IF YOU HAD ANY COMPASSION FOR YOURSELF

IF YOU HAD ANY COMPASSION FOR YOURSELF

If you had any compassion for yourself,

others wouldn’t have to suffer for you

and the world wouldn’t show you

such a sad, woeful, wounded face.

You wouldn’t see the withering leaves

and petals of the rose in autumn

as merely the scar tissue of its thorns.

In winter, mend your severance.

In spring, attend to your joys.

Like fishing nets and snow fences.

Like delphiniums in a garden bed

that’s beginning to bloom like a starmap.

And you know that stranger inside

that’s always witnessing everything we do

like a perfectly clear mirror, even in dreams?

Take another look, you might be surprised

at whose face you see at a meeting of eyes.

It’s important not to pass judgement on yourself

for fear of condemning the world.

Show me a mirage that isn’t a friend to water

or a wishing-well that resents a rainbow

for the pot of gold at the end, though

no one ever knows which end at the time.

Be kind to your delusive paradigms of life,

as you would an old skin you shed like the moon

when your serpent-fire could no longer contain itself

and broke out of its sacred chrysalis like a dragonfly

that had made itself a house of life out of matchsticks

and went up in flames like a snake with wings.

If you could see your life for what it is,

a teaching device for mentoring your own enlightenment

you might read the books of all the sages

rooted and flowering in you like the wisdom of a seed,

or the star in the ore of a panspermic universe

that was planted in you like the garden you’ve been from birth.

You might think that the wildflowers

are looking up at the stars to understand themselves

but, in truth, they’re looking up at their roots

like rain reveres the lightning that engenders it.

You don’t need to convince the wind of your freedom,

you’ve just got to ride it out to the end,

a friend to yourself, a worthy companion,

the intimate familiar of a cloud with a clear blue sky

or a subliminal lover of the darkness

love mushrooms up in like a moonrise.

If you knew how to nurture yourself

by breaking bread with the spirit of life within you

there wouldn’t be millions of children

all over the world who will go hungry tonight.

They’d be licking the spoon with stealthy laughter

like cookie-batter out of the begging bowl of your heart.

Enlightenment isn’t going to add one ray of light

or a single star to the night you’re already shining in,

and whatever wavelength you’re on, regardless

of the mystic polarities your potential flows between,

like dark matter and light, whether the journey you’re on

is orange or infrared or the blue white violet of the Pleiades,

absorption or emission spectrum alike, no wave

of thought or mind, light, heart or water

is discontinuous with the oceanic consciousness

they rise upon, so why turn back to the source

like a solar flare to ask for directions from a starmap

that sent you out like a bubble in the multiverse to look for land.

You know, if you were more of an explorer

without a preconceived destination, more

of a space probe leaving the solar system periodically,

the rest of us wouldn’t feel so lost or out of place at your table.

And even if you’ve made a vehicle

of the wheel of birth and death

and think you have a firm grasp on things

with your arm out the window in the driver’s seat,

enjoying the passing view with the wind in your hair

without clinging to anything along the way

it still might be a good idea to learn how

to come down off your throne like a pauper

and change a flat tire now and again.

Your life is not an untimely interruption of eternity.

The eternal sky does not inhibit the flight of the white clouds,

and it even bends down sometimes toward the earth

to pick up Venus like a lost earring in the sunset.

It’s your point of view that turns your back on yourself

like the retrograde motion of Mars, not

the planet itself playing rope tricks with your spinal cord.

Why go looking for your mind

like a lighthouse with a flashlight,

a flame for the source of the fire

or a star for the constellation it belongs to,

or the homeless for a home when everyone’s

the foundation stone of their own habitation

wherever they are at the moment.

If you chase the wind, it will be you

that loses its breath like the atmosphere of the moon.

And when you run out of air, breathe light, breathe space,

and don’t try to fix an expanding universe

to your nostrils like a bicycle pump

to get you back on the road again.

Or you’ll find you’re swimming out of your depths

to run to the rescue of an empty lifeboat

that’s already unloaded its contents ashore.

