FIRE FLOOD BLOOD OR ICE

Fire flood blood or ice.

The watchers are growing nervous.

The prophets are losing their voices.

The poets caw like a farce of crows

from the autumnal branches

of a scarecrow’s skeleton

as the grasslands overrun the trees of life

who dream in their fossilized heartwood

under Arctic eyelids of perpetual night

awakening slowly to the nightmare of global warming

without a hope in hell

of another cosmic ape

to stop swinging his weight around like a funeral bell

and learn to walk upright like the lighthouse of a false alarm

that came too late to avoid the storm.

The gods are asking the ants for advice.

Everyone’s wearing the mask of someone else

like the upgraded face

of a mineralized avatar into virtual reality.

The alarm clock poses as an air raid siren.

The Hubble Telescope gets busted

for distributing kiddie porn

like baby pictures of the naked universe

on the third eye of its hard drive.

There are gules of starmud

running down the candles of a black mass

like the keyholes of weeping madonnas

down on their knees

begging mercy from their tormentors

for denying them a virgin birth.

Cartels of gargoyles have pulled off

a coup d’etat of sunglasses

and posted guards on the cornices of a church

that serves black kool aid to the faithful

that smacks of licorice burning tires and oil spills.

Bodies banked like driftwood

on the concrete shores of their homelessness.

Postures of agony in the ashen Pompey

of our inner cities

modelled by Vesuvius

getting ready for the big day

they’ll be unveiled in an art museum

as part of a month long retrospective

on the geniuses of desecration

that have demonized our clay

by giving vent to their volcanic rage

like a haemorrhage of inspiration

that amputated the arms

of the experimental children of Auschwitz

and grafted them like the hands of a clock to their backs

to express the toxic ferocity of a Nazi philosophy

among the cultured doctors of Cologne.

And everywhere the bones of dismembered telephones

that hung up on death like Orpheus

when he realized he didn’t have enough minutes left

on his lyre

to make a long distance call

like two minutes with a hook

to sweet talk death

with the allure of love and music

into accepting the charges.

Do you know what hour it is?

Do you see the regata of shark fins

cruising the beach like dangerous sundials?

More children were born from women

whose wombs had evolved into body bags

in the course of the last century

than all the seedy tombs

of the unknown war dead

between Caesar and Napoleon.

The public grows nostalgic

for the rustic genocides of Hitler Mussolini and Stalin

when it was much simpler to understand

what you were being murdered for

and the secret police still made house calls

day or night

if you showed any signs of a fever

that contradicted the political prescriptions of plague rats.

Now no one knows what to hate or why

among so many candidates

trying to privatize the concentration camps

in the best tradition of free enterprise

to give a boost to the economy

by putting the shoulders of the poor to the wheel

like a slave labour force

to the solar disc of Ixion in Tartarus

by starting a war of mythic proportions.

Murder in the guest house.

Winter welcome mats

of paranoid xenophobes

wait like spiders

underneath their trap doors

to unweave the flying carpets

that cross their thresholds

like the event horizons

of blackholes

that resent the butterfly its wings

for not being cloned in their likeness

like a Canadian mosaic

of cultural icons

in an American melting pot.

They’re checking the dolls

in the arms of immigrant children

for passports.

They’re shining search lights

into the irises of refugee rainbows

and making them turn out their pockets

like pots of gold

that can be resold on the black market.

Junk bonds of lobbyists bundling people

like coyotes crossing the profit margins of the rich.

It might be harder to rise from the dead

than for a rich man to go

through the eye of a needle of Opec

like a camel through an oil derrick

like the price of a barrel of oil

but more impossible than magic or miracle

is to rise from the snakepit of the living

without getting bit like a voodoo doll

or if you’re as unlucky at evolution

as you are at love

a warm-blooded mammal in a nuclear winter

living where you work

like the undertaker of an extinct species.

I thought I saw God

dropping off loveletters to the dead last night

like shadows in the dangerous doorways of sulphur and salt

with no return address.

And then two cops

started looking in all the public garbage cans

in seriatim

with flashlights and shovels

for weapons and dope.

Evidence of the viciousness of chaos

when rapture goes wrong

and a kiss turns into a fist

and someone suffers an indelible eclipse

like a tattoo by Caravaggio

among the sprites and ghouls of isolation.

But less trivial than being awake

I was convinced I was dreaming.

When I’m not listening

to the picture-music of the mind

I’m painting masterpieces for the blind.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU ARE NOT CAST AWAY

