I PLEAD FOR ANYTHING MORE BEAUTIFUL

I plead for anything more beautiful

anything less lonely than I am tonight.

I plead to the darkness

like the new moon of a black pearl

that surrounds me like the irritant of a grain of sand

as if it could hear me from that far away.

Even among all these asteroids I’ve become

I plead to the collective unconscious

of the whole planet I used to be

to remember when we had weather and blue sky

and a jade green sea

all things ran down into

as if it could take back our tears

like rivers we wept on the mountain tops.

Even in the clamour of all this mental racket

to scare the ghosts away

I listen for the night bird that’s braver than autumn

like a lifeboat with feathers for oars that flies

like a message in a bottle that sings

of how the light still shines in the heart

of the darkest things

like a harvest moon behind a total eclipse

that passes

yes it will

because the spirit of what it came to say

is water

and water isn’t indelible.

Though I might feel like a firefly

in the bushido tradition of warrior dragons

even as the light is failing

and all that I’ve seen over a lifetime

of one insight after another

of being here to look at the stars

amounts to no more than the flaring

of a burnt match stick

bowing its head like a monk about to take his leave

of what he tried so hard to believe in

until his failure freed him from attainment

and he understood with brutal clarity

that all achievement is redundant

and we task ourselves for things

we already are in abundance

but lose sight of

the moment we start looking.

Despite having lived through all this

even so even so

I plead for a better mirage

in these deserts of the moon

than the one I’m drinking from tonight

out of the grail of my skull

as if even the passing illusion

of a compassionate life

were enough to green the ailing kingdom

buried in the sands of an hourglass

someone smashed against Devil’s Rock

like a beer bottle on Friday night

trying to get right out of it.

Even though the stone of the world

I lay my head down on every night

for a few hours of troubled sleep

gets harder and harder the more I dream

of a life more forgiveable than this one

where the spiders don’t weave their webs

like trick constellations

in the line of sight

of spotting telescopes

because they’ve taken up astronomy.

Where the angels can’t replace

the broken strings on their harps

with the spinal cords

on the electrical guitars of the demons

because they don’t share the same taste in music

one preferring music that wounds

and the other music that scars

though they’re both listening to the same thing.

Even though I’m still caught up

in this holy war of one with myself

where I’m always the infidel

that’s trying to drive Jerusalem out of me

like a bit of dust that got into my third eye

I’m trying to wash out

it makes me autumnally happy

though it hasn’t come yet

that I’ve held out this long

to be at real peace with myself

instead of a tentative truce

with a paranoid neighbour.

And even though I’m bound to lose

wrestling with life

like the angel in the way

and walk away with a limp

that would put Byron to shame

I’m not going to walk away

from my defeat weaker

than when I first came to it

debilitated by the promise of victory.

When God breaks her word to you

she expects you to get up on your own two feet

and stand upright on your own two legs

like the pillars of a portable temple to yourself

your hair will grow long enough along the way

to pull down one day

like an avalanche down a mountain

that’s had enough of itself

to get out of its own way

to level the playing field

and bend like the light

right over the last event horizon

into the estranged mysteries

of the spirit’s lost and found.

For every demon that jumps from heaven

an angel rises from hell.

On the wheel of birth and death

all opposites are reciprocally engendered.

One breath after another

we die into life.

We’re born out of death.

And even though this moment now

is always in the foreground

of the eternity that’s passing away behind us

into the blue aerial perspective of time

that it shares like a continuum

it has in common with space

like twins in the guest bedroom

at the back of the house

talking to themselves on the same wavelength

only they can understand

long after the lights go out.

Even though this much is so

I still plead like a seance sometimes

for the occasional echo to return like a bird

like the call of Canada geese crossing the moon

like a long caravan in the desert

like an affectionate word from the heart

of a distant lover

whose departure wasn’t irrevocable

even though the long silence

that has followed it ever since is.

