THE NIGHT ME

The night me when the shadows

get to advance on their own

without the handwriting of the light

to divide them

moves deeper alone

into the boundless intimacy

within and without

of a yielding abyss

where you can always tell time

by the smoke of burning leaves

and everything, even the most banal,

is charged with a sense of secrecy

like an injured bell.

The spooling and uncoiling of the nightstreams

follow their own life-themes through the darkness

like distant train whistles in the rain

or geese returning in the spring high overhead.

And I am tempered by the sorrow of my own abeyance

like a window that’s been true to too many eyes

who’ve never known beauty

without longing and lies.

And the ashes are not old

and the fire is not new

and nothing is abandoned

like a ghost with a point of view.

The fountain returns

to the watersheds of its awareness

and I’m walking on the stars that schooled me

like a truant road to read maps between the life-lines

on the palm of my hand.

No beginning, no end,

I don’t think of the wind

as a streetcleaner

and vaster than the sublime

and I am what happens to time.

PATRICK WHITE

THE OLD WORLD

THE OLD WORLD

The old world that is always here

because it is always passing

is everywhere confronted

by its own malignant children

ferociously abusing their legacy.

Genocidal Israelis whose hatred rains down

like jellyfish tentacles of white phosphorus

on the heads of the children of Gaza,

lethal Medusas of snakefire

falling like some paranoid, old-testament vengeance,

Dead Sea deep in blood and corpses,

spin their own atocities into

press-worthy innocence,

and declare the collateral coffins

of their obscene abomination

a closed investigation.

The hysteria of nations is written in bones

and the short-term memory-cards of their cellphones

downloading indictable albums

of slaughtered children.

And I still can’t believe it,

Beshir, the bowling-ball Butcher of Sudan,

a plague in the form of a man,

leeching and cauterizing

the open wound he has gouged

in the eyes, the heart, the flesh of Darfur,

indicted for killing, rape, torture, starvation,

indicted for squandering the lives of millions,

can you believe it, after all

the Palestinians have suffered,

after all the death and wounding the Iraqis and Afghanis

have learned to live around and through,

and the grief, the irreconcilable grief

that even a god hesitates to answer,

this corpse-tree of a man

hung with the bodies

of hundreds of thousands of people

like his self-appointed medals

until even murder begins to feel ridiculous,

this blood-brained clown of catastrophe

embraced by the Arab Summit!

And even though these things I say are true,

it’s hard to be a North American these days,

even when you are speaking the truth

without feeling hypocritical cold-sores

all over your own lips

as your blood thickens

trying to congeal the haemmorage of Iraq,

knowing you’ve been spoiled by war-movies.

If you eat enough eventually you’ll starve the world,

and yesterday’s captains of industry

will turn into the hydra-headed cartels

of the decapitating narcoeconomics of Mexico

and North American pharmaceuticals

warring over the Land of the Lotus-Eaters

for a market share,

not to mention the undead

who are eaten alive by the golden maggots

of our own egg-laying banks

who will never turn into butterflies.

An elitely-educated Canadian

with health-care,

I’ve written books about it all,

I’ve tatooed my voice

with the Holocaust, Palestine, Chile, Oka,

I once compiled an encyclopedia

of twentieth century genocides,

just to scream murder

when I saw murder being done

trying to transform

the alchemical empathy and compassion

of my mystic hermetical mind,

Hermes Trismegistus,

looking for seed-words like the wind

it could plant in flesh and blood

like cool herbs on the agony of a burn.

This is how I know

my mother lives within me,

and more, how I strive Sisypheanly

with the guilt of being born poor

in a prosperous country

while so many others

have been denied the chance.

And I suspect,

for the last half-century,

I’ve been trying to prove against proof,

answering my B.C. upstream salmon-nature,

my humanity isn’t just another mode of rabies

in a rainbow-coloured straitjacket,

that words might still have the power

to move atoms like spiritual streetsigns,

to jump from one opposite to the other,

either way, like a bridge

and see that it stands on both,

straddling both banks of the lifestream,

above and below. Passage. And if words

are only the scent of smoke

to someone lost in the woods deep at night,

isn’t that enough reason to go on burning,

flaring like a match in autumn under the leaves,

or brick by brick, building a lighthouse

that could hold itself up

like a candle to the stars

and illuminate them all

by reading the writing on the wall?

