EVEN SISYPHUS STANDS BACK AMAZED

EVEN SISYPHUS STANDS BACK AMAZED

Even Sisyphus stands back amazed

and tries to explain how absurd it is

to protest your lot in life by making poetry

out of your pain, to refuse to roll the planet up the hill

and reconcile yourself to the fact

it’s going to roll down again upon you

like an avalanche or a meteor shower

or a fate-shaped asteroid out of the blue.

Water-lilies withering in the lagoons of late August.

O how easy and sleazy, snakeoil for axle-grease

and regal anointments in the cathedral of Reims

it would be to stick a flower in my jester’s cap,

paint a large, plump tear under my eye

and bray all day like a bicycle horn on a donkey

loaded down with books like a silo of cordwood

on its way to a learned auto de fe where you

smoulder to death like a wandering scholar

with a preternatural fear of fire consuming your magnum opus

in a conflagration of apocalyptic daylilies.

Death’s a star-nosed mole in a tunnel of light

looking for another way out of bringing the mighty low

as even a dragon must sometimes fold up its wings

like a black umbrella in the rain it brings, just to see,

out of narcissitic curiosity whether it’s forgotten

how to crawl on its belly when it was just another snake

like everyone else trying to leave a sign of intelligence

by making wavelengths of themselves

in these desert sands of an hourglass always pouring

another shot for the road, weeping for the mirage

of another mermaid naked as water that got away

like a wishing well that wasn’t interested

in fulfilling anyone’s desires but her own. Good for her.

She wasn’t singing to be understood like an answer

to anyone’s prayers. You don’t need a voice coach

to drown in your own tears. Aren’t there workhorses

already broken in like mirrors on the wall for that?

Fame’s too late to be of any use, and ask any wolf

you don’t need a name to seduce the moon lyrically

as long as you’re howling like a barrow tomb from the crest

of a hill of prophetic skulls shafted by the spring equinox

that didn’t shine upon your bone box. You’ve got to

roll the eclipse away from the entrance to your own tomb,

without claiming you did it for anyone else, as if

the gateway to enlightenment were an emergency exit from death

and you were trapped in the burning theatre of life on fire.

I can immediately tell by reading your folklore

like a native tracker fluently multilingual in Babylonian Braille,

there’s no agony in your sorrow, in your desire,

no hot genie in the lamp that keeps burning your fingertips

with disappointment you didn’t get what you want,

which is poetry, and prose, to only get what you need.

Or are you fond of calling it a rose when it’s a nosebleed?

Do you know how many lies have been squandered

on good reasons to live the mind you were born into

like an old prototype of a kite that had to be improved upon

by striking a balance between the highest and the lowest

like the feathers and scales of a dragon with a flightpath

of its own like the contrail of a comet extinguishing

the nuclear winter in its heart in the Gulf of Mexico

at the expense of its own kind in a renaissance of rats?

When the solid becomes real it’s much easier

to swim through your own translucency than get

bogged down like a fly in a gob of Baltic amber

like a sunset that doesn’t know when to get off stage.

When you stop trying to define and divine yourself

as if you were witching for water in hell it’s more

eloquently silver-tongued than light and rain to express yourself,

and what else have you got left to echo that isn’t fouled

by a shriek of cynical laughter, if it isn’t the leaves and apple bloom

of a Druidic tree alphabet that’s known by the fruits it bears

like jugs of water drawn from a sacred spring

where the river sylphs let down their hair like willows?

Look. There’s truth. There’s beauty. Why else

would we have words in common with them

to suggest their insubstantiality like this demotic dream grammar

of everything else in the world with a patina or a patois

of the meanings we ascribe to life like the slang of a tourist book

we’re mostly likely to overhear, shopping for souvenirs

in a black market of smuggled grave goods that have yet

to be deciphered like the key to the iris identification

of an insight into a whole other way of life

passing like the shadow of a mushroom cloud of civilization

over the shapeshifting, morphic mindscape of an Etruscan funeral?

There’s wisdom. There’s compassion. There are legends

of magnificent failures standing in the winner’s circles

like the laurels of Greece, the taste of rain on the lips of Daphne,

and there are horrors that befoul the mutant alloys of our genes

as if, as Sophocles said, it would have been best to never have been.

