EMERGENCY NOCTURNE

EMERGENCY NOCTURNE

The moon breathes its own reflection

on a late night windowpane

then watches it shrink, a tumour

or a civilization on the wane. A needle of light

draws from an inkwell of night

and signs an arm.

The stars go off like a fire-alarm.

A tomcat howls in the alley,

an agony of evangelistic hormones,

while the poet in the upstairs apartment

ponders suicide like a rose

he wants to give his bride.

Spring is a peacock in a chimney

that longs to bloom

stuck like a heart or a word in the throat.

Love is an empty lifeboat

crushed by the fractious thaws

and icy faults of March.

Across the street from the hospital

in its memorial garden of tungsten lights,

its parking meters and streetlamps,

perpetually budding daffodils,

metal madonnas with luminous faces

peering down on asphalt,

industrial pietas of aluminum and glass,

a living man returns to his ghost

like any other Tuesday

with proof of nothing on the other side.

PATRICK WHITE

O BABY

O BABY

O baby, you’re an upper middle-aged man’s Disneyland sexually

and I appreciate the cleavage

and the tight jeans that look like

they were sculpted by Praxiteles

putting flesh back on a wishbone

to break it with his pinky finger

and his eyes shut

to ask for dark rapturous relations with the sea

when you put it up to your ear

like the vulva of a fortune-cookie to listen

to the mermaids whispering specifically to you.

Older, you grow more circumspect

like the rings in the heartwood

of a second growth forest

and more than fire

you begin to fear the women

who smile like chainsaws with lipstick on.

Especially when they’re as deliberately

dependent as you are

like a third world country

opening an embassy in a shopping mall.

The wolf hasn’t forgotten how to howl at the moon

but it’s been shot at enough times

by the sheep-herders in the valleys

to know enough to stay above the timberline

with its tail between its legs

like a broken pine bough

and its ears pricked like needles

for the posses of little Bo Peep

with automatic rifles and wolfhound helicopters

that make a sport of running it to ground

until its heart explodes.

Older and more autumnally wary

of your appetites growing more ferocious

as you sense the cold coming on,

like smoke from a distant fire

you begin to think

people fuss too much over the spring

and give more weight to the blossom

than they do the fruit,

more substance to the desire for union

than the solid yokes

that can grow from fragile wishbones

like two sides of the river

paper-clipped like a bridge

across a wound that never stops flowing.

Heinrich Heine said that young women

were oceans of commotion

when he’d drowned enough to know

the moon isn’t as romantic in Atlantis

as it is to the pearl divers

who hold their breath on shore

to see who survived the shipwreck

of the lunar landing module

that settled in the dead seabed

of Mare Tranquillitatis,

trying hard not to red flag its footprints

as if they could still mean anything anymore

to anyone into space exploration

and making first contact with the Selenites.

And yet you can still have sensible shoes on

and walk dangerous roads

you hoped a change of footware

would help you avoid

when your wanderlust

set out before you barefoot

on an easy starwalk along the Via Galactica

not caring whether

it’s a short cut through hell or not

or the long way home

through some kind of hot paradise

making apple sauce of the windfalls of Eden

because when it comes down to lust or love

virtue and vice are even Steven.

PATRICK WHITE

CRUCIAL DELUSIONS

Thinking sometimes I may have gone in too far

and rendered myself mad on metaphors, thinking sometimes

the river’s turning has degraded into a metaphysical noose

and I’m the prime candidate for some kind of exotic extinction,

with or without enlightenment, and considering too

the exponential myriads of incommunicable interpretations,

as many as the radiant directions of a single shining, though even that

is saying too much, too little, or nothing at all,

I sit here in front of a computer screen,

smoking, drinking black coffee, priming the morning

like an eerie stranger to spring, even the willow

under the church spire, exalting

in its being poured out of something into something

like a waterclock. Over my life, as far back as I can remember,

even in daylight, even in the green morning,

I have always walked under a dark shadow of sky, a long night

that has fallen like a palladium, or radioactive dust

from an ancient, nuclear winter I must have survived

to wonder what food-chain I’m part of now. Who

can understand the myriad selves in a single moment,

the thousands of temples

whose foundations are sapped and torched in a blink of the void

when slavery changes masters and one by one

we become part of the new linkage, precisely

where we are most empty, most apprehensively free,

contriving a bond we can belong to, something

proportional to our courage to be, to create

a delusion that might convince us for awhile that understanding

is not beyond our capacity to make things up

and forget it all began as a kind of play.

