WATER HAS ITS FOLLOWERS

WATER HAS ITS FOLLOWERS

Water has its followers

but the wind is free of an audience.

It doesn’t encourage cults of wild irises and daylilies

along the flowing of its banks.

It sows the orchards with the pollen of stars

it kicks up like dust at its heels.

But my voice isn’t the larnyx

of windmills and waterwheels

and when I speak

I’m always one among the crowd

that’s listening at the same time

to a conversation with themselves

that took the words right out of my mouth.

My voice is a seance.

The dead use it like a bus stop.

The swallows and the pigeons

drink from it as if it were a public fountain

efflorescing like an Easter lily in Florence.

It’s a guitar. But I am not

the medium, the message, or the master.

Sometimes my voice comes in the mail

like a self-addressed suicide note

I wanted to take a cheap form

of copyright out on. Be dead

by the time it got here

like the light of a star that’s gone on ahead

so I won’t need to open it to the public.

No echo. I know it’s a black hole

with nothing to say to anyone

who isn’t as singularly empty as it is

cowboying aeons of dark matter into galaxies

that won’t stray from the herd like starfish.

Still life with clown, sometimes

it finds me meditating among the pears

or half-lotus in the nunneries of the waterlilies

praying for something important to come down

like Jesus or a ufo and take me away

just take me away for good from this alien place.

When it talks as if it’s been insulted

I’m the one who loses face when it decides

it would be more honourable for me to die

facing in the direction of my chi,

gutting myself on a compass needle

that’s been in the family ancestrally,

than waste my death as I have my life on poetry.

And when it’s in a less ceremonious mood

it holds a broken beer bottle up to my throat

and threatens to cut my heart out

like a bird stuck in a chimney

putting wings on its jugular like a one-stringed harp.

PATRICK WHITE

MY FINGER ON THE TRIGGER

My finger on the trigger of the crescent moon

I hold like a gun to my head,

or should I offer my throat to its blade,

unbind the flag of my blood from its pulley,

pull down the poppy

that exalts in the wind and the light

from this sad station of passing shadows

that mourns the death of the night like birds

in a burnt-out forest of blossoms and ashes?

I have the emotional life of a bell

rooted in rock like the columbines

that have mastered a silence I aspire to,

lamenting the metal in my blood

that rusts like the afterlife of iron,

defeated pollen no bee will gather, hive, or honey.

I am passionate dust,

not the powdered auburn

that stains the stamens on the stargazer lilies,

I bleed like a metal,

and I am leafless year round,

my seeing does not follow the sun like a heliotrope;

I am a bowl full of stars, a radio dish

listening for signs of life,

one word to startle the ancient hiss of creation

that keeps returning me to this moment

to cross swords with the clock,

even knowing how time will pierce my heart.

What folly to expect a horn to flower,

what madness to weed the stars

and expect a harvest

to fill the waiting silo of the railroad granary

that funnels nothing but air and echoes

into an abyss that lingers like a famine.

There are no more fortune-cookies in my kisses,

the constellations that once slid across my eyes

like an escalator approaching zenith

all look like punctuation marks without a text,

kells without an inaugural scripture

that isn’t a sigh of miscarried beginnings,

the desiccated afterbirth

of a pen with wings

that wasn’t strong enough

to crack its way out of the cosmic egg and sing, just sing

for the celestial fuck of it.

Caw. Chirp. Caw. Chirp. Caw.

Blank. Loaded. Blank. Loaded. Blank.

The hammer I was using

to build a palace of light and water,

to be able to nail my coffin shut with the truth,

coming down

on the anvil of the heart like the pulse

of a stagestruck bullet.

PATRICK WHITE

TRYING TO SHINE TO BLIND THE VOODOO DOLLS

TRYING TO SHINE TO BLIND THE VOODOO DOLLS

Trying to shine to blind the voodoo dolls

sticking sharp pins of insight dipped in stinging nettles

into my eyes like burning thorns that won’t wash out

even when the blue rose of the sky

puts her face in her hands and cries her heart out.

