WERE THERE STARS

Were there stars in your hair that night?

I cannot remember,

so taken with your face

and the mystery and the silence and the sorrow

of the tender bell in your eyes

that could summon ghosts

of yesterday’s embodiments to the fire

of any passion that lost itself prophetically

at a rave of shadows among the trees.

You eased out of your wardrobe of rivers

like a snake on the moon

sloughing its skin like the eclipse

of a far more vulnerable shining,

and I couldn’t tell if you were

a doe or a lynx

stepping out of the alder groves warily

to lap the moonlight

that flaked the shore

with the silver petals of an undulant rose

older and darker than nightblood.

I could feel the danger within you,

the abyss of the early grave

that waited for you like a key

to come in out of the pain

that bled you like a shadow

pouring out of an open wound

that whispered to you like a secret scream

only the dead who owned you could hear.

Your hunger desperately sought salvation

from the eyes

that pleaded with you

to blow yourself out like a candle,

cancel the inevitability of your suffering

with the shudder and sigh of sex.

We lay down naked together

by the willow-stained waters

in that summer of flesh

and sought oblivion from each other

like two compatible cremations

that concealed a ravenous phoenix

ending its fast of fire.

Purified by the depth and darkness

of your intensities,

I burned in you

and felt the flames

of a dangerous angel

who had broken her afterlife like a curfew

flow over me

like dawn at a keyboard of feathers.

Your breasts still come up overnight

like supple mushrooms against my chest

and the moist heat of your mouth

throbbing with flowers like July

as you seized your joy

from the agony of the roots you tormented

to give up their dead

like bruised cherries.

I have never died as fully since

at the insistence

of any woman’s appetite

nor known a night so final,

so brutal with time and beauty

as the pendulous moon swung

like an executioner’s ax

over the nape of its own reflection

swanning on the waters.

We made love as if

we were both defying

the truth we didn’t need to say.

I wanted to plead with you,

I wanted to call out into your emptiness

like a beseeching bird

disappearing into a dark valley,

but my voice ran ahead of its echo like light

and the things I would have asked you

not to do

had already been achieved.

Heroin, your asp,

at the funeral I stood back

beyond the baffled wreaths of flowers

and the ambivalent silence

of the modest gathering that mourned you,

maculate in the shadows

of the Japanese plum tree

we once made love under

and I kissed the rose of your blood

shedding in mine

like a wound

my love was never sword enough to heal

as they closed

and boarded you over like a well.

I spent the night like an empty vase

beside your grave

until the stars that bloomed above you like wildflowers

thawed my tears in the morning light.

I walked out of the cemetery

through the hard harps and spears

of its iron gates

and I have never been back.

The years since have been

chameleonic as a hooker

who plys her art

on the stairs of a temple

even the priests of my lust

are forbidden to enter,

but as you said I would

as you lay with me that night

like a knife beside the sea,

I have returned to you over and over again

like a witching wand

looking for water in hell,

like a cult of one to a lost island

that holds you like a secret

and wept like a candle of honey

in the dark hive of your unanswerable silence,

intoning the names

of an impossible god

on a rosary of black suns

until my heart hangs like a bell

dumb with grief

looking up at the stars

you rinsed like a tide from your hair.

And I lean on the crutch and the crook

of a shepherd’s question,

looking everywhere for you

like the wind

sweeping the shadows of fireflies

like the fall of hair from your eyes

that night you tore yourself away from me

like a veil of blood and sorrows

wounded by the terrible light

of the black pearl

that ripened within you like the skull

of a full eclipse.

O my poor, broken angel,

you might have been fat and frumpy by now

if you had lived.

I could have watched your beauty

shed like the moon over the years,

and smile like an island

to remember how lost I was in your tides once,

a constellation of starfish

tumbled like dice in your dark undertow,

trying to shine, god, how

I tried to shine for you, how

I ached to embrace your planet safely

in the mandala of an empowering radiance

that could show you

I was worth living for

if nothing else.

Given the freedom

of the emptiness that engulfed us both,

we could have lived within each other,

we could have evolved our own atmospheres,

appointed our own stars,

written our own myths of origin

on the black pages of that journal of skies

where you scribbled down the events

of your per-emptive afterlife

as if you wanted to make your ghost indelible.

As it was, the only thing I could do,

was take you in

like the last breath of a summer night

I could never let go of

without following it

like a shadow of you into death.

