I'M FLYING UNDER THE LIGHT

I’M FLYING UNDER THE LIGHT

I’m flying under the light to avoid detection.

There. That’s the first line. A cornerstone.

Maybe water, granite or quicksand

but the cosmic glain

is cracked open like a skull

to extract the message from the fortune-cookie.

The second line comes easier

though it hasn’t come yet.

I’m waiting like a crematorium at the end of my cigarette.

Yes. Hot coffins for cool people.

Like it. Where’s the rest?

A mirror looks into my face

and sees the enlightened folly of creation

is not the work of a clown.

Forgive the little arrogant flag of flame

I’ve been trying to raise

out of a nation of ashes

like an arsonist with noble aspirations.

I’ve looked up at too many stars over the years

not to see beyond my next breath

like a cloud of unknowing,

a road of ghosts,

into the sweeping clarity

of the silence and the darkness

that have unmarrowed me like a bone

to grow new organs of light, new senses,

new eyes and hearts and minds

that are free of the ferocities of night

that consume them death by death

in unextinguishable fire.

It’s a mode of compassion

I can’t get off my chest,

my way of venting with tears in my eyes

when I consider what becomes of us

who stood here once in the high starfields

alone in an opening between the groves

and gave our eyes back to the sky like water

that tasted of too much suffering

to be sweetened like an apple by grief

or provide us with a vision of relief

that floats better

than all these lifeboats of belief

we’ve overturned.

Time’s refugees,

even in the donated tents of these bones,

flapping like skin in a desert wind,

only our homelessness is our own.

Like stars and dirt and leaves

we’re swept off the stairs

across thresholds, out the door

and into the dustpans of our own eyes

whenever we think about putting down roots

and waking up beside our own boots

like bodies that walked all the way with us

to a known address and a bed

we didn’t share with the dead.

Even when the moon is full and beautiful

I can hear the clacking castanets

of the crabs and the pebbles

rounded like skulls in the tides

of the untold myriads

that have come and gone like the sea.

To be so much and then nothing,

to be washed clean of everything you cherish

to watch the dyes run like blood and paint

or arsonists from autumn leaves

when your mind has lucked out

like a watercolour in the rain

and your brain unspools like mud.

Sometimes I think my awareness

is no more than the smear

of an incidental rainbow

on a distended bubble

whose inflation always

snaps back on itself in tears.

I prick myself on the thorn of a star

and let my eyes pop into vaster skies

and almost convince myself

that our bodies are crushed like grapes

to deepen the abyss of the wines

that bleed us into oblivion.

Or life is a dream without a dreamer,

fireflies in a well without an echo,

a magician so overcome by his own spell

there are doves flying out of his nostrils

and fish building nests in his brain like a tree

and yet he still can’t conceive

of what he pulled out of his hat.

And fulfilment may well be the enlightened flower

of the ignorant roots of desire

like the truth in the mouth of a liar

but I’m not assuming I’m a vegetable

and who knows,

when you put it all together

from the earth and the light and the rain

into one brain

I might be nothing more

than just another kind of weather

trying to take shelter

in this makeshift eye of the storm.

But do you see what I mean?

There’s no more continuity in being blind

than there is in looking into the face of God

and seeing the worlds within worlds

that seep like feelings into her thoughts

as if one world without a witness weren’t enough.

Words stumble here like physics

before its singularity

and are left like bodies and shoes

on the myriad thresholds of hyperspace

where the worlds pour into each other

like a waterclock of salmon

returning to the source of it all

like the pulse of the sea to the call

of the voiceless bell that gives birth

to all the unimaginable generations of time

that have wounded the faceless mirrors of eternity

by breaking the silence and serenity

of the well that would not answer

by dropping in like eyes

that disappear in waves

washing out their own reflections.

Sometimes it seems as if

there are only two kinds of people in the world:

those that are going and those that have gone.

Where did they go?

Where are they coming from?

Are we the only strangers on the road

and our inhospitable purpose, this passing?

When she leaned on the windowsill

and cradled her head in her hands

to watch the summer clouds

her arms were cormorants of light

and she wore the window awry like a crown.

