DRIVING UP TO MABERLY

DRIVING UP TO MABERLY

 

Driving up to Maberly for cheap cigarettes

at the Two Eagles Trading Post

across the highway from Silver Lake,

frost of the night

mist of the morning lifting

in the blaze of the sun

in the bleach-blue sky

that wheels the reds and oranges,

and the wild, canary, grosbeak yellows

into their complementary hue,

I can’t really see the autumn

until my blood stops thinning itself down

to peer through the lenses

of the watercolours in my eyes

and flowing, deeper, darker

turns into fire and paint

and dancing on the funeral pyre

of my last unknown masterpiece

instead of trying to walk on stars,

celebrates the crazy wildness of my solitude

by elaborating a world

I can almost forgive

as I brush myself

off the shoulders of the hills in passing

like a thread of smoke,

a parrot of ash,

a glaze of Prussian blue,

and cry like an arsonist

in an old-growth wilderness

that the trees don’t wait for me to burn.

There is a void, an abyss, an emptiness

that wears a human face

in the presence of things everywhere

that are reflected back

in the black mirror of space

as the mystically specific features

of every mineral, plant, and animal

I’ve ever been.

I’m not just a figure in a landscape

I am the whole of the scene

and even in the shadows

that don’t feel like me,

that are sometimes horrid and strange,

intensities of separation in faces

that have fallen far from the tree,

I am the child in the darkness

rooted in a fever of fear

that is slowly learning to trust me.

And it’s been like this for years

though memory is just another way

of quoting yourself

more comprehensively

through the tears

that keep turning up

like Desdemona in autumn

to audition for the play

by drowning for real.

Have you seen October sumac

set its wings afire?

I wrote that in my twenties

sitting down on the curb

with Ben Jonson

watching the house burn,

writing odes

to Vulcan’s acumen as an editor.

If you summon a phoenix

a phoenix will come

like an aspiring passion

for enlightenment

that will shake you like ashes

out of the Buddha’s sleeve

where you’ve been hiding

from a world you didn’t conceive

and doesn’t believe

in abiding with anyone

longer than it takes to say good-bye.

Now you’re alone in the darkness

with yourself as the only witness

down to your last match

like a tiny lighthouse

looking for a lifeboat

lost like a voice in the fog

and you strike your head against the rocks

like one of the black eggs of music

a phoenix lays in a nest of ashes

and suddenly the autumn flares all around you

like the sum of all sums

in a womb of sacred fire

that immolates you into being

the light in the night

of your own unborn, unperishing clarity.

Go ask the star, the candle, the maple-tree

setting fire to the roof

of the abandoned roadside fruit-stand

with its vagrant leaves

whose light their light is the child of

and how it is they all have the same eyes as you

when you don’t bind yourself

like a nun to a cross

or a blind man in the mirror

to a match that has gone out

like the swords in the hands

of the flammable angels

who burnt paradise to the ground

so they could be doused

like the torches of autumn

in the retrospective lakes of their own tears

and know what it is

to die into yourself

like a god or a human

or a leaf of fire

like the torn page

of a calendar

on the mindstream

that makes its way

through the placenta of the full moon

all the way to everyone of us

like water through a dream

of things to come

that come of us

who are the magnanimous hosts

of our own transience.

Fountains of words

from a golden mouth

for the ghosts and the birds

that are always heading south

or like me, west,

up highway seven,

a shadow at the wheel of a sundial

or the spirit of an Ojibway outcast

set free from his burial hut

after ten years in isolation

without a cigarette 

flying with the geese

who carry the souls of the dead

toward whatever afterlife they want

as if their futures were already forgiven.

Forgiven for having outlived

whoever we are

like the light of the stars

that go out in the wells of our eyes

so that we can see,

or the small search-parties of the fireflies

who won’t stop looking for us

like a postmark

we left like a homeless fingerprint

on the lost address

of the last constellation

of the transcendent myth

we were born under

like a loveletter to everyone

written on the leaves of autumn

in passion and paint,

blood and pain,

in the cursive script

of every artery and vein

that throws its books and maps in the fire

like the posthumous effects

of an old affair.

And sheds us like the apple

of an expiring art

that seeds

the myriad keyholes of the heart

with peeping toms

that lower their zeniths

on the star-crossed thresholds

before the promiscuous doors

of the moon-horned virgins

who wait like owls in the trees

for the x-rated version

of their venereal hagiographies

to be martyred into movies.

