WET FRIDAY NIGHT

Wet Friday night. Too beleaguered to paint. Don’t know if I can write. Want to. There’s a snake pit of muses in my gut trying to prohecy what I’ll do next. Enervated but enduring to get back to the bliss of the high mountain flower before the last avalanche came down on it like ten thousand Sisyphyean boulders to prove that even absurdity can fractally emerge as just another mode of redundancy. And I say to myself. Self, I’ve had enough of this. And Self doesn’t answer because it doesn’t exist. Only the rain on the black streets and the hiss of tires. And something bruised and battered like a wave that just washed the mermaids off the rocks. And I don’t care who they were singing to. I’ve heard it before. They’re just running an extortion racket like a juke-box. Put another nickel in the nickelodeon and I’ll sing for my supper. This must be the seven years of lean kind. Sickly cattle. And none of them have ever jumped over the moon. They haven’t earned the first and last crescents of their horns. Drugstore cows. Methane ozone grazers. Self, I say. Don’t take it out on the cows. Even the fat ones aren’t lithe enough to make it up to the Minoans. And we’ve all been stricken by a re-run of the same celebrity famine. Food got tired of being chained to the same old appetites. In the beginning was the mouth. The rest was food. As the young Korean Zen master with abounding squirrel energy snapped. The eye eats the picture. The ear eats the sound. Control eating. You control the world. As it is, I’m sitting here, nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to be, witnessing my mind eat its own thoughts. Some taste like the ashes of moths that never made it through the window to be consumed in the candle of their heart’s desire and others are fresh water flowing into salt. Blood coagulating into roses on a garbage dump. Kites snapping off my spinal cord to trash themselves in the powerlines. Dorian drums but all the melodic syrinxes outlawed in the new republic like subversive theme songs. Look what Catholic bells did to the pan pipes of the Incas. The right era but the wrong octave. The hymns of the valley a voice too low to sing the paeons of the mountain. And it’s a violation of a copyright law to listen attentively to the echoes.

The warrior minstrel of the forlorn hope is doing a sword dance so that peace can be more than just the shadow of victory. So there is no taint of triumph or defeat in my joy. I could go get drunk if I drank. I could go rail coke with teen-age girls who thought I was exotically amusing as a living relic of the sixties enshrined in the design of their clothes if I did coke. Instead of turning out the lights I could start a bar fight after the music’s over. I could get arrested and spend the night sleeping on a newly enamelled concrete bed in jail without my belt to hang myself from the bars like Benjamin Chee Chee nobody believed until he was dead. Or I could shatter my knuckles against a wall in a ferocious moment of aggressive solitude and wait for an ambulance to resolve my confession medically. Or I can say been there. Done that. Boring. And look for life after theatre beyond the blazing of the hucksters on the midway. Seek the kind of darkness that’s suitable for stars. Deepen my metaphors until they can embrace my solitude without over-reaching themselves. I could taste the stars one by one on the tip of my tongue to see which ones were sweet and which ones stung like killer bees. Or I could find a moody place with an estranged mirror to give my lies the right kind of atmosphere to die in. Or revive more generous truths than these stingy delusions that pass for the facts. Not much of a life if all you’ve got to celebrate is the sum of everything you haven’t done. The summum bonum of your sins of omission. Not me though. I’ve never had anything worth living for that wasn’t the first out the door. Inspiration’s just an urgent sense of incompletion. I wonder if apples panic in the fall. I want to get down to the demonic details. I want thorns on my roses and horns on my angels. I want back doors on all my oxymorons. I want iron fire-escapes and inflammable geraniums to scare away the snakes and ladders that rise up like bannisters on the stairwells to heaven. Give me an August thermal and a flightfeather from a red-tailed hawk and I can make it on my own in an earthly kind of way. High wide lyrical and alive. I could be someone you couldn’t conceive of living multiple lives on myriad worlds simultaneously. I could be donating used afterlives like body parts to down and outers with expansive hearts who like to dress down in a state of grace and don’t have any misgivings about the space they’re in.

