HEY I MISS YOU TOO

for Alysia

Hey I miss you too

even in the midst of my disintegration

even from here

after my phoenix went supernova

in the next galaxy over

in an amazing display of candle-power

I can hear the poignance of spring in your voice

like the greening of the sumac

from the ashs of its last cremation

or Persephone come back from the gibbering shades of hell

to gather flowers under the apple bloom in the orchard

without any fear of being bit in the heel

by a serial viper in the guise of a god.

My poetic skull may be bobbing toward Mitelyne

to compare mythologies of dismemberment

with Sappho and Terpander

and ask how long

a harp has to be dried on a windowsill

before you can break it like a wishbone

with someone you love.

But don’t look back this time like Eurydice

out of nostalgia

for the death you’re leaving behind

to pursue your love of poetry

and Orpheus will be thrice-blessed

by Hermes Tresmegistus

if you keep your face turned toward the sun

like the planet I was born under on a Wednesday.

I don’t mind losing my mind

as the understudy of a wornout poetical fashion

rehearsing the dying fall of Triassic pterodactyls

on the opening night

of a murder in the cathedral

that turned an Anglo-Saxon atheist into a Norman saint

who could take a chicken from the barnyard

and turn it into poultry on a plate

like two words for the same polyglot reality.

I can put up with that

like tongues wagging behind the back

of the Tower of Babel in Biblical PsychoBabylon

but I wouldn’t want to go on

without hearing your voice

this far from home

singing to me in my native language

from a hidden birchgrove in Kamloops.

It falls like moonlight on the burnt skin

of an appreciative demon

with the afterlife of a phoenix

who’s been out of touch it seems

for longer than the light has years to go by

with the one firefly who could change

the fixed stars of his burnt out constellation

like lightbulbs in a marquee

with the eyes of a double feature

starring you and me.

Amor vincit omnia.

Antony falls in love with Juliet

and Romeo sucks the poison out of Cleopatra’s tit

and we lower and raise

the same stand-in corpse

for both balcony scenes

like Lazarus in his youth

and Lazarus in late middle-age.

Two props on the same stage.

Two wings of the same lifespan

that can be measured by a lovescene

on a single page

like a purple passage

that slipped between the lines

to write a message on the mirror in the green room

meant for your eyes only.

I’m lonelier than a flowerless wind

who’s sick of scratching at leaves

that don’t know when to let go.

O Westron wind when wilt thou blow

so the small rain down can rain?

Ah, that she were in my arms

and I in my bed again.

The creative matrix of my inner space

has been so twisted by fear and pain

its got the umbilical cord

wrapped like an anaconda

around the neck of a cyanotically blue embryo

and everything it gives birth to

is a poster child for the terminally insane

with a begging bowl for a skull.

The glass isn’t half empty

or half full

it’s been smashed against the wall

for good luck

when it got hammered

on the shots it took at itself

like a sad poet

who expressed himself like a revolver

at an exuberant Russian wedding.

What are the chances of the wet dreams

of a fire hydrant

that’s fallen in love with an arsonist

ever coming true?

My love of you is phosphorus

and though I’ve been pouring myself out to you for so long

about the depths of it

even as I’m drowning

it’s grown as giganic as the squids and cucumber worms

that line up at the hydrogen sulphide foodbanks

of the volcanic fumaroles

at the bottom of the sea.

My love of you is phosphorus

nothing can put it out.

If you were to scoop up all seven seas

with a whale for a bucket

and pour them on a star

to play it safe with a campfire

and stamp on the last embers of sunset

still nothing would put it out.

It would keep on shining like Shakespeare’s star

and not bend with the remover to remove

but grow hotter and whiter in its passion

to get through your ozone

and touch you so tenderly

with days and nights

and flesh-quaking fingertips of light

so literate they can read the braille of your breasts

in five languages

and teach the princess

to kiss the cobra on the head so lightly

it would smile and mean it.

If you were to let me shine down on you

like an elemental table

eager to turn its fundamentals into forms

like a painter looking at his brushes

and tubes of brooding phthalo blue

and alizarin crimson

like a rose listening to Billy Holiday

or a poet burning with inspiration

looks at words anew

life would spring up all over you

and rocks would live and mountains walk

and the forests thrive as they used to

when there was no one there to hear them

and the sound of one hand clapping

wasn’t a snarling chainsaw

and the things that last in life

wouldn’t be set in rings

like the tears of the earth

like caged diamonds

but left to thaw

and run down your cheeks like twin rivers

glowing with bliss

like two buddhas laughing at the backdoor

to watch the leaves falling together

like the first draft of a long book

they could say in three words

to raise the dead in anybody’s language:

Amor vincit omnia.

Love conquers all.

If your earth and water

and my air and light

your spring and my autumn

ever got intimate with each other

in a commingling of the complementary colours

of the flesh and spirit

heart and mind

what can be said by day

and what must be left unspoken

until the darkness falls

when words return to their own voices like birds

and all we’ve got left to speak with are our hands.

