NOT WANTING TO SQUEEZE

NOT WANTING TO SQUEEZE A TAJ MAHAL

 

Not wanting to squeeze a Taj Mahal

or Notre Dame of gratitude

out of every nugget of dirt

she used to create humans,

not expecting masterpieces in return,

God opened her hand

like the secret sign of power

and completely disappeared.

She left no traces of the waterbirds

that flew from her mouth like words.

There are no ashes you can stir or divine

to call back the original fire of creation

she disappeared into as if it were herself

she were hiding from and not us,

no koan you can break

like the skull of a meaningless fortune-cookie

to scoop out its brains and eat its thoughts

hoping at last to overstand

what can’t be understood.

Down as many shotglass grails as you like

until your’re stone cold drunk

in the dangerous doorways

of all those ailing kingdoms

you’re dying to restore to the derelicts,

wait by as many tight-lipped gates as long as you like

proliferating the perennials of your faith

like Shasta daisies,

or pole-dance like a snake turned stripper

on the axis of the the turning world

for the liars and the crazies

pleading with God to take it all off,

you’re still alone on your own in a big space.

You’re still trying to prefigure your likeness

out of the elemental ignorance

and look into the evolution of your eyes

as if the mirror came first

and who’s been wearing your face

and is it blessed, or is it cursed?

Eyes. Light. Being. Action.

What’s wrong with your seeing

that you still don’t know whose movie it is?

Deep inside where the writing on the wall

isn’t a placard at a protest,

you’re afraid of your own creative freedom

and you call it an abyss

where nothing exists

because you don’t know how

to ride your own dragon of creative fire

through a sky such as this

waiting like children without names for the stars.

You’re afraid of a gift without a giver.

You think the whole of the universe is a Trojan Horse

and you don’t know whether it’s broken or not

but you’re still looking for a saddle and spurs

to go riding down by the river

where the moon breaks her mirrors on the mindstream

to let perfection take its place without her.

You’re riding your own eye-beam through space

like the frequency of a flying carpet through a dream

you’re afraid you might not wake up from.

Born of the shining,

born of a gust of stars that settled on the stairs

of a palace of light

like snowflakes on a furnace full of prophetic fireflies,

like chandeliers of rain that have flowed like jewels

from everything that’s ever had eyes

and wept at what they saw

when God disappeared into us

like the knower into the knowing

so that the flowers could meet the stars face to face,

why do you stable your dragons

in the ashes of a spent grace

like comets you’re afraid might come loose

like the roots of a wisdom tooth

from that blind halo that keeps circling the sun

like a vulture over carrion

you wear like the crown of it all?

Nothing could be easier than enlightenment

when all you have to do is fall.

And it has been well said

that the mind is an artist

able to paint the worlds

we must live in on our own

as if we were the only ones home

in our homelessness

when we discover

God doesn’t have a return address.

God’s nakedness is the creative solitude

of the human that answers

the inscrutable smile on her face

by painting her in the nude

posing as the universe.

And she can sit that way for aeons and hours

without moving an eyelash

as you try to catch the accent of the light

of the worlds falling over her shoulders

in a turmoil of galactic curls.

Empowered like a star

that rises from the pyres of her beauty

the dark lady lets the moon

fall from her hands like a knife

and even her ashes shine

like the marrow of the new life

that glows like gold

in the darkness of her mystic ores.

The fires of inspiration ache to possess her

in an agony of first drafts

written by the wind on the flames.

And then you hear her clear voice

filling her absence with birds

in the forbidden groves of her names.

And what does she say

through the keyholes

of the thousand and one doors

you’ve kept locked on the inside

afraid of the shadows and loveletters

moving around in the hall

when you’ve achieved her likeness

by disappearing into the work with her?

I am the secret treasure

you’ve been hiding yourself from

behind all these useless doors.

Stop saying mine and everything’s yours.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I COULD SEE THE MOUNTAINS AGE IN YOUR LOOKS

I COULD SEE THE MOUNTAINS AGE IN YOUR LOOKS

 

for Charles and Caitlin

 

I could see the mountains age in your looks.

