FOR EVERYONE IN PERTH UNDER TWENTY-FIVE WITH A FEW SPECIFIC EXCEPTIONS

FOR EVERYONE IN PERTH UNDER TWENTY-FIVE

WITH A FEW SPECIFIC EXCEPTIONS

Crazy children, willful as broken glass,

Your hearts, at best, burning arks

Of extinct animals; at worst, bad meat

Down a fresh water well: where are you going

Under so many true norths? You stumble

Like drunks off your own living roads

Into the stagnant ditches of your reeking delusions.

Perhaps I should be kind, talc your mental diapers,

Change the dressing on your festering emotions,

Abide the radiant honey your orchard hour

Pours over the dog-shit to convince yourselves

There’s a better, holier world than this

You can find no branch in, living or dead,

To perch and rest your failing wings.

Spare me the apology for your hourglass apples;

I expect more of you than most of you can bear.

Learn to fly the dragon in your own abyss;

The furious intensification of your own vital bliss.

Let the mud settle in the rain mirror.

Stop judging. In all directions from the center

Of the mind-star, it’s nothing but you,

Time, space and the dead ant on the black rose.

Is the left less than the right, the dark not

Mother of the light? Not good, not bad, not two,

How cool can you be in a used straitjacket

Even if you embroidered it yourself

And call it a pillowcase? Wake up

From the dream of your vicious isolation,

Your chronic lack of a world. What’s this

That hangs from the tip of your nose

Like the bag of dew that holds the whole of the sky

And the whole of the moon at the end

Of a hunting heron’s beak? You are

Creation; you are destruction; for you

In the time of yourself, the white stars

Array themselves as the climbing constellation

Of the wild clematis; the moon lays down

A ladder up and dead seas are sexed with fish.

Stop pretending your life is not you in all

The terrible blessings and doomed verses

Of yourself; in every event and detail, you

Meeting you, turning the pages of yourself.

All the pages, one book; all the waves, one

Emptiness, one sea; all the petals opening,

One flower; you, thirst and wine, bread

And hunger swallowing the galaxies like space.

When will you ever live up to yourself

If not for now? One night

You will drag death over you like a landscape

And blow the stars out like funeral candles

And enter the dark ageless depths of yourself.

Why not now, while this luminous body perceives

Infinite eyes blooming in the sky-fields

Of your radiant blood? Why not die now

To the lie that’s been devouring you like a serpent

Swallowing a bird’s egg long before you were born?

Show me your sky-face; show me your star-face.

Why cramp your wings inside a skull?

Get out and see how vast the sky is, you are.

The other side is this side. You can’t get from there

To here by hobbling around like a bridge on crutches

Trying to leap the mind-stream. You can’t even get

From here to here, shaking your feathers in a shell;

Even the wind, even the freedom of flight,

Until it’s released, an embryo of seeing,

Is a farce of phantoms painting dream-veils,

Not the star-bread and night-wine of real being.

How can you miss it; the truth is written

On the inside of your eyelids like a hand print

On an ancient cave wall. Not hidden or subtle

In its openness, beyond dusk and dawn,

Though the morning dove is swept by the wind

From its spring willow, and the gravedigger

Sings while he buries the bones of the sun,

Heaven, a ghetto of sinners, hell, the fire of saints,

Beyond acceptance and rejection, not two,

The whole of the unattainable truth in all

Its flawless perfection is everywhere and always

Only you, not so much as the moon on water apart

Or the waves of fire that play your cold auroral heart

Beyond this madman’s silence or that raving sage’s art.

PATRICK WHITE

I WANT TO TAKE THE MOON OUT OF THE SKY

I WANT TO TAKE THE MOON OUT OF THE SKY

I want to take the moon out of the sky

like a cup, like a rose of black wine

and drink it down to the last shadow of a mountain,

the last, lost eyelash of the light

that floats on the surface, the final crescent.

