THE STARS WILL NOT DEVISE

THE STARS WILL NOT DEVISE

The stars will not devise a way out of your life

that they haven’t already offered you

and the sprawl of green fountains

that hallows you now, the victorious trees,

will later drop all their keys

like a nightwatchman too drunk to get in.

You must stand in the ashes if you want to study orchids,

you must fill your body up with clouds

and red-tailed hawks, and autumn leaves

torn from the pages of the history of fire

if you want to follow what the wind is saying

back to its mouth in the sun.

Everything else is the source of everything else

and the rain knows more about circles and arrows

than all the bows and compasses

of the sad magician who’s stripped his purities of flesh.

Stay close to the earth if you want

to look deeply into the eyes of the stars

and see the golden maggot that hangs from its lifeline

like a message in a tear delivered with wings.

Your blood, no matter how you say it,

is a prelude of wild roses beside a murdered brook,

and there are legends of light on your skin

that are ancient instructions

on how to bring it back to life again. Denude yourself

of those feathers and leaves and mirrors

you dress the morning up in

to go and sit on the corner like an open guitar-case

to deprive the music of the night before.

There are women everywhere, half-awake,

who grope the sheets for you like spare change

in an empty bed, and blue doors where you live

waiting for you to fill the tiny eyes of their spy-holes

with ruined moons willing to sacrifice themselves

for a few moments more.

If you give your word to me

you won’t desecrate their graves with shallow questions,

I’ll show you where the harps

of the enlightened peacocks were buried with honours

when they saw through the veils of the eclipse

that opened their eyes to a dawn

they hadn’t expected. Get up off your knees

in that house of chains and crippled ladders you worship in;

there’s nothing holy about the crutches you contrive

in a shipyard of able bones, and your voyages

are already blessed by the sea that pounds in your chest

to add you to her islands. Can’t you feel

the soft adagios of her secret distances

swaying the keyboard of your crossed horizons like waves?

And why do you quote the fool of your own silence

to contradict the wisdom of the night

that everywhere answers you

with the shadows of bells and owls

you can read between the lines of the stars;

isn’t it clear that all that vastness is a rock in a well

she’s singing to you, a fragrance of time

that wants to voice the solitude

of her lachrymose labyrinths to someone

who knows how to listen

in the nocturnal flowers of her native tongue?

Write, yes, write; by all means

show us the beauty of your soul

in its passage across the moon

whether coming or going, array your lonely jewels

on the carpet of the sky before us

like the fruits and tears and eyes

that have congealed from your sorrows,

and those dark drops of amber and tar

that preserve all your flights and fears intact

like supple summers jailed in a locket; let’s

hold them up, too, to the light and wonder

that you could endure such fables of pain;

and not just your bleeding rubies, not just

your emeritus emeralds and the radiant sapphires

that fell from the crown

that graced the domain of your regal demeanour

with a northern constellation,

but the painted fish and electric eels,

and the sharks and the crabs and the jelly fish

that live in the dead cities of your all night corals

like cheap actors in ravenous wardrobes of blood

playing for real; let’s see them as well,

and all the rank gardens that grow in the dirt

beneath the crescents of your untrimmed nails

slumming like landlords in places you wouldn’t live;

let’s see all of these and more lifting the veils

on the ferrous brides of your unimpeachable sincerity.

But when all the vows have been taken and forsaken

and your dead have been lavishly mourned

in brass, granite, marble, and staples,

let’s see if you know how to drink with the shadows

you go out every sunset

with your tongue as thick as a broom

to sweep from the stairs? After the cool, blue, jazz clefs

warming up like fireflies and fiddleheads

to the implications of emptiness improvising

on the black trumpets of the scorched daylilies,

let’s hear from some passing storm now and again

that you’ve learned how to die enough

that the pulse of a profounder heartbeat

that marks time with the breathing of nightfall

is all that keeps you alive.

