LILACS AT MIDNIGHT

LILACS AT MIDNIGHT

Stars clustered around green hearts, every night

we meet like this as you walk in out of the dark

through the golden mouth of the door

that says your tender lightning into the vast spaces

of the electric room basking in its garden of lamps,

a spray of torn lilac in your hand as a gift

sweeter than the embroidered pillowcases

of our ghostly grandmothers unspooled

like smoke and incense on the wind.

And it’s been a thousand bumbling deaths and revivals

since a beautiful woman brought me flowers

and you are young and honey and peach roses

and I am the burnt library of an expurgated constellation

laired in an abyss littered with my own unmarrowed bones

where I try to look deeply into the eyes of things

no one can understand, hoping, if I stare long enough

these yarrow sticks from the book of changes, nine

in the fifth place, might restore my faith in water

and make something bloom again under the black eyelids

of the dream in the stone I’m trying to teach my name.

A fountain of flowers, pink coral, a trine

of tiny crowns, the spume and foam of twilight oceans, three tongues

on the fractured olive branch in the dove of your hand,

a sign of life and land, but you are the fairest token

of the spring to seize the grey bird in the storm-drenched nest

of my aberrant ashes, and raising a choir of fire and blood

that lives on nothing, make it sing.

And you know I love you as the sunset loves its planet,

as the great, ruined dusty rose of the dusk loves

the flashing spirit of the brilliant, white mare

that grazes in the spreading bruise of its darkening pastures,

until all is night and time and the silence of old, unmoveable immensities

too close to God to cry for the worlds

that go out in them like candles, like fireflies, like

the overturned lanterns of the heart

that never makes it home again,

its blood path through the labyrinths of the dark

uncertain as the headwaters of the streams

that slay the swan park with the force of their running.

And, no doubt, you will be reading this one autumn night

tears away from now, the windows rattling in a cold wind

and the stars breaking their glass fangs on the iron air

and I will be the small island of moist breath, the lunar lichen, that blooms

and disappears like a phantom sail on the black mirror

of your widow-walk, frost on the black rose of your grief

a ghost in the garden. You will remember me then as I am now

and feel my presence flood the room like the first draft of a love-letter

slipped through a crevice of light under the door.

And you will not fear the tremor in the bird net of the swaying curtains

or the dead branch with its solitary blossom

that scratches like a broken pencil at your windowpane,

or the shadow of the ashen moth that flutters in the flame of your votive candle.

You will not fear the things that my books could not explain

or the kiss of cold cherries on the nape of your neck

like the glance of a stranger that fills you with knives

on the blood-bridge of one of your former lives;

you will not fear the voice that whispers your name in the well

or the seabird in the fog off the coast of your hearing

that mourns like a lost ship or the ocean in the unfathomed abyss

of an abandoned shell. You will not withdraw like a wave

from the nearing because I know you are a strong bell, a lighthouse of courage,

and it will be me come back from the unsayable distances

between the blossoms and the roots on the silver tree of the dead

to thaw my hands again at the good fire of your abundant heart,

and feel once more your small body gathered up like grain and wine

and stars and volcanic poppies into the bay of mine

before we part. I will come to you out of that vast, shoreless sea

like a tender message in the blue bottle of this June night

with its gentle gestures of lilacs and love in the air

and I don’t know what I’ll say that I can’t say now

or if my tongue will be further schooled in the hidden harmonies

of unseen things the living cannot know, but sweetness,

as we live and have our being now in this madhouse of the moment,

remember this when the gust of that spirit comes like a slow lament

in a tattered robe of autumn leaves:

Though we were the unlikeliest of friends,

my sense of humour beginning where yours ends, if at all,

and the years between us the wingspan between dusk and dawn

and the others envious, askance, black, or jealous

because they could not understand or refused to see

what the autumn had to say to the spring, forgetting

that both seasons are revealed by the melting snow, that after the ice

the withered fields of last October are the overtures of March,

the first to hear the chiming doorbells of the crimson columbine

waiting in the soft moss on the bleak threshold of the rock

to be answered; that winter isn’t the wall of ice between spring and fall

but one greens into the other like an underpainting

and the echo in the valley is the first to hear the call to arise

and root the white lily in the gold-green iris of your eyes.

They sowed scorpions and vipers in the clefts

of their depletions and drank the shrieking acids of nettles and ants

hoping things would flower for them, too, even in the brain slag

of their salted earth, but the festering air of their condemnations

mothered a nation of blackflies and nothing was brought to birth

but more lies, and you can’t farm heaven with the devil’s tools

or impress the sun with the splendour of fools.

