YOU’VE GOT TO LEARN TO LET IT GLOW

You’ve got to learn to let it glow.

Cool bliss.

Ride the dragon.

The sun god’s chariot.

Not come undone like Icarus

over-reaching everybody’s best advice.

You know how to plunge

let go

but I can’t remember the last time

I saw you rise

or even try to hang on.

Yesterday you were gold

and today you’re the ore

and it feels as if you’ve had your heart ripped out

and there’s nothing precious about what’s left.

Take space from space it’s still space.

Who needs to put a gold ribbon around it

to prove there’s a gift inside?

Diamonds are born in the darkness

not the light.

The root’s more crucial than the blossom.

Alcohol, women, valium, sleeping pills, coke,

I know you’re a martyr to your body and your mind

and that cauldron of a heart you used to hover over

like a cloud around a visionary mountain

seeing things the rest of us could only guess at

has turned into a pharmacopoeia of sprites and goblins.

How many paths are you going to let yourself

be lead down by the nose

before you realize

they all leave you blind at a crossroads?

No starmap.

No windsock.

No astrolabe.

No compass.

No weathervane.

You’re immanentally on your own

with the rest of us here

apprenticed to the greater magic of the mind

that keeps casting spells upon us

it takes the transformative traumas of life to break.

So we can grow.

So we can get out of the egg

whether it’s a cosmic glain

a fortune cookie laid by a bird of ill omen

or the opal of a hummingbird.

So we can shed our skin our sky our myth

our preconceived attachments to a self

that promises one sip

of the snakeoils of death and desire

and you’ll fall in love forever

with wild dancing girls

swaying under their veils

like mirages on the moon.

And what a feeble affair

if life ever needed a why to live.

Who knows why?

For the fuck of it.

For the ride.

Because it’s inconceivable

that it’s being done everyday

in the most sublime and trivial ways

by people who say they can’t.

I’m not trying to scold your heart.

Or renew your burnish in an acid bath.

In Zen they say the mind is an artist.

Able to paint the worlds.

But that doesn’t mean

it just paints things you like to see.

When do the stars ever get to choose

what they shine down upon?

Stop strolling through the galleries of life

like some aesthetic voyeur

with a monolithic view of prophetic vision

discussing the relative merits of this and that.

Turn your lucidity around like an inner light

and illuminate your own masterpiece

like a work in progress you’ll never complete

because only the mediocrities

assess their successes in life as fait accomplis.

Real genius risks nothing less than everything all the time

for nothing

for the unattainable

knowing that failure’s a truer measure

of the ongoing attempt to avoid

the inexpressible outcome of its creative intensity

by filling all that dark abundance up

with the bright vacancy of a shapeshifting universe

than the self-contained success

of the goose that laid the golden egg

but couldn’t peck its way out of it.

I can’t imagine a river anywhere along its flowing

whether it’s hoisting the garbage barges of a city

up on the shoulders of its waves

or sporting yachts like feathers in its cap

thinking of itself as a loser or a winner.

Rain on a garden.

Rain in the gutter.

Is this successful

and that a failure of water?

And truth to tell

even the mirages can’t be held to blame

if you fix on them like a picture-frame

or a walled garden with no gate

that anyone can enter by.

They disappear like planetary atmospheres

that didn’t want to be held that close.

Mirrors with wanderlust.

But in your disappointment with life

isn’t that water?

Aren’t those real tears?

How can anyone or anything

within the expanding precincts

of these worlds within worlds

be considered false or lost or lacking

in this space where even the lies come true

and grow and bear fruit

rooted in their homelessness

like the thresholds of stars

leaving themselves

and the past behind

in all directions at once

as if the only future available to them

as for all of us who shine

whether we grope through the darkness

like a candle or a galaxy

a flash of lightning

or the merest hint of a firefly

is to open our eyes and see.

The drunk in the doorway is not junk mail.

And the ceo in the board room

dictating loveletters to his secretary

is not the last word in self-promotion.

If the mountain weeps

it’s not because it feels

it’s let down the ocean.

PATRICK WHITE

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