UNDER THIS BLACK UMBRELLA

UNDER THIS BLACK UMBRELLA

Under this black umbrella, the eyelid of the black rose

that eclipses the pearls and starfish that I feed it,

my second skin tattooed with a map of undiscovered constellations,

this black poppy of a sky ribbed like a tent

with the bones of bats and dragons, stalked on the spine

of an interrogative scorpion who reverses questions

like a fishing hook, my heart feathered for sacrifice

and pierced by its stinger for bait, though I never know

what god I’m dedicated to, what ghoul of the depths

rises to swallow me whole, I have risked my whole life

against the run of my luck, open in the house

under the shadow of its wing, following a funeral for years

that has lost its way to the grave. No need to tell you

that the mourners have turned to salt

and wandered away with the rain; no need

to tell you that I never knew the deceased

except as an elegant sorrow famous among clowns.

Under this black umbrella, this widow-veil,

this pygmy parachute, this mistaken sail of a lethal love triste

that jumps from attic windows, a deacon of descents,

there are blind birds who have never known the dawn

and seeds that wince in the light, painters

who keep the drapes drawn and their sunglasses on;

and if I were to mention the impoverished nights

I slummed with colloquial carbons while flies

bounced like black holes against the ceiling

looking for emergency exits beyond their event horizons,

I could only bore you with broken-hearted cosmologies.

Under this black umbrella, this shallow bell

with a toad’s tongue, this bitter chandelier

inverted like a crown of thorns that’s had enough to drink,

this black dwarf that’s dwindled from the shining

like the memory of a miscarriage of the light

from years ago, mascara comets rave of happier assassinations

and liberated embryos; life gets around

on the stepping stones of pregnant meteors

and there’s a spider that hangs above me like a plectrum or a hand

trying to master bass-runs on my spinal cord.

Under this black umbrella, this mouth that gapes,

this broad-brimmed palmer’s hat, this radio dish

that begs for wavelengths it can understand

from a dying civilization on a catastrophic brain

tilted on its axis below the equatorial plane

of a decaying orbit light-years away from salvation

and all the lifeboats gone, and the only signs

of advanced intelligence, this swansong in extraterrestrial code,

there are no holy lands, there are no cruel exemptions left.

PATRICK WHITE

BITTER

BITTER

Bitter, bitter, bitter, the taste of men and the curdled perfumes

of their women putting on weight like the moon

and the gaudy hopelessness of their ejaculant children

living in the extinct carapace of a condemned volcano; bitter the lies

they whisper in sleep in dreams to the gods they keep

like spare rooms with skeleton keys

to their public coffins and closets. And bitter the nightwind

that vipers over the schooled sands of their cities

looming a harp of astringent acids into the whole cloth

of a funeral shroud, a body bag to contain the miscreance of their music.

Face after face after face, among orchards, planets, waves,

how many come to fruition, how many fall from ripeness

in unknown places, elicit arms, looking up into the sun that wined them

and sent them away without tears, mysterious sugars

in the fleets of their heart, and seeds, and green

superstitious stars tangled in the lifelines of their unmooring,

to unknown exorcisms on barbarous shores that fear them?

Their blood unspooled like a ribbon for a gift

they never gave, their blood, a scarlet noose of spectral chromosomes

slumped across a bough on the tree of their bitter knowledge

to lynch the lean thief and the ardent stranger

to the rigorous sorrows of their vaporous lustrations; bitter the fate

of the poor as they wait in a traffic jam of genes for the lights to change,

and bitter the restless, blood-drenched soil that receives them

like an embassy overwhelmed by the emergency of their arrival.

Are the paupers of dawn brighter in the root than in the flower,

is there no gentleness left in the flaring poppy to console them,

no milk that isn’t soured, no crumb of light in the pantry

to redeem the crushed heartscapes of a disinfected dream?

Bitter the monstrous sterilities of affluence

that dance on their graves like shovels full of deranged stars

elated by a fate unworthy of their shining, and bitter the church

they pearl around the lie of their filth

to convince the maggot of wings. That song is dead in the mouths of men,

that song is rock that once transformed the desert into roses

and gathered eyes like bees, like poets to their unfolding,

and bitter the aftermath of forgeries that heed the call

but will not answer the singer in the well

hoarse with mysteries in supple tongues

that confound the fallen towers with echoes, thieves, and voiceless birds.

And bitter to know this, bitter to say this, bitter

to discover this truth on the wrecked shores of the heart

the corpse of a beached dolphin suffocating under its own dead weight,

betrayed by the Judas-needle of too many messianic norths.

And there shall be no respite from the pettiness

of the enflamed parasite grown fanatical with the consumption of power,

no grace in the waltz of the tide that wears its gown of oil

like bitter weeds and formic nettles to a funeral ball

celebrating the providential death of excellence, no refuge

from the scorching wind that burns the eyes like glass

and welds a race of thorns to every planetary heart

ballistically deposed from the throne of peace where it once governed itself,

infused with the brilliance of a billion inquisitive stars

in the hidden court of the red mandarin

choosing his words like fireflies from the glowing honey of his lantern.

Bitter the stones of exile that once had a pulse; and bitter

the reek of numbers in the pores of our skin

that inform the wind of the approach of the faceless death

of a species blandly annihilated by its own generative toxins.

Where truth is a waste, a garbage-barge, and compassion

an old morality play doomed to an iron simplicity of outcomes,

the clarity of the vivid waters of life tinctured

by the mysterious bliss of the moon

grown infernal with the exudium of priestly acids

that mutate the grotesque ores of the contemporary mind

into reflexive arsenals that bark like junkyard dogs

behind the razor-wire of their impending intent, bitter, bitter, bitter

the snarling isolation, the wary silence of the hunted and condemned.

Our children the convulsion of our own contamination,

the wisdom of the old rotting on the docks of their delayed departure like wheat,

the futile shrines of the spirit desecrated

by the godless holy wars of bureaucratized science

elaborating the norms of death even as it decrys

the astronomical fluke of life against the odds of happenstance,

bitter the view that grimes the seer with faltering lamps

that black the clear day in their dying with the sulphides, scabs and cataracts

that occlude the light with the clustering flies,

the cloaking demons and starless nights

of the myriad immutable facts that enforce themselves like curfews on the vision;

bitter the darkness in the heart that tars the valiant greens

of spurned hopes that want to keep faith with the rain and the sky,

and bitter the schools in the refugee camps of the mind

where the sewers of thought run like open sores

into the tainted watersheds that defile the septic muses.

PATRICK WHITE

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