AT SEVENTEEN

AT SEVENTEEN

At seventeen, having crawled out from under the street

and made my way through the culture shock

of my first year of an affluent university

with easy access to the sea,

I made my way north to a pit stop coffee-shop

on a lonely highway at a place

called Windy Point as I recall

northwest of Prince George.

I remember the tractor trailers full of strawberries

festering like hot sacrificial hearts

bruised by the quick summer,

and the electrically charged aura of bees and wasps

that hovered over them and hummed

like a powerline tuning up in the rain.

I was a young teacher assigned by Frontier College

to live and labour and teach

five hours a night after dinner on a work train,

lining, tamping, laying track on an extra gang

of the Pacific Great Eastern Railway,

forty miles as the crow flies into the bush.

I remember the impoverished trees

that grew smaller and smaller

in the immensity of their solitude and mine

as I was driven deeper into the bush

by two railwaymen who said about as much

to the long-haired hippie in the back of their jeep

as I’d said all year to myself in my sleep,

as the silence grew more aggressive by the mile

bumped along by the side of the track.

You him. Yup. Get in. And that was it.

That was as much of a welcome as I was going to get.

Or as far as they were concerned

I had a right to expect because

the illusive idealism of the sixties

was still an embryo in the matrix of a dreamcatcher

trying to jimmy the locks on the doors of perception

forgetting it’s just as easy as light

as it is for a thief or the moon

to get in through the windows.

The threat of their worst nightmare

coming unglued like the perfectly bound

paperback edition

of their unlovable orthodoxy

and unlivable reactionary redneck rectitude.

Flower power spread like fire

through the radicalized roots

of the underdogs, draft dodgers and drop-outs

fight for the right to cast its vote

like Japanese cherry blossoms on the wind

to accommodate a better more spontaneous world

to the portable Zen of their creative imaginations.

The hawks and the doves,

the fireflies locked in ice

and the snowflakes on a furnace

fighting over whose cosmic eggs

in a war of F-4s against

magic carpets with a flight plan

best measured up to the wingspan

of the winds of change

while down below their nests

in the highest crowns of the trees

dark wavelengths

hatched out of their black holes

like baby snakes

that had just passed through

the third eye of the needle

aspiring to win their wings

and become dragons of the air

by swallowing the eggs of either species

whole cosmologies at a time

and regurgitating the remains

like the collapsed parachutes

and used condoms of the moon

as if they could shed their skins

from the inside out.

Either extreme a fang in the skull

of a harvest moon in a year of famine.

And there were far fewer people

trying to firewalk their way to the stars

back in those days than there were

spiritual tourists trying to walk on water.

So I took the middle extreme of the dragon’s path

and grew a third wing down the spine of my back

like the keel of a schooner,

the dorsal fin of a shark

with the heart of a dolphin

or the tail rudder of a plane

just to keep things immensely balanced

like a phoenix between Icarus and the sun.

I oscillated like a wavelength of starmud

between the Himalayan apexes

of mystic contemplation,

the death valleys of meditation,

and the troughs where it got down and dirty

as the mysticism of action

that had to follow the blossom of insight

like water all the way up from the root

and then take it a step further, into the fruit.

And that’s why I volunteered

the sceptical lack of innocence

of my ambiguous idealism

to be brutalized by the wilderness

into the scar tissue of experience

as if I had just skinned a unicorn

and now I had to tan the leather.

And that’s why I was on my way

to bring education to the working man

in the wilds of northern B.C.

At seventeen, I was

the Johnny Appleseed of knowledge

armed to the teeth

with the revolutionary rose

of a virtuous cause

righteous as the thorn of the moon

in the side of the dawn.

I was the ladder out of the same snakepit

of poverty and ignorance I had crawled out of

like the skeleton of a hummingbird

out of a continental shipwreck

that had nowhere to dock in Atlantis but down.

One foot each astride two ties of a railway trestle,

nothing but a fifty pound iron lining bar

wedged under the track

as I pulled with all my might

backwards into oblivion

to align with one parallel line with another.

