UNLOST WHEN I'M WRITING

UNLOST WHEN I’M WRITING

Unlost when I’m writing, the going’s enough

and any path will do for the shining. Everywhere

space for the mind to move of its own accord,

dead bodies in the tide, waterbirds returning to the lake.

The pictures crowd together in the flames

and a flower blooms in the fire the fire cannot burn

and myriad themes are mingled in the same fragrance.

How else say it? I’m an alloy of stars, a weld

of metaphors that healed stronger than the original wound.

I don’t wholly understand this, but I’m changing

bodies on the fly, dying even as I grow,

and the more radiant I become the less visible I am.

The mindstream in its flowing is a flying carpet

woven of eddies and currents, of thought, of feeling

the heaving, fall, and rush of many waters

animated by the going, inspired by the approach,

and some bring an easel, a loom, a telescope

and when the moon is shining, there are feathers

scattered on ten thousand lakes at once

as the night writes starmaps on the eye of the seeker

all but the most middling minds follow like a dancer.

I live between the coming and going like a gate,

like the breath in my throat, the systole and diastole,

the ebb and neap of my heart, between the open sky

and the canning jar of a telescope full of fireflies

like a prism in a spider mount bending light through my eye

like a goldfish in water. The full moon, a coin

lost in the river that cannot be retrieved from the river

unless you grasp it without using your hands.

The way a bird on the wind enlarges a space within

and you can hold it a moment like the sky it disappears into.

Comes a swallow at dusk and a nation at noon

and you feel the easy parity of the two as if

they were both of the one intangible fleeting substance,

a birth-sac of dew about to let its water break

and bring forth the world as the youngest child of all.

An abacus of tears, worlds within worlds,

oxymoronic unions dispersing like somnambulant bells

into more inclusive realms of understanding

where every grain of sand is the cornerstone

of the cosmos elaborated out of it as if

neither small nor large, partial nor whole

one word is a myth of origin, and two,

the whole of its long history without end.

Transformative stillness, kinetic mutability,

I refine the ore of an old wisdom

in the crucible of my heart and pour it out like stars

into the available vacancies of space and time

waiting like a waterclock of begging bowls

for their emptiness to shape the tools they’ll use

to plough the moon with a sail and a rudder into fish.

How life gets around is the way I’m moved to think

in fireflies and maple keys, nebular intuitions

of the Pleiades rooting like rain in clouds

and clouds of unknowing where there’s nothing

to take on faith but the small voice on the hidden hill

calling out to you like an empty lifeboat

drifting through the autumn fog an eerie morning.

I lay my madness bare and offer you a scalpel

like the bud of a narcissus, and say cut here, cut there,

slash at me like a corpse in a surgical theater,

remove my skull cap like the lid of a cookie jar,

break it open like a fortune-cookie or a surrealistic lullaby,

a lottery you couldn’t lose, or American pie,

and don’t say anything teleological to me

about what you find, if there’s anything to find at all.

And then add me to the sum of educational body parts

on a river barge that’s going to scrape them off the plate

far out at sea in a feeding frenzy of marine life.

Star meat, my flesh, I’m adorned by the mud of the earth,

and my mind, who could find that, when

there’s so many more places to look than to hide?

Lightyears back I blundered into the open

like a tree on a hill in a field, running from something

ahead of me, when I discovered in a flash

of Druidic tragedy just how vulnerable words were

to the emotions I invested in them like ashes in urns.

Great dragons of passion that imploded on themselves

like caldera and women and meteors on the moon,

kissing stones subsumed in their own wombs

like nanodiamonds of insight into the impact.

And I might seem a lot gladder than I used to be

but there’s still too much to forget to be happy.

And I’m not truly certain I have the right to flaunt

the strange gifts that have given me the most joy

when the night comes on like the pheromone of a firefly

and I hear the unmighty groaning in their rooms to endure.

No trick to this. No elixir, no potion, no Latinate abstraction,

no apprentice, master, or skill, I could be making

straw hats among the enlightened conifers of Japan

on a mountainside where the old stones break into laughter

and the samurai class of the grass wants me to teach it

how to fight without regard to winning or losing

no matter how many times I’m killed unceremoniously

like the Buddha in the way of some fool’s redemption.