If you don’t want to go blind as a starless night

it’s prescient to eclipse your blazing from time to time,

turn the lights down low, snuff the candle,

and learn to see in the dark there’s just as much reflected

in the depths of the dark abundance

of a black mirror, though it takes time to focus,

than there is in the expansiveness

of the bright vacancy of the white

that takes things in at a glance.

The seed of a every glimpse of insight contains

the whole of the vision in advance,

and at the core of the apple of the issue

is a green star with dark auburn eyes

on the nightshift of the maternity wards of spring.

And o come on now, how long can you hang on

to being this box kite on a string

watching another phoenix ride your thermals

like inspiration on the wing, without feeling

like the premature ghost of yourself at the onset of spring,

all smoke, and no fire, your flightfeathers smouldering

like a pyre of wet maple leaves who haven’t got the courage

to break into flames and flap their wings and rise above it all.

Better to be a weather balloon losing altitude like Icarus

or even a candling parachute taking the fall for all of us,

as daring said feathers and falling took flight,

than not risk falling through the black holes of life to paradise?

And what if I were to tell you’re they’re just the pupils

the light enters through like your eyes into your imagination

to be transformed from a visual into a vision,

the visible form into the invisible shining of the spirit

that raises everything in the known and unknown multiverse,

and the trees and the stars, the rocks and the clouds

are all counting on you to do this for them,

because this is what you’re here for,

if you’ve ever wondered,

to raise them up to eye-level

with a human who knows the names of things

like parents know the names of their own children

running toward them down the street. It’s how

we were meant to meet and greet the universe.

So if once, just once, for my sake, your sake, the sake

of the forsaken with their elbows on the windows of the world tonight

watching it all go by like stars on the firewalks beneath their noses,

that are not embedded in cement like a mausoleum

of movie-stars that refused to become fossils

before their shining was spent,

you took a chance, and that’s all it would take,

one step forward with no return address,

to risk falling down at the dance,

and seven times down, eight times up,

such is life, get up on your own two good feet again

and discover you’ve got wings and spurs on your heels

the rest of us wouldn’t feel so lame

when we came over to your place

like a riot of erratic fireflies to celebrate

the lightning moves of the rain that’s dancing on our graves

where the dead lie down like the corpses of candles

knowing they’ll be reincarnated

as wildflowers and Luna moths

because nothing that’s ever given its life up

to this business of shining on everything alike

from a first magnitude star, to the night light in the hall

that shoos the ghosts away from their portraits on the wall

so the whole world can bloom in the tears of your eyes,

the fire in your heart, and in the human divinity

of the spirit of your imagination, can ever be put out

because every shadow of doubt

leads back the light that cast it

in love and sorrow, time and space

to the life and death mask of your own face.

PATRICK WHITE  

I COME TO A WALL

I COME TO A WALL

I come to a wall, the morning intellectually numb,

soft grey rain on rough-cut fieldstones that have stayed in place

two hundred years like the masonic cemetery of buildings

around town, lodged in time like books on a shelf for show.

I imagine honest, capable men, for the most part, with broken hands

that mended like starfish learning to throw a knuckle-ball.

There it stands, their work, in space and time, functionally sublime

long after life has run out of use for its makers.

Sturdy work, skilled and dirty, did they eventually

ache their lives away, old men with back problems,

sitting on a porch overlooking their wives’ flowerbeds?

Were they fastidious as Michelangelo in the quarries of Carrara

about the marble they chose for their headstones and who,

if their fingers couldn’t grip a chisel anymore, determined

not to lie under shoddy work, would carve them and set them

like jewels back in the earth they took them from? Here

and there the sway-backed stone bends under its own weight

as if it carried the world on its shoulders like an avalanche

it hasn’t let down. Someone solid you could stub your heart on.

How insubstantial this art of the evanescent that practises me

as if silence were making its own reeds for a woodwind

and I was the shriek of a blade of grass between its thumbs.

