DON'T KNOW WHERE I'M GOING

DON’T KNOW WHERE I’M GOING

Don’t know where I’m going.

Don’t care who I am.

No place I need to be.

No face I’ve got to see.

Don’t care if I’m loved.

Don’t care if I’m not.

What arises arises mindlessly.

What business has it with me?

Imagination’s just another word for free.

Free, free, free at last

I’ve let my people go.

I walk without a shadow.

There’s nothing about tomorrow

that hasn’t already passed

and yesterday’s a prophecy

of what isn’t waiting to come.

One thing suggests another

and worlds are arrayed before me

like the stillness

of the lost feather of the moon

on running water.

I endure my own weather like the sea.

The lightning strikes itself like a match

to take a look

but there’s no one to witness the clarity.

I don’t taunt my ghost like a man

who’s going to live forever.

If I flower I flower.

If I shine I shine.

Whatever appears

in the black and white mirrors

of the infernal or divine

may or may not be

the meaning of my roots.

My affirmation refutes

what my denial ordains

and the cause doesn’t

account for its effects.

I am the perfection of all my defects

so enlightenment and ignorance

are two waves of the same awareness in me.

The fool and the sage speak with the same voice.

Desire beatifies my heretics

like lies I’ve told to the stars

but their election was never a choice

and my wounds don’t seek the truth

in the afterlife of my scars.

The old man does not say I am old

nor I am young, the youth.

Autumn is not older than spring

and spring isn’t apprenticed to fall.

I can hear my own footsteps

coming down the hall like time

to meet me after all these years of looking

through everyone else’s eyes

but even when I take my face off

at the end of the day

like a tired sky

and point to the stars the light concealed

my self-portrait is always a disguise.

And nothing is revealed.

PATRICK WHITE

LIGHTING IT UP AND BLOWING IT OUT

LIGHTING IT UP AND BLOWING IT OUT

Lighting it up and blowing it out

I try to make my way through the dark

by beginning at the end

as if the coming and the going

were the same door

or good-bye were the first thing

you would say to a friend.

I approach things like a night stream

as if my death were already achieved

and behind me.

And all the atoms of my being

dancing like frenzied gnats

in the sunset glow of a last eye-beam

are certifiably primordial

and any one of them

when they lose it in the light

could begin a world.

And what can you say more of a life

that dreams of what it is

than it’s the taste of the same wine

in many different cups?

And as any fox knows

the grape is always sweetest

when you can taste it with your eyes.

Though why foxes eat grapes is anyone’s guess

but life makes itself up as it goes

like music in a fish’s earlobes.

It feathers its themes in fire and light

and goes up in smoke

like the ghost of a tree

looking for habitable planets among the stars.

New wounds with innocent root-room for old scars.

Chalking the cue to bank the long shot

you’re trying to spin off into

the deep, dark pockets

of your game-winning afterlife.

And I don’t believe in much anymore

though that hasn’t stopped me from crying

like a slow window trying to keep

the stars from leaking out of me

as if there were a black hole

somewhere in my heart

waiting for an iris to make it an eye

whose seeing might be a new way of healing

what can’t be healed.

Once here. Here forever.

But whether we’re the eternal children of forever

or just another breath on the night air

that doesn’t even know we live,

even death is just another way of killing time here.

When everywhere’s the center of everything else,

the centre holds,

things don’t fall apart.

They disappear.

And that’s the mystic art

of knowing how to make the most out of existence

by offering no resistance

to the rocks in your own mindstream

that part the waters like the thoughts

of an exile in the promised land

who can’t go back the way she came.

The river can’t step into the same you twice.

And in every direction

your eyes have ever burned like stars

you can see the dark jewel of your own life

from the inside

before it breaks into light.

Sometimes I’m the lonely sign

on the only path to nowhere

and others I’m positively amniotic

with the schools of my blue lucidity

the albino dolphins of the moon leap through

without a chance of changing their colour.

A flower of prophetic blood bleaches my skull.

I swallow the snakefire of my last eclipse

like a lump of coal

I’m trying to turn into a diamond

that doesn’t burn

and never sloughs its skin.

Reality isn’t a religion or a science,

or the back and front of a mirror

that doesn’t know whose eyes its looking through.

Religion: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

Science: how many pins can dance on the head of an angel?

Totem poles on a telephone booth where no one ever picks up.

Voodoo dolls that hex the cause of their effects.

The apple bloom on the tree of knowledge

lets go of its flightless wings

and follows the wind

like the eyelids of unfeathered angels

who opened their eyes like flawless fruit

as they fell toward paradise

without a parachute of smokey virtue

or the scale of a snake for a vice.

Emergence into the open

like a hidden secret revealed

is the engine of evolution

that empowers the dark matter

of this incorporeal starmud

to arise like the high note of a bird

that’s flown beyond the night in its voice

like light beyond its myth of origin.

And the peduncle is lost in the ensuing phylum

as a madman is lost in the scream

that woke up the asylum,

or a god is lost in his own creation.