Flood myths in the sea of awareness without a lifeboat

or even so much as the lost hope of a dove or a crow

sighting land before nightfall finds you eyeless and alone

in a cistern of circling sundials that can smell blood in the water

like a rose from a lover on a rainy day lingering in your doorway

like a perfume she distilled from the drunken vomit of the night before.

The Canada geese have barely arrived on their side

of the goose blinds on the Saguenay, and already

they’re thinking of returning the way they came

like a loveletter that went to the wrong address

like the Koran Gabriel gave to Muhammad instead of Ali.

How could revelation ever get it as wrong as that?

Sooner a strong rope than the million weak threads

we hang each other with like a no fly zone for shuttlecocks

unravelling the aniconic magic of our flying carpets

on the loom of the moon undoing by day what she weaves

like a spider on the strings of an electric guitar by night,

water music of the morning hanging like the whole notes

of her tears from the dreamcatchers and powerlines

littered with trophies and houseflies like the cover story

of the monastic lies she took to uphold the vows

she mouthed like sacred alibis singing karaoake on the Temple Mount.

Nix, nix, say the nightbirds, long past their curfews

luring the demented serpents with stone ears

to the agony of their tormented joys fingerpainting

the lifemasks of the stars with the ultramarine ashes

of sapphires that run screaming down out of the hills

like a studio gallery of the blue-blooded warrior women of the Picts.

You hear that? asks Sisyphus. Sisyphus says it’s absurd

as if there were some hidden purpose behind

the most meaningful word in command of his vocabulary.

Hill, planet, stone, star, woman, apple trees,

aren’t these the graves and shrines the light of the mind

bends in such a way they were meant for our eyes only?

Not to deny the bees the Nazca lines of their approach to flowers,

or demand absolute clarity from our mottled starmud

like Parsifal, the sacred clown, drinking from the grail

at a ghost dance trying to green the ailing kingdoms

of the reservations they’ve been corralled into

like wild mustangs in the badlands of eohippus in a zoo.

Just express yourself, as you are, as you do, unwitnessed

when you’re convinced, not even the surveillance cameras

are watching or listening to the crazy wisdom of a medium

that summons the living back from the dead at a seance

that isn’t channeling anyone to open their mouths

and speak for everyone like a flashflood in a dry creekbed

or the taste of the rain that falls from your cloudy eyes

onto the tongues of the pressed flowers dessicated by a book.

Don’t tweet what you shriek. Don’t try to roar for effect

when you’re bleating for tigers like a judas-goat in a choir.

Do even the chainsaws know the sound of a tree

that falls in a clear cut old growth forest when there’s

no one there to hear it? Do the crows weep

indelible ink like tarpits and Icarian doves

still play with the muses of fire using their beaks

for guitar picks like Jimi Hendrix cremating a national anthem,

the flags of his semiquavers at half mast for unknown arsonists

with the voices of burnt out angels huffing lighter fluid in a parking lot?

PATRICK WHITE

NOTHING BUT WINDOWS FOR AN EMOTIONAL LIFE

NOTHING BUT WINDOWS FOR AN EMOTIONAL LIFE

Nothing but windows for an emotional life,

the town dead, Saturday night done, this heritage silence

I haven’t died here long enough to belong to

reminding me I will always be a stranger until

I’ve filled up half a cemetery with my last name

to claim I’m rooted in the local starmud

like vetch, loosestrife, common mullein or Bouncing Bet,

when in fact all I want to be is a backroad to an unnamed lake.

There should be a Russian olive whose silver green leaves,

spectral with moonlight and wind should suggest

the exquisite metalwork of the Byzantines when it came

to feathering mechanical birds that could sing.

Let the fireflies shine on a par with the stars

flickering through the boughs of the ironwood trees

like a lighter that doesn’t work, more spark than flame.

Neither intimate nor distant, may the toxic weariness

of swimming through the tarpit of the world

like a watering hole on the moon my childhood drowned in,

never diminish the shock of the insight that I’m alive,

do you hear me, alive, a pilot light of blueweed,

still on in this crematorium and morgue of a night,

a peer of the stars and fireflies, their constellations,

and the wake of the Milky Way they leave like waterbirds

skipping out over the lake like stones that never sink,

echoes that reply in kind to the solitude of my intensities.

