A MOMENT IN THE WORLD, WITH NO REGRET

A MOMENT IN THE WORLD, WITH NO REGRET

A moment in the world, with no regret

I cancel the madness, the sadness, the hurt, the pain.

I cancel the thorns on the footpaths through

the labyrinths of the brain, I absolve the dragons

of the vows they took to protect the taboos

around the silver snake skins the moon shed

on the lake just before it went insane among

its secluded death masks. A nanosecond of peace

symbolically invoked against the gestures of darkness

calculating the odds of it ever happening

by a poet who lays his reason down

like the sacred syllable of an astrolabe in the grass

and shouts hallelujah at the stars until he’s got them

so well trained to the echoes of his voice

they spontaneously pour their best season of aged light

into the seashells and wine-cellars of his ears.

I short circuit the fuses and nerves

of the terrorist’s spinal cord wired to hatred

and say, brother, you can’t make a watergarden

of bloodshed in paradise by blowing up children

like waterlilies or trying to teach a snakepit

of downed powerlines to dance to the sound

of your Ousi or AK-47 like a flute. Making scar tissue

of the moon isn’t proof of the sincerity of your wound.

Allah is great. Not petty, clever, and cunning.

Yahweh made friends with a man from Uruk.

Eve was a starlit night in Ethiopia and the mother

of us all. Adam means the red man. Melanin

is a mood ring. Our flags are torn like blossoms

from a bough. O improbable cause just for once

take the barking dog off the short chain of your mind

and will, and let it run free in a wild starfield

while you lie down in paradise alive and well now

writing love lyrics for the roses in the valleys

you wander into without forgetting the name of God.

And you put down the rod. You the whip. You

the voice and the tongue that throws acid

in the eyes of your native language like a spitting cobra.

You the book that drank saliva out of another man’s mouth

to justify the public fountains piped from the sewers

of the Via Cloaca of political affairs. Get

real naked, as nude as the truth, and take a bath

in the stars for once to see what a little bit of dirt

you really are, compared to the creative radiance

of their magnificence. Take a few minutes off the clock

and throw them like flower seeds that glow

in the dark starmud of your soul on the dungheap

of your ambitions and taking root like a heart

in your body again, a blessing of change

that transforms you from the inside out,

watch them bloom like starclusters of New England asters

with astronomical aspirations undeterred

by the black dwarfs of yours that burn out

like a matchbook of solar flares along the return journey

of the looping lightyears of the humbler eras

of your second innocence better than the first

because you’ve overcome the worst in yourself

the better to receive it as a gift you didn’t

give yourself behind your back like a shadow

of what it’s supposed to be. Put down your arrogance.

Put down your deceit. How far can you get in life

anyway? Think of the 3.5 billion years

of upright walking on the earth it took put one footprint

down on the moon. Already standing on two good legs

like pillars of the public why do you reach out for

the crutch of a human who’s only got one

on their lunar lander and as much hope

as the nostalgic ghost of a child amputee?

I’ll reserve judgement for another day, but for now

put it on hold as if you had another more important

call to take from a nightbird you haven’t heard from

in a long time, trying to clarify your original longing

for something just as real, as it is sublime

whether you attain it or not, or die happily in the attempt,

as long as it takes for an electron to jump

the quantum gap between orbitals to release

a photon of insight, stop underwhelming yourself,

the rest of us, and the world. On the face of it

we’re all on the same side of seeing as our eyes are,

the same bank of being as our presence here is

listening to our mindstreams whisper lyrical suggestions

to the prophetic skulls of moonrocks caught in the flow

like glacial lockets of an underground ice age

dreaming of a day it might rain on the moon.

Un-noose the knot wrapped around your neck

like the umbilical cord of a premature birth.

Unloose the Circlet of the Western Fish

and throw them back in the water to swim away.

Kick the stool away like rabies from a mad moondog

and take it as the first sign of a parallel universe

that today’s not a good day to commit suicide,

to kill someone, to injure and maim, to bully the earth

because you’re in debt to your own self-worth.

One riff of picture-music. One gust of stars

in the dread locks of the willows, one sip of time

running like clear water down from the world mountain again,

that isn’t polluted by the oilslicks of our own reflections in it,

one moment of silence, to stop and remember your death

like a muse that comes every night to sleep on your grave

because you failed at everything she urged you to do

and you did, by losing and growing, losing and growing

against the angel in the way you never hesitated to take on.

