GREY SUNDAY PALLOR

Grey Sunday pallor.

Another church going morning in Perth.

The congregation risks getting a ticket

on their afterlife

for doubling parking.

It seems if you’re not being trod

like the grapes of wrath

at the feet of God

into the symbolic blood

of a wine-sipping saviour

you’re living off the backs

of sweating atoms

holding the world up on their shoulders

like an avalanche in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco.

Shakespeare where are you now?

I miss the homeliness

of your dream of the real world.

I want fire to be more intensely fire

and the ashs to be left unswept.

I want water to be more ponderous and wet

and the fields to have no extradition treaties

that didn’t send everybody back like wildflowers

all at the same time

to their point of orgin in a beginningless abyss.

I want to arise like a prophet in an aboriginal religion

that didn’t expect my coming

and say out loud

in five words

the whole of the perennial philsophy

we’re all native to this

that is arrayed before us now

like life on a habitable planet

whose only border is the wind

whose only flag is water.

Whose only moral suggestion

with respect to the conduct

of the mind the heart the hand the eye the ear

is keep them open.

No locks pleading like lost keys

at the doors of perception.

Peace rooted in the palm of your hand

beside the lifeline of a river

that isn’t impeded in its passage.

Compassion obsolete

because perfect empathy

has only one identity

and one passport

to go anywhere in the multiverse it wants

where the rights of humans

are written in light

and signed sealed delivered in blood

that makes them citizens of life

without anyone else’s approval.

Created in the image of God

who doesn’t live alone with their originality

without an image or a face or a shadow

contemplating the creation of worlds

to mask the unknowable with the known?

Every identity is a lie

that believes it’s telling the truth

but matter is energy and emptiness congealed

in a bosonic force field

that cries on both sides of the mirror at once.

God was a hidden secret who wished to be known.

But the minute you know one

there are two

ad infinitum.

So truer to the image of God

than an exponential simulacrum

that doesn’t bear any resemblance to the original

is not to have one.

So I’m the empty atom

of the little piggy

who had none.

The less I know about things

the more I experience them

as the earthly specifics

of my own cosmic mystery.

The moon is the fruit and blossom of my roots

who remember them

as previous incarnations of a lifeline

between heaven and earth.

I think of the planet as a sentient life form

that’s as dispassionately aware of us

as we are passionately ignorant of it.

And I marvel sometimes

at the disparity between the message

and the messenger

at the optical illusion of a thought

that clings to the notion

that it knows its own mind.

And wonder if we’re merely the functionaries

of a vaster intra-terrestrial intelligence

with the wisdom of the life of the seas in its eyes

and in its heart

compassion for all the generations of the dead

who animated its art

like models in the studio

of a painter who liked to work from life.

When I write.

When I paint.

I always think it’s dangerous

to become so identified with the work

I think it’s my own.

That’s why I get lost in it

bury my name in its solitude

and wander through a mindscape

where nothing looks like home.

Just like the river Heraclitus

couldn’t step into twice

unless he was up in over his head

everytime I write

I have to learn a new language.

Everytime I paint

the colours don’t have the same eyes

I looked into yesterday.

Thought travels faster than the velocity of light

but it isn’t a constant

and feeling at the speed of sound.

When you put the pedal to the metal of time

like dark energy

things expand so fast

that tomorrow’s extremes

are already today’s cliches.

I don’t want to be diminished by a Theory of Everything

that blinds Paul on the road to Los Alamos

like a snowman with lumps of coal for eyes

in a nuclear test site.

I wasn’t persecuting anyone in the first place

so I’ve never needed divine intervention

to bring about a change of heart

when change is the only thing it’s ever known

from the very start.

Life is the kite at the end of a long wavelength

in the hand of a star

that eventually taught it to fly on its own

by letting it go

to come back home alone when it’s called.

Fourteen hundred and seventy five c.c.s of starmud.

My brain.

Seven thousand trillion trillion atoms.

My body.

The depths of space

the volume of my eyes.

The Big Bang the age of my ears.

I’m a unifying field theory of becoming

not a unified field theory of what is

and I don’t see how I can have

a meaningful relationship with matter

if matter isn’t a matter of mind

not over anything

because in the whole of creation

as it is in the abyss

nothing is the underling of anything else.

Regardless of its time and measure

everything is a whole note

in the creative collaboration

of an unfinished song

that interrupts the silence

with sounds of life.

With the picture-music

of the nightbird in the hidden grove

that’s a dead-ringer for the mind

that reveals the song

but conceals the singer.

Everyone can hear it

but no one can see it.

You can listen to all the ghosts

of all the millions of voices

buried in the grave of a dead metaphor

and still not be able to know how

to breathe life into words

so their meaning is a living experience

of the unsayable mystery

that inspires them

to speak to themselves

like someone whistling through the dark

like an echo of mirrors.

A word is a word.

A thought is a thought.

A kite is a kite.

A hawk is a hawk.

If you don’t try to make one live

like the lie of the other

by keeping them both on a tether

you can learn to fly like the wind

without keeping an eye on the weather.

You stop pulling the flightfeathers out of your pen

like arrows out of your heart

and your heels sprout wings

like the stars in the Great Square of Pegasus

like snakes become dragons

like worms become butterflies

like the medium becomes the god

of the message it delivers

like a lock to a key

that sets the lock free

of having to keep everything in.

Religion.

Religio.

To bind.

What?

The human spirit

to the rosaries of the slavers

who compel it to servitude?

The raptures and excruciations

of two extremes of death

two visions of the same junkie

talking in his sleep

like a dream on crystal meth.

The one who thinks he’s the secret partner of life

writes his name in stone.

The one who practises necromancy

with his own shadow

and reveres his own lie

like a sacred object

everyone must bow down to

entrusts his mind to ink and horn.

