O MY MOTHER, O MY FATHER

O MY MOTHER, O MY FATHER

O my mother, O my father,

I stand at this Y in the road,

the hybrid son of an angel and a demon,

two halves of the same chromosome

splitting like the left side of my brain

as a squad car took, you, my father, to jail,

and you, my mother, my right half,

were rushed in an ambulance,

a bruised and battered rose to emergency

as if you’d just barely survived

a hailstorm of meters intent

on making your species extinct.

And it was hard to tell if flesh of my flesh

blood of my blood meant the same as

flesh upon flesh with a dull thud

upon the untempered anvil of a child’s heart,

or not. So is it any wonder

when you split the atom that day between you

like Charles Manson and Mother Theresa

and our nuclear family turned out to be

despite Leucippus and Democritus,

fissile material in a radioactive meltdown,

wholly divisible into the infinite wavelengths

that weep like shattered mirrors

with splinters of stars in their eyes

for things they wished they’d never seen.

So is it any wonder I’ve been

this photon in exile ever since,

this candle that got knocked off the balcony

like a potted geranium of blood

where Romeo declared his love of Juliet

out into this storm that’s been trying

to blow me out ever since in the pelting rain?

I’ve hung onto to that flame

like the rag of fire I was swaddled in

as my natural birthright ever since

like a withered leaf on a maple tree

in the dead of a bird-killing winter.

Strange, isn’t it, when a circus

comes to your homelessness

to put up tents where surrealistic clowns

laugh at a childhood in distress

as if it were some kind of joke

you weren’t let in on?

And I doubt at this late date

I’ll ever know what to make of it

whenever it stares me straight in the heart

and I’m brutally clear enough

not to let my vision of it be smudged

by either hatred or compassion

or the chromatic aberration

of peripheral ideals drowning in wishing wells

like flies in a toilet bowl

love’s too dainty to rescue

and the saints are too lazy to save.

Is it any wonder then O my mother, O my father

that I have become this silver-tongued

shape-shifting snake with

a graceful way of twisting things

and haut-couture tattoos on my back

I earned in a radioactive snake-pit

of high-maintenance wavelengths?

That my tongue should be as forked

as three-tined lightning in the mouth

of Hermes the Thrice-Blessed

bearing alphabets to expectant mothers

in a crane-bag of occult grammars,

prophetic as a witching wand

looking for water on the moon,

a split hair, the sacred meeting place

where rivers were enjoined

like bloodstreams of native tribes

to sit around the same council fire

and share the same heart.

That it’s a slingshot that can slay Goliath

square in the third eye from anywhere.

Two roads that diverged in a yellow wood

and I took neither one.

The split ends of one strong rope of a language

that was frayed into two

like a Manichean conception of good and evil

or the wishbone of a broken filament,

the death of a nanocosmic chandelier

that sings like tiny birds in the morning

when you shake it close to your ear

like a seashell or a crystal skull

to see if it’s still alive or not?

Blue Flower. Black Dog.

Chicory. A junkyard wolf.

Not two. Not two. Not two.

And I tell myself the brightest lights

like dreams and wine and stars

are all seasoned by the dark.

What else can I do

what else can I say to myself

to heal the wounded myth of origins

I received from you, O my mother,

O my father, but lie down like a bridge

by the edge of a river of stars,

a bridge of scars

with only one bank, one foot,

one overturned lifeboat,

one pillar of quicksand to stand on,

the sound of one hand clapping

like applause when no one’s listening

that I’ve made it this far

like the apostate of the raging heresy

that’s gone on bleeding ever since

however much holy oil I spread

on the head of the crucified dove

nailed by a slingshot when the T of the cross

where my father’s loins hung

like two thieves either side of him

like the unblessed soil

of the ground he walked on

and the people he crushed underfoot

like the cosmic eggs of the skylarks

as if they were nothing but skulls on the moon

one thumb up and one thumb down

like the torches in the hands of the dadaphors

celebrating the Roman New Year,

one thief cursed, and the other

yet to be forgiven. Changed one day

for reasons that are well beyond me

and I intend to keep that way

to the Y of my mother’s delta

that flooded like the Nile

every day of my heretical childhood

with tears, the silt of stars, the dust

of unfinished pyramids

that kept us nourished through

those long lonely nights of famine

we ate bitter bread together

and cracked burnt bones

like koans and fortune-cookies

around the kitchen table

to get at the hot marrow of the matter

without burning our fingers and mouths

as we stared for hours

at the patterns on the worn linoleum

without saying a word

as if we were Neanderthals

who’d just stumbled upon a secret cave

of sacred Cro Magnon finger paintings of us.

