FLYAWAY WOMAN

Flyaway woman with a blue ladybug for a heart,

I am not your firetruck, or the glass wishbone you break

in case of an apple emergency when you split

like the seedcase of an eyelid into the angelic smear

of an orchid of smoke with dangerous doves for hands.

Leave me alone to the night that goes on in the depths

of the praeternatural river that threads the eye of the bridge;

and the fish that brain the darkness with the constancy

of thoughts and emotional lightbulbs

that keep tripping over their hairtrigger traplines

trying to illuminate their destiny

in the palm of the skeptical lightning

who does a bad imitation of God. Flyaway woman,

I could love the way you smile as if

you had a mouthful of coffin nails

and wanted to board the world up with plywood

so you could live like a rose in a hurricane

without blowing the sandbox cities

of the peninsular children away. Flyaway woman, tell me,

is your heart an orange in the fridge with green sunspots,

your body a ship that left yesterday

riding low in the water with a hold full of broken jewelry

to trade with the illegal immigrants

who would sell you a continental gram

for a single bead of rapture? Flyaway woman,

why keep the past alive in an album of angry mirrors,

and grieve like a wounded doe

all tangled up in a constellation of razorwire

waiting for someone to put you out of your misery,

when there’s more silence

in one of the moist plums of your accusing eyes

than there is the space the galaxies

douse their torches in? Flyaway woman,

I am not an arsonist in heat
with a bouquet of wooden matches
and a ragged doll of gasoline,

standing on your threshold with the smile

of a late-breaking headline. There’s no doubt

you’re a foreign queen

in a tormented hive of black honey, but I am not

the sticky bear that’s come to maul your secret bees.

I have my solitudes and voices that speak to me

like cemetery shovels just like you; and I know the terror

of being suddenly overturned by a sudden squall

on an ocean of seaworthy love-letters just like you.

And it’s true that life is often an S.O.S. in a soggy bottle

the keeps washing up at your feet in the morning

like a dead octopus in a kissing booth,

and there are watermelons full of razorblades

who come on like the dawn
and toads of lust who ask you to lick their backs

to craze you with a vision of angels rotting like sheets.

I can’t deny the world’s a house on fire

and there are slimy organizations of algae

that go from whore to whore,

asking you to write off your life

as a charitable donation

to child pornography; I cannot say the world’s a nun,

or there aren’t scars and skidmarks on the moon

from previous landings, forks

that strike like vipers at the olives in a nest,

but, flyaway woman, I am not your nemesis,

I am not the intellectual coathanger

that wants to tear the embryo out of your belief in me.

I live in the dark with terrible imaginings

and a raped ambulance that asks me

to get the lily of her siren to the hospital

for a blood test to prove we die in jest,

and I can’t recall how many dreams ago

the surgical swans and torn peonies

last came for a change of dressings,

the effusions of neglected roses

bruising the return addresses on their unbound bandages,

but flyaway woman, there’s an eclipse in my chest,

a crow in a furnace

trying to peck its way out like a spear,

and small scorpions of doubt

rehearsing requiems of bleached fire

on the keyboard of my feelings like treble clefs,

and I am without wings

in the eternal pause of a comma

that wants to create the world anew from a maggot of light.

PATRICK WHITE

OBLITERATIONS OF BEAUTY AND WE WEEP

OBLITERATIONS OF BEAUTY AND WE WEEP

Obliterations of beauty and we weep

for what cannot long abide in us

because we, not the rose, are the ones

who are passing so irrevocably away

into an abyss that doesn’t

take the measure of anything.

The lake knows the time

by the wingspan of its waterbirds.

I note the location of the stars

in the rotation of the Big Dipper.

And there are crickets

that will yield the time as well.

Time, too, like human solitude

is embodied in the things of this world.

Time perishes when we do,

is born with us, matures,

and embraces our ends as its own nature.

Time sets its pace to the passage of us.

We are the muse, the motivator, the demi-urge

of its passion for shedding

the leaves and flowers and moon like skin.

