IF YOU KNOW MORE

IF YOU KNOW MORE

 

If you know more

about what you don’t want

than what you do

you might think you’re wise

but I just think you’re aging

whether you’re eighty-six or twenty-two.

Many friends and lovers have died.

Many dark windows without eyes.

But only on the outside.

Inside they live with me like clouds

in the uninhibited vastness of a sky

that goes on forever

like the memory of some small kindness

that revealed everything about them

I ever needed to know.

They come and go like birds

each a theme of light in their own element

that is embodied in me like starmud

that has become human.

Water or carbon

fire or wind

I taste of them

like an autumn apple tastes of the sun

as the sun goes down.

I drive by the houses

where they used to live

that other people live in now.

And I don’t always know

who I’m praying to or why

and it doesn’t really matter if

no one is listening

or standing at the window

but I ask whatever powers prevail

even if it’s just to nudge an atom with a thought

to fill their sails with generous horizons

and make a warm wind

their forwarding address.

I thank them for who they still are

not were

like the memes and genes

of the better part of my dna

that makes me me.

They are the dark matter

of things I cannot see

that shape the universe I’m living in for now

discretely.

The trees are more compassionate

because they lived

and the stone of the world

on which I lay my head at night to dream

is softer for some memory I cherish of them.

The rain is more loving.

The grass is greener.

The flower more red.

But that doesn’t mean

when I lie with a living woman

I’m making love to the dead

or she brings a cemetery to bed

or I’m the corpse on a pyre

and she’s the fire

that feathers the phoenix in flames.

I don’t look at the moon in passing

and see a gravestone with many names.

And if I howl like a mad man sometimes

just to hear an echo in my solitude

it’s the agony of life not death

that smokes the cold night air with my breath

high above the timberline

where the stars may be uncompromisingly clear

but they’re not cruel.

Life isn’t death’s fool

if you don’t live it in jest

like a guest who’s forgotten

how to be grateful for all the fireflies

you followed like stars in the east

as if you were a magus

on your way to a feast with gifts

not the grave-goods of a funeral.

Disappointment and pain

have aged you faster than time.

You’re a stone bird transfixed

by the indelible eclipse of your lucidity

swallowing you whole like a cosmic serpent.

Even your constellations are jaded tatoos.

And the wines of life

with all their chameleonic world views

no longer get drunk on you

and since you’ve drained

the colour from your eyes

like the iris of a rainbow

you might conceive of things

as if they were clues

of broken promises yet to come

but you’re inspired by albino muses

paler than the skull of the moon

waning through its final phases.

If you’d only turn your coffin over like a lifeboat

and give it back to the sea

like the fossil of an exoskeleton

you don’t need anymore

or roll the moon like a stone away from your tomb

you’d see how the yellow grass greens in the light

and the shadows of the trees and leaves

play upon it like music on water

or a strange intelligence upon the light

that is thereby made visible and alive by it.

A flat earth without ecstasy

and an impoverished ocean

where all the horizons are flatlining

because they’ve lost heart

is the small wave of a petty emotion

in the rapturous tides of life

that wash the dead and the living up alike

in the same turmoil of beginnings and ends.

I embrace my friends living and dead

the way a mountain weaves a river

like a strong rope

out of many weak threads

that spontaneously got it together.

This one wants to use it

to hang himself

and this one wants to

climb up to heaven on it

like a caterpillar.

And this one’s trying to read it

like a lifeline on the palm of his hand

with his index finger

as if it were the alpha and omega of his name.

The dead-and-gone forever

is also here-and-now

where their absence

is alive as melting snow

or the heartwood of a green bough

that keys the spine of the singing bird

like a Spanish guitar

or the dead branch

that holds the moon up like a blossom

or a loveletter to a star.

I share space with everyone and thing I’ve lost

like a shape-shifting constellation

in an expanding universe

where the light that left my eyes

just a moment ago

like people I’ve been and met and cherished

over the long dark radiant years of transformation

it’s taken me to get here

shine as if they’ve just arrived.

Life and death like all opposites

that engender one another

are a collaboration.

They’re not at war.

They give birth to things 

like two hands of the same potter

who doesn’t just work

with the substance of the clay

but the emptiness as well.

Turn it skyside up

and you can turn a funeral bell

into a wine-cup

and pour your life into it

like a sea into the mouth of the moon

and pass it around among your friends

as if they were all kings and queens of the zodiac

getting drunk on the same planet together

around a fire down by the river

toasting the night in tears and laughter

like generous atmospheres of good weather

knowing death is only as far from life

as a wave is from water

the knower from his knowing

the gone from their going

or a cup is from its emptiness

when the wine is flowing.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HAD ENOUGH

HAD ENOUGH

 

Had enough.

