NOT TO BE WITH YOU

Not to be with you,

not to know your breathing beside me,

not to be able to put my arms around you

and kiss the black candles away,

change skies with a glance,

feel your mystery seeping into me

like a veil of rain,

my heart a hive of stars,

my body crazed

by a fragrance of the moon,

to feel the intimate moment hang

like a drop of dew

poised like the silence that falls before it;

is a mountain peering down into its own valley

at a whisper of cloud

that passes like a secret,

a red carpet of blood that wants to fly

laid out for an unknown dignitary.

You are not here

but I walk with you alone

under the smudged moonlight,

through the tidal shadows of soft, ebbing trees,

and gusts of warm air touch me like your skin,

and the assent in your eyes

is a colour only the heart can see,

and my longing is a map to anywhere

my mouth might meet yours,

and my hands visit the shrines of your body

like pilgrims full of reverence

for an infidel religion

with beautiful eyes,

with sacred scars and a language

that is born along

with the serpent fire of my ripening passion

to annihilate myself in your doorway,

to unspool the river

in the supple coral of your water-rose,

the keel of my tongue

circumnavigating your startled equators,

and all your tender meridians

bowstrings taut with anticipation

of electric arrows released in ecstasy,

both of us wounded by insatiable joy

in a storm of mushrooms and black cherries,

in the oceanic hunger of the sea

for an oracular island of forbidden frenzies,

for mystic releases

that free oblivion from servitude

and teach the chains of existence

to dance to the music

of their own liberation,

their own falling away like rain,

that the true ground of their being

was always the wind

that binds the message to the world

in the arms of lovers creating each other

from black palettes in the darkness,

from moss and apricots,

from the long wharves

of interminable kisses

that gore like the horns of garden snails,

from the fountain-mouths of ancient eclipses,

the dark abundance

of the feast that is received like eyes

and the night chutes that open nocturnal poppies

like auroras of furious sugar

to squander the stars

in the throats of jubilant black holes,

to appease the unattainable

with the inexhaustible satiation of gratified silos.

Not to be with you,

my wings ache with urgent migrations,

and I am as impetuous as a sword

in the foundries of my blood,

and my voice

is the remote thunder of humbled apples,

and my dragons swarm

the abyss of your beauty

like shepherd moons, sunspots,

a calendar of desires

that marks every phase of your body off

as an apostate holiday,

the omen that winnows

a harvest of bells.

Not to be with you is a cloak

that weighs more than the night sky,

the eyelid of an iron rose,

a feather of lead

that drowns in its own reflection

like the shadow of a flightless longing,

the unquenchable silence

of a well on the moon

listening for rain.

PATRICK WHITE

THE DAY AN EMPTY ENVELOPE

The day an empty envelope, the clouds

islands of their own in a slow wind,

gathering out of nothing, going anywhere

the blue conception of the dispersing sky urges

above the green, summer turmoil of the trees.

I wake up wondering if love is just a word

or a whisper of smoke from distant mountains

or a tuberous begonia someone tore up last night

in their madness to dramatize their exit out of ecstasy,

their roses, scalded lobsters, their heart

torn like a soggy dawn in the pincers of the moon.

And I have been here before at the end

of these long wharves pillared in departure,

standing firmly fixed in the tides of sorrow,

saying goodbye to the sky and the sea

that have cried enough stars for the night

to remember its light is the taste of oblivion.

The air breathes you in like an anchor of mist

and all the words we released like vows

gently unhooking their wings from the fishing nets

we found abandoned in the wake of a lunar desert

that had wandered off like an arsonist in the archives of its tears,

are pens that have flooded in our pockets of blood like oilslicks,

not the feather of song left that could fly.

And I should thank you for the bouquet of corals

you gave me like an island in a ocean of ashes,

and the nights my heart was a frenzy of mating eels

thrashing the silver waves in a ferocity of transcendence,

a rabble of moonlit tongues, that made me feel

the hanged man was at last a key someone would risk,

a boat moored to the wind that had at last found a door

with the eye of a water-lock and the Gulf Stream

of an infinite threshold it would take a galaxy to cross,

and there were voyages I dreamed, o, I dreamed

of naming continents after you, oceans on the moon

that teemed with startling new forms of luminous life

that did not salivate for each other like arrows on a food chain

but fell from the intensity of our wishing like rain.

