EVERY WORD IS THE SEED

EVERY WORD IS THE SEED

 

Every word is the seed

of a language all its own

that goes on expressing itself forever like a vine

that keeps to itself like a musical theme

with different flowers.

The new moon splits the darkness

and there are uneasy ghosts among the waterlilies

that star the mind with openings

that bloom like gates

it’s easier than water to walk through.

For years I thought I was lonely,

wingless among flying things,

but now I know the intimate liberty

that burns in the eyes of my solitude

is a muse of fire that never goes out

even in the mouths of the dragons

that sleep in my watersheds.

The protean potential of one is greater than two

because there’s no one there to define you

like a straitjacket, a cocoon, a fortune-cookie

that keeps churning out moths and dragonflies

while everyone expects monarchs.

I know no more about what I will become next

than I do about what colour a chameleon will turn

when you put it in front of a mirror.

But I trust my transformations

like a plough in fertile starfields

and honour the skins I’ve sluffed along the way

donating my myths in luminous braille,

the constellations and the leaves I’ve shed

as I moved on like autumn,

to the local library.

You can look at a star from earth

or you can see it from the inside

before the arising of signs

hides the dream of things to come in the light,

and you can say I am this

and here I will build my celestial city

but all cornerstones of self are bad dice

and however eloquent your shrine is

words are not a voice

and Be yourself when there’s nothing to be

is a slaver’s advice to the free.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOU MIGHT KNOW THE OBVIOUS ELEMENTS

YOU MIGHT KNOW THE OBVIOUS ELEMENTS

 

You might know the obvious elements

but you don’t know the jewels of dark matter,

the lightless fireflies

buried in the starless nights

that have laboured to make a constellation of you.

You’ve never listened deeply to your own hidden myths

the wind tells around a forbidden fire

and though there are worlds gathered like candles

like eyes of slow dew on the tongues of the leaves

like roads that have never been walked at your feet

waiting for the first word from you to begin

you sit at the broken window of your imagination

like a footnote to creation

and say nothing.

And all along the coasts of unnamed continents

waiting to rise again out of your sunless depths

there are blind lighthouses waiting to see things

through your eyes

and lamps without wicks

that have run down to the shore

to salvage you like the sunken moonboat

that shatters its light

on the hard shales of your night tides

like a mirror that was never christened

by looking into your eyes.

You have the answers to many things

and you’re a good window who tells the truth

but when’s the last time

you ever stood speechless

before your own mystery

and outgrew your heart like a fountain

into all these many rivers of light and blood and water

that flow out of you like the homeless roots of the wandering sea?

And which among all these many threads and ribbons of life,

unspooled and spooling like eyes in the nightstreams of our seeing,

in the vastness of this shoreless mindscape

of time and space and dark matter

where even the mirrors are waves

that will eventually discover

they were always the God particle they were looking for

is flowing the wrong way

when the flowing itself is our destination?

What, where, why and how

are the elemental memes of a man

who takes the measure of the world in hand

to understand how far he is from knowing

his place at the table

but who is older than hydrogen

and mother of more beginnings

than there are shadows cast

by the light of the first word

into this dark-hearted world of radiant things

that are strung like the skulls of prayer beads on a rosary of planets

by an unsevered thread of light

that leads everyone out of the labyrinth of the moon

like the spinal cord of a waterclock in the womb.

There are those whose eyes are drops of water

and those whose eyes are seas,

but both are elixirs of clarity

in the immeasurable depths of the seeing

in which all things take their being

like fish that glow in the darkness by their own light.

The true whole and simple history

of all that has come of that first summons into the unknown

to let there be

is the creative mystery

that answers the echoless valley back

with the indirect imperative of I am

that stands everywhere enraptured

in a matrix of wonder

at the birth of God whose eyes

are the particulate forms and indelible colours

that run like chameleons in the infinite mirrors of time

looking back at you

like worlds within worlds without end.

But if you need to know where you’re going

and one star isn’t enough to show you the way

and you want to see as much in the dark

as you do in the light

put love in your eyes

like the sun at midnight

or a lamp in a broken window and look.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IN THE DEEP END OF THE NADA POOL

IN THE DEEP END OF THE NADA POOL

 

In the deep end of the nada pool

everyone drowns in their own eyes.

