MY THIRD EYE OPENING OCEANICALLY OF ITS OWN ACCORD

MY THIRD EYE OPENING OCEANICALLY OF ITS OWN ACCORD

My third eye opening oceanically of its own accord.

The wingspans of the flowers bloom omnidirectionally.

The blue sky lays a balmy smile upon my flightfeathers.

Blood hums to the blissful resonance of being alive.

Even the glowing concrete seems benign. The gates

with their rusting guns triggered like locks, the fences

holding the occupying gardens with their placard poppies

back like riot cops. Time without haste. Consumed

by a moment as perennial as summer on earth.

Nothing urgent in the fulfilment of small destinies

in the grass, no antecedents necessary to know

how to live this, no event trivial or especially significant,

I’m as open-minded as the wind on a shoreless afternoon

that tastes of the stars gusting in the dust at my feet.

Wild parsnip, Queen Ann’s Lace, mullein, goldenrod,

purple loosetrife and cattails in the ditches along the roads,

Lichens of the moon on the staves of the cedar rails

where the red-winged blackbirds sit

to paint their picture-music on the unprimed air

like the musical notes of a cadmium red and yellow song

with overriding tones of nocturnes to come.

Sweetness of life when it takes its mind off of everything

and requires nothing of the living but attendance.

Just to be here like a vagrant wavelength of awareness

among things as they are without trying

to gouge your eyes out like bluejays at the sunflowers

to get at the roots of the flowering mind deep in the heart

of the hidden harmonies basking on the surface

they’re joy riding like the elegant riffs

of the dolphins and flying fish that leap out of the shadows

into the enraptured atmosphere of their own auras

like blue damselflies and green tree frogs and old guitars

working their necks like weavers, or fleet-footed spiders

walking on water like heavy metal on a Ouija board,

like thorns in the eye of a bubble, hoping it doesn’t

wash them out like tears in the eyes of a voodoo doll

looking through the keyhole of a needle it couldn’t find

like paradise on the other side of its blind blessing.

Not for long or far, I’m still walking a habitable planet

full of wonders. Though the road keeps getting shorter

like a fuse behind me the further I travel down it,

and the asteroids keep making newsbreaking fly-bys,

and there are rosaries of bubbling methane rising

from under the shrinking skull caps of the poles,

and people are still trying to keep each other’s attention

by stabbing one another in the eye, but for a moment

that isn’t concerned about whether anything lasts or not,

there are no omens stuck in the throats of the rocks,

or blood of children splashed on the hollyhocks. A re-run

of provisional innocence in a few hundred acres of woodland

swept under the rugs of abandoned farms as not worth the trouble.

Lapwing gates hanging by a hinge to distract

the wild grapevines away from her empty nest

as if it still cherished its emptiness out of a force of habit.

I look upon the Tay River at sunset, the reflection

of the darkening hill quivering in the cooling breeze

like the more mercurial downside of itself,

and the sky opening the blue-green eyes of the peacocks

like stars with too much make-up on, and a handful

of charred crows flying through the roots of the trees,

trying to make sense of themselves like a burnt manuscript.

And what can you say to the stars that are beginning

to look for themselves in the approaching night

except this too is the world where even the lost,

in attempting to return to themselves through

the unattainability of the past, shed light all along the way?

Nightfall and the silence intensifies the conversation

with bioluminous insights of the radiance

blazing out of the darkness of a white coma

as if it depended upon the contrast oxymoronically

just to be noticed like waterlilies in the shallows

of the conscious mind anchored by a spinal cord

to the reptilian epodes of its own illustrious starmud

as every thought moment is, like kelp and kites

and river reeds swaying like synchronized swimmers

to the currents and wavelengths, the turns

and counterturns of thematic waters with a musical motif

that plays to its own depths from the bridge

of a burning violin dancing like fire on the water

with no fear of ever being drowned out by the moon.

