SISTER LUNACY

SISTER LUNACY

Shall we dance, shall we spin and wheel, hesitate, advance,

stall and recover, whirl like maple keys, and blow

the ashes of the starmaps we burned like passports

out of the palms of our hands to shine like dandelions

on an eye to eye level with the light they bloom in?

Sister Lunacy, I watch you uprooting your garden usefully

and shaking the stars out of the clumps of grass

as if you caught Medusa smuggling diamonds in her hair,

and I say such is woman when she forgets to be aware of herself,

and the goddess comes down to earth with dirty fingernails,

a gazelle in rubber boots. And no flower of the field,

no planet in the sunset, no eyelash of the moon over a barn

quite adorns the twilight the way her lucidity does.

And I want to take her by the hand like a binary star system

and circle one another like two hawks in the sky

until the night cools and the loons pack up their keyboards

and the stars work the graveshift on into the early hours

of the forthcoming dawn as if the end of all their labour

were extinction in a deluge of light

that doesn’t recognize any of them by name. Shall we dance,

shall we let the picture-music carry us away

like a word that hasn’t hurt us in a long time,

shall we gather wild rice in the holds of our birch bark canoes

as if we were threshing jewels on the shallow end of the lake,

or do you just want to walk the Road of Ghosts with me awhile

and see what blooms along the way, sunflowers and waterlilies

opening up like observatories and prophetic skulls

with a penchant for looking at things the same way?

Sister Lunacy, be kind to the mandalas and paradigms

I bring you like dreamcatchers woven of spinal cords

like tree rings of heartwood, ripples of rain, the net of Indra

where you mark one jewel and they’re all marked.

Or as Jesus said, insomuch as you do it unto one of these,

you do it unto me, and everyone thought he was special.

As if he owned gravity and everyone had shares.

It’s a radical act to come like a sweetness to ripen

the heart of a human that’s stayed green too long.

Just as you and I know madness is the quickest way

of never getting it wrong and if you’re going to argue

do it in song, don’t exorcise the answer

out of the person who possesses it and bid it be gone.

You can’t post a bond against a ghost.

Myriad guests of the mind, but seldom a host to speak of.

And Sister Lunacy you speak as if you were letting

a thousand voices all at the same time use you

as if they had no other mother tongue of their own,

and somehow it comes across as what you had to say.

So I’m asking you now. Do you want to dance,

do you want to bend space the way a body moves,

reshape the universe in its own image, abberate

a few wavelengths into falling out of synch like damp hair licks?

And I’d remember to remember that only horses sweat

and read your aura by the glow of the hot dew on your face.

After the last lifemask comes off, nothing but space.

Nothing but imaginative room to move as if there were nowhere

we needed to go and we didn’t feel bad about it.

We just went off into the ongoing like everything else

that’s looping and coiling its way through time,

a fragility of the air, caterpillars swaying in the wind

at the end of a fishing line tied to the allure of a butterfly.

Don’t be fooled by the vertebrae, everyone’s flying kites

at the end of a long spine when the air revs up.

You can see them tangled in the powerlines of their ancestors.

Sky burials without altars. Road kill. Cheap cremations.

The whole panoply of the tragically absurd.

But here, sister, here volcanoes still strew

islands in their wake and the birds keep arriving with seeds

and coconuts still wash ashore like prophetic skulls

you’re free to believe or not, and the air tastes like emeralds.

Here you could mentor the stars in their myths of origin

as you made them up to honour some quirk in your character

and they began to speak of you as their dark mother.

And nobody need know what you mean when you spoke to me

about those things that encroached on your silence inside.

I know how to listen for dissonant sounds in the night.

I can hear the falling of a single eyelash of light

when the moon goes out, the footfall of a spider on the stairs.

Sister Lunacy, should I take your hand, shall we dance

to the picture-music that overtakes us unawares,

you with your dark tears, and mine so far in arrears?

PATRICK WHITE

LOOKING FOR SILENCE LIKE THE OTHER WING

LOOKING FOR SILENCE LIKE THE OTHER WING

Looking for silence like the other wing

of what I’ve got to say, landscaping with meteors,

or the planet having a face lift, some of the words

have echoes and some of them proper names,

and a few still homesick for their prison cells,

I keep painting on the white noise of the world.

