IN THE FIRES OF LIFE

IN THE FIRES OF LIFE

In the fires of life stand up for the heresy of your humanity

as if there were no one else to burn for it, but you.

When you’re enveloped in the flames of an estranged loveletter

that embraced you like a flower that bloomed in fire

a long time ago, o how many afterlives has it been

since the hive had a dark queen to attend upon,

whether they honour your urn or spread your ashes

on an icy walkway for more pedestrian traffic,

don’t hitch your dragons to the death cart of a false dawn,

but ride the wind exhilarated as Icarus in your own updraft

like the errant flightpath of a firefly with a mind of its own

knowing there’s more insight in the sun that shines at midnight

than there is in the shadowless noon of a shallow enlightenment.

Listen to your heart as if it were real, not solid

and soon enough you’ll be able to hear with your eyes

what your ears can’t see that far beyond

the aerial perspective of the dark where parallel lines meet

to focus on burning another black hole in the sky

with the congruence of the intensity in the iris of your third eye.

Fire doesn’t burn fire, so you can shine lyrically like the earth

in the presence of your own star without being consumed.

How do I know this? I can taste the words life puts in my mouth

like a prophet in a fireproof furnace steeling the iron in my blood

like the growing edge of a sword tempered in my tears

that kills me back into lightyears of life every time I fall upon it

to save the face of some unknown tomorrow from debasing

the integrity of its sorrows by not hammering out the slag

of lesser stones than we draw the best Damascene swords from

as we do the sabres of the moon to the rhythm of a pulse

on the anvils of our percussive hearts forging fire-breathing dragons

shedding the darkest nights of our eyeless ores,

like a bunting of skin, a ribbon and windsock for the stars

that keep circling the north pole like the exoteric tree rings

of the lost art deep in our heartwood of calling down the lightning

like the roots of a seed embedded in our starmud, waking up

after a long sleep, like a pine-cone in the firestorm

of a germinating desire to live as immensely as possible.

While there’s time to grow the preludes and epilogues

of the next threshold we’re about to cross like refugees

over a bridge that spans the omnidirectional extremes

of our mindstreams getting on with their going

like waterclocks and aqueducts, or nightcreeks

whispering their lyrical way like the ode of a dark road

out of a grove of sacred aspens into a clearing brighter

than the light of the stars that pilot the orbs of the dung beetles

or shepherd dragons to graze on fire in higher pastures

than the world mountain could imagine in its wildest dreams.

Swept up in the fires of life, in this delirium

of inconceivable probabilities sleepwalking among the stars,

clarity isn’t so much a matter of burning your old tattoos off

like constellations that leave scars or cauterizing sunspots

like dangerous moles before they eclipse your immaculate wholeness

with the veils of isotopic ghost fleets raising sail in the bays of the north,

as it is in losing yourself in the picture-music of the lightshows

the mind puts on like an artist who isn’t looking for an alibi

to justify his eyes to what he sees without corrective lenses

like a starmap of fireflies without a fixed place in time and space.

In the fires of life you must be perfectly combustible

like the rainbow bodies of the wise men of Tibet, your eyes

inflammable as two lumps of coal in the skull of a snow man,

dead branches for arms, and your heart so generous

nothing left of it can be found like an ice cream cone

that’s fallen to the ground from the hands of a child for the ants,

and melted away into diverse forms of life that ensure

it doesn’t go to waste. We will all break bread in time

with the worms that shall nibble the crumbs of our dreams

from the corners of our eyes. Maggots overpunctuating

our mouths with too many commas and semi-colons,

necrophagoi editing our hearts and brains like turkey vultures

amending us like roadkill as if we were merely the first draft

of a poem ablaze and scattered with life as rapturous frogs in the rain.

PATRICK WHITE

NOT SITTING HERE TRYING TO FLINT KNAP THE SPLINTERS OF A MIRROR

NOT SITTING HERE TRYING TO FLINT KNAP THE SPLINTERS OF A MIRROR

Not sitting here trying to flint knap the splinters of a mirror

into Clovis points for pygmies to go hunting mammoths with.

