A COUNTRY OF ONE ON THE MOON

A COUNTRY OF ONE ON THE MOON

 

A country of one on the moon

trying to declare my independence

from the occupying constellations

that have pimped my fate like a website.

If I never could hold on to my skin long

maybe I’m a serpent shedding worlds

like the kite-string of the eleventh dimension,

infinite worlds like the thoughts

of a vast intelligence with time to squander

its unintelligible nature upon itself

to the astonishment of everything that exists.

Or maybe not. But if there’s anything divine

about my mind, it’s that

it’s not created in the image of anything.

There’s no likeness in the mirror of God.

But when has that ever stopped anyone from looking?

A name, an address, a town, a country, a planet,

and I still don’t know who I am

in this homelessness with curtains

when I look through myself like a window

with eyes of rain older than anything I’ll find.

And there may be a sadness in the sweetness of the apple

silvered by the moon when I’m alone

but I don’t spend my solitude in chains

even when I fall

knowing there’s nothing

to attach myself to that I haven’t already let go of

in the name of learning how to love

what isn’t there.

And that’s the big hole

in the side of the wounded silo

that lavishes my abundance on the emptiness

as if there were plenty of me where I came from.

And when I look for the source of the rose of blood

with all its passions, mysteries, and histories of delusion 

that engendered this thorn of a heart

that doesn’t know what it’s guarding,

immediately it’s as obvious as me

that even spiritually

nature abhors a vacuum

and the mind is a bigger room than space

older than the moment before birth

and younger than death could ever be

longing for being it can’t possess

without letting go of its own immortality.

A grub of flesh with big ideas

that keep leapfrogging over the edge

of their own conception, I move

from medium to medium

changing form through water, earth, air, light, space

like wine through so many worlds,

so many cups of the moon

and the mindlessness that keeps it all flowing.

Butterfly mind, serpent mind, mind

that idles like grass in the easy breeze,

mind that tightens like a fist

trying to squeeze the light out of space

like salt from the sea,

ore from the rock of a mining company,

mind that is baffled

by the ultimacy of suffering

when joy seems so brief a day,

and aspiration even to the highest things

is a breath let out, not in

even when it sings

to the world like rain

about the roots of pain.

Fountain mind, tree mind

growing out of the darkness

of its starmud toward the sky

so that the words come

like birds to the lips of an old song,

like the genius of stars to water.

Mountain mind that empties me like a valley

and opens my mouth

like an oracular cave to the public

who want to prophecy through it

to give their words weight and meaning

and the lottery of a chance of coming true.

The best place to hide is out in the open

just as the best place to speak

is into the silence

when you haven’t been consulted.

Mind that is and isn’t mine,

pure revelation of horror and beauty

in the playfulness of the light

when it takes the hand of a sister feeling.

Janitor mind that sustains my body cell by cell,

burning old textbooks like disproven prophets

in the furnace of a heart

that’s run out of its past

like desks and coal.

Mind bell in your own dream

why do you reforge me as cannon

to make the children scream out in their sleep

when none of us have learned

the lesson of why you weep

and we mourn like refugees

trying to outdistance the nightmare

by advancing our horizons?

If space is time, one continuum,

then do we die because we’ve run out of space?

Can I measure my age in miles?

There aren’t years enough

in a mile of light

to assess how far away I am

from what I have become.

Cleverness, irony, ambiguity,

paradox, eloquence, oxymoron,

eagles of the imperial rhetoric,

cataract cliches fogging the eyes

of the populist peacock

who thinks he sees for everyone,

the married foam of battered brides

who were wrecked like night ships on the wrong tide

and impeach the moon for the error,

the mystic gusts of stars

that blow their radiance like dust

into the eyes of a blind man

hoping to make him see

and the myth-mongering ideologues

who rub their stakes together like the firesticks

of a praying mantis hunting heretics,

all those who have turned their lives

into one long apology for death

as if it were a lapse of spiritual manners,

all the token choices of the mob

raising their placard voices up to God

like angry flowers nippling acid rain,

all tools broken by their own futility,

hammers in the dirt, and toothless saws,

constellations of flies that died at a windowpane,

untold moments of life,

mini blackholes of light

trying to aspire to the stars;

at best, fireflies in canning jars.

Despair if it’s your nature to despair,

or dare to hope dangerously

for things that can never be

if you can’t endure what you see,

or judge it all magnanimously with a laugh

and brush the issue aside with the hem of your robe

like an imperial indulgence

at the limits of empire.

Any road you take

is as hard as any other eventually.

How do you express your impossibility to the stars

like indifferent listeners,

or satisfy questions that swallow you whole

like a python, an eclipse, a koan

when they take their own tails in the mouths

like the meanings of words

and eat you all the way up to the head

like the road you’re walking now?

I don’t abuse my masks

as if they weren’t needed

by attaching them to an identity

when even this nothingness is no more

than a good guess just to be polite.

Hey, when I first got here, the stars were free.

