AN ABSTRACT SENSE OF BEAUTY

AN ABSTRACT SENSE OF BEAUTY

 

An abstract sense of beauty

is the secret wish of a closet gelding.

There’s nothing abstract about it when it passes

and a rose doesn’t come with its own fingertips.

It isn’t a theory that’s pressed to your lips.

The senses are always autobiographical.

There’s nothing numerical about a woman’s hips

and no wine in the grapes of the cosines

that touch her skin like tangents

or the sick fingers

of great stupid lumbering books

bellowing on like dying dinosaurs about S-curves.

In the war between line and colour

heart and mind

mammal and lizard

skin and idea

sex and death

put your money down on cadmium red.

Wild poppies spread like fire through your head

and even if you’re ashes in the locket of an urn

doesn’t mean you’re dead

doesn’t mean the phoenix has forgotten how to burn

or that ashes are anymore absolute

than good weather that’s taken a bad turn.

Let reason mark the passage of time

like an abstract season with a shady sundial

timing the geese as they return

overhead at night in the spring

like breads on the rosaries of the dead.

It’s your ears that receive the greeting first

not your head

and your eyes that search the darkness in vain

like midnight at noon for signs

and your skin that maps the places they’ve been

like stars at your fingertips

and your tongue that tastes

new water walking on the cool night air

like a ghost returning to an unburied bone

or the moon when it draws its reflection out

like a sword from stone

and magic adumbrates design.

If you think of your senses

as five windows on the world

an apparition of ideas peers through

like the face of longing caught in the curtains

and you feel your blood turn to glass

in a botched attempt

to clarify your rubies into diamonds

and burn like ice in your translucency

wash yourself clean of yourself

like an Arctic thaw

and catching up like river to its long delinquency

throw a stone through your cataracts on the inside

and see for yourself

the true colour of thought isn’t clarity

it’s as lilac as Mercury

in a Piscean sunset in spring

when shy violets bloom like bruises through the snow

and reason is green with envy

it isn’t wearing

Joseph’s coat

like a rainbow

at the bottom of a dry well.

The abstract lyric

of the god caught in the machine

like a spider tangling kites in its own ideas

is the swansong

of the emotional hysterics

of a bird caught in a dark chimney

thick with the moody creosote

of insufficient fires.

And long before God said

let there be light

or in the beginning was the word

red was already a fossil of the night

embedded in a chameleon’s memory

that burned like maples

in the Gatineau hills in the fall

before abstract beauty

began showing up at its own funeral

like a face without eyes

that missed the blue of the flowers

it pissed out like April showers in a mirror

all over the vertical feet of its own conceit

as the ears of the hydra-headed hollyhocks

listened discretely from their watchtowers

for the tiny hooves of purple rain on tin

to begin jamming

like the sunburst of a classical tintinabulum

with the electric blue riffs of an unrehearsed first violin.

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOT EASY TO LOVE

NOT EASY TO LOVE

 

for Alysia Bell because she asked me to

and Jesse James who gave me the cue

 

Not easy to love.

Not hard.

Effortless effort

on the downslope of a mountain

you never get over.

Love is empty.

Love is full.

Love is the moon.

Love always has two eyes

not one.

You can drive ten miles out into the country

and drop love off like a mangy homeless cat

but somehow it will always find its way back.

Love always fears what might not happen

like a great sin of omission

more than it takes courage from what has.

Love is poetry looking for a voice

among all these singing trees

worthy of what it wants to say and can’t

and love forgives all things but mediocrity.

Love isn’t just a gesture of enzymes

in a chemical pantomime

of the tragic and sublime.

It doesn’t wear its eyelids inside out.

It’s a featherweight more in the wind

than the wind can bear

and then it’s a black dwarf with radioactive hair.

Love has no colour no form no taste no texture no sound no smell

and yet it is more intimate

than a knife held up to your jugular vein

or the moon at your wrist

or the shock of the new rose in its first rain.

Love is an uninspired abstraction

the heart keeps on life support in vain

for violating the laws of its own absurdity.

One must believe Sisyphus was happy.

Love might not even need to know your name

before it starts searching through its history

for a return address

to add like a dove to a loveletter.

Love sees what it needs to keep itself alive.

