DRIVING THE SAME ROAD

DRIVING THE SAME ROAD

 

Driving the same road years later without you.

Looking at those things,

the boulder in the fork of the tree

like a giant slingshot

or the head of a baby

coming out backwards

between its mother’s legs,

all the endless explanations you had

for how and why things got here

now nothing but voiceless mutes in your absence.

But absence is too kind a word

to intimate the subtler death I feel

drawing its sharper knife across my jugular

like the Sanskrit word for conciousness

as if severance were the compassionate side of vacancy.

There’s nothing impaled on the dead trees

except for the occassional empty heron’s nest

thrust through the icebound beaver pond

where we used to slow down to spot beavers

but it’s still humped by as many lodges as it ever was

and the road’s still not out of danger.

I’m much more of a stranger now

than I was then

to all these things that go on without us

as if they had never been cherished by us in passage

as roadside shrines along the way

like the collapsing one room schoolhouse

abandoned like the empty envelope

of a lost loveletter

that left nothing to say in return but the silence.

I’m out of place in this era of my life

I’m passing through like a ghost

with more answers about the afterlife of the outcome

that became of me and you

than there are sad questions to ask them

and my solitude is deepened

by a seance of one

and I’m so weary of wounded secrets

talking in their sleep about having no regrets

they survived everything

I’m praying like a dream with no luck

for a life I can wake up from.

The lightning-struck pines

we named the Three Sisters

no longer recognize me

and the gate on the cow-pasture

where they still stand

like stone-walled gorgons

is hanging by a hinge.

And the farm that was paradise awhile

before we jumped

where we lived among sunflowers

listening to the honeybees in the locust trees

and painting ten hours a day in the fields

for months at a time

further and further from home

until we got lost one night together in the woods

and were retroactively enlightened

by the dangers of finding our way back

like wary animals among animals;

the farm is a graveyard of backhoes now

and there are people in it

overliving us like a field gone back to bush.

I don’t grieve our separation.

I know all the hairs we split to go our separate ways.

You couldn’t be famous in my shadow

and I couldn’t be anonymous in yours.

There were no Sufis

whirling in a gust of weathervanes

when the weather turned against us.

Just the vertigo of not knowing what way to go

but knowing you must

or go under.

Everything was blind.

Everything was a sign.

I didn’t know if I could make it through

another new beginning

and younger

you couldn’t wait.

So I left the gate open

and one night you closed it behind you for good.

I wanted you to be the first to leave

because I knew more about the deserts to come

so for months after

I just sat there alone

like a dead lightbulb in a dry housewell

sucking on my phallic thumb

knowing there was nothing left to keep warm

and waiting for my new teeth to come in.

I practised the brutal discipline

of being me on my own

when I doubted I had the courage

to bluff my way through the changes

as the abyss put on flesh

and walked around as if it were me

trying on avatars that couldn’t save me

from the emptiness that embodied them.

I miss you sometimes

but less and less often over the years

though there’s still more iron than rust in my tears

and I try with better and better results

I still can’t quite forget

you put my heart like a rose through surgery

without an anaesthetic

and there are still dry petals of blood

you amputated like eyelids

snagged like tiny flags

you never honoured

furled around the thorns.

I still can’t lawyer my way

through the innocence of your atrocities

as if the moon had fallen on its own horns.

Maybe you were too crazy

to know what you were doing

and you couldn’t help yourself

as time and compassion would see it.

But whatever gets said or doesn’t

things were just as dead

when they went to your head

as they were when they tried to flee it.

And I wasn’t enough of an asylum to know why

my prophetic skull lied to me

like a bad alibi

everytime I excused my murder

in the name of your homocidal youth

as if unconditional love meant being martyred

by the loveless proof of the godless truth

you had made a mistake

and it was too late to correct the heretic

that went up in Renaissance flames

fed by Botticellian picture-frames

at the Bonfire of the Vanities.

You were a Napoleon airtight

that burned so hot

there was never any soot on your window.

My demons were martyred

for insanities they couldn’t conceive

ever believing in,

but you were true to your deceptions

and I was blacklisted by the secret police

that tormented your paranoid perfections

with false confessions I never made.

And that’s the way things have stayed

for the last twelve years on the record

like the striations of a retreating ice-age

that clawed at the rocks

to keep from flowing out of itself

like many weak threads from one strong rope

over the edge of the known universe

where the mindstream doesn’t need

a lonely lamp and light in the darkness

to follow its own course

back to the sea of night it sprang from.

But what’s saddest of all to me

driving through this used landscape

that used to be the way home

through all kinds of weather

remembering the innocence

of what we hoped for from each other and life

is knowing the abysmal disappointment that would follow

as if time didn’t flow

it just evaporated.