PATRICK WHITE  

FOUR A.M. A FRAUDULENT SILENCE FALLS OVER THE TOWN

FOUR A.M, A FRAUDULENT SILENCE FALLS OVER THE TOWN

Four a.m, a fraudulent silence falls over the town

like the night ward of a hospital, things going on

after the felonious ecstasy of people getting away

with Friday night, underground, healing the damage

by appealing to a new affliction more threatening

than the last just to keep some danger in their lives,

some occasion for the irrational, some implausible rapture

of sex or violence to break the spell of the credibly predictable.

Look at that. Eight lines of abstractions

and not one of my sacred syllables bleeding

like a rose in an abattoir, a thorn in my third eye.

I suspect myself of subterfuge behind this death mask

of ash and shadow. I’ve given my heart up so many times

I’ve lost track of the gods I’ve been sacrificed to.

Did it ever matter we’re estranged by everything we love

in time? The question summons old ghosts

and the moon smears a snailtrack of light

down upon the waters of life I’m not willing

to follow anymore like a star stuck to flypaper.

Let the ghosts fall like chalkdust from the blackboard.

Blood and bonemeal from the zoo of the past.

Those rootfires blazed awhile and went out

like a burnt oak writhing on the crest of a hill

like Pompey caught in the act at the moment of death

a long time ago when Pliny still taught the orators

the memory of deranged pictures is stronger

than the aniconic memory of words. Since then

all my myths of origin are apprenticed to a dream grammar

that has vowed like a copulative verb that means

what it says never to orphan me in a house of mirages

ever again. Never to root the cracks in the mirrors

of the insane in my starmud silvered by flakes of pain

peeling off the windowsills of the moon like petals of paint.

The sinner might care less, but when grief

starts to insist it’s in danger of becoming a saint

that’s far worse than the sybaritic beatitudes of Friday night,

drinking the gods under the table until all you can see

when you look straight in their eyes for the rest of the week

are the stupefied revelations in the lees of the light.

PATRICK WHITE

IT ISN'T THE ILLUSION THAT BINDS YOU

IT ISN’T THE ILLUSION THAT BINDS YOU

It isn’t the illusion that binds you to yourself like skin.

It isn’t not finding the missing link in the fossils

of the chains you used to wear like dna. You’re still

in a dichotomous world if you’re giving your illusions

bad spin, enslaved by enlightenment. Is the play improved

by shaving the heads of the lightbulbs in the billboard?

Are you living alone in an isolation cell of bedrock?

Are you proofreading mirages in a desert of stars

that took things too far to remember where you

started from? Hydrogen and helium. Are you still nebular? Do

you really believe it’s the gathering clouds that get in the way

of your shining? Still trying to liberate the abyss

from its own emptiness, the mystery of life from the lips

of a one-finger vow of silence when it’s your mouth

that’s keeping it a secret? Let the dreamers sleep awhile

like flowers in bud, let the thorns of the locust trees

add to the poignancy of its blossoms. Admit it

all the fixed addresses you’ve handed out

to your peers like identity thefts still leave you

wondering who you are long after you’ve been accepted,

crossed the border, the bar, the threshold

as if there were always another country beyond

the one you just broke into that doesn’t recognize you either.

A garden of light, yes, but why uproot the shadows

that work behind the scenes without applause?

So many things in the world going wrong all at once,

flawed, defective, deranged, all your old starmaps

going up in flames in a state of flux like a phoenix

as if you were the Library of Alexandria and you’re

the arsonist in the crowd watching your pyre burn out.

By the discolouration of your feet, I see you’ve

walked through a lot of educated ashes

like a signpost looking for a road of smoke

in the vatic urns of your heart trying to press

the issue into a grey wine that isn’t perishable enough

to avoid publishing. When you die, do you want

your starmud interred in the sky, or would you prefer

the poppies and butterflies of chthonic goddesses

in a dream time that works the roots of the flowers

like puppet masters and umbrellas at a funeral?

