WRITING LOVE POEMS

WRITING LOVE POEMS

 

Writing love poems like belated elegies

to people who died before I was born.

Missing the future as if it were already gone.

I’ve sweetened my blood like the wines of time

but it’s time that lives on

like the wine-dark sea of a blind poet.

I imagine my way in and out of things like air

and every day I wear a different atmosphere

and every night I’m naked as the moon

through the window of a sleepless room.

My dreams are ashamed of me

but my eyes can’t help but see

what isn’t there.

I’m a kind of dark energy

that shapes things behind the scenes

by pouring the stars out

like serpents of hot metal

flowing out of black matter

like ores that burn to shed their skin like light

the night’s outgrown faster than space.

And I don’t know if folly is wiser than pain

but I have suffered variously enough

to know that if you’re not wounded in life by a sword

you’ll be wounded by a plough

and that a bell can be a weapon of mass destruction

that can break the spirit of the most explosive cannon shell

that ever tried to make a lasting impact

on the bodies and souls of the innocent.

I’m not absolutely indifferent

but even the laws of relativity

feel like strangers in a large enough frame of reference

where there’s no starproof roof you can take shelter under

like classical physics

or goldfish bowl of celestial spheres

that changes the water every day like your tears.

And I’m Zen enough

not to stuff the impersonal secret of the universe

into my sentimental little heart

and there isn’t a dragon on drugs

that would venture into the unholy places I’ve been

where just to have eyes is obscene

and to look upon anything with compassion

where even the enlightened are unclean

is to hear the sound of one hand clapping

like the Buddha in the way

you killed with detachment

like a spiritual version of gangrene.

I uphold the dignity of a foolish human being

like a royal blood-line

that died out species ago

like the Sahara covered in trees

before the big freeze that crawled toward Bethlehem

like an ice sphinx older than water.

I’m a starter civilization in a skull-bound cave

scrawling paint on the walls

like grafitti from a spray can

outlining the negative space of an amputated hand

to prove I was here and human

in the presence of everything I am

that’s perpetually missing.

I think of life as a siren

that sits on top of the world mountain

like a rock in the middle of the cosmic sea

that sings to me like a fountain to a bird

to risk everything I’ve heard

in the precocious silence of my assent

as if that were always what my life was meant to say.

Yes to it all.

It’s beautiful.

It roots in us like lightning in a dark heart.

It kills us into itself like life perishing into life

like firewalks and waterclocks

we had to pass over

to get to the other side

like chickens and bodhisattvas.

It rocks the stillness at the center of things

like a blackhole in a guitar

that adjusts its strings to the light

and sings of sorrows that weep their way through the night

like wounded mindstreams

losing themselves in oceanic visions

of worlds within worlds within sight

of a drowning man

whose eyelids overturned like lifeboats

that couldn’t save him from his dreams.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN

OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN

 

Over and over and over again

you return to me each time

made more beautiful by the pain

I embrace you with

like the aura of fireflies

in the afterlife of the lightning

that was struck by you.

Over and over and over again

I have watched the birds leave in the fall

and come back in the spring

and whether they were coming or going

especially at midnight when you couldn’t see them

high overhead like the souls of the dead

I’ve always heard the same longing in their call

for something I’ve never been able to wholly comprehend

except as the way I miss you

on this journey without end

where the destination isn’t always

the friend of the road

as the stars foretold it would be.

And I don’t know why

I always associate pain with lucidity

like the price of shattered glass

when you hurl the moon through it

from the inside

to let the light in through the damage

and you back into my life again

like the radiant sorrow of a lonely tomorrow

that today already lives in vain

like a weathervane

trying to give the wind a direction

it’s never taken before.

Over and over and over again

I have looked for your hidden mystery

in the history of gone

for some living intimacy that lives on

but I’ve run out of doors and gates and windows

flowers and skies I can leave open

hoping you might find your way back in somehow

from those spaces greater than skin that fit you now

like the dress you were buried in.

