YELLOW WILDFLOWERS UNDER A GREY SKY

YELLOW WILDFLOWERS UNDER A GREY SKY

Yellow wildflowers under a grey sky,

visionary smog on the dirty windows,

a genie in a crack pipe that ungrants

whatever wishes you came with

thinking six rocks might be enough

to make a whole new planet

everybody gets to rule

for an hour and a half

like fresh strawberries

and a brand new start. Fat chance.

The spring dawn has run out of preludes

and it’s using spider webs

and dreamcatchers for substitutes.

Could be a lifeboat, could be a shipwreck,

could be this cataract of ash

in my third eye, could be the distant cinder

of a depressed seagull on my bent event horizon.

High calibre thoughts

as dizzy as bullets and marbles

in a game of Russian roulette

that’s in it for the vertigo

and suggestive stage effects.

Addicted to the mystery

I’m always more intrigued

by what I don’t know

about what I mean

than I am by what I do.

It’s good to see wisdom

still holding hands with ignorance

after all these partially eclipsed,

partially enlightened spaced-out light-years

that went by in the flash of firefly

through the temple of a prophetic skull

that thought it was playing with lightning

when, in fact, it was only

third man on the match.

How could I possibly regret

what I still don’t understand about life,

or celebrate what I delude myself

into giving the benefit of the doubt

when I open my mouth like a dove cage

and all the words fly out,

every mourning dove and longing nightbird

with a message that might be true

from me to God knows who?

And I know I’ve been staring dragons

in the eye too long

waiting for the moon to blink first,

as if I had something to prove

about the indefensible dignity of a human

when one isn’t there to defend itself.

The true human isn’t truly human.

I think it was Hakuin who said that.

And besides, my humanity when I am one

talks with the tongue of a scuffed boot

that’s been down one too many roads,

stepped once too often over the edge,

or on a landmine buried in snow,

crossed too many thresholds,

too many burning bridges

with the broken heart of a bell in my mouth

and my new freedom shrieking

like a banshee at the door

to care much about what thing

comes thus anymore. Could be a curse,

could be a blessing, could be par for the course,

or worse, the sonic boom of experience

breaking down the sound barrier

of another sacred syllable for the record books.

Days I feel like a white tiger on the moon

with the fang of my first crescent

broken off, doomed to starvation

like fire stalking meteors for their oxygen

as once I used to drink blood like the nectar

of freshly-killed ruby-throated humming birds

that tasted like small aperitifs

of delirious picture-music

at the trough of the hollyhocks to me at the time.

Yesterday if you were to ask me what self is

I’d have said the sum of all you tried to rise above

but didn’t. Today it’s not even worth

considering the question longer than it takes

to dismiss the ensuing silence

as just another kind of curious theory.

O to be as useful and down to earth

as a wheelbarrow in the world,

a vehicle for building materials one way

and a death cart for the dead and unwanted

getting the excess baggage out of the way

of the garden I’ve wanted to be from the very start

sitting with Hafiz and Shabastari

like fountainmouths in the shadowwater

of the black walnut trees gibbering

with irritated sparrows and circus squirrels,

shooting the lyrical breeze just for the hell of it.

What could be sadder or lonelier than a muse

that no one’s listening to, if it isn’t a poet

who doesn’t write back in tears to cool her eyes

with a song he made up on the sly

to slip under her door like a mailbox at midnight?

The wind rustles in the crowns of the trees

like the transient themes of pollen and dust,

and at night, gusts of stars, we all are.

And there are fires that give us sanctuary from the cold

we can sit around like planets for a whole lifetime

trying to squeeze a constellation out of smoke

and chimney sparks, and never manage

anything more than a firefly shy of a flashlight

trying to read a star chart in the dark

like a nightwatchman peering through windows

looking to see if anything’s out of place,

untoward, missing, or lost in a space of its own

like a stay-at-home atmosphere trying to find a planet

that doesn’t take it for granted like ozone on the moon.

Tomorrow, where will today be

when you look back on it like yesterday

if not at the same seance you summoned it to just now

to try on the death masks of the ancestral mediums,

eyebrow to eyebrow, on both sides of their eyes,

as if you were choosing the best language

to speak to yourself in when you’re an alien among the stars

and everything is too immense, too radiantly hot and cold,

and time crowds eternity out of its imagination

and the void is so colour-blind it couldn’t find its way home

if you were to line the streets with lighthouses,

and to be a human is to be exalted and humbled

in the same moment, like a moonrise without any frills

like vapour trails in a sunset, or ghosts

before the break of dawn anxious

to get back to their graves on time, and you can tell

by the way she carries her prophetic skull with dignity,

she’s trying to do what we’re all trying to do

each after our own fashion, given we’re made of starmud.

