MY LIFE AS YOUR FATHER

MY LIFE AS YOUR FATHER

for Aaron

 

I barely knew you

and you were gone.

Circumstance made you my son

then circumstance undid

what it had done.

TEMPTATION

TEMPTATION

It’s easy enough to tell yourself not to

but it’s harder than keeping faith

with a selfless religion

to stay true to your own decision.

 

PATRICK WHITE

THINGS I WOULD SAY TO MY DAUGHTER IF SHE WERE HERE

THINGS I WOULD SAY TO MY DAUGHTER IF SHE WERE HERE

 

for Jody

 

The important thing

is to stay ahead of the pain

like a debt you’ll pay tomorrow with your life

they’re calling for today.

Tips for survival:

Luck has nothing to do with intelligence.

Stupid will get you killed faster than evil.

The most dangerous assassins

conceal themselves under the eyelids

of those who say they love you best.

And as any bruised heart knows

there’s more power in an open palm

than there is in a fist

and the best way to get someone

to taste their own shit

is not to point to it.

A lot of opinions

is the frenzy of gnats in the sunset.

Silence walks like a tiger on soft paws.

Take a hint from the moon

who only bares her crescents twice a month

to show what’s she’s got up her sleeve

at the beginning and the end:

keep your claws retracted

like laws you haven’t enacted yet.

And never pass judgment on a friend.

A free mind is a godsend

but don’t measure your liberty in chains.

And if you feel the need

to attach yourself to someone

attach yourself to them

like the full moon to water when it rains.

Think with your heart.

Feel with your brains.

And don’t expect the Red Sea to part

into a thousand miraculous pirate-swept sea-lanes

just to let you get away because you’re special.

You turn a legend into a farce

the minute you start to believe in it. 

You can’t make a commercial for one

of the light that falls on everything alike

so don’t abuse your shining

like a fire eclipsed by its own soot.

Greenwood blows the most smoke

and gives the least heat.

Stay a jump ahead of yourself like a real star.

People might point to you and say your name

and write your story into the Pleiades

thinking they’re only a finger’s length away

from where you are

but cherish your darkness

like a secret you keep to yourself.

And remember when you transit zenith

everything you see in the sentient mirror

isn’t having an illicit affair with your eyes.

You should receive your life in every moment

like a constant surprise

if you want to stop aging,

if you want to grow up like the wise

who are always the first born of time

to inherit eternity

like a bloodline without a beginning

that leads to everyone as if they all bore

the creative likeness

of your closest ancestor

like Castor and Pollux in Gemini

like the history of your breath

in every gust of wind

that sows the dust

of countless generations

in the features of your face

as if everyone’s story were told by the same voice

in the same spontaneous tone

of all things passing away into fruition.

Don’t track a hovel of impoverished thought

into a palace of thoughtless intuition

and expect to be invited back.

Thirty chiefs of autumn

sit around every fireleaf

that’s ever fallen

telling stories about things that last

no one believes anymore.

All the reasons for yesterday

turn into today’s folklore

and if you’re trying to look into the future

from anywhere other than now

trying to separate the light from the darkness

like gold from its ore,

trying to anticipate the harvest before it’s sown,

you’re only prying the petals of flowers open

before they’re ready to bloom.

You’re just peeking under the eyelids

of the embryo of a new moon

as if you could crawl into the womb with it

to see what’s it’s dreaming

before it comes to light

as if you could get an angle on life

to take the shot

without sinking the table

or load the dice in your favour

with the third eyes of prophetic snakes.

Insolent with disobedience

you turn yourself into a slave,

but bound by duty

the great sea of awareness

is mastered by the sloppy salute

of any green recruit

passing in review like a wave.

The stars don’t need to convince anybody

they’re stars

and the flowers aren’t trying to be beautiful.

Live as if your death were already achieved

and lost in the shadows behind you.

Life flowers in the valleys of death

and if our beginnings weren’t

our ends are equal

and there’s an eternity of a chance

more than not

there’s a sequel

but live your afterlife now like water.

