IT'S ONE THING TO BELIEVE IN GOD

IT’S ONE THING TO BELIEVE IN GOD

 

It’s one thing to believe in god

but it’s a much lonelier crusade

without a Jerusalem

to go looking for a god

without a guiding star

that believes in you as you are.

Mind is more like space than a thing

and it’s the nature of space to liberate

and who could possess it

and who could conceal it

and who could wound it

and who could heal it

and when the ignorant ask

for proof of its existence,

looking for fossils of dragons in the air

who could reveal it?

And what the ashes speak of isn’t fire.

One man hears a voice

and gets up from his table

and goes and stands

in the doorway of himself a long time

listening to the stars that beckon him

to wander out into the darkness

beyond his windows

but he’s afraid of what he might meet

and eventually retakes his seat

and adjusts his unease like cutlery,

but others hearing the same voice

will flare up like startled waterbirds

and burn like swans of white phosphorus

sailing their paper boats

like Cygnus down the Milky Way

or poems on the mindstream,

while others graze on the shadows

that have overgrown the roads

that once stretched lightyears

beyond the reach of the lamp

that busies itself with the enlightenment

of guided tourists

through an inner sanctum

that gathers its own to it

like a pilgrimage of moths.

Three waves of the same reality.

Three snowflakes on a furnace.

Three voices in an ancient abyss

trying to clarify the silence.

I am not cynical enough

to condemn the lies

that humans must tell themselves

to avoid their own tears.

On this dark shoreless sea of truth

we wouldn’t be here

if someone hadn’t learned

how to make love in a lifeboat

with lies for oars and lies for stars

and lies for reasons to hope.

But even if you’re as demonically sophisticated

and aloof as a lifeline

in a palace of patrician stars

that have grown chaste

in the pursuit specific desires,

you’re still just another refugee

on the Road of Ghosts

that leads everywhere away like the smoke

that mothered the flames

of your ancestral fires.

You can still breathe

without having faith in the air,

you can still see

without making a creed of your eyes

you must believe

by shutting them off from the light

and squinting at sin

through a keyhole in the night

that keeps changing hearts

like cellphones and locks 

that won’t let you in.

Your hypocrisy is a little demon

compared to the world-destroying universe

that kills without losing its innocence.

The righteous of any religion, philosophy, ideology

can’t point at anything with a clean finger

and the first article of belief

is a confession of your own negligibility.

Boot-camp for the spirit

to derange one delusion into another

by putting another mask

like a change of heart

on its facelessness.

Better to stay clear, and free, and dark

and know without binding yourself to the fact

that you’ve never been anyone from the very start

except what you’ve invented

guided by misguided teachers

to insist upon as yourself.

Mind can’t be framed by eleven dimensions

in a hall of distinguished portraits.

Without form

without colour, taste, texture, sound,

it isn’t the beginning or end of anything,

and when it goes looking for its source

it holds a mirror up to space

to the furthest limits of its seeing

where there is no light, no face, no being,

and it must be said

if you’re convinced

you’re already dead

no not-being either.

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASSERTIONS AND REFUTATIONS

ASSERTIONS AND REFUTATIONS

 

Assertions and refutations.

Genetic content playing

variations on a theme

of discursive enzymes

rolling dice down the mountain

to prove they’ve just squared the moon,

the random narrative of my triviality

flowing into the profundity of the sea

like a river taking on expanse and depth as I do

already at the gates of my vast approach.

The morning’s an open hand.

And the night

doesn’t close its windows to me anymore

as I pass like a solitary breath,

a whiff of smoke from a distant hill,

a thread of water vapour

woven into the arras

on the looms of the starstreams.

What is my small remark of a life

struck like an off-handed spark

of the fire in the stone that shaped me

into this marvel of wonder and agony

I keep falling on

like a sword that was forged on the moon

to be given back to the waters it lost

like a sail to the oceans of a wounded bride?

After a long life

success and failure

are just the beads

you traded away your continents for;

and place is no longer an urgent sorority

and for all that you’ve thought and felt

for all the worms you’ve turned into butterflies

and all the maggots that you couldn’t,

there is no abacus of moons to tally

the weeds from the wheat in an urn,

or the prophets from the liars

in the choirs of a furnace

that burns like the universe

in its own silent immensity

like a candle beside a coffin in a morgue.

