I'VE GROWN OLD REMEMBERING YOU WHEN YOU WERE YOUNG

I’VE GROWN OLD REMEMBERING YOU WHEN YOU WERE YOUNG

I’ve grown old remembering you when you were young.

How much wiser we were then though we didn’t know it

than I am now, or you would have been, had you lived.

Ignorant of the outcome of desire, sometimes it’s better

to drown, than learn to keep your head above water, or swim.

I made a liferaft of my bones to get to the other side

of my heart. Like the moon, one half bright, the other, dark.

I’ve knocked on so many doors the past left ajar,

but for a long time you never answered.

Looked into so many eyes so far from home,

hoping to catch a glimpse of your shadow

moving past the window like a waterbird backlit by the moon,

and though some of them had your mouth, some, your hair,

some your earlobes hung with silver chandeliers of rain

falling from your wings like a broken rosary of waterdroplets,

none of them had your soul, none were as lost

and inimitable as you unanswerably were.

Street rose, how is it my tears are still pierced by your thorns

after all these years? Out of the midnight blue,

without warning, idling among the river reeds,

or rooted in the wavelengths of the mindstream, some star

spears me through the heart like a fish on the barb of the moon

and I have to sit down among the rocks at the water’s edge

with a vision of beauty and love and the passage of time

too unbearably immense for flesh and blood to carry

like so many other empty buckets and sad bells back

from the abandoned wishing wells where the ghosts gather

to recall what it was like to want something once.

Long for someone so badly you would gladly

have endured a thousand spiritual deaths and metaphoric rebirths

as I have done, for one life of being wounded and healed,

exalted and terrified by the mystery of what or who

you truly loved like the eclipse of a moonrise in your blood

more indelibly than death itself appears in the black mirror

when you look deeply into it like a starmap of music

as your last futile hope of bringing someone back

and your eyes freeze like star sapphires deep underground

with what they see like fireflies and lightning in the sockets

of prophetic skulls whose eyes are the jewels of the dead.

Perpetual muse, you, unnamed, who distinguish my words still

with the intimacy of your absence, daughter of the abyss

I was left with when you lost your nerve and collapsed

like a suspension bridge over the moonlit thread

of your spine below when the safety web broke like the illusion

of a dreamcatcher, like the beads of the constellation

the sun belonged to when we first encountered each other

like alien planets driven out like black sheep of the solar system

and looked back at its dwindling light from a long way off

and knew of a certainty, you were, as was I,

alone in this remote space with each other,

estranged companions for life. Was it not so,

and has it not always been in its own unique way as it is now?

Between your silence and my voice have we not evolved

a dream grammar by which the living can speak to the dead?

Do I not hear you in the broken-hearted train whistle

mourning into the distance with no help for its sorrow

and in the long mantra of the wind in the aspens

and the gaping mouths of the waterlilies awed

by the symmetrical similarity of their astonished silence

to that of the stars looking ahead in wonder

at what they’ve been flowering into for lightyears.

Long after your ashes were scattered with beautiful sentiments

mingled like rose water in every one’s tears

to bless the flightpath of a fire bird’s return to the elements

from a precipitous cliff out over the sea at night

as if we weren’t saying farewell to a woman who had lived

like one of us, but were attending the sky burial of a comet

who had made a Tunguskan impact on everyone she encountered,

was it not me, when all the other listeners

thought they’d heard the whole of the message you had to say

and left you alone in the dark in an empty hall

that first perplexing night of being dead among the stars,

who went on listening to your omens as if there

could never be an end of the flames and feathers of meaning

that unfolded in the wake of your passage across

the desolate seas and annulled atmospheres of my lunar heart?

What pain, what joy, grief, loss, enlightenment,

life in death and death in life have I not endured,

what loneliness not embraced as if it were

more deeply exiled from everything it had ever known

than I was when I blew out the last candle of votive fire

like a broken dragon missing one its own in its reclusive solitude?

Even the ashen sages weep like urns of wisdom

for the extinction of the light that taught them

to see in the dark with a compassionate heart

that insight walks the same path delusion does

and attachment, too, is another paling of moonlight

on an open gate that all humans must pass through

to pay homage to the fountains and watersheds

love brings to flower in their gardens and cemeteries alike.

