MAD YOU MUST BE AND DELIGHT IN IT

MAD YOU MUST BE AND DELIGHT IN IT

Mad you must be and delight in it

like mating killdeer in the spring,

lyrical love-making in the epiphanous air

and one flys into the bumper and dies.

Tears flowing down your cheeks

as you drive on into the incomprehensible

horror and silence of the act. And later,

your girlfriend will elaborate the fact

into a beautiful piece of art. Radiance

thrusts a shard of glass through your heart

out of the blue and there you are

with a baffled pain in your eyes

crying on the easel in paint. Poor man.

Mad you must be and delight in it.

Revel in the absurd. Logic, the shakey stool

of a man trying to hang himself.

Quicksand cornerstones sinking into a miasma

of conditioned chaos. What does it prove

that would have made a difference to the outcome?

Nothing to stand on anymore. Even less

to lie down for. Nature a postcard.

A recurring calendar. And one of those months,

a close-up of a killdeer in intimate detail.

Mad you must be and delight in it.

Uproot your hidden harmonies. Give up

your golden chains. Throw the swill

out of your fountains like wine

from the night before. Ignore your dreams

as the phantasmagoria of sacred clowns.

Everything passes in a riot of stars

before you’re aware of it. Where are they now?

The aerial ballet of the killdeer. Roadkill.

Random encounters with the irrational.

The clarity cruel. The darkness immense.

Mad you must be and delight in it.

Stare at the wall until something appears.

An orphan of mirrors. An estranged elopement

trying to get away with it all. Throw

the moon down from the tower first

and after it your skull. The hearse awaits

and the horses are plumed with black feathers.

Space is warped. Time’s corrupt. And the light

isn’t on some kind of goodwill tour.

Over the newly ploughed field,

where are the killdeer that were there

a moment ago, a year, forever, a figment of time?

So beautiful in the way they impressed each other.

First warm day of the spring. Even the silence

overjoyed with the liberation of water

of earth, of sky, as the stitches came out of the wound

and winter, the scar of a worn out topic.

One of those moments it was intense bliss

to be alive on earth, unasked for,

and delightfully irrelevant the reason.

Mad you must be and delight in it

to embrace the crazy wisdom of the incomprehensible

as a spontaneous medium you’re not involved in

except as the one who suffers what you see,

the terror and the lucidity, the rapture, the monotony

and the worst you could imagine it could be,

the abyss, the car, the killdeer, the unreality

of there being no amends for the tragedy

to fall back upon, not even the pity of the poetry

or the beauty of the painting. And the tears?

What of the tears? What are we to make of them?

Water off the wings of the killdeers? Time

just another water clock that heals nothing

it wounds by accident? Annihilations

of the spirit encountering anti-matter?

You can entertain yourself as delusionally sane

by explaining the stars to the stars,

or you can spend hours trying to decipher the scars

like glyphs on the stone calendars that knew

timing revealed the content in the blink of an eye

and in the cherry-sized heart of a bird

smashed against the sun and the sky

flashing off a chrome bumper at 80k,

who knows, a moment before impact,

if it felt it had desecrated the absurdity of the event

by dying inchoately innocent of its own bewilderment.

PATRICK WHITE

THERE'S A WOMAN IN THE DOORWAY

THERE’S A WOMAN IN THE DOORWAY

There’s a woman in the doorway

flaking like a rose of red paint

with eyes that have been weeping

the shadows of dead saints, a full eclipse

of mascara, sloppy sorrows, and a mickey

she quotes like a Bible, chapter and verse,

though the Bible’s mickey-mouse

compared to how bad it can get

as I notice there’s a pink Glock in her purse,

the arthropod of an uncalibrated shrimp

that isn’t going to let her lover off the hook.

I’m engraving poems on the frosty windows

with a crow’s claw as they whisper to me

like the moon among the corals when I dream,

strange omens of incipience I always mistake

for a sign I’m about to cry though it’s seldom

revealed why. The earth is a sad, sad place

sometimes as you’re ushered to your seat

by a starmap of waterlilies that can see in the dark,

a bouquet of wildflowers in a funereal movie-house

at the first screening of a cosmic prequel

featuring your life as you’ve never seen it before.