And if the king comes to your house, don’t

put out a serving, put out a feast, and move on

empty-handed as a man who’s given it all away

just to spite the keepers at the gate searching your exit.

You can buff a Druid into a gleeman like cut cocaine

and then you can step on it again like a court jester

and if you really want to feel sacrilegiously holy

you can burn him like a martyr at the stake of a cause

that accuses him of going to extremes to avoid the law

and then invite him to a reading to scatter his ashes on the wind.

And then beatify his spirit like a white stag you hit with an arrow

fletched by sparrows with the charisma of crows.

And that’s an end of what was so mysterious about him.

That’s an end of his ambiguous glaises, alphabetic trees

and golden sickles castrating fertility gods so there

was dew on the grass in the morning when the moon

gave birth to a swan in heat before the wheat

could turn from green to gold, and the Fertile Crescent

was fecund with dismemberment and bleeding mistletoe.

Death of a poet. What a small shadow among the gloom.

The eclipse of a lunar pearl in a coalpit.

And the greatness of the perennial mystery

that seeped into his blood like the effluvium

of the dark mother’s afterbirth, merely the cosmic hearsay

of what he hoped it would be, up close and intimately.

And his star, now, a cold furnace, and all the warmth

of his violated human nature, a curious atrocity

of the times that are these times just as readily.

I salute the madman addled by creative chaos

like a spear of light in a storm, like a spiritual warrior

who fell upon his own heart like a hand grenade

to save some ingrate his delinquent day of reckoning,

to temper the karma by rounding out the crucials

with compassion and liberated tolerance

as swiftly as his savage indignation killed

the nude empress of pornographic frogs with a kiss

back into her old life in the nunnery of a neurotic narcissus.

And he looked for the moon in a window of a room

in a brothel of experienced muses who didn’t

beat around the bush when it came time to ovulate.

St. Francis dances in the dust at the crossroads with the Sufis,

talking to the birds like David, and consulting the wolves.

Rasputin gorges on the flesh of the rainbow light body

glowing in a mystical aura of sex and death

like the dark rapture that embraces him

in the circular bow of the angel of infernal revelations.

And his accusers whip his eyes

like bi-valved goose barnacles

flagellating their feather dusters in the corals.

But there are some things that move inevitably like glaciers.

PATRICK WHITE

LIFE'S A SLOPPY BUSINESS, DAUGHTER

LIFE’S A SLOPPY BUSINESS, DAUGHTER

Life’s a sloppy business, daughter. You

average out the crucials, adjust your motives to the stars

that have been tinkering with you since childbirth,

flutter your eyelashes like butterflies over the ruins

of last year’s flowers as if you were dropping pamphlets

over a subjugate nation, exhorting the weeds to ideals

promoting horrid compromises with common sense

and the general viciousness of the world embodied

in the dispassionate vengeance of corporate profit margins

to deny a foreign national four year old girl

whose amateurism still trusts people’s eyes

food, medicine, school, water, rights to the rain

freedom from from life as a silk worm

in a garment factory run by the most loathesome of men

in the finest clothes economic slavery’s got to offer

as if you could wash the sewer of a soul off

in a shower of gold that gilds you like a maggot

in an Armani suit, or a political tapeworm elected to public office

to feed off the poor as if it were for their own good,

to promote prosperity in a graveyard with mineral rights

to your bones. A Via Cloacum of dry-eyed evil in the world

emptying into a dead sea of consciousness like the swill

of trivialized krill, the bread and circuses

of engineered distractions with sunshades unfolded

like the parasols of the Roman navy as the gutted mob

gluts on the entrails of victims unluckier than they were

when the wasp came to lay its egg on their forehead

and eat them less engagingly from the inside out like worms

in their eyes and their hearts. O savage evolution

I won’t smear sparkles on the eyelids of the dead

you desecrate like the flesh of your own flesh

to get on with life like an imperial starmap of client constellations.

I suppose I should be offering you more rounded wisdom

than this thornapple of insight into inhuman nature,

more of a sweet-natured sunset than this nasty false dawn

where every new beginning by acclamation means

the death of sentience in someone else, by the millions

throughout history, where the truth is always deeply indebted

to the ingratiating co-sponsors of the capitulant facts.

