IT ISN'T RESIGNATION SO MUCH AS HALF AN ASSENT

IT ISN’T RESIGNATION SO MUCH AS HALF AN ASSENT

It isn’t resignation so much as half an assent

to the inevitable I know so little about

as I’m becoming it, living it like a lamp in my hand

shining in the dark to illuminate what’s there,

not by reflecting it, but creating it on the fly.

My eyes are bubbles on the mindstream.

The jewels of an animal in the shadows of the woods.

The star makes the eye it wants me to see it with.

Not just retinally with my iris like a moondog,

but interiorly in the heart of my imagination

where sight is a kind of love, and seeing

is dusty with stars clinging to the windows

the mercy of the rain cleans off when it’s time

to let the world see me anew as the light turns around

to look at me from the inside out, not two, not two, not two.

Music from the cover band across the street.

Apocalyptic hilarity of drunken ordinariness

extraordinarily trying to sing along to the lyrics

of the chantreuse who makes them feel special

about having everything in common with everyone else.

We can sing about pain. We can sing about joy.

And by the way we cry and laugh, know what we mean.

An apartment away, a man is endearing himself

to his own solitude without any separation in the tone

of the farewell he’s preparing, and nothing perennial

about the sacred syllables of that imaginary first hello.

He watches people’s voices rise like incense into the night air,

mystic paths of smoke disappearing down a road

into the intimate distances that deepen the darkness within

with the afterglow of humanity lingering among the half-cut stars.

PATRICK WHITE

O, AN OASIS IN A TARPIT

O, AN OASIS IN A TARPIT

O, an oasis in a tarpit when being alive

is more than enough, and happiness doesn’t scare me

half as much as it used to. It’s only an eyelid,

an opening and closing of doors, a Cepheid variable,

the blinking of the moon, blue chicory

among the stinging nettles, not the horrific beatitude

it used to seem when I was too young---

When was that? Yesterday?---to let it come

and go. A waterlily of joy, it blossoms among the stars

but its white fire is rooted in the lowest detritus

of the swamp that lives on its own perishing.

Happiness isn’t a reason to live. It’s living

beyond reason, unreasonably. Life without a buffer zone

when you can walk skinless in the moonlight

like a smooth stone in a medicine-bag of stars

that sends you skipping out over their reflections

in a lake without a name as deep as the mystery of life

and then you sink as if you’d been looking Medusa

in the third eye. And what are you, then, if not

a lifeboat of a fish swimming through the nightsky

of a bejewelled underworld resonant with soft laments?

I feel the effervescence of the Pleiades

carbonating the waters of my life. A great blue heron

flaps off like the headlines of yesterday’s newspaper,

or the first draft of another poem inspired by the abyss,

and I’m not unmindful of the sorrows of the world,

and that this is recess, a sparkle in the eye of eternity,

the exuberance of a boy on a dolphin in a great night sea

of perilous awareness, not lightyears of bliss

shed by a firefly that came looking for me in the dark.

I haven’t been rescued from anything. The depths

and the surface are one for the moment,

the highest and the lowest, the silly and sublime.

A dragon. A plumed serpent with a circumpolar outlook

a peacock of a dinosaur flaunting its boas

like a Fauvist painting of sex in the eyes of love and death.

A ghost dance, of sorts, where my beginnings

partner with my ends and together they make

one bird, one candle in a cowled plumage of flame

that took a vow of poverty but has the flightfeathers

of an heretical phoenix to spare just the same.

The nighthawk is riding its own thermals, the owl

isn’t encumbered by its wisdom. I’m free inside.

All the aviaries are empty and I’ve got an open door policy

on my voice-box. The chimney’s mellifluous

with bluebirds in the morning, and by nightfall

even the most feeble sparks of insight are exalted

by the constellations of the Eagle and the Swan.

No companion but my solitude is pleased with itself.