If this were ever to pass

rainbows would break out at night

like mad impressionists with candles in their hats

and the full moon would wash providence

up on our doorstep

like someone who survived a flood of shadows

at high tide

and found themselves marooned

on an enchanted lunar island

as if they stumbled into the afterlife or Eden

or Dilmun

and its second innocence

was more experienced than the first

and wasn’t vulnerable

and wasn’t cursed

with fiery angels at the gate

that said You can’t come in.

It’s too late.

If you were ever to let me touch your roots

with a current of light

that surged through them like a shock of life

flowers would bloom

like bouquets of radio telescopes in the night

held up to the stars in gratitude

so exqusitely expressed

that even God would think

that she was appreciated at last

and ignorant cities all over the world

living in the darkness of their blazing

would crack their concrete koans

and be illuminated on the spot

like Hispanic shadows without any papers

suddenly given a way to live with dignity

and let everybody in

and say to the homeless stranger

Hey citizen

you got a place to stay

for the rest of your life?

My heart’s big enough for all of us.

Amore vincit omnia.

Love conquers all.

If this were ever to happen

what worlds would begin without a word said

what a habitable planet we would make together

what a thriving tribute to our starmud

free to follow its own imagination into life

and you the muse that inspired it

and me the expressionist painter

who added a touch of genius to the light.

What an example of radiance

could be compressed out of

billions of years of black matter

and its brilliance astound the darkness

that thought it laboured like ore

in the snakepits of life

to bring forth nothing

but what it had already eaten.

What a surprise

it would never get over

and could never explain.

The birth of eyes.

The urgency of seeing.

A black mind mirror

with a creative imagination

as uninhibited as the sky

that gives birth to birds like words

just to flirt with the wind

and in its intimacy with the light

sees a whole new way of looking at the night.

Imagine what it would say to itself

about all the pain it suffered alone

trying to draw the sword of light

that kills you into life

out of the darkness of a philsopher’s stone

that kept knocking Goliath off its feet

like the meteorite that struck out the dinosaurs

with the fast ball of an astronomical catastrophe

that’s beginning to look more and more

like my personal history

playing Russian roulette

with my blindfolded species

like a firing squad

with five live and one blank round.

A sin of omission

that gives God an out

whenever she knocks me down.

And don’t think it’s the distance between us

that has preserved us

from the curse of familiarity.

Don’t think when you think of us

that all the miles between Perth and Kamloops

insulate us from the mundane human details

of our mystic fallibility.

I’ve met you so many times

at the edge of the knowable multiverse face to face

in a triste of time and space

so vast and incomprehensible

there aren’t enough dimensions to describe the place

or bridges laid end to end that could walk that far

to cross over the draconian abyss

that gapes like a skull at its own immensities

without losing heart

or mindstreams that could flow past so many stars

without being tempted to stop for the night

and take it easy in a mirage of its own making

with coral-lipped celestial houris

that no man has ever touched

and whose passion is renewed

by the fulfillment of desire

instead of being exhausted by it

like ashs in the fire

as it is here on earth

but not above.

The sidereal sisters of the Hesperides

with Arabic names

beds down the caravan for another night

in a desert of stars

and the golden apple of the sun goes down

and a long-faced human

picks up a handful of sand

and sees in it an oasis

and all the Mongol fountains of Samarkand

and thinks that it’s arrived in time

to hear Hafiz answer the great Khan

about the worth of the mole

on a young slave girl’s cheek

bismallah arahman arahim

and delight unequivocal death

with the poetic nuances of the answer

that saved his life with laughter.

You alone have appeared to me out here

in this available lifespan of the future

where the light can barely reach

and the darkness has nothing to teach it

about finding its way own way back to town.

It’s a long slow way up.

And it’s a short quick way down.

You can ask any apple about that.

But your epiphany and yours alone

keeps making the journey somehow

with your shadow not far behind

and everytime I look into the eyes of your apparition

I see constellations of fireflies

that you can’t see twice

exchanging zodiacs

like starmaps and dice.

So how could I ever grow bored

of caring for life with you?

How could any Hubble orbiting you

ever grow sick of stars

and try to rub them out of his eyes like sand?

How could the light ever say to the water it calls upon

at all hours of the day and night

I don’t want to take you by the hand

to the dance of life

like a bottle-nosed dolphin dating a sea otter

because I’m tired of listening

to the same picture-music over and over

as if all waterlilies were the same note

and still expect the flowers to greet it like a loveletter

instead of an empty lifeboat after everybody’s drowned?

I can swim through stone

and in the teeth of the storm

like a cat in the mouth of a dog

I know how to give up the wheel to its power

like a goldfish in the jaws of Moby Dick

that knows how to go as limp

as the dead bodyweight of a black dwarf

in the hands of an arresting officer breaking up a protest

and float that way like a heavy lift

until it lets me go

and drops the charges.

Every cubic centimeter of me

when I shrink back into my head like a star

weighs thirty tons

and there are no scales available

on either side of the great divide

between Pisces and Anubis

that could put a feather in the pan

to measure what goes on in my heart

when it’s a blackhole in the chest

of an unknowable human.

I take the low place.

I sit below the salt.