Honey turns into the gold of the bee-hive

and love dips the tips of its spears in toxin

as if it always had a violent heart

and a fist like a bad ending to a good start.

Love isn’t wise or foolish

young or old

rich or poor.

Love doesn’t open like a flower

and close like a door.

And it isn’t the disease of more and more and more

walking under its own starless skies

because it hoards the light in its eyes.

Love is gentle compassionate generous wise.

It delights in squandering itself

on someone else’s happiness

like the rain is elated to return to its roots

like the memory of many gardens

that bloomed and perished on the moon

before the angels drove us out of Eden.

Whatever you can say about love in words

love says in blood

love says in sorrow and torment and jealousy

when love grows out of your head like snakes

love says in the abyss of the last kiss

you blow to your lover

as you’re waving good-bye

like an empty twenty-sixer of Fireball whiskey

as your car drives away drunk without anyone in it.

Love never knows what it is or was

or what it’s about to be.

A worm crawls into a chrysalis

like a straitjacket

and something more

than it was before

gets set free.

A grave-digger takes up gardening.

A dead composer steps down

from the lectern of his mountain

and the music of the spheres goes gypsy.

One lover drinks the last of the wine

and the little piggy that got none

grows tipsy.

Mad mad mad mad mad mad love is

to try to walk a straight line

like a drunk on a tightrope in a curved universe

that keeps changing shape as you pass

like a marble with mass in a roulette wheel

looking for an exit off the highway.

Love isn’t caught like a doe

in the glare of the sun on highbeam

and its comets aren’t roadkill.

Love is as much of a river in the beginning

as it is in the end

and you can sail all the paper-boats down it you want

like cherry blossoms and white peonies in full bloom

letting go like snow off the roof

or the eyelids of the moon

but it won’t make a drop of difference

if all you give back to the river

is a crack in a bitter cup of tears

that throws acid in the eyes of the water

and fills its ears with empty chatter

about who got done wrong

and who got off light.

Love might look for outlaws

who have remained true

to their disobedience

like a wanted poster the stars

have pinned like a constellation to the night

but love knows its own at first sight

by the scar of a smile

and the innocence of the wound

that bleeds in good faith

to save the world.

Love may hide for weeks

in its nebular confusion

but love can’t bluff its way out of what it seeks

like a blind gambler

rolling the dice like braille.

Love is a ship that sinks before it sets sail

but if you fall into it heart first

think of it as a black hole

that everything falls into

like starlight with vertigo

or in the first few startling moments

when your I.Q. scribbles

a quick suicide note on the mind-mirror

in black lipstick

and jumps

because love has rendered it deleriously stupid

try not to grow feathers all over the place

because you don’t need wings in space

and you have to fall to the end

if you want to crawl out.

Love can turn a butterfly into a worm

that turns into a butterfly and back again

but you’re never going to get anymore

than a housefly out of a maggot.

Love is a little house of transformation.

Waterlilies bloom in the moonlight

rooted in decay and stagnation

like beautiful bhodisattvas

and the hand-gestures of dancing dakinis

silvering their skin in the glow of their enlightenment.

Sometimes love comes like a stranger to the gate

that knows everyone

and asks to be let into the garden

but it’s late and no one’s home

so it picks up the cold stone of the moon

and breaks your window like a spell

on the dark side of the mirror

and you wake and fall in love

with everything you fear

and ride off into the sunset

like Venus on a white nightmare

clinging to the belief

like a Harley to an easy rider

that in every single petal of love

that flys off on its own far from the tree

you can taste the fruit of the whole orchard

and like a refugee that knows the wind has no borders

make the sky your home and native country.

Love is the elixir of whatever you suppose it is.

A sparrow builds its nest in the Buddha’s nose.

Love is the discipline of wizards

born of passion.

Love is the anachronistic whim

of a futuristic fashion

that caught on too late.

But you are young

and love has just discovered you

like a universal language

it will make its mother tongue

and open your mouth

and free your doves

like the voices of dragons

and the roaring blue lions

on the burning towers of Babylon.

Love makes a pauper head of state

and a prince goes begging

with an empty plate.

Love is not lust

but lust is seldom enough without it.

