YOU CAN'T EMBRACE ME WITH YOUR MODERATE LOVE

YOU CAN’T EMBRACE ME WITH YOUR MODERATE LOVE

You can’t embrace me with your moderate love

as if two arms were one too many to give someone a hug,

or one eye were enough to look at the stars in your lover’s eyes,

and make up constellations you’ve never seen before.

I’ve never fallen in love with anyone who ever

made my whole body feel like it was a ghost amputee

who had never gotten over the memory of having one.

You can’t read Braille without fingertips.

And it’s either brave and suicidally noble, or something

drastically real about me but I’ve always preferred

the dark, dangerous muse, to the sunny cheerleader

who cut the bananas into my cereal just for the potassium.

No moon. No music. No slumming in heaven

when we take every other nightshift off from hell

and then walk out on the job permanently like a Tarot deck

to see how it feels to be a shipwreck on the bottom of a prophecy

that foretold, one day, swimmers and drowners alike

would be in it way up over their heads. And that’s

when I learned to count on my heart

like an overturned lifeboat to keep things afloat

for me and anyone I love who went into exile beside me.

Got to be ancient starmaps in her eyes

like the return address of extraterrestials

who promised to come back one day

and make crop circles in the hay together.

And fireflies for back up in the long dark halls

of what we were reading when the stars went out

and we opened up to each other about our secret research

into the comparative mythology of each other’s psyche.

Even at high noon I want to look out of the corner of my eye

and see in the depths of her silence, stars

hiding out in the shadows on the bottom of her wishing wells

and know that she’s ok at either end of the telescope.

And I’ll show her the sun shining at midnight

and the moon among the corals, and come up like a pearl diver

with new metaphors to show her how I can still see her radiance

like a lunar eclipse in a mystic moon rise just behind

the guile of her veils and the eyelashes of her tree line.

And there shall be no shadow upon the earth

that she casts behind her that shall remain starless.

And it must be well understood from the very start

that you can’t put the wing of an eagle on one side of the heart

and that of a sparrow on the other, even less so, a dragon,

and expect it to fly very good or straight to the mark.

And no broken arrows of the promises

we make to each other at a rain dance for the waters of life.

And no sipping from the river when there’s a chance

to swallow it all in a single gulp and satisfy all wells at once

without getting the waterbirds stuck in our throats

like the high notes of sacred syllables above the reach

of the black swans that live in our chimneys for free.

By all means, I want to see the light

but coming out of the dark like a nightbird

with a message that wasn’t meant for anyone else.

She can be swarmed by faeries, she can

live on a menu of mushrooms and toadstools,

all the soft gilled things without hooks in them she wants

I don’t care, as long as she includes

a banshee or two scratching at her wings like windows

to be let in to the inner sanctum of her devotion

like a black candle at a white mass for wounded voodoo dolls.

And if she wants me to jump through her wilderness fires

to satisfy her occult desires in a coven of one

that’s ok too as long as she’s enough of a firemaster

to know when I’ve been done well. Not medium rare.

And I won’t have things fifty-fifty, a hundred and fifty percent

and a hundred and fifty percent, or die in the attempt,

because anything less than that is nothing at all.

Love when it comes to the hour of gates, becomes

the best of the other in the leaving, as your lover

absorbs in the turn-counterturn-stand of the perennial dance

things about you she loved at first glance, jewels and virtues,

and all the wildflowers a suffering soul puts out with generosity

that were meant for her eyes only, even you

couldn’t see in yourself at the time because even

among the most enlightened of us, the deepest insight

into ourselves as embodiments of thoughtless reality

is always blind. And if you couldn’t find what you wanted

together, you always find it under your pillow

once the other who left it like a parting gift is gone.

Don’t want anyone after we’ve broken up

who doesn’t know how to honour the memory of what we tried

to be to each other before we outgrew what we meant

when we vowed to console our loss of happiness

with peace and a gentle release of the moon

like a blossom from a dead branch in the middle of winter.

She can come to me flawed, she can come to me wounded.

She can come to me like an apostate sunflower

who wandered off the beaten path to follow the moon.

Selfless as we all are behind our delusions of probity

who remains to be a judge of character except

the most doubtful and disdainfully vain among us?

Let the death masks argue it out among themselves

who is real and who is not, who’s been true and who forgot,

as for me and my house, I’d rather be loved than right.

