MAYBE IF I TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT

MAYBE IF I TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT

Maybe if I try to understand it

I can forget what it means, maybe

these breakdown, blasting cap tears

I’m wired to like a beaver dam

about to wash out the road

like blood at a crime scene

as the sky lies down upon me

like a collapsed lung, or a mattress

that enslaves rubber tires in chains

to deaden the explosion,

might leave something clean

like the glowing fields in the sunset

after a thunderstorm.

And if I’ve been trying to train my diamonds to flow

it’s only so I can take a bath in my own grave

to rinse myself off the shining like coal.

But it’s bad form to throw the world

down your neighbour’s well at night

like bad meat

so I keep my horrors symbolically discrete

by sowing stars in the wounds

to cauterize the pain

and pretend that everything is sweet.

I write poems about waterlilies

and float them downriver

like paper boats on the moon;

or I set myself on fire like the origami rose

I folded out my bloodstream

just to add a little colour and class to the ashes

or run my tongue along the sabre of the crescent moon

to hone the eloquence of the mad slasher

into something more than a papercut

and a comma of blood on my thumb,

but it’s hard to get chatty in Auschwitz

when everyone around you is playing dead or dumb

and the afterlives of the Nazis

are the cornerstones of the new millenium

they’re building for my convenience down the block.

And I want to talk, I want to say myself

wholly and unholy as I am

but my muse has turned into a Medusa

who thinks she looks good wearing

that snakepit on her head

and trying to say anything

is like trying to turn my tongue into a jackhammer

to get down to the bottom of my emotional life

like this nameless gravestone on the moon

I keep carving out of bedrock.

So I seep back into my self like blood on a sword

or a shadow at noon

or the frown of an eclipse

in the facepaint of a starless oilslick

that swims in its own skin like a snake across the moon

as if it were the sad path of a road

that never makes it home

and drown my rage like a torch

in the fathomless silence of a black mirror

to burn like the afterlife

of a dragon in an urn,

or swallow the moon whole

and drown myself in the rain

like a candle that blew itself out

to keep from boiling like a heretic in its own tears

and keep the farmers at their prayers

happy for years.

PATRICK WHITE

OVERLAPPING BULLSEYES OF THE RAIN

OVERLAPPING BULLSEYES OF THE RAIN

Overlapping bullseyes of the rain

that never misses the mark,

each bullet, each arrow of water

its own target

as if subject and object were none

or seeing the inseparable locus of being

like puddles in the parking lot

and then the gust of a shapeshifter in passing

and every drop turns into a tuning fork

that resonates out of itself like a solar system

or a bird whose wingspan is the duration of every note.

And then someone passes me

like a loveletter they found on the street

under the door of a chameleonic threshold

or a flower down a drain

and I’m alone again

trying to hang on like the last leaf on the tree

to a delusion that has already let go of me

like an address on an aging piece of paper

that’s forgotten its way home.

The mindstream is glutted

with the wrecks of November

and there’s no way across except on the skulls

of these stepping-stone moons

that cling to my emotions

like greasy moss on a moodring

but I’m urgently savage enough

to scalp my own comets

as they venture out of their dark haloes

and exultantly fling their topknots across the sky

like reruns of a warning to an extinct species.

New feathers and fur for old scales, perhaps,

but I’ve always tried

to forget the future before it happens

in order to live now with the assurance of a dangerous dinosaur

and as all the enlightened know

like a jewel opening its eyes

in the back of their brain,

there isn’t any effort to evolution

or floral agenda to the rain

because everything is utterly keyless

when the water guitar strings its own ripples

over the great abyss

and thumbs sad music

for all the missing links along the way,

all the starring parts I never got to play

that undo me like a food chain.

But in a world so elegantly free

even the rain is a mere gesture

of the eye-growing sea I bubbled up from

to explore the terrain like a wheel

until it turned from solid to real

living with purpose

is just a shortcut

to living in vain.

Go ask the rain

falling like tears

from these visions of being

back into its own eyes.

Even the hardest crystal ball

you’ve ever huddled around like north

convinced you could find a passage through like light

will eventually ride its own melting

like an icecube back into the seeing

and you will be the journey

that puts on your body like a shoe

and walks you out to clarify the view

of your own transformative mysteries

until you’re as free and as expansive as the skies

that attach themselves like wings

to the emergent exclamations of the dragonflies

and washing yourself off

like the stain of an indelible eclipse

in billions upon billions of eyes

you will taste the light like honey

in the flower-mouths of all your metamorphoses

and gathering yourself up

like the gods of roots and rivers

who enshrined their passage in everything

as if we were all survivors

of the mysterious gifts of the life-givers,

you will give yourself away to everything alike

without distinction for the demons and the divas,

and the warm compost

of all those undernourished divinities

that distemper your lucidities,

and like a god

among the shining myriads

without anything on your mind

you will bead like light

on the branches of the autumn trees

and falling to the root

like jewels and fruit

you will see what the rain sees.

