YOUR INTENSITIES

Your intensities dissipating in the silence

that follows your urgent avowals,

it hurts to be subjected to oblivion

like a burnt out streetlamp in a city of light,

to stare into the invisible blaze of the vastness

without eyelids

like craters on the moon aghast with shadows

scabbing the nightshift of a crown factory,

love’s labour locked out,

a footprint on the neck of a flower,

trampled like a protest sign by the crowd

of platitudinous slogans that defame it,

and the pain growing wider than the bridge

that can cross it

and my heart trying to pretend

it’s still a scratched poppy

when everybody knows

it’s a haemorrhaging rose.

And the stars have hardened into diamond thorns

that score the eyes like rocks

striated by arctic runes

in the path of advancing glaciers,

and there’s a hawk in my chest

excavating the message of the dove

I sent to look for land,

and every moment is the era

of a lingering why

that hauls me out to sea like a death barge

to dump my severed body parts

like scrapings off a plate

and no matter how eloquently

I rehearse for a role

in a farce of infinite agonies,

I’ve played the part too many times before

not to know

it’s all just birdseed in a cemetery

that’s tired of hearing itself moan for the dawn.

The wind blows through me

like the ghost of a curtain

long after the window it hung from has thawed,

blows through me like the slash

of a long, fluid incision

as if a knife were learning how to master

the serpentine penmanship

of a sacred crescent of the moon,

and there’s blood all over the page.

And even as the schoolhouse

of a famous arsonist’s childhood,

even as a sacrifice bunt at home plate

I feel neglected and trivial,

a butterfly, a blossom, a rag of blood

torn on the razor-wire of vehement absolutes.

Blood. Passion. Muse. Love;

the submerged foundation stones

of an Atlantean temple

kissing the feet of starfish

or the live walking of aspiring mountains

rising like stairwells up to the doorways

of unnamed constellations,

someone with the courage at last

to step into the open

without their shadows on,

disrobed of all eclipses,

all the inkwells of their spiritual indelibles

ready to taste the wine

that would make a drunkard of a desert for life

and wakes the dragons

in the throat of the well

to dispell their dreams like rain.

Lime in the grave of a used resurrection,

detonating leaking explosives

in the quarry of a black hole,

pouring igneous iodine over the fang marks

of the delirium of toxins and elixirs

that follows the colon of your silence

like the sloughed skin of the moon,

bleached, isolated, more apprehensive

than a field of harvest wheat

watching a scarecrow play with matches,

the clouds of an overhead storm

arcing blue lightning over the grain,

I break black bread with myself in a private hell

where the only way to smuggle in a firefly

is in a fireproof pocket of ashes

and the moon passes secret mirrors through the bars

and the only visitor to log in

is the death mask

of an old vacancy from the past

that has stood by me all these years like a key.

Is it circumstance, inclination, mood, a sloppy heart

that dips this noose of vinegar in the wine

to blow bubbles

in the eye of a hurricane,

or are you just amusing capricious reflections

in the mindflow of a wishbone river

that cracks like a bough

under the weight of its mute bells of ice?

And if it’s death you toy with

like toe-nail clippers,

I had thought to die more originally

than a paring of the moon on the floor,

the mediocre cremation of a shabby fire

I could swallow like a swab of cotton candy

laced with lighter fluid

to smoke the bats out of the attic

and amuse the dazzled bumpkins on the midway.

I have roared with the ghosts of glass lions

and wept like time with ashen wizards

and danced with prophetic shadows

in the lairs of demonic clarities

that could melt thought

in the creative heat of their ferocities

and I wear the scars of ancient claws

worthy of the sword that wept

like wounded ore on the moon

to plunge through their hearts

like a meteor without a warning.

And I have been torn like a page

out of the mauled journal of the rose

like a heretical orchard of blackthorn

and stayed up all night

like an unfinished poem

drinking down to the lees

of the seabeds of oblivion

until I emptied the cellars of my own darkness

down to the last good year of stars

and I could hear the whisper of a palace

in the hovel of a bottle

raise my skull to a throne.

My death is not a stranger

to the pillars of my own domains,

and there are skies that wait

with the dignity of mystic robes

every time I wash the stain of the world off

in my own grave,

and silver oils distilled from attendant ravens

that supple the agony of the worst sunspots

with the tender fountain-mouths

of the unsayable encounters that inspire

the bruised grail maidens

that bloom like nocturnal wildflowers

in a far field

to come looking for me

like the cure for their own eyes

in the labyrinthine courts of the hidden king

that rules the afterlife of the night

at the visionary discretion of a living man.

