YOU CAN TEACH THE MIND

YOU CAN TEACH THE MIND

You can teach the mind

but you can’t teach the heart anything

about the way it’s come through everything

like a theme of the ocean through a bloodstream.

The crabs clatter like sleepwalking clocks

across moonlit beaches

holding up the crescents of their claws

like lunar castanets

to dance the time away

with their own shadows.

Walking the road

you become the road

and no one gets anywhere

until only the road arrives.

Petty people toy with small destinations

they call themselves.

Be a great river

and follow your own veins and arteries

down the mountain

through the plains and valleys below

to the vastness of the sea that conceived you.

And when the sea reflects the stars

don’t look for your place in the waters

as if you were reading a starmap

when every drop of you

is distilled from a vine of the light.

When you turn the light around

and pour the mooncup of your existence

back into the river it scooped you from

to ease a stranger’s thirst for stars,

and everything seems empty and forsaken,

and the dream is quaking in the turbo-charged air,

suddenly you disappear

and the sea is everywhere

effaced by its own longing to share.

If you hate the world,

it will go to war with you.

If you love it inordinately

it will ignore you.

Better to be the fire

and not be burnt by your own flame;

better to be the sword

that kills you into life

and not be cut by either edge.

And if you’re a bell

so stuffed with choirs

you can’t sing,

or a liar pimping constellations like bling

in the blaze of your own thing,

you should know

there is no hell for you,

no truth that’s going to sting

that hasn’t already been bored to death

by your significance.

There is no inclusion

no exclusion in clarity.

If you examine closely

the coinciding of thought events

that you misrepresent as your mind,

the whole of the sea is in every wave

and the water isn’t startled

when the fish jumps.

Walking by that sea

everything the world

ever stole from you

is returned by grateful thieves.

PATRICK WHITE

WOKE UP THIS MORNING

WOKE UP THIS MORNING

Woke up this morning

and a whole side of myself

slid like half an island into the sea

to create a tidal wave of emotion

that’s come crashing down over me

as if I were the coastal city

of the continent in its path.

And it’s not unusual for me

to live in the aftermath of myself

like some thermophilic bacterium

after the comets destroy

all my higher life-forms

and slowly complicate myself

back into a new species.

I know how to feather a lizard

into a songbird

and divide the world in two

so there’s a me and there’s a you

a this and a that,

two eyes of the blind,

to be concious of a mind

that sets me apart from everything.

And there are days

I can melt diamonds in my mouth

like spring

but lately

it’s getting harder

to keep faith with what I sing,

harder to taste the gold

in the darkness of the ore

I keep refining like my life

until all I will leave on the table

is a loveletter and a knife

for the next tenant.

Every day’s a new start

if you don’t approach it

with yesterday’s heart.

PATRICK WHITE

SCATTERING

SCATTERING

Scattering black sunflower seed

like the eyes of words

out over the snow

for the squirrels.

Birds watching

high above the page

for an entrance on stage.

Food and empathic renewal,

fuel and the ferocity of life

a softer knife than the ice

because of my sweeping generosity.

I like to thaw things,

turn the brittle supple,

swords into the blades

of the wild irises

that burn like hydrogen

beside the stream,

snowmen that flow

out of themselves

like candles

until all that’s left

are the stones they relied on for eyes.

Stones have their clarities

but seeing

is a very subtle kind of water

that knows reality is not solid

and the light of a single firefly

is hot enough

to melt the planet.

And then like early spring in Perth

when the snow goes

it’s November all over again.

I see everyone alone with themselves,

sad intimates of the shadows

that forsake them like evolution

the moment they cry out

like leaves on the stream to endure.

Maybe it’s one medium to the next

as we’re transformed

by ever more rarefied spaces

that denude us like light from our ions

into luminous bodies with auroral faces

that open like one-night enlightened lilies in the starmud,

or maybe it’s just the death-leap

of the next apple into the bottomless abyss

of a darkness deeper than death is aware of itself.

Conjoined again in the primordial atom

would we feel the same snakepit

of self-rejection

and begin the universe again

by cracking out of the cosmic glain

like serpents with wings in the trees

oxymoronically bound

to the fires above

and the waters below?

Or does one universe pour into another

like a waterclock of insight

that flows on forever

like a snake or a river

through the length of itself

like one inexhaustible thought

with its tail in its mouth?

If so, there’s nothing to know

because the whole and the all of everything

is in every seed I throw to the squirrels,

like the universe in these grains of sand

quick with life

that look back at me warily

like an unspoken rosary

of black-eyed pearls.

Worlds within worlds.

But if there’s nothing discrete

about a mind that can’t be defined

then why the distinction in the first place

and why these fingertips, these eyes, this face

that keeps on trying to see itself like the moon

from the water’s point of view

as if the urgency of the tides in the mirror

were the brides and the oceans

of its own lost emotions, reflected?

There’s more to feeding squirrels

than I suspected.

PATRICK WHITE

IF COMPASSION

IF COMPASSION

If compassion is not

the fruit of your understanding

your tree is rootless and flawed

however beautiful the blossoms are.

