THE SERPENT

The serpent sits enthroned

at the top of its own stairwell,

helically reposing in its own empyrean

like an August hawk

coiling up its own thermals;

its fangs, a stargate

to an unknown afterlife, emancipation,

and the jewel of its head,

the first stone thrown,

a small planet without

the eyelid of a sky,

a nugget of mystic uranium,

looped in a turban of orbits,

a sacred arrowhead

that flys from itself like a bow

drawn back long before the wind

knew its first feather.

Lethal healer,

the sword that kills is the sword that saves.

This morning,

the drubbing of the rain on a tin roof,

the hiss of traffic

flaring like matches down the sleek ashphalt,

if I were to say

I want the emotional life of space,

I don’t know if I’d mean it,

but I’m so weary

of being this slow crisis of a bird

mesmerized by the swaying eyes

of the black lightning

that has caught me in the net

it weaves of my own nerves,

I want to douse my heart

in the next providential tide of tears

like a torch I put out in the night

to see better in the dark.

I asked for wings

and my spine was adorned with fire.

I asked for water

and I’m a fish on the wind.

and now this desert I hoped to remain,

a craze of sand,

has grown teeth

and is overgrazing the starfields like pyramids.

I don’t think

I will ever recover

from the wound I received

like the hidden twin of the moon,

trying to love the world, myself, women, people.

Every word was a road, a pulse, an eye,

a drop of blood

I could ride to the end of and beyond

into the implacable subtlety

of my own empty, ageless temples

where even the silence isn’t ghost enough

to conjure a medium

to jar the table as a sign,

and death is buried in its own vacuity

like an embryo in a mask without eyes.

I was bound by my own boundlessness,

my nerves, wicks in the abyss

that enhanced the darkness

by cleaving me like a tree

vision after vision,

another world

with every blink of the eye

that wiped the mirror clean of me like an ax

until I understood

that even the most enlightened watersheds of wisdom

are just a smear of perception

on the least drop of that splendor

I went looking for like a cloud

saturated with the ancient seas of the moon

that was covered by my own looking.

I lay at the bottom

of my oceanic odyssey,

trying not to sink,

but I wanted to give something back

for what I felt I had received;

not an ethic or a metaphysic,

but a spontaneous action of the blood

that remembers it was once a rose.

I wanted to return spring like a water-key to the moon;

I wanted to harvest the shadows

of my own non-existence

and break bread

with the famine of ghosts

that came like royalty to beg food from their servant,

blind doors standing on the thresholds of awareness

asking me to address myself

to the terrible openness

of their unanswerable need.

I have eaten my own ashes

in the furnace of every star

I have ever looked upon.

I have drowned in the wells

of the faceless, fathomless mirrors,

and every woman I have ever drunk from

was a grail with an enigmatic black pearl in it

lustrous as the moon in eclipse.

O promises of bliss

that tuned the webs of the spiders

like a guitarist with perfect pitch

to the frequency of my spinal cord

that I might entangle a star

in the silk of my conceiving;

that I might seize a firefly

in the fangs of my thought

and taste the honey of the lantern

that lit my dark corner

in the era of the moment.

O sweetest of lies to ripen with longing

like the eyes of a child in the darkness

far from home.

I was trying to find a road

that fit my walking like shoes on a mountain;

I was trying to walk on water with mystic crutches;

I was looking for an arrow

dipped in the blood of a serpent with wings,

set aflame by a demonic star

and feathered by spiritual fire

to restring me like a bow

severed like the branch of a sacred grove

by the oracular blade of the moon.

I was too deeply sheathed in the truth

to appreciate the arcane sagacity of my lies.

I stood like a shadow in the burning doorway of my own fire

and looked deeply into the night

to answer my own knocking

like the echo of a stranger in the darkness,

walking away from someone who didn’t know

how to greet himself.

I was a tree crucified on a man,

a vandal in the shrine of the moment,

bleeding like stained-glass,

a rosary of vertebrae and skulls

reconstructed in the future museum of now

I played myself into like a funeral plan.

Now everywhere the wind is a pilgrim,

I leave my heart like a shrine

I will never return to.

And the sadness, and the solitude

and the vastness of my insignificance

is the shadow of a bird on a cloud.

The only way to perfect my defeat

was to sit at the feet of my most cherished delusion

like a rootless flower watching over a coffin,

then rise like the wind

from the rubbish of the shedding,

the loneliest pillar and sole cornerstone of the sky.

Now my apish profundities

no longer crack fleas of light like stars

I picked out of God’s burning beard

with the forceps of the moon.

Now I am infested with constellations.

I no longer turn the pages of the waterlilies

like the holy books of an inspired swamp.

I no longer seep down to the river

to drink from the moon

like a serpent at the water’s edge

and watch the panicked angels jumping

from the reflection of an uncrossed bridge

that collapsed like a covenant with hell.

I no longer shred my heart

like a secret document

in an abandoned embassy of swans

looking for asylum further south,

tormented by the unattainability

of a woman’s beauty,

looking for sanctuary

in the ashes of a black sail

that flared like a poppy with passion

at every gust of desire

that silvered the trembling grass

with sidereal aspirations.

Why bother to laminate your lovers, your legends?

Let them go like autumn leaves and smoke,

the last breath you took

before you were interred

like a scream in the larynx of a deaf-mute,

a foreign currency you couldn’t spend at home.

Naked is the only way to dress for the rain,

but it doesn’t matter which

from the wardrobe of all your many lies

you wear to the fire that waits for you

like a fledgling waits for its plumage.

