THE SERPENT

The serpent sits enthroned

at the top of its own stairwell,

helically reposing in its own empryean

like an August hawk

coiling up its own thermals;

its fangs, a stargate

to an unknown afterlife, emancipation,

and the jewel of its head,

the first stone thrown,

a small planet without

the eyelid of a sky,

a nugget of mystic uranium,

looped in a turban of orbits,

a sacred arrowhead

that flys from itself like a bow

drawn back long before the wind

knew its first feather.

Lethal healer,

the sword that kills is the sword that saves.

This morning,

the drubbing of the rain on a tin roof,

the hiss of traffic

flaring like matches down the sleek asphalt,

if I were to say

I want the emotional life of space,

I don’t know if I’d mean it,

but I’m so weary

of being this slow crisis of a bird

mesmerized by the swaying eyes

of the black lightning

that has caught me in the net

it weaves of my own nerves,

I want to douse my heart

in the next providential tide of tears

like a torch I put out in the night

to see better in the dark.

I asked for wings

and my spine was adorned with fire.

I asked for water

and I’m a fish on the wind.

and now this desert I hoped to remain,

a craze of sand,

has grown teeth

and is overgrazing the starfields like pyramids.

I don’t think

I will ever recover

from the wound I received

like the hidden twin of the moon,

trying to love the world, myself, women, people.

Every word was a road, a pulse, an eye,

a drop of blood

I could ride to the end of and beyond

into the implacable subtlety

of my own empty, ageless temples

where even the silence isn’t ghost enough

to conjure a medium

to jar the table as a sign,

and death is buried in its own vacuity

like an embryo in a mask without eyes.

I was bound by my own boundlessness,

my nerves, wicks in the abyss

that enhanced the darkness

by cleaving me like a tree

vision after vision,

another world

with every blink of the eye

that wiped the mirror clean of me like an ax

until I understood

that even the most enlightened watersheds of wisdom

are just a smear of perception

on the least drop of that splendour

I went looking for like a cloud

saturated with the ancient seas of the moon

that was covered by my own looking.

I lay at the bottom

of my oceanic odyssey,

trying not to sink,

but I wanted to give something back

for what I felt I had received;

not an ethic or a metaphysic,

but a spontaneous action of the blood

that remembers it was once a rose.

I wanted to return spring like a water-key to the moon;

I wanted to harvest the shadows

of my own non-existence

and break bread

with the famine of ghosts

that came like royalty to beg food from their servant,

blind doors standing on the thresholds of awareness

asking me to address myself

to the terrible openness

of their unanswerable need.

I have eaten my own ashes

in the furnace of every star

I have ever looked upon.

I have drowned in the wells

of the faceless, fathomless mirrors,

and every woman I have ever drunk from

was a grail with an enigmatic black pearl in it

lustrous as the moon in eclipse.

O promises of bliss

that tuned the webs of the spiders

like a guitarist with perfect pitch
to the frequency of my spinal cord 
that I might entangle a star

in the silk of my conceiving;

that I might seize a firefly

in the fangs of my thought

and taste the honey of the lantern

that lit my dark corner

in the era of the moment.

O sweetest of lies to ripen with longing

like the eyes of a child in the darkness

far from home.

I was trying to find a road

that fit my walking like shoes on a mountain;

I was trying to walk on water with mystic crutches;

I was looking for an arrow

dipped in the blood of a serpent with wings,

set aflame by a demonic star

and feathered by spiritual fire

to restring me like a bow

severed like the branch of a sacred grove

by the oracular blade of the moon.

I was too deeply sheathed in the truth

to appreciate the arcane sagacity of my lies.

I stood like a shadow in the burning doorway of my own fire

and looked deeply into the night

to answer my own knocking

like the echo of a stranger in the darkness,

walking away from someone who didn’t know

how to greet himself.

I was a tree crucified on a man,

a vandal in the shrine of the moment,

bleeding like stained-glass,

a rosary of vertebrae and skulls

reconstructed in the future museum of now

I played myself into like a funeral plan.

