INFREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

INFREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Is it true

the most compassionate people in life

are the ones in the greatest danger?

That the most generous

will lose their hands to the ones they fed?

That the bravest will be hunted down by protected cowards

and when the last of the heroes are dead

and the dragons who inspired them

are the advertising themes of amusement parks

those with the smallest balls

will give themselves the biggest awards?

Is it true

those who are creative

chafe the destroyers like anti-matter

and give the intellectuals diaper-rash of the mind?

That just to open your eyes

to watch the stars and fireflies

is enough to make other people feel blind

and insist you black them out

like pearls in an air-raid?

What’s a starmap to a mole?

What’s a lamp that shines in braille

to someone without fingerprints?

Is it true that beauty summons the worm

as a material eye-witness to its ruin?

That genius is devoured

by cannibalistic Neanderthals

into homoeopathic magic

for the power of its brain

to turn thought into protein

with a high creatine content

that can make your dick strike twelve anachronistically

so you can go on knapping flint

for the next hundred thousand years?

That genius is a freak in isolation

that gets its own back

for being pecked at

like a phoenix among chickens

by opening Pandora’s box

like the atom at Los Alamos

like the genie in the lamp

and making a Trojan horse of its gifts

gives them everything they want

because anything as red

as Van Gogh’s hair and beard and ear in Arles

must be either a phoenix

or a fox with chicken-pox.

Sometimes you have more to fear

from the keys

than the locks.

Is it true

that a friend is a random event

in a space-time continuum

that’s got no room in its impersonality

for loyalty or sentiment?

That the heart has replaced the golden rule

with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

and everyone’s looking for love

like a Faberge Easter egg

that’s already hatched its ugly duckling

sans fairytale?

Or the Czar’s family?

I asked Annie

as we were landing in Toronto

from the West Coast

like a waterbird with its wheels down

on a tarmac lake

is it true

that everything we thought sincere

has been exposed as fake?

That forever isn’t worth

the loveletter

it’s written on

for twenty minutes

because of temporal inflation?

Is it true

that all roads

that lead to Rome or Ottawa

never return the way they came

like arrows and fishooks and Vercingetorix?

That justice is a celebrity fame-game with ratings

brought in by a jury of mirrors

selected by the reflections of their peers

to convict the innocent

for their sins of omission?

That the God-particle

everyone’s looking for

like something they can’t get out of their eye

might not be

trying to make a point at all.

It’s hard to get a fix on

just how fundamental you are

in the scheme of things

when you’re stuck in the starmud

up to your knees

looking for your keys like koans

you swallow like pills to feel real

but hey

no big deal

but I was meaning to ask you

is it true

that we’re wounded by death

and life is the way we heal?

I know how you feel

about what’s real

but you can have all the money you want

and that still doesn’t mean

you’ll ever really know

what it means to be rich

without having to steal.

You’ve got the disease

but none of its symptoms.

Is it true

that the most successful grow

by never accepting a challenge

that wasn’t a bigger failure than the last

and call the summits of their Himalayan defeats

experience and progress?

Answer no.

Answer yes.

Answer yes and no.

Or just nod your head diagonally

like the sum of the squares of the opposite sides.

Because the questions were less rhetorical

than sincerity being facetious

I don’t expect people to answer the doorbell

or read every piece of spiritual junkmail

that shows up on their doorstep

like a flightfeather to paradise

on the wings of a seagull.

If you’re wounded deeply enough

there’s no resentment in the pain.

You just play with your brain

like an angry child plays with the eyes of a doll.

You control your rage like a nuclear reactor

or Chernobyl goes cosmic

and you throw a tantrum

that expands like the universe.

You can polish the mirror all you want

and call it clarity

until your sleeves are as threadbare

as the carpets under the windows

you’ve been staring through

as long as it take to turn your eyes to glass

but enlightenment’s on the dark side of the mirror

like a star is

like your eyes are.

Like waves on a lake

that takes things as they come.

Myriad deaths in a single birth.

Life on earth.

Intense heat.

Unusual sprouts.

A Zen sententium worth consideration.

