MAKING PEACE WITH MY FATHER

MAKING PEACE WITH MY FATHER

You could be dead by now.

How would I know?

Last time I saw you

was fifty-five years ago.

My first day of school.

Your last with us.

You’re the little man now, Paddy,

you said

then got on a greyhound bus

in front of Tang’s Pagoda

as I watched the door close

on that fuselage without wings

as if the whale had just swallowed Jonah whole.

The last time I noticed we had the same eyes.

The end of your reign of terror.

As I remember you fifty-five years later

you were brutal, violent, cruel,

a con-man and a drunk.

You hurt people then laughed at their pain.

You were the lethal meltdown of a radioactive brain

that made the grass glow at night

from thousands of miles away

and poisoned the rain.

I went to jail with my mother to bail you out

more often than I was pushed into going to church.

And when you got out

you were always as angry as a killer bee

in the soggy autumn orchard of your hangover.

Life for you as it is for any coward

was one long complaint you took out on us.

My first seven years

I watched as many ambulances

take my shattered mother away for months

as many cop cars washing up on our doorstep

with all those messages in a bottle

that had your name on them

like a federal warrant for your arrest

as I recall the clinking horse-drawn milkwagons

with their coloured cardboard bottle caps

or the tinkling neighbourhood ice-cream trucks.

Remembering you now at this late date

is like fingering the fossils of a Tyrannosaurus Rex

and feeling the faint resonance

of your ferocity even yet

through my fingertips

like a warm-blooded mammal

in the menacing shadow of a reptilian law

whose last judgement was always a jugular in a jaw.

If you’re dead,

if you’re truly dead,

did you die alone?

Did anyone grieve?

Did you change over the years

and become a good man

as righteous as the stroke of midnight

and atone for anything

before you boarded the next bus for the abyss?

Was your last flashback of life

the sunami you drowned in

after your psychological fault lines

flintknapped an earthquake

that brought the whole planet down on us

everytime you barged through the door

back from the bar

and turned a home into an avalanche?

Did you remember your children?

Did you remember me?

Did you ever wonder

how I turned out without you?

Who knows?

Maybe I’m way too late for your funeral

and this wreath of blood and thorns I bring

to lay on your grave

like the bitter irony you fathered in me

is not a fitting obsequy for either of us

because maybe, possibly, improbably

as you aged like an acid

time defanged your thunder

like a white cottonmouth

and the moon took back its crescents

and the lightning began to make crutches of the trees

it used to split like cedar shakes

with double-bladed bolts of light

that scorched so much more

than they ever illuminated in the darkness they returned to.

As if the whole of the little earth I knew then,

my mother, me, my brother, my sisters

sported the wounds you gashed

on everyone’s heart and a skull

like chopping blocks

under your bloodied blunted war-ax.

For longer than autumn’s been keeping time now

with rosaries of geese in passage

like the secret names

of God on the run

for bouncing rubber cheques,

I have carried you around inside of me

like a chromosome in a coffin.

It’s a kind of genetic locket

I sometimes open

to remember you by

when I’m mythologizing my scars

like blackholes among the stars

or the empty eyesockets

on the wailing walls of the dice

you loaded like the prophetic skulls of a bad choice.

And I still don’t know if I’ve come

like an eviction notice

to this dismal place

to condemn you

or exorcise your ghost

I have despised you for so long within me

like the sloughed skin of a snakey oilslick,

the black blood of a hemorrhaging eclipse

that covers everything like an executioner’s hood,

the birds, the sun, the sea,

every tarnished cell of me

in a darkness that won’t wash off.

Or maybe I’ve just shown up again

like Empedocles on Etna

to jump into the collapsed caldera of your grave

like the last flower.

Ambiguous homage with seven kinds of meaning

to a spent volcano

buried in itself

that once knew how to preserve the dead

in all the twisted shapes of prolonged agony

that has characterized the living ever since.

Every day of my life

I have wanted to give you back your name

like a white cross on a black plague door

that isn’t me anymore

and never was.

Or maybe I should

jump down into your grave and say

Hey, Dad, isn’t this sad for you and me

this is the way we take leave of each other for good

like chainsaws snarling

through the heartwood of the family tree?

