LUCID BLUE HOUR OF LEAVES ON THE RIVER

LUCID BLUE HOUR OF LEAVES ON THE RIVER

Lucid blue hour of leaves on the river

drifting by like constellations on a starmap at last.

Falling, they sank to the heights of the unattainable.

Life, for all we try to order it, no less random

than death. Does the becoming ever stop?

Too nice a day to argue ethics with my skeleton.

No end term. But let my bones have the final say

on whether I lived as I had to, not should,

or covertly fulfilled a spiritual vacuum

when I entered my grave like a guest in the doorway.

Lucid blue, but a chill in the air, and everywhere,

the going and the gone, the perishing in the name

of a good cause, same time, same place,

come the spring when the seed dies into

its own flowering gesture of longevity.

I can still hear the birds singing long after

they’ve flown. I’ve got their voice boxes

like empty heron’s nests in the female crucifixes

of the dead trees in a breeding swamp

of runic trinities. Saint Hillary was a Druid at heart.

I was an impoverished golden boy with a Mongolian will

to transcend my uneager beginnings as a fatherless khan.

I brought a new level of reality to the word, mirage,

but now it doesn’t even matter why I’m alive

as I grow like a beard on the wind, cedar smoke

from these pyres I keep starting like root fires

I sit around with my hands apart to the flames

like the wings of a bird rising from its own ashes

in a strange emblem of prayer to a god

I’ve never even heard of before riding

its own updraft like the soul of a man trying

to warm his solitude up a bit with a conversational fire.

The river’s babbling somnambulistically on and on

about how effortless the dreamers think flowing is.

It’s noon, but I see the moon flashing

its sabres of light on the redshifting waves

of the mindstream as it labours like a calendar

to keep up with life. Divide and conquer

and the house falls like Tarot cards unmindful

of their own fault lines. Sequestered in

this hovel of starmud, outside the walls

of a palace of water, I watch the cattails explode

like the stuffing of old couches, the royal thistle

suffering a fluffy kind of senescent dementia.

And it doesn’t matter whether it’s got something

to do with me or not, whether I’m the protagonist

of the ghost stories I keep telling about myself

to the eyes gleaming in the dark like first magnitude stars

taking it all in like absorption spectra, or

they’re making me up on the fly to appease the shadows

that keep protesting why such darkness should

be born of the light as if there were a G-spot

on a single-petalled wild rose you could touch

like a bee that would make it all right as rain and honey.

Take the pain, the darkness, the despair, the struggle

to live inside yourself wholly alive

like a bed and breakfast for suspicious boarders.

Let a little danger ransom you from your ennui

as you grow more homesick, looking at the stars

you left like a pilgrim going off to a war

it was holy to lose, victory to die in the midst of

deluded by the rumours of virgin belly dancers

who said they were more in love with the carnal

than the nuances of the latest eclipses of an enlightened mind.

Pick any night you’ve ever lived as if

you couldn’t live anymore without spilling

out of the moment like tears of bliss

from a housewell deeper than the watershed that fed it.

One life. One encounter with yourself

like a stranger without fingerprints to say

you ever existed, as all those torments

that blasted you like clay brick in the deserts

of an hourglass settle like pyramidal dust on a windowsill.

Look at the leaves blowing down

the abandoned broadways of life like feral playbills

that barked like a dog outside a tent

you had to pay to get a seat in like a first row of teeth.

Sleep on a bed of nails if you have to

and have religious wet dreams of

the linghams and the yonis, the jewel

in the lotus, the yin, the yang, the coincidence

of the contradictories in quantumly entangled

oxymorons who never swore on the light sword

between them to keep a vow the optical illusion

of a bifurcated consciousness made for them.

Don’t give your word like a mighty oak

and then break it like a twig. Even if you regret it

later. The grander the entrance, the cheaper the exit.

It gives the story of your life a chance

to be true to you like an exception to the rule.

But don’t force yourself. Integrity’s the preference

of an aristocratic taste for the excellence

of a blue-blooded wine over a mouthwash of ditch water.

Don’t disappoint the scars of your younger heroics.

When you see the way people suffer as you suffer

and you need a word beyond righteous absurdity

to express how you feel about the mindless agony of life

or die in a futile attempt to shriek it at the stars

as if you were a magnificent bird of prey

with an arrow in your wing, don’t reject

the folly of love you’ve been chosen to die in the name of.

