THE MOON A BLADE OF STILLNESS

THE MOON A BLADE OF STILLNESS

The moon a blade of stillness honed on the heart

of a cold, dark night

without lunacy, love, or forgiveness.

Indian tobacco and milkweed pods

like the fossils of shucked clam shells

in the middens of the Neanderthals

or the twisted wombs of fortune cookies

that were long ago cracked open

to spill their good fortune on the wind.

The morning dove of the loveletter flown

they’re left with nothing but the envelope.

The wind gathers and swirls gusts of snow

across the ice-glazed fields

as if someone were about to rail coke on a mirror

like the Milky Way

and blew it big time into a gust of stars.

Venus and the moon,

perfume on a wrist

with a wound and a scar.

The cold air slashes my nostrils.

Only mad dogs and Englishmen

go out in the midday sun.

This is the light-deprived Canadian version

of the same thing

at midnight when everything

is frozen in space and time

like the numb desolation

on the face of a lost Arctic exploration

as if we were all wearing the same death mask

because whether you’re a nationalist,

a naturalist, or just winging it on your own,

when it’s this cold and birds

are dropping from the sky

like words and notes from the lyrics

somebody forgot to mime,

one size fits all.

Lethal the burning clarity of the cold

when it rimes your mouth

with your own breath

with the salt of the earth

and the lime of the moon

as if it were just one big celestial grave pit,

the cold stone of the crone

that buries people in her heart

like a locket she can’t open from the inside.

Life in these brutal windswept fields

desolate as a used calender

or a losing ticket in the lottery

of predictable apocalypses

that didn’t even remotely come true

like Mayans in igloos at the top of the temple stairs

one for each day of the year

that went on living without them.

Or the astronomical catastrophe

of nuclear winter in Puerta Vallarta,

according to a pyramidal sun dial

that got it wrong

from the late Triassic and beyond.

Fire and ice pulled like a blade

that wouldn’t be bound to a heart of stone.

Light pours out like gold and honey

from the dark ore of a new moon

opening its eyelids for the first time

since it went into a coma

like a temporary eclipse of its sanity.

Everybody obsessed with death in the end-times,

forgetting from the universe’s point of view,

there’s thirteen ways of looking a blackbird

and fourteen in reverse

and they’re all as true

as whole numbers on a clock

doing a sword dance with time.

Life lines unravel like the frayed ends

at the delta of a river about to enter the sea.

But what could be so terminal

about returning to the source

of where everything begins

like the universe with a Big Bang

that has continued

like an executioner’s drum roll

ever since the moon rose up

like a two-bladed ax in the east

and learned to cut both ways

by the time it fell in the west

on the white napes of the birch-groves

swanning with their arms outstretched

like a constellation who’s time has come

to kiss the crucifix like a vow of silence

and have done with trying to maintain the peace

like a truce with the truth of severance

as if it were their last best hope for deliverance.

And if not deliverance, then at the very least,

to let their branches pile up at their feet

and let the infallible stars set fire to them

like self-immolating heretics

or Joan of Arc in the inferno

of her martyrdom

among treacherous friends

and Burgundian enemies alike

as history neglects to write

into the hagiography of trees

the black stake she was burnt at

and suffered as much as she

for things it never meant to stand for

like the backbone of a saint

when her heart and her legs

gave out under her

like the rungs of a burning ladder

propped against the windowsills of heaven,

her feet grounded in the snake pit

that bound her to the earth.

But enough said, or too much,

or too little, or nothing at all.

Jupiter returns retrograde to Pisces

at its stationary point in the west

for thirty-five nights

and then returns to the Ram

to disappear behind the sun in Taurus.

Castor and Pollux in the Twins

and Capella and Nath and the kids

in Auriga the Charioteer.

Orion holding its club up like the glyph

of the mythically inflated victory truce

of Ramses the II’s battle with the Hittites

at Kardesh, his figure

ten times more imposing than the rest

as he puts his foot on the chest of his enemies

and hopes like stars, snow,

blood and flesh, fire and ice,

his few sparks of life will last.

