MAYBE I'M DOING SOMETHING THAT MATTERS

MAYBE I’M DOING SOMETHING THAT MATTERS

Maybe I’m doing something that matters.

Maybe not.

But having chewed off my last leg

to be free

and drunk my blood

down to the last black hole

that took it all in like an eye

without an iris,

it’s ironic that there are nights

when all I seem to be able to do now

is lie here like bait

in a trap that’s coiled like lightning

to catch something

I don’t even know exists.

Worlds within worlds,

subtleties within subtleties,

it’s difficult to assess

how many labyrinths

have lost their way in me,

but I am humbled by the vastness

of my incomprehension

when I look at the stars

through a clearing

on a backcountry road

seizing their existence out of space

and returning it like a river of light

to the darkness.

I am staggered by the magnanimous silence

of the sheer weight and wonder of it all

that I should exist to be this

as if there were no eyes

between the vision and the seer

and I was not the delinquent mirror

in an uninhabited holy place

that had forgotten my face.

PATRICK WHITE

HARD TO FIND MY PULSE

HARD TO FIND MY PULSE

Hard to find my pulse, my heart sometimes

in all the mundane commotion

of the gateway circumstances

that keep shuffling along like refugees

well past the last embassy

that might have been able to identify them.

Imagination sets the scene

and empathy peoples it

with lonely miracles of transformation

that liberate us like emotions in a dream

and for awhile, it’s peace to be who we are

with everyone else in the same lifeboat

breathing in and out

as if we were all rowing

toward the same star.

Then the moment slips out of that sky

like a snake shedding its skin

and I’m confounded

by all these new constellations

blowing around on the wind

as if they revelled in their homelessness.

Yesterday they were traffic lights,

myths, street signs, lighthouses and beacons,

but today they’re all gypsies and fireflies.

Reality is not the basis for understanding

because it is wholly without characteristics

and the black sun of noon

and the white sun of midnight

are inherently blind

in the midst of their own radiance

just as your eyes that see everything

can’t see themselves

except as simulacra and reflections.

Your eyes can’t prove to your eyes

that they exist

just as you can’t prove to you

that you don’t.

In the tiniest thing,

the vastest expanse,

no seer, no seen,

space is the seeing

that animates being spontaneously

like this poem out of my better lies

or a mushroom turning the pages

of its book of gills

like an earthbound moon

looking up at itself like a lost sea

it holds in its arms like a small madonna.

More and more I am becoming everything

as I descend through my own facelessness

and the emptiness opens its eyes

to be astonished everywhere

by its own likeness in the nature

of the aeonic myriads of the forms it sees

rising and falling like waves and weather

on the dream-tides of the living ocean

that inconceivably conceives

the inexhaustibility

of its reflective awareness

in every drop of water that falls

from everyone’s eyes at the same time

though this one calls it a tear

and that one already tastes the wine

that gushes like a grape in love

hoping I’m already drunk enough

to believe it.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETIMES THINK

SOMETIMES THINK

Sometimes think I’m always

a life too late

to catch up to my own

walking away weary of waiting for me.

Or I’m a star too far ahead of my own shining

and that’s why it’s always dark.

I know the agony

in the stones of an abandoned bridge

that shoulders the world for nothing,

upholds nothing but its own mass

and waits for things to pass.

And even when I fall into the river

to flow along with my own mindstream

without consulting the leaves like maps

I still can’t get the moon off my back.

Look at all these orchards

littered along my banks

from the tent of a single blossom.

And there are nights

when I can smell snake on the wind

as if everything were about to happen again

and I still haven’t milked the fangs of the moon

for an antidote to the pain

or put out the third eye

of the irrational surveillance camera

that oversees the sorrows of the insane

when it’s full.

I like my perfections whole enough

to include what is not

and if I am immoderately empty

it’s so I can make space for the world

like the blood-sea of the rose

that flows out of nothing

into tides that shed their waves

like the eyelids, brides and petals

of a human heart.

My breath is silver.

My breath is gold

I’ve mined from the mystic mountain

that got in my way

whenever I tried to cross

the valley threshold.