Discarded stereotypes of the man I would have been

if I hadn’t been born by nature and nurture to seed the sere

with the colour green, and listen to the mute stones sing

of the intangible mysteries of spring that seize them by the throat

like swallows building their nests like begging bowls

in between the cracks of the stone-walling earth. By other means

I build castles for the pageant of the wind on tour

to eat out of house and home, I lay the foundations of zodiacs

to come that will shelter everyone under the eaves

of their shapeshifting signs, symbolic as a guild hall

in a country parade where everyone is represented as an individual

apprenticed to the masterless trade of being themselves

just as they are, each a candidate for their own constellation

like a shire reeve that wins by acclamation. No one else

to run against with the experience of a trained eye

to keep the black and whites of their eighty-eights straight

and on the level like the skeletal keyboard of a celestial piano

playing to a full house of musically inclined ghosts.

I work in quicksand. I work in starmud. I work

on a nightshift of stars like a watchman holding up

the light he’s been given to go by like a lantern in the shadows.

Once I feared madness, but now I know,

as the waxing crescent of the moon sets above

the all night grocery store, it’s an unparalleled labour of love.

It doesn’t matter who or why. Is the rain out of focus

because it has a million eyes and there’s no end of the seeing?

Even in the way it weeps whole firmaments in every drop

along the seam of a blade of stargrass, you can’t halt

the flourishing of life along the unplotted course of the mindstream

making its way to the sea and source of its awareness.

Water remembers everything like the taste of wild irises

because it’s inspired and alive, the legendary beauty

of the fires it fed like daylilies and the ashes in the urns

of the single-petalled roses that flared for a day and a night

before the wind blew them out like loveletters it held over a candle

to read between its tears in the dark the horrendous farewells

of passion and blood that liberate the light from our starmud

and elevate our private sorrows like root-fires into the realms

of the rain that falls like compassion on everything alike

in a world where every experience is a simile of who we are,

imagination individual as a fingerprint in a mirroring consciousness

with no identity of its own, together alone with everyone

bonded like the weather to the sea of awareness we seek shelter in

like a posthumous work of spiritual hospitality that’s been

opening its door to strangers for the last 13.7 billion light years

after the first foundation stone of the universe was laid reciprocally

without pomp and ceremony on the creative side of a singularity

that popped like a mad rabbit out of the white hole of the hat

of a wise magician still gaping like an open window

at her vision of a crazy life before birth and how on earth she did that.

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

SOLID ENOUGH IN THE WORLD FOR ONE DAY

SOLID ENOUGH IN THE WORLD FOR ONE DAY

Solid enough in the world for one day

sit down at your desk and evaporate like something real.

Let your spring mindstream wash your detritus away,

lave your overturned roots like feet that have stood their ground

long enough, as if it were keeping an octopus wet,

or you were sitting down on the job having a good laugh

with radical crows who cherish you like an iconic in-joke.

One sweep of the sword and the knot in your heartwood’s unravelled

like the rain, like the pain you’ve been carrying inside of you

like the bottomless bucket of a baby that’s never going to come to term.

It’s grey outside. The air is opalescent. You’re

pearl diving in an hourglass like a nacreous agitator

that wants to add a little lustre to life. Something satin

that isn’t wasted on a coffin. Fair enough. It’s one

of the nobler ways of ruining your life in the name

of something no one ever completely understands.

Make your mind dark. Walk homeless within yourself

instead of saying you’re lost when all you are

is overwhelmed. Be overwhelmed. Astonished.

Awed. Full of wonder. The way the sky feels

every time the stars emerge like unexpected insights

into the abysmal nature of its creative potential

coming out like wildflowers, each in their own hour,

in the Lanark hills. Trout lily, hepatica, crocus.

Enthrone yourself like a queen or a mermaid

on a rock you like down by the run-off of the river

but this time don’t ask the willows what they think of your song

look at the red-winged blackbirds gathering on the hawthorn

that can tell by the way the wind applauds in the trees

you’ve been practising since they’ve been gone.

Is it so bad? Is it so wrong to enjoy the fire

from the smoke’s point of view once in awhile?

Just drift away into the night as if you had something in common

with the white, sweet clover along the Road of Ghosts.

Who knows what genies might spring from the lamp?