I’ve always seen it that way somehow.

What hunter would go out with a club

to beat a wild animal to death

unless his prey were human

with a skull that was easy to hit?

Ergo. Kardesh. Forensic mythology

on the few bones

of the original fireflies that are left to us

like the prehistoric vertebrae

of great whales that died in a bay of the desert,

or the skeletons of humming birds

as delicate as the stalks of wild oats

encrypted into the snow

like a hieroglyph for help

frozen into a bottle of ice

that took thousands of light years to get here

only to discover

that we’re as helpless as they are.

That imagination and wonder

are the mind’s way of making sure

in the desolate immensities

of these starfields overhead

and this glacial acre

of hard ground beneath our feet

impervious to the coffins

and roots of our solitude,

we’re not estranged

by what we’re looking at.

That the emptiness of the mystery

is the source of all our metaphors.

The dark mother. The muse.

Our last recourse.

Our only hope of rescue from ourselves.

Interactive similitudes in a void with no likeness.

PATRICK WHITE

IF YOU NEED TO BE TOLD, YOUR PASSION'S IMPERFECT

IF YOU NEED TO BE TOLD, YOUR PASSION’S IMPERFECT

If you need to be told, your passion’s imperfect.

You can put the wafer of the moon

like a life saver on your tongue

and swear it’s flesh and blood, but little dog,

that straw piccolo you play like a fraud to convince

the garden snakes you’re a snake charmer

is never going to make it with the wolves

in the cold night air above the timberline

when they give up their rapture and their agony

howling at the skull of the moon

and the immensity of their longing for life to the stars.

Things not to do when you’re in love

and there’s something suspiciously dysfunctional

in the way your passion

doesn’t school you spontaneously.

Don’t neglect the details. All cosmic views

are seen through local windows

and it’s as important to know the colour of their eyes

though they change like chameleons and mood rings

or sullen mud puddles into clear blue skies with clouds

as it is to spectra-analyze the galaxies.

And if you loved the cloud at sunset and moonrise

and not the shadowless noon of her eyes

you’re not much of a painter

for all that you say you can see in her

if all the rest of the indigent day

your vision of her picture-music

is just a braille postcard you’re underpainting

on the edge of nowhere

as if you’d bought time-shares

in an imagination

that was always on vacation without you.

In love and astronomy

the eye by which I see the star

is the eye by which the star sees me.

It’s the same with men and women.

It’s up to you whether you’re a solar flare

or a book of matches in your lovers’ eyes.

You say you’re a player, but little dog,

the lions don’t lie to the lambs they lie down with,

wolves mate for life, and the female leads,

and you may think you’re in the Colosseum

with real gladiators and half of Africa

but you wouldn’t act the way you do

if you’d ever been wounded

by a woman who won’t fight back

or just as lethal, one who will

like an injured predator in the tall shadows

that knows you like the smell of your clothes.

You don’t think pimps get their feelings hurt too?

Or players never get caught at the casino

and taken for everything they’ve got out back?

In love even more than content

timing is as important as a bloodstream

or a reciprocal waterclock

between the lover and the beloved

that’s at least as accurate as the moon.

If you say you’re going to call

even if it’s just another s.o.s. in a bottle. Call.

If you say you’re going to show. Show.

Don’t let the wind blow snow over your footprints

and stop just shy of the front door.

Walk in like a revelation that keeps its word

because what kind of hick

thinks he walks on the dark side

like a sin of omission

or an anti-heroic domestic tragedy at intermission?

Little dog, there are three phases of a woman

you’ve got to keep your third eye on,

nymph, wife and crone,

thesis, antithesis, synthesis,

the triune identity of the universe,

three faces the Druids carved

as one white goddess

on the cold stone of the moon.

They’d take their golden lunar sickle

and cut the mistletoe off

their sacred oak boughs

like the medicine bags

of the balls between their legs

crammed in the case of mistletoe

with a lot of little moons

or in the case of your testicles

two full moons in October,

one pale yellow ochre, and the other, blue.

And they did this because

they knew something about women

you don’t and can’t

until one of them has killed you

and another one’s brought you back from the dead.