PATRICK WHITE

I COULDN'T HAVE LIVED IT

I COULDN’T HAVE LIVED IT

I couldn’t have lived it any differently

than it lived me so inseparably

like the moon’s reflection on the water

there’s no point in trying to lift my life

like an emerging face by the corners

out of the developer in a dark room

to see whom I’ve been saying goodbye to

all the years it took to grow into me

all the years I’ve been following myself

like a wanted poster I cut two holes in for my eyes

and wore like a mask into an allnight casino on the moon.

When I look back sometimes upon my life

like a shadow who’s tagged along for the ride

it’s been a long, long getaway to the other side of nowhere

as I’ve lived through these eyeless deserts of myself

from one well to the next

like a slut of water.

And maybe I would have surrendered

if I had found anyone to surrender to

but when I turned around to give myself up

there were no posses in the light

no stool or noose of stars hanging over me in the night.

And everything after that has felt

like the random solitude of the wind

without beginning or end

blowing on the stars

like the heater of my cigarette

to pass the time

and see if I can make them brighter.

But at night the desert turns the mike over to space

and my emotions have a chance to expand

like a herd going over a precipice

or a heart clinging to the moon

like a barnacle on the side of a pyramid sunk in sand

and when I listen to myself

there’s always a left-handed afterlife

living me like a holdup I hadn’t planned.

And then there are times

when I am uplifted by some stray gust of stars

like a dusty fingerprint on the trigger of the moon

I’m pointing like some suicidal holy man at my own temple

trying to convert the thief in me to a new way to steal

from the serpent’s purse that strikes at my heel like a bank alarm

in the desparate attempt of a fading mirage

to prove I’m real.

And then those nights, those long hideous nights

when the darkness hardens like a lump of coal

and shatters me like a windowpane

when I am the least convincing argument

for the existence of God

that I’ve ever met

and the only way that I can forget,

the only way I can keep from going insane

is to live in vain

as if my life depended on it.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU DON'T DO CRACK OR SPEED OR HEROIN

YOU DON’T DO CRACK OR SPEED

You don’t do crack or speed or heroin;

you’re not lifting the moon like an eyelid

to find a new place to shoot,

but you’re boiling your heart in a spoon,

you’re thawing the six rocks of your emotions,

boiling away the seven oceans

that will get you through the night

as if you were another sign of global warming.

And now you’re weeping and raging in my living room,

violently shapeshifting through your withdrawal

like an exorcism gone wrong

because the latest hot lover

you got hooked on like a dealer

proved to be a snakeoil salesman in paradise

who convinced you the scales of your daring

would turn into feathers

and your falling take flight.

Not everybody who jumps from heaven makes hell;

for example, your heart there on that rock

you’re kicking around at your feet

like the skull of the world,

isn’t that the sun on your horizon

pouring out of its broken shell like the yoke

of another tragic casualty of spring

fallen like Icarus from the embryonic wax

of your exaggerated wingspan?

Love is not a form of substance abuse

and I’m not the local, walk-in rehab centre

you can duck into anytime

you’ve spent your last dime like a bullet

on a dealer that’s not reloading,

but pain is pain and I can feel yours

chaining itself to all your emergency doors

so that no one could ever get out

when you go hunting for yourself

like a contract you’ve taken out on a highschool.

But it isn’t the object of your longing,

the focus of the star, the shining

that you’re addicted to

like all those placebos and soothers

you keep calling boyfriends,

faking you’re better

everytime you take one:

you’re addicted to addiction.

You’re addicted to the promise you mean to keep.

And you can keep on taking your clothes off like Christmas

and suffering the usual unwrapping depressions,

but you’re addicted to being a gift that was meant for someone else

and it’s never your name that follows the to or the from on the label

when you give yourself to Santa Claus

like a pimp in sable

and he addicts you to the starburn above the stable

that keeps making an ass of you

when the wise men take back their gifts.

So here you are again

before the perilous depths

of these preciptious cliffs

trashing your afflictions like female newborns

that were born of all that genetic junkmail

you once opened frantically like a loveletter

that wasn’t addressed to you

on the rocky threshold of the shore below

that looks up at you like the sickle of a smile

that reaps what you’ve sown,

but I know what you’ve always known:

that you’re addicted

to being unmarrowed by the moon

when the hummingbird who sipped honey

like gold from a cold stone

finds herself out of money and alone.

