THE NIGHT COMES ON

THE NIGHT COMES ON

The night comes on like a bayonet in the eye of a baby. The mirror shatters. Shards of shining try to get their act together like small Balkan countries practicing their traditional viciousness. And yes, the world is dark, brutal, treacherous and you’re walking skinless through a field of nettles, your heart exposed like an igneous stone to the dead nun weeping in the acid rain. Buried alive in your own avalanche of judgment and delusion, do you hope to send down roots? Poor baby, you think I’m cruel, that when I tell you the diamond is mud, I’m trying to transplant you into some mythic crystal clarity you have not yet attained. Wrong where there is no wrong, because you’re there already. Isn’t it obvious your roots are in the sky; isn’t it perfectly clear that everything is perfectly clear. Don’t talk to me about confusion and chaos and the seven crossroads to nowhere that lie before you like a crippled starfish. I’ve pushed deathcarts in the morning through the back-alleys of Calcutta and evicted squatters from the satin slums of the cemetery. There is no sin or virtue in my seeing, no little coffin of concept waiting at the end of the boat-tour for a corpse.

You’re not innocent; you’re not corrupt. You drink the purple blood of night like everyone else and think it’s a secret. You love the criminal because you think it’s more sublime than intelligence, but you don’t see that you’re only a butterfly in the dragon’s mouth; you don’t understand that ritualizing heresy is not a bridge to the other side, not the crossing of any real taboo. Be absolutely certain, you’re the only firefly in this man’s dark vastness, but you’ve cranked your own ambivalence too long not to go through withdrawal into the deep assurance of the unseen light that wants to befriend you like a small green planet glowing with life. And screw the man who thinks he’s a guru when he says this; burn the mask he wears to his own funeral along with the rest of his tainted marrow. Why cavil?

If the thorns think they’re the crown of the rose, should the rose care, disposing of itself petal by petal, sky by sky, like the pages of an over-read book about the dangers of reading? Do you see? The wind shimmers like waves through the tall summer grass; and at night, the stars shine down on everyone alike, ignorant of their own burning legends. Deep within you, there is a hidden moon, a blind pearl, one of the lost ruby eyes of the phoenix who put himself out like a torch in the darkness of your holy waters. Why do you look outside yourself for the world you already are? Hate me if you must, but don’t curse the absence of someone who loves you outside of the net. If I’m cruel, if I’m mean, if I risk the obscenity of human lovelessness to love you; don’t ask me to forgive your hive of killer bees because it’s so painful to get near the honey. I’m not the Titanic and you’re not an ice-berg and the worst of tragedies are those that never happen. Live, if you can, beyond the billboards you call yourself; walk out into the fields of being beyond and see, truly see, what the rest of your life’s been doing while you posed like a freak in a circus tent for three grams a day. Or persist in your shadows like some third generation Nazi who can’t get it up enough to hate with any authority, but, likewise, is too fond of his designer straitjacket to love. What’s the point of using your head for a doorstop when you’re afraid to cross your own thresholds? Why lick the paper-plates for morsels of thought at a garabage-dump and call it a feast of sages? I might be stupid, I might be wrong, I might be the willing dupe of your most cherished delusion, but at least I can see you in a clear heart, your depth and beauty and agony, three flowers growing in a crevice of your well-wall. Haven’t the fish already learned to walk; the birds to swim. Don’t the stars drown, drunk, in you every night, and not one in the morning with a hangover? Go ahead, tattoo hell on your eyelids and pretend you’re awake to the world that’s hanging from the end of your nose. I love your tears when they fall; you’re a steep mountain in spring, the end of an ice-age, a fountain that’s learningto crawl.

But I’m not looking for your tears, and I’m almost as sorry as you that I am who I am under this gravestone in this six-storey cemetery of your fears. Do I die well or do I disappoint your witching wands when you come looking for me like a personalized parking space in the city of the dead? And don’t tell me you’re fragile, you’re young, you’re smudged across your own reflection like lipstick on a junkie’s bathroom mirror. I think too much of you to believe you. Here, here’s a new dagger, a clean knife, stronger metal and a more acute blade than any you’ve got in that soft copper arsenal of yours. I’ll even provide the forge and a blacksmith and the knowledge to fashion your own. Love isn’t love that doesn’t offer its artery to the beloved or complains when it’s being killed. O you who think the world is such a bad place, an ugly face, go ahead and try with your space-razor to separate the moonlight from the water. You want the flower and the fruit but you despise the root. You set fire to your own nerves like fuses and try to convince me it’s the work of mystic terrorists. Who knows; maybe you’re trying to overthrow yourself like a repressive regime and there’s no place in your politics for a firing squad still loyal to the wishes of a raving queen?

