I SWALLOWED MY OWN

I SWALLOWED MY OWN

 

I swallowed my own personal mystery

like one snake swallows another

or a dragon swallows the moon

to make it rain on its own flame

as if it were quenching a sword

in wounded water. A sane man

wouldn’t risk his ignorance

but a madman gambles

with enlightenment

by betting his eyes

on an uncertain insight.

Pain was a kind of physics

I had to take off like shoes

at the doorway of my own singularity

if I wanted to transcend

the incidental origins

of all the momentous thresholds

that parted and drifted away from me

like the wake of an empty lifeboat.

I ate my own personal history

like the bitter bread

of dead stars in a black hole

and time burned

like the temperature of the world

and the feverish dreams

that broke like blisters

and the aloof, cool moons

that sometimes dropped

their eyelids like blossoms

as if one thought shy

of assenting to my lunacy,

afflicted me alike

with caustic decisions

that made me weep like sand.

I was trying to put down new roots

in a mystic desert

that bloomed in mirages at night

and longed with every grain

and breath of its being

to turn its salinity into light

and for once

astonish the stars.

I wanted to honour human suffering

as something noble

and I was willing to labour

at living in vain

to believe in my aspirations.

But I drew pain down upon me

like the sea its own rivers and rain

and my heart imploded

like the black dwarf

of the wormwood star of Chernobyl.

Space turned to glass,

I was swimming through glass,

and the trees glowed at night

in the violet light

of a moon without eyelids.

And there was no one to talk to;

not even the silence would listen.

Oblivion looked into oblivion

like one blank mirror into another

and went on replicating itself like a word

in the mouth of a voiceless forever.

Night after night passed

like a species of used-up life

looking for extinction in a tarpit.

I’d fix my seeing

like an astrolabe to a star

and go down with my ships

like a navy in quicksand

whatever course I set.

I sought shelter

in the shadows of myself

as if the darkness

could contain me like a loveletter

someone forgot to send

but I was indicted by a wound

that even the emptiness couldn’t mend

for a lack of content.

I deluded myself that if

my innocence cross-examined itself

truthfully, eloquently, long enough,

the jury was certain to hang itself

for all the things I haven’t done.

I entered a fingerprint from my childhood

into evidence as exhibit A,

but my identity

was considered as irrelevant

as yellow tape at a crime scene

where the victim lies wrapped like a gift

to the god of Halloween

whose candles burn down

like a temple on a birthday cake.

Until only one unimploring pillar

is left standing

with nothing to uphold

but the great black flame

of the indifferent sky

that sweeps people and stars

like dirt from the stairs

and among the grand

and tiny dreams of creation,

bluffs an uncanny dignity

from the silence that falls

like eyelids and night

over the homeless faces

of the mindless graces

that inspire our devastation.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I SWALLOWED MY OWN

I SWALLOWED MY OWN

 

I swallowed my own personal mystery

like one snake swallows another

or a dragon swallows the moon

to make it rain on its own flame

as if it were cooling a sword

in wounded water. A sane man

wouldn’t risk his ignorance

but a madman gambles

with enlightenment

by betting his eyes

on an uncertain insight.

Pain was a kind of physics

I had to take off like shoes

at the doorway of my own singularity

if I wanted to transcend

the incidental origins

of all the momentous thresholds

that parted and drifted away from me

like the wake of an empty lifeboat.

I ate my own personal history

like the bitter bread

of dead stars in a black hole

and time burned

like the temperature of the world

and the feverish dreams

that broke like blisters

and the aloof, cool moons

that sometimes dropped

their eyelids like blossoms

as if one thought shy

of assenting to my lunacy,

afflicted me alike

with caustic decisions

that made me weep like sand.

I was trying to put down new roots

in a mystic desert

that bloomed in mirages at night

and longed with every grain

and breath of its being

to turn its salinity into light

and for once

astonish the stars.

I wanted to honour human suffering

as something noble

and I was willing to labour

at living in vain

to believe in my aspirations.

But I drew pain down upon me

like the sea its own rivers and rain

and my heart imploded

like the black dwarf

of the wormwood star of Chernobyl.

Space turned to glass,

I was swimming through glass,

and the trees glowed at night

in the violet light

of a moon without eyelids.

And there was no one to talk to;

not even the silence would listen.

Oblivion looked into oblivion

like one blank mirror into another

and went on replicating itself like a word

in the mouth of a voiceless forever.

Night after night passed

like a species of used-up life

looking for extinction in a tarpit.