Many times I’ve sensed your tenderness in the sensitivities

of the carillons of wild columbine that rang

discretely in the silence like rain chimes in the spring

and I came to understand it was you, whenever

I wandered along the river like a troubled sleepwalker

through the mystic cults of the woods at night

into a clearing like the third eye of the torrent

that roared all around me like a wounded black hole,

it was you in the sanctuary of your concealment who revealed

that thoughts and emotions like the unsanctified oceans

of tormented stars I wanted to drown in, weren’t

static states of mind where space turns brittle

as the looking glass you get locked into,

but dynamic events of the heart that shatter

our crystal skulls into unknown configurations of light

rising like new constellations out of the regenerative chaos

that watered the old gardens of our starmaps

with the splinters of broken chandeliers that cut our eyes

like tears in an early spring thaw. It was you

as surely as it was the clear light of the void within me

who whispered to me that night I was on the verge

of liberating the past from the future of a bad precedent

that we don’t live separately from the dead,

that each of us is the embodiment of the longing

of unnumbered myriads who released their hopes

and dreams and prayers like smoke and birds

and cedar boughs of incense on the wind

knowing they probably wouldn’t be there

to hear the answer if one ever did come back again.

Where else but now is the future made manifest

by the summons of the past in a voice

we recognize as everyone’s including yours and mine?

Just as I see your eyes in this insight like the occult bliss

of the dawn at midnight writing immanental love lyrics

in the journals of nocturnal wildflowers confiding in the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

IF ONLY I COULD REMEMBER YOU AS YOU WERE

IF ONLY I COULD REMEMBER YOU AS YOU WERE

If only I could remember you as you were

for a few, brief radiant moments as indelible

as light in space and not as time would have it

the way things have changed. To see you

lingering in the doorway on a winter night,

the snow lying lightly on your hair like the Pleiades

over your shoulder descending below the treeline

as if it knew more about saying good-bye than you did,

and o how I loved you for it. If only I could

remember that lonely ghost of a mirage

that hovered over the watershed of your tears

and looked at me like the first lifeboat

you’d seen in a thousand years respond

to your s.o.s. in a hourglass. If only I could remember

the fragrance of the summer rain on your skin

as if it had mistaken you for one of the flowers

and how I used to like wiping your tears away

with my opposable thumb like plum blossoms from your cheeks.

Eternity coming to the surface of time

like old corduroy roads and bones in a makeshift graveyard.

Not likely I’ll ever see you again in this life

but if only I could remember you before circumstance

underwhelmed itself and killed the ambiance

of our last dance by turning all the lights on at once.

But there you go, no help for it. The nightbird

transits the moon and the eternal sky as is said in Zen

doesn’t inhibit the flight of the white clouds.

And this moment, too, though it’s endured

a thousand deaths to come to this afterlife,

always saying good-bye to some aspect of you

that symbolizes the evanescence of love and life

in metaphors that buff the open wound

like scar tissue on the moon, like fireflies

welding living insights into the dead brain coral

of this encyclopedic coma life

can sometimes seem without you, even after

all these ensuing misadventures it would take a fire

and half a dozen bottles of wine to tell you about

if only I could remember you as you once were

like the lamb that laid down with the lion without fear.

For light years, images of you have flashed out of the abyss

as sharp and quick and vital as moonlight

wielding a sabre, or a bird quickened by a purpose

out of the unknown into the unknown

and I recognize them as blossoms that have blown

far from the tree that was lovelier

than the whole orchard to me, though angels

attended upon it like scripture from its roots to its leaves,

you were the locust tree with your demonic thorns

I wanted to tear my heart on like a rag of blood

on the galactic razorwire that encircled your heart

like a storm of dark matter with unlimited potential

for creative destruction that got the light out of the way

long enough for us to see what glowed behind it.

If only I could remember you as you were

when we both made eye-contact with each other

like exo-planets in the void, and understood spontaneously

it wasn’t going to take much of a wavelength

for either of us to understand this immediately

as if we could read each other’s shadows like Mayan calendars.

