THE CLOUDS AND THE CROWS

THE CLOUDS AND THE CROWS

The clouds and the crows

don’t walk the same roads I do

and the dust and the stars are journeys unto themselves

but we all share the same solitude

in a universe that’s going south.

There are things I wanted to be

with a happy brain and a good mouth

that had the spiritual life of a garden

and eras away on a distant island

I took up the pathless path of water

hoping it would follow the map of my roots

creatively

into unnamed flowers and stars.

It was easier to see way back then

that sight is a kind of love

and life is the briefest of bubbles

than it is now

the enigma of light

is caught like fireflies

in Mason jars and Hubbles

and the constellations are evicted

from their ancient faces

by the deathmasks of corporate logos.

As you grow you notice the windows

you once looked through

at the distant blue hills of your longing

are subtly turning into mirrors

and the heedless dice

you once threw against the walls

like moons and skulls

in spontaneous raptures of virtue and vice

are beginning to talk

in your voice

as if they had no choice.

You realize

there are as many lies

as there are truths

based upon the facts

and when people say they’re lost

and don’t trust the direction they’re headed in

it really means

they’re afraid of living themselves.

They’re terrified of their own rarity.

They’d rather be dead and secure in the darkness

than alive to the dangerous clarity

of following their mindstreams out of Eden

wherever they may lead

and whatever they may turn into

whether it be the ginger fountains of Salsabil

blooming in heaven

or the Styx Lethe Phlegathon of hell.

You can tell by the halo

around the black hole in their eyes

where the light goes in

and never comes out

that what used to be an iris

has lost its faith in rainbows

and nothing is well.

No manner of thing is well.

Even time gives up on them in disgust

at the lightyears it’s wasted on them

like flowers afraid of the Open

and leaves space to measure their lifespans

like event horizons

on the thresholds of tents in a desert.

After them

there is no deluge.

No arks on Ararat.

Just components and bones.

When the mind forgets how to flow

the body sheds its blood like a rose

that’s forgotten how to dream

on the dark side of its eyelids

that its thorns are the swords of a solar matador

at war with the bull of the moon

not a memento mori

thrown by a lover

on the coffin lid

like a kiss that blunts its lips on stone.

But a rose is a rose is a hemorrhage.

The moon is gored by the solar sword

and the plenum void

pours forth its dark abundance

to feed the dog and scorpion alike.

It’s hard to look at the world for long

and still think of it as some kind of cosmic favour

some unknowable god did us in passing

but it’s one of the more

delusional graces of crazy wisdom

that even to be grateful for its mere presence

and whatever dark energy

insists on being us in it

is a compassionate form of self-respect.

Of according a dignity to existence

simply because it’s you.

This agony of being

we share with ants and Cepheid variables

with great trees broken by lightning on a hilltop

with the fossils of hummingbirds

with those who sit behind curtains

at undetectable angles

with no words for what they’re looking at.

With the maggot the snake and the rat.

With the anything that everything can be.

I’m grateful for the barking of dogs in the morning

and the history of life in the light of the stars that haven’t reached us yet.

I’m grateful for my fingertips my scars my broken bones.

I’m grateful for alarmist poppies and bruised violins

and small creatures burping in the sand through their blowholes

after every wave that washes over them.

I’m grateful for blue

and oscillatory electromagnetic fields at rest

and the lies that parents tell their children

to keep them from growing up too fast.

I want to say thank you for my voice

and the old Arab in the mosque

who taught it words were living creatures.

I want to say thank you for skulls and harps

and the fact that every thought

has an afterlife of its own

that’s as sure as inspiration.

And thank you for the secrets,

the paradoxes, the enigmas, the mysteries, the questions,

the insights and uncertainties.

Thank you for my emergence out of the random

like the spontaneous formations of thousands of birds

turning on the tilt of a feather.

Thank you for my grief, lust, rage and ignorance,

and these prophetic shades

that are in compliance with my senses.

I’m grateful for the gates.

And I’m grateful for the fences.

What is life?

What is death?

What am I?

