STRANGER IN THE LEAVING

STRANGER IN THE LEAVING

Stranger in the leaving

than you were before you came.

Is it not always so

when people separate?

Lovers who knew each other intimately for years

close their gates to each other

and say each others’ name

as if they weren’t philosopher’s stones anymore.

And the base metal outweighs the gold that comes of it.

Alone with the alone

in the abyss of the absolutes

what was vivid and vital

turns numb as glass

and what was mystically specific about the other

is no longer a shrine that holds the secret name of God.

Stranger in the leaving

than you were before you came.

You leave with some of my memes

as I leave with some of yours

and we are both no doubt slightly changed for good

by the reciprocity of the encounter

like hydrogen and oxygen make water.

Though now it’s all tears frozen on the moon.

Good-bye my lovely

I shall miss your eyes and your skin

and the thrill of your dangerous heart.

I will miss your wounded mouth

I tried to heal with messianic kisses

that never walked on anything but the earth.

And there’s no blame

you couldn’t fit my lunar month

into your solar calendar.

We had everything in common except time

and our faults were as compatible as our virtues.

I will miss the rumours of alien life in the wavelengths of your hair.

I shall miss losing myself like a firefly

in the wishing wells of your eyes

even if now my own seem more

like impact craters in the prophetic skull of the moon

when I consider what’s leaving like an atmosphere from this mindscape.

And I shall always remember

that your heart was as generous as your breasts

and whenever we made love

how the earthly was the envy of the spiritual fact.

You didn’t want anyone to know you were gentle.

Not even me.

But I could see through that mask

eyebrow to eyebrow with you

as if we both were intent on showing the same face to the earth

like the crescent fangs of a Georgia moon that said

don’t step on me

because we were afraid.

More than enough to have you in the nude

I wasn’t a glutton for your nakedness

that demanded you take your illusions off

to prove you loved me.

It would have been an irreverence

beyond the aspirations of heresy

to witness you renewing your virginity

like the new moon bathing in a sea of shadows.

I never tried to pry the petals of the flowers open

before they were ready to bloom.

I was never the ant

that told the peony what to do.

I never tried to look under the closed eyelids of the rose

to see what it was dreaming.

Though I’m not into voodoo

I never desecrated

the bird shrines

of your involuntary taboos.

But now I look in your eyes

and see that yesterday

is less vivid than tomorrow

though neither of them has happened yet.

The new moon is all potential

The full moon all used up.

There are effigies of potential

standing like scarecrows

in late autumn cornfields

and paragons of actuality

who love to star in constellations

that make them out to be the hero.

I try to stay

and I end up going.

I try to go

and the earth moves underfoot.

The root feels the death of its flower

as the autumn stars turn into frost

and burn its petals like old loveletters

to the immensities that didn’t have time to read them.

The harmonies of life

are distinguished from the harmonies of death

by a single breath

taken in

and turned out

into the vast expanses of where it came from in the first place.

And the spirit that isn’t shy of its own lucidity

knows that everything it illuminates

whether by day or by night

has the lifespan of light

and light is the brainchild of the darkness.

So even when the lights go out

like people and candles

and us

the shadows go on blooming

and even when the stars

are a gust of ghosts at our heels

the dust is rich

with the memory of all the roads

that once got lost in us

trying to find their way back home

like blood and fire and spirit

as if their final destination

were always the place they started from.

And if in the lightyears ahead

you should ever wonder if I remember you

be deeply assured

I shall remember you

as if every footstep I took

were a threshold of this homelessness

I am brave enough to cross without you.

And I shall thank you for this courage

inspired by the muse of your absence

and the feel of my blood Doppler-shift toward

long meditative wavelengths of red

that stream from the intensity

of the wounded white-hot blue of a renewed beginning.

You can’t teach a bird to fly in a cage

or snakes to bite other people.

But when I first met you

it was as if the serpent-fire at the base of my spinal cord

that was running to keep its thoughts aloft like kites

suddenly had wings

and all my dirt-bag myths

that crawled on the earth among the lowest

were elevated into constellations

that burned like dragons among the chandeliers.

And when the muses of life well up in me like water

as they will

and ask me back

for all the tears they’ve shed on the sorrow

of the way things had to be

between you and me

for them and us

to happen the way we did

I will show them the eternal flame

of the nightwaterlily

blooming in the clear fire

of its lonely lucidity

not even the rain

the dragon brings

can aspire to put out.

I will show them the sun.

I will show them the moon.

And I’ll say

you see?

