DRIVING UP TO MABERLY

DRIVING UP TO MABERLY

Driving up to Maberly for cheap cigarettes

at the Two Eagles Trading Post

across the highway from Silver Lake,

frost of the night,

mist of the morning lifting

in the blaze of the sun

in the bleach-blue sky

that wheels the reds and oranges,

and the wild, canary, grosbeak yellows

into their complementary hue,

I can’t really see the autumn

until my blood stops thinning itself down

to peer through the lenses

of the watercolours in my eyes

and flowing, deeper, darker

turns into fire and paint

and dancing on the funeral pyre

of my last unknown masterpiece

instead of trying to walk on stars,

celebrates the crazy wildness of my solitude

by elaborating a world

I can almost forgive

as I brush myself

off the shoulders of the hills in passing

like a thread of smoke,

a parrot of ash,

a glaze of Prussian blue,

and cry like an arsonist

in an old-growth wilderness

that the trees don’t wait for me to burn.

There is a void, an abyss, an emptiness

that wears a human face

in the presence of things everywhere

that are reflected back

in the black mirror of space

as the mystically specific features

of every mineral, plant, and animal

I’ve ever been.

I’m not just a figure in a landscape

I am the whole of the scene

and even in the shadows

that don’t feel like me,

that are sometimes horrid and strange,

intensities of separation in faces

that have fallen far from the tree,

I am the child in the darkness

rooted in a fever of fear

that is slowly learning to trust me.

And it’s been like this for years

though memory is just another way

of quoting yourself

more comprehensively

through the tears

that keep turning up

like Desdemona in autumn

to audition for the play

by drowning for real.

Have you seen October sumac

set its wings afire?

I wrote that in my twenties

sitting down on the curb

with Ben Jonson

watching the house burn,

writing odes

to Vulcan’s acumen as an editor.

If you summon a phoenix

a phoenix will come

like an aspiring passion

for enlightenment

that will shake you like ashes

out of the Buddha’s sleeve

where you’ve been hiding

from a world you didn’t conceive

and doesn’t believe

in abiding with anyone

longer than it takes to say good-bye.

Now you’re alone in the darkness

with yourself as the only witness

down to your last match

like a tiny lighthouse

looking for a lifeboat

lost like a voice in the fog

and you strike your head against the rocks

like one of the black eggs of music

a phoenix lays in a nest of ashes

and suddenly the autumn flares all around you

like the sum of all sums

in a womb of sacred fire

that immolates you into being

the light in the night

of your own unborn, unperishing clarity.

Go ask the star, the candle, the maple-tree

setting fire to the roof

of the abandoned roadside fruit-stand

with its vagrant leaves

whose light their light is the child of

and how it is they all have the same eyes as you

when you don’t bind yourself

like a nun to a cross

or a blind man in the mirror

to a match that has gone out

like the swords in the hands

of the flammable angels

who burnt paradise to the ground

so they could be doused

like the torches of autumn

in the retrospective lakes of their own tears

and know what it is

to die into yourself

like a god or a human

or a leaf of fire

like the torn page

of a calendar

on the mindstream

that makes its way

through the placenta of the full moon

all the way to everyone of us

like water through a dream

of things to come

that come of us

who are the magnanimous hosts

of our own transience.

Fountains of words

from a golden mouth

for the ghosts and the birds

that are always heading south

or like me, west,

up highway seven,

a shadow at the wheel of a sundial

or the spirit of an Ojibway outcast

set free from his burial hut

after ten years in isolation

without a cigarette

flying with the geese

who carry the souls of the dead

toward whatever afterlife they want

as if their futures were already forgiven.

Forgiven for having outlived

whoever we are

like the light of the stars

that go out in the wells of our eyes

so that we can see,

or the small search-parties of the fireflies

who won’t stop looking for us

like a postmark

we left like a homeless fingerprint

on the lost address

of the last constellation

of the transcendent myth

we were born under

like a loveletter to everyone

written on the leaves of autumn

in passion and paint,

blood and pain,

in the cursive script

of every artery and vein

that throws its books and maps in the fire

like the posthumous effects

of an old affair.

And there, it sheds us like the apple

of an expiring art

that seeds

the myriad keyholes of the heart

with peeping toms

that lower their zeniths

on the star-crossed thresholds

before the promiscuous doors

of the moon-horned virgins

who wait like owls in the trees

for the x-rated version

of their venereal hagiographies

to be martyred into movies.

And as I said to myself only yesterday

life has a good eye

and anyone can say it and see it

in every detail of the passing scene

like water trying to hang on to its roots

but when the lens of the air

is angled for fire

like the third eye

of a deciduous choir

then it’s one thing to see it

but it’s altogether

a much more dangerously creative affair

even among the inane mundanities

when it takes more than the truth

and less than a lie

to be it.

PATRICK WHITE

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