It’s demeaning to the spirit of life

to wish you knew then

what you say you know now

as if you always wanted to begin at the end

without ever crossing a threshold.

So I don’t wish for anything more

than what is given me moment by moment

knowing what can’t be taken away

is already forsaken

but that’s not a reason to repent,

that’s not a season of lament

that’s just the way things are.

There’s always a full moon

buried in every scar

like a harvest of starwheat

we leave for the birds

like ghosts in the garden to reap.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BLOOD YOUR ABSTRACTIONS

BLOOD YOUR ABSTRACTIONS

 

Blood your abstractions.

You think the ashes remember the fire?

Or that trees don’t give up their ghosts like blossoms?

Where does your fist go when you open your hand?

No fish can ever swim out of itself

or bird fly out of the sky.

You can’t pour the universe out of the universe

without opening wide.

The wisdom of the seers

is deeper than listening.

They hear the picture-music with their eyes.

And don’t think of the interstellar spaces within yourself

and all your inner stars

on the other side of the mirror

as some kind of gift-wrapped surprise.

They might wear their myths out in public

but naked

they bed with lies.

And that’s okay too

because true north doesn’t have a needle

that isn’t either a compass wide

or a star shy of indirection

and as Shakespeare said

by indirections we find directions out.

It’s the oldest way we have

of getting about the going

once we stand up to the fact

we’re perpetually lost

in the act of knowing

where we are.

And me?

I’m heading toward a star called Vega

in the constellation of Lyra

along with the rest of you unwilling pilgrims

who never break to the chase

without crippling yourself from the start

by believing nothing can prove faster than light.

I might suggest space.

I might suggest time

as nocturnal precursors of the light

or what was there to shine through

and even a thought or a feeling

you can’t run from

you can’t run to

can burn through the darkness

like comets and fireflies

long before they’re enlightened.

And you might come

from a long line of atrocities

but it’s the things you love the least

that are the most frightened of you.

And sometimes the moon gets caught

in the crossfire of her own triggers

and bares her claws in parentheses

like a lot that got left out of her alibi

as the story keeps changing

about who took the last shot.

I always perjure myself for the moon

hoping she doesn’t turn me in

for all the lies I’ve told on her behalf

that everyone believes is a new religion.

It’s a long-standing chronic habit of mine

to flatter my waters like the moon

but tell the truth

like the eye

of the sun at midnight

that shines in the darkest corners of the wine

as if everything were still true to the perilous youth

that once endangered the doorway he stood in

as a sign of things to come.

That’s when I realized

I could spend my whole life

witnessing the unreality of shapeshifting illusions

condemned to the drudgery

of sweeping phantom oases away like stars

off the stairs of my deserts

everytime the wind effaced

the cornerstones of my quicksand conclusions.

If you want to stay alive in those realms

it’s crucial to dig deeper than that

to taste the water

and know for yourself

whatever the desert thinks

whether it tastes of the joys of life

or the tears of a sphinx.

 

PATRICK WHITE  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SHOULD I SPEAK OF THINGS BACKWARDS

SHOULD I SPEAK OF THINGS BACKWARDS

 

Should I speak of things backwards

as if the only things I could know and say

were always behind me

like starlight in my wake

or turn and look out into the abysmal darkness

not knowing what road to take

if the carpet will fly

if the theme I’m following

like my own shadow through time

will ever drop the veil from her face like Isis

and look into mine?

Stars evaporate in their own intensity like gods.

The spirit of the universe

is a shapeshifter

that never wears the same thing twice.

Every day shows up with a new face.

Every night’s a new lover in my place.

And the plot gets thicker and quicker

as the past asks the future

as if it read a lot of history

how things turned out

and the future asks the past

as if it were the watershed of the mystery

who came first and who came last

to the mindstream they both drink from.

Learning wisdom is learning space.

And it’s a big place.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

UNSPOOLING

UNSPOOLING

 

Unspooling.

As if my spine were a thread.

A triple helix.

The fingerprint of an anthropod.

Theseus in the labyrinth

making classical references to bulls.

Horns on the skull of a god.

No emergency exits.

Regard the dead parachutes of Babylon.

No one can understand you.

Probably right.

Something I have in common

with the darker freaks of the light.

Sunspots and eclipses.

Voids in the cosmic net

that lets everything through.

Where the stars don’t grow.

Where there’s no one left to kill

on desolation row

and no Lymon alpha blobs

embryo into baby galaxies.

Only lowly orphans are born

in the dead air of that womb.

