TRYING TO WEAVE A FLYING CARPET

Trying to weave a flying carpet out of the stray threads of the snake pit of life themes that so often at this time of night seems the subconscious content of a troubled mind. To get out of here. To rise above it all by conjoining the lowest with the highest and ascending the burning ladder of my own spine like a serpent with wings, no candidate of angels, forsake their feathers for the scales of the dragon? Shall I prophecy? Should I read the sine curve of every wavelength of thought and feeling like the Egyptian glyph for intelligence the viper leaves in the sand, in the stars, in the flowing of the mindstream? Forego the aviomancy of the dove for the Pythian herpetologists of Delphi? When the strong rope of my spinal cord is undone like a million weak filaments of tungsten nerve endings flickering like a lightbulb about to go out, is there one among these I can climb up to heaven on to shine among the stars like Draco around the axis of the earth? A circumpolar constellation. Half the double helix of the sign of a healer with only one wing and a dubious prayer to go on? And is it of any import anywhere in the wide wondering world that I should care to mend the unravelling of so much the full moon cherished before I swallowed it whole like a cosmic glain in a shaman’s nest to bring the rain? That I might be drenched in tears that could liberate my eyes like frogs and thorny flowers and egg-laying stars hibernating in the dry creekbeds of a desert that has spent a long time like a bride with a hope chest waiting to bloom?

Impasses and thoroughfares. Mirages undulating like the faceless veils of torrid atmospheres whose eyes have never known water. Ambivalence. Uncertainty. Doubt. Ambiguity. And the facile, end-stopped resolutions of holistic oxymorons trying to bridge the gaps between reality and delusion by yoking them both like copulating snakes to a chariot of the gods that’s trying to square the circle of its wheels to the passage of the sun and the moon. To the paths of the waterclocks that rise like civilizations living off the alluvial silt of the stars. If everything is one then how can separation stand apart and mourn the loss of anything? Is Orpheus made whole by his dismemberment? Is zero the fullest of whole numbers, and union differentiate the dark abundance and bright vacancy emanating spontaneously out of the void and returning to it just as unpredictably like the ingathering and dissolution of creation in every moment? Are the gods, if any, left guessing as well as we do at the hidden certainties of the elephant in the room. Do they feed their brains at the expense of their starving hearts the way the ideologues steal life and blood and bread like hungry ghosts from the mouths of mute children all over the earth tonight?

Ephemerids. Grave-robbers. Infanticides. I ask you. Would you steal the mummy from its pyramid? The butterfly from its chrysalis? The priestess from her temple? And leave all things speechless? The meaning isn’t in the words. It’s in the resonance that hovers over it like the dying music of an astral body taking flight like a hawk or a kite from your hand. Like a song from a window in passing that no one can hear until you let go of it. You might walk away with the feather of a lyric, a few strands of the melody, the enchantment of a voice when no one’s listening, but it isn’t until you let go of it, as if you were born without ears, that it returns like a bird to your windowsill. Like the sea to an empty shell. Like the sky to the canary in the mine. Like the soft and hard things of the earth to the intangibility of the mind that goes on forever without leaving anything behind. Because even when the sun goes down, and things go on until you’re wholly gone like a nightbird into the dark of your unknowing there is no dusk to time, only the dawn of moonrise giving voice to your eyes in a world of startled dreams. You can hear the echoes of what the stars are whispering in a choir of waterlilies gathering at the edge of the river. Themes of picture-music mingled in the mindstream like the flavours and colours of life on earth long before you had a tongue to taste them or the eyes to see them or the heart to be them, even when you’re a stolen masterpiece that doesn’t know it’s own worth, trashed in a back alley, a favela, a slum somewhere by a thief who doesn’t want to get caught handling something so radioactively hot with beauty and genius he can’t fence it anywhere without being recognized for what it is.