And through the gap between the ties

a hundred and twenty feet below me

a thin silver stream, tinfoil in sunlight,

wandering through the grey skulls

of a washed-out cemetery of insight.

The rocks I would be smashed upon

like an egg head out of the nest

if I were to suddenly fall like Icarus

through the gaps in the supine ladder

I was standing on,

or in the cruel grey eyes of the men

who were sizing me up

showed any kind of cowardice

to remind them how dangerous this was,

or if I used my education

like a parachute I could pull out of my ass

every time I was called upon like a bridge

to bestride the abyss like a man

and keep my shit together

as if courage weren’t a virtue,

but a gland I was missing from birth.

Gnothi seauton Socrates said in his Attic dialect,

as he was about to drink the hemlock.

Know yourself and I did well enough

to know as I often had in similar situations

when bravery might let you down

madness was enough to pull you through,

and for reasons they well understood

made me as crazy as they were,

I slowly won their respect

and one by one they came

to my little frontier school

where I bunked alone

coupled to my long, lonely train of thought

like a mutant gene

to a helical protein molecule

we went to work everyday with lining bars

to straighten out after

underground rivers of clay

had moved under them in the night

like flesh and blood drawn to a new idea.

I taught the Portuguese, who,

after working ten hours a day

would wash up, eat, play soccer till dark,

and then come to me

to learn how to swear back at bigots

like the low men on the totem pole

of British Columbians, Albertans,

New Brunswickers, Newfies and natives

in that hierarchical order of serfdom.

Exiles, outlaws, refugees, lunatics, outcasts,

who’d fill their pillows with modest samples

of the pubic hair of every woman

they’d ever slept with for years

or by four in the afternoon, every afternoon

when the timekeeper called a break

to let it happen, would shake their fist at the sun

and throw shovels around as hard as they could

that would kill you outright

if you ever got in the way of one

like a proofreader mistaking verbs for nouns

in an unknown mother tongue

that only the sun

and thousands of hectares of muskeg understood.

These were the mad ones, the ones

who worked like troglodytes all day,

arms sinewed like railroad tracks,

hearts beating like anvils in the hot sun

and said nothing,

as if nothing need be said

after forty years in the bush.

But come night in the separate cars

they each were assigned

to sleep isolated in the dark,

had raging conversations with themselves

like a treeful of roosting crows

so you couldn’t tell if you were listening

as I did every night in curious apprehension

the anguished echo of one voice

from another being thrown

across the room in rebuttal

by a polyglot ventriloquist

like Luther’s startled inkwell at Lucifer.

And then at four again, every afternoon,

shovels flung anywhere

like the hands of a clock

flying off like the petals of a propeller

as if they hated God for something

and for ten to fifteen minutes

at four in the afternoon every day

for as long as anyone could remember

felt compelled to start a riot

against the sun, the sky gods,

the wind, the wilderness, who knew,

but even they seemed to know

like crows at the highest pitch of their protest,

they couldn’t do anything about.

Nothing in the Norton Anthology of English Literature

nor a few weeks in a training session

at the University of Calgary

to see who would be posted where

had prepared me for this

but I winged it like a stone or an Arctic Cat

out over the open water of a lake

and soon I had several classes

of natives, Portuguese, drunken reprobates,

and a mix of curiosity seekers

more interested in being entertained

than educated on a work train

where nothing much ever happens

except extreme violence on a Friday night

and tragic accidents in the workplace

that could have been avoided.

And what surprised

and humbled me the most

two philosophers, one

from New Brunswick

and the other, Alberta,

who’d been out here so long

in the brutal isolation of the bush,

keeping their lives to themselves,

they made Henry David Thoreau look like a fake.

And for five months it went on like this

until UBC sent me the first film

to be screened on a work train this far north

and it turned out to be opening night

for the much anticipated premiere

of two teenagers learning about syphilis,

that immediately estranged a packed house

who thought I was talking down to them

as if they didn’t already know

everything there was to know about the disease.

