TRYING TO GET UNDER

Trying to get under the skin of the poem and steel my seeing like a nightsky to the blood and muscle of the words, to the mystery of the inconceivability of the devastating emptiness that abides in everything that speaks and means. Trying to walk barefoot over the stars far enough back in time to see myself in the light of a brighter beginning. So I’m not swayed by the black dwarf that stands like a period in my way, the whole and only point of the universe, that gapes like a snake’s unlocked jaw in its radical center without circumference. I look for the moon in the corals in realms where I don’t expect to be understood because the words dart around like fish in myriad, family ways, and there’s no telling what you’ll see next. Enter Hamlet:”words, words, words,” but the words aren’t the poetry, and it’s the careers bank of anyone’s guess to say what is. And maybe that’s it; maybe that’s the draw that labours like a fanatical clown for years for a few shadows of art from the flame of a woman who never answers for herself. Still, I endure these lashings of day and night like a striped fool who doesn’t know how to do anything else but keep on keeping on with the search, as enamoured with the looking as he is with the grail. I wear the night like the tattered cowl of a blind seer, so a greater darkness than the last in this dreamless rite of passage, might suddenly glow like the radiant of an apocalyptic sincerity that restores my eyes like vows I made long ago, and kept. Shakespeare again:“to give to airy nothingness a local habitation and a name.” But the heavens have grown galactic since the globe was a stage and the airy nothingness has subsumed the local habitation and the name back into itself and it’s no longer the sustainable luxury of the swan on the river to know where it is in the boundlessness of being this far from home. The laws change with every new window until even the stars are baffled like the eyes of the rain in a flood of glass. The straight lines are just special forms of curves and the triangles are obese with more than a hundred and eighty degrees. And how can you measure the detectable warpage of the poetically detained, when space itself is lyrically deranged? You can’t step into the same face twice in a flowing mirror. So how can you give it a name that isn’t going to slip like a continental plate and shake a full house out of the theatre? Now the actors and playwrights are standing in line outside the curtain going up on their opening night, and the poets have turned their rudders in for weathervanes to presume to give direction to the wind, eschewing the denser medium that carried their paper boats downstream to brighten the night of an oceanic willow washing her hair in the river with sails. When every word has a thousand voices, and the symbols navigate like waterclocks, and every door that opens is a stranger that knocks on the inside, and all insights are the pollen of a black honey gathered from the eyes of blind flowers like the nuggets of a dream that golds the fool who pans for them, and looking for a place on stage where I can stand that isn’t the threshold of an exit is the theme of a stage that has forgotten its lines in an age that has pulled down the blinds, who trifles with a place and name? Blowing a kiss to the corpse, I resist the obvious jeremiad, but just the same, I’m left waiting in the wings of a shadow that burns hotter than the flame that gave birth to it, the auroral understudy of a star I’ll never see, the seed-throne of the light in the dark matter of me, the derisive issue, the pantomimic hearsay of an unrehearsable reality.

PATRICK WHITE

SAY WHAT YOU WILL

Say what you will, when I look at the stars there’s a knife in the light that cuts, a distant bell that sadly remembers, a sea in a shell that makes me long for home again, as if somehow I were the furthest emanation of them, the secret issue of their shining, growing dim in the lantern that bears me around like the nabob of nothing to see what I’ve become. Is there an ocean in the heart of a star that turns into eyes, blood, mind, the more suffusive lucidities of the spirit; are there starwells I’ve ascended like a genome of the features that have been poured into a mould of space to cast my moon upon the waters like a face? Am I the light looking back upon itself wave after wave, or an island in the tide? Has the mindstream been unravelled from that radiance like a discontinued thread, or is the vision in the furnace of that burning, like the moon on the water, one inseparable continuum? Not fireflies, not lighthouses, not the mannequins of myth, not tuning forks, or compasses, but events of life ingathering their own chrysales out of nothing, to conceal and reveal themselves in me, utterly transformed into the reciprocal of an unknown visionary, the rootless fruit of a tree with eyes. So it should come as no surprise that I feel the stars are alive in the way they have empowered me to see one star shining in everything, inter-reflectively. One day, moving from medium to medium, ever more rarefied, one inconceivability to the next, apprenticed to these endless transformations, my vital organs might evolve into such subtleties of attenuated urgency, that the food and the breath of my elemental being are the stars and the seeing of a night without death. And isn’t it already true that every moment of light entertains its own afterlife like the host of what’s to come, as the mind does, that thrives on stars that have marrowed the scintillance of every passing thought such that I’m always beyond myself in some availability of the future that can only be embodied in the wake of my seeing, as if life and death, light and thought, were the two brides of the one breath I carry across the homeless thresholds of my ancestral lucidity, everywhere elated with stars, with eyes, with seeing, with the radiant levity of my illuminated being.