Sweet one. In the shadows. In the sorrows. In the corner of your room. The spiders weaving veils to cover your eyes, and your back to the light like the far side of the moon, stroking your heart with your thumb like the black walnut of the soft bird skull that someone you love hurled like a rock through the window with a message for the occupant to get out of his life. Terrified by the sublimity of the silence when a song as innocent as a sparrow God overlooked dies and there’s no one there to pick it up but you. A nugget of pain. A moon-dipped arrow fletched with the flightfeathers of an iron weathervane lodged in a heart that doesn’t know which way to turn in a hurricane of hurt. I address this to you like an August wind, a rising thermal under your wings, a stairwell with serpent bannisters in a water palace of wavelengths light years from here where the prayer-mats can fly in any direction they want to answer the cry of the wounded princess like dragons on red alert. I address this to you out of the fathomless emptiness of a full heart. I lift the veils of the spiders that suck the light out of your eyes like undefineable singularities at the bottom of their black holes and I stand before you like the stalwart timbers of a loom with the skilled fingers of a Spanish guitar shaped like the universe, ready to follow your voice like the musical shadow of a new creation myth into the liberated skies of celestial spheres that flow like tears from your eyes when they hear how well you can sing. Your beauty can be as whimsical as a Japanese plum blossom, a sulphur butterfly, the eyelids of a black rose in a Stygian bloodstream that flows out of hell like oil from the injured earth. And still I will dig my heels in like the stubborn root of our shared humanity and draw you up like a fountain mouth from the deepest voids and darkest watersheds of hidden wisdom in the whole of the enlightened multiverse, to bloom again and again and again as if there were no end of spring when the phoenix sings. I will stand with you now like a spirit that knows its own in a wardrobe of flesh and even more so after my death when the potential for life returns to the realms of the boundless like water taken from the stream and raised to your lips like music to your mouth is returned to the stream with reverence and gratitude. When one hand is empty because someone let go I will open the palm of the other clenched like the fist of a flower and place the new moon in it like a black pearl of inestimable worth you wove like a flying carpet high above the earth and laid out on the waters of life, the waters of earth, to receive the return of the waterbirds. To hear in the urns of the Canada geese crying high over head late at night, returning the souls of the dead to life as they once carried them off to the west in autumn, my voice. And in a way that you can know that I am near. These words.

PATRICK WHITE

AND YOU, ANGRY ONE

And you, angry one, down to splitting roaches

between the thumbnails of the moon

to make something flower in your poverty

because the soil you’re rooted in

keeps coming up snake-eyes and stinging nettles.

You whose heart is swarmed by fire ants

like the corpse of a hummingbird

that was lighter than gravity and faster than light

until it sipped from the sugar-coated feeder

of the double-dealer who spiked its drink.

You for whom the sound of life

is the snarling of a blue chainsaw

in an old growth forest of rootless trees

living in tent city on the cutting edge of grace

driving nails through your heartwood

to keep from being felled by those

who are more at fault than you are

for why the birds no longer sing in the morning.

You who weep like acid rain

on the bells and the gravestones

you keep writing your name on

and keep one dark card

like the Tarot up your sleeve

to trump the game your playing now

as if you were bound to lose your will to win

by pushing your chair back from the table

like an exculpatory suicide with nothing left to bet on.

I learned a long time ago from you

there’s a terrorist in your roots

that keeps twisting your nerves like candy kisses

with short fuses and blasting caps

that can go off in anyone’s face like a beaver dam

for nothing at all except trying to build

a small eco-system in the wrong place;

for trying to sow seeds in your wounds

where the plough of the moon cut into your flesh

and left the planting to the wind and the weeds;

for trying to turn all that pain

into something you could harvest

like golden loaves of bread

fresh from the ovens of a volcano

like small islands of life

cooling on the windowsills of your magmatic rage.

For years I’ve winched my heart up from a wishing-well

to pour sweet water on your burns

and watched you turn into a steam engine

whenever I suggested the tracks on your arms

were the wrong gauge

for two parallel lines to ever meet

like predestination in the wrong seat of here and now.

So many futures I could have had with you

that have learned to live outside the womb

like embryos in exile

like homeless thresholds no one ever crossed.

Strange and sad sometimes

when I look at you

to feel the loss of things I never had to lose.

Me in my sanctuary

and you in your asylum

though we’ve maintained mutual embassies in both

with high walls and barred windows

that have kept the measure

of how close we could have come to being lovers

instead of these refugees

seeking shelter from one another

like two storm birds under the overturned lifeboats

that saved no one from drowning

off the same shipwrecked coast.

PATRICK WHITE

AS THE NIGHT AND SILENCE

As the night and silence fall over Perth

and random voices are dwindling in the distance up the road

as I vow not to remember anything at all the right times

to the muse of broken gates hanging on the hinge of the year

and o most rare

not to forget a single intimacy

of the mystic love tokens she’s offered me

like black walnuts and ruby-throated humming-birds,

I realize I’m swimming in beautiful illusions

where the starfish lie down with the sharks

and inspired by my own absurdity

and the lack of any kind of enlightened credibility

I’m free of delusion and reality alike.