I keep writing like a wolf in the fleece

of a shepherd moon with a secret life of water.

Scofflaw, a poet, driven into the wilderness

to listen to the voices of disembodied messiahs,

kings of the waxing year, flesh stripped from their bones

like desert shipwrecks waiting for

the providential tide of their tears to return.

God particles that got in their eyes like sand.

I hear them gnawing on their bones like calendars at night.

And I’ve said it in a flash of demonic indifference

trying to pretend they were listening immaculately

and I was compassionate, as soon as you give

your fulsome assent to a few simple things

you turn into a test of what you refuse to let go of,

as if you were always faith-wrestling with rattlesnakes

you establish a church of denial that will stone you to death.

You save your soul but you render your flesh expendable.

This for That. Betelgeuse for Aldebaran.

How to read a starmap like the Wall Street Journal.

The optical illusion of a bifurcated consciousness,

loss and gain, but the viper can swim across quicksand

as if it were all one wavelength, the Egyptian glyph

for intelligence that hasn’t been wounded by the heart

and spiritually materialized into a path to follow.

Do as the wind does with your mind and eyes. Let go.

Blow the stars off your windowsills, treat all holy books

as if they were trees and let go of their leaves in the fall.

There’s always a few jewels of insight in a gossip column

but most of it’s rut, rant, and judgement, dream gossip

and slaughter, history with an expiry date.

There’s always going to be some demi-god somewhere

asking you for your fingerprints like a paranoid magician.

Kick the skulls off your stairs like last Halloween’s pumpkins

and start acting like you’re in the world and of it.

Break the neck of the hourglass of heaven and hell

and let time pour out of your cells like exorcised mirages.

Illusions are like rats and seagulls and insects. They thrive.

No more than the night, is life a reward. Water

doesn’t live its whole life fearing the indelible

like a wavelength of its own immutable mindstream.

There’s no big sky blueprint behind why you’re alive.

No circus tent covers your foolishness.

And you’re not here to answer for everything else.

PATRICK WHITE  

LEAVE OFF LIKE THE WIND

LEAVE OFF LIKE THE WIND

Leave off like the wind and it’s the beginning

of someone else you never meant to be

as the stars go round with their firefly lanterns

burning their hearts out on nightwatch

as if there were always something to raise an alarm about,

and the willows come down to the water

to drink from the wild irises and there’s---

can you hear the wind howling from here?---

an unspoken story that glows like eyes

in the shadows of the surgical birch groves

trying on prosthetic limbs, peeling back

the binding of a book like a plaster cast

they’ve worn too long like a ghost amputee.

Let’s say it’s not too late to feel the wind

shimmering the silk of the wild rice in the moonlight

as if it were breathing like summer on someone’s skin

and you feel love might perish but the moment’s indelible

as how humanly foolish it is to long to make things last,

the forbidden beauty of the secret life you’ve hidden

under your eyelids like a love note in a dovecote

you’ve been dying to release into the imageless abyss

of the emptiness you’re counting on to fulfil you in the end

like some kind of counter-intuitive prophecy

that kept the faith of an undertaker in the sub-culture

it was born into like a mirage of the sixties

pulsing like a lightshow to the backbeat of an osmotic amoeba

as if the Burgess Shale were still experimenting

with psychedelic forms of life that might lead

back to us if it were possible, and it isn’t, to step

into the same river twice if you remember your Heracleitus.

Foolish to want to corduroy the road you broke like trail

to get here with the corpses of the dynastic horses

you had to saddle like a universe with a will of its own

that didn’t leave you many alternatives as the earth

died out from under you like the smoke of a deathsong

in a native cemetery you didn’t realize at the time

you were walking through like the moon in its sleep

dreaming it’s following a starmap of fireflies falling toward paradise.

Let’s say you don’t feel like a antiquated license plate

nailed to the door of a castrated gas station

in a desert pit stop, the curtains fishing for flies

at the broken window of a sky with a grimy third eye

reflecting the spirituality of a hermit who abandoned

the solitude of his afterlife too late to do him any good.

