PROMETHEAN CONTENTIONS

PROMETHEAN CONTENTIONS

My life the wardrobe of a shabby star; here,

take this carnelian pomegranate

that has hardened into a heart

and appease what blood you can, take my tongue

that turned yellow with arsenic in the fall

and was torn down like the flag of an ancient catastrophe

by the denuding expletives of the wind.

I’m tired of the ashes and the cemetery wine

that pollutes them; I’m weary of the view,

this worm-eaten map to nowhere

and the lies it must live to fulfill.

I’ve exhausted the patience

of the bookish rain,

waiting for my shoes to stop talking

about journeys they’ll never take,

so that I can tell them I was a man

with a tarnished direction

that led me off the known roads

to taste the wild blackberries

that ripened in brambles of razorwire.

Here, take the petrified paperweights,

the mephitic moons of my eyes, still stained

by the dead seas that wept themselves empty

to the end of seeing; I once mistook them

for summer sapphires in a mountain crown

but things have been rubbled since then,

and my sidereal aspirations have toppled

to graze on the mannered portion

of the crumbs of light

that survived the avalanche

at a foodbank for wheelchairs and thrones. My mind,

gum under a desk

in an abandoned schoolhouse

and my voice, the graveside elegy

of an extinct species

that couldn’t attune its maverick genes

to the suggested forks in the path of an eloquent serpent,

I am unspooled by my own undoing

as frame by frame

I marred my life with perversions of salt and light

to contaminate my bruised confessions

in asylums of lipless inquisitors.

I am still the ore of the sword in the rock

they couldn’t extort from my ambiguous impurities,

even after the stake and the fire

that moiled the gold of my bones. Blighted by the truth

of a heresy of wounded water,

I was true to the rain

in a holocaust of cabbalistic arsonists

and even here in this fetid ditch of time,

the scattered orchard, the pageant of my blood

is not a danse macabre

or transformative contrition

of flagellant lilies. I am innocent as night

of the stars they impute to me, the lies and legends

of the man who once lived me,

a ventriloquist of physics.

Here take my face and skin, my mouth, my hair, my ears,

and if you still need

a gesture of confession

to glut the cannibal of a creed, here,

take my faith in the expired frequencies

of the universal hiss, or the charred guitars

of my carboniferous impieties. I fumbled the song

you asked me to sing

and limped from the stage

an infamous king of jesters and fools

who overthrew me for a laugh

when the minister of mirrors went insane.

Now I am a smear of sky

on a broken windowpane,

a rumour of hesitant lightning

in a choir of tone-deaf fireflies,

the fraudulent tear

of a leftover saint

who weeps sewers for the poor

to wash the planet off their faces.

I rummage through the garbage

of the aftermath, the decrescent beak of a vulture

reaping the urgent organs of tumescent roadkill

that once cast the dice of their own infraction

to steal their genius back from the gods,

to cool the fire of their solitude on the other side,

to lift the veil

from the star-worn face of the apple

and look into eyes that no one’s ever see

before the worm interrogates the vision

at a carnival of undertakers. Here, take this old taboo, this curse,

the thorns and horns of these dragon teeth

that sowed the forbidden ground of the secret

with armies of fanatical commas

in the service of a virgin period

deported like a holy relic

to the erection of a foreign capital

adorned by the marbles of carnage.

Here take this future from me,

the accident, the crisis and the shock,

the randomness, the tyranny, the sneer

of the heart-crushing boot, the rational madness

of political lovers raised for annihilation, and take this ruse

of happy endings, the chrome and glass

cosmetic face-lifts of a flagging science,

and the indecipherable grammars of the generals

who speak like triggers and the hurricane corporations

who lobby to own the rain

and want to market oxygen as an inert gas,

a logo on every gene. You can have my eyes,

you can bottle my tears

and send them off on the tide, a message and a warning

not to risk a rescue,

and leave me the sole custodian

of my own isolation like a bird in a furnace.

You can plant spies in my semen

and colonize my chromosomes with zoos;

you can introduce me like the skull and crossbones

of a designer virus

and hack into my horde

of piratical ideas to clear the coasts of consciousness

of superfluous corsairs. You can administer

last rites in rosaries of chalk

on ghetto sidewalks and doctor the autopsy

with the platitudinous gangrenes of moral turpitude,

the nemetic karma that plays muse

to your inspired amputations. Bring on the surgeon,

bring on the laughing pathologist

back from a late vacation, unhand me

with the ostrakon, the passport of pariahs,

and distinguish me with a fence, a wall, a camp,

the unmarked grave of a dismembered terrorist

who had no evidence to add

to the celebrity histories of acknowledged slaughter.

Make a token of my head, my prophetic skull

on the platter of a flat earth

to sweeten the sins of your adulterous daughter,

or let me fall upon the sacrificial blade

of the waning moon that lies before me like a sinister eyelid,

I will undo the ribbon of my blood

on a gift that arrived like a stranger

you couldn’t trust. I will endure the abuse

of a premature grave

or enter the vehement emptiness

of a third-world cupboard in a fever of hope

that proves critical, but no demon of your will,

no whim of your capricious brutality,

no reflex of your hatred of love and life, no

acidic austerity of your organized indifference,

no starless wound of any sky

that dawns like bleach in the roots of the rose

that withers like junkmail heaped

before a bolted door on a condemned threshold,

will make me renounce

for the soft immunity of a prosperous lie,

one era, one god, one vulture

of this mountain range

where the apex and the alley are the same,

one adamant link,

one feather of fire or locket of thought

on the planetary chain

of my liberated disobedience,

the enlightened insanity of this sacred malfeasance.