No rural aristocrat, it doesn’t take a body count

to make me feel I belong anywhere. I’d rather be

as I am, nothing in the emptiness that keeps suggesting

life’s never as bad or as good as you think it is,

could be a curse, could be a blessing, but rarely,

is it boring enough to be self-explanatory when it speaks

to the mystery of remaining so clearly unknown

to those who have harboured a dark love for it the deepest.

Whether I’m ready for the wind or not in this game

of hide and seek, I’m an ageing lantern now and the light

hangs heavy on me like the bells of a bruised windfall

I’ll return to the earth like the fruits by which I’ve known

I’ve had more in common with abandoned orchards

than thornapples, more as a preference of luck, than

a principle I’m prepared to kill anyone’s garden off for

like an early frost in the autumn when I set fire

to the thousands of starmaps I’ve shed in my life

to give their myths of origin a taste of shining for themselves.

I know I said pilot light but I could have meant arsonist,

or just as easily, heretic, self-immolating like the protest

of a Buddhist monk, or setting fire to the ten cubic cords

of dry, cracked, two year old red oak I’ve piled about the stake

of a black chimney pipe that shoots demons at the stars

like the sparks of the fires I’ve started, trying to get to heaven

like Giordano Bruno in Venice, or the soul of a pharaoh

to Orion when he heard what the burning bush had to say about him.

I was born with two eyes that don’t take sides like the black holes

of the Satanic positivists who define the light as what’s left

after you’ve exorcised all its shadows and left the sun

feeling the dawn gets all the aubades, but the dusk

doesn’t get to herald in the night like the beginning

of the longings of the threnodies of a hermit thrush

waiting for solitude to return like the echo of a voice

that isn’t its own, wise with the melodic melancholy

of a hope that hasn’t died, making a go of it alone.

PATRICK WHITE

SICKENED BY THE SUPPURATING WOUNDS OF THE AILING WORLD

SICKENED BY THE SUPPURATING WOUNDS OF THE AILING WORLD

Sickened by the suppurating wounds of the ailing world

attended by political maggots who swear they’ll

eat the corruption out of the system, all of it, except

their own shit. Monostomes. They eat with the same mouth

they enter with, and exit like toilet bowls. Politics

with Lyme disease, dusky yellow sunsets in the green dragon blood

of wisdom they’ve amputated the limbs off like a tree

that got in the way of their powerlines. If it’s green,

it’s gangrenous. Barracuda chainsaws snarling

in an old growth forest that’s already been crucified

by the nails of the protesters as Caesar renders unto Caesar

that which is Caesar’s and no one else’s forever and ever amen.

Listened for a pulse in the voices of the corporate poets

long enough and realized the prizes go to echoes of voices

that sing like lobbyists on behalf of their own egos,

in music, in painting, in science, in life and death,

cannibalistic viciousness like thousands of pigs at a trough

talking like an antiseptic mouthwash to sweeten the stink

of old meat on their breath like the carrion of crocodiles.

Go, little rainbow, and find some oilslick to lie down upon

you can enlighten like an auroral tattoo of a butterfly

on the scales of a rat’s snake’s skin. Too much Ariel

and you’ll suffer the karmic revenge of Caliban

in that one big eye in the sky of your Cyclopean

approach to the brutal vicissitudes of life that kiss

the innocent good night on their foreheads, good night like

wasps laying their eggs on the living host

of tomorrow’s diminishing Swallowtails and Monarchs

imbibing neonicotinoids from the fracked housewells

of the flowers. I’ll look for you on pills in suburbia

o, sometime later, when you’re retaining water

like a bored soccer mom in the second phase of the tripartite moon.

I’ll look into your one good eye and I’ll know

without you saying a word, how creatively numb

you had to become to litter the sunny side of the street

with the glitter of rainbows on the wings of infectious houseflies.

The mutants, the ghouls, the grotesque, the gluttony

of the ignorant trying to die with the most toys

in their war chest to address the hosts of their victims

as winners among the victorious ghost writers

who revise history to exonerate the complicit parts

they played in it like sophists of the heart in an abattoir---

the mutants have taken devolution too far for things

to ever change except for the chthonic outrage

of a habitable planet shocked at the damage done

by guests in the house of life it provided for them

out of its own inner resources and a little help from the Leonids.

Anything goes to amuse the mob with its own insanity.

