BLACK AUBADE

Dirty winter windows

smudged by fingerprints and nicotine

the dawn looks like an old water-blotched sepia-tinged photograph

of someone’s fiance from nineteen-seventeen.

The shadow of a crow in a dolorous pine.

Sky the colour of apricots and opals.

Shades of Keats looking at it like a sick eagle.

No sleep

I’m exhausted in the new light of day.

Vampiric blood too long out of the grave.

My heart Vesuvius

and my body Pompey

my mind the halflife

of some unknown element’s radioactive decay.

My life is a brown star setting in the east.

Too tired to shine.

Too forsaken to dream.

A wavelength shy of the light.

Too high frequency to sing.

I may be a synchronous happening

in a charged particle field

but nothing I do reverses my spin.

I suffer who I am

and the conditions of my life

as karmic retribution

for not being someone else.

I can hear the sound

of one hand clapping

like a koan slapping the wind in the face.

A heartbeat without a pulse.

Other people live

but I endure.

Other people care

but I’m the extinct species

of a unknown cure

in the slashed ashes of a burnt jungle.

Other people are happy

to throw a few coins into a wishing-well

but I’m a stem cell

for Promethean body parts

that grow back like salamanders

caught stealing fire red-handed from hell.

Other people are as clear and definitive

as copulative metaphors

but I’m haunted by

the more accurate simulacra

that approximate my likeness in similes

that suggest and enhance

but don’t make a stance

of the probable concourse of things.

My kind of clarity includes the clouds.

Metaphors don’t leave much room for individuality

and people and things are more like one another

generically

than they specifically pretend to be.

Similes put out feelers

like dragonflies and witching wands

lightning tines and serpent tongues

to taste the atmosphere for signs

of what they’re looking for.

Metaphors are an imperialist kind of identity

that lays its eggs like wasps

to feast

on the forehead of the living host

until nothing’s left but the guest.

They enslave the brain like a foodchain.

So I live similically

like the missing link

among so many evolving likenesses

of the way I think

you won’t find anybody behind the masks

you could identify with.

I burn like a first magnitude star

not to be affixed to any constellation

not to be gilled or gulled

like the Circlet of the Western Fish

like a butterfly in a spider-web

to any compliant paradigm.

The quickest way to make a mess of your life

is to look for a design in it

you can stick to.

I don’t impose my mind

upon the creative chaos

of my changing nature

by overstaying my welcome.

Others are calm and serene

but I hurry on

like a tour bus

from Kitimat to Prince Rupert

between an avalance

and icebergs in the Skeena River.

And if you were to ask my blood

what colour it is

it would say it was

a union of contradictories

between a rose and an ambulance

and show you the genome to prove it.

This morning’s it’s more like lava

coagulating into bloodclots

like islands in the stream.

Mu and Atlantis

submerging like submarines

with nothing but the daffodils coming up

like periscopes

to check the horizon for lifeboats and bees.

Space feels as heavy as a black dwarf

with its fist in my face.

And there’s no continuum to time

that isn’t T-boned

by the abruptness of eternity

at the intersection of now and then.

If space is curved

then time must be random.

I want to live longer tomorrows

and shorter yesterdays

now.

I don’t want to wait

like cold dice

for seven come eleven

on a snake-eyed clock.

I want to strike twelve now

like a sword on an anvil

my heart can fall upon quietly

like an apple

when the time is ripe

not an alarm bell at midnight.

You can’t steal your way into a dream.

And you can’t lie your way into the truth.

Reality isn’t a room in a house

someone you loved died in

where things are kept for years

like combs and mirrors

behind closed doors

just as they are.

It’s not a scar.

It’s not a fixed star.

Unrelentingly brutal

as Antarctica or a mountaintop

and yet look how lightly

it settles like a waterbird on the waters.

There’s not much difference

between a wave and a feather to the moon.

Or the Byzantine leaf of a silver Russian olive

doing oldworld metalwork on mechanical birds

and watchs with dead mainsprings

that have passed on

beside the Rideau Canal.

Reality doesn’t put the is in existence

like a lithium battery into a camera body

just to get a few shots of you

for the family album in the funeral home.

Reality isn’t the stuffing in a teddy bear.

The inflammable substance of being.

You can’t grow towers of radio dishes like hollyhocks

and stuff the secrets of the Inconceivable

like cosmic gossip into your ear

and swear that it’s unrepeatable.

Once the primordial atom showed up

in its own good space and time

like the tree in the seed

the universe wasn’t inevitable

It didn’t look for a motivation

to express itself in stars and trees and birds.

It was inspired.

It didn’t choose its words sparingly

like a sparrow in the leftovers of a garden

It squandered them like a blizzard

where every single snowflake

is as original in the seed of the atom

as it is in the fruit.

Inside time

everything looks like a beginning.

When there’s no outside to space

every grain of sand

is the cornerstone of a cosmos.

If you want to know the origins of life on earth

where are you going to find them

if not in yourself first?

In your own birth?

The peduncle may be lost in the ensuing phylum

but that doesn’t mean it disappeared.

If you want to know yourself as you really are

get rid of the mirror

you’ve been hiding behind for light-years

and all things will become as clear as the stars

to those who can feel them shining

in the nucleus of every cell of their eyes

like the sunrise of their own seeing.

And diving even deeper into your birthwaters

you’ll discover

the new moon

of the black pearl

in an endless night

of nacreous and nebular beginnings

that sleeps in the abyss of your being

like an unborn primordial atom

and dreams that you’re awake.

As Chardin said

union differentiates.

That’s why lovers are anti-social

when they first meet

and people feel alone

in their own mystic specificity

like a house-guest without a host

most

when they’re dying.

Chromatic aberrations of consciousness

around the rim of the mirror

where the stars step off into eternity.

As my dead friend Willie P. Bennet once sang

I wouldn’t be in this mess

if I could take my own advice

and I mosaically returned

the only vice I’ve ever avoided

is advice

so we’re here together alone again

trying to avoid rehab.

