THEY'RE ONLY MOMENTS

THEY’RE ONLY MOMENTS

They’re only moments pretending that they’ve past, but how sweet to remember the way things were before they worked out like water looking for its own equilibrium. Tiny fractions of time, gnats in the sunset, that live along with us like the incommensurability of pi. Fireflies and tears at the end of an eyelash fishing in the abyss, the leftover ores of the furnace that poured the dream out like gold, swept up into the corner of an eye, diamonds and dust, the seasoned intimacy with certain stars that shine out from within. Thought-moments, the sensation of the space between two thoughts, time, before it had more than one shadow. Consider the generations of ghosts that death has wrought from sex. All that undoing wrecked, for a moment, by my next breath, as I am renewed by the past like a flower along the path of an unknown messiah who hasn’t walked this way yet. Or maybe it’s just the delinquent waywardness of random chance, but you can still make my fossils dance like summer constellations, fire on the water, tatoos in invisible ink that wake up like dragons at the gates of these gardens I enter like suggestions of rain, like private conversations we once had in the same lifeboat on the moon. And it isn’t wisdom, or experience, or poetry I derive from the insight, but a clarity beyond these grails that doesn’t taste of the cup it’s served in; wine, without veils. And what fool so petty he would insult the largesse of the moment by smearing it with sorrow and longing for what he is missing, when the moment, like the sea at his lips, is always full. So I don’t long for you; I don’t miss you, knowing how you overflow all the goblets of yesterday we raised to our mutual rescue like a waterclock running down a mountain as if you were late for the sea, as if, as you were so often, late for me. My body still mourns like a bell for yours, and the face you wear in my mind like the moon on nightwaters hasn’t changed for years. And your hands? Your hands are still doves of descending fire I feed in the morning from the inexhaustible siloes of the wound in my side you opened like a loveletter mailed to the moon. What window could I ever look through, lense, eye or mirror to hold you when even the sky wasn’t an envelope large enough to keep you from flying away? So I don’t try when you return like this to these timeless intersections where we went every way like the light of a star or the beginning of a universe that still hasn’t managed over the billions of years, or the leaf of the moment, to separate us. Not even the sword of the moon raised on a wave can cleave these waters, nor the orchids of fire that burned like torches of white phosphorous through my brain to conceal my retreat, be darkened by the rain.

PATRICK WHITE

DOWNGRADING THE IMPORTANCE

DOWNGRADING THE IMPORTANCE

Downgrading the importance

of who I was yesterday

to see who I might be today

there’s no window

there’s no mirror

there’s no mind

that retains a trace of me.

I am trashed like a kite on a mountaintop,

torn up like the blueprint of a flawed constellation

that might have made things better

for anyone born under it

like a thirteenth house of the zodiac

that’s open all night to the homeless.

Time makes windchimes

out of the skeletons of young poets

and I can still pick out a few of mine

trying to untangle themselves

from the downed powerlines

of their defective voices.

Born on an island

I stood by the sea

and made choices.

I was young

and wanted to live like life

beyond my means.

And this day forty years later

is just as much a part of then

as now is,

so there’s just as much to spend

and though the features have changed

and the stars been rearranged

to marquee different names,

the seeing remains the same

and the wine is just as sweet

in the cracked

as it is in the whole cup.

I sit down with the moon

and we both drink up

at the backdoor of the asylum

neither of us could save

until we’re both hilariously empty,

knowing, the way life flows,

we’ll never run out of ourselves.

But I don’t let the chooser

talk to the chosen

in my voice anymore

and if the odd road

still barges through the door

now and then

to track thresholds all over the floor

like a painted dance for war and rain,

I’ll still shed a few feathers of light

from the black hole of my brain

to commute the cause.

It’s important to heed the blind

but a true noetic cosmology

is the heretic of its own laws

and doesn’t leave anything behind

that could be construed

as a relic, a derelict, or a sign.

No window.

No mirror.

No mind.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU CAN TEACH THE MIND

YOU CAN TEACH THE MIND

You can teach the mind

but you can’t teach the heart anything

about the way it’s come through everything

like a theme of the ocean through a bloodstream.

The crabs clatter like sleepwalking clocks

across moonlit beaches

holding up the crescents of their claws

like lunar castanets

to dance the time away

with their own shadows.

Walking the road

you become the road

and no one gets anywhere

until only the road arrives.

Petty people toy with small destinations

they call themselves.

Be a great river

and follow your own veins and arteries

down the mountain

through the plains and valleys below

to the vastness of the sea that conceived you.

And when the sea reflects the stars

don’t look for your place in the waters

as if you were reading a starmap

when every drop of you

is distilled from a vine of the light.

When you turn the light around

and pour the mooncup of your existence

back into the river it scooped you from

to ease a stranger’s thirst for stars,

and everything seems empty and forsaken,

and the dream is quaking in the turbo-charged air,

suddenly you disappear

and the sea is everywhere

effaced by its own longing to share.

