SQUIRREL ON A LEAFLESS BRANCH

SQUIRREL ON A LEAFLESS BRANCH

Squirrel on a leafless branch in the rain,

a comma looking for a clause

in the periodic sentence of the tree

delving into the matter

of its own unassuming origins

like the last affable thought

that just interviewed me.

Who the fuck knows?

Denuded down to the duff

I look upon my own leaves

like so many theories I’ve shed

throughout this long night, this brief day,

all the useless maps that carried me away

with every gust of wind

to show me where here was.

Now I’m all crazy starmaps

brailled by constellations

trying to remember the names of their capitols

that starred me like a sheriff or an aster

to this empty treasure chest

I’ve spent my life looking for.

Take a look. There’s nothing inside

but this darkness that has given up its dead

like birds out over a shoreless sea.

Things used to be a lot more drastic

when I would run to put the fires out

my heart had started like an arsonist

by weeping jewels and mirrors

over the burning wedding bed

that woke every morning up like firetrucks and bread.

I took those sails down like skies

a long time ago,

shook the stars and blackholes out of the sheets

and let my eyes wander off into space

like water on the moon

to find a more appropriate face.

Now when I get to the bottom of things,

or even just sink my way through

this unfathomable awareness

that keeps supposing me to me,

I’m as barren and rootless

as a lightning strike on the moon.

And nothing is revealed.

And nothing catches fire.

And there’s nothing

but the alms of a desert

in the craters of these begging bowls

that gape like the empty eye-sockets

of an enlightened insight

that once flashed across the night

like protein looking for a home

in the vast homelessness of it all,

or the still life embedded

in a matchead that’s gone out

like a flower from its flaring,

or better yet

the way I am bound to my life

like the holy cornerstone of a shrine

that revolves around me

like this old meteorite of a skull,

this kissing stone,

that knows me well.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN I LOOK AT PEOPLE AND THINGS

WHEN I LOOK AT PEOPLE AND THINGS

When I look at people and things, my own life,

when I turn the light around

and catch myself at work in a backalley

like an open window stealing thieves,

it’s easy to understand

that nothing exists as a thought, a dream, a form, or a person

that isn’t a protocol of the emptiness

that shapes us like flowers and cups and stars.

This morning, for example, I’m as clear

as a bottle that’s never tasted the wine

or a windowpane, the rain,

and last night I was the underpainting

of a darkness deeper than the face of a clown

before he wakes up and puts it on.

For the moment my mouth is a chrysalis

pieced together from my own duff and detritus

and bound by the glue of an ancient grammar

with bloodroots in the night

that mingle with lilies on the moon

and want to bloom like anthracite and dragons.

The highest and the lowest come together

like snakes and wings

and my penis flys!

But that’s probably

an oxymoronic overstatement

as most truths are just before

they’re absolved by their own extinction.

What’s the sound of one orgasm rapping to itself?

I’ve been blooded like a bell

to know the phoenix of grief

that rises from the fire

when gasoline weeps.

O.K.

I’ve been rounded by the moon

like a pebble in a tide,

the black pearl under my tongue,

to exorcise myself like a ghost

left holding on to life like an ostrakon.

O.K.

My heart squanders me

like confederate currency

on union collection plates

and nothing is set free

and it’s getting harder to budget being me

and I’m running out of continents and coastlines

where the ships I hoped would discover me

don’t come in like bills

where even my name

isn’t the native I was when I was young.

And it’s all relentlessly and perfectly O.K.

More leaves have already fallen from the trees

than will fall in the autumns to come

and the valleys are never very far

from the mountains that climb out of them.

PATRICK WHITE

MEAN-PEOPLED MIND-CLUTTER

MEAN-PEOPLED MIND CLUTTER

Mean-peopled mind-clutter this morning

edging my rebirth into myself

like a prophecy that never comes true

with little hicks of razor-wire

that think they’re an improvement on thorns.

I wish I was sitting in the middle of a crossroads

with nothing on my mind but a few stars

and a lost sense of direction

that was happiest not knowing where I was going,

or what I wrote in the dust for the wind to read

with a crazy finger.

