THINGS I CARED ABOUT YESTERDAY

THINGS I CARED ABOUT YESTERDAY

 

Things I cared about yesterday

don’t care for me today

in the same way they never did

but that’s okay

it’s probably better this way.

People come and go like themes and topics

that have talked themselves out of their solitude for awhile.

Who can blame them

when the narrative finally takes its own advice

and puts its tail in its mouth

and tries to finds its way back

to the headwaters of the truth

by trying to flow back up the mountain

like a snake that finds everywhere it goes

is the path it didn’t take.

Take nothing from nothing.

It’s still nothing.

I don’t see what we ever had

that was ever anything to lose.

Free to choose.

But then if you really were

as free as all that

you’d have to choose to choose to choose to choose

in a long hall of inter-reflecting mirrors

with thousands of eyes and mouths and ears

with something to see and say and hear all at once

and you’d go mad.

You’d be paralyzed.

You couldn’t keep up with appearances.

Lucky for us things move on of their own accord

without meaning anything in the way they do

however we interpret events

like fish trying to find a definition for water

when they’re it.

Solitude’s a small human matter

compared to the vast impersonal loneliness of death.

A little fire to warm a night on earth

as if thousands of ghosts were summoned

to every breath we take

to tell sad stories to the stars

in a language of smoke

that was already dead before they spoke.

Scars in the fire.

Cracks in the heartwood.

And it’s important to see things

from the star’s point of view as well.

Even when the phoenix

rises from the ashes in the urn of its heart

and spreads its wings like flames through a forest 

to renew the mindscape with seedlings

at that distance

it’s still just a firefly of existence

compared to the creative cremation of the universe.

Even if you were to rise up out of the oceans

like the peaks and pinnacles

of the Himalayas and Rockies of thought

the higher you climb

the deeper the dark valleys of the emotions

you’re trying to transcend.

One mile east is one mile west

so no one needs to ask for directions

when you can take all roads at once

that lead everywhere

you already are

by walking one road well.

Ask any star.

There’s no highway to heaven.

There’s no lowroad to hell.

The thing about light

is that’s it’s invisible

until it falls on someone’s face

and opens their eyes like loveletters

from a stranger with a passion for clarity.

There’s a lie in the heart of the truth

that is the truth in the heart of the lie.

The first is insight.

The second’s compassion.

You need both to see right.

To the stars

it’s darker by day

than it is by night.

And deeper than the white

there’s a black mirror 

that reflects being with a mind

that doesn’t bind the stars to the their light

or the blind to their lack of seeing

or leave any traces of the lunar birds

that silver the words

we mistake for the meaning of water

but frees up a huge space

for things to come and go

as if the true face of time

were an insight

into this moment now on earth

lightyears beyond

anything that could be measured in mirrors.

No birth.

No death.

Nothing appears or disappears.

Nothing of worth.

Nothing discounted.

You walk barefoot to enlightenment

across a burning bridge of stars

with the shoes of delusion in your hand

like intimate things you ignorantly understand

have no place in the house of the spirit

that demands you take your homely self off to enter

without tracking the world in like starmud.

You get to the other side.

You step inside

only to discover

that life’s a river with only one bank

and you’re not even standing on that.

You meet the Buddha.

He squats on his tatami mat

like a tree frog on a waterlily pad.

Free of violence like yesterday’s news

he sits in silence

without changing his position or views

about not having any.

You see the one in the many

and the many in the one advaitistically

like a mantra meant to put both your feet

into the same shoe

like a mouth

as you tuck your bruised heels into a full lotus

and sit like a rock in the road.

You’re just another lump on the log

but you keep thinking

if you can’t be a frog

maybe you can make it as a toad

if you try hard enough.

And then it comes to you

like a whisper of dirt between your toes

a soiled parenthesis of earth

slipped under your fingernails

like a black sail on the horizon

take delusion from delusion it’s still delusion

and all you’ve been doing

is trying to wash mud and water off

with water and mud

blood with blood

and there was never anything false or foul

about anything in the first place.

And you slip the duality of your feet back

into the infinite spaces of your newborn well-worn shoes

and the Buddha walks a mile with you back to your place

like the shadow of something greater than light

older than clarity

and deeper than the night

that summons the stars out of its dark abundance

to flesh out its insight

into the nature of itself

with your life and light.

