CATARACTS IN THE EYE

CATARACTS IN THE EYE

for April, when she’s crying

Cataracts in the eye,

flowers in the sky.

Or is it

cataracts in the sky,

flowers in your eye?

Either way,

painting your window

won’t clarify the view.

Just leave things as they are

without any more worry

and let the starmud settle in the pond

so the sky can get on with its clouds.

You can understand everything at a glance

if you touch it lightly with your eyes and heart.

But the moment you start to stare

deeply into the well

to see if anyone’s there, kerplunk,

you’re a lost penny

looking for something to wish for

or you break off like a key in your own door.

And you’re free

to consider your life a mistake

or even more mistakenly,

successful and correct,

but the trees don’t know

what you’re talking about

when they’re busy burning their leaves,

and water isn’t a failure of snow

when the crocuses begin to break through.

The winners do their crying out loud in crowds;

The losers cry alone at home in their rooms.

They both get wet.

They both ruin their makeup.

You keep advising yourself

like the Summa Theologica

to reconcile reason with God

who never wears the same church twice

in a world whose only holy cornerstone is change.

You can’t factor yourself out of the truth

and turn your philosophy into a formula

for self-advancement

when you are the truth

of what you’re looking for.

Everything seeks itself in this life

like the continuity of flowing water

that is everywhere at home

in all its forms like the moon

but the rain isn’t looking for flowers

when it falls

and the wounded apple-tree in the sunlight

isn’t making mystic amends

by bleeding from all of its boughs.

Is it fair to be you; is it unfair?

Have you been weeding a mirage for years

and wondered why no one,

not even the wind,

ever stops by for a drink?

Seeing your reflection

on the surface of a delusion

might be what you look like

but it isn’t what you think

no matter how long you wait

for high tide in the mirror

to unscroll you like a sail.

The earth isn’t a planet,

it’s an eye that’s as blue by day

as the sea

and as black by night

as the sky

and it’s never seen its own likeness

except as stars and trees,

and the darkness in between,

irises by the river

and robes of snow on the mountaintops.

Is your eye bad

when it looks upon the obscene

or good

when it spots a beauty queen?

Bad meat down the well

or fireflies

clowning with stars,

there’s no sour or sweet to your eyes

just as water and space

aren’t maimed or enhanced

by what they embrace

because your mind

is not conditioned by form

anymore than the nature

of water or blood is

by the rut it runs in.

Your seeing can be a sin.

Your seeing can be a blessing.

You can grow large and mercurial

or small and focussed

at both ends of the telescope

and witness the abundance of despair

in a famine of hope

and like empty words

eat the air,

or dancing on the eye of a lense

like a gnat above the water

agitate the fish to jump for the moon.

So which eye’s the winner;

which eye’s the loser

crossing the finish line of your nose

when they both run backwards

in opposite directions

as you so blithely suppose?

You can be a big beginning with a small end,

or a big end with a small beginning.

The first is what you will turn out to be.

The second is what you are.

Make a road of your own walking one night

through an open field,

then stop and look up

and ask any star.

PATRICK WHITE

MAYBE GOD KNOWS

MAYBE GOD KNOWS

Maybe God knows like any woman

that the unanswered prayer

is always holier to men

than the ones that come true

and that’s why she doesn’t respond.

She lures you into speaking to her through the silence

as you realize the road ends

in the most intimate whisper of stars

like your breath alone on a winter night

as you take all of Orion in at a glance

to taste your own shining

in her universal nonchalance

like a candle you’re trying to advance through the darkness

to find her room, and you do,

but she’s never at home when you knock.

Or she blows you off like autumn,

snuffs the pure flame of your urgency

you bring to her door like a bouquet

in the hands of a chimney-sweep

who burns in his passion like leaves

with no tree up his sleeves to cling to.

And it’s hard to love someone

you’ve never met before

though you whine like a dog at a door

that is always opening you like a scar

that adores the wound that makes you feel

when you look up at the nightsky

and ask why,

the bow that set it all going,

that feathered the stars like blood

with the light of their flowing

through a night of unknowing

may be a fiction,

the chameleon of your own conviction,

but, at least, by the way

it wings your mythic heel

the arrow’s real.

PATRICK WHITE

WHOEVER I AM

WHOEVER I AM

Whoever I am

it’s only for a moment that passes

as quickly as the universe.

Sometimes my eyes

outshine the stars they’re looking at,

and thought is faster

than the speed of light

and every feeling

feathers the flight of the fire like a flame.

I have a name

that I’ve been trained

to turn toward like a sunflower

but ultimately it’s only the sound

of another wave crashing on the shore

of an uninhabited island.

