IOTA SUBSCRIPT

IOTA SUBSCRIPT

Devoid of everything but metaphors,

the bread gone hard in the tasteless cupboard

littered with bees and flies

that struggled alone with death

on the plains of the upper shelf,

I enrich my patrician poverty

with poems and painted moons,

dreaming of the unlikely day

without anticipation

all things will be corrected. Hope is a lichen,

a sea of shadows on the moon

that drains the water from the stone,

the siren from the rock. Despair

is a cuff of black blood

caught in a bicycle chain,

and if there’s a dawn to all of this,

a day when it promises to change,

it always comes up like a bride

getting married at her own funeral,

my heart waiting,

alone with the flowers

in an empty limousine.

And madness is not an option

in these days of disintegration;

the asylums are full

and they’re handing out straitjackets

in the lifeboats of the survivors

who jumped ship

when the sea got rough.

I could drink or shoot up,

but that’s a parachute without a rip-cord,

and besides, who’s got the elevation

to get off on the rush

of their falling? And I’ve grown old

as a foundling

on the stairs

of an abandoned church; I have no faith

in miraculous adoptions

or the emergency exits

out of hell, and the deacons of absurdity

long ago gave up passing me around

from heart to heart

like a collection plate

when they saw how little I rendered

as the lean scythe of the harvest moon.

Now the mirrors leave pamphlets,

celestial junkmail

on the threshold of the mornings

left to live. The years fly by

like an abacus of birds

on the sagging powerlines

that weave compliant lightning

into spider-webs.

And everything I’ve caught

has poisoned me

as the women came and went,

different styles of voltage,

brown-outs and butterflies

surging through my heart

like a new transformer.

Now I remember them gratefully

as so many incubators and used cocoons

beyond conversion.

I must be a lousy messiah

or one of the lost wise men

to have come this far

beguiled by an elusive star

without finding a manger anywhere

or saving anyone

from their unsalvagable selves,

least of all me, baffled

as I always am poetically

by these luminous rumours of clarity

that arise like women and waves

to dispose of what I am

and enlighten what I’m not

in the bedrooms and Babylons

and spiritual snake-pits

of a dozen sacred brothels.

Aging is not incremental,

drop by drop,

a succession of moments;

it’s precipitious, a stairwell

of continental shelves

I keep stepping off

into deeper, darker, colder depths,

each, a longer fall than the last;

or it’s like the rain

that fell on me as a child,

and falls on me now,

and will fall tomorrow

to open the flowers

that will languish on my coffin

before they launch my moon-boat

crammed with farewells

into the grave. On good days

poetry is an encyclopedic obituary

you can’t take out of the library,

on bad, a suicide note you can

as soon as you pay your late fees.

My devotion has made me absurd;

and my famous pursuit

of an earthly excellence

has treed me like a pack of hounds,

the chronic yapping

of a literally-minded audience

who want the word made blood.

Out on a leafless limb

I linger here

with only the rising loaf of the moon

to sustain me, believing

for lack of a better delusion

as I scramble the stars like code

it somehow keeps my life

hopelessly important

to bait my own dismemberment

by maintaining this fire-watch

throughout these long nights

in a collapsing wooden tower

erected by reformed arsonists

looking for revelation in a lightning strike.

If I have stayed true to the stars,

to fireflies and candles,

and poems that flare like a book of matches,

and preferred instead

to read in the upturned palms

of the passing storms

not the judgment of a god,

but a cheiromancy of luminous life-lines,

the humour is not lost upon me

nor the danger discounted

that the way I’m going

I might very well end up

reaching out for a rescue

that condemns me to hang

from a rope of my own, as usual

the last to know

in the name

of my misplaced loyalty to everything

I took my own life

to consecrate

the unhallowed ground

of an exalted footnote

wandering from page to page,

looking for a cigarette

and a purple passage worthy

of its illuminating irrelevancy,

its penny of qualification

in the back-rooms, sewers,

short-cuts, by-ways, alleys and gutters,

the addenda, appendices

and mystical errata,

the epilogues and variant redactions

that wait like empty cupboards

and extravagant cemeteries

to annotate these endless drafts

of the unpublishable book of life.

PATRICK WHITE

BORN BELOW

BORN BELOW

The rich will eat the poor like the krill of the sea

and grateful there is no real estate among the stars

flowering in the furrowed branches of the willow,

I stand in the backyard parking lot,

and look up with the wounded longing

of a man whose questions are older than his eyes,

knowing nothing will answer the agony

of being alive awhile to bear

this incredible burden of stars

to a grave that gapes without wonder, without sky, without light.

The night is a whisper of God to the dark minerals

composed in the vastness of space

to be humbled by the exaltations of time and mind.

