CONSTELLATION

CONSTELLATION

Even in spring, the night is old, and the rising moon, fool’s gold.

Maybe I’ll go on believing this darkness is the harbinger of light,

and even if life be proven random and absurd

there is still beauty and significance in the word that says so. These days, aging,

love is elusive

as the abandoned heart grows crude and abusive

and mistakes that were made and never mastered

return like the last word of a parting sleight that chilled the stars.

Within me the wines of being still dream of becoming blood,

and there are still angels in the mud trying to fashion a man

whose life is more than a passion of decay. Forsaken as folly

the dark clarity of the holy, I am yet a candle and a planet

that runs before the sun. More time behind me than ahead,

and the silence sadder for all the things that were said,

tonight I remember friends and lovers who once burned

with all the insatiable fury of life to be wonderful, wild, and free,

extraordinary in the turmoil of eternity,

and I bless the light by which they lived

through blossom, leaf, and fruit back to the deep root

that makes apples of the rain. Human, they were worth their fate in pain

now that none of us can live those days again. And though

it’s hard to dispute that life is a house on fire where you can’t stay long,

there are harps of night and voices and soft winds

that even the stars have not fingered to commemorate

the faces and places where we lingered awhile

to explore the immensity of a vagrant smile

that opened like a gate and a garden

or fell through the bars of our mortality like a file. From those

who were wounded by the furious rose of my youth, who were lashed

by the sudden squalls of an afflicted heart, I ask pardon

for the nights their eyelids closed like scars and offer

this silver herb of the moon they watered with their tears

until something grew in the salted soil of those punishing years.

Though late, I lay it gently on the stairs I’ve descended ever since

like a star reflected on water or a face in the black mirror

that never lost its innocence. It was the light that fell,

not the darkness that everyone is convinced is hell, the dove, not the crow

that plummeted below. But that’s a sail for another horizon

to keep its eyes on. The moon takes refuge in the window,

a stone swan rippling the dirty winter glass, the eyes of an old man,

the ruses of time, thawing to let it pass. More mercy

in the righteous fire of the forgiving liar

that tells himself that he is still young

than in all the grime of proven facts

vented from the chimney-mouth into the night

like refugees or fingers of smoke reaching for something they’ll never grasp.

And are my enemies satisfied, and the women who came and went,

ingots of hot honey poured into the mould of my bones

that formed them into roses and knives and keys to mysterious doors,

thresholds of pain and joy, dark and light, mountains and valleys

that led me like a stream down from my idealistic heights

to the great seas of being that encompass

the enchanted dream of this island seeing? I was a poor student

of the solitude they tried to teach me, but at this remove,

knowing what I know of love and agony,

I offer them my gratitude, and making a sword of the hour-hand

that once slashed at my heart

lay it gently in the wound that never healed, believing at last,

slow but thorough, I understand. They were the dark masters

of a lost art that bronzed the plaster cast of my spine

and long since all the blood and tears that were spilled have turned into wine

and all that was killed has risen again like a forest, like a green phoenix

out of this igneous delirium of time.

I was the first draft of a shadow I read to the blind.

Too early to make my peace, too late not to desire ease

and freedom from the long calling of my intensities,

the hollow of this blue guitar, this abundant emptiness

is crossed by power lines

attuned to the hidden harmony of heretical black stars

that have formed a constellation of their own on the back of my eyes,

and there is a name for it, not said by anyone,

not even the wise. And only the dead and children can see it rise.

PATRICK WHITE

AUBADE WITH AMBIGUITIES

AUBADE WITH AMBIGUITIES

Everywhere I go

I am buckled by sorrows

weeping like executioners

in hooded doorways

for the harvest of doves

they’ve bloodied

with their smiles,

for the ruined roses

that stain the hospital gowns

of soft-spoken guillotines.

And when I ask

for the address

of a rumour of joy

that might risk

a cameo appearance in my heart,

I am caught in the traffic jam

of an outdoor movie

that is just another rerun

of misunderstood butterflies

draped in spider-webs.

And the restaurants are full

of lunar refugees

confessing the names of God

on a rosary of skulls

spooled from the mass graves

of irreversible exterminations;

and on the highways,

drug-soaked children,

famous among milk-cartons,

running from rescue

all the way to Calgary

with Eldorado serial killers

in cowboy hats.

I do not think I was born

to be happier

than any other man,

nor dance with rivers all my life

under the chandeliers

of waltzing willows,

I am content

to let the autumn stars

sugar the apples

and the wines of life

that have dreamed so long

of mystic bloodstreams

wake up from their coma

of midnight suns

to flirt with the morning curtains,

but everywhere I ask for water,

the odour of dogs

rotting in stairwells,

virulent mothers

blistering coke in baby spoons

and lonely adolescents

picking at the scabs

of their showcase labels

like empty whiskey bottles

cruising for flowers

on emergency fire-escapes.

And how could I ignore

the inconsolable clowns

in convulsions of grief,

and the reptilian angel-slayers

that rise from the depths

like snapping turtles

to unfeather the stupefied swans

as if they tore

the pages out of a book,

dragging the clouds down

into the hot mud

of ambiguous bottom feeders?

Everywhere the air

grows tumescent

on the yeasts of grief

and the planet groans

like a death-cart

full of starfish, full

of fractured wish-bones,

full of the severed hands

of TV amputees.