You can’t pour the universe out of the universe

anymore than your mindstream

can flow out of the sea of awareness

like blood from an irreparable wound

or a theme of unrequited love out of its music.

In what space you don’t already occupy

can you bury the corpse of all things

as if you could fit your boundless mind into anything

as if you could dig a blackhole deep enough

to bury God

as if there were ever anywhere to go in the first place

that wasn’t already in your face?

The delusions of a coward cast longer shadows

than the things they’re the images of.

There are dragons that know more about love

than the doves we send out looking for land

and who among sphinxes knows more than the sand

they come to in time like wisdom?

The mysteries are the mysteries.

They’re not looking for answers.

The meaning of life

is the life of meaning

as waves are the life of the sea

or even in late autumn

leaves are the life of the tree.

Let go of things as they do.

Blossom bear fruit and fall.

It’s not such a long way down to your roots.

Not long at all.

No further than the boots you’re walking in.

And if someone should ask you your name

say it like a constellation

that doesn’t shine its light on fame

though everyone sees it rising in the west,

not an inert all night marquee

with letters missing

that burned out like candles

that gazed too long

at their tiny tongue-tied celebrity

as if they were on a visionquest.

Sophocles said never to have been born is best

but he was just trying

to get the world off his chest through denial.

He was a bad guest with tragic manners at a great feast

who had forgotten

because he was born Greek

that life’s negation is its oldest affirmation

and what is lost in life is lost solely to those who seek.

Gratitude is the truest measure of wealth.

Squander yourself lavishly like an orchard in spring

knowing generosity is the spontaneous sign

of a spiritual being in good health

that doesn’t need money to prove she’s rich.

Let life adorn you in its robes and ashes

as if they were just so many cloaks of the moon

slipping from your shoulders

like petals in the starfields of space.

And don’t heed the blind fool

who calls for chandeliers

when she’s already got tears in her eyes

she’s been dancing to for years.

And remember this for the rest of your life

long after my tongue is a leaf

and my eyes are clouds on the wind:

once long before you were born

I asked how I could best return my life to the water

as clean as the reflection of the waterbird

that had just left it

and when the stars of Cancer

granted me you as my daughter

since then I’ve never needed to look

any further than their light in your eyes

for the answer. 

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE FLOWERS WANT TO OVER-RUN THE WEEDS

THE FLOWERS WANT TO OVER-RUN THE WEEDS

 

The flowers want to over-run the weeds.

The good guys are trying to win the garden back

from the bad guys

but all things tender themselves

like loveletters and parole boards

toward the sun eventually

as everyone does their time standing up

and the light doesn’t scan their seeds for terrorists.

The whole of the earth is one passport in a global refugee camp

exiled in a space so incomprehensibly vast and unbounded

only our homelessness is at home in the solitude.

You want to root a little pennant of blood in it,

flag the pin you push through the eye of the voodoo doll

that possesses you and say mine?

I lay claim to this as my own.

Go ahead.

The earth is still one and the same gravestone for all without revision.

Even for the undistinguished dead

who followed you blindly into your darkness

only to discover nobody’s ever truly at home

in the home of a thief.

You don’t need to make an atlas out of your skin to discover

everyone’s the spirit of water in a sack of dirt

with nine holes in it

as big as the planet

and whether you think you’re wearing

silk or a haircloth shirt,

or sunning yourself in the nude,

you’re still embodied by the earth

from the cradle to the grave

in this Rasputin of flesh in the river

and whether you’re short as a lie

or as tall as the truth

exalted in death or maligned at birth

one size fits all like the moon in everyone’s eyes

that doesn’t makes scissors of its crescents

to sever the whole cloth of the earth

into a Frankenstein of wounded flags that never heal.

