WITH FINGERS OF SAND

With fingers of sand, with hands of water

with hearts fuller than apples with night,

we reach out to pluck the orchid on the moon,

to touch beauty on the wing,

the coal swan with feathers of flame,

the shadows that wear our face,

the skin of a waterleaf of gold

that evaporates like an eyelid of dust,

the pilgrim on the smoke-road of the candle,

the black panther in an oildrum,

and the vision is blanched from the seeing

like the albumen of an egg,

the albino leper cooked in the mouth of the moon,

we reach out for what exceeds us,

for the dark thresholds of blood

in the palace of the rose,

the vivid windows of the sea

with their curtains of light and salt,

the green chandeliers of the rain,

the hidden excellence of the early wood sorrel

that whispers to us from its solitude,

shy secrets, indigo birds of paradise

with harps of eloquent feathers,

the laments and deadly night shades

of the alone with the alone in a shadowless abyss.

And there’s the predicate of an unexpected jewel

sewn into the lining of everything;

even the flies are touched by rainbows

and the morning lifts her gown

and wades gloriously through the oilslicks,

hummingbirds in the sour trumpets of the weeds,

jungle parrots painting passion fruit

with palettes of stuttering neon,

hard oyster hearts that bed with pearls. Everyone

reveres the beauty of the wine on the lips

of the unsayable quality of being

that supersedes them, a facet of the turning jewel

that falls like the eyelash of an angel,

a winged samara of autumn dusk

into the seeing, and for a moment as long as life

they touch the pulse of an ageless longing

and feel beating within them

in a panic of wonder and joy,

the radiance of the starbound dove

caught in the throat of the chimney.

Even the worst have known the nightsky reach down

and wipe the stains from their eyes,

or felt embraced by a warm summer rain

that polished their skin like heritage silver

and remembered it for the rest of their lives.

For me, the chalice in the ore is you;

for me, you are all lenses, all mirrors

dewed by the waterveils of the mystery

in the early morning dark before creation

begins itself anew. My heart is seized by the fire-trance

of a sacred silence, the word within the word

as if wax suddenly discovered the flame

whose dancing made its flesh melt in a luminous consummation.

Even seared in the igneous cages of my heart,

an iron tiger baring its worn fangs

to the torment of the staring, when I think of you,

a nightbird with gates for wings

brings me a star and a key

and the bars turn into the pillars of palatial winds,

and an openness lies before me that tastes of lilacs and rain.

For years I’ve been witching for water in hell,

for years I’ve been diving for corpses in quicksand,

living like a squall in a shipwreck

under the eyes of a pleading lighthouse,

and the morning was just the morning

and the night was just the night,

and I thought it would go on like this

until I stared myself to death,

believing there was only the suffering

and the emptiness, and the suffering

and the black, mute bells of the wingless seabirds.

Now there’s a planet that gleams like an eye

in the peacock silks of the twilight,

and a woman standing in the last shadows of the willow

like a doorway, like a ghost on a wharf,

like the depths of an urgent spear.

PATRICK WHITE

IN YOU

In you I come to the end of roads,

and an alphabet of burning wings

falls from an indigo sky

like meteors trying to write

the unsayable in a slash of light,

in a language of luminous scars

the night beatifies with mystic knowledge

that wants to name you

so deeply in thresholds and stars

the charged silence

is giving birth to an indelible mouth,

a doorway of blood,

an ancient grammar of fire

the wind puts on like a robe

to scry the darkness for a voice

that could fill the goblets

of the moon’s dead seas

with the wine of a radiant wound,

so much within me

already the tongue of a bell

that can taste you like blackberries.

The whole of you

in every single drop of your eyes,

you are the black swan

of the eclipse that rares its reflection in water,

the dark orchid in the shadow of the dragon

that sways like a bell in the night,

even your absence a shape of cherishing,

a harvest of shadows beyond the light

of the lamp that burns for you.