I can help you out with the cash flow

and though I know I’m not your drug of choice

measure my feelings out like methadone to ease the abyss,

but if you want my advice,

being addicted to addiction

is like trying to step into your own bloodstream twice

or drowning while diving for pearls

that have already risen like the full moon

and crossed you off the calendar

like the X that sucks the poison from the kiss.

Everyone longs for a night, a face, a space

they knew once even if just for the glance of a moment

when joy spiked the wine

and what was singularly human

rushed like a flashflood through the valleys

of the universally divine

and rain that had fallen like tears for years

on an ocean of sorrows

with no hope of flowers

suddenly bloomed like the moon’s corals

in the meadows of a mystic sea

and everything that could possibly be, was.

I knew that moment, for instance, once with you

but the inconceivable eventually flows down into the believable

like stars into mountain streams

and we end up panning for the irretrievable

like a nugget of night we lost in the moonbeams,

and impeaching each other like credible constellations

that can’t shine out of the box,

we check the locks on the mine

and go our separate ways

like abused metals,

mutants of gold and lead

that couldn’t turn the one into the another

once the alchemy wore off

and the glass alembic of another transformative cocoon

was shattered by the harvest stone

of an unphilosophical moon

and the pain was a change of species.

And you’re still the anti-muse of the butterfly effect

that inspires my chaos theory

of postdeconstructive poetry

when I strike one planet against another

like your heart against mine

looking for a spark

that might keep the universe warm for another night

but I know I can’t light the same fire again

or shoot the moon like silver

into the same exhausted vein

now all that matters is the next homeless hit

and this infinite choice of elixirs

that don’t quite do it

whenever I go looking for my voice

like a small word

in the ashes of a burning bush

or that bird of your phoenix heart that once sang in me like you

and fell like an autumn cradle from the lullaby tree

that still calls to me sometimes

and still keeps me up

like the ghost of an albatross

wailing off the coast of a lost art

wounded like the black sail of a loveletter on an unlucky wind.

But that doesn’t mean

I wait for you like a widower on the moon

for the last lifeboat that overturned in space

when the seas evaporated like the eyes in your face.

I’m not rummaging through my heart

like a medicine chest

for the three bells of the last all’s well

I can crush like the moon into a paste when I cry.

I’m not flagging my heart like a fit

sucking up the tranquil shadows of the moons’s dead oceans

as if I could bind your heart again to me like a barrel,

a clown in a shipwreck he’s wearing for pants,

and go over your falls again as I once did

in a Niagra of love potions.

We’ve had that dance

and the music we heard in each other

was wine unique as night

to the glass that contained it like a body,

and I don’t need to seek again

in these lotions of rain that fall gently now

what was so wholly and incommensurably once

that in every drop of water I feel you like the sea.

A truly enlightened junkie

only needs to hit once

and it’s good for a lifetime

so there’s never really any chance

of coming down from the people we’ve loved

who poured the stars into our abandoned wells

like a nightwine that shunned the sun

so why all this talk about kites

that caught fire and crashed

and the new space shuttles

you keep wheeling up to your gantry

like all these love affairs you keep trying to launch

like a rave on ecstasy,

trying to swim with the stars

when you’re already flying

with the whole of creation

like the nightsea of a black rose

that can only be seen

in the depths of its darkness

with eyes of wine

that have shed their petals and waves

like a sky that has let go of its lifeline?

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

IF YOU HAVE ANY DOUBTS

IF YOU HAVE ANY DOUBT

If you have any doubt this is about you, don’t

because I’ve summoned snakefire

to tatoo it like an underground constellation

indelibly upon your eyes

and the small skies

you mark like full moons

and forthcoming events

in the calendar of your tears.

How many doctors can you cram in a womb

to get the baby right,

or critics in your head

to align your poem with the axial north

of what everyone else has said

as if inspiration came with a coward and a compass?

You want the roads to follow you.

You stand up like a shaky mast

at public readings,

holding your poems

like a fleet of immaculate sails

that never leave harbour,

hoping some continent drifting toward China

will eventually bump into you

and some cartographer with a publishing deadline

will eventually give you a name.

I don’t mean to set fire to your watercolours

or leave them out in the rain like leaves

or deny you’re a capital looking for a country to star in

or throw myself like junkmail

on the threshold of your overpriced jeans

but I hate the way you keep setting up prisms

at all your rainbow intersections

like traffic lights and rush hour cops

to direct the flow of your reds and greens.

Enlightenment doesn’t maintain a teacher.

The muses don’t hold auditions

and life isn’t the dress rehearsal of anything

that can be prompted in the spotlight of the moon for applause.

Poetry isn’t the slurred autograph

on the second edition of a suicide note

and I’ve seen how you press your mouth to common paper

as if it were a royal document, a lettre cachet

sent through a cultural attache

to assassinate your reader like a lover

but red wax isn’t the same as sealing your words in blood,

and lipstick on a white hanky

isn’t a rose petal

or even a real kiss

and just because you’re a bleeder

doesn’t prove you’re the surviving child of a murdered czar

or that your future’s as bright as a vampire

that just got a job as a teller at a bloodbank

because you don’t know how to die for anything.

