ANSWERING THE WOLF

ANSWERING THE WOLF

Answering the wolf.

Its agony, my own.

Its long howl of irreproachable pain

enough to silence the mountains

with trepidation before something holy.

Desecration. A photo. Two dozen wolf corpses

pouring over the tail-gate of a pick-up.

The bounty of two happy hunters

kneeling beside their rifles

as if something had been accomplished

it would be worth telling their children about.

Hard truth. Here is a human. My species.

It can do this to anything that lives.

From blue algae to Auschwitz,

Uganda, Syria, Wounded Knee.

Whales, buffalo, Sabra and Shatila, the Amazon,

twenty-five million famished children a year,

an avalanche of wolves at the back of a pick-up.

Beyond wanting to know why

there’s this black spot

in people’s hearts and minds,

where sentience turns rabid,

where intelligence seems

the most inspired enabler of death,

where the wine of empathy turns into an oil slick,

how do you answer the innocence

of the wolf, the child, the old growth forest?

Life gets in the way of our enterprising hatred of it?

You kill a wolf. You kill a whole landscape.

You kill a wolf. And the moon marks you out

with an X on your forehead

for a thousand excruciating transformations.

You kill a wolf. And the rivers

will turn against you and bide their time

until you come down to the water to drink

from your own blood-stained reflection.

The sun will begrudge you a shadow.

The wind feel fouled by your smell

like dead meat in your own house well.

Even the maggots who will come

to your heart one day

like undertakers and garbage-collectors

will look upon it not

as the virtue of a noble enemy

but as an undertaking that’s beneath them.

They will not stoop to clean your body like a wound.

Wolf-spirit, wolf-heart, wolf-mind, wolf-mother,

even the white-tailed buck laments

this atrocity of psychotic caprice

that slaughters simply because it can.

I see the moon bare its fangs in proxy for these

and the stars dip their spears in poison.

And I will dance around the fire with you

mad with grief at this wounded eye of life

and smear my face with the ashes of a deathmask

to regret everything about me that is

pathogenetically deranged and inhuman.

To rid myself of the reek of those who could do this.

Do this to our own. Do this to natives.

Do this to wolves. Do this to the air and the water

they breathe and drink from. Do this ultimately

to themselves when there’s no one left to care or notice.

These kill to eat.

These eat to kill. You and all like you

who did and condone this, I ask you,

what will you do with the bodies of these wolves?

You never ravened for the meat;

was it their death that glutted your heart?

Were you compensating for some hidden impotence

giddy with the knowledge you could

extinguish life anywhere on the planet on a whim at will?

Were you urinating on your own wombs,

the graves of your ancestors because

you’re the illegitimate runt of your own myth of origins?

Are you angry at life because you were born?

Do you despise the rose and admire the thorn?

I see the narrowing in the eyes of the ancient taboos

you’ve violated like thresholds with your boots on,

bruising sacred ground without knowing

where it is you walk or the risk you take,

the danger you will encounter,

because you have been made deaf, dumb, and blind

robbed of your eyes, ears, tongue, heart, mind

insensate to what now lifts its nose to the wind

to find you when you least expect it

from the least expected quarter.

These you killed. You killed in the concrete,

and exonerate the act in the abstract.

These were blood, flesh, fur, bone, each

with a mystic specificity of its own,

wild, free, whole, intelligent, and communal

each the work of some unknown muse of life,

the spontaneity of some lavish genius,

the inspiration of the same dark mother

that never creates the same masterpiece twice.

These had seeing, mind, emotion.

These had been touched by the mystery of life

and in the shrines of the trees and the mountains

offered their delirium up to the moon

like drunks beneath a vacant window

singing to their own reflections. These

accepted their homelessness in this strange place

without doing it any harm as if

there were no other place they could belong to.

These were at peace with themselves and the earth

in a way you weren’t born with the courage to imagine.

These were alert and alive and quick with curiosity.

These were noble without lording it over anyone.

Were they executed for their innocence?