I haven’t wished for much over the years,

and the dreams have come and gone as they will,

and my hair has gone gray

and my eyes are looped like powerlines

and the sad bells of a heavy solitude

that has yoked me to grindstone of the turning world

to mill the stars like a tide

on the bloodwheel of a worn heart.

I finally burned and broke all the weeping mirrors

I consulted like half-assed mediums

to see if I could restore you somehow

to the more intimate shining of that last night

you turned and ran back,

your shoes in your hand,

to make sure your final kiss would endure like a temple.

You pitied the agony of shapeshifting

you knew the black water ahead

was about to go through

as it smashed like goblets and crystal chandeliers

on the roaring skulls of the rocks;

you pitied me because you knew I loved you,

because you knew you were already

a future memory

and I was a prophecy from the past

that had ridden beyond itself like light

to illuminate nothing but your absence

measured in the filaments and lifelines

of eyeless oceans like a seabird

circling a blind lighthouse on the moon.

PATRICK WHITE 

ON THE WOLFPATH AROUND THE LAKE

ON THE WOLFPATH AROUND THE LAKE

On the wolfpath around the lake,

a narrow-eyed moon keeping an eye

on my intrusive solitude, my equivocating silence.

I can feel the air saturated with wet noses.

I try to imagine how the stink of a human

must impinge upon the wild things that live here.

Mustard gas in No Man’s Land.

I listen to the recombinant rhymes of the nightbirds

to see if I can remember them by name.

I hear the water moving like a rat snake

through the stuffy cattails

standing like an honour guard of cannoneers

from Napoleon’s Grande Arme beside me.

Encylopedic duff of decay. Wet black leaves

of last November’s body found six months later

perfectly preserved under the snow,

cling like leeches to my leather jacket and boots,

trying to patch me with their colours

like skin grafts, as if there weren’t already

enough constellations and starmaps on my back for that.

The sun in the Circlet of the Western Fish

committing murder-suicide, or were they hung

like ballet slippers with blue ribbons

beside a door way that gave up dancing for good?

Stubby birches that have been

through the pencil-sharpening beavers

once too often to make much of a point anymore.

Vlad the Impaler’s idea of a white picket fence

around a pioneer stockade of pick up sticks.

On the wolfpath around the lake,

strewn with branches like handlebars

and the genderless frames of mountain bikes,

I hold on to whatever I can

to help me keep my balance.

I make my way to a stony clearing in the woods

nothing belongs to but a space

where everyone feels right at home

like the prime focus of a neighbourhood watch

with eyes like suspicious windows.

PATRICK WHITE

CRUCIAL DELUSIONS

CRUCIAL DELUSIONS

Thinking sometimes I may have gone in too far

and rendered myself mad on metaphors, thinking sometimes

the river’s turning has degraded into a metaphysical noose

and I’m the prime candidate for some kind of exotic extinction,

with or without enlightenment, and considering too

the exponential myriads of incommunicable interpretations,

as many as the radiant directions of a single shining, though even that

is saying too much, too little, or nothing at all,

I sit here in front of a computer screen,

smoking, drinking black coffee, priming the morning

like an eerie stranger to spring, even the willow

under the church spire, exalting

in its being poured out of something into something

like a waterclock. Over my life, as far back as I can remember,

even in daylight, even in the green morning,

I have always walked under a dark shadow of sky, a long night

that has fallen like a palladium, or radioactive dust

from an ancient, nuclear winter I must have survived

to wonder what food-chain I’m part of now. Who

can understand the myriad selves in a single moment,

the thousands of temples whose foundations 

are sapped and torched in a blink of the void

when slavery changes masters and one by one

we become part of the new linkage, precisely

where we are most empty, most apprehensively free,

contriving a bond we can belong to, something

proportional to our courage to be, to create

a delusion that might convince us for awhile that understanding

is not beyond our capacity to make things up

and forget it all began as a kind of play.

In the brevity of always, I am the dark clarity

of the unnamed witness who is and isn’t me,

and I am the actor cast into the stage lights

of the dream and the dreamer, not the thread

of the tiniest spider between them. What

I see of myself, when I’m the cowled observer,

is a long night alone with time and the stars

among the vast indiscriminate deserts

that particulate our despairing monuments and distinctions.

I drink from my own muddy well of wisdom,

looking deeply into the perversion of my reflection

for any sign of love, for any

sign of assent in the light of my glacial seeing. Never

have I been assured of anyone or any part

I’ve ever played to the single occupied seat in the house

that neither applauds nor condemns

from the cold intimacy of its throne

the antics of these crucial delusions, deliberate or spontaneous,

that adorn the mental marquees, the garish neon

of the all-night feature that is me.