Our ends are a kind of amends

our beginnings make

for existence

if the whole of our common concern

is not to love the all

in the each of one another

for our own sake.

You’re not a saint

if you put your hand in the fire

and it doesn’t burn,

and you’re not a sinner

if it does.

And that’s all interesting enough,

and it feels clarifying and affirmative to say it

as if I were mouthing flowers like a field

that echo sidereally

through the caves of the sky

and in the deepest wells of my longing

where the strangers come to drink

there were real water

in this mindstream

that flows unseen through the night

like a homeless light

weeping over them like words

as if words could turn into rain.

But no more than your eyes

have an agenda

of what they intend to see

does your brain urge you purposively

to become what you must be;

nor having any purpose,

evolve you randomly.

And so you move like water

through all the stations of the sky

through progressively rarer mediums

of time and space and spirit and blood,

imagination and thought,

all waves of the same sea of awareness

until you are all sails and no wind

on the dark side of the moon,

a lightning-rod in the Sahara

trying to conjure clouds

above an empty tent.

And though you can’t explain the event,

by the occasional grace

of something you never meant,

or could foresee happening,

you cry out in the wholeness

of your insignificance

to ease someone else’s pain

and drop by drop

even here where I am now

it begins to rain.

And that’s all that keeps me going

when I look upon the prevalence of human peversity

through a lifetime of anger and sadness and unknowing,

and ask if there’s anything left to be

that isn’t hypocritical or desecrated,

and think that it’s a terrible arrogance

in an abyss of ignorance beyond me

to console my life with a meaning

that wasn’t just another leaf on the stream

or the coils of a serpent with ideas

that wanted to swallow the planet whole

when the silence in my mouth

tastes like the acrid frequency

of a child’s star-shattering scream.

And how easy it would be

to bluff my way out of this world

into another where I don’t exist

unless I’ve got my hands over my eyes

while everyone’s running to hide,

but I remember a moment so now

it was timeless a long time ago

by the side of a backwoods road

that could have led me anywhere

when I saw the clean leaves

and the matted wildflowers

and the grass of the fields

shining in the golden light of sunset

over the abandoned ark of a farm

after the storm.

PATRICK WHITE

CATARACTS IN THE EYE

CATARACTS IN THE EYE

for April, when she’s crying

Cataracts in the eye,

flowers in the sky.

Or is it

cataracts in the sky,

flowers in your eye?

Either way,

painting your window

won’t clarify the view.

Just leave things as they are

without any more worry

and let the starmud settle in the pond

so the sky can get on with its clouds.

You can understand everything at a glance

if you touch it lightly with your eyes and heart.

But the moment you start to stare

deeply into the well

to see if anyone’s there, kerplunk,

you’re a lost penny

looking for something to wish for

or you break off like a key in your own door.

And you’re free

to consider your life a mistake

or even more mistakenly,

successful and correct,

but the trees don’t know

what you’re talking about

when they’re busy burning their leaves,

and water isn’t a failure of snow

when the crocuses begin to break through.

The winners do their crying out loud in crowds;

The losers cry alone at home in their rooms.

They both get wet.

They both ruin their makeup.

You keep advising yourself

like the Summa Theologica

to reconcile reason with God

who never wears the same church twice

in a world whose only holy cornerstone is change.

You can’t factor yourself out of the truth

and turn your philosophy into a formula

for self-advancement

when you are the truth

of what you’re looking for.

Everything seeks itself in this life

like the continuity of flowing water

that is everywhere at home

in all its forms like the moon

but the rain isn’t looking for flowers

when it falls

and the wounded apple-tree in the sunlight

isn’t making mystic amends

by bleeding from all of its boughs.

Is it fair to be you; is it unfair?

Have you been weeding a mirage for years

and wondered why no one,

not even the wind,

ever stops by for a drink?

Seeing your reflection

on the surface of a delusion

might be what you look like

but it isn’t what you think

no matter how long you wait

for high tide in the mirror

to unscroll you like a sail.

The earth isn’t a planet,

it’s an eye that’s as blue by day

as the sea

and as black by night

as the sky

and it’s never seen its own likeness

except as stars and trees,

and the darkness in between,

irises by the river

and robes of snow on the mountaintops.