Was there not enough room in your cage

for their kind of freedom? Did you envy

an understanding they had among each other

you haven’t enjoyed once in the last twenty years

you stayed drunk as a gun lobby in a lazy-boy

staring back at the glass eyes of the animals

looking down upon you like a decapitated zoo

with the pity of the unaccusing

that anything that’s ever lived

could be so full of self-hatred,

so full of disgust at the inadequacy of themselves

in the midst of so much spontaneous sufficiency,

from blue algae on over to blue whales,

could be so estranged from their inalienable nature,

could be so vindictively blind

they’d rather shoot the eyes out of the stars

and finger the braille of the bullet holes

they’ve put in the side of their coffins

like a mailbox with a return address on it

than open their own and read the writing on the wall.

Does Cain still blame God

that his sacrifice was unacceptable?

The farmer! The farmer! Not the hunter?

The meat of the hunter not sweet to Her nostrils?

So you murder your brother

and then you murder the animals

as if they somehow let you down.

And in the death shroud of the dark mother

she sends a crow not a dove,

not the wolf, nor the eagles of Rome

to teach you how to bury the dead,

to teach you how to sow the earth you’ve salted

with meat and bullets and how they only bloom

and come to fruition in you

like self-inflicted wounds square

in the third eye of your own infertility.

There used to be hunters wise enough to know

the animals they stalked were meant as a gift of a gift

not something they ripped off like a petty thief.

Now when they catch a whiff of you coming

it isn’t a hunter they run from but

that sickly-sweet freakish smell of death

that clings to the skin of an undertaker

who moonlights as a serial killer

in the deathmask of a terminal disease.

PATRICK WHITE

THE BLONDE SHOCK

THE BLONDE SHOCK

The blonde shock of wild sea grass from New Brunswick.

At first I thought it was your hair.

And tiny beads of iridescent peacock seeds

as small as the myriad hopes of a poppy

she’ll come again

that fell out of the envelope

into my coffee

as a muse of patchouli oil

inspired the air like an Egyptian temple

tending to the rites of Isis

when the moon’s in the nymph phase

of her ancient seduction.

And a drawing of a rainbow phoenix

in the form of a flower

and a money-order for five hundred dollars

to paint violet horns

on the black inverted star

with its plinths open like legs

giving birth to helical vines and snakes.

A symbolic tattoo

that means you

that will hang like a flag from your spine

down your back

as a sign of whose country it is

should anyone ever get lost.

You’re right.

You can’t draw butterflies.

But your darkness intrigues.

Your light is true to its star.

Space bends around you like water.

And there’s not a chained tree

in the whole of your wilderness.

The gates of your rivers are open and free

as the salmon who jump them

conjured out of the sea

by the siren who sings to them

like a journey of things to come

at the end of the long way home.

Love breathes life into death

and even on the fly

love is the prime circumstance of now.

And I feel the gold of your harvest in every seed.

And there’s no scarecrow with a sword

trying to defeat the ploughshare

it was born from

like the moon as it moves

like a white horse

through a wounded valley

looking for its lost rider

somewhere out there like the wind.

I’ve been blinded by squalls of stars before

the sphinx blew in my face

and I have felt my eyes

evaporate in the blazing

of certain fireflies

who could read the braille of my face

like elegant fingertips of light

deciphering the writing on the wall.

And I’ve lived through it all like space

whether I was a celestial snakepit of passion

with a mouse for a heart

or I was blowing kisses

like the petals of bruised flowers

into the grave of an enlightened starfish

passing by in a deathcart.

And sometimes the geni gets his wish

by rubbing the lamp on the inside

and asking the night to need him

like water needs a fish

like fire needs a tree

like air needs a bird

like earth an unpoached elephant.

I’m not a species bent on martyrdom

to any cause lesser than the love

I aspire to

and I won’t burn my eyes

on insincere candles at a black mass

or the votive fires of delusional crucifixions

that yearn without conviction

for a better infancy in their afterlife.

Things have been tough

but I still go to bed at night

with the door wide open

as hope to folly

to catch a thief

that might put the moon back

she stole from my window

like the coin from my mouth

I had hoped would pay for my passage.