The stars keep to themselves and for the most part so do I. Spread the shining and keep yourself aloof. But there are moods that come upon me like Chernobyl or a Zen nuclear reactor melting down and I’m blinded by the realization of how irradiated you can be by the world until everything you think and feel seems like just another cliche of the same old fraud. Tawdry and doomed. A hundred billion tons of carbon dioxide rising up into the atmosphere every year and I’m sitting here smoking a cigarette. I don’t need wings or Spanish spurs on my heels to nudge my compassion into action. I feel more than I want to most of the time about the lack of a human condition to anything. I do. I act. I am. Spontaneously in that order. Is it otherwise for you? And every gesture that’s pumped out of my heart is as big as the known universe. The only way you can stay true to falsehood is sentimentally. But one of the hidden jewels of insight buried in the ashes of a burnt out childhood where no one ever recovers the body of their brother taught me it’s pointless to try to grind your knives on clouds. Switch blade lightning. A flash in the pan. Showboating in a parking lot. Too much lustre to be seasoned steel. And even now as I’m peaking at zenith in the sidereal immensities of my igneously imaginative intensities like a prophetic glassblower in a blast furnace trying to inflate the shape of space into a more habitable universe it’s still startling to realize that even if everything wilts like a daylily after its moment in the sun, it’s been as real as it has been delusional all along. First you hear the song. And then you hear the nightbird that’s singing it in the darkness for the best of reasons that are neither right nor wrong.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU’VE GOT TO LEARN TO LET IT GLOW

You’ve got to learn to let it glow.

Cool bliss.

Ride the dragon.

The sun god’s chariot.

Not come undone like Icarus

over-reaching everybody’s best advice.

You know how to plunge

let go

but I can’t remember the last time

I saw you rise

or even try to hang on.

Yesterday you were gold

and today you’re the ore

and it feels as if you’ve had your heart ripped out

and there’s nothing precious about what’s left.

Take space from space it’s still space.

Who needs to put a gold ribbon around it

to prove there’s a gift inside?

Diamonds are born in the darkness

not the light.

The root’s more crucial than the blossom.

Alcohol, women, valium, sleeping pills, coke,

I know you’re a martyr to your body and your mind

and that cauldron of a heart you used to hover over

like a cloud around a visionary mountain

seeing things the rest of us could only guess at

has turned into a pharmacopoeia of sprites and goblins.

How many paths are you going to let yourself

be lead down by the nose

before you realize

they all leave you blind at a crossroads?

No starmap.

No windsock.

No astrolabe.

No compass.

No weathervane.

You’re immanentally on your own

with the rest of us here

apprenticed to the greater magic of the mind

that keeps casting spells upon us

it takes the transformative traumas of life to break.

So we can grow.

So we can get out of the egg

whether it’s a cosmic glain

a fortune cookie laid by a bird of ill omen

or the opal of a hummingbird.

So we can shed our skin our sky our myth

our preconceived attachments to a self

that promises one sip

of the snakeoils of death and desire

and you’ll fall in love forever

with wild dancing girls

swaying under their veils

like mirages on the moon.

And what a feeble affair

if life ever needed a why to live.

Who knows why?

For the fuck of it.

For the ride.

Because it’s inconceivable

that it’s being done everyday

in the most sublime and trivial ways

by people who say they can’t.

I’m not trying to scold your heart.

Or renew your burnish in an acid bath.

In Zen they say the mind is an artist.

Able to paint the worlds.

But that doesn’t mean

it just paints things you like to see.

When do the stars ever get to choose

what they shine down upon?

Stop strolling through the galleries of life

like some aesthetic voyeur

with a monolithic view of prophetic vision

discussing the relative merits of this and that.

Turn your lucidity around like an inner light

and illuminate your own masterpiece

like a work in progress you’ll never complete

because only the mediocrities

assess their successes in life as fait accomplis.