I take it all in like the sea

or a keyhole

and then something turns

and then something opens

like a door to a world

that no one knows anything about

and then I let it out

so everyone can see

everything that’s dangerous and strange about me

is only the background darkness of an overview

with an eye in the sky

that sees everything that’s beautiful and true about you.

My darkness urges the roots of the stars

to bloom spontaneously along the Road of Ghosts

where they can crowd the curb like childen

to watch the consellations pass by like floats

throwing comets out like candy

and argue like astrologers among themselves

about the one they loved the best

not a groomed hearse with a well-dressed corpse

in a celestial funeral procession sinking in the west.

If you never let the darkness in

how can the stars come out?

If you take the pain and decay and darkness away

how will the waterlilies ever manage

to enlighten the swamp

by what they don’t say.

How could a poet ever esteem

the face of his muse

and paint it in stars

mixed with mud for a binder

if darkness never falls?

Lost in the dark

the world sets out to find you.

At home in the world

the dark is there to remind you

it isn’t just the light

that reveals where you’re hiding

but there are coalpits too

black as night

that shine with diamonds

like starmaps for the blind

who know exactly where to find them

when they look at you.

Alysia in the sky with diamonds as big as Betelgeuse

aging in the top left hand corner of Orion

laying its card down in the west

to trump Lepus the Rabbit

who makes a clean getaway

because Orion always overbids his hand.

The club’s overdone

but it’s the sow’s ear that hangs from his belt

like a shrunken head with a wisp of hair

hanging on like a nebula

or a human souvenir from the Vietnam War

that interests me the most.

How moody hydrogen

can give birth to the stars

out of next to nothing

and making a womb of an ear

turn it into a silk purse.

That’s an art I’d like to master.

I could turn my life around.

I could be profound and listened to

at everybody’s else’s expense.

I could eat.

I could pay the rent.

I could keep a car on the road

and not worry about getting into an accident.

But you see how it goes with me?

One thing turns into another and another and another

until even the sky

trying to get a fix

on which one of all these transformations is me

which is the dragon and which is the phoenix

and who’s the firefly

looks at my reflection as my mother often did

like an exhausted mirror

or the sea

looks upon its crazy waves

and the unseatable chaos of life

that boards the schoolbuses of her lunar tides.

Who could blame her?

My maternal disclaimer.

But she was right about everything.

Paddy you’re never going to amount to anything.

There’s too much of your father in you.

Everything’s been making me up ever since then.

I was defiant enough not to be hurt at the time

but once time wheeled me out of intensive care

I became aware of how wounded I was

and as my friend Layla said

time heals nothing.

You just learn to live around it

like a boulder in a stream

that fell from space

with signs of life in it

as if the earth got in the way of your heart

when it was cast down

as it did with the demons

when it was their turn to burn

though they’ve made a bigger impact than I have.

And the weirdness of it all

what makes it all eerily true

and puts the fearful authority

of an oracle speaking through the deathmask of the moon

in her voice

as if she were totally detached

from the Platonic abstract

of the kind of person

she was certain I couldn’t grow up to be

specifically

is that I couldn’t have asked for a better mother

and I mean it.

She bared her fangs

like the first and last crescents of the moon

and bit me like someone

who had taken her by surprise from behind.

You’re bound to get bit

trying to suckle at the tit of a volcano.

It’s one of my favourite myths of origin

that ever since then

I’ve been a lunar poet

with the amorous life of lava

trying to make my own habitable moonscape

here on earth

without having to pretend I’m someone else.

A place where I can shed all my masks

like cherry blossoms and rose petals

like faces that long to be somewhere else

and let them float downstream

like loveletters and suicide notes

with life as a twelve volume prelude

like the empty lifeboats of the paper poems

that went down with the ship

I’m grateful to

for dying to come to my rescue.

I’ve gone through more transformations

than you can read about

in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

And there are changes to come

that terrify and excite me

as if I were a child

listening to adults

whispering in another room

about things I don’t want to be old enough

to understand.

So if you ask me how

I’m spending my life these days

like money I don’t have

I’d say I’m wasting my time

on things that really matter.

I’ve been sitting here writing this poem

until I forget my name

for the last three nights and mornings in a row

my fingers on the keyboard

trying to keep their eighty-eights straight

listening to the picture-music

hovering over the corpse of a piano

like a departing soul

that doesn’t want to go.

And what’s so crucial about this

that other things have to wait

that are threatening to break down the door

with their demands for more

than they could possibly take?

Let them take it all.

But what’s of inestimable value to me

is that I see the morning glory’s made a trellis

of the unhinged stargate

to our garden on the moon.

And there you are like a wild rose

with indrawn thorns

admiring the weeds

for the hardiness of their flowers.

And here I come like the Kama-Sutra

with a bouquet of symbols

I’ve scattered on the wind

like seeds in the mouths of birds

to let you know

in a world where all things end in tears

like a novel that’s too heavy on itself

for its lack of compassion

toward its loss of heart

in the power of art

to form a government in exile

to keep the Pyrrhic hopes

of a lost revolution alive

like radical ghosts summoned to a seance

by an aging medium

who talks to them like refugees

in the universal language of their mother tongue.