Humpty-Dumpty

has to put the pieces back together by himself.

Union is Separation.

Separation is Union.

On the great journey of life

pilgrims on the winds of the starstreams

like doves released from sacred shines

not knowing what they’re the signs of

except that they’ve escaped being sacrificed

to the meaning of love once again

one foot’s always leaving

the other one behind.

But the same can’t be said for wings

when they sprout from your heels

and you’ve got a hermetic message

in an alchemical bottle

full of the eyeless wisdom

of the dark blessing

that lies deep in the heart of everything

like a compassionate answer

to its own wounded s.o.s.

The iceberg goes to the rescue of the Titanic.

When you can see the toxin and the antidote

in the one snake

striking at your heel

and not crush its skull

you see the lowest in the highest

and the highest in the lowest

you become a real dragon spontaneously

with the wingspan of the universe

breathing serpent-fire

into the ashes and urns of an old cold furnace

as big as the abyss

where big is as small as something that doesn’t exist.

And you can stand forever

in the flames of illusion

like a prophet in the lion’s den

the belly of the whale

the candle of a moth

or be tied at the stake

like a hapless heretic

in Bonfire of the Inanities

and nothing burns.

But you can hear in the words

that flower from your mouth

like poppies with solar flare

returning to the silence of their source

the unborn longing for the undying

as if one eye were seperated from the other

into the subject and object

of consciousness

and there were untraversible eras of light

between them.

Running Bear and Little White Dove

Hero and Leander

on opposite shores of the mindstream.

The extinctions and distinctions

of prehistoric hunter-gatherers

on the trail of themselves

leaving empty impressions

of their hands and feet in the starmud

they keep doubling back on themselves

like the retrograde motion of Mars

to follow later.

And you want to explain the optics of thought

and the cosmic dream-grammar

of PsychoBabylonic verbal expressions

to those who mistake words for thoughts

and talk in tongues in their sleep

like conceptual polyglots.

I’m not trying to give anyone anything

that isn’t already theirs

and I’m not trying to take anything away

that no one could possibly own.

I’m just trying to undo their locks

with a hairpin

as if my own escape depended upon it.

Rapunzel lets her hair down

like a navy seal

all the way to the ground.

But I’m not kidding myself about anything.

My third eye’s so wide open

most of the time

I feel like a Cyclops with nightvision

on a covert black ops mission.

And ambassadors martyred in chains

like St. Paul

or barbecued by the Iroquois

like Brebeuf and his brethren

get better spin in this life at least

than the great heretics

who suffered the same agony

as they did

were immolated in the same flames

felt the same claws and fangs

tear their flesh

in the same ecstasy

the same mysterium

of orgasmic excruciations

like the eye of a hurricane

a boy with a telescope

hoping the clouds will clear long enough

to get a good look at the stars.

No difference between a sage and an ignorant man

except the sage knows how

to free you of his foolishness

and approach God

without losing your sense of humour

whereas the ignorant man

expects you to change into him.

Like the pseudo-morphosis of native children

press-ganged into Catholic reformatories in Ontario

or house-slaves in confederate Louisiana

or refugees who change the names of their children

like chameleons in an alien country

to gratify the cauliflower ears of tongue-tied bigots

who approach every new sound

they can’t say

as if it were Etruscan linear A.

Mo-ham-mad

not Ted.

There

that wasn’t so hard afterall was it?

It’s not like you had to tell anyone

the secret name of your God now

was it?

And tomorrow we’ll work on your taste buds.

Amen.

It’s the heretics

not the saints

the exiled and the demonized

the broken and unrepentant

the abandoned and hunted

the condemned and stigmatized

the victimized

before they become next year’s perpetrators

and the great fools

with tears running down their face

to mask their laughter

who best express our human affinity

for a divinity that doesn’t malign us

with the unattainable slyness of its expectations.

If all else fails

you can always whip the horse’s eyes.

What you can’t do

though it’s been tried

is make a mule of Pegasus

and harness inspiration

to the death cart of your heart.

It’s hard to lay rubber in a hearse.

And all the phosphorescent algae in a red tide

shine though it might like a living galaxy

can’t do any good

for a dead starfish.

Inspiration grazes on a free range.

Even if you don’t burr stars in its mane and tail

or under its girth

and refuse to wear spurs

you can’t throw a saddle-shaped universe on it

and not expect it

to cast you back down to earth.

Heretics aren’t anti-orthodox

anymore than keys are against locks.

They just know how to open them

when opportunity knocks.

They know where the loose threads are

on the straitjacket

and how irresistible it is not to pull them

like a ripcord on a parachute

of someone standing in the doorway of a plane

when things that were looking up

seem a long way down

and they’re afraid to jump.

Their brains scream at the abysmal lack of solidity

though its clear to anyone who’s been there

the cornerstone of the atmosphere

is obviously the earth.

You can stub your heart

and fist-bump your forehead on it

like the kissing stone in the Kaaba

or the meaning of Peter’s name

they built the Vatican on

if you don’t think it’s solid enough.

Or you can jump as if your life depended on it.

In any case.

Things aren’t solid.

They’re real.

Not fight or flight.

But fly or die.

Without knowing

before the fact

whether you’ve got a parachute on or not.

Some fish one day bluffed its way out of the sea

without knowing

whether it had a leg to stand on or not.

Are we so much less

we won’t even linger in the doorway

of a dangerous medium

that adapts to us as intimately

as our next breath?

Daring said feathers and falling took flight.

How did you learn to walk

if not by falling forward

and learning how to catch yourself

with the next step.

Jump.

There’s more dignity in jumping

than there is in falling

or being driven out of paradise.

The first time I did I liked it so much

I did it twice.

Now I’m addicted like an Olympic gymnast

or Hart Crane off the coast of Cuba

after a change of heart about sex

to swan-diving off the back of the Titanic

as if I were the constellation Cygnus

plunging into the Milky Way

with style and grace

and a touch of demonic glee

just to add a little shadow to all this lucidity.