You’ve never lived a lie intensely enough

to make you come true

and though you’ve watered the moon for ages

with the rootless shadows of your mirrors and mirages

nothing ever grew.

PATRICK WHITE

LET THE MUD SETTLE IN THE PUDDLE

LET THE MUD SETTLE IN THE PUDDLE

Let the mud settle in the puddle

if you want to clarify the sky you’re walking on,

the stars underfoot, and the clouds.

If you want to see your face as it is,

the front door that everyone recognizes as their own

after they’ve washed off the clowns,

if you want to return to yourself,

not as an address

but as home,

stop trembling like a witching wand

that’s just discovered an unknown sea,

stop throwing your bones around

like a prophetic skeleton

your grammar’s too bad to read,

like birds against the window

or stones skipping out over a mirror

if you want to part the waters like curtains

to see who drowned

when you flashed before your eyes

like the afterlife of Egypt

running the promised land down in the desert.

Love like life may be just a matter

of learning to keep your word to a liar

as most decent people bleed to believe

on the rock of their faith,

but I have passed through the belly

of the serpent crescents of the moon

uncoiling like a ram’s horns,

and endured the acids of this long, dark ordeal

in order to coax the pearls

of my transformative delusions of human divinity

like waterlilies out of the snake shit.

Graffitti under the bridge in ancient hieroglyphics,

I lost the Rosetta stone of my voice in the desert

lives ago that I relinquished like a language in your name,

because you were the most ferocious hunger

to ever consume me,

and even now

in the ashbucket of my heart beside the stove,

this chafing of flame like the wings of a distant phoenix.

Now the prophets play more among themselves

and it’s anyone’s guess who’s left

to bless the horns and haloes

of the knocked-up moon

in all these cradles in the treetops

but all night long I hear them fall like apples.

Do I remember you? You were a scalpel of lightning

that shredded me like the secrets of an abandoned embassy

and there weren’t enough stars in the sky

to cauterize the open wound

or urge my blood to clot like rubies

and I’ve been pouring out of myself like this ever since

astonished by the courage of the light

still streaming through the available dimension of your ageless abyss

as if I had a future.

PATRICK WHITE

IT'S A GESTURE OF THE HEART

IT’S A GESTURE OF THE HEART

It’s a gesture of the heart

that no one can explain

that lays its words down like cool herbs

gathered on the moon

to silver someone else’s pain.

We lie down in the same wound

like two stones in the same river

that might make it to the other side

without drowning in the stream

and I speak to you of shores you can reach if you try

and you add yourself like a drop of water to a shoreless sea, and cry.

And for a moment you are the devastated solitude

of a runaway in the rain

who can’t abide the stranger she’s become

as a lipstick butterfly emerges

from the shell-casing chrysalis of your rage

and you put your lips on like wings.

You’re a princess with a white flag

approaching the ashes of a dragon

who sleeps in his own fires

to wake him up from his dream of water

and negotiate a rescue now

if only I’ll concede to show you how.

You want me to respect you because you’re dangerous.

You want to ensnare me

in the white voodoo you’re practising

on the dark side of the moon,

you believe in my eyes

and want me to see something

you’ve never shown anyone before

because a window’s as good as a door to a thief

and you know we have neither in this homelessness

that shelters our grief like dark matter in space

or the far side of a face

we refuse to acknowledge is ours.

I can feel your powers

chafing their scales in the snakepit

like straitjackets they’re urgently trying to slough off

like the old skins of a hand-me-down moon

that don’t quite fit the new one right.

One fang, stars; the other, a starless night,

you know how to open things with a smile

and strike like a gate

should anyone walk between your crescents

like a terrorist with carry-on luggage

who doesn’t dream he’s been detected

as you recoil like a theme to make your point.

It would be easier to tinker with the genes

of the ancient ancestors of a life before sin

than not to want to want to sleep with you,

than not to want to be your bay for the night

and tell you everything’s going to be all right

and mean it and drown the world like a torch or a dragon

in the intimacy of our most urgent delusions.

And even if I didn’t put a match to the candles

they would still ignite

and a black sun would rise at midnight

and let the stars and flowers decide for themselves

whether they wanted to open in its light or not,

and for awhile, deep underground,

there’d be laughter in a coffin

as we posted dirty notes on our headstones

like shocking lovepoems that just rolled off the tip of our tongues

like drops of water charged with stars and snakefire

humming down our spines

like the deathbed hymns of the hydrolines

when they break the news to God.

PATRICK WHITE