Now everywhere the wind is a pilgrim,

I leave my heart like a shrine

I will never return to.

And the sadness, and the solitude

and the vastness of my insignificance

is the shadow of a bird on a cloud.

The only way to perfect my defeat

was to sit at the feet of my most cherished delusion

like a rootless flower watching over a coffin,

then rise like the wind

from the rubbish of the shedding,

the loneliest pillar and sole cornerstone of the sky.

Now my apish profundities

no longer crack fleas of light like stars

I picked out of God’s burning beard

with the forceps of the moon.

Now I am infested with constellations.

I no longer turn the pages of the waterlilies

like the holy books of an inspired swamp.

I no longer seep down to the river

to drink from the moon

like a serpent at the water’s edge 
and watch the panicked angels jumping
from the reflection of an uncrossed bridge

that collapsed like a covenant with hell.

I no longer shred my heart

like a secret document

in an abandoned embassy of swans

looking for asylum further south,

tormented by the unattainability

of a woman’s beauty,

looking for sanctuary

in the ashes of a black sail

that flared like a poppy with passion

at every gust of desire

that silvered the trembling grass

with sidereal aspirations.

Why bother to laminate your lovers, your legends?

Let them go like autumn leaves and smoke,

the last breath you took

before you were interred

like a scream in the larynx of a deaf-mute,

a foreign currency you can’t spend at home.

Naked is the only way to dress for the rain,

but it doesn’t matter which

from the wardrobe of all your many lies

you wear to the fire that waits for you

like a fledgling waits for its plumage.

And this is a long river

and this is a long day and a night

and maybe only the silence is listening

to what the stars are preaching

from the pulpits of the flowers,

and this that says me now

is just the promo for the intensive care ward

of a new religion

the founders are always the first to betray;

but when I truly let go

it was my falling

that taught me to patch my shoes with the sky.

And have you come this far,

passed through this many gates

for wisdom, compassion, freedom,

wandered aimlessly until you could not tell

the stars from the sand,

the journey from the arrival,

suffered worse than all the things you cannot say

until you forgot what you were looking for

in the first place, until

you despised what you craved the most?

I don’t remember how long I slept

before my dreaming woke me up

and I realized

no fool could defame my solitude

and that life

was only the story of a scar

looking for the knife that inflicted it

like a shadow

in the forsaken valley
of the mountains of the moon.
Looking for a pear of light

I had to plunge into a darkness

deeper than anything

my eyes had ever given birth to.

PATRICK WHITE

SO CRAZY AT TIMES I'M EXILED FROM MY SOLITUDE

SO CRAZY AT TIMES I’M EXILED FROM MY SOLITUDE

So crazy at times I’m exiled from my solitude.

I disguise my madness as the excruciating discipline

of beading the stars into a lifemask I can wear

like a constellation of fireflies that never arises

the same sign twice. Among all these myriads of me,

not one with an identity I can isolate monadically

and say, see, I’m indefensibly this mystically specific human.

I have an ontological address, and these are my doors,

my stairs, my floors and windows, my local habitation

and a name as the bard suggests. Whatever my magnitude

I’ve got a place on the starmap. I’m grounded like a garden

in being. The hummingbird thrums sacred syllables

into the ears of the hollyhocks, aum mani padme aum,

the jewel in the lotus, and the crow caws like a black mass,

but even when I walk through the cemetery

up on Drummond Road, looking for a gravestone

with the future of my name on it to prove that I existed once

to suffer the same dissolution as everyone else,

none of the voices I hear like starlings in the elms

are my own. And altogether the dead echo: not here, not here.

Everyone seems to have a God-particle they cling to for mass,

but I’ve been bubbling up for light years in one universe

after another, and I’m more vaporous than solid,

and even when I morphologically assume what I take to be,

briefly, the true shape of my shifty universe just

to get along or belong to all my friends with backbones like rafters,

it’s only a provisional scaffolding I climb up on like monkey-bars

to paint the latest theory of my myth of origins.