And it whispers you into its own ear

and pours itself out

like a great ocean of awareness

into the tiny mooncup of every tear

it takes to squeeze a tide and an atmosphere

out of you like a pet rock

and smears the mirror like the Milky Way

or the silver trail of a garden snail

or warm breath on a cold windowpane

where someone is writing a name in their solitude

like a secret that can’t be told to anyone

without waking them up

from a long dark sleep

in a world of their own

to someone they already know

is no stranger to what they dream of

when they’re alone.              

Things that are rooted in heaven

have their feet in the stars

and their head on the ground.

Cataracts in the eye.

Flowers in the sky.

There’s no need to go barefoot.

There’s no need to undermine

the foundation stones

of this house of flesh and blood.

There’s no need to sweep

autumns of spiritual junkmail

off your stairs

like the dry leaves

of the deciduous myths behind the stars.

They know what season it is

and time doesn’t stop

to ask the calendar for advice

on how to get to where it’s going.

The full moon is full to overflowing

and the harvest isn’t late.

There are no secrets

in a secret garden

that’s got a sundial for a gate.

The flowers opened up

like New England asters

with nothing to confess

long before you stopped to interrogate them

like the willing accomplices of an emptiness

that talks in its sleep to the stars

about cosmic wounds with earthly scars

that make it all real.

The effect has a feel for the cause

with blood on its claws

and the healers keep the pain at bay

by killing you deeper into life

than the infinite spaces

the stars plunge through

like agonies of light

on the edge of a knife

that cuts through you

like the crescent moon

through the heart of a hill

on the horizon of a distant sacrifice

to a god that’s never even heard of us

and doesn’t know what it is we’re asking for

that could impossibly be missing.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I LIKE A LOT OF SOLITUDE

I LIKE A LOT OF SOLITUDE

 

I like a lot of solitude with my freedom.

I don’t like my liberty cramped.

I don’t want to be exiled from my past

or summoned to my future.

If there are longings

let them find their own fulfillment

like rivers flowing to the sea.

If there is darkness

let it come to light

and may the fireflies

and the emerging stars

jolt you into lucidity and life

as deeply as the lightning bolt

of an insight

that doesn’t leave scars.

The rarity of a few brief moments of clarity

has always made more

of an impression upon me

than a lifetime of dreams

and whenever I’ve come

to a trine in the road I’m on

pointing the way out to a wave on the ocean

I’ve always chosen the middle of three extremes

and chosen feet

over fins and wings

and walked on as if I knew where I was going.

To see things as they are

isn’t to rob them

of the strange beauty

of the way they seem.

It isn’t just enlightenment

that lays the moon

cooly on your forehead

in a fever of life.

Your illusions

are creators and healers too

engines and instigators

of what makes you you.

Trapped in the mirage of a burning house.

You’d need a mirage of water to put it out.

Real water wouldn’t work.

Sometimes it takes a lie

to expose a lie to the truth.

Anything that heals is true.

And anything that wounds is not.

Salvation can wait until we’re dead.

What the world needs now is rescue.

That’s why my heart drifts with the current

like a lifeboat

that’s been emptied of everything

including myself and my name

to make more room for people to get in. 

And if they’re out here with me alone

out of sight of land or hope or human

I teach them to swim through the great nightsea

like the stone of the moon

thrown through a window of water

to keep the lucidity of the child inside

from going out like the afterthought

of something mad and beautiful

that died in old age.

It took a fool to enlighten the fool

who became the sage.

It takes a lot of suffering

to look look deeply

into the heart of joy

and not feel saddened

by the way I disappointed the boy in me

by not finding an easier way to be happy.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

DISTEMPERED BY THE VICIOUS WORLD

DISTEMPERED BY THE VICIOUS WORLD

 

Distempered by the vicious world

murdering its own in the name

of corrupt corporations

and cannibalistic governments

drilling for oil in the dark eyes

of carboniferous children

who haemorage just like heavy crude

when they come up like flowers

I stop by the side of the road

halfway between Bolingbroke and Maberly

just before midnight

and look up at the stars

as I always have since I was young

to escape the garbage-can of the neighbourhood

I was raised in looking for food.

The Milky Way unspools across the sky

as if millions upon millions of stars

were merely smoke.

And how far the eye can see

and how big the mind must be

to contain all that

in the glance of a passing thought.

No star has ever failed to astonish me

whether I’ve seen them all at once

or one by one

peeking through the clouds

to see what they’re missing.