Within the deepest abyss of myself

where the heart stands alone

like a single black pillar

in the twilight wasteland of the world,

a mysterious temple to the ultimacy

of having been here once

to suffer the passage of form and time,

everything a gesture of space

that thaws back into itself,

I have written your name

in the hourglass of my blood

like a whisper of secret ink

that once voiced the light to be

and shook the stars like wheat

out of its blind abundance

and will be remembered forever

as the first intimacy of the sea,

and there is the rumour

of a dream in the air,

the fragrance of an approach,

that out of an ocean of light

the tide will embody a woman

like the shore of an island

littered with fingertips and kisses

enmeshed like galaxies and starfish

in the exhalation of her veils

and our lips will meet like archers,

and our bodies will sing like arrows

sunk like orchards through the heart

and long after the last flame of life is shed,

the night will silence the birds

in the groves where we bled like poppies

to open the gates of the mystery

like keys and rain, or the rosary of black pearls

that chants its prayers to the night

like the slow alarm of autumn geese

in the eyes of a human face.

I try to say what can’t be said,

pouring my spirit

into the wineskin of every word,

but my heart is a larger apple

than the bough of my voice can bear,

and the silence

that would erect temples everywhere like flowers

spun from the auroral silks of my soul

and perfume the air with the pollen of sacred fireflies,

every emotion a priest with a shaven head

to honour the moon

climbing the stairwell within me

of a million horizons at once

in every breathless step,

falls away behind me like the wake of a sinking ship

that lowers me into my coffin like a lifeboat

or a message in a bottle

that pleads like wine with the emptiness

for an alphabet that isn’t in arrears to time

to say you to the night

in a lightning breath of life beyond

these elemental likenesses I carve

from a quarry of stars.

And I know I ask for immortal children

from a human womb,

and wide as my powers are

to exceed the sky with homing birds,

to adorn the dead branch with windows

that dazzle the roots of dawn,

I am the ashes of a black star in daylight,

a stone man with a chain for a tongue

when I try to swim like Atlantis

through the depths of your shining within

and the last word, the last life

to flash across my mind as I drown

again and again like a pulse

in the embrace of your beauty

is always the world as it is

before anything was said.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN YOU LOOK AT A STAR

WHEN YOU LOOK AT A STAR

When you look at a star

can you see

how the night leaves

the intimate doors

of intuitive eventuality ajar?

I’m all future with a prophetic past.

Aviomantic signs of liberated doves.

So many lifespans in a single moment.

How many light-years to the nearest star?

And how many shadows back?

Trying to say the inexpressible in words is like

to trying to thaw a snowstorm

on the tip of your tongue

flake by flake syllabically

or trying to explain bubbles to a glacier

in a momentary suspension of disbelief.

When you look at a star

do you see

that’s it’s you

that’s shining up that far

and it’s you down here

receiving your own light back like a ball

you made of your childhood

and threw up in the air

like a celestial sphere

when you had

all the time in the world

to come back and catch it later?

And as I grew older

not waiting for it to come back down

I learned to play vertical pool with the stars

to move things around

that were once considered fixed.

When you look at a star

if you want to clear the table

if you want to make the longshot

if you want to change the birthmark of misfortune

into an upturned elephant trunk of good luck

you have to chalk the cue with your skull.

But I ask you earnestly

if no one’s ever failed their death

is it probable

anyone’s ever failed their life

despite what their tears and fears have told them

about where they’ve ended up?

But a good beginning doesn’t lead to a good end

because a good beginning never stops.

A good beginning is without conclusion.

It doesn’t need to look beyond itself

because nothing’s missing from the very start.

When you look at a star

do you see the ancient wisdom

in a child’s heart

do you feel the depth

of all the eyes that have looked at it before

with longing wonder and sorrow

asking you to give them some direction

by adding yourself like another dimension to the past?

Is there a firefly of human suffering

mingled in the shining?

A window makes a better starmap

than a ten inch mirror

in a Schmidt-Cassegrain reflecting telescope

on an equatorial mount with clock drive

following them around like paparazzi

but when the stars want to know

where they’re at

it’s your eyes they parallax

at both ends

of the wingspan of your orbit.

It’s your seeing that gives them a fix.

The same eye by which I see God

is the eye by which God sees me.

It’s the same with everything

from fireflies to supernovas.

The donkey looks into the well.

The well looks back at the donkey.

Tat tvam asi.

You are that.

The lampshade and the blue parrot.

The donkey and the carrot.