Water hemlock, wild parsnip, sometimes

the memories scald like volcanic dew on bare skin,

but seldom have I ever regretted

that I lived through you for awhile,

when the stars raged in my heart like a madman

obsessed by the crazy wisdom of a woman

who had the wingspan of a bow on a bent event horizon

but knew enough about compassion

to push the burning arrow of my fascination with her

all the way through like a blood sacrifice to love and life

and the mystery that moved in the darkness up ahead

like the fork in the road that separated us,

like a wishbone that had granted all it had to give.

How tenderly painful the brevity of what

we actually relive again as if some moments in life

are illuminated by a different light than that

we read by in bed late into the night

looking for translucency in the windows of insight

that keep on opening their eyes in this recurrent dream

like the black waterlilies of new moons coming into bloom.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT AN IMPASSE, QUIET MOMENT, COME TO THIS

WHAT AN IMPASSE, QUIET MOMENT, COME TO THIS

What an impasse, quiet moment, come to this

deeper than a bell in the dead of winter. Grime

on the grey windows as if I were living inside

a sooty lantern, consuming the flesh of my body

in fire that will make me indelibly invisible

for generations to come, to each, the prelude of a ghost

that produced abundantly out of nothing

windfalls of the imagination that shook me like a tree.

I lived like a slag heap of ore for the sake of the jewels within.

Amino acids in a meteor with a genome

falling out of the abyss like a star you could wish upon

and risk getting what you really wanted

though you weren’t honest or courageous enough

to believe it at the time. Starwheat for the soul,

bread massaged by human hands, black pearls

with the lustre of a thousand new moons

you’d forgotten about your life, the dark beginnings

of something splendid that died inside of you

like creosote on the chimney pipes that creaked

like the arthritic boughs of tin trees in a firestorm.

The snow outside draped over the phantoms of buildings

like ragged cotton dust covers over the furniture

of the abandoned town as if the owners

always intended to come back one day. Time

squatting on the property like juniper and thornapple

in an overgrown field returning the way it came

like a prodigal that made it home lightyears too late.

Leafless municipal trees stripped of their legends.

I know more about being alone at night

than the moon does when everyone’s asleep

grinding their teeth like millstones geared

to the endless waterwheels of their mindstreams

going round and round without a stop, a top

or a bottom as if it were crucial to be homogenous.

Everyone trying to stand out in the crowd

like a retinal response to the black hole

in the middle of their moondog iris like a pupil

they’ve never put up to their eye to look through.

Witching the abyss for water with branch lightning

is a much more dangerous calling for wizards

that have more in common with solitary dragons

than they do with the scintillant eyebeams

of magic wands chirping in fountains of stardust

that spring out of the optic fibres of whatever

they look upon, like a rosary of dew lying

about the death trap of the spider web it’s ensnared by

in the false dawn of a mandala that makes

everyone feel better by lulling them with the opioids

of the lotus-eaters who never got off the island

to see how vast and exhilarating the sea of life truly is.

When the starmaps stop at the edge of your eyes

and you’re not disobedient enough to cross the threshold

you eventually die in a cul de sac of sticky constellations.

Shore-huggers in the tidal pools of your stagnant tears.

No need to go to a war of lenses over it. The karma’s

as instantaneous as the charismatic depravity

of the electromagnetism of your name. One day

when you’ve donated it like a black walnut

to scientific research lab for tax deductible lobotomies

someone’s going to cut deep into the sweetmeat

of your brain, to see what you thought about life,

and what it was like to live for the stain

of a little bit of fame so wholly indoctrinated

like a polyp into a tradition of dead coral,

you gave up thinking lyrically about life and light

in words, and began, at the behest of a patented gene,

expressing it wholly in a grammar of corporate logos.

Fashionably unreal as the Cambrian outbreak of icons

for Exxon and Monsanto, Shell and Microsoft in

in the auto-hagiography of your Burgess Shale.

If the spirit of making a gift of a gift within you is dead,

I suppose the only recourse you have left

for the corpse you’re passing off as the real you,

is a deal and a sale and the hysterical jealousy

you can arouse like a muse in an escort service for that.

