IN LIEU OF A FUNERAL

IN LIEU OF A FUNERAL

in memoriam: Steve Forster

Death has nothing to do with skulls or bones

seeping into the earth like widows

horded behind windows and doors,

nothing to do with the crumbling aqueducts of arches and vertebrae

that used to carry serpent fire and a thread of water,

and the gentler lightning of the little god

who was rooted in our flesh like an apprentice in a studio

learning to paint the world through our eyes, not

the gaping sockets, the oracular shrines of calcium

the blind worms probe like calendars and soft pencils

for signs of our former lucidity, the charred wizards

etched on our cave-womb walls, not

the rotten jaws and teeth we primed like leg-hold traps

and baited with roses of meat and fragrant blood

to tear and grind our daily bread

from the inquisitions of raffled animals we demonically possessed

until, unmuscled by time, unstrung like an old guitar

they lie forever open in amazement,

unhinged in the earth like ghastly lockets fallen from the foodchain.

Nor in the crumbling molars and brave patinas of our gravestones,

or the dozen words cut like valleys

through granite and marble by the unrequited eons of our tears

to say in the native ink of a waterproof language

we were here awhile among the flowers

for reasons only the rain can guess, not in the braille and signage

of these sad tokens can you refine the facets

of the black jewel turning in the light

like the lens of an indelible eclipse. There is no abacus

of days and nights, no boundary stone or compass

with the eye of a needle, no astrolabe

or ocean with coasts, no delinquency of clockable stars

to surmise the expanse of a journey narrowed to a point

like the contracting pupil of an undiscovered eye

breaching the watchfires of stranded immigrants

burning their coffins like books and lifeboats.

The human body is a bag of water with nine holes in it

and we’re all leaking out, bankrupt clepshydrae,

trying to make installments on a sea

that soon forecloses on our petty accounts, but death

is not a debt we owe to anything, not a fee for the ferryman

or a pig for the ogre at the mouth of a passage

that would otherwise gulp us down, nor

as the dark priests habitually aver

is it the craze of some ancestral miscreance

fathered on our cradles by a fall. As every executioner knows

better than those who employ the killing frost,

or the prisoner bound and hooded like a shrub

against the coming cold, death is not a punishment,

nor for the citizen of the new country

unfurling like a flag of blood in the bathtub, an escape.

The vagrant heart no more

we miss the flowering, the fire-paths, the urgent fathoms of the rose,

the maladjusted poppy of the famous apron, the introverted socks

that cried all night in their finishing school, the common sacristies

of chaste luggage, the occult cupboards of bookish bread

tutoring the plates in the Latin roots of things, the ruined eyelashes

of evangelizing nails spurning the cold bouquets

of broken-hearted hammers, we miss the aging sugar-sack

that charmed the lemons and the onions with spoon-shaped valentines,

and the moon, the streetlamp, the white peony in the watering-can,

the long hand-shakes of disinherited saws

lamenting the strict custards of their arboreal grandfathers

cunning as flies and fishing tackle. But who, among thorns,

afflicted by albino scorpions, the fetal keys of random miscarriages

that shocked the dirty sheets one night with red carnations

and fed a hundred unused baby-names

like leftovers to a famished drawer,

or the treacherous rashs of amorous adjacencies,

or the bitter histories of neglected vinegars that couldn’t sing

assassinating the voices of the mysterious wines who could, who

purposeless and bored among the abandoned ropes and ladders

of the pharoahnic garage, the thick skins of mummified paints,

or wedged like an ax with a broken handle in the poached stumps

of endangered chopping blocks, misses these, misses

the long, slow catastrophes that weep like years of glass?

The sunglass general is not sanctioned by his victory,

nor the cataract of the fool deferred by his defect.