But what really turns their heads

from the dead to the living

is you’re the only rumour I’ve heard for years

about where to begin

where to live

and how they can thrive on love

like children again

without having to stand in line

like missing links in the food chain.

I think of you as a geni in the solitude of his lamp

thinks of wishs that beggars’ would ride

if they were only horses

and my heart breaks like loaves and fishs

to feed the hungry multitudes I’ve become

living my life in arrears

to the slumlords of reality

in the name of an unheralded holy war

to liberate my imagination

like a watershed

from the dead fountainmouths of the mirrors

who talk as if they were looking forward to

the next ice age

and know even less

than the the glacial windows do

about flowing like the bloodstream of a rose

through a wounded heart

that’s haemmoraging like a watercolour in the rain

as if it were an antidote to pain.

And ass I said in a poem the other day

my art might feel as useful

as a fire hydrant on the moon

but my heart

and I’m glad

and I’ve got you to thank

when it’s inspired

by even so much

as a single firefly

of the constellation

they’ve made of you

like a chandelier in a populist hovel

to brighten the view

feels like the Milky Way

flowing through the veins of a man

who’s just given all his fixed stars

to a bloodbank

and walked away shining on the inside

because musing on the way

every ray of light he walks in

falls upon him as if it were from you

he’s not the star-crossed maniac he thought he was

but a zodiac with a good cause

and a superstition in his heart

that reason can’t detect.

A simple intuition he obeys and cherishs

higher than all the laws

he’s ever been broken on

in the name of love

above and below

to a better and more lasting effect

than anyone can know

who hasn’t been raised from the dead

by someone like you

like hidden treasure from a shipwreck.

PATRICK WHITE

THE NIGHT INTENSIFIES ITS DARKNESS

The night intensifies its darkness

and exaggerates me like a lamp in a window

not waiting for anyone to come home.

The train whistle insists it’s a train

as it diesels past the hospital

but methinks it doth protest too much.

I can feel the turmoil of the town

settling down within me

like emotions you can’t do anything about.

Like loveletters slipped back into their envelopes

the houses close their doors

not really knowing what it is they’re keeping out

beyond the usual thief and made-for-movie nightmare.

I’m blooming in a black fire of radical shadows

and flexible heresies

that burn like intransigent thrones

I’ve learned to abdicate

as if I were in the wrong place at the table

that keeps moving the salt

like a standard of living I can’t keep up with.

I consult a candle that says

it was the guru to a great chandelier once.

I don’t really think it’s enlightened

but I go along with the delusion anyways.

There’s only so much that compassion can’t refuse

and I give my assent to everything

with a slightly beleaquered sense of gratitude

that it exists at all

to enchant depress or ignore me.

Thirty years ago I would have tried to understand

the wounded otherness of life

in myself and others

as if I could prevent it

from happening to somebody else.

For all my labours

even tonight

I feel about as useful

as a fire hydrant on the moon.

My intent was unintentionally good

but as the world mountain

gets steeper and meaner toward the top

Sisyphus is finding it harder and harder

to believe his rock

is the philosopher’s stone

he desparately needs it to be.

So much base metal

dark matter

so little light

so little gold

to come out of it

compared to the raw ore

left to be transformed.

It’s clear I’ve been developing eclipses

in a photo lab with a red lightbulb on

above the emergency exit

that imposes itself like a koan

that hasn’t cracked me yet

and let the light out

to fall where it may

on the brutal and tender

the positive and negative alike.

I’m a guest speaker on an exorcist’s agenda.

Time to leave.

But you can’t pour

the universe out of the universe

and that doesn’t give me a lot of places to go.

So I’m here and now tonight as I have always been

enjoying the deeper freedom

inside things

instead of out

that comes like a birthright

when I liberate them from myself.

My whole life is one long good-bye note

I write to myself and tape to the mirror

in case my reflection

ever shows up here again

without me

it’ll feel free to move on.

Ever since I started remembering

how many afterlives it took the stars

to achieve this sentient measure of me

by letting their light ripen into mind

I’ve been hung up about shining.

I’ve been awed by the dark.

I’ve been stealing fire from Prometheus

to warm things up in the glacial heart of things.

More words listen to a bird that sings

than a muse that talks.

So I write poetry

the way a Siberian tiger walks

among English larks.

Or I listen to the sirens

and dash my skull on the rocks.

I keep trying like rainbows

to come to some kind of peace with my tears

but they insist I get the taste of fire

out of the mouth of my dragon

and this argument’s gone on for years.

Is this or is this not me

that none of you recognize

by comparison with yourselves?

And it’s not unusual for me to ask

at this time of night

when there’s nothing but my window on

to throw a little light on the trees

whose prophetic presence saturates

the visionary air with their rootless wisdom

how has it come about

that my unlikeness has evolved a self

it has in common with everything?

Why do humans getting off their thought trains

at the various stations

of life and love along the way

hasten to embrace their rejection

by excluding everyone else?

The object and its subject.

The slayer and the slain.

The lover and his life.

And conciousness the knife

that skins the moon alive

for the value of its reflection

on the black market of a species exchange.

If you see nothing but strangers on the outside

and you don’t recognize any of them

as yourself

maybe it’s because

you’re not looking deeply enough

into the eyes of your own reflection on the inside.

