EVEN WHEN THE ROAD IS MISSING

EVEN WHEN THE ROAD IS MISSING

Even when the road is missing

like the absence of God, or a woman I love,

I praise that emptiness for the freedom it accords me

to create a way of my own like a river of stars

and for the universe it’s left me

like a travelling companion I couldn’t improve upon.

The gate shut, the door closed, the window locked,

I slip a key to a poem under the welcome mat

and say my house is your house anytime you call

and then go get drunk with the moon down by the lake.

And after awhile we’re laughing at ourselves,

rolling in the leaves like the groundswell

of two happy vagrants with homeless hearts

making off with our lives for free as if

we’d just pulled off some cosmic B and E.

without leaving any sign of culpability behind,

except for the joy of our felicitous crime.

And when my moonboat’s in port for repairs

like bedsheets in a backyard fleet of laundry on the line,

I don’t mind being land locked for awhile.

I just take a walk along the shore of the lake

and gather moonlit feathers

from the scales of the waves

that have evolved from raptors into swans,

and binding them together

like Daedalus did for Icarus,

take a joy ride into the sun at midnight

not really caring too much about whether

I’m at zenith or nadir as long

as I’m transiting something akin to a threshold.

The sun can hold Venus on a short leash,

and me on the chain of my spine

like a barnyard dog barking at wolves

trying to tempt it deeper into the night

but the last crescent of the moon

will cut right through them both

like the umbilical cords of a new life

where we can both roam free

like rogue planets from star to star.

Empty-handed and full-hearted I come by day

to a low place looking for fire

from the daylilies with a bucket and an urn,

because I’m so tired of what I’ve had to do

to stay alive for the past fifty years as a serf of poetry

to keep it a calling, instead of a career,

and suffer the consequences of not attending to it

as a business that makes a profit off the stars,

but by night I’m a starling of creosote in a chimney

singing my heart out as if I wanted to eat it

because it has all the virtues of a noble enemy

and there’s no poetry or protein in the junkfood of fame,

though I think that might be a trifle ingenuous.

Impoverished Druid, you lean on a crutch for a tree,

as a flying buttress to your sacred folly,

and running out of time to avoid

a head-on collision with eternity

all your devotions the ghosts of yesterday,

you kick the stool from out under your feet

and garotte yourself from the bough of an oak,

like the berry of a single moon of mistletoe

and the last crescent of a golden sickle just out of reach

of the harvest season of the King of the Waxing Year.

Poor heart, what a battered shoe

of a vital organ you’ve become, a bone box

for the sacred skeletons of hummingbirds and elephants,

a Burgess Shale for the creative fossils and footprints

we both had to evolve through to come to this

inconceivable moment without a time scale

to measure how far it is from then to now

like the last leap of faith of the waterclock of life

into the abyss without a bucket for a safety net

or any deep assurance of even having a bottom anymore

to fall out of the ongoing over the edge of a precipice

as if even the rivers of Eden sometimes

had to seek release from it all and fall

even without a parachute to candle

like an exclamation mark all the way down,

a descent into hell creatively much to be preferred

than stagnating in paradise with nothing but apples to eat.

But still you know you won’t do it, given

the number of times now I’ve come running

with a chair and a rope to let you down

out of the window of a burning building

not knowing whether we were committing suicide

or I was running to your rescue as I always have.

Your daring has always said feathers and falling

has always taken wing like Pegasus before,

and what a wild strange radiant white water ride it’s been

across the high unbounded starfields of the shining

with Vega and Deneb goading us on

ever further like spurs of Spanish silver

just you and me, my blood brother, together

in the vastness of a mutual solitude.

My God, when I think of the flights we’ve taken.

When I think of the things we’ve seen,

and the orchards of sorrow that found more bliss

in the fruit than they did in the blossom.