Death eats the curse as well as the blessing, the climax

in the used condom beside the bed, the star in the well, the twilight

of the kiss, as well as the lightning strike that ashed

the wayward witching wand of the groping ant

like the spider-harp in a lightbulb, it eats oblivion, disaster, disease,

it drinks to the lees the faithless acids that green the copper trees,

it eats the ancient embryos of the souvenir dreams

pressed between the lean pages of florid shale, it eats the useless gesture

and the prowling submarines of sin piked under the polar caps

of aging oxygen, decrepitude, debility,

and the brooding marrows of the dusk. Fatter than a weekend newspaper

death eats but does not grow, a surfeit of deprivation, a feast

of the crucial blue salts it sits below like the sea

dethroned by the waste of its corpulent table with nothing to add of its own,

in the lowest place of all, receiving all, facelessly, eye to eye,

the colossal horses groaning like captive temples

in the ruins of their bones, and the dim star of the little red money-spider

cannibalized on its wedding night by its bridal companion,

and the unstopped flutes of the children, some no bigger

than their arms, who died before the rain could tune their fingers

to the sadder clefs of the candle-snuffing columbine,

and the wise in their tents on the moon, nomads

of a borrowed light, deceiving oceans, and the shy ones, the tender ones

afraid of heights, lost ear-rings in lachrymose places sworn to silence,

who curled into themselves like prophylactic fiddleheads, nuns

of the night that sighed in their wombs, and the proud, self-made ladders

who transcended themselves rung by rung to climb

all the way up to the sky like boys in the show-off trees

ashamed of their roots, and the deserted and the lonely in the last acts

of bad apartments with broken intercoms, wardens

of their own solitude, gnawing on the heads

of the plaster cherubs and plastic grapes that garnish the shoddy restaurants.

Without taste, without discrimination, without appetite,

because death is always full, as the eye

that takes in a million stars is always full,

as life that is its own food is always full, not

leaner by a butterfly for all that it consumes, nor ever

sated by the butcheries that tuck and tailor their meats to its waistline,

death does not malign the living or cover the dead with calumny,

no more than indivisible space, neither vast nor miniscule

mars the lifelines of the brilliant rivers that traverse it, or a billion galaxies

that fly off in all directions like fireflies from the cradle of its palm

are obstructed in their courses. Where does my fist go

when I unlock my fingers, or my lap when I stand

or the dawn when the day is far along? And by noon

when the sun is at zenith, and the clock is a widow walk

on a lonely tower encompassing the sea, are the shadows unmanned

by the synchronicity? And where does the wind go

or the wave or the flame or the person

when the fountain-mouths are still, or the silence when I say your name?

Death is not a collusion of time to undo our sandy fame

in the divine ignorance of an unspeakable wasteland.

Like a tree that isn’t elated when the birds and leaves return in the spring

and isn’t downcast when they part again in the fall;

as it was before we swam in the shining

and as it is now that we’ve come ashore,

death is a gesture that any child could understand.

Death is an open hand.

PATRICK WHITE

TRYING TO SETTLE DOWN INTO THE SIMPLICITY OF MY WILDNESS

TRYING TO SETTLE DOWN INTO THE SIMPLICITY OF MY WILDNESS

Trying to settle down into the simplicity of my wildness

inside a clearing in a grove of Long Bay birch,

one pine reflected perfectly on the sunset calm

of the intervening water. Just sit here,

not meditating, not painting, not trying to pose

the environment to suit the mood of the poet

or indulging in the anti-pathetic fallacy

that I’m somehow exempt from all of this.

I see. But I’m not looking.

I hear. But I’m not listening.

The beavers give me the benefit of the doubt

and decide I’m not there after all

and go on working around me

like another troublesome, harmless obstacle.

Nothing lonelier than the call of a crow in autumn

as it hones its beak like a sword that’s gone rusty

on the branch it’s perched on

and tries again and again

to figure out what’s wrong

by waiting for an answer that never comes.

It’s a black blob on the ink-blotter of the moon

rising almost full to the west

of a Pearl Harbour spiked with the masts

of a sunken fleet of trees in port,

a quarter-note, a misplaced comma,

an apostrophe that doesn’t belong to anyone.

I surround it with the similitudes

it engenders in me associatively

and enter crow mind

like a diamond travelling back in time

to when it was anthracite.

And don’t think of the diamond

as solid adamantine translucency

because it flows, it ripens, it falls, it weeps

like a supple absolute in play with everything

the way water is

when you pour it out of the grail,

out of the elaborate lattice-work

of a thematic atomic principle

that binds the whole to every particulate

like flypaper coiled the opposite way,

an hourglass turned upside down

like an empty hemisphere at last call

just as the Sahara returns

to nimble Capsians, antelope and grasslands

due to a change in the climate of time.

I enter the immensity of the crow

like a wingspan wavelengths wider than mine

and I’m horrified by the depths of its solitude

and how, like coal, like diamond, like me

before the diamonds thawed

its most dangerous wish was

to be consumed in the fire of what it longed for,

to break into flames and disappear.