Am I a sum of destructions, God’s Own Zero,

or a creative deficit of cosmic proportions in debtor’s prison?

Have I run out of afterlives, broken the continuum,

or is this one just unborn without a beginning

though there’s no end of dying behind or ahead of me?

Subjective idealism, the slippery slope to solipsism,

the shadowy puppet theater of my own imaginative projections,

the mind only intuition of Vishnabandu,

the vehicular autobiography of the road not taken,

no bed in the shelter of the Shepherds of Good Hope

to lay my head down on like the rock of the world

to dream of what I could have been if I’d found a self

I could take seriously. Not life in a palace, but even

a tent I could carry around with me like my homelessness,

or a deer bed of cool nocturnal grass, a crude crop circle

under a broad-leafed basswood tree to say where I slept last night

on my way to somewhere else like the stations of a crossroads

where I can dance my way honestly like a Sufi

into annihilations of anti-matter in a charged particle field

reversing my spin. But there’s no particle at the end

of my wavelength. The snake with its tail in its mouth

has swallowed its head. The exclamation mark is missing a period.

Or maybe I’m hydra-headed and the more I prune off,

dead blossoms off the hollyhocks, the more grow back.

Salome would have danced herself to death by now

if she ever wanted my prophetic head on silver platter.

Valley without an echo, rootless tree, not even an anti-self.

I’m an oxymoron of crazy wisdom, what’s to oppose,

when there’s no one there to contradict being not two?

And then, again, what if I’m missing what wasn’t there

in the first place and I’m just lamenting the loss of legs to a snake?

A toy I lost in last night’s dream. Quicksand missing a mirage?

A reciprocal hourglass I mistook for a candle without a wick?

Or maybe sometimes the moon howls for a lunatic

to talk to her like a lonely mountain

that can’t find its reflection in a sea of shadows

but fits her like the skin of an eclipse up to the elbows.

Emptiness doesn’t insist upon itself anymore than space

gets in the way of things, or the wind is a distraction

to the flight of the white clouds behaving like herons.

Or a star is inhibited by the eyes it’s shining in.

It’s conceivable that somewhere along the line

I jumped orbitals like the photonic discharge of an insight

into the earth as a beautiful woman who had become my lover

and I was enchanted into passing my time and space

here with her, without leaving a mark on her

as if I were sleeping with water so unfathomable

I had the good spiritual manners not to kiss and tell.

And there’s a freedom, I swear, when you’re not bound

to anything, not even the void, or your word,

like a flurry of loveletters released from a dovecote

that makes you laugh out loud at the absurdity of glee

profoundly delighted at the emptiness of the sky

receiving them like the first signs of a giddy emotional life

more sublime than the dragons that bring the rain

to the starfields of wild rice with a universe in every grain.

Words aren’t panned from the grammatical ruts of the mindstream

like nuggets of gold washed downed down from the world mountain

to be picked out like blackberries or stars from the galactic slurry.

Nothing’s thrown away as of little or no value,

not even the alluvial silt, or the cobwebs in the corners

of some dead stranger’s dreams. Everything shines,

and even the blind can point themselves out entangled

like medicine wheels in the treelines along their horizons

their eyes once disappeared over on the prows of Greek triremes,

or birds, yes, birds, homeward bound through the gloaming.

Disparate images appear and school into synchronized fish

or startled sparrows, and then they’re a gaggle of Canada geese

trying to rise from a cornfield like an Ottawa traffic jam

waiting for the fireflies to change. Metaphors bridge

the gap between things with copulatively interactive equals signs

or staples in wounds, the axles of death carts and dumb bells.

Or the neck of guitar like the deck of an aircraft carrier

when the music’s flying solo after take-off, and the notes

are hooked on a spiderweb of spinal cords in hidden harmony.

