WILLOW-MINDED FRIEND OF MINE

WILLOW-MINDED FRIEND OF MINE

 

for Alysia Waters

 

Willow-minded friend of mine

you’re the star of Isis in the palm of my hand

that keeps me from drowning in a sea of glass.

How often have I been washed ashore

on the coasts of your flesh

like a naked sailor in an icestorm

of breaking chandeliers

and been taken to see the king

by a princess doing laundry?

A firefly in the distance

might be a great star up close

and your every breath

seed the whirlwind

with golden drops of rain

after the tempest has exorcised its pain

and you grow more beautiful picture by picture

like someone who wants to be redeemed

in her own eyes

for things that only she could be.

But that’s not why I love you.

No siren no muse no priestess no witch

no shepherdess of exotic snakes

squirming with the future

like mystic themes around your body

no sacred whore ready to party in the temple

with Minervan nightowls and Cepheid movie-stars

that don’t want anybody to turn the lights on

to see what’s going on in the darkness

they are to everybody,

you are to me more

than I have eyes to see

to the beginning and end of things

but I can feel the night within

flowing like dark energy through space

and tendrils of time growing like paisley lifelines

into something sweeter than the wine

the white mirror drinks from its own reflection.

Before the arising of signs

I can feel your presence moving in me

like unborn constellations playing chess with time

to see who shall be the blossom

who the root

who the leaf

and who shall prime the lightning of the vine.

Long before your veils are parted by no one

like rivers of insight

I can hear your stars

whispering things into my ear

that make whole worlds appear

rocking life in their arms like water.

Time is a mental space

with different flavours.

You taste like the wounded grace

of an eloquent truce with flowers

and as Dogen Zenji said in l238

the lucky day is when you discover it’s all one day

meaning one chameleon

turning many different colours

to match the hours it spends

in front of the mirror

that keeps it guessing

who’s the seer and who’s the seen.

The grass turns red.

The flower turns green.

How long have I waited for you

like a tide on the moon to come in

like the spoke of a tree for a rim of stars

like a metaphor in the cocoon of a dragonfly for wings

you could see through like a stained-glass window

divining the silence like a witching wand

in a waterless church?

And it’s all just been a moment ago

that isn’t at the discretion of birth and death

I learned to breathe with you on the moon

like some atmospheric fish

transformed by a new medium

into whatever you wished me to be

when I was the lifeboat

in the eye of the endless sea

that washed me out like a cinder

with the tears of a passing mindstream

as if I got in the way of my own dream

and you?

You were the mystic specificity

as you will always be

in the lunar pearl of it all

that sometimes doubles for my skull.

And isn’t it funny how when the night screams

it’s always an aurora

that everyone mistakes for dawn?

A snail of a comet smears the mirror and moves on

and it’s as good a path as any to follow I suspect

if I had a destination in mind

that wasn’t looping in retrograde like a noose.

I may be as footloose and fancy-free as a ghost

but there’s no end of this longing

that keeps making me up as I go along

trying to be true and strong

to what I love the most about being dead.

I think of you

and I burn in the terrible clarity

of a light that’s never fallen on anyone

as if illumination were endlessly eyeless.

I think of you

like water looking up at the moon as it rises

and I realize the wingless openess of the dark gates before me

and pass through like a midnight sun

whose seeing evaporates in the morning

like visions and words and waterbirds

that have been transcendentally uplifted out of the graves

of their own reflections.

We are what we need to be to each other

without knowing what that is

like a phantom kind of picture-music

that’s always changing its lyrics

to keep up with the mood of the times

whether it’s the high definition tunnel vision

of the smokey beekeepers

trying to bring law to the unruly flowers

or the dark energy of an expansive space

driving the stars like exiles

into the absolute sublimity of a starless place

deep in the heart of God

that even creation can’t fill

or we’re just kicking pebbles down the road together

through clouds of white sweet clover

like afternoon companions of each other’s solitude.

Time is the poetry of the eternal

when love sits by itself under its willow tree

and watches the stream pass by

like the flowing eye it drinks from.

I drink pellucidly on the moon

from old grails of sacred blood

like an ark that survived the flood

only to find itself abandoned like a farm

on a mountaintop with two of every kind

except for one

who made his way down alone with the alone

to sing his lover up out of the dead

as if he were missing one of his eyes

and the other had turned to stone.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AND THE BLACK ANGEL

AND THE BLACK ANGEL

 

And the black angel of my igneous outrage

warps space into a negative shape

like a mold

and pours itself out in words

like metal drawn from savage ore

into a flaming sword.

I live in the twenty-first century.

I want to kill something in a way

that gives death a whole new meaning

liberates it from the living

like an entirely new outlook on life.

