SALT TRUCKS OUT ON THE STREET

SALT TRUCKS OUT ON THE STREET

Salt trucks out on the street. Black ice.

Noah’s wife salted like Carthage.

The town encased in a glass patina.

The storefront windowpanes are jealous.

Orange pygmy snowplows

seeding salt and gravel on the sidewalks.

Ladybugs about their business.

Butter on a black mirror smeared

like a palette of streetlights and logos.

One misstep and you’re on your ass again.

The night is sumi ink.

There are no revisions.

Who didn’t expect

to die on the highway tonight?

Whose heart breaks like a poppy

glazed by the freezing rain?

Who's been broken off

the brittle tree of life

like a twig that snaps underfoot

to give the nightbirds under the eaves a warning

and the presence of something foreboding away?

Accidental, trivial, random, happenstantial,

how much that was imperatively crucial

perished for nothing tonight

like the driver of a tractor-trailer

that jack-knifed on the backroad to Plevna,

haemorrhaging alone miles from the nearest farm

while the ice fell from the aspen trees

like eggshell light bulbs

and forsaken chandeliers?

I stare blankly through a veil

of freeze-framed tears

crudely woven on the loom of the bug screen

at the subatomic causes

of astronomical catastrophes

and think of the collateral damage

of something so slight as a drop in the temperature.

Three degrees warmer and you would have lived.

But just as wet and three degrees colder

and you would have lived.

No malice. No mercy.

No one to look over the fallen sparrow.

You’re a casualty, you’re a tragedy,

you’re a victim, a bitter fact, an act of God

in a godless universe

that’s anything but self-evident

to those who can’t see in it

either a blessing or a curse

or believe the worst

always works out for the good, better, best

of a cold front that was just passing through.

Who added their emptiness to the abyss tonight

as if they were returning their lives

like shattered windshields

to the frozen watersheds

they took them from

as their broken bodies freeze to the pavement

until they’re discovered in the morning

and chipped away

like a statue by Michelangelo

who could see form in stone

and where the cracks in the marble lay

like fault lines and dangerous stretches

of asphalt highway we fall through

when the earth gapes

and swallows us whole

like a snake you can’t train

to bite other people

that eats its own reflexively.

I’ve tried to reconcile absurdities.

I’ve tried to measure the worth of a human,

noble and ignominious alike,

against the indignity of the way we die

but the scales limp with a heavy foot

as if they’d had a stroke

that paralysed them on their left side,

and left them with no feeling on the right.

PATRICK WHITE

ONE DAY YOUR MOUTH

ONE DAY YOUR MOUTH

One day your mouth just opens

like a rose or an eye or an oyster

that bloomed in the night

when you weren’t looking

and whispers things you should have said

in the defense

of your own innocence

and didn’t, things

that should have been defended with fire

but were washed away with tears

and the bitter acids of high ideals

like a poem in the rain.

I lie, but never out of fear;

and when I lie it’s always

an attempt to heal, to clean, to dress

that gash of a murderous fact

or remove the thorn, the claw, the fang

the sickle of the crescent moon

from a wounded heart

that hasn’t tasted life enough to know

why the blood is made of iron.

I mingle a little shadow in with the light,

a little wine with the vinegar

when the truth has no eyelids

and the bitter cup is full of bleach; I let love

sweeten the green apple

and err on the side of compassion

when the windfall needs a face-lift.

I don’t grow gardens

in the dirt under my fingernails

or drive a golden chariot through a slum,

but a few geraniums on the windowsill

can’t hurt the view.

And what can come of trying to pour

the ocean into a tea-cup

when all that’s needed

is a quick rinse in a bird-bath,

or a few drops of holy water

through a sieve? Terminal

literalism and contagious symbolitis

are the snake-oils

of fraudulent medicine-men.

The truth is a scaffolding

to climb up on and paint

and I never sing in the same tree twice.

But I steal, from everyone, chronically,

dreams, visions, glimpses, insights,

the little jewels of wisdom

that fall from their signet rings, plunder

whole mansions of emotion

in a single night,

a cat burglar on the fifteenth floor

of a tower of moonlight, seeds,

feathers, leaves, flowers,

names and faces, I’m a thief of fire,

a pickpocket and klepto-crow

with a passion

for the silver things of life,

a b. and e. artist with an ear

for encrypted vaults

where they keep the safety deposit boxes

like black holes crammed with stars,

a grave-robber looking for afterlives

to fence to the living, a professional booster

who can walk into any solar system

in a t-shirt

and amble out with a planet.

