WRITING INTO THE VOID

WRITING INTO THE VOID

Writing into the void,

trying to outreach my own words

like Canada geese returning in the spring,

witching for new constellations

under a bell of holy water

the colour of my own third eye

that might make me cry again

like someone newly come

to an old adversity

whose history is written on the rocks

that tel the hearts of the glacially numb,

I recall my past like an old superstition

that no longer believes in me,

knowing there’s no more to the present

than just this carrying away into the carrying away

that is in all things and everywhere the same in all its changes

like water in a well that dreams it’s running.

I listen to the nightstream

as if it were a voice

I had almost forgotten

this far from home,

and I want to reach out

and touch the face of God

as intimately as skin,

but I get lost in the labyrinths

of my own fingerprints

looking for traces of myself

at a crime scene

where I can’t tell

if I’m the victim or the perpetrator

or the scream that edged the knife

that killed me into life.

A man among angels

is a kite among birds

with no one at the other end.

Strange words but resonant

with the unseen tuning fork

of the childhood demon

that grew into whatever I am.

Things just keep coming back to me

like eggs in a nest

that made it through the winter

watching the stars like weak magicians

trying to hatch snow,

but whatever I write

I am never the first to speak

and though my eyes are ripe with visions

I am never enlightened by what it is they seek.

When I was at university

sight was a kind of love

but now that I’ve been thoroughly unschooled

by the tutors of the untutored truth

that unbound me like a boat from the sea

to grow into the island I might be

if I flowed along with the waves,

I seem to depend more upon

a kind of mindlessness to direct me

as if this blindness were just another eye of the light

I have learned to go by like a firely

whose darkness is deeper than night.

And I have been the white cane

of the lighthouse on the rock

that tried to walk on water

like a red sky in the morning

that didn’t take its own warning,

and come down like a mountain into a valley

to fill the ditch my aspiration had dug for me.

But life’s a graverobber

that doesn’t respect death

and my corpse began to sprout

and the dead branch bloomed

and I realized that no matter

how many times I died

my rebirth wasn’t elective

and my grave would always be empty.

There is a voice

beyond what I can hear,

a voice within a voice

like a dark mirror behind the light

that whispers to everyone in their own idiom

so intimately that everyone’s voice

fits them like a face

they stop looking at

and begin to listen to.

The clarity of the mirror

is devoid of a self

so you can see

the profundity of the emptiness

when it’s a bell

or a mermaid casting a spell like a tide

over the undulant sea-swell.

In these depths every echo is motherless

and you must listen with your eyes

and see with your ears

if you want to realize

the original picture-music of the nightstream

that runs like a starless grammar

through everything you can and cannot say.

The silence isn’t just a lack of words.

The darkness isn’t diminished

by its abstention from light.

The white mirror reflects the blossom.

The black mirror, the root.

Truth is bound to the stake of its own heresy

as expression is to identity

and you cannot unsay either

from the straightjackets of their affinity

to set your voice free

from the chrysalis

of their themes and dreams,

turn lead into gold

in the vastness of this hermetic womb

until you spread the maps

you inch along to

like wings

to dry in the midnight sun

of the illuminated dragonfly

that emerges from a bright eclipse within.

You can circumnavigate every single drop

in this infinite ocean of knowing

as if each were an eye of yours;

you can search for years

for things that would bring a window to tears

and ink new tatoos

on both sides of the moon

that keeps flipping through itself like a journal

with a page torn out

and attune every word to the night

as if every string of the guitar in your throat

were keyed to the light

in waves of insight

that wash over you like a shore.

But even a spark is blazing to the blind

whose seeing has realized

there’s nothing to lose,

nothing to find

in the lost and found of their knowing.

Centered in all directions

a true star doesn’t shine to see where it’s going.