I’d rather have my lover’s head in my lap at the end of the night,

or mine in hers. I’d rather stand beside her

and look up at the stars together as if they knew

more about us than us about them, than feel them

hemorrhaging like supernovae in both our eyes

arguing like medieval theologians painting

a picture on the third eye of the telescope

we’re looking at through both lenses simultaneously

eye to eye, tooth to tooth, one false idol to the other,

squabbling over whose lop-sided view of the paradise

we planted to live in together, is most worthy of worship,

the hunter or the farmer, the hunter or the farmer,

keeping in mind women invented agriculture.

Intrigue me, berate me, teach, upgrade, or refute me,

just let me feel your hand when I suffer

as if it were the wing of a bird

I was scrying aviomantically to see

if it had healed enough to fly, to make

my homelessness a big enough sky for her

to spread her wings in and wheel

on the passionate thermals of joy

that arise within me like double helices of inspiration.

And in return, I would promise her to never think

I’d found an answer to her mystery, or a reply

to the silences that abound within her

like nightbirds that just won’t answer.

And if she’s not in her shrine when I come to lay

a bouquet of stars at the foot of her temple stairwells,

or off at a coven somewhere with the Horned One,

trying to get a handle on my polyphrenic diversity

that can speak to the angels as well as the demons in tongues.

Shapeshifter though I may be, I promise her

by the time she gets home she’ll always recognize me

in the form that most becomes her. I’ve always thought

that death was shorter than life, because

death isn’t lived through even for a moment and if

anything lasts forever anywhere, it’s right here

where we can dance like rootless trees to the songs of the nightbirds

and listen to the squirrels in the walls in the morning

stacking black walnuts like prophetic skulls,

and reach out to the waterlilies like dragonflies

that know how to interpret them like loveletters on the sly.

PATRICK WHITE

BECAUSE I DON'T CONFRONT YOU

BECAUSE I DON’T CONFRONT YOU

Because I don’t confront you

doesn’t mean this tree

doesn’t know how to stand up to the wind.

If I bend like a river reed in a current

I’ll still be here

long after the current has passed.

To the unenlightened it’s inconceivable

there’s nothing to win

because both opposites are empty.

Take empty from empty it’s still empty.

No reason to put a gun to your head to check it out.

Just because you’ve got a trigger

like the first crescent of the moon

doesn’t mean you have to pull it.

Three for three.

Blood and cartridges.

Strange lipstick.

But you’re still banking on the one that’s empty.

Those that have the power to hurt

but will do none.

Shakespeare.

Sonnet 94.

Lonely advice to those who never take it.

And it’s not hard to imagine

better things to do in the world

than trade barbs and stingers

with third world killer bees.

And there’s nothing unholier than a holy war.

Or a faith that festers

because it doesn’t know

how to clean a wound properly.

Even maggots make better nurses than that.

And besides

as unlikely as it seems at times

I’d rather be loved than right.

I don’t want to lie down with a woman at night

like a body count.

You say I’m not in touch with reality

as if reality were some kind of guillotine

you expected me to stick my neck out for

swanning on the block.

No.

I don’t stay in touch much

with French executioners.

But I can see the world as you see it.

A snakepit with the occasional apple-tree.

You think of reality as a hard medicine

you have to wince like a lemon to take

but if you ask me

the way you put it

reality sounds more like a toxin

than the antidote to the snake.

If the kids don’t like it then neither do I.

The iodine you pour on things

hurts worse than the original scrape.

The cure is more delirious than the disease.

You see the black door of the prison

and you want to paint it pink.

You realign the constellations

like barbed wire around a concentration camp

and reality drives up like the commandant

of what you think

to announce to the inmates

they’re in the real world now

where iron rules

and the watchdogs never sleep.

What happy fool

bemused by watching his illusions

chase their tails

and play with snakes

is going to turn his delusion in

for something as stern as that?

An ideologue is someone

whose spirit is weaker than their intellect

and ideas pack like cholesterol around their hearts

and harden like plack on their teeth.

Someone who is terminally ideational

thinks of reality as a kind of rehabilitation

for the rest of us.

A man asks for water in a desert of stars.

An ideologue offers him bleach

as if he were redressing an incorrigible wino

for giving up on reality.

And when he talks of reform

it’s like listening to a dvd

giving step by step instructions

in how to turn a chameleon into an albino.

And I see something of the same in you.

Ideologues are appalled by the sloppiness of life.