I once sold Mars in a bar

to a drunken movie-star,

but I’ve never wanted anything

that wasn’t mine, or the wind

couldn’t get its hands on,

or I wouldn’t receive if I asked,

like certain hearts that have accused me

of being in possession

of stolen property. Even the poems I flog

are hot, but like the rain and the sun

I lifted them from

I give to the rich and poor alike

with an empty hand

and the budding daffodil

of an open mike, stealing the Buddha’s purse

to buy the Buddha’s horse.

And it’s true, I’ve been violent,

cracked a few skulls, deviated

more than one septum, but only

when attacked or cornered

or on behalf of the weak and hapless,

gone out to the parking lot

and given as good as I got,

stood up and got counted

then quickly dismounted my rage,

turned the page, not

my cheek and in a week or two

when the swelling’s gone down

and the teeth marks on my knuckles

haven’t turned into aids,

like any cosmic ape or alpha chimp

with gargantuan glands

tried to play the sage

and walk away with a cosmic limp

and eons of blood on my hands.

But as I said, I lie,

and now that I’ve written this

to set the record straight

thinking I had good cause

to touch up my portrait a bit

I confess

between the cracks and the flaws

and the lines around my eyes

I can see another face

that isn’t a disguise

beneath the layers of paint

staring out at me

like a demon in the heart of a saint

who knows what I am

and scoffs at what I ain’t.

PATRICK WHITE

PEREGRINATION

PEREGRINATION 

Mauled by the infidel lions of savage hope;

my voice looking for its wings in the ashes of heroic doves

who were immolated like love letters

in my chronic cremation of the world that scorned me like a seed

and ploughed with a razorblade, I sowed shadows on the moon

and reaped a harvest of swords

to feed the open mouths of my wounds, a bitter, burnt bread

that tasted of my own embattled blood. Well beyond

the luckier stars of tamer constellations

I bent space into an igneous foundry of light

and poured myself into my work like a weapon

that would claim its own dark domain from the night

and defend the coronation of my indefensible solitude to the death.

Eventually the madmen and the clowns

and the lost pariahs who drank from tainted grails,

and those who were consumed without enlightenment

at the gates of other flames not strong enough

to grant their petitions of annihilation, and the women

who offered the vines and olives of peace with their bodies

but whose eyes were declarations of war,

and those who tilled their own dead planets

and the freaks and the criminals and the refugees and exiles,

and the dwarfs of envy with their sunspots and rashs

came to seek asylum on the uncertain slopes

of my tormented eruptions. And these were the days

when islands boiled in the sea, days

that stiffened like dogs in their death throes

swamped by the firestorms that tempered their hideous nights

under the eyelids of the tides that flanked the bay,

as skin by skin, I grew the pearl of the earth

out of the crude womb of the oyster slagged by the wave,

out of the black radiance of a ferocious heart

crushed into dark-eyed wine. I lived

as I could among the wrack of battered coasts,

among dismembered, used up things, smashed crabs,

and their fallen coats-of-arms, dead starfish

and spiny sea-urchins disgorged like the garbage of heaven,

and the deranged cryptic of delicate bones

that could only guess at what they’d once articulated,

the flayed pillars of amputated trees and huge molars

of tormented roots twisted by sun and salt, I lived

and prospered as I could

in an unsalvagable nation of the forsaken and marooned,

wholly at home around the driftwood fires

of the derelicts and castaways

who alone had died enough

to hear the oceanic lament that raved like a widow

in the fathomless depths of the bells

I abandoned like poems. But the sea is an obvious garden

that weeds itself

and eventually it uprooted me.

I followed a westerly east across the mountains.

Now I listen to the small thunder of wild apples in a night squall

dragging its nets of rain over a thousand shattered lakes

and the shipwrecks have turned into dilapidated barns,

and the shells of the hermit crabs

are the empty husks of the milkweed pods

that have pulled the rip-cords on a blizzard of angelic parachutes

and the planets still cruise

the same upscale configurations of the stars

casing their b. and e.’s for dogs and burglar alarms,

and in every leaf I see a wave, an ocean in the trees,

and the wind like the tide

still shows life’s asperities the way to my threshold,

but somehow over forty years and thousands of miles,

the poems have changed:

they’re no longer bells, though, bow into the storm,

I still turn the wheel loose

to counter the gales of the rages and sorrows

that overtake me; they’re prophetic lighthouses

on the promontories of hell

and despite the fact I know the dangers

of those dark waters well, and once abandoned them,

on the blackest of nights they’re still the only lights

that don’t forsake me.

