I REMEMBER THE BEES

I remember the bees

moving like heavy slow notes

among the sunflower microphones

two octaves lower than the fireflies

on late August afternoons

perishing in the light.

And the irrelevant felicity of being me

with nothing to do but time.

Many roads and years away now

and this is another life

another town

and I’m staring out of a window

that’s been forgotten by the eyes

that used to look through it

at the bleak winter rain

trying to distinguish the oases

from the mirages

in this glass-blowing desert of pain.

I remember white sweet clover along the dusty roadside

overwhelming the still hot air with its sweetness

and how it grew so high and thick

in the drainage ditches

it folded it wings over the road like a swan.

I remember watching the moon

lower its hook into the lake

hoping to catch something.

And now I’m trying to get it out of my mouth

like a question I can’t answer.

I’m envious of the happiness I used to know

as if it had all happened to someone else

I could never be again

because even a river

can’t step into itself twice

and the same is true of a bloodstream.

So do we all wash ourselves clean of ourselves in the running.

It’s the mind’s way of not staining its own clarity.

You don’t need to see to shine.

There are quantum events of the mind.

There are insights and thoughts

auroral premonitions

and solar prophecies

that flare like the Medusa’s hair on fire.

There are shadows of the unforeseeable

that cast their eclipses and sunspots

like exponentially tiny black holes

that steal the seeing from the light

and make space and time gape at their own measure

in the darkness of the heart of a human.

And in the next era of a moment

terrify them with the wonder of breaking into stars.

And most strange and astonishing of all

elaborated out of a chaos of photons

emerging out of the random

like wind on water

like Penelope weaving and undoing the moon on the lake

membranous worlds in hyperspace

blowing bubbles at each other

as if the light in their eyes

were life itself

shaping the multiverse playfully

into mystic glains swallowed by cosmic serpents

and fireflies caught in the drapes

by the open window

like jewels in the net of Indra

like primordial atoms going off spontaneously

for the sheer thrill of it.

Mark one world and they’re all marked.

And there’s no end of the accounting.

That’s why the most gracious of numbers is zero

and in any world I find myself possible in

I am the spacious friend of its infinite variety.

Even in Perth on a Sunday

among the flagging ambitions of leafless backyard trees

that have given up

dreaming of the doors and arrows

the coffins and lifeboats

they could have become in the hands of a mastercraftsman

and content themselves by staying out of the way of the powerlines.

Worlds within worlds within worlds being born

under my skin

at the tip of my nose

the end of my fingertips my tongue

pouring from the precipice of my lips

like lemmings and words not afraid to take a chance

the wind might feather their falling.

If compassion is worth the weight

of one single tear

of what life suffers here

then all things must be falling toward paradise.

Even the willows with their yellow-tinged hair trapped in ice.

Even the mailman who was convicted of taking his own advice.

Even the young beauty queen whose mouth overflows with saliva

as she dreams her makeup has turned into a pillow

that’s trying to smother her like a serial killer

trying to get her attention on the news.

Do you see?

When you get right down to the point

there is no point.

Ask Heisenberg.

There’s only you and I

and what we are

embodied in this memory

is merely the shadow cast

by what we are becoming.

Ask any star.

Keep the light behind you

like a ufo file with a due date.

Make a photonic leap into space.

Jump orbitals.

Release your infinitesimal quantum of energy

into the mind-bending unforeseeable gateless expanses of space

and instead of depending

on the fossils of cyanobacteria in Martian meteors

to improve on being alone

create worlds of your own

where space isn’t time flatlining

but a field of imagination

where the absurd lets its muse run free as an enzyme.

Why do you keep coming home empty-handed

like Ponce de Leon searching

for the disabled fountains of youth

when you must know by now

it’s the questions that are the watersheds of the truth?

It’s the questions that keep you alive and searching.

It’s the looking and not knowing

that keeps the fires of life

moving and growing

one step ahead of their ashs.

It’s not the questions.

