SOMEWHERE UNDER MY EYELIDS

Somewhere under my eyelids

there’s the ghost of a snake, I can feel it,

trying to shed its skin like the moon.

Maybe it wants to be a poem, I don’t really care,

or it’s an eclipse asking

who’s come to the gate of its fangs

that are just as dangerous as the darkness

behind the crescents of the moon,

or it’s something earthbound in me longing for wings,

something wisely-demonic rising like a dragon,

a serpent with wings,

the lowest and the highest,

the unfeeling engine of my ironic compassion.

I have a heart. A big heart. I bleed and weep.

And I’ve got an eye like the slash of a razorblade

that is indifferently incisive,

mystically specific,

cool and clear as a lidless reptile

staring out of the shadows

like a sundial too old

to have any need of time.

Things are as they are without rumination

but nothing’s ever the same for very long,

not even once, without it.

And there may be a trick,

like yanking porcupine quills out of a dog’s mouth,

to pulling all the needles of now out of your flesh

like a rebellious voodoo doll

that just can’t take it anymore,

but I don’t wear my heart on my thumb,

or sip from a thimble of blood

to redeem myself by acclamation.

And it may be a strange shudder of reality sometimes

to have come to this space

where the less you know about what you’re saying,

the more it means,

but I love the way everything,

down to the smallest pebble shines when it does

and more gingerly, the way

I am divested of all knowing

like a chalkmark on a blackboard

in an abandoned schoolhouse at night when it doesn’t.

I wear my new skin like the portent of a forgotten eclipse

that puts its finger to the lips of the flowers

and devours the moon.

 

PATRICK WHITE 

 

 

 

 

TRYING TO DIVINE

Trying to divine the source of my own nonsense,

the spiritual motherlode of my insubstantial substance,

more dark matter than light,

track myself back to my trackless beginnings

like a junkie who doesn’t know

what he’s addicted to,

I’ve come to this impasse of peace

like a nightriver absorbed into a desert of stars

that bloom everywhere along my ubiquitous banks

like the illuminated afterlives

of wild, New England asters

playing scrabble with my constellations.

Things transpire in the stillness without an agency

and smoke is no longer the history of fire

nor time the moon married to a bone.

The eloquence of water still streams over

the skull of my voice

as if it could make up for the loss of my eyes

and cool the clarity of the seeing,

and I am still as susceptible as ever

to the charms of the doves

that sometimes fly

from the transformative gestures of the magician’s hands,

but trees and squirrels just as they are,

and ants in the gravel

are no less of a wonder.

Sometimes the music forsakes itself

and plays the listener

and then I am a one-stringed spinal cord on a witching stick

in a choir of silver-tongued crows.

Or I am beneath the contempt of the ordinary.

Either way, the snakeoil greases the pivot

and I turn with each exit and entrance

as if I were breathing for someone else

like a homeless gate to anywhere.

And it’s amazing to discover what’s healed

when the scab of your name falls off

like a stone rolled away from your tomb

and every wound is the cradle of its own messiah.

Every aspiration is born of contrition

as food is born of the eater

or the fire devours the wood that feeds it

until you can’t tell the grass from the grazer

when both disappear like wings of the same bird

consumed by the same sky like fire and smoke and longing.

I don’t know what to want anymore.

Once I was a tree of ambition.

Now, not even a leaf on the stream

hoping somehow I was a map to somewhere.

The stars of too many nightskies

have looked too deeply into me

and a darkness brighter than light

that wipes me like a smear from my seeing

has doused the match-head of my little flaring

in the inexhaustible clarity of an unwitnessed mind

that is so mystically specific in every form and person

nothing and no one is ever missing.

It’s the dream that things are as they are that wakes up,

not the dreamer.

PATRICK WHITE

ESTRANGED IN MY NORMALCY

Estranged in my normalcy

am I mocking myself by living this way,

nothing to achieve,

everything to explore?

