LONG DAY PAINTING BY MYSELF DOWN BY THE LAKE

LONG DAY PAINTING BY MYSELF DOWN BY THE LAKE

Long day painting by myself down by the lake

where I used to paint with you many years ago,

and now your absence haunts my solitude

as I grey my greens with cool alizarin red

and though the trees and the water are the same

it’s a much eerier world just to know once

you who were here with me, are utterly gone,

and what has carried on without you, though

I’m affably intimate with its creative characteristics

is wholly estranged from the name I’ll write on this painting.

As if an era in art had passed. Dreams and assumptions,

things you take for granted because in living them

you sometimes must, like love and oxygen,

and the presumption of life going on between us,

for the most part unplanned,

but a commingling of waters nevertheless,

a sharing in the other’s quiet amazement

that the other exists as they are in your mindscape at all.

A heron rises from the cattails in the shallows.

A fish jumps at a dragonfly on the tip of a sword

of the wild irises in a muddle of mystic indigo

and a sulphur butterfly struggles in the thick pthalo blue

of the sky I slashed in with my painting knife

as if I were grouting the canvas like a mason

to lay a fieldstone wall that wouldn’t keep the birds out

that have learned to ignore me like a scarecrow

in warpaint ghost dancing at an easel

spreading its legs like a doe

come out of the woods

to drink quietly from its own reflection.

Everything seems thriving and deserted.

The waterlilies still clutter the wild rice

like prolific constellations of the frogs

whose singing doesn’t sound all that bad after awhile.

I’m a curiosity to the fox

that’s been taking a profound interest in my work

all afternoon as if I were some kind of savage impressionist

and it were a cultural savant with a few pointed suggestions.

Two raccoons luxuriating like moss on a femur of oak

behind me, watching me underpaint the lakeshore rocks

like two kids through the wire fence of a construction site.

Events of the day. Transactional armies in the grass,

bees and ruby throated humming birds

enabling the daylilies like pyromaniacs

and soon, the green dragon of the sumac

will burn in the auto de fe of the fall as well.

But you are not here to mention it to

and compared to the quality of the isolation

I once lived here with you in paradise

the beauty of my painting lacks the highlights

and finished details I used to attend to

knowing how they’d shine by the light of your eyes

as an effect of the atmospherics you brought to the scene.

And though everything appears the same,

it’s uncanny not to be heading homewards

with the shadows and the crows

as you and I did so many nights

well pleased with what

we laboured for all day in the sun

to a farmhouse full of paintings

whose windows cling to the remaining light

as we did like waterbirds for awhile

around a lake full of constellations

as the Eagle, the Swan and the Lyre,

went down behind the abstract expressions

of the sad geometry of the barn roof

weary of rusting like wavelengths of rippled tin,

not knowing whether it’s holding out

against the wind, the rain, the field fires

or still holding something empty

as an urn full of stars

that were scattered like chimney sparks

on one of the coldest nights of my life, in.

PATRICK WHITE

DYING YOUNG IN AUTUMN

DYING YOUNG IN AUTUMN

Dying young in autumn,

the ideal death of a flower or a star

whose beauty’s still as obvious

as a door that’s been left ajar at night.

The fireflies are search parties

out looking for someone

who’s made an escape through the woods,

or they’re lamp lighting deer

out of the dark into the glare of their insights.

Train whistle in the distance

works its ghost to death

Doppler-shifting its lament

into an infra-red eclipse of existence.

And then the stars in the eyes

of the recurring storm of the trees,

flaring over-eagerly like candles and dragons

to burn for the sheer delight of it.

I make my way through a labyrinth

of foliage and moonlit shadows

to nowhere in particular

with a rocky slope glacially graded

down to what the locals say

is a fathomless lake none of their childhoods

were ever deep enough to plumb.

I lie down upon the cool poultice of the earth

and I can feel it drawing

all the fever out of me like the effluvium

of swimming the thousand polluted mindstreams

I’ve become osmotically enculturated to

like a dendritic form of spiritual gangrene.

The moon puts a new dressing on my wound.

I urge the pain to rest like a homing bird

on a limb that’s healing like the rafter of a house

that broke under the weight of what it upheld

when a three alarm fire in the heart

sought sanctuary from an ice storm

and it was nobody’s fault but my own

that I didn’t let it go out like a flagging comet

with the rest of the daylilies

that died in harness like parachutes.

I’ve kept it alive for lightyears

like a book of the occult in an industrial library.

