A SCAFFOLDING TO CLIMB UP ON AND PAINT THE WORLDS

A SCAFFOLDING TO CLIMB UP ON AND PAINT THE WORLDS

A scaffolding to climb up on

and paint the worlds, my bones.

I climb the ladder of my ribs

like the hull of a scuttled shipwreck

on the moon, to highlight the stars.

And I sing as I work as if

I were being unsaid by everything

I’ve ever meant and I’m grateful

in a wary way because freedom

from all constraints, the golden chains,

the iron straitjackets of expertise

in residence like the Great Barrier Reef,

is always a work in progress

I never want to take for granted.

I’m not in love. Nor do I long to be

and I’m still more ingenuously grateful

than bitter for the poignancy

of the women I’ve loved like a pilgrimage

to a shrine in a holy war for my liberation.

I remember the nights the apricots froze

in a flash frost, but comes the dawn

of your next afterlife and things thaw out.

As you get older everything goes more crimson

than grey, Betelgeuse in Orion,

and the thresholds you once leapt across

like a photon jumping orbitals, feel more

like sway-back stairs you’ve worn down

on your knees, carrying crutches to Cavalry

like relics of the true cross returning like skeletons

to the Hill of Skulls, the unfeathered wings

of birds that crash-landed in an early attempt

at the transmigration of souls in the bone-boxes

of the aviaries they were buried in.

There are only so many bells in the world,

so many swans and moons and lion gates,

so many superlatives you can compare

the body of a woman to, and even fewer

the mystery of the starmaps of her mind

she binds you to like a firefly

in a labyrinth of night before she

elevates you into a constellation

and lifts her veils like Isis to show you

what her face looks like in your own light.

If I’ve had a quarrel with life at times

it’s been like a cloud of sheet lightning

rooting its lightning in the air like a dragon

in defence of all the wildflowers it remembers

drinking from the hidden watersheds of its tears.

In this life, less is a lot more grateful than more

for small things that happen in the microworlds

like off-handed miracles of a sort

that aren’t trying to convert you to anything

you weren’t already like the mirage

of your own creation myth as you gather

the waters of life up in both your hands

and drink deep from the wellsprings of your eyes.

Elixirs and potions of seeing and being,

eddies and currents, tidal surges and undertows

in the nightstreams of space we’re

white-water rafting like the spring run off

of the Milky Way. It doesn’t matter as much

to me whether it’s a dream or not as it used to.

Whether I wake up or I don’t. The gate’s open

or closed, or hanging on like a lapwing by a hinge.

In joy or sorrow, there’s only so much time

and then there is forever. No one ever arrives

completely. No one ever departs without leaving

something of themselves behind, be it a heart

that holds you dear as the ashes in the urn

of an old love affair, or just a sign carved

by a boy on the rafter of an abandoned barn

you were up here once when your daring

was an eagle that lacked the foresight

to keep its feet on the ground like poultry

that’s had its flightfeathers plucked for convenience.

Go ask the iron rooster that got fried

like a weathervane by the lightning

the other night. All my life, daring

has said feathers and falling has taken flight.

I’ve been a cinder of a crow

in the third eye of the storm

that washed me out as if it had been

crying all night without knowing why.

I’ve been the larynx of a waterbird caught

in the throat of a telescope that gorges on stars

to sweeten the picture-music of its voice

as Cygnus and Aquila rise in the east

of indelible summers ago that still taste

like the eyelids of the ocean in a mystic rose

in a deep sleep I once bent down to kiss

for dreaming of me as if I actually exist.

PATRICK WHITE

BEAUTY IN THE ALOOFNESS OF MY USUAL SORROWS

BEAUTY IN THE ALOOFNESS OF MY USUAL SORROWS

Beauty in the aloofness of my usual sorrows.

A respite in time and care. A hole in space

I can escape through without setting off any alarms.

And I don’t care what this poem is going to be about

I can write it with no preconceived deceptions,

no utilitarian intent, no split lip ego-defects.

