IF I COULD CRY AGAIN

IF I COULD CRY AGAIN

If I could cry again, as once I cried for you, if

I could saturate this dark fist of a heart that closed up

and hardened from that flower so long ago, trying

to hang on to the jewel, the pearl, the star, the eye of the issue;

if I could turn this stone rose freaked with harsh minerals,

back into that night you drew the blade of the moon

across the wrist of the bridge you were standing on, waiting

it seemed your whole lifetime, trembling

like a drop of shadow-flavoured water

from the tip of a spear of stargrass

for the wind to shake you loose from your agony,

a lost earring, I could put out this root-fire

that runs underground from cedar to cedar, person to person,

consuming its way without flame

through the long valley of the sorrows and years

where I buried you like a storm that had swallowed the hot sword

of its own lightning; I could affirm the black ash

of that night that has gone on dying in me ever since,

I could green it with daylilies and vetch

and the frog splash of lachrymose junipers beginning to rain.

I could stop meaning what I say when I say

crueller solitudes are born of the pain that’s endured

like a grave with no eyelid staring into the sun

waiting for eclipses to fall out of the light

like coins from a one-armed bandit

that gashed the vein of its motherlode

to die in a windfall of poppies, a junkie of luck,

than the strange loneliness of the losers

who cash their winnings in, and bleed to death.

I could mean something else other than heroin,

I could mean a new religion, a successful skin graft

of happier metaphors and cooler tattoos,

brighter constellations than the needle tracks

that loaded the deck of your dark zodiacs

with star-crossed lovers in public washrooms

tying you off with the spinal cord

you carried around in your kit. I could stop the bleeding,

I could put the fire out, I could look at your death

square in the eyes

and haul in a god to answer it

like you did me that last night

when I asked for signs of life

and you quoted maxims to live by from the razor-blade

revealed to you alone on your holy mountain

before you dumped on paradise

like a shovel full of dirt, a spoonful of ashes,

an avalanche of hurt. I could open my hand

and fill your absence in

with things that begin. I could scrawl

a reason to live on your mirror in lipstick

and marry you in our honeymoon coffin

behind closed doors

in a downpour of wedding rings

I stole from the dead.

O, baby, my lost one, my fire in the wood,

you could be my candle-holder

and angel-food for good

if only I could cry again,

as once you knew I could.

PATRICK WHITE

IT DOESN'T MATTER WHO I AM NOW

IT DOESN’T MATTER WHO I AM NOW

It doesn’t matter who I am now among these white dragons of energy

sleeping all around me like hills of snow, longing for a heart

that hasn’t been run through with a sword or fried

in the fires of its squandered passions. As I pass and passing is an art,

the silent art of learning to prefer death, alone

with the tongueless eloquence of a vast departure, as I pass

I keep a journal of faces in the windows of longing hung

with sidereal curtains

to elucidate the perfect isolation of my enlightened crimes.

I wrote myself off a cosmos ago; everything I do, a reflex of emptiness,

even the shining a cry of torment out of space, an unnamed wound,

a fountain-mouth that has sung itself away like the birds,

a leaf on articulated waters, an idiot moon that has sighed away its seas.

Within me, night; within me, mysteries I keep as pets

to amuse the children who come with their inquisitive eyes

and tortured dolls to learn if hope is the truest of fallacies. I read my own ashes,

some slapstick sage, embarrassed by their innocence

into an impromptu clarity, brick roses, embarrassed

to be anything at all. Out of the depths of my own inconsequence, the dark shale

of my awareness of life, the indecipherable chronicle of my life

that whispers strange fossils into the moment like curious doors

to the exhausted shrines of time, I laugh at myself as an antidote,

a mystical serum, as I teach the unteachable by arraying

the sacred fraudulence of my own unverified life.

I listen like the shadow of an assassin behind this eyeless translucence

for the sound of approaching footsteps, the groan of worn stairs,

the musical rain of keys, to startle the bones of their dragons

out of death, to cannibalize their lies and rob them of their radiant chains

in a sudden assault of light. I sell them forged passports to nowhere

to befriend their endless seeking like the wind

that erases their footprints home. I offer them everywhere

as a room for the night, my heart the stone beneath their head.

Sleep, gently, babies, in the arms of the dream

that covers your faraway hills like a summer sky freaked with legends.

I am the unworthy nothing that loves you best; the ghost of the grain

I break like bread and salt with stars

to entice you to the unsuspected windows of your own inner seeing.

