COME NIGHT

Come night and the ease of being alone with the rain on the window. The pain is more acutely human. And the mournful trains in the darkness get on with the homely business of being us. I turn the light around more deeply inward and discover there are tears on the other side of my eyes that have been falling for years into the mirrors of a kindlier likeness. So much doesn’t matter, but the little that does, overflows the cracked cup of the world. Come night and I am swayed like a leaf on the stream; come night and I am the ploy of a thousand suggestive faces that people the way things seem. I am the dream, I am the dream, I am the dream, and when it’s true, the dream is me. So much I wanted to do; where did the wanting go? The clock limps royally by in iambs contemptuous of the freedom of the verse, but it isn’t time that heals the unspeakable wound that is suffered by everything as if the sky wore the moon like a scar; it’s the night that grows its herb in the injured seeds of who we are. On the tongue of every blade of grass, a star, a voicing of the light within no cloud could foil. Come night and our roots digress in the soil that fervently dreams of us, that summons our lucidities like inspiration to enlighten its toil with urgent transformation. The trees, our lungs; the seas, our eyes, and our minds, the unwitnessed clarity of a sky that isn’t there to obstruct the night, there are water and fire, light, blood, star, and thought streams within that run down from the mountains far beyond us like the coloured threads of a forgotten wholeness unravelling like a childhood sweater, lifetime after lifetime, to thread the eyes with vision and amend the absence with poetry.

PATRICK WHITE

IMAGINATION ISN'T FEIGNING

Imagination isn’t feigning if I imagine I’m awake. No more than a mystery is the mask of something waiting to be exposed. If life is the medium of a dream then the dream must be reality without a second thought, no proliferation of witnesses; the leaves on the tree not testimony, no shadow at noon. The well thirsts for itself, and the fire is martyred in its own burning. The stars are blinded by the blaze. And the emptiness is always full like a woman in love. Which side of the window is clear; and which is sky? And if you consider the eye made both, arrayed both for the sake of the view, and you are the view, then where’s the distinction that would make one a fraud, and the other, the high fields of God, never broken by a plough, where under every seed the wind sows like stars, there’s the root of a demon and the flower of an angel weaving crude haloes out of compassionate herbs and scars? And when you read this; who’s inside out? When you want to know where someone you cherished and lost went; it’s easy. When the moon is on the water there’s water on the moon. If the cup were only there to contain itself, where could the wine find room? Intoxications of the morning, flower-fire, and I’ve barely woken up, and I’m already drunk. No left-handed bells, please; no lead-footed cornerstones. Let the mist pick itself up and don’t ask what lake last night left its lingerie all over the trees; it’s too early to be arraigned by the day’s convictions. Is the blood of the rose wounded by a thorn? The moon gored on its own horn? Love’s the waterlily in a swamp of porn. And look. Almost a hit. And I haven’t signed anything yet. Get it. The dawn is not an inflammation, and the imagination, the permanent side-effect of a spiritual antibiotic. Because if it is, the disease is doctor to the herb, and ministrant to the cure. Sweet fever that dances like a pulse when a woman lifts up her eyelids like a bra.

PATRICK WHITE

POETRY IS LIKE

Poetry is like swinging a cup through the river like a bell and holding it up to your lips, and drinking until you meet the sea. Strange intermingling of simulacra where the stone flows and and the trees sculpt the wind and every painting is a portrait of the brush. The stars come out, and it’s your eyes that are shining, your seeing that the myths are shades of. The majority rejected by the individual, and the individual, the apprentice of a tyrant, what discipline isn’t the foreplay of chaos? Every theme comes round again like the petal of the hour, and the shrieks and the dreams, the laughter, the sighing and the sorrow, all the alloys of an ambiguous art, are the conditions of ignorance that enlighten the word when the word listens to its own advice. It may be Buddha, but I’m grateful to the anthropogenetics of my ancestral abyss. Here. Look into this, quickly. It’s not true we’re a death shy of the view. Look at the palette, not the painting, but don’t mistake the facial for the face. That’s the mysterious grace of the seeming that recognizes you. Poetry is not like asking a shoe about a journey you made, and if you’ve raised the sail of your voice to blossom on the wind, remember, that’s only the prelude of the fruit of where you’ve been, and the wind will wreck it, and the leaves grow green.