That’s us forever.

That swan in the heart of a phoenix.

And they will be well-pleased with the beauty of the lies

I use to shadow the truth with compassionate alibis

for why the flowers fall.

Sometimes it’s the bird that swims through stone

and the snake that flys

in a profusion of fire and water

shadow and form

darkness and light

intensity and death

madness and wisdom.

Sometimes you meet someone

and you realize

this fallible flesh just as it is

is the deepest longing of the spirit fulfilled

like light in a perishable garden.

That there are no flaming swords

in the hands of the angels

at the wounded gates of our exile

trying to keep anything in or out.

Stranger in the leaving

than you were before you came.

The knowledge we have of each other

might want to keep things the same

but like all living things

in this garden of creation

the only way to sustain our innocence

is change.

PATRICK WHITE

SPOTS ON A PAINT RAG

SPOTS ON A PAINT RAG

Spots on a paint rag trying to figure out

if they’re part of a larger picture.

Daubs and smudges and smears of black and red.

Topographies of dry thick ridges of blue acrylic,

peach-coloured mesas bruised

by the encroaching violets of dusk in a painted desert.

Are these the wanna-be windows of life

who failed to achieve a whole and harmonious view

of what they’re doing here swiping off knives

thick with the gore of cadmium red,

cleaning off brushes that get to go out

on the field to caress and poke

stars and trees into being? Waterboys, not players.

I say the word, life, and I feel tonight like

the heaviness of a bell that’s supplanted my heart.

The right root, but the wrong blossom.

Even though I’d melt that bell

back down into raucous cannon

to defend the concept to my very last breath.

But tonight I’m tunnelling under the foundations

of the cornerstones of life to bring

the walls down on top of my head,

like an avalanche of prophetic skulls

to just get a peek inside the grand paradigm,

the white light of the gessoed underpainting.

The secret garden with low-hanging fruit

on easy street with the sacred whores of Babylon.

An existential sadness, deep as a death-wound,

as if I’d just been stabbed in the heart

by the hands of a clock that mistook me for an intruder,

undermines me from below, a pyramid built on quicksand.

As if all those who had drowned in life

like fish up over their gills in water

were swimming in the watershed of every tear

that almost makes it up over the top of the dam

I try to throw up like a manly front to what

I know I won’t be able to hold back for long.

And there go the villages in the flooded valley

I tried to live among like a neighbourly mountain

come to Muhammad on the way up and down.

It’s cold and lonely and the air is thin

at the peaks of experience, with only

a star and a cloud for company.

The hard diamond in the rough I used to be

has grown mushy over the years. Tears.

Imagine that. Warm, salt seas with undulant tides

of emotion coursing in and out,

the way we breathe, the way we live and die,

unite and separate, pour our shining

down an inexhaustible black hole

like Parthian gold into Crassus’ mouth

in the hope of efflorescing like the bird fountain

of a better world on the other side of hyperspace.

Armed with some decent human attitudes,

and a few that are wholly out of bounds,

no reason my mind can catalyse out of chaos

that I should feel the sorrows of the discarded colours

on a paint rag like the afterbirth of the universe

that’s gone on to greater things than road kill.

I feel the deep grief of widowed eclipses

and the creeping shame of sunspots

that were born into a maculate caste

of estranged birthmarks on the forehead of a lighthouse.

Space is warped like water by some unknown

disturbance in the pond. And I can’t discern from here

whether it’s a crack in the dam

or a birth sac ripe enough for its waters to break

and wash me out to sea like

the flotsam and jetsam of a shipwrecked lifeboat.

I hear the lilac whispering into blossom.

I see the starlings building their nests

in the corners of my third eye and the spiders

weaving mandalas between the witching wands

of the aspen saplings trying to transcend their roots.

Still, time seems studiously impersonal

and more matter-of-fact about suffering

than perhaps it really is. The mind is an artist.

Able to paint the worlds. As they say in Zen.

And I can see so clearly even through this cloud of unknowing

the kind of world I’d love to live in,

giving it my full assent in peace and contentment,

as long as I never lost the hunger that desires these things

and no one else had to live like a ratty old towel

abused as a paint rag by the shroud of Tourin.

Yet I can’t help feeling I’ve spent

my whole life trying to piece a lost constellation

back together again from leftover stars

that don’t have a clue what they’re shining amounts to.