Though I tried to plead with them

this wasn’t my choice of movies

but some idiot’s down south,

I knew my Socratic moment had come

to drink the hemlock of my idealism

and after I was knocked out in a bar fight

stepping out of a washroom in Prince George

I woke up back on the train

with a raging migraine that felt like

forty thousand hectares of muskeg

and a time keeper urgently insisting

I go back into Prince George without hesitation,

buy a thirty-eight from a friend of his,

and shoot the motherfucker who did this to me

to teach him some respect for the English language.

And that was it, time to go,

time to blow Windy Point,

time to thumb my way back to Vancouver

as if I were turning the pages of book

where art had failed to imitate life

convincingly enough to put a full stop

like a bullet hole through the temple

of some drunk logger’s head

which is what I had to do in their eyes.

Pick up a gun to prove I was man enough

to go on teaching them

about John Donne’s attitude toward death

and know from first hand experience

that left no doubt in their minds

I knew what I was talking about.

And of course I wasn’t and didn’t.

And for hundreds of miles

of black asphalt after that

I felt like a tractor trailer

hauling thousands of wounded strawberries

bruised by their own innocence

in a freak encounter with experience

to a hard empty free bench for the night

in the Camby Street bus station

that helped immeasurably in the morning

put all this behind me for awhile

like the wake of a ferry in the Georgia Straight

threading its way through the islands

wondering what just went down in despair

like another undermanned lifeboat over the side

of the flat moon society

rowing for all their worth

in a dead sea of shadows

that Sisyphus would have understood

balanced on a turtle’s carapace

like the skull of the earth

when it rises over the horizon

like a magic mushroom

or the podium at the head of a classroom

everyone pushes out of the way

to prove they can relate without barriers

to anyone eye to eye

without knowing whether

they really can or not

and whether the bond

is mutually reciprocal

until it’s way too late

way too late not to, brother.

PATRICK WHITE

TRYING TO LAUGH AT MYSELF

TRYING TO LAUGH AT MYSELF

Trying to laugh at myself to get out of a black depression. Mad. Angry. Sad. The way January is sad but cold. Lonely in a way that doesn’t call for company. Intense, but then so are the stars. Everything missing, but no sense of anything lacking. A desert, but nothing in arrears. Not a cynic. Nor wholly yet, the dupe of my own ideals. Truly impoverished the man who doesn’t have anything in his life to make a fool of himself over. He upstaged the waters of life conceptually and now he swims through glass. I pity him who doubts the echo of his own voice and can’t let the universe put its hand from behind over his eyes like the wings of a child from time to time and ask him to guess. Who’s this? It’s true that clarity can sometimes feel like your eyes had just been slashed by an edge of broken glass, but that doesn’t mean you take a scalpel to the eyelids of a rose to get it to see what you do. Why bother if everything’s as futile as you say it is? The truth can wound. There’s no doubt about that. But it wounds like the beauty of a black rose with crescent moons for thorns. It doesn’t stick it to you like a dagger through the heart. Insight. Compassion. Blossom and fruit. Moonlight that heals what the daylight burns. A feel for the living that goes beyond thought. Like this voice that’s come to me out of thin air as I’m sitting here without any oars, trying to make an empty lifeboat out of the ribcage of a great white shark with eclipsed camera lenses for eyes. And I don’t know who they are, or if we’ve met somewhere in the prelude of a past life that led to this one, or even if talking to myself this way were a sure sign that matter doesn’t just bend space but mind and time as well. But it’s enough they know who they are and I’ve let them have their say, as I’ve had mine. As you who are listening in on this are having yours.