You are not cast away. You have not been ostracized by the shards of a broken pot. You are not the torn bat wing of an umbrella in the spirit’s lost and found as the rain keeps pouring in through a hole in the ceiling as you feel the rafters heave like a ship’s hull in a storm. You have not fallen out of your constellation like a jewel or a skull. The night is not cruel to them. The darkness accepts you and when you rise in the morning. The day. Don’t greet the dawn in yesterday’s chains like spider webs you wove on a loom of dream catchers that can’t see anything without their jewels. And when have the windows ever turned you away? You stand in your doorway of shadows without any thresholds because it’s just as dangerous to go in as it is to stay out. Your eyelids are bruised bells and your heart is a scarlet rag of blood gored on a horn of the moon in a death dance with the sun. And now you feel like a ghost of yourself waiting in the anteroom of your afterlife for a doctor to tell you you didn’t survive. Love and betrayal. And the aftertaste of your sulphuric longing. The ferocity of stars you shave off the edge of the sword you don’t know whether to fall upon or kiss allegiance to. A judas-kiss. I can feel the mass of the anvil of your heart you beat things on like yourself to keep them in shape but it’s you that’s bending like space. Let the pain go. It’s a mechanical Byzantine bird in a rococo jinx wheel posing as a Chinese zodiac. It’s a viper in an hourglass you can’t train to bite other people. Give the moon back her fangs. All the known antidotes are too slow to catch up to those toxins. You’re not the turtle. You’re not the hare. There’s nothing to win or lose here. You were vulnerable. You risked the spear. You stood naked out in the open to show your lover you had nothing to hide. But no one can make a trophy of your wound. Medusa St John the Baptist Goliath Anne Boleyn and Caravaggio. You are not one of these. You have not been beheaded. Your lover has nothing to mount on his wall. He doesn’t clutch your skull by the hair and swing it like a small moon he’s enslaved in orbit. Victory doesn’t pass through the gates of the treacherous. A battle cry isn’t the hiss of an assassin behind the door. A rattlesnake under the rosebush of your heart. Two months before you had his baby your lover cut the umbilical cord like a back alley midwife with a coat hanger not a sword and now you feel like a box kite tangled in your power lines and the spinal cords of short-circuiting embryos. There are drops of blood in God’s beard and you wonder with a shudder what he’s been eating. And you long for the future you dreamed of once in paradise before you discovered you were the second mother of Eden and Lilith was the first prefiguring demon of Eve’s curse. Don’t nurse this. Don’t try to suckle a black hole. Don’t put the Milky Way on the menu of a leech that’s attached to you like a full eclipse of the moon. You’re not the blood bank of an artificial rose. Cut the tongue out of the snake and either use it as a way to witch for water in hell or root it like lightning so deep in you it can’t do anything but flower in fire. And as for leeches. Shove a match up their ass and watch them drop away like scar tissue. And don’t give the blackflies any room on your stage. Not a line in your play. Not a make-up artist a green room or an understudy. Indifference is the best antiseptic to the feeding frenzy of maggots that feed on any open wound of the heart. Don’t make a nest of thorns and razorwire to hatch the atomic eggs of innuendo and rumour. Why answer the buzzing of flies with the shriek of an eagle? Or take any account of the opinions of the fleas on a plague rat? There’s no cross on your door in the morning that’s been white-washed by nocturnal visitations of purgative angels. The moon hasn’t been stolen from your window by the furtiveness of trusted thieves. You don’t need to shed your skin for a Kevlar vest nothing can penetrate to keep the mosquitoes from flagging your blood like junkies getting a rush off your DNA like the first link in the food chain. And don’t think you have to make yourself credibly edible to be attractive. Put mascara on the eyes of a peacock and you’ll end up with a likeness of an old school Gothic rock and roll ghoul. Truth and beauty are like space and time. You have to learn to trust both the way you do your eyes. There’s no focus to seeing anymore than there is for the blind that isn’t your own mind. Don’t pry your dreams open to get them to bloom early. And don’t abuse the delirium of your innocence for not heeding a warning it didn’t have the heart to hear. Experience isn’t a sleepwalker on a collision course with a rude awakening.

Did you taste the mirages in the raptures of water that effaced you when you went down to the river to splash the acids of your tears in the eyes of your reflection? Did the mirrors break all around you like the sound of a broken word that love could not bind? Did you fall in love with the passions that took you hostage like the Stockholm syndrome? Love is a terrorist without a cause. Love never asks for a ransom that anyone can pay. Now here you are demanding proof of life even as you’re laying flowers on Ophelia’s meandering grave. And there’s nothing to save. Nothing to redeem. No vows you can take to prevent what you’ve lived like a nunnery. You can smear lipstick on the spear head that you pulled like a love letter out of your wound but that won’t keep the chandelier of your smile from bleeding like over ripe cherries all over the ground. And I know you feel denounced rejected put down. Cheated of your heart’s desire by a wishbone that cracked like a liar at the crossroads and left you standing there like the road not taken. And yes it’s more merciless than a straitjacket when space turns into glass and all that tender-heartedness is trying to swim like a goldfish upstream through a glacier. Or put the pieces of your skullcap back together like a synarthritic ice-age looking for its ancestors in the archaeological remains of a future with a bigger brain pan than that canvas of stone you paint on now in your own blood. Put your hand up to the wall and let the selflessness of the negative space say I am for you. Without really knowing what you’re pointing to. Once and for all. Be the spirit of everything you’re missing. Lover. Happy home. Adoring children. Thirty feet of asphalt driveway and a garage full of unused gym equipment. Spit-paint your dreams in black carbon red ochre and blood. Put your brand. Stamp your seal. Paste your logo. Spray-bomb your graffiti under the bridge. Make it your temple. Your shrine. Your paleolithic Taj Mahal. Your cave of Hira in Ramadan. Your Mosque of the Golden Dome with musical stalactites calling the faithful to prayer. See what you need to see to push the fish hook of the moon through your eye to get it out. Realize that you are what you need to be at every moment in this cosmic enterprise of being you. Even when you’re in that unnamed place you go to when you fuck up in hell and neither heaven nor earth want anything to do with you look the dragon in the eye like a mother eagle not a hummingbird and protect what’s young about you and your children. Show the dragon how an enraged Medusa having a bad hair day of snakes can turn a dragon’s scales into the most delicate stone feathers pressed like keepsakes in the Burgess Shale. Be the oracular priestess of the snake pit. Trust what is whispered to you like the nightsea in a shell the colour of dawn. Respect the wavelengths of the bonds of loyalty among your stars. And don’t be overzealous to take revenge should you discover a sidereal conspiracy of black holes among those you once called friends. Effortlessly the great sky bends graciously toward its extreme ends.

PATRICK WHITE

LADY NIGHTSHADE’S SUICIDE WASN’T VAIN ENOUGH

Lady Nightshade’s suicide wasn’t vain enough.

She insisted on dying for the world.

She finally stepped through the black door.

She took all that splendour of mind and flesh

and instead of going supernova to make a statement

let it shrink down into

the single snowflake of a white dwarf

in a spring thaw.

She died as unobtrusively as a wild flower perishes.

Lady Nightshade died like a whisper in a hurricane of razorblades

a candle flame

a toy in the corner

that knows when it’s time to let the child go.

She knew her greatest claim to fame

was perpetual silence.

There are some eyes so clear and radiant

the light’s too shy to enter.

There are some mirrors

that have to turn their backs on you

to show you what you’re looking at.

Lady Nightshade died like a black mass at the eclipse of a water lily

and then blew out the flames

on a skeletal replica

of the extinct candelabra

she made of her fossil remains.

It was hard to keep up with the half-life of some of her lies

but she could tell time radioactively

like numbers on a watch that glow in the dark

while the rest of us had to rely on a water clock.

