WORDS. JUST WORDS

WORDS. JUST WORDS

Words. Just words. Don’t be fooled. Oscillating wavelengths of laryngeal frequencies echoing in the mind as if ghosts had ears. Just because you’ve taken a bite out of an apple doesn’t mean you’ve experienced an apple tree. You’d have to swallow the whole universe in a single gulp to do that. And it’s more than a mouthful even for the word mongers. Selena. Moon. Luna. Al Qamar. She of the wide shining brow. Europa. All sounds for the same thing. A way of pointing without the finger. Picture-music without the baton. Sounds of the living. Sounds of the dead. First words from the cradle. Last words on a death bed. We paint with sound when we’re up. We sing the blues when we’re down. I ask my eyes to explain my ears. My ears talk about loud and understated colours. My senses keep passing a magic ball around like a word and each of them casts a different spell over my vision. Some an eclipse. Some a blue moon in late October. And there are words like small birds that break their necks against a windowpane by mistaking a frame of reference for the sky. Words live. Because you do. But if you’re dead. You write like the letter of the law on marble letterhead to let us all know where your’re buried. Words get married. Words get divorced. Words have kids and live in myriad family ways. Words leave suicide notes to be found in the morning written by scarlet snails of lipstick scrawled across bathroom mirrors that feel like rejection slips from a fashion magazine. No word since the beginning of language has ever said a thing. They’re silent. Words don’t speak up for themselves. They leave that to us. Words like climbing the rigging up to the crow’s nest like a guitarist working the struts like frets or like a spider in a high wire act weaving safety nets and neural webs dripping like hammocks and powerlines from the attics of your left front parietal lobe. In the beginning was the word but it was the imagination that was the ghost writer. And still is. And ever shall be. All words have a common proto-nostratic ancestor like a monosyllabic mother tongue that grunted its way into eloquence. But verbal expression is not thought no more than a scream is. And all thought is revelation faster than the speed of light. Words move at the speed of sound. They’re too slow to keep up with the extraterrestrials. Words walk on the earth looking for an hospitable voice to play host to their homelessness. Abstractions are the insubstantial shadows of concrete nouns. If you can’t say it in colour and sound and taste and texture you’re not in a world of forms anymore. You’re a hole in the ozone that lets the gamma radiation in like a high frequency wavelength toxic with ideas that are shed like the skin of an ideal serpent that leaves its ghost in the wake of an exorcism and moves on like a star well beyond the signs of life it leaves behind. Every word is a graveyard of metaphors. In every word is a house of the dead where it keeps the prophetic skulls it consults once a year like the tangible meaning of its origins. Comet. Comma. Comb. Coma. Or ball ballistic ballet bolemic. All petals of the same flower. All birds on the same prayer-wheel. Straw dogs, masks of the Dogan, voodoo dolls and sacred effigies heaped on the fire after the festival is over and the gods have been propitiated like powerful emotions. Venus figurines with bulging bellies as if they had something real to say about creativity. Hunting magic, yes, negative handprints and extinct rhinos defecating on dead shamans in deep trance states, but always on the wet walls of a fertile cave-womb with clitoral monoliths at the main entrance like the labial crescents of the full moon giving birth to architecture. Bury your dead under your hearth fire if you want to see how the living inpsire the dead like a phoenix to rise again out of your ashes. Words are like stars and the history of light. By the time they get here, they’re always light years behind the original insight that’s penetrated deeper into space than anything that can be measured in words can know by turning a spectrum into a bar code. Words can serve a purpose when the need arises. They can be the bearers of water and the hewers of wood. But at night in the slave-camps when the sugar-cane is cut it’s a different music than that which animates the workaday world. Words let their hair down and pound the ground of their being with dithyrambs of unfettered feet until they drown in their own sweat to free themselves of the chains and the whips that keep them in line like the imperial rhetoric that knows how to march but isn’t much good at dancing itself to death. Words are wanna be musicians with scratched guitars on their backs hitch-hiking down the Highway 7s of my breath. They stand outside the liquor-store and busk for chump change. They introduce their sorrows to strangers in the rain. Some words soar and plunge like dragons and red-tailed hawks, but most are just the same old broken propellers that have been trying to fly for years as if weathervanes had feathers and paperclips had wings. Words are pine-beetles. Words are chainsaws. Words cut whole forests down to re-paper the living room with scenic views of autumn trees. Words return the bodies of dead dignitaries in long memorial thought trains like Abraham Lincoln to Illinois. A man is just the expansion of the vocabulary of the boy who’s still trying to get his point across. Words wound. Words heal. Words repel and words beguile. But whether they’re telling the