LET ME BE WORTHY

Let me be worthy of the river

and the strange ores that glow at night,

buried like teachers in the mountain;

let my blood always taste of the moon

and my heart burn like a black rose,

like the poem in the fire

that sweetened the sky with a flower of smoke,

for the wisdom of the generously unattainable,

and transcend the hell that shadows the folly

of not being foolish.

May the stars,

when they gather in gardens

water the roots of my seeing from clear fountains

and the wind bleed like ink from my pen

when I’m wounded by the beauty and the terror

of my helplessness.

When I am large, spacious, profound,

let me sit like the universe

on the throne of a seed

that lies in the dirt;

and when I am small, brief,

a trinket of light in a flash of ephemera,

robe me in the lion skin of the night sky

and ennoble me

with delusion and enlightenment

on this road of ghosts.

Whatever befall,

let me perish or prosper as a human

who insists upon the divinity of all

and burns and rises

for the heresy and truth of it.

Let anyone born be accounted a hero,

a lifeboat that hauled the world aboard

when the seas raged in the womb

to give birth to suffering;

and may I always be entrusted

with the ancient shales of dark courage it takes

to look into the dragon’s eyes

and not be horrified

by the ferocity of the freedom

that thaws space

like an hourglass in the rain.

And should love occur

to shape the blade of the moon

on the anvil of my heart,

and a cauldron of passionate visions

scald the eyes with intimate glimpses

of myriad heavens and hells,

all truer than reason,

may my bitterness pass

like the eclipse of an hour,

a left-handed blessing,

no vinegar of injured illusion

accept the sad surrender of the wine

like the death poppy of a folded flag,

no tar of judgment and denial

feather the dream with stone pillows,

no abyss under the brief era of an eyelid,

make me too petty or afraid

to dance with my skin off

engulfed like the wind

in secret sails of mystic fire.

There’s always a clown, a jester

who rides beside the hero like an anti-self,

a thoroughbred and a dray

yoked to the little red wagon of the heart

like two thieves either side

of an unwitnessed crucifixion,

two dadaphors, two torches

disposed like opposible hinges

on a door that opens like water

at the whisper of a key.

Let me be the clown-prince

of my own idiotic profundities then,

let me survive my way into the wisdom

of the inspired fools

who know that anything they ask for

from the stolen bounty of the king

is just another absurdity in disguise,

that even laughter isn’t a lifeline.

I’ve always had my heart

caught in my throat

like a bird in a chimney,

a cork in a wine-bottle,

a habitable planet in a black hole.

I have loved and befriended

almost anyone

who would let me

and seen their evanescence,

their transience, their vagrancy, their passage

through this mansion of space

with the amazing windows and chandeliers,

the sad brevity of the things they cherished.

Blind to restorative grails,

I have not sought the meaning of life,

I have not hunted the dragon with nets,

knowing reality is meaningless

because it has no fingers,

it doesn’t point to anything beyond itself,

nor bear witness in a mirror,

but I have walked in the peacock robes

of the twilight sky, all eyes,

in the gardens of the life of meaning,

past the hushed bloodtalk of the roses,

and seen for myself

that there are flowers with petals of water

and roots of fire

that drink the stars like rain.

Meaning dethrones the flowers like bottle-caps

and there’s no refund on the empties.

Night puts its hands over your eyes

and asks you to guess;

and there’s no end of the mystery,

no end of the blessing

of sitting under a tree

looking up at a star

wondering what human beings,

what you are doing on earth;

what a thought is, an emotion,

the blade of grass beside you,

everything alone together

in the silent boat of the rising moon

docking at its own reflection

as if the port were always in the voyage,

understanding

merely an expression of the intensity

of our not knowing.

The answers come and go,

governments, religions, arts, sciences, fortune-cookies,

like parking meters, like waterbirds,

like oceans on the moon.

Life is the lock that opens the key,

the skymouth of the dream that woke itself up

talking in its sleep,

trying to remember the dreamer.