One little mutant side-step of evolution off the beaten path

so there’s no road kill in the wake of the journey

that’s revealing your life to you like crows and crocuses

in the spring, self immolations of sumac in the fall

because you’ve finally found something worth dying for

that demands nothing less than everything of your life

all the time you’ve got it like a burning candle

to befriend the light by flowering a little. Vetch

in the quantumly entangled starfields, or Lady at the Gate

over by the abandoned pump on the moon

with the broken trigger of a waxing handle for leverage.

PATRICK WHITE

SWEET SEPTEMBER FIELDS SWEEP ME AWAY

SWEET SEPTEMBER FIELDS SWEEP ME AWAY

Sweet September fields sweep me away

with the stragglers among the wildflowers

when the woods are emanating the fragrance

of the collaborative solitude of life

and death smells like an old couch

that’s been left out in the rain, abandoned

like a barn. Or a coffin in no hurry

to bury itself. Scotch thistles, asters,

eggs and butter, all the chicory’s gone

and the Queen Anne’s Lace. I’m hitchhiking

out to Smokin’ Eagles as if I owned space

and time were its caretaker. Lord

of all the estates I survey in passing

from the back of a Ford pick-up truck.

My family thousands of miles away

I haven’t seen for years, my daughter

inexplicably alienated, my son, god knows

where, lovers and friends in the past

still hanging on the walls of my mind

like ashen renditions of the mystic visions

of the Neanderthals, or busty out of date calendars

with nineteen fifties sweater girl sex appeal,

or scenic autumns that never shed their leaves,

yet however culpable I might feel

because I’m shadowed by the arrogance

of thinking anything’s ever anyone’s fault,

I’m freer than I was yesterday, and I’m ageing

like a tree in an old growth forest that’s been

spiked by nails through its heartwood

to keep it from being clear cut down.

And though there’s a sense of integrity

about being alive I still feel I don’t deserve,

as the clouds speed by and everything

is imploding into a point it’s trying to make

I’m certain I’m never going to get,

but so be it, I’m not fleeing from anything

or being drawn by anything up ahead

like a siren on the rocks I was born to drown

in my attempt to rescue. Neither a vector

nor a locus. A man with an irrelevant name

and a poem in his pocket, watching the mustard

take over the fields nobody has any use for

anymore. As they return to what they were

originally dreaming before they woke up

green as wheat in an eternal recurrence of innocence.

I study the fractals of the uppermost branches

of the maples where they meet the sky

like rivers and axons flowing into a sea of light.

Fire, fire, fire, the dragons are rising from the pyres

of the aspen groves like low lying Chinese fog

intermingling with cosmically aspiring Hindu smoke.

Words burn in the heart like processional waterbirds

heading south, and then just as quickly put themselves out

like an Indian paintbrush mixing too much burnt sienna

in its cadmium orange. And though there’s a tinge,

a patina of sad blessing in the air that’s as ancient

as the earth itself, I’m borne by life like a torch

into the dark. I illuminate without leaving any sign

or indelible mark to say I was ever here that wasn’t

at least as perishable as the vetch or the cattails

in the drainage ditches alongside these sweet September fields.

Younger, you paint your life in oils, but as

you grow older you begin to realize life is

a watercolour in a backwash of tears that runs

like blood in the water under the bridge

whenever you cry with no regrets for the evanescence

of the lightyears you left still sleepwalking somewhere

where the river turns and the willows cut off all their hair

behind you, to show you the empty nests

and downy ghosts of the fledgling stars born of the dead.

PATRICK WHITE

AND SHOULD IT COME TIME TO SPEAK OF THE SADNESS

AND SHOULD IT COME TIME TO SPEAK OF THE SADNESS

And should it come time to speak of the sadness

that reaches fruition in the medicine bag of the heart,

don’t bring a teacher that can’t heal by singing and dancing

to the wounded discipline of a lost art that’s gone

into the sacred solitude of the secret suffering

that upholds the integrity of the silence in your eyes.

This is a seeing that has nothing to do with truth or lies

or the innovative causality of pain. Don’t speak

of its release as enlightenment or liberation,

as if you were uncaging doves from the ashes of your voice.

Don’t seek what has eluded you when you’re cloaked

in an eyeless night like the screening myth of a lonely alibi.

