LET ME BE WORTHY

Let me be worthy of the river

and the strange ores that glow at night,

buried like teachers in the mountain;

let my blood always taste of the moon

and my heart burn like a black rose,

like the poem in the fire

that sweetened the sky with a flower of smoke,

for the wisdom of the generously unattainable,

and transcend the hell that shadows the folly

of not being foolish.

May the stars,

when they gather in gardens

water the roots of my seeing from clear fountains

and the wind bleed like ink from my pen

when I’m wounded by the beauty and the terror

of my helplessness.

When I am large, spacious, profound,

let me sit like the universe

on the throne of a seed

that lies in the dirt;

and when I am small, brief,

a trinket of light in a flash of ephemera,

robe me in the lion skin of the night sky

and ennoble me

with delusion and enlightenment

on this road of ghosts.

Whatever befall,

let me perish or prosper as a human

who insists upon the divinity of all

and burns and rises

for the heresy and truth of it.

Let anyone born be accounted a hero,

a lifeboat that hauled the world aboard

when the seas raged in the womb

to give birth to suffering;

and may I always be entrusted

with the ancient shale of dark courage it takes

to look into the dragon’s eyes

and not be horrified

by the ferocity of the freedom

that thaws space

like an hourglass in the rain.

And should love occur

to shape the blade of the moon

on the anvil of my heart,

and a cauldron of passionate visions

scald the eyes with intimate glimpses

of myriad heavens and hells,

all truer than reason,

may my bitterness pass

like the eclipse of an hour,

a left-handed blessing,

no vinegar of injured illusion

accept the sad surrender of the wine

like the death poppy of a folded flag,

no tar of judgment and denial

feather the dream with stone pillows,

no abyss under the brief era of an eyelid,

make me too petty or afraid

to dance with my skin off

engulfed like the wind

in secret sails of mystic fire.

There’s always a clown, a jester

who rides beside the hero like an anti-self,

a thoroughbred and a dray

yoked to the little red wagon of the heart

like two thieves either side

of an unwitnessed crucifixion,

two dadaphors, two torches

disposed like opposible hinges

on a door that opens like water

at the whisper of a key.

Let me be the clown-prince

of my own idiotic profundities then,

let me survive my way into the wisdom

of the inspired fools

who know that anything they ask for

from the stolen bounty of the king

is just another absurdity in disguise,

that even laughter isn’t a lifeline.

I’ve always had my heart

caught in my throat

like a bird in a chimney,

a cork in a wine-bottle,

a habitable planet in a black hole.

I have loved and befriended

almost anyone

who would let me

and seen their evanescence,

their transigence, their vagrancy, their passage

through this mansion of space

with the amazing windows and chandeliers,

the sad brevity of the things they cherished.

Blind to restorative grails,

I have not sought the meaning of life,

I have not hunted the dragon with nets,

knowing reality is meaningless

because it has no fingers,

it doesn’t point to anything beyond itself,

nor bear witness in a mirror,

but I have walked in the peacock robes

of the twilight sky, all eyes,

in the gardens of the life of meaning,

past the hushed bloodtalk of the roses,

and seen for myself

that there are flowers with petals of water

and roots of fire

that drink the stars like rain.

Meaning dethrones the flowers like bottle-caps

and there’s no refund on the empties.

Night puts its hands over your eyes

and asks you to guess;

and there’s no end of the mystery,

no end of the blessing

of sitting under a tree

looking up at a star

wondering what human beings,

what you are doing on earth;

what a thought is, an emotion,

the blade of grass beside you,

everything alone together

in the silent boat of the rising moon

docking at its own reflection

as if the port were always in the voyage,

understanding

merely an expression of the intensity

of our not knowing.

The answers come and go,

governments, religions, arts, sciences, fortune-cookies,

like parking meters, like waterbirds,

like oceans on the moon.

Life is the lock that opens the key,

the skymouth of the dream that woke itself up

talking in its sleep,

trying to remember the dreamer.