And the old Japanese man

with hair whiter than moonlight

who used to apologize to the weeds

he uprooted all morning long

in the whisper of a language

only he could understand

for making a distinction.

Where have they gone

where eyes can go and see and come back

across the threshold of their extinction,

mile zero of a road that leads

everywhere all at once

like any point in the infinite space

of the expanding universe?

Why must we leave

the mystic particulars of our lives

like shoes and bodies and names

at the opening door of our bootless generalities?

These fingertips were kissed by a mother

who strung them tenderly

like ten little birds

ten little arrows

to the lips of her bow.

Now that they’ve flown

can anyone follow

the light into the unknown

or lift their reflections from the waters,

their shadows from the gound

like breadcrumbs and fingertips

to say where they’ve gone

or even more impossibly

find out where we are now

so they can find their way back to us?

Or is all that we ever were and will be

irrevocably lost

like the root in the flower

that passes it by

on its way into the open

where its eyelids fall away?

When I fall away from myself

like a drop of water

from the tongue of a leaf,

an unspoken word, a tear,

like rain on an autumn headstone

will the stone ripple

like the rings of a tree

to let you know

that the great sea of life

still jumps like a fish within me

to break through the immaculate

silence of the pond,

its undulant membrane of light,

like spring in the morning,

like a pulse of light beyond

the dark side of the mirror

that has never seen the moon,

that absorbs everything

like a cloak, or an oilslick,

an eclipse, a black hole

where things never appear,

to let you know I’m here. I’m here

where I have always been

where the joy of life transcends

its own thresholds of meaning

by parting its own waters

like the wake of a night passage

or the curtains of an open window

or a woman who opens her legs like a compass,

suffering her own felicity

to give birth to the shoreless sea,

drop by drop,

you and me

each moment we live

where death hasn’t laid down its threshold

and birth can’t get through its own gate

because the concepts have left no living ancestry

in this empty world of now

where we live, where we

have always lived,

our elbows on the horizon

like two moons on a windowsill,

wondering, longing, dreaming,

a breath, a veil, a mist

as we evaporate

like visions off the lakes of our eyes

into the great abyss of our unknowing

like a nightstream that lives

blindly belonging

to what’s going on, inexhaustibly.

PATRICK WHITE

APPARITIONS OF THE MUSE

APPARITIONS OF THE MUSE

Apparitions of the muse

hanging her stars

from the end of my nose

like an exotic fragrance of night

more revealing than the light.

There. That’s mine.

The constellation of the donkey,

and there beside it, do you see

that red-haired star

blazing like a woman with a carrot and a stick?

I’ve followed that star for fifty years

always a mountain away from the valley

like a passionate Sisyphus

rolling the earth up a hill like a stone

happy with my own absurdity,

happy to go mad for her sake alone.

Elixirs of moonlight

mingled with strange waters

and I drank until I drowned

in the ferocity of my own delirium

like a myth that’s forgotten

which stars it belongs to.

I’ve never been much of a martyr

and bored with lies

I’ve always been two hells shy of a messiah

but I have fallen on the thorns of the moon

more than once

after my long descent

down the burning ladders

of God’s last word on the matter.

So there’s no splinter of the true cross

to needle the issue

like a compass or a crucifix.

And it still puzzles me

why it’s always my blood

that rushes to the end of my emergency

like a volunteer army

but it’s always somebody else’s flag

that gets raised above the rubble.

Pyrrhic victories at best

when I’m not feeling cursed or blessed

by any kind of mystic meaning

convincing me I can firewalk

barefoot on stars

when I can’t even get

this blue pebble of a planet

out of my heart like a shoe.

But even letting go of all their leaves

like starmaps home from spiritual refugees

the trees can only go so far

as the wind and streams will let them.

And then there’s a darkness that doesn’t taste of stars.

And decisions that cut like the smiles of broken mirrors.

And turmoil in the snakepits of desire

that are thrown like angry acids

in the eyes of the seers

who saint the rain with their sorrows

like old calendars of crossed-out tomorrows

playing x’s and o’s with the moon.