Like the fleets and caravans

of the seeds on the autumn wind

we are the purest expression

of a universe

that answers us with ourselves

when we ask for a sign.

Like cherries that ripen in the silence

of the deepening night,

turning our tears to wine,

our darkness into eyes,

may my shadows always be worthy

of the light that casts them.

Fifty-seven years a human being,

fifty-seven years of suffering and doubt,

of boredom and magmatic intensities,

of mystic elation and mythic insignificance,

of anger, danger, risk, defeat and victory,

of saying and seeing,

of trying to kiss the shadow of my pain away

by deepening my ignorance

and progressing backwards

through the re-runs of old eclipses

that once gorged on the moon like dragons.

Tonight the wind howls bitterly outside

and the stars seem eras away in the cold

as if the intimacy I have felt with their shining

since I was a boy

were just another leaf torn from the tree.

It’s rare to catch a glimpse of your agony,

to see that even the brightest fountains

of your efflorescence

are rooted in a wounded watershed

that has never known the colour of your eyes.

I don’t need to be forgiven

for being born;

and I won’t be poured

like a tidal wine

into a life that isn’t mine

however many cracks appear in the cup,

however I recede and leak out of myself,

my blood isn’t anyone else’s signature,

and this walking to nowhere I call a poem,

no one’s footprints following me but my own.

How should it be otherwise

that I fall like rain

to appease this rumour of life

like a fire in my roots

and flash through the creekbeds

of my own flowing

like time returning to its hidden source

with news of nothing?

An echo of light

looking for its lost voice like a star,

I don’t need to prove myself to the night

like a theory in the heart of a passing stranger

and space is the only death mask

that is the true likeness of my face.

No more than the light and the rain

that open the seeds like love-letters,

I don’t need to know

what I will become

or what was revealed behind me in the dark,

but let me be worthy

of this wounded boat of the moment

with its cargo of eyes

enduring the burden and inspiration

of the voyage

like illegal refugees

with forged passports to Atlantis;

and if I must be accounted

one of the martyrs of absurdity,

then let me be as generous as wings

to the worms in my name

that blindly tilled the soil

of a rootless country.

PATRICK WHITE

THE BOY IN THE FIRE

THE BOY IN THE FIRE

My blood a riot of flags

celebrating the liberation of a country

I no longer belong to,

that has revoked my passport

to a library of prophetic skulls, I address

my solitude like a bullet, like a mushroom

at a gala of mocking roses, realizing

it’s too lame to dance, too deeply lost

among the visions within

to flirt with thorns and razor-blades.

And it’s sad the world gets in the way

like gravestones and footnotes,

that the new skies I’m wearing as corrective lenses

are bitter with rumours

of sidereal defections, that time,

bows my head and forces me

to drink to the lees of my own reflection,

the dregs of brutal truths

that fall like petals of blood

from the virgin sheets

of emergency marriage beds.

Reeking of sundials, like an era that has past,

or a century without a manger

to show for all its heroic disclaimers,

I am yet well pampered

in the brothels and hareems of anxious ghosts,

the nunneries that cake salvation on

like make-up and swear

they will carry me to term

and see me born again

in the abandoned theater of their wombs,

the last echo of a spiritual actor

trying to decipher the hieroglyphs

of an ancient climax that eludes him,

if only I would return with them to the darkness

after I’ve ravished them like a comet.

Some thoughts are born without eyes,

some feelings without mouths, and there are rivers

sterling with stars

and the charred harvests of the moon

that go mad in the desert

gagged by the ferocious hermetics

of a godless wind

leeching its likeness

from an ancient face

it can’t wash off the water.

Like a mountain

that spews its rocks across a highway,

aging is learning to make an orthodoxy of insanity

by slaughtering the priesthoods of your youth,

maintaining the equipoise

of a fearful acceptance

even as you gnash your teeth in the void

of a terrible attainment.

Not spurned by the hours

or baglady days, not

denied pasture in the starfields of night,

a legend of passage

among luminaries born enlightened,

as the years grow vast, joy

runs out of heartroom

looking for doors

to hide behind and jump out

in ambush, delirious with surprise.

