THE ONLY WAY TO CONTROL THINGS

THE ONLY WAY TO CONTROL THINGS

 

The only way to control things is with an open hand.

Water on rock

a fist can’t do anything to stop the rain

that keeps washing its bloody knuckles

by kissing the raw red buds of the pain-killing poppies clean.

Anger grows ashamed of itself

in the presence of unopposible compassion

just as planets are humbled by their atmospheres.

The soft supple things of life insist

and the hard brittle ones comply.

Bullies are the broken toys of wimps.

Power limps.

But space is an open hand.

Mass may shape it

but it teaches matter how to move

just as the sky converts its openness

into a cloud and a bird

or the silence nurtures

the embryo of a blue word

in the empty womb of the dark mother

like the echo of something that can’t be said.

The only way to control things is with an open hand.

Not a posture of giving.

Not a posture of receiving.

Not a posture of greeting or farewell.

Not hanging on or letting go

but the single bridge they both make

when they’re both at peace with the flow.

It’s not the branch it’s not the trunk

it’s not the root it’s not the fruit

but the open handedness of its leaves

that is a tree’s consummate passion.

Isis tatoos her star on their palms

like sailors and sails

to keep them from drowning

and into the valleys of their open hands

that lie at the foot of their crook-backed mountains

the aloof stars risk the intimacy of fireflies

and fate flows down like tributaries into the mindstream

as life roots its wildflowers on both shores

as if there were no sides to the flowing

of our binary lifelines.

The only way to control things is with an open hand.

You cannot bind the knower to the knowing

as if time had to know where eternity was going

before anything could change.

X marks the spot where all maps are born

to lead you back to yourself

like a treasure you forgot to bury.

An open hand is a ploughed field ready for seed.

An open hand is the generosity that is inherent in need.

An open hand is and is not an open hand.

No hinges can define it

because it’s not a two-faced Janus

standing in the doorway of a new year.

An open hand doesn’t look forward.

And open hand doesn’t look back.

What opens like a flower doesn’t close like a door

and when a hand opens

it opens at the urging of a light within

that makes the light without glow like the mother of wine.

An open hand isn’t the writing on the wall.

Moses came down the mountain with a stone tablet

but an open hand makes an avalanche of the ten commandments

and goes its own way without submission or regret

like a vine with a prehensile grip.

An open hand is the only way to control things

when things are out of control.

It isn’t a day of yes followed by a night of no.

There’s nothing divine or infernal about it.

An open hand is all that humans need to know

about their own nature

when they let their gods and demons go.

Nothing missing.

Nothing complete.

An open hand is enlightenment.

A fist puts a bad spin on ignorance.

An open hand is a book older than the Bible.

An open hand isn’t a tool

or a new kind of stealth weapon.

And open hand isn’t a weathervane

or a rudder in the wind

or one wing of a bird

with a secret twin.

An open hand is the only way to control things

without killing them for their own good.

An open hand does not say thou shalt not

or you should.

An open hand is not a white flag of surrender

a victory flag or a sloppy salute.

It’s not the price tag you look at

when no one is looking

on a second-hand suit

you’ve been wearing out like a body for years.

An open hand isn’t the hesitant offer of an uncertain friend

held out like a placebo that can’t heal anything.

You might have fixed the palings

but you still haven’t mended the fence.

An open hand is the way things feel when you’re truly alive.

It’s got nothing to do with how the fittest survive.

An open hand is the afterlife of a fist that died in defeat

trying to unseat an older power

that swallows it like a god

dissolves a cube of sugar in water

and finds it sweet to be absolved of the deed.

An open hand is a cup that could hold an ocean

but never overflows.

An open hand isn’t a relic of the thorns

that pinned a butterfly messiah

to the webbed cross of a sacreligious spider

or Ciceronian appendages nailed to a senate door

like a bill that didn’t pass

or Che Guevara’s hands cut off

by the people they laboured for like rebel fruit

that went against the grain of the tree

that poisoned everybody like a jackboot.

