IF NOT KNOWING IS A SIGN OF THE DEPTHS

IF NOT KNOWING IS A SIGN OF THE DEPTHS

If not knowing is a sign of the depths to which

I’ve penetrated the darkness with a handful of fireflies

aspiring to a constellation of their own, something

more shapeshifting than these eighty-eight paradigms

of fixed shining, and managed to lose the starmap en route,

then I’d be urged to say I’ve been negatively illuminated

by every black hole I’ve ever fallen into. How is it with me?

I’ve been pearl diving for singularities and nacreous eclipses.

I have no idea of what I’m looking for that isn’t eventually

going to find me, but I’m a hybrid of wonder

and an agitated curiosity that makes me feel

I’m wasting some crucial element of life

if I don’t go take a look for myself or listen

to the picture-music flowing through me like a mindstream

through the woods at night more acutely than my eyes

can see enlightenment right under their nose

that can tell what it is by the smell. Larkspur or sulphur.

Witness to a dynamic awareness I’m more and more certain

isn’t mine, though it bears my name, I resist being tempted

by a partial fossil of thought to lay claim to it

as if it went to all that effort just to be me. Not self-abnegation,

which is like trying to sweep a mirage out of a desert

with a broom you haven’t learned to ride, but immersion

in an abyss that dwarfs the universe with inconsequence.

I’m more intrigued by the life of meaning as it expresses itself

as a creative medium for the ten thousand meanings of life

scattered like eyelids of apple bloom by the wind

than I am in divining provisional parameters

to rationalize the superstition of reality that regards

its own unactualized potential with an evil eye

that has to be occluded for the sake of pregnant goats.

Just to be here is the most magnificent achievement

though whether you pulled it off or not is definitely moot,

and I tend to intuit when the silence is comprehensive enough

I’m participating in an interdependently originated

creative collaboration where creation is the past tense

of what we’re about to do next without knowing it.

We exit by the entrance. Even spoliation and ruin,

the withered root, the amputated stump, the delinquent blossom

that left it too late, the imaginative context, the seed bed

for the speciation of new life forms arising out of the dead

like a child with flowers in her arms who can’t imagine

what it’s like to be old and see yourself in the doorway

asking where you keep the crayons like stubby buds

in a drawer with a rainbow she wants to draw for you

if you’ve got lots of red, and, as it happens, you do.

PATRICK WHITE

UNLIKELIEST OF INCLINATIONS

UNLIKELIEST OF INCLINATIONS

Unlikeliest of inclinations. Poetic madness

in the face of common sensical catastrophe.

I’m writing this for no one’s sake, not even

my own, a gust of stars in a back alley,

vertiginous dust devils of skirling snow

nipping at my winged heels like frost-bite.

Routinely annihilated at the crossroads

of celestial equators intersecting skewed ecliptics,

the surrealistic mystic in me dances in protest

at the nave of a jinxed prayer wheel

mistakenly enlightened by a yellow daffodil.

I could have been a lightning rod. I could have been

a weathervane, a sundial, an astrolabe , an astronaut,

an astronomer measuring the eyelashes of the stars

in a spectrographic analysis of the tree rings

in the heartwood of the light. As it happens

I’m squatting in the thirteenth house of the zodiac

dodging wrecking balls like a punchy boxer

whose sea legs keep being swept out from under him

by black ice that wants him to take the fall.

Adjust according to circumstances laying bets off

against the smart money I won’t make it

out of this coma to show up for the next round.

If so, I want my coffin to be a cabal

of underground resistance to the death of me.

I want to thrust my clenched fist through the duff

of everything that’s ever unfeathered me in life

like a mushroom in a sacred grove of black swans

waiting for the plumage of new moons to break

into a flightfeather of white light that isn’t mocked

by pink-eyed albino crows driving the fire

of foxes into deep snow to peck their eyes out

like militant evangelists of the colour-blind.