If you hate the world,

it will go to war with you.

If you love it inordinately

it will ignore you.

Better to be the fire

and not be burnt by your own flame;

better to be the sword

that kills you into life

and not be cut by either edge.

And if you’re a bell

so stuffed with choirs

you can’t sing,

or a liar pimping constellations like bling

in the blaze of your own thing,

you should know

there is no hell for you,

no truth that’s going to sting

that hasn’t already been bored to death

by your significance.

There is no inclusion

no exclusion in clarity.

If you examine closely

the coinciding of thought events

that you misrepresent as your mind,

the whole of the sea is in every wave

and the water isn’t startled

when the fish jumps.

Walking by that sea

everything the world

ever stole from you

is returned by grateful thieves.

PATRICK WHITE

WOKE UP THIS MORNING

WOKE UP THIS MORNING

Woke up this morning

and a whole side of myself

slid like half an island into the sea

to create a tidal wave of emotion

that’s come crashing down over me

as if I were the coastal city

of the continent in its path.

And it’s not unusual for me

to live in the aftermath of myself

like some thermophilic bacterium

after the comets destroy

all my higher life-forms

and slowly complicate myself

back into a new species.

I know how to feather a lizard

into a songbird

and divide the world in two

so there’s a me and there’s a you

a this and a that,

two eyes of the blind,

to be concious of a mind

that sets me apart from everything.

And there are days

I can melt diamonds in my mouth

like spring

but lately

it’s getting harder

to keep faith with what I sing,

harder to taste the gold

in the darkness of the ore

I keep refining like my life

until all I will leave on the table

is a loveletter and a knife

for the next tenant.

Every day’s a new start

if you don’t approach it

with yesterday’s heart.

PATRICK WHITE

SCATTERING

SCATTERING

Scattering black sunflower seed

like the eyes of words

out over the snow

for the squirrels.

Birds watching

high above the page

for an entrance on stage.

Food and empathic renewal,

fuel and the ferocity of life

a softer knife than the ice

because of my sweeping generosity.

I like to thaw things,

turn the brittle supple,

swords into the blades

of the wild irises

that burn like hydrogen

beside the stream,

snowmen that flow

out of themselves

like candles

until all that’s left

are the stones they relied on for eyes.

Stones have their clarities

but seeing

is a very subtle kind of water

that knows reality is not solid

and the light of a single firefly

is hot enough

to melt the planet.

And then like early spring in Perth

when the snow goes

it’s November all over again.

I see everyone alone with themselves,

sad intimates of the shadows

that forsake them like evolution

the moment they cry out

like leaves on the stream to endure.

Maybe it’s one medium to the next

as we’re transformed

by ever more rarefied spaces

that denude us like light from our ions

into luminous bodies with auroral faces

that open like one-night enlightened lilies in the starmud,

or maybe it’s just the death-leap

of the next apple into the bottomless abyss

of a darkness deeper than death is aware of itself.

Conjoined again in the primordial atom

would we feel the same snakepit

of self-rejection

and begin the universe again

by cracking out of the cosmic glain

like serpents with wings in the trees

oxymoronically bound

to the fires above

and the waters below?

Or does one universe pour into another

like a waterclock of insight

that flows on forever

like a snake or a river

through the length of itself

like one inexhaustible thought

with its tail in its mouth?

If so, there’s nothing to know

because the whole and the all of everything

is in every seed I throw to the squirrels,

like the universe in these grains of sand

quick with life

that look back at me warily

like an unspoken rosary

of black-eyed pearls.

Worlds within worlds.

But if there’s nothing discrete

about a mind that can’t be defined

then why the distinction in the first place

and why these fingertips, these eyes, this face

that keeps on trying to see itself like the moon

from the water’s point of view

as if the urgency of the tides in the mirror

were the brides and the oceans

of its own lost emotions, reflected?

There’s more to feeding squirrels

than I suspected.

PATRICK WHITE

IF COMPASSION

IF COMPASSION

If compassion is not

the fruit of your understanding

your tree is rootless and flawed

however beautiful the blossoms are.

And your eyes may be as lustrous

as polished stones

you’ve buffed like the moon on water

but there’s nothing inside

and gold doesn’t pour like dawn

from the dark ore of your suffering

when you cry.

If a child is shot in Gaza

and you don’t bleed

for the evil seed in her head

as you would your own

then only the dead will sow your field

and you will gnaw the hard bread

of your own gravestone

like a book you should have read.

If compassion is not

the fruit of your understanding

however much is illuminated

by the rarity of your perception,

the lamp you go by

is still not ripe,

you’re still a green apple

on the bough

in autumn.

