I HAVE GROWN

I HAVE GROWN

I have grown significantly to understand that every throne I’ve ever sat upon was quicksand and that I am living leniently on the match-head of a planet waiting for the thumbnail of the moon to ignite it with one quick flick of a crescent. Equine and apocalyptic as hell, and the irony is, more than possibly accurate. I’m running out of doors where I can billet my assassins; I keep giving my heart to women who reject it like a bloodbank without an overdraft. I’m a diffraction pattern in the twilight zone, in media res, between this world and the next, and that’s not the one where the herders and the hunters are having it out in a range war of religions. Like a page torn out of the multiverse, I’m just a zone of local cooling, a sunspot, and my neighbour is another, though we know we’re both just fooling when we call each other brother. Forty-eight years a poet and a painter, intoxicated by the picture-music threading the fog of the sirens like a theme I couldn’t resist. Foolish, I suppose, not to have tied myself off like a lifeboat and rowed and rowed for years just to stay where I am, but I had to jettison my landing gear to achieve cruising altitude in the oxymoronic abyss that the sirens demanded, saying, live this, if your poetry isn’t just the romantic bloodletting of a rose from a vein that you’ve slashed on the moon, prove you’re not a lie to us, and conduct yourself like a terrorist, prepared, are you prepared?---to die for us. I cut the eyes out of an eclipse and wore it over my face like a ski-mask, and walked around in the busy market, weighing the world like a tomato in my hand, the original primordial atom, packed with explosives, ready to detonate on command, to delete and improve the world by splashing myself against the wall like a bucket of paint and see what I could make out of myself in the mess of the ensuing vision. It’s amazing how suggestive a real siren can be when you’re lying in an ambulance without any legs. So I learned to swim like a fish among the stars; the last archon of an extinct species from Mars, evicted when all the water went south, and I had to come up with a completely new medium, new atmosphere, new idiom, out of myself, ingeniously, given what I had to work with. I adapted to the solitude and silence of my own vast spaces within, and vowed like a candle, to root my flower in the dark like lightning. Now there’s a squad car outside the candy-store and a swan that barks like a god. Make of it what you will. The pebble doesn’t enquire after its ripples. I write without feedback, without telltale bubbles of meaning rising to the surface like survivors who want to crawl back up on land and start it all again. There’s not much point in panning for gold in an asteroid belt when the only way to tell one nugget from the next is to break your teeth biting into them like fortune-cookies enshrining the haloes and the horns of the prophetic comets that dash by like bunting on a campaign tour. Elect me your fate, and I promise to find a place for your day old reflection somewhere on the plate, and a way to flag the fools down for easier detection. But I won’t tweak your mountainous erection like a gunshot when there are avalanche warnings all along the road, and the echoes return, born again, rehearsing their own names like fleeing refugees on a rosary of boulders that were left overs from Soddam and Gomorrah. Better to write this way than to lie buried like the last laugh of a kingly line in the barrow of a dunghill, pleading like a seed for an upgraded resurrection. I may well be the last extant defect of a fallible perfection, and all the mistakes of the bruised morning glory are mine, and the snakey tines of these tendrils of blood get tangled up in the twine of my thought and no one knows how they got in nor how to get out, and the homologous combs of the mentally coiffed are useless against the love knots that have coiled into nooses around the neck of the wind that’s run out of excuses for inciting the spring to riot, but at least I don’t snitch my way through a poem like a hydrophobic divining rod rooting out the terrorist wells of the watershed in order to secure some heartland in the back pastures of God. It’s dangerous wherever I am. And flawed.

PATRICK WHITE 

ENROBING MY NOBILITY

ENROBING MY NOBILITY

Enrobing my nobility

in the aloofness of a spurned beggar,

or a musician on a street-corner

opening the coffin

of his exhumed guitar for change

to keep his humiliation

enraptured and alive,

his song denied its bough

by a warning

from the window of a squad car

enforcing the petty complaint of the loveless

who douse

the flaring of the flowers in law

as if all that unimposing ecstasy

were merely another match

that failed to consume them,

I conceal the generosity of the stars

that urgently lavish their light

on the deepening night that reveals them

in the lordly pockets of my impoverished repose.

