GOT A BOULDER ON MY CHEST LIKE A HEAVY HEART

GOT A BOULDER ON MY CHEST LIKE A HEAVY HEART

Got a boulder on my chest like a heavy heart

someone carried all the way here like a skull

from the river, and I’m buried under the hearth fire

of forty thousand years ago as if somebody

wanted to make sure I never got up again

and did a good job of it despite the grave goods.

Seven times down. Eight times up. Such is life.

I’m as legless as a Bodhidarma doll, a sacred clown.

Pop me in my inflated cherry tomato of a nose

and I bounce right back again because of the way

I’m weighted. I can remember when I had

the footwork of a boxer and I used to duck, weave, and bob.

There’s a star still following me through the woods

deeper into the mystery of where I’m going

and what I’ll see as if it were ageing right along with me,

shining intermittently through the crowns of the maple trees

as I do these days through the eyelashes

of my intractable third eye, gone, gone, gone, gone,

altogether gone beyond as if my sanity

had lost communication with its expectations

as my subconscious leaves the solar system

like some undirected spacecraft flying solo

into realms it appears I’m witnessing just for myself.

Estranged ways of looking at my life

in the expanding context of the homeless vastness before me

as if a million light years of thresholds had to be crossed

before one door could open as imposing as space

everybody I left behind is growing into meme by meme,

symbol by symbol, as if mind were stepping out

of its shapeshifting sign of the zodiac, trading in

its quicksand cornerstones for a backpack

that will always be on the road like light hereafter.

There’s no where to garden, and the further out I get

the less faith I have that anyone is receiving these messages

I keep sending back like broken twigs and snagged rags

so that they can know where I’m at and get a fix on themselves

like a comet gone cold this far from any sun disc, Mayan or otherwise,

trailblazing through a treeless wilderness where

the only wildflowers are the irises of the Pleiades,

bull-vaulting Taurus on the horns of a dilemma

they took into their own hands like the fate of hydrogen.

Used to know what I wanted to be once. Now

I seek the unattainable and it comes to me I’m no one

close to what I’d thought I’d be, looking at it

from the outside before I was wholly dispossessed

on the inside, by the reality of living the vision

of a deeper aspiration that’s got nothing to do with me.

But it takes as much to live a mirage as it does an oasis

and I’m as faithful to the one as I am to the other,

and this spaced out, who’s going to insist on the distinction?

PATRICK WHITE

SPIDERS IN BUBBLES PUMBING THE DEPTHS

SPIDERS IN BUBBLES PLUMBING THE DEPTHS

Spiders in bubbles plumbing the depths

of a new medium. Looking up from the bottom

the stars aren’t stars, they’re water-striders.

And me? I’m walking on the surface of my mind

like a very light-footed telescope. An antelope

who’s just woken up from a dream

of a touring ballet company run by lions.

I’m sitting on a skull of rock close to the river

like some bare-footed prophecy

eating locusts and honey in the wilderness

that doesn’t know whether to make heads or tails of me.

Anxieties of surviving the way I am mingle

with lyrics of longing to change

like the metamorphic passage of the river

flowing by me like the not so Milky Way

of my mindstream trying to clarify itself

in the course of its own running. But it’s

as hard to part the waters with the wind

as it is with a sword, and I’m not looking

for any anomaly of nature to lead me to the Promised Land.

And I’ve been to PsychoBabylon and back.

And I had no eyes, I was blind, and I had to

follow my own Orphic skull up out of hell

like a song someone was whistling in the dark.

You live too long with ghosts, you start

asserting your wilfulness for all of them

and pretty soon the seance turns into an exorcism.

The fire that burned of its own accord,

stops crying like a candle and begins scrying

which way it’s going on any one of these Roads of Smoke.

I’m a pilgrimage of one to a shrine I’ve never heard of

who would like to walk part way with you,

heart to heart until you couldn’t tell

the new moon apart from the full

and like the snaking of this river

around these islands of birch groves

falling like pencils the beavers have chewed through

down to their stubs, we realize inseparably

it was always the right door to enter by, the entrance,

not this inseparable exit that keeps

stuffing the mouth of the oracle

like the three bells and all’s well of a seashell

with oceanic starmaps as to where

we’ve buried the lost treasures of our hearts and minds

that we’ve been looking for as if they weren’t

hiding out in the open where they’ve always been.