Don’t judge me by the mark on my forehead

as if it were the only letter

in an incommensurable alphabet

until you read what’s been written on yours

in glyphs and riffs and runes

of Medusan stone

and snakes like dangling participles

in need of a good conditioner

that lisp as if their tongues were split infinitives.

But don’t mind me too much

I’m just working this hard this way for nothing

duct-taping feathers to Apollo Thirteen

to avoid disintegration

passing through the eye of the needle

into my own homegrown upper atmosphere

and having that slash of light

be the only prophetic mark I made on life.

But what’s a scar without a knife

to know how to make a lasting impression?

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

He sat under a hawthorn tree

and wrote an ode to autumn

and then stuck it in a mailman’s book

to preserve the last of the flowers

as his roses were coughing up blood.

I am disposessed of my will to endure

by the excruciating sadness of it all.

How suffering clings like skin

to the baby girl

the baby boy

who grow up to see

the joy of being alive

when life is free for children

shake them out of the apple tree

like an autumn windfall

and blunt them on the human condition

as if every post-umbilical encounter

they’ve had with life on earth

were either a coma or a concussion.

And sometimes it’s hard to know

which is the worst of dreamfevers.

Life when it’s here

or life when it’s in remission.

But cynics aren’t absurd enough for their own good

and if I’m bitter

so what?

The glass may be empty

but nature abhors a vacuum

and it’ll soon be filled

with the urgency of new wine

new moons.

But don’t despise life

because the darkness is rife

with the energy of your delusions.

They’re the dragons and bluebirds of the mind.

They’re engines of light.

They do things that otherwise wouldn’t get done.

Even when I’m voidbound.

A singularity at the bottom of a blackhole.

A gravitational eye

badly in need of corrective lenses.

They keep things in focus

like a billion drops of water

going over the falls at night.

It’s the crazy wisdom of the fireflies

that you follow here and there

like a gold rush

panning for nuggets of enlightenment

from their mindstreams

looking for true north

as if everybody were given

the same axial alignment to know where they’re at

and one was supposed to be good for a lifetime.

It’s the spontaneity of the fireflies

who are the true masters of ignition.

Multiple enlightenment experiences

orgasmic with bliss

will liberate you from your lighthouse

faster than the light

can point to Polaris.

So don’t fall for that.

One size doesn’t fit all

anymore than a straitjacket

or a standard issue snakeskin.

Ask any river where it’s going

and it will answer outright.

Water.

Water my destination.

Water my guide.

My flowing pours into the cup

it empties like the moon

and I am everywhere fulfilled.

It’s the same with the mindstream

the Milky Way

the Road of Ghosts

or the waywardness of Zen.

You can run from things all your life

or you can run to them.

It’s all the same.

It’s water.

And one mile lost is one mile found

and even if you’ve wandered alone

far from home on a long starwalk

for lightyears

or just dressed up

to go to the corner grocery store

every step you take

illuminates your path

like the brilliant algae of a red tide

in the fathomless dark

painting your radiant feet in stars

behind you

on a deserted B.C. island beach

to teach you how to dance with the sea

and not feel like driftwood

when you bow to the water and light

at a crossroads of luminous covenants

with infinite thresholds

that are the true shores of life

we’re always being washed up on

into ever subtler

ever more creative mediums

that urge us like stranded fish

to take a deep breath

and transcend death

by stepping lightly

into the available dimension of the future

in astonishment and delight

that you’re the first rainbow

to ever shine at night.

PATRICK WHITE

THE NIGHTWIND

The nightwind is dancing with the leafless trees

under a new moon

as if they were crutches

that couldn’t keep up with its moves.

April night.

All potential.

Lilac month in the valley

and blue hyacinth soon

in the corners of forgotten yards

and for the first time today

down by the Tay where the willows

are going blonde

that bruise of a flower

that looks like a cross

between a broken egg and the moon.

A crocus

like a dab of violet paint

in the foreground of a drab impression.

The apple-trees are waiting for their brides like blossoms.

Saturn’s in Virgo

and I’m out for stars

on my hobby-horse of a telescope

that’s jealous of the easel I paint on

because it thinks it’s the unheralded genius

and can do more with light

than that other moron.

More Copernicus for the moment

than van Gogh

I cut through fields

that look like November all over again

now that the snow’s gone

to keep from being blinded

by the blazing of the town

attentive as a doe to the barking

of distant farmyard dogs.

I’m a one man band of snapping twigs

and slashing branches

moving deeper into the silence

away from windows and doors.

My telescope sneers at the vanity

of birches posing in the nude

because they’ve heard I’m a painter

into feminine nocturnal effects.

And I’ve been here before

looking for suitable subjects

but tonight I’m out for stars

and the wounded mystery of being alone

in a place that everything’s adapted to

but where nothing feels it belongs

to judge by the way they keep to themselves.

Wherever I am

the stars have always reminded me of home

as if this were the place of exile

and the testing ground

of life on earth

to see who makes it back

and I am stilled and mindbound

by such a commingling

of longing wonder and sadness

my blood burns like a lovesong

to the great absence that keeps us apart

and how much time and distance it takes

to abandon a heart that clings

like colour to the clouds.