But the clear light of the void

isn’t radiation.

It’s a lucidity

with nothing to illuminate.

It’s the Uncreate that plays creatively

in the absence of itself

like a child alone with its imagination

making the world up as it goes along

taking the Inconceivable

and making it believable.

Giving airy nothing

a local habitation and a name

as Shakespeare did

and dandelions do in the fall.

As I am now

by asking if it’s true

you haven’t noticed yet

how it’s always the overprivileged

who send the underprivileged off to war?

Death in the hearts of the governors.

Death in the hearts of the profiteers.

Death in the hearts of the generals.

Is it true

this spider-web shines

like democracy in the morning

star-spangled with dew

but late at night under the streetlight

it’s tearing under the weight of its own greed?

That obese spiders who once pulled the strings

of a sticky mandala to eat well

ripen like the dead weight of toxic fruit

hanging from the branches of a dead tree?

This web is not a constellation.

This web is not a starmap.

This web is not a bloodstream

that gives back what it receives.

This web is not the lyre of a siren

that called people to the rocks of a new continent.

This web is not an electric guitar.

Is it true

the interminable buzzing of panicked flies

stuck to its strings

like masses of people

waiting to be consumed

is not the music of celestial spheres?

Empathic ingestion of agony over many years

like a fish trying to identify with heavy water

by adapting to it like a sick mother

who passed on her genes like Love Canal.

Is it true

you can die tending the ill in a hospital?

Carnage without redemption.

Eye-soup.

Severed feet.

Outrage imploding into black dwarfs

that warp space like a child’s mind

into believing God is best served by the blind

than those who can read for themselves

before they martyr her body like a judas-goat

to God’s great design

for the faithful dead

who expressed their gasp of divinity

in a holy war

a marketable crusade

a deniable genocide

a mass grave

a defensible border

that doesn’t know who gave the order

to drop cluster bombs

and white phos

on the hospital

when it ran out of bandaids

and watch it flower like a white dahlia

or a belly-dancing jellyfish

with poisonous tentacles

spreading out like the spokes of a beach umbrella.

The aesthetics of atrocity.

The age of desecration.

Is it true

the next best career move for evolution

like an unknown writer

listening to his legend gossip among rumours

like a suicide note without a table of contents

is unnatural extinction?

The mystery in the riddle of the sphinx

after all those years of sand and stars

is what would she have asked

if we weren’t there to answer.

Is it true

that Saturn’s shepherd moons

have turned into human coyotes

jumping borders like orbits

in the Van Allen Belt

where the asteroids are broken by drug rings

thawing rocks in a crack spoon

to defy the laws of gravity

with deified norms of depravity?

I might be a vague social democrat

walking a Zen plank

like a blindfolded political platform

who doesn’t need a party

to spell out

or sell out

what I believe

but it’s easier to write a folksong

about a successful thief

than a man or woman

for whom love was an art

that transcended its inspiration

and compassion the root of all understanding

and when death approached

because it’s hard to be alive and real

at the same time

embraced it as a great relief.

Is it true

that more similes turn into outlaws

than metaphors do?

That when Jesus asked

the little children to come unto him

he wasn’t speaking in tongues

behind sacred firewalls

for polyglot child molesters everywhere?

The pen might be mightier than the sword

like a mammal is to a dinosaur

but I have my doubts about a bullet

and electrically detonated C-4

wired to a lab rat like the black plague

and holy warriors

with the radioactive half-lives of dirty bombs.

Suras and psalms.

Gardens with underground rivers.

And fruit trees by flowing streams.

Shalom.

Salem.

Muslim.

Jerusalem

Islam

And Bethlehem the House of Bread

that breaks into peace

when it’s shared

like a common word

from the pelican fountain-mouth

of the same mother tongue.

Peace brother.

Peace sister.

May you live to be

forever young and free

of walled partitions

and the double helices

of chromosomatic razorwire

uncoiled like vines

around your secret gardens

where the waterlilies bloom in gene-pools

and the grapes are bleeding

like a miscarriage of sacred wines.