The hidden harmony of deep love is the dark bond

that ensures there can be no discontinuity

anywhere in the bubble-blowing multiverse

whether there are spiders on the moon in diving bells

that look like Schiaparelli’s canali on Mars,

or the peculiar scars on a third eye with a detached retina,

or a neuronic crossroads in the roots of a nervous system

waiting for the wind to show up whirling like a Sufi

to tell it which way to go to transcend its spiritual vertigo

like a computer message from earth to a space rover

exploring the possibility of finding love and life

like mirages gathered around the house wells of a deserted planet

witnessing the return journey of life like a prodigal

to the first threshold it ever crossed over with a smile into exile.

PATRICK WHITE  

FEEL LOST SOMETIMES

FEEL LOST SOMETIMES

Feel lost sometimes, abandoned, a loser

that’s been fighting a guerrilla rear guard action against myself.

Light years of shining and I feel reduced

to these colours and words crawling across thresholds

that recede like inconceivable farewells into the past.

No human touch, but three goldfish named after

the Greek city states of Athens, Thebes and Sparta,

in an expanding solitude that’s all womb, and no embryo

however the stars swim through the Milky Way upstream

like salmon to the creative wisdom of their sacred spawning pools.

We’re all sharing the same aquarium like a life support system,

a lifeboat that knows it’s a shoreless life

so it’s highly unrealistic to expect to be washed up anywhere

except on the moon, there’s always the moon,

where the mad go berserk in the shadows of its tides.

There’s a pettiness about my wounds, though

several go deep, that makes me feel like a creep sometimes

when I consider that I’m alive enough

not to have been finished off by them

and God knows what I owe for the wisdom

that’s accrued to me like a shipwreck on the bottom

that’s being used as an artificial coral reef.

Sometimes I feel my heart’s being swallowed alive

like the virtues of a noble enemy

or a frog in a fetid bog of waterlilies

crawling with snakes like the radioactive wavelengths

of black lightning experimenting with flesh and blood.

Every poem I write, another sail, another horizon

I’m going off the edge of like the flat earth of a lily pad

down a black hole with more dimensions than it can fathom.

Even in spring, autumn’s always approaching

like some orthodoxy of decay with a silver stake,

a thorn of the moon, to hammer into the heart of the scarecrow

that got mistaken for some kind of vampire

after standing guard over the harvest so long

through all kinds of tempests and turmoils

even the crows admired him safely from shelter

like a street drunk in the tent of an all weather overcoat

from the wardrobe of a Salvation Army bin

with straw padded shoulders that made him look

as if he’d been crucified like a sacred clown just for the fun of it.

I preserve my self-pity like fireflies I’ve put up for the winter

in a canning jar where they’re all dogpaddling for their life

in a red tide of pectin running like a bloodstream in the light.

And I send my imagination out like a dragon on reconnaissance

to search out what everyone else is missing

so I can plot this airlift of self-healing metaphors more accurately

than the dandelion seeds I’ve been sending out lately

like parachutes candling in the manes of the lions of the sun

to ease their suffering as if I couldn’t be whole again until they were

even in the way we all fall to earth, some on good,

some on bad soil like Icarus scattered on the wind,

and some like me, into the uncharted seas of awareness

like a rogue star sent into exile by an albatross

that makes it impossible to tell from one day to the next

whether it’s a blessing or a curse, or it’s me that’s hexed

the way life seems to advance as you get older retrogressively.

PATRICK WHITE

HIDDEN JEWELS IN THE ASHES SKINLESS AS LIGHT

HIDDEN JEWELS IN THE ASHES SKINLESS AS LIGHT

Hidden jewels in the ashes skinless as light.

It’s a big place when you only see it through your eyes,

but see it through your heart, and even

your deepest tears are a wound shy

of the bell of silence that overturns the fountainmouths

of even the most efflorescent of the arts

so many paint on their windows so as not to see it.

It’s crucial to be a sincere sword in any holy war,

but how rare it is to meet anyone with

the courage of their clarity to peer beyond that

and look up at the stars from a dark, open field

and see, despite the way the light shatters like chandeliers,

we’re not living in a world of broken mirrors.