And what did we ever write about all those stars

that didn’t declare how impossibly illiterate we are

compared to the lyrics of light and time and wonder

they’ve been singing all these lightyears

since I first opened my eyes to why I’m conceivably here,

though here can be anywhere by now like a bird

that loses its bearing under the stars everytime

it tries to get a fix on where it’s going like a photon

jumping orbitals like tree rings in a flash of insight.

When you’re light, when you’re foolhardily alive

you don’t need to pay heed to where you’re going

because there isn’t a single stage, place, or phase

that isn’t the destination of what you’re shining up at.

And I never thought the day would ever come

when sadness would sweeten into wisdom enough

to take pity on the mirrors like the eyes under our lifemasks

when we went down to the river to drink

our own reflections like faces from the lifeboat of our hands,

like a rain of mercy far out at sea far from the sight of land,

when we first began to understand how clarity like unity

can be broken down into little pieces of sand

that reflect the whole universe as readily

in their mystic particularity

as the stars and the sun and the moon do

when they lay their swords and feathers

and flying carpets like wavelengths of light

down in tribute to our third eye weeping its way to the sea.

And you were surprised, admit it, weren’t you,

to find so many white horses like you running ashore,

mustangs from the waves, to check out the new guy’s wings.

And me standing there like an avalanche of winged heels

wondering why I didn’t make as big a splash

and if all we walked away with was a detailed starmap

who could say the journey really wasn’t worth it?

Let the shore-huggers do what they want with it

to find their way around in the dark like fireflies.

Leave it to them. We were ever explorers

from the beginningless beginning to the endless end,

and we’ll rise up again on a gust of stars

caught up like a dust-devil at the crossroads of earth

and ascend on a thermal of the sun, the stairwell

of a star-studded chromosome that could

take a coil of flypaper and turn it into a poem.

PATRICK WHITE

I WILL NOT BEGGAR MY VOICE

I WILL NOT BEGGAR MY VOICE

I will not beggar my voice to plead for spare thorns

from the bloodbanks of the docile roses.

Nor will I remove those from my hands

or the strawberry of my heart

like the broken fangs of old tattoos

I came by honestly in a prison of somnambulists

who kept their trigger finger

on the first crescent of the moon

to make sure nobody got the last word in

even in their sleep, whatever that meant to them.

And the sun is shining gloriously, albino peach,

azure blue of Alpine eyes, the sky,

and nothing within reach I want.

Four days now this dolorous bell

recast from the swords I’ve plunged through my heart

to remain honourable, and save face

like my empty place at the table below the salt,

making me feel as if I were only an elegy shy of grieving

without knowing why or for whom.

Me, the world, another, unknown, or the cosmic wound

that has deepened with the passing years

and has learned to worship the enlightened arrowhead

of the human condition it’s buried in like sacred scar tissue?

Five days ago I was inestimably young again, a meteor

slashing across the nightsky, all light and fury,

writing alif on my flesh in Kufic script as if

I were about to make myself a blood brother to the moon.

And I brought oxygen with me like a renewable atmosphere

to forgive my intensity, and a big, wide, open space

where the crazy sages and their lilaceous initiates

could chill out like waterlilies in a thinktank

where they could say anything they wanted

they didn’t have to mean twice. I was

a quick-witted thief of fire coming in through

the back window of the house of life like a grave-robber

with only a firefly for a flashlight

and my own intuition for a starmap

wherein lies the buried treasure under the feet of the gods.

But the sadness of the seer and the seeker

has descended upon me like a cloud of unknowing

and the mountain I was climbing has disappeared

as if it just evaporated into thin air, and, despite the fact

I still give off enough radiance even as a white dwarf

that imploded on itself turning the light around

and going deep inside, eyebeams shining

in all eleven dimensions of hyperspace at once,

I can’t help lighting up as much of hell

as I do of heaven in my search for the source of myself

as if neither I nor it exist except as the habit

of an old relationship that has kept us too long apart.