PATRICK WHITE

THE PALE MONTHS

THE PALE MONTHS

The pale months discharge their attributes of green

in the gripe of small, bitter apples

and the white blossoms

have got their laundry done like nursing caps

and the bonds of friendship with the young

have grown sticky and black, almost obscene,

as they lash the willow like bad actors and beauty queens

with long, drawn-out rehearsals of sappy plays

and the busy wavelengths

of petty mind worms inching toward the virgin cocoons

that might lark their threnodies with real wings

and flammable paper if the little mummies

ever make it to their afterlives. As it is, when they weep

their tears fall like the cold lenses

of leftover concentration camps

they may or may not have read about,

and the split seeds of their careful, furtive eyes,

the tender shoots of agile semi-quavers

run to the black and white keyboards of vinegar

thinking the moon’s just an old whole note,

and the silence that lies in state

like wine in the dark cellars of the sublime

is just another waste of time. They can’t imagine

how many stars and planets and lives it takes

to sugar the black holes of their photographic depressions,

how much light must give itself up to the night

to get one drop of translucent honey

flowing through the narrow veins

of their slim contingencies

and into the green flutes of their bones

like marrow and music. Okay, they’re not

the red wizards of autumn yet

forging swords out of the ores and eras

of the igneous sunsets that have purified their fury in the fire.

They’re too busy looking for their place

and white surplice

in a travelling choir with portable pews

and souvenir crosses of wood. They’re young

and imagine because they say the word good a lot,

they’re good. Let them stand for their hymns and anthems

as they will, it’s natural, it’s right

and there’s even a beauty

in their platitudes and repertoires, their reforms

of ancient hydrogen

that looks like the birth of stars,

the seven spoon-fed sisters of the Pleiades perhaps,

or the reluctant debutantes torn on the horns of Taurus,

white dwarfs and cepheid variables,

young pulsars turning their diamonds in the light

to see if they’ve been cut right, if all the facets

are correctly interfaced

to download easy solar systems from the night.

They’re goldfish in a shark bowl,

flamingo fan tails and neon tetras

in a cannibal aquarium

of tiger-barbs and brutal dime-angels,

they’re an army of baby turtles

holding on to their helmets

as they run for the beaches of Normandy,

strafed by the Stuka seagulls,

black panzers in heavier armour on the cliffs,

black wolves swinging their muzzles into the wind.

It’s a hell of a way to begin

the rites of spring,

but the best steel goes through the fire

and there’s a chastening beyond virginity

that’s got nothing to do with victory

or the peevish tempers of first violins.

And I look at the old women, the derelicts, the crones,

and the roadkill along the highways of life

unstrung by the turkey vultures like dead guitars

and the sad veterans of spring in the swan park

staring themselves to death like foodbanks for birds,

all the lamentable carbons of human existence

down to the last embers of their spent hearts,

the spare change of cogs and bobbins

taken apart like watches, and I see

another kind of beauty, the deeper innocence

of worn bannisters spiralling up like smoke

in the stairwells of old hotels panned by junkies,

sybarites of wood aged and polished

by the sweat and oils of ten thousand different hands

that steadied their ascents and fallings

through years of snakes and ladders

on the chromosomes and rungs

of these who’ve bleached their peptides

in the caustic salts of the sea. Born

a beachcomber among wasted, cast-off things,

the second-hand bins of the stranded performers

and dismantled wild-west shows of the wave,

a seahorse, a Pacific cowboy from the lunatic fringe,

I look efficiently into the secret urgencies within

the Pre-cambrian tidal pools of their fossils and shells,

tears the ocean left behind in the undertow of a thousand farewells,

and a I see a darker kind of flowering

and the mysterious purple fruits

of a second innocence sweeter than the first

long after the apples are out of their diapers

and their blossoms are fouled by rust,

swinging from a dead branch of boney vertebrae

like bells, and moons, and chandeliers

clustered in an eclipse of black cherries,

and windfalls of seasoned planets

waiting to be pushed through the doors

of the hungry dead

in a jubilee year of pious offerings.