Crazy wisdom.

The penultimate insight into nothingness.

Who could wish for more?

The streetlamps are still in bud

in the third week of September.

And there’s a painting on my easel

with an autumn sun covered in black spidery birch branches

like a detached retina

that’s been keeping its eye on me since midnight.

Free enough to risk entreating the stars to be kind for once.

Free enough to be attached to the things of the earth that are perishing

to ensure they don’t as if I were one of them

on the inside of the joke

that’s stranger than not getting it at all.

Show me the wise man who hasn’t learned

to take his inner clown seriously

and I’ll show you an eagle born without eyes.

Fortune-cookies with all the answers

like dancers with knots in their muscular thighs.

Overhead I hear the Canada geese off into the going

as things are slowing down

and there are fire hydrants all over town

who’ve exhausted themselves trying to put the autumn out

that long to go with them just to know

what they’ve been left out of by holding their ground.

Does in the headlights,

two young women ditching a roach

at the approach to Rainbow Bridge

wondering if I’m the troll

or the pot of gold that lives under it.

I sublimate my indifference with a smile

and keep my distance

not to spook their high

as I pass unnoticed as I can

up the wolf path to lonelier timberlines

without them knowing

I think one’s a willow with slender blonde sorrows

and the other’s a raging sumac with phoenix wings

who eats her own ashes

like the flesh of the anti-Christ

just to get a rise out of things.

PATRICK WHITE

THE STARS SO NEAR

The stars so near it seems the approaching morning

could wet its thumb and forefinger

and pinching their wicks like intimate candles

that have held the lovers close

and the ghosts at bay all night

put them out with a hiss.

An ancient mirror deep within me

I couldn’t bring myself to bury

with the woman who once looked into it

is beginning to flood like a river of eyes with autumn rain

and I want to cry for things

that have departed like water birds

from their circuitous reflections on the mindstream

and leave the heart knocking

like an empty lifeboat against the rocks

that no one sings from now.

I’ve stared at the moon several nights in a row

as if we drank from the same skull

and I want to elevate my tears to a higher level

as a rite of passage worthy of what I mourn

but no lights on in the lockmaster’s house

me and the moon both know

how impossible it is to raise the dead

from their watersheds

by adding a few tears to a dry seabed

out of the largesse of the living

in the wake of so many shadows.

I’m trying to align my third eye like a bubble

in the middle of a balance beam

and build on the cornerstone of the moon

a Taj Mahal of lunar coral to commemorate

the loss of so much beauty

to the things it touched like braille

as if it wasn’t enough just to light them up

but parting the depths of its fathomless veils

open their eyes as well.

I shall turn three times in the silver grass

and stretching my body out like a scar upon the earth

lay down in a deer-bed by the river

with her absence bigger than the night for awhile

and listen to the frogs and crickets

as I used to listen for her footfalls on the creaking stairs

and the moon won’t lay its sword of light on the waters

like a vow of separation to keep us apart

and I shall ask every star

down to the sixth magnitude of time and shining

what has become of her who used to weave

English ox-eyed daisies into her hair

as if she were already among the constellations

showing off the lesser luminaries of earth

as if there were nothing so small

nothing so slighted or disregarded

no moment of life so devoid of inspiration

even the fireflies that can’t stay fixed in one place

long enough to beat a path into a zodiac

and elaborate their own creation myths

into something unborn and unperishing

weren’t enlightened

by the immaculate darkness of her transience.

To suffer everything as if it were a blessing she once said.

I look up through the leafless bough of an aging maple

twisted like a burnt match stick

whose fire’s just flared out.

I look up at the stars

as if they’d built their webs between the branches

like momentary dream catchers.

And I can’t manage it.

PATRICK WHITE

EASY

Easy to extract oneself from the climacteric of doom

that will absolve humanity of its horrors

by placing its destiny in its own hands

like a loaded gun in the hands of a child

by taking long nocturnal walks by the Tay River

among wildflowers full of farewell.

To watch the moonrise glowing

on the Texas toes of my wet black boots

as if they’d just been spit polished by morning snails

and sense the just proportions

and inchoate eloquence of eternity

in the trivialities of sublime coincidence.