And the daughters of water

approached me innocently as trees

and fire was a splendour without equal

and there were no assassins

sequestered like shadows

behind the doors of light

like a god that had been overlooked

and every breath was a breeze that took me

and every thought that opened like a flower

rooted deeply in the earth

was a bee of my growth

and even the lightning flowed

like honey from the hive.

I learned to climb the highest fruit trees

in the abandoned apple orchards of Victoria

right up to the topmost branch

without calling for a ladder

to take the danger out of things

as I shook the windfall down to my worried mother.

So now I am the way I am now.

Like an element of anti-matter

that hasn’t discovered its place

below the salt on the periodic table

laid out like a game of snakes and ladders.

I took the moon for the cornerstone of my homelessness

and shapes of water like a woman’s body for the Taj Mahal.

And my unlikeness reveals itself in everything.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SEEING YOU AGAIN

SEEING YOU AGAIN

 

Seeing you again after all this time

is a single stitch in a hundred mile long wound

that couldn’t bridge its differences.

Spanish earrings like captured constellations

dangling from your earlobes like a jailor’s keys,

everyone still thinks

when you make your rounds

you’re someone they would like to please

by giving up their freedom

for a few skimpy minutes with you

on your knees.

You haven’t lost your knack

for making men feel lasciviously wonderful

and it would be easy to forget so much

like a last wish on death-row

just to fuck you

but there are scars on the window

that look like the moon

weighing itself like a stone

in the hand of an angry boy

who wants to break something.

You were more of a delusion to me

than I ever was to you.

It was my arrow

from my own bow

that made a target

of the archer’s heart

I wore on my head

like the crown of an apple

and missed.

It’s seven parts vanity

and three parts lust

to want to be loved

the way you always imagined.

You did your best with what you had to work with

to make something neither of us knew

come true in the aftermath

of all we destroyed in each other

as one by one our delusions

fell like sumptuous nobles

on the swords of the gladiolas

that had flared like trumpets of blood.

Now we sit beside each other

like two gardens that failed

to find common ground

as the stars salt the earth we walk upon

down memory-lane

meticulously avoiding

all the testy improvised devices

that still lie buried like passions in the road

waiting for the next insurgency to explode.

You indulge my vanity like a cup of coffee

with the most slimming subsitutes

for sincerity

but I understand

behind the sleazy gestures

it’s just your way of trying to heal what you can

without being forgiven

for not knowing when to quit.

It’s not often you get to sit down

and have a conversation

with your own obituary

and not believe a word of it.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE RAIN'S FALLING UPWARDS

THE RAIN’S FALLING UPWARD

 

The rain’s falling upward

and I’m rooted in the clouds.

I’m rifting with the greening of my leaves

without a flute, letting my thoughts grow

like musical serpents each

according to their need.

It’s the snake’s turn to charm me,

to entangle me in its form

like forbidden fruit

swaying from my highest boughs.

In the chalky, moist grey air

I’m scraping my fingernails

down a blackboard like crows

because my desires are vaguely out of reach

and my mind is a teacher with nothing to teach.

I want nothing more

than the freedom of my own humanity

thumbing its own heart

like a well-read book

or a worn guitar I taught myself to play

when no one else was around

to hear the sound of one hand clapping.

If my mind brings forth an abyss

like a vast womb where there’s only room

for my solitude

I’ll slip into it

under the reflection of the moon

on the unwitnessed side of my eyelids

without abandoning the boat of my body

and drift like stars across the timeless spaces

of anywhere the light doesn’t taste like physics.

Being is Knowing. I don’t need a web

to prove I’m a spider

and I don’t need a constellation

to shine out like a star

when I’m not being humbled

by the blind insignificance of it all.

Even when I mean bees and earthworms

too often my voice

is an urn full of dead fireflies.

Yesterday’s astonishment before the stars

in the open-mouthed fields

comes down today

like chandeliers of mystic trivia

 

on a scarecrow who lets the birds

in on the joke

that everytime he begins to burn

in his fireless martyrdom

his tears fall like an ice storm

to put him out.

But I don’t always want

wisdom oozing out of everything

like the sententious candle

of its own enlightenment

even if I am wounded by the compassion of it.

Sometimes I am content with the futility of things

just as they are.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE LILIES WERE OUT

THE LILIES WERE OUT

 

The lilies were out just a moment ago

but they’re already wilting like parachutes

hung up in their own powerlines.

They’ve gone underground

into the skulls of their bulbs

with thoughts of resurrection.

Beauty thaws and is gone in a vapour

and all that is left to attest to the passage

is an ambiguous lament on brown paper.

You can’t cry, eat, drink, dream, laugh, think,

drug, con, deal, steal, fight or fuck your way out of death.

And no matter how many times

I’ve tried to look death straight in the eye

I was always the first to blink.

No more wine of awareness to drink up

your body lets go of the cup

like a moon that’s turned its last page

or the open hand of the drunk slumped in the alley

where his fist disappears,

or your heart stops by the roadside

like a shoe that’s been missing for years.

Lately I’ve been cultivating a feel for emptiness.