Is it so hard to imagine having a heart like yours

and being at ease with it? Peace doesn’t mean

you take the tension out of life or you have to dance

with the fireflies if you don’t want to. Nothing’s prescribed.

No need to try and heal the medicine. The blue stars

of the sage are shining like sapphires left over from last spring

when you went down into the underworld but refused to drink

what it offered you. A chance to taste death as if

you were homesick for a past you looked forward to having.

The river clarifies itself in its own running. Be carried away

circuitously, as if you’d wandered lightyears from the shrine

of your own lost pilgrimage. Ask any experienced oscilloscope

there’s more intelligent life in a curve than there is in a straight line.

But don’t hold it against the turkey vultures

they’ve got an appetite for roadkill. We’re all buried in life

like organ donors with no idea of who we’re going

to give ourselves to except we hope it’s useful in retrospect

when it comes time to clean out the garage, that we suggested

the mind can make out all right on its own, but you couldn’t part

with your eyes if they didn’t go with your heart

like moonrise in early April, like apple bloom

in the abandoned backyard of the house you were raised in.

Haven’t you suffered enough on this long night journey of your soul

following your gut like runic scars on a Viking sunstone

to dapple your wings in a few fountains along the way,

run down to the bay naked and laughing as if

there were nobody around to scare or plunder

and even Eric the Red must have had a child in him

that sometimes came out to play like a pup seal on an ice floe.

Stop asking the tongues of the roses to say awww

as if they had thorns caught in their throat

like polyps on a voicebox or starlings in a chimney.

Treat your heart to the down and contrails

of unknown flightfeathers for a change

and skip the usual darning needles like an eye

you don’t have to pass through if it’s always closed

this time of the season. There will always be hard rocks

willing as an avalanche to take some of the load off

by kicking your foundation stone from under your feet

like the footstool of the turtle the world mountain balanced on

in a race with Haigha, the mad, March Hare and the Mad Hatter

to see who can make it all the way to May.

Relax. It’s all out of control. No need to be

progressively droll or superciliously altruistic

about bettering a world where the peasants ate cake yesterday

but today they’re engaged in a holy war over the recipe.

Blossom or windfall, leaf or meteor, let things

fall out as they may. Don’t give your roots

a nervous breakdown when the lightning

is witching for water by testing the air with its tongue

to see if you’re enlightened or not, and if not, bite

so you can return like spring every year released from death.

Sit down at your desk. Barefoot. Feel the starmud

ooze between your toes, as if the flesh and mind of the earth

were your flesh and mind, as they are. Be smoke, be tendrils,

linger along your own path fascinated by all the blades

of the wild irises sprouting like jackknifes along the way.

Look at the leaves unfolding like scrolls the way

we used to roll and unroll our tongues as kids.

Could you do that? Or did you whistle better than everybody?

Everybody’s got something that makes them special

some little trick or quirk they’ve mastered

whether the world recognizes it or not, some few did

and they’re still standing there somewhere in time

gaping with their jaws open you could do that

and that was the cherry blossom of the moment

when you were perfect. As the Upanishads say

This is perfect. That is perfect. Take perfect from perfect

it’s still perfect isn’t it? The question’s mine.

But that’s what we’re born and perish with however we change.

The big questions in life aren’t lacking anything,

and the answers, they’re so simple, they don’t like to be asked.

Treat the solid to something new once and awhile

and make it real. You’ll stop being in such a rush

to know who you are when you realize you’re

an ongoing event, not a thing that had to stay home

and look after the farm, and a few exotic peacocks

that moult their eyes every year just for show.

The rich man dies of democracy on his death-bed.

The genius longs to be credibly stupid among people.

The beauty-queen grows jealous of the stars like a firefly.

The athlete grows love handles like a trophy on his perfect physique.

The lover lives in a moment that longs for the past the rest of her life.

The sage wonders if wisdom is a sacred clown or a trickster.

What has the dove got that the crow envies?

Why should you harry oblivion like an alarm clock

as if life were wasting its time on you if you didn’t hurry up?