She could see things coming

from the asteroid’s point of view

and when you heard her speak

of what she thought it was you should seek

among all those invisible things

we make visible through our lives

even if you only had a rag of blood

snagged on a thorn of what’s left of a heart in your body

she made a deep and lasting impact.

You looked at her

and you knew the time of night

and the weather.

In her nuclear winter

you were either a species of delusion

that went extinct

or you changed the way she did

and she was a legend among chameleons.

She was a rainbow’s worst nightmare.

With her

you weren’t deep enough into anything

until you’d dug your own grave.

She could hold your spirit up to your face

like a mirror one moment

and in the next

tear it off like a bandage on a deep wound

as if she were unmasking a new scar on the dark side of the moon.

She could make you smile like a face-painted clown

who just had his smile widened

from cheek to cheek

by a scalpel.

She was the daughter of intensity

but god help the snake

who tried to ride the dragon

by hanging on with its fangs

as if those were any kind of match

for her crescents and claws.

She could weld a forked tongue

back into a spear head

and bury it like the Clovis point of a viper

deep in the deserts of Arizona

where it would take twelve thousand years

for someone to find it

like a flint knapped skull with lockjaw.

With her it was ok to be the universe

as long as she were its physical laws

and they were at all times and everywhere

applicable and true.

And god what a body.

You took one look at her

and you knew already

you’d been sexually bruised.

She was living proof

that on the Day of Creation

when God made woman

he had a muse

and the rest of us were plagiarized

from an overdue Texas textbook

that denied evolution

was creatively collaborative and true.

The immutable faithful still profaning existence

where everything is the genome of the many

and all are the chosen few.

But Lady Nightshade was more amused by

than convinced of her own beauty.

She was too intelligent

not to use it as an index

of male cupidity

twisting their inflated multiverse

like birthday balloons in hyperspace

into her favourite kind of lapdog

as Leonard Cohen sang in the background

no man ever got a woman back

by begging on his knees.

She was the kind of hunger

that could teach a rude man to say please

and a wiser one

who’s been seasoned by the sea

under full sail

like an orchard in a storm

thank-you.

She could roll men’s skulls like dice

that always came up snake-eyes

because she could see how clearly

they were estranged from their own reflections

like telescopes that can see everything but themselves

bring the far near

shorten the mile

be the last day of the thirteenth month

in a leaping light year

that stays one step ahead of itself

like a thief of the moon

coming in through the back door

of someone else’s homelessness.

She loved to give performance poetry readings

where she’d scream at the featured guests

molesting the microphone with their monogamous poems

like the accused at the accuser

like an oracular snake pit from the audience

or a banshee at the window

Do you know how many muses

you blind assholes

have turned into social workers?

And in the barefoot silence that ensued

no one dropped the other shoe

and you just knew

those on stage

felt like the cutting edge of a new ice age

that would be the crib-death of inspiration

and thousands of baby mammoths

that would be clutched by dozy glaciers

like stuffed teddy-bears for security and warmth

for the next twenty-five thousand years

of black ice a mile high

trying to transcend itself

like a recurring nightmare.

Lady Nightshade wasn’t the kind of revolutionary

that showed her face to the world

like a mask turned inside out.

She never let her certainty get in the way of her doubt.

I remember watching her one night

after we’d made love

look out from the fourteenth floor

of the Hotel des Governeurs

at St. Denys Boulevard

lit up like a Nazdac landing strip

in the middle of the starscape

that bloomed like Montreal.

She was naked.

She was vulnerable.

But I could see a bridge in the far distance

on her right shoulder

like a threshold that was all

exit and entrance

at the extreme ends of things

always at right angles to the direction of the flow.

It arched over the river

like the Egyptian sky goddess Nut

her body night-blue with white stars

that lined the bridge like streetlamps

as fragile and delicate in the aerial atmospherics

as the eyelashes of nocturnal humming birds.

And I saw right then and there

how vastly she longed for her ghost

to ready her for death

like a lover from another lifetime

when suffering wasn’t

the only natural renewable resource

you could rely on to make a living.

A wounded hawk never asks for pity

and she didn’t ask for mine.

She was the key

that left everything open

and for awhile

we were inseparably alone

because I was the lock

that couldn’t keep anything in.

She jumped from her bridge

into the lifeboat of a coffin

and left a farewell on the mirror

written by a bleeding snail of scarlet lipstick.

I don’t know what star she was following

but back here on earth

there’s a black hole that eats its own shadow

and chandeliers of firelies

that keep putting themselves out in their tears.

Lady Nightshade never cheated her solitude

by buffing it with love.

Lady Nightshade played solitaire

with a Tarot pack of mirrors.

She saw what turned up.

Lady Nightshade followed the Queen of Cups to the block.

She said a few words

that ransomed her life with a candle.

She blew it out.

She swanned like a summer constellation

on the smoke of a distant fire.

She drowned her silver sword in the star stream

like a barrette she took out of her hair

to let it blow away like the fragrance

of something beautiful hidden somewhere

like a secret that was meant to be kept.

Lady Nightshade bloomed like a bruise.

A blue rose.

A new moon.

Dark.

Unknown.

And cherished.

And when she perished

only strangers could have guessed why I wept.

PATRICK WHITE

PLAYING RUSSIAN ROULETTE WITH THE MOON

Playing Russian roulette with the moon.

Nothing left to lose.

Nothing left to win.

Maybe it would advance

my literary career.

Everybody loves a dead poet.

And I’ve been putting it out

for the last forty-eight light years.

Mongolian immensities of agony.

Nothing less than everything all the time.

Through wives kids lovers afterlives

and more excruciations and devastations of myself

than even I can comprehend

how they’ve twisted space around me

like an anaconda

trying to make me bend.

Feast or famine

I’ve refused to equate

my financial situation with my emotional life.

And I hear from my compeers I have no common sense.

But then they haven’t been endowed

with the crazy wisdom I have

and I can see the assassin

in the shadows of their advice

even when they disguise their true intent

by wearing rose petals for eyelids.

Intense but ultimately irrelevant.

