WHEN THE UNSAYABLE SUPPLANTS YESTERDAY'S WISDOM

WHEN THE UNSAYABLE SUPPLANTS YESTERDAY’S WISDOM

When the unsayable supplants yesterday’s wisdom

it makes it look obvious and trivial in retrospect

and you marvel at the spiritual gestures of goodwill

that swept you off your feet for light-years

as the arcana of a discipline you gave up trying to master,

because you could only see into the matter

as far as the light you were given to go by.

And you didn’t know then that when

you blew the candle out you held

pathetically up to the abyss that you did more,

by blowing it out, to illuminate the universe,

than you did when you fed it your heart

to keep it burning like a night light among the stars,

or a lighthouse paling in the full glare of the sun.

Off the path is the way of the path.

How can anyone be lost? Or found, for that matter?

Midways of gurus with their touring freak shows.

Sacred matchbooks of budding sulphur

throwing humans into the Bonfire of the Vanities,

chasing the bank-rolled Renaissance out of Florence.

Terminal literalism, infectious symbolitis

sweeping down the coast like hemorrhagic fever

from the merchant fleets of Genoa. The wild grape vines

of intuitive insight converted into the razor wire

of paranoid orthodoxies. The heretics bear witness

to the madness in the judgement of their abusers,

and scald the clouds with their blood for it.

The spiritual highways cluttered with exiles,

refugee saints, and scapegoats, where is there

a wilderness left where the tourists don’t go

to gawk at the hermits like wildlife? Back

to the birch groves and the cawing of the crows

like auctioneers that don’t have a thing to sell.

No one’s footprints to follow in. The way things

turn out, at best, a wolf path through the snow

gone by spring, or where you bent the waist high grass

by walking through it like the path of least resistance,

unmapped as the wind. What is it all, when

even the seven-tiered tower of the Scotch thistle

is a mental event, if not open, unknown and empty

in the sense of being indefinable, not missing,

as if anything were there in the first place

it was crucial not to lose? Spare your tears.

Life hasn’t got anything to repent or reform.

The mystery manifest as it is and that’s the whole of it.

What more of it is there to reveal, than the rocks

have already said? Real, not real, the flowers bloom nonetheless

and you’re free to make or feel or think or not

about them as you wish. Mourn the ruination

of the flowers in a passion play as old as the stars

or trust your own mind to mentor you in the ways

of not reifying it into a thing among things,

the source and matrix of your most cherished illusions,

the mirage of the dark mother who eats her own like time.

There is no pattern, path, paradigm, psychodynamic

or unified field theory that the mind won’t

accommodate itself to like a child’s drawing of the universe.

You can elaborate the roots of a tree like a fractal into

a morphology of knowledge forms

that sing in its boughs like sparrows

in the black walnuts of the morning

and then consult it like the grammar of a dream

for the blue print or starmap of the house you’re building

like a screening myth with a built-in library.

The magician gulled in the doorway of his own magic,

having lost the key to the spell he cast

when this desert of stars was merely

the vagrant threshold of a tent in the moon’s back yard.

The folly of sages, the wisdom of fools,

what’s the point of enlightening your own freedom

if you’re too afraid to accept it as the mystical mundanity

that’s under your nose this very moment?

You can hunt your own shadows down like heretics

fleeing the hounds of heaven, you can denounce

an eclipse for being a sunspot on your illumination

and polish the mirror for the rest of your life

and still not wash your face off with a paint rag

like a clown in a green room waxing tragic

to counteract the laughter at the expense of his own wounds.

Look into the eyes of the roadkill for yourself

as if no one else in the world can do your seeing for you

and you won’t see anything very shocking to be afraid of.

No spiritual snake-eyes. No hidden meaning

you have to get at the guts of like a turkey-vulture.

And if you feel compassion, and it’s natural you should,

it’s because there’s something communal about the random

you sense has been going on a lot longer

than the last few thought moments when you showed up

to be misunderstood by your own imagination.

You want some good spiritual advice to get you in the habit

of taking it yourself, whether things are sublimely rough

and death is dying into you, or life is trivializing

the palatial playhouse it was born into? When occasion arises,

and when does it not, learn to call your own bluff

and sit down on the ground, and have a good laugh.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT'S BEYOND THE TRUTH ALWAYS MAKES A LIE

WHAT’S BEYOND THE TRUTH ALWAYS MAKES A LIE

What’s beyond the truth always makes a lie

of what you can say about it. You can feel it

even as the words fall from your mouth like a bird bath.

