THE NIGHTWIND

The nightwind is dancing with the leafless trees

under a new moon

as if they were crutches

that couldn’t keep up with its moves.

April night.

All potential.

Lilac month in the valley

and blue hyacinth soon

in the corners of forgotten yards

and for the first time today

down by the Tay where the willows

are going blonde

that bruise of a flower

that looks like a cross

between a broken egg and the moon.

A crocus

like a dab of violet paint

in the foreground of a drab impression.

The apple-trees are waiting for their brides like blossoms.

Saturn’s in Virgo

and I’m out for stars

on my hobby-horse of a telescope

that’s jealous of the easel I paint on

because it thinks it’s the unheralded genius

and can do more with light

than that other moron.

More Copernicus for the moment

than van Gogh

I cut through fields

that look like November all over again

now that the snow’s gone

to keep from being blinded

by the blazing of the town

attentive as a doe to the barking

of distant farmyard dogs.

I’m a one man band of snapping twigs

and slashing branches

moving deeper into the silence

away from windows and doors.

My telescope sneers at the vanity

of birches posing in the nude

because they’ve heard I’m a painter

into feminine nocturnal effects.

And I’ve been here before

looking for suitable subjects

but tonight I’m out for stars

and the wounded mystery of being alone

in a place that everything’s adapted to

but where nothing feels it belongs

to judge by the way they keep to themselves.

Wherever I am

the stars have always reminded me of home

as if this were the place of exile

and the testing ground

of life on earth

to see who makes it back

and I am stilled and mindbound

by such a commingling

of longing wonder and sadness

my blood burns like a lovesong

to the great absence that keeps us apart

and how much time and distance it takes

to abandon a heart that clings

like colour to the clouds.

How much darkness

must be intensified by a human

into black matter

before the ore

is prodigal with light.

All the good stars are going down with Taurus

though I can see the snakes

still flaring lethally in Al Gol

like the Medusa’s severed head

and there’s that poor man’s chandelier

the Pleiades

still enchanted with the charms

of Alcyone and her sisters

though like me

they’re getting on in years.

Longer wavelengths

Longer shadows

shifting into infrared.

All the blue-white fury

that was the frequency of my youth

the mellow yellow of the autumnal truth

that the seeing might be as ageless

as the perennial insight

into the beginningless birth of the mind

but my eyes are estranged from the light

like two drops of water on a starless night

ripening like bells

sweetened by thoughts of perishing

above the abyss below them.

Hanging from the tip of a blade of stargrass

they’re trying to remember

without crying

what became of the wedding

that wore them like an orchard up the aisle

before they’re lowered

like the eyelids of a crocus

and disappear

into the source of themselves

like a well that can’t hold back its tears

when it remembers

light on the mindstream

like a voice in a dream

they haven’t heard for years.

What can you say?

Life is a breathful.

And if I were to guess

it’s probably better that way.

Don’t wear the silver off the mirror

with too much looking

but glance at it out of the corner of your eye

in passing

as if to say under your breath

o.k. you’ve got my attention

what now?

You should stay alert to things

without crowding them out of their eyes

the way a snakecharmer

listens to the cobra

not his flute

and maintains his dangerous distance.

And don’t judge things by their magnitude.

Sometimes it’s the dim stars

like the pale one above the middle

of the brightest three in Andromeda

that can lead you to a galaxy.

But there too you have to look askance

even to see hundreds of billions of stars

shining at such a great distance

right next door.

When everything in the knowable world is relative

it’s because of the interdependence of its origins

on everything else

and blood is thicker than water

except when it’s not

but when all is said and done

we’re all the seventh son of the seventh son

of an identity theft.

Muddy Waters

there’s another mule

kickin in your stall.

Born of fire without smoke

you’re a jinn.

Born of water without ice

you shine like a sea urchin.

Born of earth without roots

there’s starmud on your boots.

Born of air without clouds

you’re welcome everywhere.

Born of stars without eyes

you come as quite a surprise to them.

PATRICK WHITE

IN THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE ROSE

In the eye of the hurricane rose

all is as calm as a bee

as my world is shed around me

like eyelids.

The racket of Canada geese

holding a political rally

high over everybody’s heads

a thousand feet straight up

as the economy returns like spring.

I know what it is

to be a phoenix of a tree

and lose your leaves

like a fire that goes out in the night.

I used to be a snowman

and purified myself

with my own disappearance

when things warmed up.

Now I’m a scarecrow

with nothing to chase away

except the farmer.

It wasn’t me

that held a grudge against the birds.

Everything’s wrong

but it’s all right

the chaos is vividly illustrated

with picture music

and I’m wearing my eye in my ear

and there’s a keyboard and an easel near

like a skeleton with a forced grin.

A painting a day.

Van Gogh on steroids.

But I can’t afford to eat my cadmium yellow

and they’re not handing out food for thought

at the back of the think-tank anymore.

I don’t know what to say

about all those people

who set out to be artists

and wound up being stores.

People eat.

People pay the rent.

Baby needs new shoes.

Benign reason can smother an artist

faster than the demands of a serial killer

in the hands of the pillow she dreams upon

and the tigers of wrath

who are wiser than the horses of instruction

who took so easily to the cart

as Blake said in his sayings from hell

soon learn that heroism isn’t smart

if you don’t want to be hunted into extinction

by judas-goats in the jungle

for your private parts.

