BEGIN

BEGIN

Begin anywhere.

Topple fall jump stumble plunge

into the eyeless abyss

into the roadless homelessness

of not knowing where you’re going

or who’ll you’ll be by the time you get there.

Slash your way through the stretched canvas

of a painted sky

like a rogue star

with the blood of Betelgeuse

dripping from your brush if you must

perform your own Caesarian

to get out of yourself like an egg

into the Big Abide Beyond

and stretch your wings from dusk till dawn.

Don’t hover like a cloud over starmaps

trying to work out a flight plan

waiting for the weather to clear for take-off.

In an infinite universe such as this

wherever you are

in this spatial lost and found

you’re always the center of everything.

How could you not know where you are

or who

when there’s nowhere to go

and no one to be

that isn’t centred in its own origin eternally?

But it helps to get a jump on your own light like a star

now and again

if you want to stay in the game

long enough to turn your farce into a legend

that isn’t hard on the eyes.

So begin.

Like a surprise.

Like a leftover birthday you found in the attic

you were saving for a special day that never came.

Get it on.

Begin.

Break the mirror.

Throw a rock through your own reflection.

There’s no countdown

for a firefly or lightning bolt

no fuse on the Big Bang that became the universe

so let’s just have ignition

spontaneously timeless and complete

go off

get out

get down

like the primordial atom

with your own expression of yourself

before the arising of signs

teaches the flowers

they mustn’t colour

outside the lines of themselves.

Don’t let the Lilliputians tie Gulliver down again.

Don’t imperil Pauline

by tying her to the tracks

like a rehabilitated junkie

to wait for a train in vain

on the same old beaten path

your thoughts tread like cattle

back to the barn of your brain at dusk.

Or horses when it’s burning.

Begin in your aftermath.

Shoulder the world that weighs

like a rock in your grave

meant to keep you from rising

and blow it off like dust.

Come down on yourself like a meteor

and begin a new species of life

among the bones of the dinosaurs.

Get lost in this desert of stars

like the Rosetta Stone

of a new language of scars

no one’s ever spoken before

around a fire in the night

and be the first word of your own light

to give names to things in the garden.

The happy genius of your own beginnings.

How many nights must pass?

How many days?

How many full moons wane

and ice ages come and go

and trees turn into grasslands

and continents shatter like skulls

that grind their teeth in the night

before you finally let go

and begin.

Mercury had wings on his heels

when he took off on the wind

but look at you

standing there

at the edge of the world

with parachutes on your shoes

like a medium without a message.

Take them off.

Go barefoot over the stars of your firewalk like water.

Take off that used straitjacket

you bought at the Salvation Army

like the larva of a dragonfly

looking for a hand-me-down chrysalis on the cheap.

You can’t read your fate like dna

in another man’s fortune-cookie.

And there’s already enough sky around us

for everyone to share

like a planetary cocoon

without anyone running out of room

for worms to turn into butterflies

wolves into whales

raptors into birds with feathers and scales.

Where things end is where they begin.

They’re Siamese twins

you can’t separate like a loveletter

into before and after

because they’ve only got

the one birth

the one breath

between them both

and the same is true of their death.

So if you’re already over before you begin

why hesitate?

What have you got to lose

when there’s nothing to choose

between lying in wait like yesterday

for what you think you know

will come along in its own good time

and what you can’t anticipate

that comes up on you from behind

like eyes to the blind in a dream

and says it’s later than it seems.

Where have you been?

You’re on in the next scene

right after the death of the old queen.

Let the lines memorize you for a change.

Friends fall apart

when they stop being strangers to one another.

Babies stop turning solitude into single mothers.

You can gnaw on the bone of the known for years

to get down to the marrow of things

and still not be satisfied when you do

and then the hunger you never taught to hunt

begins to eat you.

So jump.

Like a fish in a still pond.

Like a frog from a lilypad.

Go mad.

Go ballistic.

Go beyond that place

where even to say you’re lost in space

doesn’t make any sense

and nothing’s ever moved in a straight line

that wasn’t a special form of a curve.

Why wait for the apocalypse

to come down on you like an old rafter

that breaks with every firecracker that goes off

when your own explosive potential

makes that look like a firefly with a wet fuse?

How long have you lepered your stars in the sun

or your constellation paled in the dawn

like a tattoo you had taken off your arm

like an old love affair that’s over and gone?

Live on.

Jump from the top stair.

Slide down the bannister

in the opposite direction

like a double helix

in the southern hemisphere.

Do something

you can get away with

that stays true to your disobedience

like evolution.

Draw a line in the sand

then overstep the bounds

like a crosswind that wipes it out.

The measure of a human is a human

without a forwarding address

that can find its way back

like an abandoned cat

to the threshold and doorway

of our homelessness

where we left like a loveletter to the world

that returns unread

with nothing to say

that would have made any difference anyway.

A phoenix might be born in fire

but it doesn’t nest in the flames.

You can’t keep what you won’t give away

so if you want to stay here

like a chameleon in front of a mirror

that likes to reflect things as they change

you have to do it like air

and grow wings.

You have to become a dragon.

Or a snake who knows

how to rise above things

like an eagle or a sea on the moon

that got caught like a fish out of water

in the first and last crescents of its own talons.

Don’t let yourself be tossed around

like an overturned lifeboat

that set out to rescue you

from the undertow of reality

and got swept off its own feet

before they could turn into oars.

Don’t be a shore-hugger

on the dunes of your own mindstream.

Go along with the flow

like the oxygen in your blood

that was conceived in a fire-womb

in the belly of a star

in outer space

and then took a meteor to this place

where it’s bagged by your lungs

and rushed to your face

like a lip transplant for a kissing-stone.

Just as every question is the prelude of the answer

so every prayer for direction

is the direction of prayer.