Everything I see and hear, down to the smallest

pale-green frog chirping in the cattails, silvered

in moonlight and water as the black snake tastes it

like a ripe strawberry on the warm, summer air,

is ancestor, bloodline, wavelength woven into

a flying carpet of picture-music I’m riding

like the multiversal destiny of my membranous mindstream

and because I love starmaps and leaves, I’m riffing off

the leit motifs of the stars, I’m writing poems in the glyphs

of the scars like birthmarks on the bodies of good guitars.

PATRICK WHITE

WE'RE WALKING ON MARS AND YET DOWN HERE

WE’RE WALKING ON MARS AND YET DOWN HERE

We’re walking on Mars and yet down here

we’re still treating each other as aliens

we hate. Retrograde biases looping our heads

in a noose. Strange fruit. Did a Boy Scout teach you to do that?

What colour do you think an albino

would paint his skin if he had a palette of melanin?

White paper, black conte, every portrait

starts with an outline, but the face of a human

shines like character from the inside out.

Even the stars move through their lives

from violet to red like the order of the turning

of maple leaves in autumn, or a rainbow.

Eighteen million people kidnapped, enslaved,

worked to death and murdered as if murder were a sport

just to boost production and profits in cotton

to keep up to the invention of the cotton ginn

and wrap the skin of London in whole cloth,

much like Bangladesh even as we speak,

and when that dynastic link eventually broke,

and Reconstruction undid the liberation

six hundred thousand people had died for,

the poor killing the poor for the rights of the rich,

and the economic foodchains that were placed

on the scars of the backs that bore them

tasted just the same as the snakepit of whips

they’d recently thrown off, as the night closes in

on that little white ice-floe in the midst

of the global warning you ignore, you’re still

trying to convince your festering self

you’re a waterlily when, in fact, you’re a corpse flower

with a moral life of pus and a gangrenous spirit.

Let’s say like it is. You hate black people

because your victims learned more from you

than you did from them, and that ain’t creationism,

brother, that’s the straight up skinny on evolution.

PATRICK WHITE

BITUMINOUS BRIQUETTES OF COAL FOR EYES

BITUMINOUS BRIQUETTES OF COAL FOR EYES

Bituminous briquettes of coal for eyes,

and the shadows of diamonds in your heart

the crows delivered like loveletters in the dark.

Spooky and eerie, the Aquarian wyrd

of someone with the emotional life

of a Tarot pack who picked up overlooked skulls

from the forest floor like lost moons

only the undertakers of the rain

and the anthracite ants you blew gently

out their eye-sockets like lunar landing craft

wept over as you placed them in the museums

of your windowsills, artifacts from the firepits

of Stonehenge at an equinoctial eclipse.

The longer I loved you, the younger you grew.

I knew you were coming back from the dead.

That love had dislodged you at the side

of your hospital bed like a snowdrift

sliding off the roof. Death or a hysterectomy

in your early twenties. They tore the bell

out of your steeple, the nest out of your bird,

the promise of dawn out of your La Brea Tarpit

and there wasn’t a lot to sing about after that

but you kept the slash of a smile on your face

like the scalpel of light edged by the new moon.

Blind isn’t a colour, but black suited you best.

A lover isn’t a knife at an occult sacrifice,

but you’d had several that wheeled you

like a butterfly crucified in a circus

where every blade that tried to cut your heart out

after your womb, was the addition of another petal.

Xion flinched, but you had the courage

of a black dwarf that took everything in

they threw at you like a shelter for the homeless.

You healed the shadows of small, broken things.

You took the fallen in like birds of prey

and you mended their wings. And for awhile

they felt like constellations after you left.

In that vast expanse of night that unrolled

like a starmap of your soul, you restored them

to an exalted place of shining in your darkness.

Noble, a few more stars and you could have passed

for a queen of Egypt rummaging for your body parts

in the canopic jars of other people’s hearts,

your beauty, an ancient creation myth restored

after long severance as if the moon in its mourning veils

hadn’t come up in years, and then, in full eclipse

just appeared one night like a sacred prostitute

on the stairs of the Iseum with a fascination

for pyramidal men aligned with the circumpolar

indestructibles of heaven centred on an afterlife

too much like this one to be astronomically credible.