Even the moon’s a maggot that can sometimes

disinfect the trough of the wound

by ennobling the foodchain with a coat of arms

that honours the housefly with a set of wings

for not reviling the running sore of the earth as corrupt.

Waterlilies rot like skunkweed. It’s clear enough.

And it’s true there aren’t many who want

to turn over the occult skull in the prophetic duff

to see what’s going on underneath the impressionist table cloth

they’re picnicking on with courtesans in the grass

as if the waters of life had never heard of autumn

as the nightbirds pine for paramours beyond

the stations of their voices like troubadours in vain,

longing and desire, the ghost in the flame

ignoring the storms that will blow its candle out

like a lighthouse that disobeyed its own warnings

and, at the very least, deepened the madness of being alive.

PATRICK WHITE

STARS TONIGHT AND THE TRAIN WHISTLES JUST PASSING THROUGH

STARS TONIGHT AND THE TRAIN WHISTLES JUST PASSING THROUGH

Stars tonight and the train whistles just passing through,

not dying like some wounded animal, a mammoth in a tarpit

beset by dire wolves just as the ice-age is taking its hand

off the throats of the rivers and returning the world to trees,

no drunks or teenagers lying across the tracks, no accidents

or suicides with loved ones leaving flowers and photographs

on the spot where it happened too late, too late, and no one

in a small town really able to relate to such a universal absence

like the death of the larger mammals when spring is at the gate.

I listen for the music of fate, and I’m almost always ready to dance,

but sometimes when I consider the erosively random indifference of chance

I speak as if I had to keep a tight grip on my molecules

or dissipate into space myself with no nebular aspirations

of ever becoming a star to shine a little light

on what I’m doing here as if I just bought drinks for the house,

though I’m never quite sure what I’m trying to celebrate,

but it’s enough to start a riot of sacred clowns

laughing on a winter night as they put each other down

as if the only way they could bluff themselves into having a little fun

were to put callouses on their smiles, and talk tougher than they are.

And over the course of time, the scars prove as hurtful as the wounds.

Atrocities turn into local stories and the asylums are abandoned

to the ghosts of the mad who murdered the nurse

in the moonlit flash of an axe you can still see ninety years later

if you’re driving by alone on a starless night in late February.

It’s the commonality of it all that makes it chronically appalling.

It’s the sententious acceptance of death as if it had already

been achieved sooner than later, and sooner waste your last breath

on the ashes of a dying fire than wonder why

intimately specific human beings turbulent with life

are forgotten as carbon copies of us as they’re fossilized

and remembered, if at all, as the narrative themes of morbid legends,

or nacreously glazed in mother of pearl as if the dawn were never false.

I can’t see the bright side of a black hole through the temple

of a universe that’s playing Russian roulette with itself,

but I can hear the tumblers of a solar system falling into place

on a safe full of secrets for my eyes only as if some things

came to light like undertakers chalking the faces of the cosmetically dead.

Lifemasks and strawdogs and scarecrows thrown

on the ritual fires of the crematorium after the sacrifice is said

to make the living feel better about having their hearts cut out.

Whatever gets you through the night. Aquatic Byron

reaching into the pyre to pull Shelley’s drowned heart out of the flames.

The way I seek a deeper solitude than death out in the nearby woods

where I always feel like an exile with a homeless heart

looking up at the stars like a handful of sacred dirt in a medicine bag

I’ve been saving for years to throw on my own grave

I’m holding up to the abysmal impersonality of the nightsky,

not to have it blessed by a consolation prize, but to give

the unresponsive silence of the alphas and omegas of the mystery

a taste of my humanity even if they spit me out as a bitter kind of light.

I will shine. Without a lantern. Without a firefly. Without

a guiding star. Without a radiant familiar in a desolate place.

If nothing else, I’ll keep adding my paint rag to the big picture

of the dark until I grow eyes to look beyond the obvious mirrors,

part the curtains, lift the veils, kiss the eyelids of the new moon

until the dead wake up like an eclipse of black roses

blooming in their blood, turn the trilithons of Stonehenge

until it’s aligned with the vernal equinox and the dead return

like migrating birds to the innocence of their childhoods

and the coffins they were buried are disinterred like toyboxes.