Back in those days, back in those nights,

when it all seemed so natural back then

before we lost our innocence to comparison,

to have been littered by a Roman wolf-mother

who had driven my father

like a jackal in a lion’s hide

with the soul of a scavenger

off what remained

of the carcass of her marriage

to feed her young

and keep them from being eaten

by the likes of him or any other man

for that matter, in her eyes,

though I remember how

it used to terrify me

in a cold sweat for sleepless starless hours

of living a waking nightmare in bed

after all the lights had gone out

that one day I would have to betray her

like her son, Judas,

with thirty moons of silver in my hand,

by telling her against my will

that I was becoming one.

I was becoming a man

and there was nothing I could do about it

except drive myself away from the pride

not knowing in my heart of hearts

whether I was a lion in the wilderness

or a scapegoat that had just cleansed

the sins of the tribes

as if they were my own to bear

for the rest of my life

like a debt to you, O my mother,

my beautiful, savage,

pagan godsend of a mother,

with the soul of a moonrise

and the heart of a gypsy artist in partial eclipse

and your crescents withdrawn like claws

and no blood on the thorns of your rose

when we were happy together, remember,

like weeds in a field, like night birds

that were going to risk the winter

in a tree full of September apples

as ripe as Queensland sunsets

you used to tell us about like passions flowers

that were your version of paradise

you wanted to get back to one day

like all those blue luggage trunks

you kept waiting in the basement like arks

if you could when the wind and the stars,

and the forty days, and the forty nights

were blowing from the right quarter

like a wharf that gave suck

to the comings and goings of the lifeboats

she nursed into life at sea

without ever going anywhere herself.

O my mother, precisely because

you’d never ask, and never did,

what can the son of bright vacancy

say to the mother of dark abundance except

I am a debt I’ll never be able to repay you

regardless of what the bloodbanks say,

I am the lion sacrifice on the lunar altar

of the black lamb of the new moon

that opened my third eye

at a coven of gypsy witches

dancing around the fire

like a zodiac of mystic eclipses

far into the wee hours

of my afterlife in this wilderness

of broken vows and stained-glass windows.

And, O my mother, you must know,

before your green eyes

burn like the salt of the earth

in the distant fires of autumn,

before you die, before I do,

before the rose of your life

you turned into a tent and a fire

that sheltered me under

your eyelids, your wings,

goes out when the wind

upends this hourglass world

like a blossom in a mirage of shifting sands.

Before the landlord comes with the sheriff

to serve our final eviction notice,

I sweep your threshold of thorns,

I sweep the wasps like cinders

from the eyes of your fountains

in tears as deep as watersheds.

Because I am so afraid of losing you,

because any word could be our last,

because every word I say to you

seems like an empty lifeboat

drifting across the moon like a cloud

or a lost nightbird in a storm of sorrow,

and all I can think to do to make

what I can’t make up to you,

is to become a small boy again,

a thief of flowers who used to steal

from orchards, telelphone booths,

and the backyard starfields

of the abandoned houses of the zodiac

to have something to bring home to you

like Evening in Paris perfume

on your birthday at the winter solstice

when the days began to get longer and warmer

and every bead on your rosary

of habitable planets in orbit, each,

one of the ninety-nine names of God

and one unknown secret she keeps to herself

so the light won’t get tongue-tied

trying to say it out loud,

tilted toward the sun at apogee

as only a mother can do

letting the light in through

a crack in our bedroom doors

like a moonrise at midnight

to see if we were all right.