Would you throw that inkpot at the wall

if Lucifer rose up before you like the morning star

or would the earth shake with a new Buddha

who’d lost his identity in the pre-dawn light

where the fresh water meets the salt when you see

the fools you’ve made of your own eyes

by trying to clarify them like stained-glass windows

blooding your eyelids when you look at the sun

so you can see right through them like a nasty spell

of aniconic Protestantism. What next? Rainbows,

moondogs, the chromatic aberration on the prisms

of oilslicks and houseflies? You are the picture-music

listening to itself when you’re lost like a voice in the woods.

Who else is whispering the stars into your ear

as if you were the key to the language they’ve

been speaking to you in for billions of light years?

PATRICK WHITE

BEGIN NOW. THE LIGHT WILL CHANGE

BEGIN NOW. THE LIGHT WILL CHANGE

Begin now. The light will change. Get the rain started.

Let a few tears fall. Open the aviary of your heart

and let the doves and the nightbirds out, and if

liberation isn’t enough to sing about, celebrate

the next best thing, escape. Get out of here.

Isn’t there enough open space within

to include worlds within worlds begetting worlds?

Or has your mind become the slumlord

of a run-down tenement you converted

from that ark you built like a lifeboat for everyone

in the flood myth of a lava flow on the moon

before you bled out like a wounded fish

in the Sea of Tranquillity and decided

like a feeding frenzy it was a shark eat shark world,

everyone for themselves? Nature red in tooth and claw.

Every star in the sky aspires to shine like a starfish

washed up on the sentient shores of a pre-dawn awareness

like pilot lights of life navigating by the starmaps

of the fireflies. The sea has its constellations, too.

Drown if you must in the unanswerable sorrows

of the accidentally innocent fate of love in the world,

or go up in flames in Vietnam or an Arab souk

as if someone had just confiscated your cash register

like an officious autumn in the Adirondaks. Or a tax

on your eyes, how much you can see in the course of a life

from the bottom of the mountain up like a haiku,

or the dangerous lyric of a northern river with muscle and mind,

making its way to the sea like a savage waterclock

that knows it’s never going to turn out of time.

Paralysed by atrocity, our sensibilities trashed

like polluted loveletters of junkmail advertising

toxic food as the soul of joy and satisfaction,

indulgence, the suicidal compassion of despair,

desecration, the alternative aesthetic to no one

ever being there to show you how to empassion

your wonder into an insight humbled by awe

at the mystery and magnificence being here at all.

Madmen punching holes in the ozone

like the only lifeboat heading for an ice floe

calved by global warming like a glacier in the North Atlantic.

Paradigms the abstract ghosts of fossilized metaphors.

Logos instead of symbols that resonate like a seance

among the living and through perception

change the spin of atoms and rearrange galactic seastars

like the seeds of sunflowers opening like the eyelids

of a total eclipse. No one needs a prophetic skull

to see how horrifically surrealistic it all is. Even

the sacred clowns aren’t laughing like Zen masters anymore.

Ryokan gets home to his hut in the shedding woods

and this time the thief did steal the moon from his window.

What now? You fold your poems into paper airplanes

and let them blunt their noses like sparrows

on the false dawns in the windows of your stem cells?

You live in a crack in the wall, you excavate

a grave in the caldera of an inactive volcano

and hope the poppies and wheat that are left

of the crumbs of your dreaming grow better

where you’re buried like the Burgess Shale that’s come

of your starmud avalanching down like the asteroids

of a rockslide of headstones in a vandalized cemetery?

PATRICK WHITE

I COULD NEVER REMEMBER YOU IN GARISH PACIFIC SUNSETS

I COULD NEVER REMEMBER YOU IN GARISH PACIFIC SUNSETS

I could never remember you in garish Pacific sunsets

or the luster of opalescent Ontario dawns.

These would be ill-fitting gowns, wrong

wardrobe of metaphors to clothe you in, you

who loved to wear the moonlight like water on your skin

and your heart like the blood of a black cherry on your sleeve,

that the rain, and I saw how hard it tried like a watercolourist,

could never wash out. When I looked

as deeply into the nightsky of your eyes as I could,

six thousand stars lavished on the dark to the naked eye,

I always saw a white tailed doe looking back at me

from the brindled woods where they opened into the starfields

and I let the silence surmise old dangers had made you shy.

