DON'T THINK I OWED IT TO MYSELF, BUT I HAVE ENDURED

DON’T THINK I OWED IT TO MYSELF, BUT I HAVE ENDURED

Don’t think I owed it to myself, but I have endured.

Scarred and broken and as full of escarpments

some bad mason laid in like a Cubist stairwell

in the Canadian Shield. Experience the sum

of all my failures, it’s a strange book to quote from.

I tell people not to listen to anything but their own hearts,

but they take that as a sign of creative sincerity

and continue to listen out of the corners of their lives,

defying my unmastery by paying stricter attention.

You’d think someone who had lived sixty four years the hard way

like a wild mountain goat on a high, noble path

the rest of the herd doesn’t take much anymore

as they did when the more siderealized shepherds

used to drive them to the Zen pastures of the moon,

would have his act down pat by now.

Still got a few gamma ray bursts of demonic energy

left in me yet, a black revolver of comets left in the clip

to take a few more pot shots on a drive by at the sun just for fun

as it’s going down like a mailbox at the side of the road

with a waning rooster painted on it like a fire hydrant.

You can spend your whole life as preparation

for a moment that never comes. Some people

don’t want to catch up to their star.

They just want to follow it as far as they can go.

They want to explore the offroad mysteries along the way.

Some ghosts radiate like well known constellations

and others roses in the dark that are just as happy to emanate.

Not in the habit of judging the ashes of others

by their constellations or their urns,

I’ve had more of a precessional inclination

to scatter them like seagulls on the wind

just to watch them hover motionless over a precipice,

each fixed in space like a mobile of sheet music

or the paradigmatic silence of a symphony

living the moment like a riff in the heart of time.

Wherever I’ve gone I’ve tried to leave signs

of where I’d been as delusory clues for those

sleeping walking in their delusional lostness,

roomy, lunar waterpalaces of the mind to move into

with more infinitely spacious windows

than there are condemned houses

in the slums of the usual zodiac of clockwork origins.

Not infrequently I can see time in a better light

than it deserves, and I like people that have been

sand blasted in the tide like a piece of broken glass

that washed up on the beach without losing its translucency.

An alumnus of the underground schools

for the occult science of new moons,

every moment of my life since

I’ve been the master apprentice of my own dark beginnings.

The serpent fire at the base of my spine woke up

like a fire alarm in the hallway of a burning house

shrieking for life at the window, and my vertebrae,

playing by ear, the silver-tongued flute,

and the picture-music within me, the snake-charmer,

swaying like a river reed going with the flow

to keep me on the same wavelength as lightning

looking for a place to strike, intrigued and alive.

It’s the arrogance of consciousness to think

it’s anymore than an eddy in the mindstream

that’s got intimate connections with the greater sea of awareness

it’s heading toward like a maple leaf with a flightplan

that’s got nothing to do with how things fall out.

The world turns and things are relegated

to stolen milk cartons like old albums weaned

from the nippled turn tables of a breast implant.

The past is a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces

keep changing shape like the fossils of a man

who isn’t comfortable in his death bed.

Over the course of time this vale of tears

slowly evaporates spiritually into the heat

like heart-shaped morning glory leaves

steaming into the dawn

like ghosts that had to get back to their graves,

arising off the lake like a mass exorcism,

or the third eye of the sun that shines at midnight

from the bottom up on the roots of the earth

as if it were trying to teach blind, star-nosed moles

to see the stars burning in the day

from the bottom of a dry housewell

that echoes like a firefly in the spider mount

of a hollow telescope listening to the cosmic hiss

of a message it’s waiting to receive

that’s already been delivered

like a star that’s strong and true,

but apocalyptically behind the times

as if one person’s past were another person’s present

and past and future and present

were all living co-terminously in the moment

like the triune identity of time looking three ways,

and probably more if you were take its lifemask off,

simultaneously, so when the wind blows

through my musical skull in this celestial desert of stars

because I listen attentively to the lyrics

like a nightbird waiting for an answer

to its amorous enquiry, I know I’m not

singing out of my ears just to overhear myself talk.

My world’s been complete since the Big Bang

and everything after, the prophetic echo

of a future memory of cosmic events

that happened without me billions of light years ago.

