A FLUCTUATION

A fluctuation in the cosmic void,

a wink of atoms,

a fallen eyelash of light,

the seeing of a lifetime

nothing but candle vapour,

ghost-water on the moon,

the exhalation of a vagrant star

looking for its lost constellation

like a berry or a gem

that had wandered offroad

from the vine of a crown.

The eye that regards all

as it rises like a blue mystic sun

over the morning eyelids

of the remote hills

waking up in the arms of their shadows

demands exposure of the sky,

a clarity pure enough for stars

as it turns the day over

like the palm of a hand

to reveal how our lifestreams

join and break

at the junction of sacred rivers.

And the vision,

the illusion of the way I see life,

the romantic intoning

into the bell of the abyss

for a hopeless beauty that died like a bird,

the lostness and the loneliness,

the unknown sorrow

that seems to bleed out of the air

like a black rose born to grieve

for the separations of long ago,

and the child in the brutal fire

that pleads at a window

weeping in the heat

for rescue from an afterlife without salvation,

all that the heart features

in the deepest silence of the night,

nothing but the auroral trash

of an overionized mind

trying to touch its own burns tenderly.

Until I became the knowing

even my own ignorance

didn’t recognize me.

Until I vastly improved

the integrity of my lies,

every mirror I looked into

like a woman’s eyes

was corrupt,

the prelude to a death certificate

in lipstick, a thorn of honey

that dripped like the fangs of the moon

with mysterious toxins and elixirs

that could scald and bleach the heart

or restore it with the kiss of a silver herb

grown in the garden of a cool eclipse.

My bitterness and fear

have made me less susceptible

to the empty boats that arrive

to take me on like some kind of foreign export,

a cargo of ashes and stars,

the bodybags

of the casualties and refugees

that perished in an unknown holy war of one

that I can’t stop waging

against a universe that won’t let me in,

but my solitude

could defeat me with a feather,

could shock the fool I am to hide

with the shadow of a wing

breaking the spell of this birdless sky

that seems to go on forever beyond the wind

like a caravan of rain

that’s outwalked the longest known road

into a wilderness

of rootless trees in big city back alleys.

When the rose

has been stripped down to its claws and horns,

how few have the eyes

to keep yearning.

Let me drown in tears of fire,

in wells of thoughtful quicksand,

rack me on the iron in my blood

and stub my cherished stars out

like angry pincers applied to my feet

like a firewalk through a snakepit

and I will confess to nothing

but an earnest ignorance,

I will not betray the abyss

where I buried myself like nuclear waste.

I will remain true

to the merciless emptiness

I uttered to myself like a vow

I didn’t know if I could keep

four decades ago.

Now I lay my head down to dream

on a stone pillow full of stars

that shine like rare metals in the night,

and when I wake

I seem to know less

about everything it took me a lifetime to master

than when I first

abandoned my eyes

like oceans on the moon to see.

PATRICK WHITE

A DAY OF WRITING

to Alysia, myself, Alysia, to the night rain,

trying to hang the universe on the tip of an eyelash

without blinking, pulling handfuls of the stagnant dimensions

of my apparent magnitude off

like the dead undergrowth

of a plausible star to try as an antidote

to the junkmail perfume samplers

that keep heaping themselves up on my doorstep

like the fake leaves of a tree somewhere on acid,

mini-nirvanas that reek in the dark of enlightened snake-oil.

Tonight I like the windows black, starless,

but keep the company mellow with my rendition

of musical lamps, one lightbulb less everytime

someone asks me what I feel most when I write.

I look at the trinity of faceless wolves on my easel

that accuse me of eyes, and punish myself by taking note

they’ve moved since I last looked at them,

and there’s a poppy of blood on the snow that’s atavistic.

O Nietzsche, how wrong can you be, though

I like the way you sublimated your rage

into the colic of apoplectic, apocalyptic prophecy.

I don’t know if the world’s bad enough to deserve you,

or if chaos has miscarried at the birth of your dancing star,

but blessings on your head and house, anyway, wherever you are.

