HOUSE FULL OF SPIRITS

House full of spirits, suffering ones, dead flies

punctuate the way

your lives have settled

on the windowsills of an indifferent eternity;

as foretold, the wind

has raked up your footprints like leaves,

and your smile no longer denudes the rose,

not even a rag of flesh

to sop up your exquisite tears.

And still, no one understands your pain,

no one sits around your heart,

the raging blue fire of your fragrant grief

trying to water your eyes like gardens.

And the brides move like waves

without a sea, the shadows of young horses,

and love that promised so much

down on its knees at the end of a wharf

that never led anywhere,

thistled into hatred and smouldering suicide,

and blood that rattled its chains at the moon,

and the years passed without remark

as if the measure of a life

were a butter knife and a French carnation.

Late at night, when the town sleeps,

when every thought

falls like the feather of a passing bird

or a pellet of bitter rain against the weeping glass,

as if the unrighteous were being stoned

by those without sin, I feel you

looking for your passage back through me,

as if you would adorn my voice

with the phantom bells of a forgotten joy

you never told anyone about,

as if you would add the ghost down

of your aimless autumn

to the warmth and moisture of my breath,

and flavour the air

with the subtle auroras, the secret dawns

of your quiet dispersals,

the petal of a blind candle

shedding its light

with every exhalation.

Take what you need,

the sorry cargo

of what you are able to carry;

and even if I don’t know what room

I am the door to,

what window I look through,

use me as your small hunger suggests,

the feast and silo of your unknown needs,

the penumbral gardens of the world next door

that never turns the music up loud.

I will leave myself out

like a portion of the garden

after harvest

for the birds who must winter forever

on a dead branch stiff with time.

And I will not ask about you;

I will not look into your eyes

as if I leaned over the wall of a well

to listen for how far the pebble I wished on

more out of habit than faith

had to fall before it drowned

in the shapeshifting starmaps of your watershed.

Be what you are, the fragrance

of the lingering rose in stale lace,

the hesitation in the shadows of intenser forms,

I ask nothing of you

and expect even less.

I have my own solitudes to cultivate,

the business of being human to get on with,

and beasts at the gate

who stutter like hinges,

energies darker and older than coal,

begging me to be the one

to carry my corpse the rest of this journey

that lies still in its coils

waiting for the last breath,

the last murmurous pulse

to quit my poor body.

Even among faces and hands,

even on the abandoned street

nodding disarmingly

at the suspicious outcasts

ostracized by plaster rooms

and hooded for hanging

in the doorways that I pass,

I am driftwood on a remote and lonely beach,

the bone of a thousand island storms,

each a transfiguration of my heart

rounded out in the brutal tides

and undertows of sorrow.

And the hands of the clock

don’t point at numbers anymore

but shine radiantly in all directions

as if the hour were a vivid gypsy

trying to dance the truth away.

And no one knows more

than the old, wooden office chair

I’m sitting in

as if I were enthroned by the life

of my own mind,

what it is I’ve been doing all these years

stuffing symbols like fortune cookies,

the vulva and wombs

of chromosomatic destinies

every one of which I’ve had to eat and live

before I could read the whisper of blood

that it was written in.

I could have made chairs,

I could have fixed shoes,

nailing on new heels with tacks and stars,

buffing the night with a spin of a brush,

I could have proposed propositions

about propositions,

and been a teacher, I suppose,

toiled at something simple

and recognizably purposeful;

nibbled nocturnally at a salad of money

when the garden was left until the morning

to the shy and the discrete.

But I was a rage

of arrogance, lies, and delusion,

I was black lightning that sneered at repose,

and any notion of the heart was justified

that stoked the furnace with the dead.

And I had to know what love was

and the damp star under the leaf

of a woman’s body,

and oblivions that tasted of honey and chalk,

and the suggestive familiars of a darkness

rich with the ores of a stranger’s voice

feathered with the light

of unknown constellations

extinct as the dice of a crucial gamble.