I had to evaporate to rise to the top;

I had to get myself together like a cloud

to transform my own delusions

into a glimpse of the other side

that didn’t take a scapegoat for a guide.

Now space is my only familiar

and the being behind the face

of who I was a moment ago

is just another snake in the furnace

of this star that sheds my skin like fire.

Streams of insight

that are not predicated like mirages

on deserts of thought

trying to spin themselves

into mirrors and silks of glass

like a new religion

sweeping the world like sand

advance the gardens

of the water-givers underground

who teach the flowers how to bloom

and drown like stars

in the infinite opening of their eyes.

And I’ve mauled the nets of the constellations

like a man in the morning

walking through a high field

radiant with spiderwebs

and if there’s anything

left hanging in the wardrobe

that used to house my masks and cloaks

they’re veils I’ve torn from the light

to better see into my darkness.

I’m still looking

but nothing has appeared yet

and no sleight of mind

that’s ever mastered me

has ever taught me how

to realize the inconceivable

except in the proportions of a human

whose mere existence is utterly unbelievable

whenever I turn the light around

and discover the dispersing stars

I have followed so long and far

into the unborn darkness where I begin

shining within.

PATRICK WHITE

WATCHING DIAMONDS EVAPORATE

WATCHING DIAMONDS EVAPORATE

Watching diamonds evaporate

as they lose their edge

like my breath in winter

breaking into stars,

I am peopled by the trees enough

not to feel alone

but most of me

is a small intimacy

in an immense space

that doesn’t wear a face out in the cold

like a man stepping through his back door

late at night

to remind himself

how far away from home he is

when he looks up

like the secret threshold

of a rootless tree

and there’s nothing left to be

but what he is and isn’t,

a journey whose only return

is always a mode of leaving.

Death nothing is

devoid of a copulative

not pre-existent and waiting

for my blood to run out of verbs

and overturn the grail like a shotglass

when it’s tasted me down to the last drop

and it’s not the cup this time

but the wine that’s finally empty.

My body’s a snowman in spring

unspooling like a map

of unnamed rivers on Mars

and my mind is an indecipherable

encyclopedia of scars

written in a lost dialect of stars

by a dying civilization

encrypted in a dead language

like the meaning of life

when there’s no longer any life

in the eyes of the meaning.

There’s no salvation

in not lying to yourself about death

nor reward for the courage

to look at it clearly

like a beginning that knows where it ends.

Every life is lightning

in the lamp of the universe

that leaves nothing unrevealed,

whose dearest, most urgent substance is revelation.

I don’t need to perform surgery

on my eyes in the mirror

and remove my face like a cataract to see.

I don’t need to sink telescopes

like Atlantean wells in space

to know how far I’ve fallen from grace

looking for paradise under my feet

before death was lonely

and life was sweet.

PATRICK WHITE

INDEPENDENTLY THE SAME

INDEPENDENTLY THE SAME

Independently the same as everyone else

like a word in an unfinished book

whether your name is in title case

or the merest of mentions

in the forensics of a footnote

micromanaging the scene of the crime,

you can always be together and alone

at this propitious nexus of time

because the sum of many is always one

and whatever road or ray or way you take or don’t take,

whether you blow the candle out

to better see the stars

or buff your own shining

like a breath on a mirror

eventually your solitude

will contract into your original unity

like a blackhole at the center of a clock without arms

and embrace everyone as the only way

to greet and meet yourself

on this long road to everywhere

that flows out of us like blood or time

or the return address of an unknown lover

and every step we take

is a threshold we’ve left behind.

It’s true, there are things to seek,

but why try to define your own becoming

like a scribe of the rain

trying to divine the eye of the well

as if water were blind and hiding

like your own proud tears

shining like the unvoiced sorrows

of the stars at your feet?

I can hear your orchards

crashing like chandeliers

from way over here

on the other side of your eyes

where the waterlilies don’t open like stars

to be seen

and the fleets of your constellations

have been washed up like ships

on the foreign shores of a dream

that’s about to wake you up.

