BY THE TIME YOU SAY IT

BY THE TIME YOU SAY IT

By the time you say it, you’re a bridge beyond the last river of your lament.

Is there meaning in this, content? Emerging

from this cold oceanic reflection, how good

to wrap the sky around you like a blue woolen robe warmed by a fire,

your lungs two bag-ladies sorting through the trash

of your denuded coffin for any rumour of green.

A back-alley dog sniffs at your limp smile beside a broken wineglass.

Your passions turn into mouths and eat you; your heart

mistakes itself for the apple on the tree of knowledge

and dreads the approach of Eve. Today, for example, over coffee on Gore St.

(just so the peasants don’t storm the moat again,

thinking we don’t know where we’re at)

I heard you wondering why the moon always ends in et cetera.

Just to distract you from gnashing your teeth in the void

and sticking your flavourless gum messiah

to the underside of the flat earth, I showed you a picture of the wind’s face

I painted under an overpass on primeval concrete.

A fascist restauranteur enraged by the ulcers on his greed

preached his disease to an unwilling congregation of tables

and jackaled our money away to the squat god of his digital scripture.

Fascinated and hurt, you surveyed the distant puppet-masters

of your own hormonal attachments assemble and reassemble

like constellations at a crossroads and then

got up to give your sad friend an embrace on her birthday,

fingerprinting your own sorrow with someone else’s hand. The albino sun

high above, opening doors and burning thresholds, was proud of you

as I liberated another orphanage in your honour.

People on wheels went by, more nonsensical than this watershed of pain

that pushes up a mad flower of poetry

through the startled soil of an intimate, unknown planet

hanging from the first crescent of the moon like a drop of water

on a blade of radiant star-grass. You. Above the turmoil

of your blood-weather. And now the vast night

crowds into the asylum of my ancient, weeping windows

and the lamps go on like recovering suicides, their light

experimenting with brown-out dosages of Prozac

like something electrical trying to live. Alone again on the deck

of an ark of phantoms beached by the flood

on this brutal world-mountain, my field of vision

is heaped with the skulls and skeletons of warrior dragons

who died true to a door that never opened. And if you listen hard enough

you can hear a secret priesthood of serpents

singing the melancholic lyrics of their eerie toxins in lethal shrines

under the foundation-stones of untenable temples

abandoned to a slum of birds, fractured stairs and pillars

a crusade of minerals on their way home, liberated by an infidel.

Is it continuous or do we make it so; the last forty years of my life

devoted like a lover to the strange face in the moonlight

that beckons me deeper and deeper into her shining as if I were no more

than a ray of her manifestation, each feeling moment

whole to the furthest star, every thought

sufficient as fire, quiescent, an event of fabulous proportions. It’s true

things change, and change is a clock without hands.

Here now in the jewelled fish nets of satiated gods

that trawl the mind-sea for luminous, translucent fish

that have schooled into vagrant poems

for a gesture of provisional expression

timeless as now, I stop and bend like light to show you

how the black water-lilies are night mirrors

returning your eyes like water to the river. And yet,

most astounding of all, there is neither you nor I to witness it,

nor anything that swims like the language of a lost people

through these imagined depths, not even the gust of a god

over the stillness of the waves. Consciousness is the shadow of a living intelligence

whose awareness and being are purposeless flower and star,

all the worlds in every directionless direction

resplendent in the heart of a single atom, dust kicked up

by a child dancing alone in a dusky summer lane

with the scintillant gnats and fairies

whose lives are neither brief nor long, born or perishing.

Here, by this road of ghosts, touched by a wing,

I offer you this expansive bouquet of galaxies, endless dancers

wheeling joy into joy like love into bread. Do you see?

Nothing approaches nothing and zero gets up to dance.

