AWAKE AND LABOURING

AWAKE AND LABOURING

Awake and labouring for light in this dayshift of dreams

as the platitudinous dawn takes her make-up off,

her eyelashes the hands of amputated clocks

that once prayed over the ruptured acids

of identical batteries, the premature twins

that exhausted their patrimony of corroded polarities

on the green-blue lichen that eats them in their graves

and spreads like an infection of the moon, I realize

I need a new emergency, a more radical embryo

than this destiny of durable shoes to fulfill the imploding uterus

of a radioactive fortune-cookie. I need more bells,

I need more bullets, I need to rise from the ashes

of my passport to anywhere with a completely new identity

that’s good for an eternity of idiotic bliss. Give me a face

I can believe in that isn’t

a drug-sniffing dog at the border, eyes

that don’t know more about me than I do,

that aren’t surveillance cameras of everything I do,

that don’t watch for me like herons hunting fish. Unspool

the movie and give me conch-shell labyrinths for ears,

I want to be lost at sea again, and a mouth

that isn’t the last druid of a dying language. And I want

an island like a shipwrecked woman who’s marooned on me,

no more of these petulant nunneries and shepherding moons,

no more of their tedious gravity and menstrual atmospheres,

there must be a muse somewhere conceived in her own fires

that isn’t a defection of all that she inspires.

I’m sick of this ghetto of overweening awards

that put their best face forward to accuse me of failure

and whine like the tarnished brass of palatial promises

I did not make that they will go on suffering for my sake.

There comes a day, an hour, a second, the ambush

of an insight that isn’t just another auroral peacock

with a shovel full of eyes, that it’s time to walk out on yourself

like the dark ages and cancel your subscription

to the jaded slug-lines and papal dispensations

of liberations that die like crusades in iron cocoons;

and I don’t care if I’m forgiven or not, let hell

thorn its black rose in my blood again,

and heaven feed like lilies on the corruptions of the swamp,

I’m already recruiting for a new holy war

that won’t make me surrender on my knees.

And how many times can a man cross his own thresholds,

his arms full of wives and groceries and hundred pound keys

he drops on the counter like anchors before

he raves for chaos to craze the plywood windows of his usual enormities

with wilder hurricanes than these that come on

like weather-reports in an onslaught of nicknames?

I want galaxies off the coast of my peninsula, I want

to hear the exaltant screaming of albatross and eagle

slashing through climacteric volumes of electric air

like maverick hinges and butterfly blades in a surf war to the death.

There must be storms in me yet that I can wear like eye-patches

to raid the angel fleets and whole universes

waiting like heretics and ferocious luminaries

to enlighten this burden of wish-bones I carry to the grave.

PATRICK WHITE

NOT A GUEST OF TIME, BUT A HOST

NOT A GUEST OF TIME, BUT A HOST

Not a guest of time, but a host, be, now

bright August stars shining above the white gold

of the riverine wheat that trembled like skin

when the wind blew on it like a lover

to cool it like bread on a windowsill

and it shuddered with light. Stand, kneel, bend

stand in the doorway of your house

like a skeleton that’s been fleshed out

by your own hospitality, and invite time in

like a runaway emotion on a homeless rainy night

and say, yes, stay; heal, eat, sleep, dream,

laugh, breathe, cry, dance with me

until you know it’s time to leave,

to kiss the wind good-bye

as it showers you with seeds and words

like a billion sleeping stars, each

a blessing on the threshold

of a world of your own

that can’t be born

until you lay your eyes upon it,

rain and light, fire and frost,

and they wake up to themselves,

like water to the memory of a distant mirage.

Not a guest of time, but a host,

with your arms as open and wide

as all that falls between

the first and last crescents of the moon,

embrace time expansively within

as the youngest caprice of the sublime

and root it like an orchard in your mind

that’s going to grow like the lucky day

you discover it’s all one day,

into a riot of enlightenment

when it gives its blossoms up to the wind.

And it comes to you,

the kiss of a beautiful farewell,

time is bliss, time is life, time

is the sad soft mushroom of cool lips

pressed against the forehead

of your prophetic skull

saying thanks for letting me stay awhile,

thanks for the future you shared with me

under the eclipse of your eyelids

when you offered me shelter under your roof

like a wood violet under the duff of your leaves.