The random singularity of death’s one demand

might shake the tree

into the soft hooves of the highest fruit

that gallop off like wild horses

spooked by their own windfall into the silence

but over and over and over again

I turn the fact that you once existed

like a jewel I once knew from the inside

into an act of insight

that over and over and over again

rocks me like the aftershock of an earthquake

as if your death weren’t once but many

and I would live my way through them all

listening to the geese depart at night in the fall

wondering which one emobodied your soul

like a star-bound angel in earthly feathers

and whether you noticed me as you left

over and over and over again

standing in the light by the window

a tiny dark figure down below

listening for you in the darkness

like a vase of full of ashes

wishing it had wings.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN

OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN

 

Over and over and over again

you return to me each time

made more beautiful by the pain

I embrace you with

like the aura of fireflies

in the afterlife of the lightning

that was struck by you.

Over and over and over again

I have watched the birds leave in the fall

and come back in the spring

and whether they were coming or going

especially at midnight when you couldn’t see them

high overhead like the souls of the dead

I’ve always heard the same longing in their call

for something I’ve never been able to wholly comprehend

except as the way I miss you

on this journey without end

where the destination isn’t always

the friend of the road

as the stars foretold it would be.

And I don’t know why

I always associate pain with lucidity

like the price of shattered glass

when you hurl the moon through it

from the inside

to let the light in through the damage

and you back into my life again

like the radiant sorrow of a lonely tomorrow

that today already lives in vain

like a weathervane

trying to give the wind a direction

it’s never taken before.

Over and over and over again

I have looked for your hidden mystery

in the history of gone

for some living intimacy that lives on

but I’ve run out of doors and gates and windows

flowers and skies I can leave open

hoping you might find your way back in somehow

from those spaces greater than skin that fit you now

like the dress you were buried in.

The random singularity of death’s one demand

might shake the tree

into the soft hooves of the highest fruit

that gallop off like wild horses

spooked by their own windfall into the silence

but over and over and over again

I turn the fact that you once existed

like a jewel I once knew from the inside

into an act of insight

that over and over and over again

rocks me like the aftershock of an earthquake

as if your death weren’t once but many

and I would live my way through them all

listening to the geese depart at night in the fall

wondering which one emobodied your soul

like a star-bound angel in earthly feathers

and whether you noticed me as you left

over and over and over again

standing in the light by the window

a tiny dark figure down below

listening for you in the darkness

like a vase of full of ashes

wishing it had wings.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IN HARMONIOUS OPPOSITION

IN HARMONIOUS OPPOSITION

 

In harmonious opposition all things exist.

Even the discordant sympathies

of the great sea of awareness

getting things off its chest like waves.

But I’m not sure it was me who said that

though they’re my words

but I know it’s mostly me who says

I don’t want to disgrace the Buddha with wisdom.

I’d rather sing like the sea

winging its way with a voice of its own

like the improvised lyrics

that make me up as they flow along with the seabirds.

As it is so it is.

But one isn’t the reflection of the other.

When I try to mean what I say

it turns into conditioned gibberish

but if I listen exquisitely to the silence

it begins to play with me like an audience.

If you don’t want to be lost at sea

tear down the lighthouse.

Only the dead know where they’re going.

I snap my fingers like a koan

and chandeliers of stars come crashing down

like mirrors of rain

and all my signposts

turn into mystic weathervanes

whirling like a gust of Sufi dust at the crossroads

of the alone with the Alone

like a red-tailed hawk

on a hot August afternoon

rising like prophetic fire

on the helical stairwell

of my two-way transcendence. 

As it is so am I

fire and flame

though we’re not the same

as soon as I give it a name.

The dragon that brings rain

is slain by a lance of water.

That’s the way things are here.

And I’ve lived dangerously enough to know

that taking a risk

isn’t the same as being given a chance.

Enlightenment knows how to dance in a snakepit

without getting bit.

Ignorance puts up warning signs and hesitates.

And after awhile one gate looks the same as two

and so on forever like a repeating decimal

that’s never done.

The seeing is one

but ignorant eyes

are blue sky

that have never seen the sun

shine at midnight

though they have their suspicions.

The trouble with being stupid is

not that you don’t have insight

but you look into the light

and think that your existence here

is one of its conditions.

The wise know there are none.

Everything is space without a mirror.

They look into the light

until even the light disappears.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LONG SAD THOUGHTS OF HOME

LONG SAD THOUGHTS OF HOME

 

Long sad thoughts of home.

Hello is blue.

Farewell shifts toward the infra-red.

Do the stars ever feel

they don’t know where they belong anymore?

I’m a direction looking for a compass.

I’m a map of the rain.