truth or not they’re no less real than the tapping of the rain on the windowpane or the dead branch that’s taken up the pen to scratch its life story out in water and glass as if words gave meaning to the incomprehensible by seating it like a guest at the head of a table of contents. Words enter the mystery and disappear like birds among the stars. Words give eye-witness testimony in defense of your ears when they lie to themselves about what they’ve heard. If the universe is in a grain of sand then what’s in a word if not the whole story of creation in a nutshell? Words make the man. Not his clothes. As soon as he opens his mouth and discloses how patchy his mind is as if he were wearing the colours of three gangs at once. A word can be the raven at your door or a nightingale in a hawthorn tree. They’re chameleons of your mood. And when you need them to be they’re mirrors you hold up to nature unadorned in broad daylight, and later that night when you’re alone in the dark, they’re looking glasses into your soul with cosmetic lights you can turn on and off like your name on a marquee in front of a theatre. And the audience that goes inside. Anyone can stumble across a word like a seashell on a deserted beach and put it up to their ear and expect to hear the ocean. But how many can listen attentively enough they can hear what the stars are saying as well or what the sky means to a bottom-feeder in a palace of water or the afterlife of the birds that evaporate out of it like messages in a bottle addressed to the sun? Listen to a single word like a bee to a flower, like a bear to honey, like a gold-digger to money, like Seti to extraterrestrial life, like a mother to a child in the middle of the night, and you’ll overhear everything down to the seediest detail. You can read God’s mail like a private loveletter to the world by steaming the envelope of a single word open, and then licking it shut again, ask it to hold its tongue while all the others are talking behind her back. Words are a worse addiction than alcohol and meth-amphetamine whether you withdraw in Zen silence or go on listening to the sound of your voice like a mermaid on the rocks. Your hypothalamus never forgets. What a rush it was the first time you made love to words like a slim volume of poetry at a book launch and they showed you your name in print on the prow of a shipwreck on the moon. And I like the Buddhist point of view. True words are any words that heal. And false words are any words that wound. So if you tell a lie and it heals, it’s true. And if you tell a truth, and it wounds, it’s false. I like the compassion of this. And then there are times when I think, no matter what they do or convey or suggest, whether they’re handing out names to the animals and flowers in the Garden of Eden, or running numbers on the zodiac, words are always innocent. True to life. Even at the scene of a murder, no one ever interrogates the knife. You keep your word and you’re martyred by integrity. You break it. You’ve just punched a fortune-cookie in the mouth. You lose your wife. And your kids won’t back you when you run for public office. In the beginning was the word? I don’t think so. In the beginning was the voice. It said yes. It said no. It said maybe so. And everything was inconceivably believable after that. Implausible, but true. Even in the long shadow of the Tower of Babel right here in PsychoBabylon Ontario words are the polyglot interpreters of the dumb deaf facts. Even though the signage of blind numbers purports to be the mother tongue of the creative matrix of the universe these days the dilemma is easily resolved by saying she had twins. A girl and a boy. Word and Number. Number and Word. To attend to the gender politics of it. Just the same. An infinite number of petals opens and one flower blooms like a word. Eyes open like the goblets of poppies to the light and the rain and at night the moon slips a coin under their tongues and places both sides of two harvest moons on their eyelids to keep reality from waking up from the best dream it’s had in years. See what I mean? You wouldn’t be able to see through the veils of the mirages on the moon if it weren’t for words. Even if someone were to call out your name into the Grand Canyon of all abysses after light years of listening to your last known wavelength, looking in black holes, shaking down echoes and showing the stars your picture like the missing thirteenth house of the zodiac out of its straitjacket, you’d still be left standing there like the torn wind-battered rigging of a shipwrecked jack pine on the precipice of a dangerous silence that thought it heard you screaming in your sleep but couldn’t quite make out what you said after that, if it weren’t for the way words have got your back and know when to keep your mouth shut. It would be easy to eloquently wax on about the incommensurably inarticulate distances of silence and time that a word has to cross like a nightbird of insight between your mind and your mouth, but who needs to run on about their life story like the dangling participles of pi? I cross my Ts like a superstitious parrot on a perch. I dot my i’s like bullet holes through a mailbox on a post at the edge of a long lonely country road full of snakey S curves that come at you out of the night like assassins of sidereal insight into a snakepit of sacred wavelengths. And all you can say is. O! As if the moon just came out from behind a cloud. And you turned your wheels in the direction of the spin just in time.