And should it come time to speak of the sadness

don’t humble the message at the expense of the medium you choose

to weep in when the hidden urges you into the open

like a dragonfly emerging from the hovel of a chrysalis

into a palace of air with the wingspan of your diaphanous windows

beaded in tears like the afterbirth of the rain

in the post-natal mirrors of your indefinable awareness of life

as the sweetest agony of sorrow transformed into bliss

you ever had to endure like the darkest night

of a sea change in the unforeseeable nature

of your inconceivable soul trying to emulate

the unknown likeness you shapeshift to accommodate

the arrival and departure of everything you’ve ever had to let go of

like summer stars, and waterbirds, and legendary ordeals of love

when the full moon so often filled the empty silos of your longing

with the unsuccessful harvests of hungry ghosts

that competed with the sparrows and the scarecrows

for the seeds of a garden the wind neglected to sow.

And should it come time to speak of the sadness

that saturates all human affairs in an aura of mourning

that hangs in the air like a mingling of swords and bells,

don’t pretend your life was a nuclear winter of unrelieved misery

when everyone knows if it weren’t for trying to cling to joy

or even the longing for it, you might have smiled your way

through everything like the cold stone of the moon.

Remember those thoughts that used to come

like snakeoil salesmen that greased their sinusoidal way

into your heart like coiled serpent fire that mesmerized you

like the blue bird of happiness on your own projections

until the promise wore thin, and all your ploys at joy

turned out to be nothing but the hucksterism of tapeworms?

And, then, as it sometimes happened more often in autumn

than spring, your heart soared like a guitar with a broken string

taking wing like a waterbird off your tears

until you burned out like a comet with an uplifting message

in a niche that was meant for candles with slower wicks?

That kept you hanging onto life like a burning box kite didn’t it?

And should it come time to speak of the sadness

like a sin of omission that overpowers us all eventually

because the best things we promised ourselves

were never unattainable and the joy we sought and fought

and laboured for, and did not find, was barely explainable

even to us who became experts in grinding mirages into lenses

to reveal where it might be hiding somewhere in the universe

right under our noses. Up close and as intimate as our eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

WON'T MEAN MUCH IF YOUR EYES AREN'T OPEN IN YOUR BLOOD

WON’T MEAN MUCH IF YOUR EYES AREN’T OPEN IN YOUR BLOOD

Won’t mean much if your eyes aren’t open in your blood.

If the stars can’t see you because you don’t know how

to read them poetry in the small cafes of your heart

accompanied by spoons and plates and broken goblets

of the cheap house wine that smash just like love affairs

dashing your skull against the rocks, hoping the mermaids come back.

If you can’t hear in the parking lot of a raucous industry

the colours of your emotions, you’re a deaf chameleon

and who could make you listen to what you can’t listen to

even if you had enough people who loved you around you

to want you to try to listen to your own tears when you cry?

Your ear on the same wavelength as a corrugated tin roof,

maybe you can see what I’m trying to say to you

if you close your eyes, and just listen to the rain without

trying too hard to make a big effortless effort to be

auditorily enlightened by the racket of your delusions.

I can’t remember when my life stopped being my own

and I went to bed one night, and I was as human as my toes are

and I awoke, I was merely the afterbirth of a visionary

I didn’t recognize, as my eyes were being igneously wrung

from a cope of dark ore like stars out of the distant hills.

Not a lot of self-respect from the beginning, maybe

it wasn’t that hard becoming everyone and everything else,

and I was a prime candidate for effacement

but when I looked into the mirror of my

ten inch, equatorially mounted, clock-driven, reflecting telescope

I used like a canning jar to capture and mount stars and fireflies

on a black velvet starmap, all I could see

was this abyss staring back at me that couldn’t say

where I’d gone, but the last I thought I heard

was that I got a job as a janitor in an hourglass

sweeping mirages out of a desert of private school stars.

I say what I see as it occurs to me spontaneously.

And I’m compelled to say it without hesitation

so the vision isn’t tainted by the colour of the jewel

it’s passing through, from one eye to the next, ad infinitum.

No light pollution in the shining, though there’s something

about the idea of purity that continues to appal me

because I never had so much against chaos from the beginning

and I sense a deep hatred of all that is soiled and flawed,

in which case, I’d rather be an outlaw than one of these monks

who disdain me because I can’t help seeing their discipline

as uncreatively redundant. Eventually, if they’re blessed,

all our faces are going to fall off by themselves

like the scabs of sunspots that healed the wounded light

like a wildflower shedding its petals like nurses’ caps

and deathmasks frozen like a moment in time meant

to last forever though we go on being estranged by them forever.

Uncanny transformations of the solid into the real.

