SHAKEN AWAKE AND CRAZY

Shaken awake and crazy

and unmeaning as the morning,

my mind fumbling around with a bouquet of keys

unable to assess whether it’s my ghost that’s being conjured

or a wide-eyed medium at a seance of doors

trying to throw his skull like a stone

through the mirror of the trance

that binds me like a threshold crossed

to the sacred folly of another day of life

leaning me up against the wall

like an empty coffin at my own wake

so the world can drink itself into oblivion for my sake.

And there are women around. I’m haunted

by their eyes in the dream-mud like jewels

that once turned me in the light

to confess my facets and flaws

until all the dark intensities within me,

my crown of coal studded with diamonds

that had hardened out of my seeing

deeply into the night like stars

broke into tears

that I was not more than I am this morning,

this braille constellation of black holes at the bottom of the page

missing their graces and wiles like kells and footnotes of light

that once illuminated the whole text and myth of me with their eyes.

Life can be long and sad and lonely as a bell of blood

when you’re holed up like a graverobber

throwing the used skulls of the moon

you once drank from

into the mouth of a fireless furnace

to keep warm.

Put a window in a candle for me.

Nail my erratic heartbeat like a Gothic knocker

to the door that you shut on the stranger you couldn’t let in.

Just look at the stars once the way the rain sees them

through billions and billions of eyes

and then try to put one out for me.

In this desert cemetery everyone’s a dead language

under a Rosetta stone.

But I’m not waiting to be deciphered

like some linear S of a viper in sand

that stands for water and mind and light

as the moon sloughs me like skin in the night

and all those cartouches of royal blood

that once raised me like a temple from quicksand

and flowed through my bones like gold

are translated into insurgent cartridges of lipstick

in a holy war of one

between my crescents and fangs.

Egypts of depravity and deception,

Germanies of xenophobic reform,

Xanadus in a Mongol pleasure dome,

all just paint on the palette of the atlas

that runs like mingled blood in the rain

after every mad slash of gestural expressionism

that wounds the canvas like a black saint

bound to the stake of a savage paintbrush

blazing with righteous fire.

Only a fool would hope to be understood.

So I try to be grateful for the backward glimpses

of the small tender things that keep recurring spontaneously

like the silver paths of the morning snails

or fireflies and distant threads of mystic lightning

that once unravelled storms

that have passed

like the valleys of the women I have known

over my shoulder

as I stepped off the last precipice of the flat earth

like a kite at the end of a spinal cord

no one was holding.

And if I’m not sitting here now like the moon

waiting for my scars to bloom

as if there were seeds in a dead sea

of tranquil shadows

that could outwit a virgin birth twice,

it’s only because I realize

whenever I’m summoned to love this way again

by the occluded mysteries

and radiant cosmologies

that derived me like a verb of light from their eyes,

a sword from a stone, an enlightened thorn

from the black rose of their dark matter,

meteors may fall like the cornerstones of nations

and prophecies hiss like comets

tempering the ambivalent clarities

of their haloes and horns in lies

and I can wake up as I have this morning

and go on like this forever like a sky

through this afterlife of endless transformation

knowing whatever pyramids I might lie under like dice

to dream of regeneration

love doesn’t give up shining down on any of us

even when there aren’t enough stars

in the whole of the universe

to finish the constellation.

PATRICK WHITE

WILD CHILDREN IN THE ORCHARD

Wild children in the orchard.

I’m obviously thinking of you.

Emotions unravel like snakes in the spring.

Sex gets involved like the R-complex

of a distant reptilian ancestor

who has not yet neo-cortically distinguished

procreation from food and murder

and all over my brain

you’re a mode of global warming.

Most people live their lives

as if it were always the morning after

something vital they’ve missed,

and I’ve known days like that

longer in the ashes than the flame

that casts more shadows on the issue than light,

but this morning isn’t one of them

though I’ve withdrawn into myself like stars

tired of the one-night-stand motel marquees

whiting out the lies and letters and legends

of their unadulterated constellations

like a bad typist that keeps hammering away at the same key

as if she were a trigger.

