NO END

NO END

No end of the desecrations and devotions

that afflict me like your eyes.

I don’t need a theory of parallel universes

to convince me I’m born in one, die

in another, and never existed in the next.

I’ve had to juggle more worlds than that

just to maintain my balance in an unalanced context

whenever you’ve walked into the room

and I was an awkward ship far out

on the nightsea you were

on the dark side of the moon.

Now I seriously doubt if I’ve ever known

what world this is

or what quantum of karma

elaborates me in it like a wave on the move.

It takes a dark wind to blow dark things away

and shed a black deathsail like an eclipse

to let people know you’re still alive from afar

like a star before the arising of signs,

always a night ahead of your own light.

Aligned with you, all my compasses lied to me,

and my planets wobbled axially like drunk tops

stumbling along the white line

unspooled like a standard orbit

by testy cops at a roadside check.

In that world and in several since

you have been a mysterious intimacy of space

that touchs me like the whispering skin of a cool breeze

in an open field under the stars

deep into my solitude

and late, later than the last fruits of autumn

into my life.

And even when I remember you now

in this affinity of dimensions

without a threshold

my heart overflows its own cup

like rivers and wine

to adorn the passage

of love through time.

PATRICK WHITE

I SEE MYSELF HAPPENING

I SEE MYSELF HAPPENING

I see myself happening

in the flight of a bird across the moon,

in the appearance of the leaves

and the leftover flowers

that have gone on blooming

in the corner of the yard

longer than anyone ever thought

and in the light of the star

through the branches of a tree

that’s rooted in me like an emotion

that’s grown beyond its rings.

For a moment the moon

holds the spring leaves up before her

like the cards of a new hand

to make sails and water of their shadows

and I am all arrivals and tides and departures,

the skeleton of a battered ark

scuttled in the mountains of the moon

after the flood receded

and everything was land

and I was the two of every kind

that disembarked like a mind

to elaborate itself through a bloodline

that wound many threads

into one strong rope

that might bind me like a spinal cord

to a place in an empty lifeboat.

We all have our protean myths of origin.

The wounded lies we use to exempt

our intimate extinctions

from the obvious suicides

who trusted death not to judge.

One voice says it’s merely a witness

while another tries to interpret

the meaning of the life that’s going on

without consultation

and another scoffs at them all

as if bitterness could save you from being a fool.

And tired of having my teachers

interrupt my truancy

with rational voices

that always knew better,

I suspended the school

with an unfinished loveletter

that got things off my chest

like baby crows in a nest.

No rule, no fool. And now I’m free

to taste the moon for myself

and know it tastes like scars.

And there are commotions of life in the grass

that don’t violate

the incredible privacy of creation

by trying to assert what they are

to the secret that gave them birth.

What child was ever of no worth

in the scales of a grieving mother?

The moment you affirm you exist, you don’t;

and denying you do won’t do either.

In a single scale of the fish,

the whole ocean

and in a feather, the sky.

Sometimes reality hangs

like a tear from an eyelash

or a drop of water from the tip of your nose,

reflecting the entirety of the world

and sometimes it’s a grain of dust

that humbles the mountains.

The moment you go looking

for the meaning of things

you pry the jewel out of the ring

and all that’s left is the eye-socket

of a skull full of fire ants.

No exit, no entrance,

no inside, no out,

isn’t it obvious by now

there’s no theshold, no door,

no far shore

no road to follow or not

no passage to anywhere

no aspiration or desire

no sage or liar

no mirage on the moon

or shadow born again

in the fires of the sun at midnight

pouring itself into forms

to ensnare you like love and war?

There’s no need to air

your private or public ordeals.

Just realize your formlessness,

your lack of beginnings and ends.

Mind is space. What’s to liberate?

Nothing gained, nothing lost,

nothing large or small,

nothing wounded or healed,

full or empty, bound or free,

and yet nothing is ever missing

because time and mind and space

are three echoes of you in the same empty well.

Why struggle exhaustively

like a wave that takes up arms

against the sea

or a light at odds with its lamp,

a flame that sobs in the ashes of its fire,

or a breath that holds itself aloof from the wind

stringing yourself out like beads

along the spinal thread

of your hydra-headed rosary,

trying to pry the pearl of the moon

out of every drop of water

that falls from the tip of your tongue?

If you think your life was attained at birth

then surely you will lose it when you die,

but when you realize

that origins and ends

are both eyes

of the one seeing,

the same breath

on the threshold of now

without an eyelash in between

like the moon on water,

everything you’ve ever looked for

asks you

where you have been,

and what, if anything,

among the inexhaustible answers

you might possibly mean.

