I ONCE KNEW A DOOR-TO-DOOR BUDDHA

I ONCE KNEW A DOOR-TO-DOOR BUDDHA

I once knew a door-to-door buddha

who thought of nothing as the space left

by everything he had lost

and grew so exquisitely refined

he hung himself in a keyhole

with a piece of nirvanically-flavoured dental floss.

We change in ways we never thought we would.

So right now

you are not especially beautiful

and I am not particularly wise or good.

Yesterday, the moon. And today

this egg in a snakepit

debating scales and feathers

as I try to swallow my own tail

up to and including my head

to see if I can disappear

like the tatoo of the dragon

born in the burning mirror

the mercy of the fire sloughs like skin.

Now there’s a scar in the sky

where my face used to be

and the crystal skull I’m drinking from

looks uncannily like me

before I left home like a grave

that wasn’t deep enough to dream in

of all the things I never became.

Right candle. Wrong flame, perhaps,

but I had to make the starmaps up as I went along

like the words to something you sing alone

when your heart’s on fire

and the dead are still flesh and bone.

It was never enough just to see the visions

I wanted to see the eye that saw them,

the black jewel that shone in all directions

like the unwitnessed clarity of the dark light

that engenders the light we go by

and I resolved like diamond

that if I couldn’t be a petty fool like other people

then I would exact my revenge

by aspiring to be a great one.

But that work is done, and now

there’s nothing left of me to be

that isn’t creatively giving and free

so that when I’m listening to your confession

I don’t appoint a jury of fireflies

and call the court into session

as we all rise like the tears in your eyes

asking to be forgiven.

I don’t turn my blood into a flowchart

and point to the north star

like the axis of the evidence

that everything turns on.

I listen to your lies inventively

as your chandeliers crash

like trees and constellations

in an ice-storm all around you

and remembering I once put

the ripples in your earrings

like an apple that fell into the river,

I grow human and warm,

I assume a kinder, more fictitious form

and remove the moon from your eye like a sliver.

PATRICK WHITE

NOT MUCH TO SAY

NOT MUCH TO SAY

Not much to say to anyone

that I haven’t said before

and what I’m listening to

is unwound in my widening wake

like the threads of a song

I once lived through and through and through.

Nothing is true. Nothing is false.

And there’s no witness to anything

so it’s impossible to be anyone else.

Spent a hundred dollars on birdfeeders

but outside the window, no bird.

I’m not building a stage in a stadium

to make an appearance

among my own thoughts

like an encouraging word.

If I am not yet wholly insane

then there still might be a slight chance

that I am perfectly absurd.

And everything I’ve ever said

has been the orphan of a lost voice

winging its way like an echo through a dark valley

that wakes up like a wound

that thought it was dead

and flashes through my head

like rain on the heiroglyphs of a dry creekbed.

But right now

I’m not looking for my own footprints

in the starmud that walked this way

a million years ago

when I lifted myself up off my own ass

to check out what was moving in the high grass.

Things pass. The monkey grows old

making up reasons

and the plack of conciousness

hardens like granite

around the jewel of life

that keeps flowing away like water

whether you drown in your own fever

in the inflammation of the city

or expire like the last tear of the third eye

of an exhausted mirage in a mystic desert

that’s forgotten how to cry.

PATRICK WHITE

THE ENORMOUS SIGNIFICANCE

THE ENORMOUS SIGNIFICANCE

The enormous significance of a little moment

recollected years later more vividly

than the details of the original event

and yet I still don’t know what it means

to remember you sitting stoned in the windowframe

of that old Victorian head-house high on the hill,

in a slip you wore like moonlight,

strapped with a thirty-eight under your armpit

complaining at my approach you didn’t know anyone

who was worth shooting

as you smiled at me like a dangerous idea

whose time had not yet come.

I still don’t know whose avatar you were,

though, for awhile, you were the muse of my revolution

as we wore lust out like a parachute

plunging into each other

as if all we were

were endless space and atmosphere and falling

in that A-framed attic where the candles pooled

like the paint on your easel

and I’d fall asleep wholly gratified

with your breath like the sea in my ear.

I wrote four hundred poems for you

and gave you the only copies

as if they were the shedding blossoms

of your own private orchard on the moon

just to prove that my love had no signature.

You were always certain of things in a way

I could never be,

and if I was a lost well in a desert

puzzled by the strange stars that were reflected in me,

you were the dark watershed

that fired up the radiant themes of the night

like a furnace that burned like a prophet

to clarify the dead

like the fine print of a fateful conversation

you hung over my head like a new constellation.

You wanted to feed and teach

the children of Africa

but you wound up

working on a kibbutz

and to this day I still wonder

when the seeds you carried with you

like pilgrims into the promised land

turned into bullets?