When the Great Lucidity appears

like a star of wheat in the Virgin’s hand

and shines down

on everyone’s shelter for the night alike

no mangers in the beginning

no arks at the end

may we all understand

that the blood-oaths of enemies

are not stronger than the bonds between friends.

May you know the enchantments of life

when it doesn’t belong to anyone

as well as you know the horrors

of disowning it now.

Or as I imagine they would say in Zen.

The pen is the sword.

It’s just a voice with words.

A lamp that gives its light away

like an extravagant genie

you don’t have to blow out to see

but you should

if you want to write good.

Black glee.

Bright vacancy.

Too much pain.

The agony of the seed realizing

the harvest was in vain

not worth what had to be endured

to live it all again.

Eleusinian ergot on the grain.

Is it true

heaven prefers

the hallucinogenically insane

and the sun only comes up

when a cock crows like a weathervane

or a God-struck lightning-rod?

On the return journey

which is more amazing than the first

you get to pass backwards

through all the stations of your life

you progressed forward through.

A prodigal innocence

that resonates with experience.

A dream reflected in a mirror

like a waterbird

dragging its wake through the clouds

like a knife ploughing a wound

through the envelope of a loveletter

no one can wake up from but you.

And no one can take away

because everything is trued by time

to the path you took

just by walking on the earth

alone on a dark night in the starless rain

when you removed the world like a mask

that proved false to your faceless pain

and you realized

how much closer a stranger is to you

than you are to your unrecognizable self.

Though pain may be prophetic

when your heart hangs on a hook

like bait on a question-mark

great suffering doesn’t reveal anything

you didn’t already know.

It doesn’t stay.

It doesn’t go.

It’s a nothing that exists.

It’s an existence that’s nothing.

A gust of fireflies

from the mouth of a dragon.

But what does come as a surprise

like dusk overtaking the window

are the numberless eyes

that emerge from the depths of your darkness

like grapes ripening on the vine

like fish coming to the surface

like urgent diamonds

growing like mushrooms

in the long night of an abandoned mine.

Numberless eyes.

Myriad stars.

Light-years of memories.

And is it true

every one of them

is a myth in the making

each an enlightened Zen master

with nothing to teach

who insists

it’s not the stars that are shining

it’s your mind?

That they’re all within reach

all the time?

PATRICK WHITE

O THIS MORNING MORE THAN EVER

O THIS MORNING MORE THAN EVER

O this morning more than ever

I want to disappear into my life

like a bird into the blue oblivion

of a migration of one

that’s never coming back.

Things aren’t solid.

They’re real.

And tonight I will appeal again

to the subtle intelligence of the dark matter

that resonates throughout space

like energy musing upon itself at rest

after long labour

to let me evaporate with the stars

like a breath somebody took

deeply into themselves

and then breathed out.

Did my eyes sweeten the windows

they looked through like women?

Did my looking help ripen the stars?

Strange wounds.

Stranger scars.

There’s no end

to the myriad afterlives of water

that a human lives through

like the weather

of an undiscovered sea

and time just keeps

carrying things forth into the carrying forth

like a clepshydra of severed heads

bleeding like buckets

one into another.

An alphabet of prophetic skulls

that never finish a sentence

because the things we say

already have more in common

with the dead

than they do with the living

from the very first word

that falls from our mouths like an apple.

If I have spoken in tongues and symbols

and mixed occult elixirs

like secret constellations

to heal the injured night

my voice never forgot

that it was a mere gesture of moonlight,

a mystic adagio of picture-music

dancing alone in its own shadows.

And if I went crazy in the pursuit

of an earthly excellence

it was just to pass the time.

Anyone with a spirit needs a cosmic hobby.

Anyone with a mind

needs to let go now and then

like a universe that expresses itself completely

and then stands a human up

like a finger to the lips of a prolonged silence.

And what can you say

to those with a heart

that wait for blood to return

like the wind to their sails

with good news

like oxygen from Atlantis

that things are beginning to look up

except drink up

until you’re sober as dry land again.

The ecliptic intersects the celestial equator

at the equinoctial colure

and it’s spring again

in the northern hemisphere

where the crocuses

are poking their noses

through holes in the snow

like bruises beginning to bloom.