PATRICK WHITE

THE DARKNESS

THE DARKNESS

note: Azazel was the name of the scapegoat the tribes of Israel would transpose all their sins to and drive out into the wilderness once a year. May, at the time of the cleansing of the temples, if I remember correctly. Over the millennia, Azazel was personified into being a Renaissance demon of broad experience and knowledge, master of all evil, and eventually Satan’s standard bearer. Over the last forty years he has come and gone from my poetry as the persona of a kind of anti-self that allows me to address themes on the dark side of my nature with a certain clarity of ironic insight into my own and the human condition that was otherwise unavailable to me. At first encounter dark, troubling, and dangerously clear, after all these years, to use Shakespeare’s phrase, he has become more of an affable familiar to me. And for those of you who are huddled around your night light afraid of things that go bump in the dark, I am no more Satanic, at least to my knowledge, than I am a born again Christian.

The darkness.

The darkness of a child.

The darkness of a child who isn’t old enough

to know what darkness is

yet it clings to his skin

like something that won’t come off.

Marked.

For what?

By whom?

The darkness that made his childhood seem

like a foregone conclusion

he was fundamentally bad

just like dad

though he never got the chance to call him that.

Flint-knapped like a chip off the old block.

O yeah before I get too confessional

I guess I should mention

the night rain is shedding its scales

like pine cones and snakes

in the tar pits of the mud puddles outside.

There.

Atmosphere.

Now we descend down into the interior

where the metaphors emerge from back alleys

and flash knives of insight

that seem to move like moonlight on water.

Shark fins waxing romantic about death.

Dangerous.

But it keeps your wits sharp.

Danger is an antidote to death.

Danger slides its stone along the blade

of an event horizon

like the wingspan of a sword

and the last word of the cutting edge

is drawn across your throat

to see what you’ve got to say for yourself.

Not much

when you’re giddy with insecurity

and all your cornerstones have turned to quicksand

and it’s hard to take your fate seriously

when you can electrically imagine

the page three sluglines you’ll make in the morning

given the immediacy of the moment

as if you’d just found a cobra coiled under your pillow

like a jack-in-the-box serial killer.

Flint-knapped like a chip off the old block

Azazel remembered his father hitting him

and with every blow he was sure his father

was flaking off bits of diamond

from a raw chunk of coal.

Childhood hopes of getting the better of his old man

by his own hand raised to strike

like a psychotic god above him.

A kind of childhood judo that taught him

to use another man’s demonic energies against him

by playing the part of the victim

that ran his abuser to ground

and pulled him down into a darker nightmare

than anything he had the imagination

to wake up from afraid of what he’d become.

Things turn round and round and round

like the little red lighthouses on top of a cop car.

Azazel cultivated his mind like a stolen switchblade

in the waterclock of bedrooms

he kept being poured out of

like a primordial ocean

of experimental life forms

as his single mother moved from house to house.

Each the womb of a different incarnation.

Azazel mastered them all

like the tantric tulpas of a Tibetan rinpoche.

Like the naguals of Yaqui Indians on peyote.