And I could see the hard cold stars

shining above their peaks

as bright as they ever were

tilting their wings like thoughts

with the eyesight of hawks

as they descended on their prey,

the unwary rabbits and lesser birds

that always turned into clouds

just before you seized them by the throat

and threw them back like wall-eye

each into their own notion of a lifeboat.

And I could see how you touched life lightly

like a course correction.

You liked being able to move the planet

but only slightly.

And all those nights on the farm

up late proofreading poems with deadlines

as we talked and laughed at the absurdity

of putting a return address on the meaning of life

and sending it back like a dove that hadn’t discovered land;

I can hear you now arguing with me

as if you were trying to teach the Black Prince Zen.

What I have learned from you Charles

has stuck like stars and burrs.

And if there were scars

on the white horse of the moon

I always forgave you for the music in your spurs.

And that time in the restaurant on Bank Street

and it rained in Wales

and I saw for the first time

as your eyes flooded with tears

how unrescuably sad life is

when the geese are flying at night over our heads

like the passage of all those better years

we can’t call back to our beds.

You recalled a platform at a train station,

all that gaiety and grief

of arrival and departure

now nothing but grass

overgrowing the rusty rails

that stretch out forever into the interminable solitude.

I saw the light that played on your glacial eyes

thaw the ice into flowing jewels

and there was life all around you

and you were beautiful.

You were a beautiful, intelligent, vulnerable, passionate, ageless man.

And if you’re looking down upon me now, old friend,

laughing with Dylan

because you beat all the Calvinists into heaven,

you know how hard I’ve tried

to fit all these elegaic modes

like spectres at a seance of tormented good-byes

to the fires of an Horation pyre

stoic enough to hold back its grief

like a tree in winter

until the last laurel leaf had expired on the wind

like Daphne in the arms of Apollo.

And you know as well as I do

why nothing seems appropriate,

nothing seems to fit.

But four years from the day of your death

I think I finally get it.

You can’t say good-bye to the spirit of a man,

you can’t write exclusive farewells

in the dying falls of dynastic dactyls,

or finger the harps of your sorrows

like echoes in the voices of so many mountain Apollos

who sing as if their shrines had caved in

to a man who only knew how to begin.

You can’t say good-bye to the spirit of a man

whose life was all hellos

on a platform at a station in Wales in the rain

as the train pulls in.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DON'T THINK OF YOURSELF

DON’T THINK OF YOURSELF

 

Don’t think of yourself

as a little thumb-puppet of starmud

stuck in your brain like a gumboot

talking to itself as if

your inner voice were a ventriloquist.

Don’t think of yourself as a self at all.

You’re never going to meet your own footsteps

coming down the hall

like the return of the prodigal

with money in her pocket.

Space is faster than light

and your mind is pre-existent

like a face without eyes

that conceives of everything.

Why cling like a ghost

to a straw of light in the wind

as if that were your only dimension

inside the black hole

that demands your attention

like something that’s eating you whole?

You can’t be lost, broken, found, wounded or healed like a thing.

The moon isn’t a scar from the last time you cut your wrist.

Your mind is the any and everywhere of a wind

that doesn’t insist on being anything.

Enlightenment can be no more attained

than ignorance can cast a shadow.

So why keep trying to weave the sea like the moon

into a flying carpet

as if you weren’t already walking on water?

The morning doesn’t come

like a revelation to space

and the night doesn’t fall like an eyelid.

Space isn’t brightened.

Space isn’t dimmed.

It accepts and rejects nothing.

Haven’t you noticed how the sea

keeps undoing itself thread by thread like your mind

whenever it’s caught like a dolphin in its own net?

Or whenever it pours the inexhaustibility of itself like the sea into a teacup

as if it could drown its oceanic awareness

in the black cool-aid of a single gulp?

Space contains everything

but even the absence of the light

can’t contain it

and stars or not

the night doesn’t stain it.

Like you space isn’t big or small.

Like you space isn’t sweet or bitter.

Like you space isn’t rough or smooth.

Like you space doesn’t foul its own perfume

as if death just stepped into the room where you were born.

Like you space isn’t blue or black or blind.

