CHANCING UPON MYSELF

CHANCING UPON MYSELF

Chancing upon myself alone in the bedroom mirror

as I pass like a flash of the moon on stormy water

I realize I can’t even call my reflection my own

as the demon who gives, and the angel who won’t say

renew me once again like the first draft

of an old passion play off Broadway.

What difference between the lake and the sky

or me and the mirror

when we both look into each other

from behind the same face through the same eyes?

And the demon suggests to me

in an off-handed voice

as if the insight were obvious,

that everything in the universe

is the likeness of everything else,

and the darkest joy to ever inspire

life upon earth, the open secret

that gapes in the hearts

of the humans who seek it,

is to revel in the similitudes.

It’s not necessary to dust

the water or the sky with stars

to see who left their fingerprints behind

when all you’ve got to do

is turn yourself inside out

like that forensic glove you’re wearing like skin

to identify who’s who for the record.

Of course, it’s you. Of course, it’s me.

Who else?

And there you go again

perpetrating the universe upon yourself

as if you were somehow hidden within it

as the angel puts her finger to her lips

and the demon kisses what’s forbidden,

all those differences born of the simulacra

that embed themselves like the green star in the apple

that teaches the wine

that the first property of light

is to shine,

is to intensify the darkness into diamonds

that will weep in their own fires for joy

that all the different stories, all

the myriad forms in the night

tarry along the road

to gaze up in astonishment

at the same constellation

that was born under you

as if you were the crystal skull

in the house of the dark mother

that determined its fate.

The taste of the vine

in darkness and light

is our simultaneous illumination

and just as the sun raises

the slender goblets

of the morning glory to its lips

and drinks the moonlight down

to the lees of a full eclipse

so are we always drunk

on our own inter-reflected shining,

drunk on a world that’s drunker than us,

setting a course by the fireflies

who guide us like sunken ships

who never left port

to the wilderness coast of continents

that no one’s ever been before

though there are signs of our drinking

scattered like a billion messages

in a billion broken bottles

all along the shore

and waves of light

drunk on their own diamonds

deliriously muscling their way out of the water

like the horse-bodies of the gods

they’re learning to ride like humans

to their own rescue.

PATRICK WHITE

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