All I can do, and it’s only

a metaphoric gesture of the love

I bear for you like a bucket of water

a wishing well once gave birth to in the desert,

is strew your path with fireflies,

with desert stars, with passion flowers,

with humming birds and honey bees

in the wild bougainvillea of Queensland,

and an easel in Eden to paint them with

and Scotch thistles with no thorns for brushes

and caterpillars of oil paint in tubes

that will turn into butterflies at sunrise

when the southern stars and the fireflies

get the light just right,

and any one of which,

their shining sitting to have

their portrait done in the living likeness

of the starmap I’ve will always see

in your green, green eyes

as life-giving as the moon

in the sentient corals

of this vast nightsea

and the way home for all of us

when the prodigal son returns

like a boy riding a dolphin of stars

through the wavelengths

of the lightyears to come

through both hemispheres

of my heart and mind,

through the northern eclipse of you

O my father, and you, O my mother

who shone even at midnight in the southern

and kept us all together even in our absence

like a weld along the equator

that scarred the wound of the beginning over

with herb gardens you gathered

from the mother-tongue of your heart

that have gone on blooming ever since

well beyond any fence

in any universe of inconceivable existence

that could keep a good thief of flowers out.

PATRICK WHITE  

FIRST THE TENDERNESS

First the tenderness; I feel the tenderness,

the downy edge of the leaf, the eyelash,

the green tooth of the leaf

gently opening its mouth to the air,

its flag of being high in the branches

unfurling like a sky of its own,

startled by the taste of the first star.

Every drop of rain that falls

is a jester’s cap,

three bells and a splash and that’s me

learning how to swim in this new space

with an ark and a flood, you

the dove with the leaf in its beak, returning.

Then I check a little calendar of razor-blades

to see if any of the days

are holy days circled in my blood,

if I’m late for a sacrifice somewhere,

if there’s a landmine waiting

like a spiny sea urchin buried in the sand,

glass petals shed from a broken rose,

waiting for me to take my boots off

and walk barefoot dazzled along your shore.

You are honey and wheat, and, angry,

a small storm that bleachs lightning white.

Brave despite myself,

your beauty crowns me King of Fools,

and though I meant to disguise my helplessness

by standing my ground like a iron thorn,

I can already feel the earth turning to quicksand

beneath my feet,

and tremors of an approaching earthquake

that might heave me up out of the sea

like a new mountain.

And it’s too early to tell

if it’s demons or angels

that prod my heart

with their taunting spears of fire,

or if they’re just bored,

hanging out on call,

like a gang of crows

pecking at the seed

I left hope against hope on the moon,

but to judge from the way I feel

like a new element

discovered first on the sun,

all my cells and molecules assuming

a new paradigm, a new mandala,

a new configuration of shining,

an unknown constellation in the doorway,

through either end of the telescope,

they seem to mean business.

Fear rolls out its black carpet

and blood rolls out its red,

but only love walks freely in the starfields,

making its own path in the going

and when I think of you,

I pale like a planet

in the labyrinths of a shadowless dawn,

I am the toy of tides of light,

a rootless island

broken like bread

from the continent I thought I was.

Unless broken from the whole loaf

nothing can be shared, and nothing

can feed the heart

that has not been broken

among the hands of the hungry.

I have seen you as a harvest day in September,

your pulse a windfall of poppies and apples,

your radiance, flying fish

and water goblets shattered translucently on the wave,

a white mare in the mirror trampling a glass serpent,

you were the pure blue of a troubled morning

melting the first frost

on the wild, New England asters

that bloomed among the grounded planets

of an abandoned apple tree

somewhere in New Hampshire;

I thought you were a window of honey

saturated in its own light,

that only the rarest of eyes

that came like bees back to the hive of your heart

could look through.

Now the moon is out. Now

I see the ghost of the water-lily ride the darkness

like the soul of a doomed ship

unloading its cargo in the depths,

or the second blue moon in October

silvering the fields

it threshes with a blessing.

First, the tenderness; I feel the tenderness

overwhelm me in gentle enigmas

of fireflies and small eclipses,

random ignitions of the mystery

that this should be so at all,

and it’s as if I could stand beside my heart

astounded by the course of its flowing

as all its rivers run suddenly down to you

like a sea on the moon,

and like the feathers of a storm bird

every sail, every burning paper lifeboat,

every next breath

is a longing off your unmapped coast

and a lighthouse of reason

bawling its warning into the fog

that the star that guides my spirit luminously ignores.