It’s the answers that are killing you.

You might seek like a phoenix

but all your lanterns are ghosts.

Your eyes might be faster than light

but you’re still blind if you can’t see

that the world is

merely the shadow of an insight

you cast behind you

like the stars

like the candles

like the fireflies in your skull.

And it’s good to know them all.

It’s good to trace the lifelines

on the palm of your hand

and follow them back to the source of the Nile.

It’s good to know the imaginary animals

that talk like your fingers

held up to the lamp

like constellations on a starmap

like zodiacs and arks

like a dog that barks

in the voice of a human.

It’s good to see your own face

in the shadowplay

of subatomic particles

and take small intimacies with the profound

as if you’d just opened your eyes

like God’s umbrella

in the spirit’s lost and found.

It’s good to stand in your own light

under the nightskies

and add your lustre to the stars.

It’s good to abide in clarity and law.

But enlightenment is a darkness that shines

beyond the reach of your eyes

and just as space is bent

by the mass of Mars

so time is as supple as water and silk

and yesterday

is just as much the future of tomorrow

as the perennial brevity of this moment now

flowing down the lifelines of the mindstream

like a wavelength of night and time

that can’t be measured in lightyears.

I reflect on everything I’m missing

and my grief turns to wine

my tears to honey.

I resonate with the forked harmonies of time

like the tremulous skin of serpentine cosines

it sheds as it moves up my spine

like a waterclock of snakefire

pouring into the watershed of my mind.

And all the threads and rivulets

of my string theory thought

and the membranous theses

that are spun from them

are gathered up

and woven into whole cloth

over the black hole

of an acoustic guitar

the shape of a universe

as if it were a loom of music.

Time is music.

Space is music.

Life is music.

And death isn’t where the music stops.

When you listen to it

not just with your ears

but with your eyes your heart your mind your blood your skin.

When you let it come empty-handed

and go empty-handed

without trying to grasp it like a thing

you realize that everything is singing

about what it is to be a human.

And you must be a human to hear it as such

because you can never understand

more than what you are

out to and beyond the youngest stars

that are the oldest of your insights

into the birth of the universe.

Time is music

and neither time nor music

leave anything behind.

Here once

here for good.

Though time has a past and future

a coming and going

a lament and a longing fulfilled

reflected like opposites on the watermirrors of the mind

it’s still the same waterbird

cosmic note

first word

from the void in the mouth of now

waking itself up from a dark dream

with the sound of our voices

arriving in joy

and crying with relief when we leave.

I can hear the locust tree in spring

even with snow on the ground

and this hopeless duty

of a bleak window before me

singing in my ear

like the slow whisper

the murmurous humming

of an intimate voice full of bees.

Time is music.

Life is music.

Death is music.

All the syllables colours notes thoughts feelings images and symbols

all the doubts and half-lives of the certainties

all the ardency of our holiest guesses

and starless inspirations

all the brutal black lightning insights

and firefly epiphanies

that have ever expressed the hearts and minds of humans

all the homeless clarities

and godless vagrancies

of what we’re doing in the world

feeling lost in the doorways of our own thresholds

where every step we take is arrival and departure.

They’re all the picture-music of us

and we’re as indelible

as the moon dropping her petals and feathers

her hooks and thorns

her horns and claws and surgical fangs

like white swans and peonies on the river

like the eyelids of a mask she takes off

a drowned nurse

to remember whose face she’s looking at.

And you can’t remove a quaver of it.

Not the slightest detail.

Not one black swan.

Not the swerve of a single photon

with an identity crisis

striking the lightning rod of a nerve

that runs it to ground

and roots it in the body

until the mind opens

like the eye of a flower

a New England aster

that can see from the inside out

that life is a phoenix

in the ashs of a blue guitar

with the wingspan

of a locust tree in the spring

and the afterlife of a star.

Light flows through the roots

of my dendritic lifelines

like a zodiac of fireflies

streaming through space

for a place in the sun

and I can remember the bees

before the arising of signs.