The bottom falls out of the bucket, the mirror

of a reflecting telescope, a brain hemorrhage of light

like the supernova of a star that has finally had enough of the dark

to lose it big time. Evanescent hybrids and alloys

of memes and genes transmutate into surrealistic paradigms

with the half-life of logos. Intelligence has a heart transplant

and reason waits like a fire-hydrant on call to be a first responder.

Forms caught in the searchlights like bats and bombers

in midflight, no sooner glimpsed than gone,

and nothing to focus on, not even the clear light of the void

where your eyes evaporate like tears on a hot stove.

Maybe I’m that river of Heracleitan fire you can’t

step into twice, or a wardrobe of shadows for every occasion

to accessorize my next incarnation as an extinct species of being time

without the necessary photo ops and passports to prove it exists

like a future that lies buried under the stones of its past.

Logic can try to stay on top of its sorrows

so it doesn’t get hurt again by the unforeseeable,

and sensible shoes can cut their tongues out

and amputate the flightfeathers on their heels like tonsils,

and still speak mutely to each other like thumbs up or down,

a waste of good messengers with nothing crucial

to say to themselves, that isn’t better left to the silence

that’s been flatlining their headlines for light-years.

But I wear a black leather jacket on my back like an eclipse,

or an oil spill, that occludes my rainbow body until

I shed it like the new moon of a rat snake

and it’s impossible to say whether I’m a hearse

or a wind-up waterclock in the hands of a teleological god

that knows I’m only dangerous when I never show up on time.

Late for the Burgess Shale again. No fingerprints. No fossils.

Spontaneous generation like a flashmob

of immaterial sub atomic particles out of the void

that always behave like thought waves cut loose

like an empty lifeboat on a sea of awareness

when no one’s looking to see if you’re solid or real.

If this is the way you are, or just the way you feel

the dark abundance of your negative capability,

the bright vacancy of your absence from the mirror,

asylums of apostate selflessness in an inconceivable abyss

where to say not that isn’t just another metaphor

for what this is. Or denying the affirmation,

the affirming of the denial. Crazy wisdom.

Deeper in the shallows of what’s hidden

than in the manifest depths of what appears.

PATRICK WHITE  

COCOONS

COCOONS

Weary of lies and the soap operas of fruit on the verge

of their due dates, weary of men and women and breezy friends

with smiles like illegal fishing nets across a river, bored

with the multiple personalities of stale bread growing pools

of blue-green bacteria like a bad imitation of the moon, the people

who landed safely from a long way up

but drowned in their parachutes, the earth-bound

curb-worn excuses that never learned how

to park a star without getting burnt; and nowhere to go

with all of this unspooling of an old documentary

that isn’t me anymore than the echo of a diamond is;

