IN THAT INSTANT

In that instant time revoked my eyes like two waterclocks and my seeing was ageless. The white mirrors that had so long stood witness to my testimony about what I was doing on earth were suddenly eclipsed by the flip side of my reflection and the earth began asking what it was doing upholding the likes of me. And I didn’t know what to answer. Except to say it wasn’t wholly my idea though there was a time when I thought of all people I should know whose it was. And even if I were able to make something up that was reasonably feasible and acceptably balanced who would I tell now in this asylum of shipwrecked survivors about what I saw flash before my eyes the first time I drowned when the star of Isis I had tattooed on my left palm let me down. Jesus and the Buddha may have been able to walk on the water but the rest of us have to be hauled into a lifeboat. That’s why everyone’s born as close as they can get to a woman. And there have been other myths of origin I’ve remained true to for an hour or so to get me through another night like a sinking constellation flashing catastrophically on my event horizon. The sacred syllable of holy men on land squatting on their hams to attain an oceanic awareness that would put them out of their pain and everyone else along with them like synchronous happenings in a charged particle field is aum but the night sea mystics who say yes to their depths don’t say anything to free them from their agony but let the light abandon ship with the last farewell kiss of an s.o.s. And I came to realize in that instant my temporal demise is an endless era of unbounded exaltation once I accepted it for what it is. Because it knew more about what was going down than I did. Most people live their lives as if they’d heard them from someone else like a kid in his bed listens to his parents arguing late at night in the kitchen to the occasional mention of his name in lower tones of constrained voices lest he should wake up and overhear them. Shadowy dispatches slipped under the door. And it’s important to give the morning a reason for getting you up but what do you say to a child to make it want to live to be unwanted? These children are born to play but this one, this one, this one’s function is to get out of the way? So you get out of the way, off the field, out of sight. And your tears make new creekbeds to flow in. And where others go straight to their destination like hot asphalt on a newly paved section of Highway 7 with freshly painted stripes of yellow down its back others accommodate their homelessness to the circuitous blossoming of unnamed rivers with no particular goals in mind except in the way they flow around things and accept their turning as a matter of course. Vertumamnis the Etruscan shapeshifter morphs into the Roman god of dreams. Nothing solid to be legitimized by like a family burial plot or a summer cottage your last and only option from the very beginning is to be real. Become space. Light. Water. Take long vacations on the shores of the Black Seas of the mind while other languish in exile like Ovid listening for Sarmations across the Ister between the lines of the Metamorphoses. You become conversant in multiple personalities and polyglot identity thefts even though you don’t have a mother tongue of your own. You let the Tower of Babel speak for itself as you do the wind and the waves and the stars and seashells that have lost their virginity. And it doesn’t matter if you sit like a sparrow on a lover’s finger to receive a kiss that longs for someone else or you peck gravel at Keats’ windowsill entranced by his negative capability to be nothing at all except whatever pauses a moment before him. God’s Own Zero. Her way of making other numbers feel whole and good they haven’t fallen into void bound nihilism. But when the ground of your being is a rootless nothing how can it be nihilism if there’s nothing there to take away in the first place? Take nothing from nothing it’s still nothing. Cool bliss. This. Not the empty sorrows of those who turn their cups over like Tarot cards and tea leaves too depressed to go on with the reading. And you who talk about cosmological constants as if they were the biggest blunders of your theoretical life, have you begun to suspect yet that the only cornerstone that upholds the whole of this radiant edifice inclusively is the one that’s missing like the black sheep of the family from all your unified field theories like the dark energy of a mind that doesn’t reveal anything about itself to the light of those who only know how to look with their eyes?

