LIVING ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF THE LUNAR WASTE

LIVING ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF THE LUNAR WASTE

Living on the cutting edge of the lunar waste

I made of my last moonrise. A truce

with underwhelming circumstances for awhile,

no apparent pitfalls on a Saturday night in Perth,

too cold for snakes, and the leaves playing their cards

close to earth and the air a knife at your throat,

I can remember when I tried harder to exist,

and it’s still a holy war every day just to subsist

and not let it scar your spirit into being cauterized

like a bad tattoo of the moon you had effaced,

but tonight I seek the ease of a solitude older than humans

down in the wetlands of the Tay River just off

Sunset Boulevard before you cross the first bridge.

Waist high in the broken antennae of the brittle grass

yellow as the fossils in a graveyard

of green praying mantes, decultified romantics,

I pad the skull of rock I usually sit on like a prophetic throne

with the old manuscripts of fallen maple leaves,

recalling lines from poems like lyrical snippets of chromosomes

I’d written many years ago to adapt my heart

to the changes it had to go through to recast

the cannon it was into the life of a shapeshifting bell

with the pulse of a nightbird lamenting the dead

instead of a twenty-one gun salute like a firing squad

aimed at the stars. Death is the saddest loss of discipline

the spirit will ever be called upon to master in order to survive.

It was sitting here one night, staring into the eye socket

bored into the albino nugget of a crow’s skull,

the boney harps of its wings torn off their hinges

like gates that weren’t strong enough to keep something out,

as the black flight feathers of a long eclipse slowly passed

across my eyes, that I realized, dead or alive,

existence is an interactive creative medium that doesn’t care

whether you live it like a seance or an exorcism

and there are untold ages of the shining left

even in the oldest ashes of a star strewn on the path

of these long nocturnal firewalks through the mind

and that hello and farewell were the two wings

of the same waterbird, beating in unison

that empowered it to fly like a phoenix of imagination

out of an aviary of urns of its past lives

that might not sing for awhile but never lose their voice.

Cultivate the kind of spirit that can sing to you in the silence

when you’re down, about the beauty of just being here

to live it, though you don’t want to hear it,

you want to drown in your sorrow like a bell

but somehow the sound of life cuts through you

like a lunar blade with a growing edge

through wounded water and you can’t help but wonder

what your ghost would give just to be here again

if only one more time, to resonate with the pain

like a back up singer to the universe,

who knows all the loneliest lyrics by heart

like a waterbird out on the river late at night.

If only to hit one perfect note of sadness, one tine

of separation and suffering like a phantom waterlily

adding its shining to the light like the art

of knowing how to paint starmaps on your tears

indelibly on water for light years to come

to let people know you were once here,

you listened as they will by the side

of this river of life to the same songs, hurt and alone,

as they must if they want to step out of the chorus

and sing solo through their tears in their own voice

before they’re gone to a hundred billion stars

that are listening to the same echo

being whispered in their ears like the fires of life

carried away by the desire to live on

like the empty lifeboat of a song full of moonlight

drifting down river to an ocean of awareness

where the gateways of the crow are refeathered

like the exit and entrance of an eclipse of wings

still keeping time to the picture-music that shines

like a new moonrise in the voice of a mindstream that sings

its way through the woods at night alone like a wild grape vine

sustaining the tears of its spiritual high notes until they turn

into the euphoric lunacy of a poetic wine aged in an earthly urn.

PATRICK WHITE

OLD SORROW, I'VE FORGOTTEN YOUR NAME

OLD SORROW, I’VE FORGOTTEN YOUR NAME

Old sorrow, I’ve forgotten your name,

you’ve been with me so long, pouring

the iron in my blood into the heavy bell of a heart

that’s climbed back up this sad tree of my spine

so many times out of the afterlives of my windfall,

these sad planets collapsing in on themselves

under the decaying weight and water of their own tears

from the inside out, and gone to seed

like a small fleet of lifeboats in this floating world,

trying to make it up out of these watersheds

to run the vertical deltas of this autumn orchard

whose roots I keep falling upon like a radical place to begin

climbing back up toward the stars again,

until one night I’ll raise my sail

like the moonrise of a blossom on the Milky Way

and be gone like a ghost ship in the fog of a nautical legend.