And it can be spiritual quicksand at times

to realize that no one experiences the seeing

because the seeing is us,

and lonely and cold and older than weather,

well beyond eyes.

And there’s a different kind of light

that illuminates the stillness with its dark clarity

and expands the frequencies of awareness

throughout its perfect creation

with a silence more horrific than love

and sometimes I think

I have annulled my being in that.

And the leaves fall

and I wonder about everything

and listen to the mystery and the sorrow

in the squalls of the Canada geese overhead at night.

It’s not so important

that they mean anything anymore,

the beads of the rosaries they were broken and scattered;

the muezzin on the minara merely the wind

that blows incessantly, but still,

they’re as sacred as they ever were

and I am awed like a well listening to the stars

by their passage

and the beauty and brevity of mine,

inflections of the same unknown endeavour

by the indiscernible doer

who may or may not be us.

Jupiter in Sagittarius

and in two days

the ecliptic will intersect

the celestial equator at the equinoctial colure

and it’s autumn again

and it’s hard to be cynical and incisive in the afterglow

of things that don’t last

when you’re one of them.

I miss every woman I’ve ever loved.

I wish I’d been kinder to my dead friends.

Where have my children gone?

Did I give it my all, and my all

amount to nothing?

Asters in the yellow grass.

Waterlilies on the further shore.

Forgoing knowledge and provision and place

I have come to compassion

by deepening the profundity of my insignificance.

Low orange moon among the willows,

I am a sad fool

looking for lightning and fireflies

in the benign extremeties of my ashes,

licking the rims of these bells of wisdom

I carry to my grave

to taste their iron for wine.

My nature is radiant

but I assess things like an eclipse.

Of all my mistakes

freedom is the most intolerable perfection.

Of all my perfections

freedom is the best flaw.

PATRICK WHITE

SIXTY YEARS

Sixty years. Serious time.

The spark life of a star. The flash of a firefly.

Am I old? Does energy age?

Should I become the accolite of drastic change?

Pursue the pathos in the mirage of some dangerous young woman

I accord the power to destroy me

just to witness the clarity in her eyes when she does?

Should I revert to my homeless dream

of being an artistic Zen mendicant

shedding poems and paintings like leaves?

Is my emptiness nihilistic or enlightened,

and does it even matter,

does it truly matter,

why should it matter

but for the fact that it does?

Are biochemicals the engines of my perception

and if they are

has my life merely been their hidden agenda?

Dark thought. Dark thought. And another.

Will the rain taste a little of my eyes when they flow away,

will the flower be tempered by their hue?

How will the child in me fare without fingertips?

Last night. Full moon. More beautiful for its passing and mine.

Death made its beauty gape

and I contaminated the clarity with the longing and fear

of a little man who knew he was wrong.

Humbled in my own eyes that I couldn’t

hold it all inside of me with serenity like the sky

or a man who deeply realized

his tears would never green

the rootless desert he wanders through,

his next breath a smudge on the wind,

less than sand on a furious gust of stars.

So be it. I am nothing. That said. Though I focus my will

to enforce my own extinction

there’s always a part more than I can release,

an angry, stubborn echo beyond the reach of my voice,

a bird more than the sky can tally on its rosary of worlds,

a crucial intimacy with something that can’t be detected.

What’s left when everything else has been answered.

This big I don’t know that keeps walking me away from myself

wondering what it might want

that I haven’t already given up.

But there’s no point in trying

to stare the moon into water

to prove you’re a dragon of rain

when the last of the flowers has already fallen

and we’re all heroic flies, each

at its futile windowpane,

falling like spent match-heads

out of the cuffs of our crazy flames.

I have been a star and played for the applause of the cemetery

and know the sound of a single gravestone clapping

like my own tongue

over the mordant oneliners

that bed my mindstream with comics and pebbles.

All my life I have tried not to be so serious a clown

I wasn’t profound but now

I am disgusted with the stench of my own meaning

as if it were bad meat thrown down a good well.