If I could inhale fire, or snort the stars

like a rail of radiant coke on a black mirror

and pull the darkness up around me

to keep me warm in the night

against the cold drafts that barge through the window,

if the darkness were a woman

I could throw my arms around

and hold her back against my chest in the bay of my body,

a shore I liked to wake up on

still drunk on the moon

and walk in the morning as she

dazzles me with her nakedness and veils,

the litter of the broken jewelry

she arrays in the sprawling waves, I would, o

believe me I would. I would

take this paint rag of a life

this hard, dirty smear of leftovers on the plate

of so many paintings, this injured towel

that has wiped the blood and tears and clouds,

the wounded sunsets from so many faces and rivers,

from so many brushes and knives and tongues

leeched off the rotten rainbows, the flags,

the bad water in the dark well, I would

take this skin of dirty flowers,

this Joseph’s coat of colours,

this blighted, blotted pelt of soiled skies

and corrupted trees, eyes that have dried

into blisters and scabs, lips

that crack like dry peonies, I would take it

and give it a decent burial, already

the poor, leather shirt

of some archaic Indian from the book of changes

lying in the yarrow of his scattered bones.

Or maybe I could acquire the thunder

of a large, rusty oil drum and burn it at night

in the backyard, cremate it and smudge

the evil spirits out of the house

of my prevailing stars, smoke

the adulterous virgin’s disease away,

like clothes after someone’s died of the plague.

There are days, and this is one of them,

when life seems kinder than I thought

to everyone else but me;

mornings and afternoons, but seldom the nights,

that seem like dead dogs

lying at the side of the highway,

ants in their eyes dissolving like soap

and turkey vultures unravelling

their organs and tendons

like the yellow and scarlet yarn of old sweaters

that will be reknitted into something else

that doesn’t fit, days

when I realize I was born middle-aged,

how homeless my heart is,

and how my voice,

though it’s been hurled into the dawn for years,

is such a lonely bird, not even an echo

disappearing into the silence

of the vast, unanswering spaces that overwhelm it.

I write in the air with the wind for a pen

like a madman who gestures at things

no one else can see, believing against belief,

he’s doing his part to better the world

though it comes with asylums

and bills to his door, demanding

mechanical birds on iron boughs,

and revisions not his to give.

I feel like a cinder in someone else’s eye,

a crumb of sleep shaken out of a dream,

a thread of smoke that stings people

into rinsing me out with anger and tears,

the stone of the new foundation cast away

though all I wanted to do

was astound the blind with stars,

make the dark flower with the wild orchids

of a more luminous fragrance,

arrive with islands of wheat and roses and wine

and lay the cool sage of the moon down

like a silver herb on a scalded heart.

I’m a brilliant hoodlum from the late sixties

as one of my ex-wives called me, leaving,

and we thought we could heal the world

with love and music and art.

Hearts change, times change, and maybe

I’m the casualty of a slow accident

and this is my coma, these days I spend

witching for water in hell,

for signs of life among the corpses

that fell en mass from a terrible height,

going from one to another,

lifting up their pale arms,

the limp necks of broken swans, looking

at my watch to time the indifferent heartbeat

of the pulsing cursor on the computer screen.

I’m a habit of buoyancy

drifting through dense fog,

an empty lifeboat crying out

to a ship that may have gone down years ago:

“Is anyone out there, is anyone alive?”

And no one answers

but the gargantuan vacuities

of the atomic distances between us.

PATRICK WHITE

I WAS A BOY IN CAMPBELL RIVER

I WAS A BOY IN CAMPBELL RIVER

I was a boy in Campbell River, six years old,

and my mother was crying because

she had been abandoned by my father

and had no food for her four children. I told

the strangers my mother was crying,

she had no food for her children,

my father was gone, and in the morning,

boxes of food, while we were sleeping,

stacked high on the wrap-around verandah,

not a gift of the fairies, though it could have been so,

but of the people, the good townspeople

who had come in the night, giving,

to spare my mother’s pride. I hoped

I was my mother’s hero

when she stopped crying. And secretly,

deep within me

as if I’d found a power jewel

I didn’t know I had:

the mouth, the sound, the word, and the heart

that listened: how utterly amazing

that I could do this, that I could speak

and things just happened, good things

for good people who needed help,

for good people who could help:

my mother stopped crying. And again, older,

with a passion for stars

because no one could soil them,

telescopes, because they’re women,

Egyptian mysteries, E.J. Pratt,

model aircraft, and Keats.

I’d write at sunset up on Heartbreak Hill,

where the old prison

that hung seven men

and buried them in the yard once stood,

the bones smothered in yellow broom.

I want you to understand this.

I’d write at sunset up on Heartbreak Hill

where “a thing of beauty

was a joy forever,”

and I was alone, as the night approached

and the hurtful world withdrew,

with myself, a telescope, and the stars

that nobody could touch,

that danced in the lens

like fireflies in a canning jar,

other worlds that knew better than this one.