Like the fleets and caravans

of the seeds on the autumn wind

we are the purest expression

of a universe

that answers us with ourselves

when we ask for a sign.

Like cherries that ripen in the silence

of the deepening night,

turning our tears to wine,

our darkness into eyes,

may my shadows always be worthy

of the light that casts them.

Sixty-three years a human being,

sixty-three years of suffering and doubt,

of boredom and magmatic intensities,

of mystic elation and mythic insignificance,

of anger, danger, risk, defeat and victory,

of saying and seeing,

of trying to kiss the shadow of my pain away

by deepening my ignorance

and progressing backwards

through the re-runs of old eclipses

that once gorged on the moon like dragons.

Tonight the wind howls bitterly outside

and the stars seem eras away in the cold

as if the intimacy I have felt with their shining

since I was a boy

were just another leaf torn from the tree.

It’s rare to catch a glimpse of your agony,

to see that even the brightest fountains

of your efflorescence

are rooted in a wounded watershed

that has never known the colour of your eyes.

I don’t need to be forgiven

for being born;

and I won’t be poured

like a tidal wine

into a life that isn’t mine

however many cracks appear in the cup,

however I recede and leak out of myself,

my blood isn’t anyone else’s signature,

and this walking to nowhere I call a poem,

no one’s footprints following me but my own.

How should it be otherwise

that I fall like rain

to appease this rumour of life

like a fire in my roots

and flash through the creekbeds

of my own flowing

like time returning to its hidden source

with news of nothing?

An echo of light

looking for its lost voice like a star,

I don’t need to prove myself to the night

like a theory in the heart of a passing stranger

and space is the only death mask

that is the true likeness of my face.

No more than the light and the rain

that open the seeds like love-letters,

I don’t need to know

what I will become

or what was revealed behind me in the dark,

but let me be worthy

of this wounded boat of the moment

with its cargo of eyes

enduring the burden and inspiration

of the voyage

like illegal refugees

with forged passports to Atlantis;

and if I must be accounted

one of the martyrs of absurdity,

then let me be as generous as wings

to the worms in my name

that blindly tilled the soil

of a rootless country.

PATRICK WHITE

THE ANGEL IN THE WAY I'M WRESTLING WITH

THE ANGEL IN THE WAY I’M WRESTLING WITH

The angel in the way I’m wrestling with

won’t box. I don’t get a choice of weapons.

My hip dislocated by a greater intensity than I am,

I’ll walk away the stronger man,

a sacred king with a limp, Richard the Second,

or Vulcan, or Byron swimming the Hellespont.

Down on a sunny day, snarly in the sunshine,

too disheartened to get with the picture and bloom.

Nothing against the vases of sappy daffodils

in green vases on open windowsills,

but I feel like tracking starmud into the living room.

Heavy green diamond steel-toed work boots

with their laces undone, their tongues hanging out,

clotted with earth, so the nuns of the narcissi

don’t forget they’ve got dark, dirty roots

and bulbs like prophetic skulls

that have been buried in the garden a long time

who predicted all this would happen in due course.

Everyone clear-eyed as a haiku in a mirror.

Wholly out of season, my heart feels

like the heavy bell of a requiem for all those

who worked themselves to death for so long

like sweating horses hauling this death cart

of a planet around to change its point of view

like the bent axle of a prayer wheel

inclined toward the sun. On this blue-eyed day

and in the morning before dawn, euphoric commotion

of birdsong in celebration of the return of the light,

but I think of how much darkness, the cast off ore,

extinct forests, Jurassic coalbins,

had to clarify themselves

for the sake of a single diamond of equinoctial insight.

The apple trees are wearing their appearances

on their sleeves, and the willows

are adding blonde streaks to their hair

after their long widowhood of veils.

God I wish I didn’t have to be a poet sometimes

warped into revealing things from the inside out

like a canary in a coalmine on a sunny day.

I try to imagine how sweet it would feel

just to be in the world like a lackadaisical dandelion

blooming like an average G type sun

in the fresh painterly green of the grass

with a couple of ants for planets.

What a miner I’d make. Always

looking for a motherlode of ore in a gold mine.