You can’t reign over an empire of quicksand

and expect to be buried like a cornerstone

or steal a gift to esteem yourself a giver

when it’s as useless as a thief

putting his name on everything

in his own house of life

to keep himself from stealing what’s his

as it is to try and cut water

into its constituent elements with a knife

to separate the moon from the river,

the thought from the feeling,

the wound from healing

or people from the seven wombs of birth they flow through

like water and life and eyes and stars

through the infinite spaces

of the myriad races

entombed in every grain of earth.

 

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LOVE'S AN ABSTRACT LIE

LOVE’S AN ABSTRACT LIE

 

Love’s an abstract lie

when it never touches anything,

when it’s a light that never opens anything

when there’s no oxygen in what it breathes

though it fires up like an inert gas

missing all the l’s in the signs above

the Taj Mahal motels,

when there’s no braille or lightning or dice

in its fingertips to read the constellations

tatooed on your skin like the lost gospels

of the gnostic fireflies.

Love’s a hungry ghost

clinging to a blade of grass in the dawn

that returns it to the dead letter bin of the grave

like an afterlife that’s doomed to live on nothing

when the six senses stand by the doorway

of the excruciating mystery

with their hats in their hands 

like hosts lacking bread and guests for a feast.

Love’s the erosive life of water

that’s never been turned into wine

when it’s only a mirage at your lips

a wishing well on the moon

that’s never been raised like a goblet

to anyone’s lips

as if they were about to drink

at the last supper in an upper room

long and hard out of their own skull

until heaven and hell were full to overflowing

in every drop of being that went down.

Love’s a rain that’s never tasted flowers

a fountain mouth full of drowned bees

a sea without wind waves or weather

when love runs aground

like the moon on its own coral

and its chronic longing isn’t enough of a tide

to lift it off

and polyp by polyp it dies

like an empty lifeboat

that never braved anyone to get in.

Love’s only ever a one-winged sunset

disappearing into its own afterglow

like a homing crow

gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond

to the nether side of here

like a star perpetually at nadir

when there’s no dawn

to feather the morning with light and birdsong

caught in the curtains of gratified desire

after spending all night mending chimneys with fire.

Love douses the torches it lit

to go looking for you down by the river.

Love would rather extinguish all those stars in its eyes

that danced like fire on the water awhile

like lightning and fireflies

then let the abstract purity

of the unseeking mirror

blow them out

to see better in the dark that it’s alone.

Love scars its skin like hieroglyphics on the moon

without ever having been wounded

or mended by an atmosphere

that could heal the wind

its mountains tore open like loveletters

to see if they knew how to bleed

like silver from the urn of the ore

or if they just paid lip-service

to the inkwell of another uninpsired eclipse.

Love isn’t a sure-footed mountain-goat

righteously walking the high paths

in a penitential hair shirt

without balls and horns.

Love isn’t a moon without thorns.

Love slips.

Love avalanches down into its own valleys

to wipe out the road between the mountain and the river

so it can follow its own lifeline to the life-giving delta

where the deserts can greet the sea

like lighthouses seagulls and ships

without heeding their own warnings to stay clear,

without being mapped like another crack in the mirror

of a one-eyed telescope in the hands of a blind-sided seer

trying to keep the night from getting in.

The orchid of sex might bloom

in the shadow of an outhouse,

nirvana in samsara

salvation through sin

the cure in the heart of the disease,

and the night lily of enlightenment

array its radiance in a swamp,

but love knows so much more

than flesh and thought

what the bodymind is

it doesn’t sever the root from the flower,

it doesn’t elevate the one 

and diminish the other

as the higher and lower power.

Love transforms.

Love expresses itself creatively.

Love is the changelessness of change.

Love isn’t the whore of eternity.

Love doesn’t turn the hour of the virgin out on the streets

to make a living between the sheets.

Love is all time.

Love is all space

like two eyes in the same face

but one seeing

one being

one embrace

of the singularity of the view

that knows one solitude

is closer to the truth than two.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ILL-DISPOSED TOWARD WHAT I LOVE THE BEST

ILL-DISPOSED TOWARD WHAT I LOVE THE BEST

 

Ill-disposed toward what I love the best.

The afterlife of a lightning bolt is a crack in a mirror.