But abstractions should not be multiplied beyond necessity like stars and flowers and creative ghosts who have returned to their senses like embryos of their symbolic simulacra. No ideas without fingerprints. But that doesn’t mean that we’re all identifiable. Or what can’t be defined doesn’t express itself out in the open like music and spring or the slim chapbooks of poetry that give voice to the Tay River in fall like hand-printed maple leaves. Where I am now. Halfway up Sunset Boulevard that taught me to paint the passage of things with a full palette, sitting under a bridge people fish from in the summer like an Andrew Wyeth reproduction, waiting for a moonrise to reveal how much she’s missed me since I went underground to overthrow myself like something imposed on me from without. And when she comes she’ll be happy to drink with me from the skulls of all those mirages on the moon that fell like blossoms from the hydra-headed stalks of my Herculean identity. Down with the laborious heroes of Hera in the death phase of the crone. Down with planting artificial flowers on the moon like flags in abandoned gardens that never perish or bloom. It may have been one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind but what’s that compared to Hathor the cow who’s been jumping over the moon since the first Minoan sprouted horns? And show me the wild iris or poppy or hollyhock that hasn’t done as much for the earth for generations. You want to come up like one of the good pennies of life from the bottom of a wishing well on the moon you’ve got to learn to put your heart into it like a rose. Not a reason for thorns. And if it sometimes feels as if you’ve lived the whole of your life as if you were bleeding out like the Tay River from an unknown watershed maybe that’s because you discovered the less you know of who you think you are is how the more of you keeps coming like a waterclock that always runs down like a river to the sea in the lowest place of all. This river was named after a river in Scotland to commemorate the race and place of the people who settled here like sword dancers from the Highlands they kept sheathed in their hearts like the bulbs of gladiolas. Who needs to pull ancestors out of their hat to add to that? I shall lie down among the moss-covered stones and tall grasses that preen themselves in the wind like the plumage of the river and embrace my transient lover as if I had nothing left to give her but a gateless gate that didn’t get in her way. What a tree gives to a bird. What the sky gives to the clouds. What water gives to the leaping fish that lives to express it in stars.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETIMES THE CLARITY COMES TOO LATE

Sometimes the clarity comes too late

to realize there was never

any need for forgiveness

and nothing to expiate

about the way we made our gracious farewells

into works of art

that would go on hurting forever.

We had a genius back then

for making death seem more beautiful than it is

because we lived on the edge of things

and not their surfaces

and o if we’d only felt all those things

that made us weep at the end

dying in doorways that were more cruel

than any threshold we had to cross to stand there.

If only we could have felt those immensities of good-bye

from the very beginning

what reason would we have had to cry like candles

when the wine turned back into water

and the roses wiped their lipstick off on their leaves?

One goes out.

One goes in.

Because severance

no less than the dance

takes two to make a difference

and as the years go by

the silver flakes off the memory of the mirror

and you can see clear through to the other side

experience is just another log

you throw on the stars

to keep yourself warm on a cold October night

by a small fire out in the open

where it’s easier to sublimate

the intensities of fate

by opening the cages you keep them in

and burning your loveletters

like the flightfeathers of half-forgotten songs

to spread their wings in the flames

and give them the freedom to rise higher

than the nest of ashes they were born in.

History isn’t the muse

the immeasurable mystery is

and if you don’t learn to let things go

you’ll never know

how to live lyrically alone in the wild

unbounded by your solitude

by the side of a river whose flowers are dying.

The green bough hisses and blisters in the fire

but the cracks in the heartwood

burn far into the night

and give off way more heat in the autumn

than the pre-emptive lightning strikes of spring.

It’s a rite of passage as old as migrating geese

mournfully bearing souls south

whose bones have turned to dust

to take all my prophetic skulls like moon rocks

out of the house of the dead

and arranging them into the ring of a firepit

stand in the middle like the eternal flame

of an unrepentant heretic

to rekindle the dance

even among the skeletal shadows

of a persecuted romance.

Even in sorrow.

Even in the silence

of the great distances

that add their aerial perspective to time.

Not to call ghosts back to a seance

as if they could tell me anymore about death

than I’ve already lived through

but every year at the second full moon in October

after the harvest is in

and the scarecrow has come down off his cross

and left it to the ravens of nevermore as a church

I lay a blue violin on a funeral pyre.

I stretch my heart out like a skin on a drum.

Dressed in the plumage of solar flares

I enter a trance of firebirds

that have long since disappeared back into the sun

and like Icarus in eclipse

or the last grasshopper

who didn’t take the advice of the ants

to drag the leaves and wings of things

piecemeal into a shelter

to prepare for deeper separations yet to come.