They’ve always been

the alpha and omega of wonder to me

apocalyptic amazement

that I should exist to see them

just as they are without meaning anything

shining out of the darkness

like broken mirrors

or the quaking chandeliers

of ballroom fireflies

waltzing through space

to the music of celestial laws

that try to speak for the silence

speak for the stillness of it all.

Just to stand here on earth

a solitary human being

at the end of a long lineage of suffering

that stretchs all the way back to

Pithecanthropus Africanensis Gracile

scavenging bones for marrow

with a stone tool

when the leopard sank its fangs into her skull

three million years ago

when things weren’t as dangerous

as they are today.

Just to stand here

at the momentary peak

of a bell-curve of refutable intelligence

and feel the mystery

of the orange half-moon when it’s rising

and embody the vastness of time

with every breath I take

knowing I’m going to die

without any real answer as to why

that isn’t either a compassionate guess

or a venal lie.

And I may be nothing more

than the latest adaptation

of my ancestral hominids

to try and discern some purpose in it all

they could make their own

to stop the suffering

and the depth of the brutality

that must be endured

by random chance

or deliberate policy

when the world loses its personality

and the mountain of skulls I’m standing on

like King of the Hill

turns into a bodycount

of all the creatures and quasi-humans

and the unfathomable depths of unknown agony

of all the races they gave birth to.

How many had to die for me to be here now

this very moment like an empty lifeboat

lost on a great nightsea of awareness

ingathered from the mindstreams and rivers

of their genetic traces?

Antares brews its red venom

in the heart of Scorpio

and what the Ojibway call

the Road of Ghosts

smudges the Summer Triangle

like chalkdust on a blackboard.

And I want to cry out to all the men and women

all the unknown life forms

that were born and suffered and perished

for this view of the present

on the ledge of this shaky precipice

that is the growing edge of intelligence

in one long scream of assent

yes yes yes yes

we made it out of the basement

by standing on your shoulders

to squeeze through a window outside

only to discover there was no roof

on this house of life

to take shelter from the storms

that still torment us.

You thought the vernal equinox

was magical proof

encircled by rocks

things would be born again

like the eternal recurrence

of paleolithic clocks.

I see the ecliptic intersecting

the celestial equator at the equinoctial colure

like ripples of rain within rain

along the thin plane of the halo

that surrounds the solar system.

Everything’s still turning

as it always has

but we’ve secularized time

by breaking the circle

and turning it into a straight line

that doesn’t go on forever.

So it’s anyone’s bet

if I’ll ever be back again.

Matter never wears the same brain twice.

I have deepened my ignorance

in the expansive unknowability of space

like a star that got so far ahead of itself

the future lost touch with yesterday

and the present hasn’t left a forwarding address.

I want to scream out yes

like one long blood-banner of victory

we’re not the fools we used to be

when we were humbled by our environment

and life looked down upon us divinely

without resentment

and practised barbarities

on our flesh and our hearts so inconceivable

we had to turn the drastic into the tragic

just to make our suffering believable

even to ourselves.

As flies to wanton boys

are we to the gods.

They kill us for their sport.

But that’s not wholly true anymore

since we cleared the boards

of false idols and savage superstitions

like bad actors

and nature abhorring a vacuum

filled the emptiness with ourselves

as you once did when Africa

walked all the way to Australia

hugging the coasts of alien continents

seventy thousand years ago.

War disease climate-change famine poverty

now we afflict ourselves upon each other

and though we’ve stopped

shaking our fist at the sky

for what ails and fails us

we still shake it in each other’s face

with a ferocity

the unindictable gods never knew

because the worst atrocities take place

inside a family

and the deepest hatreds

are always the ones that love you the best.

Stars can you hear me?

Do you know I’m here at all?

Can you tell by the way the sun wobbles

and the lightbulb is dimmed by the transit

of a shadow of a speck of dirt

I’m here standing on this planet of skulls

trying to pull my heart up by the roots

to show you where I came from

and what we made of the starmud

we rose up out of

on our dendritic way

to taste its bitter fruits?

But all I can hear is the wind in the cedars saying:

Poor dumb brute beast human.

Where is the Ariel to your Caliban?

It isn’t the star.

It’s the darkness that flowers.

The stream is crammed with waterlilies.

It isn’t the blossom.

It’s the root that has powers to heal

its own passing.

And it’s all yours

without asking.