Real genius risks nothing less than everything all the time

for nothing

for the unattainable

knowing that failure’s a truer measure

of the ongoing attempt to avoid

the inexpressible outcome of its creative intensity

by filling all that dark abundance up

with the bright vacancy of a shapeshifting universe

than the self-contained success

of the goose that laid the golden egg

but couldn’t peck its way out of it.

I can’t imagine a river anywhere along its flowing

whether it’s hoisting the garbage barges of a city

up on the shoulders of its waves

or sporting yachts like feathers in its cap

thinking of itself as a loser or a winner.

Rain on a garden.

Rain in the gutter.

Is this successful

and that a failure of water?

And truth to tell

even the mirages can’t be held to blame

if you fix on them like a picture-frame

or a walled garden with no gate

that anyone can enter by.

They disappear like planetary atmospheres

that didn’t want to be held that close.

Mirrors with wanderlust.

But in your disappointment with life

isn’t that water?

Aren’t those real tears?

How can anyone or anything

within the expanding precincts

of these worlds within worlds

be considered false or lost or lacking

in this space where even the lies come true

and grow and bear fruit

rooted in their homelessness

like the thresholds of stars

leaving themselves

and the past behind

in all directions at once

as if the only future available to them

as for all of us who shine

whether we grope through the darkness

like a candle or a galaxy

a flash of lightning

or the merest hint of a firefly

is to open our eyes and see.

The drunk in the doorway is not junk mail.

And the ceo in the board room

dictating loveletters to his secretary

is not the last word in self-promotion.

If the mountain weeps

it’s not because it feels

it’s let down the ocean.

PATRICK WHITE

TRYING TO WEAVE A FLYING CARPET

Trying to weave a flying carpet out of the stray threads of the snake pit of life themes that so often at this time of night seems the subconscious content of a troubled mind. To get out of here. To rise above it all by conjoining the lowest with the highest and ascending the burning ladder of my own spine like a serpent with wings, no candidate of angels, forsake their feathers for the scales of the dragon? Shall I prophecy? Should I read the sine curve of every wavelength of thought and feeling like the Egyptian glyph for intelligence the viper leaves in the sand, in the stars, in the flowing of the mindstream? Forego the aviomancy of the dove for the Pythian herpetologists of Delphi? When the strong rope of my spinal cord is undone like a million weak filaments of tungsten nerve endings flickering like a lightbulb about to go out, is there one among these I can climb up to heaven on to shine among the stars like Draco around the axis of the earth? A circumpolar constellation. Half the double helix of the sign of a healer with only one wing and a dubious prayer to go on? And is it of any import anywhere in the wide wondering world that I should care to mend the unravelling of so much the full moon cherished before I swallowed it whole like a cosmic glain in a shaman’s nest to bring the rain? That I might be drenched in tears that could liberate my eyes like frogs and thorny flowers and egg-laying stars hibernating in the dry creekbeds of a desert that has spent a long time like a bride with a hope chest waiting to bloom?

Impasses and thoroughfares. Mirages undulating like the faceless veils of torrid atmospheres whose eyes have never known water. Ambivalence. Uncertainty. Doubt. Ambiguity. And the facile, end-stopped resolutions of holistic oxymorons trying to bridge the gaps between reality and delusion by yoking them both like copulating snakes to a chariot of the gods that’s trying to square the circle of its wheels to the passage of the sun and the moon. To the paths of the waterclocks that rise like civilizations living off the alluvial silt of the stars. If everything is one then how can separation stand apart and mourn the loss of anything? Is Orpheus made whole by his dismemberment? Is zero the fullest of whole numbers, and union differentiate the dark abundance and bright vacancy emanating spontaneously out of the void and returning to it just as unpredictably like the ingathering and dissolution of creation in every moment? Are the gods, if any, left guessing as well as we do at the hidden certainties of the elephant in the room. Do they feed their brains at the expense of their starving hearts the way the ideologues steal life and blood and bread like hungry ghosts from the mouths of mute children all over the earth tonight?