How much darkness

must be intensified by a human

into black matter

before the ore

is prodigal with light.

All the good stars are going down with Taurus

though I can see the snakes

still flaring lethally in Al Gol

like the Medusa’s severed head

and there’s that poor man’s chandelier

the Pleiades

still enchanted with the charms

of Alcyone and her sisters

though like me

they’re getting on in years.

Longer wavelengths

Longer shadows

shifting into infrared.

All the blue-white fury

that was the frequency of my youth

the mellow yellow of the autumnal truth

that the seeing might be as ageless

as the perennial insight

into the beginningless birth of the mind

but my eyes are estranged from the light

like two drops of water on a starless night

ripening like bells

sweetened by thoughts of perishing

above the abyss below them.

Hanging from the tip of a blade of stargrass

they’re trying to remember

without crying

what became of the wedding

that wore them like an orchard up the aisle

before they’re lowered

like the eyelids of a crocus

and disappear

into the source of themselves

like a well that can’t hold back its tears

when it remembers

light on the mindstream

like a voice in a dream

they haven’t heard for years.

What can you say?

Life is a breathful.

And if I were to guess

it’s probably better that way.

Don’t wear the silver off the mirror

with too much looking

but glance at it out of the corner of your eye

in passing

as if to say under your breath

o.k. you’ve got my attention

what now?

You should stay alert to things

without crowding them out of their eyes

the way a snakecharmer

listens to the cobra

not his flute

and maintains his dangerous distance.

And don’t judge things by their magnitude.

Sometimes it’s the dim stars

like the pale one above the middle

of the brightest three in Andromeda

that can lead you to a galaxy.

But there too you have to look askance

even to see hundreds of billions of stars

shining at such a great distance

right next door.

When everything in the knowable world is relative

it’s because of the interdependence of its origins

on everything else

and blood is thicker than water

except when it’s not

but when all is said and done

we’re all the seventh son of the seventh son

of an identity theft.

Muddy Waters

there’s another mule

kickin in your stall.

Born of fire without smoke

you’re a jinn.

Born of water without ice

you shine like a sea urchin.

Born of earth without roots

there’s starmud on your boots.

Born of air without clouds

you’re welcome everywhere.

Born of stars without eyes

you come as quite a surprise to them.

PATRICK WHITE

IN THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE ROSE

In the eye of the hurricane rose

all is as calm as a bee

as my world is shed around me

like eyelids.

The racket of Canada geese

holding a political rally

high over everybody’s heads

a thousand feet straight up

as the economy returns like spring.

I know what it is

to be a phoenix of a tree

and lose your leaves

like a fire that goes out in the night.

I used to be a snowman

and purified myself

with my own disappearance

when things warmed up.

Now I’m a scarecrow

with nothing to chase away

except the farmer.

It wasn’t me

that held a grudge against the birds.

Everything’s wrong

but it’s all right

the chaos is vividly illustrated

with picture music

and I’m wearing my eye in my ear

and there’s a keyboard and an easel near

like a skeleton with a forced grin.

A painting a day.

Van Gogh on steroids.

But I can’t afford to eat my cadmium yellow

and they’re not handing out food for thought

at the back of the think-tank anymore.

I don’t know what to say

about all those people

who set out to be artists

and wound up being stores.

People eat.

People pay the rent.

Baby needs new shoes.

Benign reason can smother an artist

faster than the demands of a serial killer

in the hands of the pillow she dreams upon

and the tigers of wrath

who are wiser than the horses of instruction

who took so easily to the cart

as Blake said in his sayings from hell

soon learn that heroism isn’t smart

if you don’t want to be hunted into extinction

by judas-goats in the jungle

for your private parts.

And then if you get through the blackwater of all that

like a battered waterlily after a storm

that doesn’t have any respect for nuns

comes a swarm of dabblers and nibblers

like one of the plagues of Egypt

the blackflies the maggots the tapeworms

that pose like paper butterflies

on the lips of origami flowers

for Japanese tourists

into unenlightened North American haikus

about cherry blossoms

that never fall on dogshit.

The eternal sky

doesn’t inhibit the flight of the white clouds

and you can see that

as clearly in a dirty puddle in a parking lot

as you can through the eyes of the Buddha.

Life is a bubble.

A firefly.

A distant star.

A lightning bolt.

You don’t need to transplant

a plastic cornea

into the pineal gland of your third eye

in order to see like the Hubble.

You just need to gain some elevation.

You just need to break

the surly bonds of earth

and get into orbit awhile

if you’re looking for an overview

that isn’t just another footnote

in a Restoration play

trying to refine Shakespeare

by turning real diamonds

into zircon costume jewellery

that makes the light taste like junkfood.

I approach life

by putting the pedal to the metal

like an absolute constant

as if it were already behind me

like the light of a star in all ten directions

that stays ahead of itself

so that time cannot encompass it

like a fletcher turning freebirds into arrows.

There are no zeniths and nadirs in the void.

Don’t try to live like a curve ball on the straight and narrow.