However beautiful, however clear, translucent, well-meaning,

there’s always one syllable more that’s missing

that everything turns on like a black hole at the nave

of the wheeling galaxy, an unsayable singularity.

Love the radiance of the spokes, but where’s

the vehicle you were trying to assemble

from the yarrow sticks in the Book of Changes?

We get as far as the scaffolding we piece together

out of the bones of the snakes and ladders

we climbed up on like monkey bars to paint

our last masterpiece, and when it’s done,

however admired, it’s a paint rag of the original vision

by comparison with what flashed through our heart

like the spearhead of a life-changing insight

into the nature of chameleonic shapeshifters

mimicking our gestures like mirrors in a game of charades.

I’ve spent most of my life listening like a liar

to what I can’t say. The eclipse of an ink blot

on the silence even when the hummingbirds

gather like tuning forks to sample the larkspur.

I can say it like a star, a flower, the black swan

of a new moon making its first incision of light

like the slash of a scalpel across my throat,

but when the summons of the nightbird

stops singing on its green bough, realizing

no one’s ever going to come who understands

the inspiration and the longing, the Slavic solitude,

for all that I’ve tried to express as lyrically as I can,

I still feel the inarticulate urgency of an abyss

with its tongue cut out of what I tried to say

kicking me from the inside like the embryo

of a stillborn sky burial silently mouthing the wind

like the autumn leaves of a lonely death song.

Always an ear out of reach, a flightfeather

of a voice shy of the saying, a secret letter

of the alphabet without a likeness born of the eyes.

As if I used a blackboard and a bullet of chalk

as an understudy for the shining of the stars

or gummed the anthem of the sea like a brittle-lipped shell

I found washed up among the sea stars

like a larynx at my feet. Though I can sing

like the trees in the morning without forgetting

that every aubade is also a farewell to the stars

as sincere a field of nesting skylarks as I try to be,

my earthbound starmud rising like a constellation

of arcane serpent fire burning at the eastern doors

of the black wisdom of life arising out of the death

of what it engendered it. As with the flesh, so the spirit

salvages the detritus of what remains of its disillusions

and labours to enclose its emptiness in a chrysalis

of meaning and matter that might induce a transformation

of nothing into dragonflies. Stranger things have happened.

Truth is, according to the uncertainty principle,

the universe isn’t a metaphor, it’s a simile

for something you can’t quite put your finger on

like mercury trying to keep a starmap together in an earthquake.

I’ve looked into the future through a window

into an empty room no one’s booked into yet

and I’ve sometimes felt the same agony of stillness

being prepared by space and time as an available dimension

life hasn’t arrived to occupy yet, too busy in the present

to anticipate what’s coming like luggage from the past.

Words were the negative space. I worked in absence.

And something would always be missing. Words

were quantumly entangled like fish in the nets

of assent and denial, like spaced out fireflies on their way

to the stars, enmeshed in the torn spider webs

dripping under the weight of the panicked choirs

of dissonant frequencies strung like trashed guitars

with stagefright at the karaoke microphones of the streetlamps.

The medium beats around the message like nocturnal insects

against a window screen between them and a scented candle.

Young, my words were Luna moths and astronauts

that ached to immolate themselves in the stars

but as I got older, looking back over my shoulder

at the ashes of the winged heels of my nobler aspirations

compared to this long firewalk I’m travelling barefoot now,

and the largesse of the mystery that tunes celestial spheres

to the sound of mosquitoes whining in the woods at night

like dental drills and the villanelles of pubescent poets

that set your teeth on edge, I realized, at best,

words were just a way of whistling in the dark

with the rest of the nightbirds when the stars were out

and the moon was casting shadows as revealing as the light.

That’s when it began to dawn on me the worst lies

are always the clearest, simplest, easiest to understand

like straight lines to curves, highways to serpentine rivers,

things seen retinally from the outside like artists

with eyelids like the shutters of cameras with no feeling

for what they were looking at like reptiles

with third eyes that rarely ever blinked at anything.