I can hear them with my eyes.

I can see them with my tongue.

And I might not know

all the words to the song

or even what the lyrics

are all about

but that’s never kept me

from singing my heart out.

PATRICK WHITE

THE CLOUDS AND THE CROWS

The clouds and the crows

don’t walk the same roads I do

and the dust and the stars are journeys unto themselves

but we all share the same solitude

in a universe that’s going south.

There are things I wanted to be

with a happy brain and a good mouth

that had the spiritual life of a garden

and eras away on a distant island

I took up the pathless path of water

hoping it would follow the map of my roots

creatively

into unnamed flowers and stars.

It was easier to see way back then

that sight is a kind of love

and life is the briefest of bubbles

than it is now

the enigma of light

is caught like fireflies

in masonjars and Hubbles

and the constellations are evicted

from their ancient faces

by the deathmasks of corporate logos.

As you grow you notice the windows you once looked through

at the distant blue hills of your longing

are subtly turning into mirrors

and the heedless dice

you once threw against the walls

like moons and skulls

in spontaneous raptures of virtue and vice

are beginning to talk

in your voice

as if they had no choice.

You realize

there are as many lies

as there are truths

based upon the facts

and when people say they’re lost

and don’t trust the direction they’re headed in

it really means

they’re afraid of living themselves.

They’re terrified of their own rarity.

They’d rather be dead and secure in the darkness

than alive to the dangerous clarity

of following their mindstreams out of Eden

wherever they may lead

and whatever they may turn into

whether it be the ginger fountains of Salsabil

blooming in heaven

or the Styx Lethe Phlegathon of hell.

You can tell by the halo

around the black hole in their eyes

where the light goes in

and never comes out

that what used to be an iris

has lost its faith in rainbows

and nothing is well.

No manner of thing is well.

Even time gives up on them in disgust

at the lightyears it’s wasted on them

like flowers afraid of the Open

and leaves space to measure their lifespans

like event horizons

on the thresholds of tents in a desert.

After them

there is no deluge.

No arks on Ararat.

Just components and bones.

When the mind forgets how to flow

the body sheds its blood like a rose

that’s forgotten how to dream

on the dark side of its eyelids

that its thorns are the swords of a solar matador

at war with the bull of the moon

not a memento mori

thrown by a lover

on the coffin lid

like a kiss that blunts its lips on stone.

But a rose is a rose is a haemmorage.

The moon is gored by the solar sword

and the plenum void

pours forth its dark abundance

to feed the dog and scorpion alike.

It’s hard to look at the world for long

and still think of it as some kind of cosmic favour

some unknowable god did us in passing

but it’s one of the more delusional graces of crazy wisdom

that even to be grateful for its mere presence

and whatever dark energy

insists on being us in it

is a compassionate form of self-respect.

Of according a dignity to existence

simply because it’s you.

This agony of being

we share with ants and Cepheid variables

with great trees broken by lightning on a hilltop

with the fossils of hummingbirds

with those who sit behind curtains

at undetectable angles

with no words for what they’re looking at.

With the maggot the snake and the rat.

With the anything that everything can be.

I’m grateful for the barking of dogs in the morning

and the history of life in the light of the stars that haven’t reached us yet.

I’m grateful for my fingertips my scars my broken bones.

I’m grateful for alarmist poppies and bruised violins

and small creatures burping in the sand through their blowholes

after every wave that washes over them.

I’m grateful for blue

and oscillatory electromagnetic fields at rest

and the lies that parents tell their children

to keep them from growing up too fast.

I want to say thank you for my voice

and the old Arab in the mosque

who taught it words were living creatures.

I want to say thank you for skulls and harps

and the fact that every thought

has an afterlife of its own

that’s as sure as inspiration.

And thank you for the secrets

the paradoxes the enigmas the mysteries the questions

the insights and uncertainties.

Thank you for my emergence out of the random

like the spontaneous formations of thousands of birds

turning on the tilt of a feather.