How could I tell them that for me, in the squalls of these later years

that blew the stars out one by one, lovers and friends gone,

and the sinkings and the cruel descents that never found bottom

and kept on happening, and the shipwrecks and the sudden seizure of events

that spiralled upward only to smash the moon like an egg

on the rocks below, how could I have let them know

that for me you were a lifeboat in shark weather, a hurricane rose

with hazel eyes and deep in the heart of your fury

a haven of blue that saw me through everything with laughter?

And I don’t know what everyone else was after, a little love

some dignity, a bit of cash, and a splash of self-respect,

but I was after you, crazed by your physical charms

hoping to hold you like the new moon in the old moon’s arms

and against all gods, all convention, all the poetic lore

that said you can turn a muse into a whore by sleeping with her,

love you the way the lightning loves its lightning rods. Be that as it may

and may it be one day in some deranged encounter of the senses

that flaunt their flowers on the banks of the other side,

I remained the longing devotee of your beauty, and you, the water-bride

of a hundred hungry poems. And still I waited for the moonrise,

still I waited for the apricot of your flesh above the willow,

and your angry cassettes, and your love of cats, and your emergency tears

when life handed you another hard stone for a pillow.

You were the orchid in the shadow of the outhouse

that the world can be when you grow up in the coils of poverty

and the wines of life are rags of blood on the razorwire

and the only way out is the stamp-sized gram

crumbled in the valley of the cigarette-paper you lick and post

like a letter addressed to the fire that lights it up,

hoping the next joint gets you higher than the last.

You were the water-lily that turned the rot of the swamp

into something beautiful, a star ahead of your past, a lamp

that never went out or soiled itself with black pollen

even when it shone alone in the morgues of doubt, a glowing rose

come of the dark into which even the strongest have fallen.

And if less than a lover then I loved you more than a friend.

And you brought me lilacs at midnight, and you entered me, a river,

singing of all the things that had drifted downstream

to the dream of an ocean that never spoke

of death or desertion to the birds in the tree

at the end of its frayed rope

where the deltas and divinities give in.

And you brought me lilacs at midnight,

a three-pronged jester’s cap of flowers with hearts for bells

sweeter than any crown of laurels among the iron kells

of the embellished poets stuck like overwrought weathervanes

at the front of the line, or roosters on the apex of the roof,

or closed gates with intercoms demanding proof

they’re the masters of their chains. Lilacs at midnight: remember,

this small exhalation of earthly stars

that will never ember in time or rust in the rain

because when you were all scars and I was all pain

we were bound by something that even death can’t profane.

PATRICK WHITE

THIS LITTLE PRICK COMES INSUFFERABLY AROUND HERE

THIS LITTLE PRICK COMES INSUFFERABLY AROUND HERE

This little prick comes insufferably around here

to throw acid in the eyes of my poetry

by talking about the exhausted limits of imagism

and the logical positivism

of what’s cathartically confessional

about talking to no one in a telephone booth

when it’s snowing heavily outside

as if he didn’t know when to hang up.

It was bilious enough to watch poetry turn into a career

but now to watch it turn into a campaign

is more than I can stomach. Write what you want

anyway it comes out; what’s missing

is no less an expression of you than what isn’t.

Don’t compromise the integrity of your negative air space

by letting little maggots like this

convince you you need to put training wheels on the wind

if you want to reach cruising altitude.

Sing in the shower. Sing in the rain. Sing

on the radio. Sing under a highway overpass

if you like the acoustics, sing for your supper,

sing to get laid, sing alone in the nightwood

to someone who doesn’t want to.

Sing to yourself when no one else will

and don’t worry about remembering all the lyrics,

sing because your cat came back,

because the fire god came looking for fire

and burnt his fingers on your heart

lying in ambush under the ashes,

sing because you feel other people’s pain

more tenderly than your own

or the moon keeps picking its blossom

up off the ground

and putting it back on the dead bough

as if one day the graft is going to take

and drop crazy windfalls of lunar fruit at your feet.

Bitter, mad, gentle as wild columbine,

soft as green moss, angry, compassionate,

sure, beaten down, compassionate, doubtful or dangerous,

sing like the sea making love to its own weather

and drown the astrolabes, the weathervanes,

the fog horns, the lighthouses of editorial opinion

the crow’s nests of the next critical theory to sight land,

the compasses, the wind socks, the starmaps

the crows and the doves

that take it upon themselves to come back

with forensic evidence of what you meant to mean.