sick of approaching the vital signs of every oceanic dilemma

with the heart of a well, the mind of a winch

and the balls of a bucket, without malice

and I repeat it, without malice

because my mind is not a shoe full of interrogative scorpions

and my blood has never gone white long enough

to call itself an ice-age and there’s always a clown

to warm things up with sad defeats and comic thawings

and most things are just old bottles in a barn anyway,

tired of witching the watersheds of mystic sublimities

that are always flying away like herons startled in the moonlight,

or stars with the eyes of fish, lovers

washing the doves of their hands in the blood of a rose,

jaded by the black translucencies of hell

that smell like cordite and lightning

and leave ambivalent messages on a storm-coloured mirror

lustrous as the eyes of a horse from a paid familiar

amused by the fool he courts, I write this

to no one in particular knowing it’s a way out of the stone

I’m swimming through like ore, a dream key

to a cormorant fountain of elegant transformations

that haven’t been born yet, faces that return from childhoods

yet to come, roads to go down that aren’t roads

until I walk them, all here now in the lifespan

of a heartbeat, singing like sirens of oxygen

to seduce the wind away from paler tresses

and rattling windowpanes. Little matter

who the return journey is if it ever gets there, finds its way back,

there are fires along the way so intensely

beyond the last farms of colour

their serenity is their fury

and all this world of discernible form

in the light of that light,

a pilgrimage of shadows. And by that, do not think

there is a secret eclipse up the sleeves of flame

that rise from the candles of my adoration

because it was the world in the profundity of its playing

that lit them in the first place to celebrate

the way it hides from itself when anyone’s looking

and the way it looks when anyone hides. So I hide my wave

in the water and hang my fleece in the sky

on the branch of a dangerous star tree

to test the nerve of the neophyte sailors

who come from ports like me that are

no more than a drop in the bucket

of all there is to be. Now everyone is an effusion

of this nullity, the creative efflorescence of a cosmos

suggesting dandelions and dishevelled magnolias to the dark,

releasing black cherries and bells of deadly nightshade

to wander the forsaken labyrinths of the moon,

or shaking chandeliers of water out of the light,

worlds within worlds, fire harps in tears, and the brief urgencies

of the eyes that put them out flung out over the grass like silver seeds

in the way a dog shrugs off a lake, in the way

I’ve just emerged from the palace in the rock like a sullen metal

stapled to a wound in a tight-lipped corner

of a memorial shrine to unknown spiders,

and looking up at the stars rinsed out of the willow’s hair

released myself from this web of torn horizons

by handing out cocoons to everyone for free.

PATRICK WHITE

ADOLESCENT BRIDAL SPIDERS WEBBING THE DOORWAY

ADOLESCENT BRIDAL SPIDERS WEBBING THE DOORWAY

Adolescent bridal spiders webbing the doorway

with laughter and tumescent sex,

waiting for the hilarious rain.

Waitresses with overly bleached hair

and melting chocolate roots. Young men in wife-beaters

orbiting their pheromones like shepherd moons.

The air is a Venus fly trap saturated

with the violet wavelengths of an unexpurgated murder.

Sheet lightning rooting in the nervous system

of teenagers dogpaddling in the heat without a lifeboat

between the iodine logo of the antiseptic bank

and the unpainted stairs with their garish fire-doors

that ascend into hell like most of the local ghettoes

dancing with their fans to cool off,

or drinking beer in the parking lots,

or passing spliffs to potted plants on the fire-escapes.

Exorbitant flesh sticky with sweat and deodorant,

And the heritage streetlamps haloed

in a frenzy of mesmerized insects

like comets falling into the epiphanous sun at midnight.

Mosquitoes pumping their blood thinners

like punctuation into a periodic sentence.

And I observe all this trying to extinguish myself

like a cigarette butt in the ashtray of a full moon

trying to make a meteoric impact on the unknown

to see if anyone else is home, but me, and these exiles outside.

Stars in the window, but my eyes are grimy with traffic.

The clarity’s smudged. The heat grows a cataract

over my third eye like a low-hanging homogenous cloud,

a curd of the moon, as I keep looping back on myself

like the fervour of a solar flare that can’t escape gravity.

There are sunspots on my radiance. My meditation’s not perfect.

There are the crumbs of stale dreams in the corners of its eyes.

My diamonds are evaporating in a blast furnace

and the picture music’s gagging my voice with paint rags.

But here and there, in little pools of cyanobacteria,

love bubbles up slowly like thin silver necklaces

forged in the fathomless depths of this primordial soup.

Intense heat. Unusual sprouts. As they say in Zen.

Dawn on the feathers of the dinosaurs

couldn’t help but make them sing as well

even when my starmud’s cracked like a prophetic skull

in the dry creekbed of a dust bowl

where the toads have been hibernating

for the last seven years, and the scorpions burnt to a crisp,

add a little love to the mix, and even a blackhole

will flower like a galaxy in the cool bliss

of listening to its cosmic background radiation sing

like an ancient nightbird to its ageless longings.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN THE UNSAYABLE SUPPLANTS YESTERDAY'S WISDOM

WHEN THE UNSAYABLE SUPPLANTS YESTERDAY’S WISDOM

When the unsayable supplants yesterday’s wisdom

it makes it look obvious and trivial in retrospect

and you marvel at the spiritual gestures of goodwill

that swept you off your feet for light-years

as the arcana of a discipline you gave up trying to master,

because you could only see into the matter

as far as the light you were given to go by.