PATRICK WHITE

O SWEETNESS

O sweetness

you’ll make as good a poet one day

as you already are

but the things I’m really interested in

no one can say.

No one can think.

No one can see.

No one can feel.

A painting that’s more real than the model

who paints herself sitting there

like a palette of flesh-tones.

An interactive mirror

she holds up to nature

so nature can fix her hair.

It’s not that I don’t care about your writing career

or I’m not listening.

Attachment too is a Buddha activity.

It’s just that in the shadow of so much significance

swaying like a cobra to a flute

or a river-reed

like a semi-quaver in the current of the music

I’ve learned to kiss it lightly on the head

as a sign of respect for the dead

who didn’t.

You want to get inside poetry

as if it were some kind of scene

featured in a Jenson highgloss art magazine.

You’re a sphinx in the kelp-gardens of a seawitch

but a riddle isn’t a mystery

even if you can’t answer it

and poetry isn’t a cadaver in a surgical theatre

someone stole from Leonard da Vinci.

Poetry makes an unfashionable entrance

but by the time it leaves the party

it can fake a real cool exit.

What fool sends the wind to dancing school

to learn how to move?

Poetry is your own human nature

not Jovian thunder above a tin roof

with a butterfly’s antenna

tuned into haiku like a lightning-rod.

You don’t want to tempt God

into meeting you unprepared.

It would be rude to meet your worst fear

and not be scared.

Poetry is a power node of sublime insanity.

Crazy wisdom.

What life’s got to say to you at the back door

that it can’t tell you at the front

because all the neighbours

have installed listening devices in their telescopes.

And when I do answer you

if I seem light-years away

it’s just that I’m letting someone

I haven’t been in a long time

answer for me

as if I were twenty again

coming down the world mountain

like a mindstream clarifying itself in the darkness like stars

so the late frost of what I know now

doesn’t scorch the orchard.

Timing is as important as content

in the conduct of life.

I’m not going to hang a green apple

on a dead branch in winter.

Or tear a page off a lunar calendar

and tell the moon

when to bloom

and when to ripen.

And what can you say about the Unsayable

that isn’t two minutes of a lie with a hook?

Just because it’s playable

doesn’t make it a good book

even if you’re gossiping

with back-stabbing gods

who treat every tidbit of information

like a muck-raking revelation.

Imagistic reportage

is only the skin of the vision

the snake sheds

when it feathers its scales like wings

and the highest and the lowest meet

like a frenzy of gnats

and oxymoronic dragon stars

in the jubilant night air.

There are cave paintings

on the backs of your eyes

that have been there for thousands of years

like shadows dreaming in the darkness

of what they’ve seen and been

to the fossils of the generations

that painted them there

in ashes red ochre soot and silence.

Dream-catchers with the eyes of arachnid mandalas

webbing the threads of your lifelines

into powergrids

and table lace

that doesn’t say grace over dinner.

Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico

with a pen in his hand

by a man with an icepick in his.

The pen isn’t mightier than the sword

the moment it takes the sword for granted

or revolutionarily inevitable.

Don’t hang a pen over your head

like the sword of Damocles

and expect to write the truth

as if you had just submitted to a polygraph test.

At best all it will prove

is that you’re a good liar.

There are no border guards

or burning angels with swords in their hands

acting as if they were the hinges

of the gateless gate

that no one can enter

and no one can leave

that leaves nothing out

and keeps everything in

because it’s all around you

like the pathless space of the mind.

But don’t waste your time

trying to look into the future

of what I’m saying to you now

because however long and far you look

into the meaning of these words

you’ll never find the womb of the Unborn

until it kicks you in the belly from the inside.

I know someone raised on a diet of clocks

finds it hard to believe

but you’re the winged mother of time

with the seven ages of man

coiled around you like a helical snake

with the pit of its head above yours like a cowled chakra

or the pschent of an Egyptian pharoah

that unites within himself

the two genders of time

the past and the future

in the specious present

of this ageless moment now

this endless creative insight

this shy voiceless voice

that is always trying

to communicate you to you

as I’m trying to do collaboratively

in the panavision of a blind seer

with a child’s eyes.

Shakespeare wrote

by indirections we find directions out

so it’s okay to wander around

bumping into things

like dead ends on desolation row

or stubbing your head like a toe

on the rock of the world.

Poetry is a thoroughfare

in a labyrinth of cul de sacs.

It makes an emergency exit sign

of its inert passions

and passing a current of life through them

makes them glow in the dark

like fireflies in the mason jars

of Nikola Tesla’s lab.

Sometimes it’s God that says let there be light.

And other times

as the night comes on

and the stars are beginning to appear

it’s Lucifer the light-bringer who says

trying to get past his days as the morning star

O.K.

Las Vegas.

Sight is a kind of love

but blazing is an eyeless man

acting out against his blindness.

The sun shines at midnight

but it doesn’t put the stars out.

And at noon

in the clear light of the void

you can still see the shadows.

God has two eyes

the same colour as yours

but the liars only one

like the singularity

at the bottom of a blackhole

or a shark without an iris.

The light crosses the event horizon

and goes in

as if it were being summoned to a seance

but only the random halo

of the occasional ghost

shines out like a candle at a black mass

and nothing is revealed.

I’m writing this to you late at night

so the darkness can intensify my seeing

placed next to these highlights

I’m painting in the air

to show you the stars in your eyes

are a constellation all of your own

waiting for you to come up with a good myth

that can embody all that shining

without asking someone like me

to draw you a starmap.

There’s no doorman

on the thirteenth house of the zodiac

no lamp in the window

to guide the moths

and no phoenix in the ashes of their afterlife

to teach them how to grow new wings.