Maybe it’s time to let the mindstream flow as it will

and let the burning bridges of our delusions cross us for a change

to get to the other side of a life that’s only got one bank

and it’s as clear as space, we’re not even standing on that.

Hang on. Let go. It’s just your hand opening and closing

like a door in a dream, and you’ll find your falling

just as fast as you ever were and if you were to ask your eyes

they couldn’t tell in this vastness whether your were falling up or down.

When you’ve dismantled all you’ve desired,

post neo-deconstructionism sets in like spiritual rigor mortis

and you can’t tell if you’re sleeping with the living or the dead

when you haven’t got your mask on. You can wear holes

in your shoes, and windows and carpets, pacing

like a waterclock of the heart in an hourglass of waiting

like a boy at the edge of the curb with his elbows on his knees

and his face in his glum hands, waiting for a parade

with sacred clowns throwing away free candies

like stars along the route of the mystic Milky Way.

Just be sure to keep your eyes open like a spring thaw

so the light can recognize you like the flower that brought it

to full illumination this time last year like a candle

that keeps blowing its petals out so you can see

the black matter of what you are not deeper

into the eyeless dark than you’ve ever bloomed before.

PATRCK WHITE  

I APPROACH THE ANGER OF MY INNER CHILD

I APPROACH THE ANGER OF MY INNER CHILD

I approach the anger of my inner child

with the smile of a Buddha and let the squall

blow until it burns itself out like a field fire,

defaulting into my second innocence,

more experienced than the first to fall.

Everything is looping progressively backwards through time.

I do what the stars do. Blue through red, I shine.

I grow huge. I implode. I go supernova.

Then I’m blind as a black dwarf that will come

of all of this. I lay my ashes on the roots

of the roses and say make what you can of me.

Pour a portion of your cup back into the river

you drink from in tribute and gratitude

for what it’s given you. You take. You die.

You receive. You live. But it takes years

of coming back to life to try again

to learn how childishly simple this is

and how enlightening it is to be mentored by the rain.

Bless your ashes as a gift of the flame

that burns in you. Return yourself like dust

to the long road as lost as you were you

firewalked with like a companion who never

said a word, but trusted you to guess

where you were going and followed you

like a shadow as if nothing were left unsaid.

Dead is dead. Whatever death is, even

if it’s more of an is not than anything

we won’t have the imagination to wish for

like eyes of dark matter that keep the light

to themselves, the photonic spheres

of our skulls in blackholes and our femurs

more like firesticks than peacepipes or bird bone flutes.

If you’ve got a soul left worth speaking of,

puts wings on your urn and learn to transmigrate

in the bodies of Pythagorean birds or Iranian angels

as if you had a message written on the wind

that clarified the medium it was encoded in

without any preconditions upon your imagination.

You write it. It writes you. Starmaps and dice.

You’ve got to roll your bones like an avalanche

at least once. Bit by snake-eyes before

you clear the table like a house of Tarot cards.

I’d be nine in the fifth place if I were the I Ching.

I would do it all differently to keep it the same.

I’d be an event instead of a thing. I’d be as obvious

as the sky in my sophistication. More stoutly good,

perhaps, than spiritually uplifting as if that

were the easy path of a godless man’s insistence

upon evil, when it’s more a matter of perceptive error

when you begin to distinguish between mirages and water

and who has access, and who does not, to your housewell.

No heaven to aspire to. No hell to avoid.

No narrow bridge over a dizzying height.

No mystic vertigo at a Sufic crossroads.

The dark shines as fearlessly as the light.

Take a human pride in the night

that has fashioned you out of its own starmud.

The dark mother who knew the colour

of your eyes before you did. The one

you showed her, and the one you hid

like a private life at the back of your head.

And if you’re taken by surprise the way

an osprey seizes a snake and finds it’s

grabbed a dragon by the tail, or an Aztec

takes hold of your heart as a sacrifice

to a plumed serpent, don’t squander

your superlatives on things you didn’t mean to say.

Be diamond. Be aquiline as Al Tair in Aquila.

Don’t waste your eyes on pedestrian jewels.

High in the mountains of the moon, pursue

an earthly excellence like the sport

of a peasant king or queen in exile. But remember,

any valley you might find yourself wandering through

like a nightstream seeking its equilibrium in low places

isn’t a grave plot to overthrow you

as you approach the sea with your eyes wide open

and no summons in your hand you’ve been asked

to answer for. As if your silence weren’t witness enough.

