NO ONE WICKED ENOUGH

NO ONE WICKED ENOUGH

No one wicked enough to risk enlightenment

though everyone wants to know what they’re up to

trying to thrive on their wounds like crime,

everyone auditioning for a part in the light

like a candle flame on a wax stage,

aspiring to stardom. If I

were to hold the moon to your jugular

like a straight razor in a back alley,

and demand you turn over everything of worth,

what would you hang on to

even if it cost you everything,

if not your life, that concept

you claim keeps on happening to you

when in fact it’s happening is really

all there is of you. Neither you nor the thief

can grasp it; anymore than you can seize the darkness,

nor the lost spinal cord of the mystic shoelace

that set out like a road to look for its shoe,

will ever bind the eyelets of the stars to its walking

however it thatch itself like a crosswalk to the journey.

No one mad enough to realize clarity,

to feel the intimacy of the ocean in every water drop

or the enormity of the universe

in the slightest whisper of a star.

No one mad enough to risk their madness,

no one suicidal enough to rise from the dead.

No one made cruel enough by compassion

to let the bottom fall out of the bucket

your heart has carried far from the well

like a bell or a seabed to revive the moon.

To be alive is to be constantly baffled by joy,

to be alive is to be terrified in the dark shrines of the mystery,

to be alive is to fall like an eyelash

from the sunset above the far fields beyond your awareness

like a bird that disappears in the distance

in the dwindling of an eye.

When will you ever

teach your clubfooted sorrows to dance;

or unhobble your gazelles of joy to run

if not now while you’re alive enough to be lost

like the wind playing an abandoned labyrinth like a flute?

I am pathetic. I am profound.

I am the grief of the storm

scrying the will of my life with lightning

and all that I have said, and all that I have written,

dust on the tip of my tongue, the taste of stars,

and what I have been, that I am now,

as tomorrow isn’t a future but a feature

no more indelible than a shadow crossing a threshold,

as everywhere I flow like water, I enter by the right door,

and the only direction I’ve ever followed, my next breath.

To be alive is to kick the encyclopedic cornerstone

out from under the building

and let it fall like an old casino;

to be alive is not to know why things happen,

but not convert to a chessboard when they do,

trying to second guess your life as if it were a covert operation.

It isn’t your eloquence, thought, intuition, or emotion

that carves out a voice like a harp

from the heartwood of your walking tree,

and tunes its nerves to the constellated sheet music of the stars,

and plays it like fire into the echoless unknown;

you, the singing, you, the listening,

to be alive is a star in the generative silence,

a song that writes you like a lyric.

If you want to know God, if you want to know

meaning, know life, as conversantly as you know yourself,

listen to yourself as if you were all ears,

and open your eyes until all that’s left is the sky.

The past and the future alike are keyholes

in a door that doesn’t exist; history, a way of forgetting

and what’s to come, hinged to this moment now,

the forwarding address of an ambient threshold

you cross with every step, every breath, every pulse

like a bell unlocking itself to celebrate

the miscreant of limits who lives

to wonder his way beyond why.

I am nothing, but everything I see

is what the beginning of the world looks like

from the inside, everything I hear

is that original rupture of the silence into being

before the first bird sings in the morning

to dispel the windows from their darkness

like water from its wings.

PATRICK WHITE

BECAUSE I'VE BECOME AWARE OF

BECAUSE I’VE BECOME AWARE OF

Because I’ve become aware of what my cells knew

three and a half billion years ago does that make me

wise and sonorous? Some days I’m a ripe apple

in a big-hearted sunset basking in my red shifting shadows,

and whatever’s spiritual about me, it seems,

though I’ve never been able to put my finger on it,

lingers like a warm buzz of animal contentment

as if life and time were the synonymous friends

of a tranquil atmosphere where just to be here as it is, right now, this

sense that everything, suffering and the bliss of insight alike

had already been wholly achieved billions of years ago

and we’re just remembering our way into the future again

without going anywhere because nothing’s left out.

How can the magic circles of the dreams we draw in the rain

like the geometry of water, ever be over if they

never had a beginning when not having a beginning

doesn’t mean you don’t exist? Inconceivably

from all appearances. The powder blue damselfly

a mascara pencil on the eyelid of the larkspur

with a white star instead of a moondog for an iris.