Ephemerids. Grave-robbers. Infanticides. I ask you. Would you steal the mummy from its pyramid? The butterfly from its chrysalis? The priestess from her temple? And leave all things speechless? The meaning isn’t in the words. It’s in the resonance that hovers over it like the dying music of an astral body taking flight like a hawk or a kite from your hand. Like a song from a window in passing that no one can hear until you let go of it. You might walk away with the feather of a lyric, a few strands of the melody, the enchantment of a voice when no one’s listening, but it isn’t until you let go of it, as if you were born without ears, that it returns like a bird to your windowsill. Like the sea to an empty shell. Like the sky to the canary in the mine. Like the soft and hard things of the earth to the intangibility of the mind that goes on forever without leaving anything behind. Because even when the sun goes down, and things go on until you’re wholly gone like a nightbird into the dark of your unknowing there is no dusk to time, only the dawn of moonrise giving voice to your eyes in a world of startled dreams. You can hear the echoes of what the stars are whispering in a choir of waterlilies gathering at the edge of the river. Themes of picture-music mingled in the mindstream like the flavours and colours of life on earth long before you had a tongue to taste them or the eyes to see them or the heart to be them, even when you’re a stolen masterpiece that doesn’t know it’s own worth, trashed in a back alley, a favela, a slum somewhere by a thief who doesn’t want to get caught handling something so radioactively hot with beauty and genius he can’t fence it anywhere without being recognized for what it is.

Sweet one. In the shadows. In the sorrows. In the corner of your room. The spiders weaving veils to cover your eyes, and your back to the light like the far side of the moon, stroking your heart with your thumb like the black walnut of the soft bird skull that someone you love hurled like a rock through the window with a message for the occupant to get out of his life. Terrified by the sublimity of the silence when a song as innocent as a sparrow God overlooked dies and there’s no one there to pick it up but you. A nugget of pain. A moon-dipped arrow fletched with the flightfeathers of an iron weathervane lodged in a heart that doesn’t know which way to turn in a hurricane of hurt. I address this to you like an August wind, a rising thermal under your wings, a stairwell with serpent bannisters in a water palace of wavelengths light years from here where the prayer-mats can fly in any direction they want to answer the cry of the wounded princess like dragons on red alert. I address this to you out of the fathomless emptiness of a full heart. I lift the veils of the spiders that suck the light out of your eyes like undefineable singularities at the bottom of their black holes and I stand before you like the stalwart timbers of a loom with the skilled fingers of a Spanish guitar shaped like the universe, ready to follow your voice like the musical shadow of a new creation myth into the liberated skies of celestial spheres that flow like tears from your eyes when they hear how well you can sing. Your beauty can be as whimsical as a Japanese plum blossom, a sulphur butterfly, the eyelids of a black rose in a Stygian bloodstream that flows out of hell like oil from the injured earth. And still I will dig my heels in like the stubborn root of our shared humanity and draw you up like a fountain mouth from the deepest voids and darkest watersheds of hidden wisdom in the whole of the enlightened multiverse, to bloom again and again and again as if there were no end of spring when the phoenix sings. I will stand with you now like a spirit that knows its own in a wardrobe of flesh and even more so after my death when the potential for life returns to the realms of the boundless like water taken from the stream and raised to your lips like music to your mouth is returned to the stream with reverence and gratitude. When one hand is empty because someone let go I will open the palm of the other clenched like the fist of a flower and place the new moon in it like a black pearl of inestimable worth you wove like a flying carpet high above the earth and laid out on the waters of life, the waters of earth, to receive the return of the waterbirds. To hear in the urns of the Canada geese crying high over head late at night, returning the souls of the dead to life as they once carried them off to the west in autumn, my voice. And in a way that you can know that I am near. These words.

PATRICK WHITE

AND YOU, ANGRY ONE

And you, angry one, down to splitting roaches

between the thumbnails of the moon

to make something flower in your poverty

because the soil you’re rooted in

keeps coming up snake-eyes and stinging nettles.