Turn the wheel over to the storm

and ride the poem out like a seasoned sailor

that knows when he’s met his match

and concedes to his defeat

as the last card left he’s got to play

to overcome things from the least expected quarter.

You listen to these mud-puddle Balboas

about new planets swimming into their ken

and you’ll end up lowering your lifeboat

into a wishing well somebody’s thrown bad meat down

like the half-eaten carcass of a toxic unicorn

as full of worms as Herod on the day that he died.

Better to wear a crown of a razor wire on Mt. Helicon

then win your laurels on American Idol.

Fame is the taste of your name in the mouth of people.

Better they should whisper it among themselves

as if they’d come across a blue rose

blooming in a desert,

or a garbage bag full of unmarked money

and didn’t know who to tell

who might believe them

among the cynical mirages

who keep a jealous eye on miracles of any kind.

For God’s sake, if you’re dying of thirst

like a fish out of water beside the Lady of the Lake,

roll over and drink like a sword

that wants to get the taste

of sun and blood out of its mouth.

Or if you’re lost and you don’t know

what medium to work in

work in air like a bird,

water like a fish,

light like a star

earth like a star-nosed mole

that likes to get down to the roots of things.

Once many years ago on Laurier East in Ottawa

when I was holding court

like a jester in Graba Java

making fun of the Etruscan kings of the zodiac

for suggesting the asteroids be rezoned

as a housing project for the poor,

a young insecure, cocksure, obscure young art student

from the University of Ottawa,

joined us like a table of contents

and started going on about this and that

synthetic paradigm of bloodless abstraction

he intended to paint like the plumage of a parrot

with the eyes of a peacock

he plucked from other birds

who painted for concrete sex

and effective camouflage.

And I asked him,

standing at his easel before

that white snow witch of a canvas

that swears this is her very first time

if all that vampiric shit was on his mind

when he was about to take her feigned virginity

with a slash of cadmium red middle

like a blood bank under siege

and he said, no.

And I said what’s the good of it then

if asked to paint the Sistine Chapel roof

all you ever do is paint

your metaphysical scaffolding over and over again?

Let the paint tell you what it wants to be.

Let the poem grow from the inside out

and don’t cram all these quacks into the womb

that will leech it, and bleed it, and bleach it to death.

Invited to drink from the grail,

the wellsprings of the muses,

who cares if you have to drink from your hands,

a Tibetan begging bowl, a proboscis,

the dead seabeds of the moon,

or the thin-skinned goblets of the morning glory.

The point isn’t the vehicle, the raft

you use to get to the other side

the booster that drops off

like the empty cartridge of a fountain pen

as soon as you’re free of gravity,

and even if you’re a frog in scuba gear

and take all the contextually correct safety precautions

just don’t let one of these scorpions

talk you into giving it a ride piggyback

to the middle rock in your mindstream

where it will invariably sting you to death.

You’ll look at the moon

and it won’t mean anything to you.

You’ll look at your doorway

and you’ll wonder why it’s always

emptier than your mail box.

And then you’ll realize

trying to piece the parts that are left

like a dragonfly sticking a chrysalis together

of whatever it can lay its hands on

some apprentice planner with phoney blueprints

has stacked your little house of transformation

among the coffins of another housing project

and nipped the wings off your heels

and dug their spurs like backhoes

into your eyes so deeply

you had to settle for streetlights and security cameras

instead of stars

to know where you were going.

Better to walk down a long country road in the dark

whistling to yourself to bluff something into thinking

you’re not afraid to be here

than trespass against the darkness

by buffing the brutal radiance of the stars

with the artificial sweeteners of heritage streetlamps.

I’m not going to release anymore doves

to try and read the mind of someone I’ve never met

by relying on the fools

who think it’s all just a matter

of ritualistic spiritual etiquette,

or neo-Chicago Aristotelianism,

but I am going to liberate all my insights

like heretical fireflies

from the usual preservatives

of a cramped, conservative Mason jar

and watching them rise like sparks

from someone burning at the stake

let them make up constellations of their own

that they don’t take so seriously

because they never step

into the same mind set twice

and nothing that emerges like a paradigm

from the creative chaos

of their unconditioned light

is going to stay fixed long enough

for anyone to draw up a starmap

to ask advice, see where they are, look for signs.