Enamoured of the eloquence

of the rarest paradoxes and absurdities,

considering the nature of the sea

I lived beside, and the moon

that edged her crescents on the anvil of my heart,

and the agony of being alive

that I could not overcome, the unanswerable emptiness

that always stands like the last syllable

at the deltas of the silence,

before I enter the unimpeachable abyss of its wisdom

like a falling tower

trying to bridge the infinite

by skipping mystic stones out over the sea,

and the way I always splinter into tears

like the eyes of a message in a glass bottle

that bobs at my feet to tell me I am lost and cast away,

what else could I be, born

with this talent for autumn, but a poet?

PATRICK WHITE

FEEL LIKE THERE’S A BEAST

Feel like there’s a beast in the darkness

eating my eyes.

I’m a moon-bull

at a crossroads of solar swords

down on it knees

hemorrhaging like a poppy.

And there are constellations

I’ve never heard before

playing the harp of my horns

with pensive fingertips.

How strange this rag of life

soaked in tears and blood is.

Everything dies like a snowflake on a furnace,

a rock on an autumn mountain,

no two the same.

There are nights, there are

vigils of darkness

when the mirror can no longer bear

the weight of this feather of fire,

this vision of life

that estranges the spirit

of those who love it most

like a funeral bell

that once drank to the folly of love.

I am a snakepit of lightning

knotted in a glacier of ice

and every emotion

is the undertow of the tide in a sea of eyes

on the cold skull of the moon,

every thought, a stone lifeboat

inundated by the waves

it’s convinced it’s saving from drowning.

Once I was the dupe

of my own ideals,

now I am the master of none.

This far into the abyss

you forget the name of the god

you died in the name of;

you have squandered your certainty

on greater and greater risks,

the enciphered lotteries of mythic necessity,

only to discover,

though you traversed eras like deserts

that made a skull of your faith,

the donkeys have eaten all the mangers,

and there is as much radiance in the eye

of the dead serpent on the road

as there is the eyelash of a star.

A tear is not a fountain of seeing,

nor a drop of blood, a rose.

How rare the sword in its silence

among all these chatty scissors at war

trying to cut along the dotted lines

of their border highways

crammed with refugees

they once called lovers,

the horizon slashed

and bleeding like a letter.

I want to calculate the half-life of pain;

the pillar of ore it calls home;

the elemental devolution of its atomic evictions

into the leaden passion of a base metal.

I want to know what I’ve turned into.

I want to know what’s making the stars

throw down their spears of light at my feet

though my heart’s out in the open

like a voodoo doll

waiting for a donor transplant.

I want to see myself

opening a door in the mirror

to someone with absolute eyes

irrevocable as yesterday’s rain.

Let the star know

the flower it engenders;

let the rose

taste its own honey.

Blind in a dream; blind,

what light roots in the darkness

that I should want to

throw off this robe of blood like a sky

to slip through the eye of the needle

that binds the seams of this world

like a bird

with the single thread of a life in its beak,

washed out of God’s eye

like a firefly snuffed

in a torrential downpour of stars?

Why am I

always one heart too many

over the threshold of the truth

I had to leave home to discover?

Am I a hoax in tears

or a tear away from a gate and a rafter?

Let the wave know the sea

that packs its caravan on the moon,

let the silence of the waking abyss

write indelible preludes

with a last kiss

that goes on forever

like the white autumn wind

in a turmoil of seeds

that demonically exceed

the life they’re after,

flower by flower,

death by death

like the pulse of a bell

setting the doves free

in the towers of farewell.

It’s the eloquence of a tree

to say what life is

when the full moon ripens

in its leafless branches

and the heart beats

like a windfall of silver apples,

though I have tried,

but love is a bridge

on a finger of water

that not even the moon

can slip off like a ring

when the wind rises

like a gaping fish

to swallow the chimes and eyehooks

of its matriculate ripples.

And with each breath of the night

I took and returned,

I have aspired to succeed

at every failure I was ever inspired by.

I raised every sail,

crossed every wave,

every eyelid, every petal

of the sea of life

in the heart of the rose

only to drop the first crescent of the moon

like an anchor

in the furnace of a dream.

PATRICK WHITE

I LIKE THE FEEL

I LIKE THE FEEL

I like the feel of the new heels on my cowboy boots.

I like the feel of breathing in joy like oxygen,

of moving from one small joy to another

without pomp or pageantry

like the constellation of a black swan

on a midnight mindstream

drifting through the small torches of the stars

that won’t go out in any kind of water.

