JUMPED OUT OF NOTHING

JUMPED OUT OF NOTHING

Jumped out of nothing. The fish did. Golden.

A flake of the moon. When I wasn’t looking.

Into a lifeboat cupping something precious in its hands.

The mind an old junkyard that’s been collecting windows too long.

So many points of view. So many glass eyes

looking for the stuffed animals they belong to.

Death after knowledge. The silence that follows the music

after the bird has flown. Is the abyss death’s rebuke

of life’s dangerous proposal to let us look through the keyhole

at what’s going on in the uninhabitable room next door?

To dream a little in the interim between two enormities

abstracted from the need of our perishing to persist

aeonic light years beyond anything we can imagine?

The golden fish jumps into the boat like an unsought insight.

No hook in it. And you can tell by the scales of light it emanates

it’s risen from the starless darkness of its own depths

like moonrise out of the encyclopedic corals

of accumulated knowledge that’s found a place for everything

like a polyp on a library shelf, calcium in a cave

shaping itself into temples from the top down.

Stalagmites and stalactites of cathedrals inspired by water

to enshrine themselves in form as an aid to the blind.

Though things along the way might change

does the journey stay the same ad infinitum?

Did you amount to everything you dreamed you might be,

or were there more stairs to climb than doors to enter,

more walls than windows in the way you saw things?

I’ve seen the most sublime things humbled by their own insignificance.

And I think I’ve heard God more than once

weeping at the stern of a sinking ship for a turn of events

she couldn’t do anything about once they were set in motion.

And I’ve listened to people my whole life

talking in their sleep about how to put a rudder on a dream

as if there were a focus and a direction for life to flow in

like a solid, particulate thing instead of the wandering wavelength

of this exiled mirage of water that it appears to be

depending on the mood of the chameleonic mirror you’re looking into.

The donkey looks into the well and the well looks back at the donkey.

It couldn’t be any clearer than that. Tat tvam asi. But, then, again

why muddy the mirror by dropping the penny of the moon

down a wishing-well that never gets what it wants

and ask for something you’ve never really been missing?

I learned in my mother’s kitchen long before I went to school

that just because you can ask a question doesn’t mean

you have a right to expect an answer that satisfies you.

And even when you do receive an answer unexpectedly

it will be the quality of the question that determines its nature.

The single petal of a candle flame the size of the fire of life in your heart

like the apple-bloom of a thousand orchards in the Okanagan

thrives on the winds of change that blow it out and away

like a butterfly from the open palm of your hand

wise enough to know a hand is not just for grasping

and let it go like a mind of its own without knowing where.

Indirection is an indeterminate voyage of discovery,

a star’s way of probing the darkness radiantly

without knowing how the light’s going to be bent ahead of time.

Destination is a postcard from the edge of nowhere.

If you want to see anything worth looking at

while you’re still alive enough to know it like your own name

don’t adjust your eyes to the size of the window

you’re looking through like the keyhole of an orbitting telescope

but the spaciousness of your own mind like a sky

no starburst of bird, word, or thought has flown to the end of yet

Whether they’re bearing the souls of the dead south or west

like early transmigratory hearses yoked to a brace of angels or not.

Life still greens the tree with meaning even in the wordless dead of winter.

And who hasn’t been, from time to time, a thriving neighbourhood

that left town to seek its fortune buried in its own back yard

only to return empty-handed to watch its homelessness being torn down?

Those who see themselves as strangers in the doorways of their own houses of life

are those who ask the most questions about who that is

that threatens them the most from the inside out,

that offer escalating ransoms to their own shadows to let them go unharmed

the longer the silence refuses to identify itself like an answer

to the incomprehensible questions about what they’re doing here

like rivers weeping over what’s going to become of them

or the sun worrying about opening the wrong flowers

like somebody else’s mail without a return address

though all flowers like stars are loveletters addressed to everyone alike,

and it’s not hard to recognize a river in captivity by its handwriting

or the jewels of the dead from the eyes of the living by the accent the light

they speak in through the medium of a mother-tongue that slurs the distinction

between a seance and an exorcism once we realize we’ve been summoned

to the comings and goings of every breath, every step, every

mistake we make with our lives like a revealing insight into who lies

under these deathmasks we wear like crocuses in the spring

under the unpaginated duff of last autumn’s petals and leaves.