And for the very first time

my third eye cried a tear

like an insight into the sadness

that makes light of the world

like a sacred clown that’s scared to death.

And then its partner came like a delinquent eclipse

that distracted both of us

from the intensity of the clarity

that was setting fire to the clouds all around us

in the damp, autumn sunset,

and they flew off like ashes in an updraft

and I was left sitting here alone

with one of my eyes put out

like a cold fire pit

the stars return to every night

like the highlights of the stories

I made up about them

to bridge the distance between us,

hoping I’ll add a new twist to the plot

like another branch on the fire

they first took their shining from

when we were all full of stories

that were lyrical, lonely and young.

Radiant with despair to know

what we were all doing here

trying to read each other’s minds

as if everyone of us kept a secret

so deeply within ourselves

we didn’t know about it

and weren’t in on it

because that’s how open and apparent it was.

PATRICK WHITE

ONE SIDE OF MY FACE ALWAYS TURNED TOWARD THE DARKNESS

ONE SIDE OF MY FACE ALWAYS TURNED TOWARD THE DARKNESS

One side of my face always turned toward the darkness.

Like the moon, like Mercury.

No more to see on the dark side,

than there is on the light.

One no more the sponsor of life

than the other is.

Not Janus-faced because

they don’t swing both ways

and even when you’re walking

hand in hand with somebody,

it’s still not a hinge.

There’s no threshold of the new year

between them

and you can’t cross it

wearing somebody else’s shoes.

There’s one light, one sun,

for the whole room

and it shines down on everybody alike

yet one side gives everything back

like water to water

eternity to time

and the other turns its face toward the wall

like a child that can’t be forced to participate.

Cold, iron thoughts my tongue sticks to

like an oyster straight out of the shell

on freezing metal.

Two chunks of black anthracite

in a white stocking.

Deimos and Phobos,

terror and fear,

Martian moons with a downgraded albedo,

black meteorites in white Antarctica,

because you’ve been a bad boy

and gouged out the snowman’s eyes.

And the lies I had to tell myself

to try and survive just being normal

without getting caught

picking it up on the fly as I went along

because no one taught me anything beyond the obvious.

And though there are well-meaning,

commonsensical taboos everywhere,

legions of cliches

against pecking at the walls of your comfort zone

with a stolen spoon for a pick-axe,

like a lifer that just won’t give up

trying to get out,

one day Jericho came crumbling down

like a scab

like a cosmic egg

some harried crow dropped on the ground

to escape the furious sparrows

when the sun stood still at noon

and I made a break for it

and I’ve been getting away with myself ever since.

Sometimes the darkness is solid and opaque

when space turns to glass

and I’m locked into my own eclipse

like a baby mammoth in a black glacier

like a message in braille in a bottle

that focused on the medium too much

and burned through what I had to say

like a lens without right-brained peripheral vision.

When space freezes on me like this

I’m usually situated among the asteroids

between Jupiter and Mars

trying to get myself together

by blending in with the other fragments

of the habitable planet we all hope

we can be again one day

though I’m not sure I really mean it

and my instincts smell a judas-goat,

I say it anyway.

And you mustn’t think

the gilded matador of noon

with his flashing white swords

and flaring cape of blood

is any less tangible

than the lunar bull of the moon on its knees

because that would be inaccurate

and upset all the mirrors in the room.

Hey, but out of that trough of a wound

the dog and the scorpion eat from

flows a dark abundance

like a Sahara of grain

into the hollow siloes of Joseph’s dream

like one of the spiral arms of a starfish galaxy

that martyred the black hole

that cut it off and buried it

like the right hand of something that offended it

to ensure the fertility of the crops.

Bright vacancy.

An apostolic imagist poet

looking at himself in the mirror

as if he were measuring the width of Flaubert’s windowsill

to see how many relics he could splinter

out of the true frame of the looking glass

to sell the ignorant masses back

their own family albums on photo-shop.

He looks at them.

But not through them.

He likes the blossoms like a hummingbird

delights in the trivia of day

but he never digs a well deep enough

to discover the dark root of the Dutch elm

that hydraulically draws all this up

from an eyeless watershed

like nine tons of water a day

and six million leaves.