If there is no wonder in your love

you will never know

the profound delight

of being grateful for your life

and the stars won’t humble you

when you ask the night who you are

into knowing what they do.

Stop listening to everything with your mouth

and sit down beside the fountain

like a road or a sundial

that’s found its way back

and hear what your ears

have been saying for years

about the coin you lost in the mindstream

like your passage across the river of death

coming up like the moon

over your left shoulder

to take your breath away.

Wisdom renounces the wise

and therein lies enlightenment.

Ignorance embraces the fools of the spirit

and there are no words for it.

The best is clarity.

Clarity is all.

This is a doorway.

This is a wall.

And this is all the gold of India

I would give if I could

to sit down with Hafiz

by the banks of the Ruknabad

among all those Persian roses

and steal musical riffs from the stream

to say what we impossibly mean

to the young slave girl

with the mole on her cheek

who’s learning to speak our language like a muse.

If I have longed for things all my life

as if they were out of reach

it was one of the dark jewels of my childhood

that died like an eye for a lack of light

that taught me

longing is more creative

than fulfilment

and the nightbird

on its broken branch alone

sings like a wine closer to home

than all the daylight choirs

of happier wings in the vineyard

that inspires the liars into blossoming

like loveletters on the wind

they don’t know where to send.

So I tell them without believing

they know what I’m talking about

to take a page out of the orchard’s book like I do

and when spring’s in the air

send them everywhere.

PATRICK WHITE  

AND SHOULD I RECALL WHOSE EYES

AND SHOULD I RECALL WHOSE EYES

And should I recall whose eyes made the stars most beautiful,

and set the mindstream that flowed though us aflame with fireflies

a moment there and gone and come again like light

in the keyholes of the feral cats that prowled the graveyardshift

wholly to the top of the broom-swept path up Heartbreak Hill,

where the bones of the seven hanged men lay buried

in the duff of our childhood legends, a shadow and a name,

trying love on shyly like new clothes in the shadows of the pines,

where we lay down with the dead on beds of rusty compass needles,

out of sight of the windows of the town, how could I not feel,

here alone now by the Tay, thousands of miles away,

and more years later than it takes to walk a burning bridge,

waiting for the flower moon to appear above the horizon,

the waterclock in the nightbird’s song of longing?

And if I were to say what it was like to be touched by her

when she was brave with hunger and my body

all loaves and fishs in the innocence of her hands

and her breasts and lips magic mushrooms without the flies

that swarmed the garbage cans in the back-alleys below,

and though it was not wise to begin a new life

on the last night of the past we were ending together,

like a bell and a cannon that had been melted down

from the same dark ore of a life we were cut out of

like a wound in a loveletter we left unsigned for one another,

because good-bye was harder to write than just to let things go,

what words could I use that weren’t already

denuded of their shining like a windfall

of black dwarfs on the windowsills of time,

and the stars that night that clung to the sky

like bubbles in the evanescence of glass

or the grass to our flesh, all washed off now

as if they were grime, the quiet patina of time

gilding the dust like rainbows on the wings of flies?

And the wind asks, and the water sylphs want to know

and the wild willows are holding their breath like a veil

and the Tay is pulling a curtain of water aside in its wake

to hear about another stranger the earth swallowed

like a sacred syllable in the mouth of a snake

that envied the waterbirds their wavelengths and wings,

and though the skeletal birch and prophetic skulls

in the riverbed plead like the end of a dream

for one more lullaby in the ghost story of the moonrise,

I show them the black pearl of my heart

lustrous as hard coal to burn again in the furnace of dawn

on the dark side of the moon in partial eclipse

as I weep like a dragon for the secrets I keep

like myths of origin in the urns of things that are gone

like the irrevocable flightfeathers of the words and waterbirds

under the lost petals of fire that bloom in the eyes of the flower moon.

PATRICK WHITE

WILLOW-MINDED FRIEND OF MINE

WILLOW-MINDED FRIEND OF MINE

Willow-minded friend of mine

you’re the star of Isis in the palm of my hand

that keeps me from drowning in a sea of glass.

