SPIDER IN THE DOORWAY

Spider in the doorway of a small aircraft

I’m holding my own like a furious flag against the wind

leaning backwards out of a small aircraft

wondering if I’ve got a parachute on.

Here we go again.

Free-fall.

The baby bird dropped from the crow’s beak.

Eggs smashed like like young spring suns

that didn’t make the grade

their yellow haemmorages spread like laundry

to dry on the rocks below.

Some thief wrecked what it was trying to steal.

A waste of good birds.

Forensics of the absurd.

No one’s ever been convicted by the laws of nature.

The hawk walks.

It was a sanctioned hit.

Nature heard a rumour they were about to sing.

The worm turned

and they died with wild canaries in their mouths.

Falling from an airplane backwards

not knowing if you’ve got a parachute on

is the seed of a dandelion on the wind

wondering how it’s ever going to bloom

is a kid on a ten metre board

learning to trust the water

and the unearthliness of his first black flip.

It’s good to have a cherished delusion or two

come true every once and awhile.

Everybody’s got to leave their cozy little nest sometime

and learn to fly for themselves.

Daring said feathers

and falling took flight.

Or was it fright running from a dangerous appetite

to the end of a branch that let go of it like fruit

that made it take to the air?

There’s more compassion in wings

than there is claws.

but it’s hard to know if nature

is working under laws of its own origination

or if Lycurgus brought them back like wolves from Egypt.

The Spartans slaughtered their helots once a year

to keep their numbers down.

And spring’s got blood running down its spear as well.

I’m trying to fall toward paradise.

As above so below

but sometimes I feel as if I’m plunging toward the planet

like a meteor about to embed itself in the earth

as a cornerstone of hell

with a nuclear winter for an afterlife.

Apres moi.

Mammals.

Species extinction.

Insane alchemists playing scrabble

with the genetics of the brain.

New life forms in a black spring

whose myths of origin

are someone else’s eulogy.

Life advances at its own expense.

It gets up in the morning

and puts its shoes on

the right one a cradle

the left a grave

and it walks that way between birth and death

down a long road it never takes twice.

And it never stops at the garden-gate

to ask where it’s going.

It keeps to itself like a stranger in passing

and takes its own advice.

It acts without faith or knowing

and everything that lives and dies

is its accomplice.

Robert Frost once wrote

you worship the great god of flow

by hanging on and letting go

and that’s o.k. if you’re an apple

but what if you’re a cloud or a bell

or a wishing well

or a man without a parachute

in the armpit of a plane

feeling the need for unlimited space

and a suspension of gravity

because he can’t walk upon the earth

without being crushed under his own bodyweight?

The poignancy of the absolute

cannot be diluted by a relative truth.

And you can’t hide behind a lie

like the eyepiece of a telescope

that got turned around in the womb

and call that aloof and indifferent

that you hold at arms length

as if deep space weren’t already in your face.

Been gone so long it looks like home to me.

But that doesn’t mean I’m the prodigal son.

Icarus could just as easily fall out of the sun

like the flightfeather of an eyelash

that mistook all that flapping for wings.

You never know when it comes to letting go

whether things are looking up

or bottoming out

and there’s no place on the ladder that’s secure.

But in between the rising and falling of things.

In between this thought moment and the next

that contradicts it

in between one heartbeat and another

in the womb of the great mother

it answers to like a tiny drum

echoing the pulse of her thunder

there’s a freedom of disbelief

that fills me with wonder

that when nature abhors a vacuum

it summons someone like me to fill it.

When the sky’s a bright vacancy

I’m the black mirror of the dark abundance

that comes like Johnny Appleseed to the clouds

and gets in their eyes

like the cinder of a dragon that makes it rain

only to be washed out by the tears

of resilvered mirrors

renewing their virginity.

I’m the emergency shadow on stand-by

that gets called out at all hours of the night

to substantiate the alibi about the whereabouts of the light.

Great oak trees from little acorns grow.

And every quiet little getaway

is the start of a another great escape from prison.

A break in the wall.

A crack in the egg.

A trail of concrete breadcrumbs

a blade of grass follows

like the only path to freedom

for a sword impaled in a stone

that has to pull itself out by its own bootstraps

to keep anybody from declaring themselves king

and taking matters into their own hands

like who lives

and who dies

and who stays at home and cries

and every now and again

in exotic instances like me

who flies from the chain like a missing link

that doesn’t want to be connected to anything

that’s earthbound.

I’ve got more lightning in my roots

than boots on the ground.

I’m a starwalker.

I’m a night stalker

in the spirit’s lost and found.

It’s pleasant I agree

to watch how the happy apple falls

not far from the tree

and quote Shakespeare as an authority

that ripeness is all

but sometimes an apple’s

just a lump in your throat you can’t swallow

and screwing your courage to the sticking point

you jump to clear your voice

of old words that ring hollow.

You look your worst nightmare in the face

And for a few brief lifespans of light

on the way down

you’re a dragon

a phoenix

a gryphon

who stares the snake in the eye

until it’s Medusa that turns to stone.

You’re a visionary on a mission.

You’re the warrior minstrel of the forlorn hope.

You’re astral travelling in the ether

like a joy-jockey leaving vapour trails of stars

like extraterrestrial landing strips

on the Nazdac plateaus of the sunset

as you hover over your poor corpse

struggling on life support

to sustain its misery.

You can’t teach a bird

caught in the throat of the chimney to sing

by burning old loveletters addressed to the spring.

Any prophet who’s ever done time in a furnace

will tell you.

You need a phoenix for that.

It knows more about ashs than a crematorium.

Why go to the added expense

of a plot and a mahogany coffin

when you can fit whole aviaries of morning larks

and all their lyrics

into a reuseable urn?

Chimney sparks.

Fire-pollen.

O how the mighty have fallen.

PATRICK WHITE

WAITING TO SELL A PAINTING

Waiting to sell a painting.

Cigarettes coffee food gas rent canvases paint

and if anything’s leftover

I’ll hang on to it just to walk down the street

with a little more human dignity

than I did last night.

At least once or twice.

I can see something glimmering on my event horizon

but I’m not sure if it’s a mirage or an oasis

A mirage is a dangerous hope

in this desert of stars

and an oasis

is an Artesian spring with skulls

that punctuate the caravan

like the end of one lifelong run-on sentence.

A place to dogpaddle for the rest of the night

and go skinny-dipping with the moon

like an uninhibited waterlily

before I’ve got to move on in the morning

and do it all again

like the ghost of a dandelion gone to seed.

It almost feels like Sunday outside

but I’m afraid of a black spring.

I should act my age

and stop trying to express myself

like a job description for the poor.

How much depends

upon a knock upon a door.

When God finds out

you’re an incorrigible idol worshipper

he endows you with an imagination.

But what I don’t like most about God

is that he never lets another god go first.

The least are last because the best are worse

and everybody’s cursed

by their place in line on the foodchain.

Wheat is sweet

but meat cursed Cain.

Two cans of tuna away from extinction

and a universe shy of survival

someone else can have mine.

I’m out of here like Van Gogh’s ear.

Or maybe it’s time to start eating my still lives.

Painter with chives and a bowl of fruit.

Or turn my whole world upside down

like a bluejay ass up to the winter wind

picking the last of the seeds

out of the mouth of a dejected sunflower

with its head hung down like a streetlight

wondering why even its own feet

pulled their roots up like bootstraps

and walked out on it.

Sunflowers were good enough for Van Gogh.

He ate them like chromium yellow.

He painted potatoes.

He wore his stomach on his palette

and I’ll bet there was a whole gallery inside of him

that no one ever knew about.

I try to focus.

But I’m not a lense.