PATRICK WHITE

ONE STAR IN THE DIRTY WINDOW

for the occupiers of Wall Street

One star in the window and that’s enough to see me through the darkness for another night. Trying to weave a flying carpet out of a snakepit. Toxic wavelengths of mind. Poison arrowheads that make it worse to be wounded than killed outright. And all over Perth tonight I imagine there are bruised hearts like mine and yours turning cyanotically blue from having drunk from the same tainted wellsprings of life like fish that have no choice. The apples of October have been laced with the razorblades of Halloween by the psychopathic tree that hands them out like treats to the children in the doorway of an upright coffin. And the leaves are burning up in a fever of arsenic. Spiders work the loom like the strings of the system that hooks us by our gills in its seine nets until the great wild seas of our awareness and the dangerous freedom to look for new ungovernable continents within us so we can flee the corporate corruption of this one is reduced to the neurotic dimensions of a fish farm. If you are poor. If you’re worried about how to pay the rent this month. If it’s winter and there are harpies and sprites and ghouls threatening to turn the gas, the lights, the elements of life off like trolls under the bridge your money built to bilk you until it collapses from lack of repair. If you don’t how you’re going to manage to buy your kid a birthday present this year and you’re even more afraid of Christmas. If you’re poor and your prospects are as bleak as this deserted street tonight now all the ladys-in-waiting, princes, jesters, and warring kings have called it a night and emptied their street court like a bar. If you’re chronically tortured by the rags of dignity with the blood of a lost cause upon them like something that cost your mother and father their lives to fight for. And you’re ashamed of the straitjacket you’ve been forced to wear in order to have some overseer raise a spoon to your lips three exact times of the day like banking hours and GST cheques. If you smoulder with rage like a underground cedar fire burning in your roots like fuses of lightning afraid to explode. If you’re poor. If the weight of the world is on your back heavier than any cross the spiritual spin doctors of the complicit church and their political henchmen encourage you to carry like a virtue all the way to a fabricated heaven on the installment plan, but you can’t bear the load as a volunteer stretcher-bearer anymore, carrying your own corpse to the grave, while they rave in the wealth of what they have deprived you of here and now. If you’re poor. If you feel like a subliminal archetype of guilt in the collective unconscious of a society of quisling theosophists and weight-concscious c.e.o.’s sitting down to salads of money they eat out of the skulls of the children they’ve starved to death. If you don’t make enough money in Oregon to appeal to hypocritic oaths that sit on decisive committees to see if your son is worthy of a kidney transplant. An education. Piano lessons. A future that isn’t always an echo worse than the voices we heard yesterday protesting to the vampires that without a free blood bank they didn’t stand a chance of surviving the contributions they’re expected to make at night. If you’re poor in a chilly apartment in Perth tonight and you’re being eaten alive by the eggs that have been laid on your forehead like the living host to sustain the young of the killer bees that have sewn their nettles in the honey of life like the military-industrial complex of the hive. If you’re poor and you don’t get one year’s free subscription to satellite radio on the bus you have to take to work every morning surrounded by ads for the latest Ford-150 pick up truck ready to do a man’s work at the drop of a hard hat and then go hunting in the country, and the new black paint is trying to imitate the skin of a naked woman, because your sex life depends on what you drive, and the sumptuary laws of the lies you’re allowed to wear like a Roman triumph are too stringent to get the dirt out of the dowdy greens and browns of your serfdom long enough to get laid by the calendar girls who sit like mermaids on a brand new truck, but have never sung to you. If you’re the poor wretch sitting in the doorway of the Bank of Nova Scotia across Foster Street in the small hours of the morning like a bird that gets to pick the parasites off the back of the hippopotamus that keeps rolling over on you in your sleep. For a fee. To hold up your end of a symbiotic relationship whereby you’re expected to eat shit and call it your daily bread. Eat humiliation, a ration of rat meat, and call it a just portion. Eat your education like bitter food for thought when you see how the fascistic ignorance of antediluvian fat men and their gold-digging wives are dignified by the juke-box of the news as if the point of view of a maggot on how to turn base metal into a gold butterfly it will never become were worthy of the same air time they give to eagles. One hundred news outlets with the same six slug lines like the top hits of the day. Catastrophe du jour. With rescued puppy stories for the trimmings. Eat information like the news. It’s Chinese food of the mind. Not very filling. With a fortune-cookie and a fat tape worm of better things to come wrapped around your bowels like the noose of a downed powerline that spared the cost of the rope to lynch you by your large intestine. If you’re poor and you’re always the falling leaf and never the apple. If you’re poor and it’s always autumn to judge by the banks of junkmail and bills that are swept up on your doorsill at all times of the year. If you’re poor and you’re punished for being out on the streets after curfew for having dropped through the cracks of your caste by a neocon leper colony privatized by the messianic lobbyists of free enterprise with one finger on the scales of equal opportunity because there isn’t a feather’s worth of good in them when they go before the jackal god of death and their grubby hearts are found wanting. If you’re poor and you’re listening to the North Carolina state legislature discussing your extermination in the civic minded tones of the Pied Piper of Hamlin and you’re eating your self-respect like the plague rat of why the rich suffer. Because in their creationist myth your womb is the enemy of the state. And you the infectious carrier of the pestilence. If you’re poor and sitting by the window on a warped floor behind the heritage field stones of an upstairs ghetto apartment in Perth feeling like the second coming of the Irish potato famine with no where to emigrate this time to be third in line below the Scotch and English on the food chain. If you’re poor. Tattoo this on your forehead like an Egyptian destiny you and your eyes will live to see fulfilled. It’s not your fault. Even if you’ve given up. Even if you’re gaping like zero, like absolute nothing, between two hissing sibilants of a serpentine medical symbol unravelling. And the dragon’s lost its wings. And the physician doesn’t care enough to heal himself because he’s lost his faith in oaths. Or dangerous hope has given way to futile despair and they’re both siblings of the absurd. It’s not your fault that you were born into a society where even the mirages in this desert of stars are bundled and sold like real estate. That illusions and diseases apply for patents of ownership. That even the constellations have become the work of surveyors not shepherds on a hillside and the poor are being foreclosed and evicted from the signs of the zodiac because they can’t pay the rent or the mortgage on the house they were born into. Or the hydro on the stars. Even if your spinal cord tinkles like the burnt out filament of a dead lightbulb and the shining’s gone out. It’s not your fault if the universe that was airlifted to you at birth as your portion of life with nothing missing was intercepted and sold at prices that eat their own on the black market of free enterprise for the poor, or they couldn’t afford it, and socialism for the rich because they couldn’t survive without you. You might be like the sea in the lowest place of all but all things flow like rivers down into you. And the depth of the valley of shadows and death you’re walking through alone is a function of the height of the mountain that digs it like a grave it will be buried in. When all the grains of sand like stars come together they make a sea of waves where life thrives in the here and now spontaneously not a pyramid for the sake of a single capstone whose happy afterlife is founded on quicksand.