He binds the spirit of the word

to the letter of the law.

Everyone is guilty

until they’ve earned their innocence.

The most absurd thing about common sense

when it testifies before a jury of mirrors

is that the more it disappears

the more it’s mistaken

for prima facie evidence

to verify the quick convictions of its peers.

But the eternal sky

doesn’t inhibit the flight of the white clouds

and I’ve got a whatever gets you through the night attitude

like a long wavelength of compassion

like a sure sign of intelligent life

from the other side of the universe

that eases the mutuality of our suffering

by realizing there’s nothing alien about life.

And it’s not so much a matter of life

reaching out to life

like someone who can teach us about ourselves

as it is

someone to talk to.

Someone to walk beside like a river.

Not a highway to heaven

or a shortcut to hell.

I have relative faith

in the interdependence of my originality.

In the whole history of the universe

there’s only been everyone of me.

Why should I ask the windows

what direction to look in

when I’ve got eyes of my own

with holographic vision

that can see further

than the eyebeams

of the gravitational lenses

fixed at both ends of a telescopic black hole

projecting itself on the universe

like Batman caught in the glare

of an antimatter flashlight?

Why should I live like a gibbering shade

in the afterlife of my own lucidity

when I’ve got it made now?

I can tell a silk purse from a cow’s ear.

The dark clarity of an enlightened heretic

from the occult magic

in the bones of a martyred relic.

There is as much of the night in me

as there are stars in my eyes.

What does the wind worship

if not the sky?

And what could be more false

than trying to true the idols of I?

Woman wasn’t made from the rib of the first wishbone

like the short end

of something that sticks in your throat

like a harp in a chimney

and I can’t imagine any supreme being

being way more vindictive in hell

to the people he loved and couldn’t save

from the wanderlust of their earthly dust

gusting up along their path to salvation

like a dirt demon blowing stars in their eyes

than Hitler was in Poland and Stalingrad.

Immortal punishments

for ephemeral war-crimes on crusade?

If the water doesn’t turn to wine

when it first touches your lips

at the wedding of Canaa

you’re sipping from an eclipse

of black cool-aid in Jonestown

that tastes like spit

you drink from other men’s mouths.

What fool conducts his own life

like a foreign policy with God

as if a wavelength of insight

were opening trade relations

with the great nightsea of awareness.

I like to read scripture

that’s never learned to write

that’s as eloquent as water

when it says its secret name

like two rat snakes swimming in moonlight

like echoes of one another

returning to the far shore

of the mysterious voice that summons them

like a spring thaw

to express themselves creatively

without brainwashing their gene-pool

into believing

that in the rainbow of life

they’re the evil wavelength.

Why do people expect God

to teach them a language they already speak?

And when she doesn’t say a word

ask someone else to do the talking for them

like a medium channeling the infallibly dead?

Who needs an air raid siren to translate

the lyrics of a songbird

into a purple passage of life

that understands every word of it

like first light?

Grey Sunday pallor

of another churchgoing morning in Perth.

I love to mix the infinite prolixity of pragmatic greys

that are engendered by the union

of complementary colours

island hopping like new lava

on the palette of my eyes

as if grey were the third extreme

without an opposite

because it didn’t cast a shadow

at midnight or noon

whether it stood in the light

of Venus

the sun

or the moon.

The third wing on a phoenix

in the mystical ashes of billions of stars

I like to fly down the middle with intensity

when the fire refeathers the wind in my flames

and words overturn the urns of their old meanings

in sacred precipices

and holy mindstreams

to go with the flow of the picture-music

like the lyrics of a dream

they wrote the words to.

My emptiness is a watershed of inspiration

I can draw on anytime I like

without fear of depleting

my spiritual aquafers.

I’m an hospitable well

who doesn’t judge strangers

by what we all have in common with water

or whether they can tell a mirage from the real thing.

PATRICK WHITE

ACOUSTIC SHADOW

Acoustic shadow.

Gravitational eye of a galactic hurricane.

Ship going down

I’m clinging to a plank

in the great nightsea of my awareness

as if the last great threshold of chaos

were the lone oar of a lost lifeboat.

The moon is weeping jellyfish like willows.

There’s more isolation

in one human emotion

than there is in the whole of the universe.

The abyss draws near

blurs the mirror

obliterates all thoughts from my mind

and pushs my feelings

on crutches and wheelchairs

off the Peripeteian cliff

down to the Periclean rocks below

just outside Athens

where they expressed their democratic distaste

for baby girls

and condemned criminals.

My skull shakes with sudden headquakes

like a cosmic egg that fell out of the nest

and smashed on the earth below.

The sun haemmorages a bright yellow

like the dusky blood of embryonic dragons.

I can hear music in the distance

like windchimes made of shattered windows

and my nerves are running their fingernails down a blackboard

that’s scribbling my name over and over and over again

like the writing on the wall

in runes of chalk

and quicksand hieroglyphs

and then rubbing it out

like an afterschool punishment

for saying what I meant

when I said I had nothing to say.

Since when has an empty mouth

been a sin of omission

or silence a confession of guilt?

The void’s got a voice of its own

and can speak to itself

in Etruscan linear A

but everything else in its grasp

is a word that was left as speechless

as the rubbished first draft of a tongue-tied play.

Sometimes I look into the future

send my eyes off into the night

like a crow and a dove

from the stern of my rudderless ark

to see if there’s anywhere to land

and they come back wounded

by the slings and arrows

of what they’ve seen.

Worse than losing your faith

is losing your sense of humour

when you’re a cosmic jester

in the tragic court of King Lear.

You can act as if life were a joke

but the gods aren’t laughing.

And all my best insights

have turned into Higgs-boson God-particles

that bend space with sticky grids

and take on mass like spiders.