For a moment, the ice age is thawing

and the blue chicory and English ox-eyed daisies

like the taste of the air, and the drainage-ditches

are a riot of Queen Ann’s Lace and Viper’s Bugloss.

Temperate consolations modify my mood

into a truce with the bleaker conditions of life.

I’m gulled by the sunshine. I’m a schill of the mindstream.

The killer bees are away from their hives.

Amber tears of Baltic honey flow in my veins

without attracting flies. Life is unconscionably reasonable

in the efflorescence of its mystically specific details.

Even my dragon skull basks in the beatific wavelengths

of a better attitude toward its own martyrdom

in the greener fires of earth like salt in a flame.

And later tonight, if I’m still so entranced,

I’ll make my way down to the Tay River

to see if the fireflies are out dancing pianissimo

with the abandoned lighthouses of the stiff-necked cattails.

I’ll sit on a rock that doesn’t aspire to lord it over

anyone’s kingdom, and I’ll stare at the stars

until they’re tattooed like an indelible starmap

on the back of my eyelids, to keep my tears

from diluting them like smeared watercolours

or my more igneous aspects, from shattering them

like the menagerie of a zoo with glass bars.

And o, basking in the freedom of my own madness,

hilarious as peace, the infinite homelessness

of knowing I come from everywhere all at once,

and there’s nowhere I’ve walked alone in my life

down any road beset with assassins, or feathered

like strippers in boas of white sweet clover,

I haven’t been stepping across the threshold

of another wilderness always as vast

and cautiously intriguing as I am mysteriously lost

when the human intimacy of a longing heart

encounters the sentient impersonality

of an infinite mind that isn’t aware of anything

the heart doesn’t bring before it like a child’s drawing.

And there are themes you can follow

like bush wolves through the back woods

trampled down by the padding of their circuitous descents

into the dangerous pantries of the farms

pseudomorphically nestled between the hills.

It’s an itinerary that’s serviced the pack for years

with a sufficiency that’s got them this far against the odds.

And each to their own way, go with the gods

and I’ll rejoice in hearing you howl among the trees

to the chagrin of your detractors listening

with a begrudging admiration a civilization away

from what’s been bred out of them like freedom

under a full moon in heat. As for me

and my homeless approach to the ghost towns

of future zodiacs, I never want to know where I’m going

until I get there inconceivably as the only path

I could have taken in the first place,

because that’s always the way it is

even when you delight in the wiles of going astray.

Signs of your emptiness in the midst of the great unknowing.

Time and space mindscaping the exploration

you keep thrusting into the dark like the light and the lamp

of an estranged nightwatchman, hoping

you haven’t been here before, and anything

worth keeping an eye on has already been given away for free.

PATRICK WHITE

UNBUCKLE YOUR HEART

UNBUCKLE YOUR HEART

Unbuckle your heart, undo the luggage strap.

Wash the smell of old lovers out of your laundry.

Sow the dreams you’ve carved from your skull

like dice in sacred ground

and let’s see what springs up.

There’s the bathtub you can renew

your virginity in, and there’s a corner

you can stand your bass guitar in

like an Irishman at his wake in a coffin.

And there’s the garden for that persona

you took on the road like a scarecrow

for a travelling companion with a limp.

All the flowers taste of hummingbirds.

And it’s ok the raccoons come for the corn

like second storey cat burglars in the night.

They never take more than they need

and in a world of greed, that’s integrity.

I always leave a smile ajar to let them in.

But with you, my heart’s an open doorway

the moon’s standing in, and my blood’s

a transfusion of black roses into the occult.

My eyes, a rare conjunction of fireflies

that won’t happen again for another hundred years.

Doom can spend all the time it wants

messing with its calendars to co-ordinate

the apocalypse in all zodiacs at once

so the year of the rat and the year of the swan

don’t synchronize their prophets to the dawn

like waterclocks who think things are

just going to go on and on as they always have

like imperially inclined aqueducts without a rupture.