And I don’t know why I’m wounded

deeper than tears by joy

whenever I witness any undoubted example

of human excellence

and penumbrally share in the triumph

remembering how truly astonishing

a human being can be

when compassion and insight

are the fruit and roots of the tree.

So much in the world I abhor,

horrors and sorrows and atrocities

that violate the elemental dignity of life

as it expresses itself in a human so deeply

even the silence cuts out its tongue

as an offence against

the unspeakable decency of the darkest abyss

when it stands before evil.

Like a golden fish in a polluted stream

slurried by a nuclear reactor

into a cancerous elixir

I have ingested every toxic meme

of a sick society in a feverish dream

and I cannot help but think and feel and live

whatever’s written on the water

to soil the stars

that thought they were out of reach

and make manic depressives

of the waves that spoil the beach.

A child of my times, the Zeitgeist, the Holy Ghost,

and the jinn at every well

like the forbidden fires of holy explosives

wrapped in folds of smoke,

I see through the glass darkly

like everyone else

who paints the eye of their telescope

with the shepherd moons

of despair and hope

and reports their observations as the truth

to whomever might be listening.

I can humble the night with my darkness

when the light goes out

and I have fought for years

with the child that I am

not to feel guilty or vulnerable

whenever I was taken unawares

by some happiness

that spilled over the rim of the black hole

that indelibly kept my cup full.

Now I rejoice in the emptiness of things

as useless as rocks and people

and feel a great tenderness for anyone

who needs to feel anything more.

I like the way your gate is hanging by a hinge.

I like the dead bee on the pyre

of the late-blooming fire

that consumes it like a last kiss.

I like the way my portrait’s turned toward the wall

like a delinquent outside the principal’s office

listening for footsteps down the long, empty hall.

Lightning in the lighthouse

or fireflies on the moon

I like the way my Zippo snaps shut

like the beak of a turtle at the feather of the flame

it rose like an ancient moon from the muddy depths

to pull under.

I find joy in the slightest,

in the cast away and the spurned,

in the tiny birds that have learned

to glean the dragonflies

off the car radiators

and the way people like to be found

like hubcaps at the side of the road

holding up a mirror to the beauty

of the wild irises

like a new logo

they hope will catch on.

When you haven’t been saved from anything

there isn’t much left to save you from

or any point in trying

to save the ashes from the fire

after everything’s gone up in smoke

so why ox yourself

to the unbearable yoke of a cross

trying to grind bread out of starwheat

when the children you labour to save like seed

have already died for the night

with nothing to eat?

Who needs to turn themselves into a broom

when they’ve drunk their mirages dry

to sweep the deserts off the stairs

of an afterlife in an empty asylum

that talks to itself like the moon?

I don’t care what kind of bars

silver, gold, iron or bone,

spiritual or corruptly marrowed

by the tainted terrestrial

you want to put on the window

to keep the stars out like thieves at the gate,

I’m already in.

And you’re way too late.

I like to live my life

as if I were getting away with something.

I like being weeded out like a key

to a door that time forgot to close

like the coffin lid of the nightwatchman

who kept an eye on things like a flashlight

looking for his flashlight,

his mind for his mind.

I like being less and less of me

like a rogue sunset that sheds its roses

like a watercolour of its eyes in the void

to see more clearly into the emptiness

there’s nothing to be in this nothingness

that isn’t a last lifeboat without oars

and no one in it to rescue

jumping ship in a turbulent dream.

Illusory cures for illusory diseases.

And once you’re restored to clarity

does it really matter

what the medicine means?

I like the tear in my wounded blue jeans.

I like the autumn dyes that set your hair on fire

like the Gatineau Hills

risking everything

as you squander your leaves like rain-cheques

in the overly salubrious poker-faced casinos of Quebec.

I like the day I was let out of school

with eternity for a recess.

Why spend your life

panning your own mindstream

for the fool’s gold of the iron pyrite rule:

Do unto others before they do unto you,

when you know as well as Wall Street

things aren’t what they seem?

Look how an apple tree lives.