Rogue dragons wake in the blood, root gods thaw

and send a shudder through the branch, spinal lightning

strikes the cold stone of the brain and the castle falls

that ruled forbidden fields. Are you afraid of your freedom, your exile

your ancient throne? Is the vastness too much, the solitude, the curse;

do you tremble before the armies of your own defeat, regretting the gods

and delusions you overcame to arrive at this moment

faced through tears by the mad messiah of suicide

who has come too late to witness your lonely redemption?

Are you snarled in the void by nets you cast for golden fish,

mesmerized by the points of emptiness that come

with pins in their mouths to trick you out in a wardrobe

of designer straightjackets, your heart, the rock that killed the bird,

your blood, an igneous delirium, drunk on the wine of razor-wire

consecrated by the grave in a ritual condemnation of a lonely prisoner

eating spiders in solitaire? Here

from the medicine bag of this black dwarf

prompted by dragons that elude you, I offer you

a way out, your own slave-price, a hole

more merciful than the knotted ankh of your noose, a road

beyond your walking, this jewel

from under a pauper’s tongue. The crow returns

to this ark of clowns, a continent in its beak. If you want to know

the clairvoyant insanity of the firefly that engendered this world

out of the void, compelled by a silence of light

in a beginning that never began and has never passed, now, still

the mother of itself; if you want to know that which creates and destroys you,

the uncreate which sustains you in the reeling fever

of all those strange emotions and hazardous thoughts

you call you and mistake for something, if you’re still secretly

looking for water in the mirror, your face a dead divining rod,

listen, though you don’t understand what I mean. Go.

The dragon dreams. Look under his eyelids. What does he dream?

If you want to live forever. If you’re alive enough to know.

PATRICK WHITE

MUSING IN THE AFTERMATH

MUSING IN THE AFTERMATH

Everything sings, the shadows of the winter branches against the streetlamp

laced on the windowpane ribboned by dirt, backddoors and rooftops

and yet I am enveloped in this silence without wings, this voice

that valleys the universe like a drop of water down the spine of a leaf

to the root of no flower, no heart, no simple mystery of the night

maturing into stars. I’m in a room with books, paintings, lamps,

plants, computers, easels and cats. Things are neither right nor wrong

though I flatter myself that I have grown from mistake to mistake,

defeat to defeat and cloak the sum of all my failures

in the unconvincing authority of experience.

It’s rude to take your masks off in the light.

I try to see myself in the darkness like a star

with too much to say that loves to give its hiding place away. Forgive

this indiscretion of my solitude, but my name has obligations

and there’s nothing in the house to eat but swans.

Soon enough there’ll be a term to all these spectral visions

that add their shadows to the lead migrations of my thought

and traverse the motionless deserts of the skull-faced moon.

And what can I say to the pilgrims who come to visit my heart,

all these lean feelings without deceit or art

who crowd around the miracle like damaged mystics and moths

hoping their agony will be immolated in the serene ferocity of the void?

Space is only the rough draft of my emptiness

and ghosts confer in the wings like uninspired actors 

or lie detectors trying to interpret the crimes of my last passion play. 

Before I was born to cross the sky in a blue coffin with a black rose

among all these islands of light, I was the ashes of a bird

in the cold furnace of my life, a jest of the indifferent wind

that toys with the lamp and candle of my seeing.

Now, in every word, among a hundred million burning stars,

it’s enough to watch a vagrant firefly, a constellation of one

blind the universe in a single flash with marvel

as I slide down the helical bannisters of every descending starwell

toward the dark by which the dark is known.

Together with everyone I heed the mystery alone

and I don’t know how I got this way

or if I’m a shadow or a wing, the gesture of anything,

but when the moon is in my window, the night arrayed,

musing in the aftermath of life’s homely escapade,

a little afraid, I feel someone dying, and I sing.

PATRICK WHITE

CRUCIAL DELUSIONS

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

MIDNIGHT CANTO

MIDNIGHT CANTO

Young, you weep the falling moon,

Luminous willow, beside the black river

Where I drown in your pale ghost,

Each small wave, the eyelid

Of a scattered rose, silvered by the light.

You are everything that time could steal

From me, brought back, an afterlife

I had not thought possible, a birth

Beyond the debt I owe to anyone,

These hauntings, these crucial exorcisms.

In me, wheat, honey, white gold,

Your sad summer made mystery

By night, in me, when perfect solitude

Paints your face upon its raven waters

And the watching stars discuss conspiracies

Of love that terrify the sleepless hour.

Servant of the dream that spins the world

Through the languishing ages into yesterday,

I am resurrected like the wind to comb

Your hair, and play upon your cheek,

A memory of fire, to let you know,

Though alone, I am near and now,

The music of your shining leaves,

Companion, sage, fool, or poet,

The soft, mad music of your shining leaves.