Is it light or darkness to wonder?

Thank you for Jesus and Muhammad, Buddha and Brahma

and Silap Inua of the Inuit

that were engendered out of our suffering

like cool waterlilies out of the heat of our festering.

Thank-you for the clarity of smoke

and hiding what everyone is looking for

right out in the open.

Thank you for the seeing that engendered my eyes.

The hearing that shaped my ears.

The touching that wired the nerves in my skin

to the raindrop and the butterfly.

The saying that gave me a voice.

The feelings that ripened the green apple of my heart

so that sunset is sweeter than dawn

so I know to let go

is to live on.

PATRICK WHITE

IN THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE ROSE

IN THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE ROSE

In the eye of the hurricane rose

all is as calm as a bee

as my world is shed around me

like eyelids.

The racket of Canada geese

holding a political rally

high over everybody’s heads

a thousand feet straight up

as the economy returns like spring.

I know what it is

to be a phoenix of a tree

and lose your leaves

like a fire that goes out in the night.

I used to be a snowman

and purified myself

with my own disappearance

when things warmed up.

Now I’m a scarecrow

with nothing to chase away

except the farmer.

It wasn’t me

that held a grudge against the birds.

Everything’s wrong

but it’s all right,

the chaos is vividly illustrated

with picture music

and I’m wearing my eye in my ear

and there’s a keyboard and an easel near

like a skeleton with a forced grin.

A painting a day.

Van Gogh on steroids.

But I can’t afford to eat my cadmium yellow

and they’re not handing out food for thought

at the back of the think-tank anymore.

I don’t know what to say

about all those people

who set out to be artists

and wound up being stores.

People eat.

People pay the rent.

Baby needs new shoes.

Benign reason can smother an artist

faster than the demands of a serial killer

in the hands of the pillow she dreams upon

and the tigers of wrath

who are wiser than the horses of instruction

who took so easily to the cart

as Blake said in his sayings from hell

soon learn that heroism isn’t smart

if you don’t want to be hunted into extinction

by judas-goats in the jungle

for your private parts.

And then if you get through the blackwater of all that

like a battered waterlily after a storm

that doesn’t have any respect for nuns

comes a swarm of dabblers and nibblers

like one of the plagues of Egypt

the blackflies the maggots the tapeworms

that pose like paper butterflies

on the lips of origami flowers

for Japanese tourists

into unenlightened North American haikus

about cherry blossoms

that never fall on dogshit.

The eternal sky

doesn’t inhibit the flight of the white clouds

and you can see that

as clearly in a dirty puddle in a parking lot

as you can through the eyes of the Buddha.

Life is a bubble.

A firefly.

A distant star.

A lightning bolt.

You don’t need to transplant

a plastic cornea

into the pineal gland of your third eye

in order to see like the Hubble.

You just need to gain some elevation.

You just need to break

the surly bonds of earth

and get into orbit awhile

if you’re looking for an overview

that isn’t just another footnote

in a Restoration play

trying to refine Shakespeare

by turning real diamonds

into zircon costume jewellery

that makes the light taste like junkfood.

I approach life

by putting the pedal to the metal

like an absolute constant

as if it were already behind me

like the light of a star in all ten directions

that stays ahead of itself

so that time cannot encompass it

like a fletcher turning freebirds into arrows.

There are no zeniths and nadirs in the void.

Don’t try to live like a curve ball on the straight and narrow.

Space isn’t mutable

once you’ve achieved ultimate volume and mass

and stand eye to eye with the universe

you don’t want to meet

until you can both sit down

on equal ground

and come to some kind of mutual understanding.

Don’t use a lie

to go divining for the truth

when the truth isn’t water

it’s a weathervane.

All things change when we do.

The first word ah blossoms into all others

and they’re all true

said some master I’ve forgot.

If it hasn’t got a womb

don’t listen to its myth of origin.

If it isn’t a lifeboat

don’t get in

or better yet

learn to swim on your own.

Writing poetry is like pearl-diving for the moon

at the bottom of your tears.