Eclipse, millennial poseur, you’re a lyric of carbon

that makes the diamonds flow like tears

to realize there’s galaxies of white sweet clover

more to you than appears under the cloud cover

of a hundred billion stars burning into the silver nitrates

of the photographic plates I take of you

in the humbled mountains of my all night observatories.

And even at this distance, alone in the cold company

of these one-eyed telescopes, I’m tempted

to cross your event horizons into your black holes

and see what worlds might come of us

on the other side. Throw caution to the wind

like a rodeo clown and take the ride

as if you were not too wise or wild for tenderness.

Even when you hurt I’ve seen how you wear

the corona of the sun so lightly in full eclipse

all the haloes shining by a reflected glory

seem mere brassy moon dogs by comparison.

Out of fury you insist upon your originality

like a gamma ray burst in the path of the earth

as you weave your interlocutory wavelengths

into the flying carpets and labyrinths

of an alien cartographer mapping out the stars

with your third eye open to the loneliness of beauty

and how everyone’s threatened by an intelligent orchid.

I imagine sometimes you’re almost as unloveable as I am

when I’m at my best, when I’ve been accurately blessed,

not too much, more or less, beyond my aspirations

and I see at the speed of light how time stops,

and my mass and volume become as infinite

as my body and mind, and everything

is perfectly inconceivable in a fallible eternity

that’s adapted to us like the medium of a mystery

in a graveyard of dead metaphors we keep giving

new meaning to as if we were all randomly immortal.

Are you the supple bubble of effervescence

in a tsunami of sorrow that could keep my spirits up,

or a methane moon waiting for an airlift of oxygen

to light you up. You’re too incandescent

to shine like a brown star, too imaginatively immense

to be a black dwarf. Are you the omnipresence of a particle

or the oracular wavelength of an apostate saint

when no one’s looking but me and you

through your holy books to see if what we said

came true or not? If we kept our word

to the innovative absurdity of it all in peace and war

or threw the moon through the window

like an alarm clock that didn’t go off in time

to save the earth? I know you’re not

the existential bricklayer of the paradoxically sublime

outside the gates of Babylon, nor the whore within.

I’ve seen you wing your way from one planet to the next

trying to thread your lifelines into a nest

that wasn’t a begging bowl in the hands of tree

that came on like a slumlord in a ghetto of birds.

There are no aviaries for the hopelessly free.

But could you live with me in this homelessness

like a tent in the wind that scours Mars for survivors

of the last expedition of seeds that tried to bloom here?

I’d build you a palace of black water that eclipsed

the beauty of the Taj Mahal and plant stars

all around it that would fountain into waterlilies

and we’d be so full of moonlight and solitude

in the silence of each other’s eyes, the darkness

couldn’t help but envy us the danger of the enterprise.

PATRICK WHITE

MY DEATH WAS A QUIET EVENT

MY DEATH WAS A QUIET EVENT

My death was a quiet event.

I entered the abyss with all

the constituents of the first sign of life

to give voice to the silence

that’s been ripening within me for years.

Green bough. Dead branch. Same song.

The apple falls. The moon blossoms.

Everytime we open them, the worlds

sprout from our eyes like seeds.

Close them and it’s an excuse to dream

of sleepwalking on stars like the firmament

of our own breath expiring

like a vapour of light on the autumn air,

a tale of smoke, a road of ghosts,

the purple passage of a fragrance

from the fires of life that bloom

out of the void like stars and wildflowers

deep within where we cast the shadows of the mirages

we are. Poppies in a wheatfield. Fires

in the desert like red-shifting stars burning

with the life of meaning as if shining itself

were meaning enough to engender us

like the myths of our own imaginations.

Life’s not solid, it’s as real as any nightmare

that never came true, any dream that ever kept

its vow to you. Grow vast. Teach space

not to be confined by itself. Grow deep.

Encourage time to root in your starmud

like a river system of lightning flowing

into the great night seachange of your awareness

as wise as the salmon are, we’re not fish

swimming upstream in a waterclock to be

born again to copulate and die. We’re

the sacred syllables of sparrows in a fountain

washing the dust of the worlds off our wings

after many flights, joy-riding the wind,

after many ice-ages in the hourglass of winter,

like the crumbs of a dream from our eyes

when we wake up to the fruits of life

we keep sowing in our graves like the silver bows

of these lifeboats that keep on ploughing

the seas of the moon as the siloes of our afterlives

are filled behind us with the windfall of our flowering.