Reading between the lines of the spring constellations

to admire the brilliance of the darker messenger,

the deeper clarity of a more pellucid view of the world

as it appears on the nightshift

in the black mirrors of the blind chandeliers

I’ve been romancing at a dance of celestial spheres

by tracking my footprints all over the ballroom floor

for those who dance iambically with a limp like me to follow.

And my only alibi for looking at things on the dark side.

You can’t plumb the depths, or judge the age

of a black hole in light years. And it’s totally lost upon me

how you can truly claim to see anything, even spring

if you’re not a two-eyed telescope, one eye on day,

one eye on the darkness, and both open simultaneously

like the sun and the moon at opposite ends of the sky,

and the earth in between like the third eye

of a spiritual refugee with an extra lens for backup

in case I should feel as I do today

like a star-nosed mole with tunnel vision

trying to shine above ground with the tulips.

Even as observatories all over the northern hemisphere

are opening their eyes to the light

just to let a little fresh air in

like house plants on open tenement windowsills

sinking their roots deeper into the darkness,

like back lightning into a mystic watershed

to keep from going blind

in the blazing of the blossom overhead.

PATRICK WHITE

EVER SINCE I BECAME A POET

EVER SINCE I BECAME A POET

Ever since I became a poet

my whole life is an open wound

I’ve been bleeding out of

like a ribbon on a gift addressed to everyone.

Started out an astronomer

and then came poetry and painting.

And ever since, on days like this,

feels like I’m hanging in mid air

like Sri Lankans do to prophesy at New Year

with a great hook of a question-mark

through my gut. And I do. I prophecy

just to get a grip on the blinding pain.

Probably prophesy too much.

Wish I was talented enough to say nothing

and wasn’t compelled to scream out like this in agony

like a screech owl with blood on its claws

and huge wise eyes that can see in the dark.

End times. Sixty three years closer

to being reborn again as someone

I can identify with. And the stars have aged

a lot slower than I have. I look back.

I look omnidirectionally ahead like a star

and when I feel like a wolf, wild, free, alert and wary,

what a long, dangerous, dark, strange, radiant trip it’s been,

but when I’m a salmon, in the Druidic sense of the word,

It seems I’ve been swimming upstream most of my life

through a fluid, shapeshifting waterclock

of a space-time continuum that summons me

like a ghost to a seance where I spiritually spawn and die.

Arta longa; vita brevis. All things expire

in the same creative medium they were born from

and came closest to mastering. Like childhood.

Fame was a temptation in the beginning

but only as an aid to intriguing women

with the exquisite ferocity of my ability

to suddenly break into stars when things were their darkest.

Women have always been the gates

to the land of enlightenment for me,

the window with the view that opens out

onto whole new vistas of God so encompassingly beautiful

half the time their beauty was freaked with mystic terror

like little threads of lightning from a passing storm

over the darkening hills as the stars and fireflies came out

and charmed me back into having

the courage to open my eyes again.

Lightning, stars, fireflies, three avatars of insight.

My sex life has strangely paralleled my literary career.

I call myself a heretic. But in fact, I’ve always been

sacrilegiously sacrificial when it comes to poetry or love.

I let the lamb put the lion on the altar for a change.

It’s my oxymoronic approach to God as a woman

in whom all opposites are reconciled in a unitive state

that can be more accurately approximated as not-two, better than one.

And I don’t expect everybody to know what that means,

or how much pain there is behind those few moments of bliss

you just seem to blunder into indelibly out of the blue.

Karma, atma, anke, fate, synchronous happenings

in a charged particle field

in a dynamic equilibrium of reversible polarities.

Call it what you like, one brief kiss and you’re an addict for life.

The muse comes your way

and you’re overtaken by the path you’re on,

and you realize, as you stand there gaping,

as a poet in the presence, you’ve got nothing

of any consequence to say until your mouth learns how to listen

and no one can teach you to do that better than a woman.

So, yes, women for most of the duration and then

the beginning of this long spiritual journey

that starts in the heart with separation from someone.