Bread and circuses, foodstamps and the Olympics

to tear down the slums of the poor to fill the hotels

of the mercantile cartels of tropical Sochi. But not to worry,

Darwin said the nations of the big fish eat

the nations of the little fish like krill

strained like bleeding blackberries

through the baleen of bottom feeding blue whales,

and the little fish have to be athletic. Exceed the record

or perish in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

Even a loser who upholds the myth of regressive development

by trying as hard as an Algerian immigrant in Paris

to make a living that wouldn’t make his family ashamed of him,

can win a place of affection in the hearts,

if not the hall of fame, by echoing the same defections

in the heartlessness of the audience that applauds him

like a little guy trying so hard against the odds

of the debilities they’ve imposed upon him, they

almost remember what it was like to cry for themselves sincerely.

And here comes the press, the fourth estate, engaged

in checking and balancing the lies of the other three

as a safeguard on democracy like celebrity paparazzi

salaciously whimpering platitudes over a newsworthy corpse

they’re interviewing like blackflies on live tv. Why not

talk directly to the guys who own the freedom to speak

like the stem cells of their iphones cloned as

the Wizard of Oz making a big noise about nothing

behind the mythically inflated misquotes of mosquitoes

humming in their ears behind the story like bloodbanks

at the beginning of a food chain with the logos

of peacocks, third eyes, alphabets, and bare initials

carved into the bark of compromised lovers

who forgot what their names were for a long time ago.

Sick of it. Not ill. Sick. Like a fish swimming

in the polluted waters of life at the infectious stage

of a nuclear reactor throwing plague rats into the watersheds

of water being life, life being water if you’ve ever watched

the flowing comets of goldfish in an aquarium late at night for long.

Sick of the strong stepping on the throats of the weak

like snapping turtles at the jugulars of wild swans.

Sick of the asylum, the hospital, the drugstore, the funeral home

the old and disabled retire to when their benefits are cut off

like neurons from hydro, their redoubtable wisdom

unable to keep up with the payments on technology.

Sick of the bumper crops of pharmaceuticals threshed

like genetically modified grains of wheat when the moon is full

and the emergency wards are howling like extracurricular ambulances

they put on in Montreal like banshees at a harvest barn dance

and the violins are shrieking like hysterical crackheads

for more drugs to put them out of their misery

like the mercy of administrative angels on the psych ward.

Someone should publish a dream grammar for the sacred syllables

of our mother tongues raging like offended flower vendors

in the shadows of the Tower of Babel and market it

to the tourists so they don’t get burnt buying a rose

with more thorns than petals in the souk before

the bomb goes off like house nails reroofing

the leak in the shelter of the Lord like the meteor showers

and lightning strikes at the children of Sodom and Gomorrah

who don’t have a chance of growing up to be

a mahdi, a messiah, a hidden imam, exilic patriarchs

commanding all foreign wives be put aside,

a purging of brides heuristically unchosen by a choosey God

as a template for problem-solving extemporaneous

marital affairs. Who dares rend asunder what love

has joined together? The weld is stronger than the original bond.

As the alloys that transgress the limits of the pure element

usually take a sharper edge honed on the wheel of birth and death

than the copper chisels blunted on the pyramids,

dead, dead, dead, innocent and green as moldy bread.

Sick of the disappointments and diminishments

of my humanity. Sicker still of the cloying nostalgia

for what it used to be when the heart was a cause celebre

and not the passing effect of some random circumstance

massed against me like a god particle or birth defect

that’s difficult to detect. I’m here. Where are you?

Not cool, o no, to be disowned by the guildhalls

and literary cults with their unaffordable sentiments

trying to raise awareness of their trivialized art

like the icons and memes of quasi revolutionary saints

parading through Red Square as if life were just

one big chequered table cloth spread out on a sunny spot

in the grass that isn’t as green as it used to be

before they started making the homeless pick up

their own corpses as if they were fouling the foot path.

Not a good space, not pleasantly germaine

to the comas of taste flower-arranging chaos

to go with the urn on the mantle, still too hot to handle,

though it’s beginning to flatline like a dragon that’s flown the coup

or a phoenix in an aviary that sings as if it caught the croupe

from a nightingale with a crown of thorns for a larynx.

