BLACK SAPPHIRE ON THE VERGE OF BLUE

BLACK SAPPHIRE ON THE VERGE OF BLUE

Black sapphire on the verge of blue

what image now is this of you

gathering out of the night air

like the light of the stars

or a ghost beginning to breathe?

I’m not waiting like a host in the darkness

for company, not longing

to be anywhere with anyone, but alone.

Haven’t I tasted your sorrows enough

to know the grief that marrows you like a bone

as if it were my own?

And it may be a bell-shaped planet

that poured out of its own volcanic forges

wobbling on the clapper of its axis

like a drunk at a wake

to toll its way around the sun

mourning the death of everything born in the light

that swings between spring and autumn,

but I’m not crying to sweeten the night with my tears,

or deepen my solitude

by summoning back the leaves

that were torn out like the pages of a book

at a heartshaking seance of the lost years

when a black harvest moon cut out my tongue.

Despite the cliches applied like poultices and placebos

to draw the infection out as if age were a disease

and not the glory of an old painter

still standing at the easles of the trees

shedding himself like portraits and leaves,

I am not young anymore

and there’s more behind me than ahead

worth dying for.

No one can ever be sure,

but I think I’ve died enough for one lifetime

to walk alone in the woods far from home

through my own leaves

rather than the duff of spiritual junkmail

that lies about the violets under it

on the thresholds of a graveyard’s horizontal doors.

Now is a moment unborn, and now

is the breathless sustainer its own unperishing

and effortlessly I have become everything

that wears my face like the universe

I just breathed out of my lungs

and speaks in one voice like me, like autumn,

in many tongues, of the mystical affinity

of a human divinity to identify itself with everyone

and still not be able to give itself a name

or say who it really is

when it tries to pluck the flame from the fire.

Then again, it’s not hard to admire the tact of the fact

that sometimes life is a liar

and a snapping turtle rises up

from the murky bottom of the starmud

and rapes the swan of the moon

like a choir in a feather bed

and then sinks again like a bell with a penis head

that’s just converted gold into lead

like a heavy noun back into the dark dream grammar of the dead

who lie there like children trying not to move

for fear of alerting the nightmare

and pretend not to feel anything.

But I haven’t been looking for you

like the continuity of a lifestream on the palm of my hand,

or this theme of simulacra in a waking dream

that might lead me back to you like an island in the fog

to the coasts of the empty lifeboat

you left me like a suicide note

I’ve been trying to write ever since

that might make some sense out of your death,

out of the abysmal absence

I keep trying to live up to

like my next breath.

PATRICK WHITE

I CAN REMEMBER YOU SCREAMING

I CAN REMEMBER YOU SCREAMING

I can remember you screaming

like a shattered crackhouse window

something obscene to the last john on death row

you railed like a comet in passing.

Your mind was a mirror

that had suffered one too many exorcisms

not to weep on the dark side

like an exhausted eclipse

when you cracked like a wishbone for the boys

and I could never imagine

what you said to yourself

when you picked yourself up after them like toys

they had forgotten they had wished for.

When you pulled the shower curtain closed

like a bruise on a nun

were you in a cloister or a confessional

or are there other vows

that can only be broken by a professional?

You were all gates to everyone

but no matter how many they passed through

they never made it as far as the garden.

But I can remember one night with you

before we both grew up through the concrete

when the angel with the flaming sword

blew herself out like a candle

and there was more to the beginning

than just a word.

Everything sprang up like mushrooms

and in every one

I could taste you like the moon.

And San Francisco in the sixties

showed us both what the world could have been like

if it had been created by a woman

but it was you alone

in the silence of our mystic complicity

that revealed what could be revealed

of your plans for paradise.

Are you in it now?

Are you dabbling your toes

in the salmon-enchanted rivers of the dawn

or leaping over the obvious rainbows upstream

to heal your urgency in the sacred pools of Goldstream

as if the sea depended on it?

The last time I saw you

the drugs had made you so thin

you looked like a ladder going down into a deep hole

and there were no demons or angels on it rungs

and the stars in your eyes had turned their dancefloors

into the heads of tiny pins and celestial syringes

at the other end of the telescope that makes things small.

And then the ferry pulled away from the wharf like a planet

and left me standing dwarfed in its wake

and I remembered you, so unafraid and golden

insisting I push you higher and higher

with every return of the swing

as if you couldn’t do anything

without coming full circle,

and then you jumped like a stone from a sling

or a comet from its dark halo

and I saw the moon fall out of your ring

like an opal, like an eye

and by October when you left for Mexico,

the little we had of a belated childhood was over.

I wanted to call and tell you

I still loved you like that summer

you turned, and laughed, and raised your shirt

and showed me your breasts at the end of the walkway

like something of you

you wanted me to remember.