Space isn’t mutable

once you’ve achieved ultimate volume and mass

and stand eye to eye with the universe

you don’t want to meet

until you can both sit down

on equal ground

and come to some kind of mutual understanding.

Don’t use a lie

to go divining for the truth

when the truth isn’t water

it’s a weathervane.

All things change when we do.

The first word ah blossoms into all others

and they’re all true

said some master I’ve forgot.

If it hasn’t got a womb

don’t listen to its myth of origin.

If it isn’t a lifeboat

don’t get in

or better yet

learn to swim on your own.

Writing poetry is like pearl-diving for the moon

at the bottom of your tears.

If you want to go deep

you can’t bottle an emergency atmosphere

like a backup breath

to keep Atlantis from drowning

when the fish are already swimming

through your windows

like new insights

into your fathomless past.

But if you don’t have the depth

to be a shipwreck

don’t keep an albatross on deck

a spider on watch

in the ropes of your mast

or mistake a siren

for the cutting edge

of a figurehead

and fix her to your bow

and expect to avoid the rocks.

It’s the loneliness of the moon

that makes the loon sing

on the lake

not a parrot that talks.

Poetry isn’t just a matter

of picking up the flattest stones

that wash up from your oceanic emotions

about what it was like

to go skinny-dipping with Medusa on the moon

to make them scan

skipping out over a sea of tranquil shadows.

Words are waterbirds.

Not flightplans.

They know where all the best mirrors are

to make a good landing

and which are blind and dangerous

but poetry isn’t about keeping the lights on at night

along your runways and starmaps

or tracking fireflies on a radar screen in a lighthouse

as the circling muse runs low on fuel

trying to get her wheels down.

You can’t grind inspiration out

and expect to be ambushed by a muse

as if she were a clown in a musical jack-in-a-box

and not the serpent at the well

when you go for water.

Where are the elixirs

where are the toxins in your voice

where are the fangmarks that punctuate your pulse?

Where is the lamia that shed your lunar skin

with a spiritual knife

just before she cut your heart out

at the top of a pyramid of prophetic skulls

without an afterlife to speak of?

If you’re still around to assess

what you’ve sacrificed

to the dead ends of poetry

you haven’t died enough

to make it live.

You’re still a highway not a river.

Roadkill in a crosswalk

not a mindstream that can talk to stars

with intensity

about the return of the great blue herons

to the prodigal begging bowls of last year’s nests.

Puppets dance to the strings of laughing liars.

Make kindling of them.

Make fires

and throw Pinnochio in

if you want to sit with heretics

that tell the truth

as if every word of it

were a death wish

the genies hear in silence

as the lamps

turn themselves down low

to maintain their decorum

as they bite their tongues like flames.

Words are to names

as visuals are to visions

and images are to symbols.

The first mean precisely what they say.

Accurate simulacra.

Clear as day.

A photograph not a painting.

But it’s the lense that mimics the eye

not the other way around

and when the telescope’s

brought down to earth

like seed is to tree

like light is to life

they’re both wide-eyed flowers

gaping at their own interpretation.

The mind is an artist.

The mind is a scientist.

The mind is a poet a postman

a baglady sorting through her own garbage.

The mind can paint the worlds

as the Flower Ornament Scripture said.

You can paint them yellow blue black or red.

Reality’s an atomic pointillist.

Reality’s the negative space

around an impressionist lifeboat

full of light

as the waves give chase to the children.

Reality’s a crazed expressionist.

Reality’s a forty thousand year old cave painting.

A fresco in a womb full of correspondences

simulated in the flesh of the great mother

who keeps giving birth to the animals

late at night

after everyone’s gone home

and the gallery’s closed.

Back to Blake.

What is first imagined is later proved.

You live in the world you paint

you write you carve you think you feel

you play like your father’s guitar.

You can paint it with windows with mirrors

with ion microscopes.

You can make a painting of a painting

and call it a work in progress

that improves upon the original

like a host is enhanced by a guest

or a ghost in a different dress.

Or you can minimalize the picture plane like space

and despise perspective

and hold it up to your face

like a mugshot to a detective

to see if you can recognize anyone

by the pattern of the blood spatter.

Tired of working with the light in Monet’s garden.

Cross the Japanese bridge above the waterlilies

over to the other side of the equation

and work with matter

as if you were ploughing paint

to plant potatoes.

But whatever you express

worlds within worlds within worlds

whatever your medium

be it stars or Mars black

heaven or hell

or the triune identity of earth

water land and sky

remember they all find their equivalence

in your creative energy

acting on its own potential

as if the abyss spontaneously

took matters into its own hands

and out of nothing

out of its own emergence

out of its own bright vacancy

and dark abundance

out of the synergic emptiness

of its own unidentifiable likeness

to everything that exists in your imagination and beyond

made this.

PATRICK WHITE

LATE SPRING SNOW

Late spring snow on its way.

Dead ochres and colourless greys

that have never heard of the impressionists.

It’s a landscape

it’s a mindscape

but it behaves like a still life.

I’ve been staying up late

trying to paint my way

out of my life

until dawn every morning.

The windowpane a ripening phthalo blue.