Had enough of nothing

and now it feels real.

You want to know how I feel

after six decades on earth

in a fifteen minute interview

about so many things

I know less than nothing about.

Death for example.

Or poetry life art suffering love

what it means to be a human

or who I am in all of this turmoil of being

that just seems to exist to exist

as everything eats to live to be hungry.

Are you a cannibal

if you eat your own body like life does?

Is it so hard to understand the death of children

when we squander so much on war

all over the planet

laying waste to our own womb

as if we were not born of woman?

Had enough of inconceivable suffering

being paged through like the news

and the horrors ending in the bathetic drivel

of pundits expressing their views

about things they know about

and do nothing

as I go about my daily business

feeling like a hypocrite in everything I do

because I know I could do more and haven’t

and probably won’t.

Had enough of watching the injustice of power

bleach the bloodstains out of its lily-white image

like snow on dogshit.

Like a Nazi investigation of atrocity.

Had enough of feeling guilty about the truth.

The few are always dying one by one

in the name of the many who don’t exist.

Had enough of compassion turning its open hand

into a fist

with savage indignation

at what it witnesses everyday

as the human condition.

One lie for all

in a voting booth

that takes a poll of the truth

it’s running against like a rumour

isn’t enough of a right

to guarantee our freedom from delusion.

Symbiosis is not the same as political collusion

and three mutants with a staff of spin-doctors

talking like weathervanes

trying to anticipate

the popular course of evolution

by running God against a monkey in a primary

on the creationist platform of an antedeluvian textbook

to appease the simians descended from man

with a more exalted outlook

on how they began

isn’t the stem-cell

of a new myth of origin

we can all agree upon

like the fossil of a face with a grin

up for re-election.

Anti-Darwinian simians

against unnatural selection.

Sometimes life rolls the genetic dice

looking to change her luck

and everything comes out snake-eyes.

 

PATRICK WHITE 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SOMETHING'S EITHER POURED ME OUT

SOMETHING’S EITHER POURED ME OUT

 

Something’s either poured me out

or I’m evaporating

but I’m learning to live without content.

And don’t look for a lifestream flowing

under all the leaves of these topics I’ve been shedding.

I don’t follow a theme like an old road

winding through the woods

in the direction of my knowing anymore.

I don’t hold a mirror up to chaos

and expect to see order.

What does a mirror look like

all on its own when it’s truly empty

and there’s nothing left to reflect upon?

I’ve never had very deep feelings for ideas.

I’ve much preferred the subtleties of wonder

that occur by themselves like stars in the night.

I don’t need to make anything up to be me.

I don’t need a ghost writer

following me around everywhere

compiling research for my biography.

What’s the personal history of nothing?

And how can you distinguish one sea from another

when they’re still embryos with their eyes closed

in the same watershed?

The same shit you said about me

while I was alive

you’ll say about me after I’m dead

though we never really knew one another all that well.

The great night sea of life

isn’t trying to keep its waves in order.

And the mind isn’t the foundation stone

of a shrine to higher learning.

I can talk to the stars in their own language

if I don’t expect them to answer me

in my own voice.

I can read what the wind writes

in a Druidic tree-alphabet

like a loveletter to a birch

when I don’t let my eyes

get in the way of my seeing.

And I know you won’t believe me

but even the rocks have told me

time and time again

like old Etruscan kings of the zodiac

you can pour gold

out the ore of the dark matter like light

if you don’t let your life

get in the way of your being.

But I don’t spend a lot of time

trying to peek through the cracks in my brain for insight

when I don’t need a key to get out

or a gate to get in.

I burn my starmaps.

I hop the fence.

I cut across the field.

I find my own way like water.

But whether I’m coming down the mountain

or breaking into flowers

or just fooling around like the rain

to see what comes up

I drink from own skull

like the full moon

when it breaks its cup

to keep the wine flowing.

I don’t think of my body

as a fortune-cookie

with a little ribbon of fate inside

tucked away like a secret chromosome

that’s the writing on the wall

for an entire species.

My life is not a thesis I’m trying to prove.

I’m not seeking forgiveness for the dark.

I’m not spinning galaxies out of a chimney spark.

I’m not trying to put horseshoes

on the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

I don’t make a terrorist of my antithesis

and then waterboard it for the truth.

I’m not trying to save seeds in the autumn

that I sowed like wild oats in my youth

lying beside the woman

who invented agriculture.