An open hand isn’t a proposal for reform.

It’s not the new norm.

It’s not what not to do

when people are watching you

to see if you’re the same as them.

An open hand is the only way to control things

when you don’t know what to do

at the genetic crossroads

of cosmic and domestic things

that weigh on your mind

like the dirty laundry of evolution

piling up in the corners

like falling standards of confusion.

It doesn’t question anything

so it never rejects an answer.

It doesn’t pretend to be the sign

that beatifies its own suggestion.

An open hand isn’t trying to make

a housewife of an iris

or trying to nail things down

to get a grip on things

like a man who knows how to suffer like a floor.

An open hand isn’t something

worth living or dying for.

It won’t save your life.

It won’t take it.

It’s not a lifeboat or an anchor.

Four fingers and a conductor for a thumb

don’t make a choir of flesh

that will make the angels come like groupies

and just because

you’ve got runners on four bases

doesn’t mean you can hit a homerun

like the stand-in umpire

behind the homeplate of your palm.

Four men out and one man on

and the thumb bunts to the outfield

in the last inning of a pre-fixed playoff game

that shaves the score like a pencil into points.

An open hand is the only way to disarm a fist

that buries the road you’re on

like an improvised explosive device

timed to go off in your face like a hand grenade.

The only way to control things without controlling them

is with an open hand.

An open hand does not deny or affirm.

An open hand legislates like the light

and judges like the rain.

Five fingers are the roots of a hung jury.

Five syllables of an incommensurable life sentence.

An open hand isn’t the servile agent of a willful mind.

It doesn’t do anyone’s bidding.

It isn’t the delta at the end of a long river

whose life flashs before its eyes

like an ancient civilization

as it disappears into the sea.

An open hand doesn’t squat on the ground

like some denuded navel-gazer

who mistakes his belly-button for his third eye.

An open hand says as much to the deaf as the blind.

The only way to control things is with an open hand.

An open hand is the sign of a mind at rest

with what it doesn’t understand.

An open hand isn’t a contract with anything.

An open hand isn’t a flatlining fist.

An open hand is a loveletter that doesn’t insist

on being returned like a dove

that’s just discovered land.

An open hand is the fairest image of a god

ever created in the likeness of a human.

An open hand is the omnidirectional threshold

of the homelessness we built

on a cornerstone of quicksand

like water moonlighting as a rose.

An open hand isn’t celibate or promiscuous.

An open hand warms itself

around the cold fires of the stars

and tells tall tales about the constellations

of scars and callouses that have sprung up

like villages along its lifelines.

The only way to control things is with an open hand.

An open hand is a myth of origins

that ends where it begins.

An open hand makes no distinction

between matter and mind.

An open hand is the enlightened gesture

of a human who knows without grasping

what they don’t understand

and welcomes without expectation

all those who cross over it like the floor

and pass under it like the roof

of a house without a door or a window

to keep anything in or out.

An open hand is as certain as doubt

it doesn’t know what it’s all about

but the only way to control things

when they’re coming apart

and coming together

is with a hand

as open as an ample heart

that gets it by letting it go

one breath one death

one footstep one heartbeat

one spring one autumn

one hail and farewell after another.

The only way to control things is with a open hand.

An open hand rests in its power like the flower

the Buddha gave away to Ananda

as all he could and couldn’t and wouldn’t say.

Seekers look for starmaps to paradise

like the night looking for the day

that shines all around them

and blinds them.

But look as they may

an open hand is always the way that finds them.

The only way to control things is with an open hand

that binds us to the boundlessness

of letting go of who we are

like a star on the lam

that poured itself out like insight

to say to the night I am.

This is my hand.

It’s open.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHAT DOESN'T KILL YOU

WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?

The opinion of a weak man.

Another philosophical cannibal

who ate the heart of Hannibal

trying to transcend himself homeopathically

like an elephant high in the Alps.

And what does it make you stronger for?

More of the same lame supremacy

hobbling across the stage

like the wounded iamb of a crippled king

suffering played with like a toy

who tore the wings off things like a spider?