And the mountains listen

to the holy voices

in the valleys of their shadows

they deepen as they arise

like the guests of an echoless calling

to greet the unknown host.

It’s what the moon feels

when she fondles her locket of water

and memories pull at her heartstrings

like tides on earth

and music is the way she recalls

the sirens that used to sing

like the brides of empty lifeboats

that prayed like smashed guitars

for the night to sow the seedless sea with stars.

And in every fish that swims through fire

like the sacred response of life

to the longing in its own desire

she knows they got their wish.

Fireflies in the ashes of the phoenix tree.

And the eggs of cosmic words

like serpents in a bird’s nest

learning to fly like dragons

that have just swallowed the moon.

And it’s one thing to pull the sword from the stone

but it’s a greater power than magic and proof

with no urge to rule

that summons the butterfly from its cocoon

by giving the fool who inches toward the truth

along the green branch toward the apple-bloom

that already tastes like the forbidden fruit

of some radical insight

the whole orchard in a pair of wings

and more than enough night and light on its palette

to start a revolution in seeing among the flowers

who still labour in the chains of their roots

to turn their earthbound lucidities into stars

who might look back for a change

with eyes that have gathered like water out of the shining

and taste the light in the honey

that kissed their eyelids into gold

long before the night was old

and it wasn’t enough just to see them.

When you opened your eyes

in the burning clarity of your lone vision

before this matrix of space and time

gave birth to the world

you were free to be whatever you could see.

That’s when the light first spoke to you

in the mother-tongue of your seeing

and your voice broke

like a secret name in the mirror

that didn’t know who you were

and the moon on nightwater

the thief at the window

your breath like stars on the cold, night air

summoned the whole of being

in every particulate shard

and radiant plinth of the mirror

to drive your shining into the shadows

so myriad things can appear as they are.

Many eyes open. Night. An eclipse. One star.

And the darkness an anti-romantic

in love with the moon from afar.

PATRICK WHITE

FLOWERS ADRIFT ON THE FRAGRANCE OF THEIR OWN FOREGOING

FLOWERS ADRIFT ON THE FRAGRANCE OF THEIR OWN FOREGOING

Flowers adrift on the fragrance of their own foregoing.

In the night that takes me under its wing

to shelter me from myself, arrival and passage of spring.

Fish nibble at the wafer of the moon on the tongue of the lake.

The wind bitter as a green apple with an innocent cruel side.

Saturn at dawn,Venus at dusk, things abide in their own good time

without knowing for whose sake they shine until the mind

can’t keep a secret anymore and let’s the heart know

what the heart has always known. Reason is colour blind.

Everything that’s hidden out in the open isn’t invisibly camouflaged

to look like God at a quick glance. Flowers don’t dance

with their deathmasks on. Things may have changed

since I last walked here, but they haven’t aged. Autumn

not an older season than spring, spring not younger than yesterday.

Water’s never heard of a virgin birth that ends in a real death.

Silence of time as it appears to the spirit in a deepening sea of awareness.

Nothing disfigured. Nothing restored. Nothing scarred.

Nothing wounded in the moonlight, pleading to be healed.

Earth pungent with the expectations of urgent ghosts.

And dust in the eyes of the stars, the cries of Canada geese

with more longing in their voices than celebration

like the wailing of a train disappearing like smoke in the distance

from a sad fire in danger of going out. Exits and entrances galore

there are as many ways out of here as there is space and time to stay.

Bush wolves on a far hill agonizing over something in the night

like blues harps of blood. And in the heartwood of every leafing tree

I can hear the first violins of a symphony tuning up to the light

as if something sublime were about to begin with the first drop of rain

pinging like a tintinnabulum beside the kettledrum of thunder at the back.

To speak now would be to conceal what I really feel in words.

Lavish with life, I reveal my voice in a rush of waterbirds

startled off the lake like a mantra of sacred syllables

that nuance the ripples they leave in their wake

with a whole new way of phrasing the light with eyes

that see things musically as they fall away from their wings

like the meaning of things when meaning isn’t necessary.

PATRICK WHITE

AMAZING AS THE STARS IN THE DARKNESS, MY EYES

AMAZING AS THE STARS IN THE DARKNESS, MY EYES

Amazing as the stars in the darkness, my eyes,

though I’ve never seen them directly, only

as a reflection I take at its word they’re blue.

And when I look a little deeper, there’s

no part of me that isn’t eventually invisible.

Everything’s like that, the seer and the seen,

so wholly absorbed in each other,

there’s no sign of either of them, just the seeing,

the heart and its feeling, the mind and its thought,

the flower and the eye, crocus, turk’s cap, tiger lily, lilac

all one spontaneous happening without distinction,

one infinitely collaborative creative event flashing

out of the dark resources of the plenum-void

to give it a name for the sake of rendering experience

communicable through a delirium of form.