Like you space isn’t looking back at itself

like a forward-thinking behind

trying to sort out its ends from its beginnings

like a snake with its tail in its mouth

trying to swallow its head.

Like you space isn’t alive or dead.

And who speaks of this space as evil

and this space as good

as if you could split space

like the tree of knowledge

into a winter’s worth of seasoned firewood?

Space doesn’t hold its feet to the fire

in a bad dream

or address the orchard

like the singing master of a choir

in a good one.

Like you space isn’t many or one.

Like you space can’t be done or undone.

Why run these little choo choo trains of thought

along your electric nerves

as if you always had to be carrying something somewhere

like spare parts to a nightshift of stars

working on a tight schedule

to improve the constellations

by cramming more people into cattle-cars?

Like you space isn’t a prophetic skull

that died of thirst

trying to drink water from the eyes

of its own reflection

like the moon in the mirror of a mirage.

Like you space doesn’t sweep illusion away

like stars on the stairs with a broom.

The fish can’t fly

and the birds don’t swim out of it.

Like you space goes on forever

like the doorway of a threshold that can’t be crossed. 

Why go looking for yourself

like an echo in search of its voice

a mountain for its valley

a flame for its original fire

an hour in search of time

a wave for the sea

a feather for its bird

a petal for its flower

a myth of origin

even before you begin

a fountain-mouth for its first word

or the mind for the root of its own reality

when you know as well as I do

space like you is everywhere

at home in its homelessness 

and you can’t find what hasn’t been lost

like the face of someone

who was never at home in the first place.

 

PATRICK WHITE 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MAKING PEACE WITH MY FATHER

MAKING PEACE WITH MY FATHER

 

You could be dead by now.

How would I know?

Last time I saw you

was fifty-five years ago.

My first day of school.

Your last with us.

You’re the little man now, Paddy,

you said

then got on a greyhound bus

in front of Tang’s Pagoda

as I watched the door close

on that fuselage without wings

as if the whale had just swallowed Jonah whole.

The last time I noticed we had the same eyes.

The end of your reign of terror.

As I remember you fifty-five years later

you were brutal, violent, cruel,

a con-man and a drunk. 

You hurt people then laughed at their pain.

You were the lethal meltdown of a radioactive brain

that made the grass glow at night

from thousands of miles away

and poisoned the rain.

I went to jail with my mother to bail you out

more often than I was pushed into going to church.

And when you got out

you were always as angry as a killer bee

in the soggy autumn orchard of your hangover.

Life for you as it is for any coward

was one long complaint you took out on us.

My first seven years

I watched as many ambulances

take my shattered mother away for months

as many cop cars washing up on our doorstep

with all those messages in a bottle

that had your name on them

like a federal warrant for your arrest

as I recall the clinking horse-drawn milkwagons

with their coloured cardboard bottle caps

or the tinkling neighbourhood ice-cream trucks.

Remembering you now at this late date

is like fingering the fossils of a Tyrannosaurus Rex

and feeling the faint resonance

of your ferocity even yet

through my fingertips

like a warm-blooded mammal

in the menacing shadow of a reptilian law

whose last judgment was always a jugular in a jaw.

If you’re dead,

if you’re truly dead,

did you die alone?

Did anyone grieve?

Did you change over the years

and become a good man

as righteous as the stroke of midnight

and atone for anything

before you boarded the next bus for the abyss?

Was your last flashback of life

the sunami you drowned in

after your psychological fault lines

flintknapped an earthquake

that brought the whole planet down on us

everytime you barged through the door

back from the bar

and turned a home into an avalanche?

Did you remember your children?

Did you remember me?

Did you ever wonder

how I turned out without you?

Who knows?

Maybe I’m way too late for your funeral

and this wreath of blood and thorns I bring

to lay on your grave

like the bitter irony you fathered in me

is not a fitting obsequy for either of us

because maybe, possibly, improbably

as you aged like an acid

time defanged your thunder

like a white cottonmouth

and the moon took back its crescents

and the lightning began to make crutches of the trees

it used to split like cedar shakes

with double-bladed bolts of light

that scorched so much more

than they ever illuminated in the darkness they returned to. 