And as I said to myself only yesterday

life has a good eye

and anyone can say it and see it

in every detail of the passing scene

like water trying to hang on to its roots

but when the lense of the air

is angled for fire

like the third eye

of a deciduous choir

then it’s one thing to see it

but it’s altogether

a much more dangerously creative affair

even among the inane mundanities

when it takes more than the truth

and less than a lie

to be it.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HERE ON THIS FAR SHORE

HERE ON THIS FAR SHORE

 

Here on this far shore of blood in a cold universe

where so often I’m left standing

like the ragged flag of an undiscovered country

asking for passports

from all those who were lost

when the ship went down

I wet-nurse the paltriness of my humanity

like a sixty-one year old embryo

that drowned in the womb

when the waters of life turned into glass

and I was marooned on this island

that couldn’t swim to the other side

of what was keeping me down.

The dark alley of my childhood

where even the moon won’t walk

is still long and dangerous

though I am years away from home

and the black anger

of the abusers and the abused

who shattered each other like windows

in storms without rain.

There’s a tenderness in the solitude

of being the eldest son of a wounded mother

that grows into a kind of expansive compassion

for everything that lives without healing

and yet continues to give.

Lowly beginnings with humble ends

and yet nothing mends.

And scars may talk

like tv pundits

but it’s the wound

that walks the walk

across the hot coals and black holes

you can’t put out with mirrors

you’ve drawn from the mindstream.

In the beginning was the scream

and in the end without end

that’s never known sound

that’s never said a word

that has forgotten it ever lived

this silence that picks up after the dead

as if they were all her children

without remembering their names.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

SOFTENED BY THE SPIRIT

SOFTENED BY THE SPIRIT

 

Softened by the spirit of the elegant day,

saturated colours and the bluing of shapes

in the distant mist,

homogenous grey sky

and the last green leaves of the sumac

consumed in their own fires

(that’s enough of a local habitation and a name)

there’s a sweetness in the choirs of the ashes

that fall everywhere like feathers

from the passage of my emotions

as I consider the course of my life

like the tenderness of smoke

unspooling from a blue hill

I’ve been driving down

this snakey dirt road

forever on and on and on toward

without really knowing who lives at the end of it

or even if there’s an end of it

or a door and a threshold and a fire

that speaks the same language I do

when I’m alone with all my voices

like a stream through a grove in the night

easier than a god

about which ones I listen to.

Some are suggestive and alluring

and others are bristled with bleach

to scrub the stars from the sky

like constellations of erotic graffiti

that have composed their hunting magic

one image over the other

under the bridge

of the concrete Neanderthals

who were squandered on evolution.

And voices as mournful

as the ghosts of distant trains

wailing through the night

like mammoths sinking through tar,

and voices that are tongue-tied

by the single syllables of the fireflies

that suddenly tine the darkness,

the tintinabula of light,

with mantras no one can play

who hasn’t sat down to drink

with a broken heart.

And there are disciplined voices,

moons in the mirror,

the subtle shepherds of an art

that’s older than gravity

that try to master me

like an unforgiving medium

that wants to pull the donkey around with a cart

and shape me into forms I could not have imagined

until I stepped out of them like water.

And in the night

voices that come carrying their themes

like refugees with all they own on their backs,

exiled voices that were blown like passports

far from the tree that struck them like flags

and wrang them out like blood and hatred

upon the boundless earth

like the rorschats of haemmoraging maps

to long for a life they can’t return to

once the metal is free of the stone.

A curious lack of children’s voices,

but sometimes at night alone in the woods

in a place I’m not sure I’m supposed to be,

I can hear a child crying like a well

that’s been forgotten

under the duff of the leaves

but I know the pain goes too deep

to make anything better

and the voice is too well smothered

to go witching for it like a watershed

with a lantern.

And I pass on

like a worthless prophecy in a bottle

looking for the right island to be found on

because I am so lost

in the poignant intimacy

and impersonal immensity of the sorrow

I feel when innocence dies

God herself can’t look me in the eyes

without lying.

And voices that once belonged to people

now scattered like leaves

that show up now and again

to ask for mail

that might have a return address,

then disappointed as a foreign language

turn back to look for fossils in the window

of the life they once knew.

When I was young

and knew I would be again tomorrow

and the future was not freaked by fear

of what happened yesterday

I was taught to look for my voice

as if it were the holy grail

of a mellifluous elixir

that could rain in the throat of an hourglass.

I was taught to look for the holy one

like the gold word of the living bell

that would transform

the dead embryos

that were slain like musical notes

in the womb of the lead guitar

by Herodian extremes of jealousy

into infant harps

in the arms of all the sirens

I had knocked up.

But one voice for all

like a speaker of the house

who has the final say?