I used to look up at the summer constellations

and wonder about the night

but now I labour on the nightshift

along with millions of other slaves

and when I look up at the sky

on a cigarette break

all I can see

are the brutally twisted stars

of the barbed wire that surrounds me like the Milky Way.

And we all live under the same sign

like a halfway house on day parole

in the inner city slums

of a re-zoned zodiac

waiting for the funds to arrive

to turn all these dumps into skyscrapers.

The ants stroke the peony like a planet in bud

to tell it when to bloom

and a big star walks into the room

and everyone pales in its light like the ghosts

of who they might have been

if they weren’t so green with potential.

So many die like flies against a windowpane.

So many have been uprooted like weeds from paradise

they’ve stationed legions of spears like gates

and hot-wired high walls like nightclub bouncers

around the last blade of grass that grows in Eden.

But the facts don’t begin where the metaphors stop.

I’ve folded the scimitar of the moon

like eleven dimensions

of Damascene steel

to give it an uncompromising edge

to cut through the napes

of the hydra-headed succubi

who crush us in their coils

like corporations who want to get close to us personally.

Banks are evil.

Credit-card companies are evil.

The blackjack dealers in the casinos

of the health insurance companies are evil.

Boeing and Northrup and Wall Street are evil.

Haliburton is evil.

The cell phone company and Ontario Hydro are evil.

A man who franchises the vote to everyone

by selling guns to theocratic children is evil.

The Vatican that hates

the female principle of life enough

it’s become a gynophobic hive of celibate bees

molesting the flowers of the children

like priestly sunspots perverting

the honey of their innocence

like the pollen of the original sin they stick to

is evil.

And the pimp-daddy cable company

that hooks its clients up like a dealer

to a bad drug that’s been buffed by government regulation

is evil.

And the contractor in Iraq

who feels that life is just a video-game

you play with real people who bleed

to prove your dick’s as macho as your rifle

and you’re true to your tatoos

is evil.

The reciprocity

of atrocity for atrocity

like the balance of vengeance in the holyland

that gouges one eye out

for the other that was gouged out

of the same face

they both turn toward God

bleeding and blind

who says vengeance is mine

as they ask for a truce

in their trade relations with hate

and white phosphorus flowers over Gaza like jellyfish

and no birds sing in the branches of the candleabra

that is planted in quicksand like peace

on another man’s land.

Evil makes one master

a slave picking oranges

in the groves his grandfather kept like goldfish

and makes the other

the thief of his own heritage

as his children age faster than time

can keep up to them like a war-crime.

And the politicians walk and talk

like men at a safe distance

who are sure of their medical plans

and the leniency of their indexed pensions

discussing cuts in welfare cheques

and chemotherapy

to keep the rich from suffering

the rising costs of compassion

and even the devil

keeps his word to God like cancer

never to forgive them.

It’s one thing to be killed by a tiger

that doesn’t need to steal what it eats

but it’s altogether another

to die slowly to meet the demands

of leeches maggots and tapeworms

colonizing the meat on your plate

like your heart your blood your eyes.

Can’t you feel their eggs

hatching like rice crispies

and boring into your forehead

like the foreign policies

that govern your everyday thoughts?

Life rots before it’s dead now

and death has grown as lean as a crackhead

on the morsel of flesh that’s left to take to the grave

as a token of what’s to bury.

Everyone’s looking for fireworks at the end

of the Mayan calendar

when time goes extinct

and the Four Horsemen of Revelation

trample the earth like hail in a vineyard

but my black angel moves like the shadow

of a hashashim down

from the top of his world mountain overview

through the night

like the eclipse of an anticlimactic apocalypse

and puts the blade of the new moon

up to the jugular of all those

who have lived like anti-matter

on the dreams of others

and bleeds them like an oilslick

that has dirtied the water it whored.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AND THE BLACK ANGEL

AND THE BLACK ANGEL

 

And the black angel of my igneous outrage

warps space into a negative shape

like a mold

and pours itself out in words

like metal drawn from savage ore

into a flaming sword.

I live in the twenty-first century.

I want to kill something in a way

that gives death a whole new meaning

liberates it from the living

like an entirely new outlook on life.

I used to look up at the summer constellations

and wonder about the night

but now I labour on the nightshift

along with millions of other slaves

and when I look up at the sky

on a cigarette break

all I can see

are the brutally twisted stars

of the barbed wire that surrounds me like the Milky Way.

And we all live under the same sign

like a halfway house on day parole

in the inner city slums

of a re-zoned zodiac

waiting for the funds to arrive

to turn all these dumps into skyscrapers.

The ants stroke the peony like a planet in bud

to tell it when to bloom

and a big star walks into the room

and everyone pales in its light like the ghosts

of who they might have been

if they weren’t so green with potential.

So many die like flies against a windowpane.

So many have been uprooted like weeds from paradise

they’ve stationed legions of spears like gates

and hot-wired high walls like nightclub bouncers

around the last blade of grass that grows in Eden.