I weigh the cosmic sublimities of a moment ago

against the feather of my soul

in the scales of the jackal-god of the dead

who asks me what happened to the rest of it.

And I point to a wishbone and a clean carcass.

But hey as the neighbours would say

at least it’s not Ethiopia

and I think how strange it is

that people feel better knowing

there’s someone else worse off than they are.

We’d both sit down and eat these feathers

if we had any tar.

Or even Mars black.

You can elaborate all the aesthetic theories you want

and go on about the integrity of the picture plane

and keep things flat

or ride the new tide

of neo-retro-representationalism

like a tax return to sex

because when things go flat

there’s no up or down after that.

Whether your hanging antibacterial watercolours

in a disinfected gallery

or trying to convince the lightbars

the flowers in your garden scenes

are realer than real

all art

as it always has been

is hunting magic.

The lean looking for the fat

the way you paint

from thin to thick.

The mind is an artist.

Able to paint the worlds.

And keeping meat on your bones

is a kind of textural perpective.

I blue my hills

and establish my point of disappearance.

Trying to see the world in masses

when you’re trying to flesh

an underpainting out

when you’re hungry

is like trying to put tits on a skeleton

but I do my best to paint a bison whole

on the wombwall of the great mother

who keeps the pantry full

without getting hung up on it horns

like some amateur matador

who draws blood like a rose

but ends up being gored

by the demons in details of its thorns.

Back in those days

when everyone was African

there were roving bands of sacred painters

who kept everybody well fed

not by breaking loaves and fishs on a hillside

like a foodbank offering celestial returns

on earthly deposits

but painting the local wildlife in a cave

with carbon you sprayed from your mouth

like burnt bread

to block out the shapes of the negative space

that surrounded your prey

like the contents of an empty stomach.

Or an open hand.

What’s the difference between

braining mammoths in a cul de sac

using the gifts the great mother gave you

to live with cunning and style

and a hunting spear with a good eye

you can wield like a paintbrush

when you’re out in the bush upwind

trying to pick out the highlights

like the vital organs of a Grant’s gazelle?

Mine are Promethean.

I’m chained to a rock.

My liver grows back

like a magic mushroom at night

and the vultures are gathering

for a communal feast

like surgeons in Renaissance black

trying to explain my cadaver

to the operating room in a Rembrandt painting.

And I’ve already eaten my heart

like that of a noble enemy

to enjoin my art

to be brave and steadfast

behind this shieldwall of paintings

positioned like a Viking

on the ridge of another landscape

that keeps folding like a smalltown gallery

that was good at tactics

but didn’t have a strategy for defeat

other than to run like Naples yellow.

I was raised by a sixpack of wolves

like Romulus and Remus

by the same bitch mother

that littered Rome

high in the wild

to howl at the moon

coming up through the trees

of my last wildlife painting

like a lunatic

with more freedom in his crazy heart

than the American constitution.

It’s getting late.

The emergency can’t wait

but the reprieve doesn’t know

what it’s like to be a clock on terminal row

with its own death on its hands

praying for a last meal.

It’s easier to be more casual about time than death

when you’re not holding your breath

trying to digest it

as if you were down

to your last stale biscuit of ghostfood.

But trying to get to the moon

in a bubble of hope

is Apollo Thirteen

without life support.

Ground control to Major Tom

I’ve left the solar system

like a one night stand with a comet

that fell from my lightless halo

to make a hyperbolic pass at the sun.

I’ve gone gone gone altogether gone beyond

to catch up with a fat buddha

who makes a good living

poaching in the deerparks of Benares.

Given the nirvanic quality

of my enlightened life in art

I figure I know as much about emptiness as he does.

I’ve eaten as many desires

swallowed as many fiery swords

like hurtful words

in the marketplace.

What’s so bad

about having people

rub their noses on a full belly

for good luck?

I’ve meditated myself into a coma

as often as he has

trying to get more plenum into my life

than void

trying to turn nirvana into manna

trying to squeeze milk

from a philosopher’s stone

as hard as a nipple on the tit of a Gorgon

that broke her baby teeth on granite.

I’ve got the rainbow body of a Tibetan rinpoche

whose corpse knows how to evaporate like light

but there’s no pot of gold at the end of it

and no word from God

like the arc of a covenant

he intends to keep.

I haven’ been chosen.

It’s getting late.

No one’s coming

to buy my passion

for the Zen trinity

of land water and sky.

No one wants to buy my starmud

like a third eye

and hang it up in their living room

like the original constellation

for the thirteenth house of the zodiac.

And the way I feel about death and time

whenever I paint a sunset

and put Venus in it

to express my gratitude for sex at least

when the lights went out

on those dark nights of my soul

and the music was over

and all that was left

was flesh and wine

lingering in the west

as if there were still time enough to shine

all that

the intensity

the mystery

the ambivalence

not worth a dime.

A man lives to eat to be hungry.

Like the vultures at my liver.

And all for what?

For stealing a little fire to lighten things up?

I’m this phoenix of a heretic

addicted to a stake

because I have a creative desire

to be spiritually and materially fulfilled

by swallowing these hard-boiled bird-brained cosmic eggs

until I sprout feathers in the flames

and rise up reborn

like a green-winged fern

from the ashs of a forest-fire.

I once lived on Jerusalem artichokes

and pickled fiddleheads

that tasted like the sour notes

of vinegrette violins screeching

like fingernails down a blackboard

for a whole month

when I lived organically in the country

painting en plein air with the New England asters.

And every September

late in the month

the Ojibway would leave food and tobacco

at the eastern door of my burial hut.

Until my bones were dust

they couldn’t free my ghost.

After that

thanks to the transmigration of souls

in the bodies of birds

I could get around like a Canada goose

heading south

or back to the West Coast

where I’m originally from.

Now I’m stuck here

like a deflated birthday balloon

or a used condom

waiting for someone to come

who isn’t.

And doesn’t have a clue

what that means to me.

How the universe will change shape overnight

and space will turn its empty pockets out

like blackholes and belly-buttons

full of lint and tobacco crumbs

and all my energy will intensify into dark matter

multiplied by the squared velocity of light

leaving the theatre in panic on the first night

I asked the audience to put itself in my place

and try to imagine

just imagine

just once for my sake

what it’s like to be me

trying to hold a mirror up to nature

like a moonlit lake

in full lotus

meditating on a koan

with my life in great doubt

hoping to break it open

like the sound

of one hand knocking on a door

in an earthquake.

But it’s been my experience

there’s more enlightenment

in the twisted wisdom

of the demented fortune cookie

at the side of your plate

that insists it’s a seashell

worth listening to

on a deserted beach somewhere

life isn’t waiting on a doorbell

than there is in the great ball of doubt

I’ve swallowed like the cosmic glain

of a petrified Pterodactyl egg

that hasn’t got the beak

of Rinzai master

to break through its shell

with a single liberating shout.

Katsu!

Cat soup!

and put an end

to the pain in my gut

by eating me from the inside out.

The thing I like most about fortune-cookies

compared to koans

is that after you’ve heard your fate.

The buyer’s late.

You can always eat the messenger.

Half the world is grass.

The other half is grazing.

Grass turns into grazer.

Grazer turns into grass.

How can life be a food chain

if it’s always got its ass in its mouth?

If you are what you eat

and you eat nothing

who are you?

Where’s your i.d.?

Put an x next to the zero

beside your name

and move on.

Life isn’t a chain

it’s a food circle

and I’ve got

more wheels of birth and death in me

than Ixion in hell

or the rain.

The mind eats the thought.

The heart eats the feeling.

The eye eats the picture.

The ear eats the word.

The landlord eats the rent.

The Christians eat God.