PATRICK WHITE

SOLITUDE, MY FRIEND, LET'S GET OUT OF HERE

SOLITUDE, MY FRIEND, LET’S GET OUT OF HERE

Solitude, my friend, let’s get out of here.

Sick of looking at the same old deathmask

in the mirror like this afterlife I’ve carved

out of my heartwood like a straw dog

I cling to with too much affection. I forget

who said the mind is an artist, able

to paint the worlds, but it’s true. What

you see in the world is always a self-portrait

of what you look like from the inside.

Some colour within the lines like a choir of crayons

and others mix up a palette of homeless hormones

as if they were putting icing on a wedding cake

they were trying to keep the flies out of

like a seven-tiered ziggurat keeping an eye on the stars,

or a painting knife that slashed at the canvas

like an image of grace that wanted to paint its face

in scars of thick, dry pigment irresistible

as wet cement to a kid before everything goes solid

as ancient starmud on an effluvial flood plain on Mars.

Solitude, you’re the mast I bind myself to

whenever I hear a woman singing through an open window

as if the only way for a heart like mine

to have a long-lasting love affair with life

is to shapeshift my way like rites of passage

through all the stations of being water goes through.

Ice, fog, rain, clouds, seas, glaciers, rivers, mud-puddles,

water droplets, dew, lakes, tears, locked

in the comas of comets, frozen watersheds on the moon,

in these bodies we’re always leaking out of as if we had

more exits than entrances, and never last

and never least, this mindstream I like to sit

with you by like wildflowers in the sunset,

and drown my thoughts as if I were restocking

ten thousand lakes with the stem cells

of small-mouthed bass and northern pike

just to keep the game I’m playing with myself

dangerous and honest. Whether you exhibit or not

all visual art was born with the eyes of predators

painting their hunting magic on the walls

of their caves as if they’d found a way inside

their skulls to petition the great mother

with the mystic signage of their sacred gratitude.

Add a bird bone flute or two and it’s the picture music

that still echoes like a subterranean dream grammar

quoting the chapter and verse of mandalic metaphors

like the farewell of a waterbird to a fledgling arrow

of an albatross arcing through the sky like a paintbrush

with the taste of blood in its mouth, and its wingspan

unfolding like a book of sorrows too deep to curse.

Solitude, my friend, let’s get out of here.

I’m tired of counting the dead on the abacus

of my tears, black as new moons on my spinal cord.

Anywhere you want to go just say the word

and I’m there. Let the dark evaporate like a black hole

if Stephen Hawking is right, and if he’s not

we’ll work out some kind of cosmology along the way

of smoke and mirrors like a working telescope.

Make something up out of the ashes

of our former insights like a habitable planet

that doesn’t rely on the reflected light

of a middle-aged star for an exterior light source.

Let’s wander down that road no one’s ever

given a name to, forever further than we can go

like a new universe breaching the waters of life

with a birthpang of light that doesn’t wash

the baby out with the bathwater in the normal course

of love and life like a cradle or an ark

in a Red Sea of bloodlust that keeps saying to itself

apres moi le deluge. Let’s keep things in perspective

and make it huge enough to let parallel lives

meet like rivers mingling their way into each other

like the slim threads of one big tapestry

of marine life in a membranous multiverse.

Let’s go write crop circles in the abandoned fields

that read like the journals of the farm wives

that once lived around here as if there were

more intimacy in their solitude than there was

in the estranged company of their communion with town.

Let’s make a starmap out of the broken windows

that we’ve looked through as if someone

smashed their crystal skull like tears on a rock

scarred by glacial striations of the last ice age

that taught us to dance around a fire at night

to keep warm under the palatial chandeliers of the Pleiades

as if we had something to aspire to in life

that was higher than us. And it might sound weird

to someone who’s never haunted a house of life

they haven’t lived in, like a shrine to their own solitude

founded on a tradition of chaos that kept

the whole thing afloat like an empty lifeboat

anyone was welcome to crawl into anytime

they needed to without a passport to the moon.