PATRICK WHITE  

I SEE IN THE EYES OF SO MANY PEOPLE THESE DAYS

I SEE IN THE EYES OF SO MANY PEOPLE THESE DAYS

I see in the eyes of so many people these days

this unclaimed look as if their heart had never belonged to anyone

or only long enough to hurt, as if they’d spent

too much time in the lost and found isolated

by a longing for reunion with someone who forgot.

Above ground and usually happy about it,

the days pass like most of the lives of the people

in this town, hawthorn and lilac, locust tree

and willow, goldenrod and aster, loosestrife

and waterlilies that decay like cheap ice cream cones,

all the temperaments and moods, tumult and truce

of humans putting a good face on their wounds

like the scab of the moon that keeps them

from bleeding out into space like a lost atmosphere

or hemorrhaging in public like the miscarriage of a rose.

Lunar silts of the affluvial moon’s cheerless floodplains

talc the private conversations we keep overhearing

with ourselves, as if strangers could understand us

better than the people we cherish the most. For some

that means sleepwalking like ghosts through their dreams.

I’m devastated with sorrow at times for how much pain

I can do so little about, or even find a way to lie to myself

it’s mystically gratifying to forgive as some kind

of abstruse wisdom that seeps into your understanding

like ripeness in an apple that took a bite out of your heart

and threw the rest away like a flavourless poetaster.

I’m creatively fascinated by my solitude, never knowing

what’s not going to happen next, or is, and does

as I’m watching my mind walk on its own waters

like a spider messiah looking for the catch of the day

in green wavelengths that go ping on the other side

of a universe occult as the dark matter of the universe

or the subconscious if you’re afraid of wandering

too far from home without enough metaphors

to make it back the way you came. The light years

don’t leave breadcrumbs of the dreams we left at home

in the corners of our eyes for the faint of heart to follow.

And there’s no wind on the moon to cover your tracks

so you’re lost either way, unmoored or tied to the dock.

The more familiar I become with myself in the world,

the stranger it gets. Suffering, for example, or

the erosive torment of breathing time in and out

like an hourglass that has to be turned on its head

like a long term patient in a hospital bed now and again

on the interminable nightward of modernity. Amen.

Madness isn’t for petty people. But compassion, by comparison,

is a cult of one that identifies with everybody as if

they had no home to return to. Their solitude, an orphanage,

and their eyes, forlorn as the faces they’ve drawn on the windows.

Avalanches with big dreams of the Taj Mahal

if things fall out the right way. Quantumly entangled

with ourselves in trying to live our lives

as positive as twelve grain gluten-free bread

we’re double-crossed by our own aspirations as if

we’re more liberated by the defeats enlightenment

keeps trying to bang into our heads than we are

by the victories that don’t carry us away far enough.

I try people’s voices on for size to listen

to what they’ve got to say about life deep inside

but if they don’t fit, or they’re an idiot, I don’t

look for a mirror in which they do or try to upgrade

my introspective capacity for being anyone,

or haul Rosetta Stones to the Tower of PsychoBabylon

like simultaneous translators with earphones on.

Even divining you’re connected to everybody

like a party-line in the country where local history

is a geriatric farm girl listening in on everyone else

as if she weren’t eighty years old alone on a farm

that’s taken hold of her like a memory system a Roman orator,

it’s still crucially important to know when to hang up

like an auditory imagination at a seance that’s tapping into you

for secret rumours of life written in the runes

of the purple passages that scar your heart so glacially

even ten thousand years from now when the seas

have boiled away like the tears of shepherd moons

and the sadness in their eyes has evaporated

and drifted aimlessly on like a road off the clock

to make a small, mysteriously heartfelt offering to the stars

for being there all those lightyears for the blind to dream on

like Braille polished and bevelled by a billion eyebeams of the rain

it will still be disdainfully legible and mysterious

as a wounded rock that had its heart cut out

by the very sword it poured from the ore of the forge

and tempered in a trough of tears to keep its cutting edge

hard and sharp as the thorns of fire burning like Orion

on a winter night above a habitable planet

with a hovel of starmud nearby lavishing palatial compassion

on the vagrant in his own doorway who aches

like a frost-bitten heart to come in out of the cold

and thaw out in a space that’s undemonstratively

embrasive, human and warm, true to the perennial nature

of its own homelessness in a world of companiable form.