None of my constellations

know how to connect the dots

into the improbable myths of my longing

I tell to the blind in braille

wishing they had eyes

instead of these square skulls of dice

with empty eye-sockets

that stare back at me like black holes.

I try to shine

but I don’t know where the light goes

and I feel the sky is always disappointed.

My face ages like a stamp on a loveletter without a return address.

My heart is a bell that keeps on tolling away

like a labour of sadness

that doesn’t know what else to say

before the mute stark brutal truth of human suffering

waiting for a mouth like a wounded abyss to scream.

My life has always been the exception

of the dream I thought I was having at the time.

The one in which I seek and do not find.

I’m an exile when I’m romantic.

I’m an exclusion when I’m not.

I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t unique

but people en masse are obvious

and I do not seek what they seek

though that makes me feel arrogant.

Everything’s got to be out in the open and on the level

often enough not to go straight to hell

like a plumb-line to the devil

at the bottom of a dry well

that gave up crying years ago

when damnation turned into indifference.

I take everything to heart.

I don’t miss a detail.

I think I’m too smart

to be taken in again

by the blameless orphans

the night left on the stairs of my homelessness

but I’ve always let compassion make a fool of me

when occasion arises

even though I’ve long felt

the heart of the human condition is our helplessness.

It’s one thing to lament the state of people’s souls

but it’s a whole other universe

an heretical shape of space

on the other side of your eyes 

to feel sorry for what happens to their bodies

as if matter and mind were just two modes of roadkill.

Frogs in the rain on a highway

in high and low beam

and ghosts of water turning into fog

inverted clouds of unknowing

with more corpses in them

like crushed popcorn than mystics

or T-Tauri stars breaking into light

that doesn’t care which side of the blind it shines on.

I may well be just a bag of water

chemicals with glands

a sky-minded telescope with nine apertures in it

scanning the heavens for any sign of divine intelligence

that wasn’t as alien to me

as I am to most of you

and I still don’t know why

I am the way I am

and there isn’t a lie

I’ve been able to make fit me like skin

I don’t eventually outgrow like a phase of the moon

when she’s looking the other way

and it’s a curse to try to prove what you imagined

before you began to speak

and I still don’t know what it is I truly seek

or if I’m just looking for the hell of it

but I’ve always hoped somehow

without my even knowing

whatever I saw along the wayless way

as I left the solar system

like a comet with a long track record

of making bad things come true

was a measure of healing

was an antidote

that could be extracted from the feeling I have

whenever I consider what’s up ahead for all of us

like salmon leaping upstream

against the flow of things

back to our mysterious origins

to propogate ourselves among the dead

after all these long far gone years at sea

I followed the sirens who sang to me like rocks

thinking they were muses

I just couldn’t live without.

Now I think of death as a galaxy

that has crossed over its own event horizon

beyond the speed of light

that puts it out of sight of the rest of us

but doesn’t notice the slightest bit of difference

when it disappears like a wave into water

as if nothing had changed.

I am so far from home

I am remembering my way forward like a prophecy

of things to come

that have already happened

and there’s nothing in my past

that doesn’t lie before me like the future.

There’s no coming or going in now.

And when I take off all these masks of space and time

like a windblown orchard by the sea

and reveal there was never anyone there behind them

they could hide from me

I return to a town

that has followed me for years

like a complete stranger

and everybody recognizes me somehow.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AWARENESS COMES FORWARD

AWARENESS COMES FORWARD

 

Awareness comes forward with undoubtable proof

there is no mind to be conscious of.

Deep study superficializes your ignorance with subtlety.

A craze of blue in a maze of tree shadows on the lawn.

Grape hyacinth colouring in the sun.

And then it’s gone like a lost crayon.

And a candle takes its place

like a future autumn in the scheme of things

that must pass to stay the way they are.

The light doesn’t say I am a star

The water doesn’t say I am rain

as if they had to account for themselves

by identifying themselves to a brain

that insists on knowing the names of things

like a child that never colours outside the lines

that are erased in a blaze of noon.

The condemned man says his life

is the doing of someone else

who isn’t the slightest like him.

But spiritual journeys are always circular

and going out is a way of going in.

Things end where they begin.

The light equally illuminates hell

in the same breath that reveals paradise.

Perishing is the way we stay alive.

You want to live?

You’ve got to perish to survive.

As it is in heaven so it is on earth.

Death without birth.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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