LOOKING FOR SILENCE LIKE THE OTHER WING

LOOKING FOR SILENCE LIKE THE OTHER WING

Looking for silence like the other wing

of what I’ve got to say, landscaping with meteors,

or the planet having a face lift, some of the words

have echoes and some of them proper names,

and a few still homesick for their prison cells,

I keep painting on the white noise of the world.

I keep writing like a wolf in the fleece

of a shepherd moon with a secret life of water.

Scofflaw, a poet, driven into the wilderness

to listen to the voices of disembodied messiahs,

kings of the waxing year, flesh stripped from their bones

like desert shipwrecks waiting for

the providential tide of their tears to return.

God particles that got in their eyes like sand.

I hear them gnawing on their bones like calendars at night.

And I’ve said it in a flash of demonic indifference

trying to pretend they were listening immaculately

and I was compassionate, as soon as you give

your fulsome assent to a few simple things

you turn into a test of what you refuse to let go of,

as if you were always faith-wrestling with rattlesnakes

you establish a church of denial that will stone you to death.

You save your soul but you render your flesh expendable.

This for That. Betelgeuse for Aldebaran.

How to read a starmap like the Wall Street Journal.

The optical illusion of a bifurcated consciousness,

loss and gain, but the viper can swim across quicksand

as if it were all one wavelength, the Egyptian glyph

for intelligence that hasn’t been wounded by the heart

and spiritually materialized into a path to follow.

Do as the wind does with your mind and eyes. Let go.

Blow the stars off your windowsills, treat all holy books

as if they were trees and let go of their leaves in the fall.

There’s always a few jewels of insight in a gossip column

but most of it’s rut, rant, and judgement, dream gossip

and slaughter, history with an expiry date.

There’s always going to be some demi-god somewhere

asking you for your fingerprints like a paranoid magician.

Kick the skulls off your stairs like last Halloween’s pumpkins

and start acting like you’re in the world and of it.

Break the neck of the hourglass of heaven and hell

and let time pour out of your cells like exorcised mirages.

Illusions are like rats and seagulls and insects. They thrive.

No more than the night, is life a reward. Water

doesn’t live its whole life fearing the indelible

like a wavelength of its own immutable mindstream.

There’s no big sky blueprint behind why you’re alive.

No circus tent covers your foolishness.

And you’re not here to answer for everything else.

PATRICK WHITE

HALLOWED BE THE GENTLENESS OF A PACIFIED MIND

HALLOWED BE THE GENTLENESS OF A PACIFIED MIND

Hallowed be the gentleness of a pacified mind.

Uplifting, a gust of stars, dust doing wheelies

in a back alley like a vehicular Sufi in a Ford,

because, and this is significant, it doesn’t, I swear,

mean a damn thing and therein lies the joy of it.

Inspiration never aspires to meaning. It doesn’t

cling like a God particle to give the matter at hand, mass.

The morphology of the multiverse is bubbles.

Iridescent, rainbow-smeared grackle-headed bubbles.

And that includes the black-pearled oil slicks

shining like new moons after their first eclipse.

Meaning, that hovers like a ghost of grammar

over the things of the world that can find

their own place in it without consulting anyone.

Who turns around to ask their shadow where they’re going?

Grammar’s a dead shaman. Time for new orthodoxies,

to let the rain make some new creekbeds to flow in

when it’s lamenting the death of a Spanish guitar

like a gored matador scarred by a Babylonian bull.

I’m smothering in the parachutes of the morning glories

as if it just snowed outside by mistake. It’s not fake.

It’s playful, profoundly playful, unsayably so.

Putting things together like table legs

is the basis of perception. Put any two

disparate elements together that share the same metaphors

and guarantee you you’ll laugh at the shock

of photonic insight discharged like a power-surge

down the backroads of your nerves, out for a joy-ride.

But you’ve got to be free to do this. Unpack

all those preconceptions you’ve hoarded

like a coral reef you’ve got to navigate around

to keep from running aground without a life jacket on.

Travel light. Don’t even take yourself. On the road

let your thumb go on by itself like an over eager companion.

Hellfire’s just the smell of burning rubber

bored by life on the farm. No risks worth taking.

Life refuses to be denied its vastness, stunted

into a black dwarf that limps like the king of something.

Even the stumps of the clear cut slopes of literature

are being burnt out like old gurus in their pine-cone temples,

seeds opening their eyes in fire like a nirvanic experience

that nobody knows anything about. Who can’t hear,

anti-solar gegenshein above the horizon, the distant mutter

of another breech-loading revolution in the distance

moving like a weather front toward us with eviscerated intent?

You don’t have to live like a bird in an air-raid shelter,

a canary in the mine, you just have to gain some elevation

on the bombs. Let the sky do the flying for a change.

And then move on to stars where you can trade

your flight plans in for the source of your own radiance.

No more Nazca lines. No more fireflies organized into runways.

You just shine. Amazed at what you can do, as the light

always is, at what can be achieved without even trying.

Joy and inspiration, for example, love, wonder,

shape shifting in the mystery without having to be anyone.

Anywhere. Anytime. Anyplace. As if you had

a message to deliver that would upstage the course of history

and you sent it downriver like a paper boat

so the butterflies could marvel at how easy it is to float.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN MY HEART ISN'T A HUMMINGBIRD ON A KEYBOARD

WHEN MY HEART ISN’T A HUMMINGBIRD ON A KEYBOARD

When my heart isn’t a hummingbird on a keyboard,

it’s a spider on a guitar. The long fingers of a surgeon

my mother used to say, the air bright with potential

and the creature with a purpose, a future it meant,

a destiny it was born to fulfil like a chain reaction.