There is nowhere that isn’t a tree, no moment

that isn’t the whole of space embracing it, everything in this event

already achieved. Why grieve then as if there were holes in the world

when everything you fall into, someone’s else’s face,

the violet oceans of an orchid heart, this trance of enlightened play

is nothing more than your own footprint on an Arab moon

full of intoxicated rain. Gently, I lay your heavy head

upon the doorsill of your lover and for the moment, an elder of the wind,

whisper nightbirds of ecstatic seeing

into your abundant emptiness. The point is

that there is no point that isn’t already the whole of the radiant point

drawing long caravans, burdened with gifts for a bride,

out of the dream deserts of her loss and longing

like a star dictating love poems to a viper-scribe in the sand. Just look

at the labour of these fools who contrive a hovel out of a palace

and consult their blood like mud at the mirage of an oasis

for fishtracks. Here, I’ll sing it again on a page of water

because you are more beautiful and intelligent than the ones

who stand at the gate and swear by dawn

the light shall not pass, because your suffering is transcendence,

the original home of the many who make one face without flaw,

because I am drunk on the whiskey-fire of autumn leaves

even as the spring tunes its green harps to the high-pitched valley hearts

of ascending birds, every one a nugget of sun panned

from the empty pockets of a generous dawn,

because great sleepwalking moons of faith

are shedding your eyelids like skies and rose petals

releasing mysterious fragrances of time

in the narrow alleys of medieval Bombay where blue-white stars

feed their growing families by cobbling their tongues

like new leather fixed with nails of light

to the worn-out sandals of pilgrim gods on the Perfume Trail,

because even though there is suffering, ignorance, folly and greed,

and death enough to glut any neon highway vacancy,

and hitch-hiking saviours galore to lie down with in darkness

and rise in the light on magic-finger mattresses,

because there is no less of your whole celestial orchard

in the butterfly that lands on a dead branch

like one of your smiles

than there is in all the thundering worlds

that fall like windfall apples or wild horses cantering through the night,

because most people’s seeing is a kind of love blind to music

and you are rarer than a radioactive strawberry in that regard,

the divergent snake-roads of your witching-wands, violins of water,

and because your great insight grows a secret heart within the heart

of an embryo word and nudges it into flight,

the ripening celebration in the heart of a dazzled bird

hurled from a thousand nests like rice from a begging bowl

to express the joy she is

at the fathomless wedding of bride and water, drunkard and unknowing wine,

I’ll lift my voice again to you and sing.

A black snake swims across the leprous face of the moon

unwrapping her bandages on the water like music

to reveal her concealed beauty to no one.

Isis and the Sphinx cry out like loons.

A singing water-lily offers its severed head on a prophetic platter

to the breeze of a dancing girl, mistress of veils,

who toys with the weakness of kings.

On the slightest tongue of the rain, a feast of maggots and stars.

PATRICK WHITE

AND WHO CONSIDERS THE BATS

AND WHO CONSIDERS THE BATS

And who considers the bats

smoked out of hotel attics

with cedar boughs and burning buckets

so much like the poor; how

they move from house to house

like shoes in a second hand store,

diasporas of worn leather, well-heeled

by the walking of others,

their spinal cords unlaced

and their tongues torn out like wings?

If your heart is still a sapphire

in the orbit of a wedding ring

around a black hole

brighter than the light, if

your wounds give up their dead at night

to crawl into bed with you

like moons around a fractured planet,

afraid of intimate strangers,

and a sorrow you once met on a blind date

still puts bouquets of flashlights on your grave,

you will notice such things:

mothers abandoned like winter wheelbarrows,

tripedal dogs who were third

on the burnt matchsticks of their limbs,

the bruised violins of teen-age girls

whose tears fall like lost earrings,

old men with the courage of bridges

shaking like ladders of bone

at the crooked rungs of schoolyard crosswalks.