There’s no frenzy of the moon in a painted tear.

So much is cold. So much alone. So much

terror and mystery

in these beginnings without end

that lead us like roads to nowhere through ourselves

as if we were snakes threading the eyes of our own needles

to patch what can’t be torn.

I have been gored on the horn of God

and pricked my thumb on a thorn

to watch the roses bloom like drops of garish blood.

And I have been as sincere as water

in the darkness of my own depths

where devotion carried me like a current

when courage could not

and I watched the eclipses bloom

in the clear radiance of a seeing without a seer.

The quixotic chaos of an encyclopedic hallucination.

Who would have thought clarity so amiguous?

Or that I could push the hook of the moon all the way through?

PATRICK WHITE

AND THESE LINES

And these lines like the opening wake of a boat I’m not in.

Or is it the opening of an old wound unsealing itself like a loveletter?

Or the world held up to the lips of this fever like a spoon?

There are shadows in the valley of a scar

that sometimes mistake themselves for leaves

and turn their sewers into wine

and reel in the unmoving delirium of a black noon

when the hands of the clock disappear

into the cool centre of their turning

and time is sheathed like mercy in the darkness.

Suffering shadows my blood like a map

and so I look for joy in everything

as if my death were already achieved and behind me

and I could linger over the morning and end of everything

like a wet winter fog that doesn’t try to cling.

The tree outside the window in my writing room

is the axle of existence

and every ring of its heartwood

is the expanding wheel of the world,

as it is with every breath. But this is precisely where

I keep losing myself in the ineffable urns and ashes

of the unsayable beyond, not just of death,

but of all that life hasn’t been

to one who loved it like his only chance.

A firefly agitates the darkness more

than all the lightning of my awareness

when I consider the spectral vagrancy of my thought

calling to me like a hill to an unmoored lifeboat

to see if anyone survived the last sinking of the moon.

And my sorrows are bells of water that toll like the sea

for all the incredible dead who are buried in me

like marrow in the bone.

Which is to say no more than another

labouring under the weight of being human.

And I know of a lyrical clarity that’s free to sing what it wants,

that lifts the snake up with wings

and enfolds it in the infinite solitude of the sky

and lets it shine eyes beyond the reach of the light.

Here words jump like fish on the moon

and the dead branch is an orchard in bloom

and yesterday picks up its shoes and roads behind it

and there isn’t a shadow born of the light that can follow me

and tomorrow isn’t the ambassador of my next breath

arriving with urgent news

to wake up the dead

like a poppy or an ambulance in a nightmare.

Here the lucidities ripen like eyes with every eclipse

and the bright vacancy of the glaring moonskull

is broken like the bread of a dark abundance

that feasts in the seed of everything.

I watch the snowflakes fall randomly outside

and try to assess the chances

of finding the moon in an oyster,

remembering the unattainable has no threshold

to blunder my way across like spiritual junkmail.

The world is a drop of water flowing out of its own eye.

A squirrel natters and gnashes its annoyance

at my propinquity and for a moment

affirms that I exist by the intensity of its denial.

And it wasn’t just seas that the moon lost, not just seas,

but the sky that softened her stars as well.

The thought falls like a key on rock,

a fly at a winter windowpane,

forgetting what it once could open,

and I let it take its place at the table

like a ghost of salt that looks a lot like me

because we both mourn for the same lost sea,

born of the same bell. But let the starmud settle,

the dust compose what it will, thoughts fall

like the flightfeathers of passing birds

that do not stop to sing because my voices

echo in the cocoons of ten thousand transformations,

and who I was in the prelude that just walked past,

is now the likeness of my dissimilarity,

hobbling like a bridge on crutches downstream

or a disoriented pilgrim on the smokeroad to fire

as all the Gothic glaciers evaporate like churches.