Isn’t it just so incomparably sad

that a son being honest as a deathbed

with his father as he dies

over and over again in his imagination

as I do now here beside you

should lean over and whisper into his father’s ear

with a heavy heart that regrets it was ever born to mean it

Hey, Dad, I want you to know

when it’s my time to go

and I get to the other side

of all that was

and can be abandoned

time will heal everything

you did and didn’t do

and all these severed bloodlines

reach their final watershed,

all the weak threads

of what was unbound

like rain in the river

fall into the flowing

and be made whole as strong rope again,

and the eye that offended be plucked out

and an old fist be opened up like the new palm

of a better afterlife than the one we had here,

and reunited families everywhere

break bread together in love and laughter

and every father be a strong rafter

and every mother be a lamp in a tent

and a cool night wind

as intimate and near

as stars in a desert,

and every son

say farewell to his father

as I do now here beside you

on this re-useable illusion of a death bed

where I am trying so hard to listen

to the voices in my heart

instead of the wise-guys in my head:

Father, farewell.

You gave me these empty eyes.

My mother filled them with compassion.

May peace marrow your troubled bones at last

and God soften the stone

upon which you lay your head.

What has passed has passed

like a storm out over open water.

You were my father at noon.

I was your son at midnight.

You withdrew like a shadow

that dreaded the light.

May God grant you a deeper insight

into these lives

we pass along to one another

like candles in the doorway of a dark night

and the courage to see

when they’re blown out

and death comes to sever even this little thread

of earthbound lucidity

that exists like blood between you and me

why even if these eyes of yours you gave me

were washed up like the survivors of a shipwreck

on the eyelids of the same shores

we started out from together,

asked whose son I might be

and who among all the generations

of the unborn and unperishing gathered there

was the road that fathered my journey,

I would answer

my life was a river with only one bank

that flowed from a sea of shadows on the moon.

I would embrace my mother in tears

if I saw her standing there

for all the long, hard, humiliating years

she always sat on the edge of the bed

the last thing at night

before we fell asleep under her eyes

and quietly lowered herself down

like a ladder into a snakepit

so we could climb out

without getting bit by the same viper

that had struck her like black lightning

in the heel in an orchard in spring.

About you I wouldn’t say anything.

I’d swallow my voice like a sword.

I wouldn’t sacrifice a word

on the altar of the silence

that waited like a god

to hear himself named.

I’d shake my head.

I wouldn’t look for you among the dead.

PATRICK WHITE

SCORCHED FUTURES

SCORCHED FUTURES

Scorched futures adjourn the skull’s medley of escapes

when hell tunes the vibrant spinal cord

to one translucent black note. I don’t expect

to be believed by any but the insane inoculants of the hour.

Call it what you will, evil, error, sin, ignorance or ego; it wears

a planet of masks and a great white smile

to get around like blood amongst itself; sometimes barely visible wolves,

often, the cracked cup of the one you love

lying face-down like a wilderness, dead at the table,

blue copper sulphate slipping silently from the corners of the mouth

like a serpent or a doctor leaving a doomed house.

These days you can look through a library of mirrors

for uncontaminated eyes and see nothing for years

but an eerie oatmeal normality that belies

the pain on the shadow of the face

condemned to terminal row for life, asking silently

to be delivered from itself like a posthumous letter of regret.

Now the wounds are deeper than the deaths,

great cosmic slashes that plunder the swollen womb of its birth-stars

and render the mother still-born and dark. Death

knocks and a greater terror opens the door.

And this foolishness hasn’t got a name, a characteristic.

There is no way to distinguish the sneer from the smile.

Call it your life but you don’t know what it is

when the darkening hills open their mouths like fish

and swallow the sun, the moon, the stars. Shadows written

on pages of light, and you, an illiterate.

The river dreams it has no banks; space finally gets the point

and a million unreal worlds fall like leaves

from an imaginary tree full of the moments

of birds, a clock of birds, each an hour and an aeon, over

before they begin. Late for your birth and too early for death,

you make a life to pass the time; you draw your face

upon the waters of illusion with your finger; the face lingers

and the waters keep moving. Somehow you feel

left out, left behind, abandoned by the flowing.

Eventually you drown in your own face to ease

the irresistible current of your own longing to belong.

Is this illumination, arrival, or suicide?

Maybe the sea will receive you like a word

it whispered into its own ear; maybe this is your afterlife

and you’re too enamoured of the dream

to wake up in paradise. Or maybe this is the clearing of the throat

we call hell and all the songs are broken, all the wings are ruined,

fractured guitars, idiot lighthouses stammering to the storm.

