THE WESTERN LIGHT

The western light

comes right in through my windows

and glows in a golden haze on the dirty panes.

It slashs geometric shadows on my landscapes

like some mad abstractionist

who took them way too personally.

And all they said

was moon tree star light stone flower river sun

as if that were enough of a vocabulary

to say the whole of creation

quietly under your breath

like a secret that’s shared by everyone.

Guess I’m not enough of an ideologue

to comb the swamp for my own skeleton

like the ancestor of modern art.

I’ve gazed too long and hard

at the waterlilies in the Fall River

as if I were meditating on koans

that effortlessly open by themselves

not to waste my mind on anything

that didn’t include my heart

like a work in progress

like a river on its way to the ocean.

Dark soon.

The night sheds petals of insight

like moonlight making waves

on the shoreless seas of enhanced awareness

where I stand like a human candle

with my little standard of flame

trying to light up the universe

so I can see what I am in the depths

of my own eyes.

If I’m the tragicomic clown of my own catastrophe

or if there’s something more profound

going on around me

than time and light

glancing off the mindstream

like birds against the delusive skies

that lie like the windows of insight

until you break through them

like the sun at midnight

shining its light

on a conspiracy of mirrors

against the moon.

I must have been mad before I was born

to see things the way I do now.

Everything is inconceivably probable somehow

like a fortune-cookie

that’s had its tongue cut out

for telling lies to the emperor

or the lack of a sign

for the thirteenth house of the misbegotten

in the neighbourhood watch of the zodiac.

Even when you lose your purpose in life

like a passport in a borderless country

you can still hang on to your identity

like a willess work engendered out of nothing.

You can still firewalk the ghost road of smoke

like stars under the feet of the dead

or follow your own breath

like a dancer that no one is leading.

It’s a surprise when you first come to see

that the greatest liberty of all isn’t death

but to cry as if you were bleeding

from a wound

so much sharper and deeper

than the poignancy of the knife that opened it

like a posthumous loveletter from the gods

you feel

reading your own fate

in the silence between their voices

as if forever hereafter

you could only be killed into life

and that every rafter of delusion

you ever sought shelter under

were the overturned hull of an empty lifeboat.

Sometimes I look at my life

like one of the splendid ambiguities

of a subtly nuanced godsend.

I try to befriend the way I feel

like the generous host

of a dangerous stranger

too cold and aloof

to introduce himself

as my shadow

my eclipse

my potential assassin.

I have tried to stay true to the lies

that led to the myth of my lucidity

like a mirage in a desperate desert of stars

I could drown in like an island

up to to the neck of an hourglass

in tidal waves of quicksand

laying my life down

like the foundation stone

of an inverted pyramid

that yearns for the state of mind

he enjoyed before life

more than that that won’t come after.

I have refused to put the torch out in its own reflection.

I have not tried to uproot

the beauty of the waterlilies

opening their eyes like stars

from the decay and the lies

and the scars that sustain them.

I have put to good use

the dysfunction of delusion

to make a credible raft

to get me to the other side

of this river of shadows

swollen like a flashflood

in a lunar seabed.

I have danced with ghosts

like a lonely shaman

around the unappeasable fires

of desire and death

entreating the nightsky

to rain on my flowerless roots

and sweeten the severity

of the dragon’s eyes

with tears.

I have lived in such a way

to actualize the nameless reality

of a few common words

like love and understanding

I’ve kept alight like fireflies on the wind

and cherished them

as if the seeds of insight

were the perennial beginning

of enlightened orchards

that taste like the fruit of compassion.

I have lived in such a way

like a thief of keys

to relieve the locks

on the nightwatch

of their tunnel vision

that it’s not safe

to give my new address

to my old mailbox.

But even in a black out

I have not kept the light out

by plastering my windows with starmaps

or gone underground

like a blind star-nosed mole

that put its eyes out

to share something

in common with the dead

who would never have dreamed

they would all end up sleeping with their mothers.

I open them to receive the sun.

I close them to remember the stars

I’ve been dancing under

for lightyears

against the gathering storm

like a poor man’s chandeliers.

I have celebrated my defiance

of hitching a winged horse

to a hearse

by expressing the joy I take

in the revolutionary spontaneity

of my unself-reliance.

But of all the things

I’ve ever outgrown

or overthrown

like a sword from a bridge

I gave back to the sacred waters of life

the last to fall

was the ghostship in the mirage

of the image I had of me.

I poured myself out

like imaginary water

from a fountainmouth

in a real drought

to green the secret Edens

at the sacred crossroads

of the four rivers

that might come of it

as if X marked the spot

where I was standing

as the best place to start a garden

on the waterwheel of the mindstreams

that radiated out of its stillness like spokes.

Sometimes you end up stealing fire

when all along

you thought you were meant

to invent the wheel

or make up a new language

out of the echoes of dolphins

breaking into birdsong

as if they had turned in their feet

to go back to the sea

but had not forgotten

that their fins

could fly as easily

as the wings they once wore on their heels.

Many rivers flow into the one sea

and the sea returns to transcendence

back the way it came

without stepping into the same mindstream twice.

And I prefer to think

that the same thing is true of the multiverse.

Everything that shines in the night

or in the mind

down to the smallest spark of insight

locked like a firefly

in a lighthouse of ice

on the same omnidirectional course.

And true north

just the magnetic attraction

of a voodoo doll

in a haystack of needles

trying to get a bearing on things

like the right ascension

and correct declination

of a lost soul

summoned like a deranged galaxy

to the singularity

at the bottom of a blackhole

to exchange the light it goes by

by upgrading its eyesight

to search for itself in the night

on the higher frequencies

of X-ray vision

on board an experimental satellite.

And yet for all the myriad universes

that bubble up in hyperspace

like the last breath of the drowning

I have refused to live

like a diving bell in a wishing well

trying to understand

why nothing came true but the coins.

If you’ve never resolved anything in your whole life

maybe you were meant

to keep the mystery alive.

The medium is not the message

when the message is the mystery.

A meaningful medium

is nothing but meaningless words.