Not a guest of time, but a host,

welcome the prodigal into your life,

a green bough to a red-winged blackbird,

a dead branch to the wayward blossom of the moon,

and offer the candle of your flesh to a fire

that didn’t want to dance with anyone else.

Account time among the companions

of your silence and your solitude

who grieve with you

at the dry wishing well

you’re trying to fill with your tears

for all those things that never came true

and time whispers into your ear

gently removing your hands from your face

like the petals of a flower

whose time has come to bloom,

I am spring. I am

the most beautiful of lies that heal.

I am the wisdom

in the ashes of the dragons

who swallowed me whole

to bring the rain

like water to the dead seas of the moon.

Now is not just now.

It’s tomorrows that have come and gone,

yesterdays that have yet to be.

And you see, you understand,

time isn’t just a calendar

of grave stones in a cemetery

beside the rail road tracks;

it isn’t linear like that;

it isn’t Euclidean in the least.

It isn’t a superficial approach to space

trying to put a face on nothing.

It’s the night creek flowing

like a violin among the autumn aspens.

It’s the underground river

that sustains the secret garden in your heart

and sends you messages from time to time

like loveletters out of the darkness

that open like flowers and water birds.

The iris of the eye might be as beautiful

as the promise of gold

at the end of the rainbow,

but it’s the black hole of the pupil

that lets time in

like a porchlight that’s burnt out

to deepen its insight into stars and fireflies

as if it were asking for news

of a friend from afar.

Lavish your eyes upon time,

squander the generosity

of your passage upon it,

break bread with it

above the salt on the table,

let it be flesh of your flesh,

bone of your bone,

blood of your blood

and drink wine with it

as if you were both drinking

out of the same skull

that predicted one day you would

like spirits that know their own.

Don’t be the ghost

that comes when it’s called,

be the seance that summons time

to the table that throws away its crutches

and begins to shake and dance

and sing in tongues

that can taste spring in the air

like buds and birds

and wild columbine

like the antennae of a rock.

Don’t be the guest, be the host.

Offer time clean sheets and a bed

the dead have never slept in,

a wall with a painting on it

that was done by you

and a window with a view

that no one’s ever signed

as a work of their own,

and a key to the door of your home

you reforged from the swords of a clock

when you gave up your holy war of one

and went back to ploughing the moon

as the more vital of two absurdities.

Time is not the dark twin in the womb

of your own myth of origins

that brought death into the world

like the only known antidote

to the long hard labour

of the passing years

you spent mining diamonds in a snake pit.

Time is the wavelength of a jewel

that’s turning in your own light

like a planet around the sun,

a gold rush in a nugget of starmud

you found in your travels

on the dark side of the moon,

an eye that flows with the translucency

of water and air and fire

as if you could still see angels

walking on earth

among the daughters of men

and you were looking into the eyes

of everyone of them

vision after vision

of your own insight

into the fact

that time has no afterlife but you

to rely upon like Stonehenge,

the call of Canada geese

traversing the moon

like rosaries and caravans

or evergreens in the fall.

And the old woman

does not say I am old

and the old man

does not say I am weary.

No season younger

or older than another,

the light turned up,

the light turned down,

the stars don’t adjust their shining

to the day or the night

and time doesn’t run out of itself

like the prequel to eternity.

As I said, time has no afterlife

without you and sooner

is always later than you think.

Not a guest of time, but a host,

beckon time in off the road

as you would a stranger

in the lost country you call home;

teach it a language of your own

with a distinctly human accent,

why we might know an hour of bliss

and lament its passing for years,

why with all our meridians, sundials,

waterclocks, wristwatches and zodiacs

we live in such haste

and keep our eye precisely on

that we waste the most,

and yet we still can’t see

that the sun shines at midnight

and the stars and the shadows

are darkest at noon.

It’s been said that time

is an eckaksana, a thought moment,

as if thought had the lifespan of a gnat,

or that time is the sensation

of a gap between thoughts,

but I can’t subscribe to that

because if so we would have

drowned in the void a long time ago

though we’d never know it

or have these flashbacks

of our present and past lives

as we’re sinking

to get out of the way of our future.

