WINTER WIND

WINTER WIND

Winter wind thrashing the pines

like a mad guitarist

who only knows the single chord of himself.

The trees relent to resist the power

and shake the rain off

like dogs that have finished swimming.

Dirty window. Snow slumped

over the roots of everything

like a waiting crocus

in the bulb of itself

brewing its violets.

I look at the roiling sky

and my heart stews it like a bedsheet

to disinfect it of old passions

that once stained it like the moon.

First you suffer the pain of the loss,

and then, worse, the loss of the pain.

There’s a grammar for language

and an intuitive logic of metaphor

that is the grammar of poems and dreams,

and math may be the unlimited ally of matter,

and the law hold auditions

to discover who’s right and wrong,

and thoughts may arise

like the untethered kites and testflights

of new constellations

that keeping crashing and burning

like windfalls of fireflies

and enlightened chandeliers,

and even an embryo has HOX genes

to tell it where to put the eyes

above the nose and the mouth

in the long sentence it is growing

like Canada geese heading south in the fall,

but I’ve never discovered,

and I’ve been looking for years,

any order or path to my life

that wasn’t a journey

without origin or destination

more subtle and supple and insubstantial

than the wind, or the moon’s reflection

on the microdroplets of my cold, winter breath.

I’ve bluffed and improvised

and lied and guessed

and dared and jumped

like Basho’s frog into the old pond

of the world---Splash!---all the days of my life,

like a man who doesn’t know

if he’s got a parachute on.

I’ve been drowning in stars

that filled my lungs with light

until I could learn to breathe in the radiance

of the life that flashed before my eyes

like the snakefire of a lightning bolt

liberating fireflies from their halos

so they could wear the horns of the galaxies.

For one deluded moment there

I actually thought I was doing some good,

but it wasn’t long before I discovered

I had to remove the intention

before I could.

Now the flowers bloom

all around me by themselves

and I rain whenever I feel

the lonely bells of the sea

have ripened enough within me to fall

and I see what the rain sees

and later, if it’s summer,

the clean flowers

and the wet bees.

PATRICK WHITE

IF THERE'S FIRE IN YOUR DIAMOND

IF THERE’S FIRE IN YOUR DIAMOND

If there’s fire in your diamond

and there is, sometimes people

will turn their hearts into fire hydrants

and come running to put it out

as if fire were their worst emergency.

What the fools don’t know is

that when the diamonds get hot enough

they flow like liberated mirrors

through the dry creekbeds

longing like oases in a desert of stars

for the next flashflood of light.

And they taste of eyes

that have looked at the moon a long time,

and ravens of coal

that were jewelled by their clarity

deep in the igneous snakepit of oceans

that move creatively under us

trying to make the pieces fit

like the continental plates

of a shattered skull

that has mellowed into a jigsaw puzzle.

Listen to me, babies; listen now.

This is a school of rogue stars,

sabres of light that flash like fire

off the windows of your waterjewel

like translucent insights at a glance

that add themselves like eyes to the shining.

Return what you see to the seer

and everything will become

exquisitely clear.

PATRICK WHITE

LIGHT UPON LIGHT

LIGHT UPON LIGHT

for Jesse

Light upon light, darkness within darkness,

both are inherently blind

to the creative radiance

that opens our eyes like leaves on a tree

so that everyone can see

what they can’t.

But the mind can’t find or lose itself.

The light doesn’t illuminate itself.

The darkness can’t hide from itself.

Think of how many worlds

you can throw down

the black hole in the waterjewel

of your green eye

like moons and pennies and stars

into a wishing well

you can drink from with the morning glory

and still, after all these years

that absence isn’t full.

That’s what makes you an artist,

that’s what makes you the embodiment

of an enormous longing

to express the form of an unattainable identity

that burns without the shadow of a star

in the unwitnessed fires of its own clarity,

that’s what makes you want to make seas of your tears

and wash yourself off the beach

like a watercolour of the dawn

into the depths

where you can be more intensely

all the strange, wonderful, terrible

mystically specific things you are

when you glow by yourself in the dark.

Don’t underestimate the power

of your own most intimate vulnerability

to pull the sword out of the moonstone

or crack it like a blade of grass.

The petty look for company outside themselves

but the great, when they’re lonely,

expand their solitude to include everything.

That’s why the universe keeps getting bigger

and angelic flowers

like paintings and poems and lovers

keeping blooming like moons

along the long, dark, radiant way

we keep rising like the dead in spring

or pale fire in the lifeboat of a flower

from our own demonic roots.

The wines of love and compassion

move like blood

through the vines of hell

and the moon removes itself like a thorn

from the thumb of a bell

that keeps letting you in

like a thief into heaven

through your own back door

because the discipline of a great artist

poet, lover, human

is learning to wield the fire

of the dragon who ate the moon

and summoned the rain

out of its own eclipse

like a sword of white lightning

in the innocent hands

of the heretic who cleft the tree

like a wound in the hoof of a holy war

because it’s never been won before

by anyone who couldn’t inspire water

to catch fire

like stars in a mirror

without putting themselves out.

Ultimately, what’s it all about?