And I’m almost brought to tears

by the loveliness of the thought

as if a white-tailed doe

just stepped out of the woods

into the moonlight

but the rock of my heart

has been flintknapped

into the Clovis point

of a ballistic missile

I keep buried underground

waiting for the present

to catch up to the past

like a Mayan calendar

that could read the writing on the wall

but didn’t live long enough

to know whether it was true or not.

If you give it some thought

it’s easy to see

how we’ve changed

since we came down out of the trees.

Evolution isn’t a tree anymore for one thing.

It’s more like a shrub.

And apocalypse isn’t

so much the fulfillment of a prophecy

worthy of its end

as it is an ambush

at every bend in the river

by an old friend

straight as an arrowhead

that’s been chipped from the moon

in phases and flakes

and tipped in sorrow

and buried deep in our hearts

to be dug up

thousands of years from now

by those of us who have lived

our way into the future

like yesterday lives its way into tomorrow.

The peduncle is lost in the ensuing phylum.

But the glassy-eyed telescopes

are still stargazing

like high hopes on meds

in a cosmic asylum

that’s trying to establish

some order of madness

like the straitjacket

of a unified field theory

that comes in one size

that fits all.

Homo erectus looked at the moon

and might have seen a stone ax.

I watch it go from orange

to yellow to ivory white

as it rises through

a series of atmospheric effects

like the bare facts with no surprises.

There’s no mystery

in the bleached bones of history

that have washed themselves clean of us

to reveal who we were

like a waterclock of incarnations

that kept filling the future up

like empty cups

like empty hearts

like empty moons

with the blood of all

the lonely wounded creatures

that have struggled and died to get as far as now

and the unlikelihood of me and the stars

and the small animals hidden in the woods

existing without knowing why.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ISN'T IT OBVIOUS

ISN’T IT OBVIOUS

 

Isn’t it obvious by now

matter is the language

of the spirit

that expresses itself

as flowers and trees

and you and me

just as we are.

Matter is the mother-tongue

the alphabet

the periodic table of elements

of what can’t be said about God

without resorting to signs

like water and oxygen.

The runes of the mountains.

The purple passages of the sea.

And the moon who couldn’t find

anything beautiful in her bleakness

long before Samuel Beckett.

Out of an almost perfect vacuum

out of nothing

out of space

its thirteen atoms of hydrogen

per cubic centimeter

like magic beans

a longing for existence arises

spontaneously out of the abyss

as if it just remembered the name

of something that came back to it

like a lost thought

and happily blurted it out like the Big Bang.

God mind the abyss nothingness

the cosmic id

call it what you want

they’re all just waves of the same sea

iridescent bubbles rising out of the depths

like independent cells with shapeshifting nuclei

or the membranous worlds in hyperspace

that start with a kiss

and end with a face in the window

staring out into the same old darkness

like a syllable of dust

in awe of the silver-tongued stars.

Mind does its best

to take a good guess

but it doesn’t really matter

if you’re right or wrong

because everything’s

been clear and true all along.

The point is.

There’s no point to this.

You just break into song

like a bird that can’t help itself.

You gather everything into yourself

like a blackhole

with a creative affinity for stars

and a key turns deep inside you

and suddenly you’re walking

through an infinite number of doors all at once

that have freed you from yourself

like a replicating cell.

Water looking at itself

with eyes of water.

Mind looking for mind with mind.

The snake trying to swallow its own head

as a sign from infinity

that it’s going to take forever.

Illusions of light

burning like jewels

in the mirror of rain

rooted in the starmud

of the human brain

that thinks if it elaborates enough laws

it can hold the universe to account

for the cause of its behaviour.

Oceans roll off its tongue

like drops of water

from a blade of grass

and things keep on happening

like galaxies and starfish.

Be the bright vacancy

that shines out of your dark abundance

like a waterlily putting a white spin

on the death and decay of the swamp

that aspired to it

like the Buddha watching Venus in the dawn

or a magnanimous loveletter

as long as autumn 

at the end of a mean affair

that sweeps it like stars and leaves

off the helical stairways to heaven forever

like the memory of mutant genes. 

Be the eleven that comes of seven

and dot the dice with the starmaps

of the chance constellations

that rolled your way

like a genome

without asking for your advice.

