DISAFFECTED DISENCHANTED DEPRESSED

Disaffected disenchanted depressed.

Toxic insight into the nature of what’s worse

than the way things really are among humans

for thousands and thousands and thousands of years

when you look behind the scenes

of the morality plays that pass for the truth.

It’s all true

or nothing is.

Keep trying to write my way out of this

like an emergency exit at the end

of a long hall of mirrors

that are sick of looking like me.

Trying to remember what I meant

fifty years ago when I devoted myself

to this excruciating discipline of vacating myself

to be whatever I was called upon to be

to live a life of poetry

from the inside out

as if it had nothing to do with me.

Bright vacancy.

Dark abundance.

The ferocity of my childhood

prepared me for the nightside of the street

and I learned to see in the dark

what there was to be afraid of

and long before rapture

it was terror that enhanced my awareness.

The gods eat their children.

Injustice wills what shills for the divine.

Tolerance is a defense mechanism for the sublime.

The people are krill.

The people are the algae of the sea.

The people are thermophilic bacteria

seven kilometers down in a diamond mine.

The people are the voodoo dolls of the rich.

The rich stick pins in the eyes of the poor

until they’re blind enough

to convince the people they’re stars.

Can’t go on like this.

Coming apart like a oilspill.

Haemmoraging like an eclipse

gored on the horn of the moon.

Mithras Tauroctonus.

Maybe I’ll bleed wheat yet.

Fat chance.

They’ve got asylums for those into self-sacrifice

where the serial killers act like spiders

charged with the care of the butterflies.

And right next to the eternal flame

there’s the eternal mouth

trying to explain all this blood

that keeps flowing from the same old watershed

like one long last eloquent sentence of the dead

that runs on like a periodic incommensurable

without a point.

It’s a forgone conclusion

that the future is already a thief.

And somebody’s thrown bad meat down the well of the present

like the moral tone of a hypocrite

preaching to the furious ones

how to hate their neighbour

and blame it on love.

Got to find a hole in the ice.

Come up for air.

Break through to the other side of the mirror

and hope there’s no one standing there with a spear.

Not all the cosmic views are beautiful and radiant.

There are blackhole insights that are so universally devastating

the third eye is all pupil and no iris

and everything you see is as dark and indelible

as cannibals saying grace over what they’re eating.

Even the dragons have nightmares in this darkness

and the sharks that are circling like sundials

are afraid to go to sleep.

I stare into it with three hundred million year old reptilian eyes

because that’s what poets do.

They go down on the Medusa without turning into stone.

They break themselves like twigs and trails

and cracks in the planet

when the wilderness gets lost in them

to say they were here once

where you’re standing now

alone with the Alone

like an alien

lightyears from home

and ever since it’s been habitable.

Better to look into the darkness like a pioneer

than an exile.

The stars don’t drive their light out into the night

deprived of a door a window and a threshold

to survive on shadows among the homeless.

Even from the bottom of a deep well

you can see the stars in daylight.

Embrace the night

and the creatures of darkness

even when your eyes shatter like glass

and you can’t see your features in anything you’re looking at.

There’s more than just the Big Bang

and Steady State theories of the universe.

The first is actively mad

and the latter passively depressed.

But you can take a tantric point of view

and combine the two

into a crazy kind of wisdom.

You could see how the light

depends upon you for its seeing

and that you’re the original insight

that embodies it in being.

That the clear light of the void is eyeless

and illuminates nothing

until you open yours

to lavish the night with stars

and be the place they’re going

as they look back at you

ahead of their future

waiting for you to put a face to their knowing.

Life is a perennial insight into a temporary mystery

that looks through

our extraordinary eyes

to see what’s unattainable about us.

Listen to the universe as if it were speaking to you in your own voice.

Look and see.

Listen and hear.

You don’t need to polish the mirror

to make the darkness brighter.

A crow is a crow

not a dove in hiding.

You don’t need to denounce one

to reveal the other.

They’re not opposites.

They’re twins.

Like creation and apocalypse.

They’re simulacra.

And the valley of the shadow of death

is the exact likeness of the holy mountain

that casts it like a deathmask over a mirror

to remember its own reflection.

If you’re looking at stars with tears in your eyes

maybe that’s the only way

you can teach fire how to swim.

If you’re drowning like a nightsea in your own weather

maybe that’s just the way

you feather your waves like birds

and teach water how to fly.

If the stormclouds have left you starless

and your luck plays dice with your knees

and the cure is begging favours from the disease

maybe the dark waves all around you

pulling Icarus who flew too close to the sun

by his winged heels

down

are just water’s way of teaching you to walk on water like the moon

by lighting it up

and blowing it out like a lamp

a firefly

a star

a mirror

a mind.

Appearances are not the illigitimate children of reality.

A blackhole falls on its own light like a sword.

But one’s not a hero.

And the other’s not a suicide.

Maybe they’re just the pupils in the eyes of space

sacred wounds

keyholes in time

trying to see for themselves

what things look like on the other side.

Maybe there are times when the black mirror is brighter than the white

and infinitely deeper than a star in the night

that can only take it back so far

into the darkness that gave birth to it

before it runs out of light.

Maybe this depression is nothing

but the crone-mask of the dark mother

she puts on like the moon

when she’s sick of her webs and her veils

and giving birth to lifeboats

that don’t know when to lower their sails.

PATRICK WHITE

STRANGER IN THE LEAVING

Stranger in the leaving

than you were before you came.

Is it not always so

when people separate?

Lovers who knew each other intimately for years

close their gates to each other

and say each others’ name

as if they weren’t philosopher’s stones anymore.

And the base metal outweighs the gold that comes of it.

Alone with the alone

in the abyss of the absolutes

what was vivid and vital

turns numb as glass

and what was mystically specific about the other

is no longer a shrine that holds the secret name of God.

Stranger in the leaving

than you were before you came.

You leave with some of my memes

as I leave with some of yours

and we are both no doubt slightly changed for good

by the reciprocity of the encounter

like hydrogen and oxygen make water.

Though now it’s all tears frozen on the moon.

Good-bye my lovely

I shall miss your eyes and your skin

and the thrill of your dangerous heart.

I will miss your wounded mouth

I tried to heal with messianic kisses

that never walked on anything but the earth.

And there’s no blame

you couldn’t fit my lunar month

into your solar calendar.

We had everything in common except time

and our faults were as compatible as our virtues.

I will miss the rumours of alien life in the wavelengths of your hair.

I shall miss losing myself like a firefly

in the wishing wells of your eyes

even if now my own seem more

like impact craters in the prophetic skull of the moon

when I consider what’s leaving like an atmosphere from this mindscape.

And I shall always remember

that your heart was as generous as your breasts

and whenever we made love

how the earthly was the envy of the spiritual fact.

You didn’t want anyone to know you were gentle.