And then if you get through the blackwater of all that

like a battered waterlily after a storm

that doesn’t have any respect for nuns

comes a swarm of dabblers and nibblers

like one of the plagues of Egypt

the blackflies the maggots the tapeworms

that pose like paper butterflies

on the lips of origami flowers

for Japanese tourists

into unenlightened North American haikus

about cherry blossoms

that never fall on dogshit.

The eternal sky

doesn’t inhibit the flight of the white clouds

and you can see that

as clearly in a dirty puddle in a parking lot

as you can through the eyes of the Buddha.

Life is a bubble.

A firefly.

A distant star.

A lightning bolt.

You don’t need to transplant

a plastic cornea

into the pineal gland of your third eye

in order to see like the Hubble.

You just need to gain some elevation.

You just need to break

the surly bonds of earth

and get into orbit awhile

if you’re looking for an overview

that isn’t just another footnote

in a Restoration play

trying to refine Shakespeare

by turning real diamonds

into zircon costume jewellery

that makes the light taste like junkfood.

I approach life

by putting the pedal to the metal

like an absolute constant

as if it were already behind me

like the light of a star in all ten directions

that stays ahead of itself

so that time cannot encompass it

like a fletcher turning freebirds into arrows.

There are no zeniths and nadirs in the void.

Don’t try to live like a curve ball on the straight and narrow.

Space isn’t mutable

once you’ve achieved ultimate volume and mass

and stand eye to eye with the universe

you don’t want to meet

until you can both sit down

on equal ground

and come to some kind of mutual understanding.

Don’t use a lie

to go divining for the truth

when the truth isn’t water

it’s a weathervane.

All things change when we do.

The first word ah blossoms into all others

and they’re all true

said some master I’ve forgot.

If it hasn’t got a womb

don’t listen to its myth of origin.

If it isn’t a lifeboat

don’t get in

or better yet

learn to swim on your own.

Writing poetry is like pearl-diving for the moon

at the bottom of your tears.

If you want to go deep

you can’t bottle an emergency atmosphere

like a backup breath

to keep Atlantis from drowning

when the fish are already swimming

through your windows

like new insights

into your fathomless past.

But if you don’t have the depth

to be a shipwreck

don’t keep an albatross on deck

a spider on watch

in the ropes of your mast

or mistake a siren

for the cutting edge

of a figurehead

and fix her to your bow

and expect to avoid the rocks.

It’s the loneliness of the moon

that makes the loon sing

on the lake

not a parrot that talks.

Poetry isn’t just a matter

of picking up the flattest stones

that wash up from your oceanic emotions

about what it was like

to go skinny-dipping with Medusa on the moon

to make them scan

skipping out over a sea of tranquil shadows.

Words are waterbirds.

Not flightplans.

They know where all the best mirrors are

to make a good landing

and which are blind and dangerous

but poetry isn’t about keeping the lights on at night

along your runways and starmaps

or tracking fireflies on a radar screen in a lighthouse

as the circling muse runs low on fuel

trying to get her wheels down.

You can’t grind inspiration out

and expect to be ambushed by a muse

as if she were a clown in a musical jack-in-a-box

and not the serpent at the well

when you go for water.

Where are the elixirs

where are the toxins in your voice

where are the fangmarks that punctuate your pulse?

Where is the lamia that shed your lunar skin

with a spiritual knife

just before she cut your heart out

at the top of a pyramid of prophetic skulls

without an afterlife to speak of?

If you’re still around to assess

what you’ve sacrificed

to the dead ends of poetry

you haven’t died enough

to make it live.

You’re still a highway not a river.

Roadkill in a crosswalk

not a mindstream that can talk to stars

with intensity

about the return of the great blue herons

to the prodigal begging bowls of last year’s nests.

Puppets dance to the strings of laughing liars.

Make kindling of them.

Make fires

and throw Pinnochio in

if you want to sit with heretics

that tell the truth

as if every word of it

were a death wish

the genies hear in silence

as the lamps

turn themselves down low

to maintain their decorum

as they bite their tongues like flames.

Words are to names

as visuals are to visions

and images are to symbols.

The first mean precisely what they say.

Accurate simulacra.

Clear as day.

A photograph not a painting.

But it’s the lense that mimics the eye

not the other way around

and when the telescope’s

brought down to earth

like seed is to tree

like light is to life

they’re both wide-eyed flowers

gaping at their own interpretation.

The mind is an artist.

The mind is a scientist.

The mind is a poet a postman

a baglady sorting through her own garbage.

The mind can paint the worlds

as the Flower Ornament Scripture said.

You can paint them yellow blue black or red.

Reality’s an atomic pointillist.

Reality’s the negative space

around an impressionist lifeboat

full of light

as the waves give chase to the children.

Reality’s a crazed expressionist.

Reality’s a forty thousand year old cave painting.

A fresco in a womb full of correspondences

simulated in the flesh of the great mother

who keeps giving birth to the animals

late at night

after everyone’s gone home

and the gallery’s closed.

Back to Blake.

What is first imagined is later proved.

You live in the world you paint

you write you carve you think you feel

you play like your father’s guitar.

You can paint it with windows with mirrors

with ion microscopes.

You can make a painting of a painting

and call it a work in progress

that improves upon the original

like a host is enhanced by a guest

or a ghost in a different dress.

Or you can minimalize the picture plane like space

and despise perspective

and hold it up to your face

like a mugshot to a detective

to see if you can recognize anyone

by the pattern of the blood spatter.

Tired of working with the light in Monet’s garden.

Cross the Japanese bridge above the waterlilies

over to the other side of the equation

and work with matter

as if you were ploughing paint

to plant potatoes.