But if you think of words

as the gravegoods of the great dead

who once spoke them in their sleep

as if they were channeling metaphors

and not living creatures

as integral to your mind

as cells are to your body

or the thousands of tiny animalcules

that graze on your eyelashes like cattle

you’re just another mummy

who hasn’t come out of the closet yet

waiting like a old shoe

you had to take off

at the threshold of a stargate

to relive the same journey

that brought you here in the first place.

Better to walk barefoot the rest of the way

whether you’re walking on stars or water

quicksand or earth

than cure your body like leather

and wait under the weight of a literary pyramid

like a post-mature embryo gummy with its afterbirth.

Unborn undying

who needs to worry about living forever?

Carrying a candle through a hurricane

isn’t going to improve the weather

or impress the sun.

Poetry isn’t a nightlight you turn on

in a total eclipse

to keep the dragons at bay.

If the light weren’t alive

how could it have grown eyes?

If words weren’t living creatures

with our features

how could they express

the estranged voices

of so many different children

in the Babylonic intimacy

of their mother-tongue?

Language can be a whore

but she always acknowledges her children

by giving them a name

they can carry into exile.

And like the affable familiar

of this absurd harmony

I’m whispering in your ear

like the nightsea in a conch shell

with one earring dangling like Venus

from your lobe

I seed the wind

like a blue Sufi with an empty hand

giving generic names to the stars

in Arabic.

And these are the oghams

on the breath of the last Druid

left alive in the sacred groves of Mona.

The mystery of grammar

magically speaking

about the roots of words

is not the abracadabra of a linguistic cult

exhuming dead metaphors

like the photogenic fingerprints of ghosts

through a new medium

of necrophilic forensics.

Reality tv is just a lie

you overhear in the hall.

Like a bird that can’t peck out of its shell

what most people call reality

is just another kind of coma

that can’t break the spell of its own magic

when it backfires in the faces of the liars

by coming true.

Don’t try to take the measure

of the wingspan of a cosmic egg

or the size of the sky in your third eye

until you’ve broken out of one yourself

smashed the mirror

dispelled the mesmerism of the self

with its own awareness

and disappeared out into the open

like the last bird of the dying day.

Money talks

and bullshit walks

but money isn’t the root of all evil.

By their fruits ye shall know them

and money’s just a tree

that never comes to fruition

counting its leaves like cash

until the fall

when there’s no seed

no room in the lifeboat

no ladders at the windows of a burning house

to take all of you with it.

Money isn’t evil.

Words are

in the mouths of little magicians

when they stick like polyps and cists

to the vocal cords

of those who think they speak for God

barely an octave lower than she does.

Cast a great spell

like a fishing net out over the stars

without getting caught up in it

by expecting to catch anything

that wasn’t yours from the very beginning.

And the golden fish that swims from shore to shore

that eludes your grasp of enlightenment

will jump into the boat spontaneously

all by itself.

The heron is the second oldest symbol of a poet

but you’ll never see it out spearfishing at night

with a lamp in its hand

choosing its words as carefully

as a needle practising a cross-stitch.

Poetry is as easy as breathing

when you’re listening to the picture-music

like a submotif of its theme song

swept along like a leaf on the stream in the fall.

You only have to sweat the details

when your little mind’s lying

like a wave about the sea

to your big mind

and your big mind knows it

and cuts you off from your own depths

like the Burgess Shales.

And the rest is pre-Cambrian history.

The little mysteries might inspire you

to start looking for an answer right away

but the greatest mysteries of life

leave you so indelibly clarified by wonder

there’s nothing to ask

that doesn’t make a lie of the question

that isn’t amazed enough

to know immediately for itself

that when you perceive the whole in every part

like the reflections in the broken shards of a mirror

down to the smallest photon of a firefly

the entire sky and all of its stars

fit into it like the Andromeda Galaxy fits into an eye.

So here you are like an early spring

seeking advice from a late frost like me

and all I can do is throw myself like salt in the fire

and say

do you see?

Green flames.

The moon blossoms on a dead branch.

And there’s an echo in the valley

but no voice.

When I was young

my teachers told me

I had to find my own voice

as if there were only one among myriads

that could fit my foot to my mouth like a glass slipper.

So I went looking for it

like a Martian chondrite in Antarctica

trying to detect signs of life

like the amino acids

and fossilized proteins

of a dead language

as universal as Panspermia

in my own homegrown genome.

But I soon discovered

the little I had to say

was crowded out of the way

by the voiceless living and the vociferous dead

trying to express

their more urgent intensities through me

and if I had a voice of my own

like a brass doorknocker on the inside

how could they speak for themselves

if I were always at home in their space?

Which of all the breaths you’ve taken

and given back like water to the river

like migratory thoughts to the mindstream

wasn’t the last of the dying woman before you

and the first of the new moon in the arms of the old

that came after

through the same door

the last one left by?

And what of all you’ve heard

and will hear

wasn’t said first

by the prophetic dead

and the only distinction

between you and them

a thin skin pulled down over a hard head

like a spiritual prophylactic?

Soma Sema.

Be fruitful and multiply

like the lost tribe of a dandelion on the wind.

The seed sacrifices itself to the tree

and the tree makes a sacrifice of its apple.

Revere and praise the earth you walk upon

and the wild irises that bloom beside the starstreams

like fortune-telling gypsies in their purple tents

reading lifelines like loveletters

that haven’t been sent yet.

Be grateful for the generosity of the void

that gives you an insight

into the black matter of the dark abundance

that fills the negative space of your skull with light enough

to find your own way through the night

whenever you open your eyes

like jewels that lay hidden in eras of ore

suddenly discovering the shadows they cast

like thoughts in a mindscape

were born of their own shining.

In any direction

in every direction

there’s a star that’s following you

as sign of where it’s going.

But you don’t have to worry your maps to death

because true north is ominidirectional

and who needs a compass for that?

Poetry is the enlightened awareness

that’s endowed upon everybody at birth

by the illumination of a world of things.

Teacherless teachings.

No need to sit at the feet of your own wisdom

to master what you already know.

Open your hand

and let the wind take it

like a gust of dust and ashes and stars.