How often have I been washed ashore

on the coasts of your flesh

like a naked sailor in an icestorm

of breaking chandeliers

and been taken to see the king

by a princess doing laundry?

A firefly in the distance

might be a great star up close

and your every breath

seed the whirlwind

with golden drops of rain

after the tempest has exorcised its pain

and you grow more beautiful picture by picture

like someone who wants to be redeemed

in her own eyes

for things that only she could be.

But that’s not why I love you.

No siren no muse no priestess no witch

no shepherdess of exotic snakes

squirming with the future

like mystic themes around your body

no sacred whore ready to party in the temple

with Minervan night owls and Cepheid movie-stars

that don’t want anybody to turn the lights on

to see what’s going on in the darkness

they are to everybody,

you are to me more

than I have eyes to see

to the beginning and end of things

but I can feel the night within

flowing like dark energy through space

and tendrils of time growing like paisley lifelines

into something sweeter than the wine

the white mirror drinks from its own reflection.

Before the arising of signs

I can feel your presence moving in me

like unborn constellations playing chess with time

to see who shall be the blossom

who the root

who the leaf

and who shall prime the lightning of the vine.

Long before your veils are parted by no one

like rivers of insight

I can hear your stars

whispering things into my ear

that make whole worlds appear

rocking life in their arms like water.

Time is a mental space

with different flavours.

You taste like the wounded grace

of an eloquent truce with flowers

or as Dogen Zenji said in l238

the lucky day is when you discover it’s all one day

meaning one chameleon

turning many different colours

to match the hours it spends

in front of the mirror

that keeps it guessing

who’s the seer and who’s the seen.

The grass turns red.

The flower turns green.

How long have I waited for you

like a tide on the moon to come in

like the spoke of a tree for a rim of stars

like a metaphor in the chrysalis of a dragonfly for wings

you could see through like a stained-glass window

divining the silence like a witching wand

in a waterless church?

And it’s all just been a moment ago

that isn’t at the discretion of birth and death

I learned to breathe with you on the moon

like some atmospheric fish

transformed by a new medium

into whatever you wished me to be

when I was the lifeboat

in the eye of the endless sea

that washed me out like a cinder

with the tears of a passing mindstream

as if I got in the way of my own dream

and you?

You were the mystic specificity

as you will always be

in the lunar pearl of it all

that sometimes doubles for my skull.

And isn’t it funny how when the night screams

it’s always an aurora

that everyone mistakes for dawn?

A snail of a comet smears the mirror and moves on

and it’s as good a path as any to follow I suspect

if I had a destination in mind

that wasn’t looping in retrograde like a noose.

I may be as footloose and fancy-free as a ghost

but there’s no end of this longing

that keeps making me up as I go along

trying to be true and strong

to what I love the most about being dead.

I think of you

and I burn in the terrible clarity

of a light that’s never fallen on anyone

as if illumination were endlessly eyeless.

I think of you

like water looking up at the moon as it rises

and I realize the wingless openness

of the dark gates before me

and pass through like a midnight sun

whose seeing evaporates in the morning

like visions and words and waterbirds

that have been transcendentally uplifted out of the graves

of their own reflections.

We are what we need to be to each other

without knowing what that is

like a phantom kind of picture-music

that’s always changing its lyrics

to keep up with the mood of the times

whether it’s the high definition tunnel vision

of the smokey beekeepers

trying to bring law to the unruly flowers

or the dark energy of an expansive space

driving the stars like exiles

into the absolute sublimity of a starless place

deep in the heart of God

that even creation can’t fill

or we’re just kicking pebbles down the road together

through clouds of white sweet clover

like afternoon companions of each other’s solitude.

Time is the poetry of the eternal

when love sits by itself under its willow tree

and watches the stream pass by

like the flowing eye it drinks from.

I drink pellucidly on the moon

from old grails of sacred blood

like an ark that survived the flood

only to find itself abandoned like a farm

on a mountaintop with two of every kind

except for one

who made his way down alone with the alone

to sing his lover up out of the dead

as if he were missing one of his eyes

and the other had turned to stone.