How cosmically still everything is. As if something were about to shatter. As if the mute, inanimate objects in the room had finally found their voice and were about to speak in tongues. The orange lamp, the violet vase that spills over like a watershed into an Arum ivy, the blue glass skull on the windowsill smearing the red logo of the bank across the street like blood all over its face, not nouns, but the verbs of a universal language we each translate in our own way into a dream grammar of Rosetta Stones. Prophetic skulls talking in our sleep. It’s good to let a gust of stars get in your eyes like a mirage once and awhile. It’s generous to let the dead slip through the doors of perception you’ve left ajar for their shadows to come in out of the cold and warm their bones around your fire, and tell you stories of who they were in life. They seldom stay long. And then they’re gone. Like smoke from a distant farmhouse in the winter dawn. Been down so long it looks like up to me, Richard Farina said on the way to die at his own book launching, thrown from the back of a motorcycle, but what’s that but the mood swing of an hourglass that keeps approaching its past like the future of something that hasn’t happened yet? And if you know what I mean, then it’s quite clear that you’re here in this asylum with me hoping no one’s discovered you yet. But there you are. I can see you. All tied up in knots like a wavelength in the corner. An embryo that’s trying to commit suicide by hanging yourself from the noose of your umbilical cord. Who are you? Did you get here the same way I did? Or by some other road? And why do that? You know something to be afraid of that I don’t? The things I fear most are not in a world of forms and it’s the crippled spirits that I find most dangerous. Are you a lamia, a lapwing, or the orphan moon of an unknown world that’s been entrusted to me like a secret that keeps to itself? Poor thing. Get up. Brush the ashes from your hair. The sleep out of the urns of your eyes. That shattered mirror out of your mind that kept on lying to you about how beautiful you weren’t even when you were and didn’t know it. Mirrors are like snakes, you can’t train them to bite other people or kiss your ass. All you can do is defang them like crescents of the moon, thorn by thorn, shard by shard like a snakepit of highly toxic chandeliers that have fallen on hard times. You just take some pliers and pull them out of your heart one by one like porcupine quills from the soft wet nose of a dog that will never learn. You stand there like the child of Joan of Arc martyred in the shadows of your mother’s sacrifice as if you belonged to a guild of secret saints, and you knock that chip of a demon off your shoulder who keeps whispering in your left ear if your fire is so much holier than mine, why haven’t you, as I have, immolated yourself in it yet? Just as there’s only one part in a hundred and twenty-six that’s different between you and a tree, chlorophyll or haemoglobin, whether you’re hanging from a crucifix or burning at the stake, there’s only one jewel’s difference between a dreamcatcher and a spiderweb. And that’s you, sapphire, the difference between two antidotes. But you don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to. Denying one thing here is as good as affirming it everywhere. And there are no laws here except the spontaneous physics of metaphor that’s driven us both like storm birds into the third eye of our own weather seeking asylum from the madness raging all around us like Jupiter, or, if I read you right, your violent father. I don’t know where this is. It doesn’t have a local habitation or a name, though I’ve been trying to give it one but nothing sticks. But here in this place for reasons I don’t fully understand, if you don’t want to sever your lifelines from those kites that you’ve been trying to keep up in the air like constellations, you learn to play so intensely with your creative imagination, whatever medium your working in, you’re absorbed like a child into the immensity of your own absence from your previous state of starless affairs. You’re shining, but you don’t need to know it. You’re dancing barefoot with the wind on air listening to the picture-music of the willows waltzing to the sound of the river that’s as light on its feet as it is on the mind. And there are visiting hours for people to come see you like bees and hummingbirds and dragonflies, or voices out of nowhere like the call of Canada geese high overhead at night in the autumn who speak for the dead in passing a last few intimate words they want the living to hear. Someone blows into your ear like the opening of an empty bottle that sounds like a wolf howling at the moon way off in the distance, so you listen to the message, and you write it down, and throw it like a whale with a prophet in its belly back into the sea like a fish you didn’t mean to catch that just jumped into your moon boat one night without putting up any kind of a fight. Here no one tries to turn the fireflies into the fixed stars of an orthodox starmap. You learn to delight in your madness like a native ritual you’ve been invited to participate in like tourist who was passing through and decided to stay like a flightplan that was happy to be grounded for light years in the homelessness of a space with feathers in its hair. Either that, if you take yourself too seriously, you die of terminal symbolitis in intensive care on the night ward of a hospital ship in dry dock on the moon and you miss your next port of call completely.

PATRICK WHITE

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