But whatever you express

worlds within worlds within worlds

whatever your medium

be it stars or Mars black

heaven or hell

or the triune identity of earth

water land and sky

remember they all find their equivalence

in your creative energy

acting on its own potential

as if the abyss spontaneously

took matters into its own hands

and out of nothing

out of its own emergence

out of its own bright vacancy

and dark abundance

out of the synergic emptiness

of its own unidentifiable likeness

to everything that exists in your imagination and beyond

made this.

PATRICK WHITE

LATE SPRING SNOW

Late spring snow on its way.

Dead ochres and colourless greys

that have never heard of the impressionists.

It’s a landscape

it’s a mindscape

but it behaves like a still life.

I’ve been staying up late

trying to paint my way

out of my life

until dawn every morning.

The windowpane a ripening phthalo blue.

It’s compositionally deranged

to hear the birds singing

when you’re totally exhausted.

Mentally physically spiritually emotionally financially

gone gone gone altogether gone beyond.

All my happy endings orphanned.

A sum of depletions.

I’m living this creative life

scribbling down the notes of the picture-music

that doesn’t just run through my mind

but is my mind

colours and words

down on canvas and paper.

When I’m writing

when I’m painting

when I’ve wholly disappeared into what I’m doing

for a few holy hours of life

immensities open up like the multiverse

and I’ve got a window a wormhole

I can fly through

and out out out among the starfields

with the evanescence of smoke

or a bird

putting itself in the picture

as a finishing touch to the sky.

And I am free to explore the intensities

of my own creative peace

as I keep saying to myself

one eureka moment after another

turning into a mantra

no no I can’t leave that.

I’ve got to bring that back and show them.

They’ll be delighted with that.

They won’t believe it.

You’ve got to write and paint with an open hand.

Let the brush hold you.

Let the pen.

Then you’re the meaning

of what the words are trying to say

and it’s o.k.

you don’t have to look any further than that.

Sublimity slips into the mundanities of the world

by creative accident

and you stand down from bliss

and spend a reverential moment

in its presence

just looking at it

not knowing where it came from

or whose work it is.

And it’s the wonder of that depth of ageless being

expressing itself as a gesture of time

that’s kept me at it

for forty-eight excruciating years.

I get off this chain gang

where I’ve broken down more rocks than a junkie

or saxifrage in the rain

and the pain the labour

the enervating futilities

and terminal successes

of all those ambitions

that run counter to the flow of life like salmon

disappear from my bloodstream

like apparitions in the morning.

And I am more me

the less I grow aware of it.

When I consider the chronic agony of life

I sometimes think that God created the world

not because she was a hidden secret

that wanted to be known

but because she wanted to forget she was God

and lose every cosmos and atom of herself wholly in it.

Paint till dawn and you’ll know what that means.

As the great Zen master sort of said

you can swallow the whole of the river you’re painting

with a single gulp.

You can chug the well of the muses

with every drop.

And just when you think

you’re working in a medium of illusions

that are playing you like a gravedigger

that likes to get to the bottom of things

they all begin to taste of life.

The mirages water the flowers

in this desert of stars

and everything blooms.

You’re back in the garden again

before anybody knew anything but the names of things

to distinquish them from the angels

and life was too vital to need an explanation.

As you go to write

you can take all your dark energy

and intensifying it

by letting it empower you

bend space into a gravitational eye

that gives you a deep insight into

how even a blackhole can be creative.

How what’s been left out of the shadows and lights

says as much as that which was included.

Who you are not

is just as much of an artist

as the one who signs the painting.

And don’t think you can do things by half measures

one foot in the boat

and one foot on the shore.

Talent knows the tear

but genius knows what hurt

the feelings of the watershed that let it fall.

It’s the same in art poetry love enlightenment life.

You’ve got to let a mask every now and again

wear your face just to play fair

and see how things look from the inside out.

You’ve got to let the fireflies

make up stories about the stars

that haven’t got anything to do with shepherds.

You got to be free enough

to let the world be all kinds of things it isn’t.

You can only hex yourself

by taking a voodoo doll out of the arms

of a sleeping child

like the new moon out of the arms of the old

because you deny the darkness within you

its return to innocence

and try to separate the roses from the thorns.

Living your life

as if you were always

applying yourself to the world

like the task of the business at hand

is as destructive

as trying to pry the petals of a flower open

with a crowbar

because you haven’t got the time to wait.

Paradise is effortless.

It doesn’t have a gate.

It doesn’t have a custodian.

It doesn’t maintain a teacher.

Adam was born knowing the names of things.

Not how to keep books

on the comings and goings

of the saints and the miscreants.

The first lie out of a tempter’s mouth

is to ask Eve if she believes

she’s worthy of the truth

as if it were something that could be acquired

without her.

There’s more innocence

in running the risk of being left out

than there usually is among the deluded

who play it safe by dissing their doubt

to be included.

You’ve got to take your church your mosque

your zendo your synagogue off at the door

as if they were hats and shoes

when you enter a holy place

or you’ll track the world in

like starmud at your heels

and desecrate it with religion.

And this is as true of Druidic birchgroves

in an abandoned Westport field

with the wild geese flying overhead

just as the stars are coming out

as it is of a poet climbing burning ladders

up to his beloved

as if every rung were the vertical threshold

of a mutable transformation

that estranges and illuminates her face like water

as it changes his eyes.