Now it’s an error of evolution just to make it through another day.

And nights, sidereal ballerinas leaping like Cygnus at zenith

over the toxic wavelengths in this snakepit of street life.

Blessings on everyone’s head, I’ve shed a few lives of my own,

but I mean the nights, sometimes the nights,

scatter my own ashes over my head in mourning

like a nuclear winter that won’t let me forget.

Now there’s nothing perennial about my paradigms

and the flowers don’t grow as imperial as they used to.

Ferocious weeds spring up among the downtrodden

and swarm the gardens of the sun-king, the cattails

impaled, and the heads of the poppies on pikes by the gate.

I’m looking for new moons in the calendars of chaos

to sow the teeth of a dragon under. Soil made vintage

by the dissolution of the dead who are buried in me

as I keep on living their deaths like an impossible ending

to a recurring dream I haven’t woken up from in years.

Red alert. Don’t climb higher than the mountain is tall

unless you’ve got a star in your eye you’re going to follow

for the rest of your denatured life. But no one’s listening.

They’re all taking polls of bad examples on talent shows.

Can’t stand the artificial lights or the trained hilarity

of the audience defrocking sacred clowns at a cult ritual.

But I found a flap at the back of the circus tent

I like to slip out through and let the darkness

wash the patina of blazing out of my eyes

and encounter six thousand stars whose shining

ease the mind by enlightening its unique insignificance.

I like to blunder my way into places alone

where who I am is nobody’s business but the willows

and they’re not saying anything to the wind

that’s heard it all before. One moment you’re the canvas

and the next you’re a paint rag up to your alligators

in muddy oils trying to save an orchid from its own hysteria.

If there’s any rafter of my life left standing

it’s as fragile as a compass needle wobbling on a thorn.

One moment you’re teaching spiders to play the guitar

without barring their chords, and get rid of

those old harps of theirs that have been collecting in the corner

like dreamcatchers they couldn’t hold a note

if it were a velcro butterfly, and the next

you’re boiling strings like spinal cords in a bird bath.

But alone, where there’s no assent or denial,

and the false redeemers are orphaned

in their baskets and mangers among the hay and bull rushes,

I can juggle the crazy wisdom of myriad worlds

bubbling up in my blood like a playful multiverse

without dropping one of them, and swallow the swords

the moon lays down on the lake in tribute.

No blackboards in my freedom. No chalk fossils

among my crayons, I have been schooled

in the ghettos and still life studios of my solitude.

Here where the river emerges from a larynx of dead trees

I can think my way into the most open-minded modes of death

without having to turn around and go home again

or forget I’m just an organ of light that makes things visible

for anyone with an eye to spare, or the time

to listen to the picture-music where their senses meet

like parallel lives that have suddenly come into focus.

PATRICK WHITE

O NO WITNESS TO ME YOU CAN'T GO

O NO WITNESS TO ME YOU CAN’T GO

O no witness to me you can’t go,

though I long for it, you don’t follow,

my shadow stops leaving itself behind as a sign.

I have been ungrammatized by the madness of scientific magic,

a waterclock of life boats I kept bailing out of

until I threw the baby out with the bathwater, mushy as soap.

I tore down the shrines of chaos as an act of irreverent devotion

and the dead thanked me for stealing what they couldn’t give away.

Divine solace without earthly consolation,

I wanted to be crucified diagonally as a random act

of symbolic defiance, but I was buried

under an avalanche of skulls on the moon

and all these voices in my head that swear they’re prophetic

keep baffling me with alternative universes

that have no interest in cultivating me as a way of life.

But you my heart, dark star, dying insurgent of my solitude,

homeless door into the open, your eyes more beautiful

than reflecting telescopes on a cold mountain

far from the city, I am a casualty of space, what hands

do I have to hold you with? Time has ripped out my tongue

like an autumn leaf, and the clouds gather, sweetness,

the clouds, hushed like a book-signing at a mortuary.

Whatever value I had once as a man has turned

against the mirror of miracles, the chthonic excellence

of elegizing the teen age suicides and untactical drunks

that curled up in a coma on the train tracks

as the inevitable came into view with a warning whistle.

I poured libations of poetry to beseech the poppy gods below

among their immortal bees, to explain something to them

gentle and soothing, cool honey on a burn. Delusional

but compassionate in a useless kind of way. A gesture

of ineptitude that swept me away in tears for how much

has yet be lost in the abyss of human affairs

that doesn’t even taste of us after all these years.

At the window of wonder, if you don’t throw

the moon through it, you’re going to drop like a fly.

No more questions to pin down like the head of a snake

to keep it from turning on you like the lethal insight

of a gamma ray burst into the nature of nothingness

across the great divide of the razorwire

that twinkles like stars that are deaf and dumb

to the wishes we make upon them. I wish I may,

I wish I might be seen by you as the missing wing

of your cosmic symmetry, and you, the dark matter of mine.

Could we fly? Could we shine? Could we go mad together

under your bedroom window in a connubium of moonlight

and even the insincere candles from the dollar store seem sublime?

This far out at sea, would you be my island galaxy,

would you let me be washed up on your coasts

among the drowned, my whole life flashing before your eyes

as I reached out for you ingenuously as the tide

leaves things at your door like nomadic starfish

and my fingers, almost touching your face,

as I have so many times imagined

an enlightened savage might your talismanic sorrows,

feathers of joy and sacred dirt in a sexual medicine bag?

PATRICK WHITE

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