I don’t squander my beginnings

on trying to achieve my ends

by taking my tail in my mouth

and swallowing everything up to

and including my head.

I’m not trying to beat

ploughs for the living

out of the swords of the dead.

I’m not driving a chariot of gold through a slum

like a big wheel pimping his ride.

And I don’t think every hooker I meet

is a frustrated bride

or every false hope has time on its side.

I’m not caught up in my own mindstream

like a leaf that dropped off the tree of knowledge in the fall

to be enraptured by the mystic awareness of its own flowing

like a map to everywhere

that didn’t know where it was going.

I think of freedom as something that happens to you

like eyes for the blind

like an empty lifeboat

bobbing off the shore of Atlantis

just before it went down

not a state of mind

backed up by a government

that puts words in the mouths of the dead

and then indicts them for lying.

You can fit an entire universe into a single head

and still have time and space for more

like the sea of life that everywhere

receives itself like a prodigal’s homecoming.

Or you can wall yourself in behind bone

and lead the siege life of a landowning crustacean

or a bi-valved goose barnacle

fixed like a cold-sore to the lip of a volcano

that’s breaking up the continent of Pangea like your skull.

You can choose to choose

or you can say there’s no choice at all.

Or raising your skull up in both your hands

to the health of the universe

drink yourself down to the lees of your last eclipse

and wiping its unfulfilled prophecy off your lips

like wine and dragon’s blood

that doesn’t need anyone to get drunk on itself

black-out like dark matter when it begins to shine. 

Or you can live like a good waste of enlightenment

and never pass the cup around like the moon

so the lost can taste their homelessness

deep in the heart of the earthbound

and know they’re the two eyes

of the same oxymoron

that discovered it was lost

the moment it was found. 

Not one.

Not two.

Water and wave.

Moon-cup and skull.

Empty or full

whatever you do.

Be brave.

Drink up.

Down to the dregs of oblivion.

As if it were last call

and the lights were about to go on.

 

PATRICK WHITE  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BEFORE THEY TURN SPACE INTO REAL ESTATE

BEFORE THEY TURN SPACE INTO REAL ESTATE

 

Before they turn space into real estate

and someone copyrights the seventeenth century

why shouldn’t I wander through the wide open spaces

of my own mind like a savage mystic alone with the moon

who keeps a place for me in a lonely locket of water.

If I drink from my own skull

down to the lees

of my homely archaeological remains

when I lived on posts

beside interglacial mountain lakes

like a spider that taught its webs to fish

thousands of years ago

what’s it to anyone

that I get homesick now and again

for a less contractual kind of pain

that I haven’t felt since nineteen sixty-six

than that inflicted by these corporate wasps

who lay their eggs

like logos on your forehead

to eat through your brain

as if you were always the host

and they were always the guest

and whatever was said

whatever was written

whatever was thought and believed

whatever you could feel

without ever reaching bottom

whatever you acted upon

whatever you were ready to live or die for

were just a way of holding your fork?

The polyp glued into the Great Barrier Reef

always thinks the fish is mad

to risk so much

to swim freely away as it wants

to explore the life of the sea

that gives birth to its own water.

If I’m a man rooted in my homelessness

like a face turned toward time

what crime could it be

to crawl out of my straitjacket

like a dragon-fly with a coat of arms

and tilt at windmills

in a crusade against the wind

where I’m always the champion of the infidels

who gets blown away by Saladin

at the gates of Jerusalem?

Let the lackeys of common sense

lick their block of salt

like dairy cows

in a close-cropped field

on their side of the fence.

I don’t look for tits on the Milky Way.

There’s a place in the world for potted plants

but as often as not

I’m off like a weed that no one wants

hanging around their windowsills

or plotting conspiracies of new life

that upsets their view of the garden.

So I keep to myself

in out of the way places

high above the timberline

of the world mountain

I’ve shrugged off my shoulders

like boulders of an avalanche

and howl at the moon alone

in the lucidity of my solitude.

And when I want to shine like a star

I take off my myths of origin

and walk out into the open

as skinless as they are

and just let things grow their own way

like hydrogen and helium

into anything they want to be.

Let the winners and losers

put rungs on a ladder of water

or argue over their place in the periodic table

about who sits above and below the salt

like Carthage and Rome

or carbon and silicon.

I’ve got a constellation of my own

that never wears the same myth twice.

I’ve got a muse that’s immune to advice

on the dangers of inspiration.

When she isn’t playing with me like fire

she’s an urgent intensity of radiation

that burns blackholes in my will to live.