The summer triangle goes down in the west

and there’s a first snow on the last day of November.

How many dirty windows

must the light pass through

before it can see clearly?

And what’s the point of asking

the mirror and the mask

that suffuses creation with intelligence

if all it ever does is reflect you

on all sides of the question

as if you were all rivers

in a single drop of water at once

looking for the sea?

I uphold the integrity of my mystic specificity

like the Higgs boson particle

that gives everything its mass

but I can only imagine myself as far as I am

and it’s as impossible for me to fly out of myself

as it is to measure the wingspan of water.

You can’t pour the universe out of the universe

like a snake out of its skin again and again like the moon

and move on forever with your tail in your mouth

as if you were trying to catch up to yourself

by swallowing your head.

I have hung on.

I have given up.

And I have let go.

But even enlightenment

is the aspiration of a firefly

to illuminate the darkness like a lightning bolt.

And when you burn like a black hole beyond the light

for a deeper insight into your life

and why you’re walking around on the earth

doing what you are

because you were born to enquire

there is no star to guide the lost mountain down

these dangerous goatpaths

into the valley you heard call your name.

And what’s to seek

when everything speaks to you

in your own voice?

And is it better to flow along with things as you do in a dream 

like autumn leaves on the nightstream

that writes all the books

that you read like lifelines on the palm of your hand

to understand not just how the story ends

but why it began in the first place.

In the beginning was the word,

and God said, kun fia kun. Be. And it was.

And the rest is the afterlife of the Big Bang

that came of the foreplay

of branes kissing in hyperspace

to give the inconceivable a human face.

But let the fools of light

keeping rubbing the new lamps

of their impersonal cosmologies as they will

hoping some geni will appear like smoke in a mirror

like the affable familiar that gulled Faustus with intelligence

in the form of Mephistopheles.

Ah, Faustus, why this is hell.

Nor are we out of it.

And the world is full of sound magicians

yearning to be demi-gods

who have forgotten

blazing too is a kind of blindness.

But nur wa nur, light upon light,

when you turn the darkness around

there is more seeing in anyone’s eyes

than there are stars without bound above you.

How can you ever get anywhere you haven’t been before

if you keep knocking on your own door

to let yourself out with the cat?

And have you ever in all these years

of living on the precipice

of your fear of falling

ever stepped out into

the open inner spaces of yourself

without a parachute or straitjacket?

Have you ever walked on stars

or suddenly felt yourself feathered with fire

in that urn full of ashes

that bears your heart in a skull

like a geriatric embryo

that’s given up hope

and madly ecstatic at taking flight

pour yourself out on the wind

like the phoenix of a loveletter that’s long overdue?

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ALL THIS STUFF

ALL THIS STUFF

 

All this stuff going on in my head all the time.

All my fixed constellations changing like fireflies.

All the burning ladders of my unsuccessful siege of heaven

lying down like crosswalks at the feet of the mob.

And the stars that seemed so aloof and untouchable

settling like dust on my eyes.

I want to go home but home itself is gone

and there is no one waiting for me.

I live in these nomadic tents of my breath

that the wind blows through day and night

and everything I touch

though I long for the will of a pyramid

turns into quicksand.

I observe the life within me going on,

this flux of intimate intensities

as if I were no more than the container

and sentient window of a stranger’s house

looking in out of the darkness

of my uninhabitable homelessness

that has always been my last known address.

Nothing is ever what it seems

in this shell-game of themes and memes

that shuffles me around like a hard pea

gullible enough to deceive itself

it might one day turn into

the new moon of a black pearl.

But I’m chained by my vertebrae to a slaver

in a caravan of all my wild sides

being dragged like a jungle

toward these civilized coasts

that put everything asunder

that God has joined together

and brand what they sever

with the savage logos of an enforced belonging

that death is the only escape from.

My private cloud of unknowing

with the occassional black lightning bolt of insight

that sets my roots on fire

so that the whole tree becomes its own funeral pyre

and sheds me in flames.

And trying to fit me like a shoe

to the newly washed foot of God

is a vain waste of time for both of us

when you’re life’s got a hole in it

I keep patching with poems in the cold

or keep stopping along the way to take off

and dump out the pebble of the world

I’m walking on with a limp.