Sick of living in a shallow time, in a car pool of shore-huggers

who believe it’s enough to shed a tear or two

to claim they, too, were washed ashore like piratical survivors

who braved the perfect storms on the great night seas

of sorrow and awareness. Sometimes I’ve just got

to get the abyss out of the universe deep inside,

lance the abscess, trepan the prophetic pressure

of the dying planet of my uninhabitable skull

with all its shepherd moons volcanically, expurgate

the ambergris of a sperm whale like a more honest

fragrance of perfume, stick my finger down my throat

like a vomitorium in a Colosseum where

roses of blood in the dirt are being pruned

and tied back like the tree in the moon by

dead head gardeners in a high-walled abbatoir

fascinated by the avant garde aesthetics of blood spatter.

Got to get it out like the Oxyrhyncus sayings

of Jesus Christ, or the Freudian dowagers

of sex-crazed Vienna at the end of a neurotic empire,

or the thorn of the moon in my third eye

I gouged out like the semi precious stone

of a planet embedded in its orbit like an electron

or an engagement ring leftover from an ancient love affair

so as not to be destroyed by what I don’t bring forth.

Out, out, through the emergency exit door

of my therapeutic puncture wound, sick of living

in a shallow time where what’s written off

as the effluvium of the heart in the ditches of inspiration

reeks more sincerely of human content, than what

the mouthwashes and famous deodorants are writing about

as if the stink of enlightenment were the wise

passing cosmic gas just enough to inspire a jackass

to bray like a book with a carrot in front of its nose

that grows like lies in the heartwood of Pinnochio’s.

When your imagination has so little to reveal to you

why try to expose it as if it were real by acclamation?

PATRICK WHITE

MORE PEACE THAN DEATH IN THE QUALITY OF THE SILENCE TONIGHT

MORE PEACE THAN DEATH IN THE QUALITY OF THE SILENCE TONIGHT

More peace than death in the quality of the silence tonight.

In such a vastness, after so many turnings at the crossroads,

I can feel you breathing in the dark within me

as I used to watch you dream for hours

in the glow of the fire on an ice bound night

when no one was on the roads like buttered mirrors

and only the shadows and moonlight moved

like ghosts that were sure of their footing

and the elastic cats were stretched out in the warmth

like deserted shorelines as far as they could go

as if they never wanted to come back to themselves.

My love for you burned like a poppy of blood

in the white gold of the wheat of my body

I offered you like bread, as you, yours to me,

wine that had been crushed like wild grapes

from the vineyards of a thousand new moons.

Though space and time be one continuum,

dimension and direction, vectors of shadows on a sundial,

two feathers of the same flightpath of a nightbird

that disappears into the silence of its longing

as if it had found its voice in the stillness of the immensities

that enclosed us like two secrets that revealed

what was intimately human about the mystery of life,

just to feel the light gathering in my eyes

as I looked upon your face the way the stars

shine down upon the earth was always and only

as far as I ever had to seek to know why I lived.

The journey finds itself like a planet around a fire at night.

And all that is huge and incomprehensible about love,

is contained in the watershed of a single tear

we shed in joy as it floods the heart to realize

how wrong our starmaps were for so long about so much

though they try to fix our brevity to a time and a place

and a myth we could look up to when we’re lost

all we ever had to do, rooted in each other’s starmud,

was let the shining find us, even on the coldest nights,

like flowers blooming in the soporific aura of a fire

while your eyes were dreaming like a nightstream

under its eyelids of ice, and mine, for all the lightyears since

my seeing has ripened in time, and this night is no exception,

were grateful to witness the poppies flaring

in the gardens of the afterlife of Orion as near

as a pair of cardinals taking shelter in a snowbound cedar tree.

We burned brightly together for awhile, did we not---

two flames of a root fire folding its wings

like a love poem I wanted you to find in the morning

that didn’t return to its grave like a ghost of smoke

lingering long into the dawn of that hour you awoke

beside me, the sun gleaming in the crude chandeliers

of the icicles and the snow fronds of the ferns on the windows,

though things that were near and familiar have been

estranged by space and time, and the melting roads we once

walked down together in the spring are long gone, I write to you

in warm tears as I did that night in the glow of a fire

even after all these years, that can still take the chill off the air

as if the flames in the heartwood of the lives we are consumed by

refeather the dragons on the pyres of sumac, even time, though

it’s cold and cutting, can’t blow out like stars flowering on the wind.