And though my ignorance at this juncture

is a stairwell of wind at a crossroads

and I approach you like a tuning fork

trying to harmonize my ashes

like the urn of a burnt guitar

to sing to you out of the shadows of a summer night,

to touch you with leaves and stars,

to lace the air with the black fragrance

of smouldering roses alluring as the wine of a drunk mystic,

and the beast putting on

his brightest golden chain and collar

to greet your progress through his zoo of desires,

slowly I raise my fingertips to your secret braille of scars

to read the contours of the kells

you have elaborated from your suffering;

the symmetries of passion and solitude,

blood and tears

that ink the mingling of your silent scripture

in the shrine of your deepest intimacy.

First, the tenderness, I feel the tenderness

of a bridge for its stream,

of a fountain on the sun

watching a new comet

rinse the darkness out of its hair with light,

of a tree for its chandelier of ripe cherries

glowing brighter than blood in the night.

And I may be junkmail

on the doorstep to the threshold of your heart,

a wizard shy of magic,

or a kite tangled like a misplaced note

in a stave of humming powerlines,

and I’ve fallen

on the thorns and swords and obelisks

of my delusions more than once,

lost like a single straw in a stack of needles,

drowned diving

for tiny moons in hard shells on the bottom,

and no one grows fat on the feast

in a crumb of light,

and a rumour of love

is not the burning bush

of prophecy and inspiration in the valley of a woman,

and you are not the blue love letter

of an atmosphere I could take for granted,

but I risk slipping myself under your horizon

like the wingspan

of a homing bird in the dusk,

risk stepping out from the trees into the open

to drink from your reflection

from the waters of a midnight lake

that has eclipsed every other vision

that has intoxicated me indelibly

from the very first sip

to let you know while we live and breathe and love and hope,

though hope is seldom a road that arrives,

the first tenderness; I feel the first tenderness

of being enabled, empowered

by this transfigurative gust of grace

that turns the galaxies deep within me like well-wheels,

to summon the images, wraiths, forms of the world,

as it arrays its jewels

on the flying carpets of life,

to compare with your beauty,

to embody these auroral aspects of you

that play me like a keyboard of light

in the likeness of a woman

whose smile

though it were as many as the leaves of fall,

and eyes

though their shining

outnumber the morning asters,

have never failed to startle me

into realizing everything

I am missing in life and love.

PATRICK WHITE

BLUE FIRE

Blue fire in your eyes, for years

I’ve watched you smiling everywhere

against the odds

of the secret you carry within you,

the pain you carry within you

like a broken mirror

waiting for the moon to rise

as if you were a thousand lakes, each

waiting for the pearl

that would answer their darkness from within.

I was always afraid of your edges,

the way you pretended

to mistake my face for a mask,

as if I was always up to something,

as if you could hear the whisper

of the assassin behind the door

before anyone else could,

as if your pain had taught you

to be quick and clever,

to double-back like a choir of tigers,

the ghost of a supple cougar,

and ambush the hurt

you were certain would follow

any overture of flowers,

the waterlilies rigged to go off

like dismembering mines,

and the globes of the cherries

that hung like streetlights and chandeliers,

like tears long held back,

covert bruises, and kisses long denied,

small, black, radioactive planets

charred by the wary shadows of Eve.

And I never thought

you could see more in me

than a passing newspaper

hurled at your door

like another bone of the world,

another slug-line, another playbill

sporting the plague-mark

of another macabre extinction.

And you almost convinced me I was,

you were so curt in your convictions,

so ready to diffract the light of the stars,

to bend their shining

into their emission and absorption spectra,

to show under the lens of your polished glass sky

the subtle skeletons of death

that proved their wings were ladders.

It would be obvious

to compare you to a field of burning wheat,

to point to the fish

that rudder like eclipses through your blood

from a safe bridge above your flowing;

and you were right

when you said it would take a long time

before I could write a poem about you:

it’s taken eleven years

of being suddenly startled by your beauty

as you showed up randomly

in the wrack and ruin of here and there

like a wild sunflower

that strangely survived its own innocence

in the ashes of a sacred grove.

