I'M NOT LOOKING

I’M NOT LOOKING

 

for Heidi Clow

 

I’m not looking for the foolsgold

of the body of God

or any other miscreance of reality

that people put their faith in like a cup.

The darkness can see further than I can

and there are stars I would rather avoid

for the way they bend the space around me

into a bag of skin plump with water

leaking out through nine holes

as if all we could do were only borrow

the ocean for awhile

and not hang on to it as if it were ours.

And time doesn’t belong to anyone

That’s why it’s so impersonal.

One life? One theme? What nonsense

when everyone’s the murmuring

of innumerable rivers

flowing into one another

like a bloodstream through the night.

Let the ghosts come and go as they please

without giving up your seat at the table

whatever fable is summoned

to dispossess you.

Remain free enough

to be unbounded by your freedom

to wear chains if you wish or nothing at all.

And don’t go around trying to pull legends

out of your ass or your skull

like swords out of the magic stone

that made you king

when the gates of the spirit

you can’t prove you have

swing on one post

like the crowns of the flowers

all along the royal roads

that lead everywhere but home again

because everything is deranged by our absence

and you might be the cause of a lot of things

but who can assess the effect

by consulting themselves

like an estranged mirror

that breaks at any suggestion

of what a human can do

to keep their exiles

from killing their refugees?

The gazelles of light

don’t come down to the river at night

like a protocol of the moon 

to drink from a polluted mirror

that’s been savaged

by the toxic watersheds of the dead

who malign every thought

of ever finding the grail

that might clarify all of this

that is your mind

with lead.

Bury the dead.

Don’t marry them.

They’re trying to mend fates of their own

like fishermen on a further shore

and you can stand as long as you want

at the gates of belief

with your hat in your hand

trying to understand

the mineral callousness

that unmarrows our bones,

unappeasable grief among gravestones,

and tears us out of our deepest intimacies

like the pages of a diary or leaves

on an early evening autumn wind

buffing the dusk with crows.

But the greater misgiving

is to mistake severance for the knife

of an implacable law

and descecrate

the ubiquitous dead

by judging that lost

that goes on making a living inside you

like a root of your own

turning dark matter into light

like Merlin

or Hermes the thrice-blessed

gone underground

to apprentice the dead

no saviour can raise

to the power of their own magic.

You can’t pour the universe

out of the universe

anymore than you can pour

your mind out of your mind.

Where’s it going to go

that isn’t it?

And where are you going to go

that isn’t you?

And how can there be

an inside and an outside

where things come and go

like the shadows of birds

on the autumn moon

and the way the protean shapes of things

keep on changing

and life goes on engendering itself

like an embryo with a mother in the making,

who isn’t giving birth to everyone all the time

in every cell of their being?

And when was one eye

ever the whole of your seeing?

And how do I know

I’m not what the dead

are going through right now

like an intersecting galaxy

with so much inner space

that the stars of the one

don’t get in the way of the stars of the other?

Apple-bloom on a dead branch

the faces we wear among one another

like shedding calendars of doom

gathered around the equinoctial gravestone

that takes the measure of our day and night

by aligning our shadows to the light.

What else are we

if not this occasion of breath

upon the great seas of awareness

that brings forth the world as we know it

only to suffer this dream of loss

when the bride takes back her mirror

like a receding tide

and we breathe out

and disappear?

And for centuries

in lonely, impoverished rooms,

and ghoulish restaurants late a night

and on our knees

before agonies of paint and wood

in houses of iron and stone,

and in the amazing cities

crawling with assassins

in the alleys of belief,

and in our desparate hearts

like cheat sheets

to an exam even God couldn’t pass

squarely under the eyes

of a dispassionate invigilator,

in prisons and madhouses and hospitals

in bitter palaces that have dried like India ink

in cancercamps and bombed out villages

and in the parking lots of deathwish shopping malls

we’ve been writing shit like this to ourselves for years

and still there is no end of the tears

we try to send out like roots and rain after the dead

who go on cracking like mirrors

listening to the sad advice

of orchards in an ice-storm.

So is it madly inconceivable

to long to inspire the dead so intensely

with the grace of a dark beatitude

that doesn’t hide its face

when the moon turns around

that we can sponsor their night journey

like migrating geese

as the Ojibway do every fall

with the magnanimity of our farewells?

Can’t we learn to say good-bye

as we have learned like heavy bells

and oarless empty lifeboats

that never leave shore

that there’s only the slightest hope of rescue

and instead of mourning

like wells in the rain

that have been cheated of water,

part the dark veils like fountains of light

and reveal the face

the dead wear like the moon

is still their own,

even if you must look

into your own eyes

like water into water

without sides

to see it?

Are the departures not as much

as the myriad beginnings of everything

as everything else always is

in this inseparable moment

without birth and death

that neither unifies or divides

the thresholds we abandoned like trees

for the rootless vagrancy

of our own two feet?

Every step of the way

we are estranged and greeted

by the road we make with our walking

until everywhere and nowhere

is home to the refugee

human life is.

There is no journey

you can come to the end of

like a snake that has swallowed its own tail

up to its head

until the swallowed

and the swallower

the eater and the eaten

the grass and the grazer

the living and the dead

life and death

are the same mouth

and hunger and fulfillment

creation and annihilation

are neither one nor two

but just the space that sustains us

like starbread cooling on the windowsills

of the afterlife of wheat

and on the vines

that have mingled

the earth and the night

and the light and the rain

into bloodlines that run like rivers

down the mountains of a map

into the boundless rosy-fingered sea

of the unborn generations of the wine.

Life consumes itself

to ensure that everything lives,

breaks itself like bread like death and gives

the farmer back to the wheat

under a new moon in familiar fields.

Life lives on life

like the worlds within worlds it takes

to create a god

who sacrifices

the whole of herself like a seed

in the solitude of her dark abundance

to keep what she sadly gives away

like a woman who died young

still gathering flowers

like Persephone and Heidi

to return every spring like an orchard

to the severity of the absence

that never stops waiting for her;

because the blossoms of the beginning

are the blossoms of the end

and yesterday and tomorrow

are the two eyes of now

that can see how the deserts

on the far side of the moon

return us to ourselves in tears

like the waters of life

as the great night sea nears.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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