And the world goes to bed at night hungry.

And I’m the last scarecrow standing

who mastered birds like words

to scare them off

but wasn’t prepared

by any stretch of the imagination

or higher education

or this life in art

for the famine and locusts

that ate Egypt.

If you are what you eat

and life’s got its tail in its mouth forever

like a snake

then the opposite must also be true.

You are what eats you.

I’m consumed by a hungry heart

with an appetite for life and light

as big as the universe.

I set the table

like the composition of a still life

and I eat my own

like the stone Cronos ate

in place of Zeus

so Zeus wouldn’t take

Cronos’ place

in line at the foodbank.

I don’t know who to thank

for what I’m not about to receive

but you can see it on my face

like a blackhole

that hasn’t tasted a star in weeks.

My life in art

is a cannibal

that says grace

over an empty begging bowl.

No sale.

I stick a fork in it

and swallow me whole.

PATRICK WHITE

THE DRUNKS HAVE STOPPED SHOUTING

The last of the Saturday night drunks

have stopped shouting at each other blocks away.

A five minute interlude

and then back to the play.

The angriest of the two

is the one who’s hurt the most.

You can hear it in his voice.

He wants to freeze his pain cryonically

by killing someone

and wake up a thousand years from now

with tears in his eyes.

Not until you’ve lived long enough

to regret it

is your victory complete.

To learn from your defeat is easy

but how few can learn

from their supremacy

when things go well.

The brighter the light

the deeper the shadow.

The mountain is buried in its valley.

The knife in its wound.

The poor man digs the rich man’s grave

and doesn’t feel inferior.

The one with the most

is the one who feels

everything that’s lacking.

The one who has nothing

and gives even that away

is everywhere fulfilled.

Her life is inexhaustible

because it’s not her own.

Nothing.

Not a sound now.

Peace in this little room

immersed in a vast darkness

with the lights on.

A night on earth alive.

What’s that worth?

Immeasurable wealth

squanders the stars.

Everyone in town

has long since sunk

into their own sunsets

to go talk to the witchdoctor

about their dreams.

This must be what it’s like

to come back after you’re dead

and find everybody sleeping.

But it’s not the waste

of a good encore

because they all seem

like children somehow

to the nightwatchman

on the graveyard shift

who puts his flashlight

up to the window like the moon

and looks in on their innocence

knowing everybody will wake up from it

like the wrong dream in the morning

to live the nightmare

they think they need to be

to expect good things from life.

Even the worst of them.

How trivial it must seem

to the rest of the universe

this simple drop of time

hanging over the abyss

of a fathomless watershed

like an eye that can take it all in

and not be overwhelmed

by the dark sublimities

and cosmic distances

that don’t end in thresholds

it humanizes intimately within

as if it were throwing its arms around

dangerous strangers.

What a feat of being a human is.

However they try to deny it.

Surely the stars must be impressed by now

even if we aren’t

after so many millions of years

with how much darkness

we can take in like raw ore

and finding our eyes in it

like emeralds and sapphires

like diamonds in a sample core

refine it into pure seeing

such that sight is a kind of love

and wonder never casts a shadow on anything

that isn’t spontaneously illuminated

by the sidereal depths of our awareness of it.

The terrible forges of our wounded passions

can hammer out our differences like weapons

on the anvils of our hearts day and night

and the awful pulse of martial time

turn blood into a war industry

but who among them yet

has made even so much as a dent in the light

or conquered that imperium of shadows and eclipses

that threaten to oppress them from the inside

like quislings in their own ranks

who eat from the same plate

that raised them

like assassins and parasites

mustered and mobilized for mass suicide

as if the black cool aid

they drink from their own bad wells

were enough of an elixir

in the Jonestowns of the world

to turn into the bridal wine of a happy afterlife

with the children they say they do this for

and look forward to

already dead at the foot of the wedding bed?

Who among these

who have forgotten the generosity of water

are not thieves in the night

who steal from themselves

that which was already provided?

Bad mad sad people.

How imperfectly we’re here together

and how immaculately gone.

Why not give your troubles up

like a broken clock you can’t fix

and taking time off

leave it in the hands

of eternity to work on

like a retired uncle in the backshed

who likes to tinker with modern hardware

using out of date tools

and enjoys being useful?

Why keep the galaxy awake next door

with this supernova of words and wars

even as the dawn approaches

so you can’t hear the birds singing over it?

Sweet ones ugly ones poor ones insane

I no less nor more than you

my caustic brothers

my bitter sisters

know that honey doesn’t drip from fangs

and butterflies don’t know how to talk to spiders

and the feathers of love

have evolved from the scales of pain

and the sublimity of the profoundest child

is just a bell that eats its own afterbirth

like a voice eats its echo

a buddha shy of delusion

as the emptiness of life

begins to flood his mind again

like a bad memory

of enlightened chaos and nirvanic confusion.

It’s true that no one gets out of here alive

but more to the point for the moment

no one who stays can play

without getting wounded.

We bump into things.

We scrape our knees.

We skin our elbows.

We stub our toes on foreign cornerstones

in our haste to escape each other

and pull the wings off angels

mistaking them for flies at the window.

Goliath’s got a glass eye

and David’s out of stones.

Sweet ones sleeping like new moons

in the arms of the old

I ask you

without self-righteousness

why is affliction our favourite amusement?

Why do we turn our backs

on the original light we were born into

and seeing something it falls upon

we don’t like or understand

suspend our radiance

and shrink into ourselves like black dwarfs?

Why do flowers that were asked by the stars

before bedtime

to open their hands to the light

to see if they’ve washed them right

when darkness comes

close up like fists

they shake in the face of the night?

What window hasn’t been broken

in the house of light?

Is it any wonder

we live like abandoned shadows

of the things we could have been

alone with what’s become of us

each in a private orphanage

with a candle in a window

that doesn’t believe anyone is coming

and muttering something in its solitude

about the emptiness of life

and its lack of breath

sucuumbs to death?

If you can read the whole history of the universe

in a single grain of sand

what can you read in a human?

Isn’t it clear by now

there’s nothing you can understand

that isn’t a womb

that’s already given birth to you

fire wombs

water wombs

habitable planets

with amniotic atmospheres

and within each and every one of us

entire lifespans of aeons of stars?

We are the afterlife of the light.

We are what comes to life

when the light reflects upon itself.

Even a single thought about nothing

on a Saturday night in a small town

after the bars have closed

and the cops have taken

your keys and belt and booze

transcends all that shining

the way the mind transcends the eye

that sees it

but doesn’t know what it’s looking at.

Respect the labour of the stars

that has gone into you.

Derive your self-esteem from that.

Walk in the world

as if you were their finest achievement to date.

Be a good candle.

Illuminate things that the light can’t see.

And be grateful to the darkness within you

that deepens the night

to enhance your lucidity.

Stop painting the lense of your telescope

with what you want to see

or think ought to be there.

Stop trying to frame your mirages

and put yourself in the picture

by clarifying who you really are.

You can’t look at a tree a cloud a flower a star

or a wayward firefly

without meeting one of your ancestors.

How could you not feel you belong here?

How could you not feel at home

even in the death house

when it’s stacked

like a Mongol reason to surrender

outside the city walls

with your progenitors’ prophetic skulls?

Cosmology is the psychology of the stars.

Pisces is a mental paradigm

not just two dim fish that shine.

What you see when you look at a tree

is you standing up for yourself among others

reaching out to the light with open hands

as many as the leaves

that spring from your dendritic thoughts

about dragons that eat the moon to make it rain

and what your roots really think

about all the fruitless pain

they had to go through

all the death they had to transform

all the eras of living underground

in the name of something higher than themselves

just to raise you up out of the starmud

to greet the sun with birds

as one of its own.