I was published at ten, and then

awards, highschool, the emotional molasses

of big, sticky feelings that were real tears

but took hours to fall from the eyes

of the ages that groaned like my mother;

the usual tarpit depressions, lavish praise

from the unimpressible English teachers,

my hard, surrogate fathers,

and a lot of golden futures and abalone dawns,

but my best themes

were always wounded animals,

the underdogs, the ones with no voice but mine

which I honed on the stone of the moon

for war, justice, love, wonder.

These were my adolescent centuries

and I used them well, erecting

profound obelisks of thought

scrawled with immortal feeling,

the tragic graffiti of spring,

without forgetting I had a body

and two lives, one on the street,

and the other in my room

where blood and knives reverted

to roses and thorns, a chrysalis

for dragonflies. And the word had eyes

long before it grew a heart

that mattered. Until university, and a woman

who was an apostate madonna

with grails, a Magdelenic muse

who brained me with soft stones

that hurt like lilies, an Irish girl

I married for her white fire

and green eyes. Grails aren’t cauldrons

and cataracts in the eye,

flowers in the sky,

but the word learned

the triune identity of existence,

longing, celebration, lament.

And I lived everything in the name of poetry,

fucking, funambulism and fury.

The word made itself a god, a shrine,

and raised an idol to itself

and forced itself to its knees.

Only my daughter

was a grace beyond the creed. And these

were the decades of another darkness

deeper than night.

And then I met the black angel Aztec

who killed me, in a distant city

far from the sea. I buried

her knife in my wound, and the fire was hot,

blue, acetylene, and I was humbled by the word,

by the voodoo of her beauty

and without even realizing

I was dead,

truly learned to sing, doves

in the ashes everywhere, oceans

in the rose, stars

that struck like spears

and a long night that was not a reward.

And then the books and the prizes

they laid on my grave

to honour someone I didn’t believe in,

as if the word had disappeared like a bird

into the bright vacancy,

the dark abundance of the sky

with the thread of my blood in its beak

and I could never heal,

and haven’t. And these were the years

black lightning

used me like a filament.

But I moved to the country

with a noble witch from Westmount,

a private thorn with heart

and kept watch in a sacred grove,

King of the Wood

with a rubber sword

for a lightning rod. Paradise awhile

and then I fell again

without a parachute or poppy

to ease the descent. And the women came

with burning ladders

in negligees of gasoline

and tried to turn the phoenix green

but I knew too much about ashes

to dream for long.

For one, the moon was a scythe

and I was starwheat, for another,

a double-bladed ax

that had to fall

on the sons of the sins of the fathers

and didn’t care

if I were an execution or a sacrifice,

and still another, a cougar of desire,

spread her crescents into claws

and mauled my heart like a robin,

but the last, and the youngest,

the final dismemberment

and the worst, drank blood from my skull

when the moon went into eclipse.

And I bless them all forever

from the bottom of a well

where the stars walk on water

and the night is a fractured bell.

And these were the months

that drowned like middle-age,

and the word was robbed of its feathers

and learned to fly like a snake.

Now weeks, days, hours,

bring me their honey and lilacs,

and the old wars I fought for others,

the artillery of my books,

the fuses, the explosives

are matches in the sun,

the abandoned armories of hell,

my blood flagged at half-mast

as the skeletons of strange constellations

that litter the field like legends

unmarrowed by the changes,

mint new medals

for a black farce

that haunts me like the shadow

of the happy crow

that plucks the stars from my eyes;

and now the word is not a word,

and poetry is not a poem,

and the moon is not a widow

who waits by the sea

bruising her heart with gray roses,

but a moment of life, longer than death,

that sings to itself in the starless dark

in a language all of its own.

PATRICK WHITE

AND I WANT TO CRY OUT

And I want to cry out, unburden the bell of my pain,

release the shadow this storm has been walking for years

like a man over abandoned landscapes the earth will never finish,

let the tears flow in a flashflood of ripe sorrows,

tie a noose in a rope of roads I’ve travelled to the end of

and kick my heart like a chair from underneath me,

fruit on the tree at last, an apple sapped by lightning, black,

but sweeter than stars, ready to fall

from the blasted nightbranch

of one too many devastations, one too many blows

on the edge of a sword of light

that could cut the tongue out of an anvil.

I want to ask for forgiveness for having been a man,

but I don’t know why or from whom in the silence

that can’t tell the difference between the thief and the theft

anymore than I can peel the moon’s reflection from the river.