Maybe if I can make them small enough to go on Twitter

or Facebook, two minutes with a hook in the imagination

and I might be able to make of a little stardust, a big constellation

of gaping fish dying of thirst beside a freshwater lake.

I might make a big splash, like Basho’s frog,

for the lifespan of a haiku in prime time for nitwits.

I want to lay my vision out like a surrealistic starmap,

I don’t want some lazy idiot laying its egg on my forehead

like a carnelian, or worse, a contact lens on my third eye

to cure my astigmatism by eating little peep holes in my vision.

I don’t want a news feed for an intravenous muse

spoon feeding me whatever she wants me to hear

like a distant rumour of inspiration running like an opioid

at the end of a morphine drip with fangs.

Beauty’s not an ephemerid, nor the truth

a media fashionista on a catwalk, or an anchor’s desk,

that doesn’t so much as illuminate and deepen

the darkness and the light, but distract the heart with agitprop

and show off its lipstick as if Van Gogh just ate his paint again.

God bless the insane glorious souls dying alone in vain

as the old order changeth and giveth way to the new

and the language of the spirit that expressed itself

in a grammar of wildflowers breaking into a purple passage

of New England asters, is all thorns but no roses

on a bouquet of razorwire that was born without leaves

but still fits the brow of some silly poetling like Apollonian laurel

for having enough money to buy a good book review

if you don’t have the breasts or the chest or the talent

to get it for free. Literary criticism in a dead spin.

Why make a mockery of the lie poetry used to be

when yours is so trivial and petty your pretty snowflake

is going to piss in its pants if it ever encounters

an emotional blizzard or a spiritual avalanche?

And that little night light of yours you keep on

like a dream journal beside the bed, isn’t going

to seed the darkness with stars when all you’ve got to sow

is artificial sugar and organic sea salt. And even then,

you’re not Carthage, though you share the same impotence.

What does the candle know of the calling

of a lighthouse on the moon, waiting for light years

or why the foghorns are always in mourning

for the ghost ships it exorcises with a warning

not to come near, or its all downhill from here to the bottom

of a housewell with the literary ambitions of a black hole

the fireflies won’t come to sip from without going out

because they won’t drink from any fountain mouth the stars don’t

and you haven’t even gotten drunk on the blood

of your own skull yet, singing by a river to a moonrise.

Let the strong rope unravel as it will into a million weak threads

clinging like a mountain to a spider web, or a spinal cord

that’s never been frayed like the delta of a river or a mindstream

that can smell the great nightsea of awareness up ahead,

or even a shoelace passing like a needle through an eyelet.

The planet’s on fire, this is Dresden, this is Hamburg,

this is Gaza in a squall of white phosphorus, this is the inferno

that sweeps you off your feet like a whirlwind of igneous Sufis

and evaporates your eyes like dew off the grass in a flash

of inflammable insight that not even your guru or your shrink

are fireproof enough to live through this astronomical catastrophe.

And you, you want to write and tell me, in poems

that make me want to ask them to come over and do my hair as well

how domestically troubled you are by the pebble in your shoe.

You blindfold yourself with a no smoking sign

in front of a firing squad that thinks it might be a good career move

to make a literary martyr out of you like James Joyce

going blind in Trieste while Ezra Pound

sends him cabbages and shoes to survive on.

Bathetic, trivial, irrelevant and effete, you think

it’s radical not to explore the roots of things

like an underground fire in a valley of cedars,

or immolate yourself like the sumac in the fall

hoping to ignite an Arab spring in the middle of your perishing.

Two parachutes on your back, and one in the trunk of the car,

and still you won’t jump, even when the stars

are underneath you expecting you to join in the firewalk

and Icarus hands you a fire-extinguisher

and says, here, put them out if things get too hot.

PATRICK WHITE

I SEE MY CHILDHOOD IN A BROKEN MIRROR

I SEE MY CHILDHOOD IN A BROKEN MIRROR

I see my childhood in a broken mirror.

Seven again. Yet not quite the same.

A baleful dream figure, a wraith of then,

a boy supercharged with apprehensive energy,

hovering pensively like a curtain in the broken air,

torn like a veil from the face in the broken window,

sometimes standing on the dank earth

that was always in shadow, but lightly, as if

the whole broken world had been saturated

in sorrow, and Patti Page was on the radio.