And it’s as foolish for a river

to ask where its youth has gone

as it is for me to lament the passage of mine

that I sent on up ahead like water

to keep something flowing behind me.

I don’t look for grey hairs in the wind

when it’s as clear as grace

that time and space

don’t encroach upon the stars like cataracts

and everyone we’ve ever been

lives on in each of us forever

like water waiting in the open mouth

of the frozen moonskull

for me to swallow and thaw

so that the blossom can flesh the dead branch again

that trembles and bends before the wishing well

that all men drink from like a bell

in this mirage of fire in a desert of stars

to taste the lightning-tongued elixirs of life

that frees the serpent from its scars

like a discarded straitjacket of skin and pain

to go witching for water in hell again.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU BELIEVE OR ESPOUSE

I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU BELIEVE OR ESPOUSE

 

I don’t care what you believe or espouse,

show me what you eat

and I’ll know what your ideology is.

Capitalism, for example,

like a great hog at the Wall Street Trough,

the Toronto Stock Exchange,

eats its own young down to the marrow.

And communism descends like a plague of locusts

out to reform the sheaves of the people like wheat.

And the worst world fanaticism,

the Islamofacists and Zionazis,

and the flies who rule Africa,

who promise milk and honey

and houris around the fountain of Salsabil

to anyone who murders in their name,

puts everything on the menu

and makes anyone anywhere fair game.

And it’s free enterprise for the poor

and it’s socialism for the rich

who get the biggest welfare cheques

while the middle extreme between them

lives on the trickle-down economics

of the leftovers that fall off the table

of politicians throwing scraps to the hunting dogs

who move among the legs of their masters

like lobbyists among the pillars of the banks

knee-deep in the blood of the abbatoir

in which they sit down like cattle-prods to give thanks.

Consider the collateral damage

of children killed like footnotes

or amendments to a bill

that would permit the sale of landmines

to the lords of famine who plant them

to shatter the flesh of the farmer who’s learned

to plough with a sword.

Bumper crops of body parts.

And look how the indifferent and the evil

wash their hands of blood

in the bottled water of the highest ideals of the mob

mouthing off to the pundits of popcorn

to secure a place on the Great Cob

of the American nightmare.

And it’s good to have a big heart with a big dream

that knows enough CPR

to thump on your chest to revive you

but how long can it survive in a world

that’s got a sewer for a bloodstream?

And what can you make of a Republican party

parsing the purity of gangrene

to block health care reform

like an election with a saw in its hands?

And you may think you know Christ

and organize like the Templars of C-Street

with great crosses of blood on your adulterated bedsheets

to protect the holy land from Democrats

but you better look twice in the mirror

at the skidmark you are in his eyes

when you stand up like the atrocity you are

to toast the good life with a grail

expecting to be rewarded

for all the sick children you denied a cure

by a healer who loved them beyond death.

Did you know there are state suppers in hell

where demons drink the blood of children

from a church bell

and draw lots from your skull

to see who gets to eat your heart today?

And spit it out like a fly

that corrupts the choicest wines

of the infernal and divine alike?

Even in hell as you are on earth

you’re bad meat down the well,

and some have noticed lately

even the fire that cooks you

is tainted by the smell.

Do you really think the sublime intelligence

that suffuses creation with love

like the dark mother of us all

and frees us like rivers of insight

to return to her like bright waters full of life

would affirm your offense to existence for long;

or that Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, Buddha,

or the decency who lives down the street,

knowing the children, the uncles, the brothers,

the lovers, the fathers and mothers,

the friends who have died

because there was a cure

a remedy, a redemption

for what killed them

but you denied them,

would condone

the electoral greed and cunning

of a petty slumgod in the senate

as an excuse for so much pain?

Or that the croaking of toxic toads

on corporate lily pads

rooted in the muck and swamp gas

of your obnoxious morality

that scabs the snapping turtles

waiting like backroom ceo’s below

would pass through their ears

like the clefs of angelic choirs

swanning their way through murder on Moonlake?

Or that the way you turn the prayers of mothers

all over the earth tonight

that their wounded children might live,

that they might walk and see and hear again,

that there be an end of the suffering and the illness,

that they have shelter and food,

school, play, medicine

and time to explore their innocence,

the way you pervert their prayers

into the new rhetoric of liars

crushing compassion

under the jackboots

of your fanatically uncommon sense,

as if you spoke from one bush

for many fires,

or looked at Christ’s wound

as he hung on the cross before your committee

as you choked the neck of the microphone and said,

Physician heal thyself.

