THE DELUSION IS NEVER COMPLETE

The delusion is never complete, but, then, again

neither is enlightenment

so the whole issue is inexhaustibly irresolvable

and it’s better to pass beyond both

as seeing exceeds your eyes

or shining exceeds the star

and scuttle that skeletal liferaft

you’ve been making for years

of whatever thresholds the tide washed up.

And some of us are living like secret islands on the moon

thinking one day soon, we’ll be amazed by water,

as the stars that never fall

look more and more like rain.

Or maybe you think the mind is the brain

and you’re nestled into it

like a hibernating toad in the mud

waiting for a flashflood of awareness

to wash you out of yourself

like jewels from a stone crown

into a climacteric of copulation when you are.

And there are doors that long to turn back into trees

and windows that regret

having clarified their supple deserts into glass

and people that have fallen in love like apples with the earth

and give their hearts up like green stars and seeds

to be crushed complicitly.

And words must be said

like blossoms in the root to be heard

but there are people who approach the dark mother

like evil rumours in another room

and burn like antiseptics in the night

to quarantine the light

and keep themselves from catching the cure.

And their lies are born without eyes

though the darkness doesn’t disdain them.

But the radiant point is in all directions

life might be a lonely topic without a mouth

but it’s still the only conversation around

that knows what’s in a name.

And there are great trees

that only put out a single leaf in spring

as if all they had to speak with was a single tongue

one bud for a word

one native language

and they’re hoping to get through another autumn

like you, standing in the doorway,

with everything to say, and no way to say it

like a kidnapped choir.

PATRICK WHITE

WHY LIVE LIKE A WRECKED SHIP

Why live like a wrecked ship

running around giving lie-detectors to lighthouses

on the battered coasts of your lunar indignation

to see if they’re telling the truth?

I can see your skull from here

rising like the moon

not waiting for anything

like an abandoned throne.

It doesn’t remember the lies you told

like distress calls in the night

to prove that nobody loved you,

it doesn’t remember your heart like an ambulance

that never delivered anyone alive on arrival.

There was a stairwell, remember?---

in a palace of water

that tasted of fireflies and bells,

and fish that swayed through heavy curtains of blood

like the afterlives of mystic oceans

that have long forgotten they never had names

and you were the kind of homeless music

a man can only dream he’s heard

when I first saw you upon it, descending.

Beauty is not a word

things say often and mean

but you were the first time

I ever understood

how the light saw itself

when there were no eyes

to frame the limit of what could be seen.

I’ve run out of wisdom and spirit and night

trying to make you happen again

in the deepening silence

like a tide that pulled me under

to undo the moon from your nets.

And I still can’t tell if I’m an urn

or a lifeboat full of ashes

but my heart is a gate

I’m always closing behind me

as if I don’t want to be followed.

PATRICK WHITE

DON’T WANT TO GO THERE

Don’t want to go there; don’t want to get into that again,

Once was enough for a lifetime if you made it through

and I’m still not sure I have.

I don’t charge my hallucinations overnight anymore

and expect to wake up to an enlightened morning

that will reveal who I am

in this mess of a person I’m living

counter-intuitively against my better judgment.

You could have been me as far as I know

or I could have been you

or there was another dream

where we met in the middle between the two like a razorblade,

but you couldn’t see the crazy wisdom of it all

when the moon chalked the clouds

like a smudge on a blackboard

to show you how

and things just got darker.

Now the windows are not so insistent

and I can swim through myself for eras

without coming across any sign of myself or you.

Sixty sometimes feels like September on the moon

and who knows what comes up

in the furrows of what I’ve sown

now that the moon is nothing but a cold stone

in a vastly indifferent sky

and all that fire and passion

charged with the whole of creation in every atom

no longer believes the rain when it shows me your eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

COUNTING THE BEADS

Counting the beads of the geese returning

as if they were the rosaries of time

as the night deepens into the mercy of its roots

and silence is the name of a god

that buffers its urgency with smoke.

I want to appeal my life like a bad trial

but the jury’s been out for sixty years

and no one ever sees themselves

with the same eyes twice

so it’s hard to know

if I’m the plaintiff or the defendant

but I put on a mask

and execute myself regularly just to be sure.

A human mind at night alone

is beyond the reach of the heart

that comes running in at the last hour like inadmissible evidence

to humanize the emptiness that appalls it.

Sometimes I look at the howl on the moon’s face

like Edvard Munch’s Scream

and feel the agony and the isolation

of the universe giving birth to itself in everything

through ordeals of transformation

that can baffle even pain

with the intimacy of its excruciations

like an animal suffering without knowing why.

Always, inside of me

this vacuity that’s never fulfilled,

this longing and taste for the indefineable,

as if I could give pain a face and a shape

that would let me know if it were blind

or could see,

and what its blindness revealed

and what, if there’s a secret to it all,

its eyes concealed.

I have drunk mystic eclipses from unholy grails

and lit candles in the shrines of the moon

as if they were the sockets of my own skull

and smeared my awareness across the nightsky like stars

and been diminished beyond brutally

like a feather the wind left behind.