Old sorrow, I know you like the smoke of a thousand fires

I’ve danced around alone like the only child

of a midnight sun that abandoned me on the threshold

of a black hole I orbit like the rain in a broken mirror.

Who did you bury that we weep for, what

did you aspire to that you were too earthbound to reach,

what love of yours was so betrayed when it had

its eyes pecked out by the song birds

you never sing anymore when the bees

are in the locust trees, and the ants are opening

the peonies like loveletters from the Pleiades,

except there’s a wound in your voice the lyrics

are bleeding out of like a thorn in the eye of a hurricane rose?

Old sorrow, are you the tears deep down in things,

the lachrymae rerum that fill the wishing wells

with oceans of disappointment like the run-off

of our hopes and dreams descending the world mountain

after we’d talked to God like bathyspheres

trying to get to the bottom of our tears

like glass bubbles in our crystal skulls,

our third eyes frozen like the lenses of a telescope

fixed on a star above a shipwreck in Arctic ice,

looking for a northwest passage out of ourselves

toward a mythic Cathay beyond our continental shelves?

And what did God have to say that you kept to yourself

when you came back down from your tete a tete,

and returned your commandments like a library book

that was way overdue in Alexandria?

Old sorrow, I can sense in you how many seasons

have scarred you like a calendar of crescent moons

as you hang like the pine cone of one dolorous note

of the silence you sustain like a blues guitar

ripening in the corner of the room where the spiders

are writing music you’ll never play like the wind

in the hair of the willows down by the Tay River

when the black walnuts are floating by

like the scorched planets of sunless solar systems.

Old sorrow, I know you like a heavy boot cloyed in the starmud

of all these roads we’ve walked together to get

nowhere in particular but wherever we are now

in this graveyard of shadows

that talk to the stars who have none

about how to wash our names and faces off

like deathmasks that are tired of trying to light up the darkness

like a candle at a black mass at high noon

with an eclipse high overhead the flowers won’t look at

for fear of burning their eyes. Compendious companion,

you bend my boughs toward the earth

with the low hanging fruit of a giving nature

seasoning your inconsolable wisdom with compassion.

Immoveable buddha, are you the ancient echo

of the birth pang of life, the groan of sentience

being torn up by the roots out of the indwelling forms

of things you used to take shelter in like lenses and mirrors

you could blow into bubbles of the mind

like the multiverse through a keyhole into the abyss of hyperspace?

Old sorrow, were you rounded like a shepherd moon

in the undertow of time, your teeth blunted

like the molars of the asteroids eating stoney wheat

growing wild in the starfields of the neolithic grasslands?

Sometimes I can feel you possessing my heart and body and mind

like the corpse of an ancient ancestor, my spirit

like a prophetic skull on the dark side of the moon

lamenting the loss of its atmosphere like one of its eyes.

Other nights, I look upon you like the ruins

of a palace of water that once greened this desert of stars

like a Persian gardener that ruled an empire of flowers.

Venerable exile, do you despair of ever

finding your way home again through your lion gate

or have you encamped like so many other nations

to weep like Zion beside the rivers of Babylon?

Is your diamond corona occluded by the protocols of coal

that sully your face like the memory of darker days ahead?

I shall call you, friend, given how long

we’ve known each other like shadows of the valley spirit

blinded by the sundials of the unaging mountains of the moon.

I shall open my heart like a fire to you

and we can share the silence together for hours at a time

on long winter nights when the wind is howling outside

and there’s no need to speak of things

that neither of us understand about why

the fountains with the deepest watersheds

are always sadder than the last of the flowers

in a late autumn rain, or the willows along the Tay.

