IF YOU'RE BRAVER THAN I AM

IF YOU’RE BRAVER THAN I AM

 

If you’re braver than I am

it’s only because you’re more desparate you said

and I broke down laughing in tears

as you were tripping on mushrooms

and I was starting to peak on acid.

Why should you love me at all you asked

and I said I like to take subjective risks

and I can still light up at the smile you gave me

because you thought I thought you were dangerous.

Have you stayed dangerous over the years?

Did you ever find enlightenment?

Or have all those Doors of Perception we stepped through

way back then to expand our cosmic conciousness

by crossing all our thresholds

and dotting all our taboos

closed like space behind you?

Have you made your return address a point of view

you can live with

and turned those beautiful Hispanic eyes

into late night windows

that don’t see anything that ever goes down in the neighbourhood?

Is your seeing still ambidextrous

or have you shut your eyes to the world

so they’re more wall than window

and there’s only one way of looking in?

Sometimes I think that night I dropped acid with you

on China Beach under the stars

estranged by the flames and shadows and smoke

of a cedar fire eager to burn its first heretic

I got so high I’ve never come down

and though forty years have passed

I’m still nineteen back there somewhere with you.

Even my mother used to say in frustration

when she couldn’t win the argument

that I had a way of turning things upside-down.

That may well be so

but I’d still rather be an oxymoron

that can see all sides of things at once

like a multi-faceted jewel turning in the light

in front of a mirror

that doesn’t know which one of its infinite profiles to choose

and doesn’t

than suffer the Great Reversal of the Hourglass

and end up walking on my head

and thinking with my feet

just so everybody would think I was normal.

I’m still nineteen back there somewhere with you

and the fire we lit that night

like something ephemeral

among so much that was eternal

keeps flaring up in me like a phoenix that’s never gone out.

Clarity doesn’t turn a lie into the truth.

And enlightenment might be so blissed out

it celebrates its own ignorance

because everything is perfect just as it is

but I still think there’s more sincerity in the search

than there is in the finding.

I still think life is a mystery that surpasses its own wonder.

I still think every moment contains the whole of space

without beginning or end

like a water droplet contains the whole of the sea.

I still think that whenever people touch one another gently

they leave their fingerprints on the window

like constellations on the sky

that prove our identities are as indelible as light.

I still think there’s something more alluringly mystical about action

than there is in the undynamic peace of contemplation.

But the best is to make love as we did that night

as a tantric mode of creative annihilation

that showed the drugs we were on

like flying carpets

what it was like for once

to get so euphorically high on us

the next time they saw us coming

they’d just say yes.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I STAND WHERE THE LISTENING BEGINS

I STAND WHERE THE LISTENING BEGINS

 

I stand where the listening begins

as if my voice were just another one of the echoes

and my tongue were the tip of an edgy precipice

that doesn’t dare make a move

over an immeasurable abyss of eyes

that nobody belongs to.

This is a seeing that’s older than the stars

that were born of it

like a mirror is born of the shining.

Like a body is born of the mind

and takes on the shape of a universe

as an expressionist gesture of classical reserve.

In the great ocean of being before it turned into everyone

our eyes weren’t beaded like two drops of water

strung through our nose

like a statement we were trying to make.

They were waves.

Waves of water.

Waves of light.

Waves of thought and feeling.

They were waterbirds that came and went

without leaving.

They were meteorological events

in the emotional life of the sea

when it played alone with itself like weather.

We didn’t evolve hands to prove we had a grip on things.

We didn’t evolve brains to prove we were intelligent.

We’re not nuggets of insight

panned from the mindstream

that runs down the world mountain

in a rush of gold.

I stand where I can hear the night

breathing like a shadow in its own darkness

and whatever I am not

is as real as whatever I am.

And my sorrows drop away

like the black fruit of ruined bells

and my joys know a freedom

no holy war ever deserved.

Here my death answers to my life

and not the other way around.

My beginnings are not justified by my ends

and my solitude is so wholly itself

it embraces everything

as if it were space

and time were its only friend.

This is a poetic state.

A dynamic mode of creative anihilation.

This is a phoenix blooming in its own fire.

This is life.

This is the universe full of bright ideas

that come to it like stars in the darkness.

This is the white mare of the full moon in the high field

with the gates open

like wings growing out of her shoulders.

This is a space that is so spontaneously immediate

that you receive the reply

long before you’ve even asked the question.

It doesn’t take thousands of thoughtyears

for the light to get here.

A flower blooms.

A star comes out.

It’s as simple as that.

You lift one veil of the mystery like an eyelid.

Nothing has a history.

The old man remembers nothing.

The old woman forgets her name.

Once they were seabeds of meaning.

Now they’re just water.

And everything is ok with that.

People go grey

and turn into clouds in the mountains

just to catch the last of the light

and give their lives some colour.

And then it’s night again

and the dancing chandeliers of the stars

that are burning like legends

to make a name and a myth for themselves

fall like constellations to earth

and shatter like the rainbows of youth.

Every dawn has a taste of the sunset in it.

What’s the end of anything

if not the dark side of its beginnings?