It’s sometimes hard to tell

that the loyal hookers in heaven

are the most reliable muses of hell

and for every demon that jumps from grace

the whole choir rises like phoenix fire

from the aging pyres of autumn

to take its place

like the emotion on the face

of the new moon

when she recovers herself

like a lost ocean

among familiar avatars

when the flesh turns to stars

and your afterlife isn’t just

the long conversation

you meant to sit down

and have with yourself

at a seance of scars.

There are surer signs of life

than can be found off the coast

of a storm drain

where the leaves and the loveletters

wonder who was written in vain

but I know you better

than the pulse of the rain

on the eyelid of a ghost.

You’re Jesse Eden James.

You’re that artist who woke up

like water on Mars

to green the dream with your eyes

long before anyone else

even realized you were a planet

and there was someone original in the garden

the apple wouldn’t condemn

and the snake couldn’t pardon

for knowing how to flow

like a sword through fire

and when you tempered your heat in diamonds,

like light through the valleys

that run like wounds

along the blade of the moon

in a full eclipse,

not harden the petals

of the black rose you’ve thorned

with the haloes and horns of the mystic metals

that adorn you like the crescents of night

out over the secret seas

that rise and fall

like radiant asides of the moon

whispered between parentheses

as the constellation of the green stars

that crown the rosehips

with jesters’ caps

burns its starmaps

and puts a finger like a lighthouse to your lips

as it rises like a waterbird

jewelled by the moon

from the sacred groves

of sunken ships.

PATRICK WHITE

PATRICK WHITE

AS YOU GET OLDER

AS YOU GET OLDER

As you get older you begin

to look at your face more and more

as some kind of leftover on the curb of the mirror

that hasn’t quite finished eating.

But no more than you can keep

the snow from melting

or a candle from weeping

its way out of the light

without improving the darkness,

is there anything you can do

to change your mugshot posted on the moon

even if the last crescent

should suggest itself like a scalpel.

If I look at myself now

through the eyes of an earlier phase

that appears like the ghost

of a young man at the window

or some blossom that has fallen away

like a lover

I realize I have been shaken out

like a starmap from the shining

and there are constellations of black holes

like moles peeping through the paper like skin.

My face is the cover of a racy novel

in a public lending library

that has been taken out too many times

and thumbed to death like a rose

that’s indifferent to its own orgasm

and my eyes have weakened like stars

that fall short of the lightyears that it takes

to make it across the titanic abyss

of my expanding brain.

And for all the lifetime

I have stood like a prophet

on the mountain of my nose

like a lightning rod on a mystic peak

waiting to talk to God,

my granite commandment

that guides me like a rudder through stone

when I come down like an avalanche

of sacred tablets,

has been broken three times in a parking lot,

getting knocked down for something

that everyone’s forgot,

but I once stood up for like a blood clot.

And I remember once when my lip

was parted by a punch like the Red sea

that has since scarred up

like a little ravine on the moon.

Now I finger the cracks and the lines

of the dried-up creekbed

that no longer dreams

of the freshwater streams

that once ran like furious flashfloods

through the alleys of death

into the gleaming suburbs

of the promised land.

I return like the afterlife

of a lost language

to read my own hieroglyphics

to find out how I was finally overthrown

like a sandstorm that has blown itself out

in three languages on a worn stone

that deciphers me like a face.

What does the wind see

when it looks for its own reflection

over the water? And who is the me

that has taken my place in the mirror

and exhumes me like a dynasty

of lonely, palatial tombs

to grin like a mummy

packed like a leather suitcase

under glass

as if time had no class

and they were checking passengers at the stargate

for anyone without I.D.

who looks like me.

But I don’t think of time as a thief.

The tree just outgrows its own wanted posters

and lets go of them like blossoms

and orchard moons

that fall away from the bough

like pilgrims along the road

returning home

after circumabulating

the kissing stone in the shrine of the fruit

that contains the tree all over again.

I don’t think the blossoms were fake

or that the fruit falls for my sake

or there’s some kind of reservation

I can make in the years ahead

not to line up with the dead

as if it could serve any function

to indulge a personal compuction to endure,

though I’ve never really been

very brave about these things.

So there it is, the full moon of my face

and the smudge of my eyes and my mouth

and hair like smoke that’s drifting away

and how much strangeness there is

in the illimitable intimacy

I have with the reflection

I’ve stared into for years now

like a slow fire

or a perilous apple

and how little say I’ve had in the changes

that have bound me like a stone to the flames.

I look at my face like a distant planet

I’m trying to discover life on

under all that ice and darkness like water

that tastes of my beginnings

and I look through both ends of the scope

and one eye dwarfs me like a black hole

and the other reads me

like a message in a bottle

I wrote in blood and wine

and sent out like a dove

or a loveletter on the vine

I could not hope to see again

knowing the new moon is born blind

with teeth like sundials

breaking through the gums of the hills

like an inflammation of the dawn

and I will live on and on and on

as everything but me

and like a sailor at sea in the morning

who is still astonished

by the profusion of light

that ends the night

and peering deeply into his own eyes

that evaporate with the stars

like birds from cracked bells

turns into the oncoming squalls,

grateful for the warning.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU CAN LOOK OUT OVER YOUR LIFE

YOU CAN LOOK OUT OVER YOUR LIFE

You can look out over your life like the sea

even in a dewdrop, just like the moon

in a single drop of water, in a tear,

in every bead of a broken rosary,

and you still really won’t know

what you’re looking at

from above and below

when you turn to go

and the light leaks out of that jewel

and the stars evaporate like mist in the morning.