Slowest of rivers, you can sit saturnine and soporific,

red shifting into the longer wavelengths

of the oldest of your dreams, if you still dream yet,

and I’ll work on a poem in the shipyards of the mindstream

that will displace its weight in tears, and hopefully,

though you probably know better, keep us both afloat

like a paper boat shooting the rapids of a waterclock

that’s been running a little late like the two of us for light years.

PATRICK WHITE 

WHEN I'M ALONE

WHEN I’M ALONE

When I’m alone

I want to be with someone,

and when I am with someone,

I’m twice as alone.

My unhappiness

is a snake-pit

I dangle my heart over

like a mouse by the tail

and when joy does show up,

a butterfly with resplendent wings,

it slowly adapts its palette

to the slag and soot and oilslicks

of the black orchard

shedding its petals everywhere

like micro-eclipses in hell.

And all the poems

I gathered like asters

from the autumn starfields,

all these skies that opened above me

as I walked down a long road alone

in darkness and light,

obedient to the wind and the shadows

that whispered move on, move on

beyond the journey and the arrival,

are merely a leaf,

a tattoo on the back

of a serpent of water

sliding downstream

like rain like mind in search of a course

that isn’t the cracked map

of last year’s desiccated creek bed.

My body is scarred, my heart

a voodoo doll

pierced by a thousand fangs

as it burns like a bee

in a rose of heretical fire

for refusing to turn my honey into venom

or conform to any magic but its own.

And there is no heaven

to appeal to as a last resort.

I endure what I endure

for the dignity

of my indefensible humanity,

knowing the pain

that sometimes turns my nerves

into stand-ins for the lightning

that keeps crackling my cosmic egg

like the paint of my last masterpiece,

also schools my blood like the wine

I pour out joyously

into the empty goblet of the mystery

whenever I host the moon.

Life is neither fair nor unfair

and the seeing, a vision, a poem

is always a bird

born and breaking free of your eyes

opening like a threshold

like a flower

like a crack of lightning,

like the world that hangs,

a veil of water,

from the ends of your eyelashes now.

Love is great, love is much, maybe all,

and the being here incomparable,

and the mystery always

whispering in a field beyond its own compass,

and the wind that tastes of birds,

and the light that tastes of flowers,

and the fountains of darkness

where God washes the stars off her face,

will always urge the extinguished branch

of an astonished pen

to blossom into a poet.

Are the dead any less creative

than the living?

If they don’t come from anywhere

how can you ask where they go?

If everything is the unborn energy

of a dancing god

with worlds in her blood

how can even a blade of grass perish?

This world, this life,

this ungraspable now of awareness

is the passion of a goddess, not a passing thought.

Beyond this riot of blessing and anathema,

this racket of loss and acquisition,

of birth and murder,

there is a silence

deeper than the space

between breaths,

an abyss without longing

that knows you from within

as the fire knows the flame,

or a woman,

the haste of her lover.

If you think you know something,

cast the thought down

as you would a venomous serpent

or let it strike;

even the poisons

can unspool you like wine

in this delirium of life.

And isn’t it more than could have been asked for

just to be here

under a sky

spun finer than the silk of diamonds,

breathing the stars in and out

like trees?

I have been silently and eloquently

stupefied by the wonder

all my life;

and urgently moved to explore

the great ocean of awareness

that intrigued me to experience myself

as the world,

I put to sea with a leaf for a sail.

We must become

more intimate with our vastness, learn

to listen to the whisper

that has always been us

in our own depths.

We have depleted our preludes of awe,

the spirit slags in the pit mines

of our complacent arrogance.

Our own creations

amaze and lull us away

from the sustaining abundance

of what was given spontaneously.

What do we know?

Why water?

Why stars?

Who is it that asks the question?

The fluid continuum of the mystery

is a waterclock

and every receptacle, an era.

And science can advance the shadows of life,

but the answers eventually fall like leaves

and no one knows how to account

for the stars that root in the duff.