The tongue is a shovel

and knowledge is soil

and you can use it

to dig a grave for your brother

or prepare a garden

as it was meant to do

and your words can flower

into fruit and bread

at the eastern doors of the dead

who will raise the sun up to their lips

and drink from it like a cup,

but if all your heart can do with blood

is jewel the eloquence of the blind

with lucid insights

then your siloes are nothing

but the empty thunder

of lightning without rain

and you will reap the sand like the scythe

of a crescent moon

that’s never tasted grain.

And you may be a glutton,

you may stuff yourself day and night

like the liver of a goose

with spiritual insight

and squat like a rotund buddha on a tatami mat

squirming through the wormholes of your mind

to the other side of the universe

or knock like a xylophone

on the door of the last chakra

above your skull

like an embassy

you seek sanctuary in

but if you can’t feel

the fangs of starvation

that withers a child

in the arms of her mother in Darfur

who gave birth to a lily

that will die like a bat

because the dark matter

in your cosmic frame of reference is fat,

then the advancing flame of your snakefire

is just another lethal candle

for all the charm of the choir

you can’t train not to bite you.

If compassion is not

the fruit of your understanding

you will be disgorged

by the wiser serpents of life

like a black hole turned inside out

and thrown from the back of the truck

like the corpse of a sack of flour

in a refugee camp

and your blood will spoil

like the unused oil in a lamp

that never threw a light on anything.

You have a mouth,

but you won’t scream murder,

you won’t scream genocide

when you know what’s being done.

You have a nose

but you pin it like a clothespeg

to a a breezy clothesline

to sweeten your dirty laundry

by washing out the stink of the corpses.

You have eyes

but you keep them shut

to paint pictures on your windows

from the inside

to see what you want to see

in your house of warped mirrors

and if you should cry to look good

in front of the camera

you’re prompted by a gland of TV tears

to cologne the air with cliches

that smell like the petals that fell

like the machetes of Uganda.

Rock-bands making radical money

whining about nothing,

wanna be killer bees

trying to make their honey sting

inside the hive of a contract

with plug and play guitars

and fireworks that swarm the stars

like chimney-sparks from Auschwitz.

You have ears.

But they’re dead shells

and the sea you once listened for as a child

has been poured out of them

like living water

so you can’t hear

your daughter

being raped in the Congo,

or the scream of the boy

who died like a toy-soldier

when the Hannibal hearts

of the cannibal generals

played war-games with his life.

If compassion is not

the fruit of your understanding

you will lick your heart

like a lump of coal

you tore out of your own chest,

trying to taste the diamonds,

and you will know what it means

when the eyelids of the light

close in upon you

like a starless night

that undoes the seams

of your wasteband constellations

like the stitches and staples

it uses to sew the children

back together

in a patchwork comforter of wounds

it will lay over your head

like a sky for the dead

all reds and gangrenes

as the faces of the children rise

one by one like ghoulish moons

and apple blossoms

to stain your death

with their foolish dreams.

PATRICK WHITE

THE PAST

THE PAST

The past is slurred, smeared, smudged

like unknown, unnamed stars

deep in the night

rending their light like widows

that scream across the darkness

weeping mirrors

for the death of their light.

Protean, amorphic, the past

is a stem cell

not a pyramid

that keeps being nudged into eyes

by things as they change in the present.

The past is a river of many voices

all flowing as one

like the threads of the strong rope

it used to climb down from heaven

like a pendulum,

like a man unjustly condemned.

The past is a rosary of skulls,

the beads of many moons

strung like vertebrae

along a spinal cord

tuning up

to jam with the spheres.

I have drifted in the high fields of the past

like the evening vapour

of the man I breathed out

and watched the hours fall like petals

from the shy clocks of the flowers

and knew the blood and the time

and all the variant themes of my sorrows

were not the old cups I once drank from

when I could chug the moon,

nor the black hoods

I pull down like eclipses

over heads that will surely come off

like the lame excuses I indict

for all these acephalic tomorrows,

but always and forever

without beginning or end

the loneliest road of now

in the mode of a man

that life has ever walked.

But you mustn’t think

the road ahead

like a wave or a breath or time

is driven by the road behind,

or that the future hasn’t happened yet

or the morning is younger than the night

or the past is a lack of beginnings.

Be a smart fish and swim through the net

of your own constellation like stars

always a prelude ahead of their shining

like new moons opening their eyes

on the illustrated calendars of our scars.

Prophecy is just a future memory

you look at now

with the eyes of the past

before the arising of signs

smears the bubble

with rainbows and oilslicks

and the symbolic slums

of rundown zodiacs.

I look into the space before me.

I look into the space behind.

No difference.

Nothing to lose.

Nothing to find.

No waves on the ocean of mind.

My death achieved at the moment of birth

with the first breath

of my beginningless beginning,

I am time. I am the pageless calendar

of the ageless earth, the eternal abyss

that primed the stars in such a way

the light is not young

the light is not old

and the taste of the rain in spring

is the taste of the rain in autumn.

There’s a past.

But it hasn’t begun yet.

And there’s a future.

But don’t wait.

PATRICK WHITE