LETTING THE STARS FROM LAST NIGHT

LETTING THE STARS FROM LAST NIGHT

Letting the stars from last night

settle in this morning’s puddles

so I can see more clearly once

this turmoil of starmud precipitates out

as mental sediment in a mirror

skybound to a vast blue abyss

and, as they say in Zen, the eternal sky

does not inhibit the flight of the white clouds.

I want to be a bird that dissipates

in the mauve distance like water in the air.

I want to be a fire whose flames

never stop aspiring to the stars,

though every time they’re almost within grasp

they disappear like petals on the wind,

the pages fall out of the book I’m burning

like a sacrificial rose of galactic hydrogen,

and I’m left with a handful of ash

I can stuff my pillow with like the down

of a phoenix in the urn of his worst nightmare.

And being strong seldom helps.

Or feathering your dragons

to convince yourself they’re bluebirds.

Strong means condemned to solitude.

Hanging on to the mountain with one arm

to keep it from falling to its death

in the valley it dug like its own grave

in the valley below. Biting the bullet

like a crystal skull until your back molars break

and you’re swallowing little flakes of glass

like the beginning of a snow squall

even as you’re smiling like a grimace

on a death mask trying to hold its tears back

like a glacier trying to discipline the mindstream.

Strong means you don’t use the fossils of other birds

as crutches for your lapwings. Your calender of scars

begins to smile more affectionately at you

as you get older like waxing crescent moons

and this avalanche of meteoric life

looks more like a windfall of ore and apples

with seeds like snake-eyed dice inside

or the seven come eleven of a coal mine

that finally clarified its darkness like diamonds.

When bad news comes you fall on it

like a hand grenade in a daycare center

as you strain to keep yourself together.

Strong means being taken for granted

like the solid cornerstone that can take the weight

of the world that towers above it like quicksand.

Strong means you don’t hesitate to eliminate

your distinctions when someone’s drowning,

whether they’re a fly in a toilet bowl,

Icarus falling out of the sky because his wings

were insincere, Narcissus plunging into his face,

or a siren caught up in the undertow of her song,

you show up like a lifeboat with a lighthouse

full of fireflies for a lantern, words for a rudder

and a star to set sail by and pull everyone in

to your emptiness, happy you’ve finally found a use for it.

A holy book says that no one’s asked to bear

more than they can carry, and it’s probably true

from one direction of prayer, but I swear, lately,

one camel isn’t enough to shoulder what

it’s going to take a caravan on the moon to walk

this cargo of heavy metals to a nuclear dump site

to the dark side where it’s always midnight at noon.

One moment there are funeral bells dissolved in the rain

like sugar-cubes of acid in a wishing well

and the next, a spear of insight penetrates my heart

and I can’ t tell if it’s a pin meant for a butterfly

or a voodoo doll, or as a dance floor for the angels

to learn how to waltz without bumping into each other

like Canada geese taking off from a trashed corn field

as if they needed an air traffic controller and a runway

to bear the souls of the dead west and south

as I begin to wonder if death really is too pricey a ticket

to unload all these camels of their burdens

like sacs of genetically modified bee pollen

I’ve gathered radioactively from the starfields

so it doesn’t derange the hive or taint its honey and flowers,

and travelling lighter than life, go with them.

Yet I know I won’t because my heart’s

mortared into my Mongol blood like a brick

in the Temple of Life at Samarkand

and I would think of it as genocide

to kill even so much as a single human

who’s ever stood nightwatch in a crow’s nest

for a fleet sailing into a divine wind.

Sooner or later I’ll be washed up

on the event horizon of another black hole

at the center of a galactic starfish

all my lucidities will stick to like myriad universes

nacreously gathering their pearls

like planets and new moons out of the nebulosity

of these lunar sandstorms whipping my eyes

with the radiance of a hundred billion burning stars

that get thrown in my wounds to cauterize

the scream of my fountainmouth hemorrhaging

in the dead silence I keep like a vow to myself

not to shriek out in pain at the arrows

that strike the hearts of the clear-eyed hawks in autumn.