No one’s born

with a silver spoon in their hand

or a horseshoe up their ass

and no one’s given a chainsaw for a teether.

The way you see the world

is the way the world sees you.

You’re living in your own painting.

You’re the monster in the dark

that stalks you like a theme park.

You’re the keeper with the keys.

And you’re the empty cages.

And if someone were to ask you

how old you really are

wondering what act it is

you’re all ages of the universe.

Even as a child

who could keep track

of how many stars

you had to blow out on your birthday

just to keep a secret to yourself?

The stars have brought themselves

like lamps to a geni.

Now make a wish

that’s worthy of your powers

and live as if

it were already true at conception.

Stop belittling yourself with your own deception

or has Gulliver lived so long among the Lilliputions

he’s come to think of a million weak threads

as one strong nose-rope in his own hands

he couldn’t get around without?

Two drunks braying like bad asses on a Saturday night.

The donkey looks into the well

and the well looks back at the donkey.

Why spit upon your own reflection?

How many mirrors

need to drown in it

before you realize

that your eyes

are the furthest that the stars have ever seen

into the amazing potential of light

and the perennial beginning

of the original insight

that has grown like the universe into you?

Can’t you feel the starless vastness

of the spaces you encompass within

like cold windows

no one’s every looked through

waiting for you to break through them

like stars with an overview?

Don’t go down to the great sea of being

with a tall ship and a star to steer her by

if your eyes are only waves and tides

washing drunken sailors up like cosmic cinders

on the shores of your eyelids in tears.

Whether you’re living in a tidal pool

or swimming through stone

or thriving under the cataracts of Antarctica

or the deserts of Mars

your seeing is the water of life

the miraculous fires walk on like stars

to prove their faith in you

or the moon when she’s plumed like a Byzantine bird

in silver feathers of light

or the sun in a splendour of white gold

when it’s out in public

or slumming in its Joseph’s coat

at the bottom of a dry well

when it gets a chance to be alone.

Your seeing is the dreamwater

of the mindstream all things drink from

and see themselves in.

And there’s no more distance

between you and them

than there is the moon’s reflection

the moon

and the water it drops its blossom on.

Or as they say in cowboy Zen.

Live up to your stars not down to your spurs.

You don’t need to break Pegasus in

like a nasty jackass

when you already know how

to ride it like a constellation in the wind

with two hundred billion stars under your saddle.

Life is a fragile filament

between being and non-being

between seeing and not seeing

a shaky suspension bridge

a snakey spinal cord

plugged into the dragon fire of the stars

and yet look at the immensities it spans

and the gaping abysses it illuminates

like the eye-sockets in a skull

that went to sleep like an urnful of fireflies

with the taste of ashs in its mouth

and woke up like honey in a hiveful of stars.

The real magic of the first word wasn’t light.

It was let there be eyes

let there be grammars of seeing

that can arise out of what can’t be said

like dark matter

and express themselves so lucidly

they can summon worlds into being

even the darkness never dreamed of

just to listen to the light singing to itself

as it delights in you like a hidden secret

a masterwork

it wants to be known

like an enlightened way to live.

Not a will to power.

But a will to give

with more reasons to live

like fireflies and stars

dancing on the waters of life

without going out

without leaving scars

than there are

to kill your brother

your sister

in the grip

of your own fangs and claws.

Shoot your stars out like streetlights

and narrow your field of vision

like the eye of a needle

in a voodoo doll’s gaze

with hatred

and the chump-change

of inflationary payback

and then say you don’t know why you did it

but you had good cause.

Maybe you didn’t get laid.

Maybe she went home with someone else.

Maybe he’s cheating on you with your sister.

Maybe you didn’t mean to hear

what he didn’t have to say

and you both walked away

misunderstood.

Maybe you wanted what wasn’t yours

and you turned yourself loose

like killer bees

on the children of Iraq.

It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t last.

It doesn’t have a future

to remember its past.

It’s a solar flare

too weak to escape gravity

turned inward

like an ingrown hair

to fester.

It’s depravity.

It’s the obscenity of loveless ignorance

throwing acid in a child’s eyes

for knowing how to see

and learning to read.

It’s the jawbone of an ass

braying as if it had just seen

the holy ghost desecrating its grave

like a judas-goat making love to its prey.

The first function of the delusory ego

is to underwhelm you

with the conviction that quicksand

is a better cornerstone to build on

than the universe on which you rest.

Star-crossed lovers

wait for the traffic lights to turn green

but there’s a pettiness to their passion

that won’t wait for old ladies in a crosswalk.

Love isn’t a relative thing.

It’s absolute.

It gives you a rose

like a blood transfusion.

It knows what the others only suppose.

It’s bosons beyond that.

It’s the God-particle everybody’s looking at

as if dirt just got in their eyes.

Love is so relevant

it can’t be defined.

Deny it in yourself

like an unspeakable vulnerability

and you’ll wind up knocking

like a stranger with a foreign policy

at your own back door

and even your own children

won’t recognize you

as they stay bolted in their minds

and don’t answer.

You’ll end up asking flowers for a password

before you open up.

If you’ve got your hands up over your eyes

because your eyelids aren’t enough

to shut the light out

when you’re so blinded by your own blazing

you can’t see anyone else

you’ll undoubtedly think of love

of compassion

of understanding

of wisdom

as the sickly sweet sap

that gets the wasps drunk

on an over-ripe apple

that took the fall for all of us.

You’ll turn your nose up at it

as if you just got a whiff

of your own corpse.

And you’ll still be as mean

and green and bitter as you are

on a dead branch in winter

without a blossom for a shroud.

Love is more fundamental than space.

More sublime than time.

Love is rooted in the light

like a lucid intelligence

that loves at first sight

everything it’s aware of.

It’s the one wave

that’s not a condition

of the weather or the sea.

It’s the universal frequency

of creative ecstasy

not the echo of an s.o.s.

from the afterlife of the universe.

It’s the cosmic muse

that inspired energy and matter

from the very beginning

to transcend themselves

by fulfilling their unlimited potential

in actualizing me and you.

Love’s got one-way eyes.

It can take a death threat

and turn it into a love lyric

but never the other way around.

Things always look bigger

at either end of its telescope

because it looks at stars like a sky

looks in the mirror

and sees the jewels of insight

making new myths up

around fires it lit a long time ago.

Be kind.

Be compassionate.

Be spontaneously generous

as if everything of any true value

were free for the asking.

And when you speak the truth

and it wounds

make sure the d.n.a. on the knife

isn’t your own

when you fall upon it karmically

and your words aren’t bugged

to bear witness against you

when they turn on you

like mafia dons on the mob

who know where all the bodies are buried.

Truth is a vine that liberates

laughter and wine

among enemies and friends alike.

It doesn’t talk like barbed wire.

Truth heals.

Love empowers its words

like the leaves of an antidote in the jungle.

Love’s never known a lost cause.

Its effects go well beyond

event horizons

on starmaps for the blind.

The stars are bright in the mind mirror

because love makes them shine

by a light that’s deep within you.

Even with your eyes shut

and no moon no stars no sun no lamp

your dreamscapes are illuminated.

Light upon light.

Mind upon matter.

Love upon life.

Fire on the water.

You’re the painter and the paint.

You’re that.

You’re not just a survivor.

You’re not an aside to a theme

that doesn’t include you.

You’re the climax.

