I HAVE BECOME MY OWN SEASON

I HAVE BECOME MY OWN SEASON

 

I have become my own season

living through these renewable eras of you

that come and go

like the fragrances of passing stars

that sometimes stop by the gate

to talk about the garden blooming late.

Some flowers wait for the moon to open,

to throw their arms around space

as if they could encompass everything

in the brief embrace of their petals,

and their seeing is one eye under multiple eyelids

as they burn like jewels in the night

to keep it all shining and bright.

But I’ve worn out the elbows

of my insatiable longing

on the windowsills of a different insight.

Saddened by the distance, the time, the circumstances,

delinquent desires still hanging out their shingles

like green apples on a dead branch in winter,

withering like the inconsolable eyes of old men

who have died like sons

and now must die like fathers,

mine is the darker radiance

of the faint halo of light

around a black hole

that summons everything

down into it like the sea

sitting below its own salt

at a stranger’s table.

You can’t look into

the black mirrors in my house

with your eyes open

because they only reflect

what’s on the back of your eyelids

where the only light is your own

and you are the road

and the lantern you go by

and everything you feel and think and imagine

is your own true face without skin

not the gate between outside and in.

How could I ever recognize you

in these dark spaces

if it weren’t for the trees

and the stars and the moon

and the nightstream that runs through me

like a lifeline on the palm of my hand

down from the mountains

in a rush of diamonds and gold

that pour out like the pent-up emotions

of a sword that’s just been pulled from a stone?

And how hugely alone the night is

when you love someone as they are

and you realize without effort

that if you hold them a moment in their transience

you hold them like a star in a locket of water

that tastes like the past.

There are people

like treebound barrels of rain

and then there are people like me

who leak out of their lives

like radioactive water

that couldn’t pool the pain

long enough to stop the meltdown

long enough to cool the brain,

long enough to let it kill me.

Now in the darkness

seeded with the dust of black dwarfs

trying to clench a fist of coal into diamonds

my auroras are weeping neon dew

like a cheap enlightenment

all over the watercolours of dawn.

And I’m wondering

what kind of an afterlife is this

that I might have foregone

if I were indifferent

to how my solitude deranges me

like a lost continent

wandering through its own mindscapes

like an extinguished star

that wants to make up

just for one luminous moment

a constellation of its own

that doesn’t wait upon anyone’s eyes

for the themes of its seeing.

And though the skies have changed

like the slides of childhood dreams 

with every blink of an eyelid

whenever night approaches me

and asks to sit by my fire

and let the flames and the smoke

of our past lives 

speak for the both of us

I look up to give my eyes

like two drops of water

back to their oceanic immensities

and it’s always unattainably you

that is shining

like a woman in the window

of a secret house of the zodiac

far off the beaten path

that leads everywhere like a firefly.

And your stars speak to me

as if my flesh were light again

and my heart

that bumps its way through the dark

already a lamp beyond

the Lazarus of wax

that’s buried in his own lucidities

like a candle I left for dead.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I SPEND TOO MUCH TIME

I SPEND TOO MUCH TIME

 

I spend too much time indulging

the petty appetites

I’ve generated out of my despair.

I should eat more light.

I should care about something more

than the nothing that moves me now

toward the door

like a sleepwalker

in a palace of pleasures.

Cool bliss in unsustainable measures.

I let my worst habits get into me

like debts I owe to myself

for being me another day.

So even when I’m made of gold

like the better day behind me

my future wears a crown of clay.

And I loathe the way my ignorance

tries to wax wise about everything

like a blue moon in late October.

I’m a North American,

a wasp in a windfall of apples.

It’s hard to be born here and stay sober.

And other things: the way

I keep looking down on life

like a head higher than the stars

to remind myself how little I mean

in the great theme of being

to anyone with their eyes open

and how when I try to come clean

my lips part like the haemorraging rose

of the Red Sea

to let Moses pass

like a mountain that kept its word

like an avalanche.

I’m clinging like a song

to a dead branch

that’s witching the moon for water

way past the time

I should have gone south

and everything that used to blossom

is a tattered flag at half mast.

I don’t impugn the stars of my birth

for setting me adrift

like a message in a bottle,

Jonah in the belly of Leviathan,

when everyone’s marooned from the first

like an anchor that fell like a hard tear

from the eyelet of a moonboat,

but I am erosively disturbed

by the disloyalty of my oxymorons

to anything approximating the truth

when I summon the ghosts

that disciplined the futility of my youth

to be true to my own hopelessness

like all these shipwrecks

along my contentious coasts.

And I don’t know why

whenever I try to get along with myself

like aloes on burnt skin

it feels more like a pact with a hypocrite,

fire patching my sails

as I tact into the wind

like the wounded fluke

of an unresponsive rudder

that’s sounding like Moby Dick.

I wanted to swim naked with the mermaids

in the pools of their impossible longings

like moonlight in aging mirrors

but I drowned in their tears

when my whole life flashed before me

like a baleful absurdity

that had perpetrated me on nothing

like a voice in an empty lifeboat

calling out through the fog

for the lost black box of its own echo

to second-guess what brought me down

like the snapping turtle that got Icarus.