I wanted to add your fire to mine on a pyre of thorns

and mounting the last constellation uttered in bliss

by the mouth of a burning rose immolated in her own beauty

rise like a kite trailing a thread of blood to show the stars

how to weave a life that breathes like silk

out of the mulberry cocoons of their nebular cradles,

auroras exhaled like the veils and ghosts of riverine light

that disclose the grace of a woman, secret by secret,

until even the stars are homeless gestures of ash,

crowns of flame enthroned in the abysmal domains

of the radiant mystery they could draw from

like water from the wells of your eyes

to refute the claws of time and space with flowers.

And it’s been four starless nights, four bleached days

since I last heard from you, no word, no sail, no wick,

no eyelid of a candle to open the darkness like a dream,

not a chromosome in a fortune-cookie to dispell my fate,

only the incremental atrocity of the cruel silence that salts the garden

with the radioactive fall-out of your nuclear absence

so that even my shadow glows like a sunspot that won’t wash off.

And I must tell myself you’re not the queen caprice

of a cherry in a hive of chocolate leaking honey

all over the sticky page of a theatrical candy-wrapper

blowing up the road like the obsolete playbill of a cliche

well attended by the ants who traffic in sugar.

I must tell myself over and over again like a wheel,

not to save myself like an enlightened pagoda

in a corner of the cones of the fools who wear

their disasters like the paper headlines of a daily heart,

not to adorn death with the lies of wounded heroes,

for I am a small planet of haunted wines

you can burst against the roof of your mouth like a grape,

and far too acquainted with eclipses and cremations

to exalt my ashes with the consolations of a reviving phoenix,

tell myself not to lawyer my sorrow with a congress of crows,

and in a crowd of placards and protesters, pretend that I am brave,

that my cause is just, that the world you’ve left me needs to be saved;

or that I can save it from myself like an arsonist

by learning how to swallow it like fire,

not to incriminate you among the cap-gun terrorists

who rage like chains in the doorways of their emergency exits,

their hearts boiling hand-picked scorpions like blackberries

to mitigate the acids of their glass wounds,

but to believe you’re still out there somewhere like a road

that has wandered off in a wilderness of directions,

though the mountains and trees all point the stars out to you,

that cannot conceive of where it leads until we both walk it.

I want to believe there’s no bodycount

behind the words of love you send me like refugees

that gather in the valleys of my heart like liberated fireflies,

that the lampshades of your poems are not wrapped in human skin

with a star pricked out by fangs and the repeating decimal

of a genocidal number too powerless to stop itself

from biting at the running sore of its own ulcerations.

I have never seen your face, heard your voice,

the wind more intimate with your skin than my longing,

but I have felt the stars within brighten in your presence

when all I could be to you over the miles, lives, the worn shoes,

was someone who charged space with gusts of ionic affinities,

hoping somehow the atoms knew, the rain, the hill in the fog

calling out to the drifting lifeboat with a disembodied voice

that there was yet a breath within a breath, a light within the light,

what I was before I was born to reach out empty-handed like this

to create you out of the nothing I am, a marvel more than me,

a clear fire that burns invisibly like breath on a windowpane,

the exhalation of a ghost startled by a spirit that lives

within and beyond it in a continuum of vital strangers,

closer to us than the patches on the underside of our eyelids.

I don’t know what I am to you; though I have hoped

and you have said things to me I could only disappoint,

but they have made me want to drink your face from my bare hands,

they have made me a fountain and a vine, a door that bleeds

among the quicksand foundation-stones waiting out the mountain,

and my heart was a pauper lavish with revelation, a glove

that felt the universe fit it like your hand, and the answers,

were as evident as birds gathering seeds in an open furrow.

We have grown over the months like the rain together

and maybe now we fall, maybe now this alloy of water

is to be threshed by the wind like wild rice

shaken into a birchbark prow of aboriginal moonlight,

and the waterlilies have finished blooming like asterisks

and the stirling is marred by the acids of black fingerprints,

and a patina of commonality makes the moon a cold stone,

but there’s a pause between accountable heartbeats,

a world between waking and dreaming, exits and entrances,

where I think everything returns without having left

like stars paled in the blazing of a lesser light that thrives,

and the heart receives itself back into its own hands like a ball,

and even in the rain-soaked journals of the autumn leaves,

the wind still addresses the flowers with its inconstancy,

and hands still find each other across the dangerous table

like the lost receiving the lost in a place of belonging

that is a stranger to them both on the same side of the river.

PATRICK WHITE

SAFE, EDUCATED WITNESS

SAFE, EDUCATED WITNESS

Safe, educated witness to bestial scenes

since I was born, the destruction of cities

and species, and helpless human beings

severed from their limbs like pruned branches

too close to the borders of warring powerlines,

whole families massacred like icons

in a video game by a real soldier

whose delusion wasn’t the same,

the blood-spatter of children

freaking the flower, I

loathe the indifference

of the one-eyed watchers

who look on impotently

like hardened gum

under their bomb-proof desks

weighing the risks for both sides

of unbalancing their covert genocides

like a second set of books of the dead.