You can look at the Taj Mahals of the spirit

and see nothing but cock and balls

and that mysterious cleft

in the mountain of Venus

that leads to the underworld

as nothing but an empty wallet

or the eye of a needle

a rich man could pass through

easier than a caravan into paradise

and you could look at it that way I suppose

if you were a red-assed baboon

with your butt in the air

bent over trying to touch

your nose to your toes

and you wouldn’t be wholly right or wrong

but then again

even if you were

it would be hard to care

for someone

who only ever made it

to the bottom stair

of wherever they were.

Love may seem a game

of snakes and ladders

of mystical horses with wings

like Pegasus and Biraq

with prophets on them

ascending to the seventh heaven

where the angel Gabriel stands

naked in the light

as hell turns Paolo and Francesca

in a whirlwind of lovers

that reaped the night illicitly

under a full moon

but if love in you

is not the lifeblood of the light

that shines on everyone alike

as it does the eye and the rose

you’re just another one of love’s

puppet Pinocchios

dancing to the grey violins

of a quirky musical spider

trying to manipulate things

by pulling the strings of a dreamcatcher

as if love could follow anyone like a slave

that took her lead from a master.

But for those rare souls

the darkness of love has not blinded

by applying eclipses to their eyes like leechs

and making a poultice of the moon

to draw the wound out of its infection

love is the most cherished disaster

that could ever befall someone.

Jesus entrusts the holy grail to Judas

and Judas drinks his own blood from a skull.

There are many things in life

that could breezily delude us

like fireflies witching for water in a well

or an echo of stars in the voice of a bell.

But just knowing the words to love

isn’t the same as knowing the song

that can hit you like a high note at midnight

and shatter the stars like a bird

love sings to itself on its own.

Love is crazy wisdom.

Love walks alone with the Alone

into the inevitable darkness of so much light

that blazing seems a kind of blindness

until you learn to see

on the other side of your eyes

that solitude is the deepest intimacy

between lovers when they touch

and the black mirror when they’re apart

is the face in the mystery of the human heart.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN NOW

HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN NOW

 

for Alysia Bell

 

How long has it been now since childhood

had to become an adult pre-emptively

to survive your infancy

and take the blindfold off your innocence

in front of a firing squad of guilt

to see what was coming

like a last-minute reprieve

or another bullet through the heart

you could no longer pretend

was merely the harsh kiss

of someone you needed to believe

really loved you?

And what does it say of a world

where it takes more courage to be a child

cornered in the shadows of her bedroom

than it does to be the manic grown-up

on the other side of the door

smashing their eyes like felonious mirrors

in another drunk tantrum on the kitchen floor?

And who was there to know

how many lives you’d already gone through

by the time you were ten

trying to fit your family to the right shoe

like Cinderella to the happy ending that eluded you?

How many times have you stood like a stranger

at the graveside of your own funeral

like the only one who attended

and thrown your last best hope in

like a broken rose that couldn’t be mended?

And I’ve seen the red skies in the morning

that bloom like apocalyptic roses

just before the storm arises within you

like the ferocity of your offended innocence

trying to uproot the lightning

that lashes out at you like a wounded snake

to strike the place where it hurts the worst.

And then you’re as calm as a Zen dolphin

in a kingfisher sea

that’s just endured its own bad weather

like nothing worth watching on a broken tv

and there’s nothing absolutely nothing

you feel you can’t be

as your darkness passes into lucidity.

I’ve watched the waxing and waning of your eyelids

like phases of the moon

and I know where you keep your eclipses hid

in a shoebox of unanswered loveletters under the bed

and I’ve seen how you’ve tried to heal

the broken leg of your unicorn

whenever it’s trembled out of the shadows

to drink from the virgin elixirs mingled in your tears

like mystic antidotes

and old wives’ tales.

You’re a moonboat with black sails.

Your heart is a rose of dark blood

whose highest tide is a biblical flood

and whose lowest ebb

leaves its fish stranded in starmud

and its stars dangling

like mummified flies in a spider-web

like boyfriends who didn’t have a chance of coming true

once you plucked the jewel from the dreamcatcher

like an eye that offended you.

It’s only when God’s in love

that she creates the world

in her own image

and sees that it is good.

And when she’s not

even the rain’s

just a distant memory

in the heartwood of a leafless tree.