It’s a freak of enlightenment

to turn love into a discipline

inspiration into a law

and godless wonder into superstitious awe.

So I listen and say nothing,

see and don’t reveal,

understand but never think I know

the gates that pass through me

when I call out to the wild geese in the fall

and I am startled by the loneliness of the answer.

I’ve seen you in the nightstream down the mountain,

the river and the sea

that sits below the salt

at her own table,

and I still suspect it was you

that turned my bitter tears

into the brittle chandeliers

that fell like ice-storms in a fountain

to silence the voices of the mirrors

the birds kept flying into

like windows at war with the sky.

I was out of the egg.

I was out of my mind at last

like a gift I didn’t deserve

and the universe was full of your absence

because you were the embodiment of my longing,

the darkness in the light

that stood aloof from the meaning of everything

as if your only proof were your eyes

and that were enough

to answer the empty skies with stars.

You may put on flesh and blood

and in your human proportions confess

you don’t believe this,

but you can never be attained,

never be embraced

never be contained

by any avatar of who you are

because like space in all directions

you are limitless

and even time is consumed

in the root fires that grabbed you by the ankle

and pulled you underground

to dress a goddess of light

in the nocturnal jewels of the dead.

And it is not a prerogative of the beatifically born

to be demonically wrong,

but I have heard the skulls in the song

that allures the unwary sailors

to the lunar horns of your fishbone harps

to smash them on the rocks

as if you took a tragic delight

in the sheer delinquency of your power

to arouse and extinguish desire.

Anyone can come up

with a meaning for life

but you are the muse

of meaning itself,

the meaning of meaning

when anyone asks

without expecting an answer.

What woman that I’ve loved

like a river reaching the sea

have you not been

over these long, intense years

of radiant tenderness

and creative commotion

and an ominous darkness out over the ocean

when the moon turned around

like a bride in bed

and revealed the far side

she kept to herself like stars?

And it’s still a shock and a marvel to me

when you disappear into the air

like a breath someone neglected to take

when it bloomed on the window.

I don’t doubt your capacity to devastate

and I have the urns and the burns

and the ashes to prove it

and know on a whim of your arrogance

you could leave the phoenix out in the cold

and douse the dragon like a torch

in your fire-proof waters.

But lately, out of the flesh,

I look for you behind the eyes

of every woman I meet

and it’s rare that I find one

whose blood and passions

you’ve worn as your own,

whose mind is a jewel of yours

that flows like a star sapphire

down a dark mirror

older than the meaning of life

that relflects you in the light of a black sun.

And I know enough not to ask

about those lockets of blood

you hang like thorns

around the neck of your mystic rose

like the first and last crescents of the moon.

I opened one once to see

whose picture you carried inside

like a butterfly you were working on

like message in a bottle you never sent

like a ship to the rescue

and I’m still not certain

I was demon enough

to survive the miracles

you released upon me

like a hive of angry angels

but I came to know

what the loss of heaven meant

when I ran from the garden

through the closing gates

of the harp you stuck in my throat

like a voicebox of sacred syllables

and came up on the short end of a wishbone

like another rib I was happy to lose

like third on a match

in trench warfare with any muse of a woman

who catches me blindfolded out in the open

in the crosshairs of an inspiration

she knows I can’t help but surrender to

like a white Russian iris of a poem

to a firing squad of stars aimed at my heart

just to see if I were as ready to die for her

when she put her finger

like a moment of truth

on the trigger of the moon

up to my temple

as I claimed in thousands

of Zen haikus and enlightened alibis

that fell like Japanese plum blossoms at her feet

I was ready and willing to die for any art

where she wasn’t the medium

that fired me up with mystic urgency

to write long loveletters

like a moth in a window

to the candles she inspired in my heart

like the fairest flames of life I have ever expired in.