There’s an art to stringing arrows to the snake in your hand

that’s eyeing you like the music of a warm target

and I’m a long way from mastering it yet,

hopeless as a bone,

and my seeing has failed me so many times

there’s a constellation of black holes

weighing the dice with astronomical odds

against the farcical profundity of my destiny

as a sidereal archer,

but I’ve grown fond of the relentlessness of the clown

in this compassionately infernal way

and rush to every emergency

like the fang of the antidote,

knowing there isn’t a cure.

PATRICK WHITE

THIS MORNING I’M HAVING

This morning I’m having a lot of lonely fun

in a vast, clear space brighter and more intelligent than silence

and older than eyes

speaking in tongues to the gravestones

before I give them their names.

It’s amazing what a shadow can achieve

when it isn’t attached to anything.

Last night I noted the advance of Orion into winter

and Jupiter in Sagittarius

tried to remember the names of all its moons

and the atomic frivolity of their mythic significance.

Things have changed since I was a boy.

Since I woke up from myself

I’ve never let a god or a mirror

do my dreaming for me

and everything is a passion beyond

what is true and what is not.

And I’m wary and bored with anything

that looks like a map.

The stars are a living language

that have whispered us into our own ears

like a rumour of their radiance,

though I don’t wholly subscribe to anything.

Sometimes I think all knowledge

for all that we make it

the quicksand cornerstone of existence,

and erect ourselves upon it like an obelisk

is nothing more than cosmic smalltown gossip.

The cartouches link up

like constellations and thoughts

and handcuffs and coral and chains

and the good guess and the lie and the weathervane

embalm the blessed in a coffin of law

and sow pyramids along the river like seed.

Like time, I keep an intimate distance

from the things I change

and breathe myself in and out

without a thought or a doubt about my beginnings

or which star my afterlife is aimed at,

or whether I’ll hit the mark or not,

knowing too much about what I don’t know

to corrupt the sincerity of my ignorance with existence.

Just the same, when I listen to space

I can hear the roar of the dragon

firing everything up like the furnace of a black hole

or the cylinders of an unbaffled Harley

that elaborates itself like the road that rides the man

and marvels that so much has come of nothing

and that nothing comes of anything

until September forgets itself

and everyone remembers

they’re nothing like they are or want to be

and everything is always fulfilled, already achieved

and to be so incomprehensibly alive

is to be so understandably dead

that life is not an agony endured without a lover.

PATRICK WHITE

LIVING MY WAY

Living my way through these dark nights

trying not to be idiotized by the media

because there are so few real stars around,

like a shattered window, and glad of it,

I prefer to elaborate more enquiring delusions,

let the spiders weave dreamcatchers

around my dark jewel of blood

to keep the nightmares out

that conjure me like a mode of being

that frightens them

to a seance of long distance calls

that never pick the receiver up.

I don’t know what I’d say anyway if they were to ask.

That words roll like flypaper off our tongues

trying to catch a star,

that nothing is false because nothing is true?

Most people conceal a foreboding

even in their deepest jubilation

like an eclipse up their sleeve

to trump the blue harvest moon

of their immutable nature

betting against themselves

so busy looking for wealth

they’ve forgotten how to be rich.

Why paint your window

and when you’re asked if it’s raining,

not know, or insist

when the dead come

to legislate the here and now of the living

it isn’t seasonal, that the birds won’t be back

to jack the lies out of the eyes of your iron bells

like September?

And you may be lost

in this desert of stars like dark matter

staggering from one severity of subsistence to the next

as if you were the only certified cheque

in an encyclopedia of bad paper,

but you don’t know, you don’t know, which way to go

in these enormous spaces

until there’s real water

in the begging bowl of your most desperate oasis

and you are no longer the dupe of your own lunar seas.

I don’t look for myself like a sail, black or white,

on a tide of shadows anymore

or think I’m the unobserved phase

on the far side of the moon

that heretically hexs the crops.

I danced like fire at the martyrdom of that scarecrow

and unspooled myself like smoke

to breathe in the cool bliss of an enlightened ghost

that isn’t spooked by fingerprints

left at the scene of the crime

that reveal everyone’s identity

under the same perp’s happenstantial alias.

Well beyond culpability, judgment, blame, sin,

no swans on the river

under the hooded axes of the moon,

I have witnessed the innocent confess to the guilty

things that advance like a blade of silence through a demon’s heart

and the guilty, true to the innocent, forgive them for the scars.

And I don’t know if its a la mode among planets

to twist your orbits this way into infinite figure-eights

and revolve around the sun like sand in an hourglass

as if your desert could be timed,

or I’ved inverted the anhk

and thrust my neck through it like a noose

to hang like a constellation from a Judas-tree

that is truer to its betrayal

than I ever was to my sincerity,

but I’ve spread my wings,

I’ve closed my book of webs

and revel in these gusts of stars

in this afterlife of smoke

that sweeps all these thresholds away.

There’s nothing to be. Nothing not to be

when you’re out of the loop,

or more precisely, the loop is out of me.

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

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