I take my chances by the hand out here in the open

and I dance.

I dance with heresy.

I dance with the angels and the demons

that were martyred in the name

of what is unforgiveable about my human nature

and yet more sacred than the rain I dance for

to put the war I dance for out.

I dance with whole asylums of noetic visionaries

who went insane

trying to explain me to myself

like the origins of life on another planet.

And I dance again to the music of the women I’ve loved

whether in pain or bliss

whether I was hung by the tail

like a plague rat over the abyss

of my cannibalized emotions

like a famished snakepit

or I fell sidereally under the spell

of the fragrance of summer stars in their hair

I dance not as if it were all worth it in the end

but something inestimable to celebrate

that gives the chartered undertakers pause

about what they do for a living

when they see how a poet can dance

to the picture-music of the crazy wisdom

that sings the dead up out of the earth to their feet

without looking down from the mountaintops

or back at the valleys behind

to take the measure of their heart

to see if it’s empty or full.

I let the new moon

feel the old moon’s arms around it again

like the bright vacancy and dark abundance

of what’s joyfully absurd and playful about life

whether its doing a sword dance with words

or dancing in blue heron feathers

like a shaman among waterbirds

longing for enlightenment

like a tantric star map

to break the jinx of their prayer-wheels.

Or dancing to bullets like a greenhorn

in the main street of nineteenth century Dodge

or like me out here in the country dark

alone with six thousand visible stars

eleven miles outside of Westport

spreading my wings under the sign

of the Eagle and the Swan going down in the west

to add my phoenix to the feathers of the burning sumac

and grabbing the lightning lance of the thunderbirds

like a serpent from their talons

hold it up to the stars to the east and the west

like the wavelength of a crazy insight

into the dark word of the living light

that makes me dance my way

out of time

out of place

out of my mind

without leaving anyone or anything behind.

PATRICK WHITE

BETTER TO FLASH A SHARP KNIFE QUICKLY

Better to flash a sharp knife quickly across someone’s throat

as the last remaining mercy

than bludgeon them to death retroactively as you do.

The first is just another big city workaday murder on the nightshift

but the way your offended sense of righteous indignation

has turned to hate

as you sit there sliding needles into your arm

like loveletters into a bruised envelope

you’ve addressed in blood to yourself

I can tell you’re sticking pins into the eyes

of black madonna voodoo dolls

deep inside a secret hiding place in your childhood

where you indoctrinate them into genocide.

You’re a beautiful woman with lots to hide

and I don’t want to know where the corpses are

as if the only intimacies worth caring about

were all long buried in this desert of stars.

And twice before I’ve tasted the blood of the black widow

and yes it may be sweetened

by all the butterflies it’s eaten

but then your heart goes numb as an ice-cube

in the fix at the end

that comes on like an eclipse

of the light at the end of the tunnel

where all your dead relatives

are dying to greet you again.

I wear my heart on my sleeve

like the colours of the ghetto I was born into

to watch my mother die of overwork for nothing

of any estimable value including me

when I look at it from her point of view.

And I like the sexy West Coast sixties look

of those black Stevie Nicks Gothic spider webs

you wear more like skin

than the net of Indra

with jewels at every intersection.

And I’ve always been tempted and still am

by dangerous pariahs on the lamb

from the witch-hunts of medieval men

who fear a female messiah

that can cast her nets wider

than any constellation

among the fishers of men.

And o sweetness don’t doubt yourself.

It’s still a cheap thrill to feel so sublimely vulnerable

daring the taboo event horizons of your powers

like a firefly going eye to eye with a blackhole

even as I bend space to stay clear as a gravitational lense.

But you’re hooked on your own elixirs

like a dealer who wants to get out of it

on his own product

and in my world magic shoots the stars

like whitewater in the Ottawa River

in the spring run off in May

when the toxins wear off like cataracts

and you get high on the risk for free

in the name of sick children

waiting for heart transplants.

And yes, yes, yes, there’s still a Neanderthal in me

that wants to paint your face

in carbon and red ochre

on the inside of my witchdoctor’s mask

to make all this space seem

a lot less lonely in here

since I killed off the last cave bear.

