THE SHAPE OF EXPERIENCE

THE SHAPE OF EXPERIENCE

The shape of experience

is always a woman first.

There’s an allure,

a come-on by life

that is spiritually-sexual,

a betrayal of the old dilemma

you cling to like salvage

after a shipwreck

as if that was all

that was keeping you afloat.

You call it hanging on to yourself

but all you’re doing

is clutching at a board like a wave

to keep from drowning in your own mirage.

And there’s life,

an island, a tide, a shore

smothered in sirens

enticing you to let go

like a note or a bird

into your own music,

to disobey your own misery,

to stop pressing that voodoo doll

you’ve horned with your own features

against your heart

like the only surviving child

of a toxic eclipse

you’re raising like a king

among swineherds,

the royal seal stamped in dung.

Let go. Life transcends itself

by inclusion

so nothing can ever be lost

or gained.

Let go. Your shining

isn’t diminished by the occlusion

and the light isn’t stained

by oilslicks in the telescope.

Stop trying to court experience

by taking your own sad advice.

Let go. Elope.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU'VE GOT TO

YOU’VE GOT TO

You’ve got to look under

your own reflection sometime

like the lucid scar of the moon

to see what’s healing

and why you wear your face

like a poultice

to draw the infection out,

what’s behind that gash of a smile

that must taste like acid on your lips.

Can you see

what’s funny about the sage,

what’s serious about the fool?

Are you one of the rubies

or a sapphire of the blood?

There are ways of knowing

that are like old cups

with cracks in them

hanging in the cupboards

that shepherd the wines of life

into the same old creekbeds

that have sloughed their flowing like skin,

like snakes and grapes.

You should learn

to drink your reflection

from your own fathomless hands

until you drown in it,

until you can look back up at it

from the bottom

and realize

how the water-lilies

wire their constellations in series

and weave their myths from the mud.

It’s a lie that a reflection has no depths

or that the depths don’t have a reflection.

Everything here is the likeness

of everything else

and it isn’t only the water

but sometimes the desert

that’s the mirage.

Haven’t you ever

looked into your own face

and known it wasn’t you

who was looking back

and that maybe millions of people

with eyes as many

as stars in the darkness

were peering through your face

like wine through a crack in a cup?

Besides, it’s only fair,

after all the seeing

they do for me,

I let my eyes check out

what they might be

and turn the light around

like salmon called from the sea.

And I don’t worry

too much about meaning.

Meanings are born of themselves

and like waves

there’s no lack of them

and if you can understand

what you’ve experienced

then you’re not living intensely enough.

PATRICK WHITE

CLARITY'S JUST ANOTHER INTERPRETATION

CLARITY’S JUST ANOTHER INTERPRETATION

Clarity’s just another interpretation,

history, a suggestion from the grave,

and reality, for most,

a mutually reinforced consensus.

And I wonder about things like

the evolution of dreams

and the shadow-cats of conciousness

whose eyes widen in the dark

and how there’s no name you can give it

that the mind will answer to when you call

because your own voice is the mind as well

and that which you seek

is already here.

You can’t define the indefineable

but everything and everyone

is an expression of it

and in all they do and don’t do

express it.

The important thing is

not to let the bells of your profundities

sway like onerous horses

but to let them loose in the high fields

to play equinely with God.

You must learn to play like a child

with dragons

without being mastered

by the genius of your freedom.

You must understand

the spiritual life of clay

is an enrichment of the light

and one night in the flesh

is the collaborative aspiration

of trillions of stars

that have lived and died

their way to you

who sees and names

and includes them

in your vaster spaces within

as you have the sky and the moon and the trees.

You can’t drink the wine of life from a cup

and even if you can see the stars at noon

and the sun at midnight

you can’t put out to sea

from the bottom of a well.

You can’t illuminate a black hole

and you won’t find your reflection on the moon

and though we learn

life has nothing to teach.

Try to grasp it

and it’s always an apple

shy of your reach.

Express it effortlessly

as if there were nothing to say

and no one to say it

as children do when they play

and you’re the tree that bears it all

and life is what it is

and you are what you are.

A windfall.

PATRICK WHITE

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