You’re the highlight

that goes on at the end

of a work of art

and transforms

everything that went before

from the underpainting to the midtones

and all the greys and all the colours

all the stars and leaves and people and clouds

all the leptons bosons hadrons and quarks

all the starfish galaxies

the whole composition of the universe

with all its still lives

and gestural expressionists

ploughing the sky with a brush

and sowing it with stars

and the momentary tents

of the firefly zodiacs

at the lighting of the lamps

to show you whatever way you take home

you’re not alone.

You walk in the light.

And the light walks in you.

And two makes a gift of a gift to everyone.

Myriad petals open

and one flower blooms like the universe.

And the shadows of its blessings are not a curse.

PATRICK WHITE

A CANADIAN POET SINCE YOU ASKED

A Canadian poet since you asked.

I’m madder than the landscape.

Glaciers have scarred me

retreating north like my father.

My heart has been shaped by neo-lithic chisels

into a dolmen of Michelangelo’s David

with a silver bullet and a rock in his hand

and the determination of a statue

who refuses to be intimidated by a scarecrow.

The end of an ice age.

No leftovers.

The platter scraped clean as the Canadian Sheild.

Savage runes carved in rock by rock.

Older than the Rosetta Stone

my silence is indecipherable.

I mean marrow.

I mean broken bones.

I mean blood on the snow.

The moon comes like a nurse to the wounded pines

and applies a cool poultice of light to their limbs

in a season of storms

when the lake raves

and the fish dive deeper into themselves

and the bears huddle up under their layers of fat

in caves they’ve turned into dreamwombs

and I burn underground like the root-fire

of a radical evangelist

among survivalist cedars

gathering under tents of snow

to be born again in the blood of the Caribou.

There are more heretics in the wilderness

than there are saints.

Whatever it takes to keep warm.

There are nights when my spirit is so cold

it congeals on my eyes

like breath on a windowpane

and I’d say anything

without amending an iota of it

just to be burnt at the stake

and thaw the chandeliers of frozen tears

that hang over me like the sword of Damocles

or the brittle radiance of the Pleiades

where they pick glass apples from sapphire trees

or the crystal castles of Arianrod in Corona Borealis

where everything turns like a Sufi top

but no one ever gets vertigo

and the Celts pay back money they owe the dead

after they die

if you can imagine that.

I make a significant Doppler Shift in my lifelines

and heaven sees red.

I am a Canadian poet

and my wingspan

is the sky over Saskatchewan.

I’m the firemaster of the staghorn sumac

when it rises like a phoenix in the fall

and then I’m a bird in the chimney

like a word stuck in my throat

I can’t recall

but it had something to do

with a wishbone and a harp.

I’m not the nice guy everyone purports me to be.

I’ve got the manners of a mountain

and the emotional life of the sea

and if I seem happy to meet people

it’s only because

it sometimes gets as lonely here

in the vastness of this snowblind no man’s land

as an icebreaker

shattering imageless mirrors

like cataracts in Frobisher Bay.

I’m a warm house

that opens its door to strangers on a cold night.

I bond like fire and shadows to anyone

against the impersonal inclemency of the weather.

That said

no man is Baffin Island

but there are foreign submarines

breeding like pods of killer whales all around me.

Explorers have been planting flags here for years

like artificial flowers in real gardens

but they keep getting lost in the holocaust of maples

gliding through no man’s land

behind a barrage of pine-cone artillery shells

to overun the hill

like October assaulting Vimy Ridge.

What the earth teaches us here

like a female warrior shaman

is the hard love of an exacting mother

that no one owns

and can’t be possessed by another

because she’s got thresholds like timberlines

even a wolf can’t cross

and a memory like the Arctic

if she’s taken for granted

or real estate.

I am a Canadian poet.

White gold

from English ore

and uranium from the French.

The raven trickster of native lore.

The sacred clown.

The dangerous taboo

that lives too deep in the woods

for anyone to break.

I am a Canadian poet.

I marry knives like superstitions

that are meant to protect me from myself

but the moon keeps baiting my lovelife

with sexual acts

to trap and trade me in

like the skin of a mink

for a double-bladed ax.

I am a Canadian poet

with multiple identities.

A multilingual polyphrenic patriot.

A chameleon with a passport that’s turning green.

because it’s spring here

and the lilaceous asphodels are up

but the seasons change like manic moodrings

and by the fall I’ll be burning my i.d.

in a protest rally of disaffected leaves

just to balance things

between Cain and Able

heaven and earth

murder and sacrifice

in a fair-minded farmboy kind of way

where everyone gets their ten minute say before God

and then sits down like the House of Commons

to break meat and wheat

salt and bread

loaves and fishs

or barbecued burgers and hotdogs with the crowds.

I am a Canadian poet.

I was cooked like a kid in its mother’s milk.

I grew up on the scraps they threw under the table.

I’ve learned to sing

like a streetcorner guitar case

that belts it out

like an open coffin at the Last Supper

where all they ever eat is flesh and blood

and I’m a desert on a diet

that’s not into moral food.

If religion wanted to do my generation any good

it should go confess its accusation

to a world it’s misunderstood

like a child it won’t admit

is the issue of its own miscegenation.

I am a Canadian poet

from a big country with with an aquiline overview

of human nature red in tooth and claw

and like you

I am a citizen of the same abomination.

I arm myself to go to peace.

I talk myself to death

instead of committing suicide.

When nobody wants to know you

what have you got to hide?

There’s no risk in being open.

And yesterday always tells me the truth

about why it lied to my youth

about why the windows were weeping for the future

like a skull with glacial lakes for eyes

and a place on the totem

they keep for the dead

where I just can’t seem to get ahead

of my own prophecies.

Here’s one.

Stick a fork in it.

I’m as done as a barbecue in hell

and that doesn’t mean I just don’t feel well

it means I can feel the flesh slipping from my bones

like snow off a roof in a spring warm-up

and all I’ve got to live on

is recalled food for thought.

I’m grateful for everything

but sometimes it’s hard to know

what to be grateful for

when everything tastes like a foodbank

or Canadian culture

with the government for a muse.

For nearly fifty years

I’ve burned like a furnace

with the mouth of a fountain

firewalking across the waterstars.

There’s no axle on the wheel of birth and death

but for years I’ve been spinning it in the mud

thinking it might go somewhere

if I drive hard enough

but all I’ve done

is carded and spun whole cloth like Ghandi

from cottonmouths and fer de lance

meant to regulate the baby boom in slaves

like a cottage industry.

Now the skin I wore

like Yeats’ coat of old mythologies

in the fools’ eyes

to cover my enterprising nakedness

fits like the shroud of Turin

in a snakepit of sewing machines

that keep testing my bloodstream for plutonium.

It’s hard to learn to walk on water

when it’s high tide without any waves

and you’re always falling through the ice

too far from shore to risk a rescue.

When I’m cold enough to take my own advice.

I am a Canadian poet.

Second to none.

Because more than any nation could encompass

I’m first and foremost human.

And though it’s my brain

it’s not my mind

anymore than the wind is

and what it thinks

is not my personal property

to put my name on

and say I own this.

Sooner say you own the leaves in fall

you can at least take a rake to

and gather up and dispose of

like junkmail that came to the wrong address

than say this thought is mine

and that thought is yours.

You make a fist

of an open hand.

You begin to live behind closed doors

to keep yours in

and theirs out.

You concoct wars

that get out of hand

to change their children’s minds.

Wasn’t King Canute

and Britain when she put to sea

enough to convince anybody

that if anyone did rule the waves

nobody told the waves?

It’s the same with your mind.

How are your wavelengths

any different than those of the sea?

It’s like a star saying I own that light.

And I’m the one who decides whom it falls upon.

I am a Canadian poet.

The light is free

as it always has been

to create anything it wants to.

And though they’re my eyes

who can say the seeing

belongs to them alone?

You get the pointless point

of cowboy Zen?