As if the stars just threw acid in your eyes

and forced you to look at things another way.

And then you understand how even

a wild, single-petalled rose can open the eyes in your blood

and when you cry, it’s haemoglobin, not tears

that wash the blindness out of them like an oilslick.

And reversing the spin on the eclipse, you grow to be grateful

to the things you either didn’t know how, or were afraid to look at.

Sight is a kind of love, and there’s no end of the seeing.

You can walk in darkness like a diamond in a lump of coal

for millions of years and never suspect

you’ve been shining all along,

you’ve been decaying into light.

What is the most fervent longing of the trees

if it isn’t one day to turn themselves into the light

they keep reaching out to like

Dutch elms with six millions leaves a piece?

To be rooted in the very source of life they aspire to.

That’s why so many flowers look uncannily like the stars.

And the Sufis say you take on the characteristics

of anyone you’ve been around longer than forty days.

And by the time you’re as old as I am

you look in the mirror, and you see

the features of the universe that’s been living you

for as long as you can remember, moment by moment.

Bless, curse, heal, scry, prophesy, deepen, praise, purge,

improve, reform, redress, delight, teach, or celebrate,

when I can’t find any meaning in my insignificance

it’s great to think that poetry might do all of these things,

but the more I write, the more I begin

to counter-intuitively suspect poetry’s got an agenda of its own

you catch a glimpse of from time to time in the depths

and in the millions of subconscious harmonies

that show up spontaneously on the surface

in the course of your life’s work that defy explanation

except as a mode of participatory collaborative creation

where you don’t always know who you’re working with

or who is working you, as the case may be, so you

often feel like a bit of a fraud to put your name alone

on the fruits your labour, as if a single tree

took a bow for the whole orchard

and the sun and the light, the earth, the rain,

had nothing to do with what lept from your brain

like the myth of the origin of Athena.

And I hope it does some good in the world

like a wheelbarrow you bring to a garden.

I hope I’ve made a gift of a gift of a gift of a gift

though the way life is that’s as hard to determine

as who the real giver is. And as a pragmatic mystic

and practising artist, with my head in the stars

and my feet on the ground, not really any of my business.

And speaking of that, I loathe the way poetry

has been heartshrunk from a noble calling

into a petty business card. And as for those few among many

who still have the courage and the clarity

to risk the revolutionary dangers of their sincerity,

it fills me with savage indignation to see

their imaginations chained like young trees

to a four by four square of permissible earth

surrounded by a lifeless prairie of parking lot asphalt.

That’s how scared parking lots are of trees.

But things will change, and change again

because people get sick of the obvious soon enough

and the bling of tinfoil on the midways of life,

and stepping out of the blazing of the circus

into the darkness beyond, look up at the stars

and long as they have done and will always do

to lose themselves in the mystery

that’s shining all around them as if

the light were emanating from the inside of the lanterns

they hold up like their hearts to the darkness.

And believe me, as much as I love astronomy

and the shape of a telescope has almost

as much sex appeal to me as the genius of a woman’s body

it was poetry that taught me how much further

one of these little lanterns can see into the mystery

than the most gargantuan spaced out observatories can.

The seeking is always more beguiling than the finding,

depending, of course, on what you’re looking for.

And losing yourself in something that absorbs you wholly

is still the quickest way to dust off the staleness of life

and polish the mirror to brighten the stars in your eyes.

Or if you’re having one of those demonically possessed days

when it seems you keep knocking on the front doors

of the hives of killers bees that keep swarming you

with the ferocity of mass mundanities, hoping one of them

might turn out to be a pinata full of treats

at a Mexican birthday party, if you persist in risking enough.

Poetry, if you give it more than you even thought you had to give,

will give you in return, when you need them the most

the arms to take up against a sea of troubled dubieties,

and sitting down at your desk, out of breath from running,

empower you to give every bee and demon back its stinger

by giving each a name, and writing them to death

like a constellation of black dwarfs, as I have here

just to irradiate the air again with northern auroras

of solar flares lifting the veils to reveal

the intense clarity in the eyes of the mystery

that all things are as they are,

because just like atoms and quasars

when all is said and done

everything comes down to metaphors.