Most things kill me deeper into life.

So there’s really nothing to resent.

And society doesn’t owe me anything

as far as I’m concerned

because it didn’t put the gun to my head

and say write.

I did that all on my own.

And I’m so used to it now

it’s as easy as picking up a telephone

and calling ahead to see if I’m still at home.

Fool, said my muse to me.

Look into your heart and write.

Good advice from Sir Philip Sydney

and I’ve done that

whether what I saw

was an oracular snake pit

this singularity of a bullet

at the bottom of a black hole

or a star map of fireflies

trying to lead me to enlightenment.

I’ve been as loyally disobedient to the muse

as inspiration clarity and courage

have allowed me to be

to the point where I feel

I’m the lab rat

and she’s the experiment.

And he obeys even as he oversteps the bounds.

Orpheus and Rilke got it right.

But the night is not a reward

and insight can be a lot more brutal than ignorance

when it slashes you

like the interactive edge

of a broken mirror

that doesn’t like what it’s looking at.

I’ve had enough of a taste of fame

to know it’s bad water

and spit it out

and I hear I’ve established my name

in Canadian literature

like a pre-paid grave

in a teachable immortality

where my remains

will be mummified in paper.

I’ve published books

and made it into Poetry Chicago

when I was twenty-six.

I’ve done my time standing up

and paid my dues

in a hundred stupid interviews

where they asked the same questions of a poet

as they would a horse vet.

I’ve been the last poet laureate of Ottawa

for the past twenty years

and I’ve got four literary awards

that don’t take themselves too seriously

and two shelves crammed with periodicals

that do nothing but sit on their hands

like literary credentials

that haven’t convinced me of anything

except how necessary it is to rebel

against my own authority

in a spontaneous west coast sixties way

that picked me up like a habit

when I went to university

to study the stars

like constellations of razor wire

with black holes

in a concentration camp fence.

And I can wince at the clown

that talked his way like face-paint

through nine documentaries

that always begin with a shot of my cowboy boots

as I’m walking down the road

desperately trying not to look

like the stem cell of a stereotype

dangerous mysterious and creatively sublime

at the same time

as kids eating ice-cream cones on skateboards

are trying to show off for the camera

by doing figure eights around me

that stop on a dime

as Gary Cooper walks down main street at high noon

wondering how Thomas Hardy would have handled this.

Point is.

In my eyes

I’ve only ever been as good as my next gig

and that’s not the measure of anything.

Forever young

I’m a constant beginner

that approaches experience like a future memory.

It keeps me empty and clear.

It’s a trick I picked up from the stars.

By the time your light catches up to your eyes

you should be already gone gone gone beyond

where you appear to be.

Don’t give them the lead

on a moving target in the dark

and if you’ve got a few to believe in

and even the mailman does

don’t believe in your own myths and legends

because the moment you do

they’ll immediately turn into a farce

starring you as a famous buffoon.

And it’s okay to render experience

communicable through form

but don’t forget that form itself

is just a special expression of chaos

the way a straight line in calculus

is just a special form of a curve.

And if you take a utilitarian approach to symbols

they become logos flags badges of rank

brands and prison tats.

The purpose of art

is to be purposeless from the first.

That’s why it can square

the abstract absurdity

of a concrete reality

with a human life in despair

playing Russian roulette with the moon

without losing its innocence.

Click.

And the sound of the empty’s

louder than the bullet

when I put my finger

on the trigger of the moon

and pull it.

PATRICK WHITE

THERE’S AN ELEGANT GOWN

There’s an elegant gown

pouring down from the shoulders

of a skeletal hanger in a store-front windowpane

waiting for someone to fill it with life.

Strange and sad to be asked

to pay more for the dress

than you would be to buy the woman

but I’ve seen the same look in an animal shelter

on the faces of the kittens

that wouldn’t be given a home.

The eagerness of so much

that won’t happen.

Women that were almost loved.

Poems that just missed being written.

Men who were the ricochet

but not the first shot.

Echoes of forgotten sounds

of voices that have long ago fallen silent.

Doorways that weren’t meant for the people

who stepped through them.

Fireflies in a spider web

that didn’t quite rise like a constellation.

Old snake skins that life has slipped out of

leaving them with an amputee’s

phantom feeling of missing limbs

or used condoms.

Who’s wasting away

in the torrid apartments

above the Sunday night desolation

of the illuminated grave goods

in the closed boutiques

buried in their own isolation?

What solitudes of genius

are peopling the air

with sagas of love and vice

in those elevated fire-traps

of municipal avarice?

What moments of disregarded beauty

are teaching the mirrors

how to paint what they see

when no one’s looking

spontaneously?

What roses disappointed

by eyes that weren’t worthy of their blooming?

The water lilies indistinguishable

from the litter of the Tim Horton’s coffee-cups

that rolled up their rims

and were thrown into the Tay.

Even among the geriatric shut-ins

whose children don’t come up from Toronto

to visit them

no matter how ill and alone they are.

Even among the orgiastic adolescents

cradling their beers like criminal grails

on the stairs of the neon pool hall

above the antiquated carwash.

Even among those

whose lonely Friday night imperatives

were fuck fight or pass out

nursing their weekends like a phone

between their chin and shoulder

in the booth outside Mac’s Milk

as if they were calling in a hot story

before the shit hits the sluglines

of who’s a slut

for turning them down

and who they’re going to pay back

for the sucker punch that knocked them to the ground.

Even among those who were elected

by secret ballots of rumour

to the ranks of the wrecked and ruined

for making a pass at all that is

consensually good and light and innocent about life

like the underground aldermen of anti-matter.

Even among all those who violate the integrity

of their self-inflicted wounds

by despising the body and mind

that made them do it

like voodoo dolls martyred by the curse they cast

upon their eyes their arms their inner thighs

as if razorblades were the ministrants

of an estranged blessing

that longed for punishment.

Even among those blinded

by the glare of their own blazing

as if they knew nothing of time but noon

what forbidden stars shine beyond their solar flares?