Do you see how space conforms me like the wind

to the shapes of my own faceless emptiness

as I stand over the silence like a heron or a pen

waiting for fish that slip away like waves on the moon?

Madness or enlightenment? Asylum or shrine?

I have deepened my ignorance enough not to care.

My flesh, a wardrobe of ghosts.

My mind, the gesture of a star in the dirt.

My heart, blood on the thorn of the moon.

And still, my spirit cries out like an abyss

for the dead wasp on its back on the windowsill,

as if there were a will to my foolishness

tangled like wild morning glory

in the trellises of the constellations

where the great roses of the night

are enthroned in their bloodlines,

and do not acknowledge the passage of the small urgencies

that are dotted like periods at the end of their own sentences.

I accord the wasp, the squirrel, the tree,

full rights to my identity

in this agony of being,

this fellowship of suffering,

and with no more authority than the spontaneous value

a jest of compassion attributes to my clownish humanity

and the solitudes of anguish it must endure

to keep on approximating its life

like the long draw of the straw in a hurricane.

I have lived and wept long enough

not to trust any insight

that doesn’t feel the pain

growing eyes like a gate in the rain.

How have any of us not suffered

and cried out in our alienation

I am human, I am human,

as if our despair could voice

the violence of our relentless insignificance?

And when I say this, understand,

there isn’t anything it could possibly mean

if it doesn’t heal, if it doesn’t say

to the widow alone for the first night

or the scar of the moon in the window,

or the child savaged by atrocity

who was left torn and alone in the dark,

there is no one to whom we can plead,

no one who could hear

the scream of the hell

poured from your blood

like the iron voice of a misshapen bell,

no one who can unseed the life you’re rooted in,

no one, not even you, to know your need

for intimate fires in the ashpits of your stars

that suddenly flare up like flowers

to consume that which surpasses itself in wonder,

but when you’re wounded by the horsemen in the night

who trample you like a pulse, know this, I bleed

like the same resonance of ruptured atoms

and my harp is split like a wishbone

and my heart is the wilted lily, the failed parachute

of a sidereal haemmorage, and I

am darker than the eyelids of the gods

with anger that you should suffer so

and not know, not know

the delirium of the seed

that is buried in your wound

like the herb of the eclipse that lived you like enlightenment.

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AND THE DAY SETTLES

for Alysia

And the day settles like a collapsing poppy, a parachute of blood,

and the turmoil and commotion of all the busy things

that have accomplished me for all these long accountable hours

dies down, settles its tongue on the ground like a leaf

whose eloquence couldn’t speak for the raving wind

that tore the world up like a first draft

and looped and noosed the powerlines

as if they were the hasty autograph of a final edition.

At my desk now in my small new writing room

where the windows open like a book

and I’m a human in a cube of light

under the constellations gambling with fate

by loading the negative space of the dice,

my thoughts turn like birds toward you

and there is great solace in the moment

that pours the starwater from your eyes

into the wounded fire that longs for you like a sky.

And all that is human about you, is human about me,

and all that is mystic, moon, and thief, all

that is woman in the valley of the wave,

and woman in the darkness that is older than men,

and your silence, and you like a black orchid

that no one sees growing in the shadow of your beauty,

and your third mode of knowing

that is neither thought nor feeling

but the way a lake knows the taste of the moon on sight,

all that and more than all the midnight suns can illumine,

your talent, your doubt, your pain, and all the shy joys

that you’ve been condemned to get away with,

and the breath that expires like an atmosphere

and the breath that infuses the lock like a key

and the breath that lights the inferno of the divine

and the one that snuffs it out

and devotes itself like a storm to a lightning rod,

are ingathered into me now like a tide in a bay on the moon

as if I were the emptiness of the envelope

and you were all the risks of the loveletter that is the sea.