PATRICK WHITE

WATERCLOCKING MY WAY

WATERCLOCKING MY WAY

Waterclocking my way like a cloud

into a bigger sky

or trowelling away the stars

that cling to my bones

to get back to the unvarnished marrow

of my myriadic origins,

I realize I am as lost

as a rootless tree

or a voiceless echo

in a mausoleum of transformations

that didn’t wait for me to happen first.

So it’s anyone’s guess who I am now

and I’ve cleaned out all the oceans

of all possible life-forms

on the way to being me

to clarify the mirror

so I could see

but now, even the mirror

has run out of ontological notions.

But lately I’ve begun to suspect

that life isn’t motion or entropy,

neither still nor active,

not here now like me

nor coming to be,

not my next breath

nor a death that can’t be forsaken,

nor the space beyond these sexual opposites

engendered out of their own mutuality,

but the immensity of the godlessness that secures

my own unattainability,

and realizing the impossibility of being

I am no longer marginalized by existence.

PATRICK WHITE

THINGS I MUST DO AND DON'T

THINGS I MUST DO AND DON’T

Things I must do and don’t.

Things I shouldn’t, and do.

The world world wanders off by itself

like a periphrastic who’s who of a storm

that doesn’t make any difference

to anything I am

that is being generated spontaneously

like this morning

out of everything I am not.

I can feel the silence

honing its tongue on my solitude

like the sweet knife of the crescent moon

it found in the grass beside the mindstream

where I unfurled my blood last night

like the flag of a vagrant nation

in a bombed-out palace of water.

So I might be writing this to you

out of some delirious afterlife

I’ve woken up in

like the broken rosary of a waterclock

that no longer mistakes time

for the prime theme of my awareness,

but you can no more call me back

from my undoing

than you can the geese in the fall.

Not to trivialize the dream,

it’s the same way

I’ve approached women over the years

like an unruly desert wind

fiercely trying to score its heart

for a choir of stone-deaf sphinxes

that might turn into sirens worth listening to

as they lured me up onto their rocks

like the cornerstones of an Atlantean generation.

And wherever they kissed me

my pores were jewelled with eyes,

but in some, life before life,

you could taste the flavour of heaven,

before it had a past,

while in others,

life after life

followed me into the future

like a sequence of stations in hell,

each a more exquisite excruciation than the last.

But no one reflects on the innocence of the flowers

until the storm has passed

and the fields they once walked through together

when they were the only weather

have been torn and renewed.

Things done, things left undone.

Eventually you come to realize

that only the road moves on

making things up along the way

to keep it company

like the beginning of songs

it never finishes, like

me and you bound like a bridge

or a yoke over the oxen shoulders of the water

that reflects our dark opposites

in the weeping mirror

of the same mindstream

as effortlessly as it fields the stars

between the circular shores

of its long empty bowl.

The more abundant the silo

the deeper the echo

even when it’s full.

So there’s no need to run around

like the scythe of a crescent moon

trying to harvest mirages

or cut the throats of doves

before the snake-infested shrines

of the oracles that riddle our hearts

with symbolic wormholes

that keep digging deeper for water

wave after wave, word after word

like tongues and shovels

trying to excavate our own remains

from the deserts where we buried God

when we all lived happily together

in the same cramped grave

and there was nothing one to save

and no one who needed saving,

no bones of tomorrow

buried under the fires of today.

Things were that way once

when every chance we took was new.

And it’s not that the risks I take now

have grown blasé

or every urgency opens like a parachute

when I fly too close to the sun

or I’ve forgotten how to jump from the flat earth

like an unwanted child at birth.

Yesterday is not less than tomorrow

in the egalitarian boundlessness of the moment

that includes us in our own death

like the next breath

or the viewer in the view

or spring in a Babylon of fallen apples

that still sing like drunken bells

in a tavern of unsquired steeples

that have learned to get along like trees.

Autumn still slips its loveletters late at night

under the door like leaves with a calling,

and even under the eyes of the dice when they sleep

you are the still the dangerous dream

that is deeper than any afterlife

I could ever wake up from.

PATRICK WHITE