I’m not a fountain pen

with blue blood for ink.

I say what I think without a blotter

to wipe my mouth clean of what I’ve said

like snow melting on the red oak in the woodshed

because it can’t take the heat

and wants to get out of the fridge.

I am a Canadian poet.

Wilderness flowers.

Fireweed after every conflagration

and columbine in the ashs

that didn’t know what else to grow.

And I suppose I should say something corny

about wheat and beavers and maple leaves and Mounties

and all that

but you already know and besides

at the bottom of all these totem poles

and reformed trees

that went to A.A. for drinking too much

I’m a lot more complicated than that.

I’m more dangerous

than any hardware store

you’ve ever met before.

And one thing about being born into a country

with enormous natural resources

like a mouse in a well-stocked pantry

you can afford to be seen

being kind and considerate to the poor

or as I do

scream murder

when I hear them being killed on the news.

Orpheus picks up his guitar in the corner

and begins to sing the blues.

See what I mean?

It’s obscene to be so decent about suffering

you raise both hands to stop it.

Every quarter given that was asked.

No surrender.

In this country that makes me an iconoclast.

Stand fast in the name

of any deception you disown

and you’re an outlaw

bad to the bone.

In literature class

they teach you to kiss ass anapestically

at wine and cheese soirees

making small talk awkwardly

across language barriers

with cultural attaches

after the reading

after the hour you spent

listening to cement

lament some lost cornerstone

that brought the house down

like the government

when she just couldn’t shovel

or churn it out anymore

and pretend it was butter

and good luck woman

made for the door.

He wants to call her a whore.

But he’s too nice for that.

So he talks about her poetry

as if it were as flat-chested

as she believed she was

playing to her worst fear

like paint ball

in suggestive overtones of camouflage.

A whole hour

waiting for one good line

that isn’t about making jam

or bleeding maples for their syrup

and how to flip a pancake like a lyric

over an open fire on the shore of Canoe Lake

where Tom Tomson drowned

standing up in his birchbark

to take a piss

or being hit on the head with a poker

out of jealousy

and somebody swapped his body with an Inuit

so its hard to intuit whose ghost was left

to give the creative seance of poets on tour

a sponsor to write about.

I write from the inside out

not the outside in.

I put the pauper before the prince

because I don’t like dressing up for royalty

and my girlfriend couldn’t afford a hat to meet the queen.

She was a hell of a human being

but she had rude hair

that wasn’t familiar with protocol.

She could paint like Frieda Rivera

or Georgia O’Keefe

but she was raised on welfare in Westmount

and didn’t think she needed a hat

to go anywhere

except when it rained

and even then she didn’t mind getting wet.

Things are so bittersweet here

you’d think everyone kept killer bees

and a hive was as good as a muse

to poets as dormant as smoke.

They all burn cedar boughs in a bucket

they swing like pioneer incense

to chase the bats out of the attic

across the road to their neighbour’s house

who answers them in kind with odes.

But I’m not a turtle crossing.

I am a Canadian poet

with low enough self-esteem

like the sea at the foot of the mountains

to compel me to abuse myself

by pursuing an earthly excellence

that’s always a threshold beyond

my material means to achieve

but works wonders for the spirit

you wouldn’t believe.

I can conceive gold easy enough

when I write like the Yukon

but I live like ore

at the bottom of an abandoned mine

that was staked out by alchemists years ago

like base metal trying to strike it rich

without having to be philosophical about it.

I am a Canadian poet.

That’s not a fact.

That’s an interpretation.

And I’m turning it

like a jewel in the light

to see if that means

I’m the right man for the wrong nation.

Nature or nurture.

Dynamic equilibrium

or the membranal equivalence of hyperspace

blowing bubbles that pop like worlds?

The same eye by which I see my country

is the same eye by which it sees me?

I can live with the ambivalence if need be

but what I can’t stand

is the artificiality of the collective unconcious

when it starts adding flags and logos to its archetypes.

Jung would weep himself to sleep

every night like a recurring nightmare for years

or turn into an advertising executive

just to see how polluted things can get

when you leave the farm to an idiot.

You end up threshing waterlilies

and the engineers can’t help

competing with beavers

to see who can build the most dams.

I am a Canadian poet.

I think like Montreal

but I feel just like Toronto

with Vancouver for a spiritual life

and Ottawa for a conscience.

But I’m most at home in the backwoods

with flowering weeds and islands of trees

the farmers circumnavigate with ploughs

with little things that go on in the grass

as if everything that went on in the rest of the universe

were of absolutely no concern to them.

One-eyed Zen.

Ants on the chicory.

The fox is in its den.

I can see more space in a grain of sand

than a dragonfly’s got places

to plant pot on crown land.

And I like the way time stops

when nobody’s watching

and there’s something ageless about aging

I hadn’t noticed before

that makes me feel I’ve been here forever

and none of my questions

about what human beings are doing

walking around on the earth

really mattered anymore

now that I’ve found a place

for my homelessness

in Canadian folklore.

I used to feel trivial

surrounded by so much that was majestic.

Sunsets out over the Pacific

that put poppies to shame

and the savage pyramids of the pharoanic Rockies

too young to have an afterlife

worth the time and effort that has to go into it.

And besides

who needs hieroglyphs

when you’ve got the Burgess Shales?

I used to feel small

scurrying around in the shadows

of the tall imperium next door

under the feet of a brontosaur

waiting for a meteor

like my only hope

to get this dinosaur off my back.

I don’t have the genes to dominate a species

and evolution when you get right down to it

isn’t much of an achievement

when all it amounts to

is trying to make up for what you lack.

In art that means

there’s lots of grants for ingenuity

but none for genius.

The first painting goes up on the fridge.

The second jumps from a bridge

just to show them

how creative it is.

But that was years ago

when the only things I didn’t doubt

were trees.

I learned to weather things

like a whistling cherub in the corner of a map

that tells you which way the wind is blowing

by the gps of its cheeks.

I tasted the weather for myself

and found out all that rant

they taught me in highscool

about the pathetic fallacy not being true

was just science’s way

of looking at snow like a labcoat.

I am a Canadian poet.

It really does rain when I do.

PATRICK WHITE

HEY I MISS YOU TOO

for Alysia

Hey I miss you too

even in the midst of my disintegration

even from here

after my phoenix went supernova

in the next galaxy over

in an amazing display of candle-power

I can hear the poignance of spring in your voice

like the greening of the sumac

from the ashs of its last cremation

or Persephone come back from the gibbering shades of hell

to gather flowers under the apple bloom in the orchard

without any fear of being bit in the heel

by a serial viper in the guise of a god.

My poetic skull may be bobbing toward Mitelyne

to compare mythologies of dismemberment

with Sappho and Terpander

and ask how long

a harp has to be dried on a windowsill

before you can break it like a wishbone

with someone you love.

But don’t look back this time like Eurydice

out of nostalgia

for the death you’re leaving behind

to pursue your love of poetry

and Orpheus will be thrice-blessed

by Hermes Tresmegistus

if you keep your face turned toward the sun

like the planet I was born under on a Wednesday.

I don’t mind losing my mind

as the understudy of a wornout poetical fashion

rehearsing the dying fall of Triassic pterodactyls

on the opening night

of a murder in the cathedral

that turned an Anglo-Saxon atheist into a Norman saint

who could take a chicken from the barnyard

and turn it into poultry on a plate

like two words for the same polyglot reality.

I can put up with that

like tongues wagging behind the back

of the Tower of Babel in Biblical PsychoBabylon

but I wouldn’t want to go on

without hearing your voice

this far from home

singing to me in my native language

from a hidden birchgrove in Kamloops.