I’ve never known

what I’m listening to inside

where the world expresses itself freely

without consulting me

as to what I can and cannot hear

because as many as the stars

as it takes to sweeten a universe

or cells it has taken

to write their epitaphs like graffitti

on the evolving sentence of my dna

growing longer as the sun goes down,

are the myriad voices

in every single word

I’ve ever overheard

in these cemeteries

laid out like Latin grammar

where every grave-marker

is a Rosetta stone

whispering in the shadows with Egypt

about how estranged everything

has become over the years

since the death of their afterlife.

One voice I like

that still comes like a sad mother

to a garden-gate on the dark side of the moon

and asks in a whisper like a candle in a skull

if I’ve seen any sign of her lost son,

is the childless widow of compassion

who was once a dancing virgin

who could empty a heart like an urn on the wind

and fill it again with ghosts from the fire

she taught to sing in the choir.

And if she is aware

of the depths of her suffering

she has never made me the measure

of the night in her eyes

or the dark, starless, seas

that break over a heart I cannot fathom.

She is the crone-mother of the mystery

that is the moon

when she throws her light like grief

or a biblical passage of thorns

over the shoulders of the hills

that have died at her feet

like soldiers of the black rose

who have deepened their repose in death

waiting for Jerusalem

to turn over its stones with a spade

and discover the lunar foundations

of the original watershed

on which it was laid.

And angry, crazy voices

that smash into my windows

like kamikaze crows

suddenly hurled out of the void,

voices like acids

distempered from the grapes of hell

religiously splashed in the eyes

of an adolescent schoolgirl

like the black adder of the antidote

to her spontaneous baptism in the light,

flawed voices that haven’t spoken in years

to the broken mirrors

that cut my face like winter rain

whenever I look into them

like tainted wells

on the map of a well known mirage.

Voices that make me boil in the bone

like the marrow

of sexually frustrated volcanoes

magmatic with apocalyptic effusions

of the creative madness of God

when he tempers his fire in the sea

and cools his sword in the scabbards

of life-bound islands

waiting for the first approach

of the seed-bearing birds

that come like thousands and thousands of words.

Voices that coach the sirens

of the tone-deaf ambulance

to sing instead of scream,

to open their mouths wide like a wound

and hit the high notes of the silence

that mothers the dream that is dying.

And the tender voices

that smile indulgently like flowers

whenever they catch me looking at them

as if I were lying to myself again

about who was ultimately responsible

for the pain I have embodied to live

the joy of not knowing

the unestimable worth

of what it is I give back

in the act of being

this indeterminate simulacrum of me

and not fearing that it might be nothing.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHEN ALL YOUR STARS ARE TRASHED

WHEN ALL YOUR STARS ARE TRASHED

 

When all your stars are trashed

and the mirrors are bleeding

and the water’s turning back into wine

and your heart is just another cruel event

in a vast space

where the black holes

that eat their own placentas

when they give birth to the galaxies

are not always immediately evident

and to judge from the way

they can turn the place inside out

like the features of a human face in pain,

the womb and the tomb

that consumes what it creates,

the baby and the corpse

summoned out of the darkness

by the same lure of the fire

that is the first and last breath of desire,

ignorance and enlightenment

all rolled up into one stark insight

that lays you out like the anti-Christ

in a volcano for a manger;

to judge from nullity of this,

there’s no place you can conceal yourself,

and no point to the expanding circumferences

of the way you keep trying to reveal yourself

like water to water when it rains.

When all your stars are trashed

like black dwarfs on a roll of the dice

and hope is a cowardly virtue

that won’t look you in the face,

and your sorrow is an unsuccessful séance

trying to call back a dream that died young,

and there’s nothing to let go of

because everything’s been torn out of your hands,

don’t look for illusory cures

in the heart of illusory diseases,

dipping the other wing of the fly in your milk

to counter the taint

or try to stand back from yourself

to clarify the grain of the view

as if you were a mirage of cubist pixels

hovering over a desert like a mirror on acid,

or apply hot poultices of suspicion

to the gangrenous wound

of the swollen moon

that has become of your heart

to draw your friends out like an infection,

and if you’re still a novice

dissembling in your emptiness

before the great impersonality

of the endless, catatonic space

that has freeze-dried your face,

don’t try to stand your ground

like a lonely cornerstone

when gravity falters

and you’re looking for lifeboats

in the spirit’s lost and found

because there are waves all around

but no shore,

no islands in the storm,

no continents in the offing

that haven’t already sunk

that could survive you.

 

PATRICK WHITE