PATRICK WHITE

CROSSING THE RIVER ON THIN ICE

CROSSING THE RIVER ON THIN ICE

Crossing the river on thin ice, the next step

the beginning, and the one after that

the end and the whole of the rest of your life.

I’m listening for cracks in a mirror.

I’m jumping from rock to rock

like prophetic skulls

cobbling the yellow brick road

with glacial i.e.d.s

playing chess with my nerves

like the wicked witch of the east

laying bets against my afterlife

should I break through

and be swept under

to look at the stars as I used to do

on summer nights flat on my back

when I was young

only to find, older, I still do,

through a broken window in a palace of ice

like an acid flashback of my whole life

seen through an ice-age cataract

over my third eye

like flowers in the sky

strewn over the dangerous path I took

to get to the other side.

As I do. With the uncanny feeling

I’ve been mountain climbing on the moon.

I can trust the river like an instinct.

It’s purging to risk now and again

falling through something

to get to the other side of it

as if life had given you a pass

and you think, maybe, just maybe

it wanted you here for something

that would be made abundantly clear later

though for now, it’s more than enough

to feel the glee

of having gotten away with something

like the simple bliss of just being alive

to celebrate your victory against the odds.

But it’s crucial not to gloat.

Gloating makes you arrogant.

Arrogance makes you stupid.

Stupid makes a mistake.

And the river, like a country road,

will teach you to respect its leniency

on the way back without any.

So for the next half mile

through the intermittent field hospitals

of the birch groves overwhelmed

by the number of the fallen amputees

the beavers have chewed down to pencil stubs,

I remember Walter de la Mare’s imperative

about treading softly,

for you tread on my dreams,

and take great care not to wake anyone up

grasping stray branches I use

like crutches, walking sticks, and canes

as I place each foot down gently and deliberately

crossing a minefield covered in snow

to make absolutely sure that I don’t.

Because if you don’t let things dream

of whatever they’re dreaming about,

and walk softly whenever you’ve got

a big stick in your hand

like a dead tree trying to help you

get a leg up on crossing it like a threshold,

it could be you that wakes up to the nightmare

on the nasty side of Walter de la Mare.

The leaves claw at the ice-glazed snow

like bats at a glass-blown window,

frozen waves of a tide on the moon

flexing the neck muscles of a maneless horse,

or even more bizarrely

because life is more surrealistic

in the deep end

than it is sane in the shallows,

the mummified feet of Canada geese

who’ve lost their footing in the snow.

Brush wolves off in the distance

baiting the farmyard dogs

to howl at the end of their leashes

like the domesticated pets

that became of the dogs of war,

commissionaires at the door,

or come out and be torn to pieces

like the calves and the lambs

and those who fell for the ruse

and wandered out alone

and had their necks broken

for taking their instincts off the chain

to be something they weren’t anymore.

For accepting the challenge

of their old wild adversarial selves

like the French at Agincourt

only to be found in the fall

like the skeleton of a favourite dog

in hunting season south of Highway 7

when the white-tailed deer

are culled by the locals

to keep the population down

and the brush wolves at a distance

looking on with a hard winter ahead

in their strategic hearts

and pups to feed

learning from their persecutors

how to the steal the farm back

one sheep, one cat,

one calf, one chicken,

one foolish dog off its turf at a time.

As I am with a National Geographic

sixty millimetre refracting telescope

strapped to my back like the easel

I used to bring here in the summer,

as if I were out to cull the stars of Orion

by myself in a wild place

in the middle of the night

in a clearing in the woods

where the wolves watched what I painted

fascinated, warily tolerant, and sated

without treading on my dreams

and waking me up to the danger I was in

if they hadn’t recognized

the same voice that called to me

called to them like the sorceress

of a moonlit summer night

and in the winter,

the spell-binding stars

of a wizard of ice

that indentured us all

wolf, human, dog, deer

river, birch, hill, and telescope alike

to the crazy wisdom of an essential insight

that makes anyone whose blood

has ever risked running

like paint with the wolves,

or dared being driven into

deeper snow like a telescope at bay

or descended into a dangerous darkness

to clarify a wolf’s-eye view

of the millions of grazing stars

moving slowly across the heavens,

an apprentice of the light for life

when life isn’t a chore on the farm

you’ve been brought up to endure

securing a board on a barn door

to keep it shut like your mouth

when you know you should

but a calling you can’t ignore

to risk it all on thin ice

like Hannibal or Lao Tzu

crossing the Alps

like elephants in the dark

with one throw

of the constellations

that bite into the dice down to the bone

just to see what you’re made of

when you’re on your own

far from home

and there’s lots to be afraid of.

PATRICK WHITE

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