A woman can lay a cool poultice of moonlight

on your feverish forehead

to draw the nightmares

out of your troubled sleep,

but if you can’t feel

the mystery and the healing of this

as a gesture of grace

that even the angels envy

you’re terminal for the duration.

A dead end in a bus station.

You might fancy yourself a lady-killer,

a matador doing a sword dance

with the sun and the moon,

but, little dog, you’ve never been

gored so deeply

by the horns of the moon

that your heart bled out like a rose

no scar could ever bridge

because it was as deep and wide

as it was long

and went on like a river lost on the moon

looking for the holy grail

in a sea of shadows

with no pulse, no tide.

Syrian warriors in the Middle Ages

loved Damascene steel, perfume

water, poetry, roses

and gardens with underground rivers

and the Tokugawa samurai ninjas

wrote Zen haikus about the moon in the dawn

and seeing the whole in every part

and how if the cold

doesn’t go through your bones once

there couldn’t be apricot blossoms in the spring.

Would it be risking too much

for you to be as dangerously tender?

Not to guzzle. But drink.

Not to gorge, not to glut, but eat

as if you were breaking bread with a muse

like an intelligent savage

with impeccable spiritual manners

who knows what the moon can do

if you ever break the mirror

of the spell she casts upon you

and goes into total eclipse

turning all three faces away from yours at once.

You might replicate, abide, and die

but that’s as much as you’ll know of love

when a woman comes to you

like an open gate

and you meet her like a closed door.

Like the black dove of a burning loveletter

and you treat her like junk mail

you only read when you’re bored.

Like I said, little dog, the real wolves

who’ve tasted the lunacy of their longing

like a sailor’s tasted the moonlight

on the great night seas

of the beauty and mystery of life know better.

Tom Robbins wrote years ago

the mystery of how to make love stay

is the mystery of how to make the mystery stay.

If you need to be told, your passion’s not perfect,

but if you must be,

when she lays down her soul

like poetry before you

rise higher than yourself, little dog,

like Canis Major at the heel of Orion

and be a star of the first magnitude,

the brightest in either hemisphere,

and don’t smear it with your eyes

like two slugs on a mirror

reading a piece of dirty prose.

The eyes of a woman are the windows of God

whether you’re looking at them like a boy

or through them like a man.

Or she shows you her crone face

and all you can see is the void.

And little dog, I’ve seen you do this,

and it’s one of the worst things you can do,

when you come on like a puppy wagging your tail

and you finally catch a nymph in full blossom

in the prime of her youth

and once she’s picked you up

as something cute and cuddly

you age her so radically with your bullshit

she withers prematurely

into the apple piety of your mother.

This kind of Oedipal deviation

can make you go blind and impotent

drastic, tragic, frustrated, sarcastic and mad.

A billion stars strewn across the abyss

like the Milky Way when it drifts through the darkness

like the fragrance of a longing in lingerie,

and all you want to do, little Zeus,

is get back on Mummy’s tit on a cave in Crete.

But all that’s going to come of it

in the final analysis is

your bad, bad, Daddy, Cronos,

is going to swallow you like a stone

and time’s going to stop and dry up on you.

And then you’re going to look again at the Milky Way

and all you’re going to see

are cracks in a dry creekbed,

smoke from a distant brush fire

and a lot of toads stuck in the starmud

praying for a flashflood

as the sun slowly cooks them in a clay oven

and the kid, that’s you, little brother,

gets boiled in the milk of the mother.

PATRICK WHITE

A MAN SHOVELLING SNOW IN THE DARK AT 4 A.M.

A MAN SHOVELLING SNOW IN THE DARK AT 4 A.M.