Who among these

in the upstairs heritage ghettoes of Perth

watching their teeth fall out on welfare and junkfood

as their children stare at them like deserted parking lots

might have found a cure for cancer

if they’d been given half an educated chance

at one precise moment in their lives

to discover how much more grievously

their minds had been deprived

by the ditch-pigs of high finance

than the troughs of their garbaged bodies?

Poverty isn’t an economic condition

or a lack of ambition

a failure of the imagination

or some clandestine punishment

wreaked by some right-wing God

because there was no lobbyist for the poor

who could make a significant contribution

to the cause of the rich

who suffer like stock markets from famines in Somalia

or suggest lucrative amendments to the Book of Genesis

so the poor would still be waiting in line

on the day of Creation

for the scraps of the afterbirth of everyone else

at the same old foodbank.

I see the propaganda of greed.

I see the merchandising of ideals.

I see art that has been turned out on the street

by cynical pimps like Andy Warhol

and how colours and words and symbols

have become the lackeys of logos

enshrined in the human imagination

like the false idols of Uruk

or the infanticidal death brokers

of Carthage and Phoenicia

of Mammon and Baal

who ate the poor kids first as always

and if that didn’t work

do ut abeas

I give so that you go away

fed them a rich man’s brats.

By the time I get to Roger’s Road

heading out to the starfields

to escape the light pollution

I’m raging like a volcanic fumarole of the sixties

on the bottom of the seabed again

where I thought things were settled

like a shipwreck once and for all

and revolution had been hung up on the wall

like an antique pistol that had made its point

like some rainbow paint ball

tamped into a hippie musket

in some abortive attempt at independence

and the end of human enslavement.

I’m wise enough to know

by a fluke of intuition

I’m not wise enough to know what new limb

we could grow in its place

that would keep the pudgy fingers of a fat chance

out of our children’s underpants

but free enterprise is beginning to look more and more

from the point of view of the poor

like a flesh-eating disease.

A black cat darts out from a thorn apple bush

and crosses my path

and I laugh to think

how much darker I am inside

than either the night or him

and how much less bad luck he can bring me

than a jinxed prayer-wheel

in the heart of a human

whose path he’s just crossed

like the event horizon of a black hole in transit.

If the gods ever had a divine sense of humour

looking at the abomination

they made of our creation

like Marduk from the body parts of Tiamat

it’s probably degenerated into a black farce by now.

Poor cat.

Tomorrow you’ll be road kill

like the rest of us.

Squashed flatter than a logo

on an empty pack of Black Cat cigarettes.

No more witches for you.

Except in magazines

when the homeless dead walk the earth

in the party hats of commercial Halloweens.

God all I want to do is look at some stars

to make sure I haven’t forgotten any of their names

in four languages

and see what flowers are in bloom

down by the river beyond Conlon Farm.

I want to pull the thorns out of my heart with my teeth

like crescent moons in the privacy of my pain.

I want to feel like less of a fuck-up on my own

than I do when I’m with people

even if it’s just for as long

as it takes the third eye of a hurricane

trying to stare down what’s raging around it

to blink and lose its nerve.

I don’t want to come down on Sispyhus

pushing his little planet up a hill

like a cosmic avalanche of asteroids

he wouldn’t have the heart or balls to adapt to

without the kind sex-change

that didn’t pitch its tent in the place of excrement

as William Butler Yeats would say

alluding to the caravanserai of love.

As above so below

but if so

why go?

Are people forced to eat shit

and call it their daily bread in heaven too?

Panes et circenses.

Bread and circuses

but who watches the watchers?

But now it’s no bread

and nothing but celebrity clowns and pundits

keeping one eye on the camera

and the other on the watchers

like the latest ratings of their very own reality show

casting wide their wavelengths

like nets in the hands of the fishers of men.

Four years of an English university education

that taught me to say things in six words

that a farmer could say in one

and how literature took its commercial revenge

upon the artist

by selling the holy relics of heretics

to the iconically addicted illiterates

who don’t know that saeva indignatio in Latin

is just another way of putting words

in Jonathan Swift’s mouth

so he doesn’t say fuck you out loud

on behalf of all the starving

sexually-molested children of Ireland

in a periphrastic English class

studying the seven kinds of ambiguity

that nourish the minds of well-read cannibals

with food for thought.

I want to be gentled by the fireflies

and have the wind pass casually by me

like an animal that knows I’m not a threat

because I haven’t moved in half an hour.

I don’t want to taste these black bitter crumbs of burnt bread

acridly cloying my tongue my voice my heart.

Someone once handed me a note

as I stepped off stage at a poetry reading

that said I was the black-robed outlaw poet priest of Canadian literature

but I’m not that kind of comic book

I’m not a farcical celebrity

that makes an art of himself

to disguise the fact

that he’s an uninspired mediocrity.

And though it made me feel

like a Chaplineque parody of Zorro for a moment

I knew from years on the street

and reading Don Quixote

that the quickest way to deceive someone

is to make them believe in an illusion of themselves.

If you want to pop someone’s balloon

expand it.

And I thought to myself

how insufferably cultural everything is

like the taste of home-made jam

when children everywhere are starving.

And how obscenely irrelevant

and perversely distractive

the wet firecrackers of our tiny heartbreaks are

trying to win an audience

for the profundity of the pain

that pricks the toe of art

to see if there’s any feeling left in the limb

and if our blood is still blue

when people all over the world tonight

are forced to eat theirs

like apples with hidden loveletters

that taste like razor-blades

at a family gathering of body parts.

I love the tincture of moonlight

on the gathering storm clouds.

I love the chandeliers of the columbine

their bells of rain

on the moss-caked rocks in the spring.

I’m still amazed after sixty-two years

at the raptures of silence

the spear heads of light

humility and wonder

that can pierce my heart and eyes like stars.

I can look at the morning glory

and see grails goblets

the soft cool skin of the moon

like opalescent lingerie spread on a bush to dry

when she stepped out of it

like the wavelength of her lover serpent last night

to renew her virginity on the sly.

And I yearn to be immersed

in these realms of beauty and awe

like a mystic junkie shooting stars

who’s always looking to get fixed up.

I’m hooked.

I admit it.