Evanescent, auroral, almost immaterial,

a lingering vapour of what he was then,

I retain some sense of what he was feeling,

but he has no idea that I exist as a furtherance

of those emotions, sophisticated and complex

as a quantumly entangled creation myth

shared in common can become. As

the apple is to the blossom that disappeared

to let things proceed as they must to fruition.

Sad, thoughtful, angry boy, smouldering

like a wet cedar bough to stay lost in the fog

of his innocence, or smudge his awareness

of the raw rash of a raging drunk that scratched

at his heart like a father until it bled to death

like a medicine bag that longed to be a cure-all,

you did didn’t you, but your magic was too small.

And your mother was the martyred lioness

who stood between her cubs and the ravenous man

who would have eaten you all, just to say he had.

And you, the eldest, when did you start to shoulder

that bell of conscience that somehow accused you,

by complicity, even as an onlooker, to the black farce

of tragic severance madly slashing the life

in front of you like the fleshy cheeks of a rubber doll,

with mechanical eyes that opened and closed

like a guillotine in a reign of terror that convinced you

somehow you must be bad, given you were

the lowest common denominator between two extremes

going at each other like opposite ends of a burning bridge?

How many younger selves have I fathered over a lifetime

to make up for the absence of one of my own.

Little arsonist, out of my ashes, I tell you

it wasn’t you who set fire to the world

that’s been burning down around you for lightyears.

I’m not going to climb the mountain and sacrifice you

to anyone, I’m not going to come to you

like a stranger to play father for a day

and assume you like baseball without asking

because I’m trying to float my way into heaven

at one minute to midnight like a bubble of apple piety

that refused to admit there were any thorns in life,

that everything was whole and mended, as if

there were no boxing events off limits you could

take a kid to he would have liked a whole, lot better

than a sport you were trying to indoctrinate him into like a cult.

I’m not trying to throw a right hook with a catcher’s mitt on.

You just stand there, as you are, little hero,

with that enlarged philosophical, poetic heart of yours

way too old for your years, as if you were trying

Keats on for size, wounded like an initiate

into the discipline of that fist clenched at your side.

Let me rest my hand on your shoulder a moment

like the stoic affection of one man to another

and by that let you know how much I admire and respect you

for those wild, childhood virtues of survival

you planted in me like seeds of wilful compassion

that grew like morning glory in a rose arbour with thorns.

I want to always remember you like that.

A small warrior. A dragon slayer. With a bell

on your head like a visor you tilted at a world

of windmills sword dancing with themselves

like the hands of a clock at a victory parade of its own shadows.

O inseparable, when the geese are overhead

scattering the ashes of the dead in a long rosary

of lament, I’ll take you with me when I go.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU HAVE TO SEE WITH YOUR HEART INTO THE NATURE OF LIFE

YOU HAVE TO SEE WITH YOUR HEART INTO THE NATURE OF LIFE

You have to see with your heart into the nature of life.

Your eyes will only get you as far as the front porch.

Like a moth drawn to the light. Mesmerized by the brightness

but not shining by a light of your own. Crazy moth,

no one’s ever wrong it’s just a matter of degree, not

kind of right you want to be, the kind that’s blinded

by the dazzle of the radiance of your own blazing eyebeams

or the subtler moonrise of the longings that overwhelm you

with the haunting sadness of the unanswered nightbirds

that keep calling out to the stars as you do

like the ghost of a candle at a seance that’s gone out

so you can see better into the unknown darkness

that is as much behind you as it is ahead. Even

these blue-blooded words bleeding like the eyes of peasants

down this page, toys in the hands of the dead they’re buried with

deep in the past and not the Rameseum of royal magnificence

we built to last significantly like the starpath of a zodiac

yesterday walks on the plank of a straight and narrow tomorrow

for following its own mindstream through this life

of half-lights and shadows, the blue-greys and phantom greens

of the irises that beatify our pupils with the moondogs

of non-denominational, alla prima haloes around the blackholes

the visionaries among us who merely dream

keep pearl diving into like starfish reaching out

for the singularity of love on the bottom that makes them feel

as if they were resurfacing with it in another world

the same as this one, but unrecognized like a star

a dimension ahead of its light as everything passes into future.