I’ve cupped its light in my hands

like an ancestral offering

to the enlightenment of my peers

and though the clouds have raved

and the wind turned vicious

it still burns in me like a dragon in an aviary,

a canary in a mine, a muse in a lantern,

a genie in an old lamp, a female demon

that only blooms in fire like a black waterlily

with nothing to fear from the new moon.

Or the fireflies trying to find it on a star map.

PATRICK WHITE

SOME THINGS YOU WEEP OVER FOREVER

SOME THINGS YOU WEEP OVER FOREVER

Some things you weep over forever.

Fathomless watersheds of infinite sorrow.

Others last as long as it takes the rain

to get a flower to bloom and perish,

with promises of good things to come.

Beauty cherishes a lock of wisdom.

Separation, departure, exile, severance, change,

since the womb, and a good chance earlier,

things coming apart like a mother giving birth

to the ghost of herself she gave up

to facilitate your coming forth upon the earth.

Here you are in the splendour of your mystic specificity.

And who knows how many lifetimes

had to be achieved and forgotten just as they were

so you could show up here so uniquely?

Point is. Goodbye’s always half of the greeting

and sorrow uses the same hand to hang on to life

as it does to let go of it with.

Our entrance is a back-handed exit.

We celebrate the seance and mourn the exorcism

depending upon which way the wind

is blowing our mother’s ghost in our face.

Out of sorrow was born compassion

as our eyes were born of the light

flirting with nerve cells, as the sky and the stars

adapted to our ocularity and soft-bodied animals

grew shells and thousands of scales like eyelids

and the Burgess shale became the communal gravestone

for millions, and all the new angels

were snow blind lab technicians in white coats

and the goddess who embodied life

in a ceremony of picture-music

became a particle and a Hox gene.

Do you see how it all transmorphs surrealistically

as it sings you to sleep in a dream of life

that fits the typography of your mindscape perfectly

like the skin of moonlight brushing up like a feather

against the skin of water, mutually realizing

the millions of waterbirds that arise

like oceanically enlightened emotions from them both?

I’ve heard the sea weep. The sky release the tears

that others pray for like rain. The earth groan in its agony.

I’ve sat at the bedside of dying friends

and said nothing the numbing silence

wanted to overhear whether it was wisdom or a prayer.

Here. Then it’s There. Now it’s Where?

We die into a mirror we can’t look into.

Or maybe when the light disappears

from our eyes here, it’s because

we took it with us like a star to see

into the abysmal darkness ahead of us

as we bring the future with us

like a perpetual myth of origin

that begins like a snake with its tail in its mouth

inconceivably where it ends.

One drop of blood from the rose’s eye

doesn’t violate the wonder of the child

that’s trying to live on in you, nor death

keep the iron bells of the elegy from ripening

like apple bloom born of grief

sweetening the clouds of their unknowing

even as the wind persists in blowing

what was once attached to us

like feathers to a bird away

as we make constellations of its evanescence

as if indelibility could slow down the rate of change

like the rear guard action of a retreating army.

Born to separate into more elaborate unions,

child of the elan vitale within you, Polaris

of all the indirections it took to find you,

the epiphanous life force that wears your body and mind

like the lifemask of a creative imagination

that has a flare for painting the world with its eyes,

but in all its works can’t find a similitude for itself

that suits it for the moment any better than you.

It’s a mistake to think that you’re the only one

that’s wearing your face, or a lack of identity

is your most cherished possession, or your sorrows

aren’t shared by the rubble of a thousand shattered pietas.

Celebrate death like a lunar fire dance at the entrance

to the creatrix of all exits. Truth can’t improve

the lack of things to a heart that’s only tasted

solitude and sorrow and clear cuts the crutches

on the mountain sides of all its legless tomorrows

hoping they might abide for awhile as trustworthy cornerstones.

Sorrow can be an emotional road

suffering from its own erosion. Tears

that were clarified by the flowing of their radiance

can turn into a festering stasis of ditchwater

if they’re left to stand too long among

the purple loosestrife and lost and lonely hubcaps,

deathmasks of the rogue planets that got left behind

when everyone went on without them

riding a four-wheel drive eclipse with three full moons to go.

Vehicular witchcraft. Or divine intervention.

Or the probable concourse of both,

the mind will nacreously secrete either

a black or white dawn of insight around it

to bury a thorn in a pearl of compassion

as things you couldn’t imagine the day before

flower out of a black hole like a blind rose,

and people fall away helplessly without life boats

like the rafters of an abandoned temple

better left to the birds than the prayers of the unfaithful

victimizing the martyrs of outrageous morphologies.