When you look at a star

do you dress your destiny up

in hand-me-down constellations

like clothes you’ll grow into one day

or do you wear them like patchs on myths

you’re trying to give up

about how rough it’s been

to be chosen beauty queen

and bear the diamond tiara of the Pleiades

like the Northern Crown?

When you look at a star

is it the chip of a broken mirror

the plinth of a shattered chandelier

the Holy Ghost of fireflies

a fire-womb of immaculate fusions

that bear the transgender features

of their ancestral elements

like Abrahamic hydrogen?

A burning bush

in the valley of Tuwa

that eventually talks itself out like a candle

when the conversation begins to harden

like an auditory hallucination

into a puddle

of earwax shadows and wicks?

Or do you discern something more

you can’t quite put your finger on

or point to

not a presence

but there

an absence

but everywhere

and you standing there

like this tiny insight

with the precipitous extremeties

of a human being

trying to discover your own nature

in the inexplicability of all that shining

wondering if the rumours of awareness

the universe has been spreading about you

are true or not?

When you look at a star

have you ever thought

if mass is energy

maybe matter is mind

and thinking of one

as something that has to get over the other

is like expecting a wave to transcend water?

Light and lamp.

Body and mind.

Not one of two

but two in one

and even that’s one too much.

The flower opens

in the light of the sun

like a kiss on the eyelid

and the sun blooms

as if it had a crush on the flower.

When you look at a star

can you feel how the light

touchs your eyes as gently as a butterfly

as if all the eyelashs you’ve lost in a lifetime

like the ribbing of broken kites

or the spokes of a bike

or the straws of overworked brooms

had come back to you

as a living thing

with antennae legs and wings?

Have you ever looked at a star

and wondered how far away it would be

if you were to measure the distance in thought-years?

And such a small thing the mind

a child’s hand

and yet within its grasp

all that mass black matter energy light space time?

How could you fit

all those cosmic immensities

and the abyss that contains them

into such a small place

if they weren’t your own ideas?

When you look at a star

do you ever get the feeling

you’re swimming through your own gene-pool

your own meme pool

the Pierian spring

where it meets the sea

at the bottom of your mountain mindstream?

When you look at a star

do you ever turn the light around

and look into yourself

through its eyes

and realize

you’ve been communing with your own reflection

inconceivably

for billions of years

and that little insight

is the cosmic light of awareness

that fills the night with everything that is

when is is not the opposite of is not

and there’s no separation in the first atom

between thought life light mind matter and form

and the lion lies down with the lamb

and the old woman says she is not old

and the sparrow lays her egg in the serpent’s coil

and the old man who has seen everything says

my eyes are as young now

as you were back then

and your beauty is today?

When I was a boy

growing up in a garbage can

like a diamond in the rough

everyone wanted to cut

and buff the edges off

to polish me like a lens

so everybody could see how focused I was

when I looked up at the stars

from the bottom of a spent wishing well

where you could see them even during the day.

Though I was taught

they were responsible for my fate

and I should blame them for what I am

and not the black dwarfs of hate

who perverted the space around me

like slumlords

until even the buds of the flowers

were white as the knuckles of clenched fists

I never thought for a moment

that anything that clean and beautiful

that far away

from the scene of the crime at the time

could ever do anything here

that needed an alibi.

When I looked at the stars

I was enraptured by their mystery.

I was exalted by their unattainability

and the age of the silence

that surrounded their fires

knowing they’ve burned longer

than the light has lived

and seen more

than their eyes can forgive

of human life on the planet.

And the greatest agony of my childhood

from seven till ten

such that I would weep

my bitterness to sleep every night

like a child abandoned to a hospital

was that I was born way too early

to get to Aldebaran.

When I looked at a star

I didn’t gape like a telescope

into the depths of its utter solitude

but looked upon it like a far intimacy

I could draw near

until I could feel it breathing like silver

all over the mirror

that was as clear

as any dark spear

that ever wounded a mystic with bliss.

Strange whisperings of exiled sages

pouring stories of home

into a young boy’s ear

like my mother used to talk about

her childhood in Queensland

as if she were in the Garden of Eden.

When I looked at a star

and listened to its picture-music

I was so deeply moved

by the beauty and sadness of the song

like inspiration in utter solitude

I went into exile with it here

and it was my blossom

no wind could blow away

and it was my root

in the starmud

nothing could pull up

and throw away.