I have never not been

shocked to see you

like a window coming around the corner,

like a loaf of gold in a hungry nation,

a star cluster out of the reach

of my autumnal fingertips,

a sky too far for touching,

and the light of the life

that animated your beauty

something clear and vital and lyrical

that exceeded even you,

something that shone out of you

as if the lantern couldn’t see

the shadows that danced in its fire,

what measure of darkness

was stunned by its poppy.

I know beauty well enough

to fear the black fire of its unattainability,

the terrible preludes of possession

that arrive like temporary reprieves

and suicidal postcards,

the brutal bedside confessions

that wire the heart to an electric throne

that dims the lightbulbs with a shudder of night.

And I have preferred my palace of ashes

to the diamond hovels

of impoverished beginnings,

remembering how my scars

turned into an untranslatable alphabet,

every letter the cartouche or coffin

of forgotten royalty

embalmed in the dirty rags of time,

the tars and feathers of farcical birds

trying to hatch pyramids

that crystallized like salt in a desert

after the lifting of veils and rivers and tears.

I have stood like a ghost at the gate

of a house I was born in

and admired the beauty of roses

that went on blooming long after

I had planted them and disappeared

to let them flourish in the rain and the sun.

And I have felt the thorn of moonlight

press into my flesh like a slow fang

charged with a fatal elixir,

cold infernoes of ferocious transformations

and endured my own afterlife

like a road and a wounded wheel

threshold after threshold of black ice

as my heart tried to crawl back to the tide

like an iron crab.

I have cultivated exotic solitudes

that couldn’t say my name

without laughing,

and heard the wind lament

my most cherished intensities.

I am no stranger to death

or the eerie emptiness

of laying myself down on the table

like the only joker in a full house

to ever make a guest appearance.

But I am too stubborn for regrets

or I haven’t been convinced

of their necessity yet,

and why should I belittle

so much joy and excruciation

as the mistakes a river made in its running

as if it could correct its way back to the sea?

Think of it.

All these stars

and not one in the wrong place.

But I grew sick of the useless pain

and the misery and the grief,

the cosmic effort to open a simple seed,

boundary stones hurled at the heart

and the hard bread of broken smiles

and the ghost food of the ego-feasts

that mistake mystic vision for a lighthouse

and run themselves up on the rocks

to be cherished among the wreckage

like emotional salvage;

and I had nothing more to give,

I had nothing more to say or celebrate,

my shadow confessed to an eclipse

it was a loser,

my blood bleached itself white

and packed itself like a fire hose

under a switch and a small glass window that read

in case of emergency, surrender,

and I learned to apologize

for all the wars I’d won,

and finance monuments to my defeat,

depict myself as less than what

I never had a chance to know I was

just to keep the rose

from putting its eyes out

on its own thorns.

And I did a good job of it;

I learned to love unconditionally,

I learned to love without love,

I learned to love without me.

I forgave and understood everything;

I shuddered in pain and understood,

saw how we all die eventually,

how the candles of beauty and truth

in this terminal vastness

are so rare and precious,

even unjustly they should be cherished,

not allowed to go out in the heart

even if death and betrayal took all,

even if every breath of a desolate lover

turned into a knife on the wind, an arrow of spite,

not to let the rage to be done forever with caring,

with hurting, with radioactive solitudes

that tainted the heartwells with vicious reason,

forsake the slightest victory of tenderness,

forgo the least memory

of human intimacy in such an implacable night.

But the darkness forgives no one

and the light is a vicious testament

to how many wounded there are in the world,

how many injured and broken,

torn down like doorways

at the end of a hall no one walks down anymore,

destroyed from within by a dream

that could barely say its name

to anyone who asked why it wept.

So many injured, hurt, condemned

by the silence of forgotten smiles

that have dispersed their seed

in the dusk of a vernal ephemerality

that no more acknowledged their passage

than a broom the destiny of dust.

And there’s a part of me that cares yet,

however many lashes of the mind

assault the heart like an island

with the salt of reason

and a tide of serpents, even now

my eyes crack in the heat

of so much suffering,

so much transformative fire,

the butterfly in the furnace of the dragon’s mouth.