Take the lids off your mason-jars

and let the fireflies go free.

Overturn the urns of your cosmic theories

and instead of asking the world what it is

let it tell you who you are

and listen with your life.

The universe is a polyglot ventriloquist

that throws its voice into everything

as if it were talking in its sleep

to you alone

and you were listening to it

like a conversation you were having with yourself

in the next room.

Poetry hears with its mouth

and speaks through its ears.

It isn’t a way of expressing

what you’ve got to say.

It’s the way

the listening expresses you.

PATRICK WHITE

INFREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Is it true

the most commpassionate people in life

are the ones in the greatest danger?

That the most generous

will lose their hands to the ones they fed?

That the bravest will be hunted down by protected cowards

and when the last of the heroes are dead

and the dragons who inspired them

are the advertising themes of amusement parks

those with the smallest balls

will give themselves the biggest awards?

Is it true

those who are creative

chafe the destroyers like anti-matter

and give the intellectuals diaper-rash of the mind?

That just to open your eyes

to watch the stars and fireflies

is enough to make other people feel blind

and insist you black them out

like pearls in an air-raid?

What’s a starmap to a mole?

What’s a lamp that shines in braille

to someone without fingerprints?

Is it true that beauty summons the worm

as a material eye-witness to its ruin?

That genius is devoured

by cannibalistic Neanderthals

into homeopathic magic

for the power of its brain

to turn thought into protein

with a high creatine content

that can make your dick strike twelve anachronistically

so you can go on knapping flint

for the next hundred thousand years?

That genius is a freak in isolation

that gets its own back

for being pecked at

like a phoenix among chickens

by opening Pandora’s box

like the atom at Los Alamos

like the geni in the lamp

and making a Trojan horse of its gifts

gives them everything they want

because anything as red

as Van Gogh’s hair and beard and ear in Arles

must be either a phoenix

or a fox with chicken-pox.

Sometimes you have more to fear

from the keys

than the locks.

Is it true

that a friend is a random event

in a space-time continuum

that’s got no room in its impersonality

for loyalty or sentiment?

That the heart has replaced the golden rule

with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

and everyone’s looking for love

like a Faberge easter egg

that’s already hatched its ugly duckling

sans fairytale?

Or the Czar’s family?

I asked Annie

as we were landing in Toronto

from the West Coast

like a waterbird with its wheels down

on a tarmac lake

is it true

that everything we thought sincere

has been exposed as fake?

That forever isn’t worth

the loveletter

it’s written on

for twenty minutes

because of temporal inflation?

Is it true

that all roads

that lead to Rome or Ottawa

never return the way they came

like arrows and fishooks and Vercingetorix?

That justice is a celebrity fame-game with ratings

brought in by a jury of mirrors

selected by the reflections of their peers

to convict the innocent

for their sins of omission?

That the God-particle

everyone’s looking for

like something they can’t get out of their eye

might not be

trying to make a point at all.

It’s hard to get a fix on

just how fundamental you are

in the scheme of things

when you’re stuck in the starmud

up to your knees

looking for your keys like koans

you swallow like pills to feel real

but hey

no big deal

but I was meaning to ask you

is it true

that we’re wounded by death

and life is the way we heal?

I know how you feel

about what’s real

but you can have all the money you want

and that still doesn’t mean

you’ll ever really know

what it means to be rich

without having to steal.

You’ve got the disease

but none of its symptoms.

Is it true

that the most successful grow

by never accepting a challenge

that wasn’t a bigger failure than the last

and call the summits of their Himalayan defeats

experience and progress?

Answer no.

Answer yes.

Answer yes and no.

Or just nod your head diagonally

like the sum of the squares of the opposite sides.

Because the questions were less rhetorical

than sincerity being facetious

I don’t expect people to answer the doorbell

or read every piece of spiritual junkmail

that shows up on their doorstep

like a flightfeather to paradise

on the wings of a seagull.

If you’re wounded deeply enough

there’s no resentment in the pain.

You just play with your brain

like an angry child plays with the eyes of a doll.

You control your rage like a nuclear reactor

or Chernobyl goes cosmic

and you throw a tantrum

that expands like the universe.

You can polish the mirror all you want

and call it clarity

until your sleeves are as threadbare

as the carpets under the windows

you’ve been staring through

as long as it take to turn your eyes to glass

but enlightenment’s on the dark side of the mirror

like a star is

like your eyes are.

Like waves on a lake

that takes things as they come.

Myriad deaths in a single birth.

Life on earth.

Intense heat.

Unusual sprouts.

A Zen sententium worth consideration.

But the clear light of the void

isn’t radiation.

It’s a lucidity

with nothing to illuminate.

It’s the Uncreate that plays creatively

in the absence of itself

like a child alone with its imagination

making the world up as it goes along

taking the Inconceivable

and making it believable.

Giving airy nothing

a local habitation and a name

as Shakespeare did

and danelions do in the fall.

As I am now

by asking if it’s true

you haven’t noticed yet

how it’s always the overprivileged

who send the underprivileged off to war?

Death in the hearts of the governors.

Death in the hearts of the profiteers.

Death in the hearts of the generals.

Is it true

this spider-web shines

like democracy in the morning

star-spangled with dew

but late at night under the streetlight

it’s tearing under the weight of its own greed?

That obese spiders who once pulled the strings

of a sticky mandala to eat well

ripen like the dead weight of toxic fruit

hanging from the branches of a dead tree?

This web is not a constellation.

This web is not a starmap.

This web is not a bloodstream

that gives back what it receives.

This web is not the lyre of a siren

that called people to the rocks of a new continent.

This web is not an electric guitar.

Is it true

the interminable buzzing of panicked flies

stuck to its strings

like masses of people

waiting to be consumed

is not the music of celestial spheres?

Empathic ingestion of agony over many years

like a fish trying to identify with heavy water

by adapting to it like a sick mother

who passed on her genes like Love Canal.