And then something you once loved in your own

peculiar way, makes you cry and eternity breaks the circle

like a cosmic egg you’re trying to fly out of

and you look at time and change and passage

as you wash a gust of molecules like gold dust

to rinse the dazzling blindness out of your eyes in tears

at not knowing where they’ve gone. Some died.

Do they live on? Some just drifted away like smoke

from the wick of the candle they used to dance upon

in the upwelling of the flame that melted it down.

Hunger first. Then desire. Then suffering. It’s more

the compassion of the poet in me that says that

than it is the Buddhist heretic. Evolution eats itself

to transcend death as fast as possible creatively.

Nothing else to compare it with you can’t says it’s wrong

though you’re troubled by the rightness of it,

and though we do, it’s still fearful to cherish what

seems so randomly expendable like the strawdog

of a work of genius you throw on the fire as soon

as you’ve finished with it. Who is being worshipped

that so many have to die like feted sacrifices

to a hunger that devours the galaxies like starfish?

Infinite appetite at a bone dance that knows the music stops

when it does. Witness the euphoria of the crazed book of life

in the Burgess Shale, pressed like a flower between

the pages and pages of time without a narrative theme

it’s left to us to make up sitting around like solar systems

the boundary stones of the fires of our hearts, as if we

we’re the ones telling the story, not anxiously listening to it.

The desperate and the damaged, the shell-shocked, maimed

and mutilated, no chivalry in the struggle for survival,

and even beauty, a snare it’s wise to be aware of,

all the mistakes a Hox gene can make, even poetry

the most resplendent delusion of my heart and art,

a way of whistling lullabies in the dark when you really need

your mother, consolation philosophies we’re addicted to

like the endorphins of our own creative imaginations

sweeter than any drug a junkie ever o.d.’d on. There’s

a big gap in the story we’re trying to cross on the bridge

of a burning guitar, a caesura the equal of anything on Mars.

And every cable of the way strung out like nerves and spinal cords

on the suspension of our belief in the totally believable extremes

we’re facing with affectionate daubs of starmud on our nose

trying to shine our way across on the liferafts of our eyebeams.

The Great Divide. Everyone standing on one bank of the abyss

calling out in the night to another not sure if they, or this,

or that bank even exists, of if things just go through the ice

and disappear for good. For worse. Or neither. Ingathered

or scattered, or the mindstream returning to its watershed,

or we just wash the starmud off our noses so thoroughly

the snowman gets thrown out with the bathwater, and there’s

just a carrot, six lumps of coal and two sticks to show for it

as we step off into our empty omnipresence like mirrors

into the tears of their own reflections, air out of the parachutes

that housed us like ants and bees in the daylilies.

Or as I’m doing now, the blindfold off. Looking

down the barrel of a firing squad of stars like a black hole

at the singularity of the one blank among so many bullets,

to see if it’s got our name on it, while the others go off

in a game of Russian roulette with the Leonids.

Vodka double. Straight up. Fire. Courage or suicide?

Definitely brutal in the eerie finality of the endless outcome

if you’ve got the eyes for it, falcons under the hood of your eclipse.

Or maybe nothing can be separated from the intelligence

that divined it in the first place like the surest sign

of evolution riding its inspiration out the way a star rides

its own light like the wavelength of a single thought

blossoming like a tiny blue flower throughout the universe.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT I WANTED TO SHOW YOU

What I wanted to show you,

you will not see.

What I wanted to give you,

you will not receive.

The wind may mourn your passing

like an abandoned dog

and the leaves of the silver Russian olive

may be baffled into silver

by the way you left the gate open

to a bigger, colder, darker world than it was

before you told me you loved me

like an arsonist in a wheat field,

a comet above the willow tree

that wept its way into autumn.

Go. I lay no claims or obligations

at your feet anymore than I would

try to smudge space

with the black rose of the night

that tastes of old eclipses in my blood.

You say ebulliently

you want to know passionately

the depths of love,

but like the fools before you

who blundered into the fire,

you’re only witching for volcanoes

with the tongue of snake.