Reruns in the multiverse, I’m standing

on a million streetcorners all at once

trying to hawk my theory of fiscal surrealism

to a bloodbank trying to hang on to the Iron Age.

I turn the page like an eyelid to exorcise

the ghost of the jinn in the lamp, and the cupboards

are as bare as the vow of a celibate wishing well

the watercolour lovers have lost interest in

now that the stars have evaporated from it

like the spirit of yesterday’s perfume in a purse.

Where is the lost atmosphere of the moon going

like the shrinking ferns and bonsai trees of my breath

as if it were revising nirvanic haiku until all that was left

were parings of nothing, lunar phases

and fingernails of glass that could scratch

your eyes out like nature red in tooth and claw

as you rake wavelengths in the sand

like a Zen garden in Kyoto waiting

for enlightenment to germinate the rocks,

hard-scrabble farmers with almanacs of crystal skulls.

I’ve ploughed the moon monkishly long enough

with a silver tongue to know when

to sow, tend, reap, the skeletal crops

of the dragon’s teeth that police the secret

of a green thumb trying to hitch-hike out of here

on a long, dark, estranged, radiant byway

lacquered in black ice like the gleaming mirrors

of a snake uncoiling like the full eclipse of an oilslick

waiting for me to slip up like an apostate

of my mystical ineptness long after

the last sacred clown sat down on the ground

and had a good laugh on the house

at the expense of the unamused abyss,

remarking how absurdly child-like all this is.

Medusa, armed to the teeth, tries to tell me

she’s tired of crossing swords with her own fangs

over a point of honour someone has to die for

like a crescent of the moon she’s going to pull

out of the mouth of her lyrical liar with pliers,

every one of her vocal cords tarred and feathered

like the black swan of a stone guitar

reverberating in the Martian canyons of her heart.

Ars longa. Vita brevis. Hatred and angry grief

so much easier to master than the impossible art

of keeping your evanescent fireflies of insight

undisciplined enough to ride the lightning

like a pale horse with the wingspan of the universe

without tampering with someone else’s specious curse

or plotting a course by the stars on your Spanish spurs.

Not on the dance-card of her spite and ego,

I listen compassionately to what

the white noise outside is trying to teach me

like the universal hiss of the afterbirth of road kill

about the ontological misfortunes of being born

to long for nightbirds and hear the rattling of crabs

lugging their armaments to the front lines of love

like lunar castanets, or the horns of a bull

narrowing the gap between parentheses

like the clashing dooms of Scylla and Charybdis,

a whirlpool and a rock, gravity and mass,

the crone phase of the moon having it out

with the vernal equinox at a calendrical toredo.

I see the first crescent and I want to put it up

to my head and pull the trigger to put an end

to the incommensurable agonies of fractious decimals

repeating themselves like mantric alibis

until nothing’s left of the original cartel

except the amputated torso of the fire hydrant

that tried to put the blaze out like a voice coach

who didn’t know all the words to the hysterics

of an anonymously amorous narco ballad

mythically inflating the legend of a famous love affair

out of the redoubtable details of a few bad superstitions.

Pity the fool who begrudges even the grubbiest delusions

of the quixotic heart tilting at the stars

like the precessional axis of the wobbling earth

come round again to the eternal recurrence

of the stratagems of spring in a Great Platonic Year.

Love is as much of a companion to death

as murder is to sacrifice or genetics to loaded dice.

House wine or love potion number nine,

pink guns with clips of rose-petaled lipstick,

everyone’s upholding the incriminating honour

of their uncontested heart defended by their folly

to the death as if the mystery were about to be

lost upon them for good as they rend each other asunder

shooting out the stars like a fashionable crime of passion.

As for me and my tent, the dancing girls

with coral lips and wishbone hips have come and gone

like serpentine wavelengths red shifting into

the shadows they left behind like signs of intelligence

alloyed with carnal desire like a nocturnal mirage

of the moon laying its broken sword down on the water

like a vow we didn’t let come between us

as if we didn’t belong to ourselves

which made the theft of fire we stole from each other

a greater blessing than the hurtful consolations

of obedience to the thorns at the expense of the rose.