But the world isn’t always something horrific

offering you ice-cream

in a terrible dream you can’t wake up from.

Sometimes five petals open and one flower blooms

like an orchid

like a waterlily

like a dandelion far from home

in a swamp

in the shadow of an outhouse

in the armpit of a gravestone

in a broken home

and even the lonely teenager

in a tormented bedroom

sometimes looks in the mirror

and sees that all her sunspots have gone from the shining.

Sometimes the checkers

are jumped by an ostrakon

out of left field

that’s learned how to get over things on her own.

And night comes to the lips of the daylily

and sips fire like a dragonfly

from the grail of its burning goblet

before it closes it eye in the darkness

like a sky that’s pitched a tent

out under the stars

and falls asleep dreaming of Venus and Mars.

And there are mirrors

with cracks in the corners of their eyes

that haven’t been broken yet

by anything you had to throw at them

when they told you not to forget

how beautiful you truly are

underneath the scars you use for makeup.

And sometimes when the first snow comes

it doesn’t lie down like a virgin princess

on the pyres of fall

that no one can wake with a kiss

like a snowflake on a furnace

or a sacrificial lamb

at the eleventh commandment

of a bloodthirsty thorn,

but drifts slowly down

like the big untethered flight feathers

of an extinct species of bird

disappearing in the aerial blue perspective

of a thoughtless oblivion

sweeter than anything

that’s gone before it.

And if there’s no fairness in creation

there’s no fault in it either

and if you open your eyes and your ears wide enough

like seashells and telescopes

you can hear the leaves

you can hear the waves

you can hear the pebbles and the stars

all in the same voice you use

to talk to yourself in your solitude

about what you think your life is turning into

exonerating their homely existence

by remembering once they walked with God in freedom

but after the Big Bang they had no choice

but to be what they are

in the unique scheme of things

like porn stars and butterfly wings

or the sappy endings of bad novels

that bleed like maple syrup

that doesn’t run sweet in the spring

because they’ve made pulp fiction

out of the dark secret themes of life

that flow through us like mindstreams

always on their way to somewhere else

that flowers like the universe in all directions.

If sometimes your heart burns

like an urn full of the ashes of the voodoo dolls

you once called friends

that turned against you like unfaithful curses

that couldn’t keep your secrets to themselves

and told everyone how scared you were

of your own magic,

try to remember

that pain isn’t funny

and life isn’t always laughably tragic

and there’s a hidden antiseptic in honey

that can heal the worst burns

like acetylene and steel

if you don’t saint the sweet things in life with pins

or gore the new moon on its own horns.

And when you’re taking the schoolbus home

and you’re sitting by the window

looking out into the sad distance

away from your hilarious companions

because of some emptiness they couldn’t understand

remember that the breakfast of champions

isn’t a bowlful of thorns

and the best way to lift a hex

you’ve imposed upon yourself

is to let someone sit down in the empty seat next to you

and exaggerate your loneliness into laughter.

And when things get heavier than bells to bear

and the air chokes on an evil wind

and the only course available

is to throw the compass out the window

and let it finds its own way north

like an eye seized by stars in all directions

you can always lean on your skeleton

like the strong beam of a rafter

that’s more than enough

to keep the big bad wolf

from blowing your house down.

You have been through much early and overcome

the worst of the morning

to show the sun your flower

like a poem you just finished writing

in which freedom is a wolf

love is a heart in an earthquake zone

that’s always cracking along its fault lines

to give birth to a baby bird

in a family tree

that’s just been struck by lightning.

And everything about you

that the world has yet to believe

everything they can’t see yet

everything that’s bright and clear

and deep and dark and wonderful

about who you’re becoming

because they haven’t opened their eyes enough

in light of the unearthly things

that haunt a teen-age girl

like a mere slip of the moon

growing into a woman

is symbolized by your cherished unicorn

standing at the edge of your painting

waiting for you to come ashore

like the Lady of the Lake

or Cleopatra showing off on the Nile

in a silver lifeboat

with crescent moons for oars

and a heart as big as the sky

where Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

and Alysia in the Sea with Whales

are two of the latest constellations

she’s painted on the flip-sides of her sails.

 

PATRICK WHITE 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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