Dark abundance.

Bright vacancy.

He was the unhinged Janus-faced doorway of both.

He had the mood swings of a chameleon in a paint-store.

He knew how to outdo the Etruscan shape shifters

like a snake pit of kundalini fire.

If this feels strange to you

you can always enquire

but Azazel’s baby teeth

were the calderas of sacred volcanoes

he put like keepsakes under his pillow for the snake fairy

to swallow them whole like the moon.

Azazel in his youth

embodied the shadows of excellence

thinking love and approval might follow their example

and a light would come out of the darkness

and shine kindly down upon him

and everybody would see that he was just a kid

who liked stars because nobody else did.

But he was born on the wrong side of a promise

and no matter how well he kept it

he was mistaken for a threat.

Two cosmic eggs.

One a bird.

The other a reptile with wings.

When he’s hot he’s a dragon.

When he’s not

the earth goes docile

and sinks into a coma

like the Pythian oracle at Delphi

trying to divine the seven kinds of ambiguity

by cutting every one of their hydra-headed prophecies off

with a knife

as if she were gathering flowers

and arranging them into Medusan bouquets.

Too late to accuse.

Too late to convict.

Too late to forgive.

The hour of stone is upon us

like a sundial at the graveside of time.

Azazel woke up from his childhood

like a dream in which he died

and tried to live on the nothing that was left.

The rain outside has stopped.

Just mirages in store-front windowpanes.

The streets belong to the wind

talking to the leaves

as if they’d just had their tongues torn out

like the sacred syllable of the kataba worm

in a tequila bottle that spoke with an accent

but broke just like everyone else

when it was empty

having delivered the message

and there was no money on the return.

Ut pictura poesis.

Azazel always wanted to paint poetry

not photograph it.

Even on the astral plane

you’ve got to have some kind of a likeness

before you begin the search.

Metaphors have always seemed

too fanatical and absolute for his taste

once he understood Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

was the best alibi at the time the atoms could come up with

to explain their whereabouts.

Similes give you more of a chance.

Cut you a little more slack.

Suggest.

Don’t say.

Insinuate.

Don’t copulate with equals signs

like parallel lines that never meet.

Metaphors staple wanted posters all over town

among the rusty thorns

and wounded corners of paper

of those that were taken down

like Jesus removed from the cross of a telephone pole

advertising a local play

with dramatic significance

and then making a universal getaway

like too much ado about nothing.

Azazel is inspired to write

obscure occult holy books

people can keep beside the bed

to secure their footing in the dark

like night lights and supernovae.

Sententiae from the dark side

for people living in eclipse.

Azazel has oxymoronic lips

that answer the prayers of broken stone

that have no where else to turn.

He’s no more concerned

about what form is to content

than he is in what ashes are to urns.

Burn he says to the fireflies

if you’re serious

then scatter on the wind like Sufis

in a state of annihilation.

Don’t bring a cult of weathervanes

to the crossroads of creation

to ask them the direction of prayer

when it’s nowhere and everywhere at once.

Ah, Faustus, why this is hell;

nor are we out of it.

No entrance.

No emergency exit.

Just this space dilated like a black hole

in a gravitational eye

that bends the light

to its interpretation

of whatever this might be.

Help yourself to as many thresholds as you need

to build your stairwells up to heaven

like thermals under your wings.

But if you choose to go by ladder

don’t put your full weight

on the burning rungs

for fear of falling through again

every time you get a leg up on your ascension.

Remember when you get to the top

there’s no extension.

People who are religiously inclined

start out with a good beginning

that utterly fails

because they don’t know when to stop.

Get off the celestial omnibus

and whistle the rest of the way home in the dark alone

as if a happy man were impregnable to predators

and a sad one doomed to tragic circumstances

outside the box that we all return to

without a forwarding address

whether we’re cursed or blessed.

Fear can make a coward of a man

but it’s his joy that makes him vulnerable.

A street artist learns to draw

by making chalk outlines

around corpses on the sidewalk

with no regard to composition.

He topples the still lives

and let’s the shell casings fall where they may.