If there are gaps, then

time is the bridge between them

that arcs over the mindstream

like a vertebra over a spinal cord

that flows beneath it

reflecting the underside of the overpass

so that the circle remain unbroken

and people can get to the other side,

coming and going.

Time is no more a numeral

than a tree is the name you give it.

It never has been

nor will ever be

two in the morning

or nine at night

or the seven ages of man

declining from his gold head down

to his clay feet

stuck in the starmud.

You are two in the morning.

You are nine at night.

When time wants to know

what it is

time looks at you

and you’re older than the universe

and the universe within and without

is a spontaneous array of endless beginnings

that happen all at once.

As you are

time is.

The star above the childhood

of the abandoned barn.

You waiting for your date to arrive

and the waiter

to get back with a candle

he forgot to place on the table.

The blonde willow

that stripped the dye from its hair

and wears it defiantly thin

with an orange tinge in the winter

against a tree line of dingy brunettes.

If you don’t make an enemy of time,

a doom’s day opponent

that’s always happening to you

from the outside

then you befriend

at one and the same time

your life as well

because there’s no difference

and both it and time

are always on your side

like your eyes are,

your mind is

that can see everything

but themselves

the way a lamp is lead

by a light that’s blind

to what you’re seeing

ahead and behind you

in all directions at once.

When the darkness you’re lost in

wants to take the measure

of how many lifespans and lightyears

it is between one thought and the next

one breath and another

where breath stops

to turn around

breathless in the moment

it consults a star like a clock

that always shining

with as many hands

as there are directions of prayer

directions of light

directions of time

rivers to cross

roads to walk

gates to open

guests to greet

or ways to guess where you’re going.

Time is music.

Time is the soul of space.

Your youth doesn’t age with you

into the available dimension of the future

and your death is already behind you

like a birth with a past

that’s not the guest of time

but the open-handed host

that leaves the door ajar

to receive the pyramids, the deserts, the stars,

the masterpieces of immortal art,

the lovers who said forever

in a farewell of broken vows

on the other side of the hourglass

into the chambers of your heart.

When time says good-bye

to those who arrive

and hello to those who depart.

PATRICK WHITE

AVIOMANCY

AVIOMANCY

And the grace of the returning Canada geese in the night,

the sentinel response of their approach

in the high volumes of the moon-soaked night,

the plaintive creaking of an ancient hinge

at the slow turning of the urgent planet in my hand

undoing the door and the threshold

of another spring night on earth, the ghost of the willow,

a resurgent fountain among the black geometry

of the tumultuous roofs of Perth,

and the luminous fleets and crucifixion kites

of the emergency eyes of the window-glow in the darkness,

almost museums from the outside, an archives

of compendious fates from which the curtains seldom part or rise.

And the glorious, more concentrated stars of winter

now the ragged standards of a remnant army

in organized retreat, as the rustic proclivities

of the shepherd moons of Jupiter approach zenith, my blood

scored by the silver ploughs of sudden valleys

monitored by the demonic laughter of barbaric echoes,

I cherish the exotic pathos of my urbane exclusions of joy,

neither young in the shining prospect of the greening mirror,

nor old in the bellweather of the ascendant. No longer summoned

to the seditious beauty of conspiratorial orchards

that whispered to me like women complicit with the wind,

no longer driven to madness by the veils of promissory assassins,

my heart is yet a habit of freedom, the unmantled ashes

of a vagrant phoenix in the urns of inflammable sanities.

And though the dead pass me around

like the souvenir and rumour of a single heartbeat,

the curiosity and relic of a maverick wave of life

that once broke like the shadow of a man

on the immaculate shores and igneous chastity

of the imperturbable moon, I am not haunted

by the lascivious curiosity of their cold fingers

nor swayed from my abject apostasy by the suave prophets

of a spurious exhumation. What is dead within me,

the burnt offerings of pagan autumns deposed by a change of stars

does not entreat an untimely season to rise

but confides in me the courage

to risk it all again, all the faces and the hearts

and the exquisite transformations that sometimes

saw me born without eyes, and the dangerous sorrows

that turned into the sullen dragons of a slow agony

sowing terrible visions in the wake of their pain,

and the pornographic solitude of godless atoms,

and the chronic doubt that could only be countered

by doubting the doubt that obsessed me:

I was irrelevant, purposeless, vain, alone;

do what I will to divert the course of the river, achieve, attain

anything, long eloquently for the best, drunk

on the moon’s reflection, or curse the stone that bore me,

I lived to be worthy of a salvation that didn’t exist.

