YOU WERE A HOOKER BY SIXTEEN

YOU WERE A HOOKER BY SIXTEEN

You were a hooker by sixteen.

Your mother, your madame

The navy at N.F.B. Esquimalt, your john.

In the triplex, next door, upstairs

on a Friday night, all the windows

broken from the inside by whiskey bottles.

My friend, since you were seven,

how we struggled to keep our innocence

out of the world’s greasy hands.

Oil slick on the rose.

White peonies of blood-stained Kleenex

in the toilet bowl. Eclipse of the flowers

in a city of gardens. Even when the stars

were out, the darkness lurked, the doorways

housed strangers like trap door spiders.

Joy held a grudge against our wariness.

The windows didn’t trust us, and the street

was a firewalk of ordeals to test us

for things we really didn’t comprehend

but sensed, like broken glass, were crucial.

Painful to remember even now,

grey, grey, grey, the middle-aged children

trying to inch their way through the concrete

like dandelions or blades of grass,

or when it was wet, wrote their names in it,

each the founding member of a different slab,

gravestones with graffiti epitaphs

laid like bets against a future

that had been conditioned

by violence, poverty, disappointment.

The mythic inflation of human extremes

venting fumaroles of pent up emotions

entrenched like killer bees in their hearts

swarming the children in the agony of their perversity

as if they were always trying to get even with God

for something that drove them mad

with distemper and spiritual rabies.

Desecration always the answer.

Smashing beautiful things, debunking

the rare gestures of human divinity

that reminded them of who they weren’t,

fouling the waters of the children

with the effluvium of their own degeneracy.

I can see the chestnuts of your big brown eyes,

your helical blonde hair, your mulatto lips

and the pearl of your nacreous smile

when we walked through the wild broom fields

at the edge of town, and you forgot

how much your life hurt. Your mother.

Your body. Your corrosive acquiescence.

I should have made love to you

when you asked me why I hadn’t

and all I could say, because it was true,

I wanted to be different for you.

I wanted to show you what water couldn’t manage,

if you filled a bathtub up with tears,

you could always wash off in the stars.

You could burn off with light.

You could polish gold in the fire.

You could get out of the net

like the Circlet of Western Fish in Pisces,

out of the fetid uncleaned fish tank,

and see for yourself how vast the ocean is.

I didn’t know of a better way to be with you

especially when you showed up on Saturday morning

with wounds you’d keep to yourself

the rest of your life, and I wouldn’t ask,

it could have been anyone of a dozen men,

who bruised the beautiful blue eyelids of the rose,

and how, phosphorus and dry ice in my heart,

I wanted to give them a sex change

and turn them out like working girls on car seats

in the badlands of the Hindu woodlots

that reeked like seaweed on the moon.

Murder too good for the likes of them

in the ferocity of what was left of my boyish purity

I wanted to introduce them to the kind of agony

that feeds on itself, a root-fire, an inflammation

that can’t be contained by remorse or forgiveness.

Thorns on the roses they use to wipe their asses.

How many gates ago was that, how many

forbidden thresholds crossed, how many

long sidewalks you walked down alone

like a gazelle in the rain

with your stilettoes in your hand

thinking about nightschool

to become a nurse’s aide. Gone now,

noxious vapours from a street vent.

Heard you dumped a trick in Montreal

as soon as you got off the plane.

I went on to university which was

a different kind of whoredom without the fun

and then deepened my alienation as a poet

by refusing to forget about you

when I entered the witness protection programme

and disguised myself in my solitude

to keep the nightmares from seeping back in

like radon gas summoned to a seance in the basement

where all the bodies were buried

that had made their bones at our expense.

Still doesn’t make sense to me after all these years.

Surreal atrocities and ironic black farces

you didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at.

As I get older, little archipelagoes of memories

surface from that lost continent of childhood

before it broke up and went its separate ways.

I take little doses of depression everyday

to immunize myself against the poison

of all those people who threw themselves

like bad meat down the wishing wells of the children

we did an unconvincing job of being,

so little joy in the way we looked at ourselves

when no one else was. Salvage and shipwrecks.

Time insulates and buffs, brokers and deals,

but it does not heal. You love someone,

and you loved them even before

you learned how to feel, and they’re in

a worse mess than you are, and you burn

to help them out like one constellation to another,

a bear trap in a marijuana patch baited

like Andromeda chained and helpless on the rocks

and you want to slay the inevitability of dragons,

but all you’ve got for a sword is the hand of a clock

and the courage of a badly mauled heart

and thirty-seven light years of remembering

your unspeakable silence on a Saturday morning

and the tenderness of you leaning your head

against my shoulder as we walked

as if I were the mountain and you

were the avalanche looking for someone

to hold on to you like a meteor shower

at the end of an era of one-eyed telescopes.

Hope you’re a nurse somewhere now in the world.

Clean sheets and a compassionate bedside manner.

Maybe staring out of a window on the nightward

at the stars above and the city lights below

as we used to look down from Mt. Tolmie

to see the firefly of Port Angeles across the Georgia Strait

like a sister galaxy, Messier 31,

in the Great Square of Pegasus

where I buried our new myth of origin

in that constellation I made up for us

like a time capsule of what we could save

of our childhoods, and never dig up again.

O but that fathomless silence on Saturday morning

like a black hole in the sunshine, and the sky,

the injured bird in your eyes, has taught me more

about the crazy wisdom of compassion

and the injustice of suffering before you had a voice

to shriek it as if your nails were striating glass

like a diamond-cutter or a snow blind glacier

or a mirror you clawed until it bled red roses,

than my last eight books and four awards for poetry have.

Every anti-hero needs an anti-muse of dark energy

to fire things up like a cold furnace

in a lighthouse on the dark side of the moon,

that doesn’t listen to its own storm warnings

and goes off in a lifeboat to look for you

as if I could still keep you from drowning

in a sea of shadows after all these years.

Three bells and all’s well, I hope.

Though probability’s seldom esteemed

for the prophet it is. You left me your silence,

as if nothing else could answer me,

and I’ve been listening in my solitude ever since

for the hush of your shoes coming down the hospital hall.

PATRICK WHITE

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