YOU COME HERE TO DISCUSS YOUR WOUNDS

You come here to discuss your wounds like a political identity crisis because you think I have a way with words that makes you feel inspired to try your hand at healing. I remember when I first saw you looking at me with those two big witch hazel eyes that flowered as if they’d been raised on laser beams shot at the moon, not ordinary sunlight. I was up on stage at a poetry reading trying to address myself to the depth of the feeling I had for meaning what I said. That people have a right to eat what they sow with dignity in the starmud of their own bodies and minds whether it’s starwheat, tares among the lilies, orchids in the shadow of an outhouse under a full moon, or these black burnt roses you keep bringing me like the ashes of someone important you feel it’s crucial I get to know. And I keep asking, and I’ll keep on asking for your sake, what was so heretical about you that you did that to yourself? An auto de fe. The bouquet of a burnt matchbook quoted like the holy scripture of a fanatic to justify the ways of your mysterious self to you. Have you ever confessed to anything you didn’t torture out of yourself? Drunk gypsy doing a sacred sword dance with the scalpels of the moon. Rose of blood on a vine of razorwire. Pithia in the oracular snakepits of Delphi. Why do you always interpret your ambiguity as a sure sign of doom? Just to make your prophecy come true? You’re a beautiful Medusa but you keep getting bit by your own hair do like snakes you can’t train to bite other people. And who so dishonest they don’t look upon their moral life or the lack thereof as the curse of the blessing they laid upon themselves? Just to be alive means many things must die to accommodate you. Road kill when you’re a member of the Green Party. You didn’t mean it but it’s not something you’re proud of. Ambiguity. A lack of rush to judgment. No urgency in afflicting yourself with certainty. And if it turns out you’re more lamp than candle so what if things get a little sooty now and again? You come here like smoke looking for a sense of direction and I say wet your finger and stick it up in the air to see which way the wind is blowing. Telling me you’re lost is like saying the wind is lost or water and light are lost. Know what they know. Transformation is not severance. Even the most violent sea change doesn’t involve the loss of a single wave. Because everything’s involved in the mindstream’s flowing, and departures and arrivals are achieved by the same next step, who needs to know where it’s going? If you don’t mind waiting. You take the low place like the sea and let everything flow down into you. You’re in a hurry? You come down from the mountaintop like the ten commandments written on water. The tears of a god etched in stone like acid rain knowing that’s as close as you’re ever going to come face to face with the unknown.

Imagine what kind of story your life would make if you were to tell it to yourself as a child. Would you go to sleep feeling fulfilled or black holes emptier? Would the heroine teach you how to have compassion upon yourself in a way that heals everyone at the end of your trials and tribulations? Could you take the training wheels off your high-wire act and trust your own spinal cord for a sense of balance that bridges the abyss like the middle extreme? Would your life flow down the middle with intensity or would you hug the shore of one severity and leap from the precipice of the other until your fairy tale turned into a failed experiment? And even then would you see what there was to learn from it? That the nightmares shape us just as surely as our dreams do like the other hand of the potter on the wheel. And it’s not enough just to seek the eventual forgiveness of the dark because you’re pleased with its work. Try to be grateful once and awhile. Not everything was engendered by daylight. It’s not that I’m suggesting you walk on the dark side unless you want to and feel you have the footware for it; it’s just that sometimes if you intensify the night, stars emerge and everyone can see what there is that’s shining in you. They’ll make up stories about you as you shatter like a chandelier coming through the upper atmosphere. You can crash and burn on a cosmic scale and give rise to your own species like a creative cataclysm. Or you can anoint yourself the Black Queen of Killer Bees with a drop of holy snakeoil on your forehead to purge your third eye of the things it’s had to witness in a single lifetime that makes it wish it had been born blind. Everything was created in the likeness of everything else. Even when you fake it you’re imitating the universe in everything but yourself. Interdependent origination lends a wholeness to the body and mind that’s more than unitive enough to include the black holes as well as the new stars in the Great Orion Nebula. The dragons that afflict you are just what became of the butterflies whose chrysalis you forgot to kiss good night. They cast big shadows that loom mightily in your brain. But they can’t bite you without hurting themselves. Because it isn’t pain they’re after. It’s a more tender part in the story. A gentler oasis. A softer flying carpet. A more forgiving prayer mat than the one you’ve used so long to abuse yourself before the unknown. If you’re bad, then we’re all complicit. If you’re good, then everyone’s wise enough not to think it makes that much of a difference.

