ONE LAST PILOT LIGHT OF A BLOSSOM

ONE LAST PILOT LIGHT OF A BLOSSOM

One last pilot light of a blossom

on the ghostly candelabra of the blueweed

and the New England asters huddled

like starclusters among dishevelled stalks

of blonde hay dry and brittle as hair

that’s bleached its supple green

into a lustreless sunshine of flat bread.

Stripped of their leaves, the Southern belles

of the willows, now sadistic molls

whipping their own eyes like rain in the river

for things they wish they hadn’t seen.

Planets scorched into extinction,

black walnuts crushed underfoot,

the air, thick with the ether of decay

and the water’s turned mean in the cold.

Pelt of a muskrat in the cattails,

the leatherwork of bush wolves,

and at the foot of the oracular rock

with the birthmark of a glacier

that once passed this way like time

the shepherd moon of its gaping skull.

All the seeds have gone to ground by now,

ammunition stored for a spring revolution,

flower power redivivus, a vegetable vendor

in a Tunisian souk, a sacrificial arsonist,

a burning apple in the eye of a fire storm.

Blue jay in the yellow birch leaves.

One lone turkey vulture buffeted by the wind,

adjusting its magnificent splayed wings

to every gesture of the air as it wheels

over the dried blood flaking off

the maples like leaves of crackling paint,

and at my feet, like vulnerable sexual organs

shaped from the flesh of the moon,

labial mushrooms with the gills of albino fish.

Things of the mind, not solid, but real,

I witness myself in the decline of the woods

and every leaf, and maple key, and fuselage

of a dragonfly in a torn bird net of a spider-web,

every withered grape on the wild grape vine

I want to take with me as my grave goods

when I go, every mystic detail of the fall

down to the last God particle, an encylopedia

of what it means to have lived like an empty silo

of expanding space so I could hold all this

in the abysmal solitude of the human mind

when it discovers the image of God

in the affinitive creative potential of its own unknowability

as the many return to the one, and the one

returns to transcendence all on its own

as if everything in existence from star to stone

were merely a suggestive guess at the hidden secret

that lies on its deathbed longing like autumn

to confess itself to the expressive silence

of the mystery in the heart of the unknown.

PATRICK WHITE

IN YOU

In you I come to the end of roads,

and an alphabet of burning wings

falls from an indigo sky

like meteors trying to write

the unsayable in a slash of light,

in a language of luminous scars

the night beatifies with mystic knowledge

that wants to name you

so deeply in thresholds and stars

the charged silence

is giving birth to an indelible mouth,

a doorway of blood,

an ancient grammar of fire

the wind puts on like a robe

to scry the darkness for a voice

that could fill the goblets

of the moon’s dead seas

with the wine of a radiant wound,

so much within me

already the tongue of a bell

that can taste you like blackberries.

The whole of you

in every single drop of your eyes,

you are the black swan

of the eclipse that rares its reflection in water,

the dark orchid in the shadow of the dragon

that sways like a bell in the night,

even your absence a shape of cherishing,

a harvest of shadows beyond the light

of the lamp that burns for you.

Within the deepest abyss of myself

where the heart stands alone

like a single black pillar

in the twilight wasteland of the world,

a mysterious temple to the ultimacy

of having been here once

to suffer the passage of form and time,

everything a gesture of space

that thaws back into itself,

I have written your name

in the hourglass of my blood

like a whisper of secret ink

that once voiced the light to be

and shook the stars like wheat

out of its blind abundance

and will be remembered forever

as the first intimacy of the sea,

and there is the rumour

of a dream in the air,

the fragrance of an approach,

that out of an ocean of light

the tide will embody a woman

like the shore of an island

littered with fingertips and kisses

enmeshed like galaxies and starfish

in the exhalation of her veils

and our lips will meet like archers,

and our bodies will sing like arrows

sunk like orchards through the heart

and long after the last flame of life is shed,

the night will silence the birds

in the groves where we bled like poppies

to open the gates of the mystery

like keys and rain, or the rosary of black pearls

that chants its prayers to the night

like the slow alarm of autumn geese

in the eyes of a human face.

I try to say what can’t be said,

pouring my spirit

into the wineskin of every word,

but my heart is a larger apple

than the bough of my voice can bear,

and the silence

that would erect temples everywhere like flowers

spun from the auroral silks of my soul

and perfume the air with the pollen of sacred fireflies,

every emotion a priest with a shaven head

to honour the moon

climbing the stairwell within me

of a million horizons at once

in every breathless step,

falls away behind me like the wake of a sinking ship

that lowers me into my coffin like a lifeboat

or a message in a bottle

that pleads like wine with the emptiness

for an alphabet that isn’t in arrears to time

to say you to the night

in a lightning breath of life beyond

these elemental likenesses I carve

from a quarry of stars.