I’d fix my seeing

like an astrolabe to a star

and go down with my ships

like a navy in quicksand

whatever course I set.

I sought shelter

in the shadows of myself

as if the darkness

could contain me like a loveletter

someone forgot to send

but I was indicted by a wound

that even the emptiness couldn’t mend

for a lack of content.

I deluded myself that if

my innocence cross-examined itself

truthfully, eloquently, long enough,

the jury was certain to hang itself

for all the things I haven’t done.

I entered a fingerprint from my childhood

into evidence as exhibit A,

but my identity

was considered as irrelevant

as yellow tape at a crime scene

where the victim lies wrapped like a gift

to the god of Halloween

whose candles burn down

like a temple on a birthday cake.

Until only one unimploring pillar

is left standing

with nothing to uphold

but the great black flame

of the indifferent sky

that sweeps people and stars

like dirt from the stairs

and among the grand

and tiny dreams of creation,

bluffs an uncanny dignity

from the silence that falls

like eyelids and night

over the homeless faces

of the mindless graces

that inspire our devastation.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOT JUST THE NATIONS

NOT JUST THE NATIONS

 

Not just the nations

but the whole planet

is reaping and eating

a perverse harvest

of hot coffins for cool people

like the indigent fire

of the crematorium next door.

I don’t think the sky’s going to fall in

or accept every invitation

to the backyard barbecues

of all the apocalyptic chicken-littles who do,

but I do think the air’s

going to cramp around our fat throats

like merciless hands 

when we’re dragged

to the chopping block

to be severed like the split ends

of a short circuit

that mistook itself for intelligence.

And as for our humanity.

Imagine. Two thousand years

of Christianity

and Christ is still being greeted

like extraterrestrial life

scrolling down from the sky

like a search engine with all the answers.

And there are spiritual snake-oil salesmen

pimping out the constellations

like hookers and websites

all along the Milky Way

only too happy to sway with the flute

of your weeping pleading and prayers

by taking you by the hand and the wallet upstairs

where sin begins your undoing

by teaching you how to fall

toward paradise

like something serpentine

in the gathering voice of the divine.

Fanged oracles with lightning tongues

like witching wands

looking for signs

in a tatoo parlour.

The amends doesn’t justify the ends

and eternity swallows its own tail

up to the head

and in a single, final gulp

disappears.

But it’s as easy as water to see

that it’s always this moment

and this moment

is all you ever were, can, and will be

out to the furthest stars and beyond

and down to the frenzied nano-heart

of the tiniest gnat of an atom

trying to patch space

like a mad seamstress

in the sunset air

when the past isn’t missing

and the future isn’t yet to come.

And this moment

is not younger or older than that moment

because you can’t say where it ends or begins

and space is not volume enough to fill it

and time can’t root its theme in it

and old men don’t sit out

in the shade of the summer trees

as if they were washing

the dust and stars of the world off their feet

at the end of the long road

in unknown tides of deep thought

about what might endure

and what might not.

Isn’t it clear

after all these thousands of generations,

and the pyramids and the churches and the prophetic skulls

and the brides of the living who annul them,

that the only place you can live forever is now

in this very moment just as you are and aren’t

and that there’s only one flower in paradise

that blooms alone like the moon at night

and roots in your eyes forever?

Sometimes it burns the heart

to turn the jewel of being in the light

and taste the anguish of your own death in its fires

and feel the mute, bell-weight

of the moon under your tongue

like the unassessible agony

of the dead that endure

without a rite of passage

like roots deeper than truth,

the brevity of the living

in the old fountains of youth

that no one goes looking for anymore.

And it may be that death is merely a shadow

that’s wandered too far from home

as night comes on, and life

a little radiance in a huge darkness,

the last star of the morning 

washed out of our eyes

by the light of the dawn.

But the masks you put on

like views of the world

to accessorize your feelings

never wear the same eyes twice.

And if you were to ask the nightstream

that flows by your feet

what it was looking for

it might answer

in an ancient dialect of water,

water, just as the mind

is a longing for mind

that pours out of itself

to search the worlds within worlds

that it creates as a sign of itself in its flowing

like lilies and willows along the bank of a river.

Everywhere in its shallows and falls and depths,

its passage is the threshold

of the homelessness

deep in the heart of all forms

that array their worlds for awhile

like stray concessions

to an inexhaustible longing

they know will never be fulfilled.

If you want to know

what my mind looks like

from the inside,

or yours, or hers or his

look at the world just as it is.

Scrape the faces you keep

painting on the mirror

hoping one day one might

accidentally mistake itself for you

and seduce you away

from the evolving agony

of not knowing who you are.