A man shovelling snow in the winter dark at 4 A.M. The rasp of his shovel on the concrete sidewalk, a one-man power bulldozer pushing wet snow like a continental plate up into a white mountain range outside every shop along Foster Street. The parking meters stand like unlit birthday candles in the dishevelled frosting of a cake that’s gone to wrack and ruin. I marvel at the strength and speed he brings to his task and wonder if he wants to get home as fast as I do, though for different reasons, each to their own improbable course of events. Rimbaud celebrating his advancement into simple toil before he killed a man in Cyprus with a stone that wasn’t meant to. And remembered he dodged the draft and was afraid as far as unexplored Ethiopia. And though this might be a Sahara of white, an albino hourglass without a sphinx, this is Perth in the wee hours of the morning, and these aren’t sand dunes. And what I’m interesting in exploring is seven dimensions beyond a physical space which serves as a myth of origins for forms with beginnings and ends. All true explorers start out as exiles at home and abroad. And sometimes they’re even driven by foul winds back into the Garden of Eden like demons falling toward paradise in Addis Ababa. But the only destination I’ve ever had in mind was the road I was on at the moment, the one my walking made like a deer path down to the river, or the threads of the flying carpet I laid out under the horizon like a windowsill of the sky. Or like this hardy soul laying out a black carpet for himself that he’ll be the first to walk alone unencumbered like David Thompson followed by a lot of shoppers. I’m not trading guns with the natives, but I’ve armed my solitude, because the night is dark and old and dangerous. And hot poppies of blood have been known to bloom in the snow like the hearts of deer mice and rabbits. The only flower that anyone threw on their graves to mark the spot their body of proof went missing. But I’m not a fierce invalid home from hot climates. I’m more like a bull in the labyrinth of a snow blind zodiac, trying to follow my own star like one unique snowflake among billions that all look the same in the dark. This is perfect. That is perfect. Take perfect from perfect, it’s still one cherry blossom less than Japan, not more. But who so petty to quibble when they’re cold, alone, and starless as Taurus on a cloudy night in Eastern Ontario three days from the end of the old year coming unhinged like a calendar of new moons in the middle of winter? As if a door to liberation looked both Janus-faced ways at once and you couldn’t tell by the way it was left ajar whether it was letting yesterday out like a house-bound cat longing to give up its creature comforts to reanimate itself by risking downy death in the talons of an owl to keep its claws as sharp as its wits about it, or letting tomorrow in like it’s had enough of the cold pillow it’s been dreaming on for rescue like the Frobisher expedition in Hudson’s Bay. But no one can say what’s either side of the doorway until they walk through it. And suddenly I see the man on the street with a snow shovel as an anonymous guru clearing a compassionate pathway up to it for those who aren’t awake yet, and just as the waterbirds leave no trace, or Keats wrote his name in water, so the footprints of those who are, follow the river in deep unperturbed snow are soon erased by the wind like a starmap in a gust of constellations too numerous to name as if to imply, you’re free to make your own zodiac up and follow it like a planet through as many signs as you want. Because even when you’re lost and alone in your own private ice age, looking for the watershed of the Great Lakes like a glacier that gouged its own eyes out of the Canadian Shield like the moon to find its way home, the way this world is put together in all eleven dimensions, like a star, a snowflake, a poet haunting the ghost of his breath like a spring thaw, or a man with a shovel digging the world out of a jam on his own, up close or at a distance, you’re somebody’s myth of origin, inspiration, direction, extra dimension, even if you don’t know you are.

PATRICK WHITE

PRIMA NOCTIS

PRIMA NOCTIS

Of human misery what’s left to tell

the single bead of the moon

that makes a lonely rosary of revolutions,

one face always turned away

as if it refused to look upon

its own imploring features

in the brutal, breathless, garish light of day,

or those of the earth

reviewed in the turning below?

I am nothing, a man, a microbe on a skull

picked clean by immaculate cannibals

whose hands are greased with brains,

my much vaunted, cultivated consciousness

and sterling will, free, or spontaneously

predetermined, the leaf of an afterthought

enhancing my passion for light

and periodic sentences.

