BLACK FOSSIL OF A STAR

BLACK FOSSIL OF A STAR

Black fossil of a star

that’s bereft of all that shining,

even the emptiness I feel tonight

is a deficit of light

deeper than anything

this darkness that binds me

might reveal.

There are no wounds

worth throwing stars into anymore,

no mouths to watch like weathervanes,

no eyes waiting like water on the moon

to thaw like the jewels of life,

no blossom on the dead branch,

no bird on the green bough,

no voice in the well.

My heart is a rumour of sand.

And even after all these years

of living among the loves, the lives

the lies and the books

of this estranged man I am

I still don’t understand

why he doesn’t know me.

Dark energy, dark matter,

it is no small thing

to give your eyes back to the water

when the seeing is finished with them

and they return to the mindstream

like rain on a snake in a dream

that swallows reality whole.

I look for myself everywhere,

I dare thresholds and zoos at night,

I enter dangerous spaces

riddled with dragon bones

to look for the lotus that blooms in fire

like the first elation of the desire

to illuminate creation with a mind.

But I cannot find the antecedent to my existence

in the shadows I cast upon the earth behind me,

lost in this labyrinth of fingerprints

that keeps leading back to me, nor

in the light of the lamp I hold up before me

like fruit on the bough

to make my way down this road at night

that deludes me into thinking

there’s a continuity to my life

I can follow like a theme of water

through all these changes

back to a sea of awareness

where the keels of distinction

are not torn on the reefs of the brain

and clarity isn’t just

the exquisite extinction of pain.

PATRICK WHITE

I NEED A NEW TRUTH

I NEED A NEW TRUTH

I need a new truth

I can open like a door

and let the old one walk out into the world

with all her heavy feelings

like wounded swans in the rain

she feathered like arrows

to make her point lethal.

Time doesn’t heal much

and you can plant a crutch

but it still doesn’t sprout leaves.

The old truths just don’t go on bleeding.

They keep cutting deeper than meaning

into the life of a man

still awake at four in the morning

trying hard not to understand

why he doesn’t call out for help

when he drowns in the windows.

There’s an art to being a human

you must be alone to live,

and a dangerous passion for insight

that will open the eyes of the rain

like petals of shedding moonlight

on the empty grave of the brain

that disinters us like unrequited pain

to seek out why we breathe and grow

like assassins suckled on our own shadows.

There are secrets to life

that it is ignorance to know

and only the great fools of the spirit

can comprehend without putting an end

to the profundity of their antics.

The rest is a fiction of semantics

unfolding like the world

in the wake of a word

darker than love

when it’s time to say good-bye.

The doors don’t open by themselves

and the windows won’t cry unless I do

and it may be years before you realize

the jewels of enlightenment

you want to bathe in

to wash the world off your skin

will be drawn like tears from your own eyes

when things like people and candles come to an end.

I will miss you, my friend.

I will mourn you at the crossroads

of every new beginning

like a road I once took

and will not take again

and your absence will undo me

like an absolute of space

and there are things I will say to the moon

when I am shaking with terror and grace

that I could not say to your face

when it rose over the hills

like the unintelligible headstone

of someone who refused to confess

that she was buried under it.

I will wander the house as I do tonight

and try to suggest new shadows to the light

that don’t clash like white against white

in the dark blazing that burns me out

like stars in the marquee of a constellation

no one can see

who looks for me

with any eyes other than these

that have learned to shine on their own.

And I will remember how you once said of my life

that I didn’t deserve it,

and all I could answer back was

that you don’t need to believe life is good

to want to preserve it.

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I NEED A NEW TRUTH

I NEED A NEW TRUTH

I need a new truth

I can open like a door

and let the old one walk out into the world

with all her heavy feelings

like wounded swans in the rain

she feathered like arrows

to make her point lethal.

Time doesn’t heal much

and you can plant a crutch

but it still doesn’t sprout leaves.

The old truths just don’t go on bleeding.

They keep cutting deeper than meaning

into the life of a man

still awake at four in the morning

trying hard not to understand

why he doesn’t call out for help

when he drowns in the windows.

