AND IT ISN'T AS IF I DON'T MISS YOU

AND IT ISN’T AS IF I DON’T MISS YOU

 

And it isn’t as if I don’t miss you

it’s just that I realize

you’re not that person anymore

and neither am I.

People and things

grow away from each other

like stars in an expanding universe.

Their light might linger like a memory

but by the time it gets here

they’ve moved off into a different space

like waterbirds that leave no trace

of who we are now.

But we’re mingled in each other

like the nameless water

we took from the river

and gave back to the mindstream

that flows on forever

like stars and lovers and leaves.

I can still taste your valleys

even this high in the mountains

where even the echoes of things

are afraid of the heights

and hear your laughter

and the words you said to me

like nightbirds in the mouths

of lunar fountains

when no one else was listening.

I have gone on living with you

long after we left

for hearts unknown

as if gold still marrowed the bone

and the dead branch blossomed.

The breath within my breath.

The voice within my voice.

The  death within my death.

I can only see you on the inside now

but what has past

has as much creative potential

as the present

and I’ve watched you grow

as I have

into someone

as intimately inconceivable

as this world I find myself in

searching for something

that never shows up in a mirror

that can make me give up looking.  

Strangers to each other before we met

and what we knew of each other

by the time we left

stranger yet

how can I look upon

who we were to each other with regret

as if life had squandered an alternative ending?

Love might be

a heart-rending mind-bending bitch sometimes

guilty of war-crimes

and iron-willed truth

more of a truce with rust

than an oath of saint’s blood

sworn on a righteous sword

in a crusade of the word

against a forked tongue

but when has love ever not been

a lie you can trust

to lead you away from doubt

faster than thought can keep up with the universe

that keeps us guessing

whether it’s a curse or a blessing?

What gets better?

What gets worse?

And it’s an unholy obsession

to read a loveletter

as if it were the letter of the law on the make.

I wrote mine to you in fireflies

inspired by the muse of a snake

that struck me like lightning

with one fang

and healed me like a man

who could see again

with the other.

I treat yours like butterflies

I dare not touch

for fear of damaging their wings.

So I open their envelopes like flowers

and let them come and go as they wish

like earthly pilgrims on a divine wind

that has returned from an incredible distance

with news of the sinking of the Mongol fleet

by a hurricane-rose.

But I don’t embellish my defeat

or relish my victory

as if I lay at your feet

and you lay at mine.

I don’t stand long at the intersection

of a peace sign

where three roads meet

and take the one less traveled by

at a suggestion of the wind

as if it were a Road of Ghosts

and anyone who walked it

were walking away.

I whip the dust at my heels

into a gust of stars

that spins like a Sufi

bound to oblivion

like a shepherd moon

that’s just found its true direction

and freewheeling on my own thermals

like a red-tailed hawk on an August afternoon

or Messier 33

or a double helix

I let the road

that’s never left home

tag along with me as you do

all the way around the bend

of the known universe and beyond.

The red and black threads

of life and death

of passion and its passing

that bind us to one another

like rivers and roots and lightning

like the thorn to the rose

or horns on the moon

or two snakes copulating in the grass

like fire on the water

are not the kind of lifelines

that can be cut short

by fate and circumstance

anymore than you can wound

and separate water with a sword.

Water is its own physician

and heals itself

like a wound

that knows how to keep its mouth shut

when it’s drowning.

And fire is an old prophet

that sees better when it’s blind.

Two words for the same thing

like water and wave

come to the same sum

so nothing’s ever missing.

I loved you like time loves space

like absence loves

the nearness of things

in a loved one’s face

like an apple loves the ripening.

Like opposites engendered out of their union

love the continuum of knowing

no matter what direction they take

they’re headed back they way they came

like light out of the darkness

like the cosmos out of chaos.

But it isn’t as if

sincerity were born of falsehood

like a waterlily from decay

or the bad fell out of love with the good.

If you could only know

how many nights

I have spent thinking of you

down on my knees on the floor

looking for the skulls and moons

that have slipped from my spine

like beads from the broken rosary

of a cult that never caught on

or how many starless nights

I had to give up looking for my eyes

because of a lack of light

before the first gnostic firefly

showed up like a mystic insight

into a blackhole in the heart of the night

with a halo and a horn

that were both as true

as I was to you

and you were to me

or a knife is to its latest victim

or dark matter born of its own lucidity

to shape a new universe

out of everything that’s missing

until something comes alive that can see

it’s not the eyes that make the seeing

anymore than two lies make one truth

or two nothings make one being.

But the butterfly doesn’t make its debut

dressed in the jewels of the worm

it came from

like a loveletter out of a cocoon

when it opens its wings to let them dry

like the pages of a book

somebody’s been crying on.

Every moment of our lives is as true

as any other

even in the way they’re sometimes not.