For all that I have loved and cherished and cried for,

for all the boorish follies and noble aspirations

I have died for like an ambiguity

that could no longer live with itself

like a small bird breaking through its shell,

and the great bells that fell silent

before the unspeakable sorrows

when life washed me out of its eye,

for all that I have honoured and despised,

and all who have honoured and despised me,

and all the joy

that slipped through the fence

between yesterday and tomorrow

and stole the moment like an apple,

I still weep like a wing

before my own departure

when the waterbird takes flight

from its own reflection in the mirror

even though I know my passage

is the mountain of the unknown

walking through its own valley of death

as the stars that once guided me

grow further apart.

It’s a dark grace

and exquisite discipline

to be able to sustain the ambivalent art

of a creative nihilist

who doesn’t feel that anything is missing

who has tasted the tears that fall

from the clear jewels of awareness

like the brilliance of Venus alone in the morning

and found their shining dangerously sweet

to my unshakeable faith

in this road to nowhere

that is following me

like the eyes of an unanswered loveletter

through the darkness.

And I don’t know why it seems

that every star

every woman I look through

is a midnight window into my own house

seen like a glowing postage-stamp from afar

as everything goes down over the hill

without looking back at the way it came

like the egg of the phoenix

in the nest of the candle-flame

that illuminates the universe in all directions

like a lost Sufi,

or St. Francis of Assisi

spinning like a compass

at mystical intersections

for an answer

that wasn’t born of his questions.

But don’t wire up your fireflies

like constellations and Christmas lights

and listen for the tinkle of broken filaments

and think you must change

the way you see things

like eyes that have burned out like bulbs

in opening night marquees.

Go hang out with the galaxies awhile

and let things take their course.

You’ll start whirling like a dervish

in gusts of stars

that will gather like wise men

around the manger of your third eye

immaculately conceived

like the fire of a virgin

or life in the sea

from their own shining.

And in the dark mirror

like the blindness in the blazing

in which no one can see

their own reflection

in which all reflections are consumed

in the heat of the clear light

that engenders time and space

like the twin mothers of intelligence

and freaks the night

like lightning in the stone

with the joys and terrors of insight,

you will understand

the unfathomable compassion

and inexhaustible generosity

of the mindlessness that inconceivably

conceives of your existence

as if it were your own idea.

And slowly you will begin to remember

all the events and features of the world you are

and will ever impossibly be

are those of the dark mother

who nourished you on light

until your eyes were full

of an incomprehensible radiance

that opened the stars in your blood

like a lover alone in the night

with the myriad streams of his seeing

flowing like momentary themes

into the abyss of black beatitudes

that have amazed him into being.

And you will be at peace with yourself

like a flower reconciled to its own root.

And your suffering will sweeten

the vinegar that falls from your eyes into wine

and all that was irreplaceable and lost

will return like a cat from many miles away

and your anger will become a school

for delinquent continents

that keep sinking beneath you

like Atlantis and Mu

and there will not be a mouth

that gapes in hunger,

a disease that twists the bones

of a child that died in agony

because profits denied her a cure.

And the abandoned shall have

bread and shelter and clean water again

and the old will not be cast aside

like the smoke of an exhausted fire

that has told its story,

and the young will not be compelled

into forced labour

for a future that eats its own,

and the seven stomachs of the bankers will evolve

to graze on money alone

without skimming the ozone with methane

and again the grass will be green

and the cows and the sheep and the bull-vaulters

jump over the moon.

And you who thought you were the pilgrim

as your aspiration approaches its shrine

will know that all along

every step of the effortless way 

you were always the open gate

through which everyone poured like wheat

into the native soil

of their own hands.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

APPARITIONS OF THE MUSE

APPARITIONS OF THE MUSE

 

Apparitions of the muse

hanging her stars

from the end of my nose

like an exotic fragrance of night

more revealing than the light.

There. That’s mine.

The constellation of the donkey,

and there beside it, do you see

that red-haired star

blazing like a woman with a carrot?

I’ve followed that star for fifty years

always a mountain away from the valley

like a passionate Sisyphus

rolling the earth up a hill like a stone

happy with my own absurdity,

happy to go mad for her sake alone.

Elixirs of moonlight

mingled with strange waters

and I drank until I drowned

in the ferocity of my own delirium

like a myth that’s forgotten

which stars it belongs to.