When did the ploughshares

turn into swords

that would spill blood

for a few, stupid, ghostly words

that were vampiric abstractions

devoid of flesh?

When did you embed yourself

like a mine in the starmud

and wait like a toad for rain

to wash you out of your creekbed

into a flash flood;

when did the amaranthus who bled for love

throw all that imperial passion off like a robe

and let it fall to the floor

in gouts of blood?

Did you think you could fill the table

for the hungry and unable

by killing the people

who ate Africa down to its diamonds?

And did you expect me

to receive you like a hero

when you got back from making a difference?

You talked a lot about manifestations

of economic autonomy

in underdeveloped nations

that had more reasons than rations

to drink blood like wine,

but you never mentioned the harvest,

you never mentioned the burnt vine

or the scorched earth of the child

that was anointed with gasoline

and cremated with her straw dolls in bed

until all that was left of her flesh

broke like black, bitter bread

in the mouth of the militant multitudes

who had come, like you,

to liberate the starving with food,

but the only thing she received

in the way of loaves and fishes from your hand

that freed and filled her was death.

And then you went on to better things

like a guest lecturer

with a new book and a slideshow

on the academic, cocktail circuit

revelling in the unambiguous celebrity

of someone who had been there and done that

like fat in the fire.

Been a long time since I last thought of you

like a scar I had almost forgotten,

but never, since that day I left,

with compassion or desire.

And even now when I recall

how we never hurt anyone

making love all night long

in that tiny apartment above the sea

where the sun would lay its sword down on the waves,

and I stand in your doorway again

and think about knocking

I remember the thief

who wanted to give something back

and made a fact of her belief

by stuffing North America into her knapsack

and thumbing all the way across Europe to Tel Aviv

blooded her abstractions by killing a child

to prove what she didn’t believe.

PATRICK WHITE

CHANCING UPON MYSELF

CHANCING UPON MYSELF

Chancing upon myself alone in the bedroom mirror

as I pass like a flash of the moon on stormy water

I realize I can’t even call my reflection my own

as the demon who gives, and the angel who won’t say

renew me once again like the first draft

of an old passion play off Broadway.

What difference between the lake and the sky

or me and the mirror

when we both look into each other

from behind the same face through the same eyes?

And the demon suggests to me

in an off-handed voice

as if the insight were obvious,

that everything in the universe

is the likeness of everything else,

and the darkest joy to ever inspire

life upon earth, the open secret

that gapes in the hearts

of the humans who seek it,

is to revel in the similitudes.

It’s not necessary to dust

the water or the sky with stars

to see who left their fingerprints behind

when all you’ve got to do

is turn yourself inside out

like that forensic glove you’re wearing like skin

to identify who’s who for the record.

Of course, it’s you. Of course, it’s me.

Who else?

And there you go again

perpetrating the universe upon yourself

as if you were somehow hidden within it

as the angel puts her finger to her lips

and the demon kisses what’s forbidden,

all those differences born of the simulacra

that embed themselves like the green star in the apple

that teaches the wine

that the first property of light

is to shine,

is to intensify the darkness into diamonds

that will weep in their own fires for joy

that all the different stories, all

the myriad forms in the night

tarry along the road

to gaze up in astonishment

at the same constellation

that was born under you

as if you were the crystal skull

in the house of the dark mother

that determined its fate.

The taste of the vine

in darkness and light

is our simultaneous illumination

and just as the sun raises

the slender goblets

of the morning glory to its lips

and drinks the moonlight down

to the lees of a full eclipse

so are we always drunk

on our own inter-reflected shining,

drunk on a world that’s drunker than us,

setting a course by the fireflies

who guide us like sunken ships

who never left port

to the wilderness coast of continents

that no one’s ever been before

though there are signs of our drinking

scattered like a billion messages

in a billion broken bottles

all along the shore

and waves of light

drunk on their own diamonds

deliriously muscling their way out of the water

like the horse-bodies of the gods

they’re learning to ride like humans

to their own rescue.

PATRICK WHITE

BLACK FOSSIL OF A STAR

BLACK FOSSIL OF A STAR

Black fossil of a star

that’s bereft of all that shining,

even the emptiness I feel tonight

is a deficit of light

deeper than anything

this darkness that binds me

might reveal.

There are no wounds

worth throwing stars into anymore,

no mouths to watch like weathervanes,

no eyes waiting like water on the moon

to thaw like the jewels of life,

no blossom on the dead branch,

no bird on the green bough,

no voice in the well.

My heart is a rumour of sand.

And even after all these years

of living among the loves, the lives

the lies and the books

of this estranged man I am

I still don’t understand

why he doesn’t know me.

Dark energy, dark matter,

it is no small thing

to give your eyes back to the water

when the seeing is finished with them

and they return to the mindstream

like rain on a snake in a dream

that swallows reality whole.