And I do. God knows I do, by the way I hurt

like a road you didn’t take

or the face you kept hidden for my sake

that still keeps on using me like tears

when you asked me in jest

but listened for the answer like a bell

if after all these years

I would still die for you

and for a few hours one afternoon

you were Josie again, happy and vain and glorious,

whenever I answered yes

and there was no chain in hell

that could bind you like a swing or a well

to the pendulous clockwork deathcart axles and oxen of anything

and no pain in the silence that followed the news of your death

when I said it again

and true as a comet to its calling

or the map of a star to its falling through fire,

you streamed out forever like your hair in an exaltation of glee

lacing summer stars through the darkest places in me

screaming, higher, Patrick, higher,

push me higher than I’ve ever been

as if I could pick up where you had left off

like a kite on the wing

a girl on a swing

and the world was not dirty and mean.

PATRICK WHITE

HERE

HERE

Here. But I can’t say where this is.

Now. But it’s hard to determine the time zone

when the sun shines at midnight

like an X-ray of my skull.

Obviously, I’m thinking of you,

but I’m mapping myself like a lie detector

that’s trying to forge my neverending signature

on a pardon that didn’t come through.

And when the priests come like the last rites

to my holding cell

to compare confessions,

I’m wired to the night like a buddha

with his hand on the switch to enlightenment

and I burn for things God did on his own

though I’d be the last to throw the first stone

or plead like a judas-goat at the foot of a tiger-throne.

There’s no honour among thieves

when the shit hits the fan

and the only loyal man

is not a man born of a mother

but there are codes that you can keep to yourself

like ashes in the urns of the constellations

that have never been fingered out

like a suspect in a line-up.

I’m not rolling around in myself

like a thumb in ink

to see what I think

through a crack in the cup of the case,

and I’m not trying to conceal myself

behind the surgically-altered face of the moon

that sags like an old movie-star

over its reflection in the eyes of the morning dew.

For years I lived in isolation

like a message in the eye of a bottle lost at sea

but now I’ve forgotten what it was

I was meant to reveal

when the seal was broken

like DNA on the shard of mirror that slashed my throat

to keep me from singing

like a bubble of light in a lifeboat

or the last flash of a breath in the depths

from the mouth of drowning messiah

who mistook his feet for waves and stairs

and burnt them walking on stars.

PATRICK WHITE

JUST LOOK AT YOU NOW

JUST LOOK AT YOU NOW

Just look at you now,

bound and blindfolded,

prodded by the point of a sword

to walk your own erection

like the plank of a pirate ship

out into the depths of a woman

who receives you like the ocean

as you, who never played fair,

plead like the gulls in your wake

for the garbage she throws from the stern.

Those who live by the woman

will die by the woman,

but little brother,

you’re falling on your own sword

long before she’s even

flung herself fly fishing

from the starboard side

like the grappling hooks of the moon

to pull herself in close

until you’re both bumping hulls

and she’s swinging from the masts to board you.

And I know you’re in pain, it’s got to hurt,

dying like this for a cliche

that ripped you off like a skirt.

But you never stopped long enough

to look at the moon and notice

how it keeps changing the skulls

it superimposes over its tripleX crossbones

like the negative of a stranger

she never finishes developing

and that one of those gaping icons of doom is yours,

but then you always thought

you were the ultimate g-spot

on the Whore of Babylon

and now it’s got to itch to be wrong.

PATRICK WHITE

LONGING OVER-REACHS ITSELF

LONGING OVER-REACHES ITSELF

Longing over-reaches itself

when it turns into a request

so I’m not asking for anything from the stars;

I’m not standing here looking up at the night sky

trying to identify you among all that is shining,

waiting for your light like a remote gift

on this bridge without a past or a future

where a man in the vastness of his solitude

is still not enough of a zenith

to illuminate his passage to the other side.

I don’t keep myself on like a nightlight in the darkness

or churning in the lifestreams

of these immeasureable depths

pretend someone’s saved a seat for me

in a lifeboat that’s already full.

And for all the eternities that I have spent looking

like waves out on the open eye of the sea

for a constellation of my own,

when the moon breaks like a wine goblet

over the stone of my skull

to launch another continental shipwreck

I still don’t think I taste of stars

or that my dick is a reliable lighthouse.

And sure, it’s a lot of bluff and brave talk

when you get punched in the heart

by a bareknuckled squall

and you’re buried at sea

under the black flag of an indelible eclipse

after someone suggests you say something over yourself

as you would for the dead

and it’s lifetimes later

and you’re a dangerously different coast

but I’m beginning to remember what I said.

That you are life is certain.

That you are love

is the wind in a curtain

fishing for fireflies in an open window

as if you were trawling for stars.

And if I were caught like the gills of the moon in your nets

would you haul me up onto your decks

and choosing me like a coin from your purse

to put under my tongue

like a full moon for the ferryman

throw me back into my own resurgency?

I’ve been to the top of the prodigal mountain

that looks into its own heart

like a ghost returning home

only to stand before the scuttled gate

of a dead sea that had wept away its waters.

And I have heard the sirens scream

like poppies in their sleep

rushing to their own emergencies

like blood in the water

waiting for the jaws of life,

but there was nothing I could do to wake them

and they slept through me like an afterlife

that had come to the back door

of someone who doesn’t live here anymore.

PATRICK WHITE

THE BLITHE SURFACE OF THINGS

THE BLITHE SURFACE OF THINGS

The blithe surface of things is the worst scar.