PATRICK WHITE

MAD OR ENLIGHTENED

MAD OR ENLIGHTENED

Mad or enlightened the same, the universe

is an embryo of darkness born in upon itself, everywhere

its own womb breaking into the pulse of stars within stars,

and everywhere, the shining before the light, the dark mirror

showing the light its own face for the first time,

how in an eventually that is always now

it would attain flowers and eyes along the way

and become the skin of the rain as it falls to earth in April.

If I change to fire, these letters burn, blow away as ash

on the tongue of the wind; if water, then the stars put themselves out

in their own weeping like candles drowning in tears.

Every step of the journey around ourselves

is another world, another garden to plant the seed-names

we’ve shaken from autumns in other realms

and carried around like sacred jewels

we forgot in the corners of our pockets and hearts. Believe it;

when I am all stars; you are all the listening darkness

I pour myself into like a drunkard into a bottomless glass

and you raise me to your lips and drink yourself up

until you’re blinded into clarity

by all the open cages of the light.

Why lie in your own coffin, night after starless night,

if you’re not empowered by your long obedience?

Better to open your eyes on the other side

of your horizontal door, better to come knocking from the outside,

deluded vertically, than suffer this poverty of blood within

the hushed precincts of your skyless realm,

the skull-bone basilicas of your private Vaticans and law libraries.

When it wakes up in the morning

there’s no book-dust in the eyes of the light.

Before you now, in your endless beginning, the dream

you thought you had rubbed from your eyes, you

waking up like a key inside the heart of the dream.

There’s nothing you can’t unlock, even

gardens on the moon or the ancient futures of past lives

death only pruned back with shears to bloom again

in the efflorescence of your eyes, early dawns in the new arraying.

Who you are flows into who you are, all one river of seeing,

dizzy and composed in its own running, all

your own eddies and currents, swamps and white-water,

auroral maids of the mist when you fall in separate drops,

weeping’s just a waterfall, and frenzied tides of being

when you crash ashore out of your own wholeness into buddhas and bums.

In the fire, everyone’s crazy with passion and intelligence,

everyone’s smashed on the wine of an unknown guest

trying to be remembered by his friends.

What visions abound in the orchards of the blessing,

What hearts are torn out and thrown upon the fire

like planets called home by the longing of the sun? We are the white shadows

of the someone else who is walking up ahead

like the moon on the path of its own reflection.

Catch up to yourself and drown in the luminosity of your own being.

Who needs a map to the road they’re walking

or sages pointing all along the way, grey as barnboard signs,

or luminaries at night

pointing to the darkness. The pivot of the worlds points to itself.

True north is not a direction. Haven’t you guessed by now; the stars

all circle you like stormbirds drawn to a lighthouse on the coast of heaven,

too in love with your light to heed your warning about

the deep dragon grief that opens the mouth of the wound

that killed it into life, a one-edged sword of light

in the hands of a holy assassin darker than the silence

of the sun at midnight. If you listen with your eyes,

you can hear in that mournful emptiness

God calling out to God, lover and beloved,

through the echoless valley, across the waveless sea,

yours the name on the prow of the ship that breaks through the veils of the storm,

and yours the name of the storm. You are the bird

that answers the green bough; the lightning in the rigging.

You are the sigh of the silence

and the mystic pen in the hand of the saying.

Whatever worlds you dress for, fields and flowers,

or stars and hourglass elsewhere zones, you are the body of being,

and yours the gowns and robes of creation you draw from the abyss

like clothes from a private closet, dignified in your scriptures,

intimate in your jewels. And everywhere you coyly let yourself fall

like earrings of rain, scarves of fire, fragrances of light,

and watch to see who of the many lovers that are you

bends down like the sky to pick them up at your feet

and return them to you like the first crescent of the moon

rising like an eyelid out of sleep

to greet itself reflected in your face.

PATRICK WHITE

SOFTLY, SOFTLY NOW

SOFTLY, SOFTLY, NOW

Softly, softly, now; here there is no beneath or above, no hell

for miscreant flowers opening for the moon, no ghosts

who can’t find their way back to the grave. No one

is unacceptable in this place where even the dead dig

for the blue bones of heaven, cracking

them open like fortune-cookies

to taste the light gold of the marrow. This is the kingdom

of empty cups waiting to be filled

by the black wine of union that ripened

in the skull-shrines

of a thousand drunken buddhas

begging outside a brothel door

for the same holy candle to show them the way home. People

are seldom grateful for what they don’t know

and thought is only the dog of reality

if you can catch my drift in this back-alley

where I’m dancing with a gust of wind. How lightly

you step off my tongue into your veils and shadows

dropping your masks like petals all over the asphalt

until you can’t be seen. Is that freedom or death; do you

bathe in your grave or your heart

when you remember the sorrows you’ve buried like daggers

in the wounds that widowed you? Do you tremble

like a kite at the end of your own life-line

waiting to be found by the witching-wands of the lightning;