All the old spots

are crammed with wraiths and shadows

and the taste of the lightning is flat,

the tongue of the thunder, a wet match,

the storms that overtook you with exhilaration

on your overindulgent crusades

to heretical shrines,

reformed muses

in a habitable choir of dissonant mirrors,

new hymns for old hymeneals.

And what can you say to the young

learning to eat one eclipse after another

at a feast of shadows that never ends

in the whirling of the dervish clock?

Though they shine, they appear like sunspots

on the greater brightness

that surrounds and blinds them,

so much of their lives

tossed out like trash from a passing car,

unknown jewels to themselves

crazed in the light of a dawn that doesn’t see them.

Robbed of beginnings on the road

that entices and waylays them,

let them dance to the funeral bells

in the echoless valley of sorrows

that dogs them like the future

that waits on their bones. Soon enough

another generation of strangers

will kick through their aberrant faces

like a black wind through autumn leaves,

rebuffing the long melancholy of the fall

with a joy too stubborn to be reproved.

It’s enough if now and again, for a simple hour,

a moment or two out of eternity,

they wear the vague halo

of a black hole, a feeble reprieve,

and the night doesn’t taste of suffering.

By the time they’re old enough

to be grateful for all

they do not know

the secrets grow vicious

with answers

and the mysteries

that were the empires of the wise

wither like wines without rapture.

So I keep faith with the silence of the sea,

the dignity of rocks,

the serenity of the sky, sitting

well past midnight

with a whispering candle

and a newly washed corpse

the universe isn’t big enough to bury;

and I say nothing, think nothing,

ask nothing

of the darkness within

that dwarfs the darkness without

and makes of the sun and moon,

two coins

not heavy enough

to refute my eyes or convince my heart

this afterlife that pans me from the mindstream

like a miner looking for gold,

a crow gathering silver,

a mad jeweler

plucking stars from the wind,

or a god worlds from the flowing,

isn’t just waiting for something

that will never happen, isn’t

just knowing that it will,

isn’t just the boat of my blood, full

of moonlight and illegal refugees

bidding farewell to a wharf of bones,

or a cross without a flight plan,

but another survivor

of the birthless beginning

that abandons me

like a changeling, a crutch, a genome

on crippled stairs turned circular

in a wilderness of burning ladders.

Any moment now

the night will give me a name

and the wind that drank my eyes

come like a drunk

singing on his back beside the road

and opening the encyclopedia

of forged passports

and club-footed interpretations

that calls itself the world,

point to the broken columns

of an erudite temple of sand

and tell me,

smashing the false idols

of the mirror and the hourglass,

the glass retort of my putrefaction,

this is not who I am.

PATRICK WHITE

SIEGE-SKULL MINDS

SIEGE-SKULL MINDS

Siege-skull minds fortified

like hill top forts

in the New Middle Ages

of corporate feudalism

when everybody’s spiritual life

was then as now,

a kind of espionage.

Spying. Not seeking.

Not risking your own threshold

like a rung on a ladder

you might fall through

going to your own rescue.

I see the white-gold of human nature,

and the gold leaf of the gilded wheat

crawling back into the dark ore

of their myth of origin.

I see Monsanto

trying to sue Virgo

for the genetically altered

ear of wheat in her hand

while thousands of Indian farmers

commit suicide in their seedless fields

in the colonizing shadow of a patent

on the autumn equinox.

They ploughed and sowed the moon

and reaped an eclipse of bitter bread

they broke with the dead

who had nothing to be thankful for.

And there are corporate crusades

against the bees and butterflies as well

for copyright infraction

and companies that own the measles

and since corporations have become people

they’ve assumed the divine right of kings

to monopolize the sale of cancer

on the open market like the king’s touch

was once believed to cure scrofula.

Now the healers

must save up for the disease

before they can cure it.

I can see the surrealistic catastrophe

of human ownership

crushing the life out of a sparrow

caught in the windpipe of the world

like an archaic word for tomorrow.