I don’t want to make an effort to be generous and kind,

I don’t want to make an effort exhaustively once again

to take the high path like some bumbling goat

and try to understand

why the moon butts heads with the mountain

or why all the wildflowers

turn into little bouquets of matches

that go off like solar flares

whenever I ask for a light?

I much prefer the immeasurability of a woman

to the measure of a man,

but there are acids in the rain these days

and glass tears that burn like windowpanes

and lethal illusions of angelic translucency

that weep like box jellyfish

because they haven’t got a backbone.

And it isn’t the moon that weaves and unweaves itself

on the looms of the great themes anymore

but the memes of a hydrophobic pettiness

that arises like the mahdi of a holywar in an hourglass

to defend nothing against nothing like sand.

But I don’t want to judge.

And I don’t want to not judge.

And it’s not as if I expect everyone I know

to be a magus or sybil of lucidity,

and I learned a long time ago the hard way

you can’t turn swine into buddhas

on a steady diet of pearls

or summon fish like a seance

back to the corals on the moon.

I’d rather implore the transformative abundance

of the black hole I keep like a coin of cyanide

under my blue tongue just in case

to turn me inside out like a pocket

to prove I’ve spent myself like a star at the bottom of a well

shining up at nothing,

and I’ve been a great fool,

but no one who reached out to touch me

with night in their fingertips

and light on their lips

ever got burned.

Maybe it’s just another way

of launching an appeal like a nameless lifeboat

against my demonic innocence,

and believe me,

I know myself like the sea,

or celestially seasoning the moon

I steep in my tea,

but I’ve come to conclude

like a man in the nude

there are people whose emotions

are homeless killer bees

that have never tasted honey

that even hell won’t waste a hive on

let alone a human heart.

PATRICK WHITE

THE MOON HANGS HER SKATES

THE MOON HANGS HER SKATES

The moon hangs her skates like her first and last crescents

around her shoulders

and goes down to the pond like a mirror alone

and mistakes your wrists for a skating rink.

And I am gored on the horns of a silence I never suspected.

It’s sidereally dumb to hold your breath like the wind on the moon

and wait for a sail that will never come

as if it were spring in a turmoil of apple-bloom.

And you could look at a coffin

and see a skull in a lifeboat I suppose,

but if it is, like a human,

it’s a one-string guitar with a spinal cord

tethered to the waves,

and it’s not going anywhere

and the only song it knows is sad.

And even if space isn’t a reliable guide to anywhere,

it’s the way I took, dropping stars as I went

and it’s the way I’ll go back like a defrocked priest

wrapped in my spirit

like a cloak of soot

older than night

to put them out.

Everyone knows there are things

hidden in the darkness,

savage things and tender,

but it takes a man without eyes

to hazard a guess

at what the light conceals,

and to reveal a lie

isn’t the same as grasping the truth.

So it hardly seems worth it most of the time.

Most people are mangers without a star

that run around like mad messiahs

with fishy collection bowls

to keep the light from leaking through the roof

but if you ever need to know where you are

remember

it’s the road you didn’t take

that walked you here

just as it’s always a star beyond lucidity

that makes things clear.

PATRICK WHITE

NEVER MORE ALIVE THAN NOW

NEVER MORE ALIVE THAN NOW

Never more alive than now

when memories turn into mysteries

and love leaves the back door of things open,

and I’m no more a stranger in time

than the leaves falling from the trees

or the pages of a book I wrote in blood

washing its wings in the rain.

And there are nights that are vastly impersonal

and I am still a small thing looking up

at the cold, cold stars,

trying to imagine the universe

that imagines me standing here

sustained solely by the wonder of it all

until mind and form and matter disappear

and all’s that left is the life of the seeing,

nothing seen, and nowhere a seer.

Children born and grown and gone

and thresholds and lovers crossed

and things achieved and left undone

and even death bereft of a theme in the mirror

that shrinks like a breath,

I am yet embittered and sweetened by suffering and pain,

I am still as unknowing as I was

when I first asked,

and the hour is as new to me as you,

and it’s just as much of a struggle after all these years

to temper the radicalism of my compassion with tears

like soft bullets

as it is to liberate my cynicism

like honey from a hive of killer bees

when I am shaken by vicious insights

into the proliferant obscenity of human depravity.

Evolution loops like a virus.