Microcosmically honest, you never fully mastered

trusting anyone, though you smiled at their efforts,

but not once in nine years did I ever doubt you

when my back was turned like a sundial

though there was always something slightly suspect

about the heroism of your compassion for the dead

as you leapt like a genie in an oil lamp

into the calderas of their spent volcanoes on the moon,

to trade their new mirages in for something completely old.

I saw you grow like a religion of dependents

who never wanted to get over themselves

for fear of losing someone like you to worship

like initiates into the coven of a great witch

as many told me you were as if, being a male.

they knew more about you than I did, and who knows,

in retrospect, maybe they did, maybe they did.

Hear that northern river of raven hair

is long and white now, that you’re still beautiful,

that the guys in motorized wheelchairs line up at

the entrance of the mall to compete for who

gets to drive you across the overly waxed floors

as you jump laughing into their laps on your way

to work in the morning, and you keep

the hotshot owners of the chic clothing stores

leaning in their doorways wondering why

you choose them over them. Had to smile

when I heard that. The spirit of love lives in you yet.

You still know how to raise the dead.

Prayer wheels, hot wheels, wheels on meals,

training wheels, wheels and deals, cogwheels,

wheels of birth and death. Where the rubber

hits the road, I could have told them how it feels

to stand there like a crop circle in a labyrinth of rain

that goes round and round, spinning its wheels

like a red-tailed hawk sliding down the banisters

of its thermals, remember, when the sunsets

painted their eyelids over the alder groves?

You want a beautiful witch to ride shotgun

with you, brother, you better learn to shift

that four on the floor as if you were riding

that golden chariot of yours through a slum

and everyone were hitchhiking, and you stopped

to pick them all up to remind you that you’re mortal.

Your driveshaft better be yoked to six white moons

and every spoke of the tree rings in your heartwood

better be a broom that knows how to do cartwheels in the dark.

PATRICK WHITE  

WANT TO BE BRILLIANT, WANT TO SHINE LIKE A BLACK STAR

WANT TO BE BRILLIANT, WANT TO SHINE LIKE A BLACK STAR

Want to be brilliant, want to shine like a black star.

Trying to bend space with my mind. Trying to stop time

with my heart. Counting moments like beads on a rosary

of skulls, or shepherd moons on an abacus of gravity.

Though I know they’re not all strung out like that.

Asteroids on a wavelength of light, or a spinal cord.

Or maybe I’m just trying to bead a guitar string

with a great black hole, or is it a lunar pearl,

in the center of a lyrical abyss? Workaday world

in a small town, who spends their time like this?

Not fortunate enough to have been born a carpenter,

I’m a mystically surrealistic, poetic astrophyicist

trying to come up with a new grammar for the stars

so all they have to do to express their shining,

is say, Metaphor, and as it is in the abyss, so it is everywhere.

Because I miss you like the main clause of my relativity.

The focal point of all my wavelengths. You’re the radiant

and I’m the Martian meteor shower that’s dying

to bring the gift of life to the Antarctic like the Leonids

did in the first place as I look at my face in the mirror

and think it’s time for a change of species. Sometimes

it’s crucial to sustain a few pathetic fallacies about yourself

so when you’re under the moonweather of an estranged planet

and a black star breaks through the clouds like the anti-matter

of a waterlily, so do you. Funny how the flowers close their eyes

because none of them wants to miss the eclipse.

One of them said we’re all looking through a glass darkly

but I don’t see any soot on their petals,

and none of the telescopes are wearing shades.

I like to keep things clear in the light of the void.