If you were really down on your luck

you wouldn’t be here to know it

so why not risk it all

like a universe in the beginning

in one throw against the wall in a dark backalley

that’s been breaking banks

and bringing the house down ever since

like an incommensurable decimal

that escaped the confines

of a whole number

that couldn’t restrain it like a straitjacket?

Add yourself to things like zero

and amplify their effect

like a deep canyon foretells

the echo of things to come

that are well beyond your voice.

You don’t need to choose

when there’s nothing you can’t refuse.

There’s nothing to win or lose.

Time may well be

the adolescence of eternity

that puts cracks in its vinegar

and wrinkles its wine

but who wouldn’t rather play

than work at being who they are?

Honour the wound with a scar

that’s worthy of what you have suffered

to express yourself as you are

like a firefly in a palace of light

with a deep insight

into the black mirrors of dark matter

that multiply your afterlives like stars

in the eyes of the windows

in the house of life

that were broken from the inside out.

Astound your own vision

with the kind of crazy wisdom

that knows the crown of the universe

doubles as the dunce-cap of a cosmic egg

and say what you have to say

to add yourself to the conversation

like a bridge to the few bars of picture-music

that look and sound just like you

when you refused to crush

the head of the serpent under your heel

like the end of the long interminable road you were on

to salvation.

And you were amazed

when it struck you

like an elixir of life

emerging from the eclipse

of a dark venom

you didn’t get up off the ground

like St. Paul who had been Saul of Tarsus.

And you weren’t the Tiresias of either sex.

There was no blind catharsis.

But your heels sprouted wings

that mastered the wind like words

and the snake flew away like a dragon

with a lot in common with birds.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE WORLD IS ONLY AS BIG

THE WORLD IS ONLY AS BIG

 

The world is only as big

as the size of the life going on in me.

If I wanted to take the full measure of the sky

what could that be

compared to the lightyears it takes

to get from one side of my mind to the other?

And look how huge the darkness is

that can be cast by one star

like the negative of its shining.

And what road has anyone walked

that was ever longer than their shadow?

Eternity’s just another way of saying

you’ve run out of space for time.

I don’t think I’m going to live forever

but my life will go on without me

just as it always has.

I’ll get up in the morning

like the ghost of someone I can’t remember

and I’ll have a coffee and a cigarette

as I wait for the obscurity to clear

like steam on a bathroom mirror

to see if I can recognize

anything about me

that was true yesterday.

Will I feel as I do now like a leftover

from the night before

pushed to the side of the plate

as everything in the room

reviles me slightly

and gets back to the silence

they were engaged in

before I interrupted them so impolitely

I smeared their meditation

with my intrusive incoherence?

They all seem to be waiting

for someone to make an appearance

but it definitely isn’t me.

It’s beautiful outside

but when I look

I’m always looking at the beauty

of someone else’s bride

and I turn away like night from the orchard

as if I were always the best man

at the wedding of Adam and Eve.

Eden.

In clay-bound Sumer

from the word Edin

meaning the southern marshes

of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers

whose mouths were always full of food

and the living was easy and good.

Same garden.

Same tree.

Same apple.

Same suggestive serpent.

But I’ve always understood

from the first bite

of self-knowledge

the baffled man in me

eats the apple to know things

about the lucid woman in me

who eats it to grow wings on a snake

to raise that up high

which has been cast down low.

Now all gods and dragons are estranged oxymorons

and Nicholas of Cusa’s Coincidence of the Contradictories

is the yin and yang

the lingam and yoni

of a grand biodynamic plan

to sow clarity in the heart of confusion

to see what kind of chaos we can make of it

that might randomly advance

the creative mischance of evolution

happening everywhere the same

to everyone all at once.

Though to think it has balance and purpose

is to build two retaining walls

in the corner of the one dunce.

It’s the kind of war

where you go to peace against the other

and there’s a commotion

in the heart of the stillness

that is distinctly human.

Something stirring

about the enduring effect

of love and compassion

when it happens without a cause

and the mirrors don’t look through the laws

of iron bars

like skies in captivity

deprived of stars in their solitude

or words to lighten the mood.

Of course it’s absurd.

Life’s only playing at being serious

and a childlike madness

a crazy wisdom

that isn’t imperiously innocent

of its own experience

is the only way to express

the lucid triviality of what’s sublime

about its creativity

like stars in the daytime

lost in the lightless depths

of an expansive mind

that’s come to the limit of things

like a Martian rover

by realizing

there’s no edge to go over.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

sisters raise flowers against their brothers