I want to let go, fall to my death, revive from annihilation,

a sage of silver herbs, words that heal more than they judge,

but I’m bound to the mast of my spine in fire chains

hotter than cold snap radiators

that tighten like anacondas around me

everytime I let another ghost go like a hostage of rain.

And I keep telling myself the singing I hear in the distance

isn’t just another firefly in the harps of the willows,

another caprice of light with skillful fingers

that licks the blood off its last painting with a smile,

but I’m broken and old and too forgotten to care

if it’s mine or someone else’s, or just another contribution

to the emergency bank of plastic bladders

waiting like silicon for larger breasts.

And the wind now is always a memory,

and I keeping losing my mind like a bookmark

that’s forgotten where it left the book,

and there are pleading voices that gather around me at night

like starving children with the faces of wounded cherries,

and I seem to have less than nothing left to give them.

And when I look for a meaning to my life,

I seemed to have lived in the wreckage of an accident

that happened before I was born.

And there is no holiness in loving the earth and the people in it

with a passion honed by desperation;

and I never could see what they did in their laughing mirrors;

mine was always blacker than a sail off the coast of a waiting widow.

And now I’m here in this house of empty ballrooms on my own,

trying to box the essentials of what I’ll take with me when I go

to anywhere I’m not, and the ceilings are weeping

all over their plaster rosettes, their second empire sundogs

like blood seeping through the ceiling

while carbon-tipped spears of regret

for all the things I should have done and didn’t, or did

and wish I hadn’t, pierce my voodoo heart like micro-meteors

from a chance of God. And it isn’t as if I didn’t try to be good,

or wise or useful for the sake of earning my mouthful of salvation;

I could do what others couldn’t because to confess

I had less than nothing to lose. Sacrifice is easy when you’re free,

and waterproof stars that don’t run in the rain like tears

or the longing lines of homing poems at dusk,

no trick at all if you’ve been raising yourself from the dead for years

in rented tombs where the angels leave their junkmail at the door,

and the landlord watches everything that’s going on.

And I know this will come as a shock perhaps

to a few who tried to care, but the best I could manage of love

was to lead them away from myself

like the stairs of a burning house. I smuggled them in the night

through a hole in the razorwire fence of my heart like frightened refugees

into a better place with a green card that could walk away from me.

And there’s nothing more of dignity in this

than if I’d rescued a fly from a toilet

or put a child back on its fallen bicycle

with a warning not to talk to strangers.

No anti-hero, no tough romantic anymore,

not even an arsonist in a volunteer fire-brigade

and the moon too often these days just another cold stone with craters

come of all the goblets I once raised like a branch with a pear

to the women I drank to the bottom of their dead seas

only to fall down drunk under the crash of their smashing chandeliers.

And it’s always been something to furrow this acreage

of paper and canvas with gestures of fire and seed

watching the earth turn like flesh under the ox-driven scalpels of crescent moons,

but lately it seems that I’ll I’ve been doing for fifty years

is ploughing a minefield covered in snow with the Big Dipper

to make way for a hearse in a hurry.

So what do you say to your hands when they want to pray

and you don’t know what to ask for?

PATRICK WHITE

I'M TIRED OF SHINING

I’M TIRED OF SHINING

I’m tired of shining for the blind, enduring

all these mystical sunspots

mesmerized by their own downtown darkness.

Insanity, my lover, show them one of your lunar fangs,

let the serpent queen smile, the wolf-baron snarl;

the real kings establish their thrones

above the timber-line. No. No. No. No. No. No.

was never a foundation-stone for anything.

When the rocks weep it’s quicksand.

Overcoming delusion to open the fly on enlightenment

is just the next pilgrim wave on its way to some sacred beach.

Beyond beyond I live alone in my infernal solitude

gnawing the ruby marrow out of gold bones

that used to belong to a legless sage. Kitten, this is

the other side, black paint

on the back of the light-fields mirroring this world of things,

the emptiness that makes you you, thinking itself

into its own creation like a snake

that’s got it’s tail in its mouth and a wardrobe of old skins

sloughed like bad tattoos into a library full of holy books.

Baby, this is where the fire puts out the rain

that falls upwards towards the roots and the fish.

This is where the wisdom of the phoenix

is an urnful of ashes dreaming of wild poppies

opening their red mouths in astonishment like bliss in the blood.