Putting a smile on everything

as if nothing were worthy of darkness or sorrow

and the night that grows stars be sanctioned

by the one-eyed judges of the postive thought police

who are as blinded by their own blazing

as black holes are, grazing on light in the dark.

There is no holy war between the negative and the positive,

the mother and the son,

one wing of the bird and the other.

You want the waterlilies and the blue hyacinths

but you don’t want the swamp they grew out of,

you want the flowers and the wine

you love the blossoms on the vine

but not the mangers of sheep shit

that cradle the seed and warm the root.

Is it postive to be negative about negativity

or are you just trying to keep up appearances?

Is anything made brighter by your denouncing of the dark

or are you just another sunny puritan of noon

trying to bleach the stars out

like stains on the bedsheets

when you shake the nightbirds

out of the bedsheets like shadows and crumbs

from your queen-sized skies?

We are humans. We suffer.

We break like trees in an icestorm

and sometimes the untethered kites of our minds

burn like kamikaze loveletters in the powerlines

after the big disconnect

and we just fucking well hurt.

And there are spaces so vast and impersonal within us

that even the silence is afraid of the answer

when gods die like tigers in an abandoned zoo

and all that is left like the last insurgent in Bagdhad

is you waiting to go off like a bomb

to begin the universe again, without pain

like the child that was just identified

by her left foot

stuck in the blood and the flowers

splashed across a new running shoe.

And I know at any moment

you’re ready to tell me how many angels

are dancing on the head of a pin,

and that the darkness can only be conquered with light

when I’m afraid of being me in the night

opening my eyes

and looking down into the ocean like a wave,

but how many wombs does it take to fill a grave?

Or do you distinguish one emptiness from the other

as if one were the recipient, and the other, the organ donor?

Is birth on one side and death on the other side of the door

or is nothing given so nothing can be taken away

like the renewable virginity

of this maculate whore of a moon

that beguiles us with the beauty of her fangs

and the way she kills us into life

by unlocking the bolt on the gate

and releasing the bullet from its chamber?

But if I tell you that rape is the atrocity a la mode of genocide

being waged against the tribal chromosomes of the Congo

even just to nudge a thought like a stem cell toward the issue

that might grow the other half of your heart

you sour like ice cream

and change the theme

to flowers and babies that are born like fists

as if you were the only nurse

on the midnight shift of the nightward

and I were the resident gravedigger for the nursery

always knocking on things like wombs and skulls

to see if I can raise the dead in the rosebed

to make room for more.

Life may well be a form of emptiness

shaped and turned, effaced and urned

like a lump of wet clay on a wheel,

the starmud of a squalid planet,

celestial leftovers on a dirty plate,

but you approach it like a potter

with two right hands

trying to avoid turning left

to the far side of your brain

and when you do

you damn it like original sin

and then go around trying to milk the moon

as if you could separate

the positive snake serum

from the positive toxin

that unspools like honey

from the crescents of your lipless grin.

PATRICK WHITE

MAYBE IF I TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT

MAYBE IF I TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT

Maybe if I try to understand it

I can forget what it means, maybe

these breakdown, blasting cap tears

I’m wired to like a beaver dam

about to wash out the road

like blood at a crime scene

as the sky lies down upon me

like a collapsed lung, or a mattress

that enslaves rubber tires in chains

to deaden the explosion,

might leave something clean

like the glowing fields in the sunset

after a thunderstorm.

And if I’ve been trying to train my diamonds to flow

it’s only so I can take a bath in my own grave

to rinse myself off the shining like coal.

But it’s bad form to throw the world

down your neighbour’s well at night

like bad meat

so I keep my horrors symbolically discrete

by sowing stars in the wounds

to cauterize the pain

and pretend that everything is sweet.

I write poems about waterlilies

and float them downriver

like paper boats on the moon;

or I set myself on fire like the origami rose

I folded out my bloodstream

just to add a little colour and class to the ashes

or run my tongue along the sabre of the crescent moon

to hone the eloquence of the mad slasher

into something more than a papercut

and a comma of blood on my thumb,

but it’s hard to get chatty in Auschwitz

when everyone around you is playing dead or dumb

and the afterlives of the Nazis

are the cornerstones of the new millenium

they’re building for my convenience down the block.

And I want to talk, I want to say myself

wholly and unholy as I am

but my muse has turned into a Medusa

who thinks she looks good wearing

that snakepit on her head

and trying to say anything

is like trying to turn my tongue into a jackhammer

to get down to the bottom of my emotional life

like this nameless gravestone on the moon

I keep carving out of bedrock.

So I seep back into my self like blood on a sword

or a shadow at noon

or the frown of an eclipse

in the facepaint of a starless oilslick

that swims in its own skin like a snake across the moon

as if it were the sad path of a road

that never makes it home

and drown my rage like a torch

in the fathomless silence of a black mirror

to burn like the afterlife

of a dragon in an urn,

or swallow the moon whole

and drown myself in the rain

like a candle that blew itself out

to keep from boiling like a heretic in its own tears

and keep the farmers at their prayers

happy for years.

PATRICK WHITE