What each of us sees

when we see deeper than blood

over the course of a lifetime

are the eyes of the goddess

when she looks at us.

What we are is our own creation,

curse and blessing alike.

You created heaven.

You created hell.

Experience is just the metal

shaped on the anvil of our hearts

into edges that kill like life,

the plough drawn from the stone,

not the sword,

or blades behind the door

that wound like serpents.

You can enlighten or eclipse

the iron in the ore

by pouring it

into a heart or a bullet.

You can make a nail

and build a house

or crucify a teacher.

PATRICK WHITE

THE NIGHT'S A BLACK HOLE OF A BEGGING BOWL

THE NIGHT’S A BLACK HOLE OF A BEGGING BOWL

The night’s a black hole of a begging bowl

that doesn’t know what to ask for anymore.

Shall I throw the new moon of another beginning in

like good coin of the realm, in passing,

or bite the bullet of a counterfeit eclipse

in the silver silo of the dark abundance

I’m trying to trigger into stars again

like apocalyptic insights going off in my brain?

The heavens roll like an old thirty-eight

I raise to my temple for old times’ sake.

But the gate I used to close behind me

in the high starfields to keep nothing in

is hanging on like a lapwing by one rusty hinge

to the wing and the prayer it’s dragging on the ground.

It’s getting a little late for suicide. The timing’s

overtaken the importance of the content.

And this close to the end, it would be a shame

not to see yourself out like friend in the doorway

saying farewell to yourself as you say in return

I’m glad you came to the stranger whose threshold

you crossed like a star in transit at zenith.

My pulse is still hammering swords of light out

on the anvil of my heart for me to fall upon,

but lately I’ve been bending them like horseshoes

to put them out of use and return them in tribute

to the water sylphs in the sacred pools of my mindstream.

Inspiration ages into crazy wisdom that still

doesn’t take its own advice but never fails to sing

in a voice worthy of a wolf or hermit thrush at moonrise.

I’ve been firewalking my way through this

long, dark, strange, radiant dream since I first

opened my eyes and the stars began to shine

but I’ve never lived the same thing twice.

Though the morning star falls like Lucifer

in the false dawn of enlightenment, the abyss

cannot be bridged by anyone’s trajectories

however high we ascend, how ever deep we plunge,

until we’re burning like maple leaves and shooting stars

in the second innocence of our return journey back to earth.

Fletched arrowheads of the sky, even the birds

falling short of the unattainable miss the mark

and return to the green boughs of their beginnings

just like the flight of these words in the sunset

as the night overwhelms us all unspeakably

with the proto-nostratic of the stars

like a mother-tongue of light that leaves nothing unsaid

in the autumn darkness fragrant with the decaying dream grammars

of the dead slipping their shadows like secret messages

under the door of the book we’re writing between us,

the beginningless prelude of the endless epilogue

of the memoir of the love life we had with Venus in Virgo

when the new moon was in the claws of sensuous Scorpio.

Big, red-hearted, archaic Antares

threshing the green wheat of Spica

as if the harvest had been achieved before the seed was planted.

Just because we die doesn’t mean that life

is finished with us like the draft of a manuscript

we threw into the bonfires of the maple trees

to inspire our ashes to rise out of the open urns of our firepits

like the feathers of a dragon enflamed by the wind

so our spirits could ride their own legends a breath

higher and closer to the stars every time we open our wings

to re-read the lyrics it took a lifetime to write in scars

like thorns in defence of the mystery of the black rose

we were happy to bleed for as if our blood had no other use

than the ink in the pens of these leafless woods

dreaming of new foliage in the spring returning

like the plumage of eagles to the lonely flight feathers

of their skeletal quills. Fossil constellations

in the darkness that whisper between the lines

of the alpha and omega of the life themes that once ran

like purple passages of the mindstream

that can still shed light on our afterlives in a book of shale

long before we had eyes to read what we were writing

like loveletters to ourselves on intimate terms

with the inconceivable solitude of this distant future

we’re all living now in celebration of yesterdays yet to come.