Ingather and shine, ingather and shine, any way you have to.

PATRICK WHITE

THEY'RE HANGING FLOWERPOTS FROM THE LAMP POSTS AGAIN

THEY’RE HANGING FLOWERPOTS FROM THE LAMP POSTS AGAIN

They’re hanging flowerpots from the lamp posts again

like a change of stars every spring, and between

the young trees that held their allotted postage stamp of ground

on both sides of the street, through a long winter,

they’re turning up the soil in the whiskey barrels

as if they were digging up the corpse of a drunk

to see if he died sober or not or just accidentally fell in.

And I remember a man, used to live up there,

the second story window on the right, at the top

of a flight of sway-back stairs from carrying

two hundred years of the weight of the world

like the worn chakras and vertebrae

of a beast of burden that never woke

the serpent fire at the base of its spine

in time to free itself, but as the Arabs say

the donkey at the end

is in the lead when the line or the spine

which ever comes first, turns round.

May it be so for him who lived in a single room

for thirty years, cutting out pictures from magazines

and filing them according to their themes.

A testy, paranoid man, the black sheep of his family

who kept breaking his Faberge heart

on street girls who needed a place to stay for the night,

who could read his kind of sheet music

like an open violin case on a corner,

busking for the short end of the stick.

But it was love to him, and there were always

real tears at the end when he went back to his magazines

each time more bitter than before, to clip

the eyes out of the picture-music of his dreams

like dead flowers out of his bower of bliss in the spring.

He was a nocturnal man, half raccoon, he came out at night

to scavenge the streets as an unlicensed living off the grid.

Drugs, wallets, money, cigarettes, keys, condoms,

fancy jewelled watches with gold expansion bracelets

that had slipped from some drunk real estate agent’s wrist.

And then he was told he was going to die,

fifty-five, kidney cancer, six months at the most,

and I was awed by how he accepted his death

with the silence and dignity of an everyday affair

people have been doing unnaturally for millions of years.

And he gave his clippings and collages

and the most precious treasures of his lost and found

away like pressed flowers to people all over town

and when I asked him, sitting on the sidewalk

on the front step of his place, what he was going to do

in these last six months of his life, he said

I want to eat in every restaurant in town before I’m dead.

And he almost did, except for Mexican,

before I last saw him as I imagined he looked

under a closed coffin lid at a shabby wake

that pointed out which one he was

in his high school year book

with all the eyes cut out.

And you could live here for a hundred and fifty years

among the tribal locals of the highlands of Lanark

like an old testament prophet on a hobby farm

and still be considered too weird to sit at their table

without realizing you’re still not one of them,

though you’re tolerated like another fieldstone

in the wall with the steel gate that separates

one cemetery from another, not according

to how you died, or what you lived for,

but who you lived with on Foley Mountain

or in the back woods up around Fernleigh and Ardoch

where the people look up at the stars and wait like rocks

for the last two and a half centuries.

He wasn’t one of them, hardly anyone here is

where only the black flies are drawn to the smell

of an outsider until two days of intense heat

kills them off at the end of May, and you’re free to stay

as long as you like in the tiny one room

apartment of your mind, trying to make

strays and runaways stay awhile, linger a bit

on the last step of the stairwell

they’re climbing down from heaven on

as if life were the bannister of a free ride to the bottom

and that was the best a furtive creature like he was

could expect to snatch from life for him and his cat

and exaggerate into an expanding universe

from a single random atom of love

before it all imploded in on him under its own mass

like a black dwarf with nothing left to look forward to

but a black hole they lower you into like a dead lifeboat

into the oceanic awareness of the starless sea before you

with an admiral’s hat made of old magazines

that took the journeys you should have taken years ago

like the paper boats of Li Po down the Yangtze River.

Wary of bliss, because you’ve made your happiness

a nest in the depths of your desperate solitude

too important not to bobble the ball or the cosmic egg

like a translucent bubble smeared in sticky rainbows

out of fear of its loss, you can turn into the very thorn

you’ve feared most of your life is going

to burst your bubble into tears

that you made yourself in a hall of mirrors

look so foolish chasing it like the eyes

of beauty in the beholder with a butterfly net,

and when that doesn’t work, just as often as not,

stairwells of flypaper trying to catch the falling stars,

and put them in your pocket, and never let them fade away.