But the cool background of universal bliss

I could exist in forever

just as often as it frees my heart and mind

like unsubjected inspiration

with nothing but time on its hands

to expand into an abyss of darkness and insight

turns into the radioactive hiss

in the foreground of creation

and a savage indignation burns like acid

thrown in the eyes of cosmic elation

when I consider the atrocities

of squandered human potential

in a global society

that isn’t bonded like atoms by love

into the greater harmony of seeing and being

like Pax genes inspired to open our eyes

but is viciously sustained by an imbalance of hatreds

that is catastrophically breaking like continents and skullcaps apart

as if everyone held a pharmaceutical patent

on a different part of the disease

that afflicts our brains and hearts.

And love understanding compassion wonder gratitude

more and more were merely the slag and ore

of the unrefined

who don’t understand

like William Carlos Williams’

little red wheel barrow in the rain

beside the white chickens

how much depends upon war

upon neglect indifference greed lies

murder injustice corruption terror theft and arrogance.

I hear beta-chimps in the wild

will snatch a baby out of the arms of a female

that won’t fornicate with them

and trash it on the rocks.

But what’s that compared to us

who’ve got a big enough neo-cortex

to let twenty-five million children starve to death a year

and don’t dare think for a second

I’m just talking about food.

Sins of omission.

Obscenities of attrition.

The topsoil of the ground of being

the open commons of our mutual humanity

blown away like the dust from which we came

that we were rooted in like the nerves and arteries

that are rooted in our flesh and blood and bones.

Wasn’t it the angel of light

that shone upon the earth

and elaborated us out of starmud

so that when we look out into the incredible darkness that surrounds us

the incomprehensible intensities of chaos and cosmos

Pascal’s vast vacant interstellar spaces

we can embody those solitudes

in the nucleus of everyone of our corpuscles

as if the stars had said to our stem cells

let there be eyes

and we could see creation

as we do the Pleiades

from the inside out

each one of us

each and every sentient life form on the planet

a mystically specific insight into ourselves

in this realm of darkness and light

where it isn’t so much the vision

as it is the shining

that inspires these worlds within worlds

we look upon these days

as if we were estranged

by the works of our hearts and our hands?

M-theory says two undulant membranes

pucker and kiss in hyperspace

and there’s a big bang

and then there’s us

turning the birth sacs

of baby universes

into body bags

we stuff with heroes and their victims.

And if I were to tell you they were both

metaphors for the emptiness of the human heart

longing to be fulfilled

by the urgency of the life within them

would you be so quick to take a bath

in your own grave

to wash yourself clean of the blood you’ve profaned

knowing you’re just bad meat in your own womb

or would you make room for everyone else

to be born along with you

like a child gives birth to its mother and father

or a true gift makes a gift of the giver?

What if I said your heart’s a wishing well

would you throw the full moon down it

like a gold coin

or would you wait for it to grow horns

like quotation marks

and putrefy your own waters with a goat skull?

What if I said

twisting Jesus a bit

you are that one

that it is done unto

when you do it to the least of these?

Do unto others before they do it unto you

is a sword of iron pyrite in the hands of a fool

trying to abase the incorruptible metal of the golden rule.

And there’s no doubt

the past is as creatively mutable as the present and the future

in the timelessness of now

so what could you say to your mother

who carried you for nine months

like a blue moon waxing to full in her belly

when she looks

at the abomination she gave birth to

and there’s no alibi you can use to excuse

turning her womb retroactively into a toilet

that flushed when her water broke?

When the roots of the tree of life

are at war with the flower

don’t expect much in the way of fruit.

What if I said

before the unborn beginningless beginning

of Higgs-boson God particles

it’s always been the genius of the human imagination

to make the inconceivable believable

and then in a leap of inspiration beyond that

liveable?

Isn’t that what makes the earth

a habitable planet for all of us?

Life is a suggestible creative medium

that spontaneously adapts to us

like karma and stem cells and paint

as we express our visions of being and not being

like millions of drops of water on the grass

everyone a locket of the moon

shaped like our tears

like the billions of stars

that have exhausted their lives

so we could open our eyes and look at them

as the enlightened progenitors of our own shining.

Like billions of windows and mirrors

each looking out at the mystery of being

with their own way of seeing

in this radiant house of light.

Bitter and intense

the black-hearted prophecies

that denounce us now.

The eyeless chandelier of swords

that hangs over our heads now

like nuclear weapons in our siloes

when there should be wheat.

There should be clean water and benign air.

There should be peace and abundance

and the lyrical escapades of lovers and birds

in the unviolated olive groves of earth.

There should be books and medicine

muse and mystery.

There should be

cool herb gardens on the moon

that gently put their fingers to the lips

of wounded fountain mouths

like the healing secrets of the silence in a rainforest

we’re slashing and burning and cutting down

like chainsaws with rabies

that bites the doctor that could heal them.

Why should one human demand a pyramid

to house his afterlife

and another be compelled

to live now under a grain of sand

with his whole family

waiting for immigration to raid their birthright?

There should be houses for all like chrysales

where caterpillars can turn into butterflies

and children can make their way to school safely

through a crosswalk of thresholds

that aren’t the event horizons of the black holes

we lead them into now.

But there isn’t.

There’s just this vapid harvest of air

gathering like explosive gases

to demonize the human spirit

like flamethrowers in a snake pit.

What place is this

where we paint our faces in blood

to celebrate those we desecrate

by dressing our spirits up

in the feathers and local embroidery of our victims?

One day our hearts just run out of time like a waterclock.

One day thought is chopped off

like the last head on a hydra that can’t grow anymore

and our passions drop off

like the blossoms and radio telescopes

that keep their ears open on the towers of the hollyhocks

that listen in on the babble

of polyglot PsychoBabylon in exile.

One night our hanging gardens

just kick the stool right out from under our feet

and the long conversation we’ve been having with the stars

clicks its heels like Dorothy in the Wizard or Oz

and a Nazi appears in a krystal nacht of mirrors

and curtly stops like a reel of tape

endlessly replicating the parallel universe next door.

It’s one thing to explore the mystery of life

without expecting an answer

and it’s another altogether

to approach it like cancer

practising espionage.