Goat-junk, even the holiest. And now there is this emptiness left,

this debtor-zero that goes from door to door

asking if anyone in the house owes it anything,

its eyes, two begging bowls, its heart, a panicked furnace

eating lethal salads of incriminating Nazi documents,

the bitter herbs of withered victory gardens.

You’re trying to finance a movie of your fingerprints; you’re

lost and yet you’re standing at the crossroads like a street sign,

your emotional life, a traffic-light

in a cemetery where even the ghosts can’t give you any direction.

So what are you now; what address would you offer the stars

that have pulled you over for delirious living?

Everything, a huge lie, corrective vision, a lifeboat full of sharks.

That’s when love blooms like a white star on a dead branch of the night

and too desperate to obey, you bite into

the black apple of your own heart, trying to stir

your dispirited cauldrons of boiling vinegar

into the golden foil of joyous ciders. Don’t you see;

this time around

it’s the star that goes looking for the magi; it’s

the garden that gives names to Adam and Eve; it’s

the sinner that saves the messiah.

PATRICK WHITE

LITTLE ENEMY, YOU'RE A MAGGOT TOO EARLY TO RUNT MY BLOOD

LITTLE ENEMY, YOU’RE A MAGGOT TOO EARLY TO RUNT MY BLOOD

Little enemy, you’re a maggot too early to runt my blood.

You can eat my heart when I’m dead

but the hour’s still too dangerous for you to raise your head.

False lover, I’ve planted razors and roses of lipstick

in the mirror where you used to cut the throats of the doves

for not being swans, like those wrists you’d unlatch like gates

that were always somehow shutting you out, never keeping you in.

And the poppies are thriving everywhere like ambulances

emulating your urgency like a requiem at a wedding.

Go in peace, with a crown of deadly nightshade,

to a quiet, damp place where your bruises are silent,

and you’ve settled your score with the world like a bone

by making it atone for the fact that you were ever born.

And you, my teacher, my cornerstone, my fountain, my door,

thank you for doing the best you could with what

you had to work with like a lighthouse in a storm

swinging its sword at the lightning like the hands of the clock

it was duelling with in its sleep. I’ve worked out

an uneasy truce with the gods in this country of one

I’ve surrendered to like a starmap with no boundary stones.

I burned my books, and learned to fly by the seat of my pants.

And every step I take backwards to cover my tracks

I consider a signal advance into my expansive maturity.

Now I hang out with the dead to learn about living.

And you, my children, who have forgotten how to know me,

how far from the tree you travelled to bloom.

I am in you like a space you can’t disown

and time will bring you, scar by scar, back to me

like an ocean and an atmosphere back to the moon

where the clarity of the stars will cauterize the wound

that teaches us all how to forgive our own humanity

like a death sentence that slips a loveletter through the bars.

I still delight in the dragons of my dark energy

that wheel like circumpolar constellations

and red-tailed hawks on the thermals of my blood

but I expand and retract my claws more like

phases of the moon now, than the thorns of a rose with scales.

When there’s a chance I might penumbrally eclipse the light

with the shadows of my vans, I lower them like black sails

whenever I’m close enough to shore to bury the dead in me.

I can do no more. I kick stones down the road like a glacier.

I roam like a rogue planet from star to star

to see if I can thrive in the light creatively

without turning my back on my homelessness.

I teach hitch hikers how to paint on the move,

and tour with a sacred circus of heartbroken clowns

just to keep my voice in shape when I’m called upon

to let these mercurial sibilants of light speak through me

like a grammar of fireflies addressing the sages of chaos.

I’ve buried the rage of my father who terrorized my childhood

like an urn of demons so deeply inside of me

even the dogs can’t dig it up at the full moon

when I burn another scarecrow dressed up in his clothes

and he weeps like fire extinguished in the roots

of a harvest he never sowed. Though I keep company

with one who comes and goes like an ice age,

a translucent diamond seer of the condemned

so coldly intelligent its clarities burn without smoke,

I consult like a consigliere who knows both heaven and hell

and tempers my love of the earth, when I forget

its hoofs and horns, by slashing at the absurdity

of my longing not to desecrate the table I eat at

by neglecting the protocols of gratitude for what I’ve taken.

I’ve given back everything that was within my reach.

All those thoughts, all those feelings, no longer

my personal possessions. Not readiness, not ripeness

my all, but inspiration the way I rise to the unattainable

through no means of my own, and the way I fall

not a tragic flaw, merely moonset among words,

the way space bends light into a gravitational eye

that sees things in a different way than I do

though we both agree, firefly or dragon, they’re all true.

