HOWEVER WE EMBRACE IT INTIMATELY TO HUMANIZE IT

HOWEVER WE EMBRACE IT INTIMATELY TO HUMANIZE IT

However we embrace it intimately to humanize it

and make it ours, ingratiate it into our hearts and minds,

to understand it, and through understanding befriend it,

suffering remains impersonal, oblivious to tenderness,

faceless, a dragon without compassion for our appeals.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods:

they kill us for their sport. Shakespeare. But suffering

is not what we think about it, not the way we feel,

or the little human why of the fact that it exists at all

we shriek into the unlistening abyss, or keep to ourselves

and cry behind whatever lifemasks we care to put on it

as if it were happening to someone else we didn’t recognize.

These are my eyes and they’re weeping blood.

This is my mouth but the tongue’s been torn out

like the flame of a black candle at a mass for the mute.

And the holy men say suffering purifies. The poet

makes something transformatively creative out of it

as if he had a reptile for a muse that can shapeshift

all around him like a caduceus but doesn’t cure his ills

however he try to dull the pain with an anodyne of symbols.

Two women electrocuted in a pool of water running

to rescue a woman in a car on fire that’s just

brought down a powerline like a cobra from a branch.

The noisy bliss of a school bus smashed at a train crossing

like a beer can in a drunken fist that spares no one,

regardless of age, innocence, karma or the satin in the coffins

to prove that heaven’s a better place than this one

where all we ever see is bloodstains on favourite cotton dresses

little girls with ribbons in their hair are killed in every day.

I’ve opened myself up to the suffering of others

and I’ve seen the waterlilies of compassion

gaping at the stars as if waiting for an explanation

that would make it all beautiful and sane again.

I’ve seen friends go methodically mad trying

to gnaw through the glass lenses of the telescopic eyes

they feel they’re caged in like a spider mount

or a live rat in an aquarium with an exotic trophy snake

blunting the bullet of its head off the walls

until one of the ricochets strikes its exhausted mark.

One man’s agony is the way another makes up for

a personality deficiency by enjoying the kill.

Thirty dead wolves in a pick-up truck culled

by two redneck goofs with egos like guns

to protect the cattle on their way to the abattoir.

And when I drove cab, every morning from six

until noon when even the shadows had to turn away,

I was amazed at how many sick and injured people,

young and old, I drove to the hospital as if there were a war

going on somewhere not far from here,

but the only way you could tell was by

the number of wounded and refugees being carried

back from the front lines to the War Memorial Hospital in Perth.

I was the mobile stretcher bearer for the pilgrims

of the Canterbury Tales seeking salvation from pain

in a secular shrine of excruciating cures.

And I grew angry at a god I don’t believe in

that so many, if not all, were born to suffer

in this way at the whim of a psychopath at play.

And for what? To refine a bit of character

like a nugget of wisdom out of a ton of dark ore?

To attribute a loving cause to a tragic effect?

Clinging to desire in a passing world

might explain a lot and get you by for awhile

in the specious present of mirroring thought-moments

but when you realize you’re just dogpaddling in space

off your leash, and that attachment too is a Buddha activity,

who would dare sit at the bedside of a dead child

and void bound in its absence, quote desire

as the cause of nine cancer treatments

that didn’t send suffering into remission?

War, genocide, disease, poverty, ignorance, perishing,

lock-step ideological synchronicities of power-mongers

murdering whatever they set out to govern

that uphold the very principles their power base

was founded upon by the opinions of their inferiors.

And lovers on either side of the river, their hearts arcing

like bridges Running Bear and Little White Dove

will later jump off of. Pain as transcendent as oxygen.

Mice nibbling through the insulation of the wiring

between the walls like the nervous system of an arsonist

shorting out like a chemical fuse to burn

this hovel of a fire trap in ashes to the ground

and rise from annihilation like a culpable mystic in hell.

Maybe I wasn’t raised to be a good bell, a fire-alarm,

or even an air raid siren hoarse with warning,

and my voice is as useless as a lighthouse on the moon,

and I don’t know enough about any gods

to spiritually gossip behind their backs about

who’s on the nightshift of the terminal wards

and who’s shining like a night light in the morgue

and who’s walking in soft shoes as if

the whole world were a hospital that could attend upon

but not mend a heart that’s ticking like a time bomb

walking through a minefield covered in snow

pushing an electric chair to the edge of futile despair

intent on giving suffering some of its own medicine

like a lethal injection of what we’ve been compelled

to live through with smiles on our deathmasks most of our lives.