PATRICK WHITE

THE SINGULARITY

THE SINGULARITY

You were the singularity at the bottom of the blackhole

where all the light and life and love and money went.

You were an abyss that just couldn’t stand being empty.

You wanted to be a fat void in the midst of plenty.

You took your own body as the Standard Model of the Universe.

You were a death-maze that tried to make a living selling breadcrumbs.

You used to tell me

I could run from the blessing

but I could never escape the curse

of being an optimist for whom

things kept turning out for the worst.

You always did try to make an original point of the obvious

but your clarity was invariably cruel and cunning.

So I gave up arguing with you

and learned to grow orchids

that slept with secrets

in the shadow of that outhouse on the moon

you kept up like a diary of your changing moods.

Being the stupid one

I thought love had substance and content

the way thought and feeling had flesh and blood.

You thought it was a wardrobe of auroral attitudes

you could put on or take off as you wish

like smoke in a mirror

or a whisper of lingerie.

Sex with you was always a good day

and we had a lot of them

and that’s how I ended up staying for six years.

That and the compassion I felt

for the tears of rage you would shed

like rain on the lava of a wounded volcano

that would pop up on the west coast without warning

and bury both of us like Pompey and Herculaneum

trying to grow geraniums on its harassed slopes

like the hippies who grew pot

on Mt. Saint Helen’s

who aren’t selling anymore.

I always thought you gave your love to someone

and that’s what made it a gift

but you bestowed yours upon me

as if it were a right

I should be grateful to receive.

I was abolished from diplomatic lip-service

in the court of the mad queen

time and again

for things I didn’t mean

even in my native language

that were just too insane to believe.

But the body endures.

The mind copes.

And despair and ashes to me

given the tragic optimist I am

are full of high hopes

like spiritual loveletters

in earthbound envelopes.

And just as I did then

when at least I taught you

what not to look for in a man

I hope you’ve found the simulacrum

of the real life you were looking for

and it’s healed that crack in the mirror

that used to scar you like a black sail

on an empty horizon

waiting for cosmic news of the weather

that kept running you aground

like a widow on a beach

everytime the tide came in like providence

and left you just out of reach of yourself

like a wedding bouquet

the bride tossed away over her shoulder

without looking back.

As for me

things have gotten worse for the better over the years.

Swimming through quicksand.

Swimming through stone.

Impersonal revelations of intimate stars.

Sometimes the moon shows me

the fossils of the ancient oracles

she’s pressed between the pages

of her darkest shales

like deep wounds

gashed in the matrix of space and time

that were the distant ancestors of us

who have survived the truth of their prophecies

like scars without a myth of origin.

I still end where I begin

like the black grammar of a white magician

answering for myself before my own inquisition

for heresies that were holy enough

to be condemned to the fire as proof

of their volatility.

Your blood was a watercolour.

Mine was an oil.

And red was the colour of pain.

I shook things off me

like water off the fur of a dog

that’s just come ashore

on the far side of the river.

You ran in the rain

like a crazy ribbon

from the gifts you were given to give

and didn’t know how to survive.

But wanting to live

isn’t the same thing

as trying to stay alive

though they’re the two ends

of the same telescope.

When despair becomes

the orthodoxy of the age

and sinks like a heavyweight

who threw the fight like Atlantis

when it lost its sea-legs

the only true protest is hope

and the abandoned courage of a bubble

expanding like the universe

to break the surface

in a rapture of aquatic freedom

and disappear into the new medium

of an evolving atmosphere with wings.

And sometimes it’s hard

to remember the way things turned out

as if the certainties were brief weathervanes

of the good days that never came

and the doubts went on forever

looking for scapegoats they could blame

like the leftover smoke

of an extinguished candleflame.

And though I might be slow

I know I’ve been thorough over the years

in wishing you love and life

and laughter among friends.

So I’ve never summoned you by name

like a ghost to a seance of strangers

who think they know you better than I do

and make way too much of too many little things

that don’t matter anymore.

I haven’t swept the stars off my stairs in years.