PATRICK WHITE

THE BEAUTIFUL ARTIFICE DESTROYED

THE BEAUTIFUL ARTIFICE DESTROYED

The beautiful artifice destroyed,

is the ugly one any less fictional?

O the glow of wisdom on a disappointed man’s face.

Auroral veils in the ashes of flypaper cobwebs.

You can know someone who’s lived well

by whether children are happy around them or not.

Bleak concrete and arterial air ducts

painted red so every grey day’s got its poppy,

more like a bunker than a peripatetic perch

of higher learning. A perch for nesting missiles.

Military-industrial. Everywhere the inert gases

of the overhead lights interrogate you

overenthusiastically. Que sais je? Nothing.

Incriminated by a metaphor that ratted her out,

I heard a writer say every time she came across

some unexpected jewel of language, she

plucked it out before the Taliban splashed acid

in its eyes. Flowers aren’t allowed at a funeral,

but the asters still crowd around the muskrat

like roadkill, death and the beautiful united

in belief. And to judge from the silky, sunken

eye-sockets, the minimalist ants extol squinting

over seeing the same way. A local habitation

and a name, ok, but GPS is not a starmap

and o little journey, a step across the threshold

is only so many miles to an inch. Desecration

is hitching thoroughbreds to the bullet proof hearse

plagiarized from the sun god’s chariot. Inspire

a matchbook, you might flare for a moment,

but nothing of any consequence is going to go down

in flames. Speak for yourself like the voice

of a species. Who cares how many mammoth bones

or shoes you’ve got in the closet of your psyche?

You can look at a field and at first all you can see

is a blur of golden hay the wind is polishing

to a sheen you can breathe on like the skin of a lover,

and then, stars emerging, the wildflowers begin to come out.

I like to listen to what they’re saying in their sleep.

I don’t feel a compulsion to run and uproot them

because some nitwit’s got a writing style

that doesn’t include them. All gate, and no garden.

Even the weeds will surprise you with what

they know about flowering if they’re left

to their own resources. I got up one morning

and was mystically mauled by the New England asters

in the apple orchard caught in a bolt of sunlight,

a black bear among the ungathered windfall,

as shocked as I was to stare into the eyes

of another mammal there, doing what I was.

Biting into the amazing sweetness of the same

sacred syllables, jewels glistening on our lips

like the firesticks of diamonds raining

on Saturn and Jupiter as for one brief moment

we understood each other like apple juice

and the strange elixirs of September that

make fools out of the wasps too comatose to fly.

PATRICK WHITE

BEAUTIFUL DAY. FREE OF THE WORLD. CLOUDLESS

BEAUTIFUL DAY. FREE OF THE WORLD. CLOUDLESS

Beautiful day. Free of the world. Cloudless.

A gift of my dreams, hormones, doesn’t

matter much to me, play with your theories,

More immediate and real. Events flash

like kingfishers and switchblades over

halcyon seas. Words rollick as if I’d

forgiven them a day off as yesterday

and the day before that to sing as they please

when dawn hits the tops of the morning trees.

I don’t care if life is good or bad, mascara

or mother-of-pearl. No doubt it’s sad, no doubt.

Still too aghast at the million subtle nuances

of suffering, and the horrors that cake like blood

to the past to have resolved the internal contusion

of it spreading like a bruise of deadly nightshade

over my heart. A body made for love. A body

made for pain. I delight in the absurdity

of the agony like a man who’s gone half insane.

Astounded by my awareness of anything.

The way I remember the columbine this spring

on the skull of the rock as if it had had

a hair transplant of a thousand lamp posts of grouse

sceptred on the crowns of their heads.

Memory’s the biggest challenge time’s ever faced.

I feel graced by the lack of intent behind

my intelligence, to have outlived all

the old purposes for being here that fell

like apples from a tree with a dull thud

softened by the stargrass in the middle

of the night when no one was there to observe it.

Protocols of the particle letting its hair down

like a wavelength on its own in the dark.

Who can imagine what the world must be doing

behind their back, out of reach, empowered

by dark matter that doesn’t make itself

readily available for interviews? Life’s

not a teaching device. There’s not a lot

to learn from suffering except you don’t

make things up that sell like greeting cards.

Silence heals what words fail to find a cure for.