Out of nothing, my solitude, we have both been made,

and that makes us wholly compatible

with the best and most abysmal in life,

this vapour of patchouli incense in the nostrils of God,

the smell of burning tires like black haloes

around the necks of humans nailed like crosses

to their bodies and minds like an excruciating witness

to their life and times. O who’s to say awareness

isn’t a miracle because they live like a lab rat

under a periodic table? If only with you, my solitude,

just to be here, however long it goes on

explaining itself with every thought and emotion

you’ve ever had it’s that close. A breath of stars

on the air at night, as if someone were breathing

inside you, every moment, the inconceivable absence

that fits you like the skin of an iridescent,

supersensible spherical mirror of a soap bubble

of intelligence, or a contact lens at one end

of the Hubble wearing glasses among the celestial spheres

to focus the multiverse and all of hyperspace

into the endless immensities of one single life

in any form, whether it’s candled out like a black dwarf

or blazing like the Pleiades, because one

flash of life across the nightsky of your deepest intuition

and you’re the stem cell that envisions

all the others like people and trees, fish, birds and animals

that all speak the same dream grammar as if we all see

through the same eyes, we’re the arcane wisdom

of an abyss singing to itself in the dark

as if it were well understood by virtue of our solitude

it spoke the same language as us, whether

we’re here to hear it or not. I’ve got you, my solitude,

like the cup-bearer of the muses, topping me off

as I watch the full moon tangled like a nocturnal waterlily

in the waterfall of the willows rinsing the stars

out of their hair into the river like bubbles of light

pierced by a thorn of joy in the cool abyss of the night.

PATRICK WHITE

BROODING SUNSET BEFORE THE STORM

BROODING SUNSET BEFORE THE STORM

Brooding sunset before the storm. Over ripe apricot

left out in the sun too long. Heat brain

boiling its thoughts in their own womb.

The clouds lumber like thundering Diplodoci

Slowly and in herds. Continental rifts in Pangaea.

Black outs and the lightning roots

of unknown blossoms sticking out their tongues

like petals to taste the first drops of rain.

The air menacing, thick, humid as lipstick

foreshadowing climactic things to come.

Sky bound i.e.d.s, and the pigeons scattering

for cover under the eves from overhead drones

that have been circling all afternoon

with the turkey vultures looking for road kill.

The windows set up like easels for the show.

Action paintings of still life with blitzkrieg.

The crackling of glass that layered black over white.

Oleaceous vapours of asphalt on roofs and roads.

I can smell the late Jurassic in rut from here

as black pearls roll off my skin like new moons

sweating tar. And now it’s as dark as a crucifixion

on daylight savings time, as the opalescent grays

homogenize into Bosch armies on the Western Front

just before a rolling barrage in No Man’s Land.

The hemorrhaging, the deluge, the venting, the rage,

a welcome relief to holding it all in though

everybody’s not going to like what they hear

and the fire hydrants are jealous of the rain

and the end of the world is more American than Mayan

bring it on like the hillbilly hippies drunk at the Imperial.

Anticipation. Latent exhilaration. Acoustic guitars

meditating in the corner, chanting aum to resonate

with the positive ions of a punk rock band on the rampage.

The cows plop down in the fields, and the seagulls

for the duration of the saturation bombing run

are grounded like kites on a reconnaissance mission.

Hilarity of chaos outflanking the usual order of things.

Mosquitoes and blackflies biding their time

under the monstrous leaves of the soft basswood trees.

Wrens and swallows in their medicine bags and begging bowls,

bees in their hives, prophets in the belly of the whale,

here comes a delegation of lightning rods to reason

with the open-handed extravagance of the revelation

that we’re as vulnerable as we ever were

in a time of stagnation to cooking the books

when the gods come to get even with us ethically

and the imagination asserts its ancient privileges

over the prophylactic rituals of our own worst case scenarios.