It gives. And it thrives

by just expressing itself

like a bouquet in the hand of a bride

that walks like a bridge to the altar

and marries herself in her own eyes

to the earth she’s rooted in

holding her green arms up

to the orchards of the Hesperides

that blossom among the stars

like holy ancestors.

I like the way the comets stray

like hair across her face

and the way she twists her mouth

like driftwood in the sun

to blow them away.

And I like the blaze

of the supernovae of enlightenment

who give it all back to the night

like a blood transfusion,

a hemorrhage of light,

and even more,

these small illuminations

that arrive through the night and day

like anonymous stars and flowers

beside a death bed in a private room

where only the dying know what to say.

Stars above the mountain.

Flowers in the valley.

I like the way the moon’s punked out in the alley

between the church and the funeral home.

I like the way I refuse to assume I know where I’m going

like a newly-hatched garden snake in the spring

or a stream setting out on its own

with nothing for a creekbed

but its own flowing

and how I always catch myself like a fish

rising to the hook and allure of a new direction

as if that were the truth north of not having one.

But let the goldfish nibble at the moon as they will

and swim through the tops of the trees

even as these fire-birds are flying through my roots.

I like the feel of the new heels on my cowboy boots.

I like playing the fool with my own molecules

as if I were madder than plutonium

at having to break my balls like a kick in the nuts

with my own pool cue

everytime I give the game away

hoping somehow that will make me

as sane as lead in the table of things.

I see hell. I live in hell. I breathe hell.

And this pillar of I enshrines and embodies it

like the corpse of a murdered river

flowing through darkness

without any recourse or redemption

for its suffering.

No elixir. No grail. No lapis philosophorum.

No celestial gold to climb the ladders of fire

out of the dungeons of hydrogen

or missing link that breaks the chains

of the slaves in the hold

that labour in vain to endure.

Life isn’t fair or unfair.

Pure or compounded.

Civilized or savage.

Eternal or brief.

Loving or hateful

nor all of these together.

The sky isn’t just

the daily news of the weather

and the sea isn’t just

the tragic rage of co-conspirators

doing their worst to fall on their own swords

as if they could be turned

like waves against one another

and though it is immaculately kind of us to say so

the earth really isn’t our mother

if you go back far enough.

The earth is more of a nurse these days

trying to suckle

a hydra-headed wound

in a nightshift emergency ward

at the full moon

with plastic udders of blood

hanging from a cruclfix on wheels.

For every demon that jumps from heaven

an angel rises from hell

and I like the way

I’m learning to fall toward paradise

without a parachute

like a one-winged samara trying to angel on

with these seeds of loaded dice

riding the luck of the wind

like a wounded albatross

looking for new ground

at the foot of an empty cross.

As much has been gained as was lost.

I like the way time weaves the manes

of the sheepish dandelions

into the emergency ghosts

of a thousand scattered parachutes.

I like the way every conclusion about life

rights itself with its opposite

like a compass or a keel

and there are addictions

so intensely beyond the obvious dark mirrors

and shared needles of true north

trying to snort the stars

to light up the room like a legend

on a neon movie marquee,

unschooled states of mind

so powerfully clear and whole

your being is shot up like a tree in the lightning

that God wants to use for a voice-box

so that the tree is known by its fruits,

the taste of its words,

the joy of its birds,

the blossom of the moon on the dead branch

the butterfly on the green

like the whole notes and stops on the flute

of a snake-charmer

collaborating with the muse of a cobra

on a new song

two minutes long with a hook.

I like the way life goes on in the dark

beyond the painted eyelids of the billboards

running for re-election as a theme park

to improve the fibre-optics of their umbilical cords.

Even as the truth turns out

to be more of a lock than a key

that can be turned in your mouth like a word

to set you free of yourself

like a long thought-chain

that plugs the world into your navel;

and beauty is a pimped-out carnival

of surgical exaggerations and defects

that wear the look of lost luggage

under the sagging circus tents

that taxi down the runways of the rejects;

and the evil that is done in the world

cloaks the oceanic eye of awareness

with the cataract of an oilslick

that giftwraps everyone like water

in the same starless snake-skin

they tattoo their corporate logos on

like a new translation of the Rosetta Stone

in the demotic tongues

of the illiterate mobs of PsychoBabylon.