If sorrow ripens into compassion, the moon

enlightens the seed forms that orbit the core

of the green star of the apple and it’s chilled

by the stars of the night that turn

its taste buds into nanodiamonds

that can discern the flavour of the Pleiades

burning like a spice on the Silk Road.

If sorrow isn’t always a closed gate without a fence

trying to enclose a garden in an urn of ashes

it’s neglected like a cosmic egg for light years

trying to get over the disappointment

of finding the holy grail only to notice it was chipped.

If experience isn’t mentored by sorrow

deeper into the source of joy in life

that’s the voice coach of the exuberant birds

that are nine parts aubade and one part threnody,

and there’s frost on the windfall that isn’t stardust.

Set sorrow loose with an apple branch

to witch for wells on the moon

that have closed their eyes to spring in Aquarius.

By an overt act of sustained imagination

let sorrow root in you

like a wild grape vine

in the encyclopedic duff

of your last autumn on earth

then cry in your cups

as your tears turn into wine

remembering all the blossoms of the moon

that had to fall so you could taste

the moment of this sweetness

as if your own bloodstream,

its shadows and shining alike,

were a Gulf Stream of stars

that loved being swept away

by their own momentum

whether they’re photonically discharged

from a halfway house of decaying orbitals

like tree rings, birth marks, ripples and moon dogs

or moved by the dark energy

of their shape-shifting sorrows,

the ripening wavelengths

running up and down

the xylem and the phloem,

the ida and the pina,

the solar and the lunar threads

of their spinal cords like serpent fire

to reconfigure the world

through the third eyes

of their enlightened tears.

PATRICK WHITE

IT TOOK ME LIGHT YEARS TO TRUST MY VOICE

IT TOOK ME LIGHT YEARS TO TRUST MY VOICE

It took me light years to trust my voice

to say things my thoughts had to catch up to

like the unrehearsed understudies of hidden harmonies

making their presence manifest in the way

their dark matter bent space and made the words move

into place like water finding its own equilibrium.

The discipline, then, was not to interfere,

but listen when the wind turns the Byzantine green

of the Russian olives silver in the turmoil of its passage.

To pour yourself out of the mirror like the tear

of a weeping telescope when the Milky Way

gets in your eyes like the smoke of a hundred billion stars.

Or the ghost of a summer radiance

summoned to a seance of mediumistic fireflies

trying to fill in the gaps on their spiritual starmaps.

Last night’s full moon has sliced off

part of its waning earlobe shrinking

as it ascends from cantaloupe orange

to a pitted plum of cadmium yellow value eight.

I’m standing in a gravel driveway outside a storage shed

in the industrial part of town, my back turned

to a floodlight in a riot of insights that act like

frenzied insects, and I’m looking for stars

through the feathered ribs and scales of clouds,

toned by a copper moon rise in a cool acetylene sky.

The moon is rising over the roofs of a parking lot

full of transport trucks, and the contrast

makes the view even more surrealistically poignant.

Intensely so when I spot Arcturus burning

solely on its own in an immensity of peacock blue sky

turning Prussian blue and indigo

over a garishly lit garage that specializes in transmissions

and smells like an abattoir of oily orchids

sacrificed like sacred bulls in garlands

on the altar of a pneumatic car lift

where eternity intersects time as history.

Twenty feet from the driveway

to the perfectly latticed wire fence

sequestered on a reservation of useless land,

a pharmacopeia of every weed that grows wild

in southern Ontario, huddled on the crest

of a bull-dozed hill fort in self-defence.

And in one quick swathe of the bush-hog,

stunted runt versions of the same plants

blooming like symbols of underground resistance,

common mullein, tansy, Queen Ann’s Lace, vetch,

viper’s bugloss gone out like pilot lights on a gas stove,

and the sabre cuts and slashes of the tall grasses

waving green banners from their slender masts

and unbroken aerials as fragile as a heron’s legs.

Beauty and utility in a coincidence of contradictories

where abstractions haven’t been multiplied

beyond necessity. The earth turns as it always has

and the moon and Arcturus move accordingly

as the Summer Triangle emerges from the cloud-cover

like the brain child of a birdwatcher

with a taste for myth and mathematics.

Perennializing events in a trivial frame of reference.

And just as the bugs have their communal rapture

in the light, I stand here alone gazing at the stars

trying to see my way into other worlds

by closing the distance with the intensity

of my overwhelming wonder and longing to know

if there might be some poet out there tonight like me

watching the moon rise over bucolic machines

and the space needed to sustain them

at the expense of the trees and weeds and wildflowers

as he’s mystically weirded out by the relative parity

of disparate elements in an impersonally unified field.