Azazel learned human anatomy the hard way.

Astronomical catastrophes make a big impact.

He saw what happened to his mother.

Women were punching bags and prostitutes.

He knew what happened to himself.

Men were volcanic dissolutes in handcuffs

that tried to forge your cell tissue

into the steel they say it takes to be real

by putting their fist down

like a hammer on the anvil of a mushroom.

PATRICK WHITE

AND THE WILLOWS DOWN BY THE BANKS OF THE TAY

AND THE WILLOWS DOWN BY THE BANKS OF THE TAY

And the willows down by the banks of the Tay

whisper through their veils

like ladies of the lake

where autumn walks like fire on the water

or the marriage bed of a Viking funeral ship

as the sun goes down like a ferry

into the underworld of the west

and all these words of passage I say like birds flying

high over head with the souls of the dead

I lay down like swords in tribute to the river

as if I were returning tears to the mirrors they came from.

Maple leaves scratch like the quills of bat-winged scholars

at the parched manuscripts

lying everywhere at my feet

trying to trace their ancestral bloodlines

back through a lineage of zodiacal kings

while the Library of Alexandria burns.

All scholars are arsonists at heart

as flammable as naphtha in birch bark.

If God were to talk to anyone now

right here in Perth Ontario Canada

it would still be through a burning bush

that would sound like the voice

of the phoenix in the sumac.

Mystic immolations of an Arab spring

spreading its wings for a poet or a prophet

to jump up on Pegasus or Buraq

and fly as if you had a star under your saddle

and not a spur or burr of discontent

that makes you feel tongue-twisted and petty

beside abject comparisons with Icarus and Aaron.

Stars soon to add some glamour to the sky

as the willows turn their weeping veils

into the shawls of grieving widows.

I’ve got nothing in particular to cry for

but I admire the eloquence of those

who’ve still got something to lose

like daylilies that can’t afford a face-lift

or the shell of the baby turtle on its back

like the sun disc of a Mayan calendar

that was destroyed by boyish malice

before it could live long enough

to be old enough to be doomed

by its own self-fulfilling prophecy.

Autumn is a seance of long-forgotten fragrances.

Oceanic elixirs and and sad sad wines

trying to keep their chin up

like wild grape vines against the weather

that sends their bruised amphorae to the bottom

with heavy eyelids and tunnel vision.

The air is sweet and thick and pendulous

as a bell in a burning church

that’s been to one too many funerals.

Bring on the night

like the deepest inspiration of the light

in the nightbird’s breast

and let the lost harvests and unfulfilled longings

that stretch for light years out over the abyss

like the strings of a cosmic guitar

or the harp I made from the wishbone

stuck in my throat like a sacred syllable

that goes witching for water on the moon

in the watersheds of my voice.

Bring tears of blood to my eyes

raised up out of the well of my being

and holding my horned skull up to Jupiter in Aries

let me drink to the hidden beauty of the singing

and all those oceanic veils of seeing

that fall away like the eyelids of roses

the starmaps of asters

from a beautiful woman’s face.

Old enough now to celebrate

things I know I’ll never know again.

Young lovers jay walking across a busy street

hand in hand as if

the other were the other’s missing link.

The wide-eyed stargazers

with no scars or bruises on their telescopes

elevated now by their amazement to sidereal heights

who will later be deepened by it

as the darkness grows more sublime than the light

and radiance sways into ripeness

and the candles go out one by one

to clarify the long autumnal way home

like nightwatchmen just before the break of dawn

having done their rounds

sit down at the crossroads

where the celestial equator

intersects the ecliptic at the equinoctial colure

and opening the gates of their lanterns

let the stars and fireflies out of the mason jars

that were the only light they had to go by

that kept the others lit.

Even as the utilitarian chandeliers

of the streetlamps come on

like a constellation of runway suns

that light up in unison at midnight

to give our long departed gods somewhere to land.