Don’t add your feather of flame to the fire

like the flightplan of a faint-hearted phoenix

with ambulances standing by

in case things get out of hand

but light yourself up like a Buddhist monk in Vietnam

or a filial vegetable seller in the souks of Tunisia

who set the Middle East on fire

and consume yourself wholly

until there’s nothing left of the geni but the lamp.

When you let the way come to the end of you

how can you say you’re lost?

That’s where your freedom begins.

When the object of your quest

can’t find anyone to look for it

and there’s no one there to know

King Lear writes Shakespeare

and David sculpts Michelangelo.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMEONE KEEPS FOLLOWING ME

Someone keeps following me

like the shadow of who I was supposed to be.

The dark sibling of light

whose face got turned away from the sun.

He’s the remnant of perfection that’s left of me.

He’s the one I was expected to achieve.

He’s the one I’m supposed to believe.

I’m what happened to him along the way.

And the defeat goes on and on and on.

I want to say look you were there.

You saw what went down.

How natural everything seemed at the time.

How inevitability governed everything like hindsight.

But he just stands there staring

if I were the most inconceivable thing on his mind.

He’s the son my mother should have had.

I’m the one she didn’t deserve.

He’s the blue flower.

And I’m the black dog.

He’s the favourite of the rain.

And I’m the fire hydrant that wound up in the sewer

after putting out the fire.

He wanted to live a good life with laudable accomplishments.

He wanted to do well for himself

given where we were born

and he was groomed for it

by the very people who had made him poor.

He vowed to become one of them and thought

all shall be well all shall be well

all manner of thing shall be well

and he’d know the kind of self-respect

you just can’t get on welfare.

I went slumming with anyone

who was passionate or dangerous.

I’ve always felt guilty because

I wasn’t better than I am.

I think it was something

my mother kept saying in rage about me

when I was young.

And my tough old broom pod of a granny

always agreed.

I was so much more like my unforgiveable father

than my brother and sisters were

I could smell the burning flesh

of some kind of mark being branded on my heart.

O.K. I said

I’m evil but I’m smart

and there’s always poetry and art.

I’ll be self-destructively creative

and give myself up to visions in the desert

before they drive me out in May

when they cleanse the temples of smoke and incense

and they’re looking for a scapegoat

whose innocence is within question.

And that was the first great divide in the mindstream

between him and me

and after that we were two different shores

and one burning bridge.

And I was determined I wasn’t going to be the shadow

that got left behind.

So here we are forty-eight years later

and he’s asking me with those

eery condescendingly accusing eyes of his

if I think I’m as smart now as I used to be

before I started living my life like a river

instead of a highway

and as much as I love the stars

dropped out of astronomy

because everything felt starless and unshining.

You can make more money

asking stars how old they are

and where they’re going spectrographically

than you can sharing the little light you’ve got to go by

through poetry and painting.

In art

things get worse

the better you get at them.

Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

You might still think of yourself

as an oscilloscope with a wavelength for a lifeline

but here you’re off the radar.

And I lived like that for years.

Women black coffee cigarettes and books.

I wanted to guide people by example

and lead them away from me.

I embodied the estranged compassion of the damned

in everything I did

and kept myself at an appropriate distance

in the aerial and thematic perspectives

of all my works.

I can empathize deeply with people

but seldom to the point

where I let them become me.

I have a plutonium soul

and the afterlife of a nuclear winter.

I’m one of the heavier elements of life

and my intensities are as natural to me

as the stability of his carbon is to him.

And the way I express myself

is more of an exorcism than a seance.

I dispossess myself of all things human

so they won’t be hurt by what’s left.

And I endure.

And I’ve got the energy

of an angry rogue star in my genes

that refuses to pale in his sunlight by comparison.

He graces our Russian Mongol ancestry with gilded graves

and tears that run like chandeliers

down his ballroom cheeks.

I trace it in lightyears

and leave the rest to chance.

He preens his decency.

I revel in the bright vacancy

the dark abundance

of my reptilian clarity.

He sees things in a white mirror.

I see through them in a black.

He mourns the things I do.

But he doesn’t know a damned thing about agony.

He thinks he’s the one who’s real.

And he resists me like temptation.

Not to feel might be the way to feel about Zen

but I indulge the passions of an unenlightened man

because I don’t trust purity

to remember that it’s just the fashion

of a passing moment

that buffs its own reflection in a doorknob

and passes judgment on the poor

with the stiff bliss of a happy slumlord.

His universe is Steady State.

Mine’s a Big Bang

empowered by a dark energy

that keeps accelerating my fate

into the void ahead of me

so by the time any kind of insight arrives

it’s always too late

to be news.

Right door.

Wrong address.

He’s the cornerstone.

I’m the quicksand.

He’s the habitable planet

and I’m the menacing asteroid.

He promotes evolution

and I’ve always got a rock in my hand

as big as the moon

to bring about a change in who rules

the windows and the mirrors

on the other side

of what they expect me to be in passing.

I’m the radical zero

who thinks it’s foolish

to try to make something out of nothing

given it’s already a given

and he’s the commonsensical whole number

that takes account of things.

He says he’s not perfect

to be arrogant about his humility

but that’s only a shadow of what he lacks.

I try to carry my own weight

because I don’t expect much

in the way of serious intelligent help

but he gets around

like a corpse on everybody’s backs

as if he were the stranger who came to the rescue.

He’s the crutch who leans on legs to hold him up

whenever he walks on water without oars.

I’m the bottom-feeder that he abhors.

But I can take a handful

of the muck and decay of my starmud

and turn it into waterlilies.

I can make my perishing into something beautiful.

I can use death like a spontaneously renewable resource

and make things live

through the transformative power of my art

that are totally blameless

whether they be light or dark.