PATRICK WHITE

I WANT TO WRITE LIKE A PHOENIX

I want to write like a phoenix

but my blood is swaying

like a heavy iron bell.

Must be somebody’s funeral.

I want to write like the dogstar shines

rising in the early morning in the east

but all I’ve managed so far

is to shake a few pigeons out of the belfry.

I want to take my boots off

and walk on hot fireflies

all the way to the end

just to prove I’m fireproof

but I’m finding it hard to take the heat

for things I didn’t set fire to.

I want to immolate myself

like a Zen waterlily in Vietnam

that doused itself in gasoline

or an outraged fruit vendor

in the souks of Tunisia

but all’s quiet on the western front

of the Watt’s riots

except for the usual sound of gunfire

making the rounds of the neighbourhood

like the Crips and the Bloods.

And my heart is sick of protesting the wound

to the sword that caused it in the first place

as if there were any point

in bitching to my father

about what he did to my mother.

I’m sick of the froth and fury

of people with spiritual rabies

and the lather of hydrophobic opinions

and the deep dry wells of ungenerosity

that are at the heart of it

and how even the rain

arouses the suspicions of the rich and powerful

as the beginning of a welfare state.

I’m trying to find a flight feather to write with

when I should be painting for a living

but eagles are on the endangered species list

and all I’ve got for a pen

is the plumage of an albatross

and this curse in the doldrums

that’s laid like a white eclipse

on the black hole in my inkwell.

I want the sun to shine at midnight

and my blood to turn like a mood ring

into the dusky yellow of enlightened dragons

that burn without the smoke

that keeps getting teary-eyed with emotion

whenever the wind’s blowing my way.

But the day settles down resigned and defeated

to its diurnal round of disappointments

like sunshine on the wild field stones

in the heritage walls of Perth

that house the bank across the street

that knows the value of everything

but not the worth of anything that counts.

I need a muse with snakes in her hair

to wake me up out of the nightmare

of this stone cold coma.

I’ve kept my balance long enough

on this T-square of a tightrope

between one star and the next

but a web isn’t the same thing as a constellation

even after you’ve connected all the dots

into a dream catcher for spiders

and a good part of the art

of keeping your balance

from going to extremes

is knowing when to fall

without a safety net.

I need a muse

who doesn’t come with an ambulance

and haemorrhage all over me

as if I just had a head on collision with inspiration

at the corner of Gore and the Universe

and I was permanently paralyzed

from the mouth up.

I need a muse who knows

I’m too complex

even if she’s got thick sensual lips

that look like mushrooms on Botox

to be moved to do things

by pulling my strings

with a mere pout

and a turn of the face away

from the direction of prayer.

I need a muse who knows what an eclipse is.

I need a muse who doesn’t feed live fireflies

to the lightning but knows

what a witching stick is for

and how to go divining for stars.

I need a muse who doesn’t light me up

like the only white candle at a black mass

and then pinch my wick

like a monkish celibate

when she realizes the depravity

of the mistake she made.

The devil’s last trick

is to prove she doesn’t exist.

But I’ve caught on to this

like the Hubble Telescope

looking for infra-red haloes

around the black holes

she was last seen in

and I’ve abandoned everything but hope.

PATRICK WHITE

THERE MUST BE SOME STAR SOMEWHERE

There must be some star somewhere

that can give me an insight

into what I’m doing here

on a habitable planet

it’s getting harder and harder

to live on anymore.