Not even me.

But I could see through that mask

eyebrow to eyebrow with you

as if we both were intent on showing the same face to the earth

like the crescent fangs of a Georgia moon that said

don’t step on me

because we were afraid.

More than enough to have you in the nude

I wasn’t a glutton for your nakedness

that demanded you take your illusions off

to prove you loved me.

It would have been an irreverence

beyond the aspirations of heresy

to witness you renewing your virginity

like the new moon bathing in a sea of shadows.

I never tried to pry the petals of the flowers open

before they were ready to bloom.

I was never the ant

that told the peony what to do.

I never tried to look under the closed eyelids of the rose

to see what it was dreaming.

Though I’m not into voodoo

I never desecrated

the bird shrines

of your involuntary taboos.

But now I look in your eyes

and see that yesterday

is less vivid than tomorrow

though neither of them has happened yet.

The new moon is all potential

The full moon all used up.

There are effigies of potential

standing like scarecrows

in late autumn cornfields

and paragons of actuality

who love to star in constellations

that make them out to be the hero.

I try to stay

and I end up going.

I try to go

and the earth moves underfoot.

The root feels the death of its flower

as the autumn stars turn into frost

and burn its petals like old loveletters

to the immensities that didn’t have time to read them.

The harmonies of life

are distinguished from the harmonies of death

by a single breath

taken in

and turned out

into the vast expanses of where it came from in the first place.

And the spirit that isn’t shy of its own lucidity

knows that everything it illuminates

whether by day or by night

has the lifespan of light

and light is the brainchild of the darkness.

So even when the lights go out

like people and candles

and us

the shadows go on blooming

and even when the stars

are a gust of ghosts at our heels

the dust is rich

with the memory of all the roads

that once got lost in us

trying to their way back home

like blood and fire and spirit

as if their final destination

were always the place they started from.

And if in the lightyears ahead

you should ever wonder if I remember you

be deeply assured

I shall remember you

as if every footstep I took

were a threshold of this homelessness

I am brave enough to cross without you.

And I shall thank you for this courage

inspired by the muse of your absence

and the feel of my blood Doppler-shift toward

long meditative wavelengths of red

that stream from the intensity

of the wounded white-hot blue of a renewed beginning.

You can’t teach a bird to fly in a cage

or snakes to bite other people.

But when I first met you

it was as if the serpent-fire at the base of my spinal cord

that was running to keep its thoughts aloft like kites

suddenly had wings

and all my dirt-bag myths

that crawled on the earth among the lowest

were elevated into constellations

that burned like dragons among the chandeliers.

And when the muses of life well up in me like water

as they will

and ask me back

for all the tears they’ve shed on the sorrow

of the way things had to be

between you and me

for them and us

to happen the way we did

I will show them the eternal flame

of the nightwaterlily

blooming in the clear fire

of its lonely lucidity

not even the rain

the dragon brings

can aspire to put out.

I will show them the sun.

I will show them the moon.

And I’ll say

you see?

That’s us forever.

That swan in the heart of a phoenix.

And they will be well-pleased with the beauty of the lies

I use to shadow the truth with compassionate alibis

for why the flowers fall.

Sometimes it’s the bird that swims through stone

and the snake that flys

in a profusion of fire and water

shadow and form

darkness and light

intensity and death

madness and wisdom.

Sometimes you meet someone

and you realize

this fallible flesh just as it is

is the deepest longing of the spirit fulfilled

like light in a perishable garden.

That there are no flaming swords

in the hands of the angels

at the wounded gates of our exile

trying to keep anything in or out.

Stranger in the leaving

than you were before you came.

The knowledge we have of each other

might want to keep things the same

but like all living things

in this garden of creation

the only way to sustain our innocence

is change.

PATRICK WHITE

EVEN THOUGH THE SNOW

Even though the snow is still on the trees

I can smell the flowers from here

Like a distant fragrance of light.

Everything is creatively radiant.

Everything is an unsanctified insight

into the nature of everything else.

Whatever exists.

Whatever has ceased to exist.

What has never existed

is me.

Either I’m all of that

as you are

and we’re all of each

or we’re altogether nothing.

We make paths for ourselves

out of what we’ve already experienced

but those roads are always behind us

like the wake of a lifeboat

like the light of a star

like the generations of those

who summon us to a seance in the future

like the ghosts of those who haven’t died yet

because time doesn’t run just one way

and the mindstream doesn’t follow its own flowing

anymore than water does

because wherever it’s going

it already is.

Even at the end of all roads.

In dangerous backalleys

and suicidal cul de sacs

life makes a way out of no way.

It never looks back.

It never looks forward.

It doesn’t turn time into a schedule.

It doesn’t come early.

It doesn’t come late.

It isn’t full of hellos and farewells

because wherever it walks

it greets itself.

A bluejay turns upside down

to get at the seeds of the sunflower

with its face downturned in a crown of thorns

like a station of the cross

and a gust of stars flys off its wings

as if some stargazer

had just breathed out the Milky Way in Aquila.

You want to know who you are.

You’re that.

You’re this.

You’re him.

You’re her.

You’re it.

Just stop looking at the world

as if it were inanimate

and you can breathe in

the same night the stars do

you can breathe in the space and the darkness

and the abysmal depths of time there is

in every moment

in every breath you take

and you can turn it all

including the exceptions

into a clear light

that illuminates its own shining

nur wa nur

light upon light

with awareness

with life

with the jewel of a hidden treasure

by which the world is known

to be wholly and solely

no less or more than each of us.

I see the dead leaves

still clustered

this deeply into winter

on the young maple tree

that hasn’t learned

that poems were meant to be scattered on the wind

or that there’s a voice in the burning bush

that’s her own

she hasn’t discovered yet

that’s as passionate and generous as the fire

she speaks through now to the stars

she aspires to.

Why go looking for symmetries of randomness

like jewels in a dark ore

when they’re right in your face like your eyes?

There’s no secret eclipse in the heart of the jewel

that’s as obvious as a morning like this.

There’s nothing to know.

There’s nothing not to know.

And the light seems so much like bliss

I doubt if there’s anywhere anyone can go

where the light can’t touch the dark spot in the heart of a fool.

PATRICK WHITE

LONG RIVERINE VIOLET SHADOWS

Long riverine violet shadows

snaking their way across the snow

like spontaneously confident brushstrokes on a white canvas.

Morning’s in its studio.

I’m at my desk.

And both of us were driven here

by our own free will

though the morning’s always

more gravely creative than I am.

There’s nothing sprightly about a limping iamb

that’s trying to wrestle

the angel in its way

without dislocating its hip

like a prophetic wishbone

that doesn’t know what to ask for.

But here’s a prophecy if you want one.

There will come a day

when you won’t want to know the future

and you will take your head in your hands

like the skull of the moon

and turn it around

so its dark face

looks down upon the earth

like the back of a mirror.