In the brevity of always, I am the dark clarity

of the unnamed witness who is and isn’t me,

and I am the actor cast into the stage lights

of the dream and the dreamer, not the thread

of the tiniest spider between them. What

I see of myself, when I’m the cowled observer,

is a long night alone with time and the stars

among the vast indiscriminate deserts

that particulate our despairing monuments and distinctions.

I drink from my own muddy well of wisdom,

looking deeply into the perversion of my reflection

for any sign of love, for any

sign of assent in the light of my glacial seeing. Never

have I been assured of anyone or any part

I’ve ever played to the single occupied seat in the house

that neither applauds nor condemns

from the cold intimacy of its throne

the antics of these crucial delusions, deliberate or spontaneous,

that adorn the mental marquees, the garish neon

of the all-night feature that is me.

The same appalling silence greets the hero

as commends the clown, the theater itself

the owl of an inconclusive afterlife

enacted alike in a brothel or a shrine. No word

from the other side

has ever flowered here, no

ground of being ever sprouted keys to unlock

the efflorescence of this urgent spring, to liberate

the farce of my unknowing

from these straitjackets of affirmation and denial

and let me live sufficiently beyond both

on the nothing I am and the nothing I am not.

PATRICK WHITE

I'VE AGED LIKE SNOW

I’VE AGED LIKE SNOW

I’ve aged like snow

rounded by my own thawing.

Something’s gone cold inside

like the grave pit of a jewel

that rose from the dead

and left this terrible absence

as if one my eyes were missing.

But when I think about it

a minute or two longer than I should have

when has it ever not been so?

Cold, but I can still burn.

And not one candle in a niche at a time

but whole constellations arrayed

to squander their radiance on nothing

as if they were showing time and space

how to party.

And I’m not deaf to the big foghorns

groaning like dying dinosaurs

on the Pacific coasts of consciousness

that remind me time is passing

like an island in the night

I might be marooned on.

Desolate assessments of what’s ahead

through a long winter of solitude.

The worst lies are the ones

people stick in their ears like fingers

not to hear the cries of the drowning.

So I don’t. I listen.

But sometimes my helplessness drives me so mad

not knowing what else to do

I start dancing with the fireflies on shore

until I’m so tranced out

for one more night or two

I feel like a great bonfire of life

that set its last lifeboat ablaze

to shout out into the darkness

at the first star I see

break the gloom

like a ship on the distant horizon,

for the sake of the fireflies, the dance,

the drowning, the island and me,

Hey, we’re here.

We’re over here.

For God’s sake, we’re over here.

But after awhile I return to my senses

and it's just one more wavelength after another

like the widening wake of something that’s passed,

washing the bodies of people

I used to know and love

like blood of my blood

and flesh of my flesh

up on the beach

like a cargo of immigrant dolls

who’d paid for their passage to the other side

where things were supposed to be more beautiful

but the way things went down

couldn’t swim for their lives.

With sorrow and anger

for what’s happened to them

not caring if it’s the right attitude or not,

only that it’s human,

I gather them up one by one

and sit them around what remains of the fire

to dry off and get their bearings again

like a zodiac that lost it for awhile,

and I talk to them

about all those trivial things I remember

I never thought would mean

more than the world to me now.

PATRICK WHITE

THE SIMPLE UNFORCED ACTIONS OF A MAN ALONE AT NIGHT

THE SIMPLE UNFORCED ACTIONS OF A MAN ALONE AT NIGHT

The simple unforced actions of a man alone at night

for hours by himself

when nothing of the world

calls upon him to be anyone but himself.

He does small trivial things

like replacing the red flint in his Zippo lighter

in preparation for lifelong cosmic projects

he’s meant to execute since boyhood.