I founded a religion on the utterance of a clown,

and of all that followed me I alone was damned,

the ferocious heretic of my fanatic interdictions, confounded by the grave

without a firefly, while everything else

rose from the toils of death like a heathen rose.

And nothing has changed but the acceptance of myself

as the nothing by acclamation

on the other side of assent and denial. I sat

like an amputee on a throne in the middle of a crossroads

that led nowhere, that offered no departures or escapes,

tighter than a straitjacket, an armless compass and clock

alarmed by the approach of forever and the improbability

of waking up from the dream with anywhere to go.

In my own eyes, I was the sad visitation

of a black comet in shallow summer skies

that portended no good, without a will for malice,

to anyone befuddled by shadows down below.

My radiance, uranium, I burned to be someone else

on more intimate terms with oblivion, someone

on a lower rung of the ladder of emanations, below the salt

at the elemental table, less catastrophically alive.

In my search to turn gold back into lead,

I had gone too far and the oceans that confronted me

were shoreless virgins that had never known the wind,

waveless expanses of immaculate silence

that sang deeper than sirens on the only bloodrock

in an infinite sea colder than any conceivable tomorrow

that might be born of the view. Unbelievable

even to me, the eras of alienation that fixed me there,

the depths of my immersion in the void, the terrible harmony

of my lifeless actions as I planted a standard

in the name of nothing known to me

but the fame of a useless conceit. My utter defeat.

And now this afterlife of returning geese in another spring

that divine their way from star to star

only to disappear like a passing enthusiasm

into the unanswerable recesses of a damaged heart

that doesn’t run to the window to look up. And it’s late,

already a delinquent solitude beyond hope, and there’s release and fear

in the serenity of waiting among the unborn dawns of a world

that never happened to anyone but me

as forbidden mystics look for their eyes in the ashes. There’s peace

and an astounding abundance in the empty hand

that grasps at nothing, and a wisdom that can’t be learned

in the vision of a madman who knows he can’t return

to any aspiration of the prodigal year

that absurdly flags him down to ask for directions.

PATRICK WHITE

CONSTELLATION

CONSTELLATION

Even in spring, the night is old, and the rising moon, fool’s gold.

Maybe I’ll go on believing this darkness is the harbinger of light,

and even if life be proven random and absurd

there is still beauty and significance in the word that says so. These days, aging,

love is elusive

as the abandoned heart grows crude and abusive

and mistakes that were made and never mastered

return like the last word of a parting sleight that chilled the stars.

Within me the wines of being still dream of becoming blood,

and there are still angels in the mud trying to fashion a man

whose life is more than a passion of decay. Forsaken as folly

the dark clarity of the holy, I am yet a candle and a planet

that runs before the sun. More time behind me than ahead,

and the silence sadder for all the things that were said,

tonight I remember friends and lovers who once burned

with all the insatiable fury of life to be wonderful, wild, and free,

extraordinary in the turmoil of eternity,

and I bless the light by which they lived

through blossom, leaf, and fruit back to the deep root

that makes apples of the rain. Human, they were worth their fate in pain

now that none of us can live those days again. And though

it’s hard to dispute that life is a house on fire where you can’t stay long,

there are harps of night and voices and soft winds

that even the stars have not fingered to commemorate

the faces and places where we lingered awhile

to explore the immensity of a vagrant smile

that opened like a gate and a garden

or fell through the bars of our mortality like a file. From those

who were wounded by the furious rose of my youth, who were lashed

by the sudden squalls of an afflicted heart, I ask pardon

for the nights their eyelids closed like scars and offer

this silver herb of the moon they watered with their tears

until something grew in the salted soil of those punishing years.