And here comes Rilke like a gust of stars

to remind me that sometimes

the heaviness of life

is heavier than the weight of things.

For every angel that jumps from heaven

a demon rises from hell

and then there are those

who fall between the cracks

like cherubs with stone feathers.

I’m a Medusan snake-bird

with the eyes of a dragon

congealed like tears of glass

in a blast furnace

from lightyears of broken mirrors.

One moment I’m enlightened

and the next

it’s hard to know if what I’m looking at

is poetic vision

or the death throes of a violent exorcism.

And even when I’m dispossessed of myself

I still can’t tell

if the road I’m on

is the return of the prodigal son

or just another homeless demon on the street again.

So much pain.

Black mold in the walls.

A radioactive muse

abusing the watershed I drink from

until I glow in the dark

at all hours of the clock

like a nightlight in a morgue

for the dead who like to get up and walk.

Anti-matter universe.

I’m an unsychronized happening

in a discharged particle field.

I jump orbitals

like trains and thresholds

and coldwar wine-bottles

in a game of Russian roulette

with the empties

but all my photonic insights

are scattered like fleas on a hotplate

and even my tears hiss like scalded vipers of acid rain.

Worse than losing faith

in the candlepower of your imagination

like a canary in a coalmine

to enter a blackhole

and come out the other side

into a whole new universe

like the key that makes it true

is losing faith in your eyes to follow you.

But the only religion I’ve ever adhered to

is my next inspiration

and I owe my origin

as much to what hasn’t happened yet

as I do to the morphological past

reading the I Ching

like the Burgess Shales

while referring to Darwin’s Origin of the Species.

Nine in the fifth place.

Dissonant yin.

Blue herons fishing like pens

in the starless eclipse of an inkwell.

Sometimes the light goes insane

and starts stabbing at mad shadows

that sit for their portraits like windowpanes.

Pain without reason.

Without explanation or alibi.

Time without transformation.

The bigger the space

the deeper the isolation.

Insight lost in a labyrinth of cul-de-sacs.

Imperatives without creation.

I break the crescents of the moon like a wishbone.

Soon the starving dogs

will gnaw at it like a fortune-cookie

to get at its mineral marrow.

I wish tomorrow wasn’t already too late

or fate preferred joy to sorrow

but when there’s only

two kinds of people in the world

toys and tools

you’re bound to end up

with a lot of deconstruction sites

like nuclear disasters

in a sandbox

manned by fools and ingenues.

When I used to ask life

what life was all about

the Buddha would always hand me a flower

or point to the morning star

and whenever I needed a heart-transplant

the government didn’t oppose

I’d wake up from a trance in intensive care

grateful to the organ donor

who gave me a new lease on life

with a previously used rose.

Now I sip tragic elixirs

from the breasts

of a morphine-drip

in the poetic snakepit

of a Medusan phase of the moon.

One tit heals.

The other kills.

But you can only know

which is compassion

and which is death

by the way it feels

when it’s way too late for appeals.

My spine is a ribbed skeleton of serpent fire.

A kundalini ghost walks over my grave

without recognizing its old name.

One of the great unspoken skills of a poet

is knowing

how to go down on the Medusa

without turning into stone.

Staring the dragon down like the razorblade

that first slashed its eyes open

like the birth-sac of an enlightened eclipse

without being blown away

like spun glass

by the intensity of the exchange.

You can’t grope around in the dark

like a piece of coal

looking for black holes

like star-nosed moles

in the tunnels of your mudmind

and expect to see like a diamond

on the cutting edge of the void.

Pure acetylene.

Not even so much

as the blue petal of hydrogen

in the immaculate heat of perfect combustion.

Nothing left unconsumed

in the fire-womb

of this creative crematorium.

Effusions of freak particles

and rogue elements

with radioactive halflives

converting to black energy

in a total liberation of the light.

All attachments go as cold as a murder case

some lonely corpse bears witness to

as if she were picking waterbirds

that don’t leave the trace of a clue

out of a line-up in a one-way mirror

that keeps one eye on the way things appear

and disappear like evidence

and the other on an artist’s sketch

of what she must have looked like once

before everybody tried to identify her.

Algol decapitated by a drug cartel

in the constellation Perseus.

Medusa’s severed head

hung from a bridge

as a warning to the snakepit

not to get stoned on your own product

or believe everyone who shows you a shield is a cop.

Some people reach for the top.

Others dive to the bottom

when the seas get rough

and some try to hide

in the corner of their eye

and play I spy with a storm-front.

Let the shore-huggers examine the local rocks

for the dna of sirens.

Let the sly ones tie themselves

like the sails of Luna moths

to the mastheads of their matchstick ships

to hear the candles crying

without the risk of flying to their rescue.

Even when you know how the trick is done

it’s ungracious in a poet

whether he’s listening to a siren a muse a lamia

Andromeda on the rocks

or a cashier in a fastfood mall

to resist the magic of a beautiful woman

as if you were a bandaid

and she were a bloodless wound.

The black widow times love

with the hourglass on her back

as if she were cooking an egg.

After that she’s a cannibal

and if you’re late

at making a getaway

you’re food on the plate

of your own children.

No one ever looks

for the motivation

behind their happiness

but everyone needs

a reason for their sorrows.

Who X-rays their joy

or seeks a second opinion

on the prognosis of their bliss?

But just look at the library of alibis

that have borne false witness

to human suffering.

And the snake-oil salesman

who have shed their skins

like the shirts off their back

to bind them.

But one answer doesn’t fit all

like a unified field theory

doesn’t do much

to cure the weak nuclear force

of a kid with cancer.

And yet there’s more inspiration

in the black muses of the negative

than there is in any number of positive prints

I would imagine in the same proportion

of occult matter in the universe to white.