And there are loveletters

piled up in the mailbox

that say I’m in arrears

and when the windows cry

as they sometimes still do

looking out over the vastness

of the view from here

at the solitary figures fading

into the landscape of their homelessness

I try to cheer them up

like a reflecting telescope

by getting them to look at the bright side of things

by exchanging their lenses for mirrors

the way love does

new lamps for old

when everything that’s beautiful and lucid

disappears under a veil of rain

like old eyes looking out at the world

through the new tears of a stranger’s pain

like a faithful death-wish that’s come true again.

PATRICK WHITE

THE ONLY WAY TO CONTROL THINGS

THE ONLY WAY TO CONTROL THINGS

The only way to control things is with an open hand.

Water on rock

a fist can’t do anything to stop the rain

that keeps washing its bloody knuckles

by kissing the raw red buds

of the pain-killing poppies clean.

Anger grows ashamed of itself

in the presence of unopposable compassion

just as planets are humbled by their atmospheres.

The soft supple things of life insist

and the hard brittle ones comply.

Bullies are the broken toys of wimps.

Power limps.

But space is an open hand.

Mass may shape it

but it teaches matter how to move

just as the sky converts its openness

into a cloud and a bird

or the silence nurtures

the embryo of a blue word

in the empty womb of the dark mother

like the echo of something that can’t be said.

The only way to control things is with an open hand.

Not a posture of giving.

Not a posture of receiving.

Not a posture of greeting or farewell.

Not hanging on or letting go

but the single bridge they both make

when they’re both at peace with the flow.

It’s not the branch it’s not the trunk

it’s not the root it’s not the fruit

but the open handedness of its leaves

that is a tree’s consummate passion.

Isis tattoos her star on their palms

like sailors and sails

to keep them from drowning

and into the valleys of their open hands

that lie at the foot of their crook-backed mountains

the aloof stars risk the intimacy of fireflies

and fate flows down like tributaries into the mindstream

as life roots its wildflowers on both shores

as if there were no sides to the flowing

of our binary lifelines.

The only way to control things is with an open hand.

You cannot bind the knower to the knowing

as if time had to know where eternity was going

before anything could change.

X marks the spot where all maps are born

to lead you back to yourself

like a treasure you forgot to bury.

An open hand is a ploughed field ready for seed.

An open hand is the generosity that is inherent in need.

An open hand is and is not an open hand.

No hinges can define it

because it’s not a two-faced Janus

standing in the doorway of a new year.

An open hand doesn’t look forward.

And open hand doesn’t look back.

What opens like a flower doesn’t close like a door

and when a hand opens

it opens at the urging of a light within

that makes the light without

glow like the mother of wine.

An open hand isn’t the writing on the wall.

Moses came down the mountain with a stone tablet

but an open hand makes

an avalanche of the ten commandments

and goes its own way without submission or regret

like a vine with a prehensile grip.

An open hand is the only way to control things

when things are out of control.

It isn’t a day of yes followed by a night of no.

There’s nothing divine or infernal about it.

An open hand is all that humans need to know

about their own nature

when they let their gods and demons go.

Nothing missing.

Nothing complete.

An open hand is enlightenment.

A fist puts a bad spin on ignorance.

An open hand is a book older than the Bible.

An open hand isn’t a tool

or a new kind of stealth weapon.

An open hand isn’t a weathervane

or a rudder in the wind

or one wing of a bird

with a secret twin.

An open hand is the only way to control things

without killing them for their own good.

An open hand does not say thou shalt not

or you should.

An open hand is not a white flag of surrender

a victory flag or a sloppy salute.

It’s not the price tag you look at

when no one is looking

on a second-hand suit

you’ve been wearing out like a body for years.

An open hand isn’t the hesitant offer of an uncertain friend

held out like a placebo that can’t heal anything.

You might have fixed the palings

but you still haven’t mended the fence.

An open hand is the way things feel when you’re truly alive.

It’s got nothing to do with how the fittest survive.

An open hand is the afterlife of a fist that died in defeat

trying to unseat an older power

that swallows it like a god

dissolves a cube of sugar in water

and finds it sweet to be absolved of the deed.