The sky doesn’t intend to say birds.

The water doesn’t mean fish

anymore than an infinite number of other things.

Nothing lives like a machine

for something as small as a purpose.

You don’t have to live like a lense

to keep the sun in focus.

And maybe one of the greatest blessings

of being on the nightshift

is that when the universe is out of work

it has no use for us.

We’re free to be when and whatever we want.

Or thoroughly protean.

Or nothing at all.

A full eclipse of the clock on the wall

or a chromatically aberrant nightlight

like a colour crazy star

low on the horizon of the hall.

As for me and my house

I’ve lost track of the number of times

I’ve brought my starmud to enlightenment

like a horse you can lead to water

but you can’t make drink.

The words crawl.

The words swim.

The words take to their wings

like eagles and dragonflies

and startled waterbirds.

Half a sliced pear

looks like a short-necked Spanish guitar.

Looking for the meaning of this

isn’t the same

as listening to the music.

PATRICK WHITE

IT’S NOT SO MUCH

It’s not so much the darkness

that bothers me

it’s just that at these depths

the sea forgets how to dream.

And being a lamp unto yourself

where the darkness is so naive

it doesn’t run from the light

isn’t as much fun

as watching stars

try to imitate spiders

in the eleven dimensional corner

of my left eye

like cut-out constellations.

I’m not one of those who go looking for meaning

because they want to mean something themselves.

I listen to the hissing

of olaceously black rain on the asphalt

as the cars go by under my window

and the streetlights run like blood

in the gutters of their haemmorhaging swords.

The physicians must heal themselves

when the shadows of their grails fall ill.

I’m just singing

without seeking anything

like a nightbird in a secret grove

or a busker on a streetcorner

playing for nothing

because I don’t know what to ask for anymore

that isn’t just another version

of everything I’ve already had.

I’m just casting my voice like a ventriloquist

to overcome the loneliness

of the return journey home

only to discover

no one lives there anymore.

Illusory cures for illusory diseases.

Struggling not to be void-bound

is like a mastodon

trying to swim in quicksand.

You sink like the cornerstone

of a pyramid with a tilt.

You become the architect of a museum

your skeleton built

bone by bone

out of your minerally preserved

retroactive remains.

And it isn’t quite pain.

And it isn’t quite despair.

I’m wholly here and awake

but here isn’t anywhere

and there’s no road to take.

I ache

but there’s no longing

in the austere geometry of the windowpanes.

And if love were to come again

at this late date

what could that be

but more of the hysterical history

of the mystery of beauty and pain?

The moon running its tongue

along the edge of a sacrificial knife

to taste the wounded divinity

like poetry

in the festive blood

of a willing victim?

That knife was long ago

blunted on me

like the moon

trying to retract its claws

like the first and last crescents

out of a stone heart

it broke its fangs on

trying to maul it like a strawberry.

I still enjoy the flesh and spirit of women

and even if love is just

the effusion of an enzyme

that weighs the dealer

in the scales of his own delusion

and finds a feather’s weight missing

from the baggie he sold his soul

I told myself lightyears ago

in a narcotic cul de sac of the sixties

when I was more radical than Mephistopheles

that if it hasn’t got a root on it

don’t do it

but women can take a weed like me home

growing wild in a roadside ditch

and burying me deep

like someone they cherished

like the king of the waxing year

embedding my body parts

in a wound in the earth

invent agriculture.

If I am to be offered up as a tribute to love

I would still rather be harvested

than preyed upon.

But I fear what’s left of the garden

is just a few sunflowers for the bluejays

and a handful of scattered seeds for the smaller birds.

A rusting scythe under a blue moon

and an inspired scarecrow

reciting poetry

to the autumn crows

who don’t have the ear for it

or an eye for anything that isn’t

detachably silver.

And what of fame

that dirty word in an unclean mouth

that algae bloom in a crystal ball

that clouds it like a brackish aquarium

until the prophetic fish is lost

in the smog of its own unknowing

like Venus in the soot of a factory nightshift

when she beds down with Vulcan?

Who wants to be a name

bigger than their book

laid out like a gravestone

in the literary cemetery

of store-front windowpanes

that traffic implausible afterlives

among the dead

like hyperbolic pyramids

to mummified mannequins

with hype for breath

and social fashionistas

trying to make revolutionary statements

by using cosmetic accessories

as a dietary substitute for brains?

Who wants to shine on a starmap

when they’ve got the whole sky before them?

Who would choose

to fly like a kite on a leash

when they’ve got the wings of a bird?

Fame is like trying to take

the whole alphabet for your name

but you can tell it’s just a little hell

a poppy of fire

by the way it goes out like a candle

and any gust of time

can deflower its eternal flame.

Better to let your name thrive

like alien life

on an undiscovered planet

than become a tourist attraction.

At the moment of conception

who needs an audience in the womb

and at the leaving of life

maggots in your literary corpus

even before you’re in the tomb?

Why mark your remains with a pyramid

when any blade of grass will do?

Created out of starmud

it’s natural to want to shine

like flowers stars and mirrors

to let your light wake the worlds up

at daybreak

like the roar of tigers in the valley

but fame is a false dawn

and an unworthy witness

to your solitude.

Better to let your legend grow

and shed its own skin

like the moon or a snake

and start again naked

than dress up for your art

in the farce of a public wardrobe.

Some shine like a phoenix of desire.

Some write their name

like the light ricocheting off of water

but who takes a star

and imprints it like a fossil in cement

and walked and spit upon underfoot

expects to be pointed out

like one of the radiant highlights

of a mythogeneric firmament?

Catch a falling star

and put it in your pocket

never let it fade away.

Two minutes with a hook

isn’t the lyric of a book

that’s much of a rocket.

I’d rather be spaced out on my own

like the wavelength of a flying carpet

swimming like a sign of serpentine intelligence

written like a hieroglyph for time

on the tides of sand

in this desert of stars

than try to live up to the afterlives

they will tell about me

like lies about a pyramid.

Excellence is a darker affair than success.