PATRICK WHITE

MY HANDS WERE ONCE

My hands were once the afterlives of birds

that caressed the cheeks of the sky

and brushed back the wind from its eyes,

and took a finger to intercede with a tear

not to start a pilgrimage without a little laughter,

and I am of the stuff of three stars

and a fire in my loins

that inseminated space with planets

and wrought red iron into bells of blood,

and leaned on calcium for ladders of bone

and taught the four-armed shivas of carbon to grasp life

and dance for the wheat and the grapes and the poppies,

and man lying down with woman

in waters urged by the fires of thought

furiously rooted in the gardens of the stars.

I am the ancestor and offspring of everything

and even my solitude is the loneliness of the mountains

sleepwalking over their own seabeds,

and the way I love, a trigger of oxygen,

and the way I see, a whisper of time and space,

a feather of moonlight dipped in the ink of the night.

I have within me,

deep in the vaults of my wounds,

swords from the wars of the grass and the trees,

and words that sang like arrows in the sacred groves

to answer why I live and what I’m looking for

and why all my foundation stones are shoes worn out with roads,

and who is it looking back at me like a dark echo in a dream

to see if I’m coming like a shadow with a voice.

And there are mysterious robes lighter than a breath of silk,

auroras and lightstorms, waterskins of the water-walking stars

that have plied themselves like the rings in the heartwood of a tree,

journals of light and rain, to sailor my spirit in a chronicle of flesh,

and be a brief thing in a brevity of eras, to know

why the tiger dies looking into the open, its eyes

yellow lamps in the bluing of the early morning

as if its death were already achieved a breath behind it

and a man crawls toward a meaning on his knees.

All the deaths are mine, the births, the names,

and my heart is the shrine of the moonrise and the dawn,

the blue honey hive of the stars and the wildflowers in their fields,

and the wind takes down what the mute rocks repeat for my sake,

and every face is a blossom or a leaf or an apple from the bough

of the orchard that seasons my emotions to advent and passage,

to the transformative oceans that drink to the bottom of themselves

and leave their empty cups on the moon to be filled again.

I have within me a beginning and an end

that open like the wings of a single gate

I passed through long before the birth of time

like the prelude of a world I hadn’t read yet

because I hadn’t finished living it in tears and blood,

running my fingers over it like the tender braille of a breast,

lapping it like blood from my own skull to see what kind of drunk I was.

And there are lifelines on the palms of everyone’s hands

valleys, rivers, nerves, creases, roots, deltas, lightning

that together make a map to every dream I’ve ever lived,

all the tragedies and joys of fugitive spirits

trying to shoot the rapids with a broken oar,

and secrets that put a finger to the lips of the dead

like the horizontal threshold of a man who stands

like an infinite pause in the doorway of waking up

and just looks at himself with nothing special in mind,

a commotion of swallows in the radiant spoons of last night’s rain.

But there’s you now, who is not me,

because I long for you like a tide longs for its island,

and can find nowhere within myself the likeness of your face,

and though I know the water knows you like an ancient migration

it leaves no trace of your vines on the lips of its waves,

and there are skys where you shine among the stars for hours

where I’ve found threads of your shadow

torn on the thorns of the constellations

like rivers unravelled from your wilderness skin,

and even once I found your footprint like a boat on a beach

but you were not in it, and the emptiness was out of reach.

And I think if I find you, if I look hard enough,

if I stare into space as still as a lizard or a telescope,

if I check every leaf the doves bring back in their beaks,

every eyelid of snow that lowers the pines into sleep,

and lace the wind with fragrant spells and tragic pleas,

if I can break the code of the rocks that ore their silver secrets

like love-letters, like poems, deep in the throat of the earth,

if I grow new eyes for the seeing from the oldest wines of my being,

and the sky has to turn black forever not to have you pale like a comet,

not to lose you like a chandelier of fireflies in a galaxy,

not to reach out and touch you like the creatrix of the creator,

I can part from this life like a gift I left in the night on the stairs.