PATRICK WHITE

DRIFTING TONIGHT, A POEM IN HE CORNER OF MY EYE

DRIFTING TONIGHT, A POEM IN THE CORNER OF MY EYE

Drifting tonight, a poem in the corner of my eye,

maybe a crumb of sleep from last night’s dream,

the willows have grown up a lot since I last came here

but the stars they fix like flowers in their hair

even the lake can’t rinse out, haven’t changed much.

I seek out this precarious granite ledge

shaped like half an anvil or a stone age bicycle seat

with its thatch of moss and yellow grass

and this little patch of dirt, struggling

to cling to the rock, I’ve come to trust empathically

as if many others sat here before me

and watched the moon belly dancing on the undulant waves.

Abandoned heron’s nests in the boneyard

of marble trees, broken statuary in the moonlight

wading through the wild rice with their skirts

above their white, white knees. I come here

to listen to my solitude like a Tarot deck of constellations,

missing a couple of cards when it was stolen from the Sufis.

A nocturne of fate I’m being very cool about

I sing in dark harmony with the nightbirds

counterpointing the silence with sudden rills of longing

my heart resonates with like the hidden wavelength of sorrow

that it’s almost autumn, getting too late for anyone to come,

except for one firefly shining behind her veils

like a diamond in eclipse, a tattoo on the eyelids

of a black velvet painting of a bullfighting rose.

And something deeper, more dangerous, like pike

moving just under the surface like nuclear submarines

under the Arctic ice-caps of circumpolar cataracts,

while night creatures are out hunting each other’s flesh

all around me as if the loss of life and the joy it took

in being a field mouse with a mouthful of seeds

were merely collateral damage in the owl’s eyes

of remarkably no significance at all. Life smells

of carrion in the nest, though we all light incense

to deny it. And try to feel as convincingly as we can

life heals its own absence like a wound in water,

like a mouse squealing in midflight above

the waterlily starmaps that hide the snapping turtles.

Generations have sat here before me

with their heads on the flying buttresses of their knees

to relieve the stress of the dome of their prophetic skulls

on the walls of a cathedral wilderness

pioneered into the empty one-roomed

wooden churches around here where the flies cluster

like spiritual footnotes with no real faith in what they say.

And the pioneers have all been ploughed under

and then exhumed and placed in a less savage cemetery

than the earth without black iron fences and gates

trying to imitate the tree line of a militant event horizon

around the graveside of the black hole we all fall into

when we attribute a meaning to death it doesn’t give to itself.

And life and love follow suit, knowing there’s nothing to risk,

nothing to shed, nothing to reveal, nothing to explain or understand

that isn’t whispered in your own voice into your own ear

so nature could imitate art by deepening the mystery

of the human spirit walking like the stars on its own waters

as if it weren’t a miracle the whole sky

with all its legends of shining doesn’t go out in our tears

and love turn into a black farce of suggestive preconceptions

dancing for our heads, as if we’ll be eating

honey and locusts, dressed in the hides of wild jackasses,

or in this lunar wilderness of shadows and wraiths

wolfskins on despondent shamans with

two heads on their shoulders like snake-eyes

trying to howl like smouldering volcanoes at the moon

with one heart, one mind, igneously alloyed

to the heartache and longing that can suddenly

startle and blossom out of the darkness

like the blue fire of the Pleiades flaring through

the crowns of the trees as if love were a conversation

between two, like a star and the eye it’s shining in,

it only takes one to sing.

PATRICK WHITE

IN CERTAIN MOODS I THINK LIKE AN ICE AGE

IN CERTAIN MOODS I THINK LIKE AN ICE AGE

In certain moods I think like an ice age,

relentless, every insight, the glacier

of a window on the move that cuts like a diamond.

I’m not sentimental about baby mammoths

falling into cryonic crevasses for twelve thousand years.

I could gouge out the eyes of lakes, bully the mountains

like a mile high waterclock with its pedal frozen to the metal of time.

Something brittle and cold as broken glass in my seeing.

A clarity that burns like dry ice born without a personality.

I can still stand in the bottom of a snakepit

and see the stars like the fang marks of so many strikes

at the scared rabbit of my heart beating like a strawberry,

palpitating like the sump pump of a toxin

trying to drain the sweetest of watersheds

like quicksilver from the mirrors of my brain.