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods

they kill us for their sport.

And some people root well

in the manure of suffering

and tell me that it makes them grow

and I could easily believe it does

if I were a vegetable

but the apple is not more beautiful for its bruises

the child is not ennobled by his hunger

and if you’re truly alone

who is there to liberate you from your solitude?

Is the water more beautiful when it’s tormented

by the things it flows through around and under

than it is when it’s left to find peace all on its own?

There’s a dumb blank stupid face on pain

when you look in the mirror

and the mirror turns to stone.

There are memories.

There are scars.

There’s Auschwitz Gaza and Darfur.

There are lifeboats that jumped ship like plague rats

and ran aground in Genoa like the middle ages.

There are thorns and nails and skulls

and the sacred relics of the unholy atrocities

that burn people in fire to keep them from going to hell.

For all the people killed by cannon

as many have been killed by bells.

Killer wasps.

But no honey in the holyland

when you beat the stars out of

the golden dome of the hive like a pinata.

Inured to suffering like the least of all possible worlds

you may have learned to grow a garden in a snakepit

but the rose is not defanged

nor the thornapple of its antidote less venomous.

Some tears fall on barren ground.

And some tears are famous.

And it could be we suffer at our own hands

open our bellies and veins

as a way of putting a good face on a bad space

that’s got us down and out

in Ottawa and Osaka

and it’s amazing to watch honour overcome life

but it’s still just a way of opening a loveletter with a knife

and when all is dead and done

taking no for an answer.

Suffering might go into remission for awhile

and concentration camps turn into constellations

and a good rain wash the blood off the flowers

and the geraniums you planted around the house

keep away snakes

and the poppies bleed like junkie donors

trying to make a few bucks at the blood bank

that can’t thank them enough for their bloodstreams

but the wheel of death and birth

is always out of alignment

like most of the planets

and things come back again

like the second run of a storm

or a tidal wave that rises like a dragon

from the dream of an underground watershed

shaken by an earthquake from a deep sleep.

And I can’t see how any of this makes me stronger.

You might feel exalted by the power

in the bulldrums of the thunder

but you won’t like the taste of the lightning in your tea

when you’re rhapsodically high on your own overview

like a flag above the best

and the mountain loses its nerve

and turns into quicksand under you

and the sun stops still at noon above the walls of Jericho

and the horns of the prophet aren’t blessed

and you ask yourself in your helplessness

like a guitar that’s forgotten how to open its mouth and scream

why pain is always the black kool-aid of change

why suffering always spins the cocoon

around our transformations

as our fingernails go black as the new moon

that started out trying to make butterflies

but wound up sealing mummies in a tomb.

Can’t love do as much and more?

Isn’t joy as much of a magician as sorrow

Isn’t wonder as much of an elixir today

as it will be tomorrow

or compassion as much of a grail

or truth as much of a feather

in the scale of things

or beauty as much of a potion

to change the course of our wind blown waterwings

on the great ocean of suffering

as the rose that drowned in its own blood

like the undertow of the dream

that was swept under heavy Aztec eyelids like syphilis?

Every angel in the way

was first called Satan.

They were all Satan.

They were cops at roadblocks.

They got in your face

to keep you from harming yourself

by going down the wrong path.

They turned your eyes around and sent you back

the way of all light in the night.

Jacob wrestled with the angel in the way

and walked away with a limp

like Hephaestus and Richard the Second.

Satan dislocated their hips.

Did they hobble away stronger

because they were the divinely wounded kings

of crippled things?

Or was Satan weakened by his victory

and humans strengthened by their defeat?

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger

is a slave’s notion of how to endure the unendurable

and grow like revolution from defeat to defeat.

History is laced with the sententious pragmatism of chaste scars.

Victory heals and smiles and doesn’t hesitate.

Defeat heals and scars and waits.

A war between two sides of the same gate

neither side ever walks through

into a bigger overview of things

that brings peace to the war of wings

over who was captain of the bird

that circled like a lapwing on the runway

but neither victory nor defeat

however high the control tower

ever got off the ground.