PATRICK WHITE

I AM SO ALONE

I am so alone in this namelessness, sometimes so immured to the wall that my blood moves like a fresco someone’s painted over. I am a tree that has held on to its leaves through the longest of winters into the next spring. And all for what? I could have fared better with the dead. I could have scattered myself down any random road, lost maps to nowhere, trying to follow their own coastlines back to the first sighting. The dark. The ticking. The space is too tight around my body. So much always had to happen before I could, but this is not my straitjacket; mine’s got the sky for a hood. Times like these I tighten like a pipe wrench around the throat of a parking meter for not being the bud of a daffodil. My mind is the afterlife of an ancient future that haunts me for not being born. Pick it up in the morning. Sleep. Sleep. There are graves everywhere footnoting the text with their epitaphs; and not a scientist among them to verify the facts. Wry, pathetic, pleading last words, blighted cherubs of stone, punctuating the quote, as if the earth were indifferent to what it used. I can’t believe that I have lived for nothing. I can’t believe that life loves her children. I can’t believe that love conquers all; and I can’t believe in what does. The mirror longs for what it cannot contain. My heart is number than a thimble. The halo I used to wear so proudly in the rain, is now a nose ring chained to a rosary of slave-trading profundities. The dark is tar. Space, this hateful disparity of leering glass. I have waited to know. I have prayed. I have studied. In my rage for transformation, beside my reservoirs of ignorance I have flagellated my bodymind with the blood-caked hair of purifying comets to turn the water into wine, blood into light, for the stars to be poured into the eye of the green apple that it might taste the radiance before it falls, but the wind is a rough companion and the birds have pitted me like the moon. My life is twisted like a tie on a garbage-bag someone left after they moved out. My life is the lichen of rain on the ceiling that replaced the fraudulent rosette. Or am I wrong to ask, impugned for asking, somehow give affront if I ask why everything seems so inevitably unique and periphrastic? I am appalled by the onceness of everything, the horror of cherishing beauty that must pass, the violence of the sorrow when it does. I have looked upon the world, its trees, its clouds, its people, as the perennials of my own nature; and its fates and accidents, tragedies and toys I have learned like the grammar of my native tongue, and I have seen the earth turn from an ark into a lifeboat with limited space, and given up my own place, again and again, to the immensity of the solitude I saw in the human face. I have not managed to feel compassion for the vicious, but I can aloofly grieve the death of an innocent snake. Petty fool. Mystic migraine. Have my urgencies lied? Le poet maudit. I have dipped my quill of light in the tarpit to illuminate the darkness like a black candle, but this spring takes me aside and candidly suggests for all that I have fed to the flame I have laboured for shadows in vain. The darkness is a mouth, and even the abyss disappears with a hiss like the mirage of a snowflake on a furnace, and time anchors it fangs in my voice and wrenches me from my breath, another coil tighter. Is this data? Is this witness? Is this prayer? Are these the beached thoughts of the new conquistadores of significance slyly advancing up the alien shore of an elitist prophecy? Or merely the ghostfroth and seafoam of a dead tide clinging to rocks on the moon? Why do I suffer? What do I mean? What don’t I mean? Does a clown ask the question even as he paints his face in a mirror framed by lightbulbs that shine like the regimental lotuses of enlightenment? Are the answers skewed because the questions are awry; or is the antidote merely an encore of the toxins, and it’s better to be subsumed like a crowd in the delirium than milk a fang for mercy? The darkness is a shark’s eye. No iris. How long can I twist in a yoga of agony like an arrow bent by its target, before I am strung to my own spinal cord like a feathered serpent finally heeled to the yielding of the bow, and I let go?

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN IT ISN'T THERE

When it isn’t there, when the door’s closed and the key’s broke off in the lock, and the heart is an older stone than the moon, and where there was no threshold I’m the junkmail coupon for something you don’t want, and I’m gathering asteroids for ballast, and over everything there’s the nuclear fallout of the one that got away, and the species are drawing straws, and it looks as if winter’s here to stay, and the aloof clouds are as intimate as ashes, and the gold sunrise in the crowns of the royal quatternio is beginning to turn back into lead, and the alchemical hermaphrodite is missing one of his/her heads, and I don’t know why, never know why, my spinal cord is always winched to a black bell in a bottomless well, trying to haul up water to put the fire out. Not to be loved. To feel unworthy. Not to know why you aren’t. And to remember you felt as if you were. That’s nothing but the water-harps of the sirens on playback after they’ve left like seals. Homing songs on reel to reel, though there’s really no one to return to. And it’s hard to cherish the absence when the absence doesn’t need you. Have you ever wondered why they don’t hang a lot of mirrors in the lobby of a funeral parlour, and the silence is always a carpet and a fern? But the crematorium is no longer my last rite of passage. I burn, but less flagrantly. Candle. Coffin. Urn. The hearse doesn’t know where to bury me, and only the corpses have the physique to carry me. Bring on the professional mourners if you wish, but the small, tender flame of my life that endures has freed itself from the hook of your wick like a goldfish and swims away, a fan dance, through the auroral depths of the night. And it’s not that I don’t love you. I do. I’ve never seen you. I’ve never touched you. But your letters and your poems, the candour of your passionate declarations, were birds in a sky that hadn’t seen birds since the last full moon raved like a sty on an infected third eye. And there’s no point in thrashing around in the catacombs of the computer for resurrectable prophets, or trying to string someone else’s bow with my arrow as if I were just another one of Penelope’s romping suitors. I am gratefully arrogant enough to be sustained by the upwelling of my disaffected dignity raised like a flag of blood on the ruin of a castle in the distance. I can withstand a siege like the moon, pitted and scarred by the comets and the catapults, but obdurate as the gravestone of a captive that wouldn’t quit. And that’s the irony of it, the oxymoronic coincidence of the contradictories. These cold, bright, hard heights are merely the absence of your warm, dark, soft valleys where I walked in the shadow of your breath, psalming my sheep through the gorge when I was your eloquence and you were my content. Nothing. Not a word. For weeks. The extraction of an axis like a sliver. I weave like a drunk top in the headlights of a trigger-happy cop. Sooner or later, the pain will thaw away from itself like snow and snakes in the garden, and I’ll review the agenda of my transformations like a phoenix in therapy because I can’t cry, or the nugget of a worm with gilded wings, and knock until I don’t answer, on a thousand and one doors, intrigued without wonder, at the strange cosmetics that pitch themselves like snakeoil, a complete make-over, inside and out, on the threshold of a faithless necrophile with taste.