The same appalling silence greets the hero

as commends the clown, the theater itself

the owl of an inconclusive afterlife

enacted alike in a brothel or a shrine. No word

from the other side

has ever flowered here, no

ground of being ever sprouted keys to unlock

the efflorescence of this urgent spring, to liberate

the farce of my unknowing

from these straitjackets of affirmation and denial

and let me live sufficiently beyond both

on the nothing I am and the nothing I am not.

PATRICK WHITE

COSMOLOGIST WITH TWEEZERS

COSMOLOGIST WITH TWEEZERS

Palace after palace of blood I feed my idiot heart

to the fish and the cannibal stars

from a barge of funeral swans sullen as books.

I told myself not to look for this death when I dropped it

the day I was born, to leave it lie in the violent grass,

a key to a door that doesn’t exist yet,

an insect crushed between the pages of the sky

that reads like the failing eyes of an ancient astronomer

compiling an expanded preface

to an encyclopedic suicide note. O I can say anything

when the mirror is having an affair

with the moon’s oceanic face.

I can put lipstick on the corpse of a rose

and die for the whole cemetery like a callous messiah

sick of being resurrected at the take-out window.

My love forsaken, a beggar reaching into a serpent’s nest

for an egg that longs to be turned

like the handle to a door

that might be a way out, I consult

the crazy wisdom of the crows,

and a sage of the black night

to find my way back to a grave

that has not forgotten the taste of the dream

that was blood and wine and light.

This is a shabby afterlife, an unworthy war of mistakes,

where the orchids are raped on their wedding nights

and a peace treaty is chalk on the sidewalk

around a murdered mailman.

It would be a lie to say I wasn’t wounded,

it would be a falsehood to say I was.

This pain is the blundering apprentice of a mystic knife.

This agony is stupid and futile and vain, this sorrow

a brothel of homesick nuns.

I give my tears the address

of a man I know in Boston, a bibliophile

who might take them in as a first edition

of a bride who was published posthumously.

I give my heart like a fire-alarm to two women

waiting by the bus.

My skull begs for campaign funds

to run as an alternative planet

to the one I’m walking on,

but the terrorist behind the door

with his redressals and reforms, his ancient future

strapped to his waist like a broken promise

has already ruined my vote

by killing off the candidate.

I confess to a puppet government

with the excrescent sickle of the moon at my jugular vein

that I have always been, even in eclipse,

an avid fan of significant absurdities.

They accuse me of consorting with swans

and I give up smoking

in front of a firing squad.

The sun comes up like an afterthought, an iron rose

or a bullet hole through the troubled forehead of dawn.

“Is there no end to the wonders of God?”

cries a highschool prophet on a diving board

while his seeing-eye dog runs off

with a shoe full of massacred dice.

And this is the meaning of life,

and this is the meaning of life,

chants the scorned heart

pulling stitches out of a scar,

a cosmologist with tweezers

who bleeds to death

every time he opens his mouth to heal.

PATRICK WHITE

PROMETHEAN CONTENTIONS

PROMETHEAN CONTENTIONS

My life the wardrobe of a shabby star; here,

take this carnelian pomegranate

that has hardened into a heart

and appease what blood you can, take my tongue

that turned yellow with arsenic in the fall

and was torn down like the flag of an ancient catastrophe

by the denuding expletives of the wind.

I’m tired of the ashes and the cemetery wine

that pollutes them; I’m weary of the view,

this worm-eaten map to nowhere

and the lies it must live to fulfill.

I’ve exhausted the patience

of the bookish rain,

waiting for my shoes to stop talking

about journeys they’ll never take,

so that I can tell them I was a man

with a tarnished direction

that led me off the known roads

to taste the wild blackberries

that ripened in brambles of razorwire.

Here, take the petrified paperweights,

the mephitic moons of my eyes, still stained

by the dead seas that wept themselves empty

to the end of seeing; I once mistook them

for summer sapphires in a mountain crown

but things have been rubbled since then,

and my sidereal aspirations have toppled

to graze on the mannered portion

of the crumbs of light

that survived the avalanche

at a foodbank for wheelchairs and thrones. My mind,

gum under a desk

in an abandoned schoolhouse

and my voice, the graveside elegy

of an extinct species

that couldn’t attune its maverick genes

to the suggested forks in the path of an eloquent serpent,

I am unspooled by my own undoing

as frame by frame

I marred my life with perversions of salt and light

to contaminate my bruised confessions

in asylums of lipless inquisitors.