And your eyes may be as lustrous

as polished stones

you’ve buffed like the moon on water

but there’s nothing inside

and gold doesn’t pour like dawn

from the dark ore of your suffering

when you cry.

If a child is shot in Gaza

and you don’t bleed

for the evil seed in her head

as you would your own

then only the dead will sow your field

and you will gnaw the hard bread

of your own gravestone

like a book you should have read.

If compassion is not

the fruit of your understanding

however much is illuminated

by the rarity of your perception,

the lamp you go by

is still not ripe,

you’re still a green apple

on the bough

in autumn.

The tongue is a shovel

and knowledge is soil

and you can use it

to dig a grave for your brother

or prepare a garden

as it was meant to do

and your words can flower

into fruit and bread

at the eastern doors of the dead

who will raise the sun up to their lips

and drink from it like a cup,

but if all your heart can do with blood

is jewel the eloquence of the blind

with lucid insights

then your siloes are nothing

but the empty thunder

of lightning without rain

and you will reap the sand like the scythe

of a crescent moon

that’s never tasted grain.

And you may be a glutton,

you may stuff yourself day and night

like the liver of a goose

with spiritual insight

and squat like a rotund buddha on a tatami mat

squirming through the wormholes of your mind

to the other side of the universe

or knock like a xylophone

on the door of the last chakra

above your skull

like an embassy

you seek sanctuary in

but if you can’t feel

the fangs of starvation

that withers a child

in the arms of her mother in Darfur

who gave birth to a lily

that will die like a bat

because the dark matter

in your cosmic frame of reference is fat,

then the advancing flame of your snakefire

is just another lethal candle

for all the charm of the choir

you can’t train not to bite you.

If compassion is not

the fruit of your understanding

you will be disgorged

by the wiser serpents of life

like a black hole turned inside out

and thrown from the back of the truck

like the corpse of a sack of flour

in a refugee camp

and your blood will spoil

like the unused oil in a lamp

that never threw a light on anything.

You have a mouth,

but you won’t scream murder,

you won’t scream genocide

when you know what’s being done.

You have a nose

but you pin it like a clothespeg

to a a breezy clothesline

to sweeten your dirty laundry

by washing out the stink of the corpses.

You have eyes

but you keep them shut

to paint pictures on your windows

from the inside

to see what you want to see

in your house of warped mirrors

and if you should cry to look good

in front of the camera

you’re prompted by a gland of TV tears

to cologne the air with cliches

that smell like the petals that fell

like the machetes of Uganda.

Rock-bands making radical money

whining about nothing,

wanna be killer bees

trying to make their honey sting

inside the hive of a contract

with plug and play guitars

and fireworks that swarm the stars

like chimney-sparks from Auschwitz.

You have ears.

But they’re dead shells

and the sea you once listened for as a child

has been poured out of them

like living water

so you can’t hear

your daughter

being raped in the Congo,

or the scream of the boy

who died like a toy-soldier

when the Hannibal hearts

of the cannibal generals

played war-games with his life.

If compassion is not

the fruit of your understanding

you will lick your heart

like a lump of coal

you tore out of your own chest,

trying to taste the diamonds,

and you will know what it means

when the eyelids of the light

close in upon you

like a starless night

that undoes the seams

of your wasteband constellations

like the stitches and staples

it uses to sew the children

back together

in a patchwork comforter of wounds

it will lay over your head

like a sky for the dead

all reds and gangrenes

as the faces of the children rise

one by one like ghoulish moons

and apple blossoms

to stain your death

with their foolish dreams.

PATRICK WHITE

THE PAST

THE PAST

The past is slurred, smeared, smudged

like unknown, unnamed stars

deep in the night

rending their light like widows

that scream across the darkness

weeping mirrors

for the death of their light.

Protean, amorphic, the past

is a stem cell

not a pyramid

that keeps being nudged into eyes

by things as they change in the present.

The past is a river of many voices

all flowing as one

like the threads of the strong rope

it used to climb down from heaven

like a pendulum,

like a man unjustly condemned.

The past is a rosary of skulls,

the beads of many moons

strung like vertebrae

along a spinal cord

tuning up

to jam with the spheres.

I have drifted in the high fields of the past

like the evening vapour

of the man I breathed out

and watched the hours fall like petals

from the shy clocks of the flowers

and knew the blood and the time

and all the variant themes of my sorrows

were not the old cups I once drank from

when I could chug the moon,

nor the black hoods

I pull down like eclipses

over heads that will surely come off

like the lame excuses I indict

for all these acephalic tomorrows,

but always and forever

without beginning or end

the loneliest road of now

in the mode of a man

that life has ever walked.

But you mustn’t think

the road ahead

like a wave or a breath or time

is driven by the road behind,

or that the future hasn’t happened yet

or the morning is younger than the night

or the past is a lack of beginnings.

Be a smart fish and swim through the net

of your own constellation like stars

always a prelude ahead of their shining

like new moons opening their eyes

on the illustrated calendars of our scars.