He comes on like a lifeboat when he’s talking to women

as if he were walking by the sea.

He doesn’t know how to go swimming without an ark.

Women are attracted to me

like blood in the water

when they’re out far enough

to be thrilled by sharks.

I’m the zoo on the outside of the cage

that blunts its teeth on the bars.

He’s in it for the documentary footage

and a few convincing scars.

The sheep hunt tigers into extinction

and the goldfish are trawling

for grey nurses and great whites

to make sharkfin soup.

Even in hell

there’s a sense of proportion

almost a moral aesthetic

that goes unspoken

until someone spots a jackass

trying to lead an eagle around on a leash.

The distastes of a demonic imagination are not petty.

The taboo of the maggot

is not the rule of the whale.

So get behind me my shadow my brother self.

Don’t flash your lighthouse in my eyes

when the stars are out

as if I’m the one

that’s a few magnitudes shy of shining.

It would do you a lot of good to be a little bit bad

but then you’d feel too close to me for comfort

and forget who you are to everyone else.

I’ve never needed anything more

than the dust at my heels

to show me the way down.

I jump

and sometimes

I’m descending into heaven

and sometimes I’m plunging toward hell.

But what can you say about a man

standing at the edge of the bottomless abyss

of his own draconian absence

waiting for the flightfeathers of stray angels

with spare parachutes

to fall out of the sky?

I know you look so far down at me

from that overview

you’ve exalted like a balcony

that got it’s start in life as a pulpit

you suffer from vertigo.

But I could have told you little brother.

I wouldn’t want to alarm or harm you in any way

but I could have looked you straight in the eye

like a bemused king cobra

flaring over your nest like an unpredictable eclipse

or an umbrella somebody opened in the house

and diverted the luck of their lifeline

from the original course of its flowing

into a starmap for dice

pitted with eyeless blackholes

like the sockets in ivory skulls

lost in this wilderness alone

where nothing reminds them of home.

Alea iacta.

The dice are thrown.

You may be a better threshold than I am

but I’ve been crossed by the Rubicon

and I could have told you little brother

without even so much

as the penumbral shadow of a lie

to fall into your milk like a dragon.

I could have dipped

my other wing into your cup

as an antidote to clarify what ails you.

And as you drank up

I could have told you little brother.

The first shall be last

and the last shall be first

and it’s not a good idea when you’re here

to antagonize the lowlife

with your insufferable highness

from your upper story balcony

as if you were always trying

to get something out of your eye

like me

who burns like a cinder

just to see if I can make God cry

to hear why

I would have told you little brother

even snakes can fly.

PATRICK WHITE

CRAZY MAN DANCING WITH FIREFLIES

Crazy man dancing with fireflies.

Another one trying to shoot out the stars.

I hear the woman next door weeping again tonight.

I don’t know what for.

Desire’s a phoenix in love with water

if that’s what it is.

The torch is plunged into the wound

to stop the bleeding

and the ashes get carried away.

I’ve loved nine women for years

and they’ve all buried me in a different place.

Or saved my skull to consult the dead

about a future that wasn’t living up to the moment.

The white poppy of the moon

bats her eyelashs through the pines.

I’ve never been as innocent as a cynic

nor quite as susceptible

but I remember the pain of separation

like the mirror of the lake remembers lightning

as the most brutal of all its revelations.

And how you can walk in and out of some doors

all your life like faces

without ever opening them

or knowing whose they are.

Everybody longs for the threshold they haven’t crossed.

Poor stars trying to live up to their radiance.

Wondering why it’s always behind them.

Why the dreamcatchers never get finished

and love ends up like some kind of cold fish

swimming through endless windows.

Music from far across town

this late at night

like a ghost answering a seance.

It rises above the trees like smoke

and disappears into the moonlight.

Someone’s trying to bloom in fire.

It happens but it’s rare.

I take a firewalk down memory lane

but all my cremations seem no more to me now

than the shadows of candles

and though I feel intimately removed

this afterlife of mine is not scar tissue

whether things got over me

or I got over them

no matter.

Attachment too is a Buddha activity

and though passions that once

made even the trivial sacred

and the impossible slight

have transformed

the hot blue flame of their hydrogen

into the carbon and oxygen

of more sustainable intensities

the selflessness of my impersonality

is not aloofness or indifference or exemption

or the consolation of wisdom won by acclamation.

Time distills the spirit out of all things human

and you can delight in your past

as if it were the future of someone else

who lives it like the unfolding

of leaves in the spring

that shadow the ripening apple

until it tastes like the tears of the autumn sun.

Joy and compassion

and the lucid spontaneity

of staying improbably ageless

again and again and again and again

as the years rejoice in the young and old alike

climbing the ladder of the tree

from so far down in the dark earth

they’re beyond the reach of its ancient roots

and the utmost of its aspirant branchs

scratching at the windows of heaven.

And then most amazing of all

someone comes to the window

and parts the veils

and like the last line of the last act

just before the curtain call

you fall.

You fall toward paradise

as if you’d failed

and had to do it all over again.

But if your heart needs healing

offer your love up like a transplant

to anyone who can use it

and your mystic eyes to the stars

that want to see through them

what their light looks like

from deep inside

the expanding vastness within you

that can hold all that shining

like the sky or the sea embraces

all kinds of its own weather

without ever overflowing the brim.

The skull you drink from

like a wishing well

in the desert watersheds of the dead

is a cup without a horizon.

A real mirage with imaginary water.

