PATINAS OF DISTINCTION

PATINAS OF DISTINCTION

Patinas of distinction trying to green the terminated poets.

Death drools its cruel elixirs. Perfume

from ambergris, whale vomit for those

who have the stomach for it, dung

under the snow, then come the squabbling sparrows

to tend upon God in her rehabilitated ruins.

Literary forensics putting flesh back on the skull.

Red threads of blood in the nests

they build for themselves like pyres of cosmic eggs

in the tree where the poet hung

like a poached bird, a plumb bob of the depths,

a pendulum in a still life with choreographed knives.

The cooing pigeons who write with flight feathers

plucked from fledgling suicides. Water has a voice

of its own, the blood, the wind, three octaves

of fire. Here come the uninspired

with insulation, rebar and cement.

And even road kill’s got an undertaker.

A telescope’s more of a work of art

with a poetic vision of the stars

all waiting to greet you like long lost relatives

and friends, at the end of a dark tunnel

than the barrow tombs of all these

blind, star-nosed moles grubbing

among their damp root fires

to add their smouldering voices

in Braille like singularities

to a dying tradition of black holes.

Equinoctial careerists of their fair-minded lies,

they damn the solstice for taking

more of a stand in summer and winter

like a Stonehenge of the light

and lament the evanescence

of spring and fall that sheds them

like roseate petals of snake skin

that strike the heart like toxic sins of omission.

The sheep are hunting the tigers to death

and there are maggots in the moonlight

like toxicara worms eating the hearts and eyes

out of Mozart and Liszt to see what they saw,

to see what they did, but maggots

never turn into butterflies, and in time,

their lives are fined for fouling the footpath

like commas of excrement in the aftermath

of all the winged heels that stepped in it

like Sylvia Plath in a hive of killer bees

making a grand entrance of her exit

like the black queen of the uninhabited planets

in the corona of the starcluster in Cancer.

PATRICK WHITE  

SNOW ON THE STREETS

SNOW ON THE STREETS

Snow on the streets grooved by tires

into a bar-code. A band burning its first c.d.

Garbage bags humped against the parking meters

like terraformed drunks in an albino mindscape.

I want to sleep. But savage clouds are fuming

with moonlight. Oblivion’s sweet, my little death,

gentle as a snowflake but the prelude to it

is pierced by cauterizing anxieties

like a needle park for voodoo dolls.

I’d rather be a butterfly, a pinwheel

spinning on an axis through my thorax

but you can’t have it all. I tilt away from the sun

at perigee and try to stretch the night out

like a budget of meds for the month.

The dark’s a cool poultice that draws

the infection out of my dreams. It

sublimates my sorrows like dry ice

that skipped the tears. I don’t want to get wet

in an ice-age. Crucified by icicles

that drip like syringes in a limestone cave.

I smear my face in red ochre, blood

with desiccated binders, oil pastels,

and lay my prophetic bones under the firepit.

I place a great stone on my chest

like the weight of the world

to make sure I never get up again

but pain is a homeless ghost

and I don’t think, even with my knees

popped under my chin like an embryo

every part of me is going to fit

my place at the table like a grave.

I throw a few cornflowers in

and wander off with my spirit

like a thought wave that’s tagging along.

I chip away at my heart

like an obsidian lunette

with a bone that’s edging it

into a phalanged Clovis point

for a throwing spear to penetrate

the mammoth of the wooly moon.

I think I’m going extinct.

I’ve culled too many stars.

The herds are thinning over my head.

The green of the traffic lights

that turned yellow in the fall

drops its single, blood-stained berry in the snow.

As the birds and the bards say

of the chokecherries, ripeness is all.

Snow-blinded by this white page,

and blazing is a kind of blindness,

I want to leave something behind

for people to follow like the tracks

of a wounded caribou writing

in the cuneiform Braille of my starmud

you can read with your fingertips

like a hungry clan that hasn’t eaten for a week.

I don’t want to be sought or thawed out by anyone

who isn’t burning my fat in their lamps

or sewing my hide with a splinter

of my femur, threading my sinews

through the eye of a needle

stitching me up in an emergency room

like the mouth of a wound

that’s had its say, and holds its tongue

like the exhausted flavour of silence

masticating a wad of pitch and pine gum

like the sacred syllable of the spear point

I was trying to make an era ago

before I got stuck in this one like a tarpit,

an exile returning on a migratory journey

to the prodigal museum of my homecoming exit.