And you may be long gone from here

but what’s far

is just the other eye of what’s near.

And though it was lightyears ago

that I loved you like a star

that was always a night shy of shining

like something you kept back

like the vagrant secret

in the flagrant heart

of a black rose

that only bloomed at night

I want you to know though it’s late

and my vision of life

is shedding its eyelids like the moon

to see better in the dark

by turning out the lights

like the small windows

in the houses of the fireflies

that could never keep their zodiacs in line

I could never separate space from time

and it’s always been you

that comes like a grape to a dead vine

or a constellation to the meaning of a firesign

rising from its ashes

with no exit in mind

that could ever find a way out.

The past of tomorrow

is the future of yesterday

and they’re both happening now.

Three waves of water.

Three petals of the same blooming

that goes on forever

like all the birds it takes

to make a feather.

And though there may be infinite room

in one mouth

for many words

and the eye can go on

gathering flowers and stars forever

without dropping one

the only way to say

what can’t be said

is to let it say you

so you don’t know

who’s playing the picture-music

though it sounds a lot like you

except the notes are true

to a theme that can’t be heard

except by a nightbird

that cries out in its solitude

like the first and last words

of the same voice in the dark

that calls to you

I am more inspired

by what I don’t understand

than I am by what I thought I understood

about how dangerous it was to be good

in a bad neighourhood in hell

that didn’t know how to defend itself

against thieves that returned their innocence

and generosity was looked upon as a bully

and any kind of compassion was acclaimed a coward.

But even through these broken windows

in the worst hours

when the heart was bruised

like the skull of the moon

and it wasn’t the solitude

it wasn’t the loneliness

that came to remind us

you can’t stare into the abyss for long

and expect to see stars at the bottom of the well

as your eyes are turning to stone

at the sight of your snakey reflection.

Sometimes it takes a lot of night

not to be blinded by the shining

like a star in daylight.

And I remember trying to deepen

the negative space

to coax the stars out of hiding

but nothing seemed to work.

And what gods didn’t we try on

like the stars and weather

to see if they could fit

the world we were living in like skin

with enough room inside to hide us

from what was most human about us

when we stepped out into the open?

The fame of a good name

that lives up to its legend

like a spontaneous myth of origin

is wine

compared to the vinegar of celebrity

that spells it out like bitter gossip

that’s run its course

like spit

from lip to lip

then sells it out as a farce.

I may have fallen upon

hard cold times

like a Martian meteorite

trying to put down roots in Antarctica

like a refugee’s last chance at survival

but that hasn’t changed my point of view.

I still look up to you

like a sad mad intoxicated fire

looks up at a constellation

on a long lonely desert night

and sees that it’s still just as beautiful

as the first time it bloomed in the flames

like the flower of a story I once knew

where all the lies come true

like lovers in chains

and unknown heros

that can’t put a face to their names.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOU'RE NOT MAD ENOUGH

YOU’RE NOT MAD ENOUGH

 

You’re not mad enough to understand my poetry.

Suffering hasn’t twisted you into strange shapes

like a hangman’s apprentice

practising knots with your spine

or driven your innocence out into the desert

like a scape-goat for the sins of others

until you had mastered their evil

and become a great devil

condemned to do good

as if it were the most exquisite torment

of the damned.

You’ve never stood like an exile

at a sleepless window

and listened to the night rain

speaking in a foreign language.

Your electrons have never

been bumped out of their orbitals

like the photonic refugees

of a radioactive element

with half an afterlife

that can see in the dark

and last for millions of years.

What tongue-tied tuning fork

of a pygmy atom

like the emperor of Austria to Mozart

seeing a galaxy

or hearing a symphony

indicts a cosmic conception

beyond the diminutive perception

and bent event horizons

of a black dwarf

for too many stars

too many notes?

You can’t taste the new wine

until it’s been poured

into the same old dirty cup of a mind

you’ve been drinking from

like the bloodless goblet of the moon for years.

Long breath

short breath

don’t they both go on forever

like poems you can’t measure for a straitjacket?

You want to make haikus out of hurricanes.

You want to time the wind

when it blows your house down.

You’ve sat down among your peers

at a designer seance

and studied literature

as if you were communing with ghosts

who had the decency not to show up in the flesh.

And you may have climbed

to the top of the world mountain like a postcard

but you’ve never come down from it

like an avalanche of rocks

you rolled away from your tomb

like the vernal equinox

as if Stonehenge were built by Sisyphus.

And what’s it to me

if your attention span

is a flea on a hot-plate

and you’re in the habit

of drinking spit

from everyone else’s mouth but your own

or jealousy makes you celibate

everytime you catch me

French-kissing the muse at her wellspring?

You’re a goldfish in a shark bowl

a shore-hugger

with a spineless guitar-pick for a fin

afraid of the dangers

of being swept out into the deep night sea

by the rogue karma

of getting caught up

in your own undertow.