Saw a huge spiderweb once under a streetlamp at Carleton University thirty-six years ago. Six spiders, their abdomens obese as lightbulbs, six tumours ripening on the panicked cells and neural networks of more frenzied insects drawn to the light out of the dark than their webs were meant to accommodate. The webs were ripping under the weight of the horrified fruits of their gluttony stuck in the powerlines like kites and running shoes and treacherous parachutes. The dew spangled veils of the morning were being torn off like consumerist dream catchers to entice the mob to the artificial radiance of the light that drove them crazy. But the spiders were too satiate to move. And they were being pulled down along with their prey under the massive superflux of their immensely successful catastrophe. Pleonaxia. The disease of more and more and more. And all the insects had to do because the conglomerate spiders were too immobilized by the obscenity of their gigantism to stick an ice-pick in the back of Trotsky’s neck in Cuba was to keep a cool enough head to extricate themselves puppet string by puppet string, spinal cord by spinal cord, straitjacket by straitjacket, wing by wing from the web. But most were paralyzed by their own fear waiting for the fatal moment of the ruinous agenda to come like a budget cutting knife to end their nightmare. And after all these years that terrible insight insight still provides me with blood-freezing metaphors into the present economic system that preys upon the poor by beading the foodchain with black thoraxes as if they were the ninety-nine names of God and it were a rosary we could all say our novinas on pleading for more lifeboats and happier lifelines than the rigging of this ship of state that’s going down with all of us aboard as the captains of industry jump like rats in Genoa back into the year 1348 when there were corpses galore to feed on.

If you’re poor. Come to the revolution but leave your guillotine at home. Come to the revolution but leave Lenin in Geneva. Come to the revolution like Wat Tyler but don’t believe the promises of the king. Come to the revolution like Spartacus but don’t put your faith in pirates to provide you with the means of escape. Come to the revolution like Toussaint L’Ouverture in Haiti but first drive the fer de lance out of your sugar-cane so that no innocent bystanders get bit as an off-handed matter of population control. Come to the revolution like Aung San Suu Kyi ready to sit down in the teahouses of Burma to pry the fingers of the junta off the throats of the people like the petals of a flower whose time has come to let go. Come to the revolution like Ghandi walking all the way to the sea to turn the pillars of British imperialism to salt without all the fire and brimstone of Sodom and Gomorrah. Come like him to the revolution as a leader who knew how to follow his people. Come to the revolution like Helen Keller who stood up to the Rupert Murdochs of the age who were more in need of signage than she was on behalf of the rights of the working people and declared Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! What an ungallant bird it is! Socially blind and deaf, it defends a system that’s intolerable. The Eagle and I are at war. Come to the revolution like Nelson Mandela to an international rugby match in the uniform of a Springbok scrum half to show that over-rated hatred can’t make a comeback over the jubilation of people in play with one another in time enough to win. Come to the revolution like Victor Jara and the Chilean art brigades and bring that guitar and that voice he left us that you’ve been wanting to play for decades with a compassionate feel for the sorrows of others right down to the tips of your social democratic fingerprints as if you weren’t born too late to celebrate a lost cause with a Cinderella story right out the social pages of the mid-sixties into the front page slug lines of msnbc news today. And remember it’s better to sing sincerely than well when you’ve got Bob Dylan for a voice coach. Come to the revolution like Tuwakal Karman of Yemen like the first coffee flower of the Arab Spring to raise her voice against Ali Abdullah Saleh in the name of human rights and freedom of expression. Come to the revolution like Martin Luther to the church door in Wittenburg and post your thirty-three articles of protest but don’t think because you throw inkwells at the devil that’s the same as writing your name in blood on the marble of Wall Street or a war memorial for the dead of Vietnam. Come like George Washington to the American Revolution ready to lay your power down as a sign of complete victory over what satisfies the industrial complexity of the generals’ hearts. Come like Barack Obama to the wellsprings of a cleaner watershed than that which flowed like the corrupt ditches of the tainted bloodstreams of Eden like the four rivers of the running sores of the trickle down economics of the political food chain that ran before him for office by putting a carrot in front of a donkey and all your eggs in one basket in front of a rampaging elephant. Come to the revolution like Emmeline Pankhurst to a hunger strike in a game of cat and mouse with the government who’ll catch you and let you go to fatten you up and keep you from being force fed before they arrest you again for throwing your weight around like Emily Davison at the king’s horse in the name of wanting to run like a candidate at the same race track without the handicap of not being able to vote. Come to the revolution like Dolores Jiminez y Muro with a political plan to give Emiliano Zapata a Mexican classroom of political reform worth dying for. If you’re poor, as Kurt Cobain said, come as you are. And if Jesus doesn’t want you for a sunbeam then come as a cloud. Come as a mountain. Come as a full eclipse of the moon or a loveletter that someone sent back or come as seven come eleven and trust in your luck when the dice are not loaded against you.

PATRICK WHITE

TO SEE THE GLEE IN YOUR EYES AT EIGHTY

To see the glee in your eyes at eighty

as if you were about to achieve something as big

as you did at three.

And you, there, shy one, freaky adolescent

day after day in the same corner of the restaurant

like a bruised mermaid

riding the clock out like a sea turtle

until it’s time to go home again and face the music;

you who drive your pen so deeply

into the fleshy paper

of your black arts journal

as if you were carving up a body

or intensely wedging the tiny bird tracks

of your hieroglyphic footnotes

like some bitter aside

into the shin of that Ramsean gigantism

you’re standing in the shadow of

waiting for it to get dark enough

the fireflies might come out.

To see you light up like a rainbow at a black mass

when I ask if I can look

and you turn your book over like a leaf

and show me a breakthrough masterpiece

that’s good enough to start a school of crocuses

with no instruction from anyone.

To see you afraid to believe in your own excellence

the juno of your aristos

yet risking the possibility it might be a fact

you’re the mysterious matrix

of a genuinely creative act;

that you might feel

like you’ve got a lump of coal for a heart

and a La Brea tar pit for a mind

but when the mascara comes off

like a Gothic eclipse

you’re a new moon

and you’re starting to shine like a diamond.

To see the black dove in your eyes

liberated from the cages of disapproval

imposed on you by white crows in disguise

is to know

what human beings are doing on earth.