Since then I look at my own face in the mirror

like a mirage I’m tired of weeding

and my identity hangs

on the horns of a dilemma

in a Minoan labyrinth

that insists its my fingerprint

even as I am uplifted like a constellation

from the scene of the crime

to do my time in isolation

with the whole of creation on death row

staring into the snake-eyes of a dicey reprieve.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOUR OWN LIFE IS THE WAY

YOUR OWN LIFE IS THE WAY

 

Your own life is the way

whether it charm itself through the woods

like a small snail

or kick the stars up like dust

along the Road of Ghosts

or hang back like the sea

enduring its own weather

waiting for the next loveletter

to arrive like a sail

over the event horizons

of so much unopened junkmail.

But you’re a long way off

and deeper in darkness

than you realize

if you’re using a searchlight

to look for a star.

There’s no reason

to keep showing up

at the wrong address

like a bad definition

of who you are.

You go looking

for the meaning of things

as if meaning were precious and rare,

baby teeth under a pillow

or lost wedding rings

through the noses

of unmarried skulls.

You chase your own tides

back out to sea

and then go ask the waves

trembling in their tidal pools

like children you’ve frightened

about the meaning of water.

But when they tell you

your mouth hangs open

like a grail in the hand of a drunk

who’s sure she just drank poison.

You want to pry

the petals of the flowers open

before they’re ready to bloom

as if you were unwrapping your presents early

although nothing’s been hidden from you,

cloaked, eclipsed, or covered by a lie.

You paint the window you sit at

all the colours of a parrot

to enhance the clarity

of your longing for stars,

or scare yourself to death

with things you can see in the night

like someone who’s been left behind

like a key under your own doormat.

The return journey goes faster than the first

as you progress backwards

looping like a planet 

through all the stations of your youth

into the second innocence of awareness

knowing how deeply the soul

can be soiled by the truth

of things as they are

and how, sometimes

to the baffled astonishment of the purists

it takes a little dirt to wash it off;

which is to say, you’re human.

Not one reason for everything.

You keep ploughing the same broken record

like a season stuck in a groove

never leaving anything long enough to itself

to germinate and bloom.

Even when the moon

walks on your waters

tapping its white cane

at the curb of every wave

to show you how to master

your own blindness

with your own light in the darkness

of why you won’t open your eyes and look,

you cover your face with your hands like a book

you fell asleep reading.

But you can’t wake up from a dream

you’re not having.

You can’t look into life

like a window from the outside

or arrange your eyes

like lenses in a telescope

to view things at arms length.

I know how hard

you’ve been looking for enlightenment

and the agony of your disappointment

that you can’t pull the sword from the stone

or the apple from the seed like autumn.

You account the waste

of time, energy, aspiration,

and want to burn the whole orchard down

like a bride widowed in her wedding gown.

But the fire you set

like a last blossom on a dead branch

goes out like a torch in your own reflection

and you’re lost in the woods at night

without a road going in any direction.

You thought you’d hang around

with the constellations,

but there you are

whenever you kick the earth

like a stool away from your feet

dangling like a streetlamp in space

with only go slow and stop

the three expressions

that ever cross your face

like birds hoping they’re heading south.

And I don’t want to sound mean or unkind,

or suggest that I know

how stars taste to the blind,

or that you’re not a fury of insight,

a blazing chandelier, a broken mirror,

but when you cry

you launch your tears like submarines

into your own paranoid depths

to listen to what the others

are saying about you now

and you deploy your emotions like spies

to keep an eye on the opening night projections

you’re trying to groom into a movie

where everything comes true

all at once

in a stunning climax of you

holding out like a bridge at the fall of Rome.

Let go. Give up. Let the barbarians across

that you’ve abused

with the severity

of your savage passions for years.

Abandon the walls

you’ve beaded like a rosary of skulls

around your imperial frontiers.

How can the frowning jewels

of a dying civilization

dragging itself by the heels

like a corpse through the night

compare with the more imperfectible delights

of leaving the mindstream to its own devices

as if it were wise enough all alone

to make its own circuitous way home

like blood returning to the heart

while we, who don’t know the answers,

throw our swords back into the lake

as if we were surrendering to water.

We could feed the demons

of our startling immensities

all those doves you sent out looking for land

that came back like cornerstones of quicksand.

We could stop trying to square the circle

like college drop outs

trying to corner the rain

and forgo the blinding lucidity

of what we think we know

for the darker esprit

of being swept far out to sea

like two castles effaced by the undertow

of an abyss even the light can’t cross.

We could lower our bridges

and open our gates

and liberate our prisons

as if we were making love

like two more bad little reasons to live.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOUR OWN LIFE IS THE WAY

YOUR OWN LIFE IS THE WAY

 

Your own life is the way

whether it charm itself through the woods

like a small snail

or kick the stars up like dust

along the Road of Ghosts

or hang back like the sea

enduring its own weather

waiting for the next loveletter

to arrive like a sail

over the event horizons

of so much unopened junkmail.