It puzzles me to say it but poetry’s beginning

to smell like a corpse flower in bloom. O

the pollen of words. And yet the bees still knead

neonicotinoids into the most translucent honey

to fill their cells with like the petals of solar panels.

Feel like I’ve been walking through a valley

most of my life trying to have a spanky conversation

with the jawbone of an ass. I am not denigrated

by the size of the mountain of starmud, nor

the depth of the grave I had to dig my way out of

to attain a freedom of expression that echoes

among the peak moments of silence that speak

like clouds and eagles of the way we keep changing

creation myths to the fixed starmaps we project

like insect planetariums on the roofs of our skulls.

Further in. More deeply drowned. Gone beyond,

I rejoice without having any reason to.

Words wheel like pigeons over the wetlands

of invasive antennae broken by a lack of use.

The doorway’s been torn down that used to

let me in like a thief and throw me out

for the eloquence of my fingerprints

in a labyrinth of homeless thresholds.

Nothing but blue sky to lose my infinities in

and the sunlight crisp as newly laundered sheets

folded away like poems in the drawers of the guest room.

The mystery’s evolving somehow I can’t discern.

I’m uplifted by a fire that doesn’t burn. I laugh

as I scatter my ashes along a path with no way back.

First the rose petals and then the thorns. Just

the way the moon transforms its eyelids

from night to night like the cosmology

of star-nosed moles with divine telescopes

photo-shopping the lunar complexions

of their cover-girl conceptions of a black hole

that’s full of light, the waters of life in a housewell

but, who could have guessed, bright as they are,

know less than nothing about shining without

relying upon the dark to affirm it. Things

end and begin in the dead of the night

and the rest of the day is unimaginably irreproachable.

PATRICK WHITE

WHENEVER I REMEMBER YOU

WHENEVER I REMEMBER YOU

Whenever I remember you. Heartwood knots.

And the birds go silent. After all these years

of trying to flower my way to fruition in the light

of the effortless vision that’s been the engine

of my life. Windfall of blossoms. Windfall

of warm apples. Windfall of burning leaves.

I can still feel your arrow of moonlight in my throat.

I can still feel how you peeled back the rind

of the moon and pieced out my heart calendrically

like sundials that lost track of the time

in the bluing of the lyrical distances in your eyes.

Taste it. You’ll like it, you said. Acidicly sweet.

Indelible. Like the first time you ever smell

the dead. Love is a pear. But I wasn’t listening.

I was looking at you as the embodiment

of lust and love and death and dream and karma

summoned out of my psyche to give me

what I’ve always been in danger of wanting.

You made the dark shine when I put

the powerlines of my most courageous poetry

in my mouth, and spoke in tongues

to the naked ghost dancers that brought me

my totems like owls of smoke and crystal skulls

of dragon fire, only you, with your finger

on the trigger of the silence, could put out

like a candle with a word. And things hardened

into wax tears as if a switchblade just showed up

and cut the jugular of the wick with a flick of the moon.

The only rational approach to what we

were doing together in the same dream for awhile

was insanity beyond reform or reproach.

Night in a blackberry patch maligned as razor wire.

Intensities met like two stars passing through

these immensities like virtual solitudes looping

around each other in a prayer wheel of a dance

both knowing in advance, though you were more

inclined to fly off centripetally like a bucket

you whirled over your head the bottom had fallen out of,

we didn’t stand a ghost of a chance, however

well we conducted the seance that brought us

back to each other like a table with the manners

of a ouija board. And the silence, do you remember

the silence as I do that overcame us like a surrender

we’d resigned ourselves to? Nothing left unsaid?

No. That’s a lie. I went to the block protesting

my love of you like a death bed confession

you’d have no reason to doubt, though at that

late hour of the night in the torchlit tower

it didn’t much matter anyway. I felt

the blade of the moon on the nape of my neck

and my head fall into the basket like an Orphic dismemberment.

You added a prophetic element to my voice

but my future’s been a quiet kind of voodoo ever since.

I sing alone in the woods at night under

the willows rinsing their hair in the river

that’s keeps me company when I want

to unburden my heart of the sorrows

that have deepened it beyond comprehension.

O how many of the grains of dust on the windowsills

of these worlds within worlds once boiled

like guitar strings in the impoverished begging bowls

of a coffin open on the corner of a bank

and the tone-deaf cosmos of love on the fly.