To see what softens the angry blue eyes

of the next generation

of gram masters of Gore Street

with their heads shaved like Auschwitz

or the Stalinesque inmates of the Thief’s World

with its rock pile laws

trying to stay true to the Rosetta Stone

of their prison tatToos

like the sacred syllables

of the mother tongue of darkness.

To see in the glee in their eyes

when their girlfriends take them back

that their hearts are not hard enough yet

to be immune to alienation

and for all the rocks that blister in spoons

the occasional angel still keeps its place

as Francis Thompson knew better than these

under the stones that love turns over

like eclipses of the moon

that weren’t indelible enough to last.

To see the glee in the eyes of a child

when it looks at an animal

and sees the same instinctive innocence

that’s just as wild as it is

and watch their minds go crazy

trying to give their tongues

a jump up on their amazement

at meeting a senient life form

that speaks the same language they do

and shares in the original parity

of the undifferentiated freedom

they still enraptures them in Dilmun

Shangri La

Queensland

and the Garden of Eden.

To see such ecstasy in their eyes

is to know how much wonder is lost

how much joy in just being here with everything else

is driven out of us

as we age our way into separation

deluded by the truth

that perfects our isolation

from the small and big furry things with startling eyes

and the Bolshoi Ballet of fins and veils

that makes my gold fish Toke a dancer

or an underwater comet

high above Atlantis

like a good omen on the eve

of some catastrophic decision

to rise again with more imagination to live

than the dead have reason not to.

To see the glee in the eyes of a friend in winter

like the bouquet of good brandy

beside a warm fire mythologizing

the first drafts of the stories

that are being told and retold

by the blind poets of an oral tradition

sipping red gold

from the snifters of inspiration

they swirl like the whirlpools of the muses

warming to their palms like the head of a glass rose

with its stem between their fingers.

To see in their eyes how good it is

to recognize we’re all linked like tree rings

to the same heartwood

through all four seasons of our lives

is to make a friend of your own human nature

by remembering even in the midst

of this blitz of blazing that blinds the world

on the frantic midways of its cheap thrills

like a heart under a roof heavy with snow

the best things in life

like fires and friends

and goblets of auburn Courvoisier

still glow without diminishment.

To see the glee in the eyes of the rain

that they can behold the whole of the sky again

and all its stars

in the single drop of a tear

though the rain doesn’t know who it’s crying for

is to understand in a flash of insight

even though you fall

like the small flower at the tip of a blade of stargrass

like a grain of sand down the slopes

of the oxymoronic mountains in an hourglass

you contain it all within yourself

and you can’t pour the universe out of the universe

anymore than you can be driven out of paradise

or be obliterated out of existence

whether humanity immolates itself

or dark energy accelerates us

into an entropy of starless ice.

To perceive the stars and the fireflies in the eyes of the rain

is to comprehend that your mystic specificity

is so unique and broad-shouldered

that down to the slightest detail

what makes you so crucially you

is that it upholds the whole of the rest of the world

in every cell and grain of gold and dirt

like a mountain of a cornerstone

that’s as boundless and high

as its bottomless valley is deep.

To look into the eyes of the stranger

the child the friend the lover the corpse

the eye of the hurricane the enemy the Medusa

the wounded white tail buck in the barbed wire fence

the black-eyed Susans the English ox-eyed daisies

or the yellow suns in the hydrogen clouds

of the New England asters

or the white eclipse of the black holes

in the eyes of the shark as it rolls to kill

or to attune the expression

to the sensibilities of the moment

as a fourteenth century German mystic once wrote

the same eye by which I see the multiverse

are all the eyes by which the multiverse sees me.

What you see

everyone sees.

When you understand

everyone understands.

Lost causes flaws and imperfections.

The lamp the road the night the light the journey.

You can ask the fireflies.

You can ask the galaxies.

But when you’ve exhausted all your cul de sacs

it’s going to be your own seeing

without starmaps

that gives you the right directions

like true north on the inside

and then reminds you in a gentle aside

that it’s impossible to be off the path

because it’s as wide as your field of vision.

When you see for yourself

who’s watching you in this dream of life

even the blind are enlightened

and as many as the ways

and as myriad as the eyes there are

to see in and through your mind

like a jewel turning in the light

it reveals like infinite insight

from the dark source of its own radiance

we rejoice in the genius

of compassion and courage

who took a Pax gene and a moonbeam

and in a moment of omnidirectional inspiration

that included all points of view at once

made it the muse of our eyes.

When you realize

that sight is a kind of love

as I once read on a poster in the sixties

everyone realizes

when you open your eyes

like an expanding universe

even our imperfections shine

in the available dimensions of the darkness before us

and born from the very beginning of everything else

to see and be happy

eye to eye with your own vision of things

as they appear and disappear

like thorns and roses from your heart

like leptons axions and quarks

like the stem cells of your own creative potential

to enter the dark spaces of your own imageless realms

and revel like a child in the art

of making worlds within worlds

like an opening night that everyone’s invited to.

Comets bombarded the earth

and the waters of life

broke from their fire wombs

and for the children of that union

there’s never been a way

to look into the eyes of their opposite

without seeing themselves.

Whether in sorrow or joy

whether in love despair ignorance or wisdom

out of our minds

or biding our time within them

like a flower that knows when to bloom

our shadows cast on a winter night

by the approaching light of Venus

or exalted by the crazy wisdom of life

in the thriving tides of the moon

eyes in the sky

like spy satellites extraterrestrials

and Hubble telescopes

eyes in the water

eyes in the blood

eyes in the wine

eyes in the wheat the apple the pomegranate

eyes in the forbidden fruits

that make all things believable

two eyes and a third

in the word for imagination

to conceive of the inconceivable.