PATRICK WHITE

I'VE ALWAYS FOUND

I’VE ALWAYS FOUND

I’ve always found that it’s easier to be kind when I don’t care because I’m unattached. I’m not manipulating. Attaching strings for the good of the puppet. Without effort or perfection, I practise the generosity of everything that gives here. And everything gives. Without meaning. No giver. No recipient. Like a star. A gift. Light everywhere. Illuminating itself in what it reveals. Is anyone pleased? The fools make meteors of the cornerstones of joy and despise peace as the merest of consolations for their chronic unhappiness at never having made much of an impact anywhere. Dinosaurs. Let them knock themselves out. A coma’s as good as inspiration to a rock. And there’s never been an original point to anything. It’s all just talk. Seeding the sea with sand. Making a priest of the worm in the rose. Is it still morning if you don’t wake up? Or is something always missing?

      Stupid thoughts. Angry. Though I don’t know at what. If I didn’t let them up they wouldn’t let me down and neither me nor my soiled shadow would be advanced or disappointed. But I don’t slip a rudder in the river like a letter that knows where it’s going, and there isn’t the single blossom of a sail that I’ll take down just because the wind is blowing. I’m not the doing or the undoing of myself. When I sit still, the wind moves. When I move the wind is a rock. It’s that way with every breath, every death I take. Illusion is meaningless. Reality is meaningless. There are no oceans to cross between one dewdrop and the next. And time doesn’t give birth to anything so there’s no need to make a rosary of full moons and count the number of springs and autumns I have left to live, if that. Why school the unborn in the lessons of perishing when nothing can be taken out of context? I don’t look out upon the world, the beginning of the universe in atom or word, the history of being and not being this mystery of seeing that is neither wise nor absurd, and think that God misquoted me. I’ve never been a hidden secret that wanted to know myself because there’s never been anyone else to keep the secret from. So the silence talks all day long like a drunkard that doesn’t know when to stop. And when I really want to get down to the bottom of things, I drink the wine. And then I drink the cup.

PATRICK WHITE

NO ENTRANCE TO THE MIND

NO ENTRANCE TO THE MIND

No entrance to the mind.

No entrance to space.

What needs to open

when you’re the gateless gate?

Don’t think of yourself as a thing.

Don’t attribute form to the formless.

Don’t assume there’s a little person

the size of your thumb

mired in your brainmud

like an understudy of you

that you can consult like a script

when you forget your lines.

Reality isn’t impersonating you.

There may be a play going on

but there’s no actor

and everything is making itself up

as it goes along,

spontaneously improvising itself

out of circumstances and events.

But you’re not the play, the player,

or the expletive audience.

Not the theatre of the abyss

in which all this occurs

nor the confluent weaving of themes

into a recognizable resolution.

And there’s nothing wrong

with making constellations out of fireflies

and following them

as if they were reliable guides.

Anyone of them will lead you home

as long as you realize you’ve never left

and every step of the way

is the long road of a narrow threshold

that can’t be crossed.

Right now, you’re like a mirage,

supple palms and undulant water

trying to get down to its roots,

trying to discover the truth of yourself

in broken pots and noseless statuettes,

and the skulls of those whose thirst for life

believed in you until they discovered

that you were rooted in the air.

Have you ever considered

what you owe to the desert

that sustains the illusion?

And when you get right down to it

why pretend you’re the child

of clarity and confusion

when you know in your depthless depths

that no one’s there

to be confused or clarified?

You don’t need to sweep

dead stars off

your stairs and windowsills,

or mirages from the desert,

illusions and truths from your mind,

the northern lights from the sky,

or stand under a tree

collecting bird feathers

to learn how to fly

when you’re already the freedom

they fly through.

And in or out of the egg,

it’s the same, vast, tranformative view

and when you remember to realize

that no one’s there to see it,

that what’s left

is not what’s left of you,

that you have no origin or end

there’s nothing to wound,

nothing to mend.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU CAN'T ORPHAN THE WIND

YOU CAN’T ORPHAN THE WIND

anymore than you can abandon space

or pry the universe out of the universe like an eye

from a skull or a ring

to save it from seeing itself

as it runs everywhere away in all directions

fleeing what’s centred in you.