The way life carries on, it feels to me, is no different

in the heart of the incomprehensible mystery

than the wind that sweeps us away like death

the stars off the stairs in one and the same breath that blew them there

to ensure our continuity is always within reach of attaining

like a river that at all times and everywhere is in touch with itself.

Like a waterclock. Or a goldfish in the deserts of an hourglass

swimming through mirages on the moon that launches

our lifeboats and coffins alike on the same undifferentiated ocean of insight

that washed us ashore in the first place like islands in the night

that have more in common with the stars that at first glance

we might think we do in the vastness of the spirit’s lost and found.

But of this I am bold enough to remain uncertain of my bearings indefinitely.

PATRICK WHITE

THE WILLOWS ADORNED BY THE RETURN OF THEIR OLD HAIR-DOS

THE WILLOWS ADORNED BY THE RETURN OF THEIR OLD HAIR-DOS

The willows adorned by the return of their old hair dos.

I’ve been mud-mashing my way down to the banks

of the Tay River lately through the primordial ooze,

now that the weather’s turned round, just to feel

with an overly sophisticated sense of childish anticipation,

Venus bright in the apple-green gloaming of the swallow-swept air,

as if I were playing with fire again, the flaring

of the wild irises of the spirit burning hot and blue

as hydrogen in the heart of a needle-shaped flame

that can see right through me into what goes on

behind the curtains of my theatrical third eye

when I come like an amorous arsonist,

bearing bouquets of dried flowers

I’ve pressed between the pages of a matchbook

as a token of an old love affair I’m annually immolated by.

Not as a martyr who takes things lying down

but as a heretic who does his time standing up at the stake,

though I’ve always been a little suspicious about the heroism

implicit in that. Even in the fires of hell

I’ve tried to avoid posturing. But there again, you see,

I’m assuming a virtue I may not have, I’m blooming in fire,

I’m shooting clowns out of cannons without safety nets

as the heavens come down around me like the circus tents

of the empty envelopes of day old loveletters

who’ve lost the scent of what made them so flammable

in the first place. Just because I’m waiting for wild irises

to break ground along the banks of the Tay

doesn’t mean I’m not a spiritual disgrace

that’s as hard to fathom as a shipwreck

in my oceanic consciousness as it is

to see myself raising the skull and crossbones

like a condor among the angel fleets of heaven

at anchor in home port just to give them a good run for their money

like the wind in an orchard in bloom

impatient to get beyond the first fragrance of things

and taste the fruits by which everyone of us shall be known.

Either that. Or I’ve got more of a river nature than I thought

and that could explain why I’m always talking to myself

like water in passing that no one’s listening to

in these solitudinous out of the way places along the river

I seek out like natural shrines in the woods,

trespassing against obstacles in the way of my pilgrimage

securing its footing on the bones of those underfoot

laid out like crosswalks and the rungs of ladders

stepped on like thresholds that stayed well within bounds

as you would expect any mystical stairwell addicted

to its spiritual vertigo like a Sufi at a crossroads

dancing with a dust devil of blue hydrogen stars

into ecstatic annihilations of satoric fireflies

who clarify the afterbirth of their clouds of unknowing

by sitting still as constellations on contemplative waters, to.

Besides, everyone’s got their own way of dealing with metaphors

to render the chaos of experience communicable

through some intimate form they can spend their whole lives

trying too hard to relate to as if it knew who they were

and were simply waiting for the right time

to let them in on the secret that it knows

nothing more or less about what it is or you are

than you suggested to it in the first place

when you began to take yourself too mysteriously.