Sometimes I feel I’ve been harbouring

the skull and crossbones in the piratical bay

of a subliminal childhood that washed me up

out of a fire storm onto a more ferocious shore

of civilized savages that take their time eating each other.

I can see as supraobjectively as a reptile from the late Triassic

the asteroid that’s heading this way

to shatter the window of opportunity

like an atmosphere that doesn’t encourage

growth in a greenhouse, but doesn’t mind

genetically tampering with cell tissue

as if agriculture had given birth, not only to war,

but to a mutated child that would redesign her.

Too many nuances are left out of lizards and lenses

for me to look at the world through their eyes

too long. My third eye begins to crystallize like a jewel

instead of a black pearl of a new moon

on the tongues of the waterlilies walking on the water

like the pale flames of the constellations burning their starmaps

like passports to anywhere they’re not as homelessly here

as they are now. And there are strange viruses

that can be transmitted from telescopes in port

like heresy through the gullible angel fleets.

People begin to see that the crystal slipper

fits the darkness better than the light

the way a star fits the winged heels of the night

like the Great Square of Pegasus, or Albireo in the Swan,

Al Tair in the Eagle, or Vega in the Lyre,

as if one size for a shapeshifting universe fits all.

Time eventually sands the hardest edges down

like a dentist drill trying to put new crown on the pyramids,

triangular sun dials get rounded out into circular clocks,

and the conceptual sabres of exactitude, learn

to hesitate like humans as their mainsprings go slack

and the tension wears off at trying to insulate themselves

like referees from the vicissitudes and uncertainties of the game

by being more severely disciplined than perfection.

A saving grace I received from my mother

who would send me down to the Fountain Lunch

to buy her a True Detective magazine late at night,

I remember the elaborate ferns of frost on the window,

and spend the rest on candy, though she was down

to her last buck, like a tree with one leaf left,

she taught me how to protest impoverishment

with a flare and generosity that flew counterintuitively

into the brutal impersonality of its defeated face.

And the air full of gleeful butterflies torn up

like an eviction notice issued with a mythically deflated smile

on the deathmask of one of the nabobs among slumlords

sipping empire with their tea like the East India Company

that had a manifest destiny for themselves,

and the obscurity of obscene circumstances for everyone else.

Not a comet falling out of its black halo into the sun,

but a post-demonic clarity beyond symbols

like a fledging learning to fly

by transcending its own wingspan

into an abyss a universe shy of shining,

absurdly sublime and intensely insignificant

as a childhood is, when it’s bruised

by one too many atrocities early in the game

to really care whether it’s disappointing its despair

with a little hope, or putting a nightmare to shame

by pointing out even the clearest windows

have been known to paint themselves

the world they want to see when they look outside

instead of trying to see it as it is without turning to stone

when it isn’t interpreted like sign language,

unless, by some malicious stroke of luck

some delinquent eluding the neighbourhood watch

puts his fist through it

to enlighten his tantrum as the stars

come pouring into the vacuum

like a sea of tears in reverse

where the tide of affairs is always

worse for the wear of coming in

than it is in the ease of going out.

Providence makes a grand entrance

then heads for the exit refused and humbled

by this sinking feeling the stars get

even when they’re rising, though fire

doesn’t burn its fingers on itself

that doesn’t mean it isn’t being consumed.

Or if even so little as a single firefly

of inspired rage is glowing somewhere

across the hard-hearted tundra, that’s the end

of your eyes being scalded by an ice age

that’s been freezing and thawing them out since childhood

until your heart aches like a raw strawberry

as feeling begins to circulate in it again.

PATRICK WHITE

ANYTHING GOES AT THREE IN THE MORNING

ANYTHING GOES AT THREE IN THE MORNING

Anything goes at three in the morning.

I’m dogpaddling in the salvage of the day

after the sun went down like a shipwreck

with all hands on board. A train whistle

mourns its lonely mile and I’ve known

since I was twenty six, the night is not a reward.

And the heart not a starfish you can easily drown

to keep from shining as if it had

a sense of direction all of its own

even if its just a momentary flashback

of a life you’d forgotten on your way down.

The darkness bruises my solitude.

I bleed like deadly nightshade

and talk to myself and the stars, the lamp posts,

the glassy-eyed windows with smut in their eyes

like the rose of life with a wounded mouth.