PATRICK WHITE

THE INFERNAL SMILE

The infernal smile of people on the bright side. The demon in the light is worse than the one in the dark. The night is more compassionate, more relenting, a woman at the stake of her dreamfire, recanting the pain she once confessed to. If I carry the night in my heart like the black flame of a truer fire, and see in the daylilies less of the mystery than I see in the crowns of the moonlit waterstars, it is not to villify one of my eyes at the expense of the other, but to enter my solitude so deeply that all that remains is the clarity. People never meet themselves because they’re afraid of strangers. And you can’t know what you haven’t been. It’s just as important to look at the water and see the banks flow now and again, as it is to let your ears speak for themselves. Everything is an interpretation, a painting the mind makes that you must live in, so careful what you paint. The mind mixes moonlight and blood on its palette to quicken the lips with shadows. And every fool’s a genius. And now we come to the dark energy, dark matter of the issue, the black snowflake in a pillow of angel down that refuses to thaw in the dream of the sun like a Bedouin under the eyelids of a desert, lost in the heat, far away, discrete. Legend has it that three nails crucified Christ, two forged in heaven; one, in hell. And that’s the one that didn’t hurt.

PATRICK WHITE

EXCELLENCE

Excellence in the midst of agony; the only protest that tears the heart, not the flesh, that binds as no chain can, no violence can corrupt. Not to overcome, but to transform, to be the lily in the swamp that breeds it, not the weed that crowds the water out. It’s a deal you can strike with pain; an embassy you can open up in hell with full diplomatic immunity. Make something beautiful and true that can churn the black fallout of a radioactive heart into a star. Shape a piece of wood and fix the broken paling on the gate. Turn a pot. Walk well. Master the art of extracting honey from a funeral bell without disturbing a bee. Show up with a bucket and mop, or pen and bottle of ink, brush and palette, and lend your lustre to the clarity of everything you see. There are horrors in the world, murder, starvation, suffering, inequity, hatred, war, disease; there are teenagers hanging from the limbs of ironwood trees, and children seeded in the salted soil of unbearable perversities, lambs gathered and sheered like clouds in the sky by the new shepherds who walk through the valley of the shadow of death with a rifle and a cock and an ideology, an incubus of the eyes, that sips the light from the face of a child and desecrates flesh to blood its crazed abstractions. Shock, grief, revulsion, and even the silence astonished into the deepest reserves of itself, and the light honed like a razor to slash back at the tragic derision that looks up from the mess of its ravage, and grins for the vision. And you say the world should end like a man condemned for unspeakable atrocities, and then you cringe in the apocalyptic shadow of the thought that it might. You sit in the ambiguous electric chair that’s wired to the chakra circuit-breakers of your own serpent fire like a spinal cord that’s about to pull the switch, and you die without a twitch. Martyred by your own party-line. Not death enough to till the grave, nor silo in the seed to save. Even the worm gathers the lumber of its chrysalis, its house of transformation, its cradle-tomb, from the rubble and the wreckage of the wounded seasons that wash ashore, and inching its way in like an hour hand or a threshold, emerges a black dragon unfolding its scintillant wings like the gilded diplomas of time. Why do you shuffle your doubts at the door? Do one thing well and all things out to the furthest star are elaborated perfectly. If you don’t know what to say, no word could abide the day, bury your voice in your wound and arise from the blame and the shame like the theme of a sweeter eloquence. Let the sun and the moon weave a finer sky than the auroral silk of your windproof illusions, a tent of fire, a water mirror silvered by its own tears, a palatial space where the comets and the peacocks open the eyes they trail in their wakes as if the inconceivable vastness that confounds them were urgent with stars and rain falling to find them. Life delights in itself when there’s no one on T.V.; the practise and the practitioner, an alloy of light and water more inseparably supple than the blade of the moon when it’s drawn from its sheath of blood and laid like a truce at the feet of another provisional answer. And you’re right. There really isn’t a choice because there’s no need to choose. All things by their very nature outgrow themselves creatively to advance the loss of themselves like a river in the night. Suffering is the mercy of the left hand that bleeds like a dark joy for the roses smeared on the palatte so they might flourish like seeing itself in the eyes of those elated, spontaneously, by the grace of their fallible excellence. Because it’s not the cut of the eye in the polished gold of the finished ring that shines; that’s a flower without a root; it’s the jewel in the stone, the pearl in its nacreous dream, the moon in its cloudy ore, the human in the aftermath, that adorns the blood on the thorn with a rose that congeals like a holy book in the heart of the fire.