And I’ve been given up

like the sea gives up its dead

like the ghosts of old cliches

to the voice of a new medium

and I’ve discovered

that love isn’t the forensic history

of a mystery that can be cracked by the truth.

It’s apocalyptic lightyears beyond both

like a prophecy

uttered in the secrecy of your solitude

that can only be overheard

with your eyes.

And there is no age in it

no youth that leaves the stage

a wiser happier skeleton

no shrines to spring

no pyres of autumn.

It isn’t the beginning or end of anything

that wanders in a world of forms

like a road with all the answers

to questions it never stops to ask.

Love isn’t a lost cause

looking for someone to take a risk.

And it isn’t the silence

it isn’t the singing

it isn’t the longing

to be pulled out like the lucky straw

in a random draw among exiles

to decide who should go first.

It isn’t a thumb in a plum pie.

It isn’t the kiss that lifted the curse.

Or a lifeboat on the moon

that overturns like a blessing

that only makes matters worse.

And it would be unforgivably spacious of me

though I have loved long and intensely

to say what love is

when it wings its own immensity

like a nightbird of blood

that sheds its hood

to fly among the stars

like a fire feathering its own solitude.

But if I were to say anything

I would say

love might be a mighty sword

drawn from a dark ore

tempered in secret waters on the moon

enfolded like time in space

like a worldly loveletter

in a cosmic envelope

with a return address by the sea

that keeps faith with its prey

by giving its word to life

it’s not the expedience of the slayer

or the obedience of the slain

not the exaltation of joy in death

or the mystic terror there is in birth

that calls the lightning down

to make the weathervane crow at midnight:

I have tasted the light on my tongue

like the tine of a new direction.

A dragon sheds it skin

like the ashes of a spent fire.

And the serpents of desire

dance to the flutes

of a lyrical resurrection

like words that take

their meaning from us

when love’s the native language,

the grammar, the muse, the voice, the silence

the playfully profound way the picture-music

hides like a Rosetta stone

that doesn’t want to be found

like a key to the meaning of everything

when we’re what it’s trying to say.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU KEEP LOOKING

YOU KEEP LOOKING

You keep looking for meaning in a world

you say hasn’t given you one

worth living for

and you’re down and disappointed

and all that red passion

that used to burn like books and leaves

has turned as mystically brown

as the background of a Rembrandt painting

or gone up in smoke

at the Bonfire of the Vanities.

Now you’re a copycat Savanarola

in a faculty lounge

trying to turn God back like the Renaissance

for behaving like the Medici.

You used to be a little on the teachy side

but now you’re boring and preachy

having settled the whole issue

of what you’re doing on earth like a fist.

You once went looking for the point of life like a grail.

Now you plunge it through everyone’s heart like a spear.

Like the terrible angel at the garden-gate

to prove you’re sincere as fire

you’re ready to kill anyone

who likes what they see in the mirror

that never wears the same face twice

when it looks at you.

The truth is

since you’re fond of the word

you never found a meaning big enough

to accommodate that Delphic python of an ego

that’s kept sloughing you like skin over the years.

You were always too big

for any chrysalis or cocoon you ever crawled into

and the greatest miracle of transformation

as far as you were concerned

is the shape you took in the womb

like the pearl of the moon

from a grain of dirt

at the bottom of a seascape.

What unified field theory could ever contain you

like some cosmic Houdini in chains and locks

twisting upside down over a snakepit of thoughts

trying to think your way out of the box

as if you were the ultimate escape-artist

and could pour the universe out of the universe?

Even space wasn’t enough of an embrace

to hold you

and now time’s given up on you as well.

Eleven dimensions were never enough

to take your measure.

You wanted to be the golden Buddha

that wormed its way into the heart

of an enlightened rose.

The blackhole in the heart of the galaxy.

The exception that became the rule.

But you never understood

the candle of life that burns within us all

sheds more than one petal

over the course of a lifetime

spent gazing at the flame

fixed in the seeming stillness

like a flower that blooms in fire

every two thousand years

you can’t look at with the same eyes twice.

You never understood that when you look at things

long enough with an open heart

and an unbounded mind

they estrange your eyes

into new ways of seeing.