One moment I’m riding Pegasus bareback

with Deneb and Albireo spurring me on

to greater heights than I’ve ever soared before

and the next I’m devoted to this discipline

of turning my insides out lyrically like a pinata

hanging like a medicine bag from a black walnut tree,

bleeding siloes of Virgoan starwheat out of the wound

of a lunar bull Mithras Tauroctonus is sacrificing

like a cornucopia for waiting scorpions, dogs, and snakes

whose symbology is lost upon me like the arcane taste

of alien sensibilities who don’t speak

the same dream grammar I do without an accent.

No end of the doors or the million ways

you have of saying nothing when you approach

your folly like a priest instead of a sacred clown

blowing the pollen of mountain flowers

like gold dust from the palm of your hand,

or gusts of stars roosting in your eyebrows

like chalk starmaps ageing at a blackboard.

I see you trying on lives like different meanings

to pre-determine what pleases the mirrors best,

as if you didn’t so much express as calibrate

what moves you most like the tantric pique

of a yogic paperclip disguised as a praying mantis.

There’s no conviction to your absurdity

so your peacocks lack the courage to sing.

Your lions roar, but the victory goes to the blackflies.

Are you still hunting pygmies with harpoons?

PATRICK WHITE

PEACE IN THE SADNESS THAT ALWAYS OVERTAKES ME

PEACE IN THE SADNESS THAT ALWAYS OVERTAKES ME

Peace in the sadness that always overtakes me

this time of night. Distance and time in the silence.

The darkness breathes subliminal fragrances of the past.

Intensities relax and grow expansively immense.

The stars look down on my eccentric solitude

and deepen my emptiness with a strange longing

to shine with the same cold fury of creative turmoil

their unattainable radiance has always inspired in me.

It may well be no small thing to counterpoint

the beauty of their brilliance with my paltry daub

of mortal starmud whose every aspiration ends

in the expertise of an apostate clown trying

to embody the first principles of his sacred folly

without breaking into tears of face paint as if

I were talking to dream figures in my sleep

while I was still awake, and inseparable as I am

from the stars down here by the river where the town

doesn’t weed the stray whispers out of the light,

none of us can explain the oddity of our presence

in the midst of each other like psychic phenomena.

And it isn’t likely I’ll know before I die

whether I’ve wasted my life and theirs or not.

I wonder if Jupiter ever feels like a loser

for letting the sun down like a brown star

that didn’t quite reach critical mass

to shine as a binary companion at the dance

instead of sitting it out on the periphery

like a wallflower in perpetual bud too shy to be asked.

So my mind, as old as I can remember, has

been allegorizing the abyss with surrealistic romantic facts

to reach out like a bridge across the mirage

of a blackwater mindstream in a desert of stars

as if there were someone to relate to

in the clear light of the void less impersonal

than the Planck lengths of speculative graffiti

trying to attribute a narrative theme to chaos

I could humanize like a candle in a lonely room.

Idle ruminations of a restless night owl

with blood on its talons like the last crescent

of the waning moon roosting in the leper colonies

of the inundated birch groves on the far bank.

Most of my life it’s been an excruciating labour of love

to bind the world to me in a collagen of metaphors

that nucleates my cells and atoms with mythologems

of the multiverse in the heartwood of every one of them.

I’ve even come to appreciate the quantum entanglements

of delusion and enlightenment as complementary opposites

that have engendered my oxymoronic awareness

of their coincident contradictories of inharmonious synchronicity

and acted out the crazy wisdom of the fool accordingly.

A liberated discipline of free association

I keep rolling my prophetic skulls like dice

against the odds of my meteoric amino acids

ever having tallowed me like flesh around

the wick of my spine mining liquid nanodiamonds

out of the ore of these spent match heads in Antarctica.

I paint my interior dialogue with the cosmos

in vivid vowels but the consonants still count

as earth colours I can rely on to ground the effect

of lightning rooting in the wetlands of my starmud.

Creatures rise out of the dark lagoon like breaching trees

and I’m subsumed in these visions of their passing away

as if there were nothing more noteworthy about evolution

than someone realigning their body with the angle

of what they’re adjusting to in their sleep.

What random act of inconsequence dreams of us

when we’re not there to second guess the outcome?