You’ll finally realize

though you’ve looked everywhere

on worlds as numerous as grains of sand

and plunged through the darkness

like the only fish in an infinite, eyeless sea,

and cobbled the road

you hoped would lead you home

with the prophetic skulls

of all your past lives,

and pondered your purposeless beginning

like a funeral bell that never knew you well,

the source of the mind you look for

is as close as the lamp in your hand

and everywhere your eyes inspire the light to dare,

you see the black squirrel in the blue patch of grape hyacinth

watching you watching it

and thought-years beyond the exhibits of meaning,

you understand.

PATRICK WHITE

IF THE DOOR'S LOCKED

IF THE DOOR’S LOCKED

If the door’s locked and no one home

I just wander off somewhere inside myself

wondering if it matters

I so frequently now

catch myself on the sly

beginning to enjoy my own irrelevancy.

The more I suspect I am nothing

the more I feel fulfilled

and in the far field

on the other side of the hill

that loosely holds the road

that leads away from your house

like the slack string of a kite that doesn’t fly,

it’s bliss to be no one again,

and peace not to have to try.

I lie down in the cool grass

like an empty boat on a farm

and there’s no other side to get to

that isn’t already under my feet

that can’t tell if they’re walking

on water, fire, or stars

or sprouting wings on their heels

like maple samara

taking the fall for autumn.

Unwitnessed reality

doesn’t train a teacher

to open anyone’s eyes

to what is and isn’t there

like the yesterday and tomorrow of a star

that puts out both torches

in the eye of an ocean of night

to salt the earth with a light

that can’t stop things from growing.

Irony misses the point

when it doesn’t understand

the transoxymoronic hilarity of creation.

The opposites just don’t engender one another,

they celebrate each other’s birth.

First silver of the moon

on the greening willow

pouring out its heart to the stream

and emptier than my eyes above me

as if space had o.d.’d on a hot shot of stars,

auroral mirages in the vastness of my dissipation.

Because the dark mother

in the abundance of her timelessness

has never stopped giving birth to everything

it’s as impossible to be born once

as it is twice.

Because there is

no inside or outside

to the inexhaustibility of emptiness

her darkness teems with the unborn

who have never known the thorn of perishing.

PATRICK WHITE

WHO ISN'T TRYING TO LIVE

WHO ISN’T TRYING TO LIVE

Who isn’t trying to live

as they vaguely hope they are

whatever extremes of moderation they’ve gone to

behind all the masks and fraud?

Crosswalks and bridges of fire

trying to get to the other side of themselves

like the promised land, or God,

ladders up to heaven

like vertebrae and ribs,

and ropes like spinal cords

down a well on the moon

that hasn’t enthroned hell in her depths yet,

everyone’s trying to put a face on chaos

they remotely hope is their own.

One by one the plum blossoms

fall to the nightstream

like loveletters

from the branch of the tree

that read them once and then let go.

No one knows where they’re from

or where they’re going.

Some give their wings up

like graduate degrees to the ants

and others are raising their sails

like the flames of a great fire

that consumes the prophet

who wanted to hold his arms up

like a wishbone to the lightning

in the revery of his desire

until everything is ash and nails,

and others who think they’re

the rudders and keels of the flowing.

Sometimes I am nothing more

than this terrible inevitability

of flesh and bone

alone in the vastness of my unknowing

where neither ignorance nor wisdom prevails

and then it’s as clear as stars

on both sides of the window

that everyone’s everyone else’s good guess

as they encounter one another

passing the time

in a crumbling game of graveyard chess.

I don’t know why what’s wise about me

always ends up listening to myself

like a fool’s confession

but I’ve run out of rosaries

like habitable planets

and my homelessness has exposed

the ruse of divining purity

in the afflictions of compassion

as if everything had evolved in sorrow

like a heart-bending occasion for tears

as the mountains that fell

like an avalanche of cornerstones

into the valleys they’ve dug

like pyramids and graves over the years

abide like salt in the eye of the sea.

Intelligence might be an elaborate mode of paranoia,

but eased into the wonder of being here at all

with trees and stars and the midnight rainbows

on the necks of the grackles

and the hectic butterfly among the grape hyacinth,

since I was enlightened

by my absolute uncertainty,

I have gathered all my voices together like leaves

and burned the old texts of myself

for not being much of a liar.

Five petals opened

and one flower bloomed

like a good laugh.

Now my awareness

is a kind of playful fire that doesn’t burn

what it consumes

though the light

still tastes of the jewel

and even as the good-byes deepen their voices

like echoes in wells,

because I’ve grown older

and autumn keeps shedding its choir,

the hellos still take on a life of their own

as if nothing had changed.

An illuminated clown

I am astounded by the profundities

in every jest of being

revelling in the creative hilarity

of its mystic specificity

and how everytime I get serious about something

as if I had just remembered myself,

I bring the house down.