I’m as lunar as any wolf I’ve ever run with

but that doesn’t mean

I’m howling my heart out

to be the man on the moon in a spotlight.

I’m just up alone in the middle of the night

in an agony of insight

trying to keep from going mad

when the muse renews her virginity in my blood

like the craziest affair I’ve ever had

with the moon in my solitude

breaking through the clouds

as if she were rising from her bath.

Let your name be a leaf on the mindstream

of the path you’re on.

Your fame a whiff of smoke

from a fire rising among the trees

on a distant hillside.

Fame is a highway

but it’s the rivers

that will remember your name.

The life of the mind

doesn’t keep secrets from the heart

but fame will make you a stranger to your art.

It’s a new creation in every moment

flashing in and out of the abyss

like the occult semaphore

of a ghost ship in distress.

Excellence keeps success behind it

like a star keeps its light in its wake.

Everything is dark before it

and keeping up with the times

means being a day late

for your own arrival.

Yesterday can’t prophecy

what will be true about tomorrow.

Only today can lie like that.

Better the lonely bliss

of anonymous dark matter

making the world up

as it goes along

like something homeless

whistling its way through the night

like the nameless lyric

of an unknown road

it’s been following for years

than the crowded sorrows

of a mirror that weeps

unenlightened tears in a spotlight

that fall like fake jewels

from the last take of the third eye

on the opening night of a braille television.

Get behind me Satan.

Get behind me A Dajal the One-eyed Liar.

I’m not looking for distractions

and I’m not asking for the truth.

I’m not setting leghold trapline experiments

to capture the facts

or lamplighting in the groves of knowledge.

The only body of wisdom I appeal to

is my own

and I get up

and wash its face every morning.

I don’t take the high or the low place.

I take the no place

and things come to me

like poems sailing down the Yang-tze

like swans following

a trail of feathers shed by the moon

or heretical autumn leaves

washed down the world mountain

by disbelieving mindstreams

like refugees

purged by the more

religiously conservative evergreens.

The truth flowers out of its own root

for each of us

like a waterlily out of a swamp

or a chandelier of columbines

out of the moss pate

on a granite skull.

The minute you go looking for it

it leaves home.

I am that I am.

Sit still and know.

So why go around

overturning everybody’s heads

like stones

to seek

what abides in you

like the apple abides in the seed?

It’s clear.

Everyone’s a false idol

in the shrine of their mirroring consciousness.

But fear isn’t the beginning of wisdom

anymore than courage is.

Life doesn’t cast a shadow

like the terrible aftermath of the light

if you don’t get it right.

The best thing is

to sit down

on the ground of your being

in the absence of God

and have a good laugh

at finding reality up your own sleeve

when it wasn’t the answer

but the enlightened question

that set you free.

That what you find

sad mad bad about the world

is the shadow of your own lucidity.

And if God is missing from your life

what could that be

but her original refusal

to impose herself like a prison

on your liberty?

Not that.

Not this.

Beyond delusion and reality.

Not bound.

Not free.

The absolute clarity of the abyss

looking into the mystery of me

with my own eyes

like someone watching me in a dream

that wakes up with me when I do.

I have given of the gifts I was given

in full measure and a bit beside.

Water back to water.

Breath back to space.

To live is to give.

It’s the nature of the place.

And you don’t need a Zen master

on a tatami mat

or a blue Sufi on a prayer rug

to understand that.

Your face is the blossom

of your body fruit

and your hands and feet

are its leaves.

You’re a rootless tree

standing in the midst

of your own luminous windfall

and the worlds are humming

with bees at your feet.

Your heart sweetens

in the ageless autumn sun

and at night

your mind is a riot of stars.

Though my life may have been broken

like a toy in the hands of an intense muse

I have lived openly in her fire

without any skin on

and walked barefoot for lightyears

with the ashes of a phoenix in an urn

to deposit on the unswept stairs

of one of her ancient shrines

all that was left of my heart.

I’ve made a firewalk of the stars.

I’ve tasted the honey of life

in her hive of bliss

and drunk the black elixirs

when she dances like a snakepit

and makes a grail of my skull

and fills it full of the abyss

and says here

drown all of this

in a single gulp.

I have kissed the serpent on the head

like the sun the green bud of a daffodil

and it was me that bloomed

like the solar flare a cobra.

I have been her lover

and she has been my will.

I have been her garden

and she has been

the secret flower

that arises from my decay.

And the only road I’ve ever taken

that lead me up to her threshold

was the one I made through the starfields

by wandering off the path.

Only the lost pilgrim can find his way to her.

He can tell by the light in her eyes

that he’s only chasing fireflies

in all directions at once

but that’s more than enough to encompass

the whole earth

and beyond the veils of Isis

in the heavens above

feel the stars streaming through your blood

like one fix of love she knows

even in the depths

of your eyeless solitude

will keep you high forever.

I’m her fool

and she’s the muse of my folly.

Her tongue draws blood

like a thorny leaf

and I bleed beads of holly.

In her voice

I can hear the name

of every woman

I’ve ever been apprenticed to

like an echo of the sound

of one hand clapping for an encore.

She’s been the geni

and I’ve been her magic lamp.

She’s tied me to a stake

like the first rule

of an unprincipled heretic

who burns like midnight oil

in a school

because he thinks it’s sexier

to be a taboo

than a threshold

and applied herself like fire

to my education.

She’s been my funeral pyre

but I’ve been the keeper of the flame.

She’s never given me the key to her place

but she’s never

not left the door ajar

or an open window

for me to enter

like a thief of fire

approaches a furnace

knowing he will be consumed

in the fulfillment of his own prophecy.

The washed-up starfish

turns into a galaxy.

I live to suffer

what I rejoice in the most.

So that every love poem

I ever wrote her

was a fresh wound

not an old scar.

An ageless flame on an aging lamp

I have been a traveller

and she has been the star

that has filled the field

of my enraptured vision

with worlds within worlds.

Her inspiration has not deceived me.

I have received what she has given

and more.

Now I want to be

what the genie wishs for.