PATRICK WHITE

NOT A THING TO SAY

Not a thing to say about anything and I don’t know what it is that I’m feeling so hopeless about but I’m trying to be intrigued enough by the misery that I might find the cure in the heart of the disease and shoot one fang of the moon into me to undo the death in the other. And there are macabre bruises on my solitude that I can’t explain and ways I hurt that I suspect are suffered in vain. And the lies tell me to the lies that listen, and the biggest lie of all falls for the truth. Or, the big lie eats the little lie and the little lie better come clean. Weary. The pain, dull. The longing, acute. For what; for whom? I’m dogpaddling in my own enzymes, my amygdala and hypothalamas in idle, no dopamines overloading my neurotransmitters as I send out sparse messages from my face that always end with a digital smile, just in case the aliens take offense easily. Though that’s a little slimey and facile. Just the same, what use would I be to anyone if I weren’t worthy of some of the blame some of the time for the great cosmic crime of being me, the rag I use to sop up my self-pity when I pour too much of myself into the empty looking glass, hoping a face will appear in the flash of the lightning that shatters the seer, that isn’t the understudy of mine. But the muse gags on my ashes everytime I burn for her in the crematorium of another star and when I do her portrait in blood, she pyres the painter like a chimney-sweep to burn off the karmic creosote in the chains of the lives I’ve dragged through hell like a comet for her before. Prehistoric artists sprayed carbon over their hands to invest the cave with their presence; people around here shatter the dry plaster like a skull and jam their feet into the walls, leaving treadmark icons in their drunken rage that prove the jest of unimpressed Neanderthals. Torn down. Depleted. Thinking every bell of early columbine that rings on the mossy rocks, will later swing back like a wrecking ball through a wedding cake, I stay down; heaping the floppy arms of the dead around me, I pretend that I’m dead until time stops fixing the hour hand like a bayonet to probe the corpses for life and walks out on the opening night of my pantomime among the silent transports of the ghouls who swarm me. I’m not much of an actor, but among the shadows of the dead, anything that moves is a hit.

PATRICK WHITE

I HAVE GROWN

I have grown significantly to understand that every throne I’ve ever sat upon was quicksand and that I am living leniently on the match-head of a planet waiting for the thumbnail of the moon to ignite it with one quick flick of crescent. Equine and apocalyptic as hell, and the irony is, more than possibly accurate. I’m running out of doors where I can billet my assassins; I keep giving my heart to women who reject it like a bloodbank without an overdraft. I’m a diffraction pattern in the twilight zone, in media res, between this world and the next, and that’s not the one where the herders and the hunters are having it out in a range war of religions. Like a page torn out of the multiverse, I’m just a zone of local cooling, a sunspot, and my neighbour is another, though we know we’re both just fooling when we call each other brother. Forty-three years a poet and a painter, intoxicated by the picture-music threading the fog of the sirens like a theme I couldn’t resist. Foolish, I suppose, not to have tied myself off like a lifeboat and rowed and rowed for years just to stay where I am, but I had to jettison my landing gear to achieve cruising altitude in the oxymoronic abyss that the sirens demanded, saying, live this, if your poetry isn’t just the romantic bloodletting of a rose from a vein that you’ve slashed on the moon, prove you’re not a lie to us, and conduct yourself like a terrorist, prepared, are you prepared?---to die for us. I cut the eyes out of an eclipse and wore it over my face like a ski-mask, and walked around in the busy market, weighing the world like a tomato in my hand, the original primordial atom, packed with explosives, ready to detonate on command, to delete and improve the world by splashing myself against the wall like a bucket of paint and see what I could make out of myself in the mess of the ensuing vision. It’s amazing how suggestive a real siren can be when you’re lying in an ambulance without any legs. So I learned to swim like a fish among the stars; the last archon of an extinct species from Mars, evicted when all the water went south, and I had to come up with a completely new medium, new atmosphere, new idiom, out of myself, ingeniously, given what I had to work with. I adapted to the solitude and silence of my own vast spaces within, and vowed like a candle, to root my flower in the dark like lightning. Now there’s a squad car outside the candy-store and a swan that barks like a god. Make of it what you will. The pebble doesn’t enquire after its ripples. I write without feedback, without telltale bubbles of meaning rising to the surface like survivors who want to crawl back up on land and start it all again. There’s not much point in panning for gold in an asteroid belt when the only way to tell one nugget from the next is to break your teeth biting into them like fortune-cookies enshrining the haloes and the horns of the prophetic comets that dash by like bunting on a campaign tour. Elect me your fate, and I promise to find a place for your dayold reflection somewhere on the plate, and a way to flag the fools down for easier detection. But I won’t tweak your mountainous erection like a gunshot when there are avalanche warnings all along the road, and the echoes return, born again, rehearsing their own names like fleeing refugees on a rosary of boulders that were left overs from Soddam and Gommorah. Better to write this way than to lie buried like the last laugh of a kingly line in the barrow of a dunghill, pleading like a seed for an upgraded resurrection. I may well be the last extant defect of a fallible perfection, and all the mistakes of the bruised morning glory are mine, and the snakey tines of these tendrils of blood get tangled up in the twine of my thought and no one knows how they got in nor how to get out, and the homologous combs of the mentally coiffed are useless against the love knots that have coiled into nooses around the neck of the wind that’s run out of excuses for inciting the spring to riot, but at least I don’t snitch my way through a poem like a hydrophobic divining rod rooting out the terrorist wells of the watershed in order to secure some heartland in the back pastures of God. It’s dangerous wherever I am. And flawed.