What star, what flower, what lover, what poet,

waits to be illuminated

like a canary in a coal mine

by the shadows of what it longs for

before it shines?

PATRICK WHITE

I SHALL NOT MISTAKE THE SILENCE

I SHALL NOT MISTAKE THE SILENCE

I shall not mistake the silence

of a small town on a winter night

when only the cold stars

work the nightshift of the lightless windows

for the mordancy of a ruined bell.

I will not fletch the arrowhead of the kingfisher

in its own feathers to strike it down

as if life were merely the art of knowing

how to use others against themselves.

I will not drive

the first crescent of the waxing moon

like a tusk into war with the waning heart of the last

for forgetting where it came from

and where it must go to die.

But I remember what Muhammad said

and the early Muslims under Omar

the second caliph of Islam took to heart,

the angels won’t visit a town at four in the morning

if anyone in it went to bed hungry.

Lack of bread was a sin against the whole community

if you kept the fact to yourself

when every door was knocked upon and asked,

so as not to deprive the people of the angels’ blessing.

And they felt this for real

not in the half imitational touristy way we do

as if we were just passing through town

looking for tea and antique butter churns

we could buff our coke in

as soon as we got to Peterborough

or Havelock, to pick up the go-train to Toronto.

They didn’t horde their lack of anything.

But now we’re all standing in line

shoulder to shoulder with angels at the food bank

trying to second-guess who it is we should thank

if there’s anyone to thank at all.

And you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone

who went to sleep tonight in this small town

who wasn’t hungry for something

they’d be ashamed to admit to their neighbours.

And since the angels have mingled with the daughters of men

and Enkidu has lost the ability to talk to the animals

and Gilgamesh lost his one organic chance

of shedding one skin for another

like a waterclock on the moon

to an opportunistic serpent

who took advantage of him

while he was catching his breath,

and thereby rendered those

closest to the earth immortal and not us,

I’m going to crunch through the snow

like I’m walking on eggs through a field

in a clearing among the quiescent pines

on the highest hill on the Scotch Line

just before you get to Westport

and as indefensibly human, fallible, and brief as I am

compared to the lifespans of the stars

and the rocks in these fields

that broke the tooth of the plough

and the spirit of the ploughman

for thinking it could dislodge and wound them

like the Fertile Crescent

when even the glaciers tried but couldn’t,

I’m going to sit here on a fallen tree and wait

for the stars to divulge the esoteric teachings

of their nocturnal perspective on life.

But I’m not going to impugn the night air

as sharp and unfeeling as a diamond cutter’s eye

for its lack of angels

or excoriate the frightening absence

of any explanation as to why

all we’ve been left with

to show for the centuries we’ve laboured

in those unpropitious star fields

or these underfoot with the dead

in the cold-hearted cemeteries and fields around Perth

to make the earth bring forth its bounty

is nothing but fools’ gold in the sky’s dead pan eyes.

Now you see it.

Now you don’t.

Like me among the living.

And those who aren’t.

Empty spaces between the stars

like frames that have had their pictures cut out

like the bad parts of constellations that used to hang there

blind-folded face to the wall with their backs turned

to a firing squad of fireflies.

I can tell by how wrecked the pines are

even though the moon is applying itself like a poultice

to their fractures and wounds,

that the wind’s really put them through it this time

and that life is grave and violent and serious.

You can poeticize the facts

but picking up the skull of a baby racoon

like a moon rock that reminds you of the paintings

of Georgia O’Keeffe

and a woman you once lived with

who was deeply influenced by her work,

you can deny, distract, or abstract yourself

anyway you want for awhile

but sooner than later it hits home

that this small animal,

this empty nugget of bone

was once such as you

who felt the bewildered miracle of being alive

to sense it could turn into a curse at any moment

to make things cruelly and abundantly clear

wonder’s no more of an excuse

in the eyes of the uncompromising

unarticulated spontaneity of itslaws

than ignorance is.

And you realize

how futile and twisted

the wildflowers seem in the snow,

and how life keeps blowing smoke in death’s eyes

like warm breath on the cold night air,

a gust of stars, a ghost or two,

the million silk seeds of the milkweed,

and the terrible finality that confronts the temporal

with every breath, every step we take.

From the moment anything’s born

even its own afterbirth can turn on it.

And what makes it ambivalently worse

is that’s it’s beautiful being here.