And the esoteric teachings of inspired shape-shifters,

whispering cosmically in the dark to themselves

the secret spells of black matter that landscape the light

with imagination, insight, and intuition

and without nudging a single atom

with the slightest notion of thought

bring whole new worlds to fruition

with every wavelength of the mystery

that abides within like compassion

shy in the shadows of love, waiting

for love to open the door from the inside

and see what it’s done to the place

in the absence of the stranger

standing on his own threshold in the doorway

of the homelessness that throws its arms about him

like space, time, light, love, light and life

and welcomes him back like the return journey

of the way he left in the first place.

PATRICK WHITE

EVERY PATH

EVERY PATH

Every path is as wide with compassion

as the planet that you’re walking on

so there’s really never any danger of falling off.

I didn’t lie

and you didn’t tell the truth:

two sins of omission

trying to fit lenses to clarity

like fashionable eyewear.

It’s what people do

when they don’t want to see too much.

And I’m sure you’ve recreated me in your own image long since

I discovered good-bye was older than eternity

and more absolute than space.

I remember you asking me once

after we’d finished making love in the red tide

as the breakers dashed their galaxies against the rocks

and we both sprawled there naked dripping with stars

what I thought a human was and I replied

an interpretation with a face.

And you asked why we were here

and I said to listen to the sea beside someone like you.

And later as we were walking back to the fire

you looked back at our footprints glowing in the sand

like tiny island universes following us

like dance-steps painted on the shore

and pulling yourself in tight against my arm

you whispered I think we’re the music they’re dancing to.

And ever since I’ve cherished

an ancient silence deep within me

whenever I’ve looked at the stars and thought of you.

I’ve burned a lot of bridges

since that night of doors

with thresholds that couldn’t be crossed

and windows that turned their backs

on what they couldn’t see through.

I should have thought by now

I might have forgotten you

but you’re always the stranger

who shows up at the gate of the abyss

just as I’m about to enter

and throwing me a blindfolded kiss

says Here. Interpret this.

As if it were some kind of koan

you wanted me to break like a fortune-cookie

or Etruscan linear B

or the water of a womb that’s letting go

like the dark night sea that still surrounds us

as if all these eras of time

that have driven past us like stars

driving past roadkill

on the ghost road of the Milky Way

could be clocked

by the heartbeat of an embryo

born posthumously in the past without a future.

And sometimes it comes to me

like a glass eye rounded by the waves of its eyelid

washing up at my feet like a well-spoken memory

that lost its edge to the bluntness of time

there’s nothing natural about human nature

because there’s nothing supernatural about the divine.

PATRICK WHITE

STRANGER IN THE LEAVING

STRANGER IN THE LEAVING

Stranger in the leaving

than you were before you came.

Is it not always so

when people separate?

Lovers who knew each other intimately for years

close their gates to each other

and say each others’ name

as if they weren’t philosopher’s stones anymore.

And the base metal outweighs the gold that comes of it.

Alone with the alone

in the abyss of the absolutes

what was vivid and vital

turns numb as glass

and what was mystically specific about the other

is no longer a shrine that holds the secret name of God.

Stranger in the leaving

than you were before you came.

You leave with some of my memes

as I leave with some of yours

and we are both no doubt slightly changed for good

by the reciprocity of the encounter

like hydrogen and oxygen make water.

Though now it’s all tears frozen on the moon.

Good-bye my lovely

I shall miss your eyes and your skin

and the thrill of your dangerous heart.

I will miss your wounded mouth

I tried to heal with messianic kisses

that never walked on anything but the earth.

And there’s no blame

you couldn’t fit my lunar month

into your solar calendar.

We had everything in common except time

and our faults were as compatible as our virtues.

I will miss the rumours of alien life in the wavelengths of your hair.

