MUSIC

MUSIC

 

Music.

What the shadows think of as water.

Shadow-water on the grass like the tide of a tree.

All the windows in the neighbourhood

look cold and lonely.

Only crows and gulls on the wind.

Was just about to take the next poem out of here

when I started wondering

if our shadows think of us as their identities.

Poor things.

Nothing sings

as the tree slips its finger

through a lot of token engagement rings

that were the growing edge of last spring.

And though the flowers look the same

as they did last year

I’m sure they don’t remember me

and to be honest

I’d be somewhat insulted if they did.

Music’s not the memory of someone who’s listening.

Music is what time feels like

when it gets carried away like a leaf.

Music is the bell

peace takes off the shoulders

of a refugee grief

looking for shelter at the side of the road

among the weeds and the wildflowers.

What’s the mind

if not picture-music?

Things flowing in and out of focus like fish

swimming through space

swimming with stars

swimming through the wind

as it coils and unspools

like a snakedance on the mindstream

when the moon lays its feather on the waters?

Music.

All that is intangible

about our joys and our sorrows.

The unattainability of what we expect of ourselves

when our longings grow infinite in the darkness

and music is the only light we’ve got to go by.

Music on the rocks

is still a siren you can drown in

and Orpheus still loses his prophetic head

for driving the maenads mad with his lyre

and frenzied choirmasters that scream like fire

still echo the agony of eagles in the valley below

that wakes up to the death-throes of unknown predators

high in the mountains above

where music has stood its ground for years

like one of the clouds that circle the pious peaks.

Music is all eyes that can seek what you’re looking for

when the wine goes looking for the grail

like blood that’s out of touch with its own heart

but it doesn’t do the finding for you.

That’s your part.

But even when we fail

music takes its tail in its mouth

like the old symbol for eternity

and shows us a way of thinking for ourselves

that doesn’t bind us to anything.

Music is hunger and food.

Music is sin and redemption.

Music is what the Buddha knows

that he never told anyone

when he propped his loveletter

in front of the mirror

where no one could find it.

An anthem in hell.

A hymn in heaven.

A requiem

and epithalamion on earth.

Music dresses for the occasion

but everybody listens to it

as if they were naked.

And then it throws you the shirt off its back

and walks off stage skinless.

Doorway and exit and entrance

music crosses its own threshold

with every step it takes away from home

without looking back

to see who might be following.

 

PATRICK WHITE 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LILACS AND CRAB-APPLES IN BLOSSOM

LILACS AND CRAB-APPLES IN BLOSSOM

 

Lilacs and crab-apples in blossom

and here and there a wild cherry

abandoned in an old farmyard

like an unfashionable chandelier

that kept on dancing with itself

long after the stars went out.

If for nothing else I was born

to tell the trees how beautiful they are.

What an elegance and grace of earth.

Embodiments of time in the concrete.

Brides at the weddings of matter.

The solid become real. Mind

when it gives up looking for itself.

Fountains and clouds.

Life whispering into its own ear

about the birds and the bees

in a native language of its own

that blooms like the demotic tongues

of a Babylonian renaissance

that doesn’t need a translation.

Life says so much without meaning to.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOU'RE FREE TO BE FREE

YOU’RE FREE TO BE FREE

 

You’re free to be free.

You’re free to be bound.

Attachment too is a Buddha activity.

Unborn

there’s no need to begin.

No beginning.

No end.

Draw your own conclusions

but don’t be a small snake

and get swallowed by a larger.

Move on according to your own wavelength

and let go of everything

like a myth of skin

like a tatoo you just had removed

now that the romance is over

and time’s fallen out of love with eternity.

Separation where there should be love.

Modernity’s the ultimate divorce.

We’ve disinherited the planet.

And all our children

are spiritually illegitimate.

Boo hoo

plays a little blue violin

on the streetcorner

outside the bank

and runs to buy a rock

he can crank like music

with the small change

of compassionate passers-by.

I’m alive now as I ever was

and I’m not a time-traveler from the sixties

having been here all along

but I was young in that generation

and if we were better than anybody at anything

I think it was

we didn’t lie to our imagination.

But I wouldn’t bet on it

knowing the mind’s greatest virtue

is not that it remembers so much

but that it knows so easily how to forget.

Smoke is not the historian of the fire.

Shadows are not the ink of the light.

Thoughts don’t know if there’s a mind

anymore than you know

if there’s a god

and your feelings have never heard of a heart

that makes a damn bit of difference.