PATRICK WHITE

HEAL SOFTLY, LOVER, BURN GENTLY

HEAL SOFTLY, LOVER, BURN GENTLY

Heal softly, lover, burn gently,

the moon is full on your windowsill,

and the stars haven’t gone down

over the eyes of your bells

or made a fool of your tears

over a jest of ashes. You are

the nightbranch that reaches for me

and I’m the bird that returns

to your cherry chandeliers,

the ripe goblets of your fire-plums,

and the stars in the quince of your eyes.

And there are blackberries in your blood

thorns and vines, simmering eclipses

broken gates and lonely doorways

where I’ll always come to shine,

where I’ll wait like a ghost beyond death

for the eyelids and bridges

in the breath of your wine.

Eternity isn’t time enough

to hold the sea I bear you

nor a mountain robed in snow

nor a valley heeding voices in the depths,

more than a wound and a toy

to the love I feel for you.

Heal softly, lover, hear me, see

in this dreamtime of the flesh,

how the lanterns

of the lady slippers glow with honey

that fill the hives with light,

and the doe sleeps softly

in the silver grass that jewels the water,

and the fireflies outlive the brass

of graver monuments than these

that write our names on the moon in shadows.

I say it in bees and bruises and orchids

in apples and eglantine,

in roads and doors and thresholds,

in skulls and scars and sunspots,

in grapes and scarlet runners,

in the slips of the cucumber seeds,

and the lips of the velvet borage

that kiss and overflow the stone,

you’re the harp in the throat of time

the spider weaves

to hear the morning play.

No widow of burnt guitars,

no journal of summer

pressed between the pages

of the nightshift shales,

no blood on a chain,

or raven lost in the rags and ribbons

of her own black sails, not

frost on a garden that fails,

or a lock that’s lost it keys,

or a rock that grieves for its plundered ores,

you are the candle and the seal

of all my mystic urgencies,

the gentle thief of my confessions

at the circuits and sessions

of a doomed man’s last appeal

to die in the bay of your arms,

a dolphin, a bottle, a snail

that craved its way to you.

Heal softly, lover, turn with the herbs

that follow the sun like clocks

and when your day is done

bathe in the dusk with the birds

that fly through the air like autumn,

and scented by the apricots

and peacock blues that pour out of my heart

like the eyes and inks of a prelude,

a painter, a pitcher of words,

rise from your ancient solitude renewed

and dressed by the wind

in your scarves and veils,

in your nets, your shawls and auroras,

in anklets, chokers, loops and chains

in your nebulae and orbits

and the lunar rain of your earrings,

wait for me as I will wait for you

where the nightjar sings

to celebrate his lover’s soft approach

with every quill and feather of his wings.

And no world will deceive us,

no flame expire, no radiance cease,

no fracture mar the jubilant fire

that recast its heart in hell

to love you long and well.

PATRICK WHITE

I CAN REMEMBER YOU SCREAMING

I CAN REMEMBER YOU SCREAMING

I can remember you screaming

like a shattered crack house window

something obscene to the last john on death row

you railed like a comet in passing.

Your mind was a mirror

that had suffered one too many exorcisms

not to weep on the dark side

like an exhausted eclipse

when you cracked like a wishbone for the boys

and I could never imagine

what you said to yourself

when you picked yourself up after them like toys

they had forgotten they had wished for.

When you pulled the shower curtain closed

like a bruise on a nun

were you in a cloister or a confessional

or are there other vows

that can only be broken by a professional?

You were all gates to everyone

but no matter how many they passed through

they never made it as far as the garden.

But I can remember one night with you

before we both grew up through the concrete

when the angel with the flaming sword

blew herself out like a candle

and there was more to the beginning

than just a word.

Everything sprang up like mushrooms

and in every one

I could taste you like the moon.

And San Francisco in the sixties

showed us both what the world could have been like

if it had been created by a woman

but it was you alone

in the silence of our mystic complicity

that revealed what could be revealed

of your plans for paradise.

Are you in it now?

Are you dabbling your toes

in the salmon-enchanted rivers of the dawn

or leaping over the obvious rainbows upstream

to heal your urgency in the sacred pools of Goldstream

as if the sea depended on it?