Colloquies of madness, poetic cosmologies

extrapolated from supra-dimensional improbabilities,

I’m still amorphous enough to accept the world

on its own terms as if it had all been created anonymously

to intrigue the lunatics who focus on it as if

it meant something as significant as music

to the incoherent lyrics of their longing to hear

a voice answer back that isn’t the echo of their own

in this delirium of mystery where the nightbirds sing

simply because the stars are there to inspire them

and Sisyphean dung beetles navigate their stones up the hill

like a solar system by the spectral radiance of the Milky Way.

PATRICK WHITE

A SEANCE OF SPRITES AND GHOULS IN THE CABALS OF EMPTINESS

A SEANCE OF SPRITES AND GHOULS IN THE CABALS OF EMPTINESS

A seance of sprites and ghouls in the cabals of emptiness

as the train whistle mourns across town out of the darkness

looking for its lost child somewhere along the tracks

where last night’s waning moon put its head

down on the rails as if it were swanning on the block

like an uninhabitable planet jumping orbits

to coyote into the Goldilocks zone like an illegal alien.

O let the midnight special shine its everlovin? light on me.

Not the first time I’ve been up with these novice ghosts

in the darkest hours of the early morning and felt

this relentless sense of incompletion aching in the air

like dry ice in the tears of frozen mirrors locked in grief.

I’m a halfway house for successful suicides and my abyss

is their abyss and that’s about as close as they’re ever

going to get to the flavourless taste of death again,

clinging like old gum to the underside of their vacant desks.

I let them terraform moonscapes out of my starmud

on the dark side of things as if they were sculpting

life-size glaciers of themselves hoping they might

thaw out like crocuses and early waterlilies in the spring,

but they’re only irrigating their birth canals with glass

like Schiaparelli’s Martian aberrations on the lens

of an extinct intelligence that left signs of itself

in the wastes of an occult catastrophe that has yet

to be determined like the history of a future

that happened only yesterday in an ice-age of desolation.

Even in the dead of winter, I keep a green bough

in the leafless tree of my voice should anyone remember

the lyrics of the nightbirds they were once a moment ago

when they longed for things they didn’t know

how to ask for, or were refused, from the people who

were suppose to love them and did, or didn’t

and still don’t though it came as a shock to their indifference

how feeble and transitory the webs and mandalas that bind us

to one another are and how little it takes

for a squall of stars to sever them like

the Medusan wavelengths of Al Gol in Perseus,

or spinal cords and the coinage of new moons

and total eclipses holding their breath as death comes on

like a punchline to the perils of Pauline in parallel universes.

How much respect we accord the dead

than the little they received in their lives.

How easy it is to open our eyes like windows

balanced by lead coffins lowered into wishing wells

and take the executioner’s hood off the bird cage,

the sky off its perch and let the spirit of life spread its wings

and fly with Cygnus and Aquila on a brilliant seeing night.

I crack the seal of the past like the plack of old paint

supergluing my eyelids shut with thick-skinned dreams

like a massive picture frame that squints like a postage stamp

through the keyhole of an astronomical view

of a shattered mindscape lightyears beyond the windows

I let the birds and the fireflies bearing the souls of the dead

whose bones are chalk dust on the moon come and go by

in a riot of spontaneous mayhem full of vital possibilities

acutely aware of the chaos that troubles their graves.

With every breath they try to take like a candle in a vacuum

that abhorred its nature enough to deny the moonrise

passage through the whitewater turmoil of their apple bloom

scattered by the cold-hearted gripe of bitter green winds,

I try to mingle a lost atmosphere or two of my own

hoping they can cling to that for awhile like shepherd moons

trying to reanimate the dragons in the ashes of their urns.

I let the dead dwell within me in the empty warehouses, silos

whiskey barrels, abandoned hives and aerodromes whose wings

have lost their flightfeathers like grounded maple keys,

so they can still taste a patina of the honey and firewater

that remains like an echo of the longing to live again

like the lyrics of the excruciating nightbirds

that destroyed their voices crying out for the unattainable

like a crosstown train keening like a hopeless wind

through an unmarked cemetery of palliative road kill.