Behind the door of every affirmation,

the assassin of a denial,

as every flower engenders the frost

that will snuff it

and every candle is a pilgrim

on the road to its own extinction.

And I know it’s hard to live beyond the obvious

without a map back to your face

or breadcrumbs in the wilderness,

a voice beyond the clamour of worldly echoes,

the first feather of an abyss

that’s never known wings,

and your heart the rumour of an avalanche

that’s buried you alive

in the valley of its own debris before,

but I thought you had died enough already,

not to be looking up

at the blue bones of heaven like a shovel,

or weeping like shattered glass

at the graveside of a sparrow

that mistook the burning kites

of your midnight love-letters

for fire lilies blooming like reversed torches

on the extraordinary translucency

of a sky as yielding as silk spun from the cocoons

of the rarest stars to ever burn on water.

And it’s not that I’m not grateful

for the little eras of life that go by

like urns and rosebuds,

or the undulations of flesh and gold

that silt the hungry deltas with siloes of sacred grain,

I have been empowered by many deaths

that have slain me deeper into life

than the roots of the veils and delusions

to squander my blood like an ocean

at the feet of their busy altars,

knowing even space

must fall like a petal at last,

and the silence

of these eternities that pass

through the eye of the moment

like little red threads of blood

must give up their dead

like stories the wind tells around a fire

to make the stars tremble

with the secret lives of water

that unravel like embroidery

on the soiled pillowcase of a dream

that woke up without a tongue

in the shadows of a floodgate

that gapes like the mouth of the moon.

PATRICK WHITE 

GNATS IN THE SUNSET

Gnats in the sunset,

drunk on the light,

women like comets and vapour trails everywhere

flaring across a skullful of sky

like the omens of a toppled throne,

like the inspired slashes of a mad painter,

the deathbed confessions of an expired mirror,

but no planet with the blue rose

of a sustainable atmosphere in sight,

nothing worth naming, no heart

that isn’t the black hole of an eclipsed pearl

mired in stars like quicksand.

So many the gate to a garden they’ll never enter.

So many waiting for the mountain

to circle the burning cloud, so many

choking to death on their half of the wishbone

that got caught in their throats like a harp

they once tore apart

like the crescents of the moon

going off like mutually aimed triggers.

This one smiles like a birdnet

hunting swans on the moon,

and this one bruised her lily into a brass trumpet

to announce the doom

of the last days of her Vesuvian lover,

and there are glass shadows of women

splintering everywhere like the uncandled chandeliers

of a black ice storm, and women with eyes

like sad olives trying to root in Antarctica,

and scorpions tattooing their own hearts

with hate literature

and lethal mushrooms, angels of death

who suddenly come up in the night

and tempt you to page like oxygen

through the first draft of their gills,

idling like the thresholds of an hallucinogenic sea,

for you to slip into an abyss of agony and longing

like the lost voice of a radioactive love-letter

in a readdressed envelope.

Better to be an empty boat

unmoored like a ghost from the moon

than snag your blood

on the thorn of the weeping nightrose

shedding like eyelids and forbidden keys

in the secret doorways of her open wound.

You’ll end up trying

to paste your life together

in an abandoned embassy

that’s lost its diplomatic immunity

from the petals of the infinite sentence

in the bridal orchard

denuded like a blizzard in a wastebasket

shadowing the moon penumbrally

as she puts you through her phases

like a sky encoded with stars in a paper-shredder.

PATRICK WHITE

O MY MOTHER, O MY FATHER

O MY MOTHER, O MY FATHER

O my mother, O my father,

I stand at this Y in the road,

the hybrid son of an angel and a demon,

two halves of the same chromosome

splitting like the left side of my brain

as a squad car took, you, my father, to jail,

and you, my mother, my right half,

were rushed in an ambulance,

a bruised and battered rose to emergency

as if you’d just barely survived

a hailstorm of meters intent

on making your species extinct.

And it was hard to tell if flesh of my flesh

blood of my blood meant the same as

flesh upon flesh with a dull thud

upon the untempered anvil of a child’s heart,

or not. So is it any wonder

when you split the atom that day between you

like Charles Manson and Mother Theresa

and our nuclear family turned out to be

despite Leucippus and Democritus,

fissile material in a radioactive meltdown,

wholly divisible into the infinite wavelengths

that weep like shattered mirrors

with splinters of stars in their eyes

for things they wished they’d never seen.

So is it any wonder I’ve been

this photon in exile ever since,

this candle that got knocked off the balcony

like a potted geranium of blood

where Romeo declared his love of Juliet

out into this storm that’s been trying

to blow me out ever since in the pelting rain?