Until you feel the lightning root in you like dendritic black matter

you transplanted in exile like a flower you brought from home

you’ll never see your own reflection in the black mirror

that shines brighter and deeper than the white one

that pales like the world in comparison with the dawn

of the sun that shines from within you at midnight.

Until you stop mistaking fireflies along the coasts

of consciousness for lighthouses you can navigate by

by letting the lifeboat on the shipwreck of life

you’re clinging to like a wooden mermaid at the bowsprit

take your height above the horizon for the right ascension

and declination of the interspatial, non-temporal direction

you’re turning into like a headwind without a sail,

you’ll always feel like a cult of pleading seagulls

winging it in suspended animation in the wake

of the rest of your life while the foghorns bellow

Jurassically in the tarpits of an alien shepherd moon.

And I won’t blame you if you don’t understand

what all these metaphors are trying so hard not to mean

as a way of leaving the door open for the light to get out

of that aviary you cover every night with an executioner’s hood

as if you were judging your voice by the imperfectible standards

of the lyrics you have yet sing on the green boughs

and dead branches of life that’s always making a comeback

like a has-been instead of swinging back and forth

like a trapeze artist afraid of heights on your perch

as you do when you come before me like a water sylph

acting as if you were some kind of pendulous, grandmother clock,

tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock, the dust on the windowsill

and you bored to death like a comet portending

you’re just another dead goldfish in a huge hourglass

of quicksand. Don’t let the panic of being young

dominate any stage of your life you’re on tour with at the moment.

And don’t insult me by thanking me for something

I haven’t given you. Everything’s of equal value

when you’re free to be as worthless as you please.

PATRICK WHITE  

SO FAR FROM HOME FOR SO LONG

SO FAR FROM HOME FOR SO LONG

So far from home for so long I’m beginning to feel

I belong to this self-imposed exile that keeps whispering

like the miles and the stars and the far off voices

of the waterbirds lifting off unnamed lakes at night,

move on, move on, through the next gate, doorway,

field, rite of passage, into a deeper, darker space

where you can hear the loneliness of the light

singing to itself as its fingertips read your face like Braille

to see what kind of man you were before sorrow taught you

your eyes were bells of water hanging from a blade

of stargrass that never really knew what it was crying about

except for the hidden mercy in letting go into a farewell

it remains to be seen will last forever or not.

You haven’t come far enough if you can still

recognize yourself as the stranger that left home

as an old man or woman apprenticed to a child

you couldn’t discipline like an impetuous life

that admits of no masters. And takes possession of none.

Once you get over the mixed emotions of the tears

in your eyes at a blissful insight into your liberation,

the amazing moonrise over the birch groves,

the broken menagerie of an ice-storm’s chandeliers

you discovered reflecting as much light in pieces

as it did when it hung like rain from the lobe of a lover’s ear.

And then comes a night that closes over everything

you could possibly dream of being, like an iron eyelid,

and you’re chilled to the marrow by the mystic terror

of your cosmic solitude, and your heart is a bucket

the bottom fell out of as if time had stopped its waterclock.

And there’s no plausible way to say what’s happening

to you, except you’re alone in the world like a secret

you can’t even share with yourself because you’ve run out

of opposites and your shadows are no longer attached

to the light that cast them. Unruly forms bite their tongues

like lightning rods, and the silence stops stammering

in metaphors that reveal the dissimilarities of their likeness

to everything that preoccupies the moment

with an awareness of the unitive life of existence.

Neither zero, nor one, but not two, not two, not two,

neither denying nor affirming, not waxing, not waning,

as if you could feel the pulse of the universe beating

in your own heart, and there is no God, and there is no you

to be known in isolation, except for the fallen plum of a sparrow

in the palm of your hand you absurdly cherish

like the wounded death wish of a lamp that hasn’t gone out

when death is the inspiration that keeps you

perishing deeper into life as if you were staring

a dragon in the eyes on the inside alone together with everyone

as they were when they were a child closer to each other

than they are now. When we trusted the unknown more

than the nothing we can know about it, and innocence

were a perennial state of life like an entrance without

any sign of an exit closing like a barred door behind us

as if there were no need to ever come back this way.