PATRICK WHITE

THE LITTLE NOISE I'VE MADE OVER FIFTY YEARS OF WRITING

THE LITTLE NOISE I’VE MADE OVER FIFTY YEARS OF WRITING

The little noise I’ve made over fifty years of writing,

a star that roars in the silence on a clear winter night

as if I were trying to keep something warm from dying.

A nightbird in a grove, that sings, with nothing left to long for.

A solitary wolf that howls at the moon like a train in the distance

for the pain, for the madness, for the long drawn out sorrows

of passing, for the sadness in the eyes of the wise who know.

No food in the house, tv, heat, father, young,

I ate books in the bottom of a garbage can, in the company

of suffering women who hated men. I went

dumpster-diving at the Salvation Army for a copy

of Dante’s Inferno with a hard cover embossed

like an old man’s hands at prayer. What a strange life,

zip-guns, foodstalls, and Scientific American.

Stars, Egypt, and Keats. Dangerous freaks on the back porch

late at night, and worse, terrorized by social workers

and Sunday school teachers, fathers for a day,

who couldn’t imagine a kid who didn’t like baseball

or the eldest son of a welfare mother who needed the hamper

at Christmas, who wasn’t secretly crying out

to be severely disciplined, stern but virtuous,

by a thought-strapped surrogate for a dad

I was glad I didn’t have. One’ man’s sin of omission

can be the blessing of a son devoted to his mother.

My mother was the soul of compassion, strong and vulnerable,

and feared everyone. Open-hearted, wary-minded,

she read a book at night. I’ve been writing them ever since.

To write something so true and beautiful about

love and suffering, the lifelong gratitude I’ve felt

for the immensities of the abyss, the mysterium tremendum

et fascinans that got me out of the neighbourhood

without a criminal record waiting to fill in the blanks.

What don’t I owe to the stars? To the tongue

of the antiseptic solitude that licked my wounds

with sacred syllables and mended my heartbreak with gold?

The pursuit of an earthly excellence to make up

for the shabby and dull by looking into it so deeply

you bleed for the mystic specificity that makes it all

so unbearably beautiful and inevitably an intimate reflection

of you, the starmud of your awareness, the duff

of old nightmares, imprinted on the mind long after

their substance is gone, like the face on the shroud of Turin

or leaves on the forlorn sidewalks where terrible young girls

with the emotional life of the Medusa, once played

jacks and hopscotch and the Cyclops lost its eye

in a streetfight over nothing like a belligerent telescope

trying to bully the stars into gangs that marked their territory

like black shepherds of the zodiac they terrorized

with Braille and bling. I can sing about it now at this remove

like a snakepit of guitar strings that used to sting

like a fishook in the eye you had to push all the way through

to keep from uprooting the way you saw things

like a flower you were trying to keep alive on the porch

of a burning house, or the rose-bushes my mother

used to plant in the slums. Like mother, like son, I suppose.

If you eat enough ashes of other people’s thoughts,

it’s not true you’ll eventually breathe fire of your own.

You have to eat their hearts, assuming they have one,

not their words, to qualify for dragonhood.

Don’t put your steel through someone else’s forge

or you’ll start psychobabbling like the frauds and dabblers

about the taste of life in poetry with the flavour

of cold lettuce soup. You want to be real, gorge on life

like a famished angel come down to earth

that hasn’t eaten anything for lightyears, or a noble enemy

that doesn’t glut your appetite for blood and fire

with award-winning junkfood when you honour him

like an organ donor for the dark abundance of his art

that doesn’t blunt your desire to devour his heart like an owl

whose wisdom hasn’t lost touch with its saurian roots,

until he’s flesh of your flesh, blood of your blood, bone of your bone.