The stars, the juniper,

and all the little tracks that radiate

like aberrant lifelines out of them,

the groundwillow, the snow, moonlight

on the last gasp of leaves on the dead aspen,

the eerie wailing of a young porcupine

that isn’t used to the solitude

and climbs a tree to go off intermittently

like an air raid siren that isn’t sure of itself,

and won’t know what there really is to be afraid of

until it’s too late to evade it,

and not least of all nor different from these

the idea of angels not visiting a town

where anyone goes to bed hungry at night.

So could be a curse, could be a blessing

as an old Chinese boatman used to say,

and maybe this godless freedom

the angels don’t show up for anymore

is the greatest gift and grace of them all,

the third wing on the bird

that no one ever looks for,

the middle extreme of the immensity

that’s wholly open

to creative interpretation between us

like the dead souls in the bodies of Canada geese.

My eyes include the stars in their story

and the stars include my story in theirs.

Same with pioneers, baby racoons,

the moon among the wounded pines

making plaster casts

to mend their fractured limbs,

or that gathering of solitudes

along the narrative theme of a river

that makes for small towns like Perth

where everybody’s been talking for two centuries

about going somewhere else

as if their canoes were always half in

and half out of the water,

one cloven foot on Devil’s Rock

and the other stretched so far out over the Tay River

it thinks it’s got wings on its heels

and keeps trying to migrate with the water birds.

But with all the gates and locks,

canals, bridges, dams and waterwheels

you’d get the impression

Perth was running a prison for water

that’s been given a life sentence

without a chance of parole or appeal.

We’re better than beavers

at brainwashing water to go

wherever we want it to

even against its will.

No doubt a reflection of the temperament

of the first people to build in this place.

Make something in the vastness of this solitude

that was recognizably useful.

Build a town.

Turn the dangerous wilderness

with a weapon in its hand

into a tool everybody could use and understand.

The swords of retired British half-pay officers

into imperial plough shares

in the hands of Irish immigrants.

Giant insects of hay balers and iron rakes

rusting in the fields with horse faced tractors

like an extinct species slowly being engulfed

by the reclaimed starfields of the end times

returning to the wild as the wind

and maple saplings change

the expressions on their faces

to something more relaxed and reassured

than military, resourceful and precise.

Displaced people like me show up out of nowhere

And after they’ve stopped asking everyone

where this place is on a starmap of the multiverse

they begin to ask

who is this place is

and it’s at that moment

the graves all over town

and those lost under maple leaves

along narrow trails deep in the woods

with the names of children on them

over by Black Creek

give up their dead like the sea

gives up a message in a bottle from the past.

And you can hear them gibbering in the birch leaves

silvered by the wind with excitement in the moonlight

as if they were all clapping hands in anticipation

of some big insight into what became of them

and of what they did and didn’t do.

It’s only fair when you’re finished

looking through the telescope

at how unimaginable it all is

to give the ghosts a chance

to look into their future as well

so they can see that you’re living what they did

story after story, death after death,

that the cones of the jack pines

still wait for a forest fire

to open their eyelids

even after twenty years of dreaming

to weep their seeds in the ashes of their urns.

So my big idea

around four o’clock on a Wednesday morning,

remembering that story about the angels

and not really caring

whether I sort the chaff from the grain,

the hungry from the fat,

the scales from the feathers,

thinking every good story

has its villain as well as its hero,

its black holes and its radiant star clusters,

its poison oak and its New England asters,

and that’s what makes

for the character development

of our place in the universe,

I’d add a spider thread

like the tiniest filament of a tributary sub-plot

to the main theme of a dreaming town

eleven miles away

and let it find its own way around

like a night creek flowing into deeper waters

where an intensely visual imagination

actually does things in the depths of reality

with the slightest of radical adjustments to its roots

that no one ever suspects

by the time the effects come into bloom.

I’m going to unspool my heart like a fire kite

caught up in the wind like one of Van Gogh’s stars

until it hovers like a flying saucer

where the angels used to appear over the town of Perth

and though I know I’m making a farce of myself

trying to live up to an enlightened legend

of the common humanity

of our most contagious emotions,

just for one clear night

like an impossible probability

I’m going to feather myself in fire

like a fact in the image of Icarus

and whether it’s real or not,

take an angel’s place,

and in its huge absence

bestow as many unconditional blessings

as I can get away with

under the eyelids of the sleeping town

like pine-cones sowing the fires of life

in the nurturing ashes of those

whose homely contribution

to the story at hand

is to know how to burn out

like a demonic poet

and hope somehow you got the job done

that no one who wasn’t

at least as half as mad as you could.

PATRICK WHITE

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