I can see how the mirage of virtual reality

in this holographic desert of nanochips,

the universe injected into every one of them,

like a mind-altering meme,

is more mesmerizing to people

enchanted by the veils and screening myths

of factual delusion

than the real water they’re up to their keyboards in.

And just as Francis Thompson’s angels

keep their ancient places

under the hard stones of the world

disguised as death masks with human faces,

I can still see the eyes

of the most profound truths

behind the pebbles of our most obvious lies,

and shadows out in the hall

slipping secret messages

like encrypted intimacies of light

under the door of a dark room.

And even if you can read

the writing on the wall

with one hand alternately

covering one eye

and then the other

that’s doesn’t mean

your third eye isn’t illiterate.

Just because you passed an eye-test

at both ends of the telescope

with flying colours,

doesn’t mean

you didn’t walk out of the observatory

like a star-nosed mole blind and brain-washed

into believing a planetarium

where no birds fly

and no wind blows

and the wildflowers don’t put down roots

and no seed has ever opened its eyes

and taken a good look

is a substitute better than stars.

Real wounds with plastic scars.

The full moon with breast implants.

So no one’s inconvenienced by experience.

Ask any defence contractor

why woodpeckers are the war birds of Mars

and he immediately answer like a jack hammer

working the fault-lines on your skull

like continental plates on the moon

or the borders of countries on a global scale

as if you didn’t own

the mineral rights to your mind.

I can see the stars riding

the flying carpets of the wind

like Van Gogh’s starry night

but down below in the sweatshops of the town

I can hear the clacking of children’s bones

like the dancing skeletons

of bamboo windchimes

working the looms of the corporate spiders

that outsourced their innocence to a snake pit.

And I can see in the short-term memory loss

of my own dazed heart and its longing

to be always be happy, wise, inspired and brave,

why most people don’t want to entertain sorrow

any longer than it takes

to outlive a box of kleenex

where you can pull the angels one by one

out of the cellophane birth sac of a womb

or a coffin-shaped kayak

to dry the tears of a snowman

that flow like diamonds from eyes of coal.

I can see what the suicide sees

through the lens of his glass-blown heart

when he’s cutting his feet

on a starwalk of broken chandeliers

through the paleolithic palaces of the next ice age.

Siege skull minds like the black walnuts

of French helmets on the Maginot line

overrun by cannibalistic Neanderthals

that ate their brains

like a larger capacity for starmud

from the inside out as if

they’d inherit the powers

of the men of thought they admired the most.

Memes of liberated protein

with a mutant gene for extinction.

The fibre optics of consciousness

networked to a wireless nervous system

that downloads a terabyte of life a week.

The fossils of happy-faced icons

in the Burgess Shale

like the desecrated sacred syllables,

the pictographic alphabet,

the dead, indecipherable language

of what we didn’t say to each other in time

to make a difference.

PATRICK WHITE

FUMAROLE

FUMAROLE

The beast of a thousand unconsummated yesterdays

born without names in the gutter

roars in the rags of its own blood

for the poxy apricot of the rising moon. My voice

is a guitar without strings, the dark well

of an eclipse that eats the dragon

that has lingered too long in the depths without stars.

The crazy windows in this burning room

plead for a reason, a purpose, a sign

as they weep themselves into weary honey, sick

of the equity of their seeing, the sloppy script

of another dirty winter that scrawled

its drunken name in the amber penmanship

and metaphysical sunsets of nicotine

encrypted like scars or dry creekbeds

in the guestbooks of their sagging eyes. On the sill,

the ashes of birds, of stars, of dead fly hearts

smaller than the nuggets of gold

panned by the convict bees from the feigned tears

of the cocktease flowers who know how

to renew their virginity by giving it up

like a handful of keys to anyone who knocks. Hot ores

adumbrated into the slag of unapproachable islands

and treacherous harbours in chastity belts.