Of darkness to light.

I’m being keel-hauled on the corals of the moon

in a seabed of shadows

cast by the flowerless light

like Roman salt into my Carthaginian wounds.

I’m the photographic negative of a galactic starmap

that swarms with brighter worlds.

And though there might not be any colour

or iris in my eyes

in the clear light of the void

that can’t be stained by seeing

the primordial atom

that grew up to be arboreal Adam

knows enough about creation

to remember that the world began

from a period at the end

of the previous sentence.

A full stop at the end of the road.

A supermassive blackhole

that warps space

into the nucleus of a galactic cell

to protect the contents

like a flash in the pan

that came out of nowhere

until it could replicate its luck

like white braille in a dark room

playing with loaded dice.

Sometimes it’s fireflies on hot August nights

lingering in the valley

like the leftover cloud of a thunderstorm.

Sometimes it’s snake-eyes in the light sockets of a skull.

Sometimes everything in existence

all events and forms

wake up from being the stuff of dreams

and begin to factualize the acts

of its creative memory

as if everything

everyone in the universe

could suddenly see

in the saddest wavelengths

on the darkest nights

of their longest shadows

what inspired the stars.

Demonically confessed as I am

under the truce

of this white phosphorus halo

of horned snakes and black laurel

I might suggest

to the true few among you

still seeking the truth

without knowing what you’re asking for

to watch your step

on the threshold of an event horizon

that can have prolific effects

throughout the mirroring multiverse

of your cosmic consciousness.

Two dimensional holographic picture-music

of everything I could have been or not

projected on the cave womb wall

opposite the black hole that’s casting them

like the infinite paradigms

of everything I am.

Worlds within worlds

procreating at the slightest touch of the wind

each one the afterlife of the other

like waterclocks that don’t keep time

like a dynasty

with a line of succession

but let their mindstreams flow freely

like the vast nirvanic ethers of hyperspace

breathing on the waters of life

like light mirrored through a blackhole

into infinitely expansive bubbles of inconceivable insight.

The mind puts the whole of itself into every thought

and what feeling was ever denied access

to any part of the heart?

And show me the redacted passages

in the conservation of information principle

that never burns its tats off

never shreds the enigma of its limestone frescoes

in the cave of Les Trois Freres

would rather live half-mad sad and lonely

with what it knows

than please a blind lover

by putting its eyes out

to prove that all it knows and will ever know

is for her eyes only.

The present may be well married to the past

but it longs for the future like a mistress.

And light’s just the dove

that carries messages

back and forth between them

in the first rush of enlightenment

that comes like a loveletter in the mail

addressed to everyone.

From the very first word

to the last

that leaves even the silence speechless

from the alpha and omega

of one flightfeather of a prehistoric alphabet

to the wingtip of another

lifespans across

from the snakepits in the deserted saltmines

of Sodom and Gomorrah

to the unearthly wellsprings

in the sacred grottoes of the stars

afraid you’re going to be upstaged

by your own suicide

or uncharacteristically vigorous

for a woman of your years

written indelibly

like the equals sign

between Einstein’s energy-mass equation

like a peace treaty between chameleons

like Monet’s Japanese footbridge

giving its blessing to the waterlilies

written where everyone can see it

smeared on mirrors in desperate lipstick

like the death lyric of haemmoraging snails

or written with a slow finger

in warm breath on a cold windowpane

like the nickname of a god

that’s late getting home.

Whether you meet God or the Buddha

Jesus working on his dovejoints

Blue Krishna dancing down the road with his Gopi girls

or surrender all the battleflags

of your holy wars

to the dark imageless beauty of Allah

or you’re working hard

on a Theory of Everything

to explain the unlocality of quantum events

like synchronous happenings

in a charged particle field

to explain how the message can get here

before it’s sent

like a future memory

of something that hasn’t been done yet

because reality is a singularity with personality

that takes the shape of the way you see it

like the pixellated skin of a space time continuum

with its tail in its mouth for eternity

stringing theories of picture music

over the supermassive blackhole

at the heart of a guitar-shaped universe

just to be

in this resonant medium

of interdependent awareness

means

you are that

when you’re looking at a starmap

impersonally

but closer to home

where things are more

qualifiably human

from a more intimate point of view

than quantifiably true

there’s no doubt in the world

that doesn’t affirm

by reversing the spin

of the definition

I am you

multiplied by the velocity of thought squared.

A boundless circle

with infinite points of origin

where the tail isn’t at the end

of where the head begins.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN YOU LOOK AT A STAR

When you look at a star

can you see

how the night leaves

the intimate doors

of intuitive eventuality ajar?

I’m all future with a prophetic past.

Aviomantic signs of liberated doves.

So many lifespans in a single moment.

How many light-years to the nearest star?

And how many shadows back?

Trying to say the inexpressible in words is like

to trying to thaw a snowstorm

on the tip of your tongue

flake by flake syllabically

or trying to explain bubbles to a glacier

in a momentary suspension of disbelief.

When you look at a star

do you see

that’s it’s you

that’s shining up that far

and it’s you down here

receiving your own light back like a ball

you made of your childhood

and threw up in the air

like a celestial sphere

when you had

all the time in the world

to come back and catch it later?

And as I grew older

not waiting for it to come back down

I learned to play vertical pool with the stars

to move things around

that were once considered fixed.

When you look at a star

if you want to clear the table

if you want to make the longshot

if you want to change the birthmark of misfortune

into an upturned elephant trunk of good luck

you have to chalk the cue with your skull.

But I ask you earnestly

if no one’s ever failed their death

is it probable

anyone’s ever failed their life

despite what their tears and fears have told them

about where they’ve ended up?

But a good beginning doesn’t lead to a good end

because a good beginning never stops.