They bring you into being

like a star turning in its own light

or dark jewels of anti-matter

to see what value

you might place on them

when the gem looks through its own eyes

into the radiance of life without an appraiser.

But the flaws in perfection

are the laws of a fool

or to secularize a mystic dictum

the same eyes by which you see them

are the eyes by which they see you.

Two dunces on the same stool.

One a myth of origin

that got lost in its own meaning

chasing its own tail to see where it begins

and the other the head of a reform school

for black matter

absentee without permission.

Two abnormalities

looking for reality

in the corners of the human condition

that baffles it with the clarity

of a hundred million books

giving private lap dances

in sheep-eyed sylvan nooks

for the savage wolf-popes

with shepherd’s crooks

whose greed is the meaning of prayer.

But the universe whispers itself

into its own ear like a secret

even it couldn’t keep to itself

and everything in existence

from starfish galaxy to solitary night bird

cherishes what they’ve heard

each in their own awareness

not of the word at the beginning of things

as if things were created out of choice

but of the voice behind it

that sings freely to each alone

in the silence of their solitude

like a fountain-mouth of light

that lavishes the world on everyone

without intention or design

as if everyone were privvy to the same mind

and it were thinking out loud

in the picture-music of colours

you can only see

before the arising of signs.

That’s why it looks empty and dark

beyond the blazing billboards

of your highway paradigms.

And for someone like you

who prefers to jump into snakepits

to ask for directions

when the whole world is free-falling

without a map or parachute

through a bottomless abyss

without any sense of up or down

it must dwarf you the same as it does

a featherless bird breaking out of the egg

like a new universe into a nest of flying serpents.

Daring says feathers

and falling takes flight

because it’s in the nature of the abyss

to heal itself like wounded water

when it bathes in its own light

like light and stars

or snakes in the talons of eagles

the lowest of the low

raised up to the highest of the high

like a constellation

when they suddenly realize

in the annihilation of opposites

how dragons win their wings.

You ask fraudulent questions

and expect honest answers.

You try to define what you’re seeking

even before you look.

You stir the starmud in the mirror

to make things clearer

but you still end up looking at things

with dirty eyes.

And out of the darkness

like bats to burdock

blinded by that porchlight of a mind

you keep on all night

in a frenzy of insects

your thoughts are glued

like kites that flew into the powerlines

or flies into a spider-web

of sticky views

on how to keep it together

like a shepherd of clouds

trying to pasture the weather

in the starfields of a mountain sky.

You want to be the mystic arachnid

with fangs like the moon

and radiant elixirs for toxins

you can cook in a spoon

without flagging the fit

with a pennant of blood

that puts its cosmic armour on

and shouldering its lance like a syringe

tilts at the windmill of your arm

like the meaning of Don Quixote

lost like a peduncle in the ensuing phylum

of a species that went extinct

for refusing to adapt

to a reformed chaos theory of evolution

flintknapping the future fossils

of an improved Stone Age.

You keep thinking

if you roll enough rocks up a hill

like Sisyphus

you can build a fortress

or the Al Hambra

or the Taj Mahal

or even the Parthenon

but things just keep coming down on you

like an avalanche down from the world mountain

into the valley of the kings

where the mummies wait for their afterlives

under pyramids of quicksand.

Only a fool would spend a whole lifetime

trying to learn

what he already knows.

In order to understand such a thing

one must be such a person.

Already being such a person

why bother to understand such a thing?

You’re trying to map

the stars in your genome

to find your constellation

like a long lost home

that walked out on you like a threshold

when you went a step too far

and added yourself like a big capital I

to the beginning of that tongue-tied alphabet

that made profound spelling-mistakes

in your amino acids

the moment you started

to proof-read your protein

for punctuation marks

that were too big-hearted.

Vicarious mind!

Faecal pile and pit.

Snake-eyed jewel

at the bottom of the dung heap

that schools the fools’ laughter

by ignoring it

you can keep on looking for a kissing-stone

in a hail of Leonid meteors

that keep knocking you out

like a dinosaur

that takes it on the lip

like a quick jab

from an under-rated mammal

or you can hoard water in your humps

like a camel on the moon

that moves through the cool of the night

in a caravan of shadows

trading with the desert

toward ancient oases of ice

that taste like the frozen tears

of the ballroom chandeliers

that gathered like stars

to take advantage of the night

by twisting your words

like a speech impediment

that whispers like the sea in her ears

at a dance

for club-footed glaciers.