I am still the ore of the sword in the rock

they couldn’t extort from my ambiguous impurities,

even after the stake and the fire

that moiled the gold of my bones. Blighted by the truth

of a heresy of wounded water,

I was true to the rain

in a holocaust of cabbalistic arsonists

and even here in this fetid ditch of time,

the scattered orchard, the pageant of my blood

is not a danse macabre

or transformative contrition

of flagellant lilies. I am innocent as night

of the stars they impute to me, the lies and legends

of the man who once lived me,

a ventriloquist of physics.

Here take my face and skin, my mouth, my hair, my ears,

and if you still need

a gesture of confession

to glut the cannibal of a creed, here,

take my faith in the expired frequencies

of the universal hiss, or the charred guitars

of my carboniferous impieties. I fumbled the song

you asked me to sing

and limped from the stage

an infamous king of jesters and fools

who overthrew me for a laugh

when the minister of mirrors went insane.

Now I am a smear of sky

on a broken windowpane,

a rumour of hesitant lightning

in a choir of tone-deaf fireflies,

the fraudulent tear

of a leftover saint

who weeps sewers for the poor

to wash the planet off their faces.

I rummage through the garbage

of the aftermath, the decrescent beak of a vulture

reaping the urgent organs of tumescent roadkill

that once cast the dice of their own infraction

to steal their genius back from the gods,

to cool the fire of their solitude on the other side,

to lift the veil

from the star-worn face of the apple

and look into eyes that no one’s ever see

before the worm interrogates the vision

at a carnival of undertakers. Here, take this old taboo, this curse,

the thorns and horns of these dragon teeth

that sowed the forbidden ground of the secret

with armies of fanatical commas

in the service of a virgin period

deported like a holy relic

to the erection of a foreign capital

adorned by the marbles of carnage.

Here take this future from me,

the accident, the crisis and the shock,

the randomness, the tyranny, the sneer

of the heart-crushing boot, the rational madness

of political lovers raised for annihilation, and take this ruse

of happy endings, the chrome and glass

cosmetic face-lifts of a flagging science,

and the indecipherable grammars of the generals

who speak like triggers and the hurricane corporations

who lobby to own the rain

and want to market oxygen as an inert gas,

a logo on every gene. You can have my eyes,

you can bottle my tears

and send them off on the tide, a message and a warning

not to risk a rescue,

and leave me the sole custodian

of my own isolation like a bird in a furnace.

You can plant spies in my semen

and colonize my chromosomes with zoos;

you can introduce me like the skull and crossbones

of a designer virus

and hack into my horde

of piratical ideas to clear the coasts of consciousness

of superfluous corsairs. You can administer

last rites in rosaries of chalk

on ghetto sidewalks and doctor the autopsy

with the platitudinous gangrenes of moral turpitude,

the nemetic karma that plays muse

to your inspired amputations. Bring on the surgeon,

bring on the laughing pathologist

back from a late vacation, unhand me

with the ostrakon, the passport of pariahs,

and distinguish me with a fence, a wall, a camp,

the unmarked grave of a dismembered terrorist

who had no evidence to add

to the celebrity histories of acknowledged slaughter.

Make a token of my head, my prophetic skull

on the platter of a flat earth

to sweeten the sins of your adulterous daughter,

or let me fall upon the sacrificial blade

of the waning moon that lies before me like a sinister eyelid,

I will undo the ribbon of my blood

on a gift that arrived like a stranger

you couldn’t trust. I will endure the abuse

of a premature grave

or enter the vehement emptiness

of a third-world cupboard in a fever of hope

that proves critical, but no demon of your will,

no whim of your capricious brutality,

no reflex of your hatred of love and life, no

acidic austerity of your organized indifference,

no starless wound of any sky

that dawns like bleach in the roots of the rose

that withers like junkmail heaped

before a bolted door on a condemned threshold,

will make me renounce

for the soft immunity of a prosperous lie,

one era, one god, one vulture

of this mountain range

where the apex and the alley are the same,

one adamant link,

one feather of fire or locket of thought

on the planetary chain

of my liberated disobedience,

the enlightened insanity of this sacred malfeasance.

PATRICK WHITE

THIS IS AN OLD SORROW

THIS IS AN OLD SORROW

This is an old sorrow, almost beautiful in the way

it underwhelms me from above, a sky caving in

like a circus tent under the weight of the rain,

a ghost of fruit that could not bear the weight of its tears.