And I know I ask for immortal children

from a human womb,

and wide as my powers are

to exceed the sky with homing birds,

to adorn the dead branch with windows

that dazzle the roots of dawn,

I am the ashes of a black star in daylight,

a stone man with a chain for a tongue

when I try to swim like Atlantis

through the depths of your shining within

and the last word, the last life

to flash across my mind as I drown

again and again like a pulse

in the embrace of your beauty

is always the world as it is

before anything was said.

PATRICK WHITE

UNDER THE BRIDGE

Under the bridge

with the rest of the homeless

there is a large, rusty oildrum

that a raging orchid of fire blooms in:

my heart.

Anywhere is now my only address

and everywhere the world crosses my threshold.

I know my own spirit

as the eye of the water

knows the moon’s reflection;

a mystic firewalk of luminous petals,

a shattered urn, the shards

of an ancient mirror

that’s never featured anyone,

sharp enough to cut space.

Under the bridge

where the lost keychains

gather to enlighten the night

with stories of the things they could not open,

my spirit is a hot, black rose

on a witching wand

with the crescents of the moon for thorns.

And I have never understood the loss

the heavy bell of my pulse calls me to

like a sorrow that hauls me around tidally

in a dans macabre

or lily-laden funeral procession

to mourn the lethal beauty

of our passage and separation,

the extirpation of the mystery.

Under the bridge

my spirit is free

and no one can evict the wind,

and though the lies and the truths

eventually mingle in a confluence of waters,

and the dead are

as often the shadowmasters of the living,

as the living are lighthouses to them,

I am still robed like a trembling king

in the oilslicks of my delusions

when the guest of my awareness

mistakes the host for a servant,

and the shining seems blighted with sunspots

that struggle pointlessly like flies

on the helical gusts

of my flypaper mind

and the windowsills are thick with the dust

of unattainable aspirations.

So much of what I was taught was wrong.

Under the bridge

the dead gather like leaves at the gate

for hand-outs from the living

who have even less than they do

and the lovers don’t dare remember

what it was like not to crave and despise each other

like the next fix.

Here is where

the sages of the street,

lost and found in the tao of concrete,

linger like ants in empty brandy bottles

whose labels have slipped from them like skin,

slurring their prophecies

in a demotic of scars.

Should you come here,

bring your own totem pole of eras and masks,

the stele of your subjective imaginings

you erected in the circus of your heart

like the axis of an amputated clock

to witness the running of your passions

yoked to golden chariots,

the single pillar of the temple

that houses your most cherished afflictions.

This is where the curses come to die

a natural death

and the blessings

are the enhanced shadows of whatever’s left.

Here even the barnacles

that make toy villages

and give the tiny molars of their dead volcanoes root canals,

have tasted the dark ecstasy

of a moment that spewed them out of their fezs

like the lonely feather of an astounded bird escaping.

Under the bridge

no one knows what the skeletons are pointing at.

I want a compass with a clean needle.

Under the bridge

the ashes and shadows

of hearts that were once certain

argue over what they are the lees of,

what lights and fires

have cast them into perdition

as they swallow their liquor like hourglasses.

Under the bridge I am spared all these meanings

looking for life.

Here meaning itself is meaningless

and I want a life so immediate

I don’t need to grind a mortar out of the stars

to assign myself a place

in what cannot be located.

I don’t want to know who I am all the time

and if there’s any need of a temple,

sanctuary in the quicksand,

let it be the wind.

Love is a coil of flypaper

hung out in the hope

of catching a star;

better to be the wind

and learn to let things go

like seeds and birds and the leaves

of a tree that burnt its own holy book,

tired of flames and feathers.

Under the bridge

where everyone is the missing link

in a chain of tears,

I don’t need to master everything I see

or tighten my spinal cord like a guitar key

to jam with the blind music of the spheres.

I attune myself to space

and sing back-up in the darkness.

Under the bridge

all human knowledge, all art

is graffiti expressed in passing

to make the emptiness homey.

I’ve been weaving my blood like fire

on a loom of bone

into flying carpets and curtains;

I’ve been painting dreamscapes

on the lunar sails in a bottle of wine

and sending them off

on every wave of a delivered heart

with a warning to leave me alone.

I cry along with the rain

to adorn a palace of water

and follow every river

back to the fountain-mouth of a woman.

I plough the nightsilts in the mysterious deltas

of forbidden civilizations,

knowing the pyramids are dust

and that everyone’s afterlife is now.

Under the bridge

the lonely and luckless thresh the oracles

of the candles guttering out in their skulls,

believing love can win a war with a blade of grass

against the serpent-fire of black lightning

that doesn’t need the witness of a nightwatchman

or the fury of a junkyard dog

to keep an eye on things.

One flash of its lucid eclipse

and the work is done.