But you can’t give a black hole

the same break twice if you’re shining

and I’m not concerned about either.

I’m witching for you like water in a star.

Though I’m sitting here

peering through the smudged veils of my cigarette

drinking coffee in front

of all these garrulous icons on the computer

that don’t mean anything enough

to go looking for a Rosetta stone,

just to prove I’m as grounded as any asylum.

I think of you and the quiet stealth

of the way you come to me

like a serpent in the night,

older than innocence

to water

and suddenly I’m skinny-dippping

with lilies on the moon in an eclipse

that’s mystically blind enough to see

how beautiful you are to me

in every artless artful fact of your existence.

Long before eyes, in a vaster space within

everything shone by its own light

and life wasn’t stars away from seeing.

And these five thousand miles between us

weren’t the delusion of roads and lenses they are now.

Everyone’s forgotten that here is not a place

and time is not the history of now

and that the whole of the universe

out to and beyond the furthest stars

is only a human high and wide and deep.

The moon is not the cold firestone

of a night that kept us warm once

though it’s fun to make up things in the night

like religion and heroes and love

that needs to be wounded to be healed.

You can see the moon as a poultice.

You can see the moon as a scar.

Or you can see the way I am

because of the way you are

as if everyone were holding hands

like one long periodic sentence

in which every bead of the rosary

were the name of the wordless silence

that breaks its vows of being

with stars on every breath you take.

But I’m not longing for the ways I want to be with you,

I’m not unspooling the snow of the mountain like a river

to seek you out like the blossoms and faces and phases of the moon

that have lingered like oceans and ghosts on a dead branch,

I’m not holding a seance in an orchard

to summon you back like geese in the spring.

And it’s one thing to come like a thief in the night

through the window of someone you love

and steal whatever you can lay your heart on

but it’s wholly another

to slip in under the door like a bad debt

or the logo and letterhead of a love poem

without a skull of grace to drink from like a grail.

But right now I’m not either.

I’m more like the moon

in the way I’m getting around in my mind.

Green bough. Dead branch. Same sail.

And you the mysterious water

and you the lonely island

that runs before me like a dolphin

coaxing a seasoned shipwreck off the beach

as if everything were always within reach.

And it’s always a better life than mine has been

that flashes before me

like someone else’s dream

whenever I drown in you

to be what your eyes mean

when they can’t be seen.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT ME EARLIER

You should have left me earlier

when you caught me skinning snakes

with the scalpel of the moon

to free my voice like a bird

from the darkness of a gratuitous eclipse.

And you missed your chance that night

I told you that the things you wanted bored me

and as fine as your body was

it was still just silk on a birdcage

and there wasn’t anything dangerous in the night

you imposed like a gesture of modesty

to scare me enough to take flight

and I didn’t think of sex as a reward

for following your breadcrumbs like stars

through your serpentine miles of delusional labyrinths to bed.

There was no prophecy in the stains we left on the sheets.

I tried to listen, but your tears got in the way.

I tried to see, but my eyes couldn’t adjust to the light

you disappeared in like a shadow of noon

and the things I could see from the bottom of the open grave

I lay in for days like a baffled loveletter

trying to speak braille to the blind

weren’t stars.

It’s not hard after all these years, as it wasn’t then,

to confess you were a better woman than I was a man

but the way you were right

was forgiveness without end like the incommensurable pilgrimage of pi

to some end term of a shrine

so I could never wash the flaw of myself

like a gnostic phase of the moon out of my one good eye

to clarify my gospels like junkmail.

I’d rather be loved than right

and love is not law

and feelings aren’t just another mode of emergency administration

after every earthquake,

and I lost count of the times you were Rome

and I lept into the abyss of my own widening fault-line

hoping my self-destructiveness would look like courage to you

and save you from me

in an ironic act of hell.

Again and again I took your knife

like the moon into my heart

on every threshold you came to

as if I were raising my own orphan assassin

under the starless nightwing of my ambivalent compassion.

And it wasn’t until years after

like the light of a star too far from itself to know

what was illuminated by the sacrifice

that I would learn of my death

like a rumour of night you kept alive

to prove how bright you were.

