THE IMPERIOUS SHAME OF A SELF

THE IMPERIOUS SHAME OF A SELF

The imperious shame of a self

that isn’t susceptible to compassion

is a garden that refuses to root,

is ice that doesn’t know how

to thaw into itself

and exhilarate the flowers.

The fleets of the paper-boats

that get sent off in the spring

like poems and blossoms

don’t arrive with a cargo of apples.

Even the sun at midnight

can’t open your eyelids

and I’ve heard

some of your most seasoned constellations

who signed up for life

are having their tatoos removed.

Bright as you are

it’s hard to understand

why you haven’t caught on by now

you can’t drink water from a fist.

Ah, yes, the ladder;

I forgot about the ladder

you’ve been trying to walk on for years like stilts

and you’re always two rungs down

from where you think you ought to be,

but going forward

isn’t always the quickest way up

and it must be hell

leaning up against

the burning window of the world

with no one to rescue but yourself.

Besides, what happened to your feet?

Do you and the ladder ever go dancing

or the birds ever build in the rungs

or a leaf ever grow

on the dead branch you cling to

like autumn afraid to let go?

Your bitterness

is the impotence of vanity,

your ego

an egg that keeps growing bigger

to avoid escaping from itself

that nothing can fly out of free

to feather the wind

with the joy of its vagrancy.

Why don’t you lie down like a chromosome

or a bridge sometimes,

show a little spine

and let someone cross over

the abyss between you and the other

so that ditch that surrounds you

like a gaping wound

can scar up like the moon

into the open road out

of your indefensible defenses?

The puppets and the puppeteers

are manipulated

at both ends of the same strings

and when the master

aspires to ascendency

the slave arises stronger.

A fist of stone

disowned by your own mountain

what can you possess

of the valley stream

that makes its way around you

like a lion of water

roaring past your skull,

that extinguished meteorite

that mistakes itself for a Kaaba?

No cornerstone

you’re not even a pebble

to throw at the devil.

Until you can feel

someone elses’s pain as if it were your own

and effortlessly respond like the rain

the elaborately cracked creekbeds

that braille your brain

will never flash into life

nor the lightning turn you

like a winter weathervane

toward the light

that reaches into the darkness to see

how everywhere

by shining on everything alike

it has become life.

You might think you’re the jewel of jewels

in all that junkyard

of craters and crowns on the moon,

but it’s painfully obvious

by the way you’re enthroned

like a fool in the corner

of your own delusion

you’re just another trembling compass

embedded in the handle of a pocket knife

that feels surrounded by its own polarities

approaching from all directions

as if there were no point to your life.

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

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