It’s just that way with power.

It likes to march.

It doesn’t fly.

But if you ever do make it through

those flightless gates

into the space beyond the common ground

you’re trying to take a stand on

to keep from being knocked down

like the Colossus of Rhodes

or the flyweight lighthouses

of Atlantis and Crete

you won’t need any kind of move

to pin your opponent by his shoulders

like Atlas to the earth

in a UFC clash of the titans.

You can’t be brought to heel

like a starmap kneeling in the dirt

nursing blackholes like daggers underneath your scars.

Our endless igneous wars

are just a bad dream of Vulcan

Venus wakes up from in the arms of Mars

and delivers herself in the nick of time

from a death thrust of rust

that assays everything that’s won as lost

to fire’s version of frost.

In this place where nothing’s overcome

and nothing’s lost or won

there’s no triumph or defeat

anything weak

or anything that makes you stronger

by disdaining to kill you like the Buddha in the road

it met coming the other way

no stern angel blocking your passage

like Moses forbidden the promised land

or Adam and Eve driven out of Eden

by vicious militias of cherubim

no lamb led to the slaughter

no lion maimed by the meek

and no one blinded by what they seek

because there’s no way  

you can knock someone off their feet

who’s walking on stars

as if they were jewels of water.

And the winds of war

aren’t the measure of your next breath

and life doesn’t grow stronger by living longer than death.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AND I LOVE IT OUT HERE

AND I LOVE IT OUT HERE

 

And I love it out here this far into my solitude

where the stars are as high and holy and out of reach

as they always were

and everything that is finished irrelevant or gone to waste

discovers a secret peace in its exile and desolation

that doesn’t distinguish one light in the night from another

and there isn’t a road you can take that was meant for someone else.

Even when the wind blows the leaves around

like things I should have said to myself years ago

like things I should have known

that don’t come with a Buddha or a book

heavy with bells and the blissful fruit of wiser autumns

everything takes its place

in the spaciousness of an infinite center

the dislocated cannot exit

and even those who have found themselves

to be nothing real

cannot enter.

It’s as if all things were wounded so deeply and expansively

by the wary act of their existence

the dagger of circumstance and chance

can’t find a place to strike

and so there’s nothing to heal

nothing to fear

nothing to watch out for

that could hurt you any worse

than everything already is.

The wind on the water that trembles like skin

and the scales and feathers of the tangerine moonrise

shedding its wings on the serpentine mindstream

that flows off into the distance like a dragon

someone forgot to believe in

because they thought they grew up.

And time doesn’t ask itself what night it is

or the fish the depth of the water

and the flightplan of the hunting hawk

if it has one

is merely what catches its eye.

Parsifal the mottled fool

leaves home with the grail in his saddlebag

and it makes no difference to the kingdom

whether he finds it or not.

The first shall be last and the last shall be first

and then the grass eats the grazer who ate the grass.

There’s nothing to change that hasn’t already been brought to pass

by the leftover leaves in the birch trees

that abandon their bones like old shamans

down by the banks of the river in spring

for the fish and the birds to pick clean.

The silence is moss on the skull of a rock

sprouting elegant chandeliers of columbine

that hang their heads like streetlights

over a long road with no one in sight.

So what could it possibly mean to be a stranger

among your own feelings and thoughts

when there are no gates you can stand outside of

and the enlightened beginning of the waterlily

as five petals open

and one flower blooms advaitistically

is rooted like a deep insight into a mirror that rots?

Is the coming any less endless than the going?

Or an ignorant life any less life than knowing

you can’t know what you’re seeking

until it finds you like someone it overlooked?

The empty herons’ nests high in the dead trees of the swamp

are full of moonlight

and everywhere I walk

frogs punctuate the sloppy grammar of the water

that unspools like one long periodic sentence that’s never complete

as if the world hasn’t finished saying me yet

like something it means.