And he like me, Arcturus, the trucks, the weeds

and the moon among them, living the ambivalent beauty

of an eternity that breaks its truce with time

once and awhile, to adorn what’s been defiled,

and let unity come forth by itself to forsake the difference

in a voice of its own the storage units trust

like the sacred syllable of a lock on mundane things

alloyed like haloes and horseshoes of stardust and rust.

PATRICK WHITE

GET THESE GOLDEN NETS, THESE CHAINS, OFF ME

GET THESE GOLDEN NETS, THESE CHAINS, OFF ME

Get these golden nets, these chains, off me,

these dreamcatchers, cobwebs, suspension bridges

swaying like sticky spinal cords across the shoreless abyss.

I’m smothering under these pillows of sunset

you keep pushing in my face to soften

the impact of my meteoric heart

trying to induce a new species

out of my own extinction

that might accord me a retroactive purpose

for having lived like a root

in the dirt of their flowering.

More compassion spent on lies

than truths, the sun might come up

in the morning and pour honey

all over its head like bees in the dawn,

but it isn’t the same for active volcanoes.

Half the world waiting to receive

what the other half wants to take from them,

via positiva, via negativa, sure

all roads lead to Rome eventually

like most rivers make the sea

but haven’t you noticed the mystic path

is cobbled like a calendar with the lunar skulls

of birds and gurus all along the way

who mistook the windows of opportunity

in their third eye, for the real sky up ahead?

I know you believe time heals all things,

and day after day, this implacable pace

can be construed as some kind of advance,

and even the dust on the windowsill

will be redeemed as the pollen of windblown stars,

if someone would only give love a fighting chance.

May it be so, sweet one, but life isn’t

the agenda of the blossoms, it’s in

the corporate boardrooms of the roots

trying to put a good spin on death

like the propaganda of decay. But even

castigation has lost its joy in life

and the sages that might have saved us

yesterday, are muttering like madmen to themselves

in murderous alleys that end

in cul de sacs of laughing children

without any idea of how absurd

it really all is for them as well as the homeless

they stab in the back in their sleep

for ratting life out like the black plague of their dreams.

Even if I had no legs, I wouldn’t want to spend

the twenty or less autumns and springs of life

I have left, if that, walking on water with golden crutches

like the principles of the dilemma I stand on,

I stole like oars from a lifeboat on a shipwreck

that had no more use for hope. I don’t

want to cook the books of my cosmic home recipes

and make a diet a messianic way of life

that greets the moneylenders at the door of the temple

and feeds the people the tongues of doves.

I was born into life raw as a new wound.

The same insights that touched your eyes like fireflies

were runically striated across mine

by surgical glaciers without any anaesthetic.

A street gang flashing its smile

like an iconic switchblade of moonlight

trying to leave its mark on life like scar tissue.

I’ve seen diamonds on the fingers of adamantine saints

turn back into infernal coal bins of ungratified desire

as soon as someone blew the candles out like photo-ops.

I’m wary of good people these days.

I’ve mythically inflated the illusion of my isolation

up into a rogue planet of habitable solitude

where nothing’s ever wrong or right

but endlessly intriguing in an interstitial kind of way

like a fish that swam out of the sea

or a bird that flew out of the sky

to adapt myself to the inchoate spaciousness

of a new medium of transformational events.

I’ve jumped the synaptic gap

between the earth and the heavens,

like the sound of one hand clapping

at its own performance, the sonic boom

that ruptures the eardrum of the sky

like a clown shot out of a cannon

without a safety net to disqualify the risk.

Whether I’m Zen duelling in the snake pit of the Id,

or studying the logic of the lightning

in the mirrors of prima donnas putting on their make-up,

to let the trees in the open fields know

where it’s going to strike their nervous systems next,

I don’t cling to things like a bat in the burdock

or a monk enduring the earthly ordeals

of his immaculate detachment like spiritual velcro.

I live in a world without handles, where the atoms

free associate into elements of their own choosing

and base metal can as easily be seen

as the grey dawn of gold, rather than

the long, hard discipline of learning how to be

self-destructive creatively and calling it a sacrifice

to the new moon on the altars of occult learning.

I don’t sail my poems down river like

paper-mache swans in a labyrinth of locks

trying to make their way gracefully to the sea

without waiting for a gate to swing open

like a crane on a backwater loading dock.

I shed them like the blossoms of the moon on a lake.

I can’t dance to engineered versions of this lunar ballet

that can’t walk on water without

feeling vertiginously out of its depths

whenever the road leads through a black hole

like the easiest way around the mountain of the world.