PATRICK WHITE

FOUR AND A HALF POUNDS OF SUNLIGHT

Four and a half pounds of sunlight

hits the earth a day

like heroin hits the streets of New York.

I forget who ran away with her spoon in the lullaby

but the moon’s cooking rocks in her craters.

Madness is more of a particle than a wavelength.

A pigeon flys by my window.

I’m staring at the garish red depersonalized logo

of the Bank of Nova Scotia across the street.

It’s trying to teach me how to live

like a sexless drone in a heartless bee-hive

but it’s stolen all the gold from the flowers

and there’s no pollen

there’s no honey

left for someone like me to gather.

So I’m writing this poem to no one instead.

It’s not a Luna moth

caught inside a store-front window

fluttering against the glass to get out

and go crazy in the rapture of the streetlight.

My heart is buried in it

like an improvised explosive device

that’s been timed to go off lightyears from now

when I go supernova

like the buddha on a brainwave

that had an insight into nothing.

I’m wired for detonation like a candle

that doesn’t know when to quit.

All the stars take their light from it.

And all true lovers their inspiration.

Vegetable vendors in the souks of Tunis.

Vietnamese monks in the streets of Saigon.

Giordano Bruno at the stake

at the beginning of a new century in Venice.

Or me sitting here like a nightlight in a morgue

so the dead can find their way back home.

Creation is self-immolation

when it’s intense enough.

Burn baby burn.

Perfect combustion.

No Holy Ghost like smoke in the urn.

No holy war in the hallelujah of your hooka.

No bones in the firepit of your last cremation.

An abuse of time

in an extravagance of space

is a day in the life of Ivan Denisovich

on Dostoyevsky’s deathbed.

Unravel your rivers of lava

like a volcanic fireshed

tempering its words

like swords and islands in the sea

to give them an edge up on life.

You haven’t got both eyes open on poetic insight

if you cherish the light

and despise the ore

that carries it like life

in the nickel-iron core

of a spermatazoic meteor

to planets that have never been green before.

Standing in the doorway of your coffin

cross the threshold

break the taboo

that incarcerates your heart

like the royal seal of a blueblood

and reprieve yourself as if every moment

were one minute to midnight

for the pumpkins on desolation row.

Carve your own features

into a skull

with eyes that burn

like cosmic candles

at your own funeral.

Irony is the failure of a black farce

without enough life-force

to transcend its own poetry

by turning the immoveable mass of night

into dark energy.

Fiat lux.

Let there be light.

Nur wa nur.

Light upon light.

But you can’t see it with your eyes

because seeing hasn’t devolved yet

into the names and forms of things.

Illumination everywhere

but nothing to enlighten.

No Buddha.

No Bodhi Tree.

No Morning Star.

Nothing far.

Nothing near.

Nothing to reflect upon

in the eyeless void of the mind-mirror.

Look at this.

Look at this as if you were blind.

Look at this before there were any veils.

Look at this before God realized

what a secret she was

and nothing was hidden.

Look at this like the witness in a dream

stands on a high hill like a Druid

overlooking a war

between the names of God

and says carry on.

Or no more.

The name of your god is Bran.

There is more under heaven and earth

than is contained in your i-pod Horatio.

Once it’s fallen

even in spring

the green apple

is as old as the ripe one.

Getting back to your roots means

you disappear

you give up your blossom

your leaf

your dusky sphericity.

Root radix radish

returning to the source means

being totally radicalized by the void

by the emptiness you embody

like an empty cup

hanging like a mutant dewdrop

in empty cupboard

on a question mark

that isn’t so much a hook

or a Scythian sword

as a scythe.

Getting down to essentials means

you run out of elements before you get there

so no on ever arrives

who’s aware of it.

The extremes of chaos

are the fundamentals of a harmony

that sets you free.

Peace isn’t the leftover of a war

that cannibalized everything.

A morsel on Caesar’s plate.

It’s the creative dynamic of a ferocious freedom.

It’s living without prophets and dolls to talk to.

It’s speaking in a voice

that isn’t the first among echoes.

It’s looking into a dark mirror

that isn’t addicted to your reflection

and seeing that nothing is seperate or isolate

because there’s nowhere

the Big Bang or God

can cast creation away from herself

like a torn veil

or turn her back on the world

without coming face to face with herself

the way an old widow

disapproves of a drunken teen-age girl.

You fall in love like a hole.

You make love to a hole.

You see through a hole.

You drink from a hole.

You eat and speak and breathe

through a hole

Your body is a bag of water

with nine holes in it.

Gravity’s a hole.

You dwell in a hole

and labour every day

digging holes for a living

to fill the hole in your belly

like the little Dutch Boy

who stuck his thumb

in a hole in a dyke

to keep the sea from taking back

the hole of his excavated country.

Space-time

is a blackhole within a blackhole.

Behind us the abyss of a hole

and before us

the available dimension of another.

Mommy was a hole

and every groundhog’s got two of them.

Cradle to grave.

Hole to hole.

All the bubble-brained membranes

in the whole of the holistic multiverse

are just thin-skinned holes

twisted like wormholes

into the shapes of rabbits and dachshunds

like party balloons in the hands of a clown

who’s full of cosmic laughter

at his own playful creativity.

Water looks for the holes in everything

knowing

no holes

no flowing.

And you might think

that it’s thought

that keeps the mindstream going

and that it’s thought that it’s after

but it’s the hole in the argument

that keeps it growing.

We put our dead in holes in the earth

where hell dwells.

Shouldn’t we let the birds

peck holes in them

like winter apples

that overstayed their welcome

if we expect them to get to heaven?

Seven come eleven

like eyesockets on the abacus of the dice

that only rolls whole numbers

it’s counting like grains of rice

sown on the stairs of a church wedding

that gutter like skulls

that went bowling with the bride

because they didn’t have the vigor of grass

to sprout in cement

and there were no holes in the event

through which to pass.

And that’s what I’m doing here.

I’m a seed on rock

dreaming of all the things

I’ll never need to be

that would exhaust my potential.