One day the wonder of being alive

will freeze like a mindstream

that’s gone deeply underground

like water on the moon

to keep from thinking

about the horror of what’s going on.

Cynics look into the future

and uncover the ancient ruins of their expectations.

The light festers like the ingrown hair of a solar flare

that screws up its spiritual compass

and turns back on itself

like a flower that couldn’t see the point of blooming.

The optimists look into the future

in an abundance of light

that rises like ghost bread

they’re always handing out to the dead

as if they were the most needy among the living

to be deprived of hope.

But ruining the future with hope

is no different than ruining it with despair.

But by far the host of humanity

keeps its eyes on the present

from the inside out

trying to be what’s not there.

They’re like lost trees that read their leaves like maps.

They’re like the wind trying to get a fix on where it’s going.

A voice taking singing lessons from its echos.

The shadows flow away from the light

like roads not taken

or the luckiest among the forsaken

who know

what’s most precise

about the cosmic paradigm

of the human mindstream

is that it doesn’t have a design

it ever squares with twice.

Emotionally

life’s a mood-ring

that changes like the colour of blood

or a reptile on a rock in the sun.

Intellectually

it’s a chameleon

that’s mesmerized

by its own reflection

in a palace of mirrors within mirrors.

But I put it to you gently

as if I didn’t have a voice of my own

when was the great sea of awareness

ever troubled by its waves

or confused by its own weather?

Don’t defame the shadows

because they’re trying to make their way in the world alone.

It’s the dog on the short leash

that’s trying its hardest to get away from home.

And you could just as easily read them

as a kind of poetic script of the light

written in a sacred alphabet

that evolved out of a secret insight

in how to delight in our own creativity

living in the moment

imagining what we might be

without knowing who we really are.

PATRICK WHITE

TRYING TO EXPRESS

Trying to express a more immediate intimacy

with the life of the mind

without attributing a form to madness

might just be another way of looking for comic relief

from the actual facts of the tragic folly that confronts us

like a world that won’t tolerate any mask

you want to put on it for long

to lie about the atrocity of your irrelevance

and pretend you don’t know what you’re looking at.

I dream I suffer the same corpuscular purpose as a paramecium.

I wake up from these desert mirages

and it’s true.

OK it’s true.

Next.

Because nothing in life is an endgame

And despite the full stop like an empty cup

at the end of a thought

with the lifespan of a punctuation mark

my cup runneth over like the new moon

and everything is drunk on the lunacy of its light.

It’s not the content of life that matters

as much as the way space bends

to accommodate it.

It’s not the wine

it’s the emptiness of the cup

that shapes the forms of our knowing

so that they can be grasped by our eyes and hands

as separate things in the world.

Mind is a poet a potter a painter a parent a prophet

that will not be bound by its own works

or the laws of the defenseless who expound them.

Look out into space

and the furthest you will ever see

is a face in the mirror that’s older than matter.

Space is a vehicle of transformation

that doesn’t go anywhere

because anywhere it goes

its wheels are centered in the still points of themselves

as we are to our navels.

And all lifelines

straight or otherwise

are emanations of its radiance.

Order and logic and reason

are the dry wishbones of the fearful

looking for predictability in a world

that can’t be contained

by a unified field theory

or an elaborated straitjacket

on the fashion ramps of science.

Physics says one size fits all

but by the time the spiders are finished weaving it

the sleeves are always too short

to keep up with a universe that’s growing at the speed of light

and I’d rather walk naked

in the skin of my own clarity

than be clothed in someone else’s hand-me-downs.

I’m not out hunting birds and butterflies with a dreamcatcher.

I’m not looking for peace and healing

by abstaining from myself

like a promise I broke to my ancestors.

Everyone was born a lifeboat

in an abysmal sea of awareness

or they wouldn’t be here to know it.

So who needs to be saved?

Or is there some kind of holy war going on

between the lifeboats and the waves?

And where does Jerusalem go

to free itself of infidels

when it goes on crusade?

All waves are waterbells

that never stop tolling

and the mindstream

they’re raised upon

is in everyone

the sum of what’s holy about life.

Learn

to transcend your certainties

if you want to get over your doubts.

Don’t hoard the effects of your efforts

in the name of a good cause

that’s so blinded by its own light

that it can’t see

that there’s as much randomness in the wonder

as there is in the horror.

That what’s most terrifying about life

is that it’s free

of anything you can say or feel or think about it.

That every part in every moment

is not the sum

but the consummation of the whole

that roots and flowers in everyone

as if it were a secret that bloomed for them alone.

To know the names of things

like the names of stars and flowers

is to look at them from the outside.

Who called you Eve?

Who called you Adam?

If you know your name

you’re already in exile.

But it was not us who were driven out of the garden.

Knowledge drives the garden out of us.

It turns our eyes around

so we can’t see Eden from the inside

where our beginnings are always now

and we are no more dispossessed of our innocence

than the passion expressed by a flower

in a loveletter to the light

can be disenchanted of the insight that inspired it.

What’s truly tragic about life when it seems so

is not that it’s evil

but that it’s innocent

and its innocence is older than compassion.

The moon sheds its phases.

The flower its petals.

They’re always coming and going

from the same abyss they’re heading into.

The emptiness engenders this abundance

out of its own potential for growth

and even death is not culpable.

This is space.

That is space.

But the two

can no more be separated

than a wave can be from water.

You don’t need a unified field theory

to understand unity.

You don’t need to hold a mirror up

to your face

to see your own reflection

when you can see yourself in everything.

What does space look like to space?

Mind to mind?

Light to light?

The dreamer to the dream?

What could God possibly say to herself

that she didn’t already know?

There’s nothing hidden.

There’s nothing secret.

There’s nothing that escapes detection.

There’s no simulacrum for the void

that elaborates everyone’s likeness.

There’s no dead metaphor in the word

waiting to be resurrected.

The absolutes may be in denial

about the way things seem

but even when their eyes burn through glass like stars

lost in their own immensities

they can’t impress the darkness

with a theory of cosmic shadows.

They don’t need to look any further into space

than the ends of their noses

to see the constellations

casting them

across the universe

like the shadows of the stars

that aren’t there anymore

trying to throw a light on black matter

by noting its absence.

Gravitational eyes devoid of light.

Black holes without keys

in the doors of perception.

Dry wishing wells on the moon

that have never plumbed the depths

of their bottomless longing

to hear something irrevocably truer

than the echoes of their own voices

coming back to them

like crows and doves to an ark.

By the time you know it

any event is over.

By the time you see the dawn

the sun has already set.

In the seed of every insight

you can read your own gravestone.

You can see there’s as much death in it

as there is life.

You can feel the spring coming on

as if you were already buried

under the savage tiger-lilies.