Under the bridge

you wake up like a rootless tree

that’s free to come and go

like any other illusion

mesmerized by its own inconceivability,

or you’re the moon

eating your own afterbirth in a sea of shadows.

Under the bridge

enlightenment walks the way of the lie

like a forged passport to liberation

to show the refugees of truth

a little known escape-route

out of the war they declared against themselves.

Under the bridge

I am aging.

I am sad.

I am alone;

and there’s a spiritual oilslick

trying to convince me it’s a nightrose

and the golden chariot my heart once was,

stinking of triumph,

is now a garbage truck

reeking of angels

and the accoutrements of an outmoded purity,

the chipped relics of a secret sanctity

that bled to death through its eyes

when the solid turned real

and the fools gathered in amazement

like footnotes

to scoff at the text of themselves.

Now I saturate my silence with compassion

and leave the weeping

to make their own creekbeds

through the precarious terrain

of their infantile schemes

to dazzle the sun

with the candle of their insignificance.

Most still stick out their thumbs

for a free ride to a wild hope and a hunch,

but under the bridge

all the true pilgrims are roadkill;

and anyone who still believes in anything

is merely donating themselves precariously

to a foodbank for cannibals.

Under the bridge

the last resort

is always the burning gate of something better

and the most ardent optimists

are those without a chance:

seven come eleven,

but their only constellation,

snake-eyes.

Every morning I lift the mirror to my lips

and drink my own reflection

like blood from my skull

to forget what I am becoming

as I age like an echo among the mountains

even as a greater translucency

slowly enraptures me

in the competence of an unexpected freedom.

One day

you say good-bye to your voice like a bird

that adorned the tree

throughout the summer of its bearing,

the last flame leaps from the fire

into the darkness like a dancer

that stole everything from you

without offense,

and from that denuding on

everything you’ve got to say

is the wind in leafless branches

trying to sweep the stars from the sky

that might have shown you a way back.

PATRICK WHITE

MORE DIRECTLY, MORE INTIMATELY

MORE DIRECTLY, MORE INTIMATELY

More directly, more intimately I would approach you

with fingertips and lips, with the black roses of mysterious midnights,

with eloquent eyes full of solace and tenderness, forgotten tears,

and the leaves of our ancient longing shed like a library in the ripening silence

of the moment just before the universe is born of an unwitnessed union

and arrayed like the robes we have discarded

of as many forelives as there are

stars in the sky and gardens in orbit. Breath of my breath, how often

over the ages have I lingered in this dream of you, waking

from shrine after shrine like a swallow to find you again, the sacred syllable

of the jewel in the well, lunar sapphire, unsayable to all but the one

who has looked far beyond his seeing to retrieve it

from the welter and turmoil of the world like a second innocence? Beloved,

you have always been the firefly in my grave, the lost star

that answered what the darkness was asking,

a sunflower in the shadow of an eclipse, a ghost-song

rising inconceivably from the ashes of the guitar

like the first morning of a leaf. Together

we have lived forever in the tiniest house of time, over and over,

like a drumbeat or the beating of single heart, two wings on the same bird,

renewing and fulfilling each other, gathering and releasing,

the river in rain, bathing in its own waters, arrivals in every departure.

Soft fire, fire on the moon, blood-fire, mind-fire, mystic fire,

sweet arsonist, white heretic, you heal in your burning,

your beauty, golden knives of light that adorn the heart they strike,

even over coffee, even over distant glimpses of you

on the other side of the street, even here now, miles

and hours away among these voids and apparitions I keep searching

like abandoned theaters for the word within the word to tell you

what the world is, what we are with you in it, not just

the green bells of April annunciations, or the sanguine avowals of passion

downing the bitter cup on a hill of skulls

or the amazing resurrections, or the sun in your hair

suddenly a revelry of light, or the star in the bay of your smile, first crescent

threshing the harvest of sunset, not just that, not just

black lightning slaking its igneous roots in underground watersheds,

volcanoes spewing virgin islands for sexual castaways, but the things

I once whispered to you in a thousand languages

that have long been rubbled in the mouths of men like temples,

things I once said to you like the wind shining in moonlight

when we lay down secretly by the banks of the Orontes

far from anything but the shelter of ourselves,

obedient in that ancient future to nothing but time and the stars

as civilizations passed, talking to their gods. Slowly

like an empty boat drifting through the fog

it all returns, the many lives, the many blossoms returning to the branch,

and all the windfall of faces assumed by the flesh and the spirit,

fruit on the tree of the moon again, eyelids and mouths again,

and the many hearts that have lain like silver coins ungathered

in the fountains of yearning that flowed away from us

into clouds on the mountain just as we reached out,

and all the dreams in the cellars of blood we pulled over ourselves like skies

where we wandered in the far fields among the flowering fires,

two planets of bliss on a single thread of blood, the stars

beneath our feet and siloes of silence our only bread, too full to speak,

too vagrantly sustained by a feast of wonder to lack anything.