If you’re a man of good conscience

your soul might have both hands

firmly fixed at eleven and one o’clock

on the steering wheel you wear like a halo

but it’s the dark engine with a will of its own

that empowers your going from beneath

and the wheels on the road

underneath your feet

not the one above your head

that bears you in the golden chariot of the sun

like a triumph through the slums of Rome.

Remember thou art mortal.

When you’re a bubble

that forgets where it comes from

don’t expect the tolerance of thorns.

PATRICK WHITE

LINES FROM THE BLOODHOUSE

LINES FROM THE BLOODHOUSE

Expecting the worst because it is always now

and now is always the downfall of time,

the doomstroke of the present pulse

that goes off like an alarm clock in the grave

that no one will wake up to

but a lonely few raving in their sleep

feverish with dream, I look upon

the tribulation of the willow beyond tears,

the fury of the flagellant pines

that thrash the troubled air to keep from breaking,

the garbled flight plans of the veering birds,

and, prophet of the obvious, presage

the coming of a storm to break you

like a mirror of stagnant water

on the meteoritic thrones

of your igneous foundation stones.

Were you elected by the stars

to skull the earth with bombs,

to crater, gouge and scorch the playgrounds

of the obsolete children

waiting in their makeshift hospitals

for arms you tore from them like daisies; “she

loves me; she loves me not,” until

the night pours metal in their eyes

to seed the fire-fruits of their flowering

that has suddenly matured

in front of the guns and cameras

into a windfall of silent, acrid hearts

buried like landmines in the dazzling road

of their scorned flesh?

And they die for oil, they die

for the corporate spiders pulling the strings

of the Punch and Judy puppet governments

that tour the morgues like spring;

for bridges and contractors, power-lines

and power lunches, foreign policies

that brain them like the jawbone of an ass

they die, in their pyjamas, in their beds,

a kiss goodnight, and their prayers

imploring the disconnected dark to enlarge

the acceptable quotas of civilian dead

like the posters of the martyrs

on the walls of their rooms

shaken by the distant thunder

of computer-guided patriots and prophets

cooking their cities like God. And tomorrow

and tomorrow and tomorrow they die

in twisted, tormented convulsions

of agony and baffled blood they die and die,

learning to read and count

the names and years of their relatives

in the liberated souks of democratic cemeteries, alif

beh teh theh jim, F-l8, they master their lessons

and die in their thousands

because an executive cabal of miserable old men

with platitudes and prosthetic missiles for dicks

are into kiddie-porn snuff flicks

and biblical memoirs of all they begot

for the providence and profits

that redress the way they rot.

Acknowledging that this is not a hallmark greeting card,

I put it to you in the name

of your own enlightened self-interest,

in the name of a heart that isn’t

congested with a fashionable indifference,

in the name of a natural decency

that doesn’t need a teacher, in the name

of the families you came from

and the families you work for,

the daughter that falls asleep with you on the couch

like an island in the eye of a hurricane, the son

who listens to everything you say

as if he were kicking through bushels of autumn leaves

and then steals your car keys,

and your half-estranged wife, hoping

you’ll notice her hair-do at dinner, your mother,

the evangelist of baby pictures, and your father

softly overgrown like an old stone wall;

in the name of teen-age lovers

and their sophomoric glues, in the name

of calcium postal-clerks who smile

like Easter seals; in the name of iron men

with empty wallets, in the name

of the huge, lonely roses in all night bars

that bloom like scabs on the moon and know

they’re not pretty, in the name of physicists

and cabdrivers with chunks of quantum hash,

in the name of the angry crossroads in the singer’s voice,

in the name of the name of the insecure poet

whose last word fell like a drop of water

from a trembling blade of stargrass, I put it to you

because you are not a toad in front of a football game,

because you are not

a pebble-minded cosmetician in a delirium of pink, because

even in a shopping-mall you can feel and bleed and think,

and though you may be slow, you’re thorough

when it comes to putting on new brakes,

and though I know you don’t know what I mean

when I tell you that even the rocks, even

the rarest of ores we draw from the earth

like secret kings and artificial hearts

are freaked with seams of mystic gangrene

that will sever us like bells of blood

from the gardens of the gods we hope for,

rotten hinges from the gates,

bad meat from the starwells; you’re seer enough

to intuit the theme. It’s not about honey,

it’s about lies and death and money

devouring families like yours; it’s about

rich men gigantic with greed

and nations of thugs and thieves

infesting the earth like maggots in an abattoir,

manipulating what everyone believes,

defaming the weak and the poor, war after war,

to glut themselves on more and more and more

until all of life is nothing but a toxic insight,

and there are children everywhere tonight

making the news, hoping

they’ll need their shoes in the morning,

bleeding through their bandages like dawn.