But I abhor sloughing the suffering of the world off

like a soft, old man whose eyelids have wrinkled

like the withered skin of daylilies, who’d rather

blur and blunt his vision of life like broken glass

sand-blasted in the gentrifying tides of sea stars

he doesn’t want to cut his feet on firewalking the Road of Ghosts.

I’m repulsed by the geriatric deathmasks of strategic kindness

defrauding their own wisdom like a gnostic gospel of cataracts

in their eyes, mystic flowers in the sky, buffing the toxicity

of the crescents of the moon, because the bad fang fell out

and the only one they’ve got left they’re trying to pass off,

sensing they’re too weak to hurt anyone anymore,

as anti-venom to the same kind of people they’ve been

biting all their life for their place at the table above the salt

in a snakepit cannibalizing their wavelengths like black holes

harmonizing with the music of their uninhabitable celestial spheres

attuned to their own background universal hiss. Frog-swallowers

and nest-robbers trying to bury their thorns like

the hands of a clock in the foliage of roses that smell

like the embroidered pillowcases they no longer dream on.

Dozy, rosey, barnboard frames, picturing the punk and pulp

of rotten heartwood trying to rinse the bathtub rings

the rain left like the sediment of a dry creekbed

running through their veins like cracked starmud

waiting for a flashflood of the shining waters of life

to lower their blood pressure like the first

heart attack of the spring to wake the toads up from hibernation.

What travesties of human excellence I’ve witnessed

in the hearts of men and women who settled for less

than the lives they’ve been given to live randomly

out of the blue, blue sky like an accidental gift

of inestimable value they kept appraising like fool’s gold

by the light of a full moon that never came to harvest.

The mind is an artist and it is able to paint the worlds

with great skill and subtle hues of technical cunning

that can transform the opacity of the solid

into the myriad translucencies of the unimaginably real.

But, remember, you’re whole life’s nothing

but a portrait you’re working on from the inside.

A solitary figure in a mindscape listening

to the picture-music of a dream grammar

that keeps shape-shifting like the palette of a voice

trying to catch the atmospherics of whatever mirage

you’re rendering in the watercolours of your tears at the time

before the light in your heart changes and your bones

are laid in a grave like the field easel you’ve

been packing around with you all your life

like the stick people you drew in childhood.

Make an art of them. A masterpiece of heart,

eye, hand, and mind. Flesh the world out

in your own humanity and cherish it like a life study

you modelled for yourself in the mirror you peered into

without turning to stone at what you saw

or asking who’s the most beautiful of all,

but remaining true to your own eyes

like the creative bounty of a nightsky

whatever uplifts, whatever befalls your starmud

like the nocturnal waterlilies of the Pleiades in a low place,

or that whisper of heretical silence in the heart

that resonates throughout the whole of space

like the curse and the blessing of a habitable planet

bound to the stake of a star for remembering what it is

to be indefensibly radical about remaining compassionately human.

PATRICK WHITE  

CALM. COOL. THE FAN ON. THE WINDOWS OPEN

CALM. COOL. THE FAN ON. THE WINDOWS OPEN

Calm. Cool. The fan on. The windows open.

The cat on the windowsill and the last yahoo

yeehawing his way out of town on his bad ass bike

as he opens the throttle to startle the people

sitting in doorways like candles in niches

up and down the street he’s the clown of frowns,

a legend of gossip when there’s nothing else to talk about.

Trying to write my way mutatatively out of the shadow

of a bell of sadness being lowered over my heart

like a Mason jar over a spider or a bee, depending

on how you look at it and which you fear the most.

Life a strange elixir of toxins and honey running

through my veins, it’s funny how even

the sweetest things in life always involve stingers.

Consider the secret destinies going on in upstairs apartments,

illicit lovers, dope deals, crushed hearts and dreams

waiting for someone to come and dig them out of the avalanche,

Severe solitudes letting the stars erode in the dust bowls

that lie silent, unmoving, and old on the moon

because nothing grows there but these intense shadows

I’ve been swimming through like a star caught

like a black dwarf on flypaper in the tar

of black matter in the irisless eye of a black hole

that wasn’t on any starmap but my own a few minutes ago.