How randomly everything fits

into this urgent medium of life and death

as if it played the tailor to its own emergence seamlessly

the way the mind stream cuts a path for itself

among a bewildering array of rocks and fallen birch

or a startled rat snake adds its wavelength

like a higher frequency to the laconic water

and yet no river has ever flowed the wrong way to the sea.

Easy to step out of the polluted light of the streetlamps

into the cleaner darkness on the outskirts of town

to renew my innocence

in the macrocosmic reveries of my solitude

enchanted by the mesmerizing details

of the mystically miniscule.

How the New England asters

in the middle of September

that yesterday bloomed like stars

in happier zodiacs than this

today are watching their eyelashes fall out one by one

and the daylilies that blazed with desire

wither like the kisses of old women

when no one’s there to receive them.

Easy to accept catastrophe in nature

as the spontaneous gesture of a hidden wisdom

that our eyes are too dependent on the light to see yet.

The muskrat gutted by the cattails

by a posse of rampant coyotes

in a frenzy of panicked hunger

sensing the cold-blooded wind turn vicious.

Soon the air will bare its fangs and snarl.

Soon the earth will harden into knuckles of ice

and the raccoons semi-hibernate

and the blue jays come like thieves

to pick the time-locks on the sunflowers

and the seeds enter the cryonic comas of their afterlives

confident of their revival in a future beyond doubt

as the planet sidles up to the sun at perigee

like an old love affair gone cold

tilting its head away

to rebuff any further advances.

Easy to lose yourself in the life of the mind

and the phantasmagoria of reality

that makes you feel you’re walking with gods

you’ll never know the name of.

Turn your back on the world

and let your thoughts wander off like smoke

from the fire pits of lost caravans

that have pitched their tents

on the dark side of the moon

where they can make up their own myths

about the strange stars

that have misled them this far from home.

How the creek laps the rock

like a doe at a salt block

left out in a farmer’s field.

How the water purls over the terraced shale

that looks like a burnt book in the ashes

of a fire that’s just been put out

like the library of Alexandria.

You could do that.

And who could blame you?

You wouldn’t be wrong.

It’s hard to listen

the way you listen to a star stream

slipping through a grove of birches at night

astute to everything it’s whispering;

hard to listen to the blood

gurgling out of a wounded child

like a poppy choking to death.

Hard to fine-tune your sensibilities

to the miscreant devolution of your own species

and not be savagely appalled

into holding a mirror up to nature

that blocks the view as surely

as if you’d put your hands up over your eyes

to escape it all and wake up somewhere else

where skulls are more natural in Eden

than in the abattoirs of human carnage.

A clean life with no skidmarks of despair.

No fingernails scratching at the walls

in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

No graffiti under the bridges of PsychoBabylon.

No university students on the road to Damascus

tortured like Rosetta Stones

that have just had their tongues cut out

for not saying anything

that makes any sense

to the body language of the depraved

mutilating their flesh like slang.

Just the claw marks on the rocks

that have been sanitized by time

like the glacial striations of the last ice age

that gouged out the eyes of the lakes around here.

The bitter aesthetes of retreat run back to paradise

to study demonology by the light of fireflies

to better understand their fellow man

and live tactically out of reach

of their common inhumanity

where there’s not chance of a ricochet.

Under a locust tree in full bloom.

A fragrant cloud of honey-bees

with as many thorns as they have stingers

behind a wall of zinnias, cosmos, gladiolas

on a hill in the eye of clearing

completely surrounded by trees

sitting at a picnic table

with a black coffee, cigarette, and journal

inspired by the beauty of the morning to write

before your lover wakes up

to tend nine bean rows in Innisfree

though it’s eleven miles

and a hundred years ago

outside Westport Ontario

where you can hear the scarlet carillons

of the wild columbine in the rain

tinkling like delicate wind chimes

and modestly agitated chandeliers

plucked by the rain like the plectra

of home-made harpsichords

on the moss-pated rocks

of their composer’s skulls.

No mediocrities in nature

it’s hard not to feel like Mozart

whatever you’re listening to.

No air raid sirens, ambulances

squad cars or firetrucks

screaming like banshees

like furies and erinyes

to the scene of the tragic event.

No fractious braying of political jackasses

grinding their teeth in their sleep

like the mill wheels of the stony bread

the rich resent the poor

like loaves and fishes and mice in the silo

boat-tailed grackles and black-capped chickadees

salvaging what they can

from the dumpsters of leftover gardens.