Eye on the object reality when poets took notes

in white lab coats as if they were experimenting with fruitflies

under a lens instead of experiencing life as a vision

they’re collaboratively involved in like the dream grammars

of zodiacal alphabets written like eleven dimensional starmaps

on the backs of their eyes, hidden harmonies of the unseen

shining from the inside out like an emerald star

in the heart of an apple, under the skin of the sunset,

liberating the seed syllables of new myths of origin

from the straitjackets of a dysmorphic reality

that insists it’s the true shape of the universe

when it’s only another mirage of water trying

to put out a cosmic root-fire of underground stars.

Listen like an empty lifeboat to the mermaids

singing in the fog. Turn the light around and see

the evanescent shadow of smoke emerging

from the urn mouth of the chimney silhouetted

like lyrical dark matter on the roseate field stones

of a new morning closer to the vernal equinox

raising the level of the bright vacancy of consciousness

even as it lowers the dark abundance of the night

in a lock of light across the street opening its floodgates

on the walls of a heritage bank like a rite of passage.

Here on earth I’ve learned to reason surrealistically

according to the logic of asymmetrical similitudes that occur

in the dark of the mind like starfields of fireflies

all talking to each other at the same time

in a conversation about the next constellation

they might possibly be and what to name it after

once inspired by the muse of their prophetic memories

to remember what associative insights they forgot

when they first learned to write like cracks

in the archival creekbeds of their neo-cortex.

Next time you put words to a page like a loveletter

to a mysterious black rose that’s eclipsed

by the light of a one-eyed liar, trust your own nose

and ask yourself if they’re alive enough to smell the silence.

If the absence that surrounds them lingers in the air

like the aurora of an ancient solitude fragrant with light.

If there’s any joy of life in the starmud you blood with insight.

PATRICK WHITE  

AND THESE LINES

AND THESE LINES

And these lines like the opening wake of a boat I’m not in.

Or is it the opening of an old wound unsealing itself like a loveletter?

Or the world held up to the lips of this fever like a spoon?

There are shadows in the valley of a scar

that sometimes mistake themselves for leaves

and turn their sewers into wine

and reel in the unmoving delirium of a black noon

when the hands of the clock disappear

into the cool centre of their turning

and time is sheathed like mercy in the darkness.

Suffering shadows my blood like a map

and so I look for joy in everything

as if my death were already achieved and behind me

and I could linger over the morning and end of everything

like a wet winter fog that doesn’t try to cling.

The tree outside the window in my writing room

is the axle of existence

and every ring of its heartwood

is the expanding wheel of the world,

as it is with every breath. But this is precisely where

I keep losing myself in the ineffable urns and ashes

of the unsayable beyond, not just of death,

but of all that life hasn’t been

to one who loved it like his only chance.

A firefly agitates the darkness more

than all the lightning of my awareness

when I consider the spectral vagrancy of my thought

calling to me like a hill to an unmoored lifeboat

to see if anyone survived the last sinking of the moon.

And my sorrows are bells of water that toll like the sea

for all the incredible dead who are buried in me

like marrow in the bone.

Which is to say no more than another

labouring under the weight of being human.

And I know of a lyrical clarity that’s free to sing what it wants,

that lifts the snake up with wings

and enfolds it in the infinite solitude of the sky

and lets it shine eyes beyond the reach of the light.

Here words jump like fish on the moon

and the dead branch is an orchard in bloom

and yesterday picks up its shoes and roads behind it

and there isn’t a shadow born of the light that can follow me

and tomorrow isn’t the ambassador of my next breath

arriving with urgent news

to wake up the dead

like a poppy or an ambulance in a nightmare.

Here the lucidities ripen like eyes with every eclipse

and the bright vacancy of the glaring moonskull

is broken like the bread of a dark abundance

that feasts in the seed of everything.

I watch the snowflakes fall randomly outside

and try to assess the chances

of finding the moon in an oyster,

remembering the unattainable has no threshold

to blunder my way across like spiritual junkmail.

The world is a drop of water flowing out of its own eye.

A squirrel natters and gnashes its annoyance

at my propinquity and for a moment

affirms that I exist by the intensity of its denial.

And it wasn’t just seas that the moon lost, not just seas,

but the sky that softened her stars as well.