I want to see the horror in its eyes, I want it to become

the empath I have, I want it to taste its own tears

pacing a widow walk on its hand and knees

waiting for the sea to give up the drowned.

I want to wound reality for making the pain the rule

and the joy of life a school that doesn’t maintain a teacher

to ask a guru how to dance again without fear

its happiness is going to be shackled to a spider

by a dancing master on the other side of the mirror.

PATRICK WHITE

THERE'S A BLACK LOTUS IN MY HEART

THERE’S A BLACK LOTUS IN MY HEART

There’s a black lotus in my heart, black hole

of enlightenment, black waterstar, sacred eclipse.

Nothing worth attaining that isn’t unattainable.

And all the gates are upside down and backwards.

Albino starmaps with black dots shining

on the other side of the mirror, zodiacs

of black matter looping back on themselves

like solar auroras of the sun that rises at midnight.

I don’t know what all this means. I may have gone

too far into exile and actually managed to get

to the dark side of the moon. Or I’m a warehouse

of shadows at noon that have lost track of the time

like blind sundials that feel they’re being followed.

The light illuminates, but I bloom nocturnally.

I’ve got the burn marks of stars all over my skin.

I work on the nightshift at the foundry of a constellation

busy pouring itself out like iron and oxygen, blood and air,

forged out the afterlives of hydrogen I’ve gathered over the years.

A fire-womb engendering one you fill with water.

Fire the midwife of its own daughter. I’m envious

of creative immolations I know I’ll never attain.

Though my left brain is in full communication with the right

and I’m a full moon of the bright vacancy, dark abundance

of both sides, and the harvest is ripe, I’m always

a star ahead of my light, so I don’t end up

like a dead school furnace in the basement

writing my memoirs like a manuscript of ashes in an urn.

Deconstruct me wholly down to my last atom

and I promise you, if that’s all I’ve got to work with

like one stem cell to another at the beginning

of a matrix of causes and conditions into which

we’ll be placed by a Hox gene assessing the chi

of which direction our eyes should face, and how many

degrees of separation there should be between our ears,

I promise you, I’ll still burn with the fireflies

and the supernovas like a blind prophet

who saw two wavelengths copulating like snakes

and has been tied at this stake of of a spine,

an oracular heretic of both sexes in synchrony

like the hybrid of a phoenix and a waterbird

burning in visionary serpent fire ever since

for the sake of a muse that always comes

in the nick of time like rain on the moon to my rescue.

When it’s night in the diamond of my third eye

is the light not more mystically enhanced by the darkness,

more mystically specific than the white wash of the sun?

The moon is the mitochondrian that tempers

the toxicity of the light so the nucleus of the solar system

can blaze with alien oxygen meteorically across the night.

The black mirror, brighter than the white,

shows you your reflection on the inside

where you’re arrayed like a faceless world

that’s given up trying to second guess

who’s the unerring witness under the lifemask

of the surreal cosmology that doesn’t recognize

it’s not a self, at first glance, and that all physics

is the psychology of ridding yourself of the delusion

you can, even if you’re riding a flying carpet

out into this desert of stars to sweep the constellations away

like mirages that have been throwing bad meat

down your holy wells like sacred crocodiles.

Ignite even so much as a matchbook at this distance

or turn on a flashlight to see what’s in the dark

as if you were looking for your mind with your mind on the light

even though it’s as abundantly clear as your eyes it’s night out,

and the billions of stars in the next closest galaxy,

Messier 31, at eleven o’clock above the middle star

in Andromeda on the rocks, and two million light years

of enlightenment will gently recede back into the cosmic hiss

and disappear from your field of view subliminally

knowing, because the timing’s yours, you’re a daylily

covering your insight with the petals of your own hands

because you don’t know how to open them sidereally yet

from the outside in, where your darkness shines

and the night you turn your face away from

like the bright side of the moon blinds you

by a reflected glory to the radiance of the origins

of your own vision, deep within, where it all begins

emanating stars of the darkness of your own eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

LET GO OF MY MIND, LIKE A KITE, LIKE A SNAKE

LET GO OF MY MIND LIKE A KITE, LIKE A SNAKE

Let go of my mind like a kite, like a snake

I’ve grabbed by the tail to make a daisy chain of eternity.

Take the bit out of the Great Square of Pegasus

and pour myself out like the billions of stars in the Milky Way.

I’m hemorrhaging poetry. I’m bleeding to death like a rose.

Let it go, let it go, let it go. Blood knows its own way home.

I’m not weaving straightjackets of circumstantial vetch

into an embroidered chrysalis that never opens up.

I’m not trying to pour the sea back into the cup of the moon.

There’s more to me than I could ever drink up.