It falls like moonlight on the burnt skin

of an appreciative demon

with the afterlife of a phoenix

who’s been out of touch it seems

for longer than the light has years to go by

with the one firefly who could change

the fixed stars of his burnt out constellation

like lightbulbs in a marquee

with the eyes of a double feature

starring you and me.

Amor vincit omnia.

Antony falls in love with Juliet

and Romeo sucks the poison out of Cleopatra’s tit

and we lower and raise

the same stand-in corpse

for both balcony scenes

like Lazarus in his youth

and Lazarus in late middle-age.

Two props on the same stage.

Two wings of the same lifespan

that can be measured by a lovescene

on a single page

like a purple passage

that slipped between the lines

to write a message on the mirror in the green room

meant for your eyes only.

I’m lonelier than a flowerless wind

who’s sick of scratching at leaves

that don’t know when to let go.

O Westron wind when wilt thou blow

so the small rain down can rain?

Ah, that she were in my arms

and I in my bed again.

The creative matrix of my inner space

has been so twisted by fear and pain

its got the umbilical cord

wrapped like an anaconda

around the neck of a cyanotically blue embryo

and everything it gives birth to

is a poster child for the terminally insane

with a begging bowl for a skull.

The glass isn’t half empty

or half full

it’s been smashed against the wall

for good luck

when it got hammered

on the shots it took at itself

like a sad poet

who expressed himself like a revolver

at an exuberant Russian wedding.

What are the chances of the wet dreams

of a fire hydrant

that’s fallen in love with an arsonist

ever coming true?

My love of you is phosphorus

and though I’ve been pouring myself out to you for so long

about the depths of it

even as I’m drowning

it’s grown as giganic as the squids and cucumber worms

that line up at the hydrogen sulphide foodbanks

of the volcanic fumaroles

at the bottom of the sea.

My love of you is phosphorus

nothing can put it out.

If you were to scoop up all seven seas

with a whale for a bucket

and pour them on a star

to play it safe with a campfire

and stamp on the last embers of sunset

still nothing would put it out.

It would keep on shining like Shakespeare’s star

and not bend with the remover to remove

but grow hotter and whiter in its passion

to get through your ozone

and touch you so tenderly

with days and nights

and flesh-quaking fingertips of light

so literate they can read the braille of your breasts

in five languages

and teach the princess

to kiss the cobra on the head so lightly

it would smile and mean it.

If you were to let me shine down on you

like an elemental table

eager to turn its fundamentals into forms

like a painter looking at his brushes

and tubes of brooding phthalo blue

and alizarin crimson

like a rose listening to Billy Holiday

or a poet burning with inspiration

looks at words anew

life would spring up all over you

and rocks would live and mountains walk

and the forests thrive as they used to

when there was no one there to hear them

and the sound of one hand clapping

wasn’t a snarling chainsaw

and the things that last in life

wouldn’t be set in rings

like the tears of the earth

like caged diamonds

but left to thaw

and run down your cheeks like twin rivers

glowing with bliss

like two buddhas laughing at the backdoor

to watch the leaves falling together

like the first draft of a long book

they could say in three words

to raise the dead in anybody’s language:

Amor vincit omnia.

Love conquers all.

If your earth and water

and my air and light

your spring and my autumn

ever got intimate with each other

in a commingling of the complementary colours

of the flesh and spirit

heart and mind

what can be said by day

and what must be left unspoken

until the darkness falls

when words return to their own voices like birds

and all we’ve got left to speak with are our hands.

If this were ever to pass

rainbows would break out at night

like mad impressionists with candles in their hats

and the full moon would wash providence

up on our doorstep

like someone who survived a flood of shadows

at high tide

and found themselves marooned

on an enchanted lunar island

as if they stumbled into the afterlife or Eden

or Dilmun

and its second innocence

was more experienced than the first

and wasn’t vulnerable

and wasn’t cursed

with fiery angels at the gate

that said You can’t come in.

It’s too late.

If you were ever to let me touch your roots

with a current of light

that surged through them like a shock of life

flowers would bloom

like bouquets of radio telescopes in the night

held up to the stars in gratitude

so exqusitely expressed

that even God would think

that she was appreciated at last

and ignorant cities all over the world

living in the darkness of their blazing

would crack their concrete koans

and be illuminated on the spot

like Hispanic shadows without any papers

suddenly given a way to live with dignity

and let everybody in

and say to the homeless stranger

Hey citizen

you got a place to stay

for the rest of your life?

My heart’s big enough for all of us.

Amore vincit omnia.

Love conquers all.

If this were ever to happen

what worlds would begin without a word said

what a habitable planet we would make together

what a thriving tribute to our starmud

free to follow its own imagination into life

and you the muse that inspired it

and me the expressionist painter

who added a touch of genius to the light.

What an example of radiance

could be compressed out of

billions of years of black matter

and its brilliance astound the darkness

that thought it laboured like ore

in the snakepits of life

to bring forth nothing

but what it had already eaten.

What a surprise

it would never get over

and could never explain.

The birth of eyes.

The urgency of seeing.

A black mind mirror

with a creative imagination

as uninhibited as the sky

that gives birth to birds like words

just to flirt with the wind

and in its intimacy with the light

sees a whole new way of looking at the night.

Imagine what it would say to itself

about all the pain it suffered alone

trying to draw the sword of light

that kills you into life

out of the darkness of a philsopher’s stone

that kept knocking Goliath off its feet

like the meteorite that struck out the dinosaurs

with the fast ball of an astronomical catastrophe

that’s beginning to look more and more

like my personal history

playing Russian roulette

with my blindfolded species

like a firing squad

with five live and one blank round.

A sin of omission

that gives God an out

whenever she knocks me down.

And don’t think it’s the distance between us

that has preserved us

from the curse of familiarity.

Don’t think when you think of us

that all the miles between Perth and Kamloops

insulate us from the mundane human details

of our mystic fallibility.

I’ve met you so many times

at the edge of the knowable multiverse face to face

in a triste of time and space

so vast and incomprehensible

there aren’t enough dimensions to describe the place

or bridges laid end to end that could walk that far

to cross over the draconian abyss

that gapes like a skull at its own immensities

without losing heart

or mindstreams that could flow past so many stars

without being tempted to stop for the night

and take it easy in a mirage of its own making

with coral-lipped celestial houris

that no man has ever touched

and whose passion is renewed

by the fulfillment of desire

instead of being exhausted by it

like ashs in the fire

as it is here on earth

but not above.

The sidereal sisters of the Hesperides

with Arabic names

beds down the caravan for another night

in a desert of stars

and the golden apple of the sun goes down

and a long-faced human

picks up a handful of sand

and sees in it an oasis

and all the Mongol fountains of Samarkand

and thinks that it’s arrived in time

to hear Hafiz answer the great Khan

about the worth of the mole

on a young slave girl’s cheek

bismallah arahman arahim

and delight unequivocal death

with the poetic nuances of the answer

that saved his life with laughter.

You alone have appeared to me out here

in this available lifespan of the future

where the light can barely reach

and the darkness has nothing to teach it

about finding its way own way back to town.

It’s a long slow way up.

And it’s a short quick way down.

You can ask any apple about that.

But your epiphany and yours alone

keeps making the journey somehow

with your shadow not far behind

and everytime I look into the eyes of your apparition

I see constellations of fireflies

that you can’t see twice

exchanging zodiacs

like starmaps and dice.

So how could I ever grow bored

of caring for life with you?

How could any Hubble orbiting you

ever grow sick of stars

and try to rub them out of his eyes like sand?