Is it true

you can die tending the ill in a hospital?

Carnage without redemption.

Eye-soup.

Severed feet.

Outrage imploding into black dwarfs

that warp space like a child’s mind

into believing God is best served by the blind

than those who can read for themselves

before they martyr her body like a judas-goat

to God’s great design

for the faithful dead

who expressed their gasp of divinity

in a holy war

a marketable crusade

a deniable genocide

a mass grave

a defensible border

that doesn’t know who gave the order

to drop cluster bombs

and white phos

on the hospital

when it ran out of bandaids

and watch it flower like a white dahlia

or a belly-dancing jellyfish

with poisonous tentacles

spreading out like the spokes of a beach umbrella.

The aesthetics of atrocity.

The age of desecration.

Is it true

the next best career move for evolution

like an unknown writer

listening to his legend gossip among rumours

like a suicide note without a table of contents

is unnatural extinction?

The mystery in the riddle of the sphinx

after all those years of sand and stars

is what would she have asked

if we weren’t there to answer.

Is it true

that Saturn’s shepherd moons

have turned into human coyotes

jumping borders like orbits

in the Van Allen Belt

where the asteroids are broken by drug rings

thawing rocks in a crack spoon

to defy the laws of gravity

with deified norms of depravity?

I might be a vague social democrat

walking a Zen plank

like a blindfolded political platform

who doesn’t need a party

to spell out

or sell out

what I believe

but it’s easier to write a folksong

about a successful thief

than a man or woman

for whom love was an art

that transcended its inspiration

and compassion the root of all understanding

and when death approached

because it’s hard to be alive and real

at the same time

embraced it as a great relief.

Is it true

that more similes turn into outlaws

than metaphors do?

That when Jesus asked

the little children to come unto him

he wasn’t speaking in tongues

behind sacred firewalls

for polyglot child molesters everywhere?

The pen might be mightier than the sword

like a mammal is to a dinosaur

but I have my doubts about a bullet

and electrically detonated C-4

wired to a lab rat like the black plague

and holy warriors

with the radioactive half-lives of dirty bombs.

Suras and psalms.

Gardens with underground rivers.

And fruit trees by flowing streams.

Shalom.

Salem.

Muslim.

Jerusalem

Islam

And Bethlehem the House of Bread

that breaks into peace

when it’s shared

like a common word

from the pelican fountain-mouth

of the same mother tongue.

Peace brother.

Peace sister.

May you live to be

forever young and free

of walled partitions

and the double helices

of chromosomatic razorwire

uncoiled like vines

around your secret gardens

where the waterlilies bloom in gene-pools

and the grapes are bleeding

like a miscarriage of sacred wines.

When the Great Lucidity appears

like a star of wheat in the Virgin’s hand

and shines down

on everyone’s shelter for the night alike

no mangers in the beginning

no arks at the end

may we all understand

that the blood-oaths of enemies

are not stronger than the bonds between friends.

May you know the enchantments of life

when it doesn’t belong to anyone

as well as you know the horrors

of disowning it now.

Or as I imagine they would say in Zen.

The pen is the sword.

It’s just a voice with words.

A lamp that gives its light away

like an extravagant geni

you don’t have to blow out to see

but you should

if you want to write good.

Black glee.

Bright vacancy.

Too much pain.

The agony of the seed realizing

the harvest was in vain

not worth what had to be endured

to live it all again.

Eleusinian ergot on the grain.

Is it true

heaven prefers

the hallucinogenically insane

and the sun only comes up

when a cock crows like a weathervane

or a God-struck lightning-rod?

On the return journey

which is more amazing than the first

you get to pass backwards

through all the stations of your life

you progressed forward through.

A prodigal innocence

that resonates with experience.

A dream reflected in a mirror

like a waterbird

dragging its wake through the clouds

like a knife ploughing a wound

through the envelope of a loveletter

no one can wake up from but you.

And no one can take away

because everything is trued by time

to the path you took

just by walking on the earth

alone on a dark night in the starless rain

when you removed the world like a mask

that proved false to your faceless pain

and you realized

how much closer a stranger is to you

than you are to your unrecognizable self.

Though pain may be prophetic

when your heart hangs on a hook

like bait on a question-mark

but great suffering doesn’t reveal anything

you didn’t already know.

It doesn’t stay.

It doesn’t go.

It’s a nothing that exists.

It’s an existence that’s nothing.

A gust of fireflies

from the mouth of a dragon.

But what does come as a surprise

like dusk overtaking the window

are the numberless eyes

that emerge from the depths of your darkness

like grapes ripening on the vine

like fish coming to the surface

like urgent diamonds

growing like mushrooms

in the long night of an abandoned mine.

Numberless eyes.

Myriad stars.

Light-years of memories.

And is it true

every one of them

is a myth in the making

each an enlightened Zen master

with nothing to teach

who insists

it’s not the stars that are shining

it’s your mind?

That they’re all within reach

all the time?

PATRICK WHITE

UP LATE AGAIN

Up late again watching the stars settle like dew on the grass.

I must have been a lamplighter in another life.

Or a firefly in an observatory.

All the windows have gone out but one or two.

The Perth watertower looks like the ghost

of a Daddy Longlegs in the distance

and the tardy townhall clock

is still trying to reset the moon to full.

The gram-masters on the corner

of Gore and the universe

are too drunk and overly curious

for their own good.

There are some dark corners

you should leave to their solitude.

If you’ve met and killed the Buddha in the road

it won’t diminish your enlightenment

by so much as a shadow

to step on the occasional toad.

Delirious with clarity

is still only one side of the mirror.

When you’ve broken the spell of its mesmerism

it isn’t as if another world view comes rushing in

it’s just that another eye opens

and you’re clear about your delirium.

My thoughts are too much of a heavy lift for a coma

and I don’t dream much on the nightshift

and there’s a starless space within me

that keeps blowing all the candles out

everytime the power goes off

so I can learn to see in the dark

where I’m going

and where I’ve been

without carrying the light on my back

like vagrant insights on a midnight mindstream on the move.