In the stained, marked for life, castaway things of the world,

in the eyeless dreams of aborted inspirations,

in the twenty million dollars an hour we waste on war,

in the eyes of the twenty-five million children a year

who are starving to death globally in civilizations

based upon agriculture, I’m looking

for the trashed masterpiece of a paint rag

soaked in the blood of hemorrhaging roses

that might have parted our eyelids like the Red Sea

or a gallery on opening night to a vision

of what they might have done had they lived

to do things differently and their genius and beauty

not been squandered like blood for oil

or the waters of life learned to mingle more olaceously

with oil slicks in the womb of the dark mother

like an alternate medium of creative expression

that wasn’t shunned like the evil skin of a shedding rat snake.

There’s an expanding emptiness in my heart,

a vacuum nature abhors like a miscarriage

of what I hoped to wake up to the day after tomorrow

like the smile of an enigmatic Mona Lisa

that didn’t die in childbirth married to a banker.

What faces reside in a paint rag

I might have fallen in love with at first sight,

what mind, moon, sea, sky and landscapes

might have sat on my easel like windows in space

that might have shown me a way out of here

like the eye of a hurricane at the end of a telescope

that made things at a great distance appear

larger and more astronomically intimate than they seem

when no one’s trying to paint the other end of the lens

by wiping their glass slippers off on the grass

as if the princess just stepped into a mess of Hooker’s green.

Disoriented hues of colour blind rainbows, who knows

how many faces have been wiped off on a towel

with the big, sad, musing eyes of luminous gazelles?

How many cardinals nesting in red cedar trees

were wiped off the canvas like lipstick on the moon

when the sun went Puritan, midnight at noon,

and scourged the scarlet letter of the kissing stone

until nothing was left of humanity

but the purged shadows of an abstract divinity

that burned a hundred thousand women

foxed out like witch hunts in the seventeenth century

at the stake of a principle that stood up to the flames

like the backbone of a heretic

with a streak of Payne’s Grey in her nature

slashing at the orange sunset

with a painting knife in her hands

at those who resented the concupiscence

and dark innocence of her sacred body and soul

and saw her go up in flames

like a bouquet of sable paintbrushes

stacked at her feet like the pyre of the phoenix to come.

Sooner transform the emptiness into something

as absurd as it is meaningful, than ponder the waste

of a good mirage trying to look

for real water down a wishing well.

Sooner try to patch the tear in the sky

that rips me open under full sail running before the wind

and lets all the stars come pouring out

I was saving for a rainy day, with a paint rag,

a discarded face towel sadder

than viridian pine trees in the distance

with an aerial perspective of pthalo blue

gentled and blanched by the intervening atmosphere.

That said and done until the sky drys

I’d rather wear the patches of a compassionate clown

like paint rags on the Sufi blue of my cerulean robes.

I’d rather walk in a pauper’s clothes to show

my solidarity with the cast offs of creation,

not just finished canvases with artsy attitudes

in stiff upper collars and colours

that match the wallpaper like seasonal mood swings.

Sometimes it breaks my heart from the inside out,

it guts me like a tube of alizarin crimson

to see all these fledglings strewn at the foot of my easel,

my tree, my loom, my lean to, like the paint rags

of crumpled, ruined, leftover lives

that couldn’t quite make it as flying carpets.

But I’m not going to forget the ashen sorrows

and habitable earth-tones of starmud

under the winged heels of inspiration.

As for me and my zodiacal house of ill-repute,

my renegade observatory on the wrong side of the tracks,

I’m going to ride this wavelength of light out to the very end

where the wildflowers open

like the complementary loveletters

of a colour wheel, a rainbow come full circle,

unbroken just for them.

The donkey looks into the well.

The well looks back at the donkey.

Art. Life. Zen.

When the line turns round

the donkey at the end is in the lead.

Yesterday’s bleeding paint rag.

Tomorrow’s aesthetic creed.

PATRICK WHITE

I GENTLY TOOK THE STRAWBERRY HEART

I GENTLY TOOK THE STRAWBERRY HEART

I gently took the strawberry heart

of the bird with the broken neck

and buried it in a shrine of leaves and grass.

And in a low voice, whispered a blessing.

Under the window of an illusion

like a song you can only hear once

and it’s good for a lifetime of listening,

I buried you with your wings together in prayer.

And I prayed to know what to pray for.

I prayed to know what to ask that could ease

the burden of the earth on a nightbird’s journey

flying solo deeper into the dark

than even the stars or these eyeless words can go.

And I know death returns even the worst of us

to our innocence again, though our bones

come crashing down like childhood kites around us.