I want to want something again

that isn’t an expletive of acquisition

that ages into the accusing silence

of an unattended toy.

I want to knock down all the probabilities,

all the odds and evens

of the gravestones placed like bets

in a cemetery of bookies

that have hedged their deaths

with double or nothing on the long shot.

Love bides its time in me

like fire in a stone

that rings the ashes of its last revelation

and over the clamour of ghosts at war,

I try to live up to myself in the silence

like the impossible conditions of an unsigned truce.

I have plucked the wings of angels

and feathered my heresies

in the tars and flammable shadows of the night.

If I have withdrawn into myself

it is only to advance and transcend and array

like a wave or a breath

when the abyss gathers me into its unassailable immensities

and then sprawls me out like a map

on the shore of an uninhabited island

to discover what I’ve buried.

I am always curled

like the sickle of a harvest eclipse,

a question-mark, an imported executioner

over the pure, black point of my existence

even as I offer myself up

to the hidden face of the moon

as the first, shining stalk of wheat

to venture out of the tomb

under her inscrutable auspices.

But I am not the redivining of an old sacrifice,

I am not a child in the attic

playing in the valley of the kings

with the castaway cargoes of a rudderless moonboat

scuttled in time.

I don’t dress up in the abandoned wardrobes

of the oversized past

to practice the mute afterlife of my future.

Denied the bough of the day,

I am the nightbird perched in your roots

and singing,

not to summon,

not to warn anyone away,

and even less to convey

the bitterness of unrequited beatitudes

or the serpentine intoxicants of unanswerable longing.

Sometimes it feels as if

I were an extremity of fire

frozen in the ice of hell,

or I find myself lingering

over the petals of the pimped-out magnolias

like the pages of a torn book

or old Venetian blinds askew at the window,

to look for eyes between the lines

I might add to the watersheds of my seeing like rain,

but I’m never a pilgrim on a road of smoke for long.

And I don’t know

if I have enhanced the waters of life

with the tears that fell inwardly

from the lightless side of my eyes,

but I am not the urgent miscellany

of the misunderstood

and I have always been suspicious of the bread

that calls itself good

and founds its thunderous, empty silo

on a curse in the cradle of the grain.

I don’t peck like a pigeon

in the holy squares of the doctrinal,

and it’s been an ironic consolation at times

to wryly affirm with a quizzical smile

that only my uncertainty is certain.

My life may have been blown about

like the windswept froth of a pathetic guess,

and everything I know

be phantoms of foam clinging to ruinous rocks,

but I have that in common with the stars,

and there are tides I ride bareback without a bit

like my own bloodstream

that fly like wild horses on the moon,

muscling the dead seas of the heart like waves

that expound no more

with the gavelling of their hoofs

than the astounded pulse of the running.

I am no longer estranged

by the parsecs of solitude

that are the true measure of my age,

once I realized

it was my only way of meeting everyone.

And I have never mistaken a chain

for the rosary of a dead liberator

and linked the name of God

to anything that is bounded by what it binds.

My freedom is slanderous,

lightning and a star,

but my devotion glows like a firefly in a jar

when I consider that I owe more

to the things I got away with

like a fugitive

compelled to cross the unknown badlands

by a posse of judicial compasses,

than I do to the foghorns and lighthouses

that bellowed over my unsalvageable corpse

because it rose on its own

like an unschooled coast,

there’s still a morning in my smile I can’t regret.

PATRICK WHITE

A THOUSAND YEARS FROM NOW

A THOUSAND YEARS FROM NOW

A thousand years from now

who will remember me

once I’ve disappeared from this windowpane,

a vapour of breath with awareness,

a nebular stain on the clarity

that will wash its hands of me

like a scar of water that has clung too long?

I’m not trying to embalm

the elegiac content of these obvious sunsets in words,

and it’s hard to shake honey out of these mordant bells

that lie like duplicitous lifeboats to the gullible compasses and maps

that keep crashing like doves that don’t have the wingspan

to come back with news of land

to this museum of DNA, two of every kind,

I keep scuttling like an ark on the top of every wave.