The last time I saw you

the drugs had made you so thin

you looked like a ladder going down into a deep hole

and there were no demons or angels on it rungs

and the stars in your eyes had turned their dance floors

into the heads of tiny pins and celestial syringes

at the other end of the telescope that makes things small.

And then the ferry pulled away from the wharf like a planet

and left me standing dwarfed in its wake

and I remembered you, so unafraid and golden

insisting I push you higher and higher

with every return of the swing

as if you couldn’t do anything

without coming full circle,

and then you jumped like a stone from a sling

or a comet from its dark halo

and I saw the moon fall out of your ring

like an opal, like an eye

and by October when you left for Mexico,

the little we had of a belated childhood was over.

I wanted to call and tell you

I still loved you like that summer

you turned, and laughed, and raised your shirt

and showed me your breasts at the end of the walkway

like something of you

you wanted me to remember.

And I do. God knows I do, by the way I hurt

like a road you didn’t take

or the face you kept hidden for my sake

that still keeps on using me like tears

when you asked me in jest

but listened for the answer like a bell

if after all these years

I would still die for you

and for a few hours one afternoon

you were Josie again, happy and vain and glorious,

whenever I answered yes

and there was no chain in hell

that could bind you like a swing or a well

to the pendulous clockwork death cart axles and oxen of anything

and no pain in the silence that followed the news of your death

when I said it again

and true as a comet to its calling

or the map of a star to its falling through fire,

you streamed out forever like your hair in an exaltation of glee

lacing summer stars through the darkest places in me

screaming, higher, Patrick, higher,

push me higher than I’ve ever been

as if I could pick up where you had left off

like a kite on the wing

a girl on a swing

and the world was not dirty and mean.

PATRICK WHITE

LET ME BE WORTHY OF THE RIVER

Let me be worthy of the river

and the strange ores that glow at night,

buried like teachers in the mountain;

let my blood always taste of the moon

and my heart burn like a black rose,

like the poem in the fire

that sweetened the sky with a flower of smoke,

for the wisdom of the generously unattainable,

and transcend the hell that shadows the folly

of not being foolish.

May the stars,

when they gather in gardens

water the roots of my seeing from clear fountains

and the wind bleed like ink from my pen

when I’m wounded by the beauty and the terror

of my helplessness.

When I am large, spacious, profound,

let me sit like the universe

on the throne of a seed

that lies in the dirt;

and when I am small, brief,

a trinket of light in a flash of ephemera,

robe me in the lion skin of the night sky

and ennoble me

with delusion and enlightenment

on this road of ghosts.

Whatever befall,

let me perish or prosper as a human

who insists upon the divinity of all

and burns and rises

for the heresy and truth of it.

Let anyone born be accounted a hero,

a lifeboat that hauled the world aboard

when the seas raged in the womb

to give birth to suffering;

and may I always be entrusted

with the ancient shales of dark courage it takes

to look into the dragon’s eyes

and not be horrified

by the ferocity of the freedom

that thaws space

like an hourglass in the rain.

And should love occur

to shape the blade of the moon

on the anvil of my heart,

and a cauldron of passionate visions

scald the eyes with intimate glimpses

of myriad heavens and hells,

all truer than reason,

may my bitterness pass

like the eclipse of an hour,

a left-handed blessing,

no vinegar of injured illusion

accept the sad surrender of the wine

like the death poppy of a folded flag,

no tar of judgment and denial

feather the dream with stone pillows,

no abyss under the brief era of an eyelid,

make me too petty or afraid

to dance with my skin off

engulfed like the wind

in secret sails of mystic fire.

There’s always a clown, a jester

who rides beside the hero like an anti-self,

a thoroughbred and a dray

yoked to the little red wagon of the heart

like two thieves either side

of an unwitnessed crucifixion,

two dadaphors, two torches

disposed like opposable hinges

on a door that opens like water

at the whisper of a key.