What can you say about the nature of crazy wisdom

when the heart is bemused enough to cherish someone

barefoot beyond the bounds of common sensical shoes that pinch?

Some people would rather be loved than right.

Others more righteous than touched. Majnun

had his Laila. Love limps beside others like a crutch.

And though he sipped from many goblets

encrusted with star sapphires from the Pleiades,

none of them tasted like the night until he drank

from the reflection of the beloved from his own hands

and knew a darkness brighter than enlightenment

and the music of rain in the eyes of a desert

more beautiful than water imagery on the moon.

The mad man knows a secret even the deepest stars

can’t understand without losing their way to the well.

PATRICK WHITE

GREY DAY AFTER GREY DAY

GREY DAY AFTER GREY DAY

Grey day after grey day, little nicks and slashes

of insight, the Mongol compound bows of her lips

or the angel, Jabril, when he enveloped Muhammad in Hira

like two bows placed symmetrically opposite each other,

embraced by a Sufi experience of inclusiveness,

or was it the neck of a black swan enthroned in its own reflection,

free association of the word made light, but at this late date

I don’t think I can forget anymore than I already have.

Nor really want to, wholly, though the pain

sometimes burns like a matchead of white phosphorus,

tentacled jellyfish when I think of the translucency

of her aquiline eyes, the terrorism of their beauty

when they fixed on me like an innocent walking by.

I sleight nothing. Not a hair on her head, not one plinth

of the starmaps she smashed at my feet like chandeliers

in a sudden ice-storm in November. I was her tree.

She was my nightbird. Things were always as clear

as a glass menagerie between us when she wore her horns

like the moon in a china shop, or a viper, or a garden snail.

Always knew a day would come when

all I’d have left of her would be these memories

like fossils of the constellations we used to walk under

as I pointed out through the gaps in the wild apple trees

the Andromeda Galaxy, two million lightyears away,

as the furthest thing in life the naked eye can see,

though it was obvious to me at the time, once gone,

o is it still so inconceivable, she would be.

Just look at me, I’m weeping like a window

for the lost phases of a moonrise that’s never

going to startle me again with the same madness

I felt around her as if I could see for the very first time

in eras of trying to imagine, what a dangerous drug

love is to be addicted to after a single taste for life.

Demons revel in their sins in the darkness and dance

with slumming angels on an eye-level with paradise in hell.

The temperate homogeneity of these grey days doesn’t know it,

but I remember, I’ve lived it, apocalyptically

when joy grows so intense it’s a darkness that burns

like the portal of a blackhole hourglass that tears

the sea star of your soul apart galactically

like trillions of stars passing into a whole other world,

worlds within worlds in every one of them

and life and love and wisdom and who you

thought you were reverses spin omnidirectionally

and you can see more deeply into the heart

smeared like a rage of lipstick on a black mirror

than you ever could into the guileless blazing of the white.

PATRICK WHITE

I SHOWED UP WITH A ROSE

I SHOWED UP WITH A ROSE

I showed up with a rose and you said

it was the wrong colour. I showed up

with my head on a silver platter

and you asked as you danced for another

where I’d buried my heart

like the last love affair of the summer

as I watched your body move

like the moon on a famous river

where others before me had drowned

like fish in a dead sea of shadows,

shipwrecks thirsting for the waters of life

you denied them like the taste of your reflection

in the oceanic deserts of their tears

as they died in a graveyard of wine.

I brought you the fallen leaves

of my latest book of poems like autumn

but you swept them off the thresholds

of your hidden doorways like junkmail

and said, yes, there’s fire in their longing,

but if I’m the muse who refuses you,

next time edge the razor of your tongue in blood.

I retreated like a hermit for awhile

into the severed candle of my solitude

that burned like a comet to return

on the day of my death in your eyes

like the last known address

of my homelessness on the lost gospel

of the loveletter I sent you lightyears from paradise.