Made my Icarian ascent to the sun

like a kamikaze pilot in reverse trying to be positive

about the self-destructive aspirations

under my thawing wings, now

I’m trying to keep my balance on my spinal cord

stretched like a highwire suspension bridge

across an abyss that keeps expanding my insignificance

as I juggle planets with my feet I keep dropping

like my head in a guillotine made for mercy.

I want to say this is the dung-heap, this is the dogshit,

these are the maggots that thrive in the corruption of it

like toxicara worms that get in your eyes

and under your fingernails, and burrow

like small black holes through your heart

and let all the light out of your life like a slow leak

somewhere in the pipeline of the universe

that’s fracking me inflammably like a watershed

and I’m trying so hard to snow all over it

with the highest ideals of understanding and compassion,

every mystically specific flake sidereally designed

to ameliorate the repulsive and obscene

by cloaking it in white like an albino hypocrite.

For light years I used to believe if you

threw flower seeds in it, you could work it

like starmud blooded by a battlefield of torn corpses

into a bumper crop of zinnias and sublimely poignant stargrass.

Marvellous transformations of an outhouse

into the lunar beauty of the nocturnal Taj Mahal

making the black mirror, like the lost sheep, more beautiful

in a universe where love and light and life so often seem

mere mutations of the darkness.

Didn’t really want to make an ideology of a wild guess,

that would only add to the mess of cultish concepts,

and not really born to sow stardust

into the ploughed wound of a worm,

nevertheless, I drew a gold sword

out of a philosopher’s stone

and plunged it through the base metal of my heart

to suffer all those little deaths in life

and those liberating space twisting

indelible excruciations of cosmic transformation

that wrought this discipline of disobedience

I practise like an art into the absurd freedom

of the crazy wisdom that’s needed to make

a start somewhere, somehow, however small

by adding my crystal skull to the shining

like the sacred syllable of a drop of water

off the tongue of a silver leaf in the moonlight

that listens to it fall like a cross

between a good word and a tear on deaf ears below.

So I throw flower seeds on it in passing, the way

I throw all my loose change into a guitar case

trying to sing for a living against the impossible odds

of a dungheap laid like the corrupt cornerstone of things,

the ship of state expurgating in public like a sick whale

spinning the Parisian potential for the screening myths

of expensive, narcotic fragrances of rot on the Perfume Trail.

Say it isn’t so, Joe, but there you go, it is.

The terrorist oilwells are planting i.e.d.s

of inflammable water in the faucets of everyone’s kitchen,

so we can all burn to death

drowning in our showers in the morning

trying to chill things out

with corporate hellfire and brimstone

and legions of demon lawyers that give lying a bad name.

Been trying not to get so down I get

knocked off my axis like Neptune

ducking down below the celestial equator

and be dragged down into my own depths

by the snapping turtle of the world

that’s founded upon it like a totem on a gantry.

Barring the occasional eclipse to keep

the calendars tuned to the prophecies of doom

ranged against the small beginnings of the new moon

that might squeak through the third eye of the needle

just like mammals did at the end of the late Triassic

as the insignificant consequence of a cosmic event

that upgraded scales to feathers and fur to skin

as wolves turned into whales. Creative destruction

evident in extinction and evolution the same.

I try to keep my spirits up like a lead kite

by approaching it all as if it were

delightfully and horrifically absurd spontaneously

but an unmeaningly free and creative medium nevertheless,

and even if it isn’t etc., the most intriguing of delusions

it’s taken me light years to adapt to

without sitting in perpetual judgement

on the immensity of the darkness

that intensifies the nebularity of my enlightenment

with starclusters of insights that flower

like a mirage of fireworks in my dazzled mind.

Even if it’s no more than a flash of light out of the void

richocheting off the facet of a grain of sand,

or a firefly trying to stand up to the lightning,

or slim volume of igneous poems

wedged like a matchbook between tomes

like anthers of fire with phosphorus pollen

that will spread like wildflowers when it finally blooms

like foxfire in the ashes of an old growth forest.