The way it was was the way it had to be,

I suppose. Not exactly scar tissue. But at least

I can go out in public without space

fracturing the nervous system of my reserve

of dark energy shepherding the stars like lost sheep.

Take a look at the Milky Way. Doesn’t it

remind you sometimes of a scarf that got

strangled in the axle of a zodiac winched up

from the bottom of a black hole where we

were both drawn to each other like singularities

that weren’t given much of a voice

in what the wild geese cried out in transit

across the moon like an ancient farewell

that always heralds the sad beginning of new world?

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

I HAD TO WALK BESIDE A LOT OF RIVERS

I HAD TO WALK BESIDE A LOT OF RIVERS

I had to walk beside a lot of rivers,

miles, lightyears, trying not to impale myself

on a mace of dead trees or be swept

down a bank of slippery starmud

like an otter overconfident around the water.

I wasn’t breaking trail for anyone to follow.

A broken trail is where we all end up.

Poor Medusas. The toppled roots of snakey trees.

Frog spit on the stargrass and the trees

and the wet leather of last year’s leaves.

Dung, duff, and detritus. Sounds like

an epic poem. How burlap fell in love

with the aristocratic velvet of a rose.

Is that how it goes? Then let it.

With this proviso. That it never ends.

Misery and finesse were never friends.

The nightbird doesn’t begrudge the bell

its one note, and I drop anchor these days

like the moon going down behind the Lanark Hills,

just for a night or two, until the wind

can mend my sails like broken ear drums.

The chittering squirrel tries to have

a conversation with me but I’m sick

of the busy colloquies of hack writers

who think they’ve got a fix on the dark matter

of the mind in autumn, bluing

the post partum depression of the harvest

with shades of the moon that just came

to say farewell. The waterbirds have already left.

Homesick starmud exiled from death awhile.

The black walnuts in their jowls

are about as big their skulls, and it’s hard

to imagine anything larger than a chokecherry

for a heart. A drop of blood. Nuts

stored in trees like gravegoods in a library.

I’m imbued by the silence of the afterbirth

of the sacrifice that still wonders if it was worth it

to unburden its heart like an emergency exit.

There’s a sad equilibrium to what I become

in the fall like water finding its own level

because nothing much is going to bloom now

under the changing guard of the cold, cold stars.

I could cry my eyes out but the roots won’t

make flowers out of my tears until late next spring.

I could sing arias all night like a thirteen century

troubador in the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine,

but there’s no one at the window of the heron’s nest,

and the crows roost when they should be on nightwatch.

I walk in the ruins of all I tried to attain

like a warm summer rain that had washed

the corpse of a human the night before

and felt the abyss of what it is to be no more

and throw a few cornflowers you grew yourself

into the grave like metaphors of what you hope

might come of them, or, at least, might

speak for you like the proxies of an everlasting silence

when death sees what’s it’s done, and lies about it.

Odes of rosaries around the skulls of the firepit

that hung itself from the rafter of a shedding oak

in one last attempt to come to fruition

like mistletoe for the lovestruck, and acorns

for the feral pigs with the tusks of the moon.

Too lush, too cold, the grass greens the husked fields.

The cattails explode like upholstery.

The cedar rail fences are slimey with archipelagoes

of orange mold. The bracken Jurassic in nature.

Eras roll by like oceans playing musical chairs.

The rat snake slows as its blood runs cold.

The waves flap like wet laundry on the line.

The inconceivable goes on forever, but it starts

long before we’re born and and goes on even longer

after we die and die and die and die

as if life held a grudge and couldn’t kill us enough.

Sixty five autumns have I seen. And the spring

begins where life left off at the first snow as if

everyone had to live November all over again.

Life’s a catacomb trying to build a water palace

out of uncashed pop bottles. Death’s

a pale young man on a crutch that isn’t

going to let the surgeons take his other leg off.

Or an Aztec conduct a heart transplant.

Must all living things suffer what they love most?

I hold a child in my arms and life is

perilous and good. An old man cries

like chrysanthemums for a woman who

once ran like a river through his dry heartwood

and though there’s no argument that time

can’t abide humanity, life is torturously beautiful

to no purpose in the damp solitude

of an old man’s eyes humbled by a second innocence.

The white meteor of a salt lick for the deer.

PATRICK WHITE