If you want to go deep

you can’t bottle an emergency atmosphere

like a backup breath

to keep Atlantis from drowning

when the fish are already swimming

through your windows

like new insights

into your fathomless past.

But if you don’t have the depth

to be a shipwreck

don’t keep an albatross on deck

a spider on watch

in the ropes of your mast

or mistake a siren

for the cutting edge

of a figurehead

and fix her to your bow

and expect to avoid the rocks.

It’s the loneliness of the moon

that makes the loon sing

on the lake

not a parrot that talks.

Poetry isn’t just a matter

of picking up the flattest stones

that wash up from your oceanic emotions

about what it was like

to go skinny-dipping with Medusa on the moon

to make them scan

skipping out over a sea of tranquil shadows.

Words are waterbirds.

Not flightplans.

They know where all the best mirrors are

to make a good landing

and which are blind and dangerous

but poetry isn’t about keeping the lights on at night

along your runways and starmaps

or tracking fireflies on a radar screen in a lighthouse

as the circling muse runs low on fuel

trying to get her wheels down.

You can’t grind inspiration out

and expect to be ambushed by a muse

as if she were a clown in a musical jack-in-a-box

and not the serpent at the well

when you go for water.

Where are the elixirs

where are the toxins in your voice

where are the fangmarks that punctuate your pulse?

Where is the lamia that shed your lunar skin

with a spiritual knife

just before she cut your heart out

at the top of a pyramid of prophetic skulls

without an afterlife to speak of?

If you’re still around to assess

what you’ve sacrificed

to the dead ends of poetry

you haven’t died enough

to make it live.

You’re still a highway not a river.

Roadkill in a crosswalk

not a mindstream that can talk to stars

with intensity

about the return of the great blue herons

to the prodigal begging bowls of last year’s nests.

Puppets dance to the strings of laughing liars.

Make kindling of them.

Make fires

and throw Pinocchio in

if you want to sit with heretics

that tell the truth

as if every word of it

were a death wish

the genies hear in silence

as the lamps

turn themselves down low

to maintain their decorum

as they bite their tongues like flames.

Words are to names

as visuals are to visions

and images are to symbols.

The first mean precisely what they say.

Accurate simulacra.

Clear as day.

A photograph not a painting.

But it’s the lens that mimics the eye

not the other way around

and when the telescope’s

brought down to earth

like seed is to tree

like light is to life

they’re both wide-eyed flowers

gaping at their own interpretation.

The mind is an artist.

The mind is a scientist.

The mind is a poet a postman

a baglady sorting through her own garbage.

The mind can paint the worlds

as the Flower Ornament Scripture said.

You can paint them yellow blue black or red.

Reality’s an atomic pointillist.

Reality’s the negative space

around an impressionist lifeboat

full of light

as the waves give chase to the children.

Reality’s a crazed expressionist.

Reality’s a forty thousand year old cave painting.

A fresco in a womb full of correspondences

simulated in the flesh of the great mother

who keeps giving birth to the animals

late at night

after everyone’s gone home

and the gallery’s closed.

Back to Blake.

What is first imagined is later proved.

You live in the world you paint

you write you carve you think you feel

you play like your father’s guitar.

You can paint it with windows with mirrors

with ion microscopes.

You can make a painting of a painting

and call it a work in progress

that improves upon the original

like a host is enhanced by a guest

or a ghost in a different dress.

Or you can minimize the picture plane like space

and despise perspective

and hold it up to your face

like a mugshot to a detective

to see if you can recognize anyone

by the pattern of the blood spatter.

Tired of working with the light in Monet’s garden.

Cross the Japanese bridge above the waterlilies

over to the other side of the equation

and work with matter

as if you were ploughing paint

to plant potatoes.

But whatever you express

worlds within worlds within worlds

whatever your medium

be it stars or Mars black

heaven or hell

or the triune identity of earth

water land and sky

remember they all find their equivalence

in your creative energy

acting on its own potential

as if the abyss spontaneously

took matters into its own hands

and out of nothing

out of its own emergence

out of its own bright vacancy

and dark abundance

out of the synergic emptiness

of its own unidentifiable likeness

to everything that exists

in your imagination and beyond

made this.