I’ve hung onto to that flame

like the rag of fire I was swaddled in

as my natural birthright ever since

like a withered leaf on a maple tree

in the dead of a bird-killing winter.

Strange, isn’t it, when a circus

comes to your homelessness

to put up tents where surrealistic clowns

laugh at a childhood in distress

as if it were some kind of joke

you weren’t let in on?

And I doubt at this late date

I’ll ever know what to make of it

whenever it stares me straight in the heart

and I’m brutally clear enough

not to let my vision of it be smudged

by either hatred or compassion

or the chromatic aberration

of peripheral ideals drowning in wishing wells

like flies in a toilet bowl

love’s too dainty to rescue

and the saints are too lazy to save.

Is it any wonder then O my mother, O my father

that I have become this silver-tongued

shape-shifting snake with

a graceful way of twisting things

and haut-couture tattoos on my back

I earned in a radioactive snake-pit

of high-maintenance wavelengths?

That my tongue should be as forked

as three-tined lightning in the mouth

of Hermes the Thrice-Blessed

bearing alphabets to expectant mothers

in a crane-bag of occult grammars,

prophetic as a witching wand

looking for water on the moon,

a split hair, the sacred meeting place

where rivers were enjoined

like bloodstreams of native tribes

to sit around the same council fire

and share the same heart.

That it’s a slingshot that can slay Goliath

square in the third eye from anywhere.

Two roads that diverged in a yellow wood

and I took neither one.

The split ends of one strong rope of a language

that was frayed into two

like a Manichean conception of good and evil

or the wishbone of a broken filament,

the death of a nanocosmic chandelier

that sings like tiny birds in the morning

when you shake it close to your ear

like a seashell or a crystal skull

to see if it’s still alive or not?

Blue Flower. Black Dog.

Chicory. A junkyard wolf.

Not two. Not two. Not two.

And I tell myself the brightest lights

like dreams and wine and stars

are all seasoned by the dark.

What else can I do

what else can I say to myself

to heal the wounded myth of origins

I received from you, O my mother,

O my father, but lie down like a bridge

by the edge of a river of stars,

a bridge of scars

with only one bank, one foot,

one overturned lifeboat,

one pillar of quicksand to stand on,

the sound of one hand clapping

like applause when no one’s listening

that I’ve made it this far

like the apostate of the raging heresy

that’s gone on bleeding ever since

however much holy oil I spread

on the head of the crucified dove

nailed by a slingshot when the T of the cross

where my father’s loins hung

like two thieves either side of him

like the unblessed soil

of the ground he walked on

and the people he crushed underfoot

like the cosmic eggs of the skylarks

as if they were nothing but skulls on the moon

one thumb up and one thumb down

like the torches in the hands of the dadaphors

celebrating the Roman New Year,

one thief cursed, and the other

yet to be forgiven. Changed one day

for reasons that are well beyond me

and I intend to keep that way

to the Y of my mother’s delta

that flooded like the Nile

every day of my heretical childhood

with tears, the silt of stars, the dust

of unfinished pyramids

that kept us nourished through

those long lonely nights of famine

we ate bitter bread together

and cracked burnt bones

like koans and fortune-cookies

around the kitchen table

to get at the hot marrow of the matter

without burning our fingers and mouths

as we stared for hours

at the patterns on the worn linoleum

without saying a word

as if we were Neanderthals

who’d just stumbled upon a secret cave

of sacred Cro Magnon finger paintings of us.

Back in those days, back in those nights,

when it all seemed so natural back then

before we lost our innocence to comparison,

to have been littered by a Roman wolf-mother

who had driven my father

like a jackal in a lion’s hide

with the soul of a scavenger

off what remained

of the carcass of her marriage

to feed her young

and keep them from being eaten

by the likes of him or any other man

for that matter, in her eyes,

though I remember how

it used to terrify me

in a cold sweat for sleepless starless hours

of living a waking nightmare in bed

after all the lights had gone out

that one day I would have to betray her

like her son, Judas,

with thirty moons of silver in my hand,

by telling her against my will

that I was becoming one.