Alysia, willow, Druidic trees, the French river Alyse in Arles

where Van Gogh sliced off his ear in self-disgust

and gave it to a hooker like a premature embryo

swaddled in a gesture of genuine tenderness

and when has it ever not been this way,

brothels and asylums and expressionist reliquaries

shredding their smiles in the spokes of a cosmic wheel

like a last-minute embassy over-run by the radical passions

of a fashionable artistic solitude, the whole world with a headache

or on the rag, and even the flies that could cover the earth

forty-seven feet deep in flies every breeding day of their lives,

not in the mood for all that generative commotion.

Genius is a different kind of lonely, the third wing on a bird

that doesn’t know what to sing to the dawn or why,

when the other two are getting by just fine

in the usual sky that hurls them into the usual ecstasy,

the esteemed feathers of the coincidence of the contradictories.

The important thing is learning how to rewire your eye

to your heart, not your brain, so when they ask you

what you were writing about before they came

you can hand them a black, tight-lipped envelope

sealed with the impressionable bloodwax of your pain,

captioned by the resident emptiness of a paper airplane

so that they can go away deluded and delighted

that you’re the one that’s insane, not them,

and that for once upon a time as long as life

they’re the ones who aren’t living their death in vain

and yes you can use rhyme in a poem if you want to.

But what a price for such a little kindness;

refusing to endow your wolves with eyes

so they can spot the typos in their blindness.

PATRICK WHITE

0 NEW MESSAGES

0 new messages, eight-six in the box,

write the fury out, write the fire another love-letter,

train the crows to preach

in a snakepit of downed powerlines,

euthanize a stamp by holding it down under the wavelengths

of an approving postal service, its gravestone

a passport to delivery, it’s date of death on record,

and the radiant message it carried out of the past,

the light of a remote star

trying to make contact with similar forms of life,

luggage and a toe-tag, wind in the ashes

of dismembered dolls. And there are

disappointments so grievous, careless mishaps of the heart,

wolf-spiders wince and close up

like startled flowers under hot match-heads,

delinquencies of feeling that prowl the shopping-malls,

and wounds that bleed out of their mouths

acidic rivers of red army ants

that scald their way through the grass to enslave

the gentler colonies of another midnight without you.

And I’m here alone in the plundered tomb

of an evicted house with bad water,

clinging to the planks of my shipwrecked bookshelves,

waiting for doves and lifeboats

in a regata of sharks circling this drenched bouquet of sodden galaxies

I’m holding out to you above the sloppy waves

like flowers and flies I saved from the drain,

and your tiny sin of omission, the broken blade of your avowal

to never intentionally hurt me

is blood in the water, the fuse

of a feeding frenzy, of haemmoraging roses,

and my heart’s a lousy sump-pump for the pain

of being nicked like this by the petal of a daisy razor-blade

that loves me not. And I could be cool and noble, easy

to lie about the flaring poppy that immolates my art,

hoping for other rescues in the vicinity,

breeze over the burn like an ashen firepit, and poetically forgive

the arson of your oversight as just

another seasonal meteor shower out of Leo,

just another falling star to wish on, but it lights me up

as if my bloodstream had turned to gasoline,

and I’m not much of a monk when it comes to cremations

or emergency fire-alarms that no one answers

or the one-runged crutches you tell me to climb down like fire ladders

from the glass dragons of these melting windows

and huffing supernovas reaching critical mass like blasting caps

in a beaver dam. I can be October sumac

and set my wings afire like a phoenix all on my own,

and I’ve been burning for you like white phosphorus for weeks

to give you something to read by in a black-out,

and I’ve been cooked in the fires of separation before

like a good-natured steak tenderized in the wines of hungry women

trying to please capricious palattes

over the igneous briquets of a glowing heart,

and I’ve been happy to do it, happy to let them carve my tongue like meat

and chew till their jaws fell from their hinges like weary gates,

just to see them pleased and full, their bloodlust satisfied,

and I’m tiger enough in my own stoked fires to do it all again,

but if the chimney sparks are fireflies that want to flirt with the stars,

so the whole wilderness has to go up in flames

before anything can grow,

I’ve got a message from Mars

and a dove, with a Zippo.

PATRICK WHITE

I ENDORSE

I endorse other people’s attempts to love;

never my own,

accounting myself unloveable:

some perversity of childhood

that wants to square the moon,

an infernal-heretical aspect

too convivial with the blind watchman

at the nightgate

that has never been closed to anyone.