When you see this

through your own eyes

even the mirages the delusions the lies

confess to themselves creatively.

Don’t judge the immensity of the world within

by the grain of sand it comes in

or the density of the pyramid

by what the thieves left of its grave goods.

Imagination is a dragon fly

that can take the fallen and broken

the duff and decay

the twig the leaf the petal

and glue it into a small house of transformation

so the worm comes out breathing fire

like a burnt matchstick with wings.

Point is.

Don’t waste the creative potential

of your own imperfections.

You can find holy water in a tainted well

if you know how to look for it.

The moon dips her cup

in the waters of life

because she has none

and as she raises it to her lips

what looked like a skull

turns into a long-stemmed goblet.

Doorways of light.

Doorways of night.

We open them both alike.

White sails.

Black sails.

We part the veils of space

to see who’s wearing our face

like a mask in the guise of a universe.

Bad.

Worse.

Perfections.

Imperfections.

When you understand

everyone understands.

We weep rivers of stars

into our own hands

to drink from our own reflections

just to taste the light and the life

of the mysterious insight

that burns within us

when the sun shines at midnight.

PATRICK WHITE

IN THAT INSTANT

In that instant time revoked my eyes like two waterclocks and my seeing was ageless. The white mirrors that had so long stood witness to my testimony about what I was doing on earth were suddenly eclipsed by the flip side of my reflection and the earth began asking what it was doing upholding the likes of me. And I didn’t know what to answer. Except to say it wasn’t wholly my idea though there was a time when I thought of all people I should know whose it was. And even if I were able to make something up that was reasonably feasible and acceptably balanced who would I tell now in this asylum of shipwrecked survivors about what I saw flash before my eyes the first time I drowned when the star of Isis I had tattooed on my left palm let me down. Jesus and the Buddha may have been able to walk on the water but the rest of us have to be hauled into a lifeboat. That’s why everyone’s born as close as they can get to a woman. And there have been other myths of origin I’ve remained true to for an hour or so to get me through another night like a sinking constellation flashing catastrophically on my event horizon. The sacred syllable of holy men on land squatting on their hams to attain an oceanic awareness that would put them out of their pain and everyone else along with them like synchronous happenings in a charged particle field is aum but the night sea mystics who say yes to their depths don’t say anything to free them from their agony but let the light abandon ship with the last farewell kiss of an s.o.s. And I came to realize in that instant my temporal demise is an endless era of unbounded exaltation once I accepted it for what it is. Because it knew more about what was going down than I did. Most people live their lives as if they’d heard them from someone else like a kid in his bed listens to his parents arguing late at night in the kitchen to the occasional mention of his name in lower tones of constrained voices lest he should wake up and overhear them. Shadowy dispatches slipped under the door. And it’s important to give the morning a reason for getting you up but what do you say to a child to make it want to live to be unwanted? These children are born to play but this one, this one, this one’s function is to get out of the way? So you get out of the way, off the field, out of sight. And your tears make new creekbeds to flow in. And where others go straight to their destination like hot asphalt on a newly paved section of Highway 7 with freshly painted stripes of yellow down its back others accommodate their homelessness to the circuitous blossoming of unnamed rivers with no particular goals in mind except in the way they flow around things and accept their turning as a matter of course. Vertumamnis the Etruscan shapeshifter morphs into the Roman god of dreams. Nothing solid to be legitimized by like a family burial plot or a summer cottage your last and only option from the very beginning is to be real. Become space. Light. Water. Take long vacations on the shores of the Black Seas of the mind while other languish in exile like Ovid listening for Sarmations across the Ister between the lines of the Metamorphoses. You become conversant in multiple personalities and polyglot identity thefts even though you don’t have a mother tongue of your own. You let the Tower of Babel speak for itself as you do the wind and the waves and the stars and seashells that have lost their virginity. And it doesn’t matter if you sit like a sparrow on a lover’s finger to receive a kiss that longs for someone else or you peck gravel at Keats’ windowsill entranced by his negative capability to be nothing at all except whatever pauses a moment before him. God’s Own Zero. Her way of making other numbers feel whole and good they haven’t fallen into void bound nihilism. But when the ground of your being is a rootless nothing how can it be nihilism if there’s nothing there to take away in the first place? Take nothing from nothing it’s still nothing. Cool bliss. This. Not the empty sorrows of those who turn their cups over like Tarot cards and tea leaves too depressed to go on with the reading. And you who talk about cosmological constants as if they were the biggest blunders of your theoretical life, have you begun to suspect yet that the only cornerstone that upholds the whole of this radiant edifice inclusively is the one that’s missing like the black sheep of the family from all your unified field theories like the dark energy of a mind that doesn’t reveal anything about itself to the light of those who only know how to look with their eyes?