If your blood is a sullen radiance

that didn’t make the charts, a ribbon

in the hair of a black comet

that passes like midnight at noon,

and your mind is a star

that’s turned its blazing down

to be softened by life and if

you’re still greeted like an affectionate defeat

in the thirteenth house of candles

condemned by the fire marshals

of a safety-minded zodiac

armed with alarms and emergency exits,

then your heart is probably tender and good,

a mushroom with gills, a loaf of bread

that rises from the spores and yeasts

of the kinder ovens and quiet shrines

that bell your best emotions; and you notice things

that few but the broken can cherish,

charmed and enchanted things

in the lost and found of the sea

that no one ever claims, lives

that went to the wrong address

and wound up in the dead letter bin, bent pins

in the crack of the floor

that once put galaxies on the map,

the dolls of aging prostitutes

with chipped marbles for eyes

propped up like scars and childhood choirs

on the bestial floor of the bed. You notice

the rose arbors and overgrown bowers

that look up like old ladies with garden trowels

whenever you pass the mountainous gaps

of the missing pickets on the gate.

And because you are wide with empathy,

your heart an open life-boat,

you can feel the insulted shadows

of the dejected lovers

toying with each other

like the posthumous menus

of the things that they’ll leave on their plate;

you can hear the lyric in the leftovers

and thumbing the edge

of their sharp good-bye, relate.

And only those who have been cut like a lemon

into a rosette of bitter windowpanes

can know the loneliness of buttons

that bloom like carefully guarded flowers

on the shirt of stinging nettles

wearing the overdressed loser in the corner.

And if not for the nights alone

in a labyrinth of cheap apartments,

when you slept skinless in a swarm of blackflies

that bit like thought,

your body smeared with berries of blood

and your mind radically dwarfed

by the rumours of small exterminations; if not

for the empty cartridge shells of lipstick

you wasted on your suicide,

shooting at a face in the mirror

that dodged better than you aimed,

how could you now decipher

the cuneiform of razorblades

scored like a tragic journal

in the wet clay

of the junkie beauty queen’s thighs; how

could you ever lament

the lucky charms that have fallen

from the stigmata of her bracelets?

PATRICK WHITE

I WANT TO DRIFT OFF INTO THE STARS

I WANT TO DRIFT OFF INTO THE STARS

I want to drift off into the stars

without really knowing what that means.

Down by the Tay River, deep in the darkness

off Sunset Boulevard and the light pollution

of passing cars, there’s a fallen ironwood tree

with the skin of an elephant I sit on

and the horn of a black rhino

where one of its boughs was broken off.

And it’s got half its roots in the air like I do,

or Algol, the ghoulish head of Medusa in Perseus.

I come here when I’m sick of dealing with the world

like a game of snakes and ladders,

when I know I’m a crosswalk

or maybe even a train track

that’s never coming back this way.

I brush a frosting of snow off my log

as if I were making a place for myself

on a bench at a bus-stop that hasn’t come yet

and I gawk at the winter stars

like a junkie trying to shoot the Milky Way

into his bloodstream

so he can o.d. on all that radiance

as soon as it reaches his heart

to humanize the mystery

of how impersonal life can be to all of its own.

I sit in this small nook of cattails

that make me feel I’m an artillery officer

in Napoleon’s army, surrounded by cannoneers

waiting for me to give them some kind of order

to begin firing on the birch grove battlements

across the perennial strategy of the intervening river

that wanders through wars like a Druidic scholar

at peace with himself and the moon

like mistletoe in the tormented boughs of the oak

the river’s trying to decide

whether to let live or not.

I’ve made a pile of muskrat, raccoon,

squirrel and bird skulls

I’ve collected over the years

and I look long and deeply

into their eye-sockets man to animal

in sympathy with the fate of all that lives

however they met their ends,

however their deaths are justified

as a furtherance of the living,

and I swear the way the snow

rimes their eyes in the moonlight

they’re weeping prophetic visions

as hard as diamonds distilled

from the brutal clarity of their own fate,

sudden, cold, and indeterminate.

Translucencies of insight

that can slash your eyes

like scalpels of light

that have just finished decapitating the flowers

like Robespierre the debutantes of Paris

and notice you sitting there

with your head still on

and say what’s wrong with this picture.