I’ve come along way from the coal mines of space

to shine through your diamond so you can feel

a different kind of translucency that’s eleven parts cheap thrill

in all the dimensions I can see you in, and one,

not even you, has discovered yet, that’s the orphan of an exile

singing to himself to people the dark in a desert of stars

like a gnostic gospel in the mouth of a cave

to keep the evil jinn and bad spirits away

from the watersheds of my wishing wells

where the angels gather to mingle with the demons like water

they’ve just turned into wine. As for the other eighty-nine

realms of seeing and being what you see, they’re shrines

I’ve devoted to you, swearing in blood and devotion

on the sidereal plinth of my sword, as I dedicate

all my prophetic skulls from the dark side of the moon

where the crows are wiser about lunar things than the doves,

to the enhancement of your radiance, your love and your art,

by deepening the dark, with a full heart, with things to harvest

that will make the abyss seem like a silo of stars you can break like bread.

PATRICK WHITE  

THE LIGHT DOESN'T TALK TO THE FLOWERS ANYMORE

THE LIGHT DOESN’T TALK TO THE FLOWERS ANYMORE

The light doesn’t talk to the flowers anymore

the way it used to. I can feel a lot of shadows touching my face

as if it were written in braille. Acid in the rain.

Tears of dry ice in the housewell. Weathervanes

knocking at the door to get out of the storms

they used to revel in, and the storms themselves,

no kamikazes riding a divine wind against the Mongols,

at best, a mango-flavoured tempest in a Japanese teapot.

And even Zen can’t put an edge on the full moon

to cut through everything like a harvest being threshed.

No songs from the birds that used to wake me up in the morning,

only these spiders weaving their smokey laryngeal webs

like a voice that got stuck in the throat of a chimney

when it forgot, when you sing from the heart,

you don’t need a medium or a seance. Not even an art

that’s interested in what you’re saying unless

you’re obeying a grammar of headstones that don’t know

what you’re talking about until it’s not worth

bringing up anymore in anybody’s language

whether the metaphors are living or not. Words in a bonebox.

Locks and bars on our eyes. Dumb-bells stuck through our tongues

like someone was doing voodoo on the leaves

or the baton of a drum major in a parade

that’s never going to come, afraid to leave home on its own.

Since I was a boy in the late Cretaceous,

I’ve always wondered about the timing

of the asteroids and comets and why

they had such an impact upon the dinosaurs.

But I hear they were already on their way to extinction

because of the earth’s own volcanic activity,

and, at worst, the asteroid just accelerated

the flywheel of birth and death a bit.

Bad spin on an antiquated myth of origin.

Better luck next time, but right now the mammals

have evolved so far beyond that they’re destroying themselves

in a long, slow nuclear winter of attrition

that’s putting a pillow over everybody’s face

like the cloud cover of a screening myth with an air force

that buffers the light with our own ashes

and much prefers smouldering to ignition.

What did Berryman say in a letter to Wang Wei,

centuries after the fact, just before he jumped from a bridge

into an ice-covered river with the Pulitzer Prize in his hands?---

O to talk to you in a freedom from ten thousand things.

Be dust myself pretty soon. Not now. Or words to that effect.

But just the same, it’s hard to get into the skull

of the man anymore without the flame of a candle or a dragon

to see where you’re going in case you nudge an atom the wrong way

and bring on another astronomical catastrophe inadvertently.

Minefield covered in snow like a pioneer cemetery

buried on the hilltop of an avalanche with a view of the valley below.

Dangerous, too, to move among the stars freely

like a rogue planet without a starmap, causing perturbations

in the orbits of the shepherd moons on an exploratory flyby

to see if there’s any kind of intelligent life you can identify with.

The nights are getting darker. The stars are moving further apart.

Sooner or later everything tends toward empty space

until there isn’t even any room left in it for itself.

And nothing ever dawns upon you there but endless entropy

and time comes to a sudden halt where spaces runs out

and the bones of the fossilized stars are left like empty chairs

in a dark auditorium with bad acoustics.

I’ll write it on the wind now, while I have the chance.

I’ll write it like a fire in smoke at a ghost dance.