PATRICK WHITE

I SIT AT MY WINDOW

I SIT AT MY WINDOW

I sit at my window

trying to translate the Kufic script

of the shadows of the trees on the snow,

smoking the invisible ink of the light

over the flame of my mind

to clarify my seeing

by realizing there is no deep or shallow

in the fathomless depths of I am,

nothing hidden, nothing revealed.

And it’s not so much that I am in the presence of the world,

but that the presence, the world, is me,

and if I go looking for it,

only my fingerprints will be found

like these violet shadows dusted by the snow

under my multitudinous mugshot in the mirror.

So I open my mind and my eye, my heart and my hand

and let things arise as they will,

knowing that even this is a blunder

that advances my tardy illumination by another eclipse.

This morning blue is the taste of the sky

and I am alive again at my desk

to wonder who or what or why I might be

this wondering spontaneity

circling like a bird in the abyss,

feathered by feeling and thought

for a tree or a meaning to perch in

that hasn’t already been struck

by the lightning of my homeless insight.

Indwelling energy in the turmoil of a terrible silence,

I am an ambassador of water to an unknown star

that foils my blood with light the closer I approach

and I don’t know what the message is

or who it’s from, but every time I deliver it,

my head comes off like the moon.

At some point you have to give up looking

to go on seeing, you must

come to a full stop

if you want to liberate the pen

that indicts you like an assassin

with his ear to the wall.

So I go by night, unheeded and alone,

a constellation of my own

that doesn’t read the braille of itself

reflected like direction in the starchart on the lake,

cored like eyes into the dice of my bones,

or mummified by a legend in a straitjacket

interred in the long-standing consensus of a guess,

knowing I would only be following my own footprints

like the shadows of these words

that flow from the trees in the snow.

And there are squirrels that leap from branch to branch

of these arboreal letters like commas

that don’t know where they go

and wrens that perch like quotation marks

around things that can never be said

that everyone claims they know

as they call out their name

like the echoless vocabulary

of a febrile grammar in a mad dream

as if their whole life were ingathered into one last scream

that might shatter the mirror of the way things inevitably seem.

I listen to the world and hear in each person and form

the mindstream moving through the night

like the voice of a mystic alphabet

returning to the sea

with news of itself

whispered into its own ear.

And if sometimes the stars think

my seeing goes too far,

my seeking exceeds the bounds of the light,

as it turns planets like doorknobs

to open new rooms in a dark mansion

that stands like an abandoned cornerstone of the night on a hill

waiting for me to return like a lost threshold,

or the faceless side of the moon to a window,

then let me here and now confess to my own denial

and knock on the door of the next false address

to see if I can find who wrote

this loveletter that slashes me open like a smile

and reads me out loud to the stars on the wind

as if I were the last flare from an empty lifeboat.

PATRICK WHITE

THE WOMEN I HAVE LOVED

THE WOMEN I HAVE LOVED

The women I have loved,

the taste of old fires in my mouth,

wild orchids

that summoned me

with their fragrance in the night

to mystery, ecstasy, danger and agony,

betrayal and loss,

intensities hotter than stars

that could thaw space like glass

in the coldest, deepest abyss of their beauty.

Seizures of flesh, potions of pain,

delirium of black poppies, eclipses, cloaks,

the sweet doom of paradise

in the effulgent bells of their hips

and their skin always

a starmap back to the earth, luminous braille

only the eyes in my fingertips could read.

Each was a way of breathing

in water, in fire, in stone, on the moon,

an atmosphere that clung to me

like the smell of an autumn night in their hair,

an era of seeing

that rooted like lightning

in the starmud of my poems.

Some were the windows of a palatial awareness

that astonished my heart like a peasant

and others, the rocks that crashed through it.

I tuned all my mirrors

to the high notes

of the most beautiful stars

in each of their constellations;

and the ones I loved best

were the windows

that could see both sides of God

and you could taste it in their eyes.