The thought falls like a key on rock,

a fly at a winter windowpane,

forgetting what it once could open,

and I let it take its place at the table

like a ghost of salt that looks a lot like me

because we both mourn for the same lost sea,

born of the same bell. But let the starmud settle,

the dust compose what it will, thoughts fall

like the flightfeathers of passing birds

that do not stop to sing because my voices

echo in the cocoons of ten thousand transformations,

and who I was in the prelude that just walked past,

is now the likeness of my dissimilarity,

hobbling like a bridge on crutches downstream

or a disoriented pilgrim on the smokeroad to fire

as all the Gothic glaciers evaporate like churches.

Do you see how space conforms me like the wind

to the shapes of my own faceless emptiness

as I stand over the silence like a heron or a pen

waiting for fish that slip away like waves on the moon?

Madness or enlightenment? Asylum or shrine?

I have deepened my ignorance enough not to care.

My flesh, a wardrobe of ghosts.

My mind, the gesture of a star in the dirt.

My heart, blood on the thorn of the moon.

And still, my spirit cries out like an abyss

for the dead wasp on its back on the windowsill,

as if there were a will to my foolishness

tangled like wild morning glory

in the trellises of the constellations

where the great roses of the night

are enthroned in their bloodlines,

and do not acknowledge the passage of the small urgencies

that are dotted like periods at the end of their own sentences.

I accord the wasp, the squirrel, the tree,

full rights to my identity

in this agony of being,

this fellowship of suffering,

and with no more authority than the spontaneous value

a jest of compassion attributes to my clownish humanity

and the solitudes of anguish it must endure

to keep on approximating its life

like the long draw of the straw in a hurricane.

I have lived and wept long enough

not to trust any insight

that doesn’t feel the pain

growing eyes like a gate in the rain.

How have any of us not suffered

and cried out in our alienation

I am human, I am human,

as if our despair could voice

the violence of our relentless insignificance?

And when I say this, understand,

there isn’t anything it could possibly mean

if it doesn’t heal, if it doesn’t say

to the widow alone for the first night

or the scar of the moon in the window,

or the child savaged by atrocity

who was left torn and alone in the dark,

there is no one to whom we can plead,

no one who could hear

the scream of the hell

poured from your blood

like the iron voice of a misshapen bell,

no one who can unseed the life you’re rooted in,

no one, not even you, to know your need

for intimate fires in the ashpits of your stars

that suddenly flare up like flowers

to consume that which surpasses itself in wonder,

but when you’re wounded by the horsemen in the night

who trample you like a pulse, know this, I bleed

like the same resonance of ruptured atoms

and my harp is split like a wishbone

and my heart is the wilted lily, the failed parachute

of a sidereal hemorrhage, and I

am darker than the eyelids of the gods

with anger that you should suffer so

and not know, not know

the delirium of the seed

that is buried in your wound

like the herb of the eclipse that lived you like enlightenment.

PATRICK WHITE

COUNTING ORPHIC SKULLS ON THE ABACUS OF A SPIDER WEB

COUNTING ORPHIC SKULLS ON THE ABACUS OF A SPIDER WEB

Counting Orphic skulls on the abacus of a spider web.

Listening to them click like pool balls, crabs and castanets.

I’m beading new solar systems out of the nebular air. I’m seeding

clouds of unknowing with genetically unmodified meteors.

I’m lawn bowling with black holes. I’m collecting

echoes of zeroes from the rain on shepherd moons

and trying to link them like empty buckets

into a waterclock of life that flows inflammably

like thicker tears of methane on the surface of Titan.

I’m Saint Darkness in a sensory deprivation tank.

My aspirations are houseflies belly up on a window sill.

My longings have all been exorcised like the baby ghosts

I keep in incubators like the mangers of messiahs

on the night ward, knowing no one will ever come

to claim them. I give them names and raise them on my own

like poems that take me for granted as I teach them

to walk all over me like a starmap you could drown

your sorrows in. How not to be crucified

for the metaphoric content of the message you deliver.

And if you’re going to rise from the dead, rise

like the unknown headwaters of an alluvial river

that can grind civilizations of wild starwheat into bread.

So the angels can hover over the town

at four in the morning, knowing no one

went to bed hungry and listen to the prayers

of the people they can’t do anything to help

except hang there like the curtains of the northern lights

as if they were thinking out loud in the dream grammar

of a mystic trying to paint the mystery of life

in a palette of picture-music that hurts as deeply

as it illuminates the beauty and the agon

of staying alive long enough to know what for.