PATRICK WHITE

THE UNREFORMED LIFE OF A POET THICK WITH SCAR TISSUE

THE UNREFORMED LIFE OF A POET THICK WITH SCAR TISSUE

The unreformed life of a poet thick with scar tissue.

What did I write forty years ago? O ya, la, la,

the live ones sing, la, la. Always knew it meant more

than I could discern at the time but it’s lasted

as I have a lot longer than either of us thought we would.

If you persist in your ruination sincerely enough

light years from here, creation gets quantumly entangled

in your root fires and things begin to bloom like a moonrise

you never suspected was a flower down on its luck.

I don’t care where you’re hiding, everybody’s

got something to fear, but I know you can hear me

though I’m not asking you to show yourself,

stay where you are. I’m not the answer to

all those secrets you keep up your sleeve

like an aviary of parrots you’re trying to teach to talk,

but have you ever given any thought to being here

at the indulgence of a dark mystery you embody

in flesh and blood, starmud sullying the light

on the waters of life with hermetically unstable intelligence?

I gave my word to the X on my spotted heart

I’d fall on it like a sword in the name

of the most dangerously compassionate art

that demanded nothing less than everything of me

all the time like a renewable Promethean sacrifice

chained to the altar of a rock by a long, dynastic bloodline

of hot-fingered thieves of fire. My votive candle

of self-immolation. Though I’m compelled to say

ashes are ointment on my eyes now that my tears

have boiled away into the more vaporous emotions

of less revealing gnostics lost on a sea of awareness

without so much as a moon or a lifeboat to stand on.

It seems it’s got to be this way somehow for reasons

that happily elude me in my pursuit of the perfect illusion

to offset my sense of being an enlightened eclipse

among fireflies trying to throw a blinding light

on the best of my intentions. If that accounts for anything.

Wolf, when I’m noble, bush dog when I’m not,

I can change totem poles like a shapeshifting dolmen

when the moon is new and I’m scavenging my way

into an ongoing exploration of the life of a human

with an unwieldy mind that keeps toppling on its axis

like Neptune bobbing bottoms up like a duck,

or a waterbird, to put it more gracefully, into its own reflection.

Is this narcissism, or the slippery slope to solipsistic idealism

in the first person singularly alone in a peculiar universe?

It’s never been a purpose of mine to make a precedent

out of my absurdity like a law of life that doesn’t

inspire people to disobey it freely so they can come into their own.

Nobody else can do your flowering for you and expect you

to grow to fruition. The green, bitter apple in the chilly dawn

of its fair beginnings is sweetened in time by the loss

of its blossoms, and the erotic pulse of the windfalls of autumn.

Pain. Was there ever a poet worth reading that wasn’t

a worthy candidate for what they hated the most

until they were house-broke into being the accommodating host

of it, instead of the nervous guest? Work with it

like a cat kneading a pillow into a loaf of bread

or a white-tailed buck trampling the grass into a deerbed

for the night. Take a hands on approach, and grab it

by the throat like a hydra-headed python

with nowhere to anchor its coils like an oracular genome

that gives the secret of its extinction up

like the open-mouthed blossoms of the hollyhocks

swaying to the bird-bone flutes of the wind.

It’s ok to be a snake charmer with a silver tongue

as long as you don’t milk your own fangs

to anoint yourself in snake oil instead of serpent fire

or die of smoke inhalation in a vain attempt to put it out.

Burn, baby, burn. You can’t be beatified until

we see if there are any ashes in the urn

worth scattering among the stars like flames

that played you like the patron saint of dragons

that remained true to the heretical alchemy of their nature

like the angels that eventually evolved their flightfeathers

out of the repitilian sky burials of their hereditary scales.

Angels bear the souls of the dead south and west

like geese and undertakers in folksy vests

with a timepiece like a goldwatch that stopped ticking

cremations ago when the ground got too hard

to mine it like a grave and death had to take to the air

like a transmigration well before the invention of back-hoes

that permitted people to be buried late in the year closer to home.