I look for myself everywhere,

I dare thresholds and zoos at night,

I enter dangerous spaces

riddled with dragon bones

to look for the lotus that blooms in fire

like the first elation of the desire

to illuminate creation with a mind.

But I cannot find the antecedent to my existence

in the shadows I cast upon the earth behind me,

lost in this labyrinth of fingerprints

that keeps leading back to me, nor

in the light of the lamp I hold up before me

like fruit on the bough

to make my way down this road at night

that deludes me into thinking

there’s a continuity to my life

I can follow like a theme of water

through all these changes

back to a sea of awareness

where the keels of distinction

are not torn on the reefs of the brain

and clarity isn’t just

the exquisite extinction of pain.

PATRICK WHITE

I NEED A NEW TRUTH

I NEED A NEW TRUTH

I need a new truth

I can open like a door

and let the old one walk out into the world

with all her heavy feelings

like wounded swans in the rain

she feathered like arrows

to make her point lethal.

Time doesn’t heal much

and you can plant a crutch

but it still doesn’t sprout leaves.

The old truths just don’t go on bleeding.

They keep cutting deeper than meaning

into the life of a man

still awake at four in the morning

trying hard not to understand

why he doesn’t call out for help

when he drowns in the windows.

There’s an art to being a human

you must be alone to live,

and a dangerous passion for insight

that will open the eyes of the rain

like petals of shedding moonlight

on the empty grave of the brain

that disinters us like unrequited pain

to seek out why we breathe and grow

like assassins suckled on our own shadows.

There are secrets to life

that it is ignorance to know

and only the great fools of the spirit

can comprehend without putting an end

to the profundity of their antics.

The rest is a fiction of semantics

unfolding like the world

in the wake of a word

darker than love

when it’s time to say good-bye.

The doors don’t open by themselves

and the windows won’t cry unless I do

and it may be years before you realize

the jewels of enlightenment

you want to bathe in

to wash the world off your skin

will be drawn like tears from your own eyes

when things like people and candles come to an end.

I will miss you, my friend.

I will mourn you at the crossroads

of every new beginning

like a road I once took

and will not take again

and your absence will undo me

like an absolute of space

and there are things I will say to the moon

when I am shaking with terror and grace

that I could not say to your face

when it rose over the hills

like the unintelligible headstone

of someone who refused to confess

that she was buried under it.

I will wander the house as I do tonight

and try to suggest new shadows to the light

that don’t clash like white against white

in the dark blazing that burns me out

like stars in the marquee of a constellation

no one can see

who looks for me

with any eyes other than these

that have learned to shine on their own.

And I will remember how you once said of my life

that I didn’t deserve it,

and all I could answer back was

that you don’t need to believe life is good

to want to preserve it.

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I NEED A NEW TRUTH

I NEED A NEW TRUTH

I need a new truth

I can open like a door

and let the old one walk out into the world

with all her heavy feelings

like wounded swans in the rain

she feathered like arrows

to make her point lethal.

Time doesn’t heal much

and you can plant a crutch

but it still doesn’t sprout leaves.

The old truths just don’t go on bleeding.

They keep cutting deeper than meaning

into the life of a man

still awake at four in the morning

trying hard not to understand

why he doesn’t call out for help

when he drowns in the windows.

There’s an art to being a human

you must be alone to live,

and a dangerous passion for insight

that will open the eyes of the rain

like petals of shedding moonlight

on the empty grave of the brain

that disinters us like unrequited pain

to seek out why we breathe and grow

like assassins suckled on our own shadows.

There are secrets to life

that it is ignorance to know

and only the great fools of the spirit

can comprehend without putting an end

to the profundity of their antics.

The rest is a fiction of semantics

unfolding like the world

in the wake of a word

darker than love

when it’s time to say good-bye.

The doors don’t open by themselves

and the windows won’t cry unless I do

and it may be years before you realize

the jewels of enlightenment

you want to bathe in

to wash the world off your skin

will be drawn like tears from your own eyes

when things like people and candles come to an end.

I will miss you, my friend.

I will mourn you at the crossroads

of every new beginning

like a road I once took

and will not take again

and your absence will undo me

like an absolute of space

and there are things I will say to the moon

when I am shaking with terror and grace

that I could not say to your face

when it rose over the hills

like the unintelligible headstone

of someone who refused to confess

that she was buried under it.

I will wander the house as I do tonight

and try to suggest new shadows to the light

that don’t clash like white against white

in the dark blazing that burns me out

like stars in the marquee of a constellation

no one can see

who looks for me

with any eyes other than these

that have learned to shine on their own.

And I will remember how you once said of my life

that I didn’t deserve it,

and all I could answer back was

that you don’t need to believe life is good

to want to preserve it.

PATRICK WHITE