Trying to express the silence through the afterlife

of my voice, as if I were the ghost in the machine

of a transfixed medium you could get your bearings by

like a candle at a seance that suddenly goes out.

Or maybe I’m just the smoke of an old demon

who feels more like an exorcism sent into exile

like a scapegoat for things I might have done

if they hadn’t been done to me first by the sanctimonious

to purify a long winter of soot, incense, and snakeoil

like an oilslick contaminated by hypocritical rainbows.

But I mustn’t grow bitter. It’s moonrise

and the windows across the street, dirty

as these I’m looking through, seem sublimely elevated

to be used like a lake or a drop of water

when it isn’t raining, to reflect so much beauty

with a moondog for the iris of a third eye

that’s always urging the mindstream

to take a look for itself to liberate its seeing

from a purple passage in a bad dream that doesn’t end well.

The raccoons and feral cats are giving the dogs

something to bark about as they entangle their hind legs

like Houdini in a labyrinth of chains

to keep from running the deer to death at night.

Strange place, this earth. This starmud

that’s an alloy of blood and passion and mind

trying to second-guess where its presence comes from

as if everything had to be derived from something else

to lay a claim to the mystic specificity of its cosmic origins

and to understand that originality’s most unique feature

is that it shares its characteristics with everything else

so the more a human embodies what he perceives,

in his confusion, his horror, his bliss and sorrow,

that forms don’t appear and disappear for him to believe in,

that their passage isn’t a work of time, but the way

life shapeshifts from one dream figure into the next

without leaving the hands of anyone’s who’s ever

grabbed it by the throat and hasn’t let go

like a snapping turtle that’s just got hold of the moon,

its beak full of the flightfeathers of a waterlily

rising off the lakes of the windowpanes as unconcerned

as Cygnus flying over the tarpaper pigeon coups of the rooftops.

PATRICK WHITE

FEEL LIKE THERE’S A BEAST

Feel like there’s a beast in the darkness

eating my eyes.

I’m a moon-bull

at a crossroads of solar swords

down on it knees

hemorrhaging like a poppy.

And there are constellations

I’ve never heard before

playing the harp of my horns

with pensive fingertips.

How strange this rag of life

soaked in tears and blood is.

Everything dies like a snowflake on a furnace,

a rock on an autumn mountain,

no two the same.

There are nights, there are

vigils of darkness

when the mirror can no longer bear

the weight of this feather of fire,

this vision of life

that estranges the spirit

of those who love it most

like a funeral bell

that once drank to the folly of love.

I am a snakepit of lightning

knotted in a glacier of ice

and every emotion

is the undertow of the tide in a sea of eyes

on the cold skull of the moon,

every thought, a stone lifeboat

inundated by the waves

it’s convinced it’s saving from drowning.

Once I was the dupe

of my own ideals,

now I am the master of none.

This far into the abyss

you forget the name of the god

you died in the name of;

you have squandered your certainty

on greater and greater risks,

the enciphered lotteries of mythic necessity,

only to discover,

though you traversed eras like deserts

that made a skull of your faith,

the donkeys have eaten all the mangers,

and there is as much radiance in the eye

of the dead serpent on the road

as there is the eyelash of a star.

A tear is not a fountain of seeing,

nor a drop of blood, a rose.

How rare the sword in its silence

among all these chatty scissors at war

trying to cut along the dotted lines

of their border highways

crammed with refugees

they once called lovers,

the horizon slashed

and bleeding like a letter.

I want to calculate the half-life of pain;

the pillar of ore it calls home;

the elemental devolution of its atomic evictions

into the leaden passion of a base metal.

I want to know what I’ve turned into.

I want to know what’s making the stars

throw down their spears of light at my feet

though my heart’s out in the open

like a voodoo doll

waiting for a donor transplant.

I want to see myself

opening a door in the mirror

to someone with absolute eyes

irrevocable as yesterday’s rain.

Let the star know

the flower it engenders;

let the rose

taste its own honey.

Blind in a dream; blind,

what light roots in the darkness

that I should want to

throw off this robe of blood like a sky

to slip through the eye of the needle

that binds the seams of this world

like a bird

with the single thread of a life in its beak,

washed out of God’s eye

like a firefly snuffed

in a torrential downpour of stars?

Why am I

always one heart too many

over the threshold of the truth

I had to leave home to discover?