And you can ask

until you’re as blue in the face as a hyacinth

what it all meant

after you’re dead

out in the incredible open

that’s closed to the living

just past the end of their fingertips.

Or if it ever meant anything at all.

You can see and be it this way.

You can go on a long journey

to a prison or a shrine or a hospital

and return home

with no more insight

than you had when you left.

And still wonder if it was all worth it.

Because no experience of life is truer than another

reality is not separated from our awareness of it

nor subject to reform.

There is no norm

that isn’t a prevailing illusion by consensus.

But the desert isn’t looking for water

and only the one-eyed fools

mistake their eye-patchs for an eclipse of the moon

and their own mirages

for a new way of thinking

when it’s thinking’s best virtue not to have one.

People and things are ok as they are

but they don’t realize it.

They keep trying to live up to their own reflections.

They keep trying to sweep the stars and the deserts

off their front stairs

looking for a stairway to heaven

where the dust of the world can’t find a place to rest.

But time is a pulse of the heart

not the heavy pendulum of a grandfather clock

and as Pablo Neruda once wisely said

the poetry is under your fingernails

and I would less wisely add

as is heaven.

No one’s on the wrong path

once they open both their eyes

to what’s underfoot

whether you’re walking on water stars or fireflies

or riding dolphins.

Whether your road is a shoelace or smoke

or the lifeline of an umbilical cord

measured in wavelengths and lightyears

or your journey’s still an astronaut in the womb.

Mirrors holding mirrors up to judgment for their spots.

Narcissus doesn’t like what he’s looking at.

So what?

The roads don’t suddenly turn back on themselves

because they lack floors

and a place of their own.

Heaven uses the same return address as hell.

But when death comes knocking in Aleppo

and you’re out walking your own mile

in your own shoes

to nowhere in particular

free of arrivals and departures

no one’s ever home

and every threshold you cross

is not hindered by an exit or an entrance.

Some walk.

Some run.

Some swim.

Some fly.

Some crawl.

Some ride.

Some dance.

And some sit still by the window

growing younger by the moment

the longer they look into the distance.

PATRICK WHITE

DANGEROUS TO LOVE THINGS THAT PERISH

for Louise and Morgan

Dangerous to love things that perish

but cowardly not to.

You weren’t just a cat.

You were Morgan.

You were

as when I first saw you as a kitten

cupped in Louise’s hands

a cloud

a whiff of incense

smoke

a breath

a gust of stars

someone in love had breathed out.

And we loved you.

And now you’re dead.

And there are two more people in the world

who can’t stop weeping.

Because there is no now

in the suddenness of death

and it’s colder in our hearts than it is outside

because your absence

like your body

doesn’t have a temperature anymore.

And there’s a dagger of darkness

that’s thrust through everything

as if God were an assassin

in some kind of video killing game

that put black holes to shame.

Or is it just the impersonality of life

that it seems to derive a cheap thrill

from killing the things it creates

without knowing their names?

Morgan.

Got it.

Morgan the Cat.

A work of genius.

And you’d be a whole lot wiser than you are

not to forget it

because she was a goddess in her own rite.

She was the auroral shapeshifter

that was born a kitten

but grew up to be more than a human

because we always wished

we had more of her characteristics

than the ones we had as a superior species

and we worshipped her

and paid her the attentive kind of tribute

that was and is the natural due of her magical virtues.

And Morgan though it’s doubtful you can hear us now

where you can breathe easy out in the open

like the cool breeze you always were

among the wildflowers that look like stars

and copulate with Orion

the only cat who ever loved you back

as much as you like

without any one throwing cold water on it

because humans have learned to live like prophylactics

we want you to know somehow in some mysterious way

our species hasn’t discovered yet

how much you did to improve our innocence

by watching you live your life

as if you were born

knowing how to live

and didn’t have to work at it as we do.

You were tenderness with claws.

A female buddha with the eyes of a warrior

that were the envy of the moon.

A boddhicatva who didn’t answer to anyone

if you can forgive a bad pun

but showed us the way in

to the feline felicity of a paradise

that was as open as space to everyone.

You were the embodiment

of an affection and gentleness

that lingered like smoke in the air

above the cat’s eye flame of a candle

that God just blew out.

And the stars mourn as we do so deeply

even the darkness is panicked

that it will be turned inside out

like an absolute certainty from an absolute doubt.

There’s a blackhole in the heart of the light

that can’t be eclipsed by insight

and the reality of you in your flesh and your fur

no longer sitting by us on the floor

listening in with your eyes closed

as if even when you were sleeping

your ears were always awake

is a wound so deep

a rip in the sky so irreparable

that nothing that pours out of it by way

of tears and stars

thoughts or feelings

though blood pour from our eyes

could ever be worthy of it.

Thank-you for the love

that always fell into our laps like you.

Like an unexpected reward

for just being us.

Thank-you for teaching us

how to love you unconditionally

and knowing like a quiet healer

just when to apply your presence

like a soothing herb

to the hurts and fevers that afflicted us.

Sad and alone in the dead zone of an unanswerable room

you’d rub your tiny skull

with its walnut sized brain

against my leg

and I’d realize

that it was you not me

with my three and a half pounds of neocortical starmud

for all the lightyears I’ve been searching

that had found the philosopher’s stone

the moment you opened your eyes as a kitten

and you could work miraculous transformations

with the slightest touch of affection

or the nudge of a small wet nose.

When even God and Lucifer couldn’t move me

if they were to try and change my mood

you could

as easily as Morgana la Fay moved Merlin

with her felicity for emotional alchemy.

So many times when all I thought I could do

to save the situation

was let go

you flowed like water around my legs.

Sometimes it takes a river

to remind the bridge

what it stands for

and keep its spirits up.

Sometimes the thread of life

passes through the eye of a needle

like light

in the form of a cat

and the rip in the sky

where all the stars were pouring out

is patched up

with a single act of seeing

when a cat looks at you a moment

and then closes its eyes in contentment

like the new moon in the old moon’s arms.

You were Louise’s child.

You followed her around like a third eye

that could see into the future

like the front door you sat beside for aeons like a sphinx

waiting for her to come home

with the blue bag of salmon-flavoured cat treats.

I never saw you as her shadow.

You were more

a mirror with a mind of your own

that could look deeply into her spirit

and see your own reflection.

You were her affable familiar.

Her talismanic charm

against the obscenity of human lovelessness.

Her emergency exit.

Her fire alarm.

You were the whiff of smoke that woke her up.

If she were the long hard art

of learning how to be mastered by love.

You were the discipline

waiting on the other side of the door

that made her trudge to the store in the snow

to be sure you got your treats.

And when she returned

you’d study everything going on in the room

as if you were looking at it all for the first time

but the more I looked at you looking at us

the more I realized

you weren’t the student

you were a school

that compassionately exempted fools like us.