A good beginning is without conclusion.

It doesn’t need to look beyond itself

because nothing’s missing from the very start.

When you look at a star

do you see the ancient wisdom

in a child’s heart

do you feel the depth

of all the eyes that have looked at it before

with longing wonder and sorrow

asking you to give them some direction

by adding yourself like another dimension to the past?

Is there a firefly of human suffering

mingled in the shining?

A window makes a better starmap

than a ten inch mirror

in a Schmidt-Cassegrain reflecting telescope

on an equatorial mount with clock drive

following them around like paparazzi

but when the stars want to know

where they’re at

it’s your eyes they parallax

at both ends

of the wingspan of your orbit.

It’s your seeing that gives them a fix.

The same eye by which I see God

is the eye by which God sees me.

It’s the same with everything

from fireflies to supernovas.

The donkey looks into the well.

The well looks back at the donkey.

Tat tvam asi.

You are that.

The lampshade and the blue parrot.

The donkey and the carrot.

When you look at a star

do you dress your destiny up

in hand-me-down constellations

like clothes you’ll grow into one day

or do you wear them like patchs on myths

you’re trying to give up

about how rough it’s been

to be chosen beauty queen

and bear the diamond tiara of the Pleiades

like the Northern Crown?

When you look at a star

is it the chip of a broken mirror

the plinth of a shattered chandelier

the Holy Ghost of fireflies

a fire-womb of immaculate fusions

that bear the transgender features

of their ancestral elements

like Abrahamic hydrogen?

A burning bush

in the valley of Tuwa

that eventually talks itself out like a candle

when the conversation begins to harden

like an auditory hallucination

into a puddle

of earwax shadows and wicks?

Or do you discern something more

you can’t quite put your finger on

or point to

not a presence

but there

an absence

but everywhere

and you standing there

like this tiny insight

with the precipitous extremeties

of a human being

trying to discover your own nature

in the inexplicability of all that shining

wondering if the rumours of awareness

the universe has been spreading about you

are true or not?

When you look at a star

have you ever thought

if mass is energy

maybe matter is mind

and thinking of one

as something that has to get over the other

is like expecting a wave to transcend water?

Light and lamp.

Body and mind.

Not one of two

but two in one

and even that’s one too much.

The flower opens

in the light of the sun

like a kiss on the eyelid

and the sun blooms

as if it had a crush on the flower.

When you look at a star

can you feel how the light

touchs your eyes as gently as a butterfly

as if all the eyelashs you’ve lost in a lifetime

like the ribbing of broken kites

or the spokes of a bike

or the straws of overworked brooms

had come back to you

as a living thing

with antennae legs and wings?

Have you ever looked at a star

and wondered how far away it would be

if you were to measure the distance in thought-years?

And such a small thing the mind

a child’s hand

and yet within its grasp

all that mass black matter energy light space time?

How could you fit

all those cosmic immensities

and the abyss that contains them

into such a small place

if they weren’t your own ideas?

When you look at a star

do you ever get the feeling

you’re swimming through your own gene-pool

your own meme pool

the Pierian spring

where it meets the sea

at the bottom of your mountain mindstream?

When you look at a star

do you ever turn the light around

and look into yourself

through its eyes

and realize

you’ve been communing with your own reflection

inconceivably

for billions of years

and that little insight

is the cosmic light of awareness

that fills the night with everything that is

when is is not the opposite of is not

and there’s no separation in the first atom

between thought life light mind matter and form

and the lion lies down with the lamb

and the old woman says she is not old

and the sparrow lays her egg in the serpent’s coil

and the old man who has seen everything says

my eyes are as young now

as you were back then

and your beauty is today?

When I was a boy

growing up in a garbage can

like a diamond in the rough

everyone wanted to cut

and buff the edges off

to polish me like a lense

so everybody could see how focused I was

when I looked up at the stars

from the bottom of a spent wishing well

where you could see them even during the day.

Though I was taught

they were responsible for my fate

and I should blame them for what I am

and not the black dwarfs of hate

who perverted the space around me

like slumlords

until even the buds of the flowers

were white as the knuckles of clenched fists

I never thought for a moment

that anything that clean and beautiful

that far away

from the scene of the crime at the time

could ever do anything here

that needed an alibi.

When I looked at the stars

I was enraptured by their mystery.

I was exalted by their unattainability

and the age of the silence

that surrounded their fires

knowing they’ve burned longer

than the light has lived

and seen more

than their eyes can forgive

of human life on the planet.

And the greatest agony of my childhood

from seven till ten

such that I would weep

my bitterness to sleep every night

like a child abandoned to a hospital

was that I was born way too early

to get to Aldebaran.

When I looked at a star

I didn’t gape like a telescope

into the depths of its utter solitude

but looked upon it like a far intimacy

I could draw near

until I could feel it breathing like silver

all over the mirror

that was as clear

as any dark spear

that ever wounded a mystic with bliss.

Strange whisperings of exiled sages

pouring stories of home

into a young boy’s ear

like my mother used to talk about

her childhood in Queensland

as if she were in the Garden of Eden.

When I looked at a star

and listened to its picture-music

I was so deeply moved

by the beauty and sadness of the song

like inspiration in utter solitude

I went into exile with it here

and it was my blossom

no wind could blow away

and it was my root

in the starmud

nothing could pull up

and throw away.

When I looked at a star

I was enthralled

by the dispassionate attachment

and creative dynamic

that burned me like a sacrificial heretic

in the ice of inspiration.

I could forget the small orbit

of house arrest

that a circumstantial planet

had affixed like an electronic anklet around my leg

for being born unforgivably poor.

When I looked at a star

it was as if the flightfeather

of a bluewhite fire bird

landed on the windowsill of my cell

to take pity on me

and share its freedom

with someone living in a cage.