But abstractions should not be multiplied beyond necessity like stars and flowers and creative ghosts who have returned to their senses like embryos of their symbolic simulacra. No ideas without fingerprints. But that doesn’t mean that we’re all identifiable. Or what can’t be defined doesn’t express itself out in the open like music and spring or the slim chapbooks of poetry that give voice to the Tay River in fall like hand-printed maple leaves. Where I am now. Halfway up Sunset Boulevard that taught me to paint the passage of things with a full palette, sitting under a bridge people fish from in the summer like an Andrew Wyeth reproduction, waiting for a moonrise to reveal how much she’s missed me since I went underground to overthrow myself like something imposed on me from without. And when she comes she’ll be happy to drink with me from the skulls of all those mirages on the moon that fell like blossoms from the hydra-headed stalks of my Herculean identity. Down with the laborious heroes of Hera in the death phase of the crone. Down with planting artificial flowers on the moon like flags in abandoned gardens that never perish or bloom. It may have been one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind but what’s that compared to Hathor the cow who’s been jumping over the moon since the first Minoan sprouted horns? And show me the wild iris or poppy or hollyhock that hasn’t done as much for the earth for generations. You want to come up like one of the good pennies of life from the bottom of a wishing well on the moon you’ve got to learn to put your heart into it like a rose. Not a reason for thorns. And if it sometimes feels as if you’ve lived the whole of your life as if you were bleeding out like the Tay River from an unknown watershed maybe that’s because you discovered the less you know of who you think you are is how the more of you keeps coming like a waterclock that always runs down like a river to the sea in the lowest place of all. This river was named after a river in Scotland to commemorate the race and place of the people who settled here like sword dancers from the Highlands they kept sheathed in their hearts like the bulbs of gladiolas. Who needs to pull ancestors out of their hat to add to that? I shall lie down among the moss-covered stones and tall grasses that preen themselves in the wind like the plumage of the river and embrace my transient lover as if I had nothing left to give her but a gateless gate that didn’t get in her way. What a tree gives to a bird. What the sky gives to the clouds. What water gives to the leaping fish that lives to express it in stars.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETIMES THE CLARITY COMES TOO LATE

Sometimes the clarity comes too late

to realize there was never

any need for forgiveness

and nothing to expiate

about the way we made our gracious farewells

into works of art

that would go on hurting forever.

We had a genius back then

for making death seem more beautiful than it is

because we lived on the edge of things

and not their surfaces

and o if we’d only felt all those things

that made us weep at the end

dying in doorways that were more cruel

than any threshold we had to cross to stand there.

If only we could have felt those immensities of good-bye

from the very beginning

what reason would we have had to cry like candles

when the wine turned back into water

and the roses wiped their lipstick off on their leaves?

One goes out.

One goes in.

Because severance

no less than the dance

takes two to make a difference

and as the years go by

the silver flakes off the memory of the mirror

and you can see clear through to the other side

experience is just another log

you throw on the stars

to keep yourself warm on a cold October night

by a small fire out in the open

where it’s easier to sublimate

the intensities of fate

by opening the cages you keep them in

and burning your loveletters

like the flightfeathers of half-forgotten songs

to spread their wings in the flames

and give them the freedom to rise higher

than the nest of ashes they were born in.

History isn’t the muse

the immeasurable mystery is

and if you don’t learn to let things go

you’ll never know

how to live lyrically alone in the wild

unbounded by your solitude

by the side of a river whose flowers are dying.

The green bough hisses and blisters in the fire

but the cracks in the heartwood

burn far into the night

and give off way more heat in the autumn

than the pre-emptive lightning strikes of spring.

It’s a rite of passage as old as migrating geese

mournfully bearing souls south

whose bones have turned to dust

to take all my prophetic skulls like moon rocks

out of the house of the dead

and arranging them into the ring of a firepit

stand in the middle like the eternal flame

of an unrepentant heretic

to rekindle the dance

even among the skeletal shadows

of a persecuted romance.

Even in sorrow.

Even in the silence

of the great distances

that add their aerial perspective to time.

Not to call ghosts back to a seance

as if they could tell me anymore about death

than I’ve already lived through

but every year at the second full moon in October

after the harvest is in

and the scarecrow has come down off his cross

and left it to the ravens of nevermore as a church

I lay a blue violin on a funeral pyre.

I stretch my heart out like a skin on a drum.

Dressed in the plumage of solar flares

I enter a trance of firebirds

that have long since disappeared back into the sun

and like Icarus in eclipse

or the last grasshopper

who didn’t take the advice of the ants

to drag the leaves and wings of things

piecemeal into a shelter

to prepare for deeper separations yet to come.

I take my chances by the hand out here in the open

and I dance.

I dance with heresy.

I dance with the angels and the demons

that were martyred in the name

of what is unforgiveable about my human nature

and yet more sacred than the rain I dance for

to put the war I dance for out.

I dance with whole asylums of noetic visionaries

who went insane

trying to explain me to myself

like the origins of life on another planet.

And I dance again to the music of the women I’ve loved

whether in pain or bliss

whether I was hung by the tail

like a plague rat over the abyss

of my cannibalized emotions

like a famished snakepit

or I fell sidereally under the spell

of the fragrance of summer stars in their hair

I dance not as if it were all worth it in the end

but something inestimable to celebrate

that gives the chartered undertakers pause

about what they do for a living

when they see how a poet can dance

to the picture-music of the crazy wisdom

that sings the dead up out of the earth to their feet

without looking down from the mountaintops

or back at the valleys behind

to take the measure of their heart

to see if it’s empty or full.

I let the new moon

feel the old moon’s arms around it again

like the bright vacancy and dark abundance

of what’s joyfully absurd and playful about life

whether its doing a sword dance with words

or dancing in blue heron feathers

like a shaman among waterbirds

longing for enlightenment

like a tantric star map

to break the jinx of their prayer-wheels.

Or dancing to bullets like a greenhorn

in the main street of nineteenth century Dodge

or like me out here in the country dark

alone with six thousand visible stars

eleven miles outside of Westport

spreading my wings under the sign

of the Eagle and the Swan going down in the west

to add my phoenix to the feathers of the burning sumac

and grabbing the lightning lance of the thunderbirds

like a serpent from their talons

hold it up to the stars to the east and the west

like the wavelength of a crazy insight

into the dark word of the living light

that makes me dance my way

out of time

out of place

out of my mind

without leaving anyone or anything behind.

PATRICK WHITE

BETTER TO FLASH A SHARP KNIFE QUICKLY

Better to flash a sharp knife quickly across someone’s throat

as the last remaining mercy

than bludgeon them to death retroactively as you do.

