NOISE SEEPING INTO THE SILENCE

NOISE SEEPING INTO THE SILENCE

Noise seeping into the silence.

The apartment groans, cracks it knuckles.

The gas furnace flares, a poppy, a matchbook,

and as things heat up, the tin pipes

keep making spasmodic rimshots on the drums,

then cooling off, you can hear

the last heavy, ripe drops of rain

on a metal roof with no walls

as he imagines it, somewhere in Burma

where the bacteria have such an appetite for life

they eat books down to the spine

and the glue that binds them

like a creekbed of milky honey

that’s cracked with use and time.

And all the letters of all the words,

nothing but flies in amber paperweights.

You take the dirty laundry of a life time

and you wash the blood and semen

off the sheets, the sweat-stained outlines

of a he and a she that made lust

to exhaust themselves and go to sleep

like the chalk silhouettes of two corpses on the street.

And you hang them on the line

like a computer screen blowing in the wind

on a sunny summer afternoon

for the neighbours to see

how much like them you are

when you’re both wearing the same disguise

like clean bedsheets with no evidence of life.

A tabla rasa. A cheery white void.

Snow on a desolate sidewalk late at night

that no one’s walked in before you

showed up to ruin it with your presence.

Footprints on the moon. The estranged signs

of a starless space within

that keeps a journal of our innocence

and its aborted attempts to shine.

He watches the smoke of a cigarette

shaped by the air it passes through

and thinks of the bucolated cosmology

of his last lover’s hair, black walnut

with Bronze Age touches of infra-red.

He remembers her taking her clothes off

in master strokes of candlelight

that painted a Rembrandt of her likeness

and realizes however naked

she stood before him on Wednesday night,

there were still skins to shed,

layers upon layers of metaphor

as divisible as an atom

or the pages of a book

that’s written in wavelengths

that go on forever

beginning where they left off.

And even nude beside each other in bed

they were still too dressed up for the occasion.

And even the silence and the solitude

don’t go far enough into the abyss

not to be warped like space

by the mass of a metaphor

concentrating its light in one place

like a serpent sleeping in its coils

with its head on the pillow it makes

of the endless wavelengths of itself,

an emergency firehose encased in glass

dreaming of what snakes dream of

when they’re not called upon to put things out

by swallowing the moon in a single gulp

to bring the rain on

in this white Sahara of snow,

listening like a mirage

that wished it had something to cry about,

to the eyes of big rain drops

falling on the tin roofs of Burma

like a gas furnace

learning to play the drums

like a novice John Bonham

in Led Zeppelin’s next afterlife

in the dead of winter,

in the dark hours of the morning

in Perth, Ontario, Canada

in an apartment that thinks it’s a band

warming up,

doing a sound check before the show.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN RAGE BROKE DOWN INTO TEARS

WHEN RAGE BROKE DOWN INTO TEARS

When rage broke down into tears

over the shattered chandeliers of stars

that crashed against your windowpane

before they thawed in the furnace

of a Promethean thief of fire

human enough to burn,

and you cried, yes you did, I was there,

I took the splinter of light out of your eye

with the corner of the sky where Venus

goes down in the west like the crumb

of a radiant dream that wanted to break

loaves and fishes with the masses

only to find you were swimming through glass;

you cried as if all the birds in the world

had died under your windowsill

like the words to the song

you were dancing to at the time.

And you picked them up one by one

and cradled them in your hand

like a midwife with a manger

and stroked their soft bodies with your finger

as if you would give their lives back to them again

by way of apology for being human

in an ice age of rain

that had lost its purpose in life

like the seeds of flowers on the moon.

And that’s when the wind, that’s always

the moment when the wind cools your eyes

like a glassblower dipping crystal blue birds

in the fountains and watersheds of the moon

and strews your path with the flight feathers

of a nightbird that can see beyond a starmap

fireflies shining in the distance.

And you suddenly realize

a thousand and one ways home ahead of you

like a Nazca landing strip

for alien artists blown off course

into the third eye of a spiritual hurricane.