A seabed of shadows on the moon.

Low-tide at noon.

Providential midnights when it’s full.

But if you don’t like

what you’ve been hearing about yourself lately

when you stop to listen

to what your saying

and don’t recognize the voice

you’re speaking in as your own

hold your ears up like conch shells to the oceans

that have never heard a recording of themselves

and carefully watch their faces.

And if you make the same stupid mistake

you swore not to make again

learn to recycle your ignorance

so you can save a bit of wisdom

for the rest of the world

to remember what it was like once

to be alone in Eden

with no one else to rely upon

and all you had to add

to the conversation of the rivers

that flowed out of it

all you had to share with your solitude

and boundless emptiness

was your unaswerable longing

even as it was being shaped

by their waters

into the form of the unimaginable.

Into the form of a woman

who tasted then

and tastes forever now

of the original light

of spontaneous creation

however many worlds

and lives and years and nights had to pass

before you first saw her

and felt your afterlife condense into a star.

Crazy man dancing with fireflies.

Crazy man dancing with fireflies.

And it doesn’t matter

there’s no one here

to understand my delight.

Crazy man dancing with fireflies.

It’s hard to read me in so little light

but when you fall asleep

it’s the world that dreams

and though I feather the wind

with firebirds of desire

and write loveletters

long into the night

that grow like the graceful tendrils

of ink dissolving in water

whatever the sign of the season

there’s no bitterness in the vine

and no departure in the reason.

Though I’m a leaf with the wingspan of autumn

even in the dead of winter

the phoenix is green

and by late summer

there’s a crazy man out dancing with fireflies

down by the Tay River

who is too carried away

by the picture-music

of what he hears with his eyes

and sees with his ears

of all that he’s been and will be

alone together with everyone forever

in love and out

full cup and empty

eclipsed and forgotten

or charged with the radiant urgency

of fireflies after the rain

to care what any of it might mean

when they fire the valley up for a moment

like blasting caps in a beaver dam

that’s flooded the road.

And everything’s so nimble with light

so vital and effusive with joy

so mysteriously near and always

all darkness all pain all sorrow

all that’s lost and weary

and fearful of ever being found again

of being loved or despised

is absorbed blameless into bliss

like a tender intimacy

into a great vastness

that lives within us all

even as we disappear into it

like the sky in the heart of a bird.

Or just before the soft flare of moonrise

through the leafless veils

of the glowing birchgroves

on that far hilltop

where the pioneers

used to bury their boys with a view

a night just like this

as illusory as it is real

suffused with a spirit of water

that heals the wounded swords

the bruised flowers

the fevered promises

that are offered to it from the bridge

between this shoreless delirium

and the next.

A presence that’s always flowing away

like a mindstream among the stars and fireflies

with the power of time

and the effortless wisdom of change

that makes the going stay

and the perishing persist.

A night just like this.

A momentary kiss

that keeps faith

with the eternal flames of the fireflies

that adorn the darkness and waters of life

with indefineable joy

in the exuberance of the mystery

and unspeakable trust in the onceness of forever

and an abiding intuition

that even the fiercest thorns of pain

that have tasted first blood

and greyed the hearts of their lovers

can never be estranged

from the beauty of the rose.

A night like this

The great abyss

lucidly alive with its own shining

and a woman’s eyes

and a crazy man dancing with fireflies.

PATRICK WHITE

HOW TO WRITE POETRY IN A SNAKEPIT

How to write poetry in a snakepit

without getting bit.

It’s easy enough to prophecy

from the bottom of desert wells

on mountaintops

in prison

and it would be sheer mercy

to be torn apart by Daniel’s den of lions

or swallowed by a whale

instead of being consumed

for what you believe

by maggots and tapeworms.

Parasites have no sense of a noble death.

But how do you write poetry in a snakepit?

How do you weave flying carpets

out of diamond backs

that strike out at anything that moves

as if their fangs couldn’t help it

you were born with the reflexes of a loom.

What wipes the blood off the crescents of the moon?

Where’s the antidote to the toxic tatoos?

Why all this treachery deceit and meaness?

Is it cool to shine with a reflected pettiness?

Almost fifty years

half a century

I’ve been sitting here doing this.

Trying to listen to what the stars are whispering

over the universal hiss of primordial assholes

who’ve been there from the very beginning of the myth.

In an ugly world

beauty isn’t just a mesmerist

in the eye of the beholder.

It’s a dynamic form of protest

that can kill someone into life

without a weapon.

And it’s hard enough

trying to understand war on the molecular level

the slaughter of the innocents

the loveless obscenity of its pornographic expense

the way it snatchs lives

like scraps of children

off their parents’ plate

and leaves them hungry for the rest of time

and try to reconcile it with a unified field theory

of infinite worlds within worlds of wonder

each with a cause of its own

and a monopoly on the means of its laws

to insist on being itself.

But if you want to see hatred and delusion

on a quantum mechanical level

as it is here up close and intimate

look into the faces

of twenty of your friends

and then turn the mirror on yourself

as if you had your finger on the trigger of the moon

in a game of Russian roulette

with intensely unhappy strangers.

In an ignorant world

insight isn’t just the usual suspect

and wisdom its unwitting accomplice

and the facts their DNA and fingerprints.

It’s a way of splashing acid in the faces

of illiterate extremists.

A way of teaching them how to read

from the burning books they’ve banned

like a child’s eyes

in the name of God.

It’s the most humane way of planting

improvised roadside explosives

that will blow them into kingdom come

like a field full of ripe poppies

milky with snake serum.