A cosmetic surgeon playing Pygmalion with his Botox wife,

not a healer that ever brought anyone back to life

by transfiguring the shape of the universe they dwell in

by reminding them it only takes a little bit of starmud

aged in their tears to mould a face of their own

to the reflection of the infinite spaces contained

by their hearts and minds, eyes, smiles, and grimaces

perfectly fitted to human flesh and blood and skin

like a mirror that looks at them from the inside

to determine the colour of their eyes,

by what they’ve seen, what they’ve dreamed

what they’ve lived for, what they’ve loved,

and what they haven’t dared to look upon before

with a passion so intensely perennial and clear

it will be their eyes that will go out of fashion

long before the stars ever realize that what

breaks out of the darkness into light above

finds the source of its shining looking up at them

from down below and gauges the lifespan

of the radiance of their seeing and depth of being

by how many new moons and lightyears ago since that last was.

PATRICK

NO HONEY IN THE HIVE OF THE LANTERN

NO HONEY IN THE HIVE OF THE LANTERN

No honey in the hive of the lantern,

no flower, no flame, no light, no people

in the warmth of the windows with a sales-pitch,

I sit at my desk in front of this computer-screen,

the snow outside a million gentle pixels of white,

and I wonder if the dead buried in this page

are sensitive enough to feel it on their graves.

And I’m weary of lifemasks trying to achieve

the desired effect while the living eat neglect

and mediocrities are trying to speak

like best-selling books where the stars are just words

and the bees have been culled for humming sacred syllables.

Numb with stasis more than a month now,

no scalpel like the waning crescent of the moon at my wrist,

muses of static electricity jumping from my fingertips

to startle a few dozy lyrics into life, my lips

cracked and cloven by the archaeological air,

I’ve been painting waterlilies and blue dragonflies

to keep something green and liquid alive

in the desperate urns of my soul on the windowsill.

I’m a ladder in a tar pit walking up the down escalator

rung by rung, threshold by threshold, foothold by foothold

feather by feather, salmon by salmon and if there’s a pool

at the top I’m meant to pay regenerative tribute to

in some eternally recurring dream of time

with my black and blue battered life,

and this bent wavelength of my crooked sword, so be it.

I’ll haul myself up like an inevitable lifeboat

to the rescue of my imminent shipwreck

though every nanosecond of the journey’s been

a crisis at the crossroads and I’ve learned to proceed

as I did as a kid with my wings outspread as if I could fly

from one thermal of a dust devil to the next in a back alley

where I used to kick stones down the road

like prophetic skulls I took for granted ahead of me.

If you were born into poverty as I was

and you couldn’t afford inspiration or you sensed

it was an elitist dream that hadn’t been blooded by life

and you stood aloof from it, half wary, half longing,

like a fragrant trap, you could always rely on your ennui

to get things done just to keep from being masticated

by your shelf life as a child. As I do now

experiencing myself as a highly trained doorway

to nowhere in particular as I walk from my easel

to my desk, my desk to my easel, trying to liberate

my disobedience like a caged truant in an aviary

of peacocks and pheasants that strut the fanfare of their tails

like comets stood up like bridal bouquets

at the pale altars of their unmarriageable daybreaks.

Nothing morbid, petty, self-pitying, or vindictive

in my solitude, no secret martyrs trying to beatify

the death of art, no ecclesiastic heretics breathing

hellfire and brimstone like scripture from their matchbooks,

I listen to the rasp of the same man I heard last winter

shovelling snow off the sidewalks in front of the bank

and the first drugstore ever established in heritage Canada

as if he were scraping off a canvas down

to the grisaille underpainting to start again and again

and again, as the storms pass over like a living

and I bond with him, how could I not, no one awake

but he and I, as a self-disciplined Sisyphean familiar,

labouring as anonymously as I am to do something useful

as hauling an avalanche uphill into a snowbank

where the heads of the parking meters are protruding through

like iron daffodils and frozen rat snakes too comatose yet

to dream of the vernal equinox liberating the sidewalks.

Almost six. The quick fix of the dawn soon calling it quits

for the nightshift that lives underground, and I’m still

caught in the coils of my genomic stairwells like the coils

of oracular pythons high on the volcanic fumes

of poetic caldera preparing to explode

like the igneous flowering of a magmatic watershed

gone supernova like an old luminary withdrawing into itself

like an emotional neap tide before a tsunami of starlight

beaches me like the ark of the Burgess Shale

high in navigable mountains of nautical rocks

after forty days and nights on a frozen sea of insight.

PATRICK WHITE

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