But I grow obdurate in the midst of brevity

like a protein molecule

in the core of a flashing meteor

or gold in a nugget of black ore

that knows one day it’s going to be poured

out of the darkness where it used to abide

like a honey-tongued nightbird

that didn’t so much hide

as hesitate to reveal itself.

I gawk at the stars

and it doesn’t make a wavelength’s difference

to much that I can see,

and the way I am so sublimely ignored

by everything that intrigues me

I am split by the perennial

optical illusion of human consciousness

into feeling simultaneously horrified and blessed.

I comprehend the depths of the solitude

and the enormity of what I am

that can include the river, the stars, these skulls

and share in their passage

as a measure of the way I change.

And I ask myself how can they not know

what hour it is

when I’m sitting here like a nightwatchman

staring out into the eternal stillness of space

on an ironwood log, participant and witness

at the nexus of time and forever

realizing on a cosmic level

I embody in three pounds of starmud

like any other unimaginable dimension of the human brain,

there’s only been one fate for all of us

since we entered this world of forms

when eternity sat still and time began

as if there were any difference in reality

between ice and water

or between the emptiness of the mind

and what that emptiness contains.

Call it dark abundance, bright vacancy,

Call it the plenum-void if you like.

They’re all just fingers

pressed against our lips

like the silence of the stars

pointing at a no thing we can’t say.

And they’re pointing in all directions at once

the way a star shines down upon everything

as if each and all in this realm of forms

were the sole source of its illumination

from the inside out.

The first word

in the mother-tongue of sentience

to break the silence

like a blossom of light

in the dead of winter

on a bough of dark matter

that ripened the echo-less echo

of its sacred syllable into our eyes,

the fruits and seeds of seeing

by which it knows us

like the river knows what it mirrors,

like joy knows what’s behind our tears.

PATRICK WHITE

A SILENCE DEEPER THAN WORDS

A SILENCE DEEPER THAN WORDS

A silence deeper than words

roosting in their groves for the night.

Stars the way the darkness sings until morning.

The moon shedding its petals like windows

to show what it’s been dreaming behind them

like the withered stars that crown the rose hips

with jester’s caps.

Life burns like a long cremation

just to keep itself warm on such a night

as cold as this

when breath freezes like music on the air

in a failed attempt to shine like stars.

The intimate human lullaby.

The symphonic paradigms

of impersonal celestial spheres.

The butterfly in the blizzard.

The mind huge as the silence.

The heart dark as the night.

The wind a homeless voice

when the leafless trees

and the frozen streams

and the empty fields have nothing to say

that can be articulated.

The red berry is withered on the snow

like the third eye of an old woman

who cried drops of blood to the very end

until the wound grew too deep and cold

to bleed out anymore

and she left the broken window

in the abandoned house

and the open doorway with no one in it

to speak for itself.

An old woman seeks her own ghost

the way a young mother

dreams of a child to be.

Two doves of the same prophecy

released from both hands at once.

The ingathering and the unravelling,

the breath taken in

and the breath let out,

Atropic filos of life and death

woven on the loom of the moon,

a berry of blood

on the black lips of the rose

as if even in death

it spoke from the heart

like a woman destroyed by love.

And off in the distance,

across the brittle moonlit fields

armoured in jewels,

starting and halting to look around,

against all odds, a fox

that’s managed to keep its flame alive

even in this breathless moonscape

of loose ends and lifelines severed

from their roots like umbilical cords

or the wavelengths in the seeds

of new stars scattered

all over the ground of being

like the notes of a love song

waiting to be finished by the birds

who will search for them like composers

when the sun comes up like inspiration

to arrange them like five-piece constellations

to greet one of their own

as if you could see the picture music of night

and hear the starlight

in everything they sing.

Even now, even here

before the blazing fades

like the passion

of the young mother

in an old woman’s heart

into this desolate dawn of creation

like the Pleiades descending in the west

into a plume of smoke rising from a remote farm house

where the children are just waking up.

PATRICK WHITE

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