Perverts blowing kisses like artillery shells

to children in their beds

who scream like murdered bells

and windfalls of deathheads,

billiard balls, and tiny skulls

that broke to start the game.

I thought I was a lucky man

to be born in the land of plenty,

and the cupboard is full

but my heart is an age beyond empty

and my spirit is savaged

by disgust and shame,

and under every pellucid, abstract thought,

laying itself down like money

at an ideological dogfight,

an abyss of bones

where the children rot

like the memory cards

of disconnected cellphones.

I listen to myself, I listen

to the distinguished commentators

and the prime-time spin doctors

passing out motorized walkers

like miracles for the mentally lame

and renewable treaties

for the kingdom to come

that fits over the head

of the planet now

like the used atmosphere

of a discharged condom.

Hell seems quaint by comparison

with the agony and the torment of here

where the natural, untaught decency of a human

is accosted by the atrocities

of a loveless heart

hooking the lives of children

on inverted question-marks

like flayed cattle

in an avant-garde abattoir of bad art

as everyone subscribes to the New York Times

to keep up with the latest alibis

to expurgate the mess

of regurgitated crimes

that aligns our vomit

to the wines of progress.

And everyone feels what they say

as if God sat in their corner

like a fool on a stool,

but no one ever says what they feel

when the heel crushes the head of a child

like a grape

and her sister is hauled away

like a voodoo doll at a gang rape.

Who caters the flesh feast

at these laden tables

of fat, old, impotent, girdled men

arriving in limousines

to discuss discussing a resolution

to put an end to a child’s screams?

Summoned like vampiric thorns

to the bloodbank of a rose

that bleeds like a child or the sea

everyone opposes saving the roses

until they can be arranged

like body parts and ashes

in the funeral vase of a policy

that crashes like a junkie

at the mention of withdrawal.

O mighty world

who eats the nations

like a pack of wild dogs a corpse,

necrophiliacs at a conference table

smearing make-up on the facts,

trying to turn their maggots into butterflies

by wrapping themselves in their flags

like the stars in the sky

and the waves of the sea

and squeezing the life

out of a child like striped toothpaste.

O vicious, pygmy abomination

you pricked your thumb

on the thorn of the crescent moon

when you reached out

to leech the blood of the rose

by crushing an army of four-year-olds.

O wild hog of runt-rage

goring the world

like a girl on your tusks,

it takes more than one star

to make a constellation

and a lot more than bloodshed

to school the eyes to see it

that look at you now

like children in terror,

the plinths of your shining,

sidereal teeth,

and the lonely myth

you drop like flyers over the city,

lip-service to a fraud without pity.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU'RE LONELY

YOU’RE LONELY

You’re lonely

and you think it’s because

you’re not understood

in a small town

where extraordinarily ordinary people

go about the business of living

without expecting glorious results.

You show up catastrophically

on my doorstep

at three in the morning

and ask if I’ll let you in like a wound

that has slashed you open like a mouth

and you know I won’t turn you away.

You don’t know what to do with your beauty

and neither do I

without a prelude to the encounter

and so you ask me how to live.

I turn myself inside out

looking for loose change

in the pockets of a dream

to drop into the begging bowl of the silence

and sliced by the insight

of a master in medieval Japan

tell you every step of the way

should crush the head of the question.

You think I am immediate and wise

and for the moment it’s a useful delusion

as I look into the reasonable facsimiles of light

that are posing as your eyes

and see a painful young woman

trying to sail like a swan through her first eclipse.

I dodge the euphoric arrows

that randomly fly

from your toxological lips

and try not to get sucked into

thinking of you as a wishbone with hips

and outrunning the flashflood of the effusion

turn my attention back to your confusion.

The moon is in my window.

A muse has come

to ask for inspiration.

Water asks the fire how to flow

but what you really want to know

what you truly want to learn

is how to burn.

You’re trying to pull the moon

like a hot sword out of a cold stone

to kill your lover over and over and over again

like a wasp on a brain

trying to sting itself into honey.

If you weren’t so beautiful,

you’d be funny

but I make the appropriate concessions

and listen to your accusations

like the intimate confessions

of a promiscuous nun

who’s never slept with anyone.

I listen quietly and tenderly

to the chafing of the restless snakes

in your angry abyss

gathering myself up like visionary rain

above the cauldron of a distant, cosmic ocean

to fall like a cooling kiss

on the flaring heads of the igneous.