Is your eye bad

when it looks upon the obscene

or good

when it spots a beauty queen?

Bad meat down the well

or fireflies

clowning with stars,

there’s no sour or sweet to your eyes

just as water and space

aren’t maimed or enhanced

by what they embrace

because your mind

is not conditioned by form

anymore than the nature

of water or blood is

by the rut it runs in.

Your seeing can be a sin.

Your seeing can be a blessing.

You can grow large and mercurial

or small and focussed

at both ends of the telescope

and witness the abundance of despair

in a famine of hope

and like empty words

eat the air,

or dancing on the eye of a lense

like a gnat above the water

agitate the fish to jump for the moon.

So which eye’s the winner;

which eye’s the loser

crossing the finish line of your nose

when they both run backwards

in opposite directions

as you so blithely suppose?

You can be a big beginning with a small end,

or a big end with a small beginning.

The first is what you will turn out to be.

The second is what you are.

Make a road of your own walking one night

through an open field,

then stop and look up

and ask any star.

PATRICK WHITE

MAYBE GOD KNOWS

MAYBE GOD KNOWS

Maybe God knows like any woman

that the unanswered prayer

is always holier to men

than the ones that come true

and that’s why she doesn’t respond.

She lures you into speaking to her through the silence

as you realize the road ends

in the most intimate whisper of stars

like your breath alone on a winter night

as you take all of Orion in at a glance

to taste your own shining

in her universal nonchalance

like a candle you’re trying to advance through the darkness

to find her room, and you do,

but she’s never at home when you knock.

Or she blows you off like autumn,

snuffs the pure flame of your urgency

you bring to her door like a bouquet

in the hands of a chimney-sweep

who burns in his passion like leaves

with no tree up his sleeves to cling to.

And it’s hard to love someone

you’ve never met before

though you whine like a dog at a door

that is always opening you like a scar

that adores the wound that makes you feel

when you look up at the nightsky

and ask why,

the bow that set it all going,

that feathered the stars like blood

with the light of their flowing

through a night of unknowing

may be a fiction,

the chameleon of your own conviction,

but, at least, by the way

it wings your mythic heel

the arrow’s real.

PATRICK WHITE

WHOEVER I AM

WHOEVER I AM

Whoever I am

it’s only for a moment that passes

as quickly as the universe.

Sometimes my eyes

outshine the stars they’re looking at,

and thought is faster

than the speed of light

and every feeling

feathers the flight of the fire like a flame.

I have a name

that I’ve been trained

to turn toward like a sunflower

but ultimately it’s only the sound

of another wave crashing on the shore

of an uninhabited island.

Sometimes listening

to the music of the spheres within me

I think I can hear

the single, silver note of myself

timing my life like a drop of water

at the end of a blade of stargrass

or a triangular tintinabulum

that catches the attention

of the whole, cosmic, symphony orchestra

like the first sign of rain,

but more often I feel like ditchwater

carrying rose petals down the drain.

And there are things that I’ve exhausted myself against

like a fly against a windowpane

looking for an emergency exit

out of my own shame

at being what I am,

but it’s just another delusory sham

of the flypaper I’m stuck on like the self

of a conning chromosome.

So I call my own bluff

and shatter the lamp

and break the mirror

that buffs my seeing with stars

and dig up all these scarecrow, cruciform, avatars of being

that lie buried under my words

like bad advice from the birds,

and disappear

though I can’t say where

as if I had never existed.

But it isn’t as if

I was here and now I’m not

and there’s a great emptiness

that marks the spot like a black hole in my heart

and there’s anyone to suffer

long term loss for short term gain.

Everything’s still the same

and there’s no end of the pain

that flares up over and over again

like the universe

through an open window of the darkness

to immolate itself like a moth

in the trick candle-flame of a life

I can’t blow out on my birthday

because it’s only as old as I am

and I’ve been here forever.

PATRICK WHITE

NOTHING. I WAIT.

NOTHING. I WAIT.

for Brad Williams, with affection

Nothing. I wait. I

sweep all the stars off the stairs

and break all the windows

and melt like winter

to return in the spring

and wash myself away

to keep the view clear

and let the blossoming

go on without me.