O how much I couldn’t second-guess loved you then,

like a weathervane loves the wind,

how much I learned and took to heart

like the golden fossils of sorrow and regret

that lie buried like sundials and hourglasses

in the secret gardens on the moon

where I used to wait for you life after life

like midnight at noon when the earth

stood still and the light held its shadows

like a drowning man holds his breath,

like content delays the timing of its heart

until it’s too late for anyone to show up

like a water-gilder to mend a broken cup.

PATRICK WHITE

ONE EARTH, ONE THIRD EYE, ONE WILD IRIS OF LIFE IN SPACE

ONE EARTH, ONE THIRD EYE, ONE WILD IRIS OF LIFE IN SPACE

One earth, one third eye, one wild iris of life in space.

Nacreously pearled out of the darkness of death,

no, not even death, but the godhead of nothing,

this our crib, our grave, when our flesh falls like snow

from our leafless limbs in the spring and dissolves

back into the womb we’ve never been out of.

Who fouls their own mother like the place where they live?

Who would climb up their umbilical cord to heaven

like a waterlily anchored in a swamp and sever the connection

like the jugular of their mother’s throat, before, and before

is as endless as forever after, amen, she’s brought them to term

under a blue eyelid smeared by a patina of air as thin

as the mirage of the dream she conceived them in?

Five billion times around the sun, that star

we’re all courtiers in the presence of, five billion times

hung like the earring of a shepherd moon in an orbit

through your earlobe and we’ve managed to turn it

into a game of Russian roulette with the microbial dawn

of our own existence when she conceived of us

like a water palace of life out of her own translucency,

the firefly of an inspired thought that crossed her mind

and nudged us into being, this sentient seeing we smear

with the effluvia of our own offal then turn away in revulsion

from what we see in the mirror that repels us from us,

from each other, trying to get away from the loss of face

we made ourselves in the image of. This military-industrial,

late Bronze Age megalith of warring heroes who

distorted our vision of love by fletching it with arrows

we’re as vulnerable to as an Achilles heel.

It’s time, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to upgrade

our metaphors to more peaceful myths of origin

we create among ourselves so every thought and act

every ocean of emotion that neaps and ebbs in our tidal hearts

is in accord with the facts of who we imagine ourselves to be.

Time to swim out of the hourglass we drown our sorrows in

down to the last drop, and learn to live galactically

or what was the point of getting high in the first place?

Nature doesn’t abhor a vacuum as much as she must us by now.

Let’s clean our act up so our lover doesn’t turn away from us

toward another that doesn’t offend the protocols

of her incomparable beauty and inconceivable intelligence.

Hey, you, who put the longing in the nightbird’s song?

Who put the awe in your heart when you’re kissed by stars?

Who humanized you out of the ore and oxygen of meteors

stone by stone on the grave of an Archaic native

with a bird bone flute that still wasn’t enough weight

to keep the music of life from arising out of death

like a poem out of the mouths of deaf-mutes that spoke

for trillions of stars through their eyes? When

you look at a river can’t you feel the melody line

of your own blood and mind behind the picture-music?

One earth, one third eye, one wild iris of life in space,

iron, stone, water, air, ion and this the frailest

sphere of mind, this aura of awareness,

these neurons and dendritic axons of our cities at night

we all resonate in like the wavelengths of fish

jumping for the stars, fireflies over the water,

this sentience of ours, this exalted mode of dirt

we’ve been raised out of by this earth breaking

into consciousness, a young planet waking from a dream

she had of us to find we’re all as true as she is

to the same roots she’s welling up out of like apple bloom,

like the spine-stems of ladders to the moon,

like the interdependent origins of insight and stone,

all one body, born of the same cells, to shine, do you hear me,

back at the stars, the trees, the sky, rivers, clouds,

thermophilic bacteria in hot diamond mines,

fire like the mad passion of a genius swept up

like a poppy immolated in the blooming of its own flames,

as if we were opening our eyes to look upon our mother’s face

like the very first dawn, and we had only one smile

like the fertile crescent of a waxing moon to spend

on recognizing everything and everyone alive and dead

as we are to the whole, every grain to the harvest

in the full siloes of our dark abundance, the source

that hides us out in the open from ourselves like stars

so we never have very far to look for the efflorescent fountainhead

of our evanescence, or the foundation stones under our feet

or what keeps us afloat like the lifeboat of a hand

when nothing else reaches out to us but the earth itself.