Think of how much despair has been overcome

by the false dawn of hope in the windows

of all those rooms indicting the light of their lives

when they realize in each other’s eyes love

is a dream grammar of mirages and shadows

and the heart, for the most part, to judge from my own,

is semi-literate when it comes to reading its own signs.

The crazy sly don’t know where their lies begin and end

and call their falsehoods, axiomatic. The crazy wise

don’t know whether to laugh out loud from the hara

of their cosmic center between their loins and belly-button

like a trickster god that mocks their alibis

with the enlightened compassion of an heretical crow

or cry, cry, cry like an old sixties song that slashes

the heart open like a waterclock that fell upon its own sword

like the hour hand of era indifferent to the dignity of time.

Can you guess how much fear and terror, anxiety, paranoia,

grief, resignation, betrayal, and self-effacement

as if somebody threw acid in the eyes of a mirror

that could read them like a book, have been endured

like the coils of the nightmares that must have swallowed them whole

for there to be so little evidence left of them now,

and the parties and the sex-fests, the cloney, intellectual dens

of the confrontationally obnoxious adolescents

looking at the world through the eclipse in the eyes

of black match heads that burnt out well before they bloomed?

The broken promises of youth. The unpredictable disappointments

of old age made trivial by the absence of family,

and a backyard to grow cucumbers and geraniums in.

If I were a Cyclops and not a poet I would definitely

look at everything from a one-eyed positive point of view,

but as it happens I’ve got two eyes in the dark to see with

and I’m not blinded by my own blazing when it comes

to shining a light on the way things are binarily true

like galactic waltzes and the ghost dances of most stars.

Nor am I in the habit of mistaking a new moon

for a total eclipse, so, yes, I can see happy children

going to bed at night in the finger-painted bedrooms

of these converted office spaces, lightyears from here

looking back at them reflectively like a watershed

of the extraordinary ordinary themes of life that found

a place for themselves in the world like threads of fate

on the woof and weft of the waxing and waning loom of the moon.

For all the locked horns that gore the heart

on arguments that would rather be right than loved,

I can see the new moon in the arms of the old

like lovers on the sly getting away with each other.

I can see how beautiful the lilacs must have been

in the spring of so many years ago by counting

the tree rings under the eyes and in the heartwood

of an old woman who revelled in the rain

when joy was till coyly deciduous and the passage

of time and the tears deep down in things

not so solemn and evergreen at the approach of eternity

in the presence of the lilacs foaming over the fence.

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 watergilded 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 dishevelled 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

THE SUN PUTS MY EYES OUT LIKE A STAR IN TOO MUCH LIGHT

THE SUN PUTS MY EYES OUT LIKE A STAR IN TOO MUCH LIGHT

The sun puts my eyes out like a star in too much light.

I wait for the night to return my seeing to a vision

of things unseen, the unnarrated themes of life and love

that move like migrant birds and sounding whales

behind the symbolic lifemasks of the moon, none of them mine.

Mystery within a mystery, my voice is not a camera

at a seance. I listen to what hasn’t been revealed.

I turn even the homeliest asteroid over like a jeweller

with a pygmy telescope for a third eye

holding a diamond in the rough up to the light

to see what’s been concealed like a secret of life

hidden within the ore of its savage shining.

I invariably rebuff the heavy bombardment eras

of the brutalities of love, though I had to suffer them

like noxious atmospheres in the wake of a cosmic pummelling

to arise so wisely here, the broken pine of my arboreal insight

into the nature of rootless trees. What doesn’t kill you

can wound you so badly that even death

looks like a redundancy in the maimed mirror

of your reflection. Be clear about this. After

every extinction passes like the cloned silhouette

of the full moon, it’s the labour of a lifetime

to publish your poems like apple bloom on the branch

of the lightning bolt that cleaved you to the root

like a French executioner with an imported sword.

It’s not strength to retool the innocence of an open heart

into a lethal weapon, even if it’s a righteous kill.

It’s one thing to heal. It’s another not to be destroyed

by your scars like a shy painting in an arrogant frame.

Green bough. Dead branch. Same song. As I’ve said

before. The nightbird sings on the tongue of a serpent

as readily as water and wavelengths on witching wands

and tuning forks, the sound of sorrow in a human voice

where the rivers divide inseparably for life

like the strong rope of a spinal cord into the weaker threads

of a string theory of profoundly significant departures.