PATRICK WHITE

LIGHTNING HITS THE HORNS OF THE MORNING SNAIL

LIGHTNING HITS THE HORNS OF THE MORNING SNAIL

Lightning hits the horns of the morning snail

like the tines of a tuning fork

and the larkspur sees in the ashes of the holy one,

a tiny urn, no bigger than a cigar butt,

a deep connection to the stars

at the root of its ultramarine towers,

the ugly and despised become luminously beautiful

by what they’ve been touched by. Same

with candles, night, the human spirit, a poem

and the stars and planets

that ride the film of our eyes across the sky

or slide across the poppies of blood that bloom

on the other side of our eyelids in the sunshine

like blue sunspots and serpentine rainbows

on the deft wings of the houseflies aspiring

to penetrate the heights and mysteries of being

as if they approached God like an ineffable windowpane,

and the black mirrors of the oil slicks

that eclipse our faith in our transformative power

to change things. Two petals of violet cosmos,

two eyelids of a new way of looking at things,

swaying ethereally in the wind

as if they were keeping time

to a faint music they can hear

way back somewhere in their mind’s eye, fall

and stick themselves to the back of a snail

inching its way along a garden path in metric

through a crosswalk of rococo shadows,

and who would have believed

something so low and slow could fly

if they hadn’t seen it with their own eyes?

Show me anything your eyes have ever been deprived of,

however ugly, however visually tantalizing,

inside our out, even if you can count more than the usual three,

and I’ll show you someone who hasn’t learned

how to be grateful for the generosity

of the black hole they’re living in

like one of the darlings of light.

Clarity isn’t just a matter

of straightening out the wavelengths in your line of sight

and then looking upon everything you see

as if it were flatlining in parallel event horizons

everywhere you looked for signs of life

and came upon death, and mistook it for peace.

It isn’t just a matter of contemplating sundials

in erratically disciplined Zen gardens

until you come to understand how to use the shadows

on behalf of your own spiritual insight

as readily as you’ve mastered your weapons of light.

No one’s ever been purified by a holy war.

Not even the warrior minstrel of the forlorn hope.

You can exhaust a whole new generation of third eyes

trying to make it all one out of a lot of little separate pieces

that reflect the whole in every part

of your shattered chandeliers and mirrors,

that long pilgrimage, that fire walk of shining splinters

that dazzle you into believing it’s skip to my lou my darling

all the way down a Milky Way of stars

from here like a fingerling of light

to there like a wild salmon of oceanic enlightenment.

Beauty isn’t an essence you can extract from the ore

of who you are as a human like an existential alchemist

trying to distill the stars from the medium they’re shining in

as if you were pulling a sword from a philosopher’s stone.

All the shining spiritual metals, copper, silver, mercury, gold,

unless they’re alloyed with the darker elements of earth,

are too soft for combat. Merlin relies

on the iron forge in his own blood to work his magic.

He knows a holy war is just an exorcism

on crusade against a seance. A calling

of the dead to the dead. Not the work

of the living spirit that resides

in the human divinity of everyone of us

like a birthright of shining

that’s as indefensible and unassailable

as time and space. Clarity doesn’t try to part the heavens

like a mansion into single rooms for every afterlife

that goes into exile looking for an excellence within itself

that knows how to keep a promise to the earth.

Knowing how to fall is half the art of rising.

Learning how to get up off

your knees, your prayer rugs, tatami mats

and all those flying carpets

that don’t fly straight in any direction

with compassion for the human being you are

as you see yourself looking at you

through everyone else’s eyes,

and hear creation being said within you

like the fleeting meanings of life

that shadow the life of meaning

as fast as it’s being spoken

in the mother-tongue of everyone

who can look upon a morning snail

and hear how a grubby little buddha

of a sticky sacred syllable

that crosses your path in the morning

is saying you into existence twenty four seven

the way everything else is each other

in the wholly imaginable beauty

of a creative language that isn’t

a tongue-tied stranger to anyone.

Look at any grain of dirt on whatever path you’re on

and light it up with the shining

from the oil lamps of your own eyes

and you’ll see how easy it is to enlighten

what’s under your feet like the billions of stars

that spontaneously followed suit like wildflowers

once you got the first one lit and realized

in whatever direction you search and seek

the spirit isn’t looking for the right road of thorns

to cut its feet on, or lacerate its knees on a holy stairwell.