Tomorrows ago, then as now, all one encounter, one greeting,

we are mountain and valley and the echo of the calling as again and again

you incredibly answer like a beautiful wilderness, supernal spring,

the origin in my end. O you who are my only passage and threshold,

let me sing to you again of your alphas and omegas

on the bull-harps of the moon, let me send messengers on ahead

centuries from now to celebrate your astounding arrivals

on the shores of all these unborn lives, future after future, wave after wave,

the days and dawns of our walking from oasis to oasis, island to island

in this desert of stars. Let me drink gold from the rock,

honey from the bone, wine from the thistle; wise, let me drink

from the hands of a fool; foolish, drown me in a prophet’s tears;

ignorant or enlightened, madman or sage alike, let me

see you again under the eyelids of the moon, let me brush the hair

from your forehead and kiss you again like cool apples in September,

one orchard after another, wild grapes in the grass.

In the silver of faceless mirrors I would write your name,

on the waters of unnamed lakes I would reflect your face.

Ghetto rose, orchid in a slum, let my sorrows rinse your leaves,

let me fall like rain to the root and rise again through the petals of your ocean,

let me fill your glass and be consumed once more

on the precipice of your lips so might I be your wine and water,

this trance of flowing diamonds. And of my joys remembered and to come,

let the greatest and smallest of my palaces and hovels

hold you for the night in rooms with eyes for windows,

my body for a bed, and my love of you that makes a candle

and a shadow of the world, this lighthouse off the watchful coast

of your epiphanies, where my heart is a solitary seabird,

a sample of land from an undiscovered continent, the light behind the light

you go by. Gentle gypsy-witch, bright voyager, again

I have found you like a needle, mystic north, your star,

your steady lucidity, the calm Pacific under your shining, within and without,

direction and retrieval, a radiance that shakes the grave

of its disembodied contents and hands out living passports

in the cities of the dead to ports of call

among the lost islands of light in your eyes, greener than music.

PATRICK WHITE

NO ONE IN THE WORLD

No one in the world knows me today;

there isn’t a mirror that could sink

the black sail of my face,

or a name that could follow me home like a threshold,

no sea at the end of the limp ribbon of my bloodstream,

no shore of an island heart to be washed up on

as the trees wait to announce their burning retractions

and the sky so blue, so blue, so blue,

such a perfect oblivion of blue

no mortar and pestle of the mouth

could grind a colour so fine,

and I hear the engines of the day

and the people of the day

but their business is not mine,

and the roads that can be patched,

that smoulder under a hot poultice,

a black bandage of asphalt

are not the roads I walk like a wound

with nothing to say to the delinquent streetlamps

wondering if winter will catch them in bud,

signing a guest-book of wet cement

in a braille of fingers and footprints.

One by one I have pulled the stars out of my skin

like the thorns of roses and serpents,

the stingers of the kamikaze honey bees

that die like lost swords

in a blaze of devotion, sugar and gold,

detangled their burrs of light from my hair,

and disarmed the toxic sickles

of the moon in Scorpio

that reaps fire with fire

by letting the harvest go to seed like ashes,

by letting the harvest rust,

by making martyrs of the scars and the scarecrows

by crowning them

with the bitter ivy and barbed wire

of distinct constellations that glowed

like an eyelid of nettles,

needles through the eyes of an evil doll

that drowned in a deluge of roosters and whiskey.

And it’s not that I’m giving up on my defeat

or looking for immunity, an antidote, sanctuary,

an ebullient insight into the way I feel

that grasps at clouds with too much certainty,

or even an honorable armistice

to lay down my weapons

like the shadows of the midnight sun at noon,

or trying to get high on hallucinogenic parachutes

that gill the sky with fish and mushrooms and terminal envelopes

that house the feathers of another dimension;

let me fall like a pillar of wine

in the ranks of this lonely holy war

I wage with the sand ghosts

of a thousand visionary shrines

like a heresy whose time has come,

like the empty-handed boat I am

whenever it starts to rain.

No one needs to know who sits on the throne

of the faceless coins I’ve issued

to shut my eyes like doors

on a fever of scissors cutting the strings

of fanatical puppets

stuffing the mailbox

with bouquets of crusading propaganda

that want to tar my household gods with wings.

There are things that go on in the world

so alone and unknown,

hidden harmonies, fountains, wells,

the eyes that the night drinks from like flowers

and gates of light so open

that even space and time leave their shoes

like the beginning of ignorance

to circle the clear flame once like unwitting pilgrims

and extinguish their gaping mirrors

like the torches of unfaithful lovers in the silence.

PATRICK WHITE