There are no fiscal limits on your pity.

Or funding for universal coverage to resurrect the dead.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DON'T BE AFRAID

DON’T BE AFRAID

 

Don’t be afraid to look your dragons in the eyes.

Their fires are full of seeing.

Don’t be afraid to stare down your fears.

You’re not a bird.

They’re not snakes.

Look at all the darkness it takes

to make a single star shine

or how much death there is

in every breath,

in every drop of blood,

in any drop of wine.

Don’t play the orchard in spring

as if you didn’t have roots

that still grope in the starmud

like distant relatives

it’s pain for you to acknowledge.

You’re not a glass slipper born from rubber boots.

And not all blessings are white.

There are black beatitudes beyond the light,

dark jewels that weep mirrors of compassion

to show you the eyes of your most intimate fears

are your own looking back at you

like a child that’s been left by the side

of the long road home alone

as night comes on.

And when I say that

I know there are dark, terrible wounds,

black holes

that gape like mouths back at the moon

lifting itself up over the hills

like the unaccusing skull of someone you’ve known.

Things that can’t be fixed or healed.

Slashes of fate that sever and mutilate

the innocent’s animal trust of life,

blood on the smile of the knife

and love the word of a broken sword.

Intensities of pain

that keep on burning through you

like stars of white phosphorus

you were born under like a bad sign

making starmaps of your skin

and eyeless dice of your bones.

What poultice of a word

could draw the stinger out

or lift the veil of the poison

pain weaves on the loom of your nerves?

And only the silence knows how

to run its fingers over its scars

like a dead language

on a gravestone

no one can decipher.

So I won’t leave little sweetcakes of mercy

outside the eastern doors of your burial huts

or try to sew the mouth of the haemmoraging rose shut

with its own thorns.

Life has horns

and even the golden matadors

who hide their blades behind a cape of blood

like the flashing plinths of the sun

and brave every agony

have had their hearts gored by the moon.

All I can do is sit beside your body all night

like a candle in a morgue

and say nothing.

Or tell you I don’t know.

Or that great pain has no colour

a compassionate chameleon can mix on its palette.

And it may well be

that the worst virtue of the abyss

is that it doesn’t explain away anything

by trivializing our tragedies

in the soul-shaking profundity of the silence

when you ask from the other end of the telescope

why so little has come of so much.

But the flights of the dragon

are not guided by the lamps of the fireflies

and sometimes the only way

to get out of the coffin that grounds the world

is to pull the nails out from the inside

with your teeth.

But is this agony less ours,

less human, less faceless

than the danger

of any other angel in the way

we’ve had to wrestle with

to advance our humanity by losing?

There are mirrors so cold with the truth

that when you look into them

your face shatters like a chandelier,

and scales in the darkness

witching for blood

with tentative threads of lightning

that are trying to find you out.

But don’t deny your fears, your horrors

the atrocities you afflict upon yourself like a voodoo doll

that’s just turned Christian,

give them sky, give them time, give them wings

to break out of the cosmic egg you keep them in

and unleash the span of their fierce energies

like supernovae screaming

like unhooded hawks of light across space.

Don’t try to make pygmies of the dragons

you haven’t mastered yet

or you’ll end up shrinking your own head.

Even when the moon’s just

a spoonful of ashes

or plundered feathers on the water

it draws the same shadows

out of everyone alike

as it does when the harvest is ripe.

Get the inside out like a seed

and flower

if you want to turn the poison

in the stinger of the bee back into honey.

Be the black rose that blooms like blood

in the heart of your eclipse

and look beyond what is good and bad about the night

when after all these billions of years

it still hosts the light so generously

like a window in tears

that can see what is broken

through the star-filled holes in the glass.

Should you be grateful to one hand

and not the other

of the potter who turns you

like clay on his galactic wheel

to give a shape to the emptiness

whose sole function in life is to be filled

by the myriad wines of experience

whose ultimate high is us

like a rush of being

through heaven and hell

they could never come down from?

 

PATRICK WHITE