As well look for fishroads

under the dead seas of the moon

as follow the path you’re on.

And your beauty is no excuse,

your body no sanctuary,

your blackberry heart

no pilgrim to anywhere

you can’t stand in the light

trying on shadows like lingerie

in the mirror of the delusions

you’ve clarified like the skin of a bubble

that has smeared the reflection of the world so long

you think you’re a planet with trees.

You’re a spiritual junkie

jonesing for suffusions of the inconceivable

to animate the dust and galaxies

you have no life or love to breathe into

other than that little wind

you carry around in a bottle

in case you’re ever stranded

without an emergency exit

from all the lies you tell in paradise.

You suffer the mythically inflated gigantism

of your own unbearable insignificance,

and abase yourself prophetically

before the mountain of your own lostness,

hoping for a map

of your wandering in stone

that would authorize your confusion

as holier than the rest.

Lonely for converts,

you tell me I’m sure of heaven.

Just as lonely I reply

if someone like me

were to show up in heaven,

it couldn’t be much of place to aspire to

and how could the blessed

not feel cheated?

But you don’t get it;

you really don’t understand

that life isn’t an auditon of angels

and the black cartoon

you’ve made of yourself

to win a feather

isn’t a prelude

to the main feature

when the lights go out

and the ushers

who conducted the dead to their seats

evaporate in the aisles

and you upstage the movie

with your nakedness

as if God couldn’t see

the snake-flute of your body

dancing with serpents in the dark.

Lust alone would have been enough

to keep us together

but waking from your dream

of forbidden undertows,

washed ashore again

on your oracular island,

you kept trying to weld the right light

to the wrong shadow,

and eventually

even the most exotic futility grows boring.

You dipped the stone-flaked arrowhead

of your aboriginal heart

in the toxic fires of your own undoing

and pointing it at mine

tried to deceive yourself into a direction.

And now you want,

now you long,

now you want to come back

and immerse yourself in the life

you once stepped over

like a drunk asleep on the sidewalk.

You’ve suffered and grown,

you’ve wept and derived humility

from irreparable loss;

you’ve trembled before

the first, terrible intimations of the vastness

of the sky in your heart

like the virgin flight of a lost bird,

and you want to be given another chance,

to surrender yourself at the gate

you once walked through backwards

so enamoured were you of your shadow.

And you promise the river your tears,

the moon your scars, me

the rarest of your orchids in the night.

But when I ask you

what the drunk was dreaming

you still look blankly around the room

as if everything in existence

were merely the baffled clue to your beauty

and the answer

something black and revealing that clings.

You still can’t imagine

how easy it is

to say no to you.

PATRICK WHITE

POETRY ISN'T A SALVE I PUT ON MY BURNS

POETRY ISN’T A SALVE I PUT ON MY BURNS

Poetry isn’t a salve I put on my burns,

an ointment of the moon, though it can help

like a afterword, it’s the original shriek of pain itself.

The moment the talons tear into the rabbit,

the rose snarls and bares its thorns and bites

and the owl that seemed so wise in its nest of carrion

turns out to be, no more no less than what it always was,

a feather pillow plumped up around a scrawny raptor.

Sweet dreams. The night tossed in its sleep like a snakepit

trying to get on the same wavelength as the big names

on a starchart though everything ends in a colon

as if something were to follow like a fangmark

or a binary of black holes. If you’re going

to punctuate things, do it like a firing squad.

Born a tiger, born a puff adder, born

with the claws of the moon like an anthropod

clacking across the seas like top heavy castanets,

how did you ever manage to underwhelm yourself

and evolution, and learn to kill like a tapeworm?

Not a morning I’d enter in a new age beauty pageant.

Mercifully grey, but too exhausted to put up much

of a pretence. Mr. Bluebird’s opening a chic boutique

of organic food he’s gleaned from his many years of experience

hand picking seeds out of the teeth of vegetarians

like a sparrow dragonflies in the grilles of cars in parking lots

while the mandalic carpet of the forces of life

are swept from under his feet at his office desk

as neat as a moonrise on his fingernails

is aerated by earthworms the size of vacuum hoses.