PATRICK WHITE

THE DARK GOD FLOW OF OUR CIRCUITOUS BLOSSOMINGS

THE DARK GOD FLOW OF OUR CIRCUITOUS BLOSSOMINGS

The dark God flow of our circuitous blossomings,

the hourglass lips of two bubbles kissing

like membranes in a hyperspatial multiverse

where everything is possible ad infinitum,

the creative crossroads of contradictory energies

whirling like prayerwheels and dust devils

in all directions at once on the heels of our gnostic vertigo.

Are these wings or propellors? Or dizzy starfish?

Anybody know where I’m going with this?

Enlightened and lost. Guided by chaos

into shapeshifting modes of order? The mind

as it is. No table of contents to alert you

to what’s coming next. Or did we take

too much acid in the sixties? One too many

amoebically galactic lightshows with strobe lights?

So immersed in the algorithms of my intuition,

no reversing the emergency exit signs now,

I move into a deeper darkness, enlargements

of space, the stars separating in the vastness

like wildflowers at the end of autumn, grains

of pollen all that’s left of the garden. Always,

sorrow, anger shouldered as a responsibility

to people who can’t fight back, the moral legacy,

until recently, of having been born Canadian,

opportunistically trusting, healing, just as happy

to be overlooked as I am elated to be recognized.

My scars smile. My self-sufficiency, differential.

Good, good, so be it, but beyond the pale

where the moon is chopping wood with a double-bladed axe,

its light frosted to the bark, fingers aching

as if I’d been playing a guitar without callouses,

death’s brutal lack of preference in the night

that puts me on an equal footing with the animals

the birds, the people, and even the flies and spiders

that are trying to keep a little life alight within themselves,

why is it I always cut a solitary figure standing alone

staring up at the enormity of the stars, longing

for a larger frame of reference than a pink dominion

in a nineteen fifties’ atlas that asked permission

for its independence? I feel the inexorable onceness

of it all, remote, aloof, uncaring, yet wholly inclusive

as an extinction event in the awareness of being a witness

to it, a mere firefly of insight, no more than can be seen

in the drop of a dream in the galactic waterclock of the Milky Way

before death wakes us up to what we’ll never be again.

Unredeemably cold and immaculately beautiful as a knife blade,

the aesthetic horror that freezes in the blood

like some kind of polar ice cap that says, this far, but no further

engenders the poignancy of a wounded love in me

for everyone and thing that lives, and I sometimes think

even the rocks and the stars suffer the same fate we do,

that everyone is so rarely unique and irreplaceable,

so mystically specific and cosmically incomprehensible,

as crucially intimate as a stranger we met on death row,

as much in pain, and hope and joy, lost like a wandering starmap

in the labyrinth of their own fingerprints as I am,

I can’t help but cherish everyone as a revolutionary act

against our inevitable extermination. Once, for everything

and then decapitated zero like a reign of terror

we pass through like a nightmare of liberation

into a being so utterly free, like the stars on the growing edge

of invisibility, we’ll never see each other again.

At least not in these forms we so blithely assume are our own.

It can only make a fool of you to go on loving humanity,

life of all varieties, your own included, despite the evidence,

but there you go. So be it. What did it ever have to do

with me? Given I was born Canadian enough not

to want to belabour the issue. Given I can’t be any other way

than I am revealed to myself and interpreted by others, each a star

like Gemma in the northern crown of my abdicated

will to power, to move among the peasants and the paupers

as if crude ore and coal were the nature of all that lives

but once you accept you’re over your head in it like a nightsky

you begin to see, as your eyes adjust to the dark,

there’s diamonds and gold within everyone. Motherlodes of it.

Perseids of shining panspermically across the universe.

Zodiacs of the way we arrange the stars to accommodate our fates

without leaving a lasting impression upon anything

beyond the occasional Burgess Shale or Library of Ashurbanipal.

Ciphers of meaning neither real nor unreal,

watercolor starmaps of the paths we take in life

bleeding into one another like bloodbanks of roses

we dance with in our teeth awhile as our hearts and bodies

move to the picture music of our mindstreams, and then

throw in our graves as if the beauty we once danced with,

were the least perishable of the flowers we had to offer

the unanswerable brevity of knowing the silence

that follows indelibly in our expanding wake lasts forever.

PATRICK WHITE