They see it as something to organize

not something to create.

They hate the suggestible mysteries

that never quite come into focus.

They want to refit the Flying Dutchman

with real sails and upgraded astrolabes.

They loathe the Uncertainty Principle

at work in their atoms and their evolution.

They look at beauty as ornamentalism.

There’s nothing functional about a sunset.

Even out in the country

I’ve heard them scolding life

for squandering itself on a flower.

Wild asters and loosestrife

are merely a silly extravagance

and there are so many stars at night

you’d think life was running a casino.

When you tell me I should get in touch with reality

I feel I should be looking for some ultimate

behind everything

some ulterior way of understanding life

that illegitimizes everything under my nose

as mere phenomena and appearance.

The rat behind the arras.

The meaning of things

that makes things irrelevant

as if what my senses perceived

were mere wrapping.

When I look at things

as if there were no inside or out

to them or me

I see the creative contents

and events of a mind

that belongs to all of us.

And there isn’t a thought or a thing

that doesn’t express the whole of it.

Delusion and enlightenment

share the same nature I do.

The star is as much me

as I am the star

so when I say the stars have opened my eyes

to how exalted you can feel

when you’re humbled

by the sublime lucidity of life

my eyes have done as much for them.

You want to put life on a diet.

And time on a budget.

Usually when someone tells me to be realistic

I’m talking to a conservative

who’s in denial about the future.

Nature is nurture

and no one’s ever left the womb

but there are available dimensions

in the dark backward abysm of time

that’s been maturing us for the last

fourteen and a half billion years

out of our own inconceivability

like wine

not vinegar

into this sublime creative collaboration

which is the life of the mind.

Whatever we create

simultaneously and seamlessly creates us.

It’s a child’s drawing.

There are no flaws in it.

What’s unrealistic about a purple sun?

Lebanese cochineal shells

for the togas of the Roman imperium.

The emperor’s got no clothes.

So you dress him up in your nakedness

and paint his portrait in purples and blues

and ask Caligula to lend him some shoes.

It’s a dynamic equilibrium of transformations.

It’s a living cosmic harmony

that’s as mystically specific and intimate

as a snowflake melting on your arm.

The dead branch blossoms

like a witching stick

whenever it’s near water

and the magician’s wand sheds its skin

like serpent-fire on the wind.

These things are true too.

Anything the Inconceivable

does or reveals

is always spontaneous

because there is no way of predicting it.

Every drop of water

that opens itself like an eye

in the infinite sea of awareness

is merely water watching water

shift its shape into fish and trees and humans.

The river turns

and the zodiacal kings of the Etruscans

bow down to Vertumamnis

who will grow up to be kidnapped by the Romans

and raised as Morpheus the god of dreams.

Or Orpheus among the Greeks

if he dreams while he’s awake.

If life weren’t creatively inconceivable

we couldn’t have been born into it

to conceive of the unthinkable.

It’s the empty cup that pours the wine.

It’s the mystery

that all our answers are looking for.

When I look at the stars

though they’re arranged in constellations

to me they are never endlessly one thing

but radiant with beginnings

going off in all directions at once.

You speak of reality

as if it were the negative

of a photographic starmap

elapsed by time.

You’re an equatorial mount with clock drive

and a colour-blind spectrograph

where your third eye used to be.

Thirteen ways of looking at the same blackbird.

Meaning infinite.

And they’re all true.

I am.

And so are you.

And what’s a blackbird

if it isn’t the primordial atom

the many in the one

nuclear fusion

the muse and the inspiration

all the combinations and permutations

of the way it will continue to be seen anew

in every moment

as if it will always be the beginning of creation?

Six trillion miles in a light-year.

And Proxima Centauri 4.7 light years away.

The next star over unfencible time and space.

You look at the insurmountability of these distances

and you think that’s how far it is from here to there

and your isolation brings you to the precipice of despair

when your omnidirectional self

looks creation in the face

and mistakes humility for insignificance everywhere.

And you say to yourself

there’s no point or place

for a period

at the end of an infinite sentence.

And you make a brutal discipline of your irrelevance

and call it reality

and the dead begin to legislate for the living

and the blind for those who can see.

Van Gogh said it best in a letter to Theo.

Some people live their lives

as if they were walking to the stars.

Some take the train.

And some fly.

For the birds

nothing’s ever further away

than their wingspan

as it is with fish and fins.