You whose heart is swarmed by fire ants

like the corpse of a hummingbird

that was lighter than gravity and faster than light

until it sipped from the sugar-coated feeder

of the double-dealer who spiked its drink.

You for whom the sound of life

is the snarling of a blue chainsaw

in an old growth forest of rootless trees

living in tent city on the cutting edge of grace

driving nails through your heartwood

to keep from being felled by those

who are more at fault than you are

for why the birds no longer sing in the morning.

You who weep like acid rain

on the bells and the gravestones

you keep writing your name on

and keep one dark card

like the Tarot up your sleeve

to trump the game your playing now

as if you were bound to lose your will to win

by pushing your chair back from the table

like an exculpatory suicide with nothing left to bet on.

I learned a long time ago from you

there’s a terrorist in your roots

that keeps twisting your nerves like candy kisses

with short fuses and blasting caps

that can go off in anyone’s face like a beaver dam

for nothing at all except trying to build

a small eco-system in the wrong place;

for trying to sow seeds in your wounds

where the plough of the moon cut into your flesh

and left the planting to the wind and the weeds;

for trying to turn all that pain

into something you could harvest

like golden loaves of bread

fresh from the ovens of a volcano

like small islands of life

cooling on the windowsills of your magmatic rage.

For years I’ve winched my heart up from a wishing-well

to pour sweet water on your burns

and watched you turn into a steam engine

whenever I suggested the tracks on your arms

were the wrong gauge

for two parallel lines to ever meet

like predestination in the wrong seat of here and now.

So many futures I could have had with you

that have learned to live outside the womb

like embryos in exile

like homeless thresholds no one ever crossed.

Strange and sad sometimes

when I look at you

to feel the loss of things I never had to lose.

Me in my sanctuary

and you in your asylum

though we’ve maintained mutual embassies in both

with high walls and barred windows

that have kept the measure

of how close we could have come to being lovers

instead of these refugees

seeking shelter from one another

like two storm birds under the overturned lifeboats

that saved no one from drowning

off the same shipwrecked coast.

PATRICK WHITE

AS THE NIGHT AND SILENCE

As the night and silence fall over Perth

and random voices are dwindling in the distance up the road

as I vow not to remember anything at all the right times

to the muse of broken gates hanging on the hinge of the year

and o most rare

not to forget a single intimacy

of the mystic love tokens she’s offered me

like black walnuts and ruby-throated humming-birds,

I realize I’m swimming in beautiful illusions

where the starfish lie down with the sharks

and inspired by my own absurdity

and the lack of any kind of enlightened credibility

I’m free of delusion and reality alike.

Crazy wisdom.

The penultimate insight into nothingness.

Who could wish for more?

The streetlamps are still in bud

in the third week of September.

And there’s a painting on my easel

with an autumn sun covered in black spidery birch branches

like a detached retina

that’s been keeping its eye on me since midnight.

Free enough to risk entreating the stars to be kind for once.

Free enough to be attached to the things of the earth that are perishing

to ensure they don’t as if I were one of them

on the inside of the joke

that’s stranger than not getting it at all.

Show me the wise man who hasn’t learned

to take his inner clown seriously

and I’ll show you an eagle born without eyes.

Fortune-cookies with all the answers

like dancers with knots in their muscular thighs.

Overhead I hear the Canada geese off into the going

as things are slowing down

and there are fire hydrants all over town

who’ve exhausted themselves trying to put the autumn out

that long to go with them just to know

what they’ve been left out of by holding their ground.

Does in the headlights,

two young women ditching a roach

at the approach to Rainbow Bridge

wondering if I’m the troll

or the pot of gold that lives under it.

I sublimate my indifference with a smile

and keep my distance

not to spook their high

as I pass unnoticed as I can

up the wolf path to lonelier timberlines

without them knowing

I think one’s a willow with slender blonde sorrows

and the other’s a raging sumac with phoenix wings

who eats her own ashes

like the flesh of the anti-Christ

just to get a rise out of things.

PATRICK WHITE