Only a hypocrite is humble enough

to underestimate his own irrelevance,

and go sorting through himself

like a cellphone in the ashes

but for those who have become fire,

aspiration is achievement

and fulfillment and desire,

one breath. In every event

there’s nothing to be

further than you can see.

But that doesn’t mean

take a harder look

as if your life were a book

you were learning to read

or a mirror you had to stare into

until your eyes bleed

to know who you are.

When you stop thinking

every perception is a clue

to who you are

you’ll shine out like a star

ahead of its own light

and stop trying to recognize God

through the featureless eyes

and vigilant simulacra

of a stolen identity.

You will be neither partially

nor wholly yourself

and before and beyond

will not seem

the unending extremities of now

rounding the skull of a clock

that’s lost its way home.

Your seeing will grow deeper than eyes

and you will stop sending

your reflection out

like the moon’s last lifeboat

to haul you up out of the abyss

like a fisherman gilled in the tangled mess

of his own s.o.s.

You’ll let go of the oars

and breathe easy like the sea

and in every blossom of being

you will taste the whole orchard

drunk on its knees in laughter,

not knowing where to begin.

PATRICK WHITE

MEANDERING AFTER THE LONG THAW

MEANDERING AFTER THE LONG THAW

Meandering after the long thaw

through whatever landscape my mind

creates in its flowing, karmically disposed

or not, I unscroll like emotional water

playing with the quick otters of my thought

and no meridians or parallels on the loom

that snares the stars in birdnets,

and no horizons, no ports

of arrival and departure,

no hellish red of emergency exits

out of the darkened theater,

I revel spontaneously in the freedom

of not having a clue about where I am going,

and go off in all directions at once

like the moon on the waves

like light through the homeless abode

of the only place I’ve ever stopped like space

to admire the road without beginning or end

that leads everywhere and nowhere at once.

Thought-years away from my last death

and the nebulous rain of the sidereal breath

I took once and held forever,

waiting to grace my stars with flowers

when words don’t interrupt the silence like pyramids

and the desert is free to speak for itself

to itself about the flower

that flows like an eye through its depths.

One eye, being; the other, non-being,

and a third that is beyond both,

I don’t know what it is I’m looking into,

but I keep rising and falling

like a wave of my own seeing

casting shadows on the water

like the voices of the things I write,

the new moon like a dark coin

under the tongue of everything in the light,

and the valley voices and the mountain voices

and what they say to each other in the night

when they draw near to a fire

no one else is awake to overhear.

I may be a bull in the labyrinth of my own fingerprints

unspooling my blood along the way

so that someone else can find their way out,

an evangelist on the moon with my head in my hands

telling the stars not to fret

if they’ve forgotten the last prophecy

because eventually even the lies will come true.

My wild ass compassion wants to break the jaws of circumstance

that eat so many like thorns of the moon in the desert

when the cactus blooms and the viper strikes like a flower,

but I don’t send my emotions out to judge events

like hysterical lipstick smeared across the mirror

or let my thoughts stir the mud in the puddle

to make things clear to the clouds.

One meaning for the whole of immeasurable life

is facepaint on a clown that’s seldom funny

or a spiritual ideologue whose only expression of grace

is a frown like a knot in the wind

that dances all around him, abusively free.

But the life of meaning doesn’t need

a seeker or a teacher flipping pages like a weathervane

for the stones and elixirs and grails of life,

as if you had to struggle to attain what you already are.

The star in your eye. The tree in your spine.

The bird in your voice. The moon in your heart.

The wind in your lungs. The light in your mind.

The sea in your blood. The earth in your flesh.

It’s not hard to know who you are

when you’re breathing alone in the darkness

that sheds you like the oceans of the moon

and the manes of the lunar lions come undone

like white peonies on the flowing of the nightstream.

However you look at it, your nose

is the hypoteneuse of a right-angled threshold,

your own personal event horizon

that’s crossed with every breath you take

and your skin is a contract with the world

that begins at the tip of your nose

like an available dimension of forms and events,

experience after experience

that keeps on happening all the way back to you

like the singularity at the bottom of a black hole.

But what’s the point of looking for yourself

like a black sail on a night sea

or erecting a monolithic I like an oil derrick

or a misguided lighthouse

to drill for light

when you’re already swimming through it

and the world is arrayed clearly everywhere like eyes?

Everything you see; everything you can be

is the expression of everything else.