There’s an art to being a human

you must be alone to live,

and a dangerous passion for insight

that will open the eyes of the rain

like petals of shedding moonlight

on the empty grave of the brain

that disinters us like unrequited pain

to seek out why we breathe and grow

like assassins suckled on our own shadows.

There are secrets to life

that it is ignorance to know

and only the great fools of the spirit

can comprehend without putting an end

to the profundity of their antics.

The rest is a fiction of semantics

unfolding like the world

in the wake of a word

darker than love

when it’s time to say good-bye.

The doors don’t open by themselves

and the windows won’t cry unless I do

and it may be years before you realize

the jewels of enlightenment

you want to bathe in

to wash the world off your skin

will be drawn like tears from your own eyes

when things like people and candles come to an end.

I will miss you, my friend.

I will mourn you at the crossroads

of every new beginning

like a road I once took

and will not take again

and your absence will undo me

like an absolute of space

and there are things I will say to the moon

when I am shaking with terror and grace

that I could not say to your face

when it rose over the hills

like the unintelligible headstone

of someone who refused to confess

that she was buried under it.

I will wander the house as I do tonight

and try to suggest new shadows to the light

that don’t clash like white against white

in the dark blazing that burns me out

like stars in the marquee of a constellation

no one can see

who looks for me

with any eyes other than these

that have learned to shine on their own.

And I will remember how you once said of my life

that I didn’t deserve it,

and all I could answer back was

that you don’t need to believe life is good

to want to preserve it.

PATRICK WHITE

FREE ALREADY

FREE ALREADY

Free already and it doesn’t cost a cent

if you’ve got the courage to live it.

It’s the high price of maintaining your chains,

iron and golden, the ones

that have convinced you they’re lifelines,

the ones that moor you to the bottom like anchors,

the ones you collect like silver umbilical cords

looped like rosaries through the eyes of your keys

to various spiritual experiences

you once occupied like celestial rooms

that enervates you,

the ones you think you look good in

when you’re blinged out like a constellation

for a sleazy night on the town,

blood-chains, daisy-chains, thought-chains,

the chain of your vetebrae

that connects your ass to your head,

and the chains that are holding you up like a bridge

streaming with rush-hour traffic,

that lift you up and let you down

like a valve over the moat of your heart

that’s chained like a kite to the wall of a dungeon.

It’s thinking the chains are solid,

elemental and necessary

that binds you to them

in a linkage of circumstance

that weeps like solder all over the real.

You’re hammering out iron ellipses

on the anvil of your heart

you’ve poured your blood into

like a sword of light you’ve melted down

like the stone you drew it from

to chain the music to its notes

like a wharf to a gaggle of lifeboats

knocking their empty heads together

in a squall of bad weather.

And you’re blinding real water

in an eyeless mirage

if you chain yourself to freedom or the void

or bind yourself to the exigent absurdities

in the abyss of enlightenment

mistaking nullity for the way

to delete the dark incumbent

you carry around like a sail

you keep breathing into

as if a nose-ring could enslave the wind

or the looms of the spiders teach the angels to weave.

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FREE ALREADY

FREE ALREADY

Free already and it doesn’t cost a cent

if you’ve got the courage to live it.

It’s the high price of maintaining your chains,

iron and golden, the ones

that have convinced you they’re lifelines,

the ones that moor you to the bottom like anchors,

the ones you collect like silver umbilical cords

looped like rosaries through the eyes of your keys

to various spiritual experiences

you once occupied like celestial rooms

that enervates you,

the ones you think you look good in

when you’re blinged out like a constellation

for a sleazy night on the town,

blood-chains, daisy-chains, thought-chains,

the chain of your vetebrae

that connects your ass to your head,

and the chains that are holding you up like a bridge

streaming with rush-hour traffic,

that lift you up and let you down

like a valve over the moat of your heart

that’s chained like a kite to the wall of a dungeon.

It’s thinking the chains are solid,

elemental and necessary

that binds you to them

in a linkage of circumstance

that weeps like solder all over the real.