If you’ve ever walked by a mirror and the mirror’s disappeared,

mercury into mercury, water into water, fire into fire,

a mother into her child, an unsuccessful lover into his longing,

that’s something like it. You’re everything

and in that everything you’re nothing, you’re selfless

to the point of not even knowing what that means anymore

except it’s of no significance whatsoever. There’s just

this star flashing out of a night it’s surrounded by,

just these dark hills where the dead buried themselves

as they did their children, as they had lived, secretly

under the leaves that covered their gravestones,

lichens, moss, growing hundreds of wild columbine

on a modest rock of ages with the sensibilities of a butterfly.

If you stand by a gate that doesn’t latch by itself anymore,

and the garden’s been left to its own inner resources,

because no one lives there any longer, as, perhaps, even you once did,

o in a dream, how long ago was that? And watch the moon rise,

as if the healer and the wound were remembering

an old love affair that’s gone well beyond the inseparable

because there never was a time, a prelude to seeing,

they were ever apart. You’ll understand passing

as a perpetually new approach to things, you’ll see birth in why

the flowers fall, and death, in why they rise again.

The simultaneity of the life and death of all things.

How present you are in the midst of your longing.

How clear in the absence of everything you’re missing.

I’ve spent much of my life preparing gardens for planting.

Shaking out roots, rocking fields. Wondering

whose house of life the bones I dig up once belonged to,

cornerstones and rafters in arrears

to the temples they once upheld to themselves.

And come nightfall, my work finished for the day,

I’ve paused and looked to see if I could identify

through the trees, the whole of a constellation

from a single star. As if gazing in wonder at it

in the mutual solitude and hugeness

of the unknown immmensities that surround us both,

and bind us to a weary body and a still heart

leaning on a shovel in a garden, as if the silence

could look up or down, either way, were made sacred

by the poignancy of a momentary insight

that penetrated both our hearts as if time and space

were mere bubbles of awareness in a dream.

And in a differentiated union of not-two,

I saw myself shining through the eyes of a star

as it laboured over what flowers it intended to grow.

Without a thought or a feeling I could call my own

I was a desert of stars without a mirage

to keep up appearances. I was a single point of light

with infinite distances in it, and even the word, one,

had gaps in it I learned to jump like a star.

And I saw with the certainty of water, that

when one was a wave, the other was an ocean

and separation was simply the blindfold we put on

at midnight in front of an imaginary firing squad,

as if our whole life depended upon it, to watch

the stars shoot flowers at the sun like blanks

I seeded the garden with like constellations

breaking ground through the tree tops like Vega in Lyra.

Astro-flowers. The Pleiades approaching

the larkspur like bees. Honey in a new hive.

Light years of perceptions in a garden of starmud

encompassing strangers only an insight away from home.

It’s an immensely intimate universe. Go out.

Get down on your knees in the soil. Plant flowers.

And when you go in look at your hands, at the stars

shining under your fingernails as a sign

of some honest cosmic work well done.

PATRICK WHITE

NOT LESS AWARE IN THE DARK

NOT LESS AWARE IN THE DARK

Not less aware in the dark

than I am in the light

though it’s my blood

that sees better than my eyes,

I listen to my own breathing

and my heart banging

like a storm shutter in the wind,

and I wonder who it’s all for, if anyone,

and if there were stars in my seeing

before I walked myself like a telescope up to the roof

to get a better view

and if all these leafy yesterdays

that look so much like the tomorrows they proposed to be

that I’ve shed like thoughts and birds for years

to reveal the tree that follows itself like a map

into its own flourishing

were not already memories in the world

before I mistook this mind for my own

by giving it a name.

Nothing before, nothing after this night,

worlds within worlds, and light upon light,

I wipe myself away like the carcinogenic smear

of a sunspot in the mirror

tear my face down like an old campaign poster

to better elect the immaculate by acclamation

and step down from all these vacant offices of me

like spent cartridges

from the judicial chambers of an empty gun.

It’s not suicide if you kill yourself into life,

if the pharaoh’s ka makes it all the way to Orion

and there’s more delight in heaven than relief.

It may well be wrong and perverse on my part

but I refuse to sugar the rim of a black hole with belief

and live on the crumbs of someone else’s dream

in the corner of an eye

that looks down upon me

like a black lightning bolt an erratic firefly.

And I’m not saying once you’re nothing being turns divine.

I’ve always been too restless

to lie down for long with the mystics

sipping nectar from the moonlit goblets on the vine.

Life’s not a drunk or a hangover.

And I love to paint, it’s true,

but I won’t paint my window over to improve the view,

nor add my little bloodstain like a dye to the seeing

to make the poppy burn blue

just because I can’t take it anymore.

And it may be a long, hard, dirty, demonic coal road

lined with ditchwater and dutiful corpses all the way

to the diamond lucidity of an illuminated human being

but I still stop sometimes, alone with the stars

and listen to the cry of a bird in the night

unspeakably shake the darkness

with the vastness and agony of its life

as if it were a human heart in a rootless tree

whose solitude, like seeing, exceeded the expanse of its being.

PATRICK WHITE

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