Famine, disease, war, poverty and ignorance,

under what sign was this planet born

that this should be the birthmark of black stars

that forsake the constellation

burning like a kite

tangled in the powerlines?

And do not tell me these abominations, these

ominous eclipses of the heart

that fit the skull with lichens and cataracts

sunspots, polar caps and death shroud victory flags

are the labour of mineral casinos

playing the sluts and slots of chance

for a material immortality composing sexual requiems

on the keyboards of our genes. These

are the smiles of old scythes,

rusted and bloody,

that reap what they do not sow,

the chronic harvest of blood, bone, tears and flesh

threshed by the rotating blades of the moon;

these are the wounds and gashes,

the indecipherable science and scripture of scars

that stroke the lunar fury of the wild boars who plough with tusks,

the salt and lime and ashes that spice

the tasteless, eyeless, childless grave

with famous reasons for murder. These

are the ballroom courtesies of dancing cannibals,

these are the mothering headphones

of a twenty year old tank commander

who smothers the screams of casual children

in his video line of fire

with the curative gasolines of American rock and roll.

These are the occult imperatives

of cosmic ghouls whose mouths

are roses of blood, whose idols and ethics

are praying mantises dismembering the world,

tent-caterpillars and locusts

blighting the leaf and the grain

with the eggs and afterlives of imperial insects.

These are the arcane scales

of old serpents sloughing skins

like epochs and empires and straitjackets

that couldn’t contain the life within

the market gardens of original sin, these

are the hinges of its gaping jaws

and these the fangs and poisons

of its septic laws undone like lynch pins

to take the whole world in, disgorging again

the used condoms, the withered shells

of the nations and nests they’ve plundered.

Let the blind ambassador

whose morals are as breezy as his teeth

number the spoon-fed nightmares

propped up like dolls in unnegotiated corners,

their glass eyes open for keeps

like guide dogs at the fatal intersections

of dark, delinquent streets

that only the children cross,

hysterical in sleep. Let him explain

to the pillows of the children in the furnace

why their feathers will never make a bird that flys;

let him explain to the bracelets and bells,

the twilight of hair in the comb,

the glacial sages preserved in the cracks of the mirror,

the drowned lumber of mothers

dismantled by violent coasts, their children

snagged like cod in the purses of political fishing nets,

why death is the only guarantor of human liberty,

let him choose his words carefully

as if he were loading a gun with birthday candles,

let him drop seedlings in the bullet holes

and talk of future forests gleefully

to the press corps generals

spewing pulp fiction like chainsaws in a feeding frenzy.

Let him mark well the small graves in the footnotes

of his text, the fragile starmaps of braille

that will later come forward like witnesses

to accuse his sterling composition

of the mountainous corals of the dead,

all the polyp people that he brained into stone bread.

And when like death he’s out of a job,

let him run eagerly door to door

delivering newspapers to the mob

like personal resumes, or let him carve gravestones

for unofficial children

on the dead letterhead of his own.

Then take the presidents, the bankers,

the ministers, executives, and pimps

equipped with the long spoons and supple shovels

of their death-divining tongues

and let them dig like star-nosed moles

deep holes in the earth for the corpses of the young,

black poppies in the shadow of a white-washed bloodhouse

enthroned on a summit of dung.

PATRICK WHITE

SOFTLY, SOFTLY, NOW

SOFTLY, SOFTLY, NOW

Softly, softly, now; here there is no beneath or above, no hell

for miscreant flowers opening for the moon, no ghosts

who can’t find their way back to the grave. No one

is unacceptable in this place where even the dead dig

for the blue bones of heaven, cracking

them open like fortune-cookies

to taste the light gold of the marrow. This is the kingdom

of empty cups waiting to be filled

by the black wine of union that ripened

in the skull-shrines

of a thousand drunken buddhas

begging outside a brothel door

for the same holy candle to show them the way home. People

are seldom grateful for what they don’t know

and thought is only the dog of reality

if you can catch my drift in this back-alley

where I’m dancing with a gust of wind. How lightly

you step off my tongue into your veils and shadows

dropping your masks like petals all over the asphalt

until you can’t be seen. Is that freedom or death; do you

bathe in your grave or your heart

when you remember the sorrows you’ve buried like daggers

in the wounds that widowed you.? Do you tremble

like a kite at the end of your own life-line

waiting to be found by the witching-wands of the lightning;