I was becoming a man

and there was nothing I could do about it

except drive myself away from the pride

not knowing in my heart of hearts

whether I was a lion in the wilderness

or a scapegoat that had just cleansed

the sins of the tribes

as if they were my own to bear

for the rest of my life

like a debt to you, O my mother,

my beautiful, savage,

pagan godsend of a mother,

with the soul of a moonrise

and the heart of a gypsy artist in partial eclipse

and your crescents withdrawn like claws

and no blood on the thorns of your rose

when we were happy together, remember,

like weeds in a field, like night birds

that were going to risk the winter

in a tree full of September apples

as ripe as Queensland sunsets

you used to tell us about like passions flowers

that were your version of paradise

you wanted to get back to one day

like all those blue luggage trunks

you kept waiting in the basement like arks

if you could when the wind and the stars,

and the forty days, and the forty nights

were blowing from the right quarter

like a wharf that gave suck

to the comings and goings of the lifeboats

she nursed into life at sea

without ever going anywhere herself.

O my mother, precisely because

you’d never ask, and never did,

what can the son of bright vacancy

say to the mother of dark abundance except

I am a debt I’ll never be able to repay you

regardless of what the bloodbanks say,

I am the lion sacrifice on the lunar altar

of the black lamb of the new moon

that opened my third eye

at a coven of gypsy witches

dancing around the fire

like a zodiac of mystic eclipses

far into the wee hours

of my afterlife in this wilderness

of broken vows and stained-glass windows.

And, O my mother, you must know,

before your green eyes

burn like the salt of the earth

in the distant fires of autumn,

before you die, before I do,

before the rose of your life

you turned into a tent and a fire

that sheltered me under

your eyelids, your wings,

goes out when the wind

upends this hourglass world

like a blossom in a mirage of shifting sands.

Before the landlord comes with the sheriff

to serve our final eviction notice,

I sweep your threshold of thorns,

I sweep the wasps like cinders

from the eyes of your fountains

in tears as deep as watersheds.

Because I am so afraid of losing you,

because any word could be our last,

because every word I say to you

seems like an empty lifeboat

drifting across the moon like a cloud

or a lost nightbird in a storm of sorrow,

and all I can think to do to make

what I can’t make up to you,

is to become a small boy again,

a thief of flowers who used to steal

from orchards, telelphone booths,

and the backyard starfields

of the abandoned houses of the zodiac

to have something to bring home to you

like Evening in Paris perfume

on your birthday at the winter solstice

when the days began to get longer and warmer

and every bead on your rosary

of habitable planets in orbit, each,

one of the ninety-nine names of God

and one unknown secret she keeps to herself

so the light won’t get tongue-tied

trying to say it out loud,

tilted toward the sun at apogee

as only a mother can do

letting the light in through

a crack in our bedroom doors

like a moonrise at midnight

to see if we were all right.

All I can do, and it’s only

a metaphoric gesture of the love

I bear for you like a bucket of water

a wishing well once gave birth to in the desert,

is strew your path with fireflies,

with desert stars, with passion flowers,

with humming birds and honey bees

in the wild bougainvillea of Queensland,

and an easel in Eden to paint them with

and Scotch thistles with no thorns for brushes

and caterpillars of oil paint in tubes

that will turn into butterflies at sunrise

when the southern stars and the fireflies

get the light just right,

and any one of which,

their shining sitting to have

their portrait done in the living likeness

of the starmap I’ve will always see

in your green, green eyes

as life-giving as the moon

in the sentient corals

of this vast nightsea

and the way home for all of us

when the prodigal son returns

like a boy riding a dolphin of stars

through the wavelengths

of the lightyears to come

through both hemispheres

of my heart and mind,

through the northern eclipse of you

O my father, and you, O my mother

who shone even at midnight in the southern

and kept us all together even in our absence

like a weld along the equator

that scarred the wound of the beginning over

with herb gardens you gathered

from the mother-tongue of your heart

that have gone on blooming ever since

well beyond any fence

in any universe of inconceivable existence

that could keep a good thief of flowers out.

PATRICK WHITE  

FIRST THE TENDERNESS

First the tenderness; I feel the tenderness,

the downy edge of the leaf, the eyelash,

the green tooth of the leaf

gently opening its mouth to the air,

its flag of being high in the branches

unfurling like a sky of its own,

startled by the taste of the first star.

Every drop of rain that falls

is a jester’s cap,

three bells and a splash and that’s me

learning how to swim in this new space

with an ark and a flood, you

the dove with the leaf in its beak, returning.

Then I check a little calendar of razor-blades

to see if any of the days

are holy days circled in my blood,

if I’m late for a sacrifice somewhere,

if there’s a landmine waiting

like a spiny sea urchin buried in the sand,

glass petals shed from a broken rose,

waiting for me to take my boots off

and walk barefoot dazzled along your shore.

You are honey and wheat, and, angry,

a small storm that bleachs lightning white.

Brave despite myself,

your beauty crowns me King of Fools,

and though I meant to disguise my helplessness

by standing my ground like a iron thorn,

I can already feel the earth turning to quicksand

beneath my feet,

and tremors of an approaching earthquake

that might heave me up out of the sea

like a new mountain.