I see a red and black baseball cap floating down the river

and right away I think of a decapitated tiger lily.

A fire someone put out too early to catch on and spread

like a spiritual conflagration of heretics

through the alphabetic birch groves of the Druids.

Does that mean whatever rises from the ashes

is thereafter struck dumb, deaf, mute and illiterate?

The counter-intuitive grammars of free association

are thenceforth to be demonized and burnt as witchcraft?

If I await the coming of the wild irises with poetic devotion

and the offshoot of my daydreaming to pass the time

is to see the eddies in the water like the tendrils

of wild grapevines trying to get a grasp on things,

couldn’t that mean that life playfully suffers

the same highly suggestive visual imagination I do?

And did its ears come late to the party as mine did too

and crash it as usual like an egg a crow drops

on the skull of a river rock anointed by the sun,

beaten away by the irate broomsticks of the sparrows,

because there is more instinct in swimming upstream

salmonwise against the flow of your own thought

on a return journey more dangerous than the first

than there is in painting watercolours

from the back of a hearse when it’s raining?

But don’t try to answer that question with your eyes open

unless you’re used to seeing things in your own light

and waiting for something as I am wild irises to bloom

like the sagacious fires of female dragon muses

on the dark, unmothered side of the moon

I’m seasonally inspired to sacrifice myself to

on the altar of a river rock that sticks in my imagination

like a vow of the voice in my throat

I made to the river as much as myself

never to let its beauty lack a messenger

that couldn’t speak in the tongues of the wild irises

without tasting my own ashes in the blue fires

of what they wanted me to convey

with a passion for extinction to the clouds and the stars.

PATRICK WHITE

IF YOU COULD SEE

IF YOU COULD SEE

If you could see into the nature of a single thought,

what it really is, though you think you know already,

if you could for one moment as old as the world

stop casting all these handshadows on the moon

as if they were the birds and bedrock of your intelligence,

as if the waves hauled the sea around in chains,

as if the leaves were a language without roots,

you would stop reading yourself like a prophecy in your own bones,

and be brought to your knees like a bull

penetrated by the seven swords of insight

and realize the unwitnessed clarity of the emptiness

that suggested you to you out of its dark abundance

is also the bright vacancy of this world that keeps you company.

All these intimate secrets of yourself

you keep posting to the sky like stars

or the single shoes and milkcartons of the missing

when you go looking for yourself like knowledge

in the eyeless spirit’s lost and found;

why don’t you, just for once and ever,

treat yourself to a season of your own, and shed them;

open your fist like a tree and let them go into the big O of omega,

hold yourself up like a candle to a black hole

and see what’s deep inside

when the world’s turned inside out

like a gallery at night without pictures?

If you listen, if you learn to listen deeply

with your eyes and your blood

with the intensity and focus of a hunting cat,

you can hear the crazy keys to freedom

jingling everywhere like flowers jailed by the rain

or the sun held for ransom in the siloes of the brain

the moon ploughs and seeds with thoughts of shining.

Once you stop looking for continuity in the emptiness

you’ll come to realize that emptiness

is the fountain-mouth of its own theme

and it’s the dream not the dreamer that’s in play

when a fish suddenly jumps like a thought

and there are ripples on the moon.

Who comes like an explorer without a flag

before an undiscovered sea of light

and stands before it like a spoon?

Raise the well of your darkest night up to your lips

and drink it drier than the eyes

of the lover who gave up crying over you

once she opened up like the mouth of a river

and entrusted herself like an aimless thought to the sea.

Hold yourself up like the Hubble

to the vastness of the darkness and the shining

to the largesse of the night in its open-handed radiance,

to the imageless wisdom of the mother you don’t know

who abides in your seeing like a compassionate shadow

and the intangible mystery of the mother of forms that you do,

and drink yourself down to the last star

to ever lay eyes upon you.

PATRICK WHITE

I'M FLYING UNDER THE LIGHT

I’M FLYING UNDER THE LIGHT

I’m flying under the light to avoid detection.