And it’s true

you did shake a few fireflies out of the dragon like jewels

and there were nights I slept beside you like lightning in a jar

dreaming of dark intensities

in the sidereal immensities

of who you were for a moment

when things weren’t so sad

and you were the free water

of a theme of your own

that wasn’t looking to be uplifted

by another spiritual transformation

that always let you further and further down

like a leaf in a gust of stars.

When my demon jumped from paradise

your angel rose from hell

like the circulation of blood

so you bolted the trapdoors in the chambers of the heart

where love gets through like a thief

and more original than sin in your self-containment

pretended you were good and poppy-red

and I was the cyanotic blueblood

of a decadent habitat exhausting my resources

on being unredemptively me.

But you weren’t the bridge of fire

that could catch my breath like a choir

on the other side of oxygen,

and I never had any intentions of rescuing you

once I saw how defeated your dragons were

cremating all those bad drafts of me

like comets that fell from your halo

into a cold urn

without realizing the mad difference

between psychological graffitti

and the writing on the wall.

And it’s still not much of a consolation

to know that it was a longer good-bye than I expected

and as you would have had it

if I could have loved you like destiny

instead of blind chance

the lie of it all has been perfected by time and distance

and these autumn windows

that look through me like dutiful executioners

waiting for the cold stone of the moon

to shatter me like a trance

aren’t medium enough to summon me back to you

to say the things I would like to have said

beside you, late at night, after sex, in bed

as the carlights played solitaire with their light on the walls

and we were a language that death has never spoken

into the burning silence of the great stars

that know nothing of tomorrow.

PATRICK WHITE

I’VE NEVER LET THE WIND

I’ve never let the wind forget your name.

My heart glows like a streetlight in the rain.

I’m bleeding eclipses, and the fire

doesn’t know what to say until I burn.

How many weeping skies have washed away my eyes

and exposed my roots like lightning

to a map of lies with a divining rod

in the flash of a furious moment

that snuffs itself out like a heretic or a candle

to begin the world again like an intimate stain in the darkness,

like the meaningless whisper of a voice in a dream

to turn the lights off.

Your absence in my life

has long been a room

in the long halls of the moonlight

I have been afraid to enter,

but now I understand why it never had a door

and why even my deepest dragons

trembled like wicks in those immensities.

Your absence in my life

is the shining of a mysterious dark matter

that was bright with creation before the light was born.

And anyone can shed a leaf, a painting, a poem

and year after year, watching things pass,

I have covered the ground

with things time wrote

to endure the breathless afterlife

of its endless brevity,

but last year I got wise for a moment

and shed the whole autumn

and naked as a snakepit on the moon

that keeps changing its expressions like a face

I shook space with a beginning of my own

that reads like the first draft

of the fossil of a tree for all seasons.

I don’t think sorrow makes anyone wiser

for all the wine that gets drunk on its bells

trying to flint stars from its damp shales

or horde the dead like a drop of blood,

a surrogate heart, to a pulse of iron.

And I’m not aiming any pyramids

at the stargate in Orion on a long shot

there might be a sniper with nightgoggles in a distant tree

that could hit my third eye from here

and make things perfectly clear.

I’m not looking for my reflection in the starmud

like an extinct species trying to deduce itself

from one half of an unanswered wish-bone

or turning my skull in my hands like a phase of the moon,

and it was one thing when I was young

to want to be somebody

but now it’s wholly another

to unspool myself like the light of stars

or blood, or the Atropic thread of my spinal cord

until I am inconceivably no one,

used-up like the fuse of the Big Bang

as the applause turns into irrepressible laughter

and I know it’s just the turning of the leaves.

But I’ve never let the wind forget your name.

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AND IT’S FUNNY HOW

And it’s funny how we carry each other

within ourselves like mingled waters

that taste of the moon,

that taste of bruised orchids

in the shadow of all those glass greenhouses,

Eden in a masonjar,

that learned to throw stones,

and mysteriously engaging

that we go on creating each other as we have

forever inseparably each on his own

alone together with everyone

wondering why we exist

to know one day we won’t.