Winged heels, winged horses, prayerwheels for spurs,

stars under the saddle, bareback burrs, easy enough to ride,

acephalically high on the severed blood of the moon

but that’s only the measure of someone inspired to write

by what they can see in the light, sunny and Apollonian

as dolphins splashing your bow, but feather your poems

in scales, a snake that flies, a wilder wavelength

on the dark side of the muse slumming in her origins

and the songbirds turn into stone at the low end

or shatter like wineglasses on the fly, given the range

of the picture-music that flashes like black lightning

from a wivern’s eyes just before it rains like mercy

and the moon begins to cry. In this supersymmetrical life

of dark matter and energy no one’s ever seen,

there’s no destiny in chaos, but the deepest loveletters

are written to the muses of annihilation who consume you

like black widow queens with ghostly hourglasses on their backs

like crone phases of the moon so full of the dark harvests

they reap with fangs and sickles, time stops, and creation

reverts to maternity and your passions are bled like poppies

and the lyres of your sentiments are empowered

by the matrices of mandalic spiderwebs between

the horns of the moon you must pass through like a poet

through a dangerous gateway or a poem through the larnyx

of a voice older than night that pierces the dark

like a spear of light through a wounded heart,

like a howl from the grave in praise of an art

that kills you into a life that isn’t disciplined by birth or death.

PATRICK WHITE

THE SILENCE OVERTAKES ME

THE SILENCE OVERTAKES ME

The silence overtakes me, I had almost forgotten,

and I am disembodied again, awareness

with no fixed abode, and it’s sweet and sad

this passage of the mindstream through the darkness.

Memories of childhood, collecting bruised potatoes

fallen off the conveyor belt of the vegetable factory,

thousands of muddy spuds like asteroids in orbit,

being rinsed off by fans of sharp-edged water

spread out like the wings of translucent birds,

smell of wet burlap bags and how proud

I was as a kid of seven to be a good hunter for my mother

and haul a bag of potatoes home as if

I’d killed and skinned the carcass myself.

When you’re seven you’re still a wolf-pup

and the game isn’t quite as dangerous as it will be.

The faces of past lovers bloom on a midnight lake

and then the wind scatters their petals. Or they glow

by the light of a fire lotus burning in the window

of a Napoleon airtight on a snowed-in winter night,

musing and caressing the cats dozing under it soporifically

as the flames dance in their dark eyes like the corona of the sun

at full eclipse, and you realize how lyrically vivid

images you glimpsed out of the corner of your eye

at the time, written indelibly upon your heart,

but barely noticed, are when they move front and center

like a star into the iris of eternity. Lachrymose and beautiful

as if a deeper union than the one we thought for awhile

was ultimate, had come of its own accord spontaneously

as if separation and solitude had become the cornerstone

of a palace of water that had gone on flowing on its own

and had made the sea, and once and awhile,

a heart made big by sorrow and the silence that holds it out

like some strange kind of lantern, is there to witness it,

not outside the moment, looking in, but from within

where it lives forever unfolding like ripples in a jewel.

There’s a soft elfin frequency in the air, and an unforced smile

on the spirits of wounded things resigned as scars

to the phases of the moon that first tasted their blood.

I don’t know who they are, but I throw another log on the fire

like a threshold or a burning bridge if they want to

step out of their shadows and cross one for the homeless alone

and say with my eyes let’s all live around this for awhile

as if it were the last house of the zodiac with its lights on,

or that rusty oildrum where we used to roast the potatoes

on the branches of young maple saplings bubbling in the heat.

A riverine intermingling of vagrant hearts

addressing my mind like a star chart of fireflies

buffeted about like the Brownian motion of a playful breeze

gusting the constellations like dust before the witchbrooms

of the black walnut trees exorcising their leaves

to get on with the next chapter of their manuscripts,

ghost writing their own immolations, heretics

trued by the fires they burned in like sumac

on the pyres of their boughs, sky burials in lyrics of smoke.

Time, the sacred clown, reliving the ashes

of its own tragic-comedy as if the encore

were more profoundly sad and absurdly beautiful

than the first aspirations of opening night.

Everything in commotion then that now

moves me more deeply with the stillness of its passage

as if all the eras of my life presaged this one moment

with no birth or death in it, this farewell that never ages.

PATRICK WHITE