PATRICK WHITE

LET IT GO, LET IT GO, LET IT GO

LET IT GO, LET IT GO, LET IT GO

Let it go, let it go, let it go, as if my soul

were sweeping out a season of unleafing,

sodden feelings, sodden hearts, the rose ruined,

cumbrous clouds gusting over the eyelashes

of the treeline like dust at the broom of the treeline.

Cold-blooded, shedding an old sky, half in,

half out, I dream like a snake thickening

in its own coils as the autumn turns soporific

of weaving a flying carpet of the roads I’ve walked

the whole length of myself alone at night

only to discover that it was me that was flowing

and every step I took burnt like a new beginning

as if I were firewalking a graveyard shift of stars.

If you want to open the third eye of the needle

in the haystack of your mind, set fire to it.

What’s left shining in the ashes is a ticket out of here.

The serpent’s gone down the black hole

after a rabbit like Lepus at the heels of Orion,

like a gamma ray burst of annihilative clarity

and come out the other side of midnight in an hourglass

drying its wings like a dragon from the chrysalis

of an urn with the intensity of a furnace.

The world crowds out the truth of its own existence.

I’m pierced by the wounded insights of a butterfly

into the crazy wisdom of a flightpath without a starmap

that knows anything about where I’m going

or in retrospect, been. I’ve spent a whole lifetime

trying to mean what I see when I get myself out of the way

like an eclipse of fireflies. I experience the world

like an abyss with eyes looking into its own ferocious solitude.

I know by the whirlwind I’m reaping, it’s harvest time.

The whole earth’s a silo and a grave. Wheat seeds

in a pyramid waiting to sprout like time locks

on their afterlife when the planets align with the sun

at midnight to wake them up from the absurdities

of what they were dreaming. How strange it all is.

How vague the assurances of our sacred doubts.

I try to keep faith with my absolute uncertainty

like the third wing of a bird hovering between two extremes

and though I’m full of dark energy, strive

not to be the antithesis of everything else

like the enlargement of space in an expanding universe,

where the stars are moving further apart everytime I look.

Formless, does the mind speak to itself in a grammar of things

like dark matter providing a vocabulary for itself

to say the world into existence like a gesture of light

to keep the heart from reading its fate in between the lines

of an overwrought nervous system rooted like axons

in a garden of starmud perishing like a potted plant in a skull?

Sometimes I think I’ve gone mad, the pain

gets so unbearable in this tragic mime of exile,

when I realize how utterly inane everything is

as the transients walk through the gates of their homelessness

like a stranger on a return journey to a place

that’s irrevocably changed like a future that happened

in the wake of an absence that was always behind

whatever he was looking for when he left.

Are we just here to cross our own thresholds of being

like mystic deaths to deepen the solitude of our seeing

as if the seeing itself were the optical illusion of the light

that follows us like a guide lost in the shadows

of who we thought we were yesterday

like the past of a star with an extinct future

always catching up to us with news of the moment now?

Knowledge as the fossil of a future event

we’re always trying to predict. Hairy stars

like toupees on the pates of our bald telescopes.

It’s only when you hold your mind up to the dark

to look for the source of the light, that you realize

how lost you are and how many time-zones

can be cast simultaneously by the single shadow

of a waterclock running through the woods

like the mindstream of the Milky Way

we keep weaning ourselves from

like vulnerable gods hiding out in uterine caves

with umbilical cords as long as the Road of Ghosts.

I try to see the whole in my own dismemberment

like Kirlian light. A moment of union

in eras of separation, myriads gathered into one

that can’t help transcending itself like a fountain.

Some look for the grail. Some for the watershed.

And some ask the living in the language of the dead

what it means, if anything, to be alive in the fall.