Not the something was there and now it’s not kind,

and now I’m lethally depressed

by the postpartum effects

of an ontological miscarriage kind,

but looking deeply into space

as more a mirror of my face

than the light and the dark

that play upon it now

and realizing

the mindlessness of mind.

Somedays I carry the ashes

of my old self around

in the urn of a my skull

just to be respectful to the dead,

or I scatter myself on the wind, on a wave

from the precipice of some microcosmic abyss

and let the long sentence of the last word

disappear into a blackhole.

I’ve lost count of the worlds I’ve passed through

only to slough like the skins

of this serpentine dimension

whose chameleonic physics

makes my eyes break and run

like drops of water

leaking from the lenses

of an enlightened telescope.

And then there are times

I turn into a divining rod

just to taste the lightning

on the tip of my tongue

as if I were horned for it

by the crescents of the moon

to harmonize a mystic snakepit

with a heart that’s out of tune

with its own string theory of everything

like the dunce of a guitar in the corner

that hasn’t been played in years

because no one has the ears

to listen to the light.

I imagine myself after I’m dead

out there in the night somewhere,

invisible and aware,

mingled in the darkness

like salt in the sea

or stars in an eye

that’s given up looking for me.

Could be a ferry, an ark,

could be the pharoah’s moonboat

or the Flying Dutchman

or a raft of bones

that doesn’t float,

the black sail of a lunar eclipse,

or maybe even a sunken wreck

that makes it to the other side

but the only ship of death

I’m clinging to these days

is the solitary plank of a scuttled compass

drifting through the fog

like an empty lifeboat

toward a voice

that’s stopped calling

like a bird on a hidden hill.

You can’t turn death’s eye

like a jewel in the light

the way you can life

and expect to find your way back

over the last event horizon

that just blew you out

like a birthday candle

with your first breath

but I don’t blame anyone

for letting their eyes relax

until they stop looking at things.

Sometimes the facts are blood

on one too many blossoms

falling like ruined eyelids

and skies torn off the branch

who weren’t up for the dream

and couldn’t contain the scream.

It’s not much different from being born.

Still, I like to bite deep into the apple

not to enhance some original perversity

I yearn for like a heretic

his unwitnessed martyrdom

in the sacred fires of the night

burning like a religion he hasn’t grounded yet,

but to hasten the glow of life in the gathering sap

by adding my eyes to the mix.

I want to taste clarity

like an intimate dimension in everything.

And even if I am as lost and startled

as anyone ever has been,

still, what’s that

if not a chance to explore

the mysterious fear

of standing before an open door?

Who knows? Maybe it will be me that answers.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOU READ MY POETRY

YOU READ MY POETRY

 

You read my poetry

and you need a locus,

something to hang on to,

a familiar milieu, a focus,

right ascension and declination,

a starmap and astrolabe,

and the usual pictures painted

on the lense of the usual telescope.

If I had wanted you to follow me

I would have dropped breadcrumbs,

I would have spray-bombed the trees

an adolescent cadmium red

to show you where the road goes.

I may have been pulled like a weed

from the garden of Eden

and tossed to the wilder side of things,

a meteor among boundary stones,

but that doesn’t mean my darkness is tar,

or all these stars are a kind of quicksand

you’re sinking through like a sculptor

swimming through stone

with a chisel in your hand.

Maybe you’re just the wrong tool for the job.

Maybe you’re trying to follow the music with a map.

Maybe you haven’t come to terms

with eleven dimensions yet

and you’re still standing at the gates

of your own singularity, hat in hand,

waiting for a passport

incommensurably as pi

hoping for refugee status.

Maybe you don’t know

the whole universe

begins with a kiss

between the lips

of two membranes

in an ocean of dimensions

beyond the reach of your sensible wave

and the big bang

is not the beginning

but the afterbirth of the matter.

It’s hard to believe that your mind is free

when you’re standing there

with chains in your hand

counting rosaries like vertebrae.

It’s hard to know what to say

that might amuse you

outside of convention,

but that doesn’t mean

I’ve spent my life

trying to find

a new way to confuse you.

If I revel in the simulacra

like a kid in the fall playing in leaves,

if I kick a stone down the road like the earth as far as it can go

or use the moon to plumb the well

of my raindrop depths,

or try to walk on fire, stars, water,

hoping my feet are better lifeboats

than my migratory reasons are

birds for all seasons,

or I’m kind to the illusions

I had to leave along the way

like roadside flowers

closing in eclipse,

it may well be

the playful compassion of fools

that exempts the wise man

like a hard rock on the mountain

from the avalanche

of cornerstones and schools

you keep bringing down upon yourself like an echo.

You might hear a pair of morning doves in the trees

and the bee in the burgundy ear of the hollyhock

and all the key frequencies of string theory

and know how to finger them masterfully

leaping from fret to fret

like balance beams

and well-worn thresholds

up and down your neck

like serpent-fire through your open chakras,

but to judge from the way you look at me

you’ve never once

cupped your hands

like a lifeboat in the mindstream

and washed your face off in the music

so you could see.

 

PATRICK WHITE