I’ll write it in blood and tears and rivers and stars.

I’ll write it in scars and wounds as deep as roses.

I’ll write it on the skins of the snakes that I’ve shed

like serpent fire running up the lunar thread of my spinal cord

like a lightning rod tattooing the clouds of unknowing

with the insights of fireflies into the mysterious darkness of life,

who know that one glimpse is enough of a Big Bang

to satisfy even the blind who go looking for their eyes

with their eyes like a windfall in a thunderstorm of picture-music

though they’re still hanging on to the same old lifeline

like an umbilical cord between the backdoor and the barn

in blizzard of stars and butterflies. I’ll write it in light.

I’ll write it on the eyelids of eclipses and occultations alike.

I’ll write it on the foreheads of the mute rocks

in runic striations of glaciers retreating north in tears,

I’ll write it on my bones before I’m buried under the hearthstones

with a big rock on my chest like an asteroid

rolled over a cave to make sure I’ll never rise again

like Jesus and Muhammad said I would if I was good,

or Ali Baba and the forty thieves muttering their shibboleths

on the thresholds of an artificial paradise, in case I wasn’t.

Now is the light. Now is the loving and the living.

Now is the hour for the hidden nightbirds to raise their voices

in the sacred groves of the moon to celebrate

the brevity of their own longing for the unattainable

blossoming on the dead branch of their aspiration.

There’s only so much time, and then, in a moment or two, forever.

The heart sings awhile like a red-winged black bird on a green bough.

And then the eyeless silence of the stars

who have looked down upon nothing for 14.3 billion lightyears

and watched the fireflies dancing to the music

of their own tiny hearts, lockets of light, of insight,

that open like seeds and eyes sown into the abyss

to let all winged things, and even star-nosed moles can fly,

out of the cages of their earthbound solitude like dragons

taken down like occult books from their hardwood shelves,

with the wingspan of constellations singing in the night to themselves.

PATRICK WHITE

THIS STRANGE VASTNESS RIPENING IN MY HEART

THIS STRANGE VASTNESS RIPENING IN MY HEART

This strange vastness ripening in my heart

that makes me ache with sorrow like a farewell

to the waterbirds in autumn though it’s only

nearing August, and the loons and the kingfishers

are far from gone. And the stars are all wrong. Why?

A new start or the beginning of giving up?

Life in death. Death in life. Fire in the tomb.

Water in the womb, or is it solely human

to go on failing your way into the unknown

trying to make a gift of a gift and all you’ve got for ribbons

are a few shadows cast like words and longing

for the mysterious silence, the unseen spirit

that bids you leave your eyes in the doorway

and enter a wholly disarming space where

the nothing you’ve become can overhear

in the formidable distance, reminiscent echoes

of who you thought you were. And a mindstream

moving like a hidden nightcreek, a pageant of images

bleeding into one another like a watercolour

being creative about its tears. An evanescent chaos

tinged with moondogs and rainbows, all the homely eternities

of an intimacy with time that never makes a promise to anyone

it can’t break like a tree in a thunderstorm.

And there in the heartwood, a calendar of the springs

that have passed like ripples of rain, grail by grail

because what makes the things of life seem holy

appears to be that they share in being as lost among us

as we are to ourselves among them. Comes a thought

like the silhouette of a bat against the moon

and then it’s gone again as if the seeing of anything

goes way beyond what it means. Gapes with significance

because of its passing away. And where within us,

for all the remoteness of our solitude could we hold it

like water and sand in our hands, without limiting

the openness we pass through like waterclocks

in a labyrinth of locks that may raise our spirits a moment

like a lifeboat on the horizon, but as things approach

three bells are ringing all’s well like a nightwatch

on a shipwreck that lost its sense of buoyancy

the seventh time down? As if the hour had marked its place

in the gills of a purple passage in its last entry in its logbook

with a golden hook like a question mark between

the first and last parentheses of its waning and waxing crescents.

PATRICK WHITE