The first is just another big city workaday murder on the nightshift

but the way your offended sense of righteous indignation

has turned to hate

as you sit there sliding needles into your arm

like loveletters into a bruised envelope

you’ve addressed in blood to yourself

I can tell you’re sticking pins into the eyes

of black madonna voodoo dolls

deep inside a secret hiding place in your childhood

where you indoctrinate them into genocide.

You’re a beautiful woman with lots to hide

and I don’t want to know where the corpses are

as if the only intimacies worth caring about

were all long buried in this desert of stars.

And twice before I’ve tasted the blood of the black widow

and yes it may be sweetened

by all the butterflies it’s eaten

but then your heart goes numb as an ice-cube

in the fix at the end

that comes on like an eclipse

of the light at the end of the tunnel

where all your dead relatives

are dying to greet you again.

I wear my heart on my sleeve

like the colours of the ghetto I was born into

to watch my mother die of overwork for nothing

of any estimable value including me

when I look at it from her point of view.

And I like the sexy West Coast sixties look

of those black Stevie Nicks Gothic spider webs

you wear more like skin

than the net of Indra

with jewels at every intersection.

And I’ve always been tempted and still am

by dangerous pariahs on the lamb

from the witch-hunts of medieval men

who fear a female messiah

that can cast her nets wider

than any constellation

among the fishers of men.

And o sweetness don’t doubt yourself.

It’s still a cheap thrill to feel so sublimely vulnerable

daring the taboo event horizons of your powers

like a firefly going eye to eye with a blackhole

even as I bend space to stay clear as a gravitational lense.

But you’re hooked on your own elixirs

like a dealer who wants to get out of it

on his own product

and in my world magic shoots the stars

like whitewater in the Ottawa River

in the spring run off in May

when the toxins wear off like cataracts

and you get high on the risk for free

in the name of sick children

waiting for heart transplants.

And yes, yes, yes, there’s still a Neanderthal in me

that wants to paint your face

in carbon and red ochre

on the inside of my witchdoctor’s mask

to make all this space seem

a lot less lonely in here

since I killed off the last cave bear.

I could so easily encrypt my starmaps

on the mystic enigmas of the dice

I’ve carved like small Kaabas

and Rubik’s cubes out of my own bones

to see if the nightbird calling out to you

in this mutual darkness of ours

were worth taking the chance

if it should happen to come up snake eyes.

Or if I could learn to be hypnotized

without turning to stone

by a Pythian priestess

with a Medusan hairdo

with oracular highlights that bite

and you could learn to dance

to the picture-music

of a different kind of flute

like Salome for Herod

and John the Baptist’s head.

Love doesn’t begin where lust leaves off.

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.

I think that’s only true for those who are no good at it.

Or dominated by a spiritual Gestapo

that makes the body wear a yellow star.

Three phases of the moon.

Maiden. Mother. Crone.

I’ve seen the spider with its crescent fangs.

And I’ve hung from my own spine more than once

like a mummified fly on a trophy line

waiting for my next afterlife

assuming I had one

and Merlin I may seem to you

but I still fear a starless power darker than my own.

And there’s the maiden like Morgana la Fay

beguiling as lunar waterlilies and deadly nightshade

renewing her virginity in a snake pit.

The urge to possess you overwhelms

the certainty of being bit.

One fang kills you.

The other fang cures it.

But even death eventually wears out its welcome

and the spring isn’t enough to make up for it.

But where’s the middle extreme

defined by the other two?

Where’s the mother?

Where’s the summer

that warms the bloodstreams of the garden snakes

like water in a basking hose?

Spring and winter

but where’s the harvest moon

that shines down on the fullness of life

and adds her mother lode to the gold of the grain

like Demeter in the Eleusinian Mysteries

adding little mushrooms of gratified desire

to the wine you only need to drink once

out of your own skull

to stay intoxicated forever?

Prosperpine may have gone down into the underworld

to shoot jewels with the dead

when a serpent bit her in the heel

like a dirty syringe

but when is she going to live up

to the rest of her myth

and drive the snakes out of her garden

long enough for a rose bush or two to take root again?

You leave two kids at home alone

with a couch-surfing crackhead

you met in a bar last weekend

and you expect me to trust you?

Lady I can look through you

like a broken windowpane

and still appreciate the beauty of the view

without cutting myself on the flint knapped glass

and yes you can still cast a spell

that can turn seasoned sailors into swine

and I could so easily

buy into any delusion you wanted me to

just to sleep with you.

But I’m standing at that window with your kids

and there’s a crackhead behind us

flipping channels like cards in a game of solitaire

and we’re looking out at the view together

pretending none of us are there

because we’re all scared

of the cranky stranger with the tarantula tatoo

and all we can see as far as we can look to get away

is this mindscape of you

salting the flesh of the good earth

like Carthage on crystal meth

when you should be planting seeds

in the hearts and minds of those

who look to you for love

like a chance to flower

even on long starless nights

to live without fear

unmenaced by shadows

swarming the night light

like a seance of anti-matter.

You belong to those who love you in life

and blood may be thicker than water

but without water

it coagulates like a rose that’s lost its colour.

It makes raisins of the grapes on the vine

long before their time

as if someone cancelled summer

and no one gets to taste the wine.

And it’s probably wise

to pour both into the cauldron of your heart

until they’re both so intermingled

the rain doesn’t put

the scarlet desires

and phoenix fires

of the passionate poppies out

and the hot-blooded gypsy witches

don’t turn the rain to steam

on first contact with their skin.

We’re standing at a broken window

and we’re looking in

and what we see is that in you

there is no summer

and where blood should be thicker than water

the water’s turned to ice

and the two rosebuds

standing like your daughters at this window

like two cut flowers in a shattered vase

are haemorrhaging like too much turpentine

on two brushes loaded with red paint

too thin to bloom.