See yourself reflected in the face of an old man

if you truly want to understand what grace is,

or the well-used wood of a faithful chair

with a view of forever

beyond plans, if you’ve got the juice

to make something of yourself in the light and the rain

that can embrace the whole of the night,

can hold it like a syllable under the tongue,

a coin of insight, and not go insane. That’s what

courage is, not the charades of the young

besieging the sweetmeats

of moonlight in a nut,

raising their arrogant hammers

like stone gavels on the anvils of the heart,

mistaking their juvenile bias

for the robes of an older law

that presides without judgment

over everything that lives, not the breezy sail

of a quick voyage into the depths,

a love-boat cruise among enchanted islands,

but staring into the eyes of the Medusa

in the snake-pit of an oceanic abyss,

and greeting every grinning serpent

with an antidote and a kiss.

PATRICK WHITE

THE ISSUE

THE ISSUE

I see the sadness in the world, the malevolent madness

of the dogs of pain snarling at the moon in the tree of life,

the way people cut and claw and desecrate each other

and walk away as if there were a victory in the slaughter, a hero in the butchery

that hacks and packs the corpses in the shrieking streets,

the raped daughter, the man on his knees who bleats for mercy

from indifferent gods whose thunderbolts have changed to cattle-prods.

Little, petty people everywhere, runts of the heart and mind,

wee weak ones with the poison syrup of your smiles

distilled from killer bees, you who like to grind your heel into the human face

and celebrate your hydrophobic power as a state of grace,

I ask you here on planet earth, this dirty tear among the stars,

in this horrible hour between birth and death, are you a race

of vicious midget, spiritual pygmy, or emotional dwarf,

when you were given breath and blood and light,

were you an atrocity of genetic reciprocity, did you wince at the sight

of yourself in the mirror, repulsively queer and full of fear,

did your mother abandon you on a stone to rot,

give you to a circus, an abortion clinic, a church step, a garbage bag;

are you angry for all the things you know you’re not; do you gag

on the beauty of others, their gifts, their truth

and plot a coup to overthrow anyone who isn’t you, your puny proportions

the prototype of all your replicate distortions

until the earth is filled with ugliness and grief,

and even the strongest are consoled by the fact that life is brief?

What hideous art scars the bitter apple of your heart like a worm

and thorns and norms the form of every thought with malice?

Are you a fly in the chalice, a maggot, a convulsion of dirt;

are you washed clean of yourself by the tears of those you hurt?

Everyday a hundred species disappear, oil and faeces

smeared across the living face that’s mirrored on the waters,

and the moon repelled by the odium of what its light must shine upon.

Lucky the stars that burn so far and furiously away

from this disgrace of molecules and ghouls that only the fools

in schools for the deaf and blind look for reason in the treason,

error in the terror that you wreak. You see birds,

you learn to fly. A century later whole cities die in a flash of light

at the end of your quest for flight. You’re born with a tongue,

you learn to speak, and you say the rich must have what they seek

and the poor will bleed until their hearts are withered by need.

You’re given eyes and clear night skies and a mind behind it all

in a world of revelations, and you learn to see and name,

and by the time you’ve festered into maturity

the vision is grimed by the smog of your vain obscurity,

nacreous cataracts the skies that fog your eyes,

and you’re laying the blame on the picture frame

that holds nothing but the death mask of you, eyes closed,

and yours the signature of the artist for whom you posed,

but nothing of insight, nothing of character disclosed.

Brutal monkey, murderous ape gland, prenatal purge,

is this the world you planned as a gesture of spite,

this jest and riddle of misery on the verge

of serial catastrophe to gratify your calamitous urge

to indict existence for your devolving plight? 

Here among mystics, lovers, poets, painters, sinners, saints, 

singers, astronomers and clowns,

mesmerized by night, or useful as day,

what embodiment of pain justifies the febrile tides of hate

that animate your imagination for decay,

the treachery of the cannibal heart that leeches its own clay?

