IF YOU HAVE ANY DOUBTS

IF YOU HAVE ANY DOUBT

If you have any doubt this is about you, don’t

because I’ve summoned snakefire

to tatoo it like an underground constellation

indelibly upon your eyes

and the small skies

you mark like full moons

and forthcoming events

in the calendar of your tears.

How many doctors can you cram in a womb

to get the baby right,

or critics in your head

to align your poem with the axial north

of what everyone else has said

as if inspiration came with a coward and a compass?

You want the roads to follow you.

You stand up like a shaky mast

at public readings,

holding your poems

like a fleet of immaculate sails

that never leave harbour,

hoping some continent drifting toward China

will eventually bump into you

and some cartographer with a publishing deadline

will eventually give you a name.

I don’t mean to set fire to your watercolours

or leave them out in the rain like leaves

or deny you’re a capital looking for a country to star in

or throw myself like junkmail

on the threshold of your overpriced jeans

but I hate the way you keep setting up prisms

at all your rainbow intersections

like traffic lights and rush hour cops

to direct the flow of your reds and greens.

Enlightenment doesn’t maintain a teacher.

The muses don’t hold auditions

and life isn’t the dress rehearsal of anything

that can be prompted in the spotlight of the moon for applause.

Poetry isn’t the slurred autograph

on the second edition of a suicide note

and I’ve seen how you press your mouth to common paper

as if it were a royal document, a lettre cachet

sent through a cultural attache

to assassinate your reader like a lover

but red wax isn’t the same as sealing your words in blood,

and lipstick on a white hanky

isn’t a rose petal

or even a real kiss

and just because you’re a bleeder

doesn’t prove you’re the surviving child of a murdered czar

or that your future’s as bright as a vampire

that just got a job as a teller at a bloodbank

because you don’t know how to die for anything.

You’ve never lived a lie intensely enough

to make you come true

and though you’ve watered the moon for ages

with the rootless shadows of your mirrors and mirages

nothing ever grew.

PATRICK WHITE

LET THE MUD SETTLE IN THE PUDDLE

LET THE MUD SETTLE IN THE PUDDLE

Let the mud settle in the puddle

if you want to clarify the sky you’re walking on,

the stars underfoot, and the clouds.

If you want to see your face as it is,

the front door that everyone recognizes as their own

after they’ve washed off the clowns,

if you want to return to yourself,

not as an address

but as home,

stop trembling like a witching wand

that’s just discovered an unknown sea,

stop throwing your bones around

like a prophetic skeleton

your grammar’s too bad to read,

like birds against the window

or stones skipping out over a mirror

if you want to part the waters like curtains

to see who drowned

when you flashed before your eyes

like the afterlife of Egypt

running the promised land down in the desert.

Love like life may be just a matter

of learning to keep your word to a liar

as most decent people bleed to believe

on the rock of their faith,

but I have passed through the belly

of the serpent crescents of the moon

uncoiling like a ram’s horns,

and endured the acids of this long, dark ordeal

in order to coax the pearls

of my transformative delusions of human divinity

like waterlilies out of the snake shit.

Graffitti under the bridge in ancient hieroglyphics,

I lost the Rosetta stone of my voice in the desert

lives ago that I relinquished like a language in your name,

because you were the most ferocious hunger

to ever consume me,

and even now

in the ashbucket of my heart beside the stove,

this chafing of flame like the wings of a distant phoenix.

Now the prophets play more among themselves

and it’s anyone’s guess who’s left

to bless the horns and haloes

of the knocked-up moon

in all these cradles in the treetops

but all night long I hear them fall like apples.

Do I remember you? You were a scalpel of lightning

that shredded me like the secrets of an abandoned embassy

and there weren’t enough stars in the sky

to cauterize the open wound

or urge my blood to clot like rubies

and I’ve been pouring out of myself like this ever since

astonished by the courage of the light

still streaming through the available dimension of your ageless abyss

as if I had a future.

PATRICK WHITE

IT'S A GESTURE OF THE HEART

IT’S A GESTURE OF THE HEART

It’s a gesture of the heart

that no one can explain

that lays its words down like cool herbs

gathered on the moon

to silver someone else’s pain.

We lie down in the same wound

like two stones in the same river

that might make it to the other side

without drowning in the stream

and I speak to you of shores you can reach if you try

and you add yourself like a drop of water to a shoreless sea, and cry.

And for a moment you are the devastated solitude

of a runaway in the rain

who can’t abide the stranger she’s become

as a lipstick butterfly emerges

from the shell-casing chrysalis of your rage

and you put your lips on like wings.