Even to stand like a lighthouse on the moon,

having lost its sense of purpose, and yet,

still keep the fire in the tower burning as if

there might be a storm the way things change

and there could be a shipwreck, some nights

are so strange they’re like waves or cats

that leave things like dead moles and snakes

on the threshold of the far shore of your door out of here,

I’ve tried to keep on shining like a candle

trying to stay awake at a black starless mass

trying to make things dark enough to make an appearance,

and even when I haven’t managed it,

and all my shepherd moons are scattered like black sheep

by the snarling wolf of my mystically liberating nature,

suddenly showing up like the skull and crossbones

among the angel fleets grazing on the waves,

I’ve elevated waterlilies of constellations

that sat below the salt in the lowest place of all

to the zenith of my dreams like starmaps in transit

I’ve kept alight in a nightwatchman’s eyes for years

as he makes the rounds of the zodiac

like a candle still burning in the lanterns of his tears.

PATRICK WHITE

MY HEART ALMOST DEAD

MY HEART ALMOST DEAD

My heart almost dead, a mansion of ashes and ghosts,

a museum of ancient eclipses and supernovas,

the bones of old lovers hanging like wind chimes

in a shadowless forest of charred trees

waiting for mystical rain when the wind wakes up

and spreads its rumour of regeneration.

Love before and love after; even when they hear the music

no one dances. There are no colours in their eyes,

fixed as fired glass, and their tears fall

like lethal riddles on the nervous breakdown of the sphinx.

And it’s all so sad and okay they’re gone

or were never here, or stayed awhile

and passed on like a pilgrim in a dream

to a distant shrine where they could play the goddess.

Who isn’t the god of their own hovel

sweeping dead stars from the sills of their lies like winter flies?

Somewhere deep in space without and within

the light is two guitars at right angles

trying to play with one hand in harmony. And that’s okay, too,

but I’m bored with reading these well-thumbed books of pain

in isolated lighthouses mourning like widows in the rain.

There’s nothing much in the salvage of phantom ships

that makes me want to run down to the shore anymore

and look for survivors. Why shine or warn

when everyone runs aground on the rocks like abandoned arks?

There are dead elephants among the starfish in the tides,

tigers of salt lifeless in the brine, drunk prophets

giving their flesh to the crabs and grazing fish

like wafers of communion served by lifeless dolls,

whole worlds in embryo, dead treble-clefs

and riderless sea-horses. Why turn your heart into a church

for a congregation of coroners; why turn the wine

into embalming fluid and call it holy blood

and pretend it’s salvation

when the bell is already wounded

by a kiss of black lightning

that wanted to cut the judas-goat down from its rope?

The jackals of prayer are out hunting the motherless lamb

with the golden fleece; every leaf hears the scream

and shudders into a sanctuary of hidden roots, safe for the night;

every eye signs the averted glimpse

of sudden blood on the moon

and denies its own work three times at the crowing of the cock

like the founding quicksand of a compromised religion.

Let’s finally agree that love is dead, a dead bird

washed ashore, its neck broken against the window of the sky,

the dead song in the harp of your hand. You’re hip and cool

in the chemical bowers of your emptiness; why

suborn the only witness for the defense

and accuse yourself of jury-tampering

on a constantly remanded day of judgment

when the heart that wrote the law is also the pen that broke it?

Good-bye, little seed, good-bye; the wind is dying

that wanted you to root by the river in endless summer;

a riot of tender stars and lavish wildflowers

too free and full of life along the flowing of the mindstream

for any rational assassin with scissors and a vase.

No one sees the light within the light, the breath within the breath,

or knows who inked the stars like tattoos on the skin-bags of their hearts

the ignorant mistake for dice.