As I think of you, the night grows a face, and it’s yours,

and your body and skin, moonlight

on the bare limbs of the young basswood trees,

and your eyes, the deepest seeing in the boundless darkness of me,

and your heart, the courage of a rose in winter,

and the vapour on the window of the enlightened spirit I write in,

your spirit thawing the glass to free the stars

and ease the tears of the mirrors that weep alone.

And this is the way you come to me,

seeping out of the rocks like a sword,

investing the silence with a meaning just out of reach

of the things you’ve left unsaid, and all the worlds

within worlds that are simultaneously us and not us,

a whisper of dust, when you walk me home alone like a road.

And the breath that gives the serpent wings

and incites the lamp of the dragon’s flame,

and the breath that blows glass lungs into an hourglass

in the womb of a furnace, and the breath

that abandoned the wick like the wind to its question,

more intimately mingled with my own, inside me and out,

than the roots of last night’s dream

when your hair silked my fingertips with knowing

and your lips were a language without laws.

How vividly I want these words to bleed for you

until they’re rooted in the soil of your solitude

like books and flowers and bone

that only you can open, and only when you’re alone

and the rain is full of distance and the moon is a cold stone

hurled at the wing of a passing bird,

and you’re accused by the inmates of affliction

of an illicit affair with freedom,

and there are evangelists like junkmail

on the thresholds of your genius

who threaten to love you if you recant,

and you wonder what love is and if it’s ever known you.

I want these words to exceed themselves

beyond anything they can be,

a cherry-tree carved in jade,

shedding real blossoms,

or a chandelier of fireflies hung up at a dance

high above the club-footed constellations

that follow their own painted feet across the floor.

And the breath that is a blue tincture of the night

that unlaces the day like the fragrance of a name,

and the breath that buries its dead on the moon,

and the breath that is a fire on shore to a ship at sea

pleading like a bell for landfall. Soon. Soon.

I want these words to convey more than the river can carry,

so they sink deeply to the bottom, the sediment of stars,

the veils of a dream settling over the shipwrecks

who were killed by the swordplay of their compasses;

I want these words to ink the indelibility of a spiritual tatoo

that looks like the nightsky when the scars have fallen away

and it’s done. I want these words to express what I meant

before they were said because they mean more unborn

than they do in the noon ray, eclipsed by our understanding.

And your breath that is my ocean and my atmosphere,

and the breath that is shocked like the wind

by the random beauty of asters and orchards.

And the breath that draws itself up like a bucket

from the well of its watershed depths

to pour the serpent out

like the ambivalent residue of a black wine.

And the breath of this poem and the next taken

to squander itself like oxygen in your blood,

light in your eyes. Love, where the waters of life flow

into a vastness that only the sea

and the unsayable passions of the night you are would dare.

PATRICK WHITE

AND IT’S BEEN SUCH A LONG TIME

And it’s been such a long time

since my heart were anything other

than a way of bobbing

to keep my head above water.

I stare at things until they scare me

because that’s the only time I feel

my blood and my head come together

wholly in the moment,

and I refuse to turn a grail quest into a hobby.

Like the moon I have been denuding myself for years

to know who I am, skin by skin, sky by sky,

believing the daughter of my mystic specificity is clarity.

I have been a thirsty fountain

and held my mouth open to the stars like rain,

and even without witness, without companion, in the dark

trusted the way of the seeing wherever it led,

trusted that it worked transformations in the nature of things,

trusted that if I looked deeply and eloquently

into the terrors, and sorrows, and joys of things,

the haemmorage of gold in the side of the mountain,

removed like a bullet, or the agony of the one-winged dragonfly

that spins in the dust like a wounded helicopter,

because these are how my humanity

keeps on happening, and there is no

inner or outer to hinge your door on in a dream

even when the rocks believe they’re awake,

nor any other evidence that I’m alive.

Each knows the world

by the colour and sound and touch and form of the other,

and if you’ve never seen how all the oceans

flow down into a single tear,

you’ve never really cried.

Who doesn’t look up at night

to see if they’re still shining?

PATRICK WHITE