Look where you will

and tell me this is evolution; tell me

this is that continuum of used mutations

that bricked the river clay of ancient Sumer

into these ascending asylums of the absurd

to burn our children in the fires of the stars

as surely as Carthage ate hers,

poor kids first, then the rich, as always,

civilization nothing but musical chairs

in the food chain, a game

of I eat you; now you eat me, who

shall be the grass, and who, the proudest of cows,

the grazer. And the grass may turn into the grazer

and the grazer into grass in transformative cycles

that ripple out wonderfully like rain

to rationalize this caste of food and feeder

and make it holy, harmonious,

and scientifically insane enough

to appeal to the average reader,

the red letter ‘A’ at the top of every genetic cliche

that’s still convinced of angels in the abattoir,

growth on this planet

nothing but the pace of murder, government

a blood-bank run by vampires intent

on the deregulation

and sanctification of their fangs, the sanguine order,

the cherished symmetries of our bacterial histories

nothing but the victory bells

calibrating the advance of slaughter. And paintings

of the gouty apes and their bedizened concubines,

and poems that only the affluent can write,

and all the cathedrals, mausoleums, and pillars that enhance

the hills of blood-soaked soil we build on,

all the refinements of culture, all

the opiates of erudition, the ineffectually coherent overviews

of the chaos of bones we throw before us

like men and women and children

to allay the superstitions of the future

that demands of us now nothing less

than the last born of our own unrequited extinction,

will not do to decorate the birthday jest

and excuse with elaborate rococo icing

nuclear candles all over the blood-cake of the planet.

If liberty means I have the right to own the rain

of another country; if health and happiness depend

upon designer genocides that race

the minds and hearts of the heartless, mindless mob

with toxic logos and lethal codicils, if wisdom and art

are only the crusted, rotten, riddled pylons

on a wharf of indulgent departures

in a sea of blood and fury, the idiotic squall

of the ship’s horn as it pilots out of harbor,

the advance defection of hurricane roses

believing the false hilarity of a doomed love cruise

and there is no lifeboat in the bruise of their beauty,

then we’re only licking the eloquence out of our own wombs

and mouthing platitudes like cleavers in a butcher-shop,

masters of dismemberment;

we’re just another evil dream that no one will remember.

And no one will recall what a morning it was once

just to wake up; and all that we have cherished

will be desecrated in a conflagration of black fire

because twenty-five million children die of starvation a year

and the fact is the small fret of an obscure poem

that will turn and destroy you

in a word from the eyes of a disgusted messiah.

If the pursuit of knowledge is a regression backwards

through the hallowed slimes of evolution,

and flesh and blood and bone, the jellies of our eyes,

are now more alien than the foundation stones

of the pyramidal corporations erected by slavers and thieves

to own every square inch of the planet’s afterlife,

inflated market shares in the global necropolis

that grows in the grave like fingernails and hair, then

how can we not be refuted by our own prescience

and perish in the cyanotic blue moonrise

of our own catastrophe coming true

when we saw, we knew, we ignored

the glacial cracks in our spacious palace of mirrors

and the rips in the knees of our emaciate atmospheres

and went on chancing the planet like a week-end casino?

We’re just another inept species under the bell-jar

of the writing on the wall that no one remembers how to read

as we exterminate ourselves in radioactive ferocities of greed,

dead as yesterday’s headline in the instant that we breed.

There are nations on their knees being whipped to death

by their own umbilical cords

in the evangelic hands of missionary markets

and there are nations that vie for the lion’s place

in the imperial trend of the stable atrocities

that guarantee that children will bleed

to cleanse the wound and fatten the gland of a dividend.

The corporate wasp lays its egg on the forehead

of the living host and butterflies

are cancelled like bad cheques,

nations are gutted from the inside out,

and the experts defend the economic dialectics

of flexing their hex of hysterical democracy

over the bent necks of experimental derelicts

labouring in a labyrinth of lab rats and executive acts.