Maybe we could make a raft of all these scattered moonbones

and sail across a dead sea to an undetected paradise

waiting for us to find it like a flower

pressed between the heavy pages of these infinite horizons;

or maybe we could clear a space beneath our eyelids

and renovate the thirteenth misbegotten house of the zodiac

into a life-boat for two and sail off the edge of this flat world

into an ocean of light with eyes like green, green islands.

But who wants to be a castaway

in paradise, alone, an agony of innocence longing for Eve

to step out naked from the mirrorless wardrobes of the trees

where she’s been trying herself on like a spree of flesh?

Even the tramp and the baglady

begging in the alleys and backdoors of Eden

know more about creation than all these unborn angels

panicking into the webs of the landlord spiders

that slum the haloes of the streetlamps

into a fury of mesmerized food.

Even the ghost of the dream that breathed itself out like a crib-death

alone in the nightward of a silent orphanage

is the envy of the nations of the heart

that stand abandoned on the illusory shores of the sea of being

and long for passage through the dangerous doorways of themselves

into the freedom of the fool’s wilderness on the other side.

If even Buddha and the devil had to pawn their holiness to get across,

leaving everything behind,

what a feeble price is asked of us

cringing in these vagrant shadows under a private bridge.

But what’s the good of following these symbols to the water’s edge

like sacred footprints if you won’t joyfully plunge in?

O you who look among the pages of all these sages and books

for somewhere to send your love-letters to

like a fixed address for life; do you want

to know the meaning, the secret of it all, the key to your release

from all the straitjackets and hasty refugee camps

you’ve established at your guarded border-crossings within

demanding phoney passports from the clouds and the wind

to end your own homeless wandering?

Do you want to wear a real face over that mask

that fear carved on both sides like a one-way mirror

to interrogate yourself into exhaustion for an unknown sin?

When love lights the dark house like a lamp within;

in a word that’s never known birth or perishing,

feeling it softly like the folding of wings

or the breath of a butterfly on the white rose of your skin,

put an end to the long glacial ages of yourself, thaw the grim fictions

and like a stream that whispers in its running, joy

its only teacher, one word along its length:

Begin.

PATRICK WHITE

NAMELESS TONIGHT, NOT ME, IMMENSITIES

NAMELESS TONIGHT, NOT ME, IMMENSITIES

Nameless tonight, not me, immensities

beyond my reach. The windows

thawing in the heat. Blue moon

above a junkyard of farm machinery.

The pioneers’ bones have been exhumed

from the land they settled. Empty

the graves of those who slept in these hills,

lunar lichens plastered like playbills

over the closing night of their names.

Echoes we all disappear into like waterbirds

soon enough, skipping out over the lake

like gravestones in the hands of those

who effaced us from our own history.

I can’t place myself anywhere,

alive or dead, no homestead of my own,

where I can watch the raspberry bushes

flourish year after year and listen to the rain

drumming the tin toolshed roof into a trance.

I’m unselfishly disciplined when it comes

to rendering the unsayable communicable

through events of form that shape-shift

to the counter-intuitive logic of metaphor

that transcends physics in post cosmological realms,

but that doesn’t mean I’ve got the will of a socket wrench

to go on tightening loose bolts the rest of my life.

Rocking fields they won’t let me die in.

I like knowing the pioneers used wildflowers

for soap, Bouncing Bet, Pride of London,

Lady at the Gate, and if I were ever

to survive a nuclear war, I’d put this knowledge

to good use like a lantern in a housewell

to keep the hand pump from freezing,

potato peels in the fire to desiccate the creosote.

I’d eat staghorn sumac and briney frogs for breakfast.

My mind would be an assortment

of different size nails and screws

I’ve saved for years to meet any occasion

I might have to keep things together anti-dramatically.

In the meantime I explore these old farms

the way a raccoon exploits an abandoned barn,

listening for the torrential wavelengths of snakes

fleeing the rain to hunt mice in the dishevelled bales

of sour hay way past dreaming of mangers.

After the original occupants die

and the last born son has left the farm for good,

we’re all strangers in a used solitude.

The indignant silence makes everyone a trespasser.

Names on gravestones. Names carved in barn beams.