And though I know better, accepting

what I cannot change in this graveyard

of geriatric storms that have blown themselves out

against the implacable glass that disguises itself as the sky

and waits with its decoy of clouds

for the inadvertent sparrow

to dash the nut of its brain against the impassable windowpane,

I long for a heart of brick, a stone of dried blood

worked loose like a tooth from a crumbling temple

to smash my way out of this brittle museum of things,

this menagerie of balanced coffins

and cordless spinal columns

that account for nothing but the unearthly stillness and vacuity

of a reasonable effort to survive surviving

without a taint of life exceeding

their industrious accountancy. And though I know,

how has it not been drummed into me

by suffering the violet penalties

of love and prismatic separations, the madness

of trying to bridge your own mindstream

to the further shore with the peacock rainbows

of midnight oilslicks that let their serpents down

like the hair of a drowning Medusa, and though I know

and know and know the sad alleys

and unforgivable garbage that reeks like an over-ripe moon

in the cul-de-sacs that enshrine the priestly drunks,

did I not once tear my own heart out at their altars,

and wait for a divinity to seize me

like a flower of fire in ice, still, this long probation

that leaves me with nothing to confess

is a skeleton trying to masturbate, a chain of enslaving orbits

hauling the moon by the nose to a vicious market

that bids for exotic desecrations

to gild its impotence with curious compulsions. And my crime?

I ignored the prevalent hypocrisies of improvement

and self-advancement to occupy

my own harvest-throne in the midst of plenty

and raise myself up like a siege of gratitude

on mystic ladders that scaled

the burning towers of the stars. I obeyed

the stratagems of fire that voiced

the assaults of wonder I launched

like occupation fleets against the willing surrender

of my own mind liberated from the sapphire dungeons

of its own birthstone, the inherited castles of quicksand

that betrayed their own foundations. There was no clemency

in the sentence of the passing years

that hung me like a trophy

in a straitjacket of spider-webs, no poetry

in this exile from light, this starless sky

that no one has ever looked upon with yearning,

no music in the rain that falls from this nuclear winter

that nuns the cauldron of a sterile sea. And though I know

my fate might well be righteously imposed

because I played while others toiled, sang and danced

and squandered the abundant summers of my heart

on the impossible empires in a woman’s eyes,

made dice of the stars and rolled them against

the impregnable walls of chance like constellations,

thrilled by getting away with life

while my blood was still green and brave with expectation,

is it just that my shadow should die before me

longing to be buried in the light

as if it weren’t a suicide; is it God, and mercy, and reason and right

that a warrant for my freedom should have been issued

before a law was contrived to contest it

in the meager forums of feeble appetites? Damn me if you must

to the absurd tillage of these forsaken acres,

yoking the moon to a glass plough

that shatters on the prophetic skulls

of an unrocked cemetery opposed like salt

to the impudent resurrection of the dead.

A volcano thrust through the fault in your seed bed

I will install my shadow

like the relic of a sacred nail

in the perilous hole

it will drive

through your unhallowed head.

PATRICK WHITE

NO MATTER HOW FAR

NO MATTER HOW FAR

No matter how far into the past the star travels,

plunging its white fingers into the expanding womb of the past

to pull its own damp head out of convulsive space,

it will never find a beginning, the widening cleft between two thoughts

opening like a mouth full of silence, a sluice gate of thick water,

a dark prelude, the first letter alpha breaking like an eye

out of the eclipsed envelope into a splendour of light

to hang its jewel, its drop of flammable water

from the incredible webs of the night,

to shine alone in the dark with millions,

the elemental heart of an abandoned lover. The void

became a tuning fork and struck itself, became

a nugget of gold and dropped itself into the world pond

sinking like a throne through a center of infinite haloes,

disappearing into the origin of its own undulant pulse,

a fish leaping out of the stillness of the mirror

into the encircling waves of its own event

or an arrow into the target of its own ripples,

or God lost in his own universe without a return address.

Where now is the desolate monkey

forced down out of the trees

to stand up in the high conquering grass to look for leopards

who first shrieked into consciousness

or sat down quietly on his heels

to ponder the odd blue stone of a thought he couldn’t grasp?