And you didn’t know then that when

you blew the candle out you held

pathetically up to the abyss that you did more,

by blowing it out, to illuminate the universe,

than you did when you fed it your heart

to keep it burning like a night light among the stars,

or a lighthouse paling in the full glare of the sun.

Off the path is the way of the path.

How can anyone be lost? Or found, for that matter?

Midways of gurus with their touring freak shows.

Sacred matchbooks of budding sulphur

throwing humans into the Bonfire of the Vanities,

chasing the bank-rolled Renaissance out of Florence.

Terminal literalism, infectious symbolitis

sweeping down the coast like hemorrhagic fever

from the merchant fleets of Genoa. The wild grape vines

of intuitive insight converted into the razor wire

of paranoid orthodoxies. The heretics bear witness

to the madness in the judgement of their abusers,

and scald the clouds with their blood for it.

The spiritual highways cluttered with exiles,

refugee saints, and scapegoats, where is there

a wilderness left where the tourists don’t go

to gawk at the hermits like wildlife? Back

to the birch groves and the cawing of the crows

like auctioneers that don’t have a thing to sell.

No one’s footprints to follow in. The way things

turn out, at best, a wolf path through the snow

gone by spring, or where you bent the waist high grass

by walking through it like the path of least resistance,

unmapped as the wind. What is it all, when

even the seven-tiered tower of the Scotch thistle

is a mental event, if not open, unknown and empty

in the sense of being indefinable, not missing,

as if anything were there in the first place

it was crucial not to lose? Spare your tears.

Life hasn’t got anything to repent or reform.

The mystery manifest as it is and that’s the whole of it.

What more of it is there to reveal, than the rocks

have already said? Real, not real, the flowers bloom nonetheless

and you’re free to make or feel or think or not

about them as you wish. Mourn the ruination

of the flowers in a passion play as old as the stars

or trust your own mind to mentor you in the ways

of not reifying it into a thing among things,

the source and matrix of your most cherished illusions,

the mirage of the dark mother who eats her own like time.

There is no pattern, path, paradigm, psychodynamic

or unified field theory that the mind won’t

accommodate itself to like a child’s drawing of the universe.

You can elaborate the roots of a tree like a fractal into

a morphology of knowledge forms

that sing in its boughs like sparrows

in the black walnuts of the morning

and then consult it like the grammar of a dream

for the blue print or starmap of the house you’re building

like a screening myth with a built-in library.

The magician gulled in the doorway of his own magic,

having lost the key to the spell he cast

when this desert of stars was merely

the vagrant threshold of a tent in the moon’s back yard.

The folly of sages, the wisdom of fools,

what’s the point of enlightening your own freedom

if you’re too afraid to accept it as the mystical mundanity

that’s under your nose this very moment?

You can hunt your own shadows down like heretics

fleeing the hounds of heaven, you can denounce

an eclipse for being a sunspot on your illumination

and polish the mirror for the rest of your life

and still not wash your face off with a paint rag

like a clown in a green room waxing tragic

to counteract the laughter at the expense of his own wounds.

Look into the eyes of the roadkill for yourself

as if no one else in the world can do your seeing for you

and you won’t see anything very shocking to be afraid of.

No spiritual snake-eyes. No hidden meaning

you have to get at the guts of like a turkey-vulture.

And if you feel compassion, and it’s natural you should,

it’s because there’s something communal about the random

you sense has been going on a lot longer

than the last few thought moments when you showed up

to be misunderstood by your own imagination.

