MY HEART'S BEEN DOGPADDLING

MY HEART’S BEEN DOGPADDLING

My heart’s been dogpaddling in its own blood for so long

it’s hard to tell whether I’m drowning

or waiting to be rescued.

Some stars are salt, and some are sweet

and the rivers flow back into the sea like living languages

back into their mother-tongue

in a mingling of eloquent pilgrims

and dragons don’t linger long in stagnant waters

and the autumn wind might have a few leaves

to say something wise and enduring about it all,

and the mindstream clarify itself in its running,

but I like to linger among the lilies

still tucked here and there behind the ears of the shore for awhile

as if each were a woman

or an enlightened lifeboat

tethered by my spinal cord to the bottom of things

like a star always is to its dark mother.

Whatever that means. Honestly,

things get away from me sometimes like fire and doves

as forms of thought slide out of their thawing like butter and snakes

and the best things I’ve ever said

were in words that completely ignored me.

And there is something metaphysically Chaplinesque

about the way my most cherished profundities,

the ones that make my eyes fall silent

always seem freaked with gestures of pain

as if I hadn’t learned to love my loneliness perfectly yet.

Maybe I’m wrong after all these years

and the error has gone on elaborating interminably as me

but I still think it’s better not to be understood by a buddha

than severely articulated by a mob

even when I make a mess

of my delusions of you.

Would you have trusted me more

if I had told you not to?

Would you have loved me any better

if I had said I didn’t love you

and tried to mean it as long as I could?

MY HEART'S BEEN DOGPADDLING

MY HEART’S BEEN DOGPADDLING

My heart’s been dogpaddling in its own blood for so long

it’s hard to tell whether I’m drowning

or waiting to be rescued.

Some stars are salt, and some are sweet

and the rivers flow back into the sea like living languages

back into their mother-tongue

in a mingling of eloquent pilgrims

and dragons don’t linger long in stagnant waters

and the autumn wind might have a few leaves

to say something wise and enduring about it all,

and the mindstream clarify itself in its running,

but I like to linger among the lilies

still tucked here and there behind the ears of the shore for awhile

as if each were a woman

or an enlightened lifeboat

tethered by my spinal cord to the bottom of things

like a star always is to its dark mother.

Whatever that means. Honestly,

things get away from me sometimes like fire and doves

as forms of thought slide out of their thawing like butter and snakes

and the best things I’ve ever said

were in words that completely ignored me.

And there is something metaphysically Chaplinesque

about the way my most cherished profundities,

the ones that make my eyes fall silent

always seem freaked with gestures of pain

as if I hadn’t learned to love my loneliness perfectly yet.

Maybe I’m wrong after all these years

and the error has gone on elaborating interminably as me

but I still think it’s better not to be understood by a buddha

than severely articulated by a mob

even when I make a mess

of my delusions of you.

Would you have trusted me more

if I had told you not to?

Would you have loved me any better

if I had said I didn’t love you

and tried to mean it as long as I could?

I'M NOT COLD, OR ALOOF, OR INDIFFERENT

I’M NOT COLD, OR ALOOF, OR INDIFFERENT

I’m not cold, or aloof, or indifferent.

I can hear you crying. It’s just that

when things get deep they stop moving,

the tree loses its voice along with its leaves and birds

and there aren’t enough stars in my eyes

to make much difference in the darkness.

Naked pain clothed in itself like the sky

doesn’t need another skin from me,

and besides, where would I put the tatoo

if I could say anything

and what could it mean

that might keep us up at night

looking through each other like telescopes?

And we’re both in the room

but the silence is the sound of one hand clapping

and when you ask me what it means through your tears

I say: Listen. You can hear for yourself.

But you want to sip the night

like an elixir from a spoon,

pull swords from the stone,

ask how many legs are on a snake,

and throw yourself like a bird against a window

when you don’t get an answer.

You’re looking for the return address of a shipwreck

like a lighthouse in a lifeboat

drifting through the fog,

an enlightened pariah in a manger of stars,

and I’m throwing black holes up against the wall like dice,

but you don’t want to hear that.