All snakes are addicted to their own venom

and speak of it as if they were the fountainmouths

of a secret elixir in the hands of a great magician

who once worked miracles for the pharoahs of Egypt

before that bastard Moses showed up and ruined everything

by throwing down his rod

to see whose serpent was bigger than God.

Snakes are full of penis envy

and you can’t train them to bite other people

or regurgitate the cosmic eggs they’ve swallowed

into a litter box.

And it took years and tsunamis of tears without eyelids

to learn how to be mastered by the skill of it

but the first trick of learning

how to write poetry in a snakepit

is knowing how to turn their scales into feathers

and putting wings on them

without them knowing it

shed them like dragons of old desire

heading south from a cold-blooded climate

like the souls of the dead in the bodies of birds.

Don’t let yourself be hypnotized

or turn away like words

from the eyes of snakes

but remember you can’t live like a fly

and write like an eagle

and turning your pen into a talon

with a firm grasp of the issue

as if it were a neck you’ve pinned down

with a witching wand

look them straight in the eye

and ask them how many children had to die

to keep them safe?

Then drop them on the rocks below

until they learn how to die for themselves.

And it’s crucial

to keep the universe

at the room temperature of fire long enough

it burns like dry ice on their skin.

Poetry is an oxymoronic pursuit

of the highest by the lowest

in a conjoining of mutually engendered opposites

and the lowest will always sting

the way you feel

like Paris stung Achilles in the heel

with a poison arrow

or Hades contracted a snake

to kill Persephone

so he could rape her in the spring

and drag her down below

like the corpse of an anti-romantic necrophile.

If you don’t want to hold a grudge like summer

so that even the earliest of your flowers

are inspired by the muse of grief

tear out your hair like Medusa in a fit of rage

and realize it’s better to go bald

that try to get the cowlicks out of mop of snakes

that never wear the same hairdo twice.

And always remember

it isn’t just the angels

who keep their places like baby teeth

under the ancient stone of the pillow

where you lay your head.

It’s not just the apple-trees

that have to worry

about who they let slide into their orchard beds

but there are rattlesnakes

under the rosebushs as well

that can smell you coming with their tongues.

And if you’re at all spiritual

don’t be naive about illumination.

The light fans out in all directions

like the wavelengths of snakes

thawing like knots combed out of the locks of the spring.

If you want to sit full lotus

in the middle of a public snakepit

and think of it as a private shrine

keep in mind that the same light

that opens the gates to heaven

like the eyes of the flowers

falls into the blackhole skull sockets

of spiritual Calcuttas as well.

If you want to be a lamp unto yourself

you hold up to the darkness

on a vision-quest

remember that creative enlightenment

is radiantly omnidirectional

one mile east is one mile west

and the same firefly that reveals paradise

is a traffic light at a crossroads in hell

that never turns green

and that the worst demons

like the crumbs of celestial dreams

you broke like bread

to share with those who had none

love to gather in the corners of your eyes

like spiders weaving dreamcatchers

to ambush the butterflies.

And though it might seem tempting

to take Medusa for a muse

when you’re trying to write poetry in a snakepit

remembering she’s the death phase of the moon

with immediate access to oracular powers

but it’s just as hard to learn

how to go down on her without turning into stone

as it is to look back on Sodom and Gommorah

without turning into a pillar of salt.

Consider the quality of the inspiration

and its source

and think before you drink deep

from her Pierian spring

like black cool-aid from dixie-cups in Jonestown.

There’s a darkness deep within you

that the light doesn’t know anything about

and it never goes out like bright things do

because it’s the long night

that gave birth to the stars

out of its own emptiness

as it did me and you.

It’s the black mirror

that shines more deeply than the white

once your eyes have adjusted to the clarity.

All the muses are bottled water

compared to its oceanic expanse.

It’s much better to sail your paperboats

like cherry blossoms

downriver to that

than it is to ask a snake

to inspire you with serpentfire

so you can write lovenotes to a sparrow

as if she were sitting on cosmic glains.

Snakes are all throat and no voice

except for the occasional rattle

but what they entrance

they swallow

and there’s no more music

in your whole notes after that.

You’re poetry goes flat as a gutted shell

or the shedding skin of a used rubber

and you’ll never get it up again in your afterlife

even if you sprout wings on your heels

like Hermes Trismegistus the Thrice-Blessed.

Pegasus is dead.

Long live Icarus.

Even tarred and feathered for flight

by an abusive muse

I know it’s hard to live like this

refusing to eat shit

and call it your daily bread

or waiting for manna to fall from heaven

like an airlift from a spiritual foodbank

that doesn’t understand flesh and bone

when you’re a species all of your own

trying to write poetry in a snakepit

and they ask what you do for a living

and you say

I paint and write

among things with two gashs for eyes

that squirm and coil and flare and hiss and spit and bite

out of the pure spite of their snake-nature

no matter how well Orpheus picks the lute

or the snakecharmer fingers the stops of his flute.

Expect to get bit

but don’t be ashamed of it.

I’ve lost track of the number of wounds

I’ve had to suck the venom out of

as I could feel my nerves numbing out

like the unempowered lifelines

to the lights

of a city off the grid

as a night of cold came on like a slow glacier.

And I’ve got so many puncture marks

all over my body

I feel like a cross between a starmap

and a popular voodoo doll on a good day

and a birthday balloon for porcupines on a bad.

Crush a few skulls with the stone of your heart

if you must

but even if the Sufis are right

and you take on the characteristics

of anyone you’ve been around more than forty days

even trying to write poetry in a snakepit

and this is of paramount importance

whatever you do

don’t grow scales on it.