How could the light ever say to the water it calls upon

at all hours of the day and night

I don’t want to take you by the hand

to the dance of life

like a bottle-nosed dolphin dating a sea otter

because I’m tired of listening

to the same picture-music over and over

as if all waterlilies were the same note

and still expect the flowers to greet it like a loveletter

instead of an empty lifeboat after everybody’s drowned?

I can swim through stone

and in the teeth of the storm

like a cat in the mouth of a dog

I know how to give up the wheel to its power

like a goldfish in the jaws of Moby Dick

that knows how to go as limp

as the dead bodyweight of a black dwarf

in the hands of an arresting officer breaking up a protest

and float that way like a heavy lift

until it lets me go

and drops the charges.

Every cubic centimeter of me

when I shrink back into my head like a star

weighs thirty tons

and there are no scales available

on either side of the great divide

between Pisces and Anubis

that could put a feather in the pan

to measure what goes on in my heart

when it’s a blackhole in the chest

of an unknowable human.

I take the low place.

I sit below the salt.

I take it all in like the sea

or a keyhole

and then something turns

and then something opens

like a door to a world

that no one knows anything about

and then I let it out

so everyone can see

everything that’s dangerous and strange about me

is only the background darkness of an overview

with an eye in the sky

that sees everything that’s beautiful and true about you.

My darkness urges the roots of the stars

to bloom spontaneously along the Road of Ghosts

where they can crowd the curb like childen

to watch the consellations pass by like floats

throwing comets out like candy

and argue like astrologers among themselves

about the one they loved the best

not a groomed hearse with a well-dressed corpse

in a celestial funeral procession sinking in the west.

If you never let the darkness in

how can the stars come out?

If you take the pain and decay and darkness away

how will the waterlilies ever manage

to enlighten the swamp

by what they don’t say.

How could a poet ever esteem

the face of his muse

and paint it in stars

mixed with mud for a binder

if darkness never falls?

Lost in the dark

the world sets out to find you.

At home in the world

the dark is there to remind you

it isn’t just the light

that reveals where you’re hiding

but there are coalpits too

black as night

that shine with diamonds

like starmaps for the blind

who know exactly where to find them

when they look at you.

Alysia in the sky with diamonds as big as Betelgeuse

aging in the top left hand corner of Orion

laying its card down in the west

to trump Lepus the Rabbit

who makes a clean getaway

because Orion always overbids his hand.

The club’s overdone

but it’s the sow’s ear that hangs from his belt

like a shrunken head with a wisp of hair

hanging on like a nebula

or a human souvenir from the Vietnam War

that interests me the most.

How moody hydrogen

can give birth to the stars

out of next to nothing

and making a womb of an ear

turn it into a silk purse.

That’s an art I’d like to master.

I could turn my life around.

I could be profound and listened to

at everybody’s else’s expense.

I could eat.

I could pay the rent.

I could keep a car on the road

and not worry about getting into an accident.

But you see how it goes with me?

One thing turns into another and another and another

until even the sky

trying to get a fix

on which one of all these transformations is me

which is the dragon and which is the phoenix

and who’s the firefly

looks at my reflection as my mother often did

like an exhausted mirror

or the sea

looks upon its crazy waves

and the unseatable chaos of life

that boards the schoolbuses of her lunar tides.

Who could blame her?

My maternal disclaimer.

But she was right about everything.

Paddy you’re never going to amount to anything.

There’s too much of your father in you.

Everything’s been making me up ever since then.

I was defiant enough not to be hurt at the time

but once time wheeled me out of intensive care

I became aware of how wounded I was

and as my friend Layla said

time heals nothing.

You just learn to live around it

like a boulder in a stream

that fell from space

with signs of life in it

as if the earth got in the way of your heart

when it was cast down

as it did with the demons

when it was their turn to burn

though they’ve made a bigger impact than I have.

And the weirdness of it all

what makes it all eerily true

and puts the fearful authority

of an oracle speaking through the deathmask of the moon

in her voice

as if she were totally detached

from the Platonic abstract

of the kind of person

she was certain I couldn’t grow up to be

specifically

is that I couldn’t have asked for a better mother

and I mean it.

She bared her fangs

like the first and last crescents of the moon

and bit me like someone

who had taken her by surprise from behind.

You’re bound to get bit

trying to suckle at the tit of a volcano.

It’s one of my favourite myths of origin

that ever since then

I’ve been a lunar poet

with the amorous life of lava

trying to make my own habitable moonscape

here on earth

without having to pretend I’m someone else.

A place where I can shed all my masks

like cherry blossoms and rose petals

like faces that long to be somewhere else

and let them float downstream

like loveletters and suicide notes

with life as a twelve volume prelude

like the empty lifeboats of the paper poems

that went down with the ship

I’m grateful to

for dying to come to my rescue.

I’ve gone through more transformations

than you can read about

in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

And there are changes to come

that terrify and excite me

as if I were a child

listening to adults

whispering in another room

about things I don’t want to be old enough

to understand.

So if you ask me how

I’m spending my life these days

like money I don’t have

I’d say I’m wasting my time

on things that really matter.

I’ve been sitting here writing this poem

until I forget my name

for the last three nights and mornings in a row

my fingers on the keyboard

trying to keep their eighty-eights straight

listening to the picture-music

hovering over the corpse of a piano

like a departing soul

that doesn’t want to go.

And what’s so crucial about this

that other things have to wait

that are threatening to break down the door

with their demands for more

than they could possibly take?

Let them take it all.

But what’s of inestimable value to me

is that I see the morning glory’s made a trellis

of the unhinged stargate

to our garden on the moon.

And there you are like a wild rose

with indrawn thorns

admiring the weeds

for the hardiness of their flowers.

And here I come like the Kama-Sutra

with a bouquet of symbols

I’ve scattered on the wind

like seeds in the mouths of birds

to let you know

in a world where all things end in tears

like a novel that’s too heavy on itself

for its lack of compassion

toward its loss of heart

in the power of art

to form a government in exile

to keep the Pyrrhic hopes

of a lost revolution alive

like radical ghosts summoned to a seance

by an aging medium

who talks to them like refugees

in the universal language of their mother tongue.

But what really turns their heads

from the dead to the living

is you’re the only rumour I’ve heard for years

about where to begin

where to live

and how they can thrive on love

like children again

without having to stand in line

like missing links in the food chain.

I think of you as a geni in the solitude of his lamp

thinks of wishs that beggars’ would ride

if they were only horses

and my heart breaks like loaves and fishs

to feed the hungry multitudes I’ve become

living my life in arrears

to the slumlords of reality

in the name of an unheralded holy war

to liberate my imagination

like a watershed

from the dead fountainmouths of the mirrors

who talk as if they were looking forward to

the next ice age

and know even less

than the the glacial windows do

about flowing like the bloodstream of a rose

through a wounded heart

that’s haemmoraging like a watercolour in the rain

as if it were an antidote to pain.

And ass I said in a poem the other day

my art might feel as useful

as a fire hydrant on the moon

but my heart

and I’m glad

and I’ve got you to thank

when it’s inspired

by even so much

as a single firefly

of the constellation

they’ve made of you

like a chandelier in a populist hovel

to brighten the view

feels like the Milky Way

flowing through the veins of a man

who’s just given all his fixed stars

to a bloodbank

and walked away shining on the inside

because musing on the way

every ray of light he walks in

falls upon him as if it were from you

he’s not the star-crossed maniac he thought he was

but a zodiac with a good cause

and a superstition in his heart

that reason can’t detect.

A simple intuition he obeys and cherishs

higher than all the laws

he’s ever been broken on

in the name of love

above and below

to a better and more lasting effect

than anyone can know

who hasn’t been raised from the dead

by someone like you

like hidden treasure from a shipwreck.

PATRICK WHITE