So be it. I trembled. I cried like an abandoned housewell

whose lightbulb just went out like the filament

of a genome that tried to keep its afterlife from freezing

when the world was destroyed by ice

in the terrible clarity of the eyes that blew it out

like a mutant candle that tried to add its odd gene

to the constellations of razor wire that imprisoned it

like the dangerous exile of its own dna. In this game

of musical chairs, I always try to take the low place

like a sea on the moon so all my lost atmospheres

and high tides returned to me, kinder, deeper,

more experientially seasoned loveletters than those that left.

Hatred isn’t creative. Judgement accuses itself.

History is written by the victors in dust on a shelf.

When we all lie down on the pyres of our deathbeds

may each of my lovers have enjoyed a better

dream of life than I did, more stars, more flowers,

fewer chains, less red shift in reality than in

their memories of the way things could have been

with the strangers we became over the long lightyears

looking back in arcane wonder at how love changes

to keeps its balance against a backdrop of creative chaos.

I observe the protocols of a poet approaching

the allure of an unknown bird at the gates of my voice

like a lyric I’ve only ever heard before at a lonely distance

from its source within me. The wind blown seeds

are more prodigal with insights into the mystery of life

than the genetically modified, and every exile

tends a secret garden that travels with them

like a vagrant motherland planting a starmap

of hyperbolic comets in the open fields beyond

the prize-winning asters of lesser zodiacs.

Petty monuments to transcend our mortality

won’t arouse the quiescent jealousy of time.

Truth doesn’t renew its virginity in an acid-bath.

Beauty isn’t marked by the singularity

of a star-nosed mole piercing a black hole.

The clock shows up with a second at a duelling sword dance.

Evolution advances surrealistically like a fast lane

for atavistic snails and the celebrity messengers

try to steal the spotlight from the message

they were created like flying fish with fins

on their heels to convey as a warning of pre-eminent change.

Circus animals in an abattoir of balancing acts.

Emotional jugglers and fire-eaters, sword-swallowers

easing the silver scimitar of the moon down the throats

of shallow lakes drowning in their own spit.

Freaky sages and anointed snake-oil salesmen

gulling the vanity of those seeking to be enlightened

like exceptions to a species going extinct

since some disappointed scribe divined

by the sunspots on his shining, every bloodline,

but the holy book of his own phylum, was a bad idea.

Not to be mean, vicious, feeble, ungenerous

to even those who tried but failed to love you in life

like crutches that didn’t break into blossom under your armpits

or the right idea with the wrong blueprints

for ladders and wings to get you out of the snakepit

that keeps swallowing your cosmic eggs

like albino whole notes, the stone cartouches of eyes

that never got to see how big the sky is because

you didn’t break out of your shell in time to see the stars

or even hear a whisper of the oceanic awareness

within you like the white noise of your afterbirth

still traumatized by your universal intrusion into this life.

One night laid out on your deathbed in a tidal pool

of febrile sheets, staring into a homeless abyss

like the return address of an anonymous enquiry

reviewing what you said and felt, or didn’t say,

because you calculated the effect in numbers,

not the words in your heart, like a silent movie

with more of a gift for pictures than conversation,

you’re going to see yourself unadorned as porn

in a snuff flick of all your myriad love affairs with life,

and the bloom off the rose, whether you were

a petal or a thorn, it’s going to be too late

to rewrite the black farce of the leading protagonist

as the rising star of the person you should have been

instead of the one you are in the sewer of fame.

The intensity of the clarity won’t leave you

a patina of mind to hide behind or insulate the view.

Naked, alone, out in the relentless open, for

your eyes only with eternity your sole witness

and you about to notarize it with your flesh,

even if it be the noblest folly of a leftover child,

a dragon-slaying firefly, an iota subscript of self-respect,

the taste of crazy wisdom you can’t rinse out of your heart

like the bloodstain of a rose, honour those

you have loved painfully like a morning frost

or in joy, though lost now, when you shared the dusk

with a moonrise as lovely as any muse

you’ve ever known, come down to the river

to drink from her reflection in your eyes, or just

for the hell of it because you prefer it that way,

let your heart remain as large and lavish

as any gesture of stars the universe ever squandered

on your impetuous love of life that embraced it all,

blessing and curse alike as the old moon opens its arms

both crescents wide to the dark abundance of the new.