Sometimes listening

to the music of the spheres within me

I think I can hear

the single, silver note of myself

timing my life like a drop of water

at the end of a blade of stargrass

or a triangular tintinabulum

that catches the attention

of the whole, cosmic, symphony orchestra

like the first sign of rain,

but more often I feel like ditchwater

carrying rose petals down the drain.

And there are things that I’ve exhausted myself against

like a fly against a windowpane

looking for an emergency exit

out of my own shame

at being what I am,

but it’s just another delusory sham

of the flypaper I’m stuck on like the self

of a conning chromosome.

So I call my own bluff

and shatter the lamp

and break the mirror

that buffs my seeing with stars

and dig up all these scarecrow, cruciform, avatars of being

that lie buried under my words

like bad advice from the birds,

and disappear

though I can’t say where

as if I had never existed.

But it isn’t as if

I was here and now I’m not

and there’s a great emptiness

that marks the spot like a black hole in my heart

and there’s anyone to suffer

long term loss for short term gain.

Everything’s still the same

and there’s no end of the pain

that flares up over and over again

like the universe

through an open window of the darkness

to immolate itself like a moth

in the trick candle-flame of a life

I can’t blow out on my birthday

because it’s only as old as I am

and I’ve been here forever.

PATRICK WHITE

NOTHING. I WAIT.

NOTHING. I WAIT.

for Brad Williams, with affection

Nothing. I wait. I

sweep all the stars off the stairs

and break all the windows

and melt like winter

to return in the spring

and wash myself away

to keep the view clear

and let the blossoming

go on without me.

I don’t jam a doctor in the womb

to guide the baby into being born,

or impose the apple on its flower

like like an agenda that must be met

before the fall.

I listen without expectation

to the vast silence of my own absence

and if something happens, it happens.

A picture flashes in the void

long before anything can be said

and a whole new world

takes its first breath

and breathes out the things of the world

to make a home for themselves in their homelessness.

And it’s the old-new way of delight

that playfully comes into being

like the first day and the first night

without depending

on the turning of the light

for its extinction or illumination.

The darkness the lamp dreams in

is not less bright than its burning

and the seeing isn’t a function of eyes.

And the only sin in life,

the only death,

as it is with your body,

is not to be creative, not

to discover within yourself

you are neither creature, nor created,

not the afterlife of the Big Bang

fourteen billion years ago

but this very moment now

when God asks who she is,

breaking her own hidden secret

and you know it’s time to tell her

in babies and paintings and poems and birds

in music and clowns

and sinners burning saints,

in fire and water and stars

and vagrant scholars wandering Mars,

that everything’s out in the open

and the secret is unsayably ours

in the way we express it to live.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT A SAD, VIOLENT LITTLE SHIT

WHAT A SAD, VIOLENT LITTLE SHIT

What a sad, violent little shit you’ve become

now that your crackin.

You talk like Michaelangelo in a quarry

selecting Carrara marble

for the translucency of its alluvial veins,

and you talk about painting with feeling,

but it’s hard to get anything done

when you’re just another Tom Thumb

crushed under a tiny avalanche of rocks

so all you ever really do

is prime the ceiling white

over and over again like a sail

when there’s not much of a wind.

I watch you trying to think,

ferocious with thought,

and it’s like watching a ball

jumping around

trying to pick up its own jacks

like the stars of the razorwire constellations

that dance like a hareem of mean angels

on the head of your pin.

Only a real prick

can scare the needle,

and little brother,

you’re not even that

under all your washaway tats

as you run like a watercolour

in the acid rain of that battery brain

you’re wired to.

Once you were full of doubt and indirection,

you didn’t know who you were

and there were tears

for other people’s sorrows

that wept like candles in elegant chandliers

and a tolerance for the folly of others

that excused your own

that made you seem

at the unlikeliest of times

compassionate and wise.

You were vulnerable.

You could be hurt,

betrayed, rejected,

and I saw in your eyes

that you had no answer for anything

when she left you like a lighthouse

without any warning.

But at least you had the courage of the morning

to get up again and zombie your way

through the rest of the day

as if Lazarus wasn’t a lie.

Now you’re all severities

of radical rock

like a mad dog

biting at its own heart

as if it were an ulcer.

And every second acephalic thought

falls like a head into the breadbasket

at the foot of the guillotine

that makes everyone edgy

about what you truly mean

when you introduce your girlfriend

like a pampered queen,

a trophy butterfly

in the plagiarized web

of an award-winning spider.

You love her like a miner

at a cocktail party

with an ice-pick,

but later when she thaws

she will stab you in the bath like Marat.

Love for you isn’t about

joy or pleasure or children,

not the hive, nor the honey.