My delusions rise like waterbirds from a moonlit lake

to go witching for water among the stars

and I let them knowing they’re

the indirections by which we find directions out.

First you go down a lot of rivers

and then you take the road.

There’s a scaffolding of dark matter

we wore on the outside like an exoskeleton

and dark energies

that exhausted themselves like slaves

so we could walk erect in our watchtowers of flesh

like the ego of a candle with a spine for a wick.

Black bones buried somewhere

that once were us.

Churches that wandered off the beaten path like gravestones.

Dark sanctities of a dead lawgiver

that entrusted the truth to a liar

as if the night had a sense of humour.

And everything is as it is without discrimination

in the eyes of the light that falls upon us

as if we didn’t exist

though as far back as I can remember

my spirit has always cast its shadow upon the earth

like Venus on a moonless night

and my body laboured like a prophet with a whale in his belly

to spread the word.

And subtlety of subtleties

wonder of wonders

my mind got a good look at what it isn’t

and spontaneously learned

to be playfully creative

with the absurdity of being here

whispering into my own ear

like a wind that talks to flowers

descended from the stars

about how far we all are from home.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AND I HAVE WITNESSED

AND I HAVE WITNESSED

 

And I have witnessed the undoing of many

the destruction of much

and shaken with horror and disgust at the savagery

of the rabid destroyers perverse with power

mutating children in the Nazi labs of Cologne

and in the slapstick parabellum armies of the Congo

where a bullet in the head

is the same as going to bed without desert

for disobeying your parents

and rape is a rite of passage for girls and women

that goes on for a lifetime

despoiled and rejected like ruined fruit

and innocence is a North American luxury.

And I have witnessed the undoing of many

the destruction of much

and smelled the formic ant-heap acids of violence

God’s psychotics throw in a schoolgirl’s face

in her eyes

for wanting to read a book.

What love of God is this

that makes God seem obscene complicit and evil

in the hearts of children who fear Him like spiders?

And all will witness hell in the end

before they’re disposed of

each according to their hate

is no longer a prophecy

of things to come

but a staple of the morning news

baring its teeth like snarling sluglines

above a hopeless gate

in Avernum as it was in Auschwitz.

And I have witnessed the undoing of many

the destruction of much

and the sixty-one years of my life

seem more like the repeating decimal

of one long incommensurable body count called history

than they do footprints of the mystery

that’s been following us like a hominid

six million years old

and special among species

I bear the shame of living on this planet

with less integrity and inherited wisdom

than a bacterium living on a dinosaur’s faeces.

Just look at the blood of our children

blooming like haemoragic poppies

and flagged syringes

to buy guns for the narcoleptic Taliban

to do God’s will like Caliban without a Prospero

as if they believed the deeper the filth

the more celestial the orchid is

they corrupt like a child of Isis.

They piss in the fountainmouths of Salsabil

and the lilies of Solomon

and the holy grails

of the black virgins of the Aquitaine

like dogs at the foot of a cross in the snow.

A grenade for a teether.

An AK-47 for a toy.

An I.E.D. as a birthday surprise

and new legs if you get flown to America

as a darling of the media

who’s newsworthy enough

to bruise our finer sentiments

into outspoken acts of the heart

that prove Miami is still a good place to live

and for every child born

there’s a hospital waiting somewhere

like prince on a white horse

with a  prosthetic device

that fits just like Cinderella’s slipper

to repair what was torn

in the name of someone’s national interests.

And I have witnessed the undoing of many

the destruction of much

and I have given up trying to celebrate

the beauty of the locust tree in bloom

in a halo of bees

that attended it like mystics

and trying to capture the ineffable hues

of the Joseph’s coat that bloomed like zinnias

trying on garish shades of lipstick

in paint that coagulated

like the blood of children

spattered all over the flowers.

And I have derided my own irrelevance

and the eloquence of my prize-winning words

like a fragrance of lilac in an abbatoir

and I have cracked my harp like a wishbone

and gone down deeper into hell

where they hang the children of men

like flayed meat

on the hooks of rhetorical questions

that run like a bloodstream from the mouth

of anyone who answers.