God is dead.

Long live the landlord.

Just finished the underpainting in burnt sienna

of an autumn scene I’ll work on in the morning.

My ornamental goldfish Toke

swims above the blue stones

at the bottom of his aquarium

in underwater moonlight

sometimes like a comet

sometimes like an orchid.

sometimes like the Bolshoi Ballet.

Pain.

But I don’t know why.

Fear.

But I don’t know of what.

My palms are covered in paint

and I feel as if I’ve got

the blood of Swan Lake on my hands.

I study my star globe

and wonder how many eyes it took

to work its iconic constellations out of chaos.

The ecliptic will intersect

the celestial equator

at the equinoctial colure

in a little less than three weeks.

And I’ll be sixty-three in less than two.

I imagine the stars hooked up

like neurons in my brain.

Networking.

Dream catchers

and medicine wheels

talking to spider webs

in a vast nervous system of light

that keeps breaking into intelligence.

And I imagine more than a few of the arteries

that supply my mind with oxygen

have had their apertures narrowed enough

there must be black dwarfs

and the gravitational eyes of black holes

all through my brain by now

bending light and space

like apparitions of what they used to be.

Time turns the telescope around

and looks at the astronomer

as if he were further away than ever.

And if you were to examine

most of my wavelengths

through a spectrograph

they’d still be an emission spectrum

but shifted toward the red.

The T Tauri stars in the Hesperides

are aging like a windfall of overripe apples.

I’m in the autumn of my life.

The sumac is burning like a phoenix.

If I didn’t need to make a living

trying to catch the light

of a moment in passing

I’d finish my painting in the morning

and true to life

throw it on the fire

like an immolation

that might lead to an Arab spring.

As it is I have to sell

the way I feel about what I see

just to pay the rent.

But if I were rich enough to have my way

I’d let the wind take them like apple bloom

or Japanese plum blossoms

or the leaves of the maple tree

with a palette of strychnine and arsenic

to complement the photosynthetic greens

or if they were moon scenes

the petals of white peonies

and scatter them across the lawns

upon the stairs

and along the gutters of the streets

just to say I grasped what beauty is

and let it go.

PATRICK WHITE

LIGHTNING STORM IN THE MORNING

Lightning storm in the morning

upstages the dawn.

Snake flash.

A flickering tongue of light.

And then the walking thunder

of a rolling barrage

in the no man’s land

between the trenches and Vimy Ridge.

The leaves a darker more frenzied green.

The rains whips the windowpanes

like the eyes of a shell-shocked horse

up to its chest in mud and blood.

Hysterical alarms sound off

like a squad car full of thieves

pleading their innocence like church bells.

The dripping patter of small arms fire

from snipers in the eaves.

Perth and Pearl Harbour

bombed by the Japanese on a Sunday

but it’s still too early to tell

until the lights go back on

and the dawn gets over the trauma

whether it’s a day of infamy of not.

Lightning rods with heroic nerves of copper

lord it over the weathervanes

who lost their heads

when the weather turned round

for running the lightning to ground

and saving the barn like an ark

in a deluge of water and fire

from drowning or burning down.

And the fire hydrants on Foster Street

feel ashamed of themselves

for being so stalwart and useless

in the face of a pre-emptive emergency.

And the flower barrels

are pulling their dishevelled hair out

like petunias that didn’t see it coming.

The air flinches

as if it had just been grasped

by the karmic revelation

of an avenging ghost.

God’s trying to kill a sinner.

Everyone listens to an inner voice

like the numbers of a lottery

to see if the dice

turned up snake-eyes

or lightning struck the jackpot.

The storm rolls over the horizon

like the rim of a Tim Horton’s coffee-cup

that reads like the happy aftermath

of the last man standing

under a tree in an open field

to get out of the rain.

Please try again.

PATRICK WHITE