Outside or inside, there’s no window between them,

no wave the water in the lake sucuumbs to.

No better view at zenith than in the nadir of life.

Seeing not two has a better attitude than one.

That my solitude has no identity to speak of

but it’s never empty, and it’s always charged

with the significance of love that doesn’t try to cram

its own impersonality into a locket of the heart

by prying it open before it’s ready to bloom.

And the rest I leave to the crazy wisdom of the muse

should she ever decide to take the form

of a woman again to sweeten the fruits of the abyss

I lay on the stairs of her temple like the gift of a gift

so inconceivably unsayable she never needs to ask

to know what it is.

PATRICK WHITE

AND IT'S FUNNY HOW

AND IT’S FUNNY HOW

And it’s funny how we carry each other

within ourselves like mingled waters

that taste of the moon,

that taste of bruised orchids

in the shadow of all those glass greenhouses,

Eden in a Mason jar,

that learned to throw stones,

and mysteriously engaging

that we go on creating each other as we have

forever inseparably each on his own

alone together with everyone

wondering why we exist

to know one day we won’t.

Gates and roads and miles and whispers away

and a longing that can only be measured

in the lightyears of a star

and all the eras, all the trances of time

of passion and extinction,

of despair that turned on hope like a toxin

and hope that flared like the third man on a match

learning to brighten the stars

by deepening its darkness,

I have lived from eclipse to eclipse

like an unintelligible abyss who misses everyone

for the quality of breath and death and emptiness

that makes me me

when I want to be impossibly alone

and the memories have issues and agendas of their own

like a dead branch trying to witch for water at a window.

Where are you now?

Who were you?

Have I survived?

Whose ashes are these?

Now I am the tree. And you are the wind

and the pursuit of nothing flows on endlessly like life and water.

And all the lovely deserts that enhanced the moon

and coaxed me out of my old delirium

into a deeper one

by drinking the viper in the grail

they lifted to my lips like a gate

that everyone comes to like a stranger

prodigally returning to his own homelessness,

following the wind like a siren of sand

have slipped through my fingers like music,

though my voice still tastes of them

when I drink from their reflections,

not knowing whether I have become

a darkness in the light
or a light in the darkness

but grateful for the grander perspective

from the bottom of the well
where they showed me their stars at noon

and the sun at midnight

and how the fires that nourish love

cannot be put out like torches

in their own shadows

anymore than a bird can fall from its feathers.

PATRICK WHITE

CARRYING WATER TO THE BURNING HOUSE

CARRYING WATER TO THE BURNING HOUSE

Carrying water to the burning house,

the bottom of the bucket falls out,

a ship on the rocks, a hemorrhaging bell

that broke one of the blood vessels

in its throat like a pipeline to its vocal cords.

I see a woman who went back into the fire

for her purse, her hands pleading against the window

like a Neanderthal cave painting,

melting into the glass like a fly in amber.

Charred vision of a dangerous day in the sunlight.

I don’t want to be writing about this.

I want to be writing about red-winged blackbirds

swaying on the cattails like dozy metronomes

and something sufficiently eternal in the suffusion of sun.

Undisciplined, as if life were all I had to do.

Deep within me someone is angry and weeping.

There’s a wound that wants to take over my mouth

and bleed all over the page like blood on the snow

of a small, warm animal dying under a juniper bush.

I’m usually too uncertain of myself to be

dedicated to this kind of suicide,

but I suspect I’ve fallen into a black hole

and there’s no starmap out of this one.

I’m trying to generate light out of my own body

like a firefly, but I’m only wasting matches

by trying to ignite them in a mirage of rain.

Is it my wound? Is it hers? Am I finished with dying?

It would take a crystallographer to know

how my diamonds hurt like wounded coal.

Whose life is it I’m trying to save

like a madman with a grammar of my own

that talks in tongues to the immaculate indifference

of an abyss that been listening for light years

to me scattering my ashes on the wind

in pointillist flocks of red-winged blackbirds

emerging out of chaos into urgent paradigms

of minerals that learned to replicate their fractals.

Either that, or panspermic microbes in

time capsule meteors landing in the Gobi desert

like the ejecta of Mars or Europa, fire or black ice,

the fashionistas of a planet in hand me down clothes.

Second or third pressing of the grape.

Someone stepped on the coke with stars.