You can put a burning candle in the window and wait for me

but I’m going to follow the smoke wherever it leads

like stardust on the chalkboard of accelerated space

in a burning schoolhouse that had nothing much to teach

about the unknown in the first place. Order’s

only a special mode of chaos like a straight line

is a special form of a curve, and there are snakepits

of wavelengths that only serve as flying carpets

growing thin under the windows the dragons look through

like dark energies that can turn space to glass

like gravitational eyes bending the light to their point of view

as if fire were as good a medium as water to see through.

I’m shucking the worlds off my fur like a wolf

on the far side of the river I’ve just swum across

and I’m howling at the moon reflected in every single drop

as if I were a mad multiverse of permutations and combinations

that could be everywhere at once, above the timberline

where I can’t be hunted into extinction like a black dwarf

that knows there’s another kind of shining on the inside

deeper than the obvious scintillance when the moon

plays the lake like the nightbird of a lonely harpsichord in vain.

PATRICK WHITE

I COULD LOOK AT IT WITH SWEETER EYES

I COULD LOOK AT IT WITH SWEETER EYES

I could look at it with sweeter eyes.

The way boys and cowards romanticize war.

I could emphasize the honeysuckle and fireflies.

I could say that’s not a noose in my hand, it’s an ankh.

I could run an extortion racket of jukebox mirrors

and have them placed in all the best cafes

so when you put a quarter moon in

they reflect anything you ask them to.

You’ve got a beautiful face. Man

are you smart. Yes, you’re the son of Zeus

and I’m the oracle of Amun at Siwa.

And every occasion I can with integrity

I try to. I praise the larkspur.

I’m exhilarated by the waterlilies

that have almost come to mean

as much to me as the stars on a summer night.

I rejoice in extraordinarily ordinary events

between people, I don’t expect to experience again

the way he walks beside her like a green crutch

coming into bloom and leafing like a loveletter

trying to be a strong tree she can lean on,

and so much is so crucial to a blessed few

or a father walking down the street,

listening to his daughter as if she were the Buddha

or middle C and he had to keep his eighty-eights straight.

Born a cellular optimist or too stupid to be a cynic,

though there are days I live like a dog,

and I know that denying this suggestive reality

is to summon its affirmation as if

something in the context of life heard you

and though you’re never certain, out to prove you wrong.

And likewise endorsing it, invites its denial.

This is the middle extreme and it should be lived

immensely with intensity like a Sufi gyroscope

in dynamic equilibrium with your wingspan

whether you’re homing to a sacred grove for the night

and your heart is a bell of shadows

or you’re one of the good sugars of life

fulfilled by the dawn where all the birds

sound like one harmony, but if you listen a little harder,

they’re all out of tune with each other,

this one a bass run and that an arpeggio

on a water flute that can hold a note like a drop of dew

on the tongue of a blade of stargrass when it wants to.

When the long wavelengths of its tears

aren’t breaking ashore like a menagerie of glass horses.

My mystic guestimate is. In the dark beyond

the blazing memes that have yet to light a candle to the stars,

love silvers the harvest of the heart in moonlight

and comes by day with a golden scythe to thresh it,

and an understanding that puts its trust in the future of life

like a windfall of apples swarmed by wasps like a train

that had jumped its tracks, or dozens of whales

were beached overnight and crushed their lungs

under their own weight, though that wasn’t as buoyant

as the previous metaphor, nevertheless it’s not

an injudicious verisimilitude for what I’m getting at.

If your passion for anything is ferocious enough

sooner or later you’re going to meet a nemetic dragon

though I’m sure that’s just a dream cloak

for projecting my anxieties onto a blaze

of cold-blooded reptiles with inflammable wings,

and you’re going to look deeply into the fangs of its eyes

as if you had to go through this ordeal

to suffer for what you love to prove you’re real.

Today I lived like one long mouthless scream.

I could have kicked stars in someone’s face.

Too much of a black farce to be the credible dream

of the air corridor I’m trying to sustain

like a black hole to the other side of the hourglass

that’s timing all this like a heartbeat of picture-music.

Now I’m writing poetry beside an aquarium

at two in the morning with three goldfish

hovering in their sleep beside me like hummingbirds

gone back to the sea as we all do eventually.

And it feels good to see the likeness in disparate things

and bring them together like the moon on the mindstream,

maple fire dancing to the rhythm of northern water,

and though it’s impossible to assess the worth

of what I’m doing as a poet in the twenty-first century

I can feel the compassion of a crazy wisdom

in every feather of light that falls to earth like Icarus.

PATRICK WHITE

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