Let me be the clown-prince

of my own idiotic profundities then,

let me survive my way into the wisdom

of the inspired fools

who know that anything they ask for

from the stolen bounty of the king

is just another absurdity in disguise,

that even laughter isn’t a lifeline.

I’ve always had my heart

caught in my throat

like a bird in a chimney,

a cork in a wine-bottle,

a habitable planet in a black hole.

I have loved and befriended

almost anyone

who would let me

and seen their evanescence,

their transigence, their vagrancy, their passage

through this mansion of space

with the amazing windows and chandeliers,

the sad brevity of the things they cherished.

Blind to restorative grails,

I have not sought the meaning of life,

I have not hunted the dragon with nets,

knowing reality is meaningless

because it has no fingers,

it doesn’t point to anything beyond itself,

nor bear witness in a mirror,

but I have walked in the peacock robes

of the twilight sky, all eyes,

in the gardens of the life of meaning,

past the hushed bloodtalk of the roses,

and seen for myself

that there are flowers with petals of water

and roots of fire

that drink the stars like rain.

Meaning dethrones the flowers like bottle-caps

and there’s no refund on the empties.

Night puts its hands over your eyes

and asks you to guess;

and there’s no end of the mystery,

no end of the blessing

of sitting under a tree

looking up at a star

wondering what human beings,

what you are doing on earth;

what a thought is, an emotion,

the blade of grass beside you,

everything alone together

in the silent boat of the rising moon

docking at its own reflection

as if the port were always in the voyage,

understanding

merely an expression of the intensity

of our not knowing.

The answers come and go,

governments, religions, arts, 

sciences, fortune-cookies,

like parking meters, like waterbirds,

like oceans on the moon.

Life is the lock that opens the key,

the skymouth of the dream that woke itself up

talking in its sleep,

trying to remember the dreamer.

Like the fleets and caravans

of the seeds on the autumn wind

we are the purest expression

of a universe

that answers us with ourselves

when we ask for a sign.

Like cherries that ripen in the silence

of the deepening night,

turning our tears to wine,

our darkness into eyes,

may my shadows always be worthy

of the light that casts them.

Sixty-three years a human being,

sixty-three years of suffering and doubt,

of boredom and magmatic intensities,

of mystic elation and mythic insignificance,

of anger, danger, risk, defeat and victory,

of saying and seeing,

of trying to kiss the shadow of my pain away

by deepening my ignorance

and progressing backwards

through the re-runs of old eclipses

that once gorged on the moon like dragons.

Tonight the wind howls bitterly outside

and the stars seem eras away in the cold

as if the intimacy I have felt with their shining

since I was a boy

were just another leaf torn from the tree.

It’s rare to catch a glimpse of your agony,

to see that even the brightest fountains

of your efflorescence

are rooted in a wounded watershed

that has never known the colour of your eyes.

I don’t need to be forgiven

for being born;

and I won’t be poured

like a tidal wine

into a life that isn’t mine

however many cracks appear in the cup,

however I recede and leak out of myself,

my blood isn’t anyone else’s signature,

and this walking to nowhere I call a poem,

no one’s footprints following me but my own.

How should it be otherwise

that I fall like rain

to appease this rumour of life

like a fire in my roots

and flash through the creekbeds

of my own flowing

like time returning to its hidden source

with news of nothing?

An echo of light

looking for its lost voice like a star,

I don’t need to prove myself to the night

like a theory in the heart of a passing stranger

and space is the only death mask

that is the true likeness of my face.

No more than the light and the rain

that open the seeds like love-letters,

I don’t need to know

what I will become

or what was revealed behind me in the dark,

but let me be worthy

of this wounded boat of the moment

with its cargo of eyes

enduring the burden and inspiration

of the voyage

like illegal refugees

with forged passports to Atlantis;

and if I must be accounted

one of the martyrs of absurdity,

then let me be as generous as wings

to the worms in my name

that blindly tilled the soil

of a rootless country.

PATRICK WHITE