Among the swans and soirees of the prosperous assassins

the insiders trade in subtle abortions

and panicked climacterics of erotic stock

that convulse the planet with toxic shock

as their dicks erect with capital and war

violate the wind, the water, the oil, the ore

until the rapacity of their lust is satiate with scandal

and peace is mentioned, justice, human dignity

and they pull out in a hurry, limp with virtue,

and from the pulpits of the puppet press

dry clean the torn dress, the stained flag,

with the bleaches and fabric softeners

of their laundered confessions and laissez-faire digressions

on market pressures and open trade relations

with the third-world brides of the first night

that are torn from their husband’s arms

and subject to palatial abominations,

exploited like a resource, their wombs battered into sterility,

must learn to comply with capital’s amorous charms

among the ruined nuns and nations

labouring under the weight of corporate virility

voyeuristic eunuchs in the fiscal shadows,

and skeletal children thinner than keys,

still stunted in the filthy chimneys

of the captains of commerce, the Molochs of money

quoting chapter and verse of their logo genetics

to feed another generation to their corporate creed,

a labour camp for orphaned amputees,

severities of people on their knees,

cut like a budget.

PATRICK WHITE

MOST OF US AREN'T WORTH MUCH

MOST OF US AREN’T WORTH MUCH

with much love to the memory of Nina Nadezdhin

Most of us aren’t worth much, but you were, and I could feel the weight of that

as if some autumn dusk had wrapped itself like skin around an apple

and dropped it in my hand, a small, warm planet, and said,

here, Patrick, eat.

I could stand beside you and know

that a mountain was a petty thing without splendor,

that a river was a pilgrimage to nowhere that died in a crackling of sand and salt,

that the moon was only a moldy stone in a cemetery of worthless lighthouses,

that a loaf of bread, an olive, an orange were empty shrines

and the earth, a sad, tormented place, a house on fire

better lived in the ashes than in the flames,

that life itself was only a shadow dressed up in leaves and feathers and names

until it was wholly transformed by the humanity of someone like you

into another substance that glowed in the bloodstream,

a friendly metal, a sad gold with heavy eyelids.

I could stand beside you and know the difference

between a ladle and a sword, a bell and a bullet.

I could stand beside you and know the difference

between someone who knew how to endure pain and inflict it

and someone who had suffered their way out of a grave into a garden.

Now it’s two a.m. in Perth,

and it’s forever, years ago, and it’s you and Daniel

driving up the dirt road to the front door of the farm at Long Bay,

Daniel igneous with poetry, a soft bear in bluejeans and black turtleneck,

Kiev in Canada, and you, a pantry full of Russian-Jewish desserts,

warm loaves of bread wrapped in teacloths you unswaddled

as if you were pulling small infants in wicker baskets

out of the river of your unfailing bounty over and over again

and everything you cooked was a smile,

was a shy green star that came with the history of an offering,

and even the fruit, the chandeliers of grapes, the pregnant pears,

the crescents of cantaloupe, seemed to taste of the way you gave them.

Daniel has won his laurels, his name as a poet,

and who wasn’t amazed by your devotion to the man and his work

as if once more, in a new country, a new language, a new medium

moving from the denser tears of Russia into the thinner laughter of English,

he had to grow lungs and legs and learn to breathe again on land

and you were the sea behind him that watched and fretted and believed

even when he couldn’t, that one day his poetry would walk all the way to the stars on its own: and it looks like you were right.

But there was a day, one August day, a day of wind and clouds

that brindled the turbulent hills and fields of yellow hay

with the shadows of their continental enormities

moving across the earth, across the sun

as if they were immense hands swung like bells through blessing after blessing,

a day of light and sorrows, of birch and locust trees and wild sunflowers

thrashed by the sudden squalls that overturned the birds

when you and Daniel returned from a walk together,

younger lovers than yesterday as if in the hour you were gone

you had found Russia together once more as only you could know it

and it was a private place between two people in love in one solitude

beside a lonely Canadian lake:

and there you were, free and whole and happy within yourself

and something unsayable but wonderful in your eyes that belonged to no one,

a light that was always yours, that shone like the moon in spring

through the branches of an orchard on a cool night

saturated with peace:

and there you still are, radiant and serene, who could forget it,

crowned with a wreath of English ox-eyed daisies

and everywhere in the air around you,

the fragrance of wet silver

as the girl in the muse in the goddess

humbled two poets with a vision

of the root in the silence

that surpassed their art.

PATRICK WHITE