You can look into the eyes of the dragon

that weeps like rain. You can feel compassion

for flying reptiles and then you can kneel

at the end of the futon in front of the beaming window

and add your own ray of light as if your were humanizing

prismatic power mandalas through an antique kaleidoscope

by adding your eyes to the sand painting the next moment

is going to be erased at the zenith of fulfilment

and all the apple bloom like the circus tents

of the enlightened clouds and clowns,

are going to blow away, as if time weren’t

just the younger sister of space, but a kind

of sad, lyrical wind as well that keeps

shedding our lifemasks like the petals

of the wild roses and the wings of the flying ants,

as autumn comes looking for the maple keys

that could unburden your heart and sweeten your sleep

like a windfall of the fruits of life that replace it all

with a better return journey than when you went into exile.

Mentored by suffering the improvised myths of our origin,

keeping our third eye on the twists and turns

of the washboard road we’re driving home on,

not to be surprised about what’s around the next bend

or the rock like a hidden chip on a soft shoulder

waiting to be knocked off, wondering if life

has just provided you the occasion

to love again as inexhaustibly as you once did,

as if someone’s just uncovered you like a hidden housewell

or a buried telescope in a graveyard of famous constellations

with an afterlife of born again stars, you turn a corner,

bemused to be alive, as if you’d forgotten the feeling,

and your truly surprised, startled even, when you look to your left

that there’s a field, half-returned to the bush, beyond a cedar rail fence

patched by lichens that look like the seas of the moon

eclipsing their wounds as if time really could heal all things,

and the last of the common mullein were flowering

out of an urgent dream just before dusk, and the light,

I swear the light was making making everything

glow like effulgent honey, as the leaves on the trees

were on the verge of burning, and the goldenrod

and the purple loosestrife stood out like complementary colours,

mutually enhancing hot spots on the wheel of birth and death,

and the star clusters of New England asters

and blue chicory blooming by the side of the road

like floral prototypes of the new starmaps as the night comes on,

each as original as the last, and you’re mystically entranced

even in passage, of how reality, even in the midst

of its dissolution, can sometimes take your breath away

with the beauty that’s immanent within us all revealed

spontaneously like a stranger at the open gate

swinging on its hinges of hello and good-bye

that I took as a sign this was always the right path to be on

after all these light years of driving through the dark on my own.

PATRICK WHITE

THE CLOSER TO DEATH, THE MORE RISKS YOU TAKE IN LIFE

THE CLOSER TO DEATH, THE MORE RISKS YOU TAKE IN LIFE

The closer to death, the more risks you take in life.

Whatever’s left of your dark abundance, you spend it here

on things you know you won’t be able to take for granted

in a few light years, windows and wildflowers, dragonflies

and Venus going down blazing blue-white in a tangerine sunset,

the haiku novel you write spontaneously in your head

about the future of the red-haired kid with floured skin and freckles.

The way the light waxes lyrical about the larkspur.

Even the hairy scab of the spider you found

stranded in the bathtub after he’d put himself in peril

to come out of the darkness for a drink. And the long

pathway to heaven you laid over the side

like a two ply Milky Way of toilet paper

so it could be gone, as it was, in the morning

with blessings on its head and house. So much time

and then there’s forever. We don’t run out of it

we just plunge into one hell of a lot more of it

than we can use.

So given what I know

as one of the few certainties that have

brutally enhanced my intensity for life,

is going to happen to me sooner than later,

twenty springs, twenty summers, twenty autumns

if I’m lucky beaded out like new moons

on the optimistic abacus of my fingers and toes,

how could I not, like Tolstoy walking with Turgenev,

at the crepuscular end of an epic life,

crush flowers against my face, or let the stars

tattoo my skin with whatever constellations they wish?

How could I not admire the immensity of the light

thinly smeared on the delicately leaded stained glass window

of the fly’s wing, lying like a black maple key

on the windowsill at the foot of the sky it couldn’t unlock?

I absorb every mystically specific detail

the way I breathe. The inconceivable uncanniness

of its being here, just as it is without amendment, at all,

and me as well, to witness that all there is

to my unlikely presence is the fly on the windowsill.

Is the unknown star I’m trying to name

the constellation it’s so furiously from

shining through the crowns of the birch groves

pulling their leaves up around their throats

as autumn approaches for all of us. So far

not moribund about death or the passage of the flowers.