A scripture of old curtains hanging from the windows

like the priestcraft of spiders that haven’t been disturbed in years.

Prewar magazines espousing the miracles of magnetism

in relieving the agonies of rheumatism

and hairline fractures of cracked vertebrae

that took the load upon themselves out of pride

one too many times without thinking

of their own cornerstones and rotting floor sills.

A roof collapsing. A door on one hinge like a drunk

trying to hold on to something upright and final.

Schools and churches, pews, desks, and woodsheds,

everything as functional as the hives and houseflies

that cluster in the walls like those born to follow

the tried and trued, straight and narrow road

through the winding woods reweaving it

like a loose thread that unravelled the labyrinth

of the spiritual lost and found that dug up their bones

for hygienic reasons that had nothing to do

with how deep they were buried in the land

before their corpses were washed away from the soil

that clung to them like faithful hunting dogs

that slept on their graves for weeks after they died,

not knowing, how the city would come to them,

even in their homegrown deaths, like roadkill and erosion.

I’ve seen crucified barn boards warped by the sun and rain,

pull their old fashioned square-headed nails out

with their own teeth like dogs extracting porcupine quills

from the voodoo dolls they’ve made of themselves

like a self-fulfilling hex of hunting magic gone wrong.

And I admire all that the way I admire the palatial virtues

of the strong who live like glacial hills among

the heaped tels of Sisyphean rocks beside

the valleys they dug for themselves and their children

expiring in moats of scarlet fever, to lie down in

like time capsules without a table of contents

that could have anticipated that all they laboured for

would cast them away like strawdogs after a moribund ritual

that would not let them rest their heads on the rock of the world

and dream they were returning to the wild

like their gardens that have gone on blooming without them.

Salt of the earth with bedrock hearts, I come

like the deus ex machina, as you would have seen me

in terms you could have understood, late in the day

like a ghost to a morality play on tour in the country,

looking for a clearing among the trees to view the stars

long after the applause has died away. And the longer

I stand here surveying six thousand photogenic stars

burning without fire permits in the summer dark,

mourning your exorcism, the more I feel crowded

by your absence as if the Summer Triangle

were missing an eagle and the Seven Sisters

in the orchards of the Pleiades, carried away by the wind,

like Sabine maidens, had pruned the horns of Taurus

by deboning the land of the humans

they’ve torn out of it like the stumps of the locust trees

that used to sing here at night, bright with blossoming stars

and the occasional night bird like me

on its way to somewhere else,

and in the morning, was backed-up

by the ecstatic choirs of the born again honey-bees.

PATRICK WHITE

GALACTIC DARKNESS

GALACTIC DARKNESS

Galactic darkness. Luna moths

drawn in by the zircon oases of

candles on the coffee-table

burning behind plate-glass

like the muses of consumer longing,

given how far it is to fly to the stars,

though nothing blocks the way,

their wings spread on the windows

like death masks and decals on a suitcase,

stamps on forlorn loveletters

that can labour over every sacred syllable

for effect, but still eat

the ashes of neglect for real.

But, then, again, how can you fail

if you’re mad, if you can feel

in your blood, how the stars

can start fires here on earth

using the fireflies for chemical fuses?

Or the moon, her moths, for proxies?

Bless the beatific insanity of crazy wisdom

pursuing an earthly excellence

in the eye of inviolate perfection

to add its petal of light to the shedding

of the unsayable rose that ignites the soul

to the dragon of longing and devotion

that dwells within like serpent fire

waiting on the wind, that’s you,

to give it wings with every breath you take.

Just because you can name all the trees

in the forest, doesn’t mean

you’ve explored a wilderness

or suffered the dangerous ordeals

of your rite of passage through it

to uninhabitable states of mind

your adaptable presence

spontaneously humanizes

with the unlikelihood of you even

being there with your mountainous outlook

and sidereal overview about

the apparent impersonality of the universe

putting its roots down in you like fruitful tree

with a windfall of sustainable planets at your feet.