Each of these things has a life of its own

but death doesn’t know anything about life

and what is there for life to live through

that can only live through itself

like water being a fish

that you could possibly experience as death?

Does the fish swim out of the water?

Does the bird fly out of the sky?

The great sea of awareness sheds its sky like skin

and swims on through itself.

You can’t pour the universe out of the universe.

Water finds the witching wand

like seeing finds the star

that’s been following it.

You are what you are what you are

and that’s not a consolation

not a victory or defeat

not Buddhas at your feet

or the chains of your leftover freedom.

It’s not Merlin killing stones with chemical Excaliburs

or the curse of a heavy life even Atlas couldn’t lift.

It’s the mystic specificity

of your own irreversible life

flowing down the mountains of matter 

saying you into existence

every moment of it

like water talking to itself in the womb.

And time speaks with a human voice

about the sadness of its passing

and the eye that seeks the seer

looks in all the best directions

for the jewel of its enlightenment

like a mirror held up to space

looking back at its own unshapely face.

And that’s who we are

when we don’t stop to think about it.

We’re not lumps of intelligence

in the dark matter of it all

or crude approximations

of futures that never happen.

Our lives our lies our truths

our sorrows and joys

our love and disappointment

our foolishness and wisdom

our compassion and savagery

the things we keep faith with

and the things we betray

everything we are

and everything we are not

aren’t the masters of the medium of us

as if we were the stuff

the universe worked with

to shape small statues of itself

like a terracotta army it could take to the tomb

as a precautionary keepsake or momento mori.

We’re not the story of heroic elements

transcending themselves

around a periodic table.

That’s just another scientific fable

about the subjugation of Tiamat by Marduk

and how humans were made out of the filth

of her dismembered son Kingu

to serve the gods like faithful dogs.

White dwarfs shrinking heads into blackholes

as if oxygen could be enslaved by hydrogen

and her bitter tears turn into water.

And hydrogen beget helium

and helium begat carbon

and carbon beget us

like a polygamist at an orgy with oxygen.

Cowards coerce power with superstition

like mind maggots replacing the seeds

in the core of the apple of knowledge.

True gods don’t need to be served.

And real love doesn’t demand you do anything.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOUR PICTURE SEEMS VERY COMPOSED

YOUR PICTURE SEEMS VERY COMPOSED

Your picture seems very composed. As if you were trying to believe in yourself. But a rose is a rose is a rose and yours is dark and beautiful as if your heart knocked and the night let it in. I hope one day the dance of love chance and occasion lets me sleep with you like a dragon in advance of the rain. I’ve never slept with an eclipse before but I’ve heard they swallow you whole. If you’ll forgive me for taking this small moment out of my cathedral and choir to be kind to my lust. Someone left it like an orphan on the stairs. I think it’s yours but it keeps calling me by my name like a moth to a candleflame like lightning to a firefly that wants to get higher by deepening the darkness with a glorious death. You brood. You allure. There are bruises on your arm. You’re an amateur celibate. Your broken vows are fortune-cookies that forsake themselves like ostrakons. It must be dangerous being a beautiful woman. A siren on the moon summoning her waves back like shadows she once exiled like the tides of providence she didn’t take. You’re a precipice but you look like an island where the drowned sailors wash up on the shores of your flesh with smiles on their faces. And can you see, even as far off as you are, my little white sail on your event horizon like a feather from the wings of Icarus making his way toward the sun that shines like you at midnight?

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

I SAY YOUR NAME TO MYSELF OUT LOUD

I SAY YOUR NAME TO MYSELF OUT LOUD

 

I say your name to myself out loud all these years later

and it tastes like a stranger in my mouth

like a bird caught in a chimney

beating its wings against black tin

like a word caught in the throat of the night

that wants to get out.

To you it looks like freedom.

But to me it’s an exorcism.

When I want to let my ghosts go

I just pick any dandelion in the fall

and blow.

I don’t hang on to them any longer

than fire hangs on to its smoke.

If you take your delusions too seriously

you can turn a legend into a joke.

You smother a baby phoenix in its crib.

And I’m kind of glad

your lies don’t inform me anymore

about how unreliable the truth is

and I suppose it’s some sign of moral progress

when the liars learn to fib

in a halfway house for the truth

they can’t face up to yet

like methadone to cold turkey.

I’ve kept coming back to you

like a sexy soul to a cosmic body

every autumn since you left like a koan

that couldn’t overcome its doubt.

I haven’t seen you in years

except in my mind

but you still don’t believe me

over and over and over again

when I recall how I told you

things would work out.