Long ago somehow I entered

like a black star on a pilgrimage

to the ancient shrines of the waterlilies,

hoping their ubiquitous openess

reserved a stair for my tribute

as well as that of the brighter lights

gathered more conventionally

into their tribal constellations.

I don’t know what fate I betoken,

but I must be the illegitimate son

of some kind of shining

or what are all these roses

that drowned like eclipses

doing in my blood,

pleading with me

to sever the threads

that sewed their eyelids shut

with a virgin needle?

I don’t know what women see

when they look at me

but I always feel like an oasis on the moon

on the dark side in the beginning

before heaven ruins everything

with the mythically-inflated protocol

of a pygmy on a dragon-throne

when I look at them.

Sometimes I’m bitter,

remembering all the beautiful mundanities

that were later transformed

into visionary terrors,

the indelible eternities

in a smear of lipstick on a kleenex

rumpled like an unseasonal lotus

on the kitchen table after she left,

the endearing love-letters that were folded

like the severing steel of a Damascene sword.

I can’t remember how many times

I cut my throat on the moon

before I learned to sing to myself in the dark

like a bird born without wings

or fought in the immaculate solitude

of my own igneous depths

not to loose faith with the dream in the wine

I drank like my own reflection

from an iron flower.

Too changed by the struggle

to claim I endured,

and fool I may be,

or irrelevantly listed among the ignorant,

but I still can’t concede

that joy is the preface

to a biography of scars

that aren’t worth the torment

of the delirium

that inks these fangs of light with life.

The mind is its own experience.

There is no self

to adjudicate the arraying of the world.

Is love any different?

PATRICK WHITE

LICKING THE BLOOD

Licking the blood off my claws

in a dark lair,

sharper than the dilated pupils

of an hypodermic snake,

I have answered for myself

like lightning answers the whispering rain.

Let the moon fall like an ax

on the napes of the distant hills,

or the constellations

that fall away eventually

like warped boards from the sky

rise delinquently.

I have transformed

the ox of understanding in my heart

into a bull that will no longer

be morally goaded

into grinding the corn of the villagers.

I wear their blood on my horn

like a red flag

and everywhere

their matadors lie wounded

among the blades and unpetalled plinths

of a shining that tastes

of an unprohecied eclipse.

The trouble with understanding

is that it gives birth to itself incommensurably

like a repeating decimal;

it breeds dilemmas that need to be understood.

Why replicate the matter

like some overworked gene

until you are nauseous with immortality

when one thrust of a horn, a fang, a claw,

the truth,

resolves the issue?

Civilization, morality, manners

are just scabbards,

however encrusted with jewels and philosophies

that sheath the sword of life

whose edges aren’t paginated like a book.

Sometimes there’s more mercy and clarity

in drawing the sword like a baton

than there is in a symphony of duelling scalpels.

Is it better to go deaf

when you’ve heard too much, blind

when you’ve seen enough?

Who blows out the flame to save their eyes

or cuts out their tongue as a retraction?

I am not the cornerstone

of a hospital for wounded delusions

nor the internal afflictions

that scar your afterlife

like cracks in the plaster of paradise.

And I can’t tell you who I am

because I don’t know.

Only a fool

would stop the river

to ask it if it flows.

How long has it been

since you’ve looked at your face

on the waters of a dream

and not seen the reflection of a scheme?

Haven’t you noticed those secrets

that won’t share your eyes with anyone else,

those things you’ve known since childhood

like the pets you buried in silence and lies

are wearing you for a disguise?

PATRICK WHITE

A SUBTLE TRICK OF THE LIGHT

A SUBTLE TRICK OF THE LIGHT

for Alysia

A subtle trick of the light

this tenderness in the dark

that felt like you last night,

the soft approach of your presence again

like waterbirds or distant smoke

feathering the flames and shadows of their wings

to answer me like the summons of a grove

in a high field,

to adorn me like a tree

whose finest fruit

is the heart that takes shelter in it

at the end of its long flight.

One pulse, one lifetime of knocking

on how many doors

before

just as you’re turning to walk away forever

one finally opens

like a star

or the last flower of autumn,

or your last letter.

Last night and this morning,

there arises an urgency of joy within me

that has made me shed my skin like an oilslick

and bloom like water

in the lucid upwelling

of a spirit that tastes of stars.