Thank you for my grief lust rage and ignorance

and these prophetic shades

that are in compliance with my senses.

I’m grateful for the gates.

And I’m grateful for the fences.

What is life?

What is death?

What am I?

Is it light or darkness to wonder?

Thank you for Jesus and Muhammad Buddha and Brahma

and Silam Inua of the Inuit

that were engendered out of our suffering

like cool waterlilies out of the heat of our festering.

Thank-you for the clarity of smoke

and hiding what everyone is looking for

right out in the open.

Thank you for the seeing that engendered my eyes.

The hearing that shaped my ears.

The touching that wired the nerves in my skin

to the raindrop and the butterfly.

The saying that gave me a voice.

The feelings that ripened the green apple of my heart

so that sunset is sweeter than dawn

and to let go

is to live on.

PATRICK WHITE

JUST BECAUSE GOD BETRAYS YOU

Just because God betrays you

eloi eloi lama sabachthani

doesn’t mean

it’s a guarantee of your divinity

or that you can bring anything back from the dead.

Whatever gods I’ve lived through

divinity was never the issue

but how to elevate this human agony

into something that even heaven is not worthy of.

To hold all this suffering in large and small

up to the radiance of the stars

like a waterlily rooted in a swamp

and say Do you see?

This much is ours.

And our powers are great.

We can hold death deeply within us

like the dark flower

of the watershed that blooms

like the fountain of life

and transform the taste

of unimagineable suffering

into something brief and beautiful

that astonishes even God’s expectations.

We can take all the tears and the blood and corruption

and work an alchemical spell upon them

that turns the base metal into gold

when the suffering becomes intense enough

all you can feel is sulphur and mercury

turning into stone.

Medusa waxing philosophical

at the bottom of her black hole

where there is no base metal.

There is no gold.

And maybe this is a good state

but here space slashs me

as if all my feelings

were edged with broken glass

and belief in God were just another way of kissing ass.

And it’s terrifying mystically and physically

to realize how unimaginelably alone I am

in this place where even my solitude

doesn’t cast a shadow.

Dark night of my soul

on a nightsea of awareness

with no sail on the horizon

and I can’t tell

whether I’m a shipwreck or a lifeboat?

Or the usual poetic heroics

of a desperate man

walking his mile of quicksand

on his knees?

Don’t know where I’m going

but I know

this isn’t the road to Damascus

and it’s more than a stone’s throw to Sodom and Gomorrah.

But it’s not really a beef I have with God

because I wouldn’t trust me

if I were a god either.

And I’ve been too radicalized by compassion

to be a reliable heretic.

But to judge from the number of angels

dancing on the heads of the pins

they’ve stuck like insight into my eyes

I’ve got real potential as a voodoo doll.

A fool.

A clown.

As it is

tonight I am trapped in the illusion of having a self

that looks upon the universe

and feels like air in a collapsed lung.

And everytime I am randomly happy enough

to crow in the dawn of my spirit

the sun comes along

and blows whiskey on the rooster.

And though nothing’s a hundred percent

it doesn’t take me long

to grow angry and bitter and willful enough

to steel myself against giving my detractors

the satisfaction of seeing me feel sorry for myself

even when I do.

Boo hoo.

And that’s it.

And then I get back to pretending I’m a Viking or a Mongol.

I put on my wolf’s hide like a polyphrenic shaman

and dance to the music

of my howling at the moon.

Dance like a mad hornet

around my heart

I eat to give me courage

like honey from a hive on fire.

Dance to the dithyrambs

of the warrior minstrels of the forlorn hope

getting ready for their last assault

against the unbreachable walls of heaven in the morning.

Putting their horns on.

Their chain-mail haloes.

Dipping their spears and arrows

in the toxicity of their tears

to make every wound fatal.

I position myself like three hundred Spartans

at the gates of heat in Thermopylae

ready to fight to the death

to keep the fraud of my freedom

from being overun by betrayal.