And though I sang from my heart

like a wounded bird in the starless darkness

as if my voice were a sacred grove in the night

I brought no one up from the dead

and it was as dark as black kool-aid behind me

when I looked back to see

if the children of Jonestown

if the children of Peshawar

if the children of Baghdad

if the children of Gaza

if the children of Lampasa

if the children of southern Sudan

if the children in the favarels of Rio

if the children in the toxic oases of L.A.

if the children who went on Peter’s crusade

like pennies from heaven

like Santa’s little helpers in a Christmas parade

to liberate Jerusalem

and were sold into servitude and sex

by the tens of thousands

and the children who were suffered

to come unto Jesus

like strawberries and apricots

in the stigmatized hands

of child-molesting priests

who like to copulate with orphans

in the pews of Sodom and Gomorrah

when I looked back like a pillar of salt

God turned into a human

to see if the children were following me

up out of the abyss of the dead

into the horrors of the darkness

that lie in wait like the living up ahead

I realized the obscenity

of my helpless hapless art

and that no matter what I said

or how I said it

unless I murdered a school

just for the celebrity thrill of the roadkill of it

I had nothing to say

that anyone wanted to hear

frothing around a Canadian campfire

with an American beer.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A HUMAN CLOSER TO GOD

A HUMAN CLOSER TO GOD

 

for my mother for so much more

than a son can say

 

A human closer to God than most of us

or a God closer to humans

or the expiration of the shadows of both

in a vast abyss where there’s nothing to shine on

so neither good nor evil could be exposed

and all that was left was this deep sad night

that saturated everything as if

compassion were the only daughter

of space and time

and whatever you believed or didn’t

you knew how to take something ugly

and make it beautiful.

You were an artist long after

you gave up painting

and put your life in a trunk.

You had four kids to work with.

And if I am not now the masterpiece

you aspired to achieve

yet I am still your work

your son

and the work is not yet done.

Autumn burns like colours on the wind

as I squeeze chameleons

like tubes of paint

out onto the table I use like a palatte

to capture that wry hook

at the end of your compound bow of a smile

that turned its arrows into flowers

whenever you looked at one of us

and forgot you were our mother.

I remember the night Bill

the drunk who endured next door

came over old and hurt and pleading from withdrawal

and you went without a word

and got your purse

and opened it like a pelican

and gave him five of your last ten dollars

a fortune back then

without diminishing the dignity of the man

by telling him not to spend it on a bottle.

I knew we’d be eating bread pudding all week

as I watched him step out into the night

a little less broken

and though your eyes met mine

like a dark angel in passing a moment

as if you were a stranger who couldn’t explain

what you kept hid in your heart

and nothing was spoken between us

that one brief insight

into things I know

but still don’t understand

has been my only religion ever since.

The hero-soldier of the little man

who wanted to be your son so badly

that he often forgot that he was

still lives on in me somehow in the way

I’ve stood up for other people over the years

because when I do

it’s always seems as if

I were standing up for you. 

And I embody your darkness and pain

like alien elements in the heart of a black star

that keeps imploding on itself

like a heavy bell

that can’t escape

the mother of its own gravity.

I am more of what you never taught me to be

than anything you ever said

and if you were to ask me now I would say

you put more space into me than you did time

and what I’ve learned from you

I’ve learned by studying the stars

and never forgetting to be astonished

by even the meanest of flowers.

You’re the unseen matrix of dark matter

that shapes this white mass of starmud

I call myself

like a potter

into everyone I’ve ever been.

And as many times as I’ve been hardened

in the clear flames of the Queen of Dragons

when you were outraged

by the likeness to my father

you scorned in me as a child

and probably still haven’t forgotten

I have burned more often in your fires

like a martyr in cool silk

and risen from my ashes with a bigger wingspan

and a sky with more room in it than the cosmic egg

I lived in

before you cooked me out of myself into space

because you were bitter about men

and I couldn’t help being one of them.