PATRICK WHITE

AND SHOULD YOU THINK I NEVER THINK OF YOU

AND SHOULD YOU THINK I NEVER THINK OF YOU

And should you think I never think of you

out here like a space probe

in the great indivisibility of the abyss

sending post cards back from the edge of nowhere

to no one in particular

you’d be as wrong as you usually were.

I think of you. I remember. I recall.

You were the chandelier of the unattainable

and I was the flying carpet in the hall.

Intimately specific images of unassuming moments

Watching you slip off one your heels

with your arm braced against a brick wall

to check for pebbles.

Or that time after another fight

you stopped the car at the end of the dirt driveway

and got out to pull up your t-shirt

to show me your breasts like a superlative

you knew would keep my attention

until you came home from work that night.

Not the big things you’d think I’d remember.

Not the great revelatory enlightenments

of the dark matter at hand

when everything was either perfectly tragic

or tragically perfect between us

under the stars in the frosty hay fields

reverting to the wild by acclamation;

but little flakes of snow and ashes

or moonlight flint knapped off

the blue anthracite of a midnight lake

trying to shape a spearhead of insight

into the Clovis point of a diamond.

Feathers and petals and leaves of things

that were hardly noticed when they fell.

The feeble shadows cast by Venus

across the snow on a moonless night

when nobody was looking

because they were all inside

huddled around a fire

like blazing mesmerized by its own blindness.

Breathless shadows born of Venus.

You don’t even need to have your third eye open

to know how beautiful and rare that is.

Things on the wind that blow up like leaves

scratching at the door like cats

to be let in out of the cold.

Memories that suddenly fly into my field of vision

like bats out of the dark baffled by the porchlight

only to end up stuck on the burdock

like martyrs to the cause

and birds that break their necks

against the false skies in my eyes

with the dull thud of softballs

thrown against the wall of a house

and fall to earth like ricochets

off knightly suits of body armour

forged out of old shell casings

to hide the evidence of my vulnerability.

At least from me for a while.

And I’ve got wounds that are deeper than that

I know will never heal

and moments of vital bliss

I’m living on like a ghost in a lighthouse

that didn’t take its own advice

when it put its lantern out

like a candle beside the bed

to go all the way with a mermaid

and not get burnt.

Now I’m a nightwatchman of the stars

with a big enough flashlight

its eyebeam reaches all the way to Mars

to make sure there are bars on the windows

and locks on all the doors.

PATRICK WHITE

EVERY DROP OF RAIN AS COLD

EVERY DROP OF RAIN AS COLD

Every drop of rain as cold

as a kiss on the forehead

of a dead baby in its coffin.

And I’m soaked through to the skin.

This rain can’t afford any more flowers.

This rain drives things in

instead of bringing them out.

Except for the madmen with nothing to lose

and right now I’m one of those.

My clothes clinging like a wet parachute

that candled on the way down

and got hung up on a powerline

instead of blooming

like morning glory on the vine.

I’m a Medusan jellyfish out of my depths.

I’m holding my head up like Caravaggio

to the Duke of Naples

full of regrets that it’s me in the flesh

and not one of my stand-in doubles.

I’ve got the whole of Stewart Park to myself.

No teen agers billowing from behind bushs.

It’s hard to keep a joint lit in the rain.

Just an hour

just an hour

to break the severe discipline

of living in pain

and counter-intuitively go utterly insane.

For good.

Never come back.

Never be what you should

because it doesn’t leave enough room for solitude.

For imagination.

For the spirit to forget it’s the spirit

and just lay down in the wet grass

like any other ordinary human in agony

in the crosshairs of the lightning

and spreading its wings as wide as my arms

ride freefall in front of the Confederate snipers

trying to shoot the stars out

like Kevin Kostner in Dances with Wolves.

Twice.

The first time in earnest.

The second in jest

just to prove that death

is only an evil clown

that people take too seriously.

Despair’s the back door to liberation.

A cold bath on the dark side of the moon.

Joy’s the doorbell at the front.

The happy debt-collector that comes once a month.

Apres moi le deluge.

No arks.

No two of every kind.

No doves sent out to look for land.