Learning wisdom is learning space. One mile east

is one mile west, my teacher said. Quantumly entangled thus,

we linger in the doorway of this available dimension

of the future in our house of life, like a palatial room

we’ve never entered before and the crucial hour come round

like a waterclock breaking from the womb, will

someone die in there, and we mourn our own demise,

or will someone be born of the metaphors we spread

like the seeds of wildflowers in the starfields

on the wind that issues like the breath of life and death

out of our own mouths and hearts and minds

as one of the most inspired ways yet the light turns around

removing the veils of endless night from its face

to look at itself, one earth, one third eye, one wild iris of life in space.

PATRICK WHITE

NARCISSUS LOST HIS FACE IN THE MIRROR HE STORED HIS IMAGE IN

NARCISSUS LOST HIS FACE IN THE MIRROR HE STORED HIS IMAGE IN

Narcissus lost his face in the mirror he stored his image in

while Lady Nightshade was saying grace over the wrong coffin

rats from the shipwreck were rowing ashore

in the last lifeboat with a trapdoor in it for an emergency exit.

The holy men who couldn’t speak our language

without trying to fix it with an accent of their own

were recruiting for an army on the moon

to start a new crusade against futuristic infidels

who didn’t share the same direction of prayer

as the wavelengths that reached the ears of the extraterrestrials

with high ideals encoded in a scripture of esoteric starmaps

that spoke like oracles stoned on volcanic gas

so when you asked how things were going,

they always answered, perhaps, in an ambiguous tone of voice.

I was sitting in the window of a burning house

trying to write poems that smelled like smoke to the Holy Ghost,

when you showed up like a stranger’s doorway

out of my solitude like the bell of a three alarm death knell

with the smile that lingered like junkmail on the threshold

of a black hole that said jump right in, there’s light

on the other side of sin if you go through this

like a death in life experience in love with cosmic bliss.

Who could forget that day you came like a muse

up the leaf strewn stairs of an abandoned orphanage

looking for a heart you could inspire with the ruse

of the poetic refuse you left in the wake of your pilgrimage

like the desolation of your absence from the earthbound

that languished in the eclipse of your innocence

like a spiritual lost and found trying to make sense of itself

like a horse with a broken leg on a zodiacal merry-go-round.

I felt the fangs of your crescent moons pierce my flesh

like a staple gun under a rosebush in league

with an alliance of thorns that liked to see a poet bleed

as if the great mystery of love were nothing

but a conspiratorial intrigue of sword dancers on drugs

though I did everything I could to prove to you I was wrong

about the moonrise, you weren’t strong enough to be right for once

without starting a pogrom that interrogated

the light in my eyes for all those dark winter months

I never confessed, I never cried out as if ice were my only alibi.

I sat in the corner like a left-handed guitar with a dunce cap on

and wrote out lyrics that sang like the stars with a lisp

on your celestial blackboard until I felt like Sisyphus

a note shy of pushing my heart like a moon rock over the top.

It was the immanental sixties on a grailquest

for the objective correlative of a universal paradigm

it could fight under as the sign of a revolutionary new design of chaos

that made love not war to the thunder of home-made sonic booms

in a battle of bands with saturation bombing riffs and rimshots

that urged us to surrender to the enemy as if

they were dragonflies and quarter-notes of music

in a riot of helicopters dropping tear gas over Watts.

Even the madness wasn’t enough to mollify the sadness

of what we lost when everyone turned the lightshows out

in the concert halls and went back to the their atavistic law schools

to get a grip on the necks of the things they had let go of for a lark.

And the last time I saw you, before things went totally dark,

you were trying to set fire to my voice-box

like a lightning rod with bad wiring shorting out

like a bass amp on the stage of your burnt out farewell

to the audience that made a gracious bow to your frantic id

and headed for the exit like an arsonist long before you did.