And this is a long river

and this is a long day and a night

and maybe only the silence is listening

to what the stars are preaching

from the pulpits of the flowers,

and this that says me now

is just the promo for the intensive care ward

of a new religion

the founders are always the first to betray;

but when I truly let go

it was my falling

that taught me to patch my shoes with the sky.

And have you come this far,

passed through this many gates

for wisdom, compassion, freedom,

wandered aimlessly until you could not tell

the stars from the sand,

the journey from the arrival,

suffered worse than all the things you cannot say

until you forgot what you were looking for

in the first place, until

you despised what you craved the most?

I don’t remember how long I slept

before my dreaming woke me up

and I realized

no fool could defame my solitude

and that life

was only the story of a scar

looking for the knife that inflicted it

like a shadow

in the forsaken valleys

of the mountains of the moon.

Looking for a pearl of light

I had to plunge into a darkness

deeper than anything

my eyes had ever given birth to before.

I had to swallow the key before I could open the door.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU, MY HOUSE OF BURNING THRESHOLDS

You, my house of burning thresholds, come

to me written on the breath of urgent windows,

and the palms of the walls that want their fortunes read, come

with palettes and kittens and your blue notebook of poems

that grows through ages of skin and mushroom kisses

on the forest floors of your flesh, the bracken spume

of the fountain that pebbles its tears in the light,

and the thoughtful rocks with moss-covered shoulders.

Come like a spoon that sips from the heart

and your blood a riot of sea roses, pink and green,

and the black ashes of the eyes of your secrets

and the locks on the loveletters you wrote on the wind

and I will bury my boat in the waves of your mind,

and be your ghost forever, and live as if I were blind.

There are poppies in your paintbrushes, cherries, wine,

earlobes of blue, and the tongues of mute tattoos

that have pierced your body with sad revelations

of the lives that you leave behind, all the simple journeys

that unravel the keys of the mystery in the dark inks

of another face, another crime, dead trains in the tunnels

caught like words in the throat of a mountain

that forgot what it meant to say, the long, mourning sentences

that carry you away from life to life in the arms of today,

and the bells and the lanterns that swing like fruit

in the lonely midnight stations flowering under their names.

Bring me your love, your art, your wounded past,

your wardrobe of rainbows and scars, and the chaste rings

that chain your body like a planet with mutable orbits

to the vast freedoms of stars in the rain, all the comets

you could never explain to the skies you riddled from blue,

and all the men you’ve married under the fallen bridges

of final farewells. Come in the hour of thieves, in darkness

with your windows open, and the ladders we’ll never climb down,

from our islands in the clouds that call like whales across the moon.

And there are laments we can only say in echoes, in valleys,

in the loose threads of the stream, huge shadowing sorrows

that walk like clocks through our dreams, looking again

for faces in the window that passed their orchards in pain;

looking for tomorrows in the way they came in the night

to a doorway at the top of the stairs, that once was theirs.

There are reasons in the blood that we loose like gloves

and seasons and departures, exits and arrivals

that brave the coming and the going with maps and graves

that lead us each like bees to the heart’s destinations.

Let love guide you through the labyrinths and maze

and putting on wings feathered from the fires of sad silvers

that fall away like water and stars from the herons of our rising,

fly from the old reflections of the mirrors at your feet

out of your face of lilies and fish into a deeper darkness

that waits like a man on a bus with a vase, beside an empty seat.

PATRICK WHITE

IT'S A GESTURE OF HEART

IT’S A GESTURE OF THE HEART

It’s a gesture of the heart

that no one can explain

that lays its words down like cool herbs

gathered on the moon

to silver someone else’s pain.

We lie down in the same wound

like two stones in the same river

that might make it to the other side

without drowning in the stream

and I speak to you of shores you can reach if you try

and you add yourself like a drop of water to a shoreless sea, and cry.

And for a moment you are the devastated solitude

of a runaway in the rain

who can’t abide the stranger she’s become

as a lipstick butterfly emerges

from the shell-casing chrysalis of your rage

and you put your lips on like wings.

You’re a princess with a white flag

approaching the ashes of a dragon

who sleeps in his own fires

to wake him up from his dream of water

and negotiate a rescue now

if only I’ll concede to show you how.

You want me to respect you because you’re dangerous.

You want to ensnare me

in the white voodoo you’re practising

on the dark side of the moon,

you believe in my eyes

and want me to see something

you’ve never shown anyone before

because a window’s as good as a door to a thief

and you know we have neither in this homelessness

that shelters our grief like dark matter in space

or the far side of a face

we refuse to acknowledge is ours.

I can feel your powers

chafing their scales in the snakepit

like straitjackets they’re urgently trying to slough off

like the old skins of a hand-me-down moon

that don’t quite fit the new one right.

One fang, stars; the other, a starless night,

you know how to open things with a smile

and strike like a gate

should anyone walk between your crescents

like a terrorist with carry-on luggage

who doesn’t dream he’s been detected

as you recoil like a theme to make your point.

It would be easier to tinker with the genes

of the ancient ancestors of a life before sin

than not to want to sleep with you

like a thorn under the skin of your rose,

than not to want to be your bay for the night

and tell you everything’s going to be all right

and mean it and drown the world like a torch or a dragon

in the intimacy of our most urgent delusions.

And even if I didn’t put a match to the candles

they would still ignite

and a black sun would rise at midnight

and let the stars and flowers decide for themselves

whether they wanted to open in its light or not,

and for awhile, deep underground,

there’d be laughter in a coffin

as we posted dirty notes on our headstones

like shocking love poems

that just rolled off the tip of our tongues

like drops of water charged with stars and snakefire

humming down our spines

like the deathbed hymns of the hydro lines

when they break the news to God.

PATRICK WHITE

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