Ex-hippie vulture capitalists with their third eyes open

like the fractals of a peacock collecting

emotional enlightenment experiences like the badges

of a cub practising knots he’ll later hang himself with

as soon as he masters a noose. Wonder what the Buddha would think.

I’m not moaning Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani from a cross

or a pigeon with the messiah complex of a dove

betrayed under the eaves of my apartment

and I wish I could forgive everyone for not knowing

what they do, but simply put, this morning, it just isn’t true.

Try a troll under a bridge by the fieldstone embankment

at the side of the Tay Canal trying to spiritualize his anti-matter

by putting a happy face on a total eclipse. Sometimes black

is the only colour my rainbow body can resort to

to reinvigorate my soul, though it’s reticent to admit it.

My mother’s ninety three. Afraid of what that means.

My brother just had his leg amputated for number two diabetes.

I haven’t seen either of my kids in thirty plus years

such that the distance between my tears and theirs

would have to be measured in parsecs and lightyears

and I’m so sick of not having any money

I’d tar and feather another night owl with it if I did.

It makes me queasy sometimes remembering

how wonderful life used to be before I entered

this isolation cell in the name of a solitude bigger than me

that would demand nothing less than everything of me

all the time, so that when I died from all the things

I’ve given up in life to write, I’d have to ask someone

if they noticed an appreciable difference in my line-breaks.

I’m imminently qualified and well published enough

to say that what I do, before another donkey begins to bray

about the anti-social function of my heretical wisdom

sticking the stars in their eyes like the spurs of a man

broken by a winged horse, is unpatently absurd

though I still don’t think there’s any other way to learn

to ride a word like a wavelength instead of a particle

and when I talk to God in the valley at the foot of the mountain

about what she’s doing to me, I’m still humble enough

to remember to always use the indefinite article in her presence.

Though I’ve had love affairs with other muses, poetry

has always been my most committed relationship to life.

Say it beautifully. Say it tragically. Exalt like a stranger

before the open gates of your metaphors. Don’t step

on a crack in the sidewalk that will break your mother’s back,

and when shining comes to zenith like a firefly in a lighthouse,

never respect a threshold that hasn’t got it fingers crossed

or darken a burning doorway with a firehose at nadir

until all the houses of the most influential zodiacs

go up in flames like the taste of a slum in a spoonful of ashes.

And if you get mistaken for a cult leader of one

in a small town of succubi, leave a garbage bag

full of used voodoo dolls one night outside the Salvation Army

and watch the passersby steal the burnt effigies of your childhood

without attempting to save anybody from anything

like the curse that cast aspersions on King Tut’s throne.

I didn’t come to poetry like an immigrant to a foreign country

but I’ve tried so hard over the years just to belong

except for a few benighted souls, no one visits me

unless their unremarkable absence wants something

it’s impossible to give them as long as their hands are full.

I try to balance their bright vacancy with my dark abundance

but how few on a spiritual path ever truly realize

that scales are the first step on your way to feathers

and if you’re not dragon enough to swallow your own eclipse

don’t try the full moon unless you’ve got dental insurance.

Your fangs would break like the first and last crescents

of soft, graphite pencils biting into stone like the fossils

of Anomalocaris in the collected works of the Burgess Shale.

And that’s ok, too. As I’ve often said my brother used to say.

Unrequited goodness is the sign of a successful sacrifice.

Do ut des. I give so that you give. Or, more savagely,

do ut abeas. I give so that you go away. With blessings

on your head and house of course, and a small shrine in my heart

where I keep the relics of all your best ideals

like the needles of baby teeth that fall like thorns

from the mouths of kittens that roar like crematoria

though I’m demonically amused that the flamethrowers

they mistake for real dragons never seem to bring the rain

in time to put their pyres out like new age fire brigades.

Just the same sumac in the fall is still more of an arsonist

than the naphtha of paper birch in the dead of winter.

Knowing what I know about how little much there is to know

about nothing, I won’t disrespect myself by becoming bitter.

Someone asks, I show up like a genie with a lamp

and we talk about matchbooks like the haiku of a dragon

or a crow on a branch in the void bound autumn rain.