PATRICK WHITE

ON A BARREN HILLTOP IN THE MOONLIGHT

ON A BARREN HILLTOP IN THE MOONLIGHT

On a barren hilltop in the moonlight,

as if the soul of the rock it’s rooted in

had been torn out of it by the nape of the neck

the broken pine bears its agony alone

in violent supplication to the wind and the stars.

A ladder of fractured limbs, horns. Fireseeds

under the eyelids of its windfall pinecones,

a brutalized will to live indomitably

as it clings like the claws of a dragon

to the earth, thrashing the air to soar away,

Perseus on Pegasus or Draco around the axis mundi.

Not a thing, but the history of an event

in the making. I will endure. I will endure.

And I shall be beautiful in the way I am broken.

The gash of lightning that scorches my heartwood

and blisters the resin of my long, slow tears.

The torch of pitch I put out in the stars

like the hasty fire of a zodiacal heretic

that refused to shine by a reflected light.

Live by a creation myth not of its own telling.

Blue green chalked by the moon through

the crags of its needles, its wings all quills

without feathers, it drops its fruit

like sticky bullets as if it were emptying itself

like a revolver it might have held to its head

at one time to protest its own dying like the shriek

of a deermouse in the talons of a snow owl

or a madman in a safe sane house for anarchists

who delegitimize chaos at the expense

of the abyss that engendered it out of nothing

as surely as starfish and galaxies share the same blueprint.

Not a tree, but the tormented first letter

of a shakey alphabet that had its fingers broken

for striving to write its full name in pain

across the sky like surgical scars on its heart

and eyes, a mantra of struggle and suffering

like a knot in the rough going of all living things.

A dynamic paradigm of the commotion of space

and time winging it on the fly from the start

as if life didn’t so much evolve as improvise

on the unlikeliest of beginnings backlit

by the same arcane radiation that houses the stars

each to their own mode of shelter and solitude

like the strong rafter, flying buttress, crooked crutch

of a broken pine tree holding up the sky

with nothing but the shoulder of the moon

to lay its head against when the weight becomes

unbearable as the excruciating faith it has

in risking it all like its mutilated will to live

in making the attempt to fail nobly standing its own ground.

PATRICK WHITE

BANGING BINS AND HAMMERS UNBENDING NAILS

BANGING BINS AND HAMMERS UNBENDING NAILS

Banging bins and hammers unbending nails.

Morning in a small town. Chores, chores, chores,

the self-interested business of the world.

Wood and bread. Coffee and kids. Tooth aches

and cabbies trying not to get caught

drinking on the job again. Car alarms going off

in panicked parking spots. Blue September sky

and bright sunshine clean as newly laundered sheets.

Hillbilly hippies arguing over who stole whose crop,

wearing their crystal laurels like the root rot of the sixties.

I study the masonry of the orange brick

in a building across the street and wonder

what it would look like glazed in Babylonian

lapis lazuli. I feel like the thirteenth inch

of a carpenter’s foot when the old world

went metric. What am I the measure of

if not the freedom to observe the life

going on around me, with no discernible purpose

in mind than the rain falling on the roots

of dead flowers giving their ghosts up to the wind?

Two bees working a late blooming Scotch thistle,

eggs and butter, sunny side up, and star clusters

of asters deepening their imperial purple

like cochineal on the eyelids of junior highschool girls

gaggling down the street to the greasy Pizza Parlour

for a coke and a slice they eat like torrid landscapes.

Deadly nightshade boiled out of foul-smelling snails.

Wasn’t it ever so when witches catwalk like models?

Brave bodies that ignore the Braille of their goosebumps.

Even though it’s cold. The show must go on.

Life insists. There’s a season to be on stage

like a trooper on tour, and a time, as most of us do

just to sit sublimely in the audience

and enjoy the view we’re ambivalently happy

we never have to live through again except as art.

Recollections in creative turmoil on the run

from the chaos of killer bees that once churned honey

in the hives of our hearts where the mystery

of love and lust still presides over us

like a dark queen in winter after the first snow.

How meaningfully irrelevant life can delightfully seem

to a dog without a purpose that’s slipped its chain

like a distinguished voice in a choir of wolves

who feel the sadness of the full moon

is unspeakably deeper than the second rising

of the blue that looks down upon the threshed fields

and the few remaining flowers like the paint rags

of an unachievable masterpiece that failed brilliantly

to be apprenticed to its own solitude as a kind of guess

at a good life that cleaned up its mess before it left

like a traffic jam of Canada geese rising

from a ruined cornfield candied by frost and moonlight.

PATRICK WHITE