The most intimate example of myself is me

so I lean back sometimes

and array the years like the wingspan

of the wheeling word

that hones its eyes like diamonds

and scans the abysmal realms that surround it

for any tree to land in

but it seems I was born before gravity

and what is most profound

when it is lived wholly

often makes the greatest fool of me.

What strikes me more and more frequently

as I grow older though

is how in the space of one breath

the clarity of the mystery

can reveal itself

like a feature on the face of God

and the next

the mystery of the clarity is us.

And the only lifeboats of hope

that are still afloat

on this starless nightslick of a sea

are my eyes like fish in the depths

and stars in the watchful skies.

But I haven’t looked for salvation in the seeing

and I’ve always been too much of a shapeshifter

to linger over constellations like plans

for the reform of my being.

Besides, enlightenment and delusion

might concede a slight difference

in the enticement of lures

but they both fish with the same hook

and the crescent moon is left dangling

in her own dead seas

like a queen that got bumped by a rook.

What have I learned?

I had to become a very sophisticated savage

to survive these visionary ordeals

that brain me like an ambush

when I stick to any path that isn’t my own walking.

And when you stop to listen to the toads along the way

it’s important not to let them talk you out of yourself

or take what they say too seriously.

Like the choir in a church I’m passing

late in the night

like a different fate

I walk by curiously.

PATRICK WHITE

I ONCE KNEW A DOOR-TO-DOOR BUDDHA

I ONCE KNEW A DOOR-TO-DOOR BUDDHA

I once knew a door-to-door buddha

who thought of nothing as the space left

by everything he had lost

and grew so exquisitely refined

he hung himself in a keyhole

with a piece of nirvanically-flavoured dental floss.

We change in ways we never thought we would.

So right now

you are not especially beautiful

and I am not particularly wise or good.

Yesterday, the moon. And today

this egg in a snakepit

debating scales and feathers

as I try to swallow my own tail

up to and including my head

to see if I can disappear

like the tatoo of the dragon

born in the burning mirror

the mercy of the fire sloughs like skin.

Now there’s a scar in the sky

where my face used to be

and the crystal skull I’m drinking from

looks uncannily like me

before I left home like a grave

that wasn’t deep enough to dream in

of all the things I never became.

Right candle. Wrong flame, perhaps,

but I had to make the starmaps up as I went along

like the words to something you sing alone

when your heart’s on fire

and the dead are still flesh and bone.

It was never enough just to see the visions

I wanted to see the eye that saw them,

the black jewel that shone in all directions

like the unwitnessed clarity of the dark light

that engenders the light we go by

and I resolved like diamond

that if I couldn’t be a petty fool like other people

then I would exact my revenge

by aspiring to be a great one.

But that work is done, and now

there’s nothing left of me to be

that isn’t creatively giving and free

so that when I’m listening to your confession

I don’t appoint a jury of fireflies

and call the court into session

as we all rise like the tears in your eyes

asking to be forgiven.

I don’t turn my blood into a flowchart

and point to the north star

like the axis of the evidence

that everything turns on.

I listen to your lies inventively

as your chandeliers crash

like trees and constellations

in an ice-storm all around you

and remembering I once put

the ripples in your earrings

like an apple that fell into the river,

I grow human and warm,

I assume a kinder, more fictitious form

and remove the moon from your eye like a sliver.

PATRICK WHITE

NOT MUCH TO SAY

NOT MUCH TO SAY

Not much to say to anyone

that I haven’t said before

and what I’m listening to

is unwound in my widening wake

like the threads of a song

I once lived through and through and through.

Nothing is true. Nothing is false.

And there’s no witness to anything

so it’s impossible to be anyone else.

Spent a hundred dollars on birdfeeders

but outside the window, no bird.

I’m not building a stage in a stadium

to make an appearance

among my own thoughts

like an encouraging word.

If I am not yet wholly insane

then there still might be a slight chance

that I am perfectly absurd.

And everything I’ve ever said

has been the orphan of a lost voice

winging its way like an echo through a dark valley

that wakes up like a wound

that thought it was dead

and flashes through my head

like rain on the heiroglyphs of a dry creekbed.

But right now

I’m not looking for my own footprints

in the starmud that walked this way

a million years ago

when I lifted myself up off my own ass

to check out what was moving in the high grass.

Things pass. The monkey grows old

making up reasons

and the plack of conciousness

hardens like granite

around the jewel of life

that keeps flowing away like water

whether you drown in your own fever

in the inflammation of the city

or expire like the last tear of the third eye

of an exhausted mirage in a mystic desert

that’s forgotten how to cry.

PATRICK WHITE