And he wasn’t a good earner with lots of candle power

so he had to traffic his experience for their lost innocence

like a blind lighthouse in love with fireflies

that could see him better than he

could ever see them or himself.

Love loses the mystery of the inconceivably real

once it becomes a deal in life, a tit for tat.

Most young women know that by the time

they’re fifteen these days, and especially the runaways

couch surfing in the archives of ardent stamp collectors.

But it strikes me as too facile for those

who are luckier in life and love to judge him

from a few snippets of gossip on the local mill wheel

grinding the gist of the issue down to something digestible,

and barely a mention in the paper worth cutting out.

And, who knows, maybe if he had lived as he had died,

offered a last meal, he should have tried

everything on the menu that life had to offer him,

stood astride himself like a colossus of a lighthouse

in the face of the storm on that dangerous coast

he never got to see, instead of sitting in his room

waiting for some mermaid who wasn’t singing to him

call him to the rocks as if she were coming to his rescue

like a black and white issue of a pin-up movie queen

in an old back issue of Life magazine.

And there’s plenty of people with more rocks around here

than they know what to do with to cast the first stone,

like the kissing stone of the Kaaba in the filthy hands

of the local Taliban at a romantic man and woman

trying to find some love in life in Afghanistan

just the same as they are in Ompah tonight.

But the only rock this delinquent would throw

through his window if I were ever going to

would be the full moon at the ghost of the scarecrow

breaking bitter bread with himself

at his own harvest table, to get up out of his grave

like a lunatic with a happier appetite for life and love

and like the longing of the crow and the wolf on the moonlit hill

call out for more than he ever knew how or what to ask for,

except in the way he died, nobly, without a word of reproach,

as if a long-standing empty prophecy

had been at last wholly fulfilled by the menu

of almost every restaurant in Perth,

where a blue moon in late October

served second helpings of a last meal

to a condemned man of no little worth to those of us

who admired the equanimity and grace of the way

he pushed his chair away when he’d had enough

and left the table like a pair of scissors

on the cutting edge of life for good.

PATRICK WHITE

OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN

OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN

Over and over and over again

you return to me each time

made more beautiful by the pain

I embrace you with

like the aura of fireflies

in the afterlife of the lightning

that was struck by you.

Over and over and over again

I have watched the birds leave in the fall

and come back in the spring

and whether they were coming or going

especially at midnight when you couldn’t see them

high overhead like the souls of the dead

I’ve always heard the same longing in their call

for something I’ve never been able to wholly comprehend

except as the way I miss you

on this journey without end

where the destination isn’t always

the friend of the road

as the stars foretold it would be.

And I don’t know why

I always associate pain with lucidity

like the price of shattered glass

when you hurl the moon through it

from the inside

to let the light in through the damage

and you back into my life again

like the radiant sorrow of a lonely tomorrow

that today already lives in vain

like a weathervane

trying to give the wind a direction

it’s never taken before.

Over and over and over again

I have looked for your hidden mystery

in the history of gone

for some living intimacy that lives on

but I’ve run out of doors and gates and windows

flowers and skies I can leave open

hoping you might find your way back in somehow

from those spaces greater than skin that fit you now

like the dress you were buried in.

The random singularity of death’s one demand

might shake the tree

into the soft hooves of the highest fruit

that gallop off like wild horses

spooked by their own windfall into the silence

but over and over and over again

I turn the fact that you once existed

like a jewel I once knew from the inside

into an act of insight

that over and over and over again

rocks me like the aftershock of an earthquake

as if your death weren’t once but many

and I would live my way through them all

listening to the geese depart at night in the fall

wondering which one embodied your soul

like a star-bound angel in earthly feathers

and whether you noticed me as you left

over and over and over again

standing in the light by the window

a tiny dark figure down below

listening for you in the darkness

like a vase full of ashes

wishing it had wings.

PATRICK WHITE

MAKING PEACE WITH MY FATHER

MAKING PEACE WITH MY FATHER

You could be dead by now.

How would I know?

Last time I saw you

was fifty-five years ago.

My first day of school.

Your last with us.

You’re the little man now, Paddy,

you said

then got on a greyhound bus

in front of Tang’s Pagoda

as I watched the door close

on that fuselage without wings

as if the whale had just swallowed Jonah whole.