When I looked at a star

I was enthralled

by the dispassionate attachment

and creative dynamic

that burned me like a sacrificial heretic

in the ice of inspiration.

I could forget the small orbit

of house arrest

that a circumstantial planet

had affixed like an electronic anklet around my leg

for being born unforgivably poor.

When I looked at a star

it was as if the flightfeather

of a bluewhite fire bird

landed on the windowsill of my cell

to take pity on me

and share its freedom

with someone living in a cage.

When I looked at a star

it was the synteretic spark

I sent out like a dove from the ark

with two of every mind

in the zodiac aboard

after forty days of flood

to look for Atlantis

like the next best thing

to Mt. Ararat or Cathay.

It was the angel that always looked back

with the same mystic fury in its eyes

that were in mine

when I looked up.

When I looked at a star

I could prognosticate the future

like the distant memory

of someone returning to their origins

waking up from exile

to discover it wasn’t a dream.

You can tell by the way a star

flashs like a panicked chameleon

on the event horizon of a blackhole

things are what they seem

when you’re peering through atmospheres

with tears in your eyes.

I used to make telescopes when I was young.

I would grind their pyrex eyes

with ever finer grades of carborundum

until they could see just right.

I shaped their fibre-glass bodies

until they were as smooth as a woman’s skin.

And I took them out into the open fields naked

far beyond the intrusions of the city lights

and exposed them to the stars

who revered them like clear-eyed mirrors

and adorned one with leaves

and the other with sidereal veils

and said like the elders

and old midwives of an Ojibway tribe

when they name the newborn.

This one shall be called Eve.

And this one Isis.

And to celebrate their birth

opened a third eye

and said

as it is on earth

it shall not be in the sky.

PATRICK WHITE

BRIGHT MORNING

Bright morning, blue, and the clouds gossiping with the treetops and the fallen ladders of the impossible horizons. I sustain six lives simultaneously in a wounded apartment that’s been bleeding for years, continents of plaster out of the walls, the cartography of aging, rewriting the maps as the world drifts like a cinder across the seas of its weeping eye. The trees sway in the wind like smoke, and I sit at my desk, waiting for my hair to dry, smoking, drinking black coffee, happy to be enthroned in my solitude as my dreams pale like stars in the extremity of the light. Lost. I couldn’t tell you who I was if you showed me, and the mirrors have grown bags under their eyes like the heavy pollen of time in bee-satchels, silver wombs that are still trying to get my birth right. I’ve become an apostate of reflections, erasing my face with a sleeve; or watching it shrink like a warm breath on a cold windowpane. Maybe the hive of a mind somewhere is turning me into honey. And I remember lovers I’ve had, and lovers I will never meet, and all the changes of a comet as it approaches each one to glow luminously in the darkness of the bottomless watershed that is always within me, the familiar one-eyed abyss. And there’s a wing of my heart that opens and passes over them like a generous eclipse to bless them all for the time I spent in their mansions of blood and tears, for the candles that ached like joy in the mystery and led me to the eras where they wanted me to stay for the night. They left a desert by the bed and I drank it like an hourglass, true to a calling that exceeded us both. Like the wind, I left a note, extolling their beauty to the webs of the morning, hanging on the bell-ropes of the flowing diamonds that wander the labyrinths of the wet peach hair and Appalachian earlobes I dampened with my tongue. A language of one, I drank from their intimate stars and played the skeletons of their burning harps in a controlled fury of power and hunger as the earth convulsed with islands of flesh, bolts of black lightning that illuminated oblivion in a flash of annihilant ecstasy. And habitable planets were born of the encounter, two children, old enough now in their passage of nights and days to know that it’s life that flows, not the river, that their wings are bridges of light and blood and breath that once offered themselves like the crutches of winter trees to the sky in a paradox of love that wanted to lay down roots and fly. What a dream it all is; what a vast and amazing hallucination of darkness within darkness, shadow writing on shadow, a confusion of gates trying to enter one another with both eyes closed, fire obsessively trying to coax the hydrant of the heart to open up before the house burns to the sky and the ground, uncertain whether it’s a root or a flower, a bone or a star, a desert of light, or the whisper of a billion gestural galaxies.