Every flower

is the promise of a bird to the wind

and every word has its seasons,

and the human voice very seldom more

than the trembling of grass in the rain,

and only the orchids have ears

that can hear the shadows,

and I am panicked by how little

I can say

and how much I want to express

these moments of you I keep discovering

under the sodden leaves

of last year’s passions and books.

If I could pull on a thread of air

to unravel the sky

and show you the stars that never age

bathing naked in their own light,

renewing their vows

to shine down on everything alike,

I would show you how

everywhere you walk in me

you are a garden without a gate,

a lifeboat of light

in the mystic dark

on a sea of love that thrives

with the creative eclipses and auroras of life

lifting this voice of stars

like morning veils from an unnamed lake.

I would show you a boy alone

trying to be brave about his fears

as he listens like a nightbird

to the approaching echoes

of an unknown eternity

growing louder in his bones.

You could watch him

fold his poems into paper-boats

and sail them across the eye of water

that opens all its eyelids at once like waves

on the resevoir of tears he never shed,

strange lilies born on the moon.

And from the shore of a neighbouring island

you could observe the wind and the gulls

performing their traditional sword-dance

with the warrior lighthouse of his deepest truth,

knowing the most he will ever illuminate

is the ultimate bluff of his own mind in endless space.

So dark and unknown and forever

the abyss that embraces

this firefly of life

that thinks it’s a star

in the infinite folds of its boundlessness.

There is no form to the mind

we can worship like a faithful god

except the masks of the moment

even as they’re peeled away

to reveal the face of our own mortality.

And who could count

the faces of the goddess

that blow like Japanese plum tree blossoms

along the road that continually leads us back

to a place we’ve never and always been?

Do you see how these drafts of awareness

weave these subtle webs of light

that are spun and torn

like river reeds in the star-riddled mindstream

on their own thorns

and how the moonlight

catches the fish at the bottom

with the flash of its silver hook?

And at times

it’s the undiscoverable north

of the lonely pathos of being human

that makes me feel

there are so many places I go

that are so abandoned and mine

that no one can find me,

so forsaken of every hint of me

that it’s enough of a lantern in these barrens

to make out your face in the distance,

trying to look for me

like the moon peering over the hills

into her own lost reflection.

Or I feel the night

pressing its lips against mine

and know it’s you.

I’ve never seen the goblet that holds it

but for two years now

I have been drunk on your wine

like a man with room to celebrate,

passionately singing

under the healing willow

that pours itself out like you.

When your love whispers to me

it’s always the flavour of space

and I am astonished by what I see

in a glimpse of the lightning

in the iris of your eye.

Your letters have arrived

like the petals of a hidden rose

shedding itself like the phases of the moon

on dark waters

and I have bent and tenderly kissed each

that I might be the grain of sand

that pearls the night in the eyes

of your most beautiful dreams.

And like the rain

that roots the stars,

cuttings of light it took

from an intimate language

older than anything I could ever mean

in my book of windows,

when you weep

it’s not salt and water

but the light itself

that wells up and runs from my eyes

to flint your tears with marvels of protean fire

whose very ashes

are the constituent bliss of a world

and whose chief joy

is to surpass its own understanding

as I do on this ladder of thresholds

I lean against the highest walls

in a sudden siege of unbesiegable heaven

every time I hear from you.

PATRICK WHITE

THE SECRET OF YOUR BEAUTY

for the muse

The secret of your beauty told

would be to understand God.

To know you as you are

would be an eternal beginning.

And the pain that I have suffered

pursuing you through everything

though you were everywhere like space,

is the dark ecstasy

of following my own blood back

to your heart.

Late autumn now

and even the fires of the leaves

have conceded to the deeper dream

of the serpent that sleeps in the root,

having burnt their books.

I have grown old

trying to substantiate shadows,

wearing these tatters of light like skin.

And the solitude

is the holy apprentice of time,

but I have mastered

the excruciating discipline

of remaining true,

though I perished in the transformation,

to the eloquent folly

of loving you

like a tongueless bell

that no word has ever sounded

in the abyss of the silence.

To encounter you

is to long for life

like an empty boat

drifting toward a voice in the fog.

Infinite the times

I’ve said I do

and you wore the world for a wedding-dress,

and every poem I’ve ever written,

the lifting of one of your veils.

PATRICK WHITE