PATRICK WHITE

THIS IS AN OLD SORROW

THIS IS AN OLD SORROW

This is an old sorrow, almost beautiful in the way

it underwhelms me from above, a sky caving in

like a circus tent under the weight of the rain,

a ghost of fruit that could not bear the weight of its tears.

This is a random sadness that’s got me as its only friend

when it thaws like a mirror

looking back over its shoulder

at its glacial past, ex-lovers, friends, certain pets,

and eyes that were glass weeping

in the intense mystic heat of a blast furnace full of stars

for how little they understood at the time, things pass

like Canada geese migrating across the moon

like a river you can’t step into twice.

Though it doesn’t make any sense to say so.

This is an ancient sorrow. And though one direction

is as good as many, I’m still following

the herds of the grazing stars as far north as I can.

O we shall sit down on the good earth half lotus sometime

and cry together for the wound of being alive.

The rose has teeth. And celebrate the scars

in the herb garden as if they were crescent moons.

Or the eyes of a powerful wraith of sadness

saturating the atmosphere with the pathos

of a lament that’s been sublimely burning

through its heart for lightyears

like some deep emptiness it knows can never be filled.

As if God would never be enough for herself

and the whole of the universe were

one long maternity of endless creation

that is manifested in its entirety in each one of us

the way the moon’s reflected in a drop of blood

hanging from the thorn of a rose

with the last of two beautiful sunsets for eyes

like the sheen of auroral silk glancing off the scales

of a black watersnake at nightfall when the swallows go in

and the bats come out on the nightshift

like the winged heels of some demonic messenger

with minions that squeal in a frequency too high to hear.

But however you send it, by sound or by silence,

by light or by night, be assured the message you send

however time and space bend things

is the message that’s received, like a bee by a flower

or a star by the eye that transcribes it creatively

into hieroglyphic metaphors of picture-music

following a dream grammar of starmud

with a bird stuck in its voice like a phoenix in the Arctic.

Time washes the dust of the road off

by shedding the moonlight like a snake’s skin

and skinny-dipping in the fathomless lakes of eternity

it finds along the way like eyes along the mindstream

full of stars and fireflies and what blooms in the soil of its sorrows

beside the stairs at the back doors of all those tomorrows

that left the way they came without saying good-bye.

Volcanic lunar oceans that are only as deep

as the dark tears I have left within me

when I dip the leaking cup of my heart

like the goblet of an impact crater

into a watershed of compassion that looks like the holy grail

and share it with my fellow mirages in this desert of stars

as if they were all as thirsty as I am and everyone

deep down inside somewhere within them

like the green star you can find at the core of an apple,

had a fountain within them like a moon dial or a wine glass

they smashed on the high notes of the nightbirds

just to express their joy as a kind of defiance

in the face of their lots in life, though, in fact

nothing is longer or shorter than anything else in eternity

just as there’s only so much time and then there is forever.

And it’s the black magic in the roots of a demon

that blossoms like Venus in the west

or New England asters up around Westport in the fall.

And though there’s something beautiful in this sadness

that eludes me like a Braille starmap

I can’t quite put my finger on to see what’s shining

like Aldebaran through the tree line of a bride in a widow’s veils,

as I listen to a whisper of flesh

pleading in the darkness not to be excluded

from the presence of time, or left behind by the spirit

like a false clue of cast off rags on a hawthorn bush

to say where it’s gone forever and ever and ever

as if whatever the spirit and the flesh had

going on between them never mattered,

whenever the clarity cuts through

the thin-skinned mirror like this

as if it were trying to slash my eyes open

like an insight into what’s beyond the obvious,

immediately out of a wounded mouth

I am healed by the balm in a voice of compassion

that rises sweetly like the new moon from the womb

of a scarred guitar that didn’t know it had such music in it.

And it says in moonlit windows and nightbirds

that make all the dreaming children wake up and listen

to the intimate strangers that speak as gently as fireflies

to the vast nightskies of their own imaginations,

that the world that casts these shadows on your wall

like a crow preening its feathers, or a bell

that’s lost its faith in knowing, and plunges like an apple

into its next afterlife, are merely the holy petals

and sacred syllables taken like pages from the Book of Life

left out like an orchard in a nightwind for every one to read

like a story each of us writes for ourselves

to help us drift gently off into sleep again

to find out how it all ends in a dream that goes on forever

like the fragrance of lilac in an old woman’s memories

or the marrow of the apple bloom

that clings like the moon to our bones

or stars to the flypaper stairwells of our chromosomes.

No other way to explain the shining of this sadness deep within

as if my very blood mourned the passing of the things

that have drowned and disappeared into it over the years

like honey-bees in the lees at the bottom of a black tulip

full of rainwater, and by that I know

this is a sadness common to all

that’s worthy of the stars in its windows,

and the dreams in the mirrors that paint our faces

like quick watercolour life studies of rainbows in tears.

PATRICK WHITE

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