PATRICK WHITE  

ALL THE DUFF AND DETRITUS OF MEANING IN MY HEAD

ALL THE DUFF AND DETRITUS OF MEANING IN MY HEAD

All the duff and detritus of meaning in my head.

Turmoil of celestial sediments in a tormented creekbed

of starmud. Images and symbols, glimpses and insights,

effluvia of indelible impressions that focus

a whole lifetime into a locket of tears, mingling

in the waters of life like the tributary of a deeper feeling

entering my mindstream like a first violin

in a symphony of picture-music conducted

by the silence of owls with blood on their talons

singing Allah hu, Allah hu, Allah hu under their breath

like a Sufi dancing like the axis of a galactic umbrella

at the crossroads of enlightenment and extinction. I don’t mean

to be thematic about all this. It’s more a synthesis

of happenstantial contradictions and random nuances

in a matrix of suggestive wavelengths having sex

in a lunar snakepit like a triple x porn flick

wasted on a blind prophet who had already seen too much.

The sting of the most beautiful sorrows

ages like wine in the catacombs of your heartwood

if you let it sleep a long time like a passage of poetry

you never understood, but could taste its hidden harmony

as if you were drinking life straight out of your skull.

A rapture in the absence that lingers like a ghost of smoke

on a bridge that burnt a long time ago,

where it hopes to meet you again, though it knows

it can’t, the timing of our departures less crucial

than the content of our arrivals. The stars

pale in the dawn. Venus in Virgo. And the Pleiades.

Funny how we try to hang on to what we’ve already let go of.

So many lovers, friends, intriguing enemies, gone.

Dream figures that didn’t wake up with us

in the same surrealistic play of dark energies we did.

Farewell is always the shadow of a sad hope

standing in the doorway staring out

into the terrible emptiness of threshed fields in autumn,

weeping like a watercolour in the rain

back into the river we drew it from. And the wisdom

that comes like an afterlife, meagre consolation

for the excruciating transformations we endure

to adapt a little happiness to it like an exile on foreign soil.

I spread bread crumbs on the snow for the birds.

I hang meat on the clothesline for the wolves

when winter turns against everything that lives.

I wrap burlap on the roots of the rose the way

I used to bundle the scarf of my daughter

on her way to school when her breath

was a wraith on the air of a dispossessed exorcism

yet to come, and I would be the one she disposed of

as if the parents, not the children, were hostages to fortune.

So be it. Walk on. Bite the bullet. Swallow the loss.

Look at it through the eyes of an experienced star

speculating on what all the light comes to in the end.

What it all amounts to when the shining itself

must bud and bloom and fall. I love like a mammal

but I grieve like a reptile. I don’t show any feeling at all.

My blood returns to absolute zero. Entropy

as a kind of self-defence. I whip the air with my tongue

like lightning for some real or imagined offence.

By day, I scrounge for the sun on the rock of my skull.

By night, I wait for comets and meteors down by the river

like the eclipse of an advent calendar marked for extinction.

I can blaze like a dragon sage. But I live in a coma

like a neuron star upstaged by a comedic deathmask

and my mind is leaking out like anti-freeze through my hair.

PATRICK WHITE

AWAKE AT SIX A.M.

AWAKE AT SIX A.M.

Awake at six a.m. The clock ticks, nicks,

flintknaps little pieces of my life off,

a French executioner’s sword quicker and neater

than the sloppy axe of the moon

naping the strike. I swan on the block

to the drum roll of a panicked palpitant

among kitchen utensils. I’m the crucifix

of Cygnus in the Summer Triangle,

arms outspread. I’m severed like a carrot.

I’m the headless horseman. An acephalic shallot.

Someone yanks me up out of the earth

and holds me up by a gout of hair

like a prize turnip with a characteristic look

of freeze-framed despair on my face

as if it had just been amputated.

I had a snake transplant. Now I’m Medusa.

The star, Algol, in the grip of Perseus.

The ghoul of my own solitude, I can heal

or I can enflame the disease with an unclean needle.

Beware. In case of no urgency. Break glass.

My torso sits at its desk and tries to write.

Headless as the rest. A skull, a book,

an ashtray and some candlelight, coffee

and a keyboard clotted with sticky nicotine

and the finger sweat of a thousand poems.

Stem cells and salamanders come to mind.

Regenerative urns scattering my ashes

like sunspots on a Flemish complexion,

crows in the dusk. My hands feel

like a pair of mouldy gloves, newly exhumed,

but they do the work of twenty spiders.

Ten silkworms gnawing on a mulberry bush.

Prussian blue with an aura of gegenshein,

I wonder if the windows ever wish they had eyes.