You’re more at home

among dead starfish and washed-up things

in the slums of shallow tidal pools

than the palatial spaces

of more gifted myths of origin.

Literati in the corpus delecti

of the great dead

forensically parsed

by the grammar of maggots

it must be scary for you

to try to imagine

anything you can’t prove

like the singularity

at the bottom of a blackhole

or the creative potential of dark matter.

You may be armies of lice

in the Golden Fleece

living like stars with tenure

in faculties of sunlight

but who among you

knows how to sow

the teeth of the dragon?

If I keep faith with my calling

by following it like a salmon

all the way to the sea like a river

and back to the mountains to die

why should I listen

to the fingerlings on a fish farm

about flowing the wrong way

without checking the depth of the water

to see if I’m in too deep?

I can’t get enough of the stars

but you look at them like a blackhole

and think they’re overdoing their shining.

I’ve never regretted trusting or loving someone

in some interglacial warming period

when the trees come back.

And I’ve never killed a thing I ever loved.

I swallow the darkness of separation

knowing it’s the poisoned mushroom

of the emperor-clown’s last act.

I taste the fact on the fork and concede.

I take more than my own death

out into the desert

and I mourn without accusation

the empty cup of the moon

at the dry lips of its dying mirages.

It’s just the way the rose haemmorages

when it gets cold.

It’s just the way a paper boat

is kept afloat by its own themes

all the way down a river

that doesn’t care where it’s going

because its only destination is anywhere.

And what decent fire lies to its flames?

And I’d rather be loved than right

most of the time anyway

so I’ll take the blame upon me

and you can sleep tight as a lifeboat on the Titanic

and I’ll just drift south with the icebergs

hoping that at the first sign of your solitude

you don’t panic

at the way things are going down

and way way too overboard.

You put pen to paper

like a pharoah builds a pyramid

only to wind up

like a mummy in a museum under glass.

But the first thing I write off is me.

I dispossess myself of thoughts and feelings

like a serpent ditches its skin

tired of being the fall-guy for sin

or the ocean gets its waves off its back 

as if they didn’t belong to anyone’s mind

when the wind reads what’s written in sand

like a lifeline on the palm of my hand

that bends round the heel of my thumb

like an ongoing question of when.

You have to become no one

if you want to understand

the mindlessness of being a human

and the only way to express it

is to say it without a mouth

hear it without listening

and see it without eyes.

Anyone can write a decent poem

but how many can walk on the dark side

and let the poetry write them

without squealing for death

to make their last breath

the whole orchard

in the blossom of a haiku

that might read like a fortune-cookie

but breaks just like an egg

that got the word out

like a bird afraid of the sky

there’s no more room at the inn

for the stars to follow the magi like a hearse

wreathed in laurels and flowers

like the dead blessing

round the bend of a live curse.

You can’t live like a maggot

and write like an eagle.

And though it’s not a grace

that’s easily acquired

by verse lamplighting at night in the woods

to attract the muse like a doe

to your moth-bound lucidities

baying at the moon

you hope will mistake you for a wolf

even the darkness has enough taste

not to try to pour the ocean into a teacup

that hasn’t been washed out first

like someone with a filthy mouth.

All your dainty revisions

were the personal decisions

of someone addicted to plastic surgery

like the bride of Frankenstein to Botox

trying to deconstruct her face.

But me?

I had no choice.

How can you revise space?

Or take anything away from zero?

You try to keep order in your life and work

as if you were building Rome again

from the ashes up like Nero.

And I don’t know why it’s so

but insight after insight

flashing through me like sunswords

through the back of a lunar bull

though it’s been painful

has sustained my life somehow

like the brainchild of a compatible chaos.

And I may have been treated madly by poetry

and speak in tongues

like a lunatic in the rain in Babylon

long after it’s bricks were broken

and the last eclipse had spoken

its last word

about free choice

being gerry-mandered out of the absurd

but you’re as well-versed

as the soft lip

of a Georgian sheep dip

that’s just found its voice.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

             

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE ONES I LOVED THE DEEPEST AND THE BEST

THE ONES I LOVED THE DEEPEST AND THE BEST

 

The ones I loved the deepest and the best

turned into strangers and enemies

or worse, friends.

Now I’d trust evil

before I’d trust stupid

because stupid will get you killed faster than evil

almost any night of the week

when I’m out with my demonic acquaintances

like a gangland constellation

that wants to burn the house down

to get even with the astrologers

who talk too much

about the eloquent future

they see in our illiterate past.

And it isn’t as if

I’ve been emptied of human content

and I don’t care

if I feel anything or not

about the unspooling

of my emotional life

as just another way of breathing in and out

or the indifference and separation

that has passed between me and all these people

like a knife looking for something holy to wound.