Let the paint flake away from your eyes

like autumn leaves 

down to the heartwood

of the tree that has stood

like a many armed traffic cop

trying to redirect the wind

like a vagrant violin

and listen to your seeing like music.

Picture-music bluing the distant hills

like the secret emotions of angels

hovering over an unknown grave

they’ve kept coming back to for years

like the ghosts of unsummoned oceans

gathering in tears,

true to their hopelessness.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOT JUST THE NATIONS

NOT JUST THE NATIONS

 

Not just the nations

but the whole planet

is reaping and eating

a perverse harvest

of hot coffins for cool people

like the indigent fire

of the crematorium next door.

I don’t think the sky’s going to fall in

or accept every invitation

to the backyard barbecues

of all the apocalyptic chicken-littles who do,

but I do think the air’s

going to cramp around our fat throats

like merciless hands 

when we’re dragged

to the chopping block

to be severed like the split ends

of a short circuit

that mistook itself for intelligence.

And as for our humanity.

Imagine. Two thousand years

of Christianity

and Christ is still being greeted

like extraterrestrial life

scrolling down from the sky

like a search engine with all the answers.

And there are spiritual snake-oil salesmen

pimping out the constellations

like hookers and websites

all along the Milky Way

only too happy to sway with the flute

of your weeping pleading and prayers

by taking you by the hand and the wallet upstairs

where sin begins your undoing

by teaching you how to fall

toward paradise

like something serpentine

in the gathering voice of the divine.

Fanged oracles with lightning tongues

like witching wands

looking for signs

in a tatoo parlour.

The amends doesn’t justify the ends

and eternity swallows its own tail

up to the head

and in a single, final gulp

disappears.

But it’s as easy as water to see

that it’s always this moment

and this moment

is all you ever were, can, and will be

out to the furthest stars and beyond

and down to the frenzied nano-heart

of the tiniest gnat of an atom

trying to patch space

like a mad seamstress

in the sunset air

when the past isn’t missing

and the future isn’t yet to come.

And this moment

is not younger or older than that moment

because you can’t say where it ends or begins

and space is not volume enough to fill it

and time can’t root its theme in it

and old men don’t sit out

in the shade of the summer trees

as if they were washing

the dust and stars of the world off their feet

at the end of the long road

in unknown tides of deep thought

about what might endure

and what might not.

Isn’t it clear

after all these thousands of generations,

and the pyramids and the churches and the prophetic skulls

and the brides of the living who annul them,

that the only place you can live forever is now

in this very moment just as you are and aren’t

and that there’s only one flower in paradise

that blooms alone like the moon at night

and roots in your eyes forever?

Sometimes it burns the heart

to turn the jewel of being in the light

and taste the anguish of your own death in its fires

and feel the mute, bell-weight

of the moon under your tongue

like the unassessible agony

of the dead that endure

without a rite of passage

like roots deeper than truth,

the brevity of the living

in the old fountains of youth

that no one goes looking for anymore.

And it may be that death is merely a shadow

that’s wandered too far from home

as night comes on, and life

a little radiance in a huge darkness,

the last star of the morning 

washed out of our eyes

by the light of the dawn.

But the masks you put on

like views of the world

to accessorize your feelings

never wear the same eyes twice.

And if you were to ask the nightstream

that flows by your feet

what it was looking for

it might answer

in an ancient dialect of water,

water, just as the mind

is a longing for mind

that pours out of itself

to search the worlds within worlds

that it creates as a sign of itself in its flowing

like lilies and willows along the bank of a river.

Everywhere in its shallows and falls and depths,

its passage is the threshold

of the homelessness

deep in the heart of all forms

that array their worlds for awhile

like stray concessions

to an inexhaustible longing

they know will never be fulfilled.

If you want to know

what my mind looks like

from the inside,

or yours, or hers or his

look at the world just as it is.

Scrape the faces you keep

painting on the mirror

hoping one day one might

accidentally mistake itself for you

and seduce you away

from the evolving agony

of not knowing who you are.

Let the paint flake away from your eyes

like autumn leaves 

down to the heartwood

of the tree that has stood

like a many armed traffic cop

trying to redirect the wind

like a vagrant violin

and listen to your seeing like music.

Picture-music bluing the distant hills

like the secret emotions of angels

hovering over an unknown grave

they’ve kept coming back to for years

like the ghosts of unsummoned oceans

gathering in tears,

true to their hopelessness.

 

PATRICK WHITE