I can see right through their deathmasks

with my X-ray insights. The thrum

of the emergency helicopter lands nearby

like a dragonfly on the hospital’s lily pad.

Nightshift angels bloom like nurse’s caps.

The war memorial is wounded by felt poppies

dressed for the weather this time of year,

like a haemophiliac that never stops bleeding

for the boys of summer who went off to war

wielding their ploughshares like swords.

Good-bye Jerod. Good-bye, Joe. I see you

baling corpses like strawdogs after a bayonet charge.

I grieve like chlorine. My tears burn like mustard gas.

My grandfather died spitting up blood

on a sheet of newspaper beside the bed.

Is it any wonder I’m staining this unexpurgated page

like a Rorschach test conjuring up the simulacra

that bear an interior resemblance to me

to see if I can put my head to rest

like a jellyfish parachute candling

in its own tentacles like unbound spinal cords

of serpent fire striking reflexively at the unwary air?

Take this bar code of a chromosome off my heart.

This emission spectrum with genetically modified

Fraunhofer lines, these frayed deltas of life

in the palms of my hands. I am not

a product of my times. I won’t be sold

like the child of a Goth for dogmeat,

though the vultures are in a holding pattern overhead.

I’m not road kill. I won’t be culled

by a hunting license north of highway 7.

I’ll give myself to the wolves furthest from my door.

Let the Aztecs go to war if they want a human sacrifice.

I’ll die by my own wits like a lunatic

raising a skull cup of blood to the noble enemy

of the god I deprived of my barbarous piety

as she does me, food, love, money, sleep, respect

and this flickering head I’ve made a candle holder of

so the light can weep for hours until it burns out

like Aldebaran or Antares in another false dawn

that wires me bloodshot flowers. Eyeless carnations

freaked by the scarlet crackling

of another seismic breakdown

of incommunicable excruciations.

PATRICK WHITE  

WAIT. WAIT. WAIT FOR IT TO COME

WAIT. WAIT. WAIT FOR IT TO COME

Wait. Wait. Wait for it to come,

the mad folly of my creative destruction.

Bleak the flowers in this ruinous garden

and my psyche speaking in tongues

like gates someone left open banging in the wind.

Bring on the storm. Uproot the lightning.

I will not run. I’ll stand here steadfast

as an amputated stump in this open field

with a ghostly feeling I can grow my arms back

like a faith healer sitting like Stonehenge

in solstitial silence at the last broken window

snarling at the fixed stars that keep drifting

in and out of the asylum like a seance of fireflies

that’s turned into an angry mob

looking for stars to martyr for not taking

their fanatical starmaps as literally as they do.

I’m an heretical astrologer tied to the axis mundi

of my own imagination. I read my doom,

cowled in candlelight like the skull of the full moon

scrying the entrails of a wounded bull

garlanded in laurels like a loveletter to the gods.

My end without exit. My beginning without a door.

My backbone bent like a rafter from shouldering

this dance floor that’s crippled me for life.

Should I paint my skin blue? Should I get a tattoo?

Should I carve a more fashionable deathmask

out of my heartwood and learn to lie like a man

acquainted with the truth? Should I go into battle naked

like a beserker sporting his own vulnerability

in the face of an enemy outraged by the insult?

I’m beating on a pinata of killer bees.

I’m cauterizing my nerves with the synaptic

welder’s arcs of the stars until I’m numb as an alloy

of water and blood at the point of a sword

that’s about to cut my throat like a ouija board

that’s run out of answers and alibis for everything.

I’m jester to the divine sense of humour

of a moody goddess trying to decide if she’s a crone

or a nymph. Too late for autumn. Too early for spring.

She falls through the cracks of time

like an old age pensioner. She is the muse

that takes the new moon from under my tongue

and throws it like a penny into a wishing well.

Good luck. I’m done. I’ve worn my bones out

like dice in a gambling den long enough.

Seven come eleven or snake-eyes,

it’s all come around like Russian roulette to me.

I’m dissipating my intensity in the supernal immensities

that don’t give a damn whether I exist or not.

The hurricane’s out of the aviary. The singing-master’s

dropped out of the choir of crows of the black mass

in the ashes of the infidels cherishing the leftover relics

in the sacred shrines of their fire pits, surrounded

by the boundary stones of their spiritual opulence.

I’m tired of mistaking a faithless face in a broken mirror

as an ultimate insight into life. There’s nothing orthodox

about a labyrinth of cul de sacs. Nothing infernal

about a scapegoat driven out into the wilderness

by the sins of the tribe to graze on burning bushes.