It’s compositionally deranged

to hear the birds singing

when you’re totally exhausted.

Mentally physically spiritually emotionally financially

gone gone gone altogether gone beyond.

All my happy endings orphanned.

A sum of depletions.

I’m living this creative life

scribbling down the notes of the picture-music

that doesn’t just run through my mind

but is my mind

colours and words

down on canvas and paper.

When I’m writing

when I’m painting

when I’ve wholly disappeared into what I’m doing

for a few holy hours of life

immensities open up like the multiverse

and I’ve got a window a wormhole

I can fly through

and out out out among the starfields

with the evanescence of smoke

or a bird

putting itself in the picture

as a finishing touch to the sky.

And I am free to explore the intensities

of my own creative peace

as I keep saying to myself

one eureka moment after another

turning into a mantra

no no I can’t leave that.

I’ve got to bring that back and show them.

They’ll be delighted with that.

They won’t believe it.

You’ve got to write and paint with an open hand.

Let the brush hold you.

Let the pen.

Then you’re the meaning

of what the words are trying to say

and it’s o.k.

you don’t have to look any further than that.

Sublimity slips into the mundanities of the world

by creative accident

and you stand down from bliss

and spend a reverential moment

in its presence

just looking at it

not knowing where it came from

or whose work it is.

And it’s the wonder of that depth of ageless being

expressing itself as a gesture of time

that’s kept me at it

for forty-eight excruciating years.

I get off this chain gang

where I’ve broken down more rocks than a junkie

or saxifrage in the rain

and the pain the labour

the enervating futilities

and terminal successes

of all those ambitions

that run counter to the flow of life like salmon

disappear from my bloodstream

like apparitions in the morning.

And I am more me

the less I grow aware of it.

When I consider the chronic agony of life

I sometimes think that God created the world

not because she was a hidden secret

that wanted to be known

but because she wanted to forget she was God

and lose every cosmos and atom of herself wholly in it.

Paint till dawn and you’ll know what that means.

As the great Zen master sort of said

you can swallow the whole of the river you’re painting

with a single gulp.

You can chug the well of the muses

with every drop.

And just when you think

you’re working in a medium of illusions

that are playing you like a gravedigger

that likes to get to the bottom of things

they all begin to taste of life.

The mirages water the flowers

in this desert of stars

and everything blooms.

You’re back in the garden again

before anybody knew anything but the names of things

to distinquish them from the angels

and life was too vital to need an explanation.

As you go to write

you can take all your dark energy

and intensifying it

by letting it empower you

bend space into a gravitational eye

that gives you a deep insight into

how even a blackhole can be creative.

How what’s been left out of the shadows and lights

says as much as that which was included.

Who you are not

is just as much of an artist

as the one who signs the painting.

And don’t think you can do things by half measures

one foot in the boat

and one foot on the shore.

Talent knows the tear

but genius knows what hurt

the feelings of the watershed that let it fall.

It’s the same in art poetry love enlightenment life.

You’ve got to let a mask every now and again

wear your face just to play fair

and see how things look from the inside out.

You’ve got to let the fireflies

make up stories about the stars

that haven’t got anything to do with shepherds.

You got to be free enough

to let the world be all kinds of things it isn’t.

You can only hex yourself

by taking a voodoo doll out of the arms

of a sleeping child

like the new moon out of the arms of the old

because you deny the darkness within you

its return to innocence

and try to separate the roses from the thorns.

Living your life

as if you were always

applying yourself to the world

like the task of the business at hand

is as destructive

as trying to pry the petals of a flower open

with a crowbar

because you haven’t got the time to wait.

Paradise is effortless.

It doesn’t have a gate.

It doesn’t have a custodian.

It doesn’t maintain a teacher.

Adam was born knowing the names of things.

Not how to keep books

on the comings and goings

of the saints and the miscreants.

The first lie out of a tempter’s mouth

is to ask Eve if she believes

she’s worthy of the truth

as if it were something that could be acquired

without her.

There’s more innocence

in running the risk of being left out

than there usually is among the deluded

who play it safe by dissing their doubt

to be included.

You’ve got to take your church your mosque

your zendo your synagogue off at the door

as if they were hats and shoes

when you enter a holy place

or you’ll track the world in

like starmud at your heels

and desecrate it with religion.

And this is as true of Druidic birchgroves

in an abandoned Westport field

with the wild geese flying overhead

just as the stars are coming out

as it is of a poet climbing burning ladders

up to his beloved

as if every rung were the vertical threshold

of a mutable transformation

that estranges and illuminates her face like water

as it changes his eyes.

Don’t add your feather of flame to the fire

like the flightplan of a faint-hearted phoenix

with ambulances standing by

in case things get out of hand

but light yourself up like a Buddhist monk in Vietnam

or a filial vegetable seller in the souks of Tunisia

who set the Middle East on fire

and consume yourself wholly

until there’s nothing left of the geni but the lamp.

When you let the way come to the end of you

how can you say you’re lost?

That’s where your freedom begins.

When the object of your quest

can’t find anyone to look for it

and there’s no one there to know

King Lear writes Shakespeare

and David sculpts Michelangelo.

PATRICK WHITE