PATRICK WHITE

MEET ME

Meet me where the rivers

never cross their legs

and the starwells entwine like snakes;

and the trees pin notes from the light

like leaves to a bulletin board,

and the sun is a blemish

of impoverished fire compared

to the mystic dark

that floods the far fields within

with the fragrance of the moon

as it makes lilies of the clouds

and sacred lakes of the two of us

realizing each other in the shining.

And don’t take off the world

when you come,

bring your shadows

and the rubble of your smashed masks,

and the dictionary of scars

you’re trying to translate

into a dead language,

and the silver snail paths

of the necklaces you wear like ripples of heartwood,

and the black bells

that ripen in the night

like the eyes of guardian dragons

and the shadow of the knife

that always points to you like north,

and I will bring my meteors and shipwrecks,

and the sorrows of my rain-sodden books

glued shut like eyelids and onions

and the broken yarrow sticks

of my thresholds and horizons

and the seed of the island I keep

in the locket of my skull

to carry into the next world

like a bird beyond its wings,

and we will make a bed on the wind like deer

and devote ourselves

to roseate oblivions of blood

that would make the orchards of the angels envious

of the roar of our imperfections

giving birth to the sea,

of the dragonflies and fleets of love-letters

that emerge from the hovels

we pieced together of decaying mirrors

and the detritus of junkyard autumns

to gerrymander a shrine of transformations

into a winged palette with two eyelashes for brushes

that sits like an easel on the lip of a flower

and paints the world with pollen.

I have had to become the sky

to bridge the space between us,

a junkie who snorts the stars

like a line of coke he’s railed into an arm of the galaxy

to reach out and touch you

in the rush of another dimension,

a gust of eyes in the back alleys of your neck,

the luster of a ghost on the wing of a nightbird

that delivers itself like the message

that hurls itself into the abyss like a bottle

I have drunk to the lees of tomorrow,

and eaten the visionary worm

enthroned in the fire-robes of ecstasy

and signed the moon in my passage

with a scrawl of harvest geese

to let you know

you are the black pearl

that has become of me

like a grain of sand

on the urgent tongue of the night,

the raven palace of plundered silver

you grew from the stone

in the brittle blossom of my heart

like a veiled planet

that I wander like water,

like a sleepwalker in a waking dream,

calling out to you from the inside

like the fountain of fire

in the heart of the earth

that unspools its longing like continents.

I don’t know what love is

when you unfold it like a map,

I can tell you it’s got your eyes

and your blue-tipped hair

and a gearshift in its pierced tongue,

four on the floor with overdrive

that can pop the clutch like a grape

and lay rubber or wine

down the main drag of a reckless mind,

and I want to touch it with the fingertips

of tender emergencies

and the feathered caresses

of homeless doves sweeping over its skin like morning,

and kiss its scars open like shy irises

and hidden starfish

and ruin myself like a kite in the hive of a storm

to taste the tine of its honey and lightning.

Your absence is the empty vase

of a flowerless cosmos

when I search the abyss of fugitive shadows

for a feather of your own

to exceed the wounded ink of my blood

with the eloquence of the wind

trying to light your candles

with a flaming arrow of the virgin bow

I cut from the forbidden grove of my voices

to sing to you through the night.

How often have I stood

in the doorway of your poems

like a city lost in the labyrinth of a stranger

and wanted to belong to you like an address;

or the ghost of the moondog on the window

you veil with your breath,

wondering if you’ll notice when I leave?

Do you know how many times

my mouth has turned into a furnace of poppies,

a holocaust of bees and coffins,

how many times I’ve drawn a razor

across my throat trying to bleed

my way into an afterlife with you

like a slash of milk

from the scepter of the dream queen?

I shed lives like a serpent sloughs

the surgical gloves of terminal eclipses,

or the cherry beds its blossoms

in the rain cradles of the gutter,

or the moon pulls away

from the wharf of its hills like a ferry

between one abyss and the next,

to pour my life into yours

like stars and rain

and the death-bed wish of a thousand secret extinctions,

an ancient wine crowned and anointed

by all the deaths and candles

I have wept my way through like a window in a morgue

to stand breathless in your shadow again.