And turning the jewel in the light

and looking at its infinite flashes of insight

without the glass eye

of a Cyclopean appraiser

cut it up atomically

like a butcher or a surgeon

deciding on where to make the next incision

I would add that like a star

even after billions of years on the road

whose light never really leaves home

because everywhere it goes

it’s in the doorway

on the threshold

because there’s no discontinuity

no distinction

no severance

between a ray of light and its source

between a way of life and its course

there’s a fourth kind of pilgrim

who just has to look up at the stars

or the sun and the moon

or Venus luxuriating in the sunset

if he wants to shine down on everything.

So if I don’t confront you like a bottom-feeder

on the floor of your thinktank

rising to the surface

like a scumbag to high public office

it’s not because I’m a coward or a fool.

It’s just that I’m enrolled

in this funny kind of school

where you learn through experience

to use your ignorance

as a teaching device

to enlighten the Buddha.

What’s water to the goldfish

is water to the barracuda

without and within

every wave of water light and life

the whole sea of awareness at high tide

the whole sky with all its myriads of stars

tattooed on the skin of a water droplet

that thinks it’s tough

to stick pins through the eye of an inkwell

like an Oedipal voodoo doll

with Medusan issues

because she never had a mother

who didn’t turn her heart to stone.

Water is fish.

Fish is water.

Air is bird.

Bird is air.

Earth is worm.

Worm is earth.

And fire is a phoenix that nests in its own ashes.

And you can ask the moon

if you don’t believe me.

Sometimes the water

makes a quick exit

and swims out of you

like tears and light-years of neap tides

but there’s never going to come a time

whether you measure it in lunar months

or waterclocks

or the wavelengths of a snake-pit

you’re ever going to swim out of it.

PATRICK WHITE

THE WORLD IS ONLY AS BIG

THE WORLD IS ONLY AS BIG

The world is only as big

as the size of the life going on in me.

If I wanted to take the full measure of the sky

what could that be

compared to the lightyears it takes

to get from one side of my mind to the other?

And look how huge the darkness is

that can be cast by one star

like the negative of its shining.

And what road has anyone walked

that was ever longer than their shadow?

Eternity’s just another way of saying

you’ve run out of space for time.

I don’t think I’m going to live forever

but my life will go on without me

just as it always has.

I’ll get up in the morning

like the ghost of someone I can’t remember

and I’ll have a coffee and a cigarette

as I wait for the obscurity to clear

like steam on a bathroom mirror

to see if I can recognize

anything about me

that was true yesterday.

Will I feel as I do now like a leftover

from the night before

pushed to the side of the plate

as everything in the room

reviles me slightly

and gets back to the silence

they were engaged in

before I interrupted them so impolitely

I smeared their meditation

with my intrusive incoherence?

They all seem to be waiting

for someone to make an appearance

but it definitely isn’t me.

It’s beautiful outside

but when I look

I’m always looking at the beauty

of someone else’s bride

and I turn away like night from the orchard

as if I were always the best man

at the wedding of Adam and Eve.

Eden.

In clay-bound Sumer

from the word Edin

meaning the southern marshes

of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers

whose mouths were always full of food

and the living was easy and good.

Same garden.

Same tree.

Same apple.

Same suggestive serpent.

But I’ve always understood

from the first bite

of self-knowledge

the baffled man in me

eats the apple to know things

about the lucid woman in me

who eats it to grow wings on a snake

to raise that up high

which has been cast down low.

Now all gods and dragons are estranged oxymorons

and Nicholas of Cusa’s Coincidence of the Contradictories

is the yin and yang

the lingham and yoni

of a grand biodynamic plan

to sow clarity in the heart of confusion

to see what kind of chaos we can make of it

that might randomly advance

the creative mischance of evolution

happening everywhere the same

to everyone all at once.

Though to think it has balance and purpose

is to build two retaining walls

in the corner of the one dunce.

It’s the kind of war

where you go to peace against the other

and there’s a commotion

in the heart of the stillness

that is distinctly human.

Something stirring

about the enduring effect

of love and compassion

when it happens without a cause

and the mirrors don’t look through the laws

of iron bars

like skies in captivity

deprived of stars in their solitude

or words to lighten the mood.

Of course it’s absurd.