I don’t jam a doctor in the womb

to guide the baby into being born,

or impose the apple on its flower

like like an agenda that must be met

before the fall.

I listen without expectation

to the vast silence of my own absence

and if something happens, it happens.

A picture flashes in the void

long before anything can be said

and a whole new world

takes its first breath

and breathes out the things of the world

to make a home for themselves in their homelessness.

And it’s the old-new way of delight

that playfully comes into being

like the first day and the first night

without depending

on the turning of the light

for its extinction or illumination.

The darkness the lamp dreams in

is not less bright than its burning

and the seeing isn’t a function of eyes.

And the only sin in life,

the only death,

as it is with your body,

is not to be creative, not

to discover within yourself

you are neither creature, nor created,

not the afterlife of the Big Bang

fourteen billion years ago

but this very moment now

when God asks who she is,

breaking her own hidden secret

and you know it’s time to tell her

in babies and paintings and poems and birds

in music and clowns

and sinners burning saints,

in fire and water and stars

and vagrant scholars wandering Mars,

that everything’s out in the open

and the secret is unsayably ours

in the way we express it to live.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT A SAD, VIOLENT LITTLE SHIT

WHAT A SAD, VIOLENT LITTLE SHIT

What a sad, violent little shit you’ve become

now that your crackin.

You talk like Michaelangelo in a quarry

selecting Carrara marble

for the translucency of its alluvial veins,

and you talk about painting with feeling,

but it’s hard to get anything done

when you’re just another Tom Thumb

crushed under a tiny avalanche of rocks

so all you ever really do

is prime the ceiling white

over and over again like a sail

when there’s not much of a wind.

I watch you trying to think,

ferocious with thought,

and it’s like watching a ball

jumping around

trying to pick up its own jacks

like the stars of the razorwire constellations

that dance like a hareem of mean angels

on the head of your pin.

Only a real prick

can scare the needle,

and little brother,

you’re not even that

under all your washaway tats

as you run like a watercolour

in the acid rain of that battery brain

you’re wired to.

Once you were full of doubt and indirection,

you didn’t know who you were

and there were tears

for other people’s sorrows

that wept like candles in elegant chandliers

and a tolerance for the folly of others

that excused your own

that made you seem

at the unlikeliest of times

compassionate and wise.

You were vulnerable.

You could be hurt,

betrayed, rejected,

and I saw in your eyes

that you had no answer for anything

when she left you like a lighthouse

without any warning.

But at least you had the courage of the morning

to get up again and zombie your way

through the rest of the day

as if Lazarus wasn’t a lie.

Now you’re all severities

of radical rock

like a mad dog

biting at its own heart

as if it were an ulcer.

And every second acephalic thought

falls like a head into the breadbasket

at the foot of the guillotine

that makes everyone edgy

about what you truly mean

when you introduce your girlfriend

like a pampered queen,

a trophy butterfly

in the plagiarized web

of an award-winning spider.

You love her like a miner

at a cocktail party

with an ice-pick,

but later when she thaws

she will stab you in the bath like Marat.

Love for you isn’t about

joy or pleasure or children,

not the hive, nor the honey.

It’s the engine

of a fanatical rampage

that fires you up

like a killer bee

to swarm any form of life

that isn’t you in the shopping mall

like a bad tatoo

that can’t make an indelible impression

on anyone

trying to have a gang life

that doesn’t bang around like you

when you sport your true colours like your girlfriend,

tricked out in black and blue

and patched with bruises

where she shoots what she uses of you

like the last crumb in the eye of a dream

you cooked in a spoon without eyelids.

Little brother, don’t come back.

Don’t sit at my table, don’t

greet me when I pass.

You’re just another scream

on fastforward, you’re

just another improvised explosive device, an i.e.d.

buried in the road you’re on

like a heart attack

waiting to happen

like Iraq to an amputee.

If once it was hard

to take the measure

of what you could have been,

like a new energy policy

that insisted on being clean,

now you’re as easy to understand

as Chernobyl or an oilslick.

You’re a spiritual polluter,

a dirty needle, just

another chrome-plated dipstick

in a motor-mouth

that runs on mystic gangrene.

PATRICK WHITE