When I looked at a star

it was the synteretic spark

I sent out like a dove from the ark

with two of every mind

in the zodiac aboard

after forty days of flood

to look for Atlantis

like the next best thing

to Mt. Ararat or Cathay.

It was the angel that always looked back

with the same mystic fury in its eyes

that were in mine

when I looked up.

When I looked at a star

I could prognosticate the future

like the distant memory

of someone returning to their origins

waking up from exile

to discover it wasn’t a dream.

You can tell by the way a star

flashs like a panicked chameleon

on the event horizon of a blackhole

things are what they seem

when you’re peering through atmospheres

with tears in your eyes.

I used to make telescopes when I was young.

I would grind their pyrex eyes

with ever finer grades of carborundum

until they could see just right.

I shaped their fibre-glass bodies

until they were as smooth as a woman’s skin.

And I took them out into the open fields naked

far beyond the intrusions of the city lights

and exposed them to the stars

who revered them like clear-eyed mirrors

and adorned one with leaves

and the other with sidereal veils

and said like the elders

and old midwives of an Ojibway tribe

when they name the newborn.

This one shall be called Eve.

And this one Isis.

And to celebrate their birth

opened a third eye

and said

as it is on earth

it shall not be in the sky.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU SAY

You say you’re the fruit of a different flower than me.

I bloom in sidereal fire

and there’s no higher or lower

to shine down on

or look up to.

You say you’re earthbound.

But I could show you how

to cut a shoot of lightning

and root it in the air like wild strawberries

and transcendental jellyfish

that swing like comets

from the handlebars of a girl’s first bike

around the sun symbolically.

You say you’re a jewel embedded in ore

because your eyes can’t take the light.

That you’re the eye-seed of an apple

born with shades on.

But I could show you things beyond seeing

that none of your material mirrors

have ever dreamed of.

Places where they don’t carve guitars

out of trees with lockjaw

where the trees and the leaves and their shadows

don’t lipsynch the music

they play on your face with feeling.

I could teach you how to play a birdhouse like a flute

and make a demo of the silence

that would top the charts

like darkness on a starmap.

You’ve got the voice for it.

You’re as vocal as bees in a hive

making honey out of Japanese plum blossoms.

But two minutes with a hook

isn’t the same as a run-on haiku

that reads like the mindstream

all the way to nirvana.

I know backroads and shortcuts

off the main highways of our lifelines.

Sacred groves at the back of abandoned barns

with big hearts

that buried their children

where they thought it was most beautiful.

You may have been a dewdrop

in this dewdrop of a world

but even so even so . . . .

Reflections of Buddha and Basho.

Most people bleed for the world they wound

but I’ve tasted the sweetness of the mellifluous moon

adding its blossom to a dead branch

out of compassion for the emptiness

that embodies it like the deathmask of a tree.

Green bough.

Dead branch.

Same song.

Go ask the birds.

They know what I’m talking about.

You say you can’t get a grasp on the infinite sea

of your own awareness

but you approach it wave by wave

dewdrop by dewdrop

oar by oar

lifeboat after lifeboat

when the trick is to down it all

in a single shot

like your eyes do

when they’re out for a night on the town.

But I’m the wolf-shepherd of mountain clouds

and the lightning master of fireflies

that rig the beaver dams with blasting caps

that go off like soft munitions

with a change of heart

in the wiring of a terrorist

with the perfect timing

of an ageless face.

You preach the morals of the valley

to a mountain of offense

not realizing that your redemption

is only as deep

as the mountain is high

and you’re buried in a landslide

trying to make a comeback from the dead.

You say a lot of things

as if you were trying to make sense

to a lunatic

about losing your mind

for the sanest of reasons.

And you talk about motivation

as if you were trying to fit spurs

on glass sneakers

and inspiration

like wings on that born again hobby-horse

you transformed from a witch’s broom

into a drone with the sensibilities of a stealth kite.

You say you feel close to God

in everything you say and do

but I can tell by the terrible solitude

of your grailquest

that you’’re just another stormcloud

divining for water with a lightningrod.

Insanity’s just like any other kind of religion.

First you go mad.

And then you begin to doubt it.

St. Jerome in the early church Latin

of quicksand cornerstones

trying to beatify their heresies

with murderous absolutes.

Credo ergo absurdum.

I believe it because it’s absurd.

But you’re not crazy enough

to know the conventions of God

as inventions of your own

when there was no else around to play with.

Trying to regain possession of your mind

as if it were a homeless flower

out of touch with its roots

by making an ally

of the occupying army

is like trying to train circus snakes

to jump through hoops of hellfire

for haloes they don’t believe are worth the risk.

You obviously have the courage

and fanaticism of an ant

but whenever you show up like a dove

to make peace among combatants

you’ve always got a stinging nettle in your beak

instead of an olive branch.

You talk like bleach

that wants to clean things up between us

but you burn like formic acid

whenever I hook up with you

like a bloodbank on intravenous.

I may speak in a universal language

with an extraterrestrial accent

but that doesn’t mean I’m a dolphin

you can saddle with the boyhood of a god

that speaks in tongues to the agrammatoi

like some polyglot Apollo.

Muhammad was illiterate

and Jesus relied on ghost writers

to tell his story

and it took seventy-two Jewish scholars

in the library of Alexandria

before it was burnt accidently

against Caesar’s strict orders

to photocopy the Septuagint verbatim

out of the mouth of God.

Miracles and magic may be the backup authorities

that stand like default programmes

and power points

behind the throne of your actuality.

But I’m too steeped

in mystic surrealistic factuality

to look for a Rosetta Stone

to unlock the eloquent silence of God

with the echo of my own voice.