As a bush wolf calls out like the only witness

of its homely longing like a summons

on a hill in the distance that’s heard it all before

and knows the ensuing silence is probably

the most comprehensively compassionate answer.

PATRICK WHITE

WALKING STRAIGHT THROUGH THE COBWEBS

WALKING STRAIGHT THROUGH THE COBWEBS

Walking straight through the cobwebs of old emotions,

trying to get these straitjackets off me, these

brown starclusters that stick but never seem to shine.

Don’t care if I’m in or out of my mind, enough’s enough

and comes a time to take a bath in your own grave

to wash all these ghosts off like the smoke of old fires

that returned to their urns like shepherd moons a long time ago.

And I still can’t tell if that’s a rose petal or an eyelid of blood

under the fingernail of the crescent moon

when she scratched the eyes out of her prophetic skull.

Tired of asking for clarity and being answered in labyrinths.

The more I see the more alone I feel. I’ve been

disciplined by catastrophe long enough to know

how to build bridges of fire across the mindstream

without extinguishing my reflection like a torch

in my own awareness. Suspension bridges

woven of spinal cords like the suicide nets

around the Peace Tower. Dream catchers, yes,

but who can stop the nightmares from falling to their deaths?

The scars grow old as the tongue leather of leeches.

Time for them to drop off like deathmasks on a pilgrimage

that just couldn’t keep up with the unholy pace of my blood.

Tired of waltzing with bear traps in a plastic marijuana patch.

Weary of arranging flowers so they’re not embarassed by the stars

that are wearing the same thing this year,

as they always do in the fall, when it’s not their wardrobe,

but our eyes that are renewed by their shining.

Not a crusade in advance of hope, not the retreat

of apostate despair, nor yet a sideways move

to get out of the way of anything I labour

under the delusion for convenience

I was meant to experience without being consulted.

It isn’t the stump that has to fear the lightning.

Asleep or awake, it’s all the same vision to a sorcerer

casting spells on the moon like oxymoronic dream grammars

that don’t come with parachutes or safety nets

to catch the flying fish when they swan dive back into the abyss.

What’s a thought? What’s an emotion?

Why do the butterflies sting worse than killer bees?

Why do the scalpels of thought only dance with amputees?

PATRICK WHITE

THE WIDENING COMPASS OF PAIN

THE WIDENING COMPASS OF PAIN

The widening compass of pain in the wake

of beauty that must pass deeper into us,

the illimitable spaces within, than any black hole

the gateway of its singularity into another world

where the ashes of the stars we once walked under

nourish the flower mouths of a darker shining

than this that consumes us here in these intimate fires

where lovers consult each other’s desires like starmaps

and farewell is the path of a transitory medium.

Deeper than nails, than stars, than the night skies

we breathe so deeply into us our lungs burn

in the cold air, to transform them into blood,

to bathe in the fragrance of the light in our tears,

to root the seeds of our despair like nerves

of dark matter in the tillage of our starmud

until the universe is shaped by the unseen

and what we curse today as pain, tomorrow

we shall bless in praise of what our sorrows

came to mean like autumn to the apple of the heart.

Give loss two wings, not one to lure away predators

from what you cherish most in life

by feigning injury like a feather duster

or a cedar bough that sweeps the earth of your tracks,

two, if you want the waterbirds to rise

from the unnamed lakes of your grief

and send your longing off into oblivion

like a message that isn’t expecting an answer

from what you seek so ardently from love

it’s a secret you dare not speak of, even to yourself

lest you soil it with your own vulnerability.

Wounded, practise the art of soothing

with no thought of saving yourself. Separate

and apart, let your eyes speak of union

as if every drop of rain flowed

like the course of the river from the mountain

to the sea, down the broken windowpane

of the ice in the eye of the fountain of your lament.