I’m this emptiness

channeling creation out of the void

with my ear up to the keyhole of an open door.

I’m the vacuum that nature abhors.

And I’m the bloodflower

of an ancient star

that pours long wavelengths

of red-shifted light

like a well-aged wine

into the skullcups of the two of us

until our tongues are blacker

than a fortuitous eclipse

in a liberated telescope

that drank deep from its silver mirror

like Narcissus at the water’s edge

and drowned in its own constellations

when no one else was watching.

I’m the myriad-eyed astronomer

in residence for the universe.

I’m the inquisitive physicist

who obeys the law in reverse

and doesn’t think one size fits all

the knowledge in the multiverse.

It’s not my nature to judge or curse

but if I’m mad at someone

I intensify my blessing

until it hurts.

Mass is the sensation

of the mind’s gravity

in its own presence

and time and space

are the illusion of gaps

between thoughts.

A unified field theory is dead.

But a unifying one

lives like a mind that’s never finished

converting dark matter to light.

It never goes out of date.

Time isn’t early

and eternity isn’t late.

And then there is that which shines

that the light itself is the shadow of.

What’s the cube root of love?

Sisyphus might be absurd

but he isn’t blind or stupid.

His brain isn’t the engine

of the energy of the insight

that is equal to his mind times

the velocity of thought squared.

He’s got eyes.

But that’s not where his seeing is.

He’s got more selves

than Esmeralda Marcos has shoes

but that’s not where his being is.

I’m an electronic boddhisatva

who jumps orbitals

like the wheels of birth and death

on a photonic freight train

carrying the remnants of my factory brain

like a war effort

beyond the Urals

to be reassembled again

where the bombers can’t reach it.

I’m the lead end of the Golden Horde

stabilizing my radioactive half-life

in Keeshteem in the county of Perm.

I’m a dirty bomb that refuses to go off.

I’m a homesick terrorist in exile

because I’m not fanatical about God.

It’s hard to tell the wavelength

from the particle

when the moon walks on the water

like Buddha in the Lankavatara Sutra

five hundred years before Jesus

walked on the Sea of Galilee.

I am the Dead Sea.

Everybody walks on me.

I’ve got streetlights bobbing all over me

like a Christmas tree

like fireflies manning a ghost ship

but the crosswalks aren’t in the places

they used to be

and no one can read

these s.o.s. s I keep writing

like loveletters in Etruscan linear A

for someone to come and rescue me from me.

So my works are returned to the Library of Congress

like the anonymous empties of a two-four

back to the beer-store

like Japanese fishing floats

free of their nets

to ride the tides of hyperspace

like a bubble in a world of thorns.

There’s a tender center

in the middle of my moondog haloes

and there’s a point to my horns.

PATRICK WHITE

SO USED TO THIS

So used to this

the pain is almost normalcy.

I’m more attached now

to everything that has gone

than I ever was when it was here.

How could so much serious potential

turn into such a laughable past?

And yet what part of it don’t I cherish?

I am a Canadian poet.

Fire in a cold country.

I burn like a glacier.

I think like the Burgess Shales.

I feel like the Canadian Shield.

Snow dragon.

Half-mad.

Old.

Poor.

Alone.

Baby-boomer from the sixties

that took up all the air in the room

and sucked the future out of us

though we didn’t know it at the time.

Now I’m as original

as the singularity at the topless bottom of a blackhole.

And the ashes are as fascinating as the fire.

My eyes are diamonds wishing they could cry.

I’m freezing to death in a blizzard

trying to convince myself it’s a choir.

Or the down of angels in a pillow fight.

I live in an apartment with three windows

and my goldfish Toke

where the floors are so warped by time and tonnage

you’re either wobbling like a drunk

or taking dramamine to keep from getting seasick

on your way to the kitchen.

And it smells

like someone died here before me.

Turn on a tap

and the pipes knock and groan

like an extinct species of dinosaur

coming back to life.

And yesterday the toilet

mistook itself for a fountain

and flooded the bridal store downstairs.

I try not to get too excited about things

hoping to use the unwanted wisdom

I garnered from my tragic errors

but I keep getting carried away.

Like fire in the night air

I expend myself on nothing.

But squandering it

is the only way I know how

to honour life

as if life were a beautiful woman.

Though even that might not be important.

I’m a good wolf

and know how to turn a porcupine over

without getting any quills in my nose

but I’ve never approached a woman on her back

without walking away

with icicles plunged through my heart.

It’s the discipline of this long effortless art

to learn to thaw my way out of them

but I don’t blame women for being water.

When they cry

they put the dragon out

as easily as blowing out a candle.

Now I’m a little black monk of a wick

waiting for the resurrection of wax

like a fly in amber

for the end of the last ice age

or an astronaut in suspended animation.

Fat chance.

But I keep walking

though I’ve run out of road.

I keep writing these poems.

I keep painting these pictures.

I keep hustling a buck

so I can buy a little time-share

in the eye of this hurricane of razor-blades

and shake awhile with the shock

and patch the slashes

with the Atropic threads

of my severed life-themes.

These aren’t the lines of a poem

they’re the seams of the stitches

that are sowing a wounded mouth shut

so it doesn’t bleed to death

pouring its heart out

like blood on the snow

that doesn’t turn into wine.

I’m just a man talking to himself like barbed wire.

My flesh is torn on the plinths of a star

that digs into me like a Spanish spur.

The snake bites the heel

and the heel bites back.

Not much of guide

but sometimes it’s all I’ve got to go by.

And when it’s not that

I’m all three wise men

following any firefly that blinks

in all directions at once.

But I’m sick of messiahs

that don’t come looking for me.

By the time you’re salvage

it’s too late for salvation.

I can’t remember the last time

I sang like a fountainmouth

crazy with words

washing their wings in my eloquence.

Now the poems pour out of me

like blood through my pores

and my eyes weep acid

like an antidote to the elixirs

that once tasted so sweet

when they bloomed like flowers

and perfumed the night air

with the flavour of stars.

No one to rely on but myself.

No one to suffer my downfall but me.