As if the whole of the little earth I knew then,

my mother, me, my brother, my sisters

sported the wounds you gashed

on everyone’s heart and a skull

like chopping blocks

under your bloodied blunted war-ax.

For longer than autumn’s been keeping time now

with rosaries of geese in passage

like the secret names

of God on the run

for bouncing rubber cheques,

I have carried you around inside of me

like a chromosome in a coffin.

It’s a kind of genetic locket

I sometimes open 

to remember you by

when I’m mythologizing my scars

like blackholes among the stars

or the empty eyesockets

on the wailing walls of the dice

you loaded like the prophetic skulls of a bad choice. 

And I still don’t know if I’ve come

like an eviction notice

to this dismal place

to condemn you

or exorcise your ghost

I have despised you for so long within me

like the sloughed skin of a snakey oilslick,

the black blood of a haemmoraging eclipse

that covers everything like an executioner’s hood,

the birds, the sun, the sea,

every tarnished cell of me

in a darkness that won’t wash off.

Or maybe I’ve just shown up again

like Empedocles on Aetna

to jump into the collapsed caldera of your grave

like the last flower.

Ambiguous homage with seven kinds of meaning

to a spent volcano

buried in itself

that once knew how to preserve the dead

in all the twisted shapes of prolonged agony

that has characterized the living ever since.

Every day of my life

I have wanted to give you back your name

like a white cross on a black plague door

that isn’t me anymore

and never was.

Or maybe I should

jump down into your grave and say

Hey, Dad, isn’t this sad for you and me

this is the way we take leave of each other for good

like chainsaws snarling through the heartwood of the family tree?

Isn’t it just so incomparably sad

that a son being honest as a deathbed

with his father as he dies

over and over again in his imagination

as I do now here beside you

should lean over and whisper into his father’s ear

with a heavy heart that regrets it was ever born to mean it

Hey, Dad, I want you to know

when it’s my time to go

and I get to the other side

of all that was

and can be abandoned

time will heal everything

you did and didn’t do

and all these severed bloodlines

reach their final watershed,

all the weak threads

of what was unbound

like rain in the river

fall into the flowing 

and be made whole as strong rope again,

and the eye that offended be plucked out

and an old fist be opened up like the new palm

of a better afterlife than the one we had here,

and reunited families everywhere

break bread together in love and laughter

and every father be a strong rafter

and every mother be a lamp in a tent

and a cool night wind

as intimate and near

as stars in a desert,

and every son

say farewell to his father

as I do now here beside you

on this re-useable illusion of a death bed

where I am trying so hard to listen

to the voices in my heart

instead of the wise-guys in my head:

Father, farewell.

You gave me these empty eyes.

My mother filled them with compassion.

May peace marrow your troubled bones at last

and God soften the stone

upon which you lay your head.

What has passed has passed

like a storm out over open water.

You were my father at noon.

I was your son at midnight.

You withdrew like a shadow

that dreaded the light.

May God grant you a deeper insight

into these lives

we pass along to one another

like candles in the doorway of a dark night

and the courage to see

when they’re blown out

and death comes to sever even this little thread

of earthbound lucidity

that exists like blood between you and me

why even if these eyes of yours you gave me

were washed up like the survivors of a shipwreck

on the eyelids of the same shores

we started out from together,

asked whose son I might be

and who among all the generations

of the unborn and unperishing gathered there

was the road that fathered my journey,

I would answer

my life was a river with only one bank

that flowed from a sea of shadows on the moon.

I would embrace my mother in tears

if I saw her standing there

for all the long, hard, humiliating years

she always sat on the edge of the bed

the last thing at night

before we fell asleep under her eyes

and quietly lowered herself down

like a ladder into a snakepit

so we could climb out

without getting bit by the same viper

that had struck her like black lightning

in the heel in an orchard in spring.

About you I wouldn’t say anything.

I’d swallow my voice like a sword.

I wouldn’t sacrifice a word

on the altar of the silence

that waited like a god

to hear himself named.

I’d shake my head.

I wouldn’t look for you among the dead.

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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PATRICK WHITE