Thirty-eight years away from home

and I’ve been back twice

like a homesick prophecy

that didn’t heed its own advice

not to trouble an aging sybil with bad dreams.

Time and again I have been defeated

by what I owe you

and will never be able to repay

in any measure of the heart I could weigh

against what you gave up like the gift of gifts

to those of us you refused to throw away.

Somehow you always managed to be

the green bough in blossom

we all held onto like the strong rafter

of a shakey treehouse in a storm.

Sometimes I would watch you

through my bedroom window

look up from gardening in the back yard

and stare way off into the distance

as if you were a bird

disappearing into yourself

to make it all the way back

to Eden in Australia

from Vancouver Island on your own.

How could I know the other hemisphere

you always were away from me

like a lost paradise

or the strange stars you walked under

like stations of the southern cross

you bore all the way to Canada

like a mother to a hill of skulls?

When did Eve conceive the Virgin

you became over the years

to keep us from being abused?

And how did everything shiny and new

turn into something used?

Voodoo mother

I feel the ancient curse

of my father’s whiskey-breath

defiling the angels dancing on the heads

of all these pins you keep pushing through me

like dark insights into what it means to be a man

and worse.

If my infancy was nettled

like a diaper rash on the moon

now it has deepened into a wound

like the grave I know I will be buried in

like a dagger that refused to strike back

at its own womb

because I have suffered enough

in your name to know

there was never any malice in your eclipses

and if I ever had a childhood

it was just the way things had back then

of growing old before their time

like lots of girls and boys

with lots of broken toys.

Moon mother

I am the son of the dark side

you keep turned away from me like the face

of the woman I’ve never seen

and you are the public figure in the townsquare

of your bright side

that I have failed intimately

like a refugee in the shadow

of the Statue of Liberty

that forbids him to land.

And I think as I turn into an old man

I am beginning to understand why

it isn’t just the angels

that can’t go home again

but the prodigal demons as well

who are kept at arms length

not by any original sin

not by the bloodstain of their difficult birth

not because they were reversed

by the order of things

like the axis of Neptune

or a baby turned in the womb

and lived things from the outside in

not inside out as the others do

like Mother Hubbard’s children

piling out of a shoe

but because they were once loved

by someone like you

who laboured like the earth

to sustain the life of things

that were less than your due

and more underwhelming

than the undertow

of the great sea of pain

that scattered them ashore

like children from from the womb of a lifeboat

only to watch them be swept under again

by strife and fear and time

like dolphins beached on their brains

hoping for rain

as if there were treasures beyond

the obvious riches of life

that wholly long to be lost

like the black pearls

of many moons in full eclipse

in the perilous depths

of what they couldn’t attain

like wrecks of gold

that never made it back

to the black madonnas of Spain.

Gypsy mother

I take my blood

like a red scarf in my teeth

and though I am lame when I dance

because one heel is winged by the joy

of a wild boy at the top of an apple tree

throwing celestial fruit down to you below

to make earthly apple sauce

and the other is a rudder of grief

lost at sea like a lighthouse

that let the lights go out

like a torch in its own reflection

at a requiem for water

I celebrate my love of you now

while we’re still both alive

like a crutch celebrates the tree

it was carved from

like the mystery that still binds us

to the glacial haste

in the heart of the turtle of time

that moves on like history 

overcoming every obstacle

like the river of playful grace

that flows from a mother otter

down from the mountain teeth of the shewolf

that howls to her own kind

like a litter suckled by the moon

in a lair on the dark side

of a heart and mind

even I can’t follow you back to

though I long like spring to know you again

as you were then

and as you are now

and as you will always be to me

a fifth season more than life knows how to end.

My astonishing mother.

My unexpected friend. 

The breath within the breath of me

that lives behind these lights and veils

I keep lifting to look upon your face

into those green green eyes of yours

that once washed me up out of the sea

like the child of a shoreless wave

like the son of an island universe

that never abandoned what it couldn’t save.

 

PATRICK WHITE