The hydra-headed deception of the perennial paradigm.

Listen to the screen door flapping like a lapwing

that doesn’t have anything to protect anymore

like the wounded encore of a showgirl in a ghost town

from the meathooks that used to keep the scorpions out.

Auroral evanescence of oleaginous covenants

on the wings of demonic flies with star cluster eyes

wintering like an eclipse between the epidermal plaster

of the punctured lungs behind the ribs of the unmended walls.

Bleak enough for any existentialist who wandered

off highway looking for the exit sign he missed a ways back.

And when the night approaches like a widow

whose nightmares all died out shortly after her dreams,

and your devotions smell like the incense of candling skin,

let’s forget you were ever afraid of the dark

and go watch the Perseids plunging into the atmosphere

like a gust of hot cinders from a comet that once

firewalked like a dragon across the firmament

sowing meteors on the wind that flare and fall away

like the flowering of goldenrod and loosestrife

in the wild starfields nature takes back into itself

as if yesterday didn’t adumbrate the way you see things

right now, and the nightbirds remembered all the words

to the songs you used to sing yourself asleep to

whenever your voice gave comfort to the longing in the room.

Let’s imagine you’re not mystically snowblind

in a blizzard of fireflies and there’s still a radiance

blazing like the corona of the sun through

the valleys of the moon in a total eclipse

that rests like a tiara of jewels from the underworld

lightly upon your head, and not these endless

heron’s nests you’ve abandoned to the predatory ospreys

like feathers hanging from the medicine wheels they use

to raise their young in like fledglings of the arrow

that once taught you how to fly as if you had the sky to yourself.

Stop eating your own thoughts like junkfood for cannibals

and all will come right, unlock the aviary of your voicebox

and let the stars out like Cygnus and Aquila

when Lyra’s at zenith riffing on the wavelengths

of Vega singing the blues with the Doppler Effect

of a shipwrecked guitar catching fire in the crow’s nest.

And all will come right as three bells on the bridge

of a lifeboat that’s crossed the bar like an albatross

in the blood oaths of the Knights Templar

who retracted their false confessions

like heresies of insight into the true nature of things

that fed the flames of the fires that consumed them

like the dark vow of a deepening passion for life

when the candle goes out like the wick of a new moon

and there are more intriguing taboos in the shadows to burn for

than the afterlife of a scarecrow crucified

on the dead branch of its own half burnt heartwood

in a firepit at Stonehenge like paleolithic music

frozen in time like a trilithonic danse macabre

at a seance of the winter solstice when the sun

stands still at midnight like a black hole

on the event horizon of a sky burial as deep as it is wide.

Let’s say the bride didn’t have to paint her eyes

like the lens of Galileo’s telescopic third eye

to hear the priests of the tunnel rats in the catacombs tell it,

just to look into the eyes of your face in the mirror

to deceive your sunspots into believing their beauty marks.

See transparently like space into the nature of the light

that illuminates this pageant and progress of perceptions

wandering like a mindstream on a habitable planet

like a purple passage of automatic writing on the foreheads

of our fates deepening the solitude of the woods late, late at night.

What choice were the living ever given by this chance at life

but to cherish the ageless elation of insight into the stars

in the eyes of the mysterious inspiration

to create something sacred as a hidden secret

to this wild and unholy perishing of the light?

PATRICK WHITE

NOT LONGING FOR, NOT MISSING ANYONE, NOT WISHING FOR MUCH

NOT LONGING FOR, NOT MISSING ANYONE, NOT WISHING FOR MUCH

Not longing for, not missing anyone, not wishing for much,

maybe the last half of the rent, my muse stepping

out of a thicket of hawthorn, a white-tailed doe,

into a clearing in my mind that doesn’t care

if she licks the salt block or not. The town gearing up

for Friday night, the roaring flatulence of bad mufflers

throttles up like distant echoes of the bad boy dragons

in the urns of ageing bikers, each of their women

astraddle a horse of her own like a black leather saddle bag

studded like a starmap of the pyramids on the plain of Giza

as they gauge the number of points on the handlebars

of each other’s chrome plated antlers underneath my window.