I milk the fangs of the moon

into experimental antidotes

and no fool around match heads and cobras

summon the wind like an ambulance on standby

to immunize me against the toxicity

of your insistence

I’m your private school.

Morgana la Fey at Merlin High,

eager to learn, eager to deepen her darkness.

You want me to teach your eyes to flow

through a labyrinth of underground dreams

you’ve tunnelled through your pain like a blind mole

waiting for moonlight to wash you out

of all your crazy bloodstreams.

If you can’t live with the one you love

the way you long to

appealing to oblivious gods

maybe you can kill them into it.

If you’re hurt so deeply

you can no longer feel your heart,

maybe there’s an art

that can be mastered

to do it so discretely

the blood that unspools on the blade

prefers the wounded poppy of their death

that stalks them like a bloodclot in a rose

to the lonely craving of their next breath

to feel the edge again

that addicts them like the moon

to another hit on a battered vein.

I can hear what you’re thinking,

I can see what you feel through my fingers.

I know you haven’t come to heal

or put your hand in the hand of another

that isn’t folded like a secret loveletter

of Damascene steel

ghouled by jewels of blood.

I can peel the eclipse from your eyes

like an executioner’s hood

and fill the darkness

with the music of diamonds

falling like rain from their crowns of coal.

I can look into your eyes

like the lies you wanted everyone to believe in

and make them come true.

I can teach you to hunt like a magician

in the twenty-first century

and dropping your halo down to your feet

encircle you in the dark clarity

of an inviolable sanctuary

with gates of golden horn

that swing open like the moon

between the wingspan of her crescents.

Or I can turn a word like a stone

and set the angels free

like petrified bone

amazed by the new lucidity

that remarrows it like the clone

of a woman no one can be

until she returns the sword to herself

she lay down like the moon

surrendering to the sea

in a holy war

that cut the throats of the waves

and made widows of the sacred tides

she concealed like the secret insurgency

of her own dark urgency.

But since you asked

and the flower is already

half-unmasked by the morning

and the truth is only a voice away

from revealing itself,

and the hour scratches at the door

like a cat to be let in,

I will tell you

what the good and foolish never learn:

If you want to burn

like fire on the water

without going out

like a flame unwicked by the wind

that sins against it like a veil

it knots with nets of doubt

to gill the moon like shale,

you have to teach your demons how to sail.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU DON'T NEED TO PUT A SUPERNOVA IN A WINDOW

YOU DON’T NEED TO PUT A SUPERNOVA IN A WINDOW

You don’t need to put a supernova in a window

like a candle in a telescope

to help me find my way back to you

from the next galaxy over. I’m gone

like a sixties light show after the music was over.

But I didn’t close you like a door behind me,

I didn’t find you like a threshold

in the spirit’s lost and found

and try to return you to the house you belonged to.

I’ve always been a little ahead of myself

so when I said good-bye, it will be light years yet

before you know anything about it.

It’s just that time doesn’t linger in the doorway

of enlightenment, and eternity isn’t any closer to God

than the next moment is. A hundred billion stars

two thousand lightyears away and you,

checking the wiring on blasting caps in a beaver dam

that’s threatening to flood the road you’re on

as I go off like a firefly already

two mellenia into the future that’s looking forward

to meeting you eye to eye in a brighter place than this

just to see if you recognize me as I am.

Black matter in the lifemask of a blossom

peaking through the keyhole of the universe next door

to see if I’ve returned to my room like the moon

with a curfew it’s in my nature to break forever

whenever we are, if the timing’s not right.

If you can’t see in the dark what the light owes

to the shadows who have died for it

just to attract your attention from afar again

like a man who’s been tarred and feathered

and set aflame like a phoenix in the rootfires of the sumac.

Like an immolation that scatters the ashes of a burning house

all over the garden you’ve been tending

like a urnful of flowers about to come out.

Like a candle in the darkness enlightenment

snuffed out on the dark side of the moon

to keep you from being lost in the blazing like a star at noon.

I lead you away from me, like all I’ve ever wanted.

I say good-bye to keep death from saying hello along the way

as if it had met you somewhere before I came on the scene

like a flame thrower with a flare for arson burning

like the passion flower of a dragon on a pyre beside the Ganges.

To raise you up shining out of the grave of your aspirations

like lightning and fireflies in the updraft of my expedient means.

So when you cry over someone you’re missing like me,

your tears have the power of a sunflower in the garden after dark,

and the ashes turn green. And scarlet runners bind themselves

like the happy home fires of heretics to the triune axes of your tent poles.