PATRICK WHITE

IN EVERY FACE I PASS, THE INSUFFERABLE SMOTHERING

IN EVERY FACE I PASS, THE INSUFFERABLE SMOTHERING

In every face I pass, the insufferable smothering

of human potential to achieve great things,

take the jewel out of the ore and let it shine

in the light of their eyes, their hearts, their minds.

As if a new star had been added to the night

and they had lived a life that enhanced

the radiance of their insight. Wouldn’t that

be happy? To see these dead apple trees

in an abandoned orchard suddenly break into bloom

and bear fruit? To see the bears and the birds

the wasps, the humans, gathering it up

like a windfall of small, habitable planets

among the New England asters of a fertile galaxy?

If only so much didn’t depend upon subjunctives.

If only chance were incorruptible, if only

things had gone your way instead of their own.

If only we hadn’t been born into everything

we’re missing, if only our longings had less to do

with what we actually want. If only our words

weren’t links in another chain of iron or gold.

If only we stopped chasing our mirages around

like water in a turmoil of starmud that smudges

the view, and stop dying of thirst like fossils of fish

in a freshwater lake that tastes of our fear of death.

Would the deserts bloom so the children

can be fed? Would the stars efoliate into

cures for cancer like the occult herbs of a jungle

that dipped its arrows in the honey of life?

Would old men waste their time on useless dreams

and the children not be taught to mistrust the rain

for the lies we ourselves told about the nature of gain

as we stepped on a ladder of everyone’s throats

thinking higher was safer than lower

when we’re caught like birds in a chimney?

Are the stars in our eyes antithetical to the black holes?

And our irises lifesaver rainbows? Isn’t

just to be here aware of what we’re seeing

so that every grain of dust on this long, strange road

shines as if the Milky Way were under our feet,

and everything were neither far nor close

but the whole of us in every single part?

I keep thinking you only need to touch the heart

of someone, like ants tell peonies when to bloom,

and everything will be revealed like moonrise.

How incredible it is there’s so little wonder

in our eyes, so little tenderness toward

the brevity of the lives that suffer along with us

into an abyss where we don’t even know

if we’ll ever exist again to see all this as it is.

Even to suffer, even to fail, even to dread the darkness.

Even to ask what place is this you’re passing through

and be undeterred about not accepting

your own dead silence as an hospitable answer

worthy of the mastery of being able

to pose the question as if someone else

were there with you who knew what you meant.

Express yourself. Shine. Bloom. Rain down

on everything alike to show the abstract eye

of the truth, what new beauties can come

of your starmud when it’s sown by you as freely

as a child gives you a leaf or a twig, or the head

of a poppy as if you hadn’t forgotten how to dream

along with her that your amazement is as good

a reason as any to be here. Write poems

to the opalescent sunrise of your toe-nails

or what the thorns of the rose mean

to a dead matador awash in the blood of a bull.

Irrational in the mirrors of reason, perhaps,

fill your emptiness up with the fullness

of your own absurdity and learn to laugh

at the unattainability of the things you aspire to.

Learn to play wavelengths on your spinal cord

as if the shape of the universe when it’s not a woman

is an eleven stringed guitar in the corner

where the spiders are walking its strings like bass runs

and every thing is singing along to the words

of a song that only they know like an aviary of voices

in asymmetrical harmony with the dawn.

Adorn your sorrows in the laurels of sacred wounds.

Now is the time to utter wow under your breath

and include the woman standing beside you

in your astonishment as well as the stars arrayed

to entrance your sense of the inconceivable

by giving you something to compare her to.

Lift up your head like a dormant dragon

that smells the moon on the wind and roar

like the solar flare of a flower that blooms in fire.

Sooner a brilliant failure than a mediocre success,

accept your incompleteness as a sign

of spiritual progress, your terminal homelessness

as the path of the wind among the flowers

of the starfields that depend for their lives

on your passing beyond the gates of their gardens

with letters back to the wilderness they came from.