Buck with you, anytime, bud, but loud isn’t going

to outshout the whisper of the past that lives

like a ghost in your ear. Man up to the fact

your heart’s done a lot of hard time in solitude

and if you haven’t gone mad, you’re a little more

thoughtful and kinder than you ever expected to be

discretely intrigued by the second innocence of the novelty.

O, the racket of the screening myths of decultified fish

still removing the baffles from their gills, so

their four-strokes can sound like it’s their engines

not them, having the heart attack. Idle, down, brother,

idle down. There’s only so much time and then

there’s eternity. Let the moment seize itself

for a change. What do you think? The dark energy

accelerating galaxies over the event horizons of your precipitous eyes

into an abyss that’s been stripped of its patches like stars

among rival houses of the zodiac, are trying to take

advantage of the opportunity? If so, toward what end?

Better to have never been born isn’t bad or best.

No need to be wounded spiritually in a holy war

between the Pollyanna and the pessimist in you.

Be a good Roman and make room for both

in that pantheon of tribal superstitions you brought

home with you like skeletons in your closet,

and remember to take Sophocles, cum grano salis,

in jest more often like the black farce of himself

that made him one of the tragic clowns of comic Athens.

Sniper or snowball, this is your life alone

and you get one shot at it with unlimited ricochets

but you’ve got to get a lead on it like the light of a star

if you want to hit a moving target on the fly

you’ve spooked out of the bush like the moon

as if there were no comprehensive alibis for anything.

Time, death, the devil, and suffering aren’t

the mercenary allies of a local apocalypse,

anymore than the moon is a golden chariot

on a milk wagon run on the spiral arm of a galaxy

delivering bittersweets with a free razorblade

and Vas Hermeticum to the alchemists

in the bloodbank of a Pleistocene slum

going through glacial withdrawals at the end

of an ice age. Haven’t you noticed yet how all

your threats have turned into sententious adages

on the backs of frictionless matchboxes

as if you finally put some clean oil

in that short shag flying carpet of yours.

Instead of kicking in doors, try valves for awhile.

Why labour to bite a snake back in the throat

like a wavelength you weren’t wary enough

not to step on in the first place? And however

you caress them love won’t make snakes purr

like a highway you can train to bite other people.

Hate’s a limp arrow. As if somebody fletched

a spaghetti noodle and then boiled it

like an old guitar string on a compound bow

glued like a splint of bone to your broken heartwood

trying to let it all hang out and what don’t hang

pull like the ripcord on a candling emergency chute.

But if I say it’s all the same to me this morning,

please don’t mistake that for the hidden grail

of a dead metaphor buried like the skull of a cure

to the black plague that ratted out the Middle Ages.

No ship to jump from. No port to quarantine

with silence. No one setting themselves afire

in a danse macabre of self-flagellating scarecrows

crucified like martyrs by their own slave revolt.

I’m listening to the rush of the wind in the crowns

of silver Russian olives like the wings of a white horse

grazing in the starfields of a slow, easy moonrise

in this labyrinth of roads that have made a calling of my life

disappearing like the keening of a waterbird

into the evanescent distances of getting lost

in my own eyes as if the ride, stars in the nightsky,

never comes to a dead end where your tattoos wash out.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU WOULD HAVE BEEN PROUD OF THE WAY

YOU WOULD HAVE BEEN PROUD OF THE WAY

You would have been proud of the way

I honoured your ghost as the focus

of my loneliness after you left. I refused

to malign your solitude or mine

by attempting to come back to life.

Discretely mad as it must have seemed

at the time to anyone outside the allegory,

still, I mimed the protocols of the dead

as if I were mouthing the words I had

once said to you one night in the afterglow

of wreaking fervent love upon one another

released from my vows by your absence

as the shadows of sacred syllables disappeared

into the silence like a coven of crows

cacophonously breaking the spell of a cold sunset,

helter-skelter, with the asymmetry

of standing there alone without you.

The stars I taught you have returned and gone

many times since then. The maple groves

have shed their foliage like pole dancers

their circumpolar clothes of serpent fire

coiled seven times like the ages of man

around the earth’s axis, a dragon slayer

and healer in one oracular insight

into the hopeless hunger for someone, anyone

to lie naked in the dark beside them

like the tiara on an X-rated starmap of beauty queens.