But the facts don’t begin where the metaphors stop.

I’ve folded the scimitar of the moon

like eleven dimensions

of Damascene steel

to give it an uncompromising edge

to cut through the napes

of the hydra-headed succubi

who crush us in their coils

like corporations who want to get close to us personally.

Banks are evil.

Credit-card companies are evil.

The blackjack dealers in the casinos

of the health insurance companies are evil.

Boeing and Northrup and Wall Street are evil.

Haliburton is evil.

The cell phone company and Ontario Hydro are evil.

A man who franchises the vote to everyone

by selling guns to theocratic children is evil.

The Vatican that hates

the female principle of life enough

it’s become a gynophobic hive of celibate bees

molesting the flowers of the children

like priestly sunspots perverting

the honey of their innocence

like the pollen of the original sin they stick to

is evil.

And the pimp-daddy cable company

that hooks its clients up like a dealer

to a bad drug that’s been buffed by government regulation

is evil.

And the contractor in Iraq

who feels that life is just a video-game

you play with real people who bleed

to prove your dick’s as macho as your rifle

and you’re true to your tatoos

is evil.

The reciprocity

of atrocity for atrocity

like the balance of vengeance in the holyland

that gouges one eye out

for the other that was gouged out

of the same face

they both turn toward God

bleeding and blind

who says vengeance is mine

as they ask for a truce

in their trade relations with hate

and white phosphorus flowers over Gaza like jellyfish

and no birds sing in the branches of the candleabra

that is planted in quicksand like peace

on another man’s land.

Evil makes one master

a slave picking oranges

in the groves his grandfather kept like goldfish

and makes the other

the thief of his own heritage

as his children age faster than time

can keep up to them like a war-crime.

And the politicians walk and talk

like men at a safe distance

who are sure of their medical plans

and the leniency of their indexed pensions

discussing cuts in welfare cheques

and chemotherapy

to keep the rich from suffering

the rising costs of compassion

and even the devil

keeps his word to God like cancer

never to forgive them.

It’s one thing to be killed by a tiger

that doesn’t need to steal what it eats

but it’s altogether another

to die slowly to meet the demands

of leeches maggots and tapeworms

colonizing the meat on your plate

like your heart your blood your eyes.

Can’t you feel their eggs

hatching like rice crispies

and boring into your forehead

like the foreign policies

that govern your everyday thoughts?

Life rots before it’s dead now

and death has grown as lean as a crackhead

on the morsel of flesh that’s left to take to the grave

as a token of what’s to bury.

Everyone’s looking for fireworks at the end

of the Mayan calendar

when time goes extinct

and the Four Horsemen of Revelation

trample the earth like hail in a vineyard

but my black angel moves like the shadow

of a hashashim down

from the top of his world mountain overview

through the night

like the eclipse of an anticlimactic apocalypse

and puts the blade of the new moon

up to the jugular of all those

who have lived like anti-matter

on the dreams of others

and bleeds them like an oilslick

that has dirtied the water it whored.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I HAVE SUCCEEDED IN COMMON

I HAVE SUCCEEDED IN COMMON

 

I have succeeded in common but failed alone.

Experience? The sum of all my mistakes.

What kind of authority is that to quote

as if wisdom were just a matter

of throwing in the sword

or snatching victory like food

from the mouth of defeat?

Just because you’re arrogant about your humility

must I be humble about my arrogance?

What haven’t I given to the poor

that hasn’t been stolen by the rich?

I let go of bitter things

just to sweeten the ripening

but there is no second innocence in decay

and I knew a lot more yesterday than I do today.

Where you stop is where you start

and I suppose my death

has already been achieved

as many times behind me

as it will be tomorrows from now

when the vast nights

of these foreshortened days

live through me again

like a road we’ve all walked down before

as if we were in pain and didn’t know where to go.

Gratefully I was born too stupid to be a cynic

or maybe I’m just stubborn enough to wait

for things to regenerate all on their own

or perhaps I’ve gone a gate too far

but it gets harder and harder to say

where things end and begin

when even the elements of my body

have already been through three lifetimes of a star.

Is this Bethlehem or Armageddon?

I’m a flash flood in a waterclock of blood

and how many eras of shining must have gone into

making these two little beads of water I use for eyes

that keep running down my cheek

as if it wasn’t enough just to see

you had to feel to find what you seek.

I’m as old as any apple tree

that measures its lifespan in seeds.

I’m an old old monkey

who looks back up at the trees he just left

and wonders if he took the right step

or if he’s just losing his prehensile grip.

I try to do my time standing up

but sometimes I feel as if the universe

ground the two lenses of my eyes

like Spinoza in his attic room

and put them together like a telescope

just to get a good look at itself through me

as it scanned the immeasurable uber-stellar spaces within

for signs of intelligent life.