And the flight feathers of the aerial acrobatics

of our love lyrics run out of ink

when there’s no one in the dark

to sing for anymore, no stars

to chart where you’ve gone,

no sign from the heavens you’re not alone,

no ghost of smoke from a distant fire

I can summon to a seance of lingering desire

that would console you in the flesh again

like a candle in your solitude reaching out

to the pain of a stranger in the shadows

to make your wound cry out in bliss

as you once did from a greener bough

than this dead branch I sing from now

when we thought blossoms were the answer

to everything we didn’t understand at the time

that could befall us like fledglings in the spring

who didn’t know what autumn would bring

like an ice-storm in its wake

to things that break against the sky

like the cold-hearted lie of a window

that wasn’t open and didn’t go on forever.

And though I ask the weather for news of you,

if the wind might have heard

a word or two in passing, all

the silence does is deepen your absence

and teach me not to cling to things

like birds and flowers on the wing.

But if grief is all I can know of you now

I’ll console myself with sorrow.

I’ll hold onto it like the string of a kite

soaring among the constellations.

I won’t let go. I’ll play the line out

like a flying fish I caught in Pisces

and hauling it into a lifeboat with a net

I’ll take the hook of the moon out of your mouth

and throw you back into the depths like a muse

swimming among the stars like a siren

that keeps calling me to the rocks

like an astronaut to these mountains on the moon

I keep hurling through this earthly view

of a window from the inside out

that breaks just like the shell of a cosmic egg

unfolding a loveletter with a wingspan of light

that penetrates this dark forever

like the third eye of a needle in a haystack

of begging bowls I won’t abandon like the nests

of nightbirds with flightplans

that feather our falling into the abyss

of the unbelievable with starmaps

and the beacons of homing metaphors

that make our disappearance inconceivable.

I’ll live like the return address on an envelope

with a mouthful of silence for a voice

and wait for you to answer me again

like a songbird at the spring equinox

through a broken window in a house of pain.

And though it hurts worse when the candles go out

I’ll refuse to turn my heart away

from your reflection in everything I see.

Everything I hear and do and say.

Everything that was as true as a night sky about you.

PATRICK WHITE

DON'T KNOW WHERE I'M GOING

DON’T KNOW WHERE I’M GOING

Don’t know where I’m going.

Don’t care who I am.

No place I need to be.

No face I’ve got to see.

Don’t care if I’m loved.

Don’t care if I’m not.

What arises arises mindlessly.

What business has it with me?

Imagination’s just another word for free.

Free, free, free at last

I’ve let my people go.

I walk without a shadow.

There’s nothing about tomorrow

that hasn’t already passed

and yesterday’s a prophecy

of what isn’t waiting to come.

One thing suggests another

and worlds are arrayed before me

like the stillness

of the lost feather of the moon

on running water.

I endure my own weather like the sea.

The lightning strikes itself like a match

to take a look

but there’s no one to witness the clarity.

I don’t taunt my ghost like a man

who’s going to live forever.

If I flower I flower.

If I shine I shine.

Whatever appears

in the black and white mirrors

of the infernal or divine

may or may not be

the meaning of my roots.

My affirmation refutes

what my denial ordains

and the cause doesn’t

account for its effects.

I am the perfection of all my defects

so enlightenment and ignorance

are two waves of the same awareness in me.

The fool and the sage speak with the same voice.

Desire beatifies my heretics

like lies I’ve told to the stars

but their election was never a choice

and my wounds don’t seek the truth

in the afterlife of my scars.

The old man does not say I am old

nor I am young, the youth.

Autumn is not older than spring

and spring isn’t apprenticed to fall.

I can hear my own footsteps

coming down the hall like time

to meet me after all these years of looking

through everyone else’s eyes

but even when I take my face off

at the end of the day

like a tired sky

and point to the stars the light concealed

my self-portrait is always a disguise.

And nothing is revealed.

PATRICK WHITE

LIGHTING IT UP AND BLOWING IT OUT

LIGHTING IT UP AND BLOWING IT OUT

Lighting it up and blowing it out

I try to make my way through the dark

by beginning at the end

as if the coming and the going

were the same door

or good-bye were the first thing

you would say to a friend.

I approach things like a night stream

as if my death were already achieved

and behind me.

And all the atoms of my being

dancing like frenzied gnats

in the sunset glow of a last eye-beam

are certifiably primordial

and any one of them

when they lose it in the light

could begin a world.

And what can you say more of a life

that dreams of what it is

than it’s the taste of the same wine

in many different cups?

And as any fox knows

the grape is always sweetest

when you can taste it with your eyes.