PATRICK WHITE

NIGHT. A WHISPER OF RAIN.

NIGHT. A WHISPER OF RAIN.

Night. A whisper of rain. Peace in my heart.

A penny on the third eye of the hurricane

I’ve been trying to ride out all day without

having it throw me off like a big cat on its back.

Farewell, turmoil. I retract my claws

like quotation marks and crescent moons

around the silence of your name.

The fallen pine boughs of your broken wings.

Inspiration doesn’t trample on things

like flowers and stars. No more. No more

of those feelings that were meant to be as famous

as a Trojan horse to a poet grazing on the plains of war.

Eyes running down the windowpane in tears

as if they were teaching it to cry. Listen to the rain

deepen the silence like the roots of silly flowers

when you fire the voice coach

and teach them to paint watercolours.

It’s sad. But I add that poignancy to the light

like a fragrance of the moon to an apple orchard

and let it dream like wine in the dark

until I taste it again in the windfalls of late September

and in the retreating rosaries of grace leaving like birds.

For the moment I am the inclusive intimacy

of a passion that doesn’t scorn the fruit of its outcome.

I kiss my skull the same way I kiss the blossom.

Come life, come death. Two feet on the same path.

I don’t split hairs like the wishbone of the road I’m on

and not expect to lose my way back home

wherever that is now the astrolabe is blind and starless

and I drift like a paper lifeboat in a truce with the sea.

I should raise naval flags like spring flowers

to signal the relative victory of a few short hours

but the candles have already sent the message in flames

and the shadows have answered: message received.

No need of tomorrow and much less of yesterday

let the moment tend to the affairs of its own will

I’m an apostate event unbound from the stake

of the irreligious history of the world trying

to burnish lead into gold in the wrath of a volcano god

someone met on the way to the promised land

and asked to join the caravan at the wells in Median

to compound the absurdity of visionary matchbooks

that rained manna and vipers from the opposite eyes

of the mirage of an hourglass skinny-dipping in the desert

to renew the virginity of time like a sundial on the moon.

Rare revelation to the changelings of lust

released on the river like prophetic decoys in a false dawn

to lure the waterbirds into friendly fields of fire

as if to say you can come this far, no higher.

There’s never been a star named after a human

except for Cor Caroli, the heart of Charles the Second,

dimly under Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider,

under the handle of the Big Dipper I raise to the lips

of a mermaid in the desert like real water

to a true believer in the midst of delusion

just to hear her sing again on the rocks of longing

like a waterclock on a windowpane in the rain.

And I don’t want to tie her to the bowsprit of a shipwreck

that went down at the end of her song,

the whole town on board this leaking ark

and she’s the only one that’s crying into a lifeboat

like a woman with her face in her hands at the news.

Forty nights and forty days of rain in the spring,

the earth’s a hydrocephalic with water on the brain.

And the roads are cobbled with sloppy frogs,

and the darkness is dense with a wardrobe of sorrows

that hangs in the air like an era of hesitation

above the crystal slipper dancing shoes and rubber boots

in the pungent closets of the watershed

that waltzes them like rain on the Tay River

under chandeliers of light-footed starmud

in the abandoned ballrooms of the willows dancing

like gusts of air to the heritage harps

that shine like constellations in their high-strung hair.

A train howls like a wounded animal in the distance,

an iron horse. The nightwatchmen have gone out

like fireflies, but not the streetlamps that have stayed on

like starmaps in the rain to walk the drunks home

arm in arm, crying in their cups like watered down wine.

Nothing divine, earthly or infernal, the eye of time

no more vernal in the east where the moon rises

than eternal in the west where the sun sets,

I’m not playing solitaire in the rain with old regrets,

I’m at peace with the stars that are caught like civilians

between storm fronts, as their seeds get washed away

like flower bombs in a flashflood of shell-shocked rivulets

someone stepped on by mistake. And I’d rather keep

the worst of my war-stories to myself, than swap them

with the vets being strafed by the rain of ricochets

in the Legion’s parking lot where things are fought all over again

as their wives usher them to the passenger side of their cars.

Just the rain and me. As if we were born a moment ago.

And neither of us had anything to fight about.

And I was the bud of a wound that hadn’t started bleeding yet,

like a shrieking poppy or a stoic rose, and it

wasn’t the cure that washed all the blood off

like a paint rag of a sail in a Pacific sunset hemorrhaging at sea.

Just the rain and me. Doing what we both do best.

And all our labour effortless as tears in the eyes of the night.

PATRICK WHITE