I listen to the sacred name

with a profane ear

and everything under heaven

and upon the earth

is a clear as a Sanskrit syllable

written in water

like the works of a tubercular poet

drowning in his own lungs.

The music of the celestial spheres

is like light.

It falls on the deaf and mute alike

like songs that were written just for them.

The lyric of life

can’t be heard by anyone more than once

but not knowing how to listen

you rewrite it as a hymn

to be sung over and over and over again

as if you could catch the picture-music of life

on an evangelistic video-cam.

But the word within the word

that can’t be heard by anyone

isn’t a linguistic scam.

Life is always sending everyone love-letters

but those with a nose

that sees more than their eyes

smell a lie in the rose

that keeps them from trusting their hearts.

They end up French-kissing the tongue of the envelope

and deleting the contents like spam.

And when they speak about life and love as you do

trying to legalize their wishful thinking

and unionize their guesswork

it’s as if all their words had paper-cuts.

But you can’t mend a forked tongue

by quoting God

as if she were a celestial brand

of super-glue

you were promoting

like a chastity belt

guaranteed to keep your legs closed

and your eyes shut.

You say it’s better to live like a clam or an oyster

at the bottom of a spiritual seabed

so deep

no one’s ever going to pluck your pearl

but when you edge your lips like that

I swear all your sacred syllables

sound like the tintinabula of falling paperclips

attached to the last word of God

as if they were in like pins

on a secret agenda.

I freely admit I may suffer

the loquacity of stars

that are always talking about something or other

they don’t understand

like what we’re all doing here in the first place

looking for our eyes like flashlights and cameras

in the gene-pools of candles and reflecting telescopes

that can’t believe what they’re looking at

even when they do find them

on both sides of their nose.

And it’s true that sometimes my silence

is a singularity in a blackhole

that sucks all the light out of the room

and it’s as hard to get on the same wavelength as me

as it is to tune a snakepit with a battery charger

but if I keep my mouth shut

about where my heart goes on its own

to be alone with the whole of creation

as if it kept me like a secret to itself

that doesn’t mean I’m a waste of life

because I would rather squander it all here now

like flowers and stars and leaves in the autumn

than squirrel it away for some rainy day in the hereafter.

I’d rather be a root

than hang my fruit

from a rafter in a house of cards

with one big toe of a cornerstone

over the fault-line in a earthquake zone.

Even if it means I’ve got to risk

bumping into God one day on my own

and I make a date to see her again

and she leaves me standing here

in this strange doorway in the rain.

Even if as you say

there’s no exit

for a heretic

who would rather go down in flames

of self-immolation

as the lesser of two agonies

than fly fighter-planes like a kamakazi

with a divine wind

in her tailfeathers

in defense of a hive of killer bees

who don’t know how to make honey

out of weeds.

Even if Eve

took a bite out of the apple

at least she spit out the seeds

like the taste of temptation for the rest of us.

She didn’t make jam or apple sauce

of what she learned that day

from the tree of knowledge.

And she didn’t knead the flesh

of her body-mind

with cold hands

into the crust of an apple-piety

that rises toward heaven

like the unleavened ratings

of a reality show

keeping one eye on the oven

like a crematorium

in a sports stadium

that moonlights as a prison camp

and the other on her cosmic temperature

as if

ah Faustus

why this is hell

nor are we out of it

weren’t the cause of global warming.

You want to wash blood off with blood

mud with mud

paint with paint

me with me

but I say

you’d see a lot more clearly

if you were ever to wipe your make-up off

and take a look at things

you’re fanatically fixed upon

more like a window than a mirror

more like a bird feeling its way south

than a nervous weathervane

that thinks it’s the lighthouse and foghorn in one

of the coming apocalypse

you demonize in people like me

who mean what they say

omnidirectionally

so they can be overheard

and understood by the stars

more like a medium than a message.

Trying to palm an s.o.s. off as a lovenote

from the gods

is like saying the word always

to a one way street

baffled at the crossroads to nowhere.

Remember when Dogen Zenji

whispered in your ear

the place is here

the path leads everywhere?

He wasn’t trying to make candles out of earwax.

Or ladders out of crosswalks.

Rivers out of roadside ditchs.

Mindstreams out of oilslicks.

You might have wiped your lips

clean of the profanity of my name

like a full eclipse of the moon

but there’s still lipstick on the mirror

like the painted tear

on the mask of a spiritual buffoon

trying on the face of a sacred clown.

But there is no likeness

no working hypothesis

no masterpiece in progress

no unified field theory

not so much as the eyelash

of a holographic simulacrum

projected by the pineal gland

of my third eye

in the Buddha realm of a screening room

where universes are born to be stars

when no one is watching

and all the seats are empty

that can begin to compare

with my inconceivably unattainable life

just as it is.

You say that’s just mere existence

flatlining on the terminal nightward

like a wavelength that’s given up on going straight.

But I’ve torn a page out of the book of the light

without casting so much as a shadow of censorship

like an eclipse across my seeing

and I’ve travelled voluminously

through a near perfect vacuum

for billions of years

without ever losing touch with the source of my being

because every step

of the long dark strange radiant road I made by walking

was the ubiquitous threshold

of my original homelessness

in all directions at once.

And everywhere I look

these fireflies of insight

showing off like supernovas in distant galaxies

and Cepheid variables

in the playhouses of the constellations

that are not fixed

but show up in every lifetime

with a new script

for an old myth

behind the rising curtains of nightfall.

And whenever I’ve encountered the truth

along this pathless path

it wasn’t the angel in my way

or the demon at my back I met

but an intimate stranger

who travelled light and alone

without a compass or a destination.

But I’ve never bumped into a lie

by accident or design

who wasn’t travelling with a witness.

But the power of the truth

doesn’t depend upon its innocence or guilt.