Am I a hoax in tears

or a tear away from a gate and a rafter?

Let the wave know the sea

that packs its caravan on the moon,

let the silence of the waking abyss

write indelible preludes

with a last kiss

that goes on forever

like the white autumn wind

in a turmoil of seeds

that demonically exceed

the life they’re after,

flower by flower,

death by death

like the pulse of a bell

setting the doves free

in the towers of farewell.

It’s the eloquence of a tree

to say what life is

when the full moon ripens

in its leafless branches

and the heart beats

like a windfall of silver apples,

though I have tried,

but love is a bridge

on a finger of water

that not even the moon

can slip off like a ring

when the wind rises

like a gaping fish

to swallow the chimes and eyehooks

of its matriculate ripples.

And with each breath of the night

I took and returned,

I have aspired to succeed

at every failure I was ever inspired by.

I raised every sail,

crossed every wave,

every eyelid, every petal

of the sea of life

in the heart of the rose

only to drop the first crescent of the moon

like an anchor

in the furnace of a dream.

PATRICK WHITE

SAD TO SEE HOW WE BAIT OUR MIND-HOLD TRAPS WITH OUR HEARTS

SAD TO SEE HOW WE BAIT OUR MIND-HOLD TRAPS WITH OUR HEARTS

Sad to see how we bait our mind-hold traps with our hearts,

put all we are on the line, just for a little love, a kiss, a touch

an embrace that doesn’t snap shut like the jaws of a great white

we put our trust in not to draw blood at the first bite.

I take people’s faces off the shelves as they pass by

like second hand bookstores, and casually browse

their life stories only to find whole chapters ripped out

and sometimes the eyes, so you can see clear through

to the other side of what there was in the way of a view

to look back at you, that someone despised, and cut out

like a number two, twenty pound, book paper death mask,

black holes like the eye sockets of a skull,

slowly eating what was left of a face that yesterday

was the peer of the stars, the great seal of the sun,

the imprimatur of moonlight on the waters of the lake.

And I know those who love love for love’s sake

more than they ever have the topsoil of an erosive human,

or the bedrock and watershed of their darker depths

where the fish, like ghosts, or fireflies and stars

have to shine by their own light if they want to walk

swim or fly the rest of the way whistling in the dark on their own.

Or just want to stand there like lighthouses

unaware of the danger they pose to themselves

when they don’t take the advice of the seagulls in a storm

and just stand there, upright and brittle as the eternal names

on an obelisk in an earthquake, or a candle

whose spine was broken before it had a chance to burn.

Trashed, rejected, betrayed, played and abandoned,

the spring equinox makes its precessional wobbling way

through ordeals worthy of an Apache warrior

daring his adolescence into maturity

like a flagellant whipped through the stations of the cross,

or the slums of the black-hearted houses of a zodiac of anti-matter

dreaming of Shangri Las of light where totem animals and taboos

are tasted like forbidden fruit with ritualistic immunity.

Bitterly estranged by the excruciating transformations of love

I’ve seen people befriend and sword dance with each other

like alarm clocks in a snakepit with what they hate the most

to see which of two assassins is going to wake up first

from the coma they’ve put each other in like a direct hit

in public in broad daylight, or more discretely,

slumped against a lamp post like a garbage bag.

Love can empower a hero in a hardware store,

but once someone walks under a ladder,

love sours into an infernal power base

that depends on the opinion of its inferiors

to sustain its paranoid grasp of supremacy.

Love cuts the power lines to the embassy

like a coup d’etat as it shreds

its correspondence in leaving

for a covert afterlife without extradition.

And fair to say, love’s the white blossom of the moon

on a dead branch that breaks into leaf again.

Love’s the pain-eater, the bliss-giver,

the sacred whore outside the Iseum,

the vestal virgin that keeps the hearth flame

alive for the lifespan of a vow of thirty years,

or be buried up to her headful of honeyed tresses

in red army ants that burn like stinging nettles.

Love’s the lonely career of a bank cashier

that talks through a hole in a bullet proof window

wishing there were no time locks on her heart

to keep the bad guys out of the hope chest of the vaults

or the morgue of safety deposit boxes

where she keeps her feelings to herself.