Because the ladybug

is too busy playing with matches

trying to get a rise out of the fire-hydrants

to see if she’s still the arsonist she used to be

to know when her own house is on fire

her kids are alone

and it’s time to fly away home.

PATRICK WHITE

WET FRIDAY NIGHT

Wet Friday night. Too beleaguered to paint. Don’t know if I can write. Want to. There’s a snake pit of muses in my gut trying to prohecy what I’ll do next. Enervated but enduring to get back to the bliss of the high mountain flower before the last avalanche came down on it like ten thousand Sisyphyean boulders to prove that even absurdity can fractally emerge as just another mode of redundancy. And I say to myself. Self, I’ve had enough of this. And Self doesn’t answer because it doesn’t exist. Only the rain on the black streets and the hiss of tires. And something bruised and battered like a wave that just washed the mermaids off the rocks. And I don’t care who they were singing to. I’ve heard it before. They’re just running an extortion racket like a juke-box. Put another nickel in the nickelodeon and I’ll sing for my supper. This must be the seven years of lean kind. Sickly cattle. And none of them have ever jumped over the moon. They haven’t earned the first and last crescents of their horns. Drugstore cows. Methane ozone grazers. Self, I say. Don’t take it out on the cows. Even the fat ones aren’t lithe enough to make it up to the Minoans. And we’ve all been stricken by a re-run of the same celebrity famine. Food got tired of being chained to the same old appetites. In the beginning was the mouth. The rest was food. As the young Korean Zen master with abounding squirrel energy snapped. The eye eats the picture. The ear eats the sound. Control eating. You control the world. As it is, I’m sitting here, nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to be, witnessing my mind eat its own thoughts. Some taste like the ashes of moths that never made it through the window to be consumed in the candle of their heart’s desire and others are fresh water flowing into salt. Blood coagulating into roses on a garbage dump. Kites snapping off my spinal cord to trash themselves in the powerlines. Dorian drums but all the melodic syrinxes outlawed in the new republic like subversive theme songs. Look what Catholic bells did to the pan pipes of the Incas. The right era but the wrong octave. The hymns of the valley a voice too low to sing the paeons of the mountain. And it’s a violation of a copyright law to listen attentively to the echoes.

The warrior minstrel of the forlorn hope is doing a sword dance so that peace can be more than just the shadow of victory. So there is no taint of triumph or defeat in my joy. I could go get drunk if I drank. I could go rail coke with teen-age girls who thought I was exotically amusing as a living relic of the sixties enshrined in the design of their clothes if I did coke. Instead of turning out the lights I could start a bar fight after the music’s over. I could get arrested and spend the night sleeping on a newly enamelled concrete bed in jail without my belt to hang myself from the bars like Benjamin Chee Chee nobody believed until he was dead. Or I could shatter my knuckles against a wall in a ferocious moment of aggressive solitude and wait for an ambulance to resolve my confession medically. Or I can say been there. Done that. Boring. And look for life after theatre beyond the blazing of the hucksters on the midway. Seek the kind of darkness that’s suitable for stars. Deepen my metaphors until they can embrace my solitude without over-reaching themselves. I could taste the stars one by one on the tip of my tongue to see which ones were sweet and which ones stung like killer bees. Or I could find a moody place with an estranged mirror to give my lies the right kind of atmosphere to die in. Or revive more generous truths than these stingy delusions that pass for the facts. Not much of a life if all you’ve got to celebrate is the sum of everything you haven’t done. The summum bonum of your sins of omission. Not me though. I’ve never had anything worth living for that wasn’t the first out the door. Inspiration’s just an urgent sense of incompletion. I wonder if apples panic in the fall. I want to get down to the demonic details. I want thorns on my roses and horns on my angels. I want back doors on all my oxymorons. I want iron fire-escapes and inflammable geraniums to scare away the snakes and ladders that rise up like bannisters on the stairwells to heaven. Give me an August thermal and a flightfeather from a red-tailed hawk and I can make it on my own in an earthly kind of way. High wide lyrical and alive. I could be someone you couldn’t conceive of living multiple lives on myriad worlds simultaneously. I could be donating used afterlives like body parts to down and outers with expansive hearts who like to dress down in a state of grace and don’t have any misgivings about the space they’re in.

The stars keep to themselves and for the most part so do I. Spread the shining and keep yourself aloof. But there are moods that come upon me like Chernobyl or a Zen nuclear reactor melting down and I’m blinded by the realization of how irradiated you can be by the world until everything you think and feel seems like just another cliche of the same old fraud. Tawdry and doomed. A hundred billion tons of carbon dioxide rising up into the atmosphere every year and I’m sitting here smoking a cigarette. I don’t need wings or Spanish spurs on my heels to nudge my compassion into action. I feel more than I want to most of the time about the lack of a human condition to anything. I do. I act. I am. Spontaneously in that order. Is it otherwise for you? And every gesture that’s pumped out of my heart is as big as the known universe. The only way you can stay true to falsehood is sentimentally. But one of the hidden jewels of insight buried in the ashes of a burnt out childhood where no one ever recovers the body of their brother taught me it’s pointless to try to grind your knives on clouds. Switch blade lightning. A flash in the pan. Showboating in a parking lot. Too much lustre to be seasoned steel. And even now as I’m peaking at zenith in the sidereal immensities of my igneously imaginative intensities like a prophetic glassblower in a blast furnace trying to inflate the shape of space into a more habitable universe it’s still startling to realize that even if everything wilts like a daylily after its moment in the sun, it’s been as real as it has been delusional all along. First you hear the song. And then you hear the nightbird that’s singing it in the darkness for the best of reasons that are neither right nor wrong.

PATRICK WHITE