Though late, I lay it gently on the stairs I’ve descended ever since

like a star reflected on water or a face in the black mirror

that never lost its innocence. It was the light that fell,

not the darkness that everyone is convinced is hell, the dove, not the crow

that plummeted below. But that’s a sail for another horizon

to keep its eyes on. The moon takes refuge in the window,

a stone swan rippling the dirty winter glass, the eyes of an old man,

the ruses of time, thawing to let it pass. More mercy

in the righteous fire of the forgiving liar

that tells himself that he is still young

than in all the grime of proven facts

vented from the chimney-mouth into the night

like refugees or fingers of smoke reaching for something they’ll never grasp.

And are my enemies satisfied, and the women who came and went,

ingots of hot honey poured into the mould of my bones

that formed them into roses and knives and keys to mysterious doors,

thresholds of pain and joy, dark and light, mountains and valleys

that led me like a stream down from my idealistic heights

to the great seas of being that encompass

the enchanted dream of this island seeing? I was a poor student

of the solitude they tried to teach me, but at this remove,

knowing what I know of love and agony,

I offer them my gratitude, and making a sword of the hour-hand

that once slashed at my heart

lay it gently in the wound that never healed, believing at last,

slow but thorough, I understand. They were the dark masters

of a lost art that bronzed the plaster cast of my spine

and long since all the blood and tears that were spilled have turned into wine

and all that was killed has risen again like a forest, like a green phoenix

out of this igneous delirium of time.

I was the first draft of a shadow I read to the blind.

Too early to make my peace, too late not to desire ease

and freedom from the long calling of my intensities,

the hollow of this blue guitar, this abundant emptiness

is crossed by power lines

attuned to the hidden harmony of heretical black stars

that have formed a constellation of their own on the back of my eyes,

and there is a name for it, not said by anyone,

not even the wise. And only the dead and children can see it rise.

PATRICK WHITE

I'M LEARNING TO DANCE WITH ECLIPSES

I’M LEARNING TO DANCE WITH ECLIPSES

I’m learning to dance with eclipses

and the outmoded ecologies of the sword-rattling windows

weeping rivers of acid rain that hang

like the ragged lace of abandoned curtains

or the tentacles of protozoic jellyfish. My life

is a rock too hard to sweet-talk the larks and swallows,

and the wolf that came once a week

to teach me to sing underwater grew old

and died like the piano he was buried in at sea.

I don’t know what I want from the walls

I’ve designated heritage battlefields

with an array of awards and degrees

and the pitted impacts of meteor-coloured earwigs,

but everything I ask for seems to make

terrorists of the lamps

and the single moth

knocking himself out trying to crash into flames

against the vanilla fez of the shade

is two fanatics shy of immolation. What does it matter

my eyes have congealed into a still-life

with antique ax-handles, a menagerie

of scarred paint, the landscape of the moon

humped and bubbled in contaminated crimson,

I haven’t seen anything for disposable eras

I wanted to drink from a skull. While the shadows and ashes

discuss what they have in common, hoping

for a marriage of convenience,

the blue night sifts my constellations through a spider-web

looking for the penumbral tear of the last life I shed

longing to avoid this one

like black shoe-polish on the pillowcase of a swan.

Even the absurdities have looped into platitudes

and petty thieves have stolen

the mask of the mouth in the imperial mirror

that keeps telling me

I’m the slumlord of my own ambition,

the blighted rind of the moon withering in the garbage,

the sloughed skin of a serpentine condom full of stars.

And how am I to understand my loneliness

and the fools I deploy to deface it

except as one more yearning octopus

with arms like hollyhocks

trying to cross the highway without a line of credit?

I should be bolder, smarter, more mineral

than light, my bones recast in gunsmith plastic,

and my heart a leaking hand grenade, white phosphorus,

unpinned and ready to hurl like a violent dove

through the slutty dreamcatchers in the windows

of strategic brothels, I should stand up

to the apostrophes of Armageddon

and handcuff my voice to a pair of quotation marks

and send all my friends bouquets of radical placards

until my voice is released from isolation, my blood

from intensive care, my mind from death row,

and I’m paid all the back wages I’m owed for the use of my innocence.

When the wind decides to defeat the leaves with poison

and the charcoal women burn their tongues

like meat on the grill of their dinner-bell smiles,

their charms all smoke and cocktail tears,

I should have the metal to drop

depth-charges on the willow cruising the shadows for convoys,

and depose the cult of scorpions marching south

that tried to brainwash me into believing

I’ve aged like wounded shoes.

PATRICK WHITE