I shall miss losing myself like a firefly

in the wishing wells of your eyes

even if now my own seem more

like impact craters in the prophetic skull of the moon

when I consider what’s leaving like an atmosphere from this mindscape.

And I shall always remember

that your heart was as generous as your breasts

and whenever we made love

how the earthly was the envy of the spiritual fact.

You didn’t want anyone to know you were gentle.

Not even me.

But I could see through that mask

eyebrow to eyebrow with you

as if we both were intent on showing the same face to the earth

like the crescent fangs of a Georgia moon that said

don’t step on me

because we were afraid.

More than enough to have you in the nude

I wasn’t a glutton for your nakedness

that demanded you take your illusions off

to prove you loved me.

It would have been an irreverence

beyond the aspirations of heresy

to witness you renewing your virginity

like the new moon bathing in a sea of shadows.

I never tried to pry the petals of the flowers open

before they were ready to bloom.

I was never the ant

that told the peony what to do.

I never tried to look under the closed eyelids of the rose

to see what it was dreaming.

Though I’m not into voodoo

I never desecrated

the bird shrines

of your involuntary taboos.

But now I look in your eyes

and see that yesterday

is less vivid than tomorrow

though neither of them has happened yet.

The new moon is all potential

The full moon all used up.

There are effigies of potential

standing like scarecrows

in late autumn cornfields

and paragons of actuality

who love to star in constellations

that make them out to be the hero.

I try to stay

and I end up going.

I try to go

and the earth moves underfoot.

The root feels the death of its flower

as the autumn stars turn into frost

and burn its petals like old loveletters

to the immensities that didn’t have time to read them.

The harmonies of life

are distinguished from the harmonies of death

by a single breath

taken in

and turned out

into the vast expanses of where it came from in the first place.

And the spirit that isn’t shy of its own lucidity

knows that everything it illuminates

whether by day or by night

has the lifespan of light

and light is the brainchild of the darkness.

So even when the lights go out

like people and candles

and us

the shadows go on blooming

and even when the stars

are a gust of ghosts at our heels

the dust is rich

with the memory of all the roads

that once got lost in us

trying to find their way back home

like blood and fire and spirit

as if their final destination

were always the place they started from.

And if in the lightyears ahead

you should ever wonder if I remember you

be deeply assured

I shall remember you

as if every footstep I took

were a threshold of this homelessness

I am brave enough to cross without you.

And I shall thank you for this courage

inspired by the muse of your absence

and the feel of my blood Doppler-shift toward

long meditative wavelengths of red

that stream from the intensity

of the wounded white-hot blue of a renewed beginning.

You can’t teach a bird to fly in a cage

or snakes to bite other people.

But when I first met you

it was as if the serpent-fire at the base of my spinal cord

that was running to keep its thoughts aloft like kites

suddenly had wings

and all my dirt-bag myths

that crawled on the earth among the lowest

were elevated into constellations

that burned like dragons among the chandeliers.

And when the muses of life well up in me like water

as they will

and ask me back

for all the tears they’ve shed on the sorrow

of the way things had to be

between you and me

for them and us

to happen the way we did

I will show them the eternal flame

of the nightwaterlily

blooming in the clear fire

of its lonely lucidity

not even the rain

the dragon brings

can aspire to put out.

I will show them the sun.

I will show them the moon.

And I’ll say

you see?

That’s us forever.

That swan in the heart of a phoenix.

And they will be well-pleased with the beauty of the lies

I use to shadow the truth with compassionate alibis

for why the flowers fall.

Sometimes it’s the bird that swims through stone

and the snake that flys

in a profusion of fire and water

shadow and form

darkness and light

intensity and death

madness and wisdom.

Sometimes you meet someone

and you realize

this fallible flesh just as it is

is the deepest longing of the spirit fulfilled

like light in a perishable garden.

That there are no flaming swords

in the hands of the angels

at the wounded gates of our exile

trying to keep anything in or out.

Stranger in the leaving

than you were before you came.

The knowledge we have of each other

might want to keep things the same

but like all living things

in this garden of creation

the only way to sustain our innocence

is change.

PATRICK WHITE