No one to endure my rising again

like the Summer Triangle

with more than a hundred and eighty degrees.

I’ve always pursued an earthly excellence

from as far back as I can remember

gold stars at the top of my essays in school

but perfection isn’t a direction

any fool can fake like a Japanese plum blossom.

Comes a time

when the only thing

a cosmic compass can do

to save face

like a course correction

is to gut itself on its own needle

like a spur disembowelling Pegasus.

No one to fear for me but me.

No one to hear me but this autumn wind

that keeps talking over everything I say

as if I’m not there

like a bookend to my own posthumous works.

In a world of electrical guitars

I feel I’m trying to play rock and roll

on the bagpipes

or meditative flute music

for insomniac cobras.

I’ve put sensible shoes on

and tried to walk the way other people do

but the wings on my heels don’t fit.

And whether I walked barefoot in chains

and called it liberty

or kept my boots on in bed

so I wouldn’t meet the dead unshod

I’ve never greased my feet with reality

to cheat on the long firewalks

that tested me to see if

I was worthy of my initiation

into the cosmic inflation

of my own pain thresholds.

I’ve done my time standing up.

I’ve stared at the same immensities

as my simian ancestors.

I’ve eaten my own ashes out of a silver spoon

and drunk my blood out of a cracked skull-cap.

I’ve read the linear A of my Etruscan scars

like the dead language

of the hidden thirteenth king of the zodiac

who was delegitimized like the new moon

of an unpredictable eclipse

on an ostracized lunar calendar.

I’ve broken bread with jovial evil

at a table in a snakepit

free of all mythologies

knowing neither of us would do

the other any good

and a Pyrric victory

wasn’t worth the liberty we took

to shed our skins

and spread our wings

like an old truth that didn’t fit

the cosmology of the moment anymore.

Evil bought into the legend

and I didn’t drop a dime on its farce.

When two opposites meet

in an hospitable truce

on either side of the table

they greet each other

as if they were both

dangerous and scarce

and observing a propriety

befitting the rarity of the moment

they pass the salt

both agreeing that if it spills

it’s no one’s fault.

I’m the gene for moral immunity

that separates the wolves from the sheep.

I’m so nacreously poetic

that if you put a grain of dirt

on the oyster of my tongue

I’ll expand it into the pearl of the full moon

and pointing my snout at the sky

like the holster of a gun

some lunatic ran off with

to shoot the stars out

I’ll howl like Pushkin in Last Duel Park.

You give me a spoonful of ashes

and I’ll give you back Joan of Arc.

Real means full measure

and the multiverse beside.

You study the stars

as if they weren’t part of you.

I look upon them as family.

You look for extraterrestrial life out there.

I reverse the spin of my electrons

and explore alien biology right here

in every encounter I have with myself

by the deep starwells of my own cells

where I drink the light

that turns into water blood and wine

knowing there’s nothing more alien

than this intimate life of mine

that keeps trying to prove I don’t exist.

Know thyself long enough

and you’ll eventually become

a stranger to yourself.

No I.

No You.

Soma Sema.

Phenomena noumena.

You’ll wind up sitting in a room like this one

listening to a single mother with a child

playing country music in the apartment next door

as if she were the last one on earth

to know what a broken heart means anymore

or what it’s like to be a virgin

that gave birth to her own abandonment.

And the floors are as warped

and muscled as potato chips

or the space-time continuum of starfields

in all eleven dimensions at once

by the exertions of local blackholes

that have no respect for the integrity

of the picture-plane

anymore than pain does

for the red velevet curtains

haemmorhaging like roses

on both sides of a cracked windowpane.

Or as the Sufis say

if it’s only water that falls from your eyes

when you weep

and not blood

it’s just another lover’s tale.

You haven’t failed yourself deep enough.

You’re still looking for gold

in the abandoned mines of your bones

long after the canary has died

and the wolves have lapped your marrow

like music from a flute.

All is Void.

All is Silence.

And when you speak

you’ll speak in the voices of all humans

who were born missing a root like a parent

and making a virtue of a vice

a ubiquitous absence into a god

talk to it like empty cupboard doors

that won’t stay shut.

The departed and far draw near.

The blackhole turns into a seance

and summons the star to channel

the ghost of its grievance.

And a stranger keeps arriving

like a warning that came too late

to remind you of who you are

when you’re sitting in an apartment

as old and spent as a maxed-out quasar

with Daliesque floors

and overflowing clocks

that don’t flush like toilets.

And over and over and over again

like a cliche of enlightenment

like a cosmic insight

into the orbital nature

of your own madness and pain

looping everything else in the universe

like a deerfly that flew in through

an unscreened window

expecting a different effect

from the flyswatter

of a Zen master

who rejects it

like a false interpretation of a koan

with the sound of one hand clapping.

Over and over and over again

you realize

that every moment

is a death in life experience

as immediate as the velocity of insight squared

when you’ve run out of lies of your own

sitting in the pharoanic chaos

of your pyramidal afterlife

alone with a goldfish

in the rubble of your last incarnation

your vital organs

stacked around you in cardboard boxes

as you wonder where they put the dope

so you can get philosophically stoned

on your abandonment of all hope

that there’s any pattern god reason law cause

or unifying field theory

among ten thousand theses

to the saturation bombings

that keep changing your life

like a species of warm-blooded sauropod

into these nuclear winters

of degenerate starmud

waiting like a wild Arctic strawberry

to ripen quickly in the midnight sun

like the heart of Canadian poet

in the stone dolmens

and arboreal totem-poles

that stand up to the inclemency of the weather

like a red poppy of blood

pinned to the chest of a snowman

on memorial day

like a veteran human

that will be long forgotten by the spring of the year

like tears shed in a bad dream

you never wake up from

to the way things were

before your scales turned into fur.

Before your poetry turned into a great fire

that burned the forest down

like literature.

And you sit like a phoenix

alone in a homeless apartment

as if your heart were the urn

of the ashes of the Library of Alexandria

waiting for the first green leaf

of your next poem

to prove you’re still alive.