It’s the engine

of a fanatical rampage

that fires you up

like a killer bee

to swarm any form of life

that isn’t you in the shopping mall

like a bad tatoo

that can’t make an indelible impression

on anyone

trying to have a gang life

that doesn’t bang around like you

when you sport your true colours like your girlfriend,

tricked out in black and blue

and patched with bruises

where she shoots what she uses of you

like the last crumb in the eye of a dream

you cooked in a spoon without eyelids.

Little brother, don’t come back.

Don’t sit at my table, don’t

greet me when I pass.

You’re just another scream

on fastforward, you’re

just another improvised explosive device, an i.e.d.

buried in the road you’re on

like a heart attack

waiting to happen

like Iraq to an amputee.

If once it was hard

to take the measure

of what you could have been,

like a new energy policy

that insisted on being clean,

now you’re as easy to understand

as Chernobyl or an oilslick.

You’re a spiritual polluter,

a dirty needle, just

another chrome-plated dipstick

in a motor-mouth

that runs on mystic gangrene.

PATRICK WHITE

I DON'T TRY TO ALLAY THE INEVITABLE

I DON’T TRY TO ALLAY THE INEVITABLE

I don’t try to allay the inevitable as much as I used to.

Let it come.

All my efforts are exhaustive and absurd.

I checked it out.

I’m not on the agenda.

I didn’t make the honour roll

and no matter how you dress the worm

maggots don’t turn into butterflies.

The important thing

is to wake up from conciousness

without dreaming you know who you are

or that there’s any right road to anywhere

that comes with a star.

If you want to shine,

you’ve got to learn to shine up

through the roots of everyone alike

as if there were no purpose to the light

or meaning to the flower that opens its book to the night

as if it were looking for a publisher.

I have died and died and died again

to empty myself like mirrors and rain,

focussed myself to the point of a pin

until space was the last balloon of my lonely skin

before I exploded into oblivion

to begin it all again

like an interminable birthday party

that keeps presenting me with a brain

like a watch on a gold chain

that runs too slow

to keep up with the accelerated pace

of my exponential afterlife

running like stars ahead of the light.

You can make constellations

out of anything you can see,

and franchise them all along the ecliptic

like truckstops for the longhaul planets

but the thirteenth house of the zodiac

is the only one where you can live in the moment

beyond your own future,

and before history.

You can live in clarity

with the unbegotten

of a generous mystery

that gives your life back to you

like something you might have forgotten.

You know how to be

a grain of sand in the universe,

and count yourself small and trivial

but you know nothing about

conducting yourself like the universe

in a grain of sand.

So you wash yourself

out of your own eyes in tears

and go on watering mirages in a desert

that never blooms.

You case your own house like a thief

looking for a way to break in

that doesn’t alarm the windows

that can see you coming

from a long way off

like the back of your eyes

and like the woman in the mirror

you broke into a million images of you last night,

your face reflected in a million lockets of water

that broke like a womb,

how can you be fooled

by your own disguise

and pretend there’s no one here

in this long line of mugshots

taken of you as a loser

you recognize?

You want to know how to win?

Collect on the bounty.

Turn yourself in.

There’s a price on your head

more precious than life to the dead.

PATRICK WHITE

THE EUPHORIC HIGHS

THE EUPHORIC HIGHS

The euphoric highs,

the terrifying ecstasies

don’t last too long

so why ride the comet out to the end

without reading your own doom

in what comets portend

when there’s a third extreme you’ve overlooked

in the middle

that is born of the other two?

That’s why your words

don’t have three wings

and when you’re all dolled up

like the suns’s puppet

you’re still just a snowball on strings.

And hypocrite that I am,

I love the way you can turn your heart

into a nightclub for demons on shoreleave

from an ocean of shit,

the anti-madonna

of an older religion than light

that binds the serpent to its charms

by out-tempting the apple of knowledge

with the more alluring urgencies

of a woman rebooting her flesh

before the begetting of forms.

I’m as beguiled as any of your tides

by your ebbing and flowing

and there’s no end

to the simulacra of the moon

where I have lived too long alone

like an island in the sea of shadows

waiting for your return

without believing it was possible.

Eventually everyone’s an ocean

that can’t endure its own weather

and disappointed in gravity

wanders off into space,

scars of water among stars.

Now it’s one of my strangest graces

to cry over the slightest thing

without warning

whether the bell of a sorrow

too heavy for anyone to lift,

or any human excellence

that transcends understanding.

Some people follow them like blood

and some people cut across them like veins

but the road I’m on

is as wide as it is long

and it hasn’t gone anywhere for years

but I don’t let my homelessness

exaggerate the importance

of making it back to my own heart

because if there were any love there in the first place

things are best left to do that on their own.

PATRICK WHITE