Slavic enough to take the whole burden

of the integrity of pain upon myself

as one of the eventualities of suffering

it’s as crucial to live through as it is not to,

I still reserve the right to shake my fist at the sky

like an extra gang railroad lineman

at four every afternoon before I fling a shovel

like an inkwell at the decapitated sun,

all the fruits of my labour you shall know me by

surrealistically Sisyphean as the tracks I’m laying

keep on decoupling my thought trains in the wilderness

as if this were as good a place as any to jump off.

PATRICK WHITE

THE VOICES OF DEAD FRIENDS, DEPARTED LOVERS

THE VOICES OF DEAD FRIENDS, DEPARTED LOVERS

The voices of dead friends, departed lovers

aimlessly feather the night air like the fragrances

of wildflowers and burning guitars thriving in the dark.

I’m out to see the Delta Aquarids down by the river,

leaping like a man with faith in his precarious footing

from skull to skull like a chessboard of oracular rocks

keeping their heads above water like a half-hearted bridge

dog-paddling in its own collapse, trying to cross

the same mindstream they’re in up to their eyes

for a better view of the sky in the clearing on the other side.

Clouds of cometary junkyards in decaying orbits.

Placental remains of unilluminated afterbirths.

I delight in watching how wasted things shine the brightest

on their way down like blossoms of paint

flaking off the windows of heaven like rose petals

revealing these thorns that gore and slash the night

like matadors and meteors with razorblades

hidden under the screening myths of their eyelids.

It’s natural when opposites come together,

enjoining disparate elements into more enduring alloys,

it’s the clarity that seems confusing to the untrained eye

and chaos that foreshadows transmorphic reality.

All my aspirations emanate from the same radiant

like sudden cremations in the upper atmosphere

that disintegrate and flame out upon re-entry

like Icarian candlewax at the black mass

of a waning eclipse factualizing the omens

of its own self-fulfilling prophecies of subliminal descent.

All the matches I strike like fireflies

and phosphorus flower buds against my heart

are put out by the same bloodstream

they once illuminated like wild columbine

and the hydrogen blue of the star clusters

burning like irises along this highly siderealized river.

Meteors. Two an hour. Bayonets of light

making the rounds on the nightwatch.

The tree line blows through the open window

of the wavering lake like an old curtain

about to be shed like the veil of the Queen of Heaven.

Indigo the eyes of Isis. With a white wavelength for a smile.

Here where she gathers up the severed hearts

of the light’s dismemberment like body parts

she heals by leaving the waterlilies on all night in the morgue

and staring so long and immaculately

into the darkness like a lump of coal

for the third eye of a spiritual snowman

washing his hands of himself like a pilgrimage

weeping diamonds all along the way

like the excruciating tears we all shed

in the shrines of the black suns that rise at midnight

like broken mirrors from the graves of dead metaphors.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMEONE'S CUT THE TONGUES OUT OF THE BELLS TONIGHT

SOMEONE’S CUT THE TONGUES OUT OF THE BELLS TONIGHT

Someone’s cut the tongues out of the bells tonight.

Even the silence isn’t singing to itself.

The windows are generously tolerant of intruders

but I’m locked into the splendour of my isolation

empathizing with things I don’t love.

Full moon. Fruit moon. Moon of berries and grain.

I thought I’d be happier at this time in my life,

but I’m threshing a harvest of shadows

for having sowed all my wild oats on the moon.

I’m intrigued by the fragrance of occult raptures on the air.

Dark intensities that can only end in immolation.

Black roses that only bloom in fire. Mystic disobedience

that lifts the flesh and blood taboos off

whatever comes to it naturally

as a late night 24-7 convenience store

or the fire that started in the kitchen of the Chinese restaurant

three doors down from my apartment yesterday.

Late night moods. The mind dogpaddling in its immensities.

Heritage town standing down from its fieldstones.

No drunks on the street, and all those angry voices

I didn’t recognize, gone home to sleep off their disappointment.

I sit like an air traffic comptroller mindwatching

behind these panes of glass as Arcturus goes down

over the tar paper rooftops I poetically associate

with clouds, stars, seagulls and hand-held mirrors of rain

after a thunderstorm has shattered its reflection in them

like a love affair that wasn’t going anywhere.

Doing time on earth, but of little consequence.

The bank across the street makes me feel depreciated.

Ask me this moment what legacy I’ve left

for the half century I’ve laboured creatively here

and I’d probably answer indignantly, a garage sale,

then reassure you by saying, for a good cause,

and mostly mean it, and partially wish I didn’t.

PATRICK WHITE