And we’re the ones who grow infinite

at the speed of light so that everything stops

immeasurably from there on everafter.

All things returning to the one, and the one,

returning to transcendence. Which is why

I come here this late at night when the stars

are as far from people as they can be

and yet they’re still as intimate to me

as my eyes are. A mutually creative continuum.

The star makes the eye I need to see it by.

I am the fragrance of the wildflowers

and the adamantine insights of the rocks.

The singing master of the nightbirds.

The oracle in the leprous skull of the raccoon.

And my heart is one long, continuous moonrise

when I think of how the dead still animate me.

How they cling to my heart like ants to a peony

to let me know when it’s time to bloom.

The dead trees house the mosquitoes and the herons.

The fallen pine cones, the seed koans of Zen masters

under their brittle eyelids waiting for the fire

to crack them deciduously open into evergreens.

I don’t lament the passivity of the dead in my life

because I put them to good use in their capacity

as enlightened mentors who urge me

to live splendidly whatever I encounter in the world

for all our sakes. I can be the blossom and the fruit

on the dead branch, as easily as a red-winged blackbird

sings from the green and leafless alike.

Not a bush wolf raises its voice up to the moon

that I don’t feel its distant longing in my own throat

like a sacred syllable half way to blossoming among the dead

who always hear it like an auspicious beginning

to the summons of their leave-taking in the fall,

to the deeper greeting in the meaning of farewell.

PATRICK WHITE

RESTLESS WITH THE DEAD TONIGHT

RESTLESS WITH THE DEAD TONIGHT

Restless with the dead tonight.

Old friends, the gates to abandoned farms,

the roof collapsed and the wind with access

to all their windows, overgrown roads

going nowhere I can walk with them now.

Blue-green the evening sky, still,

without direction, island clouds, but unmoving.

Sparse beginnings, and sorrow in the seed.

Relying on the stars to do for me

what I can’t do for myself. Pull me out

of this black hole I keep slipping in and out of

on the rim of my event horizon, stray photons,

butterflies ducking in and out of the dragon’s mouth,

a halo of X-rays looking brutally right through me.

Down to the musical instruments of my bones.

Flutes and drumsticks. But I’m void-bound,

trying to shed my skin like a chronic illusion,

liberate the chains I can feel but can’t see,

numbed by having to say no

when all I want to do is say yes

over and over again to the picture-music

to the themes, the hints, the clues, the nuances,

the radiance, sorrow and horror of the mystery

wherever it leads, whatever occurs,

be so fully here, I don’t exist, not even

as a witness, and be nothing but the listening.

I suffer crucial impasses of circumstance.

My heart is blocked, the way isn’t clear.

The emptiness is leaner than usual, longer

than a plague of Egypt living up to a penurious dream.

Third eye of the hurricane slowly closing.

My friends at the end of a tunnel of light.

Reptilian as a camera shutter. I howl

for stars and fireflies, the accoutrements of my bliss

and the pleasure I take in the hidden harmonies

of my drifting, my circuitous blossoming.

Someone is using my skull for a door stop.

Too grounded by the shadows of the impending,

Even here by the river, the sound of distant trucks,

the occasional train bemoaning its way through the dark.

Snakes out hunting the frogs, slide and splash

back into the lake at my approach, estranged enemy,

walking in my place, face covered with ashes

of a man-shaped urn that’s avoided me for a while.

The way I like to live. Overlooked by the world.

Unregarded. Obliviously free to disappear

without worrying about what I’m coming back to

or who’ll be waiting for me when I do

to tell me while the idiocy of this languor

has got its hands on my throat, I should learn

to get a grip on myself, eat the pain, swallow the bilge,

live like a bear nibbling on the edges of a garbage dump,

give up this discipline of doing nothing

as if mere being were a form of worship

though to what is anyone’s guess and why

is just the nature of the mind reveling in itself

the way the stars make me guess their names

peering through the crowns of the trees,

dissociated from the features of their mythologem.

Time with their lifemasks off to be uncontained.