Put a pair of cosmic wings on a morning snail

and the whole earth turns into a landing strip

of green boughs in blossom, even

when the fireflies take over the nightshift

like microcosmic demonic nightwatchmen.

Go ask the bees if you don’t believe me.

They can read the petals of the secret starmaps

that bloom like love notes and shared recipes

for honey that tastes like a solar flare

transformed by the transactions of a spiritual atmosphere

that pearls this grain of nacreous earth

as surely as the air that breathes us does,

into auroral arrays of beauty and compassion.

If you can’t love the veils, how are you ever

going to learn to love the face behind them

that smiles back at you in a likeness of yourself,

all eyes, and stars, flowers and nocturnal metaphors

for what you’re looking at?

A morning snail with two petals of cosmos for wings,

with flashy grains of dirt on its back, each

a world within a world in its own right,

rising chromatically over their event horizons

as a sign of a significance of their own

as poignant as the silicates and stars they’re reborn from,

delivering the mail at its own pace

as if its wings were two loveletters

addressed to itself by the wind personally

each sealed with a kiss

like two complementary eyes

you must look into deeply if you want to see

how the hourglass flowers in your gazing

like larkspur and shapeshifting desert stars.

If you don’t want to live your whole life

like a scar looking for a wound you can believe in.

Even a morning snail, if you’ve got the eyes for it,

can make a trail of the silver veil it leaves in its wake

like a smeared mirror on the path to enlightenment.

If you only love the light at moonrise,

and despise what’s fallen into the dirt

like so many windfalls of

demons, stars, snails, angels, apples and humans before it,

your life is not adjusted to the time-zone you’re living in

and your heart keeps missing a beat

you go endlessly wandering over the earth to look for

through the gardens on the moon

and the starfields above

when everywhere and always

it’s been right under your feet all the time

like a snail path shining like the Milky Way

on the garden walkway through

the blue and white stars of the larkspur

like lightning in the morning

that flashes from your own eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETHING SAID SOFTLY

SOMETHING SAID SOFTLY

Something said softly in the night

like a tendril on a windowsill

tasting the moon, a whisper, a word

that walked in the light without

abandoning its shadow,

a phrase with wet wings

dreaming itself out of its chrysalis

not knowing whether it’s a leaf or a dragonfly

until the whole tree wakes up beside it,

something sought but rarely said

saturated with the meaningless life of meaning

that could touch space like flesh

and make it feel the thrill of new eyes

running down its arm like tears.

And it’s not that I want

to unsay the night or God

to define myself as a human,

and it’s of little moment to me,

seed on the wind,

what worlds are born of my words,

what ends, what begins,

what comes of what I cannot say,

but I want to say something

with the savour of time in it

that’s worth living for a little more each day

like a small tree rooted like a thought

in a crevasse of eternity,

greening the moon.

Late at night, in the darkness,

while the silence is off preserving something,

and all I can hear is your breath

off in the distance like an ocean,

I want to unpack my vagrant heart

like a patched guitar-case,

a grave-robber in a pyramid,

and attune my afterlife

to the key of this one

in such a way

I can play like a new star in Orion

to all the sad, beautiful fireflies of the moment

that hover over us like living constellations of our own

not bound to any paradigm of light

that can only be touched by a mountain of stone.

I want to paint something

that feels like the flower

that just brushed against your hand,

I want to be inspired by the mystic blue of midnight

like window glass fired in the kiln of a star

that has looked upon the suffering of humans for so long,

their atrocities and deprivations,

their terrors and wrecked joys,

compassion has turned it into an eye so clear

you can sip water from it like tears

that taste of the history of blood and wine

that danced alone like a vine at its own wedding

with a bride of rain that unveiled herself

like falling chandeliers.