And what is a grave if not an abandoned embassy

that didn’t have time to shred its dreaded secret?

And sometimes, when the emptiness and the silence

are beyond bearing,

I hold myself up like a passport at the panicked gates

that have made me an exile and a wounded threshold in my own home

and clamour like a continent

to be repatriated anywhere

that isn’t a country whose borders are stretched out like refugee lines.

But it’s a foolish wish.

And if there’s a dragon to slay,

I realize it’s only more shadows and swordplay,

and I think of the return of the rain lifted from the sea

and how the sea never feels anything is missing,

and everything is passage without arrival or departure

and how the arrow never leaves the hand of a good archer.

It’s human nature to understand,

a sacred mode of disobedience

to look into the eyes of our worst fears

even if it’s just to flare like a star without rescue

and scream out in light a moment against its own extinction.

But who or what or nothing is ever there to listen

as we go out like flies and stars in a toilet bowl?

And a love of laws is not the law of love

and there have been so many dragons

left out of the chrysales of their questions like answers

that the heart is not sustained by the impersonal blessing

of ubiquitous entropy in a long, lab coat

as the spirit longs for transformations

a star and a night beyond itself

that might astonish a human

with something enduringly human

like a next breath that can’t be smudged by death

or something drastic in the dust that remembers us

when we were stars

that thawed through the windowpane

as if we were looking through the lenses of our own eyes

to discover everything we live is how we die

and we’re always a plight and a plea away from knowing why.

Imagine, one night, looking up at the sky

and there were no death to raise the moon

like a calendar above your neck,

and everything you saw around you,

crows, kites, keys,

last year’s pine cones on this year’s trees,

were not denuded of their mystic specificity

in this mortal profusion of origins

that ends where it begins. Imagine,

one morning, not getting up from the dream

to pan the mindstream for the nugget of a skull

that might be gold, and the luster of the radiance

never grows old like the taste of the moon in your mouth.

Wouldn’t this onceness then be eternal,

and what I’m saying now, indelible

as the space that prompts the stars to shine?

Learning wisdom is learning the universe

as if it were your own face, on the inside,

and you were its only eyes,

disappearing from view so that all that remains is you.

Birth, a breathing in; death, a breathing out,

before the first and after the last, this pulse and suspiration,

muses around the wellspring, witches around the cauldron,

planets fluttering like moths

at the windows of the constellations. Like the moon

I pass my hand over like an eclipse as if it were my own skull,

I have been creatively maintained from the start by my own expiration.

Are there no orchards in the hearts of old women?

Are there no graves in the eyes of a child?

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN YOU LISTEN TO A BIRD

WHEN YOU LISTEN TO A BIRD

When you listen to a bird

you should hear the whole of the sky

just as when you look at a star

you should be a fountain of eyes.

Because you cannot see,

the darkness is not blind

and your consensus of conventional abnormalities

is not reality, is not the source

of the hidden halo of comets that afflict you,

nor the crazy constellations of the fireflies that bless.

I don’t know if I speak for anyone other than myself

but that’s enough to reflect the moon in every drop

of this unvoiced delirium

that surpasses enlightenment and lunacy like old shoes

to walk barefoot across the stars

as if they were no more than cool sand in a desert at night

that’s never been bound to a road,

though every single grain is the cornerstone of the world.

How unsayably me I must be

that so many thoughts and emotions,

so many vital themes of blood and time,

years that have returned their fields to the wild,

have enshrined my namelessness

in this abandoned palace of shadows

I’ve pitched together like a chrysalis out of words.

A true muse is a well

that finds its own way to your mouth,

and I accord mine the perfect freedom to be me,

and drink deeply of the night she pours into me,

until neither of us knows who the other is

though we whisper like leaves on the same tree.

What’s crucial is not to offer yourself up

like a tourist map to the wind

but to let go. To find out where you’re going

not by giving up everything that you know,

but the knowing.

I let my thoughts follow the path

of a snowflake in a blizzard

until they melt like eyes on earth

to show my roots how to flower,

this one a waterlily opening

like a diploma in a swamp,

and that, the devil’s paintbrush.