There is no ultimacy in it.

No corroboration or culpability

because the truth is never complete.

It’s alive and creative as the past is.

As transformative as the universe.

It’s not the vehicle of law

nor any other conceptual nonentity

getting its hands dirty

in mundane realities

like ghosts summoned to a seance of the senses

to pass judgment on life

like black and white smoke

from the Vatican chimney

after a vote among flawed men

on who’s the most infallible.

The truth doesn’t know anything about freedom

because it’s never been bound

and even less about rights

because it’s never had to ask anyone’s permission.

The truth isn’t the flavour of enlightened buddhas

and its shadow the stench of sentient beings.

The truth is just as likely to free

the key from the jailor

or the jailor from the jail

as it is to liberate the drunken sailor

who posts bail for all of them.

The truth exists because everything else here does.

The truth lives because you and I do.

Because the stars do and the rocks and ants in the grass.

Boom!

The primordial atom strikes twelve randomly

and Cinderella turns into a pumpkin.

Interdependent origination.

I owe as much to you for my existence

as you do the warring dragons of your worst fears

and they to you as the harshest of teachers.

And once the primordial atom

like the transcendent one

who’s always one step beyond

everybody’s best guesses

like the light of a star

by the time it gets here

got things started

its hereafter didn’t depend on what was to come

but the beginningless beginning of this moment now

at the center of everything

like a jewel in the navel of God.

Your future isn’t waiting on deathrow

for the past to come through

with a last minute reprieve.

You don’t need to close your eyes

to see the sun shine at midnight

nor open them

to see there are no shadows at noon.

And you can go ask the lightning

if you don’t believe me

about how hard it is

to put down roots in the earth

nerves in the flesh

like rivers and stars and cosmic themes

who don’t know where they’re going

but nevertheless

at the heart of their enlightened guess

indulge their taste for intuitive compassion

in the ripening fruit of their intellect

and that sweetness of autumn life on their tongues

like frost on the morning glory

dew on the stargrass

take the time

to teach the maps

that fall from the trees like leaves

to the mindstream below

as much as they do about flowing.

How you can only know the road by going

and that’s as true for the road

as it is you.

Because every step of the way

every whirl in the current

the path and the destination

the road and you

a star and its light

a thought-wave and its brain

the many and the one

are not discontinuous and discrete.

Death isn’t the singularity

at the bottom of the blackhole

envious of your rainbow Joseph’s coat of light.

And life isn’t a concept

that’s been reified

with fingerprints and blood samples

waiting nervously

for news of its purity

to come back like a vampire bat

from some celestial bloodbank

turning it into wine

and nasty drunks

defacing the shrines of killer bees.

Your heart’s not Jerusalem.

And your blood hasn’t gone on crusade.

You say you’re looking for god.

I say that’s o.k.

but why do you go about it

as if you were looking for her number

listed on the cellphone of a terrorist?

She’s not being held for ransom

because she’s worth less than nothing

and more than the inconceivable

but the moment you begin to look for her

I’ve got a hunch

she’s lost.

And there are missing posters

on telephone poles

out looking for your face everywhere

because you are

who you want to know.

The light doesn’t come

like a thug with shadows

to cover its back.

And life doesn’t need to show its i.d.

to the arresting officer

to prove its an ambassador with immunity

to criminal prosecution

in a foreign country

where one law of life for all

and all for one

covers all the flaws

of creationists mimicing evolution.

If the emptiness within you

you’re trying to fill with God

weren’t already aware of your potential

to change the course of the universe

with every breath you take

every step of the way to everywhere

you wouldn’t have been empowered into being by it

to achieve yourself exactly as you are

every moment of the unborn day

and in all the watchtowers

of the undying night

in the small quiet hours

just before morning

when the dew grows eyes in the dark

that ripen like luminous bells of insight

into what we’re all doing here

looking for our minds with mirrors

that have sweetened the light with our tears

like old wines

that have been dreaming for years

of dancing like stars on the waters of life.

And even after the blossom has bloomed and gone

like the plumage of a phoenix in spring

the drunks still sing unreasonably

of the seasonal sorrows

that come of untimely desire.

Because deep in their urn and furnace hearts

they can feel the seeds of fire

the ghost of the orchard left

sprouting like the bloodroots

of their next incarnation.

Salamandrine regeneration.

Dust to dust.

Ashes to ashes.

Though it all sounds

a little too cut and dry to me.

Let’s try

just for a change of pace

life to life

death to death

light to light

water to water

fire to fire

mind to mind

heart to heart

human to human

face to face

like inspired reflections

that don’t depend upon a mirror

to make things far

seem near?

We all enter life

before the inception of thought

like intuitive forms of the inconceivable

with stars on our breath

and even when death

shifts our wavelengths toward the red

they don’t go out.

When did we ever need

more of a reason to shine

than our own seeing

needed to grow our eyes?

So why average out the crucials

looking for god like your lost omniscience

when she’s omniabsent everywhere

the moment you begin to look for her

like the muse of a longing poet

who knows how to keep the fire burning

as spontaneously in the lamps

as she does the urns?

Why put on a death mask

and go looking

for the highest common denominator

to the sum of it all

as if you were trying to commensurate

the dynamics of the world like pi

or square the roots of your eye

into the self-contained monad

of a whole number

forgetting that every number

like the letter of every word that was ever spoken

is the alpha and omega of all the rest?

Myriad houses with the same address.

Who speaks of completion

in a world where

one inspires the all

and the all inspires one

like grains of sand

pyramids and pearls

or one atom

elaborating a lonely dark space

into billions of galaxies

without beginning or end

and everything in existence

is already the boundless center

of the infinite immensities

in the creative intensities

at the extremeties of everything else?

PATRICK WHITE