PATRICK WHITE

THESE WORDS ARE NOT MEANT TO BURN YOUR SMILE

THESE WORDS ARE NOT MEANT TO BURN YOUR SMILE

These words are not meant to burn your smile.

I lay them gently like cool herbs on your cracked lips.

This light takes its shoes off before it enters your eyes

like shrines to the apostate darkness that lives within you

and waits for the moonrise to gentle your Vesuvian wounds.

Pompous to call myself a healer when all I am

is a confabulation of lyrical cures for what ails you

but I call the wind to the winter willows

and the taste of rain in the air washes the blood

out of your hair like a painter caressing a watercolour

with sable brushes that bleed like dusk on the river.

Let that man pray discretely no evil comes of his words

when he speaks of love as if his heart knew

what he was talking about so I will not tell you

to exit by the fire-escape the next time he fire-bombs

your palace of water gardens with emotional phosphorus.

You take that up with the silence of the abyss

you’re already pleading for consolation answers from.

It’s your light and the way you bend it like a gravitational eye

is how love can wander like a straight line for lightyears

without realizing it’s always been a special form of a curve.

Even with a chubby lip and that orchid of a black eye

that will descend like a moonset into a bruised eclipse,

wounded so, whipped like a rose by a comet

disappointed by the lack of spectators who anticipated

being more amazed by the light show, your beauty

is still an unspoken assumption that pervades the air

like the vulnerable fragrance of a woman mourning

the death of a dream that made the lesser nightmares tolerable.

I can hear the understudies of the mermaids backstage

trying to overcome their stagefright, and, sweetness,

it would be so easy at this station of my life

to include you in my aniconic pantheon of mystic influences

that have been shapeshifting my heart like renegade muses

as wild as they were dangerous in their heretical solitude

for more inspired memories behind me of what was

with no rancour denouncing what could have been

than there are creative eternities ahead that will be validated

by the annihilations I’ve suffered through to aspire to them.

You’d be the right door but I’d be the wrong threshold

you need to cross right now into an abysmal absence

that makes even death wince like something paltry

by comparison, and immolate yourself in the intensity

of the clarity to sort through your ashes to see

what hissed and evaporated like an exorcised ghost

from the green wood that smothered your fire

with the need to possess a life to make up

for the neglect of its own squalid smouldering.

Spontaneously distinguish the star sapphires and emerald lakes

the white gold of your burnished bodymind could swim in

like the plumage of the moon unfeathered like a peony

on the supple waters of life whispering a secret

that has slept like an ocean in a seashell waiting

for you to remember it when you first picked it up on the beach

like a little girl wondering why something so beautiful and strange

came such a long way for you to find it like a kiss

you could hold in your hands like an eyelid

or the petal of a nacreous rose in your palm.

When your prince proves something less than mortal,

appeal directly to the fire of the dragon

to refresh your innocence in the rain

that will fall shortly after as if it just discovered

the sacred syllables of lunar flower seeds

in a desolate garden trying to bloom like the palings

of a closed gate and you will be received like a messenger

from another state of seeing with crucial news

about how love can root in the shadows of desert seabeds

like a mirage of waterlilies that actually float

like stars on the wavelengths of unmapped rivers.

Risk the fear of being who you are even

when the voices of the dead have your best interests

at heart, and gibber about not making the same mistakes

their authority rests upon like resolute quicksand,

and don’t scorn the pettiness of what people

are willing to die in the name of, but turn your face

like a sunflower toward the sublime perils

of what you’re truly inspired to live as

with no gap between your imagination

and the shadows of reality it casts on the clouds

like the penumbral wisdom of compassionate dragons

passing over your intertidal moonscapes

like the eclipse of a dark blessing that buries

its shining like a loveletter in a black envelope,

serpentine jewels in the ore of the night

that will flood your eyes indelibly with the mystery

of being illuminated by the light of your own heart,

galaxies of fireflies reflected in the sea stars at your feet.