Poor in spirit, break the dark abundance

of your poverty into bread you can share

with the bright vacancy of the rich

who have squandered their shadows

on the mirages of light that deceive them

like birds flying into mirrors of the sky

like windows in a palace of water

that disappears into oblivion as soon

as the prince reaches out to possess

his own illusion like the reflection of a moonrise.

Even if you’ve built a pyre of green wood

that hisses and smoulders like the wet leaves

of a holy book you’ve been crying over in the fall,

waiting for a phoenix to perch on your burning bough,

lie down upon it yourself and be that flower

that blooms in the fire of your autumn immolations.

At war with the world and yourself

like two halves of the same unbroken wishbone,

teach the children how to approach their crossroads

in peace, and speak of the sword of the slayer

like a sacred syllable in the mouth of the slain

that cut through your umbilical cord

like a link in a golden chain that held you back

from the liberation of a lyrically unbounded life.

Mollify the poison of the thorn with the cure

in the medicine bag of the other fang.

When the wedding gown of the Japanese plum tree

is ruined in the rain and the dust like blossoms

blowing down the road like the happiness you hoped for,

be the nude in the doorway of a darker bliss

that roots its revelation like lightning in the soil

of your flesh, like deltas of insight greeting

an ocean of awareness at the end of a long pilgrimage,

knowing the return journey is more radiant than the first.

PATRICK WHITE

NO MUSE AROUND, I SIT DOWN BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD

NO MUSE AROUND, I SIT DOWN BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD

No muse around, I sit down by the side of the road

and let my solitude inspire me, insights

flashing like unnameable night birds

across the occult intuition of the moon.

The dark matter of nocturnal words

like the nerves of the light, the hidden scaffolding

before the light begins to shine like neurons

or the superclustering of galaxies strung out

along my axons rooted in 120 billion cells of starmud.

The silence revels in its unpredictability.

Moonrise over the birches, great blue herons

reflected in the waters of the swamp,

and a parity among wild things that makes us all

equally susceptible to each other

as we charge the air and ionize the shadows

with our sentience, everybody with blood in the game.

No rules. Just instincts. Life neither fair, nor sly

when the snow owl snatches the purse of the mouse

that was trembling under the juniper

its cheeks full of seeds like the eyes

of another roll of the dice. Peaceful here,

remotely freaked with danger though I’ve outwalked

the ghosts and robots who were harrying me

like an uncooperative medium swarmed by voices

pleading with me for time shares in my life awhile.

The far town, diffuse, an apparition,

a haze of infra red above the tree-line,

as the road I’m on narrows deeper into the woods,

though I don’t know what it is

I’m walking away from or toward

or if one mile west is one mile east

or the earth is moving under me

and I’m just trying to keep my balance

by staying in the same place. Until

I get to the farmhouse where the road

loops back on itself like a needle or a noose

and I can feel it following me with its eyes

like shattered moonlight beaming

from the windows that still keep more inside

than they let on, something sacral about the place

with its sway-back roof and overgrown porch

playing solitaire with the floorboards

laid out like a well used deck of cards

curled at the corners as if someone

had cheated themselves, no one else around.

The gate’s a drunk swinging by one arm

as it falls and the vetch catches it in a safety net

it remains entangled in. The sutures

of a cedar rail fence trying to stitch up space

with staves of femurs stacked like skeletons

in the skin and flesh of lunar lichens and moss

fallen into disrepair long after the music has flown.

And there’s a presence, remote and almost menacing,

stronger than the spirit of any church,

as if something had gone on living here

well past its time, that wasn’t a ghost

though it had undoubtedly died by now

to judge from the year it stopped

nailing license plates like a rusting calendar

to the woodshed door. Alive, but so estranged

even the leaves shuddered like no trespassing signs

as I stood warily in my culpability as a human

who could feel the taboos in his blood

even if he didn’t always heed them, beware, beware

whose ground you tread, whose threshold you cross

in your rootless wandering back into the past

that isn’t going anywhere without you.