PATRICK WHITE

WON'T MEAN MUCH IF YOUR EYES AREN'T OPEN IN YOUR BLOOD

WON’T MEAN MUCH IF YOUR EYES AREN’T OPEN IN YOUR BLOOD

Won’t mean much if your eyes aren’t open in your blood.

If the stars can’t see you because you don’t know how

to read them poetry in the small cafes of your heart

accompanied by spoons and plates and broken goblets

of the cheap house wine that smash just like love affairs

dashing your skull against the rocks, hoping the mermaids come back.

If you can’t hear in the parking lot of a raucous industry

the colours of your emotions, you’re a deaf chameleon

and who could make you listen to what you can’t listen to

even if you had enough people who loved you around you

to want you to try to listen to your own tears when you cry?

Your ear on the same wavelength as a corrugated tin roof,

maybe you can see what I’m trying to say to you

if you close your eyes, and just listen to the rain without

trying too hard to make a big effortless effort to be

auditorily enlightened by the racket of your delusions.

I can’t remember when my life stopped being my own

and I went to bed one night, and I was as human as my toes are

and I awoke, I was merely the afterbirth of a visionary

I didn’t recognize, as my eyes were being igneously wrung

from a cope of dark ore like stars out of the distant hills.

Not a lot of self-respect from the beginning, maybe

it wasn’t that hard becoming everyone and everything else,

and I was a prime candidate for effacement

but when I looked into the mirror of my

ten inch, equatorially mounted, clock-driven, reflecting telescope

I used like a canning jar to capture and mount stars and fireflies

on a black velvet starmap, all I could see

was this abyss staring back at me that couldn’t say

where I’d gone, but the last I thought I heard

was that I got a job as a janitor in an hourglass

sweeping mirages out of a desert of private school stars.

I say what I see as it occurs to me spontaneously.

And I’m compelled to say it without hesitation

so the vision isn’t tainted by the colour of the jewel

it’s passing through, from one eye to the next, ad infinitum.

No light pollution in the shining, though there’s something

about the idea of purity that continues to appal me

because I never had so much against chaos from the beginning

and I sense a deep hatred of all that is soiled and flawed,

in which case, I’d rather be an outlaw than one of these monks

who disdain me because I can’t help seeing their discipline

as uncreatively redundant. Eventually, if they’re blessed,

all our faces are going to fall off by themselves

like the scabs of sunspots that healed the wounded light

like a wildflower shedding its petals like nurses’ caps

and deathmasks frozen like a moment in time meant

to last forever though we go on being estranged by them forever.

Uncanny transformations of the solid into the real.

Maybe it’s time to let the mindstream flow as it will

and let the burning bridges of our delusions cross us for a change

to get to the other side of a life that’s only got one bank

and it’s as clear as space, we’re not even standing on that.

Hang on. Let go. It’s just your hand opening and closing

like a door in a dream, and you’ll find your falling

just as fast as you ever were and if you were to ask your eyes

they couldn’t tell in this vastness whether your were falling up or down.

When you’ve dismantled all you’ve desired,

post neo-deconstructionism sets in like spiritual rigor mortis

and you can’t tell if you’re sleeping with the living or the dead

when you haven’t got your mask on. You can wear holes

in your shoes, and windows and carpets, pacing

like a waterclock of the heart in an hourglass of waiting

like a boy at the edge of the curb with his elbows on his knees

and his face in his glum hands, waiting for a parade

with sacred clowns throwing away free candies

like stars along the route of the mystic Milky Way.

Just be sure to keep your eyes open like a spring thaw

so the light can recognize you like the flower that brought it

to full illumination this time last year like a candle

that keeps blowing its petals out so you can see

the black matter of what you are not deeper

into the eyeless dark than you’ve ever bloomed before.

PATRICK WHITE  

UNDEVOTED, FREE, AND WILD

UNDEVOTED, FREE, AND WILD

Undevoted, free, and wild,

no one to answer to, no one to answer for,

the urns shattered, and the ashes scattered,

and the fire liberated to perfect its own combustion

and the stars without anyone to walk home,

and the solitude silent, dark, and deep, cool

as the bliss of a wine-cellar talking in its sleep,

I have grown mad in the heat of the purple sun.