There must be a hell for you if nothing more

than to meet yourself as you are

behind every opening door, in every house of pain,

in every abattoir, scrying the gore on the bestial floor,

to discover your own features

in the severed eye and lifeless hand of a hundred million creatures.

You’re insane. Every thought, a blister of the brain, a scar too far.

These were your teachers, and every time you applied your iron rule,

and raving in your dementia, or rationally composed, killed one,

you liberated another buddha from a fool, another sky, another jewel

from the treasury of your own lie,

the one that beats on your heart like a drum

and never lets you forget

that for all the noise you make in the empty silo of creation,

you’re not the harvest, you’re the crumb.

PATRICK WHITE

I KEEP RETURNING TO THIS LINE IN MY CHILDHOOD

I KEEP RETURNING TO THIS LINE IN MY CHILDHOOD

I keep returning to this line in my childhood

I once stood in one dreaded day

every month with my mother

to prove I was loyal and reliable,

waiting for food at what was

back in the late fifties

called the Foodstall.

Though we were not animals.

We were simply poor

at the mercy of the God-wielding charities

and though it’s nowhere near the same degree

as it is of kind, we almost felt

like natives in the hands of the Catholic church.

Mostly separated mothers left in the lurch of love

with two or three whining kids

that were plague rats of measles,

mumps, ringworm, and cold sores,

agitated as electrons wanting to jump orbitals.

Natives, dried-out rummies

with faces like desiccated orange peels,

more alcoholics than druggies back in those days,

the addle-brained with psyches like quicksand

they kept falling into, some lambs

and some the tigers

that wouldn’t lie down with them.

Lonely bachelors that came out

of their self-imposed exiles

once a month to this lottery of foodstuffs

they carried home in a big brown

Vancouver refinery two ply paper white sugar bag

stitched together like the parched skins of mummies,

as if they were carrying a woman back to their place

like one of the Sabine maidens they’d snatched

to populate Rome with their solitude.

Women with too much make-up on,

a lot of them bruised,

their black eyes waxing from dark blue

to the festering yellow of ruined orchids,

as my mother’s used to

before my old man left for good.

A few boisterous madames

with chameleonic hair

that changed colour every month,

laughing and talking too loud

as if to show the more righteous among mothers

how free and flamboyant and flaunting they were

in the face of anyone’s disapproval,

as if they always had a trick up their sleeve,

though that wasn’t always the case

or they wouldn’t be standing there with us.

I keep returning to this line in my childhood

as if it held me no matter

how hard I’ve struggled to get off it

like a spinal cord tied to a kite and a key

that’s dangerously exposed to the lightning.

Shame. Humiliation. Guilt.

Though God knows for what

when you’re a child

trying to figure out what you did,

thinking you must be evil because you can’t.

Three hundred people lined up for hours

like a caterpillar that went around the block

exposed to public scrutiny

that felt it had a right to stare

because they were doing their share

and from the looks of things, we weren’t.

though I saw what bleach can do

to a woman’s knees and knuckles

when she was trying to raise four kids

by scrubbing a rich woman’s floors.

There are bitter moments in life

that can burn holes in your heart

like the Taliban splashing acid

in the eyes of a young girl who can read.

My mother could paint.

But not with her hands bleeding and raw.

Not with her mind and heart

scorched with anxiety

like a hot iron branding an ironing board

like another steer in the herd.

Even writing about it

I am depressed by the ferocity

of my boyish helplessness fifty years later,

as I stand beside her

to help her carry the bag home,

slabs of black bear meat

with tufts of hair still on it

haemorrhaging through the paper,

that would rip open

like the stitching of a wound

in the side of the lunar bull of abundance

Mithras Tauroctonus killed,

partially bruised vegetables and fruit,

usually a small bag of day old donuts,

two loaves of bread, leprous margarine

with a packet of orange dye

to mix into it for a little local colour,

sugar and canned spaghetti,

macaroni with powdered cheese,

brown potatoes sprouting

virginal green tendrils for tails

that made them like giant sperm,

would come pouring out of it

and scatter all over the sidewalk

to deepen the spectacle

of our monthly fertility ritual.