PATRICK WHITE

IF YOU HAD ANY COMPASSION FOR YOURSELF

IF YOU HAD ANY COMPASSION FOR YOURSELF

If you had any compassion for yourself,

others wouldn’t have to suffer for you

and the world wouldn’t show you

such a sad, woeful, wounded face.

You wouldn’t see the withering leaves

and petals of the rose in autumn

as merely the scar tissue of its thorns.

In winter, mend your severance.

In spring, attend to your joys.

Like fishing nets and snow fences.

Like delphiniums in a garden bed

that’s beginning to bloom like a starmap.

And you know that stranger inside

that’s always witnessing everything we do

like a perfectly clear mirror, even in dreams?

Take another look, you might be surprised

at whose face you see at a meeting of eyes.

It’s important not to pass judgement on yourself

for fear of condemning the world.

Show me a mirage that isn’t a friend to water

or a wishing-well that resents a rainbow

for the pot of gold at the end, though

no one ever knows which end at the time.

Be kind to your delusive paradigms of life,

as you would an old skin you shed like the moon

when your serpent-fire could no longer contain itself

and broke out of its sacred chrysalis like a dragonfly

that had made itself a house of life out of matchsticks

and went up in flames like a snake with wings.

If you could see your life for what it is,

a teaching device for mentoring your own enlightenment

you might read the books of all the sages

rooted and flowering in you like the wisdom of a seed,

or the star in the ore of a panspermic universe

that was planted in you like the garden you’ve been from birth.

You might think that the wildflowers

are looking up at the stars to understand themselves

but, in truth, they’re looking up at their roots

like rain reveres the lightning that engenders it.

You don’t need to convince the wind of your freedom,

you’ve just got to ride it out to the end,

a friend to yourself, a worthy companion,

the intimate familiar of a cloud with a clear blue sky

or a subliminal lover of the darkness

love mushrooms up in like a moonrise.

If you knew how to nurture yourself

by breaking bread with the spirit of life within you

there wouldn’t be millions of children

all over the world who will go hungry tonight.

They’d be licking the spoon with stealthy laughter

like cookie-batter out of the begging bowl of your heart.

Enlightenment isn’t going to add one ray of light

or a single star to the night you’re already shining in,

and whatever wavelength you’re on, regardless

of the mystic polarities your potential flows between,

like dark matter and light, whether the journey you’re on

is orange or infrared or the blue white violet of the Pleiades,

absorption or emission spectrum alike, no wave

of thought or mind, light, heart or water

is discontinuous with the oceanic consciousness

they rise upon, so why turn back to the source

like a solar flare to ask for directions from a starmap

that sent you out like a bubble in the multiverse to look for land.

You know, if you were more of an explorer

without a preconceived destination, more

of a space probe leaving the solar system periodically,

the rest of us wouldn’t feel so lost or out of place at your table.

And even if you’ve made a vehicle

of the wheel of birth and death

and think you have a firm grasp on things

with your arm out the window in the driver’s seat,

enjoying the passing view with the wind in your hair

without clinging to anything along the way

it still might be a good idea to learn how

to come down off your throne like a pauper

and change a flat tire now and again.

Your life is not an untimely interruption of eternity.

The eternal sky does not inhibit the flight of the white clouds,

and it even bends down sometimes toward the earth

to pick up Venus like a lost earring in the sunset.

It’s your point of view that turns your back on yourself

like the retrograde motion of Mars, not

the planet itself playing rope tricks with your spinal cord.

Why go looking for your mind

like a lighthouse with a flashlight,

a flame for the source of the fire

or a star for the constellation it belongs to,

or the homeless for a home when everyone’s

the foundation stone of their own habitation

wherever they are at the moment.

If you chase the wind, it will be you

that loses its breath like the atmosphere of the moon.

And when you run out of air, breathe light, breathe space,

and don’t try to fix an expanding universe

to your nostrils like a bicycle pump

to get you back on the road again.