The Kaaba waits like a pilgrim

for the first crescent of the moon

to circumambulate you

in all directions at once

and in all months of the year

like the sun through the zodiac

when it shines at midnight

and the sky is unusually clear.

The mystery of life

that seeks you out

like its best guess at everything

is just that

is just this

a mystery

not a secret waiting to be told

like a baby without a name

that’s grown post-mature

and gummy in the womb

like matter in the matrix of being.

And when things let go of the green bough

like the singing bird in your heart

or a windfall of silver apples

shaken from a dead branch by the wind

when the moon goes down over the hills

and all that’s left of the view

is two elbows on a worn-out windowsill

watching things return to themselves for the night

like stars and dust and dew

and love when it’s over

tastes autumn on its breath

like long sad thoughts of last September

that always seem to end in death and sorrow

it helps to remember

the seeds in the green apples of spring

that are buried in their birth

as if there could never be a tomorrow

that wouldn’t open their small sad eyes

like fireflies in the orchards of earth

that age like the truth

in a purple passage

on the second to last page

they burn through falling asleep

thinking of things to come

as if each were either a lighthouse

or the evening star in the morning

or a tiny Armageddon in a mason jar

as big and bright as the universe

that goes off without warning

everywhere all the time.

PATRICK WHITE

AND THERE IS ONE VOICE

And there is one voice among many,

one I remember as mine

among so many drops of rain, so many stars,

so many leaves, flames, feathers, flowers,

and the teen-age girl in so many corners of her darkness

skeining her pencil webs across the page

to catch something, a butterfly hunting spiders

that won’t understand her,

and the lovers that have sifted downstream

from the radiant watersheds of their mountain plateaus

like silt over the laryngal deltas of my saying,

black pollen of extinguished stars

I carry around in the medicine bag of my afterlife

like mystic winds to keep the sails up

like the eyelids of a blind rose.

So many skies have enthroned themselves within me over the years,

so many waves and planets and legends of darkness

and the shipwrecks and shores of the weather,

and the storms and the birds, and the shriek of the lightning,

so many dawns and sunsets

and the strutting peacocks in the twilight,

and the sumptuous nights with their illicit luminosities,

so many banners of burning straw

as I look for the one needle of light

that was the gate and the eye and the mouth and the voice

of what most closely resembled me for awhile,

before I learned how to slough my skin

and the hauntings of the black poppies who long to be clear began,

and what was one threshold for a poet in solitude

turned into a palatial labyrinth of doors

that swung on their hinges in space like birds and tongues and bells

all the homeless whose last address will be a gravestone,

all the hapless, broken wretches

who keep trying again like losing bottle-caps,

and the women who came to the mike

to sing like an ambulance,

and the atrocities, the murders, the obscenity, the weeping,

that grabbed at my throat like severed hands

to scream of the horrors and sorrows

in the bloody braille and crippled signage of slaughtered flowers.

There was a boy. He was sixteen. And a prelude

that grained him out of a black cloud

that swirled around his feet like a snakepit

and pearled him into an eclipse

that time held up to the moon like a crow,

like a telescope silvered by the eyes of the night,

a black mirror that parted the veils of the obvious

like a woman’s legs

and went looking like a silo of infinite space

that echoed like a famine

into what he was the name of.

And he discovered he was nothing but the shadow of the world,

deaf mailmen, reluctant debutantes, car thieves

with the souls of hunted deer,

hookers whose blood glowed like neon

to fill the pleading mouths of a nest of empty wallets,

and the arrogant, the boring, the vicious,

the scholastic tidal pools who conjectured

about the existence of the great sea of being

that overwhelmed them day and night,

and the arsonists who walked in the rain of their distant exile

playing with their hearts like matches,

and the bruised violets who hide their eyes

under the sodden leaf of an autumn journal

that reads like the last ocean on the moon,

and the treacherous, the bitter, the liars

whose quivers of feathered asps

broke like arrows against the stone lions of the truth,

and the assassins who waited

like the thorn of a sundial to blood their shadows

in the eyeless witnesses of the crimes of noon

and the reformers who wanted to cover the earth in leather,

put shoes on the world

and wore out like flying carpets,

and those who were born to salt the field

and those who were born to sow,

and the rootless wildflowers

that gathered on the corners of concrete cities

like fire on the wind

only to be threshed by the blades of the moon,

cut down by the scarlet scythes of harvest squad cars.

And he has lingered among the opals and sapphires

and on the stairwells of water

that coiled like rivers and women

through the hovels of fire and ash

that consumed him like the memories of a phoenix

that had gone out like a pilot light,

and drunk the stars and eaten the radioactive meat

out of his own skull

like an enlightened begging bowl,

and come undone like a bell of wine in space

like a drunk shapeshifter, a staggering compass

on the high wire of his spinal cord

when his locks were moved by one of the keys of the mystery

that attuned him to the voice of his freedom

in a vast, starless abyss

that wiped the universe off the mirror

like the last breath of the light

to prove he was irrevocably dead.

And through all of this he has been a podium, a stage,

the gaping ellipse of the clear light of the void

auditioning another dream for the talent show,

an advance scout in the night

following rumours of stardom

across the appellant deserts of the moon

like thought chains of migrating geese

trying to remember their lines

like the secret names of God

on the rosaries of their long farewells,

and the only way to be anything

when he turned the light inward

was to agree that everyone had the answer but him,

that even the darkness that dyed

the clarity of his waters with night

to detonate the fireflies like blasting caps

wasn’t a robe of his own

but the nocturnal paint rag of the sky

that has been making him sit for his portrait like space

for the last forty-seven years

of writing shadows on the road like poems.

And I haven’t stopped crying for him since.

PATRICK WHITE

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