Mercy and healing the radiant view

that expands like a universe within

when the heart grows tired of reading the braille of its scars.

Those lights, ferocious hawks shrieking in their wheeling heights,

the shattered glass of their unsoiled scintillation

thrown down like a goblet they only drink from once,

were my first teachers, the legends of their fury,

ancient, transformative fire imbibed early

that raised me up out of myself like a face

from the boat of my hands

or a passion I couldn’t return.

Are they changed somehow from the stories we tell of their shining,

the laws by which we divine their mysterious origins,

or enhanced by the thousands of years of gazing

that first raised ziggurats and pyramids on alluvial plains

to witch the will of the gods with lightning rods

in a chaos of mutability, civilization

the delusion born thereof, do they burn blindly

above the brutal business of the world, unconcerned

with the politics of extinction that rages below,

the flaring matchbook of nuclear powers

held to a page of apocalypse

that shadows the cowering earth

with arsonists and Armageddon?

Is all that flare and fury, the creation

of the very letters by which the worlds are said,

nothing but the afterlife of a sterling moment

in which, like us, they can’t in the present be seen?

Do the stars that shone on Babylon

shine on us; shine down on nothing,

or have they been humanized even slightly,

as they have been reputed to urge our own blood into fate,

by the view of love and carnage down below?

And gods, each to themselves,

have we become as they are, indifferent to our own glory,

random debacles of accidental intent

weighing our lives in the same purposeless breath,

the same hollow heartbeat

as moments of no appreciable account

in the grandiose obscenity of a loveless creation?

If a star could speak

would it curse or bless the dream

that adorns and torments it,

these eyes of mine that search it out in the darkness

a petal of light in the orchard of dendritic space

to give it a name and ask

for mercy from the bone-yard of the world awhile

by staring into the cool fountains

of its self-purifying mystery,

grateful for its unattainability? Given a voice

that even a child could understand

would it consider what we’ve been,

what it’s witnessed of what we’ve become

over the last five million years

and scream eureka or shriek;

or would it break down in tears

and put its own light out,

disgusted with the embodiment

of its own elements, the issue of its fire-womb?

Iron rises up against calcium

in a war of murderous siblings

like a sword against a skull,

a bullet through the brain,

the chain of bestial beatitudes

that enslaves us in our cities to the ethics of steel,

and destroys on the whim of a few

for the advancement of a few

iron in the form of blood,

the millenial millions slaughtered and wasted

by the extravagant progress of metal

crazed against metal in a robe of red. Ferrous cannibals

in executive suits, in uniforms, in rags,

we eat the brains and drink the blood

from the planet’s fractured cranium, the orthodoxy

of our overly-vaunted evolution, the structure

and inhuman elaboration of civilization

after civilization nothing but the enforced order of our eating.

The big fish eat the little fish

and the little fish cry.

If the eye by which I see this star

is the star that eyes me, could it be

the stars have gone mad

over uncountable nights afflicted

by the same recurrent nightmare

of our astounding savagery,

the gigantism of our capacity

for agony and mutilation,

the brutal depravity of our deepening ignorance

exalting in its consciousness of new modes of murder,

our societies, organized theft,

the flowers of our culture

rooted in the bone and blood meal of a garden

planted in the shadow of an abattoir,

Auschwitz with daisies? Atoms join and separate,

their annihilations, edicts of light,

amalgams and almagests of matter,

mind in the fire-womb

mastering the art of water,

the elixirs of life drawn alchemically

from destruction and putrefaction, the water-lily,

the water-star that opens like a hand

that would give something back to the stars,

transforming the muck and mud of the swamp into light.

Is there any flower a human

can offer up to the night

that has come of all our killing, the suffering

we have enforced upon one another

as if, insane, we despised our own species;

is there anything we have made

of the tragic waste in large and small

we could hold up to a star, to ourselves,

to the moon in the willow

and say, yes, of all the blood we have spilled,

of all the minds and lives

we have brought to rot and ruin

there is this great, black rose of wonder,

this light by which we know the light

born of the billions who have lived and died

in the course of our conception, the countless exterminations

to show you this, just this,

one flower, one incorruptible efflorescence

worthy of the fire that engendered us?

PATRICK WHITE

BY THE TIME YOU SAY IT

BY THE TIME YOU SAY IT

By the time you say it, you’re a bridge beyond the last river of your lament.

Is there meaning in this, content? Emerging

from this cold oceanic reflection, how good

to wrap the sky around you like a blue woolen robe warmed by a fire,

your lungs two bag-ladies sorting through the trash

of your denuded coffin for any rumour of green.