I listen to the world dispassionately as if I were

absolutely certain there wasn’t a quantum self to the atoms

that wasn’t certifiably insane according to its own lights,

as I show them my arcane starmaps with albedos of chrome

and carbon, so they can see for themselves in the dark

how much deeper a black mirror is when the lights go out

than a white one that’s in your face all the time

as if it didn’t trust you to take your eyes off it once and awhile

like the broken link of a shepherd moon on a short chain

that wants to howl with the wolves, free of the flock,

still labouring under the delusion it’s got something to do

with where it’s going and where it’s been and tomorrow’s

already so far off the path, every prophecy you ever make

is just the future memory of your erratically inspired aftermath.

PATRICK WHITE

DEEP IN THE NIGHT

Deep in the night that shells its husk of blue

to pan the nuggets of its stars from a darker stream,

the heart an executioner with a fistful of pardons,

and the soft, moist, lulling of the evening air,

the threshing of slow fish,

I’m enthroned alone in a crucial palace of light

that realigns its domains to the borders of the wind,

and I don’t want to feel lonely but I do,

and I don’t want to miss so many, so many faces

stripped from the bough like a savaged telephone-book,

so many feathers of light drifting through the shadows of their names,

and the black granite of the uncarved bell

that turtles the blood under the eyelid of the knowing,

that makes my eyes want to scream

until the pillars of the dead sea fall like rotten salt:

how long can one road endure the passage of everything

walking life off into the stars that measure the miles in skulls?

Was I young? Were you there in the brindled moonlight?

Did I remember how to love you well; did I see with long eyes

how you rose out of the chest of the hills like a spirit leaving,

the blue effulgence of your nebulous departure

almost a cocoon of morning mist, the last breath of a lake

as if an indigo thistle released its silk to the wind

or a dandelion relinquished its ivory mane?

Were you the soul of me that lingered by gates and wharves?

Have you come back now with your bells of blood and lamps of flesh?

Can I feel again the leaves of the silver herbs

in the gardens of your fingertips?

Touch me like the breaking of a fast,

find me like a river in the night,

the dazzled theme of a wandering valley,

and pour your journey into mine like stars into a vine,

shadows running down the worn convictions of the stairs,

the midnight wines of old eclipses in the goblets of your eyes.

Once for the flame that dances on the wick of the tongue,

Once for the orchards that plead with the heart for birds,

Once for the envelope that read the letter it married,

and you, by the river, a sapphire among rocks,

tender blue grass in the translucent water-skin of the night,

loving me once as if your hands were autumns full of departure

and your eyes, the gulf of the world in your eyes, your eyes

were the soft flowing of the dark honeys

that leak from the wounded hives

we carry like knives to the grave.

Distinguished among broken clocks,

sultry and bitter, a quarantined bay of refugee stars,

caught in the threshing blades of a circular waterfall,

a mess of tents I’ve furloughed across the milky distances

like a chain-letter from a secret constellation to you,

I blue the intimate spaces between us with time

and patch the maps with the confluence of our lifelines

and try to restore the eyes in the sockets of our bridges

under a brow of swallows in the dusk. And I remember

all the names of the flowers, all the names of the stars,

all the badges of love that heaven and earth once offered

in lieu of the reasons why

love bares the skin of a poppy

to the teeth of the hunting sun

and then flares like a firefly

over the water-lamps of the moon,

but when it dies of its own self-inflicted wounds,

slashed by shadows among the ripe fruit of its vowels,

and the seed wasn’t asked and the harvest had no choice

there are always two skies,

one bound by roots, the other, eyes,

at the back of every voice.

PATRICK WHITE

SHAPE OF DESIRE. HURT ONE. LOST. HOLINESS, GRIEVING

SHAPE OF DESIRE. HURT ONE. LOST. HOLINESS, GRIEVING

Shape of desire. Hurt one. Lost. Holiness, grieving.

Who could make love to someone as melancholy

and beautiful as you? And that face. Erotic innocence

baffled by a world that doesn’t quite know how

to receive your gift, however happy you are to give it.