Just this shipwreck at the bottom of the sea

looking up at the sheet lightning

of its broken rigging

making neural connections between

the synaptic gaps in the grey matter of the clouds

like a panicked damage assessment

to see if I went down with the ship like a real captain

or one of the rats who jumped into a lifeboat

and threw the baby overboard

like a cradle in the treetops.

A cold wind burrs my skin

like the swan song of a sadistic lullaby.

I lie here obedient to nothing

because I refuse to die

until I’ve lived what I was born for.

And everybody who’s ever given up on themselves

like a bad drug that doesn’t make you happy knows

it wasn’t this.

PATRICK WHITE

ALL THAT I COULD WISH FOR YOU

All that I could wish for you or anyone else

is more than I could attain for myself.

So far from home for so long

as if home were the alibi

that put the distance between me and a lie

I got sick of telling myself

to feel I belonged somewhere to some people

who might look up from the compass

of what they’re doing once and awhile

into the thirty-six years of my absence

and care that I’m not there anymore.

So I wish you a door that opens

before you need to knock.

And a thief in a window you leave unlocked

so he can steal your heart like sterling silver

and pawn it off as moonlight.

I suspect most people are way too clever

to ever be loved the way they want to be

and I’m not saying that I’ve never been graced

by the mystery

of waking up beside someone I loved

dreaming next to me

about things I know nothing of

because love keeps its deepest secrets to itself

like water on the moon

but I wish you the purest of fountains

from the sweetest wellsprings of life

that don’t look upon the reflections of the clouds

or the leaves and birds that come to sip from its glass

as just another mouthful of polluted words

indelible as headlines

disposable as trash.

My light’s been bent

by a lot of black holes and gravitational eyes

in the five billion light years it’s taken to get here

like a past I almost forgot I had

and I’m not saying that’s bad

though its relatively slow

compared to the speed of thought

that overtook it like a hawk

coming down on a morning dove.

But I wish you the immensity of a clear night sky

it will take you forever to disappear in

because of all the things

you can learn to say good-bye to in this world

the hardest farewell to master is love.

I’ve always been grateful

for the gifts I’ve been given

and endeavoured like any other B.C. salmon

to make a gift of a gift

by swimming upstream

like a waterclock doubling back on its way to the sea.

Like the retrograde motion of Mars

there may be loops and nooses and garottes in my orbit

and small raw pieces of my heart I used

to bait the trapline

to catch and skin the fishers

that kept killing my cats when I lived on a farm

not very far from here

without meaning any harm to the wildlife

that accepted me as one of their own

and like I did them

left me alone.

Except for the fishers.

So I wish you a free passage through life

where every breath you take

adds another inch of feather to the wind

like a mindstream flowing into an older river of stars

with wild irises blooming along its banks

like blue flames of hydrogen

that stick their tongues in each others’ ears

as if they had something to say to one another

like lovers and celestial spheres

and oceans in a seashell

not well-intentioned highways lined with roadkill

like the primrose path to hell that most of us take

like a short cut back to a worse mistake

than the one we made to get here.

Most of my life

I’ve felt like a fluke of the truth

that was able to win out against

the astronomical odds

of my small chances of having the courage

to stand up for it like a strong voice

in a lottery of echoes

but fortunately I’ve always been

self-destructive enough

to risk everything in the name of nothing

I’ve ever seen

but sensed was near and clear to me

like a warm spring rain on a dirty window pane

like the gardens of ice

that grew out of my breath

like the tendrils of ferns unfurling

like the treble clefs of blue violins

in a sad exiled place

where the truth was music to my ears

that fell like the sound of rain from home on my roots

but felt like all the shattered chandeliers and broken mirrors

had gone into diaspora.

A crystal nacht of jackboots

refused to see the whole

reflected in every part of me as in them

like the yellow star

of the myriad-eyed conspiracy theory

that out shone the black hole they wanted to bury it in

like something you could catch

and put in your pocket

and save for a rainy day

like a ghetto or a bank to bail you out

whenever they got so fanatically deep into themselves

everything they felt

everything they had to say

was a debt to someone

they couldn’t possibly repay

even if they could turn

the bad luck of their swastikas the other way

like the prayer wheel of a poisonous flower

like hate mail disguised as a loveletter

even the wind and the light refused to answer.