The irisless ace of a shark’s eye.

I can hear dark matter

when it cries the light out

taking the shapes of things

no one can see.

God said Let there be light.

And that was the end of me.

Now I’ve got nerves of black lightning

tatooing constellations on my back

with a blackhole that doesn’have the eyes

to read a starmap backwards.

You said you loved me in the past.

But I thought you were only confessing.

And still you say you’ll love me forever.

But now I know you’re guessing.

I abide in the shadows of a deranged blessing

not knowing which is worse,

a flawed beatitude

or the perfect curse.

 

PATRICK WHITE 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THINGS I MUST SAY TO YOU THE CRYSTAL SAID

THINGS I MUST SAY TO YOU THE CRYSTAL SAID

 

for Layla Proulx

 

Things I must say to you the crystal said.

Jewels I must turn in the light.

Things I have gathered

like wild herbs from the starfields

to make a cool poultice of the moon

to draw the pain out of the wound

like a child that got turned around

when she was born

on the nightside of her blue eyes

to colour outside the lines of her constellation

like one of the original watersheds of Aquarius

that didn’t take to the bottle and spoon of lesser wells

that warily sip from themselves

as if they were testing for poison,

but poured herself out

in an elation of so many lifelines

so many rivers vital with beginnings

the world mountain discovered her

like gold in the stone

gold in the mindstream

gold in the ore of its bones

gold that shone even in the darkest of valleys

wherever she flowed

like the white moon

when it wants to be mistaken for a swan

and sheds her eyelids like the petals of a waterlily

that’s gone, gone, gone beyond herself

like a waterbird into the undetectable mystery of things

that lifts us up from our own reflections

and calls us to exceed ourselves

by flying beyond our own wings

past the last lake at the end of the universe

we could bask in like a keyhole

in the third eye of an unrelenting sky.

 

There. That’s a breathful.

A dust-devil in a gust of stars.

A precipitous river of my own.

But I like listening to the green mountains

talk about things that are perennially true

that no one ever believes.

There’s inspiration in the fires

that inspires their leaves

to burn like old myths

and poems that went up in flames

true to the muse of autumn

that has forgotten their names.

 

And I’m listening to this little world mountain

this dolmen of a crystal you gave me

this palace of mirrors

that sits above my desk

and tells me things about you

only an older spirit than the road I’m on could know.

It whispers to me at night

like a fragrance of light

from the unseen flowers

behind your eyes

flowing down from the high fields

and unscalable facets

of the mystic mountain you live upon

planting trees. 

Abruptly enlightened medieval Rinzai Zen masters

did the same

in the mountains of Japan

as if they were rooting their pupils

like worlds within worlds

within a grain of sand

like the cornerstone of it all.

 

Trees are the future memories

of a prophetic skull

that stays true to its ancestors

like pines in the fall.

Anyone who plants a tree

raises a temple to the wisdom of birds

who will speak to you

in the native tongue of a new language

in voices older than words.

Anyone who plants a tree

attains what lives beyond them like an afterlife

that’s always rooted in now

and even the dead branch

that holds the autumn crow in the rain

when things are bleak with the passage of things

will turn into a strong rafter in the house of life

and the moon will add its blossom to it

and the sun its butterfly

and everything that grows

will greet you as a child of its own.

And life will hold you up

like a candle

like a Douglas fir

like a star

like the tiered pagoda

of a pine-cone

like a mirror

like a bird

like a quiet smile

in the sweetest of solitudes

and well-pleased with what you’ve sown

hang you like a thousand shining chandeliers of rain

in the sacred groves of the Pleiades

to show you what has grown over the years

from the labours you undertook

from the tears you shed

to green the wounded mountain back to health

by adding your life to its life

is you returning

like a prodigal daughter of water

to the mystic springs

of your own starcrazy source.

 

Ride the wave.

Ride the snake.

Ride the wind.

Ride the fire.

Ride your own eyebeam

like a sword that delivers

the boon of life

like the first word

of a new universe

that’s just heard its name called

like an endless beginning.

 

You are comet. You are wheat. You are starwheat.

You’re a comet in the starwheat

making crop circles.

Aquarius.

Aquarians can take their skin off

and put it on again like water

and pour themselves out forever

like the sea in every drop

so when the tide returns

it’s never empty-handed.

I see a naked watersnake

swimming through the moonlight

like the path of something perpetually true

and inconceivably beautiful

as if time itself had learned to move like that

and every ripple was an era

widening its wingspan in its wake.

Hic sunt dracones.

That’s how dragons learned to fly.

The highest and the lowest all in one.

The snake in the claws of the eagle.