Was anything heard?

Did anyone listen?

Or did our mouths just make sounds

that drowned out the shrieks and groans

of the people we slaughtered

in the roar of the aesthetics of desecration

at a Nuremburg rally

at a political convention of ideologues

at an abbatoir of Wall Street speculators

brokering commodities

trading the bundled junk bonds

of what they’ve made of people’s lives

on the electrically prodded stock exchange?

The TSX of human flesh.

The slave block of the nations.

The cave of vampiric succubbi

that incubates the nightmares

that open Pandora’s Box in a panic every morning

at the sound of a bell in a bloodbank of hell.

Go forth and multiply

didn’t mean a feeding frenzy

of sharks that eat their own.

Didn’t mean thrive at the expense

of everyone else.

Didn’t mean

look upon human suffering

as an unlooked-for opportunity to heal yourself.

There should be a book left ajar

to tell the next night’s story

like a child’s mind

and the door to her bedroom

to let the light in

and the shadows out.

There should be a boy

noticing how his telescope

looks like a praying mantis

or the skeletal remains

of a reassembled dinosaur.

There should be a library

not just a gallery

for rejected genius

and shrines to those who were martyred

by their own imagination.

There should be a tree or a fountain

or an eternal flame

dedicated like a new religion

to the unknown dignity

of every anonymous hapless human

that ever looked out of an upstairs apartment window

at the weather

at the bleak deserted streets

the unenigmatic doorways

the empty confessionals of the streetlamps

the garbage cans

the parking meters

the bright vacancy

in the dark abundance of the storefronts

the litter in the gutters

the wind keeps nudging

into new signs of life

and comparing the human condition

to what they have become

took the fall for all of us.

There should be an open field

full of wildflowers and stars

that come a little closer each night

and an innocent gate on one hinge

that knows that human freedom isn’t just a matter

of getting things out

but more profoundly

mastering the spontaneous discipline

of the ancestral art of the heart

that lets them in.

PATRICK WHITE

I REMEMBER LOVING YOU

I remember loving you.

You turned my heart into a koan I haven’t cracked yet.

You were a muse of dark matter.

A Mayan phase of the moon

that kept your predictions to yourself.

You were the unified field theory

that made me feel I knew why I was here.

That my abysmal ignorance

was the ore

of infinite enlightenments to come

each one a world of its own

we were free to start with each other.

I remember touching your skin

as if I were reaching out to a ghost

to see if it was real.

Even now after all these years

I can recall the sensation

as if I were holding

a first folio edition of Shakespeare

that no one knew anything about.

A kind of preternatural reverence

for the profound and rare

so intense that whenever we were together

I was always in the presence

of something more than real.

I saw extraordinary beauty and power

in the most ordinary things you said and did.

My will wasn’t so much

bent to yours

by force desire or cupidity

as made irrelevant.

And I remember being astonished

to see how little effect

gravity had around you.

How I bounced around

like a helium balloon

on the ceiling of any room you’d walk into.

How every time I saw you

I could feel my eyes evolve

to accommodate the vision

and see deeper into the dark.

You were such an intriguing planet

if I’d been Jupiter before I met you

I still would have gladly

abdicated from the solar system

just to be your orbiting telescope.

You were all those species of life

the Amazon keeps a secret.

Cures for diseases

I didn’t even know I suffered from

until I met you.

You were the mystery made tangible.

You were the lightning insight that cracked the mirror.

You were the perennial avatar of woman

in every universe

that was worth returning to.

I remember seeing you in the late sixties

sitting in a windowsill

with nothing but a gun and slip on

as the song Spoonful by the Cream

blared out from the heavy hippie drug house

at the top of the hill

over the whole despairing neighbourhood

like an anthem and a challenge all in one.

You smiled like the Mona Lisa

with a midnight special

enigmatically bored with the adoration

you commanded from the blind

who’d never seen anyone like you before.

You looked at me like a silver bullet

but the silence was crucial

and I knew it wasn’t time to go off.

Someone told me your name

as if they were trying to frame

a dangerous alias

but I knew you knew way back then

I could see through them

and the best way to be your friend

was to stay a stranger to the end.

Eight years later in the mid-seventies

I was invited to a field-party

that turned out to be

a snakekpit of holy rollers

baptizing the faithful with a dirty syringe

as they tied you naked to a stake

to burn you like a witch

because you were the most flammable woman in the room.

But I knew you were safe

because fire doesn’t burn fire

water doesn’t drown fire

and danger isn’t afraid of itself

but I broke a few glass fangs

like toxic chandeliers

that had gone into a trance

just in case of an emergency

to cover your back

as the whole place went up in flames.

You said I guess you expect me to say thanks?

And I said no

I don’t run trap lines

to lure my friends

into cages of gratitude.

Put your clothes back on.

I’ve got nothing you want right now.

And it was three years until I saw you again.

And it was then we connected like stars

in an occult constellation of two

and I made love to you

as if we were both on death row

for the same heresy at last.

You were the first

to reverse my spin

in a charged particle field

and show me that love isn’t perfect

until the annihilation is rapturous.

And look at me now

wherever you are

laughing or in tears.

I’ve been singing in those flames for light years

and I haven’t recanted yet.

PATRICK WHITE

WAITING FOR A THUNDERSTORM

Waiting for a thunderstorm

just me and the moon

and these deserted streets with their heritage lamps

and tungsten suns

swarming with frenzied insects

like the brain of the occasional crackhead

who’s made a hoody of the night

and pulls it down tighter as he passes

wondering whether he should have asked me for a cigarette.

Lines from sad songs like lingering smoke

from distant fires

curl through my head

like the ghosts of roads I once walked

then break off like old shoelaces.

O and the faces

like blossoms from a tree

hidden deep in the night

suddenly crossing the moon

like birds with messages and destinations

not meant for me anymore.

Kids wives lovers friends.

Imperatives of tenderness

like the first sight of her

shy and naked

and the first angry word

from his mouth

that ever passed between us

as we both stood in silence

knowing the weld

would be stronger than the original bond.