PATRICK WHITE

POETRY USED TO LIVE IN A FORBIDDEN STATE OF COURAGEOUS GRACE

POETRY USED TO LIVE IN A FORBIDDEN STATE OF COURAGEOUS GRACE

Poetry used to live in a forbidden state of courageous grace

but now it’s palpably culpable of cowardice.

Paper-mache lifemasks with all the characteristics

of a gaping sin of omission. As F.R. Scott said of E.J. Pratt

in his poem about the building of the CPR

where are the coolies in your poem, Ned?

The ten thousand that died lining and tamping track.

Now the real subject matter of most works of art

is not what was put in, but what was left out,

where’s the heart, the soul, the imagination,

where’s the grief and the longing that slowly matured

into the black flames of the charred roses

that immolated themselves in their own fires

for the love of someone they couldn’t live without

like the other wing of the song of a bird

maimed by the oversight like a tree in chains.

The applause of trained seals isn’t praise

and celebrity isn’t fame. Everyone’s good

at divining the well, but who takes the time

to dig one any deeper than their own shallow grave?

Maybe there’s a sleeper out there who’s fighting

for his life in a dream, enduring excruciating transformations

as experience shapeshifts his voice into poems

we’ll get to overhear one day after he’s dead

like the sound of distant water in a mindstream

or the ashes of an unknown soldier

that couldn’t be contained by a broken urn

or buried under a monument to anonymous violence.

A hero or a heroine who didn’t play to the crowd

like an acrobat of words faking it as a wizard

in a literary scene of very unsacred clowns.

Tiger-striped arsonists that couldn’t burn

their way through a matchbook. Where are

the thieves of fire, the Promethean criminals,

the fore-ordained demons of nihilistic doom,

the mad who used to sacrifice their shadows

on the altars of the mountains of the moon

and came down into the valleys in tears

with a message like an avalanche of the underwhelmed?

Are there no more Druids? Is the bloom off the mistletoe

of myriad moons that have lost their atmosphere

to the bright vacancy of the vacuum on the reflected side of things

and forgotten the dark abundance of the occult originality

of the true face that’s turned away like a perennial eclipse

of the black sheep of a severely depleted family

that doesn’t want to talk about such things in public?

No more shamans risking death in the cradles of the treetops

at the hands of the visions that cut them to the bone

to see if they’ve marrowed suffering into lunar gold

they scatter on the waters like feathers and bread?

Even the deer miss their hunting magic more than they realized.

Now the flies stalk lions in zoos that know better

than to fight back. And poetry reads like a tourist trap

for expired prophets glad-handing their coveted awards.

Bleed a bit, damn it. Weep like a mountain. Write a poem

like an amputee in a straitjacket with the pen in your mouth.

Pour the ocean into a seabed, not a teacup

that tastes vaguely of life, and down a deep draft

of your own blood in a single gulp from the vessel of your skull,

then wipe it from your lips like the petals of a rose

that knows how the heart feels when it’s sealed

like a blood bank and the hungry ghosts of ideas and ideals

have been summoned to it like a seance of vampires in lieu

of the living metaphors that animate the lives of real things.

I’m not saying that the morning is without singers,

or that one should only listen to the night birds

or that the old stumps aren’t sprouting tender green branches

out of their Medusa-headed roots. There’s fire

in every generation if you get close enough to it

sufficient to singe your eyebrows on or at least

walk toward on a cold night in a cruel landscape

to spread a few stories around to scare the children

into listening to their imagination unbound

from the usual lullabies that keep their parents lyrically young

in a state of arrested development. Where are

the dangerously dissociated ones who yell Merd!

at the choirs of cant and stab an established

pigeon of a poet through the hand like an osprey

then walk off the stage into oblivion as if

a mediocre morality play were beneath his felonious dignity?