I celebrate the dangerous awareness of my crazy wisdom

on the merest of hunches that play on the bird bone flutes

of my deepest hopes lingering like lyrical spirits

around the asteroid belts of my archaic graves

rolled like thousands of stones away from the tomb of Sisyphus

trying to beatify his absurdity like an orbiting avalanche.

Good luck, my brother. Watch out for low-flying telescopes

trying to shoot out any stars it catches in its cross hairs

like a spiritual trespasser trying to transit two thresholds at once.

And don’t be discouraged if you hear them calling Einstein a dunce.

Sooner a persistent fool ageing wisely than a sporadic sage

acting out like a bitter green apple in late winter.

Put it down to the age I live in. The fountain of youth

is syrup in a Coke can everyone is sipping from

like hummingbirds on crack, fish in medicated water

outside their dilated kitchen windows next

to the hemorrhaging thermometers of their patriotic syringes

at a needle exchange for global warming.

No mercy asked. None received. Take all the space you want.

The gravitational eyes of the universe are upon you, sunbeam.

Shine on, shine on, shine on. You’ll be a wildflower yet.

I’m trying to be rationally surrealistic about the perversity

of the ambitions of perfect vacuums sucking the life

out of their fellow insects like parasitic guests

of the corporations they’re elected by like mud slides.

The free press has become a screening myth, a smoke screen,

a trivially, distractive one-eyed liar. Politicians

lead with their anus like mouthy monostomes

for whom it doesn’t make a difference what end

they speak out of, to, or for. How deranged

does it have to get before the electorate stops consulting

expert proctologists who speak like rubber gloves

for spiritual advice about their innovatively tragic lives

in the most pleonastically, lucrative of times

before everyone starts talking in tongues

to the local nightbirds like I do whenever

I want to get something off my chest

like an avalanche of gravestones and asteroids

trying to jumpstart my life all over again

by upgrading the quality of the starmud

they spread all over my alluvial plain

like lunar corn silk and a few more scarecrows

that get along, whatever the song, with the nightbirds

in the hallowed valleys of my brain

where I sow thorns and question chaos about my solitude.

PATRICK WHITE

A LITTLE THOUGHT IN A BIG SPACE

A LITTLE THOUGHT IN A BIG SPACE

A little thought in a big space, I’m falling

through my own immensities here at my desk,

one of my Icarian propensities for plunging into things.

My voice intimidated by the violence of the silence within.

I’m on the dark side of my eyes.

No one’s ever been here before.

No window, no wall, no door,

I’m on the threshold of my homelessness again.

I’m looking at stars, but I feel like rain.

I’m talking to ghosts that I don’t remember.

Might be the wrong medium, but it’s the right seance.

I don’t even know what I’m doing here myself

but it seems I’m free to go or stay as I wish.

I’m wearing my shadow like a candling parachute

that didn’t step back from the edge in time.

No point in pretending you’re an airborne dandelion

when you feel like a rock with a message

someone just threw like the moon through a mirror

disguised as a sky the night birds keep flying into blind.

No one asks your name here on this pyre of a sky burial

if your birth certificate says you were born in fire.

Desire anything you like. It was all written in smoke

before you came. And these words that are saying me here

have been out of the aviary of the lantern for light years.

Who knows where the light goes or what if falls upon?

Trying to shine in a dark time without taking anything away

from the lunar eclipses that aren’t in need of enlightenment.

Don’t know if I’m a solar flare, a firefly, a matchbook,

or a lightning bolt that keeps stressing my starmud out

by sneaking up on it from behind and overdoing things a bit.

If you find yourself trying to pry the flowers open

with a crowbar or a koan, and it’s nightfall, it’s

time to turn your hourglass in for a waterclock

and see how the stars emerge out of nothing

as soon as you deepen the dark with a more acute sense of timing

that let’s everything happen spontaneously by itself.

Even if you’re the lighthouse of your dreams

that doesn’t mean you’re the nightwatchman

keeping his third eye on you in the shadows

like a theft of fire you can get away with

this second time around with only a warning.

If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.

And if you did, whining about it in your sleep

isn’t going to help and who’s Spartan enough these days

to stash the fox under their tunic to keep

from being caught while it eats them alive?