Everything was second hand,

even our food.

Even the way we felt about ourselves

for living the way we had to.

Everything shabby, used, abused

with an aura of ruin about it

you couldn’t get out of your heart,

your psyche, your clothes,

like the smell of death

in the upholstery of a car

where someone had died at the wheel

at the side of the road three days ago.

Street shrinks by seven,

pessimist philosophers by eleven,

even the children reeking of experience,

their innocence rooted like mushrooms

that came up overnight

in the compost heaps of life.

I stood like a pawn beside

the dethroned queen of my mother

and thought one day all this will be reversed

and those who were blessed

and didn’t pass it on

would later be cursed for realizing

too late the hard way,

that you really can’t hang on to anything

in this world of change,

this cosmic hour glass

shaped like lungs,

the valves of the heart

that keep reversing themselves,

that you haven’t already given away

just like your last breath

to make room for more.

Even in the spring,

even in the sweltering heat of summer,

wet winter days when the leaves

were plastered like collages

of artists in despair to the sidewalks,

after the cross burnt the scarecrow

as the strawdog of an idolatrous heretic,

we were always the last birds allowed in

to glean what was left of Eden,

before the hunger of winter

closed it down again and the tourists

went home to their homelessness with the poor.

And the seagulls and the mice

and the feral cats and the rats

that always seemed to have

so much more right to be there than we did

waiting for the loaves and fishes

to be broken on the hillside

though we were made to stand for hours

on heel-numbing cement designed

to torment your feet by standing

in place too long as the line

inched its way up the the front

like a millipede of people

growing nasty and impatient

to get what they needed to get

of what was left, then get gone

as fast as they could not to belong

to the bottom feeders in the same lifeboat

they’ve just been standing among.

And though my mother didn’t say much,

standing there in her isolationist silence,

there was always a troupe

of housewives in kerchiefs,

turning the trivial gossip of a reality show

into a running sore soap opera

they improvised from one end of the line

right up to the time the door opened

to let them in and they left the stage

to get down to the serious busy

of picking out the best turnips

and the less stale loaves of bread

suspecting the Elk’s Lodge ladies

had stashed the freshest for themselves

as a spiritual perk for all their altruism

that remotely tasted like vinegar

mixed with the deathly sweetness

of the canned milk of human kindness

as if one too many flies and angels

had dipped their wings in it

so that by the time it got to us

or we to it, it was an albino oil slick

from a cow that jumped over the moon

in total eclipse. Circus tricks,

hoops of fire with ringmasters

the barnyard made the caged tigers

jump through once a month

through the endless zeroes

of a slinky wound around the block

that had swallowed all of us heart first

like a multi-headed hydra

with a bellyful of hungry people

in a line that’s only grown longer over the years.

PATRICK WHITE

SUDDENLY THE NIGHTWIND

SUDDENLY THE NIGHTWIND

Suddenly the nightwind comes

and scatters me like dust, leaves, stars, birds,

flakes of blood and paint from a dried rose

and I am nowhere again among the extracted windows

compiled like used theories in the mind-dump,

cataracts, fog, ice between their thermal panes

an obsolete encyclopedia of seeing, image, view,

skating rinks and skies that shattered like eggs

from which nothing ever flew.

Believe me when I tell you

there is not a flame or a shadow

as lost as I am when I fall like moonlit rain

from this endless pilgrimage of clouds

into the wells and watersheds, the dark godheads

and cracked mud of ancient creekbeds

once urgent with my flowing. And I am a fanatic

of unknowing when the darkness

overtakes me on the wing, an apostle

of undelivered monologues

humming like a powerline

in the ears of inattentive telephones,

the dirty needle of a compass

that has shared one too many directions

with the addicts of the north. In the freefall

of this vast space that confounds my eyes

with numberless illuminations, gravity

is just another superstition, light

a bride that leaves me standing at the altar,

baffled by absence, time, and futile distances.