A star gives birth to your eyes and water

organizes you like a neighbourhood

and a genius of mud lays a scarlet cloak

of flesh and blood across your shoulders

strong enough to uphold the earth like a head

and space readies itself like a sensitive room

where you can stay up late to watch your eyelids bloom

like waterlilies coaxed out of hiding by the full moon.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETHING SAID SOFTLY

SOMETHING SAID SOFTLY

Something said softly in the night

like a tendril on a windowsill

tasting the moon, a whisper, a word

that walked in the light without

abandoning its shadow,

a phrase with wet wings

dreaming itself out of its chrysalis

not knowing whether it’s a leaf or a dragonfly

until the whole tree wakes up beside it,

something sought but rarely said

saturated with the meaningless life of meaning

that could touch space like flesh

and make it feel the thrill of new eyes

running down its arm like tears.

And it’s not that I want

to unsay the night or God

to define myself as a human,

and it’s of little moment to me,

seed on the wind,

what worlds are born of my words,

what ends, what begins,

what comes of what I cannot say,

but I want to say something

with the savour of time in it

that’s worth living for a little more each day

like a small tree rooted like a thought

in a crevasse of eternity,

greening the moon.

Late at night, in the darkness,

while the silence is off preserving something,

and all I can hear is your breath

off in the distance like an ocean,

I want to unpack my vagrant heart

like a patched guitar-case,

a grave-robber in a pyramid,

and attune my afterlife

to the key of this one

in such a way

I can play like a new star in Orion

to all the sad, beautiful fireflies of the moment

that hover over us like living constellations of our own

not bound to any paradigm of light

that can only be touched by a mountain of stone.

I want to paint something

that feels like the flower

that just brushed against your hand,

I want to be inspired by the mystic blue of midnight

like window glass fired in the kiln of a star

that has looked upon the suffering of humans for so long,

their atrocities and deprivations,

their terrors and wrecked joys,

compassion has turned it into an eye so clear

you can sip water from it like tears

that taste of the history of blood and wine

that danced alone like a vine at its own wedding

with a bride of rain that unveiled herself

like falling chandeliers.

Unfailingly, absurdly, obsessively human

in the shadow of thundering magnitudes

that feel like the extinctions of gods

that time has wheeled out

to the enormity of the gravepit

that limes every abyss of the heart

with the stars of a new universe,

I want to add one candle to the shining

in a folly of insight so illuminating

even the earliest galaxies

forever entering the darkness

on the threshold of their first shedding

could see it, something

so profoundly vernal and intimate

even I can believe in it.

PATRICK WHITE

WALKING ON STARS

WALKING ON STARS

Walking on stars,

walking on skulls,

walking on myself, water,

giddy suspension bridges

swaying over windy river gorges

playing chicken with my heart

to see if it’s just another mini-blackhole

or a real abyss,

one foot where I’m coming from,

the other, where I’m going

it’s all the same road

my feet make with their walking.

I don’t know what impels me to keep going,

but it walks me where I will

over the quicksand and tarpits,

the improvised explosive devices,

the lunar blossoms of the tree on the moon

that keeps sprouting out of the stumps

of my clear-cut emotions.

Inside and out, I may be space

but even space sometimes get sick of its own distances

and longs for homier stars,

lamps in the window

to draw it out of the vastness

of the huge night of its crucible,

its chrysalis, its galactic cocoon,

like a moth or a dragonfly

or a man with nothing but time in his eye

to cast himself like a spell or story

into the flames of a deeper intimacy

with the voiceless fire

that listens to everything

as if the saying and the not said

were two flames of the same pyre.

You need the wisdom

of a Solomonic serpent or a river,

the intuition of a witching wand,

to know how to split your tongue oxymoronically

between the living and the dead

to speak of the unsayable

as the moon raises its sword

above your head

to cut the cord

and unbind the word

from the lesser magic of your grammar

floating like an empty boat on an infinite sea

as if that were all there were to say.

For years I’ve winnowed the stars

to sort the thistles out of the grain

like dead metaphors among the simulacra

but ultimately, likeness, like a mirror

can find no likeness in anything

though everything elaborates

its mystic affinity with everything else

because we’re all born of the same darkness,

of what was not said

on the first day of creation

when the word was already

the past tense of the beginning

and God said, Be. And nothing happened.

There’s nothing in a state of being

that can be misconstrued as an event

though we like to think of ourselves

as the children of a happy, ongoing accident

the multiverse isn’t expanding

into the hyperspace of its own extremes

or entropically cooling to the idea of a private cremation.

A compassionate pragmatist with a mystic bent

light-years of elation from home

that keeps saying hello and good-bye

on the same threshold

like the needle of a compass

pointing both ways,

with a heart that is rarely more

than a full moon away from forever,

I’m riding the tide of my own resurgency

like a wave of illumination

thriving with eyes

across the deep seabeds of my skull

toward an emptiness that is always full

of the same reverberating echo

returning like geese in the spring,

a sail to a bay,

a loveletter that went missing for years

like the prodigal word of a bloodstream

to the voice on a hill above the valley

that keeps calling out my name

without expecting an answer.

PATRICK WHITE