By a treacherous shepherd

from a neighbouring village.

O Ephialtes Judas Brutus and Abu Sufian

nothing is forgiven.

Thirty pieces of silver.

Thirty faces of the moon.

And I’ve tasted my own incomprehensibility

on the lips of them all

as if they had a secret in common

that hated what’s sacred

about being a human

and could find nothing holy about the wound.

But they don’t know how the lies can heal

like fingertips on torn skin

or how imagination can fake the world

and make it real.

They are kept far from human and God alike

because they have yet to discover

the power of their own vulnerability.

Let he who is without sin

throw the first church.

Let he who is without imagination

not fear the last and the first

as a dress rehearsal for the worst.

Let she who has lost

the innocence of her beginning

find it unstained in the depths of her heart

like a black pearl that changes phases like the moon.

Let her exalt in the arts of her spirit

and the science of her body

without making amends to anyone

that there’s more compassion

in her imagination

than there is God

in the lack of your sin.

PATRICK WHITE

WIRED TO LOOKING FOR GARDENS OF EDEN

Wired to looking for Gardens of Eden at the wrong end of my dopamines.

Want to move back to the country

and live in a secluded place

you couldn’t find unless I led you there.

Want to take pride again

in knowing all the names of the trees and stars and flowers

as if they all lived in the same small community

of intimate immensities that I do

like pebbles on the edge of an avalanche.

Tired of playing Russian roulette with the asteroids.

Want to live somewhere even the animals know

the plants know more about healing than they do.

And it would be great

to have a woman who knows how

to think and feel and fuck there with me

to laugh at what a brilliant idiot I am

to know how to make soap out of the sap of flowers

that smell like their names.

Bouncing Bet.

Pride of London. Lady at the Gate.

I’m not looking for purple noons and honeybees.

I’m not trying to make a big splash like Basho’s frog in Walden Pond.

Just want to lie down in the tall yellow grass of a September hillside

and feel like a freshly baked loaf of bread

cooling on a windowsill

like a philosopher’s stone

as the sun goes down over the hill

and the dust of many roads

gets in the eyes of my starmaps

like gusts of stars

that makes them water with the wonder

of being here at all to know how lost and homeless I am

even in the depths of the dark womb that first imagined me like water.

I cling like a tree to my lucidities

and I’m rooted in the light

as much as I am the dirt

and I sprout poems and paintings like flowers and leaves

and even when I’ve been struck by lightning

the dead branch blooms like the moon

and you can hear the drums of silver apples

marshalling at my feet

like a troupe of white-winged horses.

Like the pulse of the windfall

when death first entered the garden

to let me know how alive I am

in this present moment

that has no death or birth in it

no beginnings

no ends

and goes on forever

as the only feature of time

that doesn’t need a calendar.

But I’m not waxing Biblical about the brevity of days

and I’ve always been grateful

that I was born too stupid to be a cynic

and looking up at the stars from anywhere

one of the greatest wonders of life to me

is that so few people are amazed.

They’ve never listened with their eyes to the night

so that when their eyes speak

they don’t understand

the mother language of the light

and the fireflies forget how to talk to the stars

and everybody’s looking for an interpreter

to tell them the meaning of things.

They don’t know how to enjoy

being alone

with everything they don’t understand.

That’s why I like New England asters and purple loosestrife.

That’s why I like being kept at home by snowbound roads

and unanswerable fires.

I want to sit at a carved picnic table

under a locust tree in the morning

when it’s in full bloom

and humming with thousands of bees

and wonder aloud in a poem that’s writing me why

whenever you find nectar

there’s always thorns

as if my life depended upon it.

I want to approach my material confinement

with the suppleness of water

given that’s what I mostly am

and have no fear of spiritual evaporation

after I’m dead

and gone beyond into

the transformative darkness of my original watershed

because I’ve seen the same thing happening to the shapeshifting stars

that everyone says are fixed.