But you can’t wriggle out of the universe

like an anaconda in thin-skinned panty-hose

that’s just swallowed itself all the way up to the nose

like a mystic condom

playing it safe

down on its knees

to make cosmic contact

without contracting an unforgivable disease.

And there are dangerous cave-bears

that live at the back of your mouth

among the skulls of your ancient ancestors

and bones like bad omens

so you won’t find much shelter there

to keep the fire alive long enough

through the long night ahead

to finish the painting

you were working on

without saying a word

that would discolour your voice with a meaning

that won’t be discovered for years

long after your words have moved on without you

like the common language

of a migrant tribe

in the direction of their spears.

PATRICK WHITE

IF THE NIGHT WERE TO REMEMBER ME

IF THE NIGHT WERE TO REMEMBER ME

If the night were to remember me

among all these shadows of lucidity,

for the firefly I burned to become,

for the corpse of the candle I am,

By the scars on the window I swear

By these constellations on my arm

I’m still learning to wear

as if I deserved them,

I always kept faith with the wonder;

even if I took the river

and left the road I was on

to go the rest of the way alone

as if it were better off without me

and fire on the water in fall

enraptured by the mystery

I was nothing at all

but the shadows of objects in a mirror

that taught me how to disappear,

a phoenix among the waterbirds,

a breathless secret in a gust of words.

Even the diamonds grow old.

And the light that shines through them.

And the eye that stares and beholds

the message that answers the medium

like the future ghost of tomorrow

of why joy thrives on sorrow

and our deathmasks hide our happiness

where we’d never think to guess

here arrayed before us

this unseen paradise

everywhere just as it is

in all its wretched blessedness.

I’ve looked for grace in the curse.

I’ve eaten the afterbirth of the worst

Taken sanctuary in the shadows

of abandoned embassy windows

keeping an eye on me in the dark.

Smothered in the ghost dust of stars

trying to make a fresh start

I’ve exchanged old wounds for new scars

just to blow on the fire a bit

to gratify the heretic

his penchant for martyrdom

and mine for creative delirium.

Ask me why and I’d say

that was my nature back then.

I didn’t know any other way

to avoid being Zen about Zen.

Now I don’t give a damn.

A true human is not human.

Better to avoid both

as pirated copies of the same truth.

Let go, give up, bye bye,

or cling to the dream in the doorway,

and nothing is purged or clarified.

Words are born with nothing to say.

Insight doesn’t condition chaos.

Seeking a way out of the cosmos

is just another way of finding

a new way to stay that’s binding.

PATRICK WHITE

IF ONLY THERE WERE ONE WORD I COULD SAY

IF ONLY THERE WERE ONE WORD I COULD SAY

If only there were one word I could say

that could reach out and touch your sorrow,

a cool kiss of moonlight on the eyelid of a widowed rose.

If there were a way to make it better,

to wake you up from the pain you are living,

a dream of rain on a kinder windowpane in the morning.

If I could mend what was broken

beyond feeling and thought and goodness

how could I not feel the piercings of the wounded voodoo doll

victimized by her own mortality

as I am by my own

and pull the pins out of her butterflies

as readily as I would pull the quills out of a dog’s nose?

Accustomed to grief, accustomed to hearing

someone crying in the backyard of the house next door,

at three in the morning, accustomed to observing

the angry solitude of the skate-boarder

always out alone on the abandoned street

as if that were his lonely girlfriend,

trying to figure out why the embittered old woman

never smiles back, or a child will sometimes look at you

as if it were a vicious heart attack

that wanted you to feel as paralysed as it does.

Accustomed to the skin that grows over our eyes

like mother-of-pearl cataracts

so we can fake something beautiful of our indifference

because how much helplessness in the face of pain

and complicit suffering can one person take

before they go mad walking in a world of nettles

with no skin on, no atmosphere to burn

the meteoritic slag of incoming

astronomical catastrophes off before they hit ground zero?