The short straw of a lifeline that was bent on revelation.

Such is the world.

The seeing goes on without me.

I can’t hasten a vision that’s already out of time.

But when I’m truly bad

there’s something infectious

about the sublimity of my laughter.

When I was a kid in a garbage-can

all I wanted to do was get to the stars.

And it’s all these years later like eyes without eyelids

and I’m still walking around on earth

as if I were on the wrong side of the light.

Young I aspired to be something.

Chrome on the bumper of an ideal.

Older I realize what I am was never my idea.

And there’s so much to miss that I am still unworthy of

even when I grieve

and things that my cowardice is still true to

that my courage doesn’t believe.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

THE QUIET MADNESS

THE QUIET MADNESS

 

The quiet madness on the other side of despair.

The sad pride of one who knows it’s useless to care

but still lets compassion trivialize his attention.

Even if you knew what human beings are doing

walking around on earth

that doesn’t mean the truth would exalt you.

There’s always a danger of losing your eyes

when you go looking for origins.

Go ask Tiresias.

The blessings and the curses are copulating snakes.

To see the furthest extremes of your nakedness

you must go the last part of the way blind as a prophecy

that has no intention of coming true.

You must enter the abyss

like a threshold without a doorway.

Washing your eyes clean of everything they’ve seen

is like trying to sweep mirages out of a desert.

Illusions don’t leave watermarks on the sphinx.

Nothing adheres to the seeing

like a sticky view of what appears to be passing.

You’re looking through one eye into a vast room

on the other side of the keyholes of your thoughts

hoping to see something that might unlock the door

when all along you’ve been kneeling before it

like a key in adoration.

Ask all these constellations above your head

ask all these chandeliers of dancing water

how it fucks the palace up

whenever you pauperize yourself

and go begging for chump change from the servants.

It’s disobedience in a heretic to stay within bounds.

Dumber than a muse with writer’s block

you cut a curl like a flame of hair from your fire

and lay it in a locket of ice

like the tiny coffin of all you once cherished

that perished like planets in the blaze of your shining.

And, yes, you can blow your eyes out like candles

but no one’s going to know about it

for at least a thousand years back on earth

because it takes that long for your light to get here

that’s how far you are into the night,

that’s how thick the window is between you

and the last time you’ve seen us

going down like Venus after the sun

only to come up again like Lucifer before it.

I know a madness that would put your sanity to shame.

I know a freedom that I don’t drag behind me in chains.

I know how love dies from death to death

as if it were still breathing in the reeds of the mindstream

like a goldfish in the undercover waters of the moon

when its eyes are in full eclipse.

I have watched the unborn take their first breath

like the unlikeliest of flowers to have found their way here

and I have sat in a circle of prophetic skulls

and said nothing that wasn’t the wonder of fools

who didn’t recognize their own voices in the echo.

I know of edges so sharp

they’re still waiting for swords

that must be folded like space to hold them.

And I know the bluntness of murderously compassionate guillotines

coming down on the nape of my neck

like the square of the hypoteneuse

of a wrong-angled triangle

with more than a hundred and eighty degrees.

I know how the murderers defend my liberties.

I have seen enough of myself and others in the world

to grieve for the dirt we will be buried in

and I have collapsed to my knees

on the long roads of the loneliest of my friendless sorrows

and forgiven all my tardy tomorrows

for not meeting me halfway today.

How many times have I slumped down this world mountain

like an avalanche with the corpse on my back

of someone sent to rescue me from myself?

I’ve canned enough stars and fireflies

to make it through the long dark winter ahead alone.

I’ll be warm enough before my own fires

reliving the ghosts of my unsanctioned desires

and the moon will still glow like the promise of gold

in the unmarrowed ore of the bone I’m gnawing on.

And I will not let the futility of my life make me lazy.

I will not dishonour this feast of earthly delights

by cringing like a dog under the table

snatching at scraps

and snarling like an ungrateful guest

when I know like a rat in a mystic silo

no one’s above or below or under the salt

anymore than the stars rise up and sit down in the same place

or the eyes that look at them

look at them with the same eyes in the same face twice.