And now sweet one

what is it

that you want us to learn

from your perpetual absence?

As you once sweetened our lives

are you now trying

to sweeten death?

Are you trying to teach us how to see in the darkness?

To let go of our grief

as if that weren’t the only thing we had left to hold on to?

The silence in the house is a lot lonelier

for the lack of your whisper

to confide in

like a secret you kept to yourself

when no one else was home.

The birds and the windows keep waiting

for you to jump up at them any moment now

but it’s beginning to dawn on them you can’t anymore

and it isn’t just the rain

that’s making the glass cry.

Who’s going to stare at the plaster for hours

like Bodhidharma meditating in his cave

listening to the baby squirrels

learning to crawl through the walls

now that you’re not sitting there

tense as an archer

and as attentive as a Zen master?

You had a C-spot under your neck

close to your jugular

that could make you purr

when anyone pampered it like Cleopatra.

Now who’s going to know how

wherever you are

to make you stretch your claws out

like crescents of the moon

and make the green honey of your eyes

ripen into gold?

There’s a darkness in the heart of grief

that burns like a black fire

all these tears can’t seem to put out.

It’s a measure of the love you inspired in us

that we’d rather let the pain of missing you

consume us in the flames

of remembering

some tender eccentricity of your cathood

even in the midst of trying to let life

get on with us without you

than ever let death make you a stranger to us.

You were Bast the Egyptian cat goddess among us in the flesh.

We learned to read your eyes like a Druidic Ogham

like phases of the moon as it waxed and waned.

One glance and I knew what you wanted.

You were a rose with retractible thorns

and we’d watch you for hours

wondering what you were dreaming

under your twitching eyelids.

And the tenderness that people are afraid

to expose to each other

because they haven’t learned to walk through life skinless

we showed to you

without feeling that even the slightest gesture of it

was ever wasted

or unreturned

or that the spirit didn’t recognize its own

whether it was embodied by a cat or a human.

Morgan

you’re among the stars now

like a gust of light on the road of ghosts

like a hurricane that found rest in the eye of it own turbulence

like a cat-muse among these words

that can feel you watching them like birds

from your perch in the cosmic window

at the foot of the bed in Louise’s room.

Morgan

though there’s this black hole

your absence has left in the middle of everything

it’s not an exit.

It’s an entrance.

It’s the way you taught us

how to diminish the darkness

by growing bigger eyes

to get the most light out of it

even when we think

as we do now

that there’s nothing left

in this starless night

that could shine.

That the winds of time

have swept the last of the blossoms away

like phases of the moon

and even our tears

are the one-way tides

of the heart-numbing farewells

the whole of our lives seem.

Did we have the dream

or did the dream have us

or is it only the nightmares

that wake up screaming out in their sleep somewhere

where the pillows are wet

and the mothers come running

to reassure them

that what they thought they saw in the dark

was not real?

It was just another human

summoning some lost joy from the past

like the ghost of a watershed

that keeps recalling things

as if it were alone at night in a dark museum.

But an abyss isn’t just an abyss.

It’s also a fountain.

Everything reveals its emptiness

in the fullness of life

like the depth of the valley

is revealed by the height of the mountain.

The sweet brief life of the blossom

is the bright vacancy

rooted in the dark abundance

of the indelibility of the way we change.

To be here once

should be enough

to prove to anyone

that they’ve been here forever.

Life leaves signs

that anyone can follow back to themselves

like leaves on the mindstreams of their flowing.

They had to let go of the tree like maps

to know which way they’re going.

It’s the same with humans and cats.

Life breathes on the ashes of the starstreams

and everything starts glowing

like the eyes of a cat in the dark.

Morgan

it hurts not to see you

mesmerized by the turning water in the toilet-bowl

or sleeping in the bottom of the tub

or the end of my bed

or across the top of the easy chair

like a strategic adornment

keeping one ear open

to everything that was going on around you?

It hurts to wonder

what Louise is going to use for an alarm clock now

that you’re not there

to lick her eyelids awake in the morning

and where are the candles

where are the plants

that could ever take your place in the windowsill

watching for her to come home

as if you were one of the streetlamps?

Sometimes it’s hard to know

which hurts worse.

Never to have known love

or realize at times like this

how vast and excruciating the abyss is

how sad and foregone

the sad effusions of sorrow

the begrudging smiles of acceptance

that feel like the scars of an assassin

who doesn’t know who to get even with

when even the least atom of something we’ve truly loved

like the cosmic beginning of everything

in large and small

in the petty and profound alike

in the mystical and the earthbound

in what is different and what is not

in the star and the candle and the phoenix and the firefly

in Louise and her cat

is extinguished.

Morgan yes

you’ve left a hole in the light

as big as the universe

and all the stars are pouring out of it

as if the light could cry

for the passing of your radiance

but Morgan

no more than the pupil of an eye

blocks the light from getting in

does the hurt of your death

qualify the dangerous rapture

of having loved you in this life

as well as we knew how to love anything.

Sweetness.

Gentleness.

We’re all on the same journey

though sometimes we change bodies

like forms and shoes along the way

or walk barefoot awhile on stars

along the Road of Ghosts

talking to shoeless angels

about how mysterious it is

that every step of the way

where we come from

is where we’re going

and it’s not the destination

but the journey itself

that enshrines what is most sacred about life.

Not the arrival.

Not the fulfillment.

Not the completion.

Not the consummation that exhausts us wholly

and leaves us beseeching heaven

or pleading with emptiness

for a clarification of death

like the air we breathe out

leaves us longing for breath.

Our beginnings go on forever without end

and Morgan like you

if we wind up chasing our tails around

it’s only because of the great delight we take

in knowing nothing’s ever over

and everything is looping

like a snake with its tail in its mouth

or the horizontal eight of eternity

that keeps falling over

like a Bodhidarma doll

and righting itself like spectacles

worn by someone lying down

whose eyes go vertical

whenever they’re dreaming.

It’s not the farewell of the guest

but the welcome of the host

that we treasure most.

It’s not the finding

but the seeking

that’s the jewel of our quest.

That’s why you stuck your nose into everything

and learned to see with your ears

and hear with your eyes

the wings of the stars and fireflies

that hovered just outside your window

when what was always wild about you

answered the Zen savagery of the night

like an austere summons to life.

Morgan you’re gone

but there’s no imperative

in why you had to go.

No harsh god.

No assassin cloaked in light.

No doors close

our senses and our hearts

to the earthly delights of loving you.

No gates open

like a cats’ eyes

that will not see us return like insight

to the faces of the living creatures

we live to behold in our own features

and touch most gently.

PATRICK WHITE

ADVICE TO POTENTIAL SUICIDES WHILE WE'RE STILL ALIVE

ADVICE TO POTENTIAL SUICIDES WHILE WE’RE STILL ALIVE

 

The worst vice is advice

and I’m not certain I have the right to speak

about a blackhole my light hasn’t entered yet

or even that you have

given death isn’t something that’s lived through

and you still might know as little about it all as I do

here on the near side where the sun is still warm.