I have spoken from the mouths of the caves in the desert

and not expected the echo of my own voice

to return to me like a pilgrim stashing a gnostic gospel

deep in the sand, without realizing

how much closer to the stars dirt is than I am.

When you’re no one but the wind in disguise

you don’t need to be humble, you don’t need to be wise,

nothing to trust, and no one to rely on,

you can watch the dead at night

streaming toward Orion

like a blue-white ribbon of light

undoing the gift wrappings off the bodies and eyes

of people who can see and be again.

And you know it comes to everyone

like a nebular orchid with a fragrance of stars,

that the Sahara will green and bloom again

and the wind sing hymns to the grass

and the gazelles sport their elegant legs,

adolescents in the spring brush,

running like violins succulent with beginnings,

and it doesn’t matter you’re alone out here

listening to the ashes of a mirage

make up legends to tell the fire

about its ancestors buried on the moon anonymously

and how their blood once stained the earth

like a scarlet letter even the stars couldn’t wash off.

The mystic anti-hero of my own dragon myth

I exalt in my isolation like a shriek of revolution

and overthrow myself like a book in the flames

to keep something I don’t understand alive in me

as if I had to keep on dying to sustain myself

and the distinction between one and the other were lost upon life.

It’s a touch, it’s a feel, it’s a hole in veil

with one eye looking out at me to see

if I’ve intensified the dark enough to break into stars,

if I can unravel my heart like smoke like water like fire

and perfectly disappear into the atmosphere of my dispersal

without a shudder of farewell to the masks I wore like scales.

Not to be constrained by even so much as

the single thread of a straitjacket, the husk

of an abandoned sanctuary left to the imagination

of the hermetic flowers to do with as they wish.

I shriek freedom across the heavens like the death cry

of a hawk waking the valley up in the morning.

I whisper to the water things the wind was never meant to hear.

So faithful to my calling, I lead those who come, away from me,

as if it were the perennial custom of the universe

to meet like this for a moment in time and space

and then disperse into the darkness alone like a unlit candle.

I’m a riot of fools in the sublimity of the presence within me

that elates the crazy wisdom of my spontaneous ignitions

and schools the black lightning of its absence

in the folly of trying to enclose my spirit in gates

like a candle in the niche of a tempestuous vision.

Yeeeeeeessssss, I scream into the face of nothing

like the efoliant scripture of my confession and protest

that life doesn’t need an alibi to live and die by,

no extraneous, no outer, no other, no object, no subject

no flying buttress to act as a bridge

over a flowing river of Gothic stone,

no strong tree standing on its own to cut down

and carve into a crutch, no cork to keep the ocean out,

no bucket to bail the moonlight out of the lifeboat,

no jade Buddha to make your supplications to,

no footprints on the water Jesus walked,

no cave in Ramadan to receive the angel of light,

no Kabbalah to baffle your way through the night,

no Schmidt-Cassegrain reflecting telescopes

on clock driven equatorial mounts geared to the heavens

to thread the golden needle of the mystery

without any knots in your spinal cord,

to penetrate the vulva of the sea like a sacred shell

that once gathered armies on a burning hillside

to contest their revelations with the tongues of swords.

I shall tell you, my brother, I shall hasten to you my sister

like moonlight through your window, I shall not

hold back from you the least shadow of the furthest star

releasing its dark wisdom like the black doves

of its own excruciating ashes glowing like the pain

of horrendous transformations into light.

I shall not bring you the skins of the dragons I’ve shed

but inspire you with a fire you’ve never been burned by before,

a spiritual immolation into a godhead without a metaphor

to guide you by, a torch you can’t drown in your tears,

a long firewalk down to a river of stars,

and there you shall cross on a burning life raft

of the bones you’ve been carrying around for lightyears like a body.

And it’s a heresy of silence to say, but there

you shall you shall lie down in the nocturnal emptiness

in the long blue seagrass of the moon

and empower out of your own creative abundance

whatever worlds your longing inspires you to embrace

to amuse the bright vacancy of eternity with time, like love,

and the dark abundance of unperishing potential

with space, like wisdom, and the clear light of the void

and the unspeakable absence of any other voice

to ruin the silence with the bliss and sorrow of seeking

the mystic night you found within you longing like a bird

for the stillness to write it like a lyric of the wind,

a passage of blood through the labyrinth of the heart,

a shadow against the moonrise of a compassionate awareness

there’s a divinity that sings like a human

in the heart of everything that breaks its long fast of nothing

with praise and celebration, with fire and light and rain

with the firstt sacred syllables to touch the lips

of the black rose charred in the heart of the dragon, like poetry.