You’re not the residue,

the lees of the Big Bang

trying to scry your fate

out of your own detritus,

chemical compliance

with a spiked alliance

in an area of local cooling.

Whether you think

you’re getting a little too much ahead of yourself

or falling far behind,

you’re still the Primordial Atom

before and after time

flashing out of the void

and returning to yourself

like a thief coming and going

through your own window.

And there isn’t a now

that yesterday and tomorrow

could ever track down like today

that isn’t eternal,

that isn’t an undefineable field

where there is no birth or death

or labour of stars on the nightshift

pouring you out like metal from a stone

that isn’t as intimate as oxygen

with every breath you take

to construe the world before you.

What have you seen or been or smelt or felt and thought

that wasn’t your own mind?

And if you were no one

before you were you

how can there be two,

let alone one?

What could outside and inside

mean or be

except the distance

between a wave and the sea?

How could any sword, word, world that arises

slay the water or wound the sky

when you’re the deep, dark watershed mother

of the original fountain

pouring yourself into your own mouth like the moon?

You parse your wholeness

into the things of the world

to define yourself

to the imperial rhetoric of a chatty brain

in a language of forms

who can’t know who you are

until you know with or without a doubt

what you are not.

You’re all of these things.

You’re none of these things.

Listen. The moon’s wearing earrings

that play like rain on the wind

and everywhere she catches the trees’ attention

like water longing to spill

into the empty seas she sails alone.

And her deserts are not the urns of the stars.

PATRICK WHITE

THE NIGHT ME

The night me when the shadows

get to advance on their own

without the handwriting of the light

to divide them

moves deeper alone

into the boundless intimacy

within and without

of a yielding abyss

where you can always tell time

by the smoke of burning leaves

and everything, even the most banal,

is charged with a sense of secrecy

like an injured bell.

The spooling and uncoiling of the nightstreams

follow their own life-themes through the darkness

like distant train whistles in the rain

or geese returning in the spring high overhead.

And I am tempered by the sorrow of my own abeyance

like a window that’s been true to too many eyes

who’ve never known beauty

without longing and lies.

And the ashes are not old

and the fire is not new

and nothing is abandoned

like a ghost with a point of view.

The fountain returns

to the watersheds of its awareness

and I’m walking on the stars that schooled me

like a truant road to read maps between the life-lines

on the palm of my hand.

No beginning, no end,

I don’t think of the wind

as a streetcleaner

and vaster than the sublime

and I am what happens to time.

PATRICK WHITE

THE OLD WORLD

THE OLD WORLD

The old world that is always here

because it is always passing

is everywhere confronted

by its own malignant children

ferociously abusing their legacy.

Genocidal Israelis whose hatred rains down

like jellyfish tentacles of white phosphorus

on the heads of the children of Gaza,

lethal Medusas of snakefire

falling like some paranoid, old-testament vengeance,

Dead Sea deep in blood and corpses,

spin their own atocities into

press-worthy innocence,

and declare the collateral coffins

of their obscene abomination

a closed investigation.

The hysteria of nations is written in bones

and the short-term memory-cards of their cellphones

downloading indictable albums

of slaughtered children.

And I still can’t believe it,

Beshir, the bowling-ball Butcher of Sudan,

a plague in the form of a man,

leeching and cauterizing

the open wound he has gouged

in the eyes, the heart, the flesh of Darfur,

indicted for killing, rape, torture, starvation,

indicted for squandering the lives of millions,

can you believe it, after all

the Palestinians have suffered,

after all the death and wounding the Iraqis and Afghanis

have learned to live around and through,

and the grief, the irreconcilable grief

that even a god hesitates to answer,

this corpse-tree of a man

hung with the bodies

of hundreds of thousands of people

like his self-appointed medals

until even murder begins to feel ridiculous,

this blood-brained clown of catastrophe

embraced by the Arab Summit!

And even though these things I say are true,

it’s hard to be a North American these days,

even when you are speaking the truth

without feeling hypocritical cold-sores

all over your own lips

as your blood thickens

trying to congeal the haemmorage of Iraq,

knowing you’ve been spoiled by war-movies.