You’re a princess with a white flag

approaching the ashes of a dragon

who sleeps in his own fires

to wake him up from his dream of water

and negotiate a rescue now

if only I’ll concede to show you how.

You want me to respect you because you’re dangerous.

You want to ensnare me

in the white voodoo you’re practising

on the dark side of the moon,

you believe in my eyes

and want me to see something

you’ve never shown anyone before

because a window’s as good as a door to a thief

and you know we have neither in this homelessness

that shelters our grief like dark matter in space

or the far side of a face

we refuse to acknowledge is ours.

I can feel your powers

chafing their scales in the snakepit

like straitjackets they’re urgently trying to slough off

like the old skins of a hand-me-down moon

that don’t quite fit the new one right.

One fang, stars; the other, a starless night,

you know how to open things with a smile

and strike like a gate

should anyone walk between your crescents

like a terrorist with carry-on luggage

who doesn’t dream he’s been detected

as you recoil like a theme to make your point.

It would be easier to tinker with the genes

of the ancient ancestors of a life before sin

than not to want to want to sleep with you,

than not to want to be your bay for the night

and tell you everything’s going to be all right

and mean it and drown the world like a torch or a dragon

in the intimacy of our most urgent delusions.

And even if I didn’t put a match to the candles

they would still ignite

and a black sun would rise at midnight

and let the stars and flowers decide for themselves

whether they wanted to open in its light or not,

and for awhile, deep underground,

there’d be laughter in a coffin

as we posted dirty notes on our headstones

like shocking lovepoems that just rolled off the tip of our tongues

like drops of water charged with stars and snakefire

humming down our spines

like the deathbed hymns of the hydrolines

when they break the news to God.

PATRICK WHITE

THE MORNING AFTER EVERYTHING: FOR LUKE COCHRANE

THE MORNING AFTER EVERYTHING:

FOR LUKE COCHRANE

Saturday morning rain in Perth

and things seem as intimately far off and strange

as the new maps of water running down the windowpane.

No birds on the black boughs of the November trees

and black mirrors in the empty funeral home parking lot

and on the other side of me

the stalwart bloodbrick of a wet church

that looks better in the nicotine lingerie

and dusky seaspray

of a single yellow floodlight at night

that can’t get it up to be a lighthouse.

It would be a lie to say that I’m not in love

and happily alone, but I most wistfully am,

as I excuse myself for being me

and put myself off like the small death of another way

I could have taken to get back home, but didn’t.

November’s an orphanage after the last kid has left

and I’m sure there’s an ancient chthonic wisdom

under the duff and detritus

of all these slick, leechy leaves

that the earth has applied to herself like a poultice

to draw the violets and worms out in spring,

but right now my mouth is not a wound

with anything deep to say

about things too deep to be said

and there are memories of women and friends in my head

sleeping like keys in the bottom of a drawer

that I have saved for when the day comes

to open the flowers and doors

that I’ve forgotten,

all the soft sorrows that rime the radiance

of the halo around a black hole

haunted by these ghosts of light.

I am absorbed like tears in a tenderness of grey

and there’s more healing than thorn

in the cool aloe of the air

moist with a seance of emotions

that gust lightly around me

as if yesterday were merely a fragrance

hovering over an eye of wine

like the dust and smoke of today

that bottles its purity like water.

Sometimes love passes like a glacier over you

and there are runes and scars and striations on your skin

and lakes and craters and eyes the sky fills in

and the sun comes out like an exorcist

and you feel like you’ve been baptized in ice

or tucked into the crevice of a wailing wall

like a baby mammoth, or an unanswered prayer

and you try not to care

that you’re a freak of your own evolution

trying to clone yourself out of the museum into a zoo

and that all these people are staring at you

like a missing link between the parentheses of your tusks

that have unhinged you from the gate of time

you once swung on like your next breath,

and if you were asked about the extremes of mercy

you would say, without hesitation, death.

Sometimes it’s that hard to accept

that nothing that happens here, including death

is ever over, and that the absence of something or someone

doesn’t mean they’ve ceased to exist

like footprints that lead down to a river.

Because we all live the same beginningless beginning

that is the once and forever of this universe

even if it should call itself home occasionally like an eye,

we go on living and dying each other alone

like an extinct species always asking the time

when the moonlight burns like lime in a grave

and then, once more, absurdly never the same

riots of flying fish leap from every drop of rain

that remembers the passion of the wave

offering itself in the life of every moment

like a jewel thawing, or an icecap over the eye

or the opening of a brittle window

to be scoped out by the nightwind

that longs like a thief for the sea

to gather him up like one of its belongings.