Be the black sheep that burned the maps

in a flurry of chimney sparks and wandered off

like an irrevocable planet into the immensity of the stars.

And whether you sleepwalk on the thorns of life

or tread lightly across a river cobbled in skulls,

however the rose bleeds, don’t belittle

the mouth of its wound with with a grammar of scars.

PATRICK WHITE  

EACH WINDOW ITS MOON

EACH WINDOW ITS MOON

Each window it’s moon,

and a thousand lakes around here

each wearing it like a medallion.

The spirit of a woman haunts me

as the starlings head for home

and I just want to go down by the river awhile

and sit among some companionable bones

while the daylilies tender their buds

to the hot night air, and the river runs by me

without any notion of what I see in it.

No waterlilies yet, but the wild irises

are protruding out of their blue green sheaths

like cartridges of lipstick, and the clouds clear

and the stars get me thinking about her again,

and all the tender lucidities held in abeyance

I would say to her if she were here.

My heart startles me and jumps like a fish.

The fireflies play a game with me

where I have to guess what constellation

I’m in now as they ricochet off the water like a starmap.

She’s beautiful and bright and dangerous

as a witch in heat, and she’s been hurt so deeply

she loves the stars the way I do because

distance is a guarantee of their innocence

and she uses her pain like a weapon

on behalf of other people who suffer as she does.

Who hasn’t been wounded deeply by someone they loved?

Who hasn’t thought of suicide in a bus station washroom

where the mirrors won’t leave you alone with yourself

long enough to think of a destination

that isn’t bleak and unknown and against the way

your heart’s aching to go, you go, you just go

as you throw the face you just wiped off in the trash can

and try to get on with a life that’s over?

And once the scars have healed what they could

the terrifying blandness of a world that tramples

on the absence deep within you everyone ignores

by whipping your heart with advice, as the leaves

are hair braided like feathers into the tresses of the willows,

clarity, peace, and a solitude that understands you

better than anyone else can, one afternoon

in a backyard somewhere, sitting alone

in the shadow water of the maples and black walnuts

inundating the grass as the sun goes down,

when you least expect it, resonate with your awareness

of being lost, but delighting in the fact you can’t be found,

without feeling your happiness is some kind of consolation prize.

The ant with the wing of a butterfly in its mandible

doesn’t shine like a star cluster of floral chandeliers

they way love once did, it glows like a tiny coal of life

turning to diamond in the heart. Arcturus in Bootes.

Brutal exigencies acceptable to an incomprehensible radiance,

the commotion that has stirred the prophetic cauldron

for light years now has almost always been terminally creative

and I’ve always known the absurdity I’m dying in the name of

has been accelerated by dark energy into the expansiveness

of a sublimated kind of love that evaporates

like the ghosts of a diamond of dry ice into the night.

Sometimes it feels as if I’ve been working nightshift

on the looms of the spiders weaving curtains

to hang over the mouth of a screaming window

that never got over breaking up with the moon.

No longer apprenticed to a mage of crazy wisdom

I could take it from here on my own like this river

if I had to. I could flow like a diamond all the way to the sea.

I could get drunk down here with Li Po’s shadow

and drown in my own reflection, trying to embrace the moon.

And it would be all right, all right. I could live with that.

Like a red shift in the way I paint, and sure proof

I’m not wasting my life writing poems inspired by the abyss.

I could live like the black stone of a meteorite

that was never meant to be kissed, and it would be all right,

I could always tell myself when I needed a delusion

to rationalize why I’ve come so far the way I have,

I was a nickel-iron tektite with new paradigms of life

in my core that were contaminating life

with the antidotal memes of a creative future

that doesn’t replicate like logos into the brittle corals of life

we’re all being keel-hauled over like the hull of the moon.

I could tell myself all that but there would be one black pearl

like a new moon missing from the rosary of the truth

like the unknown name of someone inconceivably absent

as I sit here waiting for her to step out of the birch groves

like a white-tailed doe. Because I’ve become too foolish

to make a fool of myself, too hermetically balanced

to damn my own salvation for the sake of a greater bliss?

I’ve always thought it was a lunar privilege to love someone

and if they loved you back with anymore light

than a reflected glory with a few stars in it

to spice up the flavour of the imported candles,

you lived in the aura of a human divinity

like a paradise without any gates and you could

write poems on the wings of the butterflies

they passed on to the wild flowers that inspired them.