Should it be otherwise?

Can you turn your eyes back like a clock

and unsee the things

that have looked so deeply into you

the skull of an impersonal space

wears the atmospheric intimacy of your face

like the ghost of an unknown planet?

I have felt poppies of blood

hotter than any prophetic furnace

rend my flesh like starving lions

for things I never knew I believed,

for the heart I laid down like a sword on the altar

to the inexplicable gods of the misconceived,

when I realized that not even my homelessness is shelter

and the only country under the flag of my blood

that might have claimed me as its own

has caged me like an undocumentable alien

in a holding cell of bone.

But it’s foolish to look for passage

when nothing’s in your way,

or seek enlightenment with a candle at midday,

not knowing you’re only washing a mirror with shadows

and handing out wicks to the stars.

And what’s the sound of one hand clapping?

Be compassionate. Be generous. Be kind.

This is the only way to forgive your mind.

PATRICK WHITE

EVERY MORNING OF THE MOMENT, A NEW CREATION

EVERY MORNING OF THE MOMENT, A NEW CREATION

Every morning of the moment, a new creation,

the distillation of the dreams of the night before

when the moon was as fertile as the dew we were born from.

I start out each day with a new face. By nightfall

it’s just another phase of the same old ageless deathmask,

heavier than a bell that’s been talking through my mouth

for more light years than I’ve got tears to measure in mirrors.

That’s usually when I start thinking like a potato about stars.

Blood sugars in my mindstream ripening me like a vision

I’ll only ever get to see backstage like a forlorn clown

trying to hang on to his faith in laughter.

You can pursue happiness, but it will only

run from you like the light, or you can cover your eyes

and try to avoid it for fear of losing it like the last time,

but when you turn around, it’s right behind you,

flirting with your shadow. Better to let it come and go

of its own accord, like a waterbird in a moonrise

reflected on a lake. Then when you speak of things

you increasingly know less about the more

you’re intimate with them, your voice isn’t

a bird net trying to cage words on the fly

but an aviary as open as the sky when

Cygnus and Aquila are up, and the Lyre’s

a larynx for the asking. And you’re free

to sing your heart out as if no one were listening

but you and the trees and the stars you hit like high-notes.

Or shriek like a rabbit seized by the coydogs

if you run out of lucky feet and that’s what comes up

like snake eyes. Lap the experience out of the bone

until there’s nothing left to eat but your appetite itself

and among the myriad flavours of life you’ve exhausted

that will taste the sweetest of all to that emptiness

that harvests the world like a blue moon that’s never full.

Is the moon not the equal of its waxing and waning alike?

Is it trying to enlighten its dark side?

When the candle goes out, does the light have any trouble

handling it? Fear returns to what it knows the best.

It hugs the shore like a tidal pool beside the sea,

a dead starfish or two it can get its arms around

like a worm’s-eye view of the galaxy, and the shell

of a red sunset in the morning on the carapace

of a crab that left its hovel for a house in

a more upwardly mobile zodiac. Sometimes

it comes down to that. Quantum level gravity.

A gravitational eye with myopia that bends the light

like a stick in the water, a mirage of sand in an hourglass

that’s afraid of being swept out to sea

with nothing to hold onto but the lifeboat

of a shucked clam Venus just stepped out of onto land

to have sex in a new medium like an artist

who’s just switched from water colours to oils.

You’ve got to accept the down times as all part

of the same wavelength you’ve been riding

like a snake scaled in white caps of light

that break on shore in a turmoil of kelp.

The cosmos doesn’t need to be put in order

and chaos doesn’t need any help. Listen to your sorrows.

Summon them to a seance of yourself

and apologize to their ghosts for not having the voice

to let them speak through you about

learning to swim with the stars further out of your depths

than you’ve ever been before. First you drown

in the fathomless immensities of even the smallest detail,

and then you bubble back up to the surface

of a multiverse with an oceanic awareness

of what’s been hiding under every eyelid of a wave

like a overturned lifeboat that’s waking up

to the fact that everything floats like the moon

in the reflection of its own mindstream.