But you can’t pour the universe out of the universe

where the whole is sustained by every part

anymore than you can empty the human heart

that is renewed by its own exhaustion like a tide.

Time is always prelude

and death has never known when

to take down its sail like a tree in the fall.

And because things are never the same twice

and the road back is not the road taken

the world and everyone in it

just as they are, have always been here.

Things don’t come and go

like migrating geese ascending southward out of a field,

or things fallen returning to their leaves

because there’s nowhere to come from

nowhere to go to

that isn’t now and here

as intimately far as it is impersonally near.

Ask almost anyone who they are

and they’ll look down a well in a mirage

to haul up their reflection on a wheel

and insist it’s real

when they ladle their face to their lips

like the moon on dark water.

Or they’ll tell you a story around an unending fire

where the shadows are always truer than the flames

and the most illuminating themes burn like stars without names.

Mind is space and there is

nowhere inside or outside of anything

that is closer or futher than anything else

because everything is mind as far as you can be.

So I can stand here in my lengthening shadow

like a long departure

turning into the wind like a sail or a sundial

as if I were the last of my species of eclipse

and life were merely the long, hard discipline

of unmastering the art

of saying hello to the living

and good-bye to the dead,

or turning the telescope around

and saying good-bye to the living,

hello to the dead as I please,

but I’d rather shed myself

like all these falling maps to anywhere

that once arrived like the fleets of the leaves like me

on the shores of this rootless tree

that doesn’t let go of things for its own survival

but lives in itself like a stranger come

to the opening gate of an endless arrival.

I let the birds come and go, the apples fall,

the stars build their webs in my crown,

and grow like a holy road I take as my own,

like geese passing overhead at night,

or the small birds that come to me like voices

a moment here then gone

who taught me that it’s always dawn

because there’s no end of the beginningless beginning

and it may be a green bough

or a dead branch

you hop up and down on like the hidden notes

of something you’re singing

on the rungs of these crazy snakes and ladders

that long like flesh and bone in the night

for things they can’t see anymore in the light,

or fish dying of thirst in a fathomless pond

or a fire putting itself out in its own eye

or someone dying and someone else asking why

and the whole of creation left alone at home

feeling it doesn’t belong under its own sky

like this Saturday morning rain in Perth

the day after your death

that falls like a loveletter too late upon the earth

or the harvest moon of a delinquent heart

above an untimely skeleton

that can’t decide whether its a tuning fork

or a witching wand

looking for answers like water

under every stone on the moon,

the way we cry for people we think are gone,

but green bough, dead branch, Luke, same song.

PATRICK WHITE

THE ONLY DIFFERENCE

THE ONLY DIFFERENCE

The only difference between a winner and a loser

is that the winner cries out loud in crowds

that trample on his pain

and the loser weeps alone at home in his room

like a faucet without a drain.

Two drips of the same hurricane.

So why put these distinctions on like handcuffs

and spend your life looking for a pin

to jimmy them loose,

or run around in a panic

trying to make bail

by pleading with loansharks

not to bite through your cage as you drown?

You may know the truths of hell religiously well,

but are you as well versed

in the lies of heaven, or is it with you

that one turns into the other

so all the lies come true

and it’s all just a big mess of demonic stew

you keep stirred up with your tongue

to keep from burning on the bottom?

Or are you like most people

who spend more time looking for a guide

than they do at where they’re going,

who think the colour of their eyes tints what they see,

who paint their windowpanes to improve the view

and abide like first stones

in their righteous mansions of glass?

If the angels jump from heaven

so the demons can rise from hell,

you would do well to lie in your grave like a threshold

that knows the way in

and the way out

instead of trying to deport the dead back

to a native way of living.

If you were to ask me, and you haven’t,

so I’ll presume,

you need to take a good bath in a hot mirror

and wash that face off

you keep trying to renew

like a virgin on the moon

every time you start to seek the spiritual.

Clarity isn’t an enlightened target

you can paint on the ass of a baboon

and there are no line-ups and limousines

when the truth is screened like a lighthouse

in an empty theatre

and the sound of one hand clapping

is definitely not applause.

You can walk out of the darkness

like a shadow into a blaze of noon

while your mind streams the credits of the last dream

you’ve left behind you like a life,

or you can hang out like flypaper at midnight

and catch a few stars on the main drag

as if every constellation were the logo

of a mystical consumer brand

blinged out like a shrine

to pimp and pope its radiance.

Either way you cut it, the way I see it,

win or lose, up or down,

thorns, horns, haloes, cosmic eggs

or the full moon itself

in the begging bowl of your crown,

you’re still drinking cool aid in Jonestown.

PATRICK WHITE

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