But I tried several times when I was young

and once in middle-age

to disgorge myself like a cosmic egg from a serpent’s mouth

finding it impossible to believe in my resentment as a way of life.

Whiskey and sleeping pills for the big events.

And a lot of subjective risks

I took like a samurai committing hiri kiri

so I could live up to my image of John Keats

who always made a gracious bow

at the end of a poem

he wrote on his deathbed in water.

But the worst trespass

against the Bushido laws of anger

when they turn on themselves

is to turn them into the farce

of a tragic sentiment

trying to put a good face on its flaws.

Things don’t have to be that severe to be true to themselves.

You don’t have to put barbed wire around the rose

to protect it from its thorns

or die like a rodeo clown

to keep the moon from being gored on its own horns.

You don’t have to add your darkness to the darkness to brighten the light.

You don’t have to snuff the shining to see a better way through the night

than the door you’ve been knocking on from the inside

on the threshold of your homelessness

as if you had already died

and the news was late in coming.

The trick is

not to expect chaos to come to your rescue

but to outwit death like the mystics

and find a way of dying that kills you into life.

I’m sixty-three this year

and I’ve had a lot of friends and lovers

I was expecting to die of old age among

kill themselves along the way

and that’s even before I consider those

who died of natural causes

and the usual accidents

for the best of reasons

suggestions

guesses

relativities

making gestures of sympathy

at the wake of a dead absolute.

No meaning to life?

No response to yours?

No direction to go in

that hasn’t got its head up its ass

like the beginning of the end?

Can’t tell the difference between purpose and panic anymore?

Did you set out looking for a new continent

or a northwest passage to fame

and after you drowned like Atlantis

one night in a storm

those on shore

who watched you go down

ended up naming a lifeboat after you?

Tired of the squirming bag of skin you’ve been living like a snake in?

Time for a new straitjacket on the corpse in the coffin?

Is your Sisyphean avalanche still trying to crawl back up the mountain

like a country bumpkin

to the laughter of sophisticated pyramids

amused by upstart civilizations

that haven’t learned how to outlive themselves yet?

Has the loveletter that wished you well in leaving

evaporated like the ghost of a snowflake in the mouth of furnace?

I know how despair can make everything go mad but your sorrow.

How space can suddenly convulse

into a seizure of glass

and turn your face into a lunar landscape

where yesterday has nothing to do with tomorrow

because nothing ever changes the way you look at yourself

when you’re more brittle than the mirror you’re holding up to nature

to see if there were any defining feature

that was better than the creature you are?

I know you don’t want anyone listening in on you

but that doesn’t mean

that it still isn’t crucial to be heard from time to time

like a man living upstairs you’ve never met

opening a window.

I saw a man jump from an attic window

and land on a white picket fence

when I was ten.

At seven in a garage I was trying to break into

I found a Salvation Army major in full uniform

hanging by his neck.

I didn’t know what to say then

and I don’t really know what to say now.

Exotic memories of a deranged childhood

whose first transgression

was its own innocence.

The way you take your life

says a lot about how you lived it.

Suicides always seem to come in through the back door

of their own house

when no one’s around

and leave by a window

as if they’d stolen something from themselves

and everyone else

that no one could put a value on

and no one would ever get back.

Come on now.

Take some time with me.

It’s not running out.

There’s only so much

and then there’s forever.

And we’ll all be dead soon enough anyway.

Every tree baby bluejay and blade of grass.

All the onceness of life in its mystic specificity

all that sacred indelibility

gone just like that

in a hundred years or so.

A watercolour in blood washed out by the rain.

And here’s something that might make you mad enough to live

or give you pause in your extinction

while you’re waiting for the next asteroid.

All suicides are control freaks

who insist on having the last word

like the silence they impose on all of us

that cannot be taken back

like the ad hominem of a bad argument.

Suicide is a nuclear winter

that can’t be aimed at any one species.

When you kill yourself

it comes down on all of us

and the sun isn’t seen again for years.

Suicide is a way of passing the buck

to someone else

for an astronomical catastrophe

no one can afford.

You die quick

but the rest of us have to endure your agony

like work you left undone.

The candle has a bad dream

and wakes up

and puts a pillow of smoke

over its face

to stop the light from breathing.

A shattered fortune-cookie isn’t fate

anymore than a cracked egg is a bird.

It’s the same with your heart when it’s broken.

You say the world lies to you

but open your own mouth

and see if your word is as true to the voice you heard

before you spoke it.

Even if life were one long interminable sentence

who could read to the end

of its unrepeatable content

and think that all that was meant

was the endstop of a punctuation mark

that poked a blackhole in the balloon of an expanding universe

like the womb of a pregnant voodoo doll

who looked upon life as a curse?

It’s important not to break faith with your delusions.
If you throw bad meat down a wishing well

bright with stars and fireflies

why should you be surprised

if the only thing that seems true to you

is a fossil of Tinkerbelle?

Come on now live with me awhile longer here on earth

as if you had already achieved your death

and there were nothing left to bind you

to what’s been left behind you

or what’s up ahead.

Let’s live as if rigor mortis had nothing to do with freedom.

Let’s live as if life were a lover who couldn’t care less what we meant

and our thoughts were merely the ashes of the ropes that bound us to the stake

of persecutors who don’t wake up with us when we do.

Let’s live as if it weren’t important

that no one else in the world

ever knew pain as intimately as we did.

Let’s live this once and forever together

as if all our agonies were transformative

and even in the deepest snakepit

where the light is thin

if you grow enough

you can shed the universe like skin

and strut your stuff in a new one that fits you better

than that whale-bone straitjacket with a spinal cord for a lace

you wore in the last one.

Let’s give ourselves all of time and space to shine

and bend the light like Einstein

into a gravitational lense

to keep an eye on our absence

while we disport ourselves among the fixed stars

like homeless delinquents

like firefly freedom fighters

liberating them like captive constellations from their mason-jars.

Let’s throw roses in our path instead of thorns just this once.

Let’s not jump from the same old bridge we did last time.

Let’s not fall to earth again like bitter green apples

that couldn’t get over the loss of their bloom.

Let’s get a little colour on our skin

to go with the autumn

before we give in.

Let’s take advantage of the opportunity

to transcend death

by adding ourselves like a third extreme to life

without expecting our ghosts to notice the difference.

If hanging on has got you down

letting go won’t bring you up.

Think for a moment before you jump.

If you’ve really overcome the biological imperative to live

and you’re as free to go as you are to stay

just like the buddhas you met on the road

and killed along the way

why waste all that power and freedom on the dead?

You can come at enlightenment

from the dark side of the mirror

as easily as the bright side at the front.