And though every breath

that feathers it into flame

is a nameless passport

to a familiar nowhere

you thrive on the wind

like a root embedded in everywhere.

You stare out of the window

like one of the membranes of M-theory

torn like an old blind

or a ruptured hymen

that broke like a primordial bubble in hyperspace

and you wonder which is worse

to never know your place in the scheme of things

or see all the permutations and combinations

of your infinitely sad-eyed face

in the disappointed features

of the creaturely multiverse

seeking shelter from the storm

in an old circus tent

that houses more content

than it can conform to

like Homo Heidelbergensis

in a grubby apartment

he’s trying to warm to.

PATRICK WHITE

SEE YOU CRAWLING ALONG THE STREET AT NIGHT

See you crawling along the street at night

with three coats on

like a corpse in a garbage bag

pushing another along in your shopping cart

from trash can to trash can

looking for your lost body parts.

Or you’re standing in the doorway out of the rain

in blonde army boots

with your shoelaces undone like spinal cords

and a dirty dress with big pink flowers on

that looks like it wore you to a rodeo

and you were the calf they roped.

People say you were a beauty back in the day.

That the mailman never delivered a loveletter

without a hard on

and even the local ministers

wanted to bring you to Jesus like Jonestown

and lay you down on the ground

like a triple x-rated cross

where salvation played second fiddle

to temptation and lust.

Man does not live by bread alone.

You had done nothing to anyone

but Hammurabi wanted his pound of flesh.

The small town businessmen ached

to incorporate you like a slush fund

they could dip into anytime

they needed a dirty drunken weekend

in old Montreal

with a trophy chick

to remind them how successful they were

at lying for a living.

I saw your eyes once

in passing

when the wind blew the hoody off your head.

They were blue skies without birds

but they still looked

as if they could have had a singing career

without knowing any of the words.

I wanted to say something

that wouldn’t be misunderstood

even just hello

but you’d placed

a No Man’s Land of barbed wire

between me and your solitude

and I could tell by the way

you narrowed your eyes at me

from your hiding place in the rubble

I was on a suicide mission at dawn

up against a machine-gun

in the grip of a die-hard Hun.

How much fun

had been made of you I wondered

as I walked on

down the deserted street

and how did it get to be an act of war

just to greet you.

I heard you once had a child they plucked from you

like a wild strawberry in a hospital bed.

That you loved the father with all your heart

but he loved you with his head.

He was a rich man’s son

who lived off the dead

by inheriting the harvest of their labours

and he could afford the lawyers to take custody

of the fruit of your womb

as if your last will and testimony

like a voice from the tomb

were the first of many favours

he’d do for your son on his own.

A changeling mother worthy of his future

and a good education

and summer vacations at the cottage

with yachts and canoes and inner tubes.

But no you.

I heard they wrote you a cheque

to cover the expense of his absence.

After that you sold yourself to everyone

for all that you could take.

You weren’t tempted by evil.

You were exempted by the evil

that had been done to you

and you fucked the snake

until you had taught it

to kill other men for you

that were dying to lead you astray.

You crushed their heads

under the murderous innocence of your heel.

You would not go down to death

like Persephone again.

You knew where Hades buried his jewels

and how to give blowjobs to the rubies

that dripped from your neck like blood

from the necklace of skulls of Kali.

The fools would feel your pain

as if they owned it

like a woman undressing in a window

knowing she was being watched.

A town councillor told me

that your vengeance went on for years

until one day your own son

came to you on the sly

with some highschool friends

to learn how to fornicate

to avoid being embarassed on his next hot date.

It’s said that you had everything to give

at this point in your life

but nothing to offer.

The son was revealed

but hate had concealed the mother

and it was too late in the day

for the key to find the lock.

He’d have to find another way

to pull his sword from the rock

if he wanted to be crown his pecker king.

You chased him down the stairs

back to the hilarity of the good life

that was too happy to doubt

the adventure would ever end.

Is that when you went around the bend

like six white horses

and a runaway hearse?

Three years of thirty pills a day

and a year and a half in the looney bin

where they gave you thirty more

like pieces of silver

at your own crucifixion

to betray yourself.

But I could have told you friend

demon to demon

beauty is a bigger curse than genius

because twice as obvious.

Genius is isolated

by the ignorance of the mob.

Hidden like a star at noon

in the blazing of their blindness

but beauty isn’t spared

the rapacious of their gaze

and what their eyes admire

their hands will wreck.

Ask Blake.

O rose thou art sick.

The invisible worm

that flys in the night

has found out thy crimson bed of joy

and doth they sweet short life destroy.

Your rose haemmorhaged.

You gave birth to a healthy baby boy

but it was your life that miscarried

after the fact.

A broken seal of blood on a clean white sheet.

The last loveletter you ever signed.

An ice-cream cone in a blizzard of blackflies.

And between your thighs

the Gates of Heat.

Fifty thousand Persians

and three hundred Spartans

fighting in the pass at Thermopylae.

I watch you walking up and down the street

like an old fishwife in Atlantis

and I ask myself

is that the face that launched ten thousand ships?

The rose blown

all that’s left

is that ragged star of hair on a withered rose-hip?

And I want to shout down from my window

in the thirteenth house of the zodiac

hey you there

with the broken arrow in your teeth

why don’t you come up here

where the air isn’t wounded

by your breathing?

And bring your baggage with you

and we’ll sit down together

and I’ll remove the thorns from your eyes

like slivers of stars from fallen chandeliers

and we’ll share the same madness

as if Alice had just come to take tea

with a mirror with tears in its eyes

like a sad telescope

that’s looked too long and hard and far

into the dark night of its soul

to care whether my heart is too spaced-out

and yours is in a wormhole.

Heal softly vicious one.

Thaw like an ice-age.

Let your rivers rise like an alluvial voice

to the mouths of their deltas

and let your lullaby

fill the empty cradles

of the seabeds on the moon again

with the happier fish of liberated emotions

swimming through enlightened oceans

of fathomless bliss

where laughing Zen masters

whisper in your ear like rain

and blow you kisses like flowers

and birds returning in the spring

that absolve you of all pain

with the brutal gentleness of their words.