A back-alley dog sniffs at your limp smile beside a broken wineglass.

Your passions turn into mouths and eat you; your heart

mistakes itself for the apple on the tree of knowledge

and dreads the approach of Eve. Today, for example, over coffee on Gore St.

(just so the peasants don’t storm the moat again,

thinking we don’t know where we’re at)

I heard you wondering why the moon always ends in et cetera.

Just to distract you from gnashing your teeth in the void

and sticking your flavourless gum messiah

to the underside of the flat earth, I showed you a picture of the wind’s face

I painted under an overpass on primeval concrete.

A fascist restauranteur enraged by the ulcers on his greed

preached his disease to an unwilling congregation of tables

and jackaled our money away to the squat god of his digital scripture.

Fascinated and hurt, you surveyed the distant puppet-masters

of your own hormonal attachments assemble and reassemble

like constellations at a crossroads and then

got up to give your sad friend an embrace on her birthday,

fingerprinting your own sorrow with someone else’s hand. The albino sun

high above, opening doors and burning thresholds, was proud of you

as I liberated another orphanage in your honour.

People on wheels went by, more nonsensical than this watershed of pain

that pushes up a mad flower of poetry

through the startled soil of an intimate, unknown planet

hanging from the first crescent of the moon like a drop of water

on a blade of radiant star-grass. You. Above the turmoil

of your blood-weather. And now the vast night

crowds into the asylum of my ancient, weeping windows

and the lamps go on like recovering suicides, their light

experimenting with brown-out dosages of Prozac

like something electrical trying to live. Alone again on the deck

of an ark of phantoms beached by the flood

on this brutal world-mountain, my field of vision

is heaped with the skulls and skeletons of warrior dragons

who died true to a door that never opened. And if you listen hard enough

you can hear a secret priesthood of serpents

singing the melancholic lyrics of their eerie toxins in lethal shrines

under the foundation-stones of untenable temples

abandoned to a slum of birds, fractured stairs and pillars

a crusade of minerals on their way home, liberated by an infidel.

Is it continuous or do we make it so; the last forty years of my life

devoted like a lover to the strange face in the moonlight

that beckons me deeper and deeper into her shining as if I were no more

than a ray of her manifestation, each feeling moment

whole to the furthest star, every thought

sufficient as fire, quiescent, an event of fabulous proportions. It’s true

things change, and change is a clock without hands.

Here now in the jewelled fish nets of satiated gods

that trawl the mind-sea for luminous, translucent fish

that have schooled into vagrant poems

for a gesture of provisional expression

timeless as now, I stop and bend like light to show you

how the black water-lilies are night mirrors

returning your eyes like water to the river. And yet,

most astounding of all, there is neither you nor I to witness it,

nor anything that swims like the language of a lost people

through these imagined depths, not even the gust of a god

over the stillness of the waves. Consciousness is the shadow of a living intelligence

whose awareness and being are purposeless flower and star,

all the worlds in every directionless direction

resplendent in the heart of a single atom, dust kicked up

by a child dancing alone in a dusky summer lane

with the scintillant gnats and fairies

whose lives are neither brief nor long, born or perishing.

Here, by this road of ghosts, touched by a wing,

I offer you this expansive bouquet of galaxies, endless dancers

wheeling joy into joy like love into bread. Do you see?

Nothing approaches nothing and zero gets up to dance.