Gates and roads and miles and whispers away

and a longing that can only be measured

in the lightyears of a star

and all the eras, all the trances of time

of passion and extinction,

of despair that turned on hope like a toxin

and hope that flared like the third man on a match

learning to brighten the stars

by deepening its darkness,

I have lived from eclipse to eclipse

like an unintelligible abyss who misses everyone

for the quality of breath and death and emptiness

that makes me me

when I want to be impossibly alone

and the memories have issues and agendas of their own

like a dead branch trying to witch for water at a window.

Where are you now?

Who were you?

Have I survived?

Whose ashes are these?

Now I am the tree. And you are the wind

and the pursuit of nothing flows on endlessly like life and water.

And all the lovely deserts that enhanced the moon

and coaxed me out my old delirium

into a deeper one

by drinking the viper in the grail

they lifted to my lips like a gate

that everyone comes to like a stranger

prodigally returning to his own homelessness,

following the wind like a siren of sand

have slipped through my fingers like music,

though my voice still tastes of them

when I drink from their reflections,

not knowing whether I have become

a darkness in the light
or a light in the darkness

but grateful for the grander perspective

from the bottom of the well

where they showed me their stars at noon

and the sun at midnight

and how the fires that nourish love

cannot be put out like torches

in their own shadows

anymore than a bird can fall from its feathers.

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOT AN OPINION, NOT A LIE, NOT A TRUTH

Not an opinion, not a lie, not a truth,

blood that clings, blood that sings like a whip

in registers of pain that not even the angels could screech,

I wake up this morning wearing Darfur like a straitjacket, like a burn

as if the stars had been poured into a gash

or the moonlight talced my corpse with powdered lime

and I feel another’s wound as if it were not mine

and realize how much seeing can be an asylum

from feeling it as if it were

and there’s a reek of obscenity

under the subtle cologne of my cynicism

that is amused by the polymorphous perversity

of an empathic innocence it hadn’t suspected.

How many doors and walls and windows and gates and countries there are,

how many ingratiating perspectives,

how much luck of the delusion

and credit cards and passports and bureaucracies away I am

from the roar of the slaughter I read about

in the volcanic shales of hell,

opening the morning paper of my heart

like a refugee tent in Darfur.

So let me be clear. This poem

is not a loaf of bread that can be broken

to feed the distended planet of a child’s belly,

not a messiah of medicine anointing with a syringe,

it feeds nothing, it cures nothing, it kills nothing

that needs to be killed

nor brings the dead back to life

and it despises itself

that it’s not an ambassador or bubble

you can find sanctuary in

bobbing irridescently on an ocean of rabies,

that it isn’t lowering arks over the side of the planet like lifeboats

or sinking wells on the moon like mothers to drink from.

It’s as irrelevant and stupid and vain as most of us here

preening rainbows on the palettes of our feathers

like pimped-out parrots nipping at ideological lice

while a young woman is trying to learn to walk normally again

in front of her stigmatized shadow

after being ideologically raped like oil.

And should I subsume the expedience of her violation

under the necessitous tolerance of collateral atrocities

in a shifting global market

that arrays its statistics like maggots?

What is it that we find so difficult to admit

when we look upon a young black boy, four years old,

starving to death, and it isn’t sadness in his eyes

that have given up imploring, not anger or blame

as he sits like a big-headed buddha in his own filth and vermin,

as if the silent ucoiling of his Darfurian genes

had written his destiny on flypaper?

Do you see that numbness in his eyes

like an eclipse with nothing to cover,

an unholy nakedness deeper than skin,

and the concession of impotence beside him

that was once his mother, more accustory

than Amnesty International or the U.N. or CNN

because she doesn’t accuse? Do you feel

how the moon has been ripped from the bride

and hear how she breaks like the limb of tree,

and understand how her every step and breath and pulse

is an exhausted intimate of horror

that took her like gangrene on her wedding night?

Do you know she lies in your driveway like roadkill?

Did you wake up this morning as I did

feeling as if I were living her honeymoon?

PATRICK WHITE

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