or have you forgotten your madness, the dark jewels

in which you took sanctuary for the night

like an orphan in her longing, the crazy wisdom

that put on the costume of a dead clown

and offered herself to the blind and humourless

like a chessboard. Do you still swim naked in sapphires, raise

gardens of fish on the moon, perform

open-heart surgery on paralyzed serpents

that wake up from the anaesthetic between your legs

like a spring thaw, believing they can walk and then

come crawling back, veteran amputees

demanding crutches? Wild moon on a lonely river, night-lotus,

flesh and stars, every moment of you is origin; why doubt

your own reflection in the mirror of my voice? I’m

not selling snake-oil on the midways of eternity, filling the sails

of a slave-ship and calling it the love-boat; this is not

a wardrobe of auroras I buy up cheap in Montreal

and hawk from the back of a truck in Sunday parking lots. If the words

dance, if the wind plays lightly in the leaves, if the fire sings

and the diamonds flow and the rain falls musically

like phantom fingers on the spotted touch-me-nots, should I impugn

the graces of perception that sing, unseen, in the deep woods

because they fly without a limp, praise without a stutter?

I see in whispers; I hear in glimpses. Nameless affinities rooted in silence

bloom in the saying and fall back into themselves,

fountains within fountains, pursing their waters

to kiss the light as it breaks like glee against them. Fountains,

not pedestals. Deep sky-dwellers ride the helix of their own thermals,

their wings spread from dawn to dawn, and if they build,

they build from the sky down, not footstools, scaffoldings, and temples,

not ladders of bone at the bottom of dry wells, but tents of light

in the secret grottoes of space, supple as life.

Up is not up nor down, down, when you dream in the seed, neither

born nor unborn, yet nothing missing; creation within the Uncreate,

the intimately impersonal holy mother that is born and perishes

with us. I walk this vastness alone; who, then, to impress or pedestal

in this empty, pathless, mouthless, dark bliss of a world

where even the silence is speechless before it? If

the ignorant see the world as an open hat on a lonely streetcorner

begging for change and prizes; let them. That is their hour,

their seeing, their word. All seeing is a kind of love.

Orchids and dandelions alike. All that is loved is seen to be beautiful

but not all that is beautiful is seen to be loved. I see

a blue rose, shedding lives like petals and skies,

night skies, freaked by stars tatooed on heavy eyelids, falling

into dream and destiny. Graffiti Mona Lisa mother Bacchanal,

mad, menstruating, moon-dump bag-lady, I see you

vaulting topless over the horns of lunar bulls in ancient Crete,

or lady of the lake, royal witch-bride, bored with weddings

and vase-tamed bouquets, waiting to grasp the hilt

of magic swords whose power is older than the stones

from which they’re drawn. And there, in the window

of the thirteenth house of the zodiac, isn’t that you

plucking dead leaves off the herbs you grow on the sill, hanging curtains

you’ve pirated thread by thread from old mythologies

and woven again like the moon into light? Crow-weaver,

tell me, have you ever stolen silver from the mirror to heal a wounded vision,

or known an appetite so great, so incomprehensible

it consumed the galaxies like krill? Death is the dark inspiration,

pure energy, radiant and whole, the mute mirror that reflects nothing

that stands before it in an arrogance of forms; the face you wore

before the beginning of faces. Already achieved,

not something up ahead, a black star on a white night, the dark mother

who fills the wombs with gestures of light. Death is the ancient future

that passes instantaneously, the crone-nymph, oyster and pearl,

the miner in the ore that releases the child like a bell. The dream that wakes you

from a dream, the dead tree that gives birth to a bird. Death is

the terrifying abundance, the terrible joy of perfection falling

into perfection, the honey and the horror of the sacrificial wound. The child

that carries her mother in her womb. Death is no less life, no less us,

than a wave is water. Death has no beginning so life is never

finished. One afternoon, in an autumn garden, the air shuddered with mine

and I knew that it was already done like the stars above the flowers

of gardens to come. What death, then, to stare into

that isn’t already under your feet? Wombs, waterclocks, and coffins;

can you tell me the difference? Here’s my skull. Break it.