I am not deceived by appearances

into believing there’s any kind of reality behind them

as if a mirage were lying to a desert.

Water’s no less of a window

when it reflects the moon on its surface

than it is in the depths of the sea

that grows it like a pearl.

If you can only see with the eye

and not through it

as Blake suggested

then you’re inundated with visuals

as impersonal as the camera lense

that follows you through the city

like an upgraded form of state shadow.

But out in the country where no one’s watching

but the occassional squirrel

once you let the light in

your seeing isn’t just

a phenomenological reaction

to photonic randomness

but a creative response to chaos

that makes images out of visuals

and symbols out of visions

and facts out of purposeless experience

like tiny mouse skulls

and abandonned herons’ nests

that don’t make a liar

out of your imagination.

I want to live somewhere in peace

without thinking I’m selfish or a coward

to observe the world around me

as if it were the expression

of the beautiful absurdity

of this reclusive artistic discipline

that keeps making me up as it goes along

to fill in the lyrics

of a half-forgotten song

it’s singing to itself like water.

I’m tired of the gibbering of the sacred monkeys

who don’t know what’s holy about life

unless it’s washed in blood.

I’m tired of the intrusion of the good and bad

into my solitude

as if the mob

and the government

civilization

culture and education

had a right to homogenize

the taste of life in my mouth.

Not the same.

Not different.

Not exclusive.

Not effacing.

I’m sick of gaming the rackets of life

for my daily bread.

Sick of the maggots

laying claim to the pedigree of butterflies.

Sick of the tapeworms

trying to convince me they’re spinal cords

and shoelaces

or downed powerlines that are the envy of cobras.

Sick of never underestimating

the violence and ignorance of humans

without always being right.

Are there ants that go to sleep hungry tonight?

Are there bees in the hive without honey?

Just want to walk out late at night up to a high field

with a broken gate

by myself

or with someone else

that hasn’t been closed in years

and delight in going creatively mad under the stars

exalting in the radiance of human eyes

in an exchange of lucidities

that proves we are not strangers to the light

here on earth

or in any other place

where we greet each other like guests without a host

wondering why we are gathered here to ask.

My heart is torn under its own weight

and all my dreamcatchers

have turned into unsustainable spiderwebs

by accumulation.

My soul is the swan of the full moon

unfeathered on dark waters

by a snapping turtle

that keeps rising from its depths like the world.

I’ve walked so long down this long road on crutches and stilts

it’s forgotten the feel of my feet

and all the mystic auroras of my spirit

robe me in meat

and chameleonic anxiety.

Sick of technological progress

that is the equal and opposite reaction

to the devolution

of what’s beyond comprehension

into the truth

into wisdom

into knowledge

into facts

into data

into lies

that upstage the myths of the stars

with mutative alibis.

Want to go somewhere I can scream

and the hills will understand the echo.

Want to go somewhere I can look at the spring columbine

growing out of the green moss tupe

on the lichen-covered rock

and not see it covered in the blood of children.

Want to walk out into the darkness

even on a starless night

and feel like a vulnerable mortal

made wary by the innocence of natural dangers

and not the deranged perversities

of ghouls off their meds in the cities.

Want to get away from the maggots and tapeworms

that govern the body politic within and without

like the corrupt flesh of a dead horse

that died of exhaustion

pulling the milkwagon uphill.

Don’t want to walk any more roads that turn into quicksand.

Just want to kick my cornerstones like pebbles

down a dusty lane

as if I had all the time in the world

not to explain to anyone

why it seems so crucial

to get the colours of the New England asters right.

And I know it’s a dream.

I know it’s an illusion.

A mirage of the way I feel.

But sometimes even water

is wounded by this desert

where the only roads are snakes

that make paths in the sand and the stars

and it takes a mirage to heal.

Sometimes it’s better

to let yourself be decieved by appearances

to be relieved by the compassion

inherent in the way things seem to the mind

like a cool herb on a severe burn

than go blind.

PATRICK WHITE

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