EVERY WORD TURNS AWAY

EVERY WORD TURNS AWAY

Every word turns away

shame-faced and a liar

when you try to say things so true

they could only be contaminated

by a mouth.

And the tree in your voice

may be its own guitar

and every flower of your breath

be rooted in stars like the wind,

and you can spend a whole lifetime

trying to say everything

as if words could exact living destinies

from the names on the scrolls of the dead

to save everyone, to save

everything that exists

from nothing

but when you’re done,

when the tree falls silent

and the bird has flown away,

everything, just as it is,

will still be left unsaid

and just as there is no likeness for the living

there will be no likeness for the dead.

It is the unsayability of the mystic theme

that runs through us like a road through a dream

or the poem in our bloodstream

that is the cosmological constant

that keeps on expressing us

like waves of its own water

though we go looking for ourselves

like empty cups

to fill the topics of our names

forgetting like the moon

that water is its own chalice.

Why kneel by the water like the moon

to drink from your own face

as if it tasted any different downstream

than it did when you were a cloud

high on the mountain

when you can taste

the facelessness of the sea in everything

if you drink deep enough?

And there are eyes full of wine

waiting to get drunk on you

that haven’t bloomed yet

and wells that your tears

are still falling through

like plumb-bobs and pennies

that haven’t reached bottom yet,

and deaths that are antiquely your own

you must rise from

like the hosts of the morning glory

to show the gaping bells of your irrefutable ghosts

it can be done.

Words have bad memories.

Words are troubled sleep and nightmares.

Words are dead trees in a winter swamp

that couldn’t wake a mosquito up.

Words are the ring of the gold on the countertop

that tells you it isn’t true.

Words are a snakepit of spraybombs

that go off like terrorists

on any average day

in the market-heart of the silence.

Words are wanted posters

nailing their own likenesses

to the crucifix of a telephone pole

to divert their detection like water

from the tines

and witching wands of the lightning

that seeks them out like humans alone in the open.

And if you try to say the unsayable

by smearing the view

with a new holy book

what have you said

that isn’t just more graffitti

scratched on God’s face,

or the vast scream of the dawn

just before you wake up from the dream

to discover you’re gone?

Words are the negative space

we use to delineate

the shapes of ourselves

when we talk ourselves

like water into fish,

like infinite, open-mouthed skies

that have winged their way into words

like autumn rain in the hearts of the waterbirds

that leave no trace behind.

Words are blind. And eyeless.

Words are boulders

in the throat of the impasse

when the mountain tries to speak

of things that last,

or mud in the stream of the valley

when it lowers its gaze like a poem

to whisper of things that pass.

Words turn the spell

on the sorcerer

and dangle him

like a participial puppet

from the strings

of his own grammar,

his own magic,

like stars in farcical cocoons

on the trophy-lines of his webs.

Why rummage through

the wardrobe of a wave

for something to cover your nakedness

when every time you go swimming

you can wear the sea?

Take a page out of the book of the stars

and keep words behind you

like seagulls in the wake of your shining

so by the time anyone can see you

that’s not who you are.

Words are living creatures,

words are all eyes and ears

as vivid and vital as yours

looking out from under the autumn leaves

like a flower pressed into a book

that gives it no meaning

that it didn’t have in the fields.

Ignorance doesn’t eclipse the light

and enlightenment doesn’t illuminate.

You may talk forever around it

but what’s the meaning of fire

or sit by the mindstream all night

making constellations of the fireflies

that come together like words

and there may be no separation

between the water

and the reflections of the stars

that ride it like long-legged spiders,

or between you and the earth

not so much difference

as a grass blade,

but what’s the meaning of water,

what’s the meaning of the earth under your feet,

what’s the meaning of that blade of grass?

Words speak for themselves,

not anything else.

Words are living voices

not harps in the throats of the dead.

A word is not a thought,

not an emotion,

not a stand-in for reality

not the verbal version

of the stem cells on your tongue,

or the eloquent fragrance of a brain

recruiting bees to chafe their pollen into honey.

You can spend a whole lifetime saying

and still not know what a word is,

a whole lifetime feeling

and not know what emotion is,

a whole lifetime thinking

and not know what a thought is.

Beyond appearances

that are not wholly

at the discretion of the depths,

nothing is the likeness of anything else

in the unity of their uniqueness,

the oneness of their oneness,

the mystic specificity

of many rivers

unspooling the mountain

to weave this infinite sea of awareness

into the myriad forms and tongues and waves of us

who take on minds and hang

like empty cups and water droplets

from the tip of a blade of star grass,

from our own hooked fingers,

the black crescents of the lunar triggers

that play Russian roulette with our heads,

and the dreams that fit us like skin

and the lean watercolours of our sweat

on form-fitted sheets

when our separation troubles us

like waves trying to say the unsayable sea

to islands that already flow

like clear diamonds

that have mastered the yoga of tears.

Everything’s like that

when things turn from solid to real.

Even these words.

Even in the fireflies

no one ever sees

deep in the well of the word,

even in the human heart,

the star, the rock, the tree,

in the smallest eye of water

that ever looked upon a summer sky,

the unsayable sea

of the whole of this multiverse

that sheds worlds like cool petals

from the sea mouths of the mind,

the life of everything

effortlessly exists

to explore its own weather

like water, to hold

its own life like a jewel

up to the light

and see everyone crowned

in a palace of water

whenever you say your name

to the stars

just to let them know

that you were here

as if you meant it.

PATRICK WHITE

FOR SOME

FOR SOME

For some the world is always about to end, and for others, it never really begins. Two eyes of the same watershed. Both blind to their own lucidity, the ruse of unfathomable fish swimming through their own light like dreamers who never wake up. I recall an old Chinese poet sailing his poems like paperboats, blossoms of the moon, downstream to elaborate the impermanence of the wind. Exquisite felicity! No ignorance. No liberation. The eternal sky does not inhibit the flight of the white clouds. Nor the flower concern itself with the future of its seeds. Events in the abyss don’t succeed one another anymore than thoughts do and all those phases of the moon too infinite to name. The important thing is not to hang on to what you think you’ve understood. Not to uncoil your mind like chromosomic flypaper among the stars that swarm you like a window at night, or make webs of their constellations to gain something from their light. You will never be more than you are now. Why put make-up on a mirror or glue eyelashes to the moon? The good dreams and the bad dreams are both painted on space. But as long as you keep trying to sign your own face with indelible markers, joy will always be a catastrophe.

PATRICK WHITE

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