Other lovers have estranged me from myself

in the name of the same oceanic notions

I can’t help seeing in the unfolding of the black rose

that burns me like a love poem I wrote in blood,

a nocturne of thorns, my rapturous devotions

to a mystical eclipse of a new moon rising

like Orpheus from the dead, my prophetic skull

refleshed with the starmud of the face I had

before I was born to wear this assortment of deathmasks

and return the swords I drew from the wounded rock

to the waters of life like the hands of a cosmic clock

that couldn’t do otherwise than throw them away

like crutches at the top of the temple stairs

I mounted on my knees in the bower of a feather bed.

The down of a dead swan in the eyrie of Altair in Aquila.

Blood on the talon of the moon and all those sad elixirs

that used to make my taste buds bloom as if

my tears had been spiked irrecoverably

by the picture-music of a black rose lingering

like the shadow of a hungry ghost about

to take possession of me again, a creative medium

of love pierced through the heart by the pain

like a searing dream in a black mirror

I’ve been trying for lightyears to wake up from.

PATRICK WHITE

STUPEFIED LIKE THE MOON THAT STAYED IN THE RING TOO LONG

STUPEFIED LIKE THE MOON THAT STAYED IN THE RING TOO LONG

Stupefied like the moon that stayed in the ring too long

and took one too many blows to the heart as the knees

of the Pillars of Hercules are beginning to buckle and my legs

have turned to rubber but nothing’s bouncing back

like a lacrosse ball banked off my prophetic skull

like a wake up call in a game of billiards

nobody’s put any spin on, chalking their pool cues

as if they were standing in front of a blackboard

like a long shot everybody’s betting on

to pocket the eight ball in the far left blackhole.

Alarming as it was at first, I find myself slipping into

the occasional bubble once and awhile like

an alternative universe, and just sitting there

staring back at the world numb as the lens

of a glass third eye embedded in the rosette

of a plaster hurricane. A bit catatonic,

and if not a peaceful recess from the world

as if it were something I were dying to get back to,

at least a truce to gather up the dead like roadkill.

No opinion, judgement, reason, word, or rapture

of blissful ignorance and miserable wisdom,

Neither empty nor full at either end of the hourglass,

feels as if I’ve sat here on my lotus for a thousand years

like a meteoric foundation stone with a Martian lichen

for a brain, as if that were as far as the Rover got,

and Curiosity would just have to go it alone from here.

Cul de sacs, dead ends, and wombs, moments out

of time when you put your starmap down like a sketchbook

and stop looking for your likeness among the stars

as if things couldn’t get any stranger than they already are.

Is this ageing? Is this some kind of spiritual Benz

breaking effervescently like nitrogen bubbles

in my blood like a moonrise that came up

from the depths of its own dead seas too fast

like the great white whale heading for the Pequod?

No one ever really knows until it’s way too late.

O, Mama, tell me again about the future I dreamed

of having before I was awakened by a world

that got in my way like a gatekeeper demanding

obols and boar’s tusks minted from gold dust

I panned on the moon to watergild my deathmask,

especially the part about living up to my own

expectations in life. Haven’t I stood my ground,

starmud caked to a rootless tree, never

taken my eye off that star that’s been wandering

beside me all these lightyears, leaving firepits

in its wake it’s made out of the crowns of the thorns

in the locust trees burning at their own stakes?

Consumed in the auto de fes of distant starlight breaking

through the pyres of dead branches it’s placed

like a laurel around the feet of a lighthouse in a desert

firewalking its own lunar mirages of oceanic consciousness,

did I not light a candle in a shrine of unconsecrated sky burials

following creation myths of their own making

as if they were breaking trail for offroad zodiacs

instead of going by the book and covering their tracks

like a life in the shadows of posthumous pyromaniacs?

PATRICK WHITE

TRAIN WHISTLE

TRAIN WHISTLE

Train whistle then the rush of surf from its wheels on the track

as if it were hauling an ocean somewhere.

Graffiti from North Carolina on tour, one long art gallery

spray bombed by underground American artists

on its boxcars and tankers. When I stopped at the crossbars,

driving cab, I always wished I could publish

a poem like that, one line coupled to another

as if our metaphors were holding hands at a barn dance.