Or you’ll find you’re swimming out of your depths

to run to the rescue of an empty lifeboat

that’s already unloaded its contents ashore.

If you don’t want to go blind as a starless night

it’s prescient to eclipse your blazing from time to time,

turn the lights down low, snuff the candle,

and learn to see in the dark there’s just as much reflected

in the depths of the dark abundance

of a black mirror, though it takes time to focus,

than there is in the expansiveness

of the bright vacancy of the white

that takes things in at a glance.

The seed of a every glimpse of insight contains

the whole of the vision in advance,

and at the core of the apple of the issue

is a green star with dark auburn eyes

on the nightshift of the maternity wards of spring.

And o come on now, how long can you hang on

to being this box kite on a string

watching another phoenix ride your thermals

like inspiration on the wing, without feeling

like the premature ghost of yourself at the onset of spring,

all smoke, and no fire, your flightfeathers smouldering

like a pyre of wet maple leaves who haven’t got the courage

to break into flames and flap their wings and rise above it all.

Better to be a weather balloon losing altitude like Icarus

or even a candling parachute taking the fall for all of us,

as daring said feathers and falling took flight,

than not risk falling through the black holes of life to paradise?

And what if I were to tell you’re they’re just the pupils

the light enters through like your eyes into your imagination

to be transformed from a visual into a vision,

the visible form into the invisible shining of the spirit

that raises everything in the known and unknown multiverse,

and the trees and the stars, the rocks and the clouds

are all counting on you to do this for them,

because this is what you’re here for,

if you’ve ever wondered,

to raise them up to eye-level

with a human who knows the names of things

like parents know the names of their own children

running toward them down the street. It’s how

we were meant to meet and greet the universe.

So if once, just once, for my sake, your sake, the sake

of the forsaken with their elbows on the windows of the world tonight

watching it all go by like stars on the firewalks beneath their noses,

that are not embedded in cement like a mausoleum

of movie-stars that refused to become fossils

before their shining was spent,

you took a chance, and that’s all it would take,

one step forward with no return address,

to risk falling down at the dance,

and seven times down, eight times up,

such is life, get up on your own two good feet again

and discover you’ve got wings and spurs on your heels

the rest of us wouldn’t feel so lame

when we came over to your place

like a riot of erratic fireflies to celebrate

the lightning moves of the rain that’s dancing on our graves

where the dead lie down like the corpses of candles

knowing they’ll be reincarnated

as wildflowers and Luna moths

because nothing that’s ever given its life up

to this business of shining on everything alike

from a first magnitude star, to the night light in the hall

that shoos the ghosts away from their portraits on the wall

so the whole world can bloom in the tears of your eyes,

the fire in your heart, and in the human divinity

of the spirit of your imagination, can ever be put out

because every shadow of doubt

leads back the light that cast it

in love and sorrow, time and space

like the life and death mask of your own face.

PATRICK WHITE

THE LEAVES TREMBLE

The leaves tremble at the tips

of their half-denuded branches

against a flat grey sky,

the ruination of yellow and green

and the maples afire.

The house to myself;

four hours to myself. My head

jammed with the business

of swarming blackflies,

the crucial trivia of the morning,

crankshafts and cabs,

fitting the lid

over the spoon in the coffee can,

drinking brewer’s yeast

to coat my neuronic synapses

with vitamin B

to counteract the stress

that just handed me the single rose

of an unrequited cold sore.

And I’m chain-smoking

contraband cigarettes,

and I just lit up a joint

and I’ve got enough money,

I’ve got enough smokes,

and the coffee’s not bad

and I don’t even mind

this ashen hour of October

as I wait for the mud in the puddle to settle

the turmoil of the soiled cloud,

the ecliptic commotion of the meteor shower

to stop smearing and smashing

the silence of the eyeless mirror,

and my feelings are waiting for mouths

like the interlaced fingers

of a Druid who doesn’t know

what he wants to say

but knows how to say it

a hundred and fifty ways.