Even the windows don’t place any demands upon him

though he looks for the occasional star

above the roofs of the buildings across the street

and whose lights are still on

in the rooms of those the darkness hurts the worst.

He micromanages his body

hair by hair,

tamps back his cuticles

to get a better view of the moonrise

over the horizons of his thumbnails

the way a man who’s read too many good books

proofreads his garden in the morning.

He enjoys a porous intimacy with the night

as it soaks into his bones

like lamp oil into western red cedar

and deepens the darkness

with mahogany poetry

almost the colour of blood.

He makes a sandwich.

He fills a coffee cup.

It’s winter and he feels

the demotic inflections of temperature

as the air gives up its pretense

of being cooly debonair

for more peasant aspirations

to turn the heat up higher.

The sublimities of three a.m.

The last streetcleaner and garbage truck have gone by,

perfecting the desolation of the deserted street.

Not quite peace, not quite emptiness,

the sweetness of the hour suggests

it doesn’t matter what it is.

Absolute solitude, thickening silence,

as if the darkness were a way

of mourning the death of stars

most people never even saw shining

so deeply into their eyes while they slept

they penetrated their dreams

and touched their hearts in a way

that didn’t wake them up.

If anyone were to ask him

what he felt like right now

he’d say he felt like space.

Unmoved somehow

without inhibiting anyone’s passage.

He’d tell you that it isn’t time that moves.

That the greatest gift

anyone could give to the world

is their stillness.

As if you were returning your cup

to the river you drew it from.

He stares at the small red Zen lamp

with its friendly infernal glow

embossed with the leaves and seeds of autumn

like fossils in the Burgess Shale

next to the recovering snakeplant in the window.

Blasting caps and fireflies of poetry

go off in his mind like images and insights

of distant lightning and thunder,

and though he feels like an empty bus terminal

he knows how stupid it is

to wait for something that’s spontaneous.

Let that live that can.

Something will sooner or later.

It isn’t true that nature abhors a vacuum

or nihilo ex nihilo fecit, nothing

comes of nothing.

Nature adores a vacuum

the way a poet is possessed by a muse.

Or some vandal

with a genius for disobedience

passing by a freshly painted wall

loves his spray bomb

just like any other Neanderthal.

He lights a violet candle

and a stick of patchouli incense

as if both were of vital importance.

The ghosts of the cigarette-smoke in the room

gravitate like gulls

toward the lighthouse like a seance

only too happy to go up in flames

and attain a state of perfect combustion.

If the world weren’t constantly

emptying itself out

like the moon from its skullcup

or a man alone at night in a small town

waiting for the next star to appear

between the slow clouds in his window

there’d be no more room for inspiration.

Even a fallen gate hanging on by a hinge

in the untended starfields

lets more in than it can pour out.

There’s an absence of people and things

that were there and aren’t anymore

and that emptiness tastes

of the inconsolable sadness

of a desert that mothers mirages

only to outlive them all.

And there’s the emptiness

of a confined space

when it reminds time

that it is also eternity.

And that can sever

and shock you like a knife

you just pulled on yourself

to keep your distance from death.

And then there’s the unconditioned clarity

of a nothingness that holds you up

like a mirror to your own nature

and says put a face to this.

And poems emerge like enlightened liars

that are true to their own

knowing that’s all there is.

PATRICK WHITE

POETRY

Poetry isn’t a talking fly

on a one way street in a lightning storm; isn’t the orchid

that issued from the sword in the snakepit

that penned whatever it saw in stone. What does this mean?

Forty-one years of trying to push

the singularity of the universe

through the eye of a needle as large as the reasons why

without twisting the thread of the original theme,

without shrinking the sky to an umbrella

in a glass skull freaked with insistent translucencies.