Though why foxes eat grapes is anyone’s guess

but life makes itself up as it goes

like music in a fish’s earlobes.

It feathers its themes in fire and light

and goes up in smoke

like the ghost of a tree

looking for habitable planets among the stars.

New wounds with innocent root-room for old scars.

Chalking the cue to bank the long shot

you’re trying to spin off into

the deep, dark pockets

of your game-winning afterlife.

And I don’t believe in much anymore

though that hasn’t stopped me from crying

like a slow window trying to keep

the stars from leaking out of me

as if there were a black hole

somewhere in my heart

waiting for an iris to make it an eye

whose seeing might be a new way of healing

what can’t be healed.

Once here. Here forever.

But whether we’re the eternal children of forever

or just another breath on the night air

that doesn’t even know we live,

even death is just another way of killing time here.

When everywhere’s the center of everything else,

the centre holds,

things don’t fall apart.

They disappear.

And that’s the mystic art

of knowing how to make the most out of existence

by offering no resistance

to the rocks in your own mindstream

that part the waters like the thoughts

of an exile in the promised land

who can’t go back the way she came.

The river can’t step into the same you twice.

And in every direction

your eyes have ever burned like stars

you can see the dark jewel of your own life

from the inside

before it breaks into light.

Sometimes I’m the lonely sign

on the only path to nowhere

and others I’m positively amniotic

with the schools of my blue lucidity

the albino dolphins of the moon leap through

without a chance of changing their colour.

A flower of prophetic blood bleaches my skull.

I swallow the snakefire of my last eclipse

like a lump of coal

I’m trying to turn into a diamond

that doesn’t burn

and never sloughs its skin.

Reality isn’t a religion or a science,

or the back and front of a mirror

that doesn’t know whose eyes its looking through.

Religion: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

Science: how many pins can dance on the head of an angel?

Totem poles on a telephone booth where no one ever picks up.

Voodoo dolls that hex the cause of their effects.

The apple bloom on the tree of knowledge

lets go of its flightless wings

and follows the wind

like the eyelids of unfeathered angels

who opened their eyes like flawless fruit

as they fell toward paradise

without a parachute of smokey virtue

or the scale of a snake for a vice.

Emergence into the open

like a hidden secret revealed

is the engine of evolution

that empowers the dark matter

of this incorporeal starmud

to arise like the high note of a bird

that’s flown beyond the night in its voice

like light beyond its myth of origin.

And the peduncle is lost in the ensuing phylum

as a madman is lost in the scream

that woke up the asylum,

or a god is lost in his own creation.

And the mountains listen

to the holy voices

in the valleys of their shadows

they deepen as they arise

like the guests of an echoless calling

to greet the unknown host.

It’s what the moon feels

when she fondles her locket of water

and memories pull at her heartstrings

like tides on earth

and music is the way she recalls

the sirens that used to sing

like the brides of empty lifeboats

that prayed like smashed guitars

for the night to sow the seedless sea with stars.

And in every fish that swims through fire

like the sacred response of life

to the longing in its own desire

she knows they got their wish.

Fireflies in the ashes of the phoenix tree.

And the eggs of cosmic words

like serpents in a bird’s nest

learning to fly like dragons

that have just swallowed the moon.

And it’s one thing to pull the sword from the stone

but it’s a greater power than magic and proof

with no urge to rule

that summons the butterfly from its cocoon

by giving the fool who inches toward the truth

along the green branch toward the apple-bloom

that already tastes like the forbidden fruit

of some radical insight

the whole orchard in a pair of wings

and more than enough night and light on its palette

to start a revolution in seeing among the flowers

who still labour in the chains of their roots

to turn their earthbound lucidities into stars

who might look back for a change

with eyes that have gathered like water out of the shining

and taste the light in the honey

that kissed their eyelids into gold

long before the night was old

and it wasn’t enough just to see them.

When you opened your eyes

in the burning clarity of your lone vision

before this matrix of space and time

gave birth to the world

you were free to be whatever you could see.

That’s when the light first spoke to you

in the mother-tongue of your seeing

and your voice broke

like a secret name in the mirror

that didn’t know who you were

and the moon on nightwater

the thief at the window

your breath like stars on the cold, night air

summoned the whole of being

in every particulate shard

and radiant plinth of the mirror

to drive your shining into the shadows

so myriad things can appear as they are.

Many eyes open. Night. An eclipse. One star.

And the darkness an anti-romantic

in love with the moon from afar.

PATRICK WHITE