This is a random sadness that’s got me as its only friend

when it thaws like a mirror

looking back over its shoulder

at its glacial past, ex-lovers, friends, certain pets,

and eyes that were glass weeping

in the intense mystic heat of a blast furnace full of stars

for how little they understood at the time, things pass

like Canada geese migrating across the moon

like a river you can’t step into twice.

Though it doesn’t make any sense to say so.

This is an ancient sorrow. And though one direction

is as good as many, I’m still following

the herds of the grazing stars as far north as I can.

O we shall sit down on the good earth half lotus sometime

and cry together for the wound of being alive.

The rose has teeth. And celebrate the scars

in the herb garden as if they were crescent moons.

Or the eyes of a powerful wraith of sadness

saturating the atmosphere with the pathos

of a lament that’s been sublimely burning

through its heart for lightyears

like some deep emptiness it knows can never be filled.

As if God would never be enough for herself

and the whole of the universe were

one long maternity of endless creation

that is manifested in its entirety in each one of us

the way the moon’s reflected in a drop of blood

hanging from the thorn of a rose

with the last of two beautiful sunsets for eyes

like the sheen of auroral silk glancing off the scales

of a black watersnake at nightfall when the swallows go in

and the bats come out on the nightshift

like the winged heels of some demonic messenger

with minions that squeal in a frequency too high to hear.

But however you send it, by sound or by silence,

by light or by night, be assured the message you send

however time and space bend things

is the message that’s received, like a bee by a flower

or a star by the eye that transcribes it creatively

into hieroglyphic metaphors of picture-music

following a dream grammar of starmud

with a bird stuck in its voice like a phoenix in the Arctic.

Time washes the dust of the road off

by shedding the moonlight like a snake’s skin

and skinny-dipping in the fathomless lakes of eternity

it finds along the way like eyes along the mindstream

full of stars and fireflies and what blooms in the soil of its sorrows

beside the stairs at the back doors of all those tomorrows

that left the way they came without saying good-bye.

Volcanic lunar oceans that are only as deep

as the dark tears I have left within me

when I dip the leaking cup of my heart

like the goblet of an impact crater

into a watershed of compassion that looks like the holy grail

and share it with my fellow mirages in this desert of stars

as if they were all as thirsty as I am and everyone

deep down inside somewhere within them

like the green star you can find at the core of an apple,

had a fountain within them like a moon dial or a wine glass

they smashed on the high notes of the nightbirds

just to express their joy as a kind of defiance

in the face of their lots in life, though, in fact

nothing is longer or shorter than anything else in eternity

just as there’s only so much time and then there is forever.

And it’s the black magic in the roots of a demon

that blossoms like Venus in the west

or New England asters up around Westport in the fall.

And though there’s something beautiful in this sadness

that eludes me like a Braille starmap

I can’t quite put my finger on to see what’s shining

like Aldebaran through the tree line of a bride in a widow’s veils,

as I listen to a whisper of flesh

pleading in the darkness not to be excluded

from the presence of time, or left behind by the spirit

like a false clue of cast off rags on a hawthorn bush

to say where it’s gone forever and ever and ever

as if whatever the spirit and the flesh had

going on between them never mattered,

whenever the clarity cuts through

the thin-skinned mirror like this

as if it were trying to slash my eyes open

like an insight into what’s beyond the obvious,

immediately out of a wounded mouth

I am healed by the balm in a voice of compassion

that rises sweetly like the new moon from the womb

of a scarred guitar that didn’t know it had such music in it.

And it says in moonlit windows and nightbirds

that make all the dreaming children wake up and listen

to the intimate strangers that speak as gently as fireflies

to the vast nightskies of their own imaginations,

that the world that casts these shadows on your wall

like a crow preening its feathers, or a bell

that’s lost its faith in knowing, and plunges like an apple

into its next afterlife, are merely the holy petals

and sacred syllables taken like pages from the Book of Life

left out like an orchard in a nightwind for every one to read

like a story each of us writes for ourselves

to help us drift gently off into sleep again

to find out how it all ends in a dream that goes on forever

like the fragrance of lilac in an old woman’s memories

or the marrow of the apple bloom

that clings like the moon to our bones

or stars to the flypaper stairwells of our chromosomes.

No other way to explain the shining of this sadness deep within

as if my very blood mourned the passing of the things

that have drowned and disappeared into it over the years

like honey-bees in the lees at the bottom of a black tulip

full of rainwater, and by that I know

this is a sadness common to all

that’s worthy of the stars in its windows,

and the dreams in the mirrors that paint our faces

like quick watercolour life studies of rainbows in tears.

PATRICK WHITE