I could so easily encrypt my starmaps

on the mystic enigmas of the dice

I’ve carved like small Kaabas

and Rubik’s cubes out of my own bones

to see if the nightbird calling out to you

in this mutual darkness of ours

were worth taking the chance

if it should happen to come up snake eyes.

Or if I could learn to be hypnotized

without turning to stone

by a Pythian priestess

with a Medusan hairdo

with oracular highlights that bite

and you could learn to dance

to the picture-music

of a different kind of flute

like Salome for Herod

and John the Baptist’s head.

Love doesn’t begin where lust leaves off.

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.

I think that’s only true for those who are no good at it.

Or dominated by a spiritual Gestapo

that makes the body wear a yellow star.

Three phases of the moon.

Maiden. Mother. Crone.

I’ve seen the spider with its crescent fangs.

And I’ve hung from my own spine more than once

like a mummified fly on a trophy line

waiting for my next afterlife

assuming I had one

and Merlin I may seem to you

but I still fear a starless power darker than my own.

And there’s the maiden like Morgana la Fay

beguiling as lunar waterlilies and deadly nightshade

renewing her virginity in a snake pit.

The urge to possess you overwhelms

the certainty of being bit.

One fang kills you.

The other fang cures it.

But even death eventually wears out its welcome

and the spring isn’t enough to make up for it.

But where’s the middle extreme

defined by the other two?

Where’s the mother?

Where’s the summer

that warms the bloodstreams of the garden snakes

like water in a basking hose?

Spring and winter

but where’s the harvest moon

that shines down on the fullness of life

and adds her mother lode to the gold of the grain

like Demeter in the Eleusinian Mysteries

adding little mushrooms of gratified desire

to the wine you only need to drink once

out of your own skull

to stay intoxicated forever?

Prosperpine may have gone down into the underworld

to shoot jewels with the dead

when a serpent bit her in the heel

like a dirty syringe

but when is she going to live up

to the rest of her myth

and drive the snakes out of her garden

long enough for a rose bush or two to take root again?

You leave two kids at home alone

with a couch-surfing crackhead

you met in a bar last weekend

and you expect me to trust you?

Lady I can look through you

like a broken windowpane

and still appreciate the beauty of the view

without cutting myself on the flint knapped glass

and yes you can still cast a spell

that can turn seasoned sailors into swine

and I could so easily

buy into any delusion you wanted me to

just to sleep with you.

But I’m standing at that window with your kids

and there’s a crackhead behind us

flipping channels like cards in a game of solitaire

and we’re looking out at the view together

pretending none of us are there

because we’re all scared

of the cranky stranger with the tarantula tatoo

and all we can see as far as we can look to get away

is this mindscape of you

salting the flesh of the good earth

like Carthage on crystal meth

when you should be planting seeds

in the hearts and minds of those

who look to you for love

like a chance to flower

even on long starless nights

to live without fear

unmenaced by shadows

swarming the night light

like a seance of anti-matter.

You belong to those who love you in life

and blood may be thicker than water

but without water

it coagulates like a rose that’s lost its colour.

It makes raisins of the grapes on the vine

long before their time

as if someone cancelled summer

and no one gets to taste the wine.

And it’s probably wise

to pour both into the cauldron of your heart

until they’re both so intermingled

the rain doesn’t put

the scarlet desires

and phoenix fires

of the passionate poppies out

and the hot-blooded gypsy witches

don’t turn the rain to steam

on first contact with their skin.

We’re standing at a broken window

and we’re looking in

and what we see is that in you

there is no summer

and where blood should be thicker than water

the water’s turned to ice

and the two rosebuds

standing like your daughters at this window

like two cut flowers in a shattered vase

are haemorrhaging like too much turpentine

on two brushes loaded with red paint

too thin to bloom.

Because the ladybug

is too busy playing with matches

trying to get a rise out of the fire-hydrants

to see if she’s still the arsonist she used to be

to know when her own house is on fire

her kids are alone

and it’s time to fly away home.

PATRICK WHITE

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