There is nowhere that isn’t a tree, no moment

that isn’t the whole of space embracing it, everything in this event

already achieved. Why grieve then as if there were holes in the world

when everything you fall into, someone’s else’s face,

the violet oceans of an orchid heart, this trance of enlightened play

is nothing more than your own footprint on an Arab moon

full of intoxicated rain. Gently, I lay your heavy head

upon the doorsill of your lover and for the moment, an elder of the wind,

whisper nightbirds of ecstatic seeing

into your abundant emptiness. The point is

that there is no point that isn’t already the whole of the radiant point

drawing long caravans, burdened with gifts for a bride,

out of the dream deserts of her loss and longing

like a star dictating love poems to a viper-scribe in the sand. Just look

at the labour of these fools who contrive a hovel out of a palace

and consult their blood like mud at the mirage of an oasis

for fishtracks. Here, I’ll sing it again on a page of water

because you are more beautiful and intelligent than the ones

who stand at the gate and swear by dawn

the light shall not pass, because your suffering is transcendence,

the original home of the many who make one face without flaw,

because I am drunk on the whiskey-fire of autumn leaves

even as the spring tunes its green harps to the high-pitched valley hearts

of ascending birds, every one a nugget of sun panned

from the empty pockets of a generous dawn,

because great sleepwalking moons of faith

are shedding your eyelids like skies and rose petals

releasing mysterious fragrances of time

in the narrow alleys of medieval Bombay where blue-white stars

feed their growing families by cobbling their tongues

like new leather fixed with nails of light

to the worn-out sandals of pilgrim gods on the Perfume Trail,

because even though there is suffering, ignorance, folly and greed,

and death enough to glut any neon highway vacancy,

and hitch-hiking saviours galore to lie down with in darkness

and rise in the light on magic-finger mattresses,

because there is no less of your whole celestial orchard

in the butterfly that lands on a dead branch

like one of your smiles

than there is in all the thundering worlds

that fall like windfall apples or wild horses cantering through the night,

because most people’s seeing is a kind of love blind to music

and you are rarer than a radioactive strawberry in that regard,

the divergent snake-roads of your witching-wands, violins of water,

and because your great insight grows a secret heart within the heart

of an embryo word and nudges it into flight,

the ripening celebration in the heart of a dazzled bird

hurled from a thousand nests like rice from a begging bowl

to express the joy she is

at the fathomless wedding of bride and water, drunkard and unknowing wine,

I’ll lift my voice again to you and sing.

A black snake swims across the leprous face of the moon

unwrapping her bandages on the water like music

to reveal her concealed beauty to no one.

Isis and the Sphinx cry out like loons.

A singing water-lily offers its severed head on a prophetic platter

to the breeze of a dancing girl, mistress of veils,

who toys with the weakness of kings.

On the slightest tongue of the rain, a feast of maggots and stars.

PATRICK WHITE

AND WHO CONSIDERS THE BATS

AND WHO CONSIDERS THE BATS

And who considers the bats

smoked out of hotel attics

with cedar boughs and burning buckets

so much like the poor; how

they move from house to house

like shoes in a second hand store,

diasporas of worn leather, well-heeled

by the walking of others,

their spinal cords unlaced

and their tongues torn out like wings?

If your heart is still a sapphire

in the orbit of a wedding ring

around a black hole

brighter than the light, if

your wounds give up their dead at night

to crawl into bed with you

like moons around a fractured planet,

afraid of intimate strangers,

and a sorrow you once met on a blind date

still puts bouquets of flashlights on your grave,

you will notice such things:

mothers abandoned like winter wheelbarrows,

tripedal dogs who were third

on the burnt matchsticks of their limbs,

the bruised violins of teen-age girls

whose tears fall like lost earrings,

old men with the courage of bridges

shaking like ladders of bone

at the crooked rungs of schoolyard crosswalks.

If your blood is a sullen radiance

that didn’t make the charts, a ribbon

in the hair of a black comet

that passes like midnight at noon,

and your mind is a star

that’s turned its blazing down

to be softened by life and if

you’re still greeted like an affectionate defeat

in the thirteenth house of candles

condemned by the fire marshals

of a safety-minded zodiac

armed with alarms and emergency exits,

then your heart is probably tender and good,

a mushroom with gills, a loaf of bread

that rises from the spores and yeasts

of the kinder ovens and quiet shrines

that bell your best emotions; and you notice things

that few but the broken can cherish,

charmed and enchanted things

in the lost and found of the sea

that no one ever claims, lives

that went to the wrong address

and wound up in the dead letter bin, bent pins

in the crack of the floor

that once put galaxies on the map,

the dolls of aging prostitutes

with chipped marbles for eyes

propped up like scars and childhood choirs

on the bestial floor of the bed. You notice

the rose arbors and overgrown bowers

that look up like old ladies with garden trowels

whenever you pass the mountainous gaps

of the missing pickets on the gate.

And because you are wide with empathy,

your heart an open life-boat,

you can feel the insulted shadows

of the dejected lovers

toying with each other

like the posthumous menus

of the things that they’ll leave on their plate;

you can hear the lyric in the leftovers

and thumbing the edge

of their sharp good-bye, relate.

And only those who have been cut like a lemon

into a rosette of bitter windowpanes

can know the loneliness of buttons

that bloom like carefully guarded flowers

on the shirt of stinging nettles

wearing the overdressed loser in the corner.

And if not for the nights alone

in a labyrinth of cheap apartments,

when you slept skinless in a swarm of blackflies

that bit like thought,

your body smeared with berries of blood

and your mind radically dwarfed

by the rumours of small exterminations; if not

for the empty cartridge shells of lipstick

you wasted on your suicide,

shooting at a face in the mirror

that dodged better than you aimed,

how could you now decipher

the cuneiform of razorblades

scored like a tragic journal

in the wet clay

of the junkie beauty queen’s thighs; how

could you ever lament

the lucky charms that have fallen

from the stigmata of her bracelets?

PATRICK WHITE