I’ve read the gnostic allegory of my life

to loose-lipped interpreters in burning libraries

all over this country from one coast to the next

without being hexed like a nightbird

by their symbolic superstitions. And I’ve listened

for vital signs of life in neglected cemeteries

where no one’s making love on the graves

to tempt the silence out of hiding its genius

like a birthmark under the headstone

of a prophetic paperweight with no voice of its own

to speak of were the wind not a shepherd of leaves

looking for greener pastures for its lost sheep.

I’ve done it right. Nothing less than everything

all the time. I’ve kept it all together like a night sky

that goes on forever like a crow with an eye

to the shining. I fletched my eyebeams like arrows

with the feathers of ospreys to bring down the stars

like messenger pigeons of the light with rumours of home.

I’ve broken the seal of my blood, like a scab on the moon,

or the immaculate sunspot of my word, to liberate

the mystic singularities at the bottom of a black hole

that promised them a better life on the other side

and hung a lantern in the tunnel of an oncoming thought train

that knew it could, knew it could, knew it could,

but didn’t. What more could you ask, what

moeity of my life hasn’t been devoted to the absurdity

of conducting sky burials in an orbiting observatory?

I’ve sung for my supper, sex, money, fame and meaning.

I’ve raised my voice like an axe on behalf

of people on the receiving end of the stick

and I’ve brought my winged heels down hard

on the skulls of slack snakes on railway tracks

when it became clear as an X-ray to me

they weren’t fledgling dragons and the babies

were as toxic as the adults. Retreads on black asphalt,

most of their books, shedding their skins

as if they were laying rubber on well published roads

lined with critical road kill. Everybody underestimating

the monstrosity of a mythically inflated ego

with the mass of a black dwarf that’s imploded

on itself like the withered daylily of a weather balloon.

Imagine the rapture of frogs in the rain

blissed out on the highbeams that will crush them

like chocolates with strawberry hearts.

And everybody grieves like a sieve

for the mystic mishaps of the lesser vehicle

But poetry isn’t a joy ride for petty thieves,

and there are dangerous hitch-hikers, thumbs up

on the backwoods highways at night out in the starfields

poaching the horns of unicorns to sell on a black market

that doesn’t believe one miracle’s ever enough.

I may have been eclipsed by my own enlightenment,

but I can still shine. I radiate. I emanate. Every meteor’s

got its radiant. And there are always stars in a poet’s eyes

he hasn’t got around to naming yet like diamonds in the rough.

My life might ring as hollow as an empty silo,

and yet I’m fulfilled. I’m ripe as the red end

of the spectrum, a windfall in the Hesperides,

all flavours of the lifesavers in the sunset.

My fear hasn’t aged. My grief. My love. My imagination.

Strange recollections from dissonant hours,

I regret having mismanaged the retroactive exorcism,

of my childhood, but things get better the less they matter.

Even a shipwreck on the moon has oceanic powers

over the way the waters of life ride out the storm.

I take liberties with chaos and risk more than I have to lose,

bracing for the fall with an incommunicable form of the blues

that reconciles me to the unattainable by revealing

what’s most human about me isn’t a still life with apple piety,

not what I excelled at, but the bruise I achieved when I fell.

PATRICK WHITE  

I CAN FEEL THE RAGE INSIDE, A GAMMA RAY STAR

I CAN FEEL THE RAGE INSIDE, A GAMMA RAY STAR

I can feel the rage inside, a gamma ray star,

burning through me like a cigarette heater

through the upholstery of an over-used couch

with enough chump change in its pockets

to set up shop as a parking meter. No fire in your voice,

your song isn’t flammable, you didn’t get

the inside out, your leaflet of a poem doesn’t turn red

in the fall. There’s nothing seasonal about the dead.

But run for office, you might get elected

for all the cheesecake issues and anthems

you stand up for like a reflexive erection

that’s never died, in the Elizabethan sense of the word,

for anything you could bring to consummation.

You should be racked by inspiration just once but well

for treason against the muse. You should have the screws

put to you to get you to open your mouth

and let something out like a scream so high-pitched

it’s beyond earshot, though the voice is undeniably yours.

I see a lot of tattoos that are very fashionably done,

but where are the scars, where are the wounds,

where is the full face of the harvest moon

pitted and cratered by the creative impact

of a meteoric life with its radiant in the Pleiades?

Did you paint that persona of a deathmask

in your own blood, or did it just come that way?

Did you carve it out of the heartwood of a bleeding cedar

on the sacrificial altar of an Aztec table saw,

or is it some kind of medicinal bark

you brought back to remind you of your travels?