Poetry isn’t breast-fed by a doting Medusa

who will excuse your wailing with a pat on the back

as you try to configure your verbal relations; it’s not until

the lantern’s overturned and all the stars and fireflies go out

and your mouth is stitched shut like a wound

that will never heal, and the flowers latch their honey-gates

in a surprise eclipse, and even the worm is a lonely comet

in the eye of the rose that called for your annihilation,

that the wonder of having nothing to say for no reason

begins to gather like light in the wishbone of a harp

and sings to amuse the silence

with the posthumous profundities of its own retraction

like a drop of water crying down a mirror

that didn’t know it cared. Free yourself

of what you think you have to say about anything

to hear the urgent fountain-mouths of eyeless dawns

that write with the beaks of frenzied birds

that have absorbed the night like ink. Live

on the underside of the leaves that never fall

from the unpruned tree on the moon

if you want to know the nightmare of the spider

webbed to the morning like a poem

between two blades of stargrass.

There’s a storm with a candle in it

that isn’t a leftover star, more powerful

than the black-outs of the lightning

that seizes the heart like a hawk

and slashes it open,

a love-letter to the world with a knife,

to see what truly phrases your blood to the moon.

Do you understand, do you truly understand;

there’s a firefly in the grave,

a soft, shy light like the glow of a distant city

pearled on a blind horizon, a black mirror

that absorbs the faces it reflects like death,

so much brighter than the white hole

of all that you’ve been saying

that even the stars are maggots of light,

commas in the wake of summer swans,

compared to the oceanic radiance of that shining.

Drown your paper lifeboats in that,

add your grief like a river to the nightsea

you’ve been walking on like a messiah with a map,

and let go of yourself like an apple from a bough.

Do you see the blossoms of the orchard

swept up in the gutters of the busy world

working hard at its own extinction; those

are the withered eyelids of poems,

the useless sails of spineless foolscap

lined with blue horizons

that asked you where you were going

and because you answered like a compass

left you breathless at the equator, junk-mail

on the doorstep. The world has been discovered,

the metal capitals starred like jewels;

the real estate offices crammed with valleys and lakes.

Sink like a continent that can’t be colonized

and show me the thresholds you’ve sloughed like skin,

the footprints of your transformations

where you jumped from the tree

that swung you like a bell

and walked away deranged

by the solitude of your dangerous humanity.

Look for a door with a broken hinge and enter.

Stop carving your name on your bones

like the prows of old shipwrecks, dismiss that hareem

of painted figurines you’ve bound

to the mast of your bow like a pen

and learn what it really means

to be destroyed by a living muse,

to hear the sirens singing you to death.

There’s a ram and an altar on the world mountain

waiting for you to drag yourself up there

like an avalanche of dead meteors

and plunge the last crescent of the blood-crazed moon

through your heart like a sacrifice

in the name of nothing at all

if you want to true the wind

to the womb of your ghostly poems

with embryonic whispers of I am. I am. I am.

PATRICK WHITE

PROMETHEAN CONTENTIONS

My life the wardrobe of a shabby star; here,

take this carnelian pomegranate

that has hardened into a heart

and appease what blood you can, take my tongue

that turned yellow with arsenic in the fall

and was torn down like the flag of an ancient catastrophe

by the denuding expletives of the wind.

I’m tired of the ashes and the cemetery wine

that pollutes them; I’m weary of the view,

this worm-eaten map to nowhere

and the lies it must live to fulfill.

I’ve exhausted the patience

of the bookish rain,

waiting for my shoes to stop talking

about journeys they’ll never take,

so that I can tell them I was a man

with a tarnished direction

that led me off the known roads

to taste the wild blackberries

that ripened in brambles of razorwire.

Here, take the petrified paperweights,

the mephitic moons of my eyes, still stained

by the dead seas that wept themselves empty

to the end of seeing; I once mistook them

for summer sapphires in a mountain crown

but things have been rubbled since then,

and my sidereal aspirations have toppled

to graze on the mannered portion

of the crumbs of light

that survived the avalanche

at a foodbank for wheelchairs and thrones. My mind,

gum under a desk

in an abandoned schoolhouse

and my voice, the graveside elegy

of an extinct species

that couldn’t attune its maverick genes

to the suggested forks in the path of an eloquent serpent,

I am unspooled by my own undoing

as frame by frame

I marred my life with perversions of salt and light

to contaminate my bruised confessions

in asylums of lipless inquisitors.