No loss.

No gain.

No life.

No death.

What you take in.

What you let out.

The same breath.

You’re the living edge of a great spiritual warrior

without a religion to fall back upon.

You don’t need to draw first blood to prove your sincere.

Among mujadeen

you can be the one that defused the bomb.

Among crusaders

you can be the one that turned around and went home.

You can be a great Zen samurai

and lead an army of grass

up to the gates of the trees

to accept their surrender

like the blossoms of spring

or you can take pity on the living

and add the clarity of your darkness to their night

to help bring their stars out

like fireflies of spontaneous insight.

You can do anything.

If you can’t find a meaning to live

you can make a meaning of yourself

and get behind someone else’s good guess

like a nightwind going in the same direction.

It’s easy to see the rabid madness of the world.

Even if you’ve freed yourself not to be in or of it.

That’s only step one.

That’s not true extinction.

That’s only the ashs of nirvana.

Live a little longer.

Wait a bit.

And you’ll feel the dragon

rising out of its own immolation

with a spirit of serpent-fire

and a wingspan that transcends

the highest and the lowest

the worst and the best

east and west

life and death.

Step two is to see deeply

into the sublimity of human folly

and reanimate your death with desire

to bring the rain

because you know water

is a more generous element than fire

with more staying power to heal

what’s left of the fire

long after it’s gone out.

One fang stings.

One fang heals.

The assassin plays doctor to death.

The doctor cries over what the assassin feels

and the dead get their coffins off their chest.

Step three is seeing the finality in transience.

The crazy wisdom in the absurdity of our ignorance.

The complicity of our innocence.

What’s unindictable about our guilt.

How lame a blessing is without a curse.

How the best emerges from the worst

like a waterlily from a reeking swamp.

Torn down like pillars of quicksand

with the world on your shoulders

like hair down your back?

Beaten up humiliated scorned by the bullying world?

Violated and dispossessed?

Thieves in your treasure-chest?

Lost touch with your self-image

like a snake that’s lost touch with the last skin it’s shed

or a river that runs down a windowpane like rain

trying to make it back to the sea

without getting to the roots of anything?

Tired of witnessing what’s irrational about rationality

and losing your mind over it?

All your noble ideals gone slumming with their counterparts

and you’re left like the jack of hearts

without a punchline in the parking lot?

Tired of coming home

to the immensity of your loneliness

and finding out you’ve been robbed in your absence?

You don’t have to be these shadows of yourself

behind closed doors

taking pathetic stabs at the tragic

to turn a voodoo doll

in the likeness of yourself

into a clown that doesn’t feel real.

There’s no history of the future you haven’t lived through

that hasn’t already absolved the mystery of you in tears.

Not afraid to die

isn’t the same thing

as having the courage to live.

It may well be the birthright of a suicide

to raise its own assassin

like a messiah of the dead

come to convert the living

with the jaw-dropping prophecies of prophetic skulls

preaching the original sins of a new religion

trying to rise to its feet

and fall toward paradise

with an umbilical cord around its neck

knotted like a noose

instead of a cross

but suicide is an indefensibly human excuse

for thinking life is what is happening to you from the outside

like a battered planet

or the great sea of life

were picking on you personally

like the tiny embryo in the womb of a drop of water

hanging on by a thread of itself

to the tip of a blade of stargrass

in a categorical hurricane.

Sensitivity makes you sensitive.

A house divided cannot stand.

Neither can human nature.

That’s why the waters of life

everywhere in all forms

at all times

in every space

in every face

just like reality

or the mind

all share the same features of being

in the same mirror

on the same wall.

Life isn’t a privilege a right or a choice.

It’s a calling.

Everyone’s life

is one among myriad answers.

Infinite petals of the efoliate rose.

Life summons everyone in their own voice

like the light of the sun and the moon

in the accents of the flowers.

Five petals open.

One flower blooms.

It’s the same way with our mouths when we speak.

Or this dream that keeps urging us to wake up

and see for ourselves

whether it was lying or not.

Life is the kind of hidden treasure

you can’t know the value of

until you seek it.

The longer you look

the more the search is worth it.

Please brother.

Please sister.

Hear me like an echo of starlight in your unremitting gloom.

Hear me like the creeking of a floorboard in an upstairs room.

Listen like the flowers listen to their dark root

or frightened children in the dead of night

listen to the wind

as if they lived in tents.

Don’t waste your suicide on death.

Die deeper into life than you’ve ever been before.

Whether you’re walking in sand

or walking on water

they’re all just waves of your own mindlight

making mirages where you can bed down for the night

and show your face to the stars

like the good omen of a full moon without nightmares.

Don’t snuff the light.

For every life that goes out

we’re all cast into a deeper darkness

than the shadows we wandered in before you appeared.

If the dead look less lonely than the living do to you now

peacefully composed and ordered under their gravestones

in close company with other books in the library

wait awhile

let the story run on a bit.

Take the dead silence for a muse

and let it inspire you like the night inspires your eyes

to be the genius of your own life

and mustering your courage

like an extreme form of desperate trust

let your feathers say jump

and your falling take flight

like the master of a new medium

like the lonely heroine of an original beginning

who has nothing but her own wingspan

for a true horizon

and the wind beneath it for a map.

The dead haven’t learned yet

how to take the example of her creative freedom

without turning it into a crude simulacrum of the cliches

that despair of any happy ending

that doesn’t compare with their own.

If the wine’s gone bad in the grail

pour yourself out on the ground if you must

but trust your emptiness

like the new moon in the old moon’s arms

and you will be filled up again

and life will heal itself and thrive in you

like a new word added to your vocabulary

that just like water in a running stream

or the wind in the leaves

through a birchgrove at night

doesn’t know when to shut up.

There’s no rapture in death.

Death isn’t a joy

that’s caught up to itself

breathless with anticipation.

The mountain when it speaks

isn’t any less sincere at its peak

than it is at the bottom of its valley.

The same is true of water and mind.

It’s the same in the shallows

as it is in the depths.

Aren’t all your senses

all your thoughts emotions insights intuitions

all the arts and skills of your heart and mind

your imagination

your prophetic vision

whether another cosmic storm’s on the way

or it’s just another spider

crawling across

the flat eye of your television

thinking the earth’s still round.

Aren’t all these curses gifts and blessings

evidence enough

of the way life takes compassion on itself?

Maybe your next breath

is a holier inspiration

than death ever could be.

You breathe in.

And the dead look upon you in awe.

The questions themselves might be the answer

to why people are walking around on the earth.

And this agony of being with climactic interludes

might be the life of a play

with comic relief

composed by a tragic hero

with a sense of humour

like a pantomime for the blind

after he tore his eyes out

enraged by what they’d seen.