Sometimes my eyes aren’t brave enough

to look upon

what she keeps hidden from the light

as I pass her dark window

like a stranger into the night

unenlightened by his own seeing

knowing his metaphors won’t last any longer

than the untimely fireflies of the last generation

that thought they saw her ghost.

But she’s not wired like a doorbell to a bride.

When you push her buttons

she’ll leave you standing in the doorway

not knowing if you’ve arrived on her threshold

like junkmail with a return address

or return to sender

scrawled across the envelope

of the last loveletter

you wrote to her in your blood

like lipstick on the mirror of a famous suicide.

She’s the kind of door

you’ve got to knock on from the inside.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DON'T KNOW WHAT TO ASK FOR ANYMORE

DON’T KNOW WHAT TO ASK FOR ANYMORE

 

Don’t know what to ask for anymore.

Live in a house so big

it doesn’t need a front or back door.

Not all gifts were meant for someone else

and I’ve been given a few along the way

that had my name on them.

And though I opened them

with the delight of a child

and peered astonished into the box

at things I never realized were true

the more I understood they were not mine.

They didn’t belong to anybody.

The drunkeness was mine

but not the wine.

Listening to the rain

strike the plectra of the new leaves

on the black walnut tree

as if I had lived in vain all these years

and I’m just now beginning to acknowledge it.

In the locket of the rock

a cherished fossil

not the magic sword

that once lay between me

and what I loved

to teach my passion obedience

as I waited for signs of things to come.

Some did.

Some didn’t.

Moonlight and lime.

Many stayed hidden most of the time

but a few stepped out of the night

like the firefly beginnings of new universes

or the first drafts of constellations

that went up like the frames

of new houses

in the ghettos of a zodiac

that avoided animal names

like people who wear fur.

That was way back before

this was then

and now wasn’t the waste

of an unbelievable godsend.

But that’s just the way it appears

now here for the moment.

If you’re ruled by your mind

you want to be enlightened.

If you’re ruled by your heart

you want to be blessed.

When one’s the host

the other’s the guest.

The mind bows to the heart

with feeling

and the heart says something revealing.

When has it ever been different?

The paint’s not trying to hide the picture from you.

The marble’s not harbouring some secret form.

The water feels the same in a dewdrop

as it does in a storm.

Yesterday’s radical.

Today’s norm.

The going gets on without knowing

whether it’s a truth without effect

or a first cause lying through its teeth.

The poor man struggles

to be liberated from poverty.

The rich man prays for a thief.

The bright and the dark side of the moon.

Two faces of the same grief.

One asks for everything.

The other asks for more.

One is always missing something.

And the other lives in a big house

without a front or a back door.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE PURE JOY OF WATCHING THINGS

THE PURE JOY OF WATCHING THINGS

 

The pure joy of watching things

come together beyond me

of their own accord

without ever having been achieved

as if a leaf were suddenly amazed by apples

it didn’t know anything about.

Watching the mind

walk on its own waters like moonlight

as if it had never heard of my name

and being astonished and delighted

by everything that goes on without me

like habitable planets

revolving around the fireflies

that show up now and again

like tiny green suns that keep them guessing

at the nature of the relationship.

Knowing time and space might be a guitar

but life plays a corny accordion that breathes

music in and out of its lungs like good air

and what you feel is

what you hear when you listen

as if no one were there.

Reasons to write

if you need them like training wheels

or crossing guards to hold your hand

and back the traffic up

all the way to the other side of nowhere.

Reasons to disappear into an expression

that gives shelter to your voice

in someone else’s mouth.

You’re crying.

But they’re not your tears.

You’re listening.

But not with your own ears.

In these realms of dark matter

you can make stars with your eyes

if you stare hard enough into space to warp it.

Things that were shrouded in fog like a lifeboat

become opulently clear as the moon in an autumn sky.

When there’s no one to answer to

you don’t need to know why

you see the things you do.

You can look at a mountain

and see the way

the mountain sees you.

Not for the betterment of anything.

Apple trees aren’t social workers.

They’re just turning their roots inside out

to be what they happen to be.

They know a lot more

about changing things for the good

by raising stars up out of the dirt

as a way of living without virtue

that makes them generous and beautiful

without enslaving the world in gratitude

without even trying

than those who grunt for evolution

like the spent radicals of a lost revolution.

Do nothing

and nothing is left undone.

Say nothing

and everything is perfectly expressed.