Alone in the world

but I never lack company

because the world’s simultaneously alone with me

but we’re both a little nervous

like a seasoned sailor alone with the sea

or a reunion of lovers with what used to be.

I’ve been watching the spring willows

dye their hair blonde in the Tay all day

and now their roots are showing silvergray

in the pewter moonlight.

I like to go down and sit by the water

whenever I forget how to live.

I like the way the willows

pour themselves back into the river

like fountains of lemonade

and at this time of the year

they’re wearing see-through veils

like negligees of Isis

made of spiderwebs

and fishing nets

like the star-crossed wedding laces

of their greatgrandmother’s constellations

passed down through the generations

for special occasions such as this.

And if they weep now

like young women in the spring

it’s only a light rain

but when they’re fully greened by the summer

it’ll be a waterfall.

But the world’s a snapping turtle

that won’t stay submerged for the night

like the id of the subconcious mind

and there are feathers of moonlight all over the water

where someone who felt

under-rated as a god

just raped a swan on drugs to prove it.

A serpent bites Persephone in the heel

and the spring is black with her absence

and death isn’t a crack in the void

you can easily heal

by sowing seeds

of Virgoan starwheat in the wound.

My prophetic skull bobs

like a horse chestnut

surfing its thoughtwaves

all the way to Lesbos

but I’d rather be a cherry blossom

or the empty lifeboat of an origami poem

drifting down the Yellow River

like a homeless loveletter

with nothing but

mystic black waterstars on my mind

instead of being blind-sided

by my last Maenadic dismemberment.

It’s not easy to get a gig

as a singer

or a stand-up comedian in hell

and even harder to make it big

as a court jester

when everyone’s into mimes.

You don’t raise the dead up to your lips

as if you were raising a bucket

from a wishing well

or your voice an octave higher.

Even if the music’s true

the lyrics can still prove you’re a liar.

And the Lord of Jewels isn’t a pimp

you can readily inspire

to sing along

with Sioux deathsongs at karaoke.

So down I go again.

Orpheus descending

with a wishbone harp

stuck in his throat

like a bird in a chimney

to see if I can charm death into letting you go

even if like the last time

you do look back in disbelief

at what you’re leaving behind

like a deathwish that came true.

River of fire.

River of darkness.

River of forgetfulness.

Lethe Styx and Phlegathon

running backwards in reverse order upstream

because this is hell with hope

Hades of the gibbering shades

and pre-Socratic philosophers

in the thought-fields of Elysium

standing like Druids and wandering scholars

on a sacred hill overlooking their holy wars like referees.

And all the mirrors

write left-handed in invisible ink

like the smile of the Mona Lisa

to keep the living from knowing what they think.

Sisyphus got used to rolling

his heart like a rock up a hill

only to watch it roll down again in vain

but you were an avalanche in the Rockies

and now I’m trying to excavate

a blackhole in the Old Perth Cemetery

beside Last Duel Park

like a backhoe deprived of ls

to sing you back into the light

like a vernal equinox

among the daffodils and bluebells

that keep attending your funeral

over and over and over again

like friends of the family

meant to mourn your disappearance

by showing up early

to avoid the crowds.

A last warm kiss on a cold forehead

or a cold tear on a hot stove

and I can hear the cosmic hiss of the background dead

like the afterbirth of a foregone beginning

thanking me for not trying

to extinguish their fires

like torch bearing Roman dadaphores

in the waters of a Christian life.

My fingertips burned like ashes and urns

putting them to my lips then yours

as I turned sublimely

and walked away into the immense solitude

that followed me like the echo of your name.

Thereafter I could always hear you

as I do now late into the night

sitting by this snakey water

whispering dark insights into the black mirror

that keeps its reflections to itself

like a shadow with the voice of a nightbird

bleeding in a hidden grove.

No man is an island.

John Donne.

Dean of St. Paul’s.

He’s a peninsula.

Marty Balin.

Guitarist for the Jefferson Airplane.

But one wave of you

washing up on the shores of my skin

and I can feel your breath and fingertips all over again

and the urgent way you used to kiss me

as if I were an emergency exit for pain

and my heart turns over like a full lifeboat

far out at sea among the icebergs

that float by like corpses in the Ganges.

Blood-roses for the crocodiles.

Swans for the snapping turtles.

It’s not just the nave

of the wheel of birth and death

that keeps a person centered

but the rim and the spokes as well

so when the dead come knocking

I’m a good host

and let them in

like strangers on the Road of Ghosts

or leaves on the bamboo branch

of a sumi ink painting.

Guests of my heart and art

I don’t enshrine them

in the beatitudes of oblivion

but my house is their house

my life is their life

and what I see they see

on the same side of my eyes as me

because I don’t greet them

like the black sheep of the family

who were determined to go their own way

like a prison break on the outside.

I don’t play shepherd to the dead

and though I sometimes feel like a lightning rod

I’m not a cattle-prod in a hospital morgue

and they’re not Giovanni Volta’s frogs.

Some are true as worms to the dead.

And some are not.

But if you’re a spiritual fraud

the Zen thing to do

is not get caught

fencing hot gravegoods

in the living rooms of your friends.

When you’re walking with the dead

your means don’t justify their ends

and their space doesn’t bend to your thought

even if the likeness is remarkable.

Eidolon spirit wraith

waif on the wind

your simulacrum possesses me

like a bird possesses a rootless tree

that follows it around.

Water and moon.

And this incredible longing

that makes an eye in the moonlight

inseparable from what it reflects.

Let Rhandamanthus recoil in judgment of the dead

or Anubis awake from a nightmare in a feather bed

to weigh the worth of this afterlife

I’ve spent with you

like a grail I poured back into the watershed

I took it from

like life from the womb of the dark mother

who gives birth to all of us

in secret on the far side of the moon.

Inseperable one.