Even in a small town where the virgins

who’ve turned everyone down get called slut

by six adolescent boys with the windows rolled down

like purple tinted skies just after sunset

to bluff the bruise out of the rejection by punishing it

as if it happened to someone else, you wear your face

more like a soft, sad atmosphere around an uninhabited planet

than the brittle carapace of an overturned begging bowl

like a turtle on its back most people wear for lifemasks.

I can see a milky aura of white hovering around your face

like an auroral scarf of light glowing with tenderness.

I’ve seen it before in the faces of both sexes, though

I’m heterosexually suicidal, and it lasts

about two years and then disappears for good

between a night and a dawn like the death of morning glory.

I’ve been into seeking other things myself,

but in the whole orchard when I’ve seen it in the past

I’ve often thought this must be the hour of the perfect blossom,

when a face isn’t an expression of anything, but a seance

that calls the gentlest spirits to it like night mist on a lake

and everyone mourns as if beauty were predestined to be forsaken.

Genius ever was so. And I suspect good people, too,

with quiet virtues kinder than plants returning oxygen

for carbon dioxide like new lamps for old, are just as betrayed

by the anonymous sacrifices they make in private

as they are commended in public by people who hate them.

I’ve got to be careful here because I don’t want

to dig a black hole in your heart, when I was out witching for water.

I’m trying not to use lightning bolts of insight

when a gust of intuitive fireflies would do the job.

I don’t want to be an unwieldy dragon among

the blue glass menageries of your exquisite tears.

Aggrandize the thorns and diminish the rose.

You can judge for yourself by the capacity of your eyes

to hold so many stars all at once that shining

can’t be stamped out like a cigarette heater on the carpet

anymore than the heart can doused like a burning house

and learn to live like a fire hydrant out of gratitude.

There’s definitely something seeking about the way you look.

Explore the loneliness. The sadness. The abyss.

Don’t lose the opportunity to learn to mindscape your pain.

As they say in Zen, intense heat unusual sprouts.

Orchids have been known to bloom in the shadows of outhouses.

Listen attentively to how even the most buff bells of life

seem to swing between the sentimental and the vicious

like two extremes of the same enzyme when it’s hard to tell

whether love’s still the lifeline it was reputed to be

or at the end, doubles back on itself and loops into a noose.

And don’t kid yourself. Not all waterclocks make it to the sea

nor do the salmon, however nobly they answer the call

to a higher vocation of oceanic consciousness, make it back up.

Spring no more favours the fledgling in its nest,

than a baited leg hold trap a wolf in mid-winter.

Many people talk and act as if they know what they’re doing,

but most of us are living like a secret that keeps us going,

so don’t be afraid when the unknown becomes inevitably vast

and space turns into glass you’re trying to swim through

like a goldfish or the flamingo fantail of a comet

and everyone’s got a precipitous attitude about what you should do.

It’s your cliff. Jump if you want to or enjoy the view

like a star that’s just been given your eyes like its first telescope.

But don’t let yourself be pushed. Make sure

you’ve got the feathers for it because timing in life

is synonymous with the whole of its content, and suicide?

That’s like asking antimatter to come to the rescue

of a lifeboat with a positive outlook going under

as your life flashes before your eyes like lightning without thunder.

If you want to respect yourself for the immensities

of the myriad annihilations you’re willing to risk,

go all the way like a dragonfly uncurling from its chrysalis

like a question mark that crawls out onto a limb

into an exclamation mark that unfolds its wings and flies

when there’s no where else to swim. Do it creatively

and take a much more dangerous leap of absurdity

by risking it all on a beginning that starts with a fall

and ends up a mountain climber with a base camp among the stars.

What aviator laments the broken egg-shell on the ground,

cosmic or earthbound, when the whole sky lies before it

with a smile on its face as wide as your wingspan

and a heart as big as any abyss, as if it always knew,

as the wind comes to the fireflies and the stars

in a perpetuity of unperishing perennials that refuse

to bloom like traffic lights and triggers, one night,

maybe now, in a blaze of self-immolating transformation

as surely as the Pleiades coming up like the chandelier

of a lost earring in the east, just as beautifully,

in the great lost and found of sorrow and bliss

you, too, no less bravely, would come to this.

PATRICK WHITE