The bird’s already out singing you like a handful of joy

hurled well beyond itself into the dawn, and in the morning market

among laughter and apples

the phantoms array their illusions.

PATRICK WHITE

IF YOU WASH YOUR FACE IN YOUR OWN REFLECTION

IF YOU WASH YOUR FACE IN YOUR OWN REFLECTION

If you wash your face in your own reflection

your face will come off in your hands

like moonlight on Jebb’s Creek

far off Rideau Ferry Road

in the wide open mud flats

of struggling trees and cattails

that French-kiss your boots with every step you take

as if you were wearing octopus suction cups

walking across a window.

Here the stars outdo themselves for radiance

as if they were competing for attention

with the myriad frogs who contend by example

cannibalistic procreation in a small pond

where the creek fans out like the hood of a cobra

is the answer to survival

not oceanic emotionally attached illumination

gone stargazing.

Caliban having it out with Ariel in an ossuary

of frog bones and old myths

pouncing on the facts of life like a fresh kill.

The car lights round the curve at Millerbrook Farm

penetrating the darkness as far as they can

and then pass on

like owls doing a routine flyover

through a dogfight of swallows and bats.

The darkness returning to itself

after a false alarm, seems deeper, richer

more certain of itself than it was before

as if it had gotten away with something

that made it feel more satisfied

with the way things are.

Life getting away with itself

by staying off the beaten path

like a thief that comes in the night,

furtively, unbeaten, for the sterling of the moon.

And the stars seem so magnificently unperturbed.

And the house cats let out for the night

from the nearby housing project,

who escaped death

by dodging traffic across the road

wind their way like the smoke of root fires

through the cedar groves

like a rhapsody of feline fuses

on the trail of something big.

The deer mice listen warily

in the tunnels of the London blitzkrieg

for the cunning of their music to dissipate

like the piety of a burnt offering to the sky gods

who aren’t even aware of them

nor hear the all clear of the stars to stand down.

Here everything that lives

casts a spell of its own

to adapt itself like a fact to its environment,

its own magic trick

to capture and evade life

as it randomly shuffles

exits and entrances

with a joker up its sleeve

like a guest list at a feast of appetites

playing their genetically marked cards

close to their chest.

Here the stars overhead

put everything down on the table

knowing the best place to hide

is out in the open

with light for a witness

and anyone with an eye

to the emptiness

that’s the modus operandi

of the death mask that remains

indelible as starmud sticking to its story

when you wash your face off

in your own reflection

like the last, best alibi you had left

to rebutt the testimony of the mirror

that’s proved to be a bigger liar

than the theme of darkness

that runs through all of this.

Jebb’s Creek with its cargo of waterlilies

flowing into the Milky Way

like a local tributary

of something sublime and unknown

with the same cosmic aspirations writ large

in the eyes of those who try

to live up to them from down below.

PATRICK WHITE

THE CARS GO BY MY WINDOW

THE CARS GO BY MY WINDOW

The cars go by my window

like the swish of arhythmic breakers

on black shores of snakey asphalt.

Dirt, cataracts, geriatric pearls

that were retrieved from the Titanic,

December windows full of grace,

I sit in my place like paperweight on a desk

like a fieldstone in a bank wall,

like a capstone on a hill of skulls,

and contemplate how it came about

that young, I could focus

like a laser beam of polarized light,

but as I’ve grown older it seems

I look at the stars at night

like a dissipated mode of time and space

and don’t so much focus anymore

on what’s in my line of sight

as embrace the atmospheric ambiance

of the hot mangers that burn within

to give birth to something unmessianic

that shines from the inside out

like the ingenuous divinity

of a fully realized human being.

One small red lamp on

like the heater of a cigarette

glowing in an ashtray,

like the traffic light of a firefly

whose green lightbulb has gone out

like do not pass go on a monopoly board,

trying to deal with things like a stop sign in winter.

Abstruse broodings at the butt end of the year,

when the trees look more like numbers than words

and everyone is so scientifically dependent

on a single thermal-paned window

or a computer screen

for their point of view

they don’t know where else to look

but at the details,

at the shabby exactitude of the facts

that fit their feet like unclipped toenails

sticking up like gravestones in the bath,

or moonrise,

once they’ve been dredged like a canal.