But I had to grow tougher than space to survive,

to teach fire how to walk

on the dead seas of a vast moonscape

pocked with the astronomical impacts

of a childhood I lost like a leaky atmosphere,

I had to convince the world

I was at least as real and irrelevant as it,

that I could breathe in the randomness

the cold drafts of a faceless abyss.

I was a fraud out to prove his own sincerity,

and there are saints that would wince,

ferocious hermits in glass deserts,

hallucinatory purities of nothingness

that would tremble to undergo

the talons of the furies that afflicted me

like barbed stars on a chain

that refused to indulge itself with any key,

any liberation that smacked of peace.

And this is not a confession,

not an accusation or retrospective opprobrium;

nor does the withered branch

cling to the wraith of a blossom

any longer than it takes the frost of an early winter

to melt like an orchard.

I applaud the intensity of my mistakes,

the depths of my madness,

the unsustainable enlightenment of my rage;

how every victory was shadowed

by my own insistent mortality,

the doggish constancy of my own fallibility.

And there were perversities within me,

the dark haloes of my occlusive sanctity

that wanted to lead the night like a willing virgin

through the intimate stations

of the far fields beyond the blazing billboards

that urged a delusional frenzy

to seed her like a blind fish

in the gutted depths of an eyeless normalcy.

I wanted to dare my own horror into submission,

risk without counting

the sugar-coating on the placebo

of my inherited humanity

in the impersonality of the void

that never paid any heed

to the furious courage of my expansive folly.

What nonsense it all seems like now;

the renewable virginity of a junkie

that bled like a candle to shoot the moon

under the tongue of a pointless habit.

Who did I think I was, fool

that I was to believe

all these brutal masks of frost

were only waiting for the sun,

that the collective ashes of the ancient urn-burial

that calls itself society

would rise to the blue phoenix

that woke up drunk in the recovery room

eating its own heart

just to prove it didn’t need one

to remain true to its own transgressions?

In a fever of creation

I enhanced the quality

of human idiocy. An oracle, I revealed

the shallow roots of the sacred fires

and lit my cigarette and warmed my hands

over the eternal flames

that snapped shut

like the eyelids of windproof zippoes.

Like wardens the sun and moon

walked the ramparts above, high-powered rifles,

the heretical compasses of misdirection,

and I saw how even the stars,

the cool rush of the established constellations

were nothing more than the subtle tracks

of a long-term addiction

that could afford its own vice,

random derangement in the name of nothing;

the whole of creation

nothing but a black rock

cooked in a spoon,

the severed filament

of a wingless embryo of night

enthroned in the tomb of a shattered lightbulb.

Ecstasy became the ghoul of a horrid withdrawal

steeled to my isolation

and I reveled in the severities of my spirit,

the hospital furnace of a raging heart

that disposed of my gangrenous body parts,

the febrile infection of the disgusting dream

that cooed like a madame

in the brothel of a ruined magnolia

where I finally lay down with my spirit,

enshrined in the blood and mud and lust

of an incubator in hell

where I was delivered prematurely to the night,

the immaculate conception

of an inspired whore

that didn’t try to reform

the fire in the mirror that burned like a face.

Now no one can recognize me,

and no one can account

for the injudicious happiness

of a condemned soul

that can scatter its ashes

like stars across the sky

for the wind to dance,

a road of ghosts to nowhere.

And the days and the nights

rain and shine, rise and fall,

and blood, and time,

and the curse and the blessing of their carrying forth

into a carrying forth

like the eye of a waterclock,

occur as they occur

without blame or salvation

in a freedom that doesn’t know I’m here

to witness the improbability of their existence,

the improbability of you and I

sitting down on the concrete stair

of the bookstore where you work,

like two thorns removed from our own hearts,

free of the shadowless viper and the black rose

that taught us to bite and swallow

and I swear,

the spontaneous irony of your laughter

was sweeter than water lapping

the startled shores

of two islands on the moon,

both of us joyously distinguished

in a confusion of doves and crows

by what we had denied.

PATRICK WHITE