If you eat enough eventually you’ll starve the world,

and yesterday’s captains of industry

will turn into the hydra-headed cartels

of the decapitating narcoeconomics of Mexico

and North American pharmaceuticals

warring over the Land of the Lotus-Eaters

for a market share,

not to mention the undead

who are eaten alive by the golden maggots

of our own egg-laying banks

who will never turn into butterflies.

An elitely-educated Canadian

with health-care,

I’ve written books about it all,

I’ve tatooed my voice

with the Holocaust, Palestine, Chile, Oka,

I once compiled an encyclopedia

of twentieth century genocides,

just to scream murder

when I saw murder being done

trying to transform

the alchemical empathy and compassion

of my mystic hermetical mind,

Hermes Trismegistus,

looking for seed-words like the wind

it could plant in flesh and blood

like cool herbs on the agony of a burn.

This is how I know

my mother lives within me,

and more, how I strive Sisypheanly

with the guilt of being born poor

in a prosperous country

while so many others

have been denied the chance.

And I suspect,

for the last half-century,

I’ve been trying to prove against proof,

answering my B.C. upstream salmon-nature,

my humanity isn’t just another mode of rabies

in a rainbow-coloured straitjacket,

that words might still have the power

to move atoms like spiritual streetsigns,

to jump from one opposite to the other,

either way, like a bridge

and see that it stands on both,

straddling both banks of the lifestream,

above and below. Passage. And if words

are only the scent of smoke

to someone lost in the woods deep at night,

isn’t that enough reason to go on burning,

flaring like a match in autumn under the leaves,

or brick by brick, building a lighthouse

that could hold itself up

like a candle to the stars

and illuminate them all

by reading the writing on the wall?

Our ends are a kind of amends

our beginnings make

for existence

if the whole of our common concern

is not to love the all

in the each of one another

for our own sake.

You’re not a saint

if you put your hand in the fire

and it doesn’t burn,

and you’re not a sinner

if it does.

And that’s all interesting enough,

and it feels clarifying and affirmative to say it

as if I were mouthing flowers like a field

that echo sidereally

through the caves of the sky

and in the deepest wells of my longing

where the strangers come to drink

there were real water

in this mindstream

that flows unseen through the night

like a homeless light

weeping over them like words

as if words could turn into rain.

But no more than your eyes

have an agenda

of what they intend to see

does your brain urge you purposively

to become what you must be;

nor having any purpose,

evolve you randomly.

And so you move like water

through all the stations of the sky

through progressively rarer mediums

of time and space and spirit and blood,

imagination and thought,

all waves of the same sea of awareness

until you are all sails and no wind

on the dark side of the moon,

a lightning-rod in the Sahara

trying to conjure clouds

above an empty tent.

And though you can’t explain the event,

by the occasional grace

of something you never meant,

or could foresee happening,

you cry out in the wholeness

of your insignificance

to ease someone else’s pain

and drop by drop

even here where I am now

it begins to rain.

And that’s all that keeps me going

when I look upon the prevalence of human peversity

through a lifetime of anger and sadness and unknowing,

and ask if there’s anything left to be

that isn’t hypocritical or desecrated,

and think that it’s a terrible arrogance

in an abyss of ignorance beyond me

to console my life with a meaning

that wasn’t just another leaf on the stream

or the coils of a serpent with ideas

that wanted to swallow the planet whole

when the silence in my mouth

tastes like the acrid frequency

of a child’s star-shattering scream.

And how easy it would be

to bluff my way out of this world

into another where I don’t exist

unless I’ve got my hands over my eyes

while everyone’s running to hide,

but I remember a moment so now

it was timeless a long time ago

by the side of a backwoods road

that could have led me anywhere

when I saw the clean leaves

and the matted wildflowers

and the grass of the fields

shining in the golden light of sunset

over the abandoned ark of a farm

after the storm.

PATRICK WHITE

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