I don’t know for sure

but I suspect there are as many

Japanese words for grey rain

as their are Inuit words for snow

and just where the sumi ink brush

feathers out like a low hanging lenticular cloud

on the event horizon of nirvana,

like the last skidmark on samsara

that’s where you’re most likely

to find enlightenment

like the last breath of apricot season

letting go of its ghost.

And there are ghosts to let go of

like fire driven out of the sacred wood

like books from a sanctimonious library

run by a small town born again spider

trying to keep the world pure for royalist butterflies

I haven’t even begun to remember yet.

X-rated books profuse

with the purple passages of summer

that got taken down off the shelf

like a wild orchid among all these wallflowers

of common sense and uncommon practicality

that think of a Shasta daisy

as the waste of a good vegetable garden

and a star as the excess of a neighbouring farm

that keeps its porchlight on all night;

taken down like the hand

of the foxiest girl at the dance

for all the gold of India, or Samarkand

as Hafiz said it

and read so many times

the glue is cracked along the spine

of its perfect binding

and when the wind goes to exorcise them

like the petals of the flames that bloomed

like a flower of fire in the voice of a candle

speaking in tongues at a black mass

and read so many times

when the landlords of these heritage ghettoes

drive them out like crackhead prostitutes on welfare

trying to get their kids back

the same way they came in the first place,

I swear I see in the first snowflakes of the year

the pages of a tear-wrenching novel

scattered like the first draught of morning doves

who refused to be revised by an eclipse of crows

who’ve never understood how imperishable snow is

when someone writes on it in blood

like a rose listening to the death bed confession

of a wounded worm with nothing to feel sorry for

instead of pissing on it from above

when you’re feeling comparatively godlike and cruel

toward those whose love can’t help you

get out of the snake pit you’ve dug for yourself

like the crow that taught Cain how to bury Abel

by scratching a living out of the earth

like an undertaker with a back hoe

before it gets too cold to bury anyone.

Sleet, rain, snow, smothering immensities of grey,

I’m trying to jump-start a phoenix

like a heart attack in a pail of wet ashes

to get something going again

that will see me through the winter

like the box kite of a Chinese fire lantern

I hold on to like a string of smoke

that keeps me together

and prevents my wings from being iced over

like the main theme of my mindstream

the higher it gets.

A little fire

in the dark furnace

of a combustible heart

can go a long way on a day like this

without mistaking itself

for a mythically inflated extraterrestrial weather balloon

looking for a supernova of inspiration

in every sorry snowflake

it approaches like a star

going through withdrawal

after the Milky Way of human kindness froze

dead in its tracks like a creekbed in shock

at the beginning of a new ice age

and someone snorted it like the Road of Ghosts

and someone o.d.’d on the illuminated flash

ricocheting off the bling of their own exorcism

and someone looked long and hard

past the demoralized stained-glass dragonflies

that sat on the broken eggshells

of the brittle waterlilies

through the winter patina of a dirty window

and stared blankly at the grey intensities

that are about to overwhelm us

like four hundred miles of cloud cover on Venus

as any blind man will confirm

and every third eye of a crocus will deny

as much as I love it

seeing isn’t enough.

There’s the mysticism of contemplation.

And then there’s the mysticism of action.

Outdated slug lines and snippets of Shangri La

crying out like this December rain in its impotence

like a grail on the moon

that’s looking for an ailing kingdom,

if not a return to Eden,

then why not a Viagra of flowers?

Though artificial midwinter springtimes

don’t weather well in the sun

and all these artificial Christmas lights

that have ripened like a still life

of cherries, pineapples, banannas, strawberries,

and Jerusalem artichoke hearts

all mixed on the same palate

and fixed to the life lines

of the imitation grapevines

of a small Italian restaurant

in a rurally conservative Ontario town

with a northern temperament

for adapting to depression like a storm front;

for all the electrical aura

that surrounds them like holy signs

on the short-circuiting vines of life,

no one’s going to tread them into wine

without getting their own blood

all over their feet

like a Vincent Van Gogh painting

of farm girls harvesting a vineyard

as the sun slows down solsticially behind them.

Seeing isn’t enough

and tears are about as strong

as two and a half per cent American beer.

You need to learn to cry like an ambulance

on its way to give a Protestant poppy

on the lapel of an aging war vet

an Irish Catholic blood transfusion

if you want to survive winter here

like a medic in the middle of No Man’s Land

keeping your cool at an accident

that was bound to happen to everyone.

PATRICK WHITE