WIDE OPEN NIGHT

WIDE OPEN NIGHT

Wide open night, supple and unresponsive

you come on like a cool, black pearl,

an eclipse of the mind,

to keep me from going blind.

And it hurts to think

of how I could love you and won’t.

There’s a mystic urgency in the pain

of a universe in a grain of sand

trying to catch a pyramid’s attention,

and I doubt if I’ve caught yours

though I know the names

of all your stars

and saved the first drafts

of all your pulp-fiction constellations

as if they were the fakings of a holy book.

I don’t know why

my passion for you

always ends up feeling

like the afterbirth of small nations

on third-world rations,

or worst-world cannibals

trying to teach me how to cook.

One day I’ll compile a grammar

of the indecipherable markings

on the flaring hood

of the queen cobra in the room

that bides her time

by swaying to the music

as if she were the writing on the wall.

I’ll learn to speak to you about unspeakable things

and when you smile at me

I won’t feel as if my blood

were being strained through a teatowel

like stewed blackberries

being thickened into jam.

I will be maculately clear

about who I am

and you will know

that each of us

is experiencing

the whole of the universe

in every moment

as ourselves,

and life is not more

and death is not less

than they have ever been,

that no river is flowing the wrong way to the sea,

that what you see is engendered by the unseen

and what flowers within you

is the perennial theme

of water in the mindstream

enabling forms effortlessly

along the uncontainable way of its growing

to play at being you

deep in the wells and watersheds

of your unfathomable eyes

and more lightly on the grass like dew.

PATRICK WHITE

WIDE OPEN NIGHT

WIDE OPEN NIGHT

Wide open night, supple and unresponsive

you come on like a cool, black pearl,

an eclipse of the mind,

to keep me from going blind.

And it hurts to think

of how I could love you and won’t.

There’s a mystic urgency in the pain

of a universe in a grain of sand

trying to catch a pyramid’s attention,

and I doubt if I’ve caught yours

though I know the names

of all your stars

and saved the first drafts

of all your pulp-fiction constellations

as if they were the fakings of a holy book.

I don’t know why

my passion for you

always ends up feeling

like the afterbirth of small nations

on third-world rations,

or worst-world cannibals

trying to teach me how to cook.

One day I’ll compile a grammar

of the indecipherable markings

on the flaring hood

of the queen cobra in the room

that bides her time

by swaying to the music

as if she were the writing on the wall.

I’ll learn to speak to you about unspeakable things

and when you smile at me

I won’t feel as if my blood

were being strained through a teatowel

like stewed blackberries

being thickened into jam.

I will be maculately clear

about who I am

and you will know

that each of us

is experiencing

the whole of the universe

in every moment

as ourselves,

and life is not more

and death is not less

than they have ever been,

that no river is flowing the wrong way to the sea,

that what you see is engendered by the unseen

and what flowers within you

is the perennial theme

of water in the mindstream

enabling forms effortlessly

along the uncontainable way of its growing

to play at being you

deep in the wells and watersheds

of your unfathomable eyes

and more lightly on the grass like dew.

PATRICK WHITE

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