or have you forgotten your madness, the dark jewels

in which you took sanctuary for the night

like an orphan in her longing, the crazy wisdom

that put on the costume of a dead clown

and offered herself to the blind and humourless

like a chessboard? Do you still swim naked in sapphires, raise

gardens of fish on the moon, perform

open-heart surgery on paralyzed serpents

that wake up from the anaesthetic between your legs

like a spring thaw, believing they can walk and then

come crawling back, veteran amputees

demanding crutches? Wild moon on a lonely river, night-lotus,

flesh and stars, every moment of you is origin; why doubt

your own reflection in the mirror of my voice? I’m

not selling snake-oil on the midways of eternity, filling the sails

of a slave-ship and calling it the love-boat; this is not

a wardrobe of auroras I buy up cheap in Montreal

and hawk from the back of a truck in Sunday parking lots. If the words

dance, if the wind plays lightly in the leaves, if the fire sings

and the diamonds flow and the rain falls musically

like phantom fingers on the spotted touch-me-nots, should I impugn

the graces of perception that sing, unseen, in the deep woods

because they fly without a limp, praise without a stutter?

I see in whispers; I hear in glimpses. Nameless affinities rooted in silence

bloom in the saying and fall back into themselves,

fountains within fountains, pursing their waters

to kiss the light as it breaks like glee against them. Fountains,

not pedestals. Deep sky-dwellers ride the helix of their own thermals,

their wings spread from dawn to dawn, and if they build,

they build from the sky down, not footstools, scaffoldings, and temples,

not ladders of bone at the bottom of dry wells, but tents of light

in the secret grottoes of space, supple as life.

Up is not up nor down, down, when you dream in the seed, neither

born nor unborn, yet nothing missing; creation within the Uncreate,

the intimately impersonal holy mother that is born and perishes

with us. I walk this vastness alone; who, then, to impress or pedestal

in this empty, pathless, mouthless, dark bliss of a world

where even the silence is speechless before it? If

the ignorant see the world as an open hat on a lonely streetcorner

begging for change and prizes; let them. That is their hour,

their seeing, their word. All seeing is a kind of love.

Orchids and dandelions alike. All that is loved is seen to be beautiful

but not all that is beautiful is seen to be loved. I see

a blue rose, shedding lives like petals and skies,

night skies, freaked by stars tattooed on heavy eyelids, falling

into dream and destiny. Graffiti Mona Lisa mother Bacchanal,

mad, menstruating, moon-dump bag-lady, I see you

vaulting topless over the horns of lunar bulls in ancient Crete,

or lady of the lake, royal witch-bride, bored with weddings

and vase-tamed bouquets, waiting to grasp the hilt

of magic swords whose power is older than the stones

from which they’re drawn. And there, in the window

of the thirteenth house of the zodiac, isn’t that you

plucking dead leaves off the herbs you grow on the sill, hanging curtains

you’ve pirated thread by thread from old mythologies

and woven again like the moon into light? Crow-weaver,

tell me, have you ever stolen silver from the mirror to heal a wounded vision,

or known an appetite so great, so incomprehensible

it consumed the galaxies like krill? Death is the dark inspiration,

pure energy, radiant and whole, the mute mirror that reflects nothing

that stands before it in an arrogance of forms; the face you wore

before the beginning of faces. Already achieved,

not something up ahead, a black star on a white night, the dark mother

who fills the wombs with gestures of light. Death is the ancient future

that passes instantaneously, the crone-nymph, oyster and pearl,

the miner in the ore that releases the child like a bell. The dream that wakes you

from a dream, the dead tree that gives birth to a bird. Death is

the terrifying abundance, the terrible joy of perfection falling

into perfection, the honey and the horror of the sacrificial wound. The child

that carries her mother in her womb. Death is no less life, no less us,

than a wave is water. Death has no beginning so life is never

finished. One afternoon, in an autumn garden, the air shuddered with mine

and I knew that it was already done like the stars above the flowers

of gardens to come. What death, then, to stare into

that isn’t already under your feet? Wombs, waterclocks, and coffins;

can you tell me the difference? Here’s my skull. Break it.

The bird’s already out singing you like a handful of joy

hurled well beyond itself into the dawn, and in the morning market

among laughter and apples

the phantoms array their illusions.

PATRICK WHITE