Wisdom in the lawlessness of insight.

God.

You.

Me.

The Mysterium.

 

For those who haven’t opened

the eyes in their blood yet

to see the bloodflowers

the bloodstars

talking to each other

like variations of the same light

these visions are the lost dreamgrammar

of an ancient madness

you can’t recover from like a fever. 

But to those who know the fireflies

are lamps on the road

the stars are not useless

and everywhere is the clarity and passage

of a river that forever arrives.

 

And I can see the wounded child

who’s brave about her pain

but feels like a ladder in the rain

no one will hold for her

to climb down like the moon from her window.

And those that should have been waiting down below

to catch her if she falls

have scattered like stars

on the insides of her eyelids when she blinks.

Abandonment is that hollow shell

you find washed up somewhere on a beach

and raise to your ear

to hear the sea far off

like a life that’s going on without you.

Even the sea can’t fill that cup.

Only another emptiness

could feel at home

in the homelessness of that space.

Abandonment is getting up every morning

and putting your face on inside out

and thinking of it as some kind of good luck

you’re on the other side of the universe

all on your own.

And though you howl like a wolf on the wind

the moon still cannot hear you.

That’s how longing is born

in the fires of separation;

that’s how the universe is called

every moment out of the nothingness

like someone to love,

and the deeper and darker the emptiness

the higher and brighter the mountain.

The watershed holds the fountain up

like a bouquet to the rain.

Emptiness doesn’t stand like a god

in the shadow of an unknown definition.

It’s the selflessness of everything that is.

Unborn it lives without distinction in the heart of things.

Unperishing it dies for everyone

without leaving anyone out.

 

When insight blossoms

like the moon

on a dead branch

compassion’s the fruit

that’s always in reach.

Life doesn’t practise

what the heartless teach.

 

This morning

I’m sitting at the feet

of your little crystal buddha

enthroned in full lotus position

as he turns my heart in the light

like a jewel in the eye of a diamond-cutter.

And the sky is generous with tears

as it clarifies the windows of perception 

with eyes as old and wise

as the sun at midnight.

And every thought I have of you is a fierce peace.

And every feeling a black mirror

deeper than white

that has extinguished my face

like one of last night’s stars

in the bliss of a greater illumination.

The mystic specificity of my mind

pales like the moon

in a blinding abyss

of no-minded indistinction.

And the stars that shone down on nothing for so long

like an indecipherable language

are now looking up at you

like the fountainmouth

high above the treeline

in the mountains

of an Aquarian understanding

of what they’ve always meant to say.

There are no echoes in the voices of love.

No avalanche of Rosetta Stones.

No scoffing crows.

No genuflections of the dove.

There are no shadows hiding like daggers

under the cloaks of day

to get even at noon

for things that happened at midnight.

Love is a feather

from a passing bird in flight

life puts into the scales

and the earth turns eastward toward the light

and death takes its finger off the measure

of life’s most cherished treasure.

 

And now the buddha turns into

two lovers sitting upright

face to face

in a lotus embrace

of enlightened connubium

in a coincidence of the contradictories

as if two were not the extinction of one.

And when desire opens its flames like petals

and blooms like a phoenix

there are no strangers in the fire.

And love doesn’t burn its feet

by making a firewalk

of the nameless constellation

rising from the dark innocence

of its sweet dreamless sleep

like the thirteenth house of the zodiac

with two people home from everywhere

with myths of their own

like Venus and Mars

turning the lights on and off

like lovers and stars

while the neighbours stare in amazement

through closed windows and locked doors

at the bright vacancy of the rumours

the dark abundance of the night

that knows all we are and do

and will and have done

is true to the overproof joy I take

in this lyric of a jewel in the light.

It turns me like your eyes

turning the key in the dark gate

of a mystic moonrise

where fate elaborates the worlds

like pearls from grains of sand

and time refires its last hour

like a master glass blower

to make more space

for stars in the desert at night

by breathing on the flames

that feather the ashes of the moths

in the urns of our names

with the wings

of a dragon

the wings of a phoenix

the wings of a sphinx in the rain

planting trees on the slopes of a pyramid

to watch the dead mountain grow green again

and know all the secret paths down into its afterlife

like a river running through the wilderness

or this theme of stars on the mindstream

beguiled by the mystic wiles

of a cougar caught in the moonlight

like a jewel in the eye of a dreamcatcher.

Or the seasoned seer in a mirror like me

enraptured by the anarchic fireflies

beading themselves

like the mandalic stars

of a new constellation

only the enlightened can see

enflamed like a prophecy

empowered by love

to rise in the night of your name.

 

PATRICK WHITE