But there’s no return address

for an echo in a blackhole

that’s lost its voice to the night

and no light to write an answer back.

I keep sending myself off

like a starmap in a bottle of water

trying to get a fix on my location

somewhere in this island universe

and bring Ovid on the coast of the Black Sea in Tomis

writing his Tristes among the Sarmatians

home from exile at last.

But the universe is still too Augustan

for that to come to pass

and everytime I light a candle

to see where I am

it’s at a black mass

of dark matter and energy off the scale

of anything I could assess.

But it occurs to me now and again

as the strong rope is unwoven

by Penelope the moon

into the frayed lifelines of this weak string

I’m growing like space away from everything.

And what was at my fingertips yesterday

like sunlight on the frets of the waves

that squandered themselves like music coming ashore

is today the evening din of a few dim stars

sitting like bass clefs and birds

or clinging like overdue apples

long into November

to the five senses of my sway-backed powerlines

lingering like the longer wavelengths of my star-crossed staves.

All the blue light of my mornings

has shifted to the red of night

as I dream like calcium in an iron bed

and beat the stardust out of the constellations

that have lain under the windows of my room for lightyears

like flying carpets on a clothesline

the wind wants back. 

Who said you couldn’t exceed

the speed of light

when every seer knows

space and time are faster than insight

and it isn’t the water

it’s your mind that flows through the abyss

like a lost starstream through a great emptiness

naming everything anew

like things it left at home?

A star doesn’t make a farce of its legend

by believing in its own light.

It stays ahead of its shining

as if it were an endless night beyond

the arising of signs

so no one can say for sure where it is

when they point to it for direction.

There’s nothing terminal about death.

It’s just a course correction.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IF YOU ONLY BELIEVE THE BELIEVEABLE

IF YOU ONLY BELIEVE THE BELIEVABLE

 

If you only believe the believable

and don’t believe in what is unbelievable as well

I don’t know what universe you’re living in

but it’s only got one eye open

1.56 billion lightyears across.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

EVERY PATH

EVERY PATH

 

Every path is as wide with compassion

as the planet that you’re walking on

so there’s really never any danger of falling off.

I didn’t lie

and you didn’t tell the truth:

two sins of omission

trying to fit lenses to clarity

like fashionable eyewear.

It’s what people do

when they don’t want to see too much.

And I’m sure you’ve recreated me in your own image long since

I discovered good-bye was older than eternity

and more absolute than space.

I remember you asking me once

after we’d finished making love in the red tide

as the breakers dashed their galaxies against the rocks

and we both sprawled there naked dripping with stars

what I thought a human was and I replied

an interpretation with a face.

And you asked why we were here

and I said to listen to the sea beside someone like you.

And later as we were walking back to the fire

you looked back at our footprints glowing in the sand

like tiny island universes following us

like dance-steps painted on the shore

and pulling yourself in tight against my arm

you whispered I think we’re the music they’re dancing to.

And ever since I’ve cherished

an ancient silence deep within me

whenever I’ve looked at the stars and thought of you.

I’ve burned a lot of bridges

since that night of doors

with thresholds that couldn’t be crossed

and windows that turned their backs

on what they couldn’t see through.

I should have thought by now

I might have forgotten you

but you’re always the stranger

who shows up at the gate of the abyss

just as I’m about to enter

and throwing me a blindfolded kiss

says Here. Interpret this.

As if it were some kind of koan

you wanted me to break like a fortune-cookie

or Etruscan linear B

or the water of a womb that’s letting go

like the dark night sea that still surrounds us

as if all these eras of time

that have driven past us like stars

driving past roadkill

on the ghost road of the Milky Way

could be clocked 

by the heartbeat of an embryo

born posthumously in the past without a future.

And sometimes it comes to me

like a glass eye rounded by the waves of its eyelid

washing up at my feet like a well-spoken memory

that lost its edge to the bluntness of time

there’s nothing natural about human nature

because there’s nothing supernatural about the divine.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

BECAUSE I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN YOU

BECAUSE I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN YOU

 

Because I have not forgotten you

I can feel your breath in the air

this first gray day of spring

like the wake of a bird that just flew by.

And I smile inwardly to myself

because I have known joy in my life

and know that in time its water

wears away the stone of the hurt.

Because I can still gaze upon your face

in my mind’s eye and see as I saw then

when I was happier than I have ever been

that your beauty did not belong to anyone

I bend down to pull last year’s leaves away

from the violet crocus

that’s trying to French kiss the sun

and I remember how I used to

blow playful strands of hair

off your cheeks

as you lay with your head on the pillow

like a distant star you’d made a wish upon

And even after all these years

I’m still astonished by the tears

that well up in my eyes

when I look into yours

and see all those things

we didn’t know then would never come true.

 

PATRICK WHITE