I am the fool of a freedom

that lets things be whatever they want to be

deep within the heavy fruit of a compassionate heart

that ripens in its own lucidity.

There are worms.

There are birds.

There’s a green star in the apple core.

My skin is the chameleon of the sun going down.

I know how to swim through stone and water.

There are fish in my treetops

and birds in my roots

and when I drown

it’s the sun in the sea

and nothing ever really goes out.

Everytime I open my mouth to sing

this is where the muse

puts a finger to her lips

to teach me what I’m talking about.

I’m a star when I write.

First I let go of the light.

And then the children point fingers at me

and say in mutual recognition

of the stories they make up on the go

there you are

just as we foretold.

It’s the same way with water

when it’s lost in a desert of sand and stars.

Sometimes it takes a mirage to find your way home.

Death gapes like the jawbone of a mummy

and writes like a pyramid

as if it wanted to make all things last forever.

But when life picks up the pen

around the fires of the stars

to whisper into its own ear

things that only solitude

can suggest to the night

its poems are always tents on the move.

The moon sailing paper lifeboats down a river

like waterlilies

blooming in the pale flames

of their lunar immolations

as if each were a white phoenix

rising above its own ashes and smoke

like someone dreaming of swans.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THERE'S A TWILIGHT ZONE

THERE’S A TWILIGHT ZONE

 

thinking of a friend’s suicide

 

There’s a twilight zone between dissolution and creation

where life can exist for awhile

as the polar extreme between two non-opposites

that share the same nature

like two bays of the same heart

where the departures are just a way

of making room for the new arrivals.

It’s the way life gets around like blood.

It’s the way the moon trancends itself

without giving up an inch.

It’s how your eyes give birth to windows and mirrors.

It’s how your seeing mothers the world into being.

If you’re only clear enough

to see beauty reflected in the autumn hills

and not in the filth of the polluted valley below

like the oilslick of a fly with rainbow wings

then you’ve only got one eye open on things

like a badge-minded cub scout

learning to tie knots in your thinking

that even Alexander could undo without a sword in his hand.

There’s a middle extreme

between nothing and nothing

between waking and dreaming

between what’s false

and what’s true

between your tears and your laughter

your darkness and light

between the adult and the child

that’s trying to keep itself alive in you

by keeping one breath ahead of death

like the runner behind you

not the one you’re trying to catch up to.

Life is a sea that braves its own weather

as if there were no difference

in the shallows and depths of water.

That’s reality.

What brings us together is space.

What keeps us apart

is a sign of the times

looking for a fresh start

like a new mask under an old face.

Whatever mediums you master.

Water.

Land.

Sky.

Starmud.

Intelligence.

Passion.

Emptiness. 

Life.

If you can’t keep faith with your own absurdity

without losing your mind.

If you lose touch

with the light at the end of your fingertips

even when your genius

gropes its way through the darkness

blinder than a mole with a starmap that doesn’t shine.

If you haven’t understood yet

that even when you cast your life aside

like a fish you throw back into the sea

because it’s not big enough

for the both of you

it’s just another way life has of hanging on to it like a lifeboat.

If your feet have misjudged the journey

and your winged heels

are no match for the speed of light

and your shoes are old turtles that are tired of holding up the world

or being run over on the road

and you’re looking for a resting place

among the lost hubcaps in the drainage ditch

smothered in white sweet clover.

If you’re not as wily and cunning as the morning glory

or the single-petalled wild roses

that are holding up the abandoned fence

that’s given up keeping anything out

or holding anything in.

Then all you’re doing

is trying to approach

what’s open and free

and accessible about you

like a gate that won’t let you in.

You’re dying of thirst beside a freshwater lake

that doesn’t impede the flight of the white clouds

anymore than it’s disturbed

by the departure of the waterbirds

heading south with the souls of the dead

like the homesick thoughts of the living.

It might look like taking.

But it’s a thief’s way of giving.

Even if you were born the child of an executioner

with a long lineage of dynastic skulls

that have slowly evolved into a family

and there’s nothing alive on earth today that wasn’t

every breath you take

is an eternal flame

that never goes out

among generations of the dead

who gather like ghosts around it

to remember what they died for.

If you can’t feel the rapture in the ashes of moths

that burned their bridges behind them

like loveletters to God

in the light of a candle

that summoned them out of the darkness

into the deeper darkness of an unknown medium of life

that brightens things up

by turning the transient fireflies

of today’s heretics

into the fixed stars of tomorrow’s martyrs

like every moment of the life you lived until now

then your eyes have been numbed by their own seeing.

As if the tears

the lachrymae rerum

were cryonically frozen deep down in the heart of things

like the blind embryos of the children that were born of your shining

to look up at the stars

and see flowers.

To look down on the flowers

and feel alive as light and rain

called to the seance of a rose

that lets them use her voice

to say their names

before their days were crossed out

like the Xs and echoes of a used calendar

that time ran out on like a bucket in a waterclock.

You downed yourself in a single gulp

and turned the glass over like a barfly

to say you were finished

with pouring one universe into another and another and another

down to the last drop

until your mindstream leaked out of itself

and all that was left of the conversation

between you and the dead

were hieroglyphics in a dry creekbed.

 

PATRICK WHITE