PATRICK WHITE

FIFTY YEARS OF WRESTLING WITH THE DARK ANGEL IN THE WAY

FIFTY YEARS OF WRESTLING WITH THE DARK ANGEL IN THE WAY

Fifty years of wrestling with the dark angel in the way.

You’d think we’d be friends by now. Blue flower

rooted in all that dark energy standing like an eclipse

in the burning corona of the doorway, the flammable sugar maple

fallen across the road, the sun that shines at mystic midnight,

the aniconic black wisdom of a one person cult

marking its own door with an X for extinction.

Even a spear of light that drinks from your heart like a heron

can sometimes feel like a blackfly up against

the cold windowpanes of obstructive immensities

shaping the course of your mindstream in the shadows

of the valleys of death, and darker yet, the flightpaths of love

buffeted back like arrowheads against the vortices

of hurricanes and black holes unworthy of the names of women.

If you haven’t been crippled and mended by God,

you’ve never met her. You’ve never known what it’s like

to be so deeply loved by a wound you’d happily bleed out

like a waterclock for the rest of your life as you hung

on the hook of the moon prophecying in euphoric agony.

If you haven’t looked upon human suffering, your own

and others. If you’ve bleached your soul with industrial disinfectants

because you’re too weak to get down and dirty

in your own starmud, and more than your heart

it’s imperative to keep your hands clean. If you

haven’t taken off the deathmasks of the slayer and the slain

to look deeply into the eyes behind the disguise

like peas in a shell game, you’re only holding a candle up

to a blind mirror that will never see anything at all

until you blow it out. Until you learn to love humans enough

you hate God in your heart of hearts, she’ll excruciate you

with her absence until your passion is perfect

and your heresy breaks into the flames of a great blessing

that knows the night is not a reward,

and even if you’re fully enlightened

you’re still ploughing the moon with a sword.

Until your blood burns like a black rose

in the killing frosts of the abyss etching

the inside of your eyes like tears of crystal glassware

when the windows turn their eyelids inside out,

you’re still not intense enough to thaw the next ice age.

There are no visionaries in the eyes of your dice.

You might be buried alive in an avalanche of prophetic skulls

or roaring in the mane of a Leonid across the atmosphere,

but you’re still heaping the corpses of your constellations up

on the pyre of a starmap administering last rites at a sky burial.

The words might be yours. But the voice that animates them isn’t.

You can say to the starclusters of the New England asters

when you’re startled by their wild beauty like a new tenant

in the organic apple orchard you inherited with the house

one early autumn morning these are my eyes, but the seeing

knows different. And the being you are is still a stranger at the gate.

I’ve always tried to live in such a way that my ghosts

were proud of me, though I know how nostalgically absurd that is,

an immaculate misconception of my own ignorance,

an affectionate preference, if nothing else, it gives me an excuse

to celebrate the qualities the dead have incorporated into my life

as effortlessly as the air I breathe for all of us awhile.

And not just the angels, but the demons as well,

the lucidly dark gifts it takes more courage than wisdom to accept.

Compassion continually enlightened by its own delusions.

Inimitable starlight hidden in the glitter of tinfoil.

The inconceivable revealed by the unattainable

like the memory of an event that had already occurred

and been forgotten in the rush to understand it.

How we throw ourselves like keys into the grass at night

and down on all fours begin a systematic search

even when there are no locks on the doors

and everywhere is passage, no exit, no entrance,

out in the open as obvious as space with nowhere to hide.

We fashion compasses and destinations out of

our labyrinths and cul de sacs. We lose ourselves

so deeply in what we’re looking for we’re dying of thirst

immersed in it like fish crying out for lifeboats.

One mile west. One mile east. One step back as

the other moves ahead. Progressing backwards,

in a looping universe is as good as regressing forwards

whether you’re walking with galaxies along the Road of Ghosts,

or standing in your own way without giving your assent

to the creative potential of coming to the end of yourself

like an unassailable impediment, an undeniable fact

that returns you like a key to the open gate

that’s always been yours to enter by as vagrantly

as the map of a lost leaf on the mindstream

that’s been following you blind for lightyears.