Late at night I won’t listen to the wind

scratching at my windows like bad advice I won’t let in.

And if I’ve taught a few angels along the way

to look more deeply into sin than their eyes have ever been

it was the last mercy of a forbidden darkness

that taught them to mean what they mean by themselves.

Snow White thawed right there in front of all her elves

like a candle in the ice palaces of her desperate perfection.

And if I have done good

it has always been as a demon condemned to do good

in a surrealistic kind of afterlife

no one’s ever lived their way through before

without running their blood like blackwater

through the underground rivers and lifelines of their disinherited descendents

like a backdoor for the tradesmen of  paradise.

And I will not let the slightest itch of the righteous

pervert my passion

for burning so ferociously in my own fires

I am purified for life after life after life

by the kind of clarity that condemns the saved.

I want to set a fine example

of what the human species has to aspire to

as soon as I come down from the trees.

I have met all the blackholes of my goals in life

like a firefly in the mouth of a dragon of space

that went out like the last lighthouse at landsend

candling its light over a body in an allnight morgue.

And I know how hard and long and single-mindedly

you must lie to yourself to keep moving on

to be all that you can be

to the blind star-nosed moles

burrowing through your celebrity

like magi and maggots grubbing for the body parts

of spent messiahs as long extinct

as the elephant in the room.

And even after everything fits

like a swan clearing its throat under the sink

and everything’s flowing again

like a dervish of words down the drain

of another unsatisfied black hole,

I’ve still thought of my failure to bloom

like a newsflash from an undiscovered star 

as a more graceful exit

through the emergency doors of doom

than those who panic like musical chairs to take their seats

in the vast theatre of things that rarely matter.

Now there’s another Lincoln you can stick like a feather

in the stovepipe of the Mad Hatter

trying to get out like a bird

proclaiming the unique rightness of his anguished freedom

to a confederacy of the absurd

that listens to everything he has to say

like the sheet music for Old Swanny

in the ashes of a choir on horseback

riding like a posse to the rescue

of everything they’ve ever understood is worth killing for

to keep their white face from being stained

by the blackface of their purer part

that sings like Al Jolsen in the spotlight of an eclipse to his mother

who isn’t in the audience.

He calls to the mountain to ask his people to let him go

hoping the fleetness of his voice is an absolute of light

that can outpace the relativity of its own echo

looking for answers in the valley below

like the dejected polls of early election returns.

It’s one of the more amusing of the persistent anomalies

that constitute the patently absurd way

a human learns

that my questions have always been

worthier of being heard

than anything I’ve ever answered

about why I keep on setting the bird free

like the last of all the things

I ever expected to go south on me

like the wings of a fruitless tree.

Uprooted by a lightning strike

from a fulminating squall of hell

that welded the crack in my liberty bell

a scar stronger than the original wound I suffered

like a rose on the thorn of the bull

the moon sent like a meaning she meant to gore me

when I waved myself in front of her like an eclipse

trying to get her not to ignore me

like a court-jester jousting in the shadows of the midnight sun

with his own lunacy,

I still find it the greater pain to lose

what can’t be attained

than I do to lose what I have.

And what is this cosmic storm of emotion

that I sometimes think I am

when I’m lonely enough to look for a sign of myself

in the ashes of the forest-fire

that renewed my sacred groves

by killing them back into life

at the slash of a lightning insight

but a small commotion of thought-waves

I live like a teapot of the local weather 

rising and falling on a vast ocean of awareness

you can’t pour into any cup

without it overflowing

the mind that would drink it all up in a single gulp

just to get back to the homier illusion

of being an island paradise

in a lunar sea of sidereal quicksand

like a medium I understand

only the mad are monkey enough to master

how to stand up in like a human

looking at all those stars eye to eye

light into light

darkness into darkness

proud of his work

and exalted by what it was defeated by.

 

PATRICK WHITE