If it were a bad thing, the animals would know,

and be afraid of it, and yet I’ve witnessed

some of the highest summits of dignity

in the way an animal dies, accepting what must be,

with such grace and dignity, even in the clutch

of great agony, I just have to remember

what I saw in their eyes as they looked at me calmly

as death underwhelmed them on the inside

without the slightest disappointment

that this was the end of life. And no panic,

no sense of possibly having lived it wrong.

Just the calm of a flightfeather making a soft landing.

All my life I’ve tried to have the courage of my calling

and look into dark spaces and forbidden realms,

fathomless abysses that staggered the imagination

with their imageless prolixity, the hidden harmonies

of archetypal starmud subliminally suggesting

themes and metaphors of picture-music that might

shed light upon my emptiness and yours as if

we, too, were hidden secrets that wished

to be known creatively, the way the moon is,

when the seminal dew is on the grass like the waters

of a breaking womb, though a lunar life is strictly visionary,

or there’s an orgasmic frenzy of silver fish

flashing their lunacy like sabres of light

in their urgency for life in the rising tide

of a providence that inspires them when it’s high

to do or die, or expire in a tidal pool of shore-huggers.

I’ve looked into the dragon’s eyes directly

like two switchblades in a back alley

and recalling Rilke’s advice, tried poetically

to kiss them back into princesses I’ve neglected too long,

to humanize them back into my good graces again

like the dark side of the moon taking off its deathmask,

and turning around, showing me its face, eye to eye,

as if mirrors hadn’t been invented yet,

and I wasn’t a bird that had to be afraid of turning into stone.

PATRICK WHITE

IF YOU WERE TO GIVE ME YOUR HANDS

IF YOU WERE TO GIVE ME YOUR HANDS

If you were to give me your hands, break your prayer

and offer each wing up to me, broken halves of the heart,

I would make one burning dove out of them

that would carry a ribbon of flame in its beak,

a comet in the night, a vision of life and love,

a message to God she couldn’t ignore, a wild flower

that emerged out of the ashes of her abyss

like a star waking up from a bad dream

in the skies over the darkening hills of Perth.

If you were to give me your eyes for a moment

like the lily pads of two eclipses, I’d put my lips

to each of your eyelids like the kissing stone of the Kaaba,

and erase all memory of its igneous fall to earth,

and when you opened them at moonrise,

where I touched you, there’d be two waterstars

shining as if they’d just fallen from the Pleiades

among the waterlilies and crazy raptures of the nightbirds.

Spare me a tear, and I’ll return it to you like an elixir

that will dye your grief like the palette of an autumn tree

that’s been painting for years, a sidereal Prussian blue,

with a touch of alizarin crimson, to burn

like the subliminal passion of a dragon in the background.

And when the fish return to their sacred pools on pilgrimage

like water sylphs, even when your mindstream

breaks like a rosary into billions of separate beads

flowing over the precipice of your eyelashes into the void,

you’ll be the bird that amazes the sun and moon

reflected in each of them as they are in your eyes

as you wheel like the phoenix of a double helix

with the Swan and the Eagle across a summer

of clear night skies casting the nets of their constellations

far and wide, like a spell that gathers them up like shepherd moons.

If you were to give me your breasts, your lips,

your arms, your legs, I’d come like spring to a landscape,

clouds and rain to the moon, a hummingbird

to the goblet of your body, water to a wishing well

full of stars and fireflies, even at noon,

that’s just realized all she ever had to do was ask.

I’d make your flesh feel like the shores

of some vast sea of unexplored sensual awareness

and walk them like a beachcomber in a red tide

of radiant starfish pumping light into your blood.

I would not ask for your soul or your spirit,

knowing the eternal sky does not inhibit the flight

of the wild waterbirds startled off the lake,

and even the wind can’t hold them for long

like leaves and kites, when autumn says it’s time to move on.

But if you were to give me their chains,

I’d retool them into royal cartouches,

ellipsoid orbits, halos, and shield-shaped lozenges,

to distinguish your name, like a waterclock

in an hourglass of desert queens firewalking across the sky

by the Milky Way, as if you were on pageant

sailing up the Thames or the Nile in a barge of moonlight.