PATRICK WHITE

THOSE NIGHTS I WENT OUT WITH A BUTCHER'S KNIFE

THOSE NIGHTS I WENT OUT WITH A BUTCHER’S KNIFE

Those nights I went out with a butcher’s knife

down the dark alley between our house

and the triplex next door, twelve years old,

my courage running down my leg, to stab

a full grown pervert running down the back stairs

when you flipped the porch lights on to spotlight

the spider stealing your panties off the clothesline,

onto my green gladiolus of a Spanish short sword

that hadn’t tasted the blood of its first blossom yet,

I don’t want to remember this anymore.

I don’t want to be estranged from my own childhood

by garbage cans that look like dangerous men in the moonlight.

When I think of those days, there’s a pervasive grey

that saturates everything like a cold fog,

and all my emotions are black oilspills on the concrete.

And all my insights come to me with a shock

like unknown eyes peering through the mail slot

you eventually boarded up like a plague door on the inside.

I watched the stardust of my innocence blow away

like the topsoil of the dirty thirties, as you spread flour

under the windows every night to see

if the drunk who lived above the grocery store

were painting his footprints on the ballroom floor again

as he had three nights before the cops wouldn’t come

to arrest an increasingly brazen Peeping Tom.

saving themselves a bullet for everyone of us who ate our own.

I don’t want to remember how excruciatingly transformative it was

to want to be the hero of a squadron of model Spitfires

that hung from my bedroom ceiling, and then

be called upon by a frightened whisper at the door

to go outside like a dragon with a flame thrower

of aviation fuel to confront the dirty end

of the joy stick of a sick world terrifying you

with the atrocious scenes on True Detective magazines

that were more intimately real on our front doorstep

than in any paranoid fantasy of yours

where big-busted blondes in torn blouses

were chained to trees by men with axes

and no one was trying to save an old growth forest.

I wish there’d been a timelock on my childhood years.

I wish things had been different, and you were always safe,

and I say this with no regrets, because I had to know

how to stand like a flaming angel at the gates

of a ruined Eden, to keep you and my sisters

out of reach of the hunting snake

with forbidden fruit between its legs

crawling up the tree towards panicked eggs in the nest

you flew around like a mother bird

in an emergency without an exit. It’s been light years since

and it’s funny how after all this time

the man in me has begun to shed delinquent tears

for the boy who had to know what a woman fears so early

I weep for you and I weep for me for all the pain and fear

we had to endure like a nightmare while we were still awake,

though I’d do it all again, for your sake, if I had to,

except now I’d go out back with a gun to get the job done.

Just the same. I wish I hadn’t grown up in No Man’s Land

and my childhood wasn’t an elsewhere zone with warning signs

not to enter without abandoning all hope

that things would ever change for the better.

I wish I’d learned the spirit of the word first

like a feather of light in the scales of the jackal-god

before my heart knuckled down to the hard and fast letter

of learning how to ambush things that go bump in the night

while my heart beat harder than a hammer and an anvil

at what I was about to meet in the dark

like the nemetic karma of the eldest son of a welfare mother,

tenuously prepared to inflict a stomach wound on a stranger

who forgot the baby rattlesnakes could be

as toxic as the adults, if you scared them so badly

all that they feared was focused like a snakepit

on wanting to get you over with summarily like an intruder

on the threshold of a lethal childhood I wish would pass

transitory as the dew on the grass, not these ageless glaciers

that still wake me up from my boyhood dreams

in a cold sweat of garbage cans and moonbeams.

What kind of a man would I have been

if I hadn’t seen perdition as a child too afraid

of being afraid, lest worse be hung over my head

than a World War II model airplane, and I burn alive

out of shame in a cockpit that never got off the ground

or went around the back to confront an unknown horror

that cut both ways like the crescents of the moon,

two sides of the same wound, one that congealed

like blood around a cut, and the other, a gash

deeper than that, in a childhood that never healed.

PATRICK WHITE

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