And there’s not much I can say to myself

when my eyelids bleed like stone roses

looking into the truth of my species like rabies,

nor anything to offer the wounded mystic

who sheds his eyes in shame

when his spirit clots like blood in his throat

to see how we have violated

even the elemental decencies

of matter, of fire and water,

earth, light, and the star-smudged air.

What we have done and continue to do to each other.

What cowards we are to kill what we don’t understand

because we refuse to turn the light around,

the telescope, the gun, and understand ourselves,

the deathless beauty of what the mind is

when it isn’t soiled by a brain.

PATRICK WHITE

NEITHER UPLIFTED NOR UPLIFTING

NEITHER UPLIFTED NOR UPLIFTING

Neither uplifted nor uplifting

you array your ideas like eggs

in little tree-bound nests of knowledge

you can’t seem to break out of.

And you won’t fly out of your own eye

until you’ve measured the sky in wings

so nothing sings in the tree on the moon

you’ve planted like a flag.

And here is a place with a broken gate

and a shattered window

you don’t return to much anymore

like the return address of a painful loveletter.

You’re deep and you’re smart and you’re dark and you’re weird

as if your life were a secret

that’s trying to keep you.

And when I talk to you like this

and it’s good to be open and honest,

it’s strange how we always

end up in the same lifeboat

with a cargo of skulls that look like the moon.

But you asked and I’ll answer

one delusion with another

because I’m bored

and I haven’t heard an original lie in years

that could rival the last one

that flamed out like a brutal mode of clarity,

a martyr to the ferocity of its own insight.

Do I stink of enlightenment?

Do I reek of delusion?

One is aware.

The other aware of being aware.

And it all somehow seems so crucially absurd

you try to doctor every word

like grains of sand in the sea

or a third world country

proudest when it’s begging from the blessed

trying to get things off your luxurious chest

like a budget that went down in defeat.

And though you’re neater than a needle in your probing

the stitches keep coming undone

like the rungs of an unlucky ladder

or a wound that healed like a zipper.

How easy it was to love you

when you came naked to my bed and my body

and the life of meaning

was fire and moon and kells of blood

more than the meaning of life.

We didn’t mean anything then.

It was enough to be the effulgence of our own wayward energies,

and say things to each other

that can only be said in fingertips and braille,

to walk barefoot across our own stars

and taste things with our eyes

like the bells and the masses and the wafers

of the mystic eclipses in the snakefire

that burned for more than a year,

and know things in our hearts

about each other

that are once and silent and clear.

PATRICK WHITE

MY EGO OFF

MY EGO OFF

My ego off campaigning somewhere

wrapped in the bunting of its shadows

like a vampire, an eclipse, or a bat

gone out like a black hole

or a lightbulb on the ceiling,

I’ve got time to be inconspicuously left

alone

with the playful intimacy

of my own absurdities

and the crazy wisdom

of playing strip poker with the stars.

It’s good to lose your skin sometimes

like a night you don’t want to remember

or a soothsayer holding all the wrong cards

like constellations that have been marked.

It’s how to get naked with the universe

when everyone else is embroidering a straitjacket.

Most people think that clarity has eyes

but I know it sees through me like the starless water

that everything is born from.

Ask almost anyone what they believe these days

and they’ll start quoting page two of their tatoos

like violent mandalas of scripture

mining the road to goodness and light

with explosives swaddled in mangers.

A new religion of sword swallowers

but I won’t dip my blade in wine or blood

and receive it from anyone’s hand

like the distempered steel of a consecrated wafer

or the body parts of a cynical holy war

that defeats its own people like roadkill.

The root of the word, religion, means to bind

like ligaments and lutes

or rosaries and chains

the pain to the wound and the wound

like the scar of a mouth that can’t sing to everything.

I’ve been falling for years like the autumn leaves

and coming up trees again

like a winning poker hand

or a butterfly that’s learned to lay traps for the spider

and the worst I’ve known of hell

is a woman who fell so far from grace

she went skinny-dipping in a midnight lake

like the eye of God

with her clothes on.

And as for paradise

I’ve been a pilgrim too long

to descrate my shrines with arrival

and I’m not in the habit of looking up to things

that are under my feet like stars

as the moon unfolds like a parachute

and I’m walking like water on Mars.

PATRICK WHITE