No pathological racket of garbage cans

being tipped over in a street fight

to end all street fights

like knights in armour on their backs

in front a shield wall of local police

picking them up to hold them for ransom.

No drunks and druggies in the hallways

only bats velcroed to the burdock

blinded by the porch light

and star-nosed moles and snakes on the threshold

the cats leave like offerings

on the stairs of the temple of Bast.

So much easier to listen to the eerie wailing

of baby porcupines high in the basswood trees

than the shrieks of a family

being dragged out of their beds

by an occupation army

to see which of their daughters sisters mothers

will be raped like the Congo

whose childhood shall be pressed into murder

and who shall be bred out of existence.

Easy to buff the crack of the world with talcum powder

to spare you from getting diaper-rash of the mind

and side-track the ferocity of your insight into the horror

with lightning-rods and tuning forks

you can break with your pinky finger like wishbones

torn from the throats of children

who didn’t have time enough on earth

to learn to read the names on their own gravestones

if they’re lucky enough to have one.

Easy to have a time-share

in nature’s indifference to death

when there no place left

on the surface of a raging planet

that isn’t a dangerous vacation.

So much easier to tinker with echinacea

and smudge the bad spirits

out of the renovated farm house with sage

from home-grown herb gardens

than it is to inhale the reek of cordite

or the stench of organic decomposition

of the adolescent flesh of the festering corpse

found in a drainage ditch among the weeds

like a lily that smelled far worse than them

on the outskirts of Argentina

in the stadiums of Chile

in the Tiananmen Squares of China

in the mass hysteria of the bloodbanks of Syria

trying to assail a nest of dynastic vampires

with a silver bullet through the heart of the cloaked one

in the radical slums of Gaza

in the Warsaw ghettos of the West Bank

run by Israel searching children outside the gate

for smuggled vegetables from the Fertile Crescent

in the native reservations of the originals

who peopled Canada

like a charter of indigenous freedoms

without any concept of surveying their mother like real estate.

Outside the emergency exits and entrances of Arizona

where immigrants beaten to death

and dumped on the pavement to die

abandon all hope of ever entering there

and bullfrogs squatting on their sheriff’s badge

croak about getting tough on the mosquitoes

by hand-cuffing them to the food chain for deportation.

Flies eggs in the goat’s milk.

Spiders sucking the life out of the jewel

in the heart of the American dream catcher.

All that is hideous, grotesque, perverse,

genocidal, fratricidal, patricidal, matricidal, suicidal and worse

than acid splashed in the eyes of Afghani schoolgirls

learning to read through holes in the ozone

by flashlight under the veils of Isis.

Seek ye knowledge even as far as China.

Wheresoever ye turn is the face of God revealed

like the encaustic portrait of girl that came unglued

like a multilated candle on CNN

trying to shine a light on

nur wa nur

what’s dark and brutal

about the alif ba ta tha gim

of an alphabet in the mouth of an oral tradition

with an alchemical regime of hashashim for muscle.

You know how many dolls they collected at Dachau?

You know how many soccer balls

have had their feet blown off by cluster bombs in Gaza?

You know how many weathervanes

have stiffened their resolve

to look the other way like iron roosters

with alarmist political agendas

and industrious military complexes

as corrupted as the weather

when the wind is blowing the wrong way

like bad spin from the chimneys of Auschwitz

and Sabra and Shatila lie in the direction of prayer

like the gunsight of a Palestinian sniper?

Is this God’s ferocity

or the inconceivable atrocities of mad men

eaten alive by Herodian maggots

seeking the life of the first born of every nation

to preserve their myth of spontaneous generation.

Sweet to see the shadows of the autumn leaves

fossilized like bat wings on the sidewalk;

to notice how they turn

in the same succession of colours

from the outside in

as rainbows sunsets

and the emission spectra of nearby stars

busy on the nightshift making calcium and carbon.

Sweet to know this and to wonder at it

easy in the mystery

among the dragonflies and the blue hyacinth,

nailing bluebird boxes out of the reach of the barn cats

and egg-stealing raccoons

to play your part in it like a companionable spirit.

Asylum from the world.

Sanctuary.

Diplomatic immunity among the great blue herons

because you’ve stood there so long

without disturbing a fish

they think you’re one of them.

PATRICK WHITE