An open hand is a cup that could hold an ocean

but never overflows.

An open hand isn’t a relic of the thorns

that pinned a butterfly messiah

to the webbed cross of a sacrilegious spider

or Ciceronian appendages nailed to a senate door

like a bill that didn’t pass

or Che Guevara’s hands cut off

by the people they laboured for like rebel fruit

that went against the grain of the tree

that poisoned everybody like a jackboot.

An open hand isn’t a proposal for reform.

It’s not the new norm.

It’s not what not to do

when people are watching you

to see if you’re the same as them.

An open hand is the only way to control things

when you don’t know what to do

at the genetic crossroads

of cosmic and domestic things

that weigh on your mind

like the dirty laundry of evolution

piling up in the corners

like falling standards of confusion.

It doesn’t question anything

so it never rejects an answer.

It doesn’t pretend to be the sign

that beatifies its own suggestion.

An open hand isn’t trying to make

a housewife of an iris

or trying to nail things down

to get a grip on things

like a man who knows how to suffer like a floor.

An open hand isn’t something

worth living or dying for.

It won’t save your life.

It won’t take it.

It’s not a lifeboat or an anchor.

Four fingers and a conductor for a thumb

don’t make a choir of flesh

that will make the angels come like groupies

and just because

you’ve got runners on four bases

doesn’t mean you can hit a home run

like the stand-in umpire

behind the home plate of your palm.

Four men out and one man on

and the thumb bunts to the outfield

in the last inning of a pre-fixed playoff game

that shaves the score like a pencil into points.

An open hand is the only way to disarm a fist

that buries the road you’re on

like an improvised explosive device

timed to go off in your face like a hand grenade.

The only way to control things without controlling them

is with an open hand.

An open hand does not deny or affirm.

An open hand legislates like the light

and judges like the rain.

Five fingers are the roots of a hung jury.

Five syllables of an incommensurable life sentence.

An open hand isn’t the servile agent of a wilful mind.

It doesn’t do anyone’s bidding.

It isn’t the delta at the end of a long river

whose life flashes before its eyes

like an ancient civilization

as it disappears into the sea.

An open hand doesn’t squat on the ground

like some denuded navel-gazer

who mistakes his belly-button for his third eye.

An open hand says as much to the deaf as the blind.

The only way to control things is with an open hand.

An open hand is the sign of a mind at rest

with what it doesn’t understand.

An open hand isn’t a contract with anything.

An open hand isn’t a flatlining fist.

An open hand is a loveletter that doesn’t insist

on being returned like a dove

that’s just discovered land.

An open hand is the fairest image of a god

ever created in the likeness of a human.

An open hand is the omnidirectional threshold

of the homelessness we built

on a cornerstone of quicksand

like water moonlighting as a rose.

An open hand isn’t celibate or promiscuous.

An open hand warms itself

around the cold fires of the stars

and tells tall tales about the constellations

of scars and callouses that have sprung up

like villages along its lifelines.

The only way to control things is with an open hand.

An open hand is a myth of origins

that ends where it begins.

An open hand makes no distinction

between matter and mind.

An open hand is the enlightened gesture

of a human who knows without grasping

what they don’t understand

and welcomes without expectation

all those who cross over it like the floor

and pass under it like the roof

of a house without a door or a window

to keep anything in or out.

An open hand is as certain as doubt

it doesn’t know what it’s all about

but the only way to control things

when they’re coming apart

and coming together

is with a hand

as open as an ample heart

that gets it by letting it go

one breath one death

one footstep one heartbeat

one spring one autumn

one hail and farewell after another.

The only way to control things is with an open hand.

An open hand rests in its power like the flower

the Buddha gave away to Ananda

as all he could and couldn’t and wouldn’t say.

Seekers look for starmaps to paradise

like the night looking for the day

that shines all around them

and blinds them.

But look as they may

an open hand is always the way that finds them.

The only way to control things is with an open hand

that binds us to the boundlessness

of letting go of who we are

like a star on the lam

that poured itself out like insight

to say to the night I am.

This is my hand.

It’s open.

PATRICK WHITE