Be nothing

in your homelessness

and everything’s your guest.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LOVE ISN'T AN ANTI-VENOM

LOVE ISN’T AN ANTI-VENOM

 

Love isn’t an anti-venom

you inject into your heart

every time you feel the moon

sink its fangs into your heel

like Persephone in the spring

dragged down into the underworld.

Love isn’t a cure

for the way you feel

bilious about the world.

It isn’t black toast to your stomach acid.

It isn’t the holy grail.

Go looking for it like a sail

even over the edge of the known world

and you and the wind will both fail.

Try to run from it like time

and it turns into space.

Love isn’t the meaning of anything.

It isn’t a cause.

It isn’t a final effect.

And though it might hang from the Buddha’s nose

like the jewel of a fact

it’s not something to accept or reject.

Love is an embrace that deepens your solitude.

It isn’t a way of keeping the lights on at night.

It won’t save you from death.

Love is a dark matter.

What can you know of it?

It’s not an abstract idea.

It’s not in the world of forms

though it often assumes

the shape of the universe

like a white horse on a hillside in the moonlight

in early autumn with the first frost upon the ground

it isn’t the exit of your beginnings

nor the entrance of your ends.

Love is a helium high weather balloon

that dumps things out to gain altitude

like family and friends

as it ascends to the stars.

But it’s not a parachute.

It’s not a dandelion seed.

It’s not a way of growing wings on the way down

like the twin-bladed propellers

on the seeds of a maple tree

or Archaeopteryx.

It won’t turn your feathers back into scales.

You might unreasonably expect perfection

but love is just as much a way

of imperfecting things

as it is the genius that resolves them

by coming up with a unified field theory

that explains everything.

When two people gamble on love

one is always the squared bone

of a foundation stone

and the other the eyes of the dice.

Love can squander stars

like a generous Cowichan chieftain at a Potlatch

to make a show of its power and wealth

and spend itself like a mountain

on everyone around

and then resent the wind a few seeds

stuck in its hair like flowerless diamonds.

To ask for something

isn’t the same as to ask

but love isn’t the answer to a prayer

anymore than a face in a mirror is.

It’s like inspiration.

It doesn’t care.

Love might be food for the soul.

But it hungers like a body.

The gods might imbibe

from celestial fountains

all kinds of elixirs nectars and wine

but there’s nothing divine

about the way love drinks blood.

Or tears the flesh of false messiahs.

If you haven’t learned to fear love

you don’t know it yet.

You don’t know

how dark and lonely it can get

on the far side of the moon

when love turns its back on you

like a cross it refused to carry.

You don’t know the terrible history

of being mortal in a world that’s passing

until love opens its eyelids like a rose

and reveals the corruption it’s been hiding

deep in its heart for years

like a worm

that just wouldn’t turn into a butterfly.

Or what a thankless discipline it is

to haul your emotions

like blocks of quicksand

up to the top of a gold-capped pyramid

that never got off the ground

to ensure the afterlife of love

is a happy mummy hunting with Orion

among stars that shine down on nothing.

Love is a cosmic caprice.

An uncompromising accomplice.

It commits the crime

and then it calls the police

and makes a false confession.

Love isn’t a calling or a cult or a mission.

It isn’t a holy war God can’t win.

You can sell your soul

like debased currency

to the devil for it

or your flesh to a passing john

but love isn’t a profession.

It isn’t rehabilitation.

Love doesn’t have an I.Q.

and it’s not a lesson you can learn.

It doesn’t say to the water flow

or the fire burn.

It’s not the Tao or the I Ching.

It’s not a cheap novel you can read like Tarot.

It’s not a sign language for blind pronouns.

You can ask it anything.

It puts its finger to its lips like silence

and blows the stars out

and rolls up the braille starmaps

that failed to grope their way

through a northwest passage

tapping the ice like three blind mice

with the white canes of their broken masts

around a continent

that calls itself North America

but acts just like Atlantis.

Love might play the part of the clown

but the roles it seeks are tragic.

A great black affable familiar

that practises white magic

love is a spider

that seams its webs like dreamcatchers

and silks the torn butterflies

in cocoons that confuse the dead.

Trying to say what love is

when it keeps its word

is like trying to describe colours

to a blind chameleon in front of a mirror

when it’s looking the other way.

Love is elemental

but you can’t place it on a periodic table

or count photons in a Wilson cloud chamber

or find the mystic G-spot of the universe

in a hadron collider

by bombarding it with orgasms

in a charged particle field reversing spin

like a beatific sin.

Love is meeker than light

in a black ice age

that can’t bring itself to cry.

If God were ever prone

to distort the truth

love would be her lie.

 

PATRICK WHITE