Where is he who has gone on expending himself

like the first violin of a tribal symphony

through the blind abyss of the blood all the way to me?

Is there a skull that lies cracked and quarried somewhere,

a fallen idol in a temple of shattered bones,

a small, moldy moon clotted with earth

who was the first to become aware of himself

as a paling star who would be washed out

in the brightening flood of the following dawn? Did he glimpse it all in a flash,

as the seed contains the whole of the tree, the blossoms

the singing branches, the closed eyelids of the apples,

did he see in the lightning gap between matter and mind,

in the first atom of self-brained sentience

all the murderous troupes of civilization

that would walk out of that first step, that progenitive initial

that goes on unspooling the maple samara

of the helical generations down even

into the bloodstreams and wellsprings of the lines of this poem?

Did he see the continuum of his own beginning

moving outwardly in time like a viper

through the oceanic fire-wombs of a nubile cosmos,

the world serpent that would marry the world

with a rib of light? Did he see me as I am this morning,

elaborated in all directions like rain from his watershed,

trying to make lifeboats out of the leaves to survive

this oblique sliding into the depths

of my own gashed being, the vagrant omega

of a maritime disaster morsed between two sibilants,

like an egg between the forked tongue

of a torn chromosome, this feeble S.O.S. I’ve sent back

through the anguish of the years to find me, to find him,

to shut the eye of the circle, a tail

in search of a mouth that could create what it consumes

in a single breath, a single word wholly sufficient

for all eternity, unborn, unperishing?

And it is not enough to say that the peduncle

is lost in the ensuing phylum, the root in the tree, the tree

in the seed and the seed again in the leaves and branches;

am I given eyes and nothing to see, wonder

and nothing to be amazed by, the blue wheel

of a flowering heart and nothing to feel? Homage

to the fallen bell of my unsung ancestor, male or female,

and the way he picked himself up off the ground,

homage to his pendulous walking across the plain;

and the tracks he followed through the luminous mud of his brain,

saying his name with his feet; homage and compassion

for the brute in lunar shock

before the rising of the moon through the startled dark,

homage to the lightning and the firefly

that jarred him out of his uterine revery

like metal from the ore of a stone. Homage

to the horror and grief and genius of the huge hope

he buried in himself with red ochre and bird-bone flutes

like the bodies of his children under the fire and ashes of his cave;

I bring black cherries, wheat, and scarlet poppies,

I bring the immaculate weave of the starfields,

sapphires and silk, and the wisdom of the wind,

the passion of fire, the will of water, the beauty of light,

and the freedom of infinite space,

and I scatter the worlds like opal grains of sacred rice

over the wedding carbons of your baffled remains

and I fill the clay moulds of the footprints you left behind

with the fleets and caravans and flights of mind

that were born of your bruised heel,

your circuitous pilgrimage toward bison and berries, you

the brutal mile zero of the highways through the mountains, you

the first drop of rain in the headwaters of the river, you

the first feather of empathy that danced to fly, you

the first prayer to divine the green valleys of an afterlife

where the silver gazelles came down every night

to the water’s edge, gifts of the great mother’s thighs.

Like a prodigal son returning to the boneyard of his cannibal parents,

without judgment, I bring you the sugars of a ripened mind

and the fat of my sedentary flesh

to gorge on as you wish. And though we shudder with progress

over the excavated skulls in the hovels of the homophagoi,

we unmarrow each other no less. So praise

to your broken, battered, disease-ridden body,

your muscled weapon and your withered breasts

that hung like oriole’s nests from a rack of bone; praise

to the beast master and savage cauldron of your mind

from which you drew the elegant visions of a predator

you charred at the end of your tunnels on lime.

This morning I practice the same art for the same mysteries

on the same dank womb-walls of efflorescent time,

following the spoor of these migrant histories

back to you. Faster than light I must outrun myself to regress,

and I come with poems and paintings and problems

and a forwarding address.

PATRICK WHITE