Lost doll.

Sacred whore by the virgin spring

in the temples of the Iseum

sphinx and incubus

whatever sites I open

whatever windows I stare out of

however I channel the remote like a medium

you’re the banshee

the crone face of queen Mab of the Fey

the white goddess on the dark side of Kali

drinking blood libations

to each other’s spiritual health

from the skulls of their devotees

that comes in like a late-breaking wavelength

that jams the news of your unending death

on all two hundred stations.

I’m a creature of flesh and blood

and you’re into Platonic necrophilia.

Get thee to a nunnery

and I’ll sprinkle rue on the river

in our secret meeting place

where time was no friend to space

when the strong rope of our continuum unravelled

into tiny weak threads of fate

with severed Atropic filaments

for spinal cords and lifelines.

I’ve met you where the rivers meet

at every fork in the road

between your legs

at the junction

of wishbones

witching wands

lightning bolts

and snakes-tongues

anywhere one face

could speak to the dead

through the mask of the other

without feeling estranged by their violet eyes

like a blacklight on the wedding dress

that drowned Ophelia in flowers

when they recovered your body

like a blameless sacrifice to an unknown river

I’ve been sitting by for hours

like the white nights

of a winter Saturnalian

or a lovelorn dragonslayer

wan and palely loitering

waiting for his lamia to show up

late to the seance.

You’re the python priestess

in a prophetic trance of magic mushrooms

that fills my Orphic skull

like a message in a bottle from the future

with inspired oracles of oxymoronic wisdom.

You’re the divine coincidence

of my contradictories

karmic redressal

for the dress rehearsal

of my favourite incarnations.

Apollo will keep chasing Daphne

on the winds of time forever

but every moment’s a crossroads

where the dead intersect the living

like time and the eternal

like the mortal and the praeternatural

like the celestial equator with the ecliptic

at the equinoctial colure of spring

pouring out of Pisces into Aquarius

like the sea into a waterclock on the moon

where time stands still

and the midnight sun beds down with Virgo.

But this time around

you ditched the laurels

and turned into a willow

so I could run my fingers through your hair

in a whirlwind of lovers

like Sufi poets

and Paolo and Francesca

under the demotic breath of Dante in a dark wood

lost for good in his vision of Beatrice

like the ashes from the urn of a moth

caught in the updraft of a candle.

But then again

alive or dead

when were you ever not an inspiration?

Muse and atmosphere

for years

I have breathed you in

like a fragrance of light

from an intimate eye

in a private garden

passing the time

flower by flower.

And I’ve blooded every breath

deep in this heart of mine

where the vine bloods

the darkest grapes with wine

and myriad meanings make one sign

of the two of us

like many streams flowing

under the name of one river.

I have lived with you for lightyears

in a house of the zodiac

the sun never enters

because it has no fixed address

and no one looks out through any windows

that don’t belong to the neighbourhood watch.

It has no thresholds

or doors to open and close.

There are no walls

no floors no roofs or cornerstones

no living rooms and long halls

where the mirrors sleepwalk at night

no stairs to climb

no skeletons in the closet

to remind us of better times

just you and I

urgent with life and longing

listening to the watercharms of the willows

rinsing their roots in the river.

You’ve been dead for many years

but you’re not a watercolour

washed out by the rain

or stained by human tears.

You’re not a ghost

that came back to haunt a tent

like a painter you once sat for

who’s packed up his canvas and easel

and moved on like a one man caravan

to the next well of the closest mirage

that wants its portrait done.

Death is undying.

And life is unborn.

So they’re both as ageless

as ashes and fire

and what was lost in the autumn

is found in the spring

and everything that seemed

voiceless mute remote

cold as the stars

shining down on the snow

suddenly begins to sing.

And though different birds different words

might change the lyrics and intonation

from generation to generation

once a muse always a muse

and there’s no expiry date

on the inspiration

that keeps me up this late at night

like an empty grave that can’t contain

the life that stirs within it.

Everything’s that gone gone gone beyond

like Venus over the horizon of a sunset

meditating on life and death

like Buddha under the Bodhi tree

or you and I under the willows

enlightened by the morning star

returns to a dawn without limits

not a blackhole in space with its grave-face on

like the unscalable summit

of the world mountain

founded on the back of a snapping turtle

with its eye on the moon like a swan.

It’s the silence within

that shapes the word without.

It’s the fish that jumps spontaneously

that articulates the stillness of the water.

The branch that interesects

the circumference of the moon

that amplifies its roundness.

And just as you have

these many years

it’s the dead

that intensify our lives

with the intimate absence

of everything that was near to us.

Voice within my voice.

Mindstream flowing into mindstream

though we think we drink alone from our skulls

it is not true

it is not true

that we don’t pass the cup to the dead

and say as we do to one another here

like a prophet in a bottle

or a message in a whale

drink up

drink up

drink the whole river in a single gulp

because sweeter than the waters of life

from the watersheds of the dead

are the tears we shed with them

and that delirium of awareness

that is neither spiritual nor material

neither now nor hereafter

neither then nor yet to come

that we share with them like crazy laughter.

Under the willows together

at this time of night

as the wind combs out their hair

and a snapping turtle

tries to bury the moon

like a cosmic egg in a sandbank of stars

as proof that it’s really a dragon

who can bring the rain.

No world other than this one

that includes all the others

like the boundless eye includes the stars.

The way I am included in your death

like an intimate familiar

from no other side than this

we’re all on

like our eyes are

and the stars in all directions

neither near nor far

but here

where you are

and nothing’s ever missing

because now has never heard of life

and forever isn’t convinced it’s death

and you sweet one

nectar of grief

elixir of joy

honey alloy

that pours like gold and willows

from the pollen and ore of my soul

you are the belief that I’ve forsaken

as nothing more

than the schoolproof signage of fools

and you are the dream that wakes up in me

and keeps me from my bed

life after life after life

like the death in every breath I’ve ever taken.

PATRICK WHITE