And whatever sail you spot coming up over

your event horizon, whatever constellation

or black hole you take for a sign of salvation

or salvage, it first had to sink

before it could rise to the rescue.

PATRICK WHITE

PUTTING IT DOWN TO SOME IMPACT ON MY HEART

PUTTING IT DOWN TO SOME IMPACT ON MY HEART

Putting it down to some impact on my heart

in my sleep, this sunny afternoon edged

with cold anger like a residual hangover

from some dream I don’t remember having.

Did you visit me again last night like an albino nightmare?

Was Venus in Virgo? Were we unaligned?

Was I talking through a window embedded

in heritage brick? Did I mutter things at the sky

that were indignantly unjust without meaning to?

I wonder if the stars after all these light years

they took to get to my heart, are completely happy

with an afterlife without flowers or hermit thrushes.

Who knows why anybody looks back on their past

and risks turning into a pillar of salt,

or returning to the dead by default

but did you let go of my hand again last night?

I’m sick of your absence always being the prelude

to my dismemberment. And those eyes

that always rebuke my poverty as if they’d

been bathing in jewels. Those spiked stars

you bait like red meat you leave out for polar bears.

The brittle sensibilities of a neglected ice age.

Did you break your windows again like a frozen lake

to get at the waters of life in your mindstream?

I hate it when the light goes unappreciated

but this soulless blue of a late autumn afternoon

is beginning to get on my nerves

like a Hallmark greeting card that’s chewed

all the real flavour of life out of its feelings like gum

masticating its words for public consumption.

I feel I’m letting some prophecy down somewhere

as if I were misreading the tea leaves at the bottom

of the moon cup of my prophetic skull.

The gash of first crescent early this morning.

A lunar hair on the shoulder of the dawn that swears

it wasn’t untrue to the sun the Luciferian morning star

is leading on as if a new fool were born every day.

No matter. By the time I was ready for sleep

I expected a lot less of you than anyone’s ever delivered.

And I’ll be ok in a while, and you’ll hate me for it

when your heart turns into a toxic arrowhead

that didn’t have any effect. Just this Clovis point

to say you’d been here once and been wiped out

with the larger mammals of North America

in the dust bowl of another sudden flash freeze.

PATRICK WHITE

HAVEN'T SEEN A STAR IN FOUR NIGHTS

HAVEN’T SEEN A STAR IN FOUR NIGHTS

Haven’t seen a star in four nights

and the windows are pining for more than lamplight.

It’s darker in than it is out, but suddenly

through the breaking clouds, hey, there’s one

and I’m momentarily thrilled by the delight of a child

spotting her first firefly rising like a chimney-spark

above this ashen town on a cold, autumn night.

Small pleasures in the aftermath of great intensities,

the immaculate focus that burned eyeholes

in the sockets of my crystal deathmask

that left me feeling like wounded glass

thawing into the long slow tears I carried back

from the wishing well like the empty buckets

of a waterclock that acts like a volunteer fire brigade

that never put anything out before it was too late.

Wouldn’t be the first house of the zodiac to burn down

and probably not the last, but, at least,

it’s not a plague door to the past facing east.

It’s not blood leaking out of the nostril of a bell,

but who knows? You can never really tell.

Anyone here ever go through a transformation,

emerged from a chrysalis of solitary despair

like a dragonfly with a retroactive message of hope

shining like Venus in the false dawn

of a real enlightenment experience? Do you see

how the light breathes on the darkness

and it’s morning everywhere at midnight?

I’m off to the woods to listen to the laughter

of the falling leaves abandoning their dissertations

on the nature of perishing as if the answer

had always been a breeze of effortless effort.

Truth is just the sound we make for something

we’re never going to stop looking for.

In the company of birches and the ghosts

of lake mist Druids it’s easier to sit still long enough

to recognize it. Let the starmud settle in the puddle

as if a vapour of metal were silvering a mirror

like dew in the night, a silk cloak of auroral insight,

without trading your eyes in for a Zen telescope.

To a dead man, is it folly to hope?

To a live one, is it wisdom to despair?

PATRICK WHITE