Don’t look for a quick fix

but build your tolerance up slowly

as if your poetry

were the bloodwork of a syringe

that breathes in

as if it were taking a deep draft

and deliberately takes its time

like a good wine

to push back.

Don’t try to regulate the heart

of a warm-blooded mammal

with the rheostat of a reptile

or you’ll wind up writing

haikus and heiroglyphs

that read like the lines of vipers in the sand

and no one who’s ever written poetry in a snakepit

like an antidote to an ancient poison

will ever forgive you for or understand.

PATRICK WHITE

SINCE I LAST WROTE TO YOU

for Alysia

Since I last wrote to you

I told a Napoleonic goldfish

who thought she ruled the shark bowl

to take my job and shove it

as the measure of a man

who still hasn’t acquired the habit

of eating shit

and calling it his daily bread.

I’ve gone back full time to my art

and now I’m eating paint

and enduring the tedium of terror

in a dangerous life

struggling to pay the rent

as I paint and write

knowing I am bereft of the elements of life

for refusing to be economically deprived of my freedom.

If you’re never hungry

you’ll never know what it means to eat.

I laugh blackly like a raw martini

at the cutting edge of irony

when I think of my art as a Zen oxymoron

that’s discovered a way of starving

that bears fruit.

I can taste my food better now

and if I don’t waste anything

it’s a much happier experience

when it isn’t done out of principle.

I count the probability of the number of years

I have left to live

the springs and autumns

I have yet to become

on my fingers and toes.

And I try not to let my disappointment

in the humanity of demons

keep my heartwood

from blowing tree-rings up to heaven

just to give the angels something to crow about.

I’m alone and sad most of the time

and lately I’ve noticed my solitude

flirting with the idea

of turning into a conviction.

Women approach me

with the ambivalence

of a koan in their gut

they can’t resolve.

But it’s not a good idea

if you’re trying to get laid

to baffle the mystery

with your estrangement

and I strive real hard

as often as I can

not to spook

the middle-aged youth

by being a younger man.

I greet guests warmly when they arrive

but it’s rare that I grieve for anyone

when they leave

like most of what was left out of the conversation

we didn’t have

about who among us was telling the truth.

It’s been awhile since I’ve heard a good lie

that didn’t bore me.

I’m an all-inclusive recluse

more interested in studying the psychology of time

as I get to know it experentially

as the immediate intimacy

of the serial-killer at my throat.

I’ve decultified my work

to keep it from turning into a career

but even as we speak

five poems are being translated into Spanish.

And upon learning

I was the last poet laureate of Ottawa

and after me there was no deluge

they could find to fill

the empty ark of my shoes

I emptied on the mountain top:

or I bruised everyone’s feelings so much

like a pebble in their boot

that turned into an avalanche

I endangered my species with extinction.

Whatever the case

I feel the mystic glee of blacklight fireflies

igniting randomly

like stars and lighthouses

I’ve never listened to

about looking for shelter

from the storm of dark energy

that is released by knowing I’m the last of my kind.

And my spirit and mind

have missed you too

as the months have gone by

as if the colour of my blood in autumn

were missing from my palette

and my heart were an urgent artist

who wanted to get out

and paint with you in Kamloops

where the rivers meet in a sacred place.

I’ve never wanted facebook

to be all that I know of your beautiful face

or the starmaps of our cosmic loveletters

to be all that I know of the grace of your shining.

I can still see the stars mirrored in the flowers

in our gateless garden on the moon

where the roses that fell on their thorns

have healed well enough

to go on blooming without us.

I think I felt more like a weed than the waterlily

I wanted to bring into your life

like a paper ship

I floated down the mindstream

to see if my favourite siren

had any use for an empty lifeboat like me.

On the worst of days

when misery gloated

that pleasure might be a principle

but it was a fundamental law of the universe

even as a shipwreck going down

I could still be entranced

by the memory of your singing.

You get a different view of moonlight

when you look at it

with the eye of the sea

from the bottom.

And now once again

your voice pearls me

like a grain of sand

you can see in the universe

if you look closely enough

under the stones

where the angels keep their ancient places.

And I couldn’t be more delighted

that you still love me

and that your heart aches

like an unanswered telephone

or a wounded seance

when my ghost doesn’t answer my absence.

I’ve lain here like a dead seabed on the moon

for so long waiting for you

to pour your ocean into me

I was beginning to think

the vast expanse of my interminable emptiness

was nothing more

than the homely measure

of a cracked teacup

the little I’ve known of you

that was wet

kept leaking out of.

And it would take a great void

to embrace the depth of your waters

and a clear sky immense enough

not to inhibit the flight of your white clouds

and even if my feelings

were to break

like telescopic mirrors on your rocks

it would take a great three-eyed stargazer like me

not to see that you can’t point

to a piece of me

like the firefly chandelier

of a shattered constellation

that was too spaced out

to fit into anyone’s zodiac

that doesn’t still reflect the whole you

on any good seeing night.

I look at you

as I look at the stars

and you’re the lucid muse

of what’s radiantly possible

deep in the dark secret heart of the improbable.

And I want to reach out

like the uppermost branches

in the crown of an inspired tree

and touch you on the cheek

as if my fingertips

were a chaos

of falling apple bloom.

I want to fall asleep with you

and share the same dream

that summons the waterbirds

and scatters the Japanese plum

like loveletters everywhere

under the eyelids of the wind.

PATRICK WHITE