I’ve been in love and know that when you’re in love

there’s no outside anywhere. I’ve felt the fire

run its fingers through my hair and ignite

the fuses of my cedar roots burning underground

to flare up five miles down the valley,

a week after I thought I’d put it out. I’ve

touched the mystery of life embodied in a woman

and drank the wine of the shipwrecked hareem

of amphorae on the bottom, and been slain

by the beauty of the death that was offered me

by the black muse of a waterlily into witchcraft

and been feted like an Ainu bearcub at the New Year

before she sacrificed me like a message to the gods.

Though less immediately appealing to the Luna Moths

who want to be immolated in the candle flame

that’s driving them tantrically mad with mystic lust,

I’ve loved women who were kinder than most sunsets

and bloodbanks, gardens like nurses

in intensive care units on the nightshift

whose tears could keep you alive intravenously,

whose smiles were bouquets with something illicit

smuggled inside, to motivate a full recovery.

And the way a stone feels the sun seeping into it

in the morning, until it’s saturated with light

like the fruits of the earth, I came to love them

the way a rock with any understanding of life

comes to love its lichens, moss and columbine

even though, a moment ago, it was a nickel-iron meteor

about to put its fist through the mirror like an change of species.

Nymph, wife, and crone. Birth, life, and death.

The triune identity of the moon that gives you breath

and then takes it away like a gift you would be

better off without. A black widow spider

playing a violin as if she were rocking a baby in her arms,

and you couldn’t help but be brought to tears,

and in the blink of a third eye,

the bloodthirsty eclipse of a detached retina

wrecking the rainbow of a promise that wasn’t kept

as if the cockpit just blew out of the space shuttle.

O and then the cooling loaves of the flesh

she makes of her occult body and breaks with you

like a wishbone she makes of her hips

from the throat of a black swan in the chimney

of an amorous anaconda with the eyes of a running doe.

And I know that death is love, is passage,

extinction and renewal, is growth that leaves you

feeling like a stranger on your own doorstep,

or it was your house but there was no one left

to answer you when you showed up again

like a loveletter feeling like junk mail.

Walk away, walk away, walk away,

on your own two feet, not your hands and your knees

and on your way out, see if you can remember

all the names of the stars in the Pleiades,

beginning with Alcyone, even as space turns to glass,

and ruminate on the beauty in the vastness of things

that come together, mingle, and separate

like restless sacred rivers out for a fling

that ended up crying alone before themselves or God

as if their eyes were jewels, and their hearts

the mystic watersheds of flowers smiling through their tears.

Walk away like an actor turned audience

walks out on his own play on closing night.

Not always, but often, separation is a veil of tears

that gives its eyes up to the beauty of the light

that comes shining through them like a smeared insight

into how easily the simple radiance of being alive

to discover in compassion the sweetness and wisdom of life

how easily the afterlife of love can thaw

the diamond snake-eyes, the lunar fangs

of the most intransigent horrors at zenith or nadir

and liberate all the stars like the pollen of fallen flowers

from the glacier the Milky Way turned into

to bloom again like starmaps gone mad

and green the Sahara into a sea of mammals and grass

with ten degrees of warmth and affection

at the end of a long ice age weeping into its hands

for how creatively beautiful, sad, freaked

with motherlodes of wisdom in its darkest ores,

inspired visions in fires that put the constellations to shame

when love goes supernova and can be seen a galaxy away.

And the metaphors that proliferate like new forms of life

as if the Pre-Cambrian were merely the blueprint

for masterpieces to come, and yes, even when love

plays the delta blues with its face against the wall

like Robert Johnson, and the abyss breathes in your face

as if you were about to be swallowed like a cosmic egg

by a dragon of dark transformative energy

unhinging its jaws to consume you without pity

like a black hole that turns you

like the key to another universe

where snakes can fly and you’re not denied

some of what you weren’t granted in this one.

And looking back at what you thought had ended

you’re amazed at the dark harmonies of picture-music

that kept on playing while Atlantis sank,

like deep undercurrents of love

in the watershed of your housewell,

and the eclipses that no one heeded in time

or mistook for sunspots, shed themselves

like the petals of a black rose

emanating the fragrance of a new moon

tempting the martyrs of moonlight

to the danger of her thorns

and the elixir of her tears

we sip from our own skulls

like hummingbirds at the lips of holy grails.

PATRICK WHITE