there’s no way of telling what age we are

in this season out of time,

and I want to love him, I want

to say things that could heal us both like water

before I take him with me into my grave,

but I don’t truly know how,

and there are secret vows of violation

that are taken without a mouth

and assassins of intimacy in the shadows

and children sleeping in snakepits

who make up their own bedtime stories

and dream of things that can’t be told to anyone

who hasn’t been devoured in their ancient infancy

by the furious innocence of the sea.

Dark-hearted jewel

of a child in the night,

older than light

who has made more of me

than I can make of him,

when I weep for what he knows

and will not say, what am I,

what are these words

in the inky shacks of the trees

but the lengthening shadow

of the darkness that pours out of him like blood,

or duct-tape like moonlight over the mouth of a scream?

And if I come back now

like the legend I have made of his sorrow

to gather him up in my arms like a harvest under a full moon,

and if I sit with him all night

without saying anything

here on this skull of a rock

until each of us is the memory of the other,

could it make anything better,

would it take the thorn of the moon

out of the eye of the dragon

that sheds its skin like childhood skies,

not knowing where things end, things begin?

PATRICK WHITE

A STAR'S JUST

A STAR’S JUST

 

for Layla whose name means night

A star’s just another mode of intelligent light

looking for its eyes with its eyes,

its mind with its mind

just as most of us go looking for ourselves

in someone we will never know,

someone we can never find

because they’re always the open door behind us.

It takes a lot of shining to make a human,

and a lot of darkness to blow one out,

but somehow the universe has managed it

like a thought without an opposite, and we’re here

like a manger of fire, a magus of ashes

to witness our engendering

like a star well beyond its own light

by the time we see it, turning around,

a jewel in the night, or a glass of wine

in a thoughtful hand,

to host the mystery of its own radiance

as if each of us were the guest of our own longing,

the stranger in the doorway smiling like a threshold

with gifts for everyone.

A little laughter with your tears perhaps might help,

if I can suggest it lightly enough

to feather your crying.

It’s true. Some people

live like blackholes,

like rats behind a mirror

trying to pick themselves out of a line-up

like the fourth magnitude stars of a slummy constellation,

for things they only wish they’d done,

but certain they can recognize themselves.

Concrete hands and mystic fingertips in mystic Hollywood.

But it’s easy to throw a whole lot more light on the matter than that

and get out beyond the dazzling billboards of the white dwarfs

on this midway of the Milky Way

imploding into their warped identities like periods.

Look. I turn the lights out

and one of us, me, no doubt

is the darkness of a wounded dragon,

and you, when you laugh, the shining.

And of course it’s not truer than trees in the moonlight

if I say it in shadows and snow,

but it’s the only language I know

when the night pours me out like this from Aquarius

and I speak in tongues like the sea,

or paper gulls winging it like poetry

around the weeping candle

of the lighthouse that once was me.

And maybe tomorrow I’ll be the star again

of some one-night constellation

looking for a cheap motel

off this road of ghosts

that drives me like an eye

through the needle I lost in the haystack

of a scarecrow that took off his second hand clothes

like skins and myths and skies he’d outgrown

to prove there was nothing up his sleeve

like the dagger of an identity

that the birds couldn’t believe.

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

SQUIRREL ON A LEAFLESS BRANCH

SQUIRREL ON A LEAFLESS BRANCH

Squirrel on a leafless branch in the rain,

a comma looking for a clause

in the periodic sentence of the tree

delving into the matter

of its own unassuming origins

like the last affable thought

that just interviewed me.

Who the fuck knows?

Denuded down to the duff

I look upon my own leaves

like so many theories I’ve shed

throughout this long night, this brief day,

all the useless maps that carried me away

with every gust of wind

to show me where here was.

Now I’m all crazy starmaps

brailled by constellations

trying to remember the names of their capitols

that starred me like a sheriff or an aster

to this empty treasure chest

I’ve spent my life looking for.

Take a look. There’s nothing inside

but this darkness that has given up its dead

like birds out over a shoreless sea.

Things used to be a lot more drastic

when I would run to put the fires out

my heart had started like an arsonist

by weeping jewels and mirrors

over the burning wedding bed

that woke every morning up like firetrucks and bread.

I took those sails down like skies

a long time ago,

shook the stars and blackholes out of the sheets

and let my eyes wander off into space

like water on the moon

to find a more appropriate face.

Now when I get to the bottom of things,

or even just sink my way through

this unfathomable awareness

that keeps supposing me to me,

I’m as barren and rootless

as a lightning strike on the moon.

And nothing is revealed.

And nothing catches fire.

And there’s nothing

but the alms of a desert

in the craters of these begging bowls

that gape like the empty eye-sockets

of an enlightened insight

that once flashed across the night

like protein looking for a home

in the vast homelessness of it all,

or the still life embedded

in a matchead that’s gone out

like a flower from its flaring,

or better yet

the way I am bound to my life

like the holy cornerstone of a shrine

that revolves around me

like this old meteorite of a skull,

this kissing stone,

that knows me well.

PATRICK WHITE