I am still the ore of the sword in the rock

they couldn’t extort from my ambiguous impurities,

even after the stake and the fire

that moiled the gold of my bones. Blighted by the truth

of a heresy of wounded water,

I was true to the rain

in a holocaust of cabbalistic arsonists

and even here in this fetid ditch of time,

the scattered orchard, the pageant of my blood

is not a danse macabre

or transformative contrition

of flagellant lilies. I am innocent as night

of the stars they impute to me, the lies and legends

of the man who once lived me,

a ventriloquist of physics.

Here take my face and skin, my mouth, my hair, my ears,

and if you still need

a gesture of confession

to glut the cannibal of a creed, here,

take my faith in the expired frequencies

of the universal hiss, or the charred guitars

of my carboniferous impieties. I fumbled the song

you asked me to sing

and limped from the stage

an infamous king of jesters and fools

who overthrew me for a laugh

when the minister of mirrors went insane.

Now I am a smear of sky

on a broken windowpane,

a rumour of hesitant lightning

in a choir of tone-deaf fireflies,

the fraudulent tear

of a leftover saint

who weeps sewers for the poor

to wash the planet off their faces.

I rummage through the garbage

of the aftermath, the decrescent beak of a vulture

reaping the urgent organs of tumescent roadkill

that once cast the dice of their own infraction

to steal their genius back from the gods,

to cool the fire of their solitude on the other side,

to lift the veil

from the star-worn face of the apple

and look into eyes that no one’s ever see

before the worm interrogates the vision

at a carnival of undertakers. Here, take this old taboo, this curse,

the thorns and horns of these dragon teeth

that sowed the forbidden ground of the secret

with armies of fanatical commas

in the service of a virgin period

deported like a holy relic

to the erection of a foreign capital

adorned by the marbles of carnage.

Here take this future from me,

the accident, the crisis and the shock,

the randomness, the tyranny, the sneer

of the heart-crushing boot, the rational madness

of political lovers raised for annihilation, and take this ruse

of happy endings, the chrome and glass

cosmetic face-lifts of a flagging science,

and the indecipherable grammars of the generals

who speak like triggers and the hurricane corporations

who lobby to own the rain

and want to market oxygen as an inert gas,

a logo on every gene. You can have my eyes,

you can bottle my tears

and send them off on the tide, a message and a warning

not to risk a rescue,

and leave me the sole custodian

of my own isolation like a bird in a furnace.

You can plant spies in my semen

and colonize my chromosomes with zoos;

you can introduce me like the skull and crossbones

of a designer virus

and hack into my horde

of piratical ideas to clear the coasts of consciousness

of superfluous corsairs. You can administer

last rites in rosaries of chalk

on ghetto sidewalks and doctor the autopsy

with the platitudinous gangrenes of moral turpitude,

the nemetic karma that plays muse

to your inspired amputations. Bring on the surgeon,

bring on the laughing pathologist

back from a late vacation, unhand me

with the ostrakon, the passport of pariahs,

and distinguish me with a fence, a wall, a camp,

the unmarked grave of a dismembered terrorist

who had no evidence to add

to the celebrity histories of acknowledged slaughter.

Make a token of my head, my prophetic skull

on the platter of a flat earth

to sweeten the sins of your adulterous daughter,

or let me fall upon the sacrificial blade

of the waning moon that lies before me like a sinister eyelid,

I will undo the ribbon of my blood

on a gift that arrived like a stranger

you couldn’t trust. I will endure the abuse

of a premature grave

or enter the vehement emptiness

of a third-world cupboard in a fever of hope

that proves critical, but no demon of your will,

no whim of your capricious brutality,

no reflex of your hatred of love and life, no

acidic austerity of your organized indifference,

no starless wound of any sky

that dawns like bleach in the roots of the rose

that withers like junkmail heaped

before a bolted door on a condemned threshold,

will make me renounce

for the soft immunity of a prosperous lie,

one era, one god, one vulture

of this mountain range

where the apex and the alley are the same,

one adamant link,

one feather of fire or locket of thought

on the planetary chain

of my liberated disobedience,

the enlightened insanity of this sacred malfeasance.

PATRICK WHITE