PATRICK WHITE

LOOKING FOR AN ORBIT IN THE RIPPLES OF RAIN AT MIDNIGHT

LOOKING FOR AN ORBIT IN THE RIPPLES OF RAIN AT MIDNIGHT

Looking for an orbit in the ripples of rain at midnight

like a rogue planet that doesn’t belong anywhere.

I enter this page like a tent city in my homelessness

without self-pity, a vagantes wandering in exile

having cast myself out like an ostrakon of one

when my heart shattered like an urn full of ashen insights

into my own insignificance as an ageing dragon among the stars.

Scars, scars, scars, the cuneiform of my flesh

trying to translate itself into the linear A of my mother-tongue.

I don’t pair well with women who aren’t as self-forsaken as I am,

though I’ve tried, though I really did love the effort they put into me

and how I was moved to see the eclipse of God

through their eyes darkly so I didn’t go blind

in the mountains of the moon no prophet has ever climbed

without a warning not to look directly into the sun.

As I’ve said somewhere before I can’t remember

my tongue is a leaf on the wind, my eyes are clouds

in a sky that absorbs me like the vapour of a contrail at dusk.

Ghosts of hindsight, no wiser than the man who lived them once,

I mistrust the wisdom I derive from them at these

lonely seances of the heart like an expiry date

on all I’ve ever aspired to in the name of love and poetry.

A great fool, I risked it all, knowing what I was doomed to lose.

My sincerity knew no bounds. My intensity made

the sidereal ore of my Canadian immensity weep starwheat

into ploughshares that laboured to harvest

the mistletoe of the moon as if I had to cut off

my own balls with the golden sickle of my last crescent

like the King of the Waxing Year to keep my imagination fertile

and the siloes full of the dark abundance I reaped

like a reward for the lightyears of bright vacancy

I had to endure like Spica in Virgo at the autumn equinox

before the days got shorter, and the long, cold nights

doled out short straws at the foodbanks for the blind

that wintered in my mind like star-nosed moles

that shone underground like the light at the end of a tunnel.

I raised a black sail like a new moon among

the startled angels fleets that scattered

like the phases of apple bloom on a brisk wind

that blew them out to sea like a deepening awareness

of how transitory even the most beautiful are

running before the storm like butterflies

over the flatlining event horizons

of the black holes I warned them away from

like the skull and crossbones of a poem on a headstone

I dedicated to them like a bride catalogue

of transfigurative unions, alloys of paradisaical hells.

Moonboats and bottles of wine, tokes, guitars, poems

and paintings, existential sex, tomorrow with a no exit sign,

fame a passing acquaintance of mine, I threw my heart

back into the fire time and time again. I ate

the blistered grapes of vinegar that soured

the still-life depressions that censored my subversive silence

like a cut flower on a chequered table cloth

next to the long stem knife in an operating theatre

where I stitched the wounded roses of my miraculous passions

up with their own thorns to make something holy

out of nothing. Holy, holy, holy, the archival dust

of love affairs heaped like the Library of Alexandria

to keep the fire burning in the cracked heartwood

I threw on the flames like a heretical gesture of forever.

Not good times, no, never what anyone would ever ask for,

no winterized cottages with organic orchards at the end

of a country lane, but whole and crazy, resonant

with meaningless significance at the time, no intercessors

between me and my emotions like second thoughts

before I jumped like a skydiving dandelion toward paradise,

encouraged by my failures to find a place to land

to try, try again like the little train that could or a bird

meditating in the third eye of a hurricane like a shelter

for the homelessness of the words I turned out like muses

on the streetcorners of the wellsprings and literary watering holes

of binging poets trying to get it all in before last call

when they turned the eye-burning gaudiness of the light on again

and the proprietors of profitable mundanity who thrived

as our vices flourished, said in unison like a choir of cowbells

haven’t you got a home to go to, knowing quite well, the answer

was invariably no. Not in the way you imagine four walls.

PATRICK WHITE