Prophecy is just a future memory

you look at now

with the eyes of the past

before the arising of signs

smears the bubble

with rainbows and oilslicks

and the symbolic slums

of rundown zodiacs.

I look into the space before me.

I look into the space behind.

No difference.

Nothing to lose.

Nothing to find.

No waves on the ocean of mind.

My death achieved at the moment of birth

with the first breath

of my beginningless beginning,

I am time. I am the pageless calendar

of the ageless earth, the eternal abyss

that primed the stars in such a way

the light is not young

the light is not old

and the taste of the rain in spring

is the taste of the rain in autumn.

There’s a past.

But it hasn’t begun yet.

And there’s a future.

But don’t wait.

PATRICK WHITE

CIGARETTE. COFFEE. COMPUTER SCREEN.

CIGARETTE. COFFEE. COMPUTER-SCREEN.

Cigarette. Coffee. Computer-screen.

Now what? This as it is, no before

or after, nothing peering out like a squid

through its own inky simulacra

as it jets away

like a comet through the stars

that portends nothing but its own escape

though it’s impossible to elude the likenesses.

Illegal white phosporous

letting down its tentacles

like lethal Medusae over Gaza

to cook the skin of the children.

Now that I’ve said that,

show me the child that was saved

in Gaza, Darfur, the Congo.

Words do nothing.

The obscenity of the atrocity

deepens beyond despair

and the desecration of the innocents

is the foreign affair

of unindictable governments

setting fire to a child’s hair.

Are you appalled

or like the rest of the world

are you enthralled

by the chaos of the destroyers

as they colour outside the lines

of a child’s blood,

billions of impotent voyeurs

impaling children on hearts of horn

like kiddie porn?

And treaties are changed

like clean sheets and flags

as the entreaties of the damned

wring tears from the web-cam

that broadcasts the violation live.

Have you ever noticed

how many more cliches

there are for killing

than there are for peace?

And how eloquent and coiffed

and reasonably corrupt

the spindoctors are

who stare into the cameras

like the eyes of peacocks

and weep for the children

with the reservations

of rapacious nations

until they wash the obscene

clean from the lense

prioritizing the issues

make it crystal clear

a child is just a special form

of a blood smear?

Recipe for a country

in the twenty-first century:

First you make a concentration camp.

The Warsaw Ghetto, Sawetto, Gaza. Darfur.

Then you tie a child

like a goat to a stake

and demonize it

with your own sins,

jinxed swastikas

and six-pointed stars,

all the bogus constellations

that fall like white phosphorous

and cherubic gunships, Stukas

and F-16s from the heavens

as if God had spoken

and a child was broken like kindling

crushed like berries and twigs

under your knees

whenever you pray

for a greater good

than the children in your neighbourhood

and hatred gives you an erection

like a missile among your figs

no one suspects

as you assure the watching world

that when you rape the children,

when you dismember them in Gaza

like natural selection

or an upcoming election

you’re practising safe sex.

PATRICK WHITE

DON'T OVER-READ THE SYMBOLS

DON’T OVER-READ THE SYMBOLS

Don’t over-read the symbols,

don’t see a street-sign

and turn it into a novel,

don’t add the effluvium

of all that irradiated meaning

to clean water, don’t

slag the clarity of the water.

There are things and things and things

myriad, translucent things

trying themselves on like shapeshifters

in the five mirrors of our own senses

to adjust their costume

to the play of infinite events

that have nerved space into us.

Isn’t it always a big night, a sell-out,

lines around the block

whenever you’re truly you?

I like those big, expansive nights

when I feel at home

in the homelessness of the world

as if I were everywhere

at peace with myself like water

that is wholly and discretely undone.

My blood unspools

to follow its own wayward longing

like a stream into a valley

where I dodge my own head

like a fallen stone

that can’t bruise the flowing.

Night or day, it’s impossible

to sever the light from its lamp.

We’re not the knower.

We’re not the known.

We’re purely forever now

and before we were born,

the imperfectible act

of a mind without witness

that is the knowing

that is this life without a that

because what could ever be missing

or retrievable, abundance or dearth,

in the empty siloes of the inconceivable?

You might think you’re

the pivot of the scissors

you gerrymandered

from the crescents of the moon,

shears at the throat of the mine,

and that you were only born once in time

with a tape-measure for a spine,

and the universe won’t fit

through the doorway

but the truth is

your birth

is ongoing,

flowing everywhere

into the roots of things,

through every crack and crevice,

out of your eyes

into the grapevines

and down the tongue of a leaf

like the silver syllables of the moon

that fall from rising wings.

If you listen to yourself at night

like a stream you can hear

but not see

as it lingers over itself in the swamps

like vapour

or surges through the grass

like the whisper of a snake

divining its own path without a polygraph

as it fountains and falls and evaporates

into clouds and underground themes

you will come to realize

how foolish it is

to try and select the music

when the snake has wings

and you are what the water sings.

PATRICK WHITE