And it’s too early to tell

if it’s demons or angels

that prod my heart

with their taunting spears of fire,

or if they’re just bored,

hanging out on call,

like a gang of crows

pecking at the seed

I left hope against hope on the moon,

but to judge from the way I feel

like a new element

discovered first on the sun,

all my cells and molecules assuming

a new paradigm, a new mandala,

a new configuration of shining,

an unknown constellation in the doorway,

through either end of the telescope,

they seem to mean business.

Fear rolls out its black carpet

and blood rolls out its red,

but only love walks freely in the starfields,

making its own path in the going

and when I think of you,

I pale like a planet

in the labyrinths of a shadowless dawn,

I am the toy of tides of light,

a rootless island

broken like bread

from the continent I thought I was.

Unless broken from the whole loaf

nothing can be shared, and nothing

can feed the heart

that has not been broken

among the hands of the hungry.

I have seen you as a harvest day in September,

your pulse a windfall of poppies and apples,

your radiance, flying fish

and water goblets shattered translucently on the wave,

a white mare in the mirror trampling a glass serpent,

you were the pure blue of a troubled morning

melting the first frost

on the wild, New England asters

that bloomed among the grounded planets

of an abandoned apple tree

somewhere in New Hampshire;

I thought you were a window of honey

saturated in its own light,

that only the rarest of eyes

that came like bees back to the hive of your heart

could look through.

Now the moon is out. Now

I see the ghost of the water-lily ride the darkness

like the soul of a doomed ship

unloading its cargo in the depths,

or the second blue moon in October

silvering the fields

it threshes with a blessing.

First, the tenderness; I feel the tenderness

overwhelm me in gentle enigmas

of fireflies and small eclipses,

random ignitions of the mystery

that this should be so at all,

and it’s as if I could stand beside my heart

astounded by the course of its flowing

as all its rivers run suddenly down to you

like a sea on the moon,

and like the feathers of a storm bird

every sail, every burning paper lifeboat,

every next breath

is a longing off your unmapped coast

and a lighthouse of reason

bawling its warning into the fog

that the star that guides my spirit luminously ignores.

And though my ignorance at this juncture

is a stairwell of wind at a crossroads

and I approach you like a tuning fork

trying to harmonize my ashes

like the urn of a burnt guitar

to sing to you out of the shadows of a summer night,

to touch you with leaves and stars,

to lace the air with the black fragrance

of smouldering roses alluring as the wine of a drunk mystic,

and the beast putting on

his brightest golden chain and collar

to greet your progress through his zoo of desires,

slowly I raise my fingertips to your secret braille of scars

to read the contours of the kells

you have elaborated from your suffering;

the symmetries of passion and solitude,

blood and tears

that ink the mingling of your silent scripture

in the shrine of your deepest intimacy.

First, the tenderness, I feel the tenderness

of a bridge for its stream,

of a fountain on the sun

watching a new comet

rinse the darkness out of its hair with light,

of a tree for its chandelier of ripe cherries

glowing brighter than blood in the night.

And I may be junkmail

on the doorstep to the threshold of your heart,

a wizard shy of magic,

or a kite tangled like a misplaced note

in a stave of humming powerlines,

and I’ve fallen

on the thorns and swords and obelisks

of my delusions more than once,

lost like a single straw in a stack of needles,

drowned diving

for tiny moons in hard shells on the bottom,

and no one grows fat on the feast

in a crumb of light,

and a rumour of love

is not the burning bush

of prophecy and inspiration in the valley of a woman,

and you are not the blue love letter

of an atmosphere I could take for granted,

but I risk slipping myself under your horizon

like the wingspan

of a homing bird in the dusk,

risk stepping out from the trees into the open

to drink from your reflection

from the waters of a midnight lake

that has eclipsed every other vision

that has intoxicated me indelibly

from the very first sip

to let you know while we live and breathe and love and hope,

though hope is seldom a road that arrives,

the first tenderness; I feel the first tenderness

of being enabled, empowered

by this transfigurative gust of grace

that turns the galaxies deep within me like well-wheels,

to summon the images, wraiths, forms of the world,

as it arrays its jewels

on the flying carpets of life,

to compare with your beauty,

to embody these auroral aspects of you

that play me like a keyboard of light

in the likeness of a woman

whose smile

though it were as many as the leaves of fall,

and eyes

though their shining

outnumber the morning asters,

have never failed to startle me

into realizing everything

I am missing in life and love.

PATRICK WHITE