Sometimes the river

just tears the roots of things

away from the shore

in a torrential downpour

that wakes the desert up

and a judas-goat tempts a bad messiah.

Compounded of too many different parts

to belong solely to any one of them,

a bag of starwater punctured

by nine black holes

that haemorage like an oilslick

that’s trying to pretend

it’s just another eclipse in passing

and endowed at birth

by the black beatitude

of an intensely acquisitive intelligence

that approaches knowledge like a Mongol,

I put a Zen finish on the agony of my solitude

and hold my ground against the approaching abyss.

What does it mean to be a human?

What else but this?

Just this as it is and isn’t?

The river flows by the skull of the swan

and the bones of its wings

that once swam upright

like a harp on the water

and played to the moon in tears

slow songs about the stark beauty

in the sadness of passing things;

the river flows by extemporaneously

true to the nature of water

going along indifferently

with what’s missing by the mouthful

when death rises from the bottom

like a snapping turtle

to the lunar surface of things

and hunger’s the only meaning in life

that satisfies the doubtful.

The opposites engender each other

like predator and prey.

If I didn’t know you were listening

I wouldn’t know what to say.

The words may be male,

stars on a lonely night,

fireflies and lightning bolts

but the voice is the dark female

behind all this commotion of light

raising waves on the ocean of life

like thresholds and sails

that cling to the coasts of their thoughts

for fear of drowning alone in their tears

like a lifeboat

all tied up in the nets and knots

of the last navigator

that swore he’d send a continent back

to look for them

as soon as he made landfall

like a dove from the Bible.

What’s the meaning of an open door

when you approach your own house

as if it were the house

of someone you once knew

who doesn’t live there anymore?

That’s what the stars feel like

denuded of light

like the meaning of words

in an expanding universe

driven by the engine of dark energy

into the strange empty spaces

older than light

of the black muse-mother

that keeps out of sight

of her offspring inspirations

so they can exist on their own

to look for the meaning of her absence

when they get home

like thieves

on the backstairs of everywhere

who don’t know where to go

or what to steal that’s real.

Who stole the moon from the window

of the cosmic view

I used to take

of my human relationships?

I put a finger to my own lips

and listen to the silence

rolling over like hard evidence

there’s no truth in facts or words

that isn’t a complicit witness

to the crime-scene

that chalks the sidewalks of my mind

with the ghosts of old friends

outlining where they fell

when the past caught up with them

like someone they once knew well.

I drink the eyes of yesterday’s lovers

like wine from my own skull

and fall down drunk in the doorway

of a stranger’s afterlife

as if it were the gates of Eden

hidden like the petal of a dream

that clung like an eyelid

to the vision of the black rose

that only revealed its mystery

in the dead end of the light.

How could I help it

if I kept falling in love over the years

with women of the first magnitude

always a night shy of shining?

And it didn’t matter

what shape of darkness

I took in their minds

to enhance their outlook by contrast

they weren’t any brighter for it

by the time they left

and I wasn’t any less blind.

And it’s hard to say

who got the best

of whose worst

but I always thought of it

as my last loveletter

to what they were

and would never be again

if they left first.

Life and love

like the food of angels

who don’t eat

because they’re above all that

goes better with an earthly appetite

and a clean place-mat

in an allnight restaurant alone

looking out through the window

like a rogue constellation lost

in the artificial glare of things

like a bottomless cup of coffee

or a blackhole

where the moon used to be

before they fenced it for money

and the cow ran away with the spoon

like the Milky Way with a lean junkie

she suckles like baby Zeus

snorting stars from the mirror

of a stone-cold Titan

that wants to eat him like a cannibal Dad.

I’ve learned to feel sad about things

the way the mad do

when they wear they’re feelings

inside out like skin and clothes

as if nothing were weird or strange

about living without fear of a straitjacket

that’s been bruised and abused by bad tattoos.

The impersonality of life

that shepherds my memories like moons

through these echoless valleys of death

that have disembodied my voice

in the vastness of an unanswerable space

like a bird disappearing into the nightsky

crying like a wounded thing

struck by the cold stone of the moon on the wing

can’t be expressed in a lot of sentimental boo-hoos

that run amok like the ink of a loveletter in the rain

and stain the last known address

on the rainbow envelope

like the name

on the watercolour

of a miscarriage of the moon

framed by a family album

like a face at the window of an empty house.

So I don’t raid the tombs of the dead

as if I had no respect for bones

or couldn’t keep faith

with the sacred whims of chaos

that makes pyramids

out of the dust of our afterlives

as if we were pharoahs

aiming our souls at Orion

like long-shot snipers

through the wrong end of the telescope.

I’m an enlightened cynic.

I take the shot

with the hollow-point

of a higher calibre of hope.

 

PATRICK WHITE