Some to dance naked in the rain. Some to stand

under lone trees in open fields trying not to get bit

by a snake pit of oracular lucidities with the aloofness of a lottery.

PATRICK WHITE

BASKING IN THE SILENCE OF THE COOLING DAY

BASKING IN THE SILENCE OF THE COOLING DAY

Basking in the silence of the cooling day,

sunset in the blood of a snake on a rock,

coiled into its own thermal like the hawk

in the twilight eye of a peacock past its prime,

I go out of my way, by the railroad tracks,

where the adolescents lay their lives on the line,

to accord it the dignity we all hope for in time.

The acrobatic swallows have finished

their aerial attack on the cults of the gnats

and now the nightshift relinquishes the sky

to the dog fighting gypsy moths

and the stealthy dive-bombing bats.

Every evening, the same, their finest hour,

shooting each other down in flames,

and the stars and heritage lamp posts looking on

as if they couldn’t be any less concerned.

Crackheads in khaki shorts pass me,

caps askew, and smile nervously at my earring,

though they’re baffled by the cowboy boots,

but it’s got nothing to do with me

whether they can read the memes right or not.

I just want to mesmerize the ocean

of lunar commotion in my brain

by the rhythm of walking as if my body

held sway over the tides for awhile.

Rage, sorrow, love, my judicious attention

to being fastidiously kind especially

if I suspect I don’t really like the person,

just to keep the record clean with myself

and outwit my pettiness just because I can.

Goes with being a poet trying to live generously

among thieves who’ve never heard

of magnanimous humans weakening themselves

like the chiefs of the Potlatch as a sign

of power leap frogging itself to the top of the totem

by giving it all away with an expansive hand.

Not really sure I understand it myself,

but I live a life of isolation in between

trying to make things mean way more

than they deserve to or not just to hear

the scarecrows mocking my absurdity

like straw dogs on the pyres of existentialism.

Voices like scalpels in my head,

chainsaws in my heart, razor blades

nicking my starmud like cuneiform

into a library of Assyrian incisions

made by Ashurbanipal to cook the books.

Living in the twenty-first century

has taught me to mistrust all the others.

Double back to the health food store,

up the road to Sunset Boulevard

that taught me how to paint moonrises,

five miles to Glen Tay and back again.

And if I’m lucky there shouldn’t be anything

left of my brain by then but a reflexive flunky.

Someone’s addiction is following me

like a rat in the shadows of my ancestors.

My rotten father maybe, his rubber cheques,

that deaths head of brutal alcoholics

with the insolvent grin on its face

that said I have nothing to give you

but violence and heart benching wretchedness?

Or my saintly mother the day she turned on me

for nailing Michael Jones square in the third eye

with a stone David would have been proud

to have thrown with such authority and finesse?

And I still am for the way he transgressed my fort

by throwing dirt at it like the Taj Mahal.

My legs are growing heavy and numb

and I’m running a gauntlet of road kill

through an ordeal of toads and turkey-vultures

unravelling the complexities of the dead

thread by thread until the loom is dismantled

that wove the big picture of the details

into a prayer rug of sectarian wavelengths.

Man of my age, or son of an old adage,

someone once said I was born a hundred years

too late, though late for what is lost upon me,

if I’m already a century ahead of my time.

The lucky day is when you discover it’s all one day.

This specious thought moment of the mind.

It’s all emanating out of the same radiant

simultaneously. Nothing gets left behind.

Haven’t you seen how the mountains

synchronize their spontaneity to the birth

of butterflies like waterclocks of being-time?

There’s no hour of doom for every era of redemption.

My ends aren’t shorter than the beginnings were long.

Eternity’s the rule of thumb and time’s the exemption.

Ten miles just shy of two hours whether you

measure it in tame avalanches or rogue asteroids.

Coming back the way I went as if I’d gone nowhere at all,

blueweed in the ditches, and loosestrife

in the moonrise of the river through the drowned trees.

PATRICK WHITE