And you can’t help but fly through it

like an open window into your soul

seeking repose and shelter

among the human totems

of more habitable emotions

scratching fish, birds, monkeys, spiders

jaguars, flowers, trees, fallible people out

in the desert plains of coastal Peru.

Zoomorphic geoglyphs of greeting and return

in every conceivable sign of life

as if the whole planet came out

all at the same time to say hello

and welcome back

like a vow they kept for you

until your myth of origin

returned to its fulfilment,

a nightbird singing

in a rootless tree on the moon,

as if love, rage, life, joy,

death, separation and sorrow

were all pilgrims of one voice.

A pageant of medieval notes

bearing the banners of knights

the hoods and habits of monks,

unholy vocables of middle English

on the tip of your tongue

like the wicks

of holy candles at a black mass

where a young girl dances naked

around a pale fire on the moon

as a flower blooms in the flames,

or sparrows on a stave of power lines,

when the music makes its return journey

like Canada geese in the spring

bearing the souls of the underworld back

like the eyes and stars

and new moons of the dead

to the night of the living

making love in the dark.

Pelvis to pelvis,

heart to heart,

crescent to crescent,

two halves of a broken wishbone

conjoined again into one harp,

one cithara, one guitar

in the ashes of a blue moon,

the second harvest of loaves and fishes

at the spring and autumn equinox.

Every year a new zodiac,

the growth rings in a tree.

Something protean about memory.

The dark matrix of the muse.

A wavelength with its tail in its mouth

that doesn’t ricochet off anything else.

Lamentations, bewitchment, rapture,

time in the hold of the abyss

for not mastering your own powers.

You either cast the spell for yourself

or you wind up gilled

in your own sidereal nets,

a firefly in spider webs of dark matter,

and it’s not likely

you’re being hauled into a life boat.

There are realities, there are windows,

some broken, some whole

even the moon won’t dare look through.

And there are rooms in a palace of water

that move like fish on the moon,

and starmaps that are used to start a fire.

Birds that are the sacred syllables of the sky

that nest in chimneys like hash pipes,

every one of them the Rosetta Stone

to a language of your own

only you can learn for yourself

even if you’re the only one

who was ever born to speak it.

Most people sip spit

from other people’s wishing wells

but they’re always two echos shy of an original

and it’s enough if they put a seashell up to their ears

like a hearing aid to listen to the ocean,

a tidal pool dying like a starfish

out of water and sky,

a shore-hugger that’s afraid

to go along with the ebb and neap

of the dream that gives a pulse to the moon,

your own mindstream

returning to its homeless source

to realize that life and death are both redundant.

That whatever passes away, stays.

And that which doesn’t, goes.

And there are places so deeply secret

that everybody thinks they know

what’s happening to them as it unfolds.

But this is just a way of using knowledge

to keep your eyes closed to the world.

Only a fool would build a gate

and live in a guardhouse

of sword swallowers and fire-eaters

to keep the birds out of the garden.

Or a refugee camp for turtles.

True clarity doesn’t know the light

for what it is.

Reality is as blind to its own translucency

as a painted window.

Two blades of stargrass in a hurricane.

But if you were to take them away

like the long and short straws

of something to win or loose

like the luck of the draw

and chew on them like cud

to get to the deeper meaning

you might get a gesture of it,

you might get the flavour of it

like a dry wad of gum

stuck to the bottom

of a school room desk,

but you wouldn’t get the use of it,

for any reason at all

that should or should not concern anyone.

Have you ever noticed

that time might be

an hourglass full to the brim on top

but it always begins at the peak

of an inverted pyramid

stuck like an arrowhead

in a flesh wound of sand that’s bleeding out?

What’s the point of trying

to claw your way up the heap

to the top of the bottom

when even Sisyphus knows

enough about absurdity

to realize the mountain

climbs its own reflection

all the way down like an avalanche

of all those little rocks

you used to roll up a hill

convinced you were getting somewhere.

And it’s true there’s a different universe

in every grain of sand

and every grain of sand is us.

So why go looking

for what’s already been found?

In any universe there’s no up or down.

And everywhere anywhere you are

from the smallest pebble on the beach

to the most radiant star beyond reach

the gates of the lost

are the end of the search.

PATRICK WHITE

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