PATRICK WHITE

RAIN IN A SMALL TOWN

Rain in a small town at the beginning of spring and some of the trees are wondering if they might need a root canal, while others are putting their shoulders to the sky that’s stuck like a wheel in the road mud of the same old equinoctial revolutions that lengthen the day at the expense of the night and call the adjustment even. Brides are mostly boring, but the bloom on the cherry-bough, and Venus in the foam, leave me breathless. And, yes, the young women are restored to the forms that got bundled away like astronauts for the winter, and, no doubt about it, my blood runs to the window quicker should one walk by a little slower than the rest, smouldering like an eclipse of the moon I’d be crazy to plant seed under, but there you go; not everything’s covered by the farmer’s almagest, and there are some prophecies that are easily mislaid. But mostly, the cocked hammer falls on a wet cap whenever I squeeze the trigger of the moon from my shamanistic, sniper’s nest high in the new branches of this visionary tree. Though the whole tree flare like a struck match in the shadows, it seldom proves the prelude of a star, and even less, the genius of a smokeless fire intense enough to endure its own clarity that it casts the lamp aside like a shoddy avatar and grants itself to itself as the only wish worth making. Whoever we are. Grass and grazer alike. Or something more urban like the crucifix of a televangel razor fixed in its pulpit to thresh the nations like wheat should they deny the blood of the lamb inks their book of blades, Jesus stabbed in the ribs by a pleading microphone. Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani. And the news crews gathering like shepherds. And the analysts come like wise men to parse the death. And the web sites sincere as a credit card. And in the last days of Al Dajl, the red-haired liar, remember, your God has two eyes; the liar, only one: Muhammad. When women dress like men, when sex is savagely free, when the shepherds of the black camel build tall buildings in the desert, and a tree is planted in Israel in which no birds sing, the last man shall be Chinese and he will grovel in the dirt at his sister’s feet. The bells have not sweetened for all the autumns they’ve hung on the tree, for all the windfalls of doom that have thundered in the garden only to be absorbed back into the earth like rain. And the voices that call us to prayer from the nibs of their towers, haunting as a childless swing, befall us like the pollen and seeds of a dark flower without the likeness of a lover. Lemming climacterics of apocalyptic rapture, a place in the lifeboat of belief, mercy packed like a parachute, and the rest of us hurled into flood, fire, off the cliff, hurled into cyberspace, out the dazzled windows, into the kitchen middens of the Tapeian rock. Google it if you haven’t the Greek. I’m leaving the room. Outside the spring. The down of maple buds, baby grackles, supple women, and the rain, small violets under the duff of the grove. Not the feeble flame of salvation flickering behind the lampblacks of doom, not you, standing on my threshold like a spiritual broom, or an eager vacuum cleaner salesman, throwing dirt on my flying carpet, to suck it up like a grave. Rain falling in a small town, and the leaves like poets rushing into print. On every tree, a billion pamphlets declaring my afterlife in paradise is not delayed. Heaven meaning concisely, no one to save. And later tonight, walking from encounter to encounter with the earth as it keeps its ancient places, out to the far fields alone, to bathe my eyes like birds in the light of the last watch as it changes constellations, the great guesses, the great myths, I will not know who I am or why I was born to wonder why I was born, to eat to be hungry, to walk, sit, sleep, love, wake, dream, defecate, and die. Maybe the mind makes this place and everything I’m looking at is my own face elaborated into stars and birds and willows in lemon lingerie, the way I suspect a poem is, or maybe, there’s no one looking out through the history of my masks that fall away like blossoms and poems without ever knowing the fruit that came of what they conveyed, but walking out like smoke that has strayed too far into the solitude of its candle, I shall gaze up at the stars, silently elated, washed in cool flames, and think that my life and the night and their gesturing light are all well met and served, if I should remember their names.

PATRICK WHITE