But trying to understand yourself

isn’t like trying to explain laughter

to an audience of skulls

and the compassion that follows insight

like fruit follows the blossom that’s flown away

isn’t just a matter

of lowering lifeboats for lemmings in a bad dream

or being kind to the weather when no one else will.

You can cut your heart out like the core of an apple

you bit into when it was green and bitter

and spit it out

like the wisdom of a snake

but you can’t cut the tree out of the seed

anymore than you can stifle the creativity of your worst mistake.

If your life isn’t a reflection of anything worth seeing

maybe it’s time you learned to paint.

If you can’t stand the sound of your own voice

listening to itself anymore

maybe it’s time you learned to express yourself like music.

If you’ve burned your feet on life like your last firewalk

and the dark jewels you trampled into the starmud

hoping they’d turn to wine

don’t shine anymore the way they used to

when you held them up to the morning like grapes on the vine

maybe its time to bring your own to the wedding

instead of pinning all your hopes on water

like tails on the donkeys of all the miracles

that didn’t come true.

You might get higher on death

than you ever did on life

but don’t fool yourself.

You’re just changing one dealer for another.

And life’s been clean for five billion years

overcoming itself

like the evolution of an addiction

to an addiction

that craves nothing else

than your present state of mind.

Just because you feel like a big star

that gravitationally imploded into a black dwarf

that warps space into a circus of mirrors

that make a farce of the light

doesn’t mean you’re any less of who you are

or you’ve lost face on the dark side of the moon.

If no one’s ever lifted your veils

to look into your eyes

and feel the shining

maybe you’re Isis.

Maybe you’re the Queen of Heaven

and your star

is tatooed on the palms of left-handed sailors

who look to you to keep them from drowning.

Or maybe you’ve been looking for togetherness

in the dismembered body parts of your son-consort

blazing like Sirius on the distant horizon

like your last measure of hope.

There’s no stream of conciousness

in which you can wash your life away

in the waters of death

as if it were all one long incommensurable sentence

that’s having trouble dealing with punctuation.

There’s no black river in hell

in which you can wash the light off

anymore than a star can keep a secret from the night

or a period can interrupt

the flow of your thought.

If you meet the Buddha in the way

and you’d rather die than kill him

don’t try swimming through stone.

Listen to the mermaids singing to you

about love and the sorrows of life.

But don’t just listen with your ears.

Listen with your life.

Drown in the sublimity of the music

that tastes like the meaning of tears

and fall upon the rocks

you’ve been summoned to

like water that can’t be wounded by their voices.

It won’t help to weave another straightjacket

out of your elaborate choices

that isn’t so long in the sleeves

so you can fit right in with the rest of your peers.

If you don’t like what you see

when you look at your reflection in their eyes

be a light among mirrors

and realize

that one man’s face is another’s disguise

and there are deathmasks walking anonymously among them

that don’t look like anyone

until someone puts them on.

What can a rose be

if it never sheds its petals?

Or a tree

if it begrudges the wind its leaves?

It’s good to look up sometimes and feel the stars on your skin

dancing like angels on the head of a pin

or the riot of thoughts in the head of a human

who understands that heaven’s always been as close as that

not lightyears of insight away

and opens the door from the inside

out of compassion for the living 

and lets the whole of the night in

like a guest playing host to himself.

Take a look around you.

It’s the best show in town

and the ticket was free

even if you had to pop in

through a flap in a circus-tent

you learned to call mother.

The life of the mind is a feast of awareness.

Whether you’re sitting at the head

below the salt

or begging scraps down under with the curs

you’ve still got a place at the table

that’s as big as a universe

that’s been personally reserved

just for you

and you should approach it with good spiritual manners.

You should be as grateful as time

and as gracious as space

and exalt in the company of all things

as if you were among friends.

You should accommodate yourself like space

and embrace everything you are and aren’t

as if you were being a good host to yourself

and sit down with the least of us

as you would the most

and laugh as if it weren’t always winter outside.

Too many shoulds I know

but I’d rather get them off my chest now

than later say when it’s too late to say them

I should have.

I’d rather sit down at the table with you now

while we’re alive

while there’s still pain and beauty and insight in our eyes

to laugh at what we’re living

or cry over the disappointed lies

than wait for a knock on the wall

and try to believe it’s you.

I don’t want to break bread with your ghost

at a seance or an exorcism.

No one ever brings much to the table

when they sit down to talk to the dead.

No salt.

No wine.

No bread.

The living aren’t left out like the dead are.

Whenever you see people gathered together

and you’re not one of them

that’s because they’re all lonelier than you are.

It’s our separation that brings us together.

It’s our solitude that makes us all one.

It’s a uniqueness we all have in common.

It’s like the strong rope of a river

being unwound by a precipice

into a million little weak threads and drops of water

each one measureable and self-contained

feeling how lonely it is to be falling through space

bound by nothing to nothing but the nothingness around you. 

Each one of them reflects the whole of the universe

as if they were millions of tiny eyes

though they can’t see it

in the same way our eyes can’t see themselves.

You say you’re trying to find yourself

but who’s doing the looking?

Your looking for your lamp with your lamp.

Fireflies with fireflies.

Your mind with your mind.

Water doesn’t grow a witching wand to go looking for itself.

Green bough.

Dead branch.

Same song.

Even when we’re standing alone like whole notes

without any flags to surrender

how can we ever be separated from the music

when even the silence plays its part?

You can’t pour the universe out of the universe.

You can’t rise up like a wave

and sucker-punch the sea.

You can’t take your own life without killing me.

Without killing the trees the birds the flowers the stars

that depend on you to see what they are.

There’s never been a river that flowed out of itself

like a bloodstream.

There’s never been a mind

however far out at sea it might be

in bad weather

that’s ever returned to shore

whether this side or that

like a lifeboat

without someone in it.

Let go.

Put it on auto-pilot.

And let the wheel turn you for a change of direction.

Take that bit you’re teething on like a nine millimeter

out of your mouth

and learn to speak for yourself

in your own accent.

Why harness Pegasus to a deathcart

and then envy the birds their inspiration?

Does the eagle envy the swan its wings?

The depth of the valley of death is a measure

of the height of the world mountain we climbed.

The brighter the light.

The deeper the darkness.

And the victory is only worth so much as we had to overcome

to achieve it.

So even in full eclipse

when you’re lost in a sea of shadows on the moon 

and you’re emotional life

moves you like a snakepit of dangerous portents

look around for the nightlight nearby

that’s casting its spell on the darkness.

Take the highest and the lowest of yourself

and bring them together like the winners and the losers

who engender themselves like opposites

and let your contradictions consume themselves

like the snake that ate so many birds

it sprouted wings

and flew away

not like an eagle with a snake in its claws

not like predator and prey

obeying natural laws

but like a dragon of life

a sage of blood

with light in its veins

one of the fire-swallowers of life

who bring the rains.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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seek