Where are the black-robed, outlaw, poet priests,

the sybils, oracles, witches and warlocks,

the vatic rebels hiding out in caves to amplify their voice

like the anarchic mountain they’re trying to bring down

on everybody’s heads like a meteoric shower

of portentous space junk in a degenerating orbit

that cremated their body parts separately as if each

had nothing in common with its fellow asteroids

except they couldn’t keep their cornerstones together long enough

to establish a small planet they could live on in anarchic accord.

I can remember when poems were written in blood,

not bleach and fabric softeners. Not anti-bacterial detergents

that shoot at their own troops over the heads of the enemy.

And how the poetic toads that hibernated for seven years

in the dry creek beds suddenly woke up one day to a flash flood

and started singing sexually naked in the downpouring rain,

not these isolated ripples and trickles of acidic dewdrops

that burn the tongues of the flowers with trademarks and name brands.

Where the savage mystic who wanders in out of the desert

reeking of stars and the wisdom of a snakepit

that could make a whole village stop work, and listen

to the unexpurgated desert wind that spoke through him?

Where are those who ennobled the miseries of life

by living their way through them like diamonds in a black lung?

Now it’s the association of the sensibilities into elitist cliques

of enculturated memes with homogeneous life themes

that never leave home to save their children, as Rilke rightly observes,

from having to do it for them. Domesticated lapdogs

never very far from the begging bowls that feed them

like the awards and grants of an institutionalized paternalism

that lets them know when the silver-tongued should be heard

at the table, each in their proper place, and when

Skinnerian censorship, like repressive tolerance, is golden.

Poetry’s as old and as dead an art as prostitution.

It’s been dying since the first shaman

imitated the song of a bird with its feathers on fire

or the first stripper teased her nakedness with boas.

Or the first wounded wolf let out a warcry

that chilled the moon with its unwaning sincerity.

And the ultimate angle? To be the thing itself

until it breathes you in and out like a way of life

the petty won’t risk aspiring to for fear of falling

and being found out like a candling parachute

tangled in its own life lines like a labyrinth of axons

that have lost their nerve for heights. Twenty-five million

children dying of starvation every year on the planet

and you’re lying in the lap of the luxury of literature

writing about the rustic quaintness of making home-made jam,

the same way they turned totem-poles into telephone booths

and minor domestic tragedies into recyclable myths of origin.

Let the stars burn deeper into you. Befriend the darkness

like the largest room in your house. Salt your tears

with oceans where your sorrows can learn

to swim like fish without ever swimming out of your eyes.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is it, this onceness,

of the dirge and the lyric you’re never going to hear

the same way twice, this mystic specificity

that encompasses us wholly in the mystery

of what we’re doing here, what we’re saying

and thinking and feeling and shrieking and seeing here

in the presence of each other bearing witness everywhere

as if even the void we flash out of like the morning dew

and return to with the dust of the sunset all over us

were also in some inconceivable way, though

we can’t put our lips to its eyelids, sentient

and playfully absurd, but never frivolously recognized.

Don’t live like the dress rehearsal of a play you didn’t write.

In the pursuit of an earthly excellence that expresses

our human consternation of who we are and are not,

neither this, nor that, say deeply what you mean

so that we can all draw water from it like the sun.

So there’s lightning in the clouds of your depression

and the fireflies take over where the starmaps leave off.

Be a great high priestess of the sacred syllable

and when you enter your venerated groves

like the night wind among the crowns of the trees

be at least as engaging and beautiful as they are

and as at home among warriors as you are homeless among saints.

Awake and alert in the unsayable silence. Wait.

And the metaphors will come like bridges that burn

and go up in flames like an orchid and bridges

that collapse under their own weight into the river

they were trying to cross to the colder, lonelier shore

where purity’s just a long, slow annihilation

of everything you still insist upon cherishing.

Let go. Fall. Revive. Return. Go up the mountain.

Find the mother lode. Bring it back down into the valley

like a strong river brings its knowledge of gold within.

Behind every explorer is a child who likes to discover

and share things. So what’s worth finding that you can’t?

You just have to look into one eye to see the history

of everything that can be seen. And when you open your mouth

prompted by a rush of stars, you sing

for thousands of dead poets who used to occupy

these green boughs and leafless branches, you sing

as if you were the last surviving member of the choir,

and the silence, the enraptured silence, were listening.

PATRICK WHITE