Accustomed to the agony of enduring innocence

inspiring the genius of the malignant

to greater atrocities than anyone’s even aware of,

accustomed to the shock of depravity

leaving a more indelible impression upon my blood

than the acts of the heroes who show up

in desolate dangerous places with tents and oxygen

to stay longer than the news, whose life

isn’t half a sin of omission, and the other half

constrained by a straitjacket for their own good?

If there were a way to imagine pain away

as easily as we imagine it into being,

and have the work of one be the healing of the other,

before sitting here in silence as my only bedside manner

before the dying and the dead

painting death masks for the living

that might make them feel like children in disguise again,

I’d greet them at the happy gates of hell

like some spiritual good guess of an earthly intuition

that a liberated imagination isn’t just

the placebo of another culpable superstition,

but a way to reverse the curse we’ve laid upon ourselves

like a sacred syllable of innocence

said backwards in the mirror

without slandering our own human divinity

by denouncing our delusion at the expense of the real.

It’s been well said that the mind is an artist,

able to paint the worlds, and I would add,

for the slow and thorough like me,

it’s also a carpenter, able to build them

and that’s how you understand the world

from the ground up as if everything had to be on the level,

or the healing herb of a nurse, the first

to arrive like spring with a white flower on her head.

Or a lumbering bell of wisdom and seasoned sorrow

sees the world as a tortoise that’s been asked to dance

at its own funeral as if there were no more weddings to celebrate.

The same eye by which you see it

is not the floodgate between imagination and reality

as if one were the shipwreck of the other,

as if the mountain were separate from the avalanche,

but the way you’ll live to be it after awhile.

A tear can no more be distinguished from the rain

than the light can be from flowers,

than eternity can be from time

or you from the mysterious powers of mind

that are living through you

in a creative turmoil of absolute freedom

that isn’t second-guessing what kind of universe

you want to live in, if you were to live in it alone.

If the stones to you are merely dead languages

that have had their say, having said nothing

for millions of years, if you can’t see

your home constellations

gleaming in the starmud all over your feet,

whose skull, other than yours, rolled the bones

and came up snake-eyes in your vision of life

as ritually unluckier than death, if not yours, you, who else?

If there were one mondo, shibboleth, mantra, or blessing

I could say that would show you

just as a mirage is a near relative of water,

the dream of what the desert’s longing for,

the memory of what it used to know,

so delusion is just as much a friend of reality

as the left hand is to the right hand of the wheelwright.

Nor pain the enemy of joy, nor winter, spring.

No more than the silence of the dead is hostile

to those who would sing, nor the helplessness of who you were

a hurtle in the way of the sufficiency you’ve become.

Out of its dark abundance the inconceivable illuminates the flower

as well as the star, the mind, the heart, the tree, the rock, the river,

and the candles cry along with the abandoned lover

as once they lit up like fireflies in an ecstasy of insight

that made them wholly, solely, hopelessly the other

in a union of one revealed by the bonds of separation.

If only I could speak one improbable word of truth

that might absolve you of seeking irresolute resolutions

for the empty grails and fables of pain

you left like the skulls of milestones

and wounded roadsigns along the way.

It wouldn’t matter at all to me

whether your chains were iron or gold,

or you were snared by the crescent thorns

of the birdnets and dreamcatchers

that slipped like fireflies between the lines

like insights into time and space

that couldn’t be grasped until

it was well understood and forgotten

the life isn’t solid, it’s real.

If only there were one word I could say

one sound, sign, star, drop of water

I could offer you in the goblet of a flower

that only blooms an hour in the morning

like the tear of a distant ocean of time,

that would lay a kiss upon your heavy eyelids,

or that stone of a forehead you’ve dreamed upon

so long now like the pillow of a sleeping mountain

that circles it like a cloud that refuses

to believe it hasn’t already risen from the dead

and leaves an unsigned loveletter from a shy star

just like you who are learning to shine underwater

as if there were no end of the message or the messenger.

PATRICK WHITE