If you want to be a dragon you’ve got to learn

to swallow people’s hearts like hot coals as if they were chocolates,

without wincing. The stars don’t come out

like emergency candles you’ve been saving

for exactly this kind of situation. And if

you really want to know the truth about illumination,

try and blow one out. Quick, now, look

and see immediately into the clear light of the void

what it’s like to shine without a metaphoric reflection.

The stars here don’t hide their nakedness under a cloak

of black holes and dwarfs that take it all in

but give nothing back like the second hand clothes

of serpents shedding their skin. One size fits all

like a bubble in a watershed of dark worlds

dazzled by how much a single eye can contain

whether it’s hanging from the lip of a flower in the fall

or going down the drain in spring. I know

you hit it like a snowflake on a furnace

and do your damnedest not to cry. Thing is

as unique among billions as you think you are,

there’s not a star in the sky that isn’t a rite of passage.

PATRICK WHITE

MERE THREADS OF THE LIFE WE ONCE LIVED

MERE THREADS OF THE LIFE WE ONCE LIVED

Mere threads of the life we once lived when our feelings

were flying carpets, and more unravelling all the time

where the frayed river meets the sea like the bloodline

of a mindstream that kicked the buckets from underneath

its waterclock after the house had burned down,

the fire was out. Now I ride grey horses with manes of smoke.

On nights like this. Quiet, after midnight, a gesture of snow

frosting the streets outside and my rage

at the atrocities of the pandemonious world,

weary of coming to exonerative conclusions about humans,

hoarse with shrieking murder at God and the stars

for this grotesquerie of death even the gaping silence

that shadows the wonder of being alive can’t answer,

knowing how many times it’s tried before, and failed.

On a night like this when my heart is exhausted

as an asteroid that doesn’t care if it makes

an impact or not in a splash of instantaneous diamonds,

meteoric insights generated out of the catastrophic heat

like pure fire in the heart of its apocalyptic translucency,

I just want to sit by the river and watch it take its time

as I drown my mind in the flowing like a sword

I blunted on the rock of the world and now lay in pieces

like the moon shedding its petals and feathers of light

on the waves of the waters of life, in peace, in tribute

like the falling of the snow, and remember

when I used to reach out to touch your eyelids in your sleep

so gently I could feel what you were dreaming through my fingertips.

I want to put these heavy bells of sorrow down

like a windfall of the fruits of the earth that have

sweetened over time like the labour of a human

that tried like the light and the rain

to add an element of heart to the mix

before the work were taken out of his hands

and returned to the root as he must be soon

with a little more love, a little more beauty,

a little more compassion in the visionary tastes

of next year’s apple bloom as you were to me once.

Awake or asleep, what a seance of stillborn dreams

this passion for life can seem sometimes,

and how strange the vows of the fireflies

we once exchanged, pledging ourselves

to each other’s stars as if they’d forever

remain faithful to the wildflowers of the earth.

Dream-figures in passage who don’t always

wake up with us when we do and so much

torn like a purple passage out of the book of life

like loosestrife from the wetlands, all you can do

is share your memories with your solitude

like the smell of snow in her hair, night on her lips,

autumn burning in her green eyes and the council

of five fires at the sacred meeting place between her hips

where the rivers of her legs met like green boughs

that made the nightbirds ache with longing.

Long gone, years ago, so far away by now

it’s annalled in the archives of the fossils and stars,

all the mystic details conserved like data

in the bottom of a blackhole, the open gates

that once banged in the wind like applause,

unhinged like lapwings and grown over with vetch,

and the black pearls of the prophetic skulls

we consulted like new moons every spring,

thatched over with green moss like a funeral carpet.

Disembodied vapours of what we were, our breath

gone from the windows we used to draw in

trying to get the light right on our tears

when the sun came out after a lightning storm

and waterguilded the rain that dripped from the leaves

like sacred syllables at dusk in a skin of gold,

and gently restored the direction of prayer

to the deranged fields, standing the goblets

of the poppies upright on their altars again,

combing the hairknots out of the disheveled grass,

coaxing the turkey-vultures to spread their wings

to dry like totems at the tops of broken pines

as if they weren’t the undertakers of road kill

for the moment, but war bonnets of eagles in disguise.

PATRICK WHITE