You could forgive the thorns of the locust tree full of bees

for not wanting to die like martyrs to their own blessings.

Or the begging bowls of necessity that came to realize

that life was something they couldn’t afford

not to be attached to. And maybe I’ve been

looking at the stars too long for things

they don’t know themselves, but it all made

incandescent human sense to counterpoint

all that lonely fury in the cold distance,

that can be dwarfed by the loneliness of people,

to ingather all the supernovas of my expanding afterlives

and use them to kindle the shining of someone I loved.

And I was willing to tap into the heat of hell itself if need be

so she could bathe naked among the stars

blowing bubbles like the multiverse into the abyss

that always smelled like cucumbers and apricots

as greater than a goddess, she shampooed her hair

and clipped the dead ends of the willows like a woman

highlighted by the medicinal signs of her intelligence.

A discipline, an art, a devotion, a grace of human nature

in the service of a body, a mind, and a spirit

that wasn’t unacquainted with demons,

I lived like a warrior on the cutting edge

of growing thresholds in perilous doorways

as the sages of my dragon blood stood watch over her

as she dreamed, and wherever she touched me

my scales turned into the feathers of fabulous fire birds

and I was the happy heretic who burned in sin

at the stakes of desire without any apprehension

of punishment or isolation in an urn of ashes.

Immolations of the spirit in a sexual narcosis

of gratified dreams. Sex as the bread of the soul,

butter on a cat’s feet, salt on the tail of the bird,

the lyric of the mob, the muse of the poet’s ode,

champagne and mud, the mythic inflation of love,

the dark root of the white blossom in the moonrise.

The jewel in the lotus like the third eye of a drop of dew

shining translucently in a flash flood of light

from stars that bloom like the flowers of solitude.

Time for the angels to sleep with the daughters

of men again. Time for the demons to dance

with the fireflies like the shadows of candles

in a shrine to what’s holy about the devoutly insane.

The hour come round to break this windowpane

like a pact between me and the stars and return

this journey of enlightenment back to the place

it started from like a mountain in the valley of a woman.

Let my eyes thaw. And her passion be the firewalk

of a weathervane that’s never sure which way

the wind’s playing for keeps from one day to the next.

Breach the clarity of the abyss with the bliss

of a commotion that surpasses the void bound

intimacies of a peace that’s about to return to transcendence.

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

the 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

CRAZY MAN DANCING WITH FIREFLIES

CRAZY MAN DANCING WITH FIREFLIES

Crazy man dancing with fireflies.

Another one trying to shoot out the stars.

I hear the woman next door weeping again tonight.

I don’t know what for.

Desire’s a phoenix in love with water

if that’s what it is.

The torch is plunged into the wound

to stop the bleeding

and the ashes get carried away.

I’ve loved nine women for years

and they’ve all buried me in a different place.

Or saved my skull to consult the dead

about a future that wasn’t living up to the moment.

The white poppy of the moon

bats her eyelashs through the pines.

I’ve never been as innocent as a cynic

nor quite as susceptible

but I remember the pain of separation

like the mirror of the lake remembers lightning

as the most brutal of all its revelations.

And how you can walk in and out of some doors

all your life like faces

without ever opening them

or knowing whose they are.

Everybody longs for the threshold they haven’t crossed.

Poor stars trying to live up to their radiance.

Wondering why it’s always behind them.

Why the dreamcatchers never get finished

and love ends up like some kind of cold fish

swimming through endless windows.

Music from far across town

this late at night

like a ghost answering a seance.

It rises above the trees like smoke

and disappears into the moonlight.

Someone’s trying to bloom in fire.

It happens but it’s rare.

I take a firewalk down memory lane

but all my cremations seem no more to me now

than the shadows of candles

and though I feel intimately removed

this afterlife of mine is not scar tissue

whether things got over me

or I got over them

no matter.

Attachment too is a Buddha activity

and though passions that once

made even the trivial sacred

and the impossible slight

have transformed

the hot blue flame of their hydrogen

into the carbon and oxygen

of more sustainable intensities

the selflessness of my impersonality

is not aloofness or indifference or exemption

or the consolation of wisdom won by acclamation.

Time distills the spirit out of all things human

and you can delight in your past

as if it were the future of someone else

who lives it like the unfolding

of leaves in the spring

that shadow the ripening apple

until it tastes like the tears of the autumn sun.