Unfailingly, absurdly, obsessively human

in the shadow of thundering magnitudes

that feel like the extinctions of gods

that time has wheeled out

to the enormity of the gravepit

that limes every abyss of the heart

with the stars of a new universe,

I want to add one candle to the shining

in a folly of insight so illuminating

even the earliest galaxies

forever entering the darkness

on the threshold of their first shedding

could see it, something

so profoundly vernal and intimate

even I can believe in it.

PATRICK WHITE

WHO ISN'T TRYING TO LIVE

WHO ISN’T TRYING TO LIVE

Who isn’t trying to live

as they vaguely hope they are

whatever extremes of moderation they’ve gone to

behind all the masks and fraud?

Crosswalks and bridges of fire

trying to get to the other side of themselves

like the promised land, or God,

ladders up to heaven

like vertebrae and ribs,

and ropes like spinal cords

down a well on the moon

that hasn’t enthroned hell in her depths yet,

everyone’s trying to put a face on chaos

they remotely hope is their own.

One by one the plum blossoms

fall to the nightstream

like loveletters

from the branch of the tree

that read them once and then let go.

No one knows where they’re from

or where they’re going.

Some give their wings up

like graduate degrees to the ants

and others are raising their sails

like the flames of a great fire

that consumes the prophet

who wanted to hold his arms up

like a wishbone to the lightning

in the revery of his desire

until everything is ash and nails,

and others who think they’re

the rudders and keels of the flowing.

Sometimes I am nothing more

than this terrible inevitability

of flesh and bone

alone in the vastness of my unknowing

where neither ignorance nor wisdom prevails

and then it’s as clear as stars

on both sides of the window

that everyone’s everyone else’s good guess

as they encounter one another

passing the time

in a crumbling game of graveyard chess.

I don’t know why what’s wise about me

always ends up listening to myself

like a fool’s confession

but I’ve run out of rosaries

like habitable planets

and my homelessness has exposed

the ruse of divining purity

in the afflictions of compassion

as if everything had evolved in sorrow

like a heart-bending occasion for tears

as the mountains that fell

like an avalanche of cornerstones

into the valleys they’ve dug

like pyramids and graves over the years

abide like salt in the eye of the sea.

Intelligence might be an elaborate mode of paranoia,

but eased into the wonder of being here at all

with trees and stars and the midnight rainbows

on the necks of the grackles

and the hectic butterfly among the grape hyacinth,

since I was enlightened

by my absolute uncertainty,

I have gathered all my voices together like leaves

and burned the old texts of myself

for not being much of a liar.

Five petals opened

and one flower bloomed

like a good laugh.

Now my awareness

is a kind of playful fire that doesn’t burn

what it consumes

though the light

still tastes of the jewel

and even as the good-byes deepen their voices

like echoes in wells,

because I’ve grown older

and autumn keeps shedding its choir,

the hellos still take on a life of their own

as if nothing had changed.

An illuminated clown

I am astounded by the profundities

in every jest of being

revelling in the creative hilarity

of its mystic specificity

and how every time I get serious about something

as if I had just remembered myself,

I bring the house down.

Only a hypocrite is humble enough

to underestimate his own irrelevance,

and go sorting through himself

like a cellphone in the ashes

but for those who have become fire,

aspiration is achievement

and fulfillment and desire,

one breath. In every event

there’s nothing to be

further than you can see.

But that doesn’t mean

take a harder look

as if your life were a book

you were learning to read

or a mirror you had to stare into

until your eyes bleed

to know who you are.

When you stop thinking

every perception is a clue

to who you are

you’ll shine out like a star

ahead of its own light

and stop trying to recognize God

through the featureless eyes

and vigilant simulacra

of a stolen identity.

You will be neither partially

nor wholly yourself

and before and beyond

will not seem

the unending extremities of now

rounding the skull of a clock

that’s lost its way home.

Your seeing will grow deeper than eyes

and you will stop sending

your reflection out

like the moon’s last lifeboat

to haul you up out of the abyss

like a fisherman gilled in the tangled mess

of his own s.o.s.

You’ll let go of the oars

and breathe easy like the sea

and in every blossom of being

you will taste the whole orchard

drunk on its knees in laughter,

not knowing where to begin.

PATRICK WHITE