O little mystic, in midnight shades

of Prussian blue, it isn’t true if you

were to look into the face of your god

your eyes would burn like an oilspill

on an ocean of of prescient wavelengths

that will turn on you like a snake

from the burning faucet of a toxic housewell.

Embrace what consumes you like fire at the stake.

In the blast furnace of the universe they peer into

like the source of the mystery that absorbs them

the astronomers have recast their eyes

into philosophically ground lenses and pyrex mirrors

silvered by a quarter ounce of their vaporous spirits

looking for clarity in a cloud of unknowing

the way the morning air cleans its stardust off with the dew.

Nothing less than everything all the time.

What does the world hold back in reserve,

or your bodymind all you need and prefer

to be as lost as a feather in the shadow of a sundial

as the nightbird you are now, afraid

of where the wind might carry you

far from the aviary of that golden cage

of a voice-box that’s trained you

what to say to strangers who ask

when was the last time you went looking

for continents in a flood, or even

went down with one like Mu or Atlantis,

the kingfisher captain of the ship?

Take a cometary approach and leap

from your black halo into the sun

as if you were jumping orbitals

from a burning bridge where

the serious arsonists come

to commit suicide by flinging themselves

like fire on the water to see if,

like the reflections of the stars,

they can get over their hydrophobia,

by realizing the pilot lights of their fever

can never wholly be put out once

they start spreading like a wildfire

through the zodiac, house by house.

But you don’t need a fire department

in the inflammable amethyst village

sequestered in the coffin of your spiritual life

like a seed afraid to come out of itself

like foxfire after a cosmic conflagration.

You don’t need to dream your totem alone

in a fire-tower in the woods,

high among the crowns of the trees

polling fireflies and meteors by the minute,

to see if you’ve got what it takes

to get something started within yourself

that isn’t just another demonic firecracker

you throw at the ghosts of your afterlives

like pebbles and beans, to scare them away.

Pinocchio runs to the pyre of his karma

in the sacred ashes of someone else’s lifemask

though the flame at the end of his nose

is a dead giveaway he’s attached too many strings

to the box kite self-immolating in the power lines

he thought he could do a quick fly over

like a transmigratory bird avoiding a snake pit

that’s trying to catch its eye like a liar’s holy book,

two minutes with a hook, then dead air

when the hits are shelved like golden ashes

in the urns of an elephant graveyard

where the poachers come to salvage

the tusks and crescent moons of their mnemonic relics.

Any fool can make a religion out of a salvationist alibi

by telling themselves that we were all no good

before we were born, and we all need to be recalled

like Toyota suvs for legally culpable emergency repairs

at mystically specific authorized garages

and shrines with forklifts for spiritual vehicles

to have their undercarriages inspected in the pits of hell

by gurus with Jiffy Lube all over their coveralls

greasing the wheel bearings of the celestial omnibus

to turn round and round and round

like the wheel of birth and death suspended in mid air

and going, as the crow flies, nowhere.

Don’t scorn the fire in the darkness of the coal

that burns on the inside when there’s nothing

but diamonds freezing at the door on the outside

or looking down in longing like the stars

at the flurries of chimney sparks rising

like intimate insights with the lifespan

of enraptured gnats at dusk, to illuminate

the fixed assumptions of the mythic shining

with impromptu constellations of their own

in a smaller darkness closer to home

that glow at night like astral plastic stars

stuck to the ceiling of a child’s bedroom

made infinitely intimate and wondrous

according to the orders of her intuitive seeing

when she walks in the starfields, following

the fragrance of whatever’s she’s dreaming

whether the road evaporates like smoke

from a fire on a cold night in the distance,

or unfolds like a starmap of wildflowers,

a bird with a library of feathers for wings,

she embraces the vast, vacant, interstellar spaces,

the sublime, empty vastness of the tabla rasa

of her imagination, the light emerging out of the void

into the eyes of the uncarved lifemasks

of the most tender and homely of things.

PATRICK WHITE