The stone is lustrous.

But from it comes nothing.

The ore is different.

But from it comes gold.

Turn the baglady back into a bee

and reside in your hive again

like a queen enthroned in honey.

Go ask the morning glory

and the deadly nightshade

like ladies in waiting

to help you put your game-face back on again

and perfume your flesh with the elixirs

of a virgin witch

with a sunny profile

and a lunar shadow.

I’ll teach you how to drink your beauty

from a broken mirror

as if you’d just recovered the grail

and you’ll forgive me for knowing how to

eat the darkness and shit out light.

Sweet one it’s all right

to go dancing with club-footed mops

for reasons that aren’t apprenticed

to the master hand of sorcery.

No one’s lived through what you have

quite as you have before.

You’re the door the angels marked

like an emergency exit

out of Sodom and Gommorah

and you’re the original mystery

of how even a homeless refugee

following fireflies through a labyrinth

as if there were as many axes to the earth

as there are pins in the eyes of a voodoo doll

counting the angels that dance on their heads

can find her own way back

like a circuitous river

the retrograde motion of Mars

or a sexual dakini on a dark enlightenment path

that took the long lonely way home

through a dangerous valley

because she had more in common with the moon

than she did the tungsten streetlights of reality.

Funny isn’t it

how we always capitulate

to what we fear the most

like the skin of one

among myriad shadow selves

you have to die to fit into?

A snake’s wardrobe

in the closets of the moon.

Ballerina shoes that fit

like the chrysales of silk worms

working like child labour

on the nightshifts of the mulberry bushes.

Crystal slippers that can’t fake

the metamorphoses of midnight

and take to their heels with wings.

And then there’s this one unworn mask

that’s never been recognized by anyone

who hasn’t been effaced of their identity

like moonchalk on a blackboard

and it’s rumoured that anyone

who dares to wear it

will see through all delusion

that what appalled it like a self

is a dysfunction of starmud

created in its own image.

That life is a festival of spontaneous absurdities

not the occult grammar of a religious ritual

that leaves you in desolation and solitude

as if what was most sacred about you

could only last

like a mask among the Dogans of East Africa

until the rite was over

and you were discarded with indifference

like a strawdog.

Who among all sentient forms

embodies the likeness of you

that fills the void

even if you’re groping a braille starmap

of the supernovas and blackholes

of your thoughts and feelings

like the skin of elephant

in a dark room in Kansas City

where the cowboys have never seen one before?

The flowers bloom no less brightly

in a slum

than they do at the Taj Mahal.

Most people look up agape at the white one

like the full moon in daylight

and miss the black one at their feet

on the lunar side of the street

as if the shadow of perfection

were cast down in ruins

like a throw of the dice.

And do you see the beauty

that arises out of the perishing

like the dome of a budding waterlily

devoted to a loved one’s demise?

I’ll comb out all the Gordian knots

in your tangled hair

like Alexander with his sword

striking midnight

like a prophetic time-lock

on the door to Asia.

No more Medusas.

No more many-headed Hydras.

No more guillotines in a Reign of Terror

imposed by Robespierre.

Weep the acids out

of the bloodshot pearls of your eyes

and taste the antidote in your tears

to the poisons that were spit into yours

by toxocological cobras

looking for an open wound

they could target

like Zen archers

when the bow and the arrow become

one lightning strike from the ground up.

Hold your life up like a torch

to the myths in the Caves of Les Trois Freres

or like Gabriel the angel of light

reciting things that Muhammad can’t read

in the cave of Hira in the month of heat

or Jesus in Joseph of Aramithea’s tomb

before he stepped back into the light

or the Buddha cowled in the lotus

of his own unattainable emptiness

and see what’s written there

like a diary you kept

of your own eclipses and insights

into the features of the teacherless wisdom

you had to forsake to live it.

We all walk the same path you do

whether it’s strewn

with flowers stars or thorns.

We’re all shut out

by the same gates and doors as you are.

But how few are as clear

in their house

as you are in your homelessness.

You’ve dropped all pretense

of being anything more than you are

when everyone else has ceased to exist.

You take the low place

and all things flow down into you

like lost wallets and stashs of blow

and used condoms

abandoned by a snake

that got too big for its britches

like a phase of the moon

waxing and waning

above the dumpsters

in the lovesick parking lots.

And I’ve heard what

the ugly teen-age boys

who never get laid call you.

Hag and whore and plague rat

and seen how they torment you

out of their sexual frustration

after the girl they wanted

went home alone

and their little manhood

couldn’t cope with coming down

after she’d smoked all their dope.

So they stoned you like Mary Magdalene

when they called Jesus’ bluff

for not getting laid enough

to be with or without sin.

Three blind mice.

See how they run

from a righteous fist

and a white knight with a butcher’s knife.

And I remember you looking at me

after they’d gone

as if I were scarier than they were.

And nowhere in your thousand yard stare

the slightest hint of thanks

as I picked you up off the ground

and gathered your scattered treasures

your jewels of junk

and put them back in your cart.

But I could see the impact craters on your heart

and seemed to understand

why you locked all your water up like the moon

and let go of your atmosphere.

Most of us have one face

to meet other faces

and another we keep to ourselves

on the far side of our eyelids

but I paint portraits on the side

and I could see

you had turned both of yours

away from the earth

and glared out at the bleak stark stars

without blinking

as if you wanted to be the first

to outstare them.

The spider holds its dreamcatcher

like a constellation

spun out of its lifelines

like strands of silk

up to the stars

and waits like an ice-pick

holding a jewel

in its lunar pincers

in dead center

that needs a transfusion

like a junkie fixing

of butterfly juice.

And I could tell by the way

you clutched

the broken discarded things of the world

like relics the Vikings would never get hold of

you were on a grailquest

not to discover

the concealed meaning of life and love

but to recover the use of it.

You refused to hang your messiah on a false cross.

And the rest of us

would just have to get used to it.

PATRICK WHITE