You want to apprentice yourself to the lightning

like the impious revelation

of an alternative universe

and start something that shines,

and when it doesn’t,

deepen the darkness to make it impossibly brighter

by putting out your eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

INTIMATELY ALONE IN THE ABYSS

INTIMATELY ALONE IN THE ABYSS

Intimately alone in the abyss

equally ashes and shining

there’s a rootless man

walking around on the earth

being introduced and accepted

as knowable and known,

who thinks he’s me.

He suspects he’s a crosswalk

but I know he’s a ladder

a rung shy of rescue.

There’s never been any security in security

and you don’t have to be a full moon

to agitate the asylum

or much of an autumn to lose things,

people included, so he gets up and goes to sleep

and eats and shits and walks and sits like everyone else

who live like unopened loveletters among the bills

with no return address.

Every step he takes is a one-way threshold

and he already knows the value

of everything he seeks

before he’s found it.

Now the stupid think

there’s only one mode of seeing through their eyes

but I know the seeing of the dragon

is not the watching of the flies.

However they cluster like constellations.

Now here a lot of people

will start to worry about

what the stupid think

but I wouldn’t advise it

because that’s what they do.

The less it means the more it can be

and the rest is written on flypaper.

Everywhere I look

I see the north star shining above me

but I don’t mistake my spiderwebs for maps

to the spirit’s lost and found.

Not lost, not found, not bound or free,

my eyes don’t dilute the darkness

with the clarity of the blind

when there’s nothing, really nothing to see.

I’m sixty now. More a mystic statistic

of the jewel in the dreamcatcher

that keeps me away from myself

like the beginning of a recurring nightmare

than a scarecrow playing with matches,

but I’m still a mirror you don’t want to look into.

PATRICK WHITE

YESTERDAY THE MOON

YESTERDAY THE MOON

Yesterday the moon was a swan on gentle water.

Tonight it comes up like a used ashtray

somebody stubbed their eyes out in.

I could be a nightbird in a bad dream

and slip myself like a message

from a distant constellation under your door

but there’s something tedious about the stars

mindlessly spinning overhead era after era

like a loom in a sweat factory flatlining.

I resist the sway of the metaphor

by staying rooted in the mud of the mindstream.

Happiness just happens. Happ, an Icelandic word,

(remember Snori Sturlesson and the Viking skalds?)

means luck, grace, good fortune

but like a stone, like a planet

you keep turning yourself over to look for it.

You can crack your emotions open

for another thousand lifetimes

like fortune cookies

that have had their tongues torn out

and never find it.

First and last, the moon

may be an Arabic sabre,

the beginning and breaking of a long fast,

the alpha and omega of extremes,

a holy war,

but you never heed the phases in between

as you live from cover to cover

like the front and backdoor

of every heresy and revelation

that eventually shreds you like paper in an abandoned embassy.

I don’t know what your heart’s wired to anymore,

your body still supple and pliable

as C-4 under a bridge,

and you’re always dangerously appealing

when you let your candles dance with your scalpels

in a lethal alliance of science and art

that pushes down hard on my libido like a plunger

that wants to set you off

like a real apocalypse on a Halloween night

tricked out like the treat of the bedsheet ghost that haunts me. Boo.

Sex is an exorcist.

But with you,

it drove the human out of the demon

and charged the darkness with raving angels

that fell like snow on a furnace.

If I didn’t know any better

I’d say love was a delusion of snakeoil

and all its fire-eyes, the testing tines of its flame,

soot on a lamp, why nothing is seen here

expect through a glass darkly.

Or maybe it’s a disease you take

to get through the cure?

But I’m not a saint.

I won’t paint my window to improve the view.

I like to look clearly into things

until there’s no seer, no seen,

just this whisper of seeing like water

in the voice of a bottomless well

that drinks like a dragon from the skull of an ominous moon.

PATRICK WHITE

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