The first scar to ever write alif on my daughter’s skin

like a tiny sabre of Kufic script

you could touch

only if you were very very careful

it was so sacred

she revered it like a holy book.

The first time I ever realized

making my son breakfast in the morning

as he usurped my chair like a throne

and shrieked with laughter

daring me to uproot him

like a baby tooth

that he was fathering me

as much as I was fathering him.

And we could both feel the new ones growing in.

Evanescence of time

releasing the flavours and fragrances

of wounded flowers like cultish elixirs

into the humid night air.

Auroral phantoms of past raptures

gather and disperse

and gather again

like radiance and rain

like carnal intensities

red-shifting into the spiritual immensities

of an aging star.

A squad car slows down to check me out

and I expect any moment

to be talking to a cop

like a fast food attendant

at a drive-through window

but he decides I’m not a threat to the food chain

and cruises off.

And what could I have said to him

if he had asked me

what I’m doing out so late and alone

if I’d been in the mood to be accurate.

I’m watching water lilies

banked along the star streams

bloom and perish like Cepheid variables.

I’m remembering all the women

I’ve ever loved

teach the green phoenix

how to burn in the autumn like sumac.

And then eat my own ashes

like honey from an urn

without getting them all over my heart.

The uncontained contents

of an intimate stranger

passing the closed gates

of a more habitable solitude than mine

listening to the picture-music of his past lives

brighten the wind with fireflies

with the spearheads of weeping candles

guarding the entrance to Eden

as if there were no return address

on the uncensored love letters

that expressed the innocence

of our tragic insight

into the mutability of love.

A furtive young man bobs up

like an apple in a dumpster

in the grocery store parking lot

and stares at me

as if the whole world had root rot.

I make myself as inconsequential as I can

and pass on

wishing I had enough

to take him to Mac’s Milk

and buy him some pizza pockets

that four and twenty blackbirds

don’t fly out of

like a nursery rhyme

that’s as real to him

as the seagulls and crows

he shoos away from his garbage-can

like fierce competitors

for a place in the ark

of his peerless lifeboat.

Humans live to eat to be hungry.

Life eats life to live.

It’s incestuously symbiotic.

It’s cannibalistically psychotic.

It’s a perpetual agony machine.

The big fish eat the little fish

and the little fish have to be smart.

This one swallows like a silo.

This one steals food

from the begging bowls of children’s mouths.

And that one

makes you think

he’s as sweet as St. Francis of Assisi in poverty

as he brushes the flies off a butter tart

and smiles like grace

over something he found half-eaten

and cast away as he is.

Sweet mother of God

have your breasts withered

like the collapsed parachutes of emergency airlifts?

No more manna?

No more locusts and honey in the wilderness?

No more milk of human kindness?

No more galaxies at the spigots of your tits?

Just this ferocious squall of hot toxic vipers

falling like acid rain

down a dry wishing well

that ran out of holy water

like a gnostic mirage

in a hermetic desert of stars?

Are you past the age of child-bearing.

Are you laughing with Sarah

at the very idea of giving birth again.

Have you come to the end of your rope

like the bloodlines of great nations

in the loins of hapless prophets

sacrificing their sons to you

even though you asked for goat

in a holy war of sibling chromosomes?

Are you finished for good

with morning sickness and messiahs?

Have you had enough of immaculate miscarriages

that rise from the tomb

like a man not born of a woman?

No more loaves and fishes?

There’s a genie.

There’s a lamp.

But no more wishes?

There’s a prayer mat.

There’s an oilwell.

But no more flying carpets?

There’s a fortune cookie.

There’s a message in a bottle.

But only this afterlife of lottery tickets

and instant wins

that rip the wings off the heels

of mercurial chance

and alchemical hopes

of turning base metal into gold

with instant defeats

that are as quick on their feet

as turtles and hares on steroids?

The fruitless anomalies of a complex man

bewildered by his own helplessness

not knowing whether he should

insist on the birthright of food with a fist

or open his heart and his hand

and give everything he’s got to give

though there’s as little protein

in the names of his mythic ideals

as there is among the hungry ghosts of fame.

Estrangement and outrage.

The savaged dignity of the cornered

eating their own hearts for the courage

to face their sacrificial lives again another day

like the strategic retreat of an ice age

trying not to do any damage

as they gouge their eyes out in their dreams

and silence the birds with their screams.

Sometimes I think the radiance

I see in the stars and people’s eyes

whatever they’re looking at inside themselves

isn’t so much a function of light

as the shriek of murdered mirrors.

But way leads on to way

and by the time I get down

to the willows on the bank of the Tay

I’m alone again in my own agony

and the willows sway

and the river flows

and the eternal sky

does not inhibit the flight of the white clouds

everything in passage

a water snake riding

the wavelengths of the moon

like a mirage of dead seas in a desert.

And the deep unsayable sadness returns

to pervade and saturate the mind

with ephemerids of the heart

that resonate in time

like the last flowers of the summer.

Translucent simulacra of past familiars

who once possessed me

like occult seasons of the soul

that scattered like leaves and water birds

but made such an impression

upon the waters of my life

they’re indelible reflections

left untouched

by the summons and imperatives

of the long seances of the heart

and quick exorcisms of the mind

cooling the swords and grails of their passions

in star streams exalted beyond thought.

Focused like a drone strike

hunting frogs among the irises

a wild cat disregards me.

A fish jumps at a mosquito.

A flash of long distant lightning.

The shorter circuits of the fireflies.

Headlights slashing through the dark groves

beyond the train tracks

that intersect the road by the cemetery.

Elephantine clouds labour for a mouse of rain.

But every drop a star globe

and the whole of the moon and the sky

in each little tear of a world.

Beauty in the pain of departure

comes like a consolation

and leaves like an alibi.

The willows have lost their flowers

and soon enough their birds.

Some people are buried deeper than others.

And some are at a loss for words.

And some rely on bells

to temper the severity

of their disciplined farewells.

Each of us reaches out for the other

as if we could touch time itself

and gentle it

like a feather of a breath upon our skin

that for a few unborn moments

that last longer than life

makes light of death

for not knowing where to begin.

PATRICK WHITE