To go mad and not be held to account for it

because it doesn’t excite the attention of the crowd

when you’re unattainably available to live

as if your eyes were the way the stars touched you in tears

to see how the light labours for its flowering in you.

Thought-moments and light years bringing news

of friends from the past, bats and owls

flashing through the inadvertent moonlight,

the whole of existence in every locket of my cells,

freedom born, creatively, with a starmap for a genome.

PATRICK WHITE

IF I EVER GET TO LOOK BACK ON ALL THIS

IF I EVER GET TO LOOK BACK ON ALL THIS

If I ever get to look back on all this

even if it’s just to show me how wrong I was

about so much, how much I risked for so little,

I don’t want to have been mean and petty here,

I don’t want to have lived short-minded

as if my brain never grew to its proper height

and I had to live close to the ground

with burrowing wasps and centipedes

trading toxins in the grass like slumlords.

Tried to live like a magnanimous man

with an open hand whenever my luck kept pace

with my generosity. Didn’t want to die

knowing nothing about the stars, that shining

that grew in time even brighter in the dark within.

Wanted to know the fury and compassion, genius,

the affable kindness, madness and love of humankind.

Used to say we were born to see and be happy,

and if you couldn’t find a meaning that suited you,

make one up of your own. Don’t waste

the great creative potential of the absurd

and try to fit yourself like a little polyp of sentience

into the fossilized coral reefs of the past.

Go for the galaxies. What’s to lose?

If you’re going to fall, fall from a height.

Sooner a brilliant failure than a mediocre flight.

You’d be surprised at what the timing of one comet

falling out of the black halo around the sun

can mean to millions watching down below for signs.

Sensible shoes, or starmud on your winged heels,

Icarus or Neil Armstrong using his foot

to take a big step for humankind, walk your mile

standing up as if you were scanning for leopards,

your simian continuum at a fork in the road.

Danger is a capricious muse, but it can still

rivet you with inspiration. The hunters get eyes.

You grow an exoskeleton, then rib

the walls and rafters of the house and soon

the sun decides where the windows are going to go.

The Hox genes talk, and you’re the topic of conversation.

You start listening as if

you were listening in on yourself,

all those voices and things

for words you don’t understand,

bliss, butterflies, sorrows and assassins,

the victimized heroes of egoistic tragedies,

and the poetry in the pity of unexpurgated passion.

Lovers in the last throes of unmitigated catastrophe.

The rush and turmoil of the picture-music

going on all the time, shapeshifting

from one musical scene into another

and even you with your hands over your ears

sick of listening to the cosmic hiss,

climactic cymbals in the great performance

just waiting to come together like a hadron collider

deep underground where black holes in space

are born of the impact. If you’re not already

too calculating, or mesmerized like a stone bird

by the snake-eyes of the dice, put some money

down on yourself as if you had one to lose,

and if for nothing more than the exercise,

kiss your prophetic skulls for luck and let them roll.

And when you love, don’t approach a seabed on the moon

with a spoonful of water you can both sip from.

Return like an ocean with a convincing atmosphere.

If fools rush in where angels fear to tread

the angels will follow soon enough, with blessings

on the horns of your head. Learn

every gesture of her eyes like pictographic signage,

of her heart, a grammar for two, of her mind

be the no one to lift its veils, of her body,

apprentice yourself to the genius of her starmud.

Everything that lives is a gesture of the absurd

the imagination delights in elaborating

like people with the personalities of apple-trees

or the encyclopedic prolixity of the Burgess Shale.

I am is not the cornerstone of anything.

I imagine. And the wind is the threshold of the tent

that sheds the desolation of a self like a flower

that blooms in fire. Why water a mirage? Live large.

Squander stars on your vision of this, swallow the abyss

to keep your emptiness well fed, let your wisdom

be the private life of space, your time on earth

be passage and transformation, and your heart

cherish the bliss of all, animate and inanimate alike,

who suffer the same dream of being awake that you do.

PATRICK WHITE

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