PATRICK WHITE

DO I NOT KNOW YOU NOW

Do I not know you now, you, without past, without future, you distant probabilities of breath, prevalence of a moment that does not exist yet, and will not exist even when you do? As the garden keeps coming up mint and roses, so the earth keeps growing lips and eyes and fingers, and I have those now as you do, gates to greet the world. It’s true the mind makes itself a body out of the detritus and effluvia of the earth; but it does not act like the living upon the inanimate, like God upon dirt, but living collaborates with the living, and all things live, to build itself a chrysalis, that what crawled might now have wings. Black dragonfly on the glowing milk of the waterlily and not a bruise on the light. Four petals of a flowering diamond, and the rest, a bolt of anthracite, I dip my brush in the hotspot of the sun reflected in its eye, and paint you a picture in space, the shorthand symbols and images of my secretary voice, auroras you can see and hear when your eye and your ear are one immediate clarity, a breeze of vital light, the tip of the tongue of the wind on your translucent skin, a visionary summons to live aware of me as I am of you, not later, but now, here, at this joining of rivers such that my thoughts, emotions, insight and blood flow into yours and yours into me on this long fall down from the mountain to the sea. But I have not come before or after you, but with you, and my breathing and pulsing in this unbounded brevity of space, is yours, and the seeing and the hearing and the touching yours, and what of my voice that isn’t your saying, that isn’t a river whispering into its own ear like a future memory, things the mountain said to tell the sea? And if my ignorance is a window of coal trying to stare its way into an enlightened diamond on the moon, a subtler deception of the light, and if the folly of my pain is to try to build picket-fences of whitewashed virtues erect as military palings, and more than a few off the gate, missing without leave from parade, to keep the snakes out, and if I labour freely to assist the effortless effort and know I am not needed, so do you, so is yours, so are you as I am now, a bubble of sentience arising from a spiritual watershed breaking like a womb. Not subtle. Not obvious. You will come to the world like a memory, and what you know, and all that you can know, you will have already been. Blue lights over the entrance; red over the exit. Like a river, I am not poured into you; nor you poured out of me. What I didn’t cry for but held onto like a grape, you will let go of like one tear over the edge of the cup, and that will be the sweetest drop in the vineyard because it was aged in a darkness deeper than night, like a message or a dream in a bottle, a man embodied, to be the wine you get drunk on to fall across the threshold of my blood, relieved to have made it home out of the maelstrom of voices and visions, that call for a mouth, eyes, hands, a heart, the silver earring in my left ear that hangs like a planet from the lobe of the moon that rises higher tonight in the west, a sail unfolding like a loveletter, the first blossom, to unveil the passage in the shale of your breath like a warm wind in the dark.

PATRICK WHITE

HOW MUCH ACCRUES

How much accrues to every word, like the deserts and rainforests in the voice of the wind, that are never heard. Under the wet plaster, the duff of last year’s words, first violets and the bones of the deermouse, local candidates with big meanings. And there are hermaphroditic mushrooms, two sexes in one, penis and gills, mortar and pestle, that come up in the night unobserved from the spores of an ancient vessel. What I have said, and, without invention, didn’t mean, though I could see the dolphin off the bow, is more of a book than the one I did write, straying with the flowers and the shadows that strewed my path. Now I follow like a bird in the aftermath of my life, and the sirens let down their hair like comets in the themes of my wake, to play me gently with the thorn of another heartache because I am a willing sorrow, not a scuttled defeat, and the music that gulls the reef is sweet.

PATRICK WHITE