Life’s only playing at being serious

and a childlike madness

a crazy wisdom

that isn’t imperiously innocent

of its own experience

is the only way to express

the lucid triviality of what’s sublime

about its creativity

like stars in the daytime

lost in the lightless depths

of an expansive mind

that’s come to the limit of things

like a Martian rover

by realizing

there’s no edge to go over.

PATRICK WHITE

TIME SUFFERING AND TOO MUCH LOVE

TIME SUFFERING AND TOO MUCH LOVE

Time suffering and too much love have made me soft. I’m a moonrock that’s blunted its edge in a war against water. I’ve put my volcanoes to bed. I’ve put my anger on ice like a Martian meterorite in Antarctica. And I don’t go looking for victories that are worthy of my scars as much as I used to. It’s enough to get carried back on my eyelids like a shield wounded in a solitary war of liberation whose frontlines are everywhere. You may be bullet-proof but how do you keep yourself from being assassinated from the inside by your own insight? Or the shadow of a loveletter being slipped under the door by someone in the well-lit hall late at night? I remember knowing who I was. I was whole with a goal and an undeniable direction. Everyone said I was a diamond in the rough but that only meant I couldn’t be cut by the baggage I was carrying. I was the eldest son of a single welfare mother and that’s why I think my small boy’s notion of doing good to please her turned into a holy crusade of gutter heretics against the orthodoxies of wealth and power that squatted like a landlord on the lid of the garbage can we were living in, trying to mistake it for the holy grail. I grew up like a goldfish in a shark bowl and quickly learned to get the jump on evolution by evolving teeth and fins. And though I’ve gotten rotten falling down drunk with the nine muses beside the Pierian Spring on Mt. Helicon just before they moved down from Thrace to Parnassus I still think of inspiration as blood in the water though I feel more like a dolphin swimming with sharks these days than I do a three hundred million year old marine carnivore who hasn’t changed his ways since his Paleozoic childhood.

Sometimes I think I might be punchy enough to be loveable and good. But the further I get from home in space and time and thought the more the whole universe looks like my old ratty neighbourhood. And there’s that same old slumlord toad of a toxic Buddha still meditating on his lily pad flowering like the full moon of enlightenment rooted in corruption and decay like a garbage-can lid over the whole earth. Sooner or later you either have to indict life as a war-crime or convince yourself somehow that life isn’t fair or unfair and you can’t stuff the impersonal secret of the universe into your little sentimental heart. You’ve got to mentally outpace space in your expansion to stay one step ahead of the universe. You’ve got to understand that a curse isn’t the reverse of a blessing but two eyes in the same game face you’re wearing to scare your opposite into submission even as you read this now.

So I turned to love like a romantic poet but women weren’t the church of my soul. They were the manger of thorns that gave birth to me creatively. I may have thought I was the matador with a sun-forged sword in my hand but it was my blood that ran down the horns of the moon. It’s sweet when the new moon lies down in the arms of the old but it’s hell on earth to be gored on the first and last crescents of a star-crossed calendar. But if someone were to ask me now I would say that sex is a farcical oxymoron that binds us to our spiritual profundities like sacred clowns. Love might stand up for the national anthem but fucking is the lyric of the mob. Two contradictions of the same coincidence or Nicholas of Cusa’s coincidence of the contradictories either way you cut it it’s still Shakespeare’s making the beast with two backs. The dark ores of those motherlode goldrush moments of rapture that punctuate the transcendental tedium of panning the mindstream for things that shine with nothing inside.

Now I consider the possibility that I’ve grown too immense to be loveable and it takes too much time and space for my light to get back to earth as a sign of intelligent life before I’m gone beyond myself again over the intimate edge of the universe as we know it like something that keeps outgrowing my mind. It’s not that I’m not getting younger as I approach the speed of light to make time stop it’s just that the stars get further apart and then go dark like braille constellations fingering the glyphs of their ancient myths as if they were divining for light in the blackholes of the cosmic mystery.

But all you have to do if you want to clarify the turbulent mud puddle of your personal history is evaporate. Liberate yourself from your own reflectivity on the other side of the mirror. The dark side of the moon. Where there is no emergency exit sign above the entrance to death because everybody goes in the same way they come out like a clock at midnight that’s lost sight of where it begins and ends. The shadows of the hands of time are amputees by noon. And by midnight they’re as blind as Tiresias looking upon two snakes copulating like DNA. The Atropic filos of fate severed like the umbilical cords of our afterlives by the scissors of the moon. Two hinges on the same gate that turns like a two-faced calendar of the new year. Two strangers trying to get over the same fear of the solitude that binds them to one another like an ice-bound roll of the dice in January.