PATRICK WHITE

THESE MEMORIES, SHOES I'VE WALKED IN TOO LONG

THESE MEMORIES, SHOES I’VE WALKED IN TOO LONG

These memories, shoes I’ve walked in too long

and worn out, holes in the bottom of my universe,

watercolours fading in the glare of my mind,

the ghosts of vivid sunsets overshadowed

by the mystique of the stars like New England asters

caught by surprise in a shock of blonde hay

or pawn shop poppies selling their dreams cheap.

Cool bliss. More joy in the dark watersheds of my heart

than these abandoned housewells I keep swimming in

like a garter snake lapping the rain with the tines

of its lightning tongue, not sure, like the fireflies

and the moon, I can rise, smoke from a chimney,

the same way I got in, a wavelength of the sun

that shines at midnight in the depths of a nocturnal mirage.

I don’t know much about success. My life has been

a rear guard guerilla action against the odds

of even achieving an orderly retreat from

the invasive armies of inanity I’m surrounded by

like drones fighting a holy war without caring

whose side they’re on like a retinal response to reality.

I can’t count the times I’ve been collaterally killed

by hungry blue whales in the sky screening for krill

like a food chain with its tail in its mouth.

My flesh gets passed around like a torn loaf of bread

though my aspirations are more galactic

than messianic, it all comes down to atoms in the end.

The small things you remember, the enigma

of a distant star winking intimately at you

through the boughs of the black walnut trees in the fall

as if there were more to the encounter than you can second-guess.

The crumb of a dream some lover rubbed from the corners

of her eyes as she woke in the morning, her hair

flowing like night rivers down into the bays of her eyes

washing the stars out from the evening before.

The thorns of the rose that nicked your heart

like scalpels of cuneiform that baked your starmud

in the kiln of a book fired like a clay urn.

Is it sacrilege to pour the ashes out on the wind

that scatters you like a narrative theme on the roots

of a dragon that doesn’t want to be burned alive again

on the pyres of the sumac and daylilies expiring

by a river of sorrows that tastes of a thousand

self-immolations in the cold furnaces of love

we all stand prophetically in like heretics

who could see their fate painted on the lenses

of the telescopes of the orthodox who insist

the moon isn’t pitted like rings that have lost

the initial sparkle of their jewels and the the sun

isn’t maculated by dark spots. What use now

these gnostic starmaps I sited through an astrolabe

of fireflies, if it isn’t to start a fire in the morning

to take the chill off these desert nights

and warm up the leftovers of my daily bread?

Memory is the mother of the muses but she recalls

visions, not photographs trapped in their own image

like the Burgess Shale. The absence of so many

people and things is still a transformative event

that keeps on growing within me like an expanding universe

where every star is a diaspora of one driven

by the dark energy of some occluded insight

into the oblivion of lovers who have become

so interspatially out of touch with each other’s

lightning and fireflies their eyes atrophy

because of a lack of light and the company

of strangers, and you, no less of a stranger

to the intimate distances of the dusky solitude

you disappear into like a crow or a mourning dove

into a sky with an infinite wingspan whenever you open

the gate on the aviary of your hooded heart

and every love letter you write after that

sounds like the silence of a flightfeather in an envelope

cresting like a wave breaking on the shore

of some island galaxy you’ve been washed up on

like a sea star with a new way of shining

that doesn’t throw a light on anything but is

blazing with life that reveals a lot more than can be seen.

Things don’t die like gravegoods around you.

They take the same journey you’re on

like a ka gun pointing at Osiris, the dog-star, in Orion.

Whether your embalmed or dismembered

all the parts are assembled once more as if death

were only a bad joke no ever catches onto

until they can hear laughter on the other side

of the black mirror you’re peering into

that doesn’t recognize the new identity

you’re dreaming in your sleep as if you were

awake again, and none of this had happened yet,

great joy, great pain, and the freedom to forget creatively

even when you walk alone by your own light

you cast thousands of shadows.

PATRICK WHITE