There. That’s the first line. A cornerstone.

Maybe water, granite or quicksand

but the cosmic glain

is cracked open like a skull

to extract the message from the fortune-cookie.

The second line comes easier

though it hasn’t come yet.

I’m waiting like a crematorium at the end of my cigarette.

Yes. Hot coffins for cool people.

Like it. Where’s the rest?

A mirror looks into my face

and sees the enlightened folly of creation

is not the work of a clown.

Forgive the little arrogant flag of flame

I’ve been trying to raise

out of a nation of ashes

like an arsonist with noble aspirations.

I’ve looked up at too many stars over the years

not to see beyond my next breath

like a cloud of unknowing,

a road of ghosts,

into the sweeping clarity

of the silence and the darkness

that have unmarrowed me like a bone

to grow new organs of light, new senses,

new eyes and hearts and minds

that are free of the ferocities of night

that consume them death by death

in unextinguishable fire.

It’s a mode of compassion

I can’t get off my chest,

my way of venting with tears in my eyes

when I consider what becomes of us

who stood here once in the high starfields

alone in an opening between the groves

and gave our eyes back to the sky like water

that tasted of too much suffering

to be sweetened like an apple by grief

or provide us with a vision of relief

that floats better

than all these lifeboats of belief

we’ve overturned.

Time’s refugees,

even in the donated tents of these bones,

flapping like skin in a desert wind,

only our homelessness is our own.

Like stars and dirt and leaves

we’re swept off the stairs

across thresholds, out the door

and into the dustpans of our own eyes

whenever we think about putting down roots

and waking up beside our own boots

like bodies that walked all the way with us

to a known address and a bed

we didn’t share with the dead.

Even when the moon is full and beautiful

I can hear the clacking castanets

of the crabs and the pebbles

rounded like skulls in the tides

of the untold myriads

that have come and gone like the sea.

To be so much and then nothing,

to be washed clean of everything you cherish

to watch the dyes run like blood and paint

or arsonists from autumn leaves

when your mind has lucked out

like a watercolour in the rain

and your brain unspools like mud.

Sometimes I think my awareness

is no more than the smear

of an incidental rainbow

on a distended bubble

whose inflation always

snaps back on itself in tears.

I prick myself on the thorn of a star

and let my eyes pop into vaster skies

and almost convince myself

that our bodies are crushed like grapes

to deepen the abyss of the wines

that bleed us into oblivion.

Or life is a dream without a dreamer,

fireflies in a well without an echo,

a magician so overcome by his own spell

there are doves flying out of his nostrils

and fish building nests in his brain like a tree

and yet he still can’t conceive

of what he pulled out of his hat.

And fulfilment may well be the enlightened flower

of the ignorant roots of desire

like the truth in the mouth of a liar

but I’m not assuming I’m a vegetable

and who knows,

when you put it all together

from the earth and the light and the rain

into one brain

I might be nothing more

than just another kind of weather

trying to take shelter

in this makeshift eye of the storm.

But do you see what I mean?

There’s no more continuity in being blind

than there is in looking into the face of God

and seeing the worlds within worlds

that seep like feelings into her thoughts

as if one world without a witness weren’t enough.

Words stumble here like physics

before its singularity

and are left like bodies and shoes

on the myriad thresholds of hyperspace

where the worlds pour into each other

like a waterclock of salmon

returning to the source of it all

like the pulse of the sea to the call

of the voiceless bell that gives birth

to all the unimaginable generations of time

that have wounded the faceless mirrors of eternity

by breaking the silence and serenity

of the well that would not answer

by dropping in like eyes

that disappear in waves

washing out their own reflections.

Sometimes it seems as if

there are only two kinds of people in the world:

those that are going and those that have gone.

Where did they go?

Where are they coming from?

Are we the only strangers on the road

and our inhospitable purpose, this passing?

When she leaned on the windowsill

and cradled her head in her hands

to watch the summer clouds

her arms were cormorants of light

and she wore the window awry like a crown.