And I could go on. But it’s a waste of time.

And you’d go away, please, thinking the dragon’s unkind,

when all it’s trying to do is throw the moon

through your window, vandalize you with a little Zen,

fire up your maple trees as if they were burning heretics.

Get you to trust your own instincts, instead of

relying on books about the way things should look

for advice. You ever sword dance barefoot with razorblades?

Anyone ever ripped your heart out and ate it,

saying grace as a compliment to your nobility

as they chewed on it like gum till it lost its flavour?

There’s always an absence in the truth of what we’re living

as if we were missing something crucial. Beauty

is more deeply revealed by a compassionate action

than a contemplative world in a walled garden

where vagrant states of being fountain and flower

in the third eye of the firestorm sweeping over you

like autumn burning its memoirs. Do you know

how much light you can generate like Venus in the Pleiades

just before dawn, by deepening your shadows

to enhance its luminosity? Enraptured by the darkness

within you like the infernal perfume of a flower

that blooms in fire, you’ve got to break more

than a few taboos like chains on a gate

guarded by angels with flaming swords

if you want to get back to the garden

you and the snake were exiled from

for taking Adam along for the ride of his life.

What kind of a temptation could it have been

if it didn’t bring sin into the world like a deciduous tree

among the evergreens? Be honest with your evil

and you’ll never be called upon to lie to the truth.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU LOOK AHEAD TO THE SLICE OF LIGHT AT THE OPENING DOOR

YOU LOOK AHEAD TO THE SLICE OF LIGHT AT THE OPENING DOOR

You look ahead to the slice of light at the opening door

and you’re tempted to look back at what

you’re not going to be anymore once you walk through it

without knowing whether it’s an entrance or an exit.

A station of change. A bardo state that slipped between the lines

of the Tibetan Book Of The Dead you’re karmically

sowing your way through to synchronize your seed to the harvest.

Dawn soon. False or otherwise blanching the nightblue

like any other day of life upon earth, into the starless hue

of waking up from the mystery of being alone in the dark

shining into a vast solitude of hidden insights

like the eyes of shy animals warily observing you walk

through the woods like a nightwatchman without a lantern

looking for a light to go by like lightning and fireflies.

In vino veritas, mystically speaking, I’ve been intoxicated

by the grails and skulls of life like a drunk for so long

I speak in the oracular voices of my own exhausted honesty.

I squandered my potential on the actual, applying

my imagination to the surrealistic factual aspects of life

like an oyster bed on the moon pearling whole new worlds

out of a grain of starmud. If work is a form of worship

as the Upanishads say, I’ve laboured long and hard creatively

like a heretic at play in the flames of the staked-out starfields.

And the shadows I’ve cast upon the earth like scarecrows

to look after things in my absence have never depended

upon a light source that wasn’t sublimely human.

I’ve reflexively responded like a shapeshifter

to any fixed image it’s been imperatively suggested

I was created in the name of to mimic like a dead metaphor

I was living like the lyric in the heart of a man

with nothing left to lose when I breached the boundary stones

of the usual taboos like a labyrinth of seawalls, locks and dams

in the liberation path of an emotional tsunami

of oceanic awareness after every earthquake that shook

my foundation stones into an avalanche of quicksand

sliding down the unstable slopes of the world mountain

like an otter down the mudbanks of my own mindstream.

Compassion’s a ruby. Innocence, an emerald. Insight,

a star sapphire. And I wore those like the corona

of an eclipsed crown on the head of a pauper prince,

but it was the diamonds that intensified out of the darkness

like coal in the furnaces of the star clusters I beheld

like luminaries in the black mirrors on the far side of my eyes

that intrigued me the most as an adamantine example

of how to live my life in the midst of decay

with feet of clay and my head among the stars

like the catalytic agent of my own transformations,

the mercury and sulphur of the royal quaternion

of the philosopher’s stone I was enthroned upon

like a beggar king with a dynastic history of self-abdications.

I got down in the dirt under my fingernails

where Neruda says the poetry is. I planted

the withered crescent moons of zinnia seeds

in the furrows of my brow like terraced gardens

I ploughed with the needle of a boustrophic lp

like a palindrome that sang the same

whether you were coming or going either way.

A Satanic message from the angel in the mirror

trying to play both sides of the fence in reverse.

Like the moon, I’ve never lingered in the window

of enlightenment for long, without looking

for an unlocked, backdoor I could enter with effortless ease

like a thief returning what had been taken from me.

PATRICK WHITE