I look for the column shift

and put the world in park.

I look for my heart

and it’s a small, scuffed planet

trying to throw a curve at me

as if I were nothing but space.

I’m the key to a forgotten lock

in the spirit’s lost and found,

and part of me likes it this way

because for several eras now

the sleeves have been too long

on the winter straitjacket

time sized and knitted from my solitude,

and I hate the stingy herb of the colour.

I have lived like wings without a sky,

fire in the heartwood of a weeping willow,

and the birds piled up on my windowsill

like the craven junkmail

of an insincere migration that kept turning back

and my tears were always pall-bearers

at the death of water,

and I couldn’t understand,

couldn’t fathom the shallowness

of the infinite interpretations

that sprawled like lavish waves

across the sandy inclinations of my mind

with shells and starfish and seaweed for proof.

How could everyone not be right, 

each according to the ruler of their spine,

a full measure of the truth?

The universe five ten and a half feet tall,

and flowers that taste like stars to the blind,

and wounds that heal like scalpels

in the hands of the surgical moon,

and emergency rooms full of clowns,

and shovels like iron valentines

indifferent to gardens and corpses;

and the beautiful arches of the women

who collapsed like aqueducts and bridges,

the stones of their plundered geometry

collaged into the gaps of makeshift hovels

to keep the cold night drafts out.

And I put it all down as a poet.

I was faithful to the vagrancy of my voice.

I offered the first born of my blood

to the law of my heart

and my soul was an ardent shapeshifter

with the wardrobe of a theatrical poppy

forgetting the lines of a dream.

I was an arsonist waiting in the dark

for the bell of a woman in the doorway,

and my cells were haunted

by the ghosts of the vacant thrones

of dark intensities

that swept me like rain over the masks and hills

of faceless domains.

I squandered myself

like confetti fire and cherry blossoms

at the weddings of water and gasoline.

Everywhere was threshold and door,

and the world a ghetto of exiles,

a refugee camp for stars and humans alike,

an oil drum under an urban overpass

where I spray-bombed the hunting magic

of the beast masters

who danced to keep warm

under the horns and hides of their sacred shadows.

I have never been anyone

I ever thought I was.

Alone and alone and alone,

the hidden eye under a robe of light,

gazing out at the world from the inside,

I could never claim my thoughts and emotions as my own,

and without realization

I could be the vision

but I could never say that it was mine;

and slowly I was poured out on the ground

like blood and blue wine

and what was left was space, was

the whole palace in a single cornerstone,

a way of keeping everything in mind

and mind in everything,

of holding the world with an open hand,

letting the rivers

slip through the delta of my fingers

back to the sea they issued from

and I was always the last drop of water

to leave the moon. Empty and dry,

I lived on ashes and salt, a gnawing thing,

breaking its teeth on minerals,

trying to build a house of transformation

with glass nails, speaking

in the liberated tongues of broken mirrors.

How many days, deserts, dragons,

surviving on the marrow

of thorns, fangs, claws,

on the exhausted fruits of the fire,

on the flakes of blood

I shed like brittle roses,

like the paint of a condemned post office.

There was no more meat on the bones of the gate

and my heart turned into a loaf of coal.

My annihilation was perfected

in the crucible of my skull

by an excruciating isolation

that wept like the swords of diamond clarities

and the women and the children and the books,

and the abandoned shrine

in the tiny grove of my name,

fell away behind me

like wharves in my wake,

points of departure,

everything I’d ever cherished

lost in the undertow of the abyss.

Days of defamation and reptilian discretion.

I lived on nothing, a habit of breathing,

my heart a looping reflex,

terrified by the carnivorous grey of everything,

the short somewhere in the house

that would burn everything down,

the unforeseen event

that would snatch me

from the auroral approach of joy

by making me stand at the window

behind the stone curtains

of a harsher delusion,

always returning me to the same moment

as if a lesson I hadn’t quite mastered yet,

convinced again and again I was a chronic clown

proofreading the encyclopedic obituary

of someone who didn’t know when to quit.

PATRICK WHITE