No one has lived here since

before the beginning of time. Still heart, listen,

softly, softly, now, to the emptiness taking its first breath,

filling its lungs up with dawn, breathing out the dusk.

Here we come and go through our eyes, hear

with our eyes, think with our eyes, every step of the way home

stumbling drunk on the wine of our eyes, every forsaken mile

the crossroads of our seeing. What does this mean?

The tigers were created before the tapeworms. Pygmies

have little dicks and when they think

they’re hooked like worms on the question-marks.

I can tell by the way you lower

the bucket in the well of your eyes you know.

Sorry for your sex life but things grow.

Besides, there’s lots of space, lots of room under the weeping willow

for a garden full of little tombs. Space doesn’t care,

imperturbably getting to the point. Neither do I

knowing there’s no need to weed the inconceivable. Baffling,

isn’t it; this rash of galaxies you keep trying

your home-remedies on, your whole mind

a poultice on an agony of light? I was like you once,

until I filled the black sockets in the skull of the dice

with eyes that opened sky by sky, petal by petal,

like a beautiful woman waking up in the windows of the shining.

Delusion is enlightenment, the moon spread out on the waters.

Do you doubt it? Then doubt it.

But until you can walk this bank of the river

that flows singing to itself through the night,

without leaving any footprints on your own face,

what you call consciousness is an ape

choosing its own ignorance like a piece of coloured glass

it’s snatched from someone else,

a smear on the revealing. Learn to read

that which has never been written

as your own intimate journal

and all the attics and trunks

of all your hopes and longings, all your fears

that your confusion is your only certainty

will turn their light around

and show you who’s standing like a lover

in the shadows of your eyes.

Most people drift all their days and nights

like empty lifeboats through the hordes of the drowning,

bewailing their lack of direction

to the endless sea that confounds them. You

fence your mental coastlines with erect lighthouses

that call you to your wreckage again and again on the rocks.

And me? I’m tired

of slipping these spiritual razor-blades

into the candy-apples on the tree of knowledge

for all these Eves who keep coming to the door like Halloween

and ringing the bell on the inside

to be let out of themselves like children

afraid of their own unconvincing masks.

Curse or kiss me as you must,

but who’d thread the eye of the needle

with the spine of the serpent

if there wasn’t a wound to patch? Try to get real;

the other side is not

the other side

once you’ve arrived like junk mail

on the threshold of your own homelessness.

PATRICK WHITE

BURNING WORLD, TAKE ME

BURNING WORLD, TAKE ME

Burning world, take me, fold me in your flaming arms

and let me disappear into the unforgiving night.

Among these blind, here, in their black eggs,

eyeless birds who nest in their own ignorance,

I am the leper of light they drive out

with the stone of the moon, the wolf

with the mystic wound that will not heal until the last star

is born of the bleeding. Return me to the cold, brutal beauty

of your mineral wilderness, my bones on Venus

and my skull an abandoned planet circling the sun at midnight.

Let my eyes be the last of my tears to fall

and my blood be strewn like a gypsy scarf across the darkness.

Erase all trace of me as you do the path of the water-stars

who walk here among the dead like spirits from another world

intrigued by our passing. Pygmies in a circus,

cannibals and emperors all, leaping from thought to thought

rock to rock in the lifestream

to the applause of future funerals, o let them fade

like the idiot savants of last night’s dream, meaning nothing

but what they meant to themselves,

trying to jump their own distorted shadows.

What difference between the venom of the bee and its luminous honey

to these whose flaring in the vastness

was the kingdom of a match? At most

lightning on a water droplet shaken from a blade of grass.

Did they think the great fires of being flowed like blood

around their carbon hearts? Sweet world,

bestow your flowerless garden upon me and let me forget

the holy wars of their tiny gods against my solitude.

Didn’t they see, so full of themselves,

there was never any room in their arks and shrines and coffins

moored like lifeboats to the rotting dock

they built like a bridge to nowhere?

I never meant to be unkind or rise from the depths

in waves of light and blood that wiped them out

like the mythical monster of a shore-bound sailor

too far out deep down to be confirmed by their disbelief

or worse, their shallow faith. Leave them, undisturbed

to the shadows of things they trade in

like spiritual money. I wish them no worse, no better

than who they think they are, little prophets

inveighing against the purity of my absence.

The dark mirror is better, brighter, more abundant

than the poverty of their trembling reflections,

mere nothingness more tender than their lies.

PATRICK WHITE