Even in this deepest eclipse of hell

that swallows us whole

like the eggs of the moon in a nest

and is running out of eyes to darken,

even here there are still small lighthouses of joy

that shine through the cracked skulls of these coasts

and haloes of fireflies

that still iris the eyes of the black holes

that are too deep for anyone to put down roots

or go witching for water with lightning

screwed into the eyesockets

of their spineless lightbulbs

playing peek-a-boo

in their see-through birthday suits.

Let evil offend or amend its own statutes.

I like the feel of the new heels on my cowboy boots.

PATRICK WHITE

DON'T APPROACH ME

DON’T APPROACH ME

Don’t approach me with your cozy round gratuities of old age

exuding geriatric sophistry

as if time had worn all my thresholds down

like old sway-backed stairs on their way out.

Vast space behind this blossom of my face

this bad moon

still clinging to my spine

and the night is not young or old.

Since the day I was born

I’ve been off the clock

like some illegitimate hour

no one ever talks about

and I’ve got a salmon-nature

that keeps swimming upstream

against the flow of things.

Saccharine ghosts of cotton candy

handing themselves out

like new hairdos of hovering kindness

to the kids on a derelict midway

missing a lot of lights

and if it isn’t that

it’s missing the point entirely

like bullets in the attic

trying to remember who

they were supposed to be shooting at.

Don’t pat me on the back

as if we were the same as one another

because we’ve outgrown our experience of things

and there’s this wise sunset glow

that wraps its light around things

like the golden skin of a sage in autumn

or an apple just before it goes rotten.

I was a fool then.

And I am a fool now.

And I will be a fool tomorrow.

And my life has been more of an anti-scripture

I’ve kept writing to warn people away from me

than the word of an abiding god

looking for followers.

The book of an idiot

though it took eighty years to write

though its falsehoods be fossilized

in pages of shale

like the lost diaries of time

confiding what really went on

is still just the prelude to ignorance

that reverences its own stupidity

by quoting itself lavishly

about evolution gone wrong.

We’ve all heard these brass knockers before

talking through the door

about what life’s taught them

and how you should live

if you ever want to see

through their window on the world

in a home of your own

what it means to look and never be

the stone that shatters the past like the moon.

The buddha rides the back of a braying buffoon.

A clown milks a judas-goat for cheese.

There was a man standing here a moment ago.

Now he’s on his knees in his own abyss

shaking his afterlife at the gods like a fist

as if he were always dying for someone else

the gods woke with a kiss on the palms of their hands.

As my friend Charles Fisher called them

dusties and mumblies whinies moanies

and weekend croanies

greeting each other like bookends.

The dust of the road may settle like vision

in the eyes of the dew

and the stars that once burnt so furiously

to be let in

gather like dead flies

on their potty windowsills

where all their cute trinkets lie about things

as if they were butterflies in the web

of a spider with wings

they were teaching to fly

but I like the demons who flock

to my states of grace like refugees

who’ve burned the bridges

of their homelessness behind them

and know there’s no way back to bind them

to any path but the one they’re on.

So it was in the beginning.

So it is now.

The road grows old before you do

and the body begins to fall apart like a weary shoe

that walks as if it knew its own way home without you

and the spirit can’t remember

all the names of God

it’s been beading for years

like a rosary of skulls that just keeps getting longer

and though you advise everyone not to

the world keeps making the same mistakes you do

even as the brahmins of desire succumb like autumn

to the ashes of the pyre

to get closer to the stars

like smoke from a dying fire

giving up the ghosts of its past lives

to animate something inestimably higher than sex.

But when it rains like a woman crying over my grave

it’s not the blossom that craves to be enlightened

by the firefly mystics in the valley of her sorrows

it’s my roots that want to possess the truth

like a woman in the prime of her youth

like a summer on earth

without giving a damn how it flys in heaven

or who it is that’s firing up the oven

because when I’m the starwheat

she’s the terrestrial leaven.

I’d rather cook in her fires

and break bread like my flesh with the devil

than immaculate myself

on the celestial sickle of the moon

like an old fertility king

that can’t get a rise out of anything.

PATRICK WHITE