Even the atoms of my body

are the liberated doves of a scuttled ark

that waits in vain for signs of land

when the waters roll me like a drunken sailor

far from any port of call

that ever pressed me into service.

I grieve like a passport

for vanished borders, circumferences

subsumed in parsimonious points

once radiant with lighthouses,

and all the clandestine crossings of my youth,

the zeniths, nadirs, transits,

all the date lines and ecliptics,

the equinoctial colures

that adorned my green meridians,

my perilous explorations,

with nautical clocks

and astrolabes that shone like jewellery.

Now I drift, an empty lifeboat

through unknown waters, the toy

of any wind and current

that wants to play me like a map

or a spiritual castaway

that grew old on the way to the rescue.

Even the language that I use, the tongues

I once mastered to implore the world to stay,

the tines of disaffected lightning

that taught me how to pray,

are the fossils of white serpents, harps

and combs of bone between the shale

of books that sank like continents,

the cacophonous keyboards of burnt pianos,

the scales and frets

of Pre-Cambrian guitars

that never learned to lie

by listening to themselves

like birds in rootless trees.

And if now I write with the unmanned rocket

of a pen that’s left the solar system,

sending back these junkmail messages

these chainletters without return addresses

in my search for intelligent life

to thresholds that don’t exist

except as the lost and founds

of imaginary households,

it’s only my way of whistling in the dark,

of trying to make contact with myself,

of riding to shore like a boy on a dolphin

or the crest of a homing wavelength

from the ghost of a failing beacon.

And though the solitude is overwhelming,

the oceanic closure of the dark

a rock on the tomb of embryonic ages

that will rise to their feet again

and learn to walk from heart to heart,

star to star

in a revery of origins

that seeds the journey back,

certain of their courage in the open,

do not mistake the obvious fools

for the hidden harmony

that guides them with an empty hand; there is

no plea or warning in my voice,

no call for help or a place to stand

that isn’t already the ruined capital of the going,

and it’s been that way for years.

PATRICK WHITE

AND I DON'T KNOW IF I SUCCEED

AND I DON’T KNOW IF I SUCCEED

And I don’t know if I succeed myself

in every moment, a hereditary dynasty;

are ashes the continuum of fire, sorrow

the natural legator of joy, one thought

the progenitor of the next? How

can the mirror reflect itself

unless all things are mirrors

drinking from their own faces; unless

there are roses even as we speak

growing the eyelids and lips

of young women elegant

as eighteenth century herons and willows,

a poet who once dedicated himself like rain

to the battered body of the moon,

trying to turn his visions into atmospheres

that she might breathe again,

that the atrocity of her nakedness

might be clothed in orchids and grass

that shuddered in the gentle foreplay of the wind,

now bagging grams like the loaves and fishes

of a street messiah? In a world

where it is always autumn for the children

who wither and twist like brittle leaves

in the arms of desecrated mothers

whose wombs are trivial catastrophes, the flesh

of their emaciate sons and daughters

buried like shoes in short graves

pathetic with flowers, is art, is God, is love

merely the dodge and deceit

of the bored and obese, these

metaphors and symbols, this search

for a truce among these unknown factions

on which I ruin myself

in minor holy wars against ferocious kennels,

only the debauchery and douche

of a mystic luxury

that refuses to see the moon and the earth

for what they are, a blood-stained rock

beside a shattered skull? I love

the orange trollops of the wild honeysuckle

and the open palm of summer stars

that comes in the night for a reading,

I love the negligent beauty of the high fields

and the radiant empires of time

that suggest I was not always thus

in the all-night laundromats

that pry through my dirty linen

out of the corner of their small town eyes

to see if I’m deranged or dangerous, but how many times

in a mudpack of disgust and laughter

who has not reviled the self-indulgent facials

that estrange them from the truth

of what they fear they have become,

a pampered sin of omission

looking for the words to enroll their emptiness

in a night school for working corpses?

PATRICK WHITE