Then on to pick up the next fare as if you were cruising

the red light district for a working girl who called

without a return address, mind-reading doorways in distress

as if you were ambiguously oracular about where you were going.

More sedentary now, the crackheads trust me less

about where I dropped them off and picked them up

than they used to when they knew I had taken

an unspoken street vow of silence like a vehicular priest

who confessed everybody for their indefensible humanity,

on his way to somewhere else that was seldom paradise

with its feet on the ground like a corporate pharmaceutical

wallowing in its own starmud as if someone

had just thrown the shepherd moons of its pearls

before real swine, sometimes, who blackened the reputation

of the death mask they wore as if Zorro were a dealer

fencing with the delusions of Don Quixote tilting at windmills

he mistook for prayer wheels. You don’t know whether

to be mad or sad, or just as bad as the fools that milk

the wrong fang of the snake they’re buying the antidote from.

There’s more loneliness in moving than there is in sitting still.

This road of ghosts is dotted with tasteless pit stops

like a starmap with nuclear, attention-getting

big city magnitudes of light on all night outblazing the stars

like a ferryman on a graveyard shift who’s trying

to stay awake in the wheelhouse by the pilot light he’s been given to go by.

Coffee and cigarettes please, in the snowblind glare

of a lap top that’s got a long, hard drive ahead of it

I play like a keyboard on its knees that’s got

no idea of how to get there from here before it invariably does

through a labyrinth of cul de sacs and train crossings

that don’t attract as many Sufis as they used to

when I was dancing my way deeper into my homelessness

for shelter against the white noise life was humming to me

as I watched the deaf grooving like water snakes to flute-music.

Now I take long, dark walks along the Tay River

where I’m least likely to meet anyone coming my way

as I watch the stars flicker in the river like lures

on the fishing hook of the moon trying to catch the big one

like the legend on a starmap it never fails to throw back

into the sea of tranquillity its awareness jumped from

like a northern pike that arises from the bottom up

like a covert insight into the nature of life eyeing

what’s inspired it to strike like the imagination of a madman

caught a moment in his own highbeams like the ghost

of a white-tailed buck leaping out of the headlights

like enlightenment with no intention of adding itself

to the pageant of roadkill along the back roads

of the shadows of lost sheep in the shepherdless valleys of death.

See how I wrote that like a train passing through town

in the dead of the night like a found poem

I’ve spliced together like the neurons of railroad lines

from all over North America like delinquents with winged heels

rising like waterbirds from a million weak threads

of a river system bound into the strong rope of a spinal cord

you can climb up to heaven on like a fuse or the lifelines

rooted in the palm of your hand like a crosswalk beginning to flower

with zodiacal traffic signs because the mindstream flows

horizontally onward like an egalitarian that will come to harmony progressively

like water seeking its own equilibrium from the same sea of awareness,

each at the level of the thresholds they’ve crossed

like a sword dance with a waterclock that’s always on time

as if it were running on sundials with alarmist hour hands.

Bad dream grammar, perhaps. But I bet there’s

a poet-cabdriver in North Carolina with the same

mad picture music in his heart who understands perfectly

the denaturing of creative humanity from his art

isn’t a short cut to that right side of the tracks no one’s ever

been reincarnated on like the side of a bone box

that didn’t express itself demonically like an exorcism

blessing the empty hearses of dead air in the freight cars

with nothing written on them as if some nihilistic orthodoxy

had freshly painted over the hunting magic

of artistic Neanderthals scarred indelibly

by shamanistic spit paintings of genius with blood

like red ochre and night like soot in the mouths

of their lanterns waiting for the lights to change

from the false dawns of fake songbirds in the sun

to the mystic moonrise in the occult guild halls

of howling bush wolves contemporaneously

packing in the dark like the solos of nightbirds

echoing across the lake like the longing

of an unanswerable response to the sublimity of why

we must live, love, desire and die as we do, written on the fly

like the linear A of inchoate thought trains of subversive water and fire,

hissing like spray bombs of scalded metal whenever we come to a full stop.

PATRICK WHITE