You want some good spiritual advice to get you in the habit

of taking it yourself, whether things are sublimely rough

and death is dying into you, or life is trivializing

the palatial playhouse it was born into? When occasion arises,

and when does it not, learn to call your own bluff

and sit down on the ground, and have a good laugh.

PATRICK WHITE

KISSES INSTEAD OF SCARS IF YOU CAN MANAGE IT

KISSES INSTEAD OF SCARS IF YOU CAN MANAGE IT

Kisses instead of scars if you can manage it.

Love, not a science. Still an art. Though a dying one.

The discipline of staying a constant beginner.

As if the morning glory had never felt the light before.

You want to love or be loved? Make up your heart.

But you want to sword dance with queen cobras in heat

like a lapwing in a snake pit, two egg-layers

at opposite ends of the same extreme, you better not

step on anyone’s toes, and if you do, hope

the wing you favoured with a false wound

like a collapsed bridge you lay down like a joker

to trump your Tarot pack, is as long as the other

royal flush you neglected to play like a winning hand.

Human, you might be the measure of all things,

but believe me when I tell you, love’s got a bigger wingspan

than Cygnus and Aquila in the Summer Triangle have light-years

to get a fix on the wing tips of their feathers by parallax.

Love with class if you want to make something elegant

of your absurdity, diamonds of your dirt, if you want to

water flowers with your tears without salting the seed bed.

If you want to steal a little fire from the mystery

to enlighten your nightmare, if you want to be the star

that everyone points to in your lover’s eye,

don’t enter it like a dirty needle of light washed up on a beach,

you keep overdosing on like a starmap with a bad addiction.

Love is a retroactive prediction from the past come true at last.

Even after dismemberment, love is Orphic, a prophetic skull

bobbing like an apple all the way to Mytilene from Thrace,

that can still sing the dead back up out of hell

until they realize the light of love’s too strong

for the eyes of gibbering shades and turn around

as if they’d come too far down the wrong road.

As a working stiff, love is kind, generous, trustworthy, loyal,

like the smell of heartwood after a carpenter has built

his own sturdy cross. Not acrid oak, but terebinth.

As a thaumaturge, love works miracles with silver herbs

cool as moonlight laying its feathers on the sacred pools

you return to like a battered salmon or a sword in tribute

to give back in gratitude what was given to you.

O, yes, you can be a nice guy or an agreeable woman

for a moment, and bask in the whole wheat sunshine

of a promising harvest, but love is the blue,

the second full moon in October and it looks down

on what’s been threshed to see what you’ve left for the birds

and if you ever get so drunk in your delirium

you went dancing with the scarecrows as if you

were all martyred by the same cause like a prelude

of watchdogs to the white nights of the living dead.

Love’s a celebrant high on the bliss of poppy wine

but it doesn’t turn the dancing floors of the starfields

into a bride catalogue for impoverished wallflowers.

Love’s got the eyes of a snake, the voice of a bird

and the wings of a vampiric bat in an unpredictable eclipse.

And when love mystically sublimates its appetites

like black ice into more beatific ionospheres of solar flaring,

the poetry goes aurorally absurd, but nobody cares

because everybody’s more awed by the picture-music

of the rippling veils than they are by the face behind them.

You make love safe. You take the danger out of it,

you defang the lightning storm, you brainwash

the theta waves of the turbulent night sea

where the soul journeys alone, into saying aum

every time there’s a breathless squall of stars in the southwest,

though you might think in your lustreless way

you’re throwing sacred holy oil on troubled waters

you’re just another oil slick running a nunnery of pearls.

You want your honey without a stinger. You want

your rose without a thorn. A one-eyed oxymoron.

I’ve made it a counter-intuitive point of survival

most of my occult romantic afterlife

to never fall in love with a woman until I’m absolutely certain

it’s well within her power to kill me outright

without a word of warning. But she abstains

and in that moment of hesitation you can live

three full lifespans on the cutting edge of a black hole

without a fear of lights or vertiginous heights.