Joy and compassion

and the lucid spontaneity

of staying improbably ageless

again and again and again and again

as the years rejoice in the young and old alike

climbing the ladder of the tree

from so far down in the dark earth

they’re beyond the reach of its ancient roots

and the utmost of its aspirant branchs

scratching at the windows of heaven.

And then most amazing of all

someone comes to the window

and parts the veils

and like the last line of the last act

just before the curtain call

you fall.

You fall toward paradise

as if you’d failed

and had to do it all over again.

But if your heart needs healing

offer your love up like a transplant

to anyone who can use it

and your mystic eyes to the stars

that want to see through them

what their light looks like

from deep inside

the expanding vastness within you

that can hold all that shining

like the sky or the sea embraces

all kinds of its own weather

without ever overflowing the brim.

The skull you drink from

like a wishing well

in the desert watersheds of the dead

is a cup without a horizon.

A real mirage with imaginary water.

A seabed of shadows on the moon.

Low-tide at noon.

Providential midnights when it’s full.

But if you don’t like

what you’ve been hearing about yourself lately

when you stop to listen

to what your saying

and don’t recognize the voice

you’re speaking in as your own

hold your ears up like conch shells to the oceans

that have never heard a recording of themselves

and carefully watch their faces.

And if you make the same stupid mistake

you swore not to make again

learn to recycle your ignorance

so you can save a bit of wisdom

for the rest of the world

to remember what it was like once

to be alone in Eden

with no one else to rely upon

and all you had to add

to the conversation of the rivers

that flowed out of it

all you had to share with your solitude

and boundless emptiness

was your unanswerable longing

even as it was being shaped

by their waters

into the form of the unimaginable.

Into the form of a woman

who tasted then

and tastes forever now

of the original light

of spontaneous creation

however many worlds

and lives and years and nights had to pass

before you first saw her

and felt your afterlife condense into a star.

Crazy man dancing with fireflies.

Crazy man dancing with fireflies.

And it doesn’t matter

there’s no one here

to understand my delight.

Crazy man dancing with fireflies.

It’s hard to read me in so little light

but when you fall asleep

it’s the world that dreams

and though I feather the wind

with fire birds of desire

and write loveletters

long into the night

that grow like the graceful tendrils

of ink dissolving in water

whatever the sign of the season

there’s no bitterness in the vine

and no departure in the reason.

Though I’m a leaf with the wingspan of autumn

even in the dead of winter

the phoenix is green

and by late summer

there’s a crazy man out dancing with fireflies

down by the Tay River

who is too carried away

by the picture-music

of what he hears with his eyes

and sees with his ears

of all that he’s been and will be

alone together with everyone forever

in love and out

full cup and empty

eclipsed and forgotten

or charged with the radiant urgency

of fireflies after the rain

to care what any of it might mean

when they fire the valley up for a moment

like blasting caps in a beaver dam

that’s flooded the road.

And everything’s so nimble with light

so vital and effusive with joy

so mysteriously near and always

all darkness all pain all sorrow

all that’s lost and weary

and fearful of ever being found again

of being loved or despised

is absorbed blameless into bliss

like a tender intimacy

into a great vastness

that lives within us all

even as we disappear into it

like the sky in the heart of a bird.

Or just before the soft flare of moonrise

through the leafless veils

of the glowing birch groves

on that far hilltop

where the pioneers

used to bury their boys with a view

a night just like this

as illusory as it is real

suffused with a spirit of water

that heals the wounded swords

the bruised flowers

the fevered promises

that are offered to it from the bridge

between this shoreless delirium

and the next.

A presence that’s always flowing away

like a mindstream among the stars and fireflies

with the power of time

and the effortless wisdom of change

that makes the going stay

and the perishing persist.

A night just like this.

A momentary kiss

that keeps faith

with the eternal flames of the fireflies

that adorn the darkness and waters of life

with indefinable joy

in the exuberance of the mystery

and unspeakable trust in the onceness of forever

and an abiding intuition

that even the fiercest thorns of pain

that have tasted first blood

and greyed the hearts of their lovers

can never be estranged

from the beauty of the rose.

A night like this

in the great abyss

lucidly alive with its own shining

and a woman’s eyes

and a crazy man dancing with fireflies.

PATRICK WHITE