The dream we wanted to be

wakes up from us

and moves on

like a scar

that thinks of the pain

of who we weren’t to each other

as trivial

compared to who we were.

That’s the trouble with dreams

that lie to themselves

about coming true.

They don’t understand themselves

when they do.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHEN THE SKY SPEAKS

WHEN THE SKY SPEAKS

 

When the sky speaks

it’s stars sun moon

but when it sings

its voice is full of birds.

This morning I saw

two white tulips

hovering above the grape hyacinth

like angels that could still feel

where the moon left

cool wet kisses on their skin.

And cosmic events

are going on in the grass

that make the galaxies shudder

with unimaginable significance.

The trees have fingerprints

but no one takes them.

And every ant

is a prophet to all the others

as everyone follows everyone else

to the nectar and honey.

I watched them issue

from the tiny caldera

of their sandy volcanoes like lava

trying not to crush them accidentally

and stood in amazement

like a dumbfounded god

as they made the world.

And I asked myself

for all I have written

for all I have painted

what have I ever done in my life

that was comparable to that.

And the crows cawed

and the squirrels chattered angrily

flicking their tails like the horse-tailed hossu

of an old Zen master

trying to keep the flies away.

The point is there’s no point to get.

The period begins the sentence.

And it’s a foolish distinction

that honours its ends

in a world full of beginnings.

Look at the sun.

Look at the moon.

Look at the crazy flowers.

They’re all rank amateurs.

There’s a play.

But no rehearsal.

The stage is new every morning

but no one blows a line.

Everything expresses itself completely

right on time.

Everyone is the grail

of what they’re looking for

like a grapevine looking for wine.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GRAY RAIN

GRAY RAIN

 

Gray rain

but the trees

are teaching the stars how to break into leaves.

Good rain on the good earth.

Autumn’s a long passage.

Spring is full of thresholds.

Rainbow bridges in the distance

over urgent streams.

Everything’s in a rush to become something.

I thought I knew once

who I was supposed to be

but more and more it eludes me

like a future that’s already behind me.

I leave it to the world

to finish what I began

and include myself in the mystery

and try to carry on like a man

who looks at a star he won’t follow

through the branches of the burgeoning trees

as the history of who I am

now that I’m not anymore.

The less I am the more there is to be.

And one eye doesn’t get in the way of the other as much.

There is just this as it is

and what am I beholding

if I’m not looking upon myself as I am

in common with everything

that’s changing all around me

like a mind that can’t contain itself

in any fixed mode of being

anymore than the eye

can decide what it’s seeing.

Everything is burning with life in the rain

and change is the dangerous bliss

we feel when we cease to exist.

The trees might have fingerprints

graven into their bark

and you might accord them

an identity in the dark

and approve of their names

and let them pass as if you knew who they were

but that doesn’t make them

any less of a stranger than you are

or the clouds carry passports.

Praise be to the abundance of oblivion

and the cornucopias of blackholes

in the hearts of the galaxies

that keep wounding themselves into life

by falling on their own swords

like a knife that heals.

By day the light gives.

But at night

it steals.

And the mirror lives

and pours water over the eyes of the blind

and suddenly the stars can see again.

And the grape hyacinth is drunk on blue wine.

And I’m walking on water on the moon

even as the moon walks on my tears

without knowing which ones

flowed from the bells of my sorrows

and which overwhelmed me

like birds in the fountains of joy.

First I am a man.

And then I am a boy.

Spring takes itself for granted.

And autumn comes on with regrets.

But they both know

this is as good as it gets

and nothing’s missing

in the mind’s lost and found.

It’s just the way things get around

when you throw the world back in the water

like a life of your own

you gave up years ago

to be who you are now.

Praise be to the stars

that stop by the gate this late

to chat about gardens

and how to keep

the roots of the roses alive

when the ground hardens.

Even if you’re a demon in steep descent

or an angel rising from hell 

life has the power of a flower

and the genius of a universe

to turn falling into a calling

like planets and Canada geese.

You can walk out alone

into a wide open field at night like I do

and stand there under the stars

that have been staring at you since childhood

like someone they should keep an eye on

and say: This is me. This is who I am as I am

to the whole twinkling lot of them in self-defense

to uphold the savage dignity of the difference.

You can stand there in the vastness

of that one definitive thought

that goes on forever like a silence older than birds

and feel the sweet release of upending joy

trying to master its new freedom

when space morphs into a mouth for a moment

and says softly

o so softly

in a voice that’s been singed by compassion:

No.

You’re not.

 

PATRICK WHITE