You can ride the helical stairwells of your mutual d.n.a.

like the parallel bannisters of two hawks wheeling

synchronously on the twisted ladder

of their thermophilic passions for the highs and lows of love.

When did Icarus ever fly too close to the sun

with a parachute or a safety net? What fool

shot out of a cannon like a fly into a spider web

doesn’t expect to get entangled in the details

of hedging his bets instead of taking the fall on his chin.

If you fall in love, and you’re not a clown,

or someone who bumbled over the cliff by accident,

be prepared to fall deeper than any place

your death has ever descended into before, and darker,

and more intense than the petty sentiments

of people dropping stones in wishing wells

to fathom the abyss by staring into the eyes of a telescope.

PATRICK WHITE

DOUBLE FULL MOONS IN THE THERMAL PANES ACROSS THE STREET

DOUBLE FULL MOONS IN THE THERMAL PANES ACROSS THE STREET

Double full moons in the thermal panes across the street,

elaborate fractals of disproportionate replicates

in a seasick multiverse warped by the aging ripples of the glass.

I see Li Po drowning in all of them trying to embrace

the euphemistic screening myth of his suicide. I don’t think

a lotus bloomed where he died, but Jesus has a star

where he was born, so let’s put one there anyway

for a man who sang and drank and chanced his path

through life because no one offered him a job as a bureaucrat.

I love the double entendres of the unadorned.

How the waterlilies land like migrating swans

in the wetlands of the windows, and don’t expect to drown

like Narcissus in the mirrors of their own reflections.

But then I’m not in the habit of looking at things

like the emergency mentor of telescopes that suffer

nervous breakdowns looking for their third eye among the stars

as if it were interred in neuronic masses of black matter

and you could uproot it like a grail quest for ginseng

in the deep woods of Lanark County if you know where to look.

The night hot and humid and totally unmotivated,

all the windows open, and a big fan sword dancing above my head

waiting for the thorax of the rest of the helicopter to show up,

all revved up like a propeller without a flight path to anywhere,

I’m Zen-duelling in the acephalic shadows

of my hydra-headed anti-selves

for the lack of better company

until the muse of my solitude shows up

like a knock on the door of my coffin without

expecting a cogently analogous answer.

I write her long loveletters of cedar-scented smoke

I conjure from the ancestral inkwells

of my penumbral black holes to express

the excruciating loneliness of my singularity in eclipse.

In the intense heat of frog-rutting desire

black orchids bloom in the all-consuming fire

of an heretical apostate trying to burn

his God-particles into the wavelengths

of the photonic discharge of the rainbow bodies

of the highest Himalayan rinpoches as if

the sherpas of the Book of the Dead

were way over their heads like clouds

in the mountains of the moon without an atmosphere.

Easy in public to master the mot juste of a scalpel

you can use to nip and tuck the flabby psyches

of the less beautiful among your friends, but alone,

it’s different to divest a ventriloquist of your life-mask

and express yourself in a secret grammar as twisted

as the sensibilities of the evil jesters of the times are

in the fun-filled halls of the judicious mirrors

that can only recognize you by the accent of your tears.

To bring a gravitational eye to your unworthy affairs

and bend space into conformity with the magic rituals

of a black mass in an asylum of acquiescent pharmaceuticals.

Not to talk to yourself as if you were enamelling buttercups

with imaginative projections, or immolating blue hydrogen

like wild irises breaking out like insurgent firestorms

along the mindstream of your vagrant waywardness

as if off the path were the way of the path as far as you can go

without turning into the template of a preconceivable destination.

But to see how the full moon shines in a thousand lakes,

a thousand thermal-paned windows, a thousand and one eyes

and a mystical number of poets drowning like a multiverse

in every one of them, or conversely, the moon,

as must happen in the infinite waterclocks of time,

sinking like a pearl of nacreous wisdom

through myriad incarnations of Li Po letting go

like blossoms and poems scattering before the fruit

of their inexhaustible enterprise ripening into a windfall of eyes.

PATRICK WHITE