I’ve never been much of a martyr

and bored with lies

I’ve always been two hells shy of a messiah

but I have fallen on the thorns of the moon

more than once

after my long descent

down the burning ladders

of God’s last word on the matter,

so there’s no splinter of the true cross

to needle the issue

like a compass or a crucifix.

And it still puzzles me

why it’s always my blood

that rushes to the end of my dick

like a volunteer army

but it’s always somebody else’s flag

that gets raised above the rubble.

Pyrrhic victories at best

when I’m not feeling cursed or blessed

by any kind of mystic meaning

convincing me I can firewalk

barefoot on stars

when I can’t even get

this blue pebble of a planet

out of my heart like a shoe.

But even letting go of all their leaves

like loveletters home and refugees 

the trees can only go so far

as the wind and streams will let them.

And then there’s a darkness that doesn’t taste of stars.

And decisions that cut like the smiles of broken mirrors.

And turmoil in the snakepits of desire

that are thrown like angry acids

in the eyes of the seers

who saint the rain with their sorrows

like old calendars of crossed-out tomorrows

playing x’s and o’s with the moon.

It’s a freak of enlightenment

to turn love into a discipline

inspiration into a law

and godless wonder into superstitious awe.

So I listen and say nothing,

see and don’t reveal,

understand but never think I know

the gates that pass through me

when you call to the wild geese in the fall

and I am startled by the loneliness of the answer.

I’ve seen you in the nightstream down the mountain,

the river and the sea

that sits below the salt

at her own table,

and I still suspect it was you

that turned my bitter tears

into the brittle chandeliers

that fell like ice-storms in a fountain

to silence the voices of the mirrors

the birds kept flying into

like windows at war with the sky.

I was out of the egg.

I was out of my mind at last

like a gift I didn’t deserve

and the universe was full of your absence

because you were the embodiment of my longing,

the darkness in the light

that stood aloof from the meaning of everything

as if your only proof were your eyes

and that were enough

to answer the empty skies with stars.

You may put on flesh and blood

and in your human proportions confess

you don’t believe this,

but you can never be attained,

never be embraced

never be contained

by any avatar of who you are

because like space in all directions

you are limitless

and even time is consumed

in the root fires that grabbed you by the ankle

and pulled you underground

to dress a goddess of light

in the nocturnal jewels of the dead.

And it is not a perogative of the beatifically born

to be demonically wrong,

but I have heard the skulls in the song

that allures the unwary sailors

to the lunar horns of your fishbone harps

to smash them on the rocks

as if you took a tragic delight

in the sheer delinquency of your power

to arouse and extinguish desire.

Anyone can come up

with a meaning for life

but you are the muse

of meaning itself

the meaning of meaning

when anyone asks

without expecting an answer.

What woman that I’ve loved

like a river reaching the sea

have you not been

over these long, intense years

of radiant tenderness

and creative commotion

and an ominous darkness out over the ocean

when the moon turned around

like a bride in bed

and revealed the far side

she kept to herself like stars?

And it’s still a shock and a marvel to me

when you disappear into the air

like a breath someone neglected to take

when it bloomed on the window.

I don’t doubt your capacity to devastate

and I have the urns and the burns

and the ashes to prove it

and know on a whim of your arrogance

you could leave the phoenix out in the cold

and douse the dragon like a torch

in your fire-proof waters.

But lately, out of the flesh,

I look for you behind the eyes

of every woman I meet

and it’s rare that I find one

whose blood and passions

you’ve worn as your own,

whose mind is a jewel of yours

that flows like a star sapphire

down a dark mirror

older than the meaning of life

that relflects you in the light of a black sun.

And I know enough not to ask

about those lockets of blood

you hang like thorns

around the neck of your mystic rose

like the first and last crescents of the moon.

I opened one once to see

whose picture you carried inside

like a butterfly you were working on

or a loveletter in a bottle you never sent

and I’m still not certain

I was demon enough

to survive the miracles

you released upon me

like a hive of angry angels

but I came to know

what the loss of heaven meant

when I ran from the garden

through the closing gates

of your wishbone,

on the short end.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EVENTUALLY THE MOON

EVENTUALLY THE MOON

 

Eventually the moon

struggles out of its cradle

like a sulphur butterfly

out of its house of change.

And far, far away

in the loneliest of deserts

that cling to a skull like thoughts

someone waits like water

spilled from the countless eyes

that have looked to her

like a cool eclipse for healing.