You’re hammering out iron ellipses

on the anvil of your heart

you’ve poured your blood into

like a sword of light you’ve melted down

like the stone you drew it from

to chain the music to its notes

like a wharf to a gaggle of lifeboats

knocking their empty heads together

in a squall of bad weather.

And you’re blinding real water

in an eyeless mirage

if you chain yourself to freedom or the void

or bind yourself to the exigent absurdities

in the abyss of enlightenment

mistaking nullity for the way

to delete the dark incumbent

you carry around like a sail

you keep breathing into

as if a nose-ring could enslave the wind

or the looms of the spiders teach the angels to weave.

PATRICK WHITE

IF YOUR HEART IS A BURNING HOUSE

IF YOUR HEART IS A BURNING HOUSE

for Joanne, thirty years late

but not a lifetime too soon

If your heart is a burning house

you keep running back into like blood

to save someone you’re not even sure is there

like the perfect flame

of the dangerous stranger who set you ablaze

you might pray for rain, and rain might fall

and put the fire out

and mercy flood in like an ocean

but you will taste the ashes the rest of your life

like the bucket beside the stove

of a kitchen philosophy

that roars at the stars

but ends up shovelling the words

like an avalanche of urns out of its own mouth

it will later throw on the roots of the roses.

Thirty years since we last saw each other

when I woke you up in the morning

and said I was leaving and afraid

and you with a smile

that can still bring me to tears said

don’t be such a coward.

And in that last moment of our life together

everything I had ever loved about you

pierced my heart like a spear

that had been dipped in the flaming exlixir

of your long, auburn hair, Irish lava

flowing over the side of the bed

like the coast of a new island

I would be marooned on for the rest of my days

like a lifeboat scuttled on the moon

I keep trying to patch with fire

and launch on the next high tide

that comes in like a bride

and throws herself down upon me

like water on my funeral pyre.

But the only thing that ebbs and neaps here

are these shadows and eclipses

in the fierce silence of a mouthless scream

and a face that’s always turned away from me

when I look for you among the planets

like the longing of a chromatically aberrant telescope

trembling with stars and rainbows

high atop its rickety tripod footstool

with its head in the noose of another birth

and there is no earth.

PATRICK WHITE

IF YOU WANT TO LIE APART

IF YOU WANT TO LIE APART

If you want to lie apart from your lover

like the Red Sea in bed

there’s no need to thrash the water with a sword

when the tone of one word will do it.

If you’re angry and dispossessed as the full moon

and you’re holding your lover like a viper to your breast

because he appeals to you like death

and no one could guess how good it feels

to slough off his mortal coil like skin

no need to cauterize your constellations like tatoos

and vex the moonlight with the ashes of doves

rising from the smoke of the angelic X

you painted on your door

to text you away from contagion

because no one lives there anymore

and the hex of a whore

is a stronger medicine

than the exlixir of virgins

that come running with a cure.

Time to wash the watercolours out of your eyes

that run like blood in the rain.

Time to realize even the universe

can’t keep it together

and everything is flying off into space

like a fifteen billion year old tantrum

and no one knows why.

Maybe God was a hidden secret in his solitude

who wished to be known

and committed suicide

just to see his own life

flashing before his eyes

in the company of you and me

before he returned to himself like death

on the last breath he let go of like creation.

Point is: it’s time to stop looking for a suicide note

he might have left you like a sacred text

of his hidden gospel by the Dead Sea

and realize that just being here

is enough of a cosmology

to get you through the night

and the only direction

you should heed in the light

are your own eyes. It’s time

to stop thinking you showed up in the world

like some kind of unlooked-for surprise

and that your life is a bonus

that puts the onus on the lucky to be grateful

because you know better than I do

how hard it is to love the unlucky

when sad luck turns into the hateful

and the falling stars of scar-crossed lovers

pit and pummel the moon

until it swells over the horizon

like a palatte of black and blue

to smudge the bruises on its face

in the mirrors of the lakes and the dew

with ontological cosmetics

that indelibly paint the view

over the broken window

that murders the birds with lies and illusions.

Those aren’t lovemaps on your cheek.

They’re contusions.

PATRICK WHITE