So I wish you the mindscape and spirituality

of a generous country with a big sky

where the constellations have no nationality

other than free access to the great sea of awareness beyond

that reflects all the colours of the colour blind stars

and makes them feel they’ve made it home

as soon as their light arrives

like honey bees without borders

to open the flowers

like the passports of Japanese plum blossoms

that travel without i.d. anywhere they want

like the billions upon billions of fingerprints

that never lie about our common humanity

to anyone who needs to ask

who we all belong to

if it isn’t each other

and where we all come from

if it wasn’t from the same dark mother.

Poetry has been the most ardent folly of my crazy wisdom

for as long as I’ve known how to weep and wonder

in joy and sorrow

at the mystery and the horror

of what’s arrayed before us here

with such immensity

even time feels small in its presence.

Keats once said load every rift with ore

and so I have

but the greatest discipline of my calling

the gravest risk

the royal quatternio of Orphic alchemy

in the hands of a master shapeshifter

in the smile of a sacred clown

has been to approach the shining

without turning gold into a base metal.

To taste the water without fouling the well I drew it from.

To look at the stars without getting in their eyes.

To pursue an earthly excellence

that expressed the human divinity

that was born of suffering in everyone

without giving offense to the transcendentalists

who like to keep their gods unattainable

because I could see its immanence

was a lot closer to them

than they were to it.

I could see it in the hunch-back baglady

sorting through a garbage can at four in the morning

for the hidden jewel she was sure to find

if she looked deep enough.

I could see it in myself from time to time

when my mind strayed like a white horse

with an odd-shaped birthmark

in the middle of its forehead

because it wasn’t born lucky enough to be a logo

into the star fields of my reclusive neighbour

like the constellation Pegasus

through a gap in a fallen fence

and she was there to lead it back like a muse

along the Road of Ghosts

and you could tell by the smile on her face

that she’d always met me this way

and that there was nothing supernatural

in what she wasn’t trying to hide.

I can see it in you like light in a lamp

that isn’t cagey enough to keep a dove in

even if it wanted to

and it’s as clear as fireflies on a starless night

that it can’t and it won’t and it doesn’t.

So I wish for you a long love affair

with a passion you can’t marry.

A calling that doesn’t have your name on it

because it doesn’t belong to anyone

but loves the sound of your voice in the stairwell

whether you’re coming or going

and the picture-music you set it to

like morning glory on the moon

to let life speak through you in dead earnest

as if you were wholly possessed by the play

of the hero’s entrance

and the villain’s exit

though you know they’re both taking

a standing ovation in the same doorway.

I wish you the sublimity of a single blade of grass

and a darkness as profound as the shadow of an ant

and a heart like a bell of sorrows so sweet and deep

even in a single tear

it’s way out of its depths.

And in the evening just before the stars come out

and Venus is following

the last crescent of the moon

down in the west

having wandered as far as it dares from the sun

I wish you a soul so expansive and radiant with light

all the nights to come can’t help making

enlightened gestures of glee

toward the court jesters

who illuminate your crown with laughter

like waterlilies that shine up at everyone

out of their dark wisdom

and their artistic genius for working with water

like a Zen master amusing himself

with paper boats that float

like the moon on the mindstream

knowing there’s nowhere to go

nothing to do

no one to be

and no one to set free.

Because the people all know

there’s never been a river

that doesn’t lead to the sea

or a hand or a brush or a pen

following its own cursive script

like the holy book of a lost art

that isn’t written in blood

but makes itself up as it flows along

like a spiral galaxy without a star map

all the way to the heart.

And once the lightning’s rooted in your mind

and blossoms like fireflies

in a garden of insight

I wish you never a thought

whatever the mode of expression

whatever the fashion

whatever the theme

the scheme

the dream

that doesn’t tend like all lucidity

to sweeten the fruits of compassion.

PATRICK WHITE

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