And the old Japanese man

with hair whiter than moonlight

who used to apologize to the weeds

he uprooted all morning long

in the whisper of a language

only he could understand

for making a distinction.

Where have they gone

where eyes can go and see and come back

across the threshold of their extinction,

mile zero of a road that leads

everywhere all at once

like any point in the infinite space

of the expanding universe?

Why must we leave

the mystic particulars of our lives

like shoes and bodies and names

at the opening door of our bootless generalities?

These fingertips were kissed by a mother

who strung them tenderly

like ten little birds

ten little arrows

to the lips of her bow.

Now that they’ve flown

can anyone follow

the light into the unknown

or lift their reflections from the waters,

their shadows from the gound

like breadcrumbs and fingertips

to say where they’ve gone

or even more impossibly

find out where we are now

so they can find their way back to us?

Or is all that we ever were and will be

irrevocably lost

like the root in the flower

that passes it by

on its way into the open

where its eyelids fall away?

When I fall away from myself

like a drop of water

from the tongue of a leaf,

an unspoken word, a tear,

like rain on an autumn headstone

will the stone ripple

like the rings of a tree

to let you know

that the great sea of life

still jumps like a fish within me

to break through the immaculate

silence of the pond,

its undulant membrane of light,

like spring in the morning,

like a pulse of light beyond

the dark side of the mirror

that has never seen the moon,

that absorbs everything

like a cloak, or an oilslick,

an eclipse, a black hole

where things never appear,

to let you know I’m here. I’m here

where I have always been

where the joy of life transcends

its own thresholds of meaning

by parting its own waters

like the wake of a night passage

or the curtains of an open window

or a woman who opens her legs like a compass,

suffering her own felicity

to give birth to the shoreless sea,

drop by drop,

you and me

each moment we live

where death hasn’t laid down its threshold

and birth can’t get through its own gate

because the concepts have left no living ancestry

in this empty world of now

where we live, where we

have always lived,

our elbows on the horizon

like two moons on a windowsill,

wondering, longing, dreaming,

a breath, a veil, a mist

as we evaporate

like visions off the lakes of our eyes

into the great abyss of our unknowing

like a nightstream that lives

blindly belonging

to what’s going on, inexhaustibly.

PATRICK WHITE

APPARITIONS OF THE MUSE

APPARITIONS OF THE MUSE

Apparitions of the muse

hanging her stars

from the end of my nose

like an exotic fragrance of night

more revealing than the light.

There. That’s mine.

The constellation of the donkey,

and there beside it, do you see

that red-haired star

blazing like a woman with a carrot and a stick?

I’ve followed that star for fifty years

always a mountain away from the valley

like a passionate Sisyphus

rolling the earth up a hill like a stone

happy with my own absurdity,

happy to go mad for her sake alone.

Elixirs of moonlight

mingled with strange waters

and I drank until I drowned

in the ferocity of my own delirium

like a myth that’s forgotten

which stars it belongs to.

I’ve never been much of a martyr

and bored with lies

I’ve always been two hells shy of a messiah

but I have fallen on the thorns of the moon

more than once

after my long descent

down the burning ladders

of God’s last word on the matter.

So there’s no splinter of the true cross

to needle the issue

like a compass or a crucifix.

And it still puzzles me

why it’s always my blood

that rushes to the end of my emergency

like a volunteer army

but it’s always somebody else’s flag

that gets raised above the rubble.

Pyrrhic victories at best

when I’m not feeling cursed or blessed

by any kind of mystic meaning

convincing me I can firewalk

barefoot on stars

when I can’t even get

this blue pebble of a planet

out of my heart like a shoe.

But even letting go of all their leaves

like starmaps home from spiritual refugees

the trees can only go so far

as the wind and streams will let them.

And then there’s a darkness that doesn’t taste of stars.

And decisions that cut like the smiles of broken mirrors.