Still it’s worth remembering that if you’ve grown bitter and spiritually impoverished by love because you couldn’t ring someone’s bell there’s always a line-up at the back door that’s longer than that at the front. And your knuckles bleed when you have to make a fist to knock. But if you’ve been enriched by love like a sour grape that’s turned its bitterness into wine you can always enter by an upstairs window like the full moon anytime you’re vine or ladder enough to climb up out of the radiant starmud of your own roots like a bootstrap theory of flowers. You can flow upwards like a river into the sky like the shapeshifting smoke of your remains scattered like ashs along the road of ghosts. The feather of a phoenix. Have you seen October sumac set its wings afire when it starts getting cold? You can burn like that beside the road. Or you can lie there on your funeral pyre beside the indifferent night river alone in the dark wondering where you go from here for a whole lifetime. O.K. You died. Big deal. Everybody does. But if you don’t make a gracious bow and get back to life what do you do for an encore after the applause that’s going to make the cemetery sit up and take notice?

PATRICK WHITE

FOR ALL THE SEERS AND SEEKERS OUT THERE

FOR ALL THE SEERS AND SEEKERS OUT THERE

For all the seers and seekers out there,

all you bright seeds on a blind wind

looking for a vision of life you can root in

and express yourselves like willows in the moonlight

to the night creek nearby that listens

when you cry out in mystical bliss

at the surprise of waterlilies gathered at your feet

to catch a taste of the same essence that makes you weep,

deep inside, inside, inside, look there for paradise,

where the stars are dazzled by your eyes

that don’t fade away in the blazing like Venus at dusk.

Looking for the spirit with the spirit

like a breathless wind looking for the wind

to give it mouth to mouth resuscitation

is a snake with its tail in its mouth

enchained to its own liberation.

Is a candle in the sun living on borrowed light

when it’s already well-provisioned with its own shining

for the long nights in the heart

of an unknown radiance within?

Long nights on the high slopes

of the world mountain you’re sitting on alone

like a pauper with kingly second thoughts

about abdicating the ancestral throne of your ego.

For you who are not stuck

like a false idol the size of your thumb

through a three and a half pound brain of starmud.

For you who are not voidbound by your freedom,

or cower in the shadows of your solitude

afraid to read the messages that flower under your doorsill

from anonymous admirers passing in the hall.

For those of you who learned to read and write

in an alphabet of loveletters waiting for a reply

that could answer them all like a return address on the silence.

For you who have taken the splinters of a shattered mirror

out of your eye and replaced them with stars

that have gone on giving light long after

the chandeliers of light-winged sorrows

have stopped waltzing in three four time with their

club-footed candles for the night.

Follow this goat bell up the high dangerous trails

where even overcoming your fear of heights

isn’t enough courage to guarantee your footing

and I’ll show you the jewelled hoofs of the wild horses

kicking up the dust of stars on the open plains

of an inconceivable spiritual vastness where wishes are horses

and beggars do ride and you can hear the jingling

of constellations like the wind-chimes of Spanish spurs

that get under your skin where the spiritual junkies shoot up

like selflessly motivated thorns of starlight

potent enough to keep them high for the rest of the lives

on the antidote they derive like the milk of human kindness

even from the toxic serums of the most dangerous mystical snakes

that have ever poled danced like a winged caduceus

around the axis of the most habitable planet you’ve ever been inclined to.

Whether you’re a blissed-out gardenia of God

or just another double agent doing espionage for the Devil

to see when the next whirlwind of revelation

is going to sweep you up like a chimney spark

into a maelstrom of cosmic events against your will,

look at how the radiance shining out

from the clear void of an unknown light source deep within you

illuminates heaven like the moon in your window

as surely and truly as it does the prophetic skulls of hell.

And this is the point I’ve been missing

and trying to make simultaneously throughout this poem

like a tattoo starred on my forehead

that leads me like a lantern into deeper and darker spaces

than any abandoned shrine in a sacred wood

I’ve ever existed in before like a swallow

among the quake-proof columns of the trees.

We’re all three-winged songbirds under the leaf-cluttered eaves

of the temples we brought with us like spiritual refugees

overstepping the bounds and borders of ourselves

like prodigal sons and daughters on the thresholds of exile.