But you’re a long way off

and deeper in darkness

than you realize

if you’re using a searchlight

to look for a star.

There’s no reason

to keep showing up

at the wrong address

like a bad definition

of who you are.

You go looking

for the meaning of things

as if meaning were precious and rare,

baby teeth under a pillow

or lost wedding rings

through the noses

of unmarried skulls.

You chase your own tides

back out to sea

and then go ask the waves

trembling in their tidal pools

like children you’ve frightened

about the meaning of water.

But when they tell you

your mouth hangs open

like a grail in the hand of a drunk

who’s sure she just drank poison.

You want to pry

the petals of the flowers open

before they’re ready to bloom

as if you were unwrapping your presents early

although nothing’s been hidden from you,

cloaked, eclipsed, or covered by a lie.

You paint the window you sit at

all the colours of a parrot

to enhance the clarity

of your longing for stars,

or scare yourself to death

with things you can see in the night

like someone who’s been left behind

like a key under your own doormat.

The return journey goes faster than the first

as you progress backwards

looping like a planet 

through all the stations of your youth

into the second innocence of awareness

knowing how deeply the soul

can be soiled by the truth

of things as they are

and how, sometimes

to the baffled astonishment of the purists

it takes a little dirt to wash it off;

which is to say, you’re human.

Not one reason for everything.

You keep ploughing the same broken record

like a season stuck in a groove

never leaving anything long enough to itself

to germinate and bloom.

Even when the moon

walks on your waters

tapping its white cane

at the curb of every wave

to show you how to master

your own blindness

with your own light in the darkness

of why you won’t open your eyes and look,

you cover your face with your hands like a book

you fell asleep reading.

But you can’t wake up from a dream

you’re not having.

You can’t look into life

like a window from the outside

or arrange your eyes

like lenses in a telescope

to view things at arms length.

I know how hard

you’ve been looking for enlightenment

and the agony of your disappointment

that you can’t pull the sword from the stone

or the apple from the seed like autumn.

You account the waste

of time, energy, aspiration,

and want to burn the whole orchard down

like a bride widowed in her wedding gown.

But the fire you set

like a last blossom on a dead branch

goes out like a torch in your own reflection

and you’re lost in the woods at night

without a road going in any direction.

You thought you’d hang around

with the constellations,

but there you are

whenever you kick the earth

like a stool away from your feet

dangling like a streetlamp in space

with only go slow and stop

the three expressions

that ever cross your face

like birds hoping they’re heading south.

And I don’t want to sound mean or unkind,

or suggest that I know

how stars taste to the blind,

or that you’re not a fury of insight,

a blazing chandelier, a broken mirror,

but when you cry

you launch your tears like submarines

into your own paranoid depths

to listen to what the others

are saying about you now

and you deploy your emotions like spies

to keep an eye on the opening night projections

you’re trying to groom into a movie

where everything comes true

all at once

in a stunning climax of you

holding out like a bridge at the fall of Rome.

Let go. Give up. Let the barbarians across

that you’ve abused

with the severity

of your savage passions for years.

Abandon the walls

you’ve beaded like a rosary of skulls

around your imperial frontiers.

How can the frowning jewels

of a dying civilization

dragging itself by the heels

like a corpse through the night

compare with the more imperfectible delights

of leaving the mindstream to its own devices

as if it were wise enough all alone

to make its own circuitous way home

like blood returning to the heart

while we, who don’t know the answers,

throw our swords back into the lake

as if we were surrendering to water.

We could feed the demons

of our startling immensities

all those doves you sent out looking for land

that came back like cornerstones of quicksand.

We could stop trying to square the circle

like college drop outs

trying to corner the rain

and forgo the blinding lucidity

of what we think we know

for the darker esprit

of being swept far out to sea

like two castles effaced by the undertow

of an abyss even the light can’t cross.

We could lower our bridges

and open our gates

and liberate our prisons

as if we were making love

like two more bad little reasons to live.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NO REASON WHY I SHOULDN'T LEAVE

NO REASON WHY I SHOULDN’T LEAVE

 

No reason why I shouldn’t leave

is not as good as a reason to stay

but the first has its eye open

while the other is shut.

So when I find myself

at a fork in the road

I don’t go either way

but pick it up like a witching stick,

and go off in directions of my own

trembling all the way

like water in a stone.

It can be deeply restorative sometimes

to be alone and lost

as you walk through the front door

of your original homelessness,

remembering where you hid the key.

Your shadow stops following you like the north star

of the threshold you left behind,

unhinges itself like the pivot

of the prosthetic arm

of the disabled clock

you’ve been all these years

and walks beside you like a bridge

to anywhere you want to go.

You can feel what a star feels

when it looks down in envy

at the fireflies all over the map

wondering if their disobedience

to the higher forms of order

might not be the fulfillment

of an enlightened discipline

that radiates out of its own

spontaneous lucidity

free of meaning anything

to whatever it casts its light upon

than the sheer delight of shining.

 

PATRICK WHITE