And should, never perish the thought, you see fit

to offer me your heart, not as a fortune-cookie

with a happy ending, but like the complementary colour

of the world’s biggest emerald, or the red berry

to a crown of prickly holly leaves, never

would any of my thorns ever draw even so much

as a drop of blood from you to gray the greening

of this lyrical innocence that sings in the urns of autumn

as if Eurydice raised Orpheus out of the grave for a change,

or wild geese carrying the souls of the dead south

out of a threshed cornfield under the first frost of the stars,

or awoke the Sleepers in the Cave, to a new age

that believes if you can’t dream it with your third eye closed

it isn’t real. It doesn’t sail. It isn’t champagne that’s breaking

like a bottled wave against the bow of a moonboat

that’s been in drydock long enough to heal its wounds

and drift down the mindstream of the muse

like a feather of life, with a leaf for a starmap,

a message of love, with no astrolabes or compasses up its sleeve

and a fleet of poems flying high over head across

the lifeless sea of shadows below, the crane bags of Hermes

reaching your delta where the river greets the sea of bliss

breaking into bloom like a third eye from its chrysalis,

a dragon at dawn, a planet in the sunset, a dream figure

that woke reality up from a firepit of illusion

like foxfire in the scorched roots of an old growth forest

where lightning sows the seeds of illumination

like fireflies and transformative storms of stars

under the heavy eyelids of the pine-cones

that have fallen into a deep meditation on the koans

that have rooted love like an unlikely windfall

of constellations, whether your walking on stars or their ashes,

in the unsalted soil of its own galactic immolations.

PATRICK WHITE

WHITE VOID FOR THE MOMENT, QUIESCENT AS PAPER AND CANVAS

WHITE VOID FOR THE MOMENT, QUIESCENT AS PAPER AND CANVAS

White void for the moment, quiescent as paper and canvas,

a little white square in the middle of my heart

as a psychologist once said, startled and wide-eyed,

and there’s no one there, as if I were the simplest

of impossibilities. Could be. But who would be there

to know what it might make a difference to, or care?

Some purposes fulfill themselves or maybe

the quality of peace goes white in the winter

as it does in the dove, so as not to attract

undue attention to itself in a snow storm of poems.

Or maybe, sooner or later, even reality

comes to realize its suprasensual ground of being

is misconceptualized from a word or a name

that has the creative power of one of the shapeshifting lords

of the dead metaphors that get brought back to life

with no idea of where they’ve been in the meantime.

All of genesis in the first word, the to logos,

the whole table of contents of the imagination, now and to come,

the alpha and omega like the short and long vowels

of the sacred syllables of picture music,

apple bloom playing the dead branches of its leafless violins,

and the grammar of a living medium of animal images

and the shamans who entered into their visionary agony

painted on the blackboards of our native skull caves

where we worshipped bears dressed in the hides of humans.

The happy beginnings quit and the hard-line endings go on forever.

I’m back here at Long Bay, like the long story

of a lifemask that’s been passing itself off as me for light years

sitting alone around a daylily of fire

giving a private lapdance to the wind,

scattering stars and leaves and smoke around

all over the place, as if it were looking for something it lost

in a panic to retrieve it from the passage of the mindstream

like time unravelling the seams of all things

unstitching the constellations like the wavelengths

of the enfeebled threads that kept our wounds together

long enough to heal into the crude ores

of terraformed scar tissue that might smoulder

like a starmap of brown stars over the course of time,

even when it’s been mined out like the open pits of the moon,

no light bulbs in the sockets of an empty skull

but never shines the way its eyes used to

when you could look through them

like reflecting telescopes into the sidereal splendours of the soul.

Before it discovered the unbearable solitude

in the nightfall of pain, and the white apparition

that comes like the silence of a nurse in soft shoes

to sow its mouth shut to keep the others

from waking up on the night ward from their dreams

to discover like a wild rose at the end of summer

that everything is terminal, our departures and arrivals,

our exits and entrances alike. That there’s a holy war of one

deep in the heart, win, lose, or draw, day and night

that goes on without respite that even for survival

the crazy wisdom of a compassionate warrior will not fight,

our human divinity not something to be won,

but a birthright, a square of light like a faceless stamp

on a loveletter that melts like a snowflake

as soon as it alights like a star on the furnace of the heart

and the ghosts of our tears return like rivers

to the oceanic awareness of the bays

we sit beside listening to the spiritual white noise

of the cosmic events, in bliss and sorrow,

we once lived through like the mirages and muses

of a tomorrow that came too late to celebrate our absence.

PATRICK WHITE