I could never remember you as you were and fix

the image in amber like a butterfly in a paper weight

as time wept glacially by like an ice-age in an hourglass.

Shapely as the cedar candelabra of a passionate forest fire,

you were the elegant daughter of dragons, the willow witch

of your own desires, and you spoke to my body

in the occult languages you kept alive for the sake of the dead

who were always with you like voices in your sleep.

I put this albino abyss of a snowblind canvas on my easel

like the negative starmap of the nightsky I imagine

death to be, so the wind can colour outside the lines

of the constellations as you were fond of doing

with an elfin kind of glee like a happy bell

you’d hung around the neck of something bleaker

as you often did with your life as if you were

bending space to your will like a black hole

at the nave of your galactic prayer wheel

turning in the wind like the golden ratio of a sea star.

I paint you in the picture music of a wounded heart

punctured like a matador on the thorn of the moon

as I looked upon you haunting your solitude

and knew like the last crescent in the book

of waning scars, there were some roses

just too beautiful in what they’d made of their pain

to heal. The eyelids of black roses shadowed

by penumbral eclipses of carboniferous mascara.

The deepest starwells of our sorrows flower

into the most expansive fountains of compassion,

and what a tender champion the small things of the world

found in you. The starling under the windowpane,

the Monarch butterfly that just stopped like

a slim volume of poems, intact, at the moment of perfection

denying death its deconstruction, and those

dozens of shepherd moons that showed up

like the skulls of racoons and groundhogs in the grass,

relics of a tragic past you arranged like asteroids

on the windowsills of your studio like the eastern door

of an Ojibway burial hut you adorned with the feathers

of red-tailed hawks until the autumn moon

could free their spirits from their bones.

I could never remember you as a blue-jay

among the sunflowers, you were never as abrupt

and decisive as that. You beaded all parts

of the disassembled world into the flowing

of one long continuous wavelength of a rosary

like different skulls with a variety of names

for the same spinal cord of a narrative theme

that whispered, like your life, louder

than the savage sparrowhawks of your emotions

shrieking out in predatory pain and as I remember well

how your eyes would grow wider than owls

or the new moons of Spanish guitars

when you were astonished by the symbolic depths

of some black pearl of transformative wisdom

you’d discovered dreaming on the seabed of your heart

like a lunar eclipse among the feathered corals.

The red violet that lingers over a city on a cloudy night

and saturates the air with tinctures of iodine and diluted blood,

I will add that hue to the palette of your likeness,

and glaze the bricks in the sphinx gate of your moonrise

with ultramarine blue and fleck the lapis lazuli

of your nightsky with gold paint on the bristles

of a toothbrush to simulate stars pouring out of

the watersheds of Aquarius to cool the scorched roots of things

in sacred pools and fountains inextinguishable pain

found its way to as if you were some kind of Gothic cathedral

cratered out of the moon like a river of stone

that taught the outcasts and the damaged fruits of life

how to flow up the stairwells of their renewal

with the courage of wild salmon called home from the sea.

I knew it was crucial not to make a mess of my dying

the night you left, to honour the spirit of the life

we had lived together, to make the end

as charismatically intriguing as the beginning had been.

So something inspired by our separation

could keep growing beyond us like a bridge

where incomplete solitudes could meet as strangers

and say farewell to one another like full siloes

in the plenum-void, whole as the sun and the moon

who go on shining in the darkness of ten thousand lonely nightfalls

not as the undoing of the dawn in the broken mirrors of the stars

but as a way of housing the buckets and bells of their tears

under the strong rafter of the well by the locust trees

blossoming among its thorns in the spring to summon the bees

that once sang to us, as if honey had a voice so poignantly sweet,

however deeply gored the heart by the horns of the moon,

waxing or waning, full or eclipsed, it never left scars on the music.

PATRICK WHITE

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