And turmoil in the snakepits of desire

that are thrown like angry acids

in the eyes of the seers

who saint the rain with their sorrows

like old calendars of crossed-out tomorrows

playing x’s and o’s with the moon.

It’s a freak of enlightenment

to turn love into a discipline

inspiration into a law

and godless wonder into superstitious awe.

So I listen and say nothing,

see and don’t reveal,

understand but never think I know

the gates that pass through me

when I call out to the wild geese in the fall

and I am startled by the loneliness of the answer.

I’ve seen you in the nightstream down the mountain,

the river and the sea

that sits below the salt

at her own table,

and I still suspect it was you

that turned my bitter tears

into the brittle chandeliers

that fell like ice-storms in a fountain

to silence the voices of the mirrors

the birds kept flying into

like windows at war with the sky.

I was out of the egg.

I was out of my mind at last

like a gift I didn’t deserve

and the universe was full of your absence

because you were the embodiment of my longing,

the darkness in the light

that stood aloof from the meaning of everything

as if your only proof were your eyes

and that were enough

to answer the empty skies with stars.

You may put on flesh and blood

and in your human proportions confess

you don’t believe this,

but you can never be attained,

never be embraced

never be contained

by any avatar of who you are

because like space in all directions

you are limitless

and even time is consumed

in the root fires that grabbed you by the ankle

and pulled you underground

to dress a goddess of light

in the nocturnal jewels of the dead.

And it is not a prerogative of the beatifically born

to be demonically wrong,

but I have heard the skulls in the song

that allures the unwary sailors

to the lunar horns of your fishbone harps

to smash them on the rocks

as if you took a tragic delight

in the sheer delinquency of your power

to arouse and extinguish desire.

Anyone can come up

with a meaning for life

but you are the muse

of meaning itself,

the meaning of meaning

when anyone asks

without expecting an answer.

What woman that I’ve loved

like a river reaching the sea

have you not been

over these long, intense years

of radiant tenderness

and creative commotion

and an ominous darkness out over the ocean

when the moon turned around

like a bride in bed

and revealed the far side

she kept to herself like stars?

And it’s still a shock and a marvel to me

when you disappear into the air

like a breath someone neglected to take

when it bloomed on the window.

I don’t doubt your capacity to devastate

and I have the urns and the burns

and the ashes to prove it

and know on a whim of your arrogance

you could leave the phoenix out in the cold

and douse the dragon like a torch

in your fire-proof waters.

But lately, out of the flesh,

I look for you behind the eyes

of every woman I meet

and it’s rare that I find one

whose blood and passions

you’ve worn as your own,

whose mind is a jewel of yours

that flows like a star sapphire

down a dark mirror

older than the meaning of life

that relflects you in the light of a black sun.

And I know enough not to ask

about those lockets of blood

you hang like thorns

around the neck of your mystic rose

like the first and last crescents of the moon.

I opened one once to see

whose picture you carried inside

like a butterfly you were working on

like message in a bottle you never sent

like a ship to the rescue

and I’m still not certain

I was demon enough

to survive the miracles

you released upon me

like a hive of angry angels

but I came to know

what the loss of heaven meant

when I ran from the garden

through the closing gates

of the harp you stuck in my throat

like a voicebox of sacred syllables

and came up on the short end of a wishbone

like another rib I was happy to lose

like third on a match

in trench warfare with any muse of a woman

who catches me blindfolded out in the open

in the crosshairs of an inspiration

she knows I can’t help but surrender to

like a white Russian iris of a poem

to a firing squad of stars aimed at my heart

just to see if I were as ready to die for her

when she put her finger

like a moment of truth

on the trigger of the moon

up to my temple

as I claimed in thousands

of Zen haikus and enlightened alibis

that fell like Japanese plum blossoms at her feet

I was ready and willing to die for any art

where she wasn’t the medium

that fired me up with mystic urgency

to write long loveletters

like a moth in a window

to the candles she inspired in my heart

like the fairest flames of life I have ever expired in.

PATRICK WHITE