No doubt I was ruinous

in ways that it’s taken years

of deep solitude and suffering

to clarify, the ore

wasn’t always worth the metal within,

the volcanic rage of my baffled aspirations,

the urge to express, release, affirm, excel,

the way I parted women I loved like seas

in my quest for the promised land

and the way they closed up on me like pharaoh,

like a flower that doesn’t want to look at the night

and lowers its lonely eye,

like coffin lids

that were once the petals of a mystic rose.

Who knows who was buried

on those sexual slopes

that overlooked the motif of the river

wandering easily

through the vistas of the valley,

or how the story truly ended

that went on writing itself

as it does today

long after we were villages,

tiny necropoli, perfectly preserved,

and wholly usurped

like utensils by the afterlife

of the erupting mountain

that put an end

to the interminable funeral orations

that unrolled us like thunder in hell.

We slashed heaven

with the bloody razor of the moon

like the vicious legates of a papal threat

to spiritually salt the holy ground

we were rooted in

like lava, blood, and lightning.

I am still a confusion

of wounded dreams,

and when I look at the moon,

the bruises, the dead seas,

I am devastated again and again

by a ghostly sorrow

that returns to my heart

like a dove to a dark bell

that once knew the morning with another.

The truth is slurred by time,

and the confessions we made to the sky,

gusts of shame and contrition,

tiny burnt-out match-heads

that once flared into big fires,

slagging their depletion

like ore in the rain,

were abysmally true to the moment,

as we felt the ground beneath our feet

sinking like a continent.

We may have drowned like Atlantis

but how many decades since

have we lain here

like a thousand other toppled shipwrecks

offering the hilts of our masts

sheathed in coral

and the bunting of weeds

to the sea that slowly accepts our surrender?

All the beauty of that seeing,

the laughter in bed,

the aloof eternity in the form of the woman

at the end of the garden,

seen through the kitchen window forever

as if I had never made love to her,

pulling weeds from among the asters,

forever true, forever

preternaturally true,

the mystery that transfixes

and devours me yet.

I have not laid my dream down

like the head of a child

on the pillow of a stony heart.

I have not looked upon the stars

that shone over us those long walks into each other

as if we were two banks of the same river

and we were still a wonder

and a temptation to each other,

two wings of the same gate

hopelessly opening.

I am still summoned against my will

to those dread nights we went out in each other

like down-turned torches,

and the bouquets of the daylilies,

those truces of fire and water

we burned beside,

turned into congested refugee camps

that plunged into civil war with their own reflections.

All along this road

where I carry my life

like the shoes in my hand

there is broken glass,

shattered goblets of the moon

we once drank from together,

shards of the suicidal chandeliers

we once danced under

like the tails of the unnamed comets

that followed us like paparazzi

as if we were the prophecy.

Vampires once cloaked like assassins

in the darkness of the light,

they still come for blood,

pleading in the shadows like beggars for alms,

and I am often aghast at my own compassion,

feeling the quick tendrils

of their tongues flickering in my heart

that my blood still feeds these candles in eclipse.

Perhaps there is more spontaneity

in the darkness

than there is in the light,

but I have not let my mouth

turn into an open wound,

or wielded the cold flame of my tongue

like a dagger of fire that could only be put out

in the blood of another.

Leeches and lilies

are born in the same pond

and I have not denounced one

at the expense of the other,

but have stood before both in silent awe,

trying to overhear any whisper

of what these things might mean

that they should still sweeten and startle

my deepening ignorance

like the shadows and stars

that leap out of their own darkness and light

to ambush and detain us with love and life

all along these lonely, vivid roads

that walk us like the wind

that moves me now to remember

the generosity of loss that is love,

and the flaring of the dust that we once were,

this frenzy of dust, this urgent dance of the dust

that will forever be

like the wind, like love,

like fire and life, like the nights

that bent down over me while I slept

and kissed me good-bye,

the journey whirling in the arms of its own destination.

PATRICK WHITE