And each of us weaves, after our own fashion,

on a loom of lunar wavelengths of shadows and light,

a crown of thorns we leave with wings

like the mangers of the earthbound killdeer and English skylarks

after we’ve cracked the koans

of the cosmic eggs we were born from.

We fly away home like ladybirds and dragonflies

whose house is on fire and kids are alone

to have it burned into us like a prison tattoo

that enlightenment is just as white

on the dark side, as it is black on the light.

And though you were to look like billions of fireflies

for millions of lightyears, you’ll never find enlightenment

up ahead of you because it will never be found

anywhere other than behind and beside you

where it’s always been from the beginningless beginning

like a shadow that’s been following you

on the blind side of your third eye that set out

the moment it first opened up to you like a flower to the stars

to look for the other two like a shepherd

looking for lost goats on the altars

of the unblooded sacrificial mountains of the moon.

You just have to look at the stars

and feel them staring back at you on the inside

with the same inconceivable wonder at why and what you are

as you return the light that was given to you back to them

realizing every insight into the nature of life,

every word, every star, every bird, firefly, every

lighthouse and clocktower of the moon

is a sign of mutual greeting that can’t be ignored.

For those of you who cry for the earth that is moved

by the same agony you are, as if you were born

to be its tears, its wounds, its scars,

to suffer like flowers for the beauty you aspire to.

For those of you whose seeing

will become the substance of the world tomorrow

though you should lose your eyes for it today

like apple-bloom, for the sake of the root of the light within.

For those of you who are always seeking

the things that belong to all of us, the dreams

the visions, the insights, the perfect expression

of what we have to say to the silence

that’s always listening to us

talking to ourselves like a sleepwalking stream

or a wild grapevine putting out tendrils

like Korans of Kufic script and Books of harvest Kells.

May your labour come to love you like a bad habit

that’s grown fond of you over the years

because you made an art of your life

that brought the merciless desert to tears

to see how even a delusion or a mirage

with a big enough heart and a taste for compassion

that gives it an eye for how sublime beauty really is

as deep as the watershed at the bottom of a wishing well

it turned into the moment it cried on behalf

of everyone’s efforts to make themselves

in all the glory of their schemes, dreams and delusions

streaming out behind them in victory parades

put on by their own minds

like the emperor’s non-existent clothes

for knowing how to turn a defeat into a celebration,

come true to life. The seeking life. The seeing life.

The just life like dry oak on a good fire.

The life of thought that eventually forgets

what there is to think about. The wasted life

whose gifts were mistaken for flaws in its character,

The anonymous life of a spiritual blood donor

that sent a single red rose to a dead child

and restored her back to life. Life returning to life

like crocuses and killer whales through the ice,

seeking itself out in every corner of our lives,

and under the stones of our own starmud minds

lodged in the earth like meteorites

that once flashed across the sky like insight

from an unknown radiant i

in the eye sockets of prophetic skulls

as if strange new life forms were going on in there

it knew nothing about and was dying to see.

And who knows? Maybe even something

unspeakably precious it thought was lost for good.

And most especially a life that feels life

has shapeshifted it into the dupe of its own ideals,

that all its disguises and deathmasks were removed

like painful tattoos only to reveal a rodeo clown

dressed in a barrel with a red poppy for a cape in its hat

to draw the bull away from the rider that’s down.

To feel like a clown in all your actions

to judge by the crowd’s reactions,

but to put your life on the line anyway

as a funny kind of sacrifice that saves the hero

you risked as much to rescue, as he did

to put you in harm’s way when he faltered.

And you embodied the human condition with compassion,

running away as a way of coming to the rescue,

without realizing, as you laughed at yourself,

it doesn’t get anymore divine than that.

Trying to get a smile out of the bull

you’re running before on someone else’s behalf

in a funny hat with an artificial flower

is a sublime act of devotion

and the truest form of worship

from the human divinity in each of us to another.

Because getting up after life’s been struck to its knees,

is how everything grows, even when its roots

are watered by delusions and its butt gets kicked up

into the grandstands of the amused demons and angels,

that funny little dejected flower in a rodeo clown’s hat

that steals the show like the Buddha’s purse

to buy the Buddha a horse to get back up on,

regardless of what you, the bull, the Buddha,

his purse, the horse or the thrown rider feel,

still blossoms from the heart it’s rooted in for real.

PATRICK WHITE