Illusory cures for illusory diseases

but she makes their wounds seem beautiful

and their madness a fashion of God

running naked through the surf

of an orchard in bloom.

Twice in a doorway

and once in a grocery store

in broad daylight

I have tasted the black rose

of her collusive shadow

opening all her eyelids

like phases of the far side of the moon in me,

unspooling the fragrance of her darkness

to sweeten the night that overcomes me

whenever I see her.

Dark beauty, cormorant, stars pour

from the shapely pitcher of your body

into the dry wishing wells of my eyes

and all things are granted in a moment

it would take a lifetime to repair.

Sphinx without history,

black box of the mystery,

I dream and drift

with the serpentine currents

of these themes of you

like the pale lifeboats

of blossoms and poems on the nightstream

and everywhere

I’m building bridges in the air.

And a great tenderness shakes me

as I press the head of an arrow to my lips

like the last jewel of a foolish prince

or the shadow of a bird against the moon

or a crazy wise man’s last word

and release it like a spirit with flare

to fire the night with fountains and flowers

to summon you here with me

like the alluring simulacrum

of an unspoken intimacy

that inspires my eyes to see

beyond the dark gates

and flaming swords of poetry,

and the light that brings peace to the garden,

and the law that can only be kept

by the breaking of it

and the sad music of compassionate hearts

that have been broken like bells

and the children whose blood

was violently spilled

and runs like a river through hell

we’ll all have to cross one godforsaken night,

beyond the infinite expanse of the middle extreme

like a third wing on a bird

that baffles the guardian dragons,

beyond the clarity and the darkness

of the wisdom and the lies

where the rivers meet for sex

and the lowest stars on the horizon

are the flashbacks of enlightening psychodelics,

talking in the unbroken code

of the mandalic relics

that yarrow the Book of Changes

like the ups and downs

of fossils swimming through stone.

Beyond the wind

that blows the stars into my eyes

like chimney sparks and firelies

and rattles the diamond bones

of the skeletal chandliers

that dance to their own music

and saturates the summer night air

with the most poignant of delusions,

and further beyond the wind that clarifies

the eyes of the wounded water

that fell on the swords of its own waves,

beyond what condemns and saves,

beyond the palaces of the slaves who master

and the palaces of the masters who enslave,

and the quicksand cornerstone hovels

of those who uphold them,

and the revolutions that fail for their own sake

to escape the wheel of the prophecies that foretold them

like the blood of a dove in the heart of a snake,

beyond the ashes of the burning cities

that gave a human voice to the flames

like oxygen that screams

and the barely audible syllables

of people without names

who were hurriedly buried in pits at night

like the student bodies

of old backdoor universities

that dared to indict the juntas of death

that covered their eyes like sunglasses on a skull

to witness their own eclipses

in the outhouse pulpits

of a war crimes trial.

Beyond the beatific and the vile,

the black mirror and the white

that God keeps up her sleeve

to trump whatever you believe

until the candle goes out

like the seer and the seen

and you are left alone in the dark

before the arising of eyes and signs

bore witness to the singular event

of that mysterious seeing

that brought the world into being

that you know as your own life

that darkness within darkness

where you must go like a star

by your own light

like a lamp already

beyond its long journey

without a guide.

Beyond all this in a space

I cannot locate or name

as if God spoke in a foreign language

in a native tongue of flame

when she created this world of desire

that keeps pouring its heart out like an urn

to renew its capacity for death,

for churning ashes into honey

without getting burned,

where the universe forsakes its own laws

like a straitjacket

and the freedom is not the freedom

of the crazy or the sane

still handcuffed to each other

like two ends of the same bone

they keep running through forensics

to distinguish the perp from the crime,

but a sublime profusion of cool bliss

that I exist to feel this eclipse

in the heart of the shining

and drink this dark elixir

from the well

of a homeless mirage on the moon

as if it were more real than water

and watch in unadmonished wonder

how it deranges me creatively

like stars agitated by the unknown atmosphere

of a planet that’s wandered far off the path alone

past the thirteenth house of the zodiac

waiting in its illegitimacy

like eyes at a window

to be acknowledged by the sun

across the tracks

of the proper perspective

into shipshifting constellations of its own

that grow as the night grows

and can’t be retold

in a familiar voice

around the same fire twice.

 

PATRICK WHITE