There’s an arsonist in the methane like a fire storm

trying to melt its own polarized ice caps

like the skull of a dragon in total eclipse.

Who knows the secret life of shepherd moons

anymore than they do their own mind

this far from the sun? If there’s any compassion

in a perfect vacuum, God help them both.

If not, I’ve got to rely upon this poem like a lifeboat

with a hole in it the size of the universe

to save my life from the upwelling of things

I don’t understand about me in this tsunami

of hyperbolic sorrow and dysfunctional salvage.

Maybe it’s a sign I should go down with the ship.

Maybe I should affix a gold earring to my left ear

like a drowned sailor and hope I’m not buried alive

when I wash up on shore, a toy of the tides.

Maybe I should have had the star of Isis

tattooed on my left palm to keep me from drowning,

or paddled close to shore with waterwings

that keep the well-stocked poetlings from sinking

instead of being swept out of my own depths

by the roiling of this turbid undertow that pulls me down?

Dogen Zenji: When the truth fills your body and mind

you always feel that something’s missing.

When it doesn’t, you always feel you’ve had enough.

Have I had enough and no longer care what’s missing?

All my koans are in despair. I feel like

making a sling of my yellow belt and shooting

my skull into the sun like an asteroid that just missed earth.

PATRICK WHITE

YOUR EYES FOR AWHILE

YOUR EYES FOR AWHILE

Your eyes for awhile

were the only eyes

I could see through

to catch a glimpse of God;

were windows into my own soul

that I could look through from the outside

without throwing the moon

through my reflection like a stone

in the hand of an angry boy.

And it was always as true

as the way your heart grew

that you could love strangers

easier than I do even now

after all these years of learning how

to talk to mirrors in their own language.

And you were not one woman

but all women forever

when I saw you once

bending down like the dusk

to touch the last of the flowers

as if you would never see them again.

As serene as the evening

there was no labour in your beauty

and I swear when I saw you that night

I felt as if I were the whole world watching

time put a finger to its lips

and pour its fountain

into the flow of your body

as if it were the sum of all passage.

And though I was your friend in all things

every evening since

the candle went out

in the lantern of a lost tomorrow

I have walked out into abandoned fields alone

and asked the saddest questions

of the most distant stars

knowing there is not enough light sometimes

even in the eyes of God

to be a companion of our sorrows.

And the questions grow longer

as the darkness deepens

the echo of my longing

in a well as dry as my skull

and closes its gates like scars.

And then those nights come

like a life or a day

or even just this moment

when I stop asking

why human suffering

is always indescribably true,

and joyful as an irreproachable buffoon

sword-dancing alone with the moon

who writes me dangerous loveletters

as if she were the Lady of the Lake

receiving me back

like a funeral ship

into this mysterium of you,

I can almost believe that you know

even though the night mocks the crow

that pines for mercy

and turns its lightless face toward you

as if it could still feel

the warmth of the sun at midnight

in your eyes again

like the afterlife of light

playing with fireflies in the abyss

now that the summer constellations have gone down;

that somehow you must know

like a guitar

on the far side of a room

where someone is singing

as if they had their ear

to the womb

of your irrevocable absence

that binds me to you with every breath

I take for two

as if I had learned to live on death

to keep you alive in me

where you still flow through the seasons

on the nightstreams of my blood

like blossoms and leaves and stars

and the moon leaves no scars on the water;

Must know. Or a demon’s a kinder face

to bestow on the darkness

than a black hole without eyes,

though it’s taken many, long, painful years

for the night to share the light with its jewels again

and as many schools as there are fools to fill them

that even just one

of those slightly compassionate smiles

you would send across the room

to cool the furnace of my heart

with the lightness of one snowflake,

one feather

gracing a change in the weather,

knew more about love

as a raindrop knows the sea

than all of us

who have been washed up

on this cold, lonely shore together

thinking we may have been saved

for something more

than this tidal longing

to brave the sea again

and even if doomed to drown

as I have learned

from these shales of pain

that have carbon-dated the eras

of my missing you

like a life that didn’t

flash before my eyes

as I went down for good with everything,

to thank-you, o, yes,

with nothing but love and light in my heart

and your face in the eye of my solitude

as I stand before the sea in gratitude

to thank-you

as you well knew one day I could

for the generosity of the wound

that has run like my life

down these eyes

these windows

this page

these empty mirrors

of autumn rain

that have wept for years without you

just to see you again

for one moment more

than the time I have left

to know that I never will.

PATRICK WHITE