And I want to pay the late fees

on the lightning that struck

the horns of the snail

like a war-crime, I want

to green the emeralds again

that were bleached in a flash

by the physics of food, my heart

burns to proclaim to the tribunals

that reek of thick colognes

and pounds of atrocious innocence,

that humans were born

to see and be amazed,

that there are still plants

in the scalded jungles

that will come forward

like shy cures, and golden salamanders

that will give us back our legs and arms,

that we’re not just a necropolis

of flesh-eating bacteria,

that there are truths and beauties

and ethics of water

that aren’t just triumphal marches

under the arches of our vertebrae,

that there are gods at work

like tender waterlilies

transforming the swamp,

turning the shit back

into intimate constellations

that won’t dwarf the night

with staggering distances

or runt the wonder

of our brevity

with the unattainable radiance

of reversible wedding gowns.

I want to make it all better,

breeze the pain

with blue-eyed summers

from a cedar hope chest,

appease the hungry

with mountains of bread

ored from miraculous grains,

talk the bridges down

from their keystone suicides

by showing them what’s needed

to get to the other side;

do everything I can

to grant immunity

to the bloodbank

that cries constantly

under my window at night

for braver transfusions,

give up an eye if I must

to defray the cost

of blind justice,

do whatever it takes

to prune the hazardous stars

from the razorwire crowns

of our unexempted suffering.

But everywhere I go,

roadkill redirecting traffic,

arsonists in volunteer fire brigades

pissing on a field that’s burning,

closet terrorists in uniformed bomb squads,

defusing suspect shopping-malls,

computer-generated humans

mechanizing the rights of man,

soldiers safer in the army

than children in their beds,

leaders following the followers

in climacterics of lemmings,

the rich bitching the poor

are the reason they suffer,

deviants preaching deliverance

to delinquents on their knees,

free markets enslaving nations

to brand-names on demand,

banks robbing the wretched

to give to those with more,

genocide on probation

while murder goes to jail,

excellence cowed by fools

when ignorance runs in schools,

doctors despising health

as an obstacle to wealth:

anyway, you get the picture.

When the fleas

train the tigers

to jump through fire

and the crows

coach the hawks

to look for silver,

or the avalanche

tells the mountain

where to stand

for a photo-op,

even if you feel,

even if the heart

bleeds like a blackberry

punctured by thorns,

and you’re up

to your neck

in a starless tar pit

darker than night,

and the bombs fall

like meteors like

the foundation stones

of crystal palaces,

is there a point

a pebble

an afterlife under

these quicksand pyramids,

these deserts in an hourglass,

this crack in the dawn

to build another world upon?

PATRICK WHITE

FLY ON THE WINDOW

FLY ON THE WINDOW

Fly on the window, trying to get out

for hours, incessant erratic movement,

as if it were looking for a parking spot.

Strokes its legs as if it were sharpening carving knives.

Firesticks. Witching wands. Who knows?

Nothing ignites. Cul de sac. Dead end.

Aerial view of Captain Cook exploring Bella Coola,

a kamikaze at Midway looking down

into a totally translucent sea

that proves there’s an outside on the bottom

all the way to the bank across the street.

Will undaunted, the ferocity of life,

and its commitment to it,

its savage insistence on

walking itself to death on a windowpane

as immaculate as the grimy glass

even in something the size

of a mythically inflated punctuation mark.

Musca. Fly. Liar. Spawn of Beelzebub.

Are you lying to me now? What about?

What do flies lie to people about?

Bet you don’t know I’m even here.

Objectivity. The delusion

of not clinging to anything that isn’t there

as if the mind doesn’t enable a random selection

of what is. You lie to me, fly,

and, I swear, I’m going to interpret you,

existentially. No exit. No entrance.

Right now, you look like a shoe

that’s learned to walk independently.

A black slipper, a sticky computer cursor

when the batteries are dying.

Shakespeare said by indirections

we find directions out. Is that

what you’re trying to do? Personally

I think you just confuse the whole issue.

In some labyrinths you’re the only bread crumb

you’ve got to follow. And o yes now

the little squalls of frustration,

the short, angry, flights as if you want

to head-butt the glass. Break through

to the other side. The abyss of your longing.

You can see it so clearly, not even

through a glass darkly, the stars and the moon.

Is this the mirage of a heatwave in an hourglass,

or the old Satan, the shaitan, who used to be

the angel who just might still be

the angel in your way? Prophetic reason,

trying to keep you from hurting yourself,

or the pique of an idle distemper amused

by its torment of you? Until you drop

of exhaustion like a fridge magnet

that didn’t get to spell out anything.

Flat on the delta wings of your back,

legs up in the air like tiny black wicks

in a candelabra at a black mass,

or charred stakes in a forest fire of heretics.

The whole world on fire. A cosmic auto de fe.

Poetic hyperbole. But, fly. I don’t mock you.

Of all the things I could be looking at,

the trophy lines of the spidery window jewellery,

Arcturus, the one bright note like a firefly

among the staves of the powerlines,

or something lyrically fascinating

like a woman at the back of my mind,

I’m looking at you as if we both shared

the same lifeboat, you, the rudder, me,

the sail, and the name on the bow in Braille.

PATRICK WHITE

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