PATRICK WHITE

THE CATASTROPHIC INSIGHT

THE CATASTROPHIC INSIGHT

The catastrophic insight. The black hour

on the widow’s back, spirit of ice-picks,

and my blood, my nerves, split ends

of red lightning freaking my flesh

with burning rivers of fire that clings

like tar and creosote to the shrieking skin

as if sound could be cold, silence so mad

peace is a high pitched truce between wars

coiled like the mainspring of a chromosome

in a wind-up alarm clock mistaken for the heart.

Moments of aggressive impersonality,

angry houseflies electrocuting the window

with black power surges in their downed powerlines

as they die on the windowsill, the exhausted words

of some black dwarf of a world that imploded

on itself, baffled and betrayed by the sky

that one day out of the blue, just said no to the light,

no to the houseflies, no to the broken neck of the wren

against a brittle mirage of motiveless clouds

that wrote their names on a black list

that denied them their alienable rites of passage.

Vicious carbon of martyred scarecrows

who insisted they were the favourites of God,

after walking in the brilliant starfields

among the resurgent lyrics of the wildflowers,

I can sense the emergence of mini blackholes

sinking my solar system like eight balls

in a pocket too deep to be retrieved from.

I gnash at nothing as if there were an immaculate intent

behind the brutal venality of random circumstance.

I’m restrained by a straitjacket of killer bees

like a gamma ray burst of toxic thought-waves

that don’t mean anything more than the usual extinction

but reek like the post mortem effects of a curse.

Even an abandoned house that’s burnt to the ground

can give shelter to the sacred syllables

of the song birds that used to sing

from its green rafters like the boughs of my bones

before my mouth was stuffed with ashes like the urn

of the asmatographer I was last week before

I was scalded in this acid bath of a dream fever

that revels without joy in the perverse glee

of disillusioning my will to fight for life

by whispering to me like the chorus line of a snakepit,

you may be strong, you may be immunological fit,

but there’s a limit to how many times you can be bit

and not succumb to the delirious radiation of the melt down.

When your dream of amelioration turns on you

like a pet python in your sleep and presses itself

like a pillow full of fledgling flightfeathers into your face

and says the more you try to believe you can fly

the more I’ll swallow you whole in a single gulp

like that vast sky and all those stars you keep lit

like a nightwatchman of lighthouses and fireflies

along the shipwrecked coasts of your consciousness

deluded by the radiance of their rescue and warning,

the beauty of life and light stepping out of the dark

as if mind were the happy exception to the undeniable

and not the rule as perilous hope wilts like a flower

of crazy wisdom in the eyes of an ailing fool.

And I shall reply, as I do now in this poem

from the deepest watersheds of my volcanic solitude

because I’ve been alienated from the surface

all my life, let despair do what it must. I’m sick

of cringing like a bubble in the shadow of its thorns.

I’ll fly like a cinder of a dragon in the eye of a hurricane.

I shall enlist an army of heretics and lead them

in a holy war against recalcitrant hypocrites

who haven’t got the imagination to stand up

for their wardrobes and personas when depression

pulls the plug on the applause of their pollsters.

Being true has got nothing to do with being right.

Though the road I’m on be trampled

into a bog of starmud and snapping turtles

pull my wild constellations down like swans and eagles

I’ll remain shining as sidereally

as a blade of mystically surrealistic stargrass.

I’ll make a faith of my spite, a religion

of all the most cherished mistakes I’ve made

believing in life as the most inspired child of the light.

Though spurs of razorwire cut the tendons of my winged heels

I’ll morph into a clubfoot dancing with fireflies

in the condemned ball room of a homeless starmap

and I won’t think twice about the worth of the sacrifice.

Even when death holds its dress sabre

up to my jugular like the last crescent of the moon,

I’ll remain the unkempt buffoon of my upbeat futility

and smile like an eclipse in face paint as if

I knew something absurdly wise about being alive it didn’t.

PATRICK WHITE