The last time I noticed we had the same eyes.

The end of your reign of terror.

As I remember you fifty-five years later

you were brutal, violent, cruel,

a con-man and a drunk.

You hurt people then laughed at their pain.

You were the lethal meltdown of a radioactive brain

that made the grass glow at night

from thousands of miles away

and poisoned the rain.

I went to jail with my mother to bail you out

more often than I was pushed into going to church.

And when you got out

you were always as angry as a killer bee

in the soggy autumn orchard of your hangover.

Life for you as it is for any coward

was one long complaint you took out on us.

My first seven years

I watched as many ambulances

take my shattered mother away for months

as many cop cars washing up on our doorstep

with all those messages in a bottle

that had your name on them

like a federal warrant for your arrest

as I recall the clinking horse-drawn milkwagons

with their coloured cardboard bottle caps

or the tinkling neighbourhood ice-cream trucks.

Remembering you now at this late date

is like fingering the fossils of a Tyrannosaurus Rex

and feeling the faint resonance

of your ferocity even yet

through my fingertips

like a warm-blooded mammal

in the menacing shadow of a reptilian law

whose last judgment was always a jugular in a jaw.

If you’re dead,

if you’re truly dead,

did you die alone?

Did anyone grieve?

Did you change over the years

and become a good man

as righteous as the stroke of midnight

and atone for anything

before you boarded the next bus for the abyss?

Was your last flashback of life

the sunami you drowned in

after your psychological fault lines

flintknapped an earthquake

that brought the whole planet down on us

everytime you barged through the door

back from the bar

and turned a home into an avalanche?

Did you remember your children?

Did you remember me?

Did you ever wonder

how I turned out without you?

Who knows?

Maybe I’m way too late for your funeral

and this wreath of blood and thorns I bring

to lay on your grave

like the bitter irony you fathered in me

is not a fitting obsequy for either of us

because maybe, possibly, improbably

as you aged like an acid

time defanged your thunder

like a white cottonmouth

and the moon took back its crescents

and the lightning began to make crutches of the trees

it used to split like cedar shakes

with double-bladed bolts of light

that scorched so much more

than they ever illuminated in the darkness they returned to.

As if the whole of the little earth I knew then,

my mother, me, my brother, my sisters

sported the wounds you gashed

on everyone’s heart and a skull

like chopping blocks

under your bloodied blunted war-ax.

For longer than autumn’s been keeping time now

with rosaries of geese in passage

like the secret names

of God on the run

for bouncing rubber cheques,

I have carried you around inside of me

like a chromosome in a coffin.

It’s a kind of genetic locket

I sometimes open

to remember you by

when I’m mythologizing my scars

like blackholes among the stars

or the empty eyesockets

on the wailing walls of the dice

you loaded like the prophetic skulls of a bad choice.

And I still don’t know if I’ve come

like an eviction notice

to this dismal place

to condemn you

or exorcise your ghost

I have despised you for so long within me

like the sloughed skin of a snakey oilslick,

the black blood of a hemorrhaging eclipse

that covers everything like an executioner’s hood,

the birds, the sun, the sea,

every tarnished cell of me

in a darkness that won’t wash off.

Or maybe I’ve just shown up again

like Empedocles on Aetna

to jump into the collapsed caldera of your grave

like the last flower.

Ambiguous homage with seven kinds of meaning

to a spent volcano

buried in itself

that once knew how to preserve the dead

in all the twisted shapes of prolonged agony

that has characterized the living ever since.

Every day of my life

I have wanted to give you back your name

like a white cross on a black plague door

that isn’t me anymore

and never was.

Or maybe I should

jump down into your grave and say

Hey, Dad, isn’t this sad for you and me

this is the way we take leave of each other for good

like chainsaws snarling

through the heartwood of the family tree?

Isn’t it just so incomparably sad

that a son being honest as a deathbed

with his father as he dies

over and over again in his imagination

as I do now here beside you

should lean over and whisper into his father’s ear

with a heavy heart that regrets it was ever born to mean it

Hey, Dad, I want you to know

when it’s my time to go

and I get to the other side

of all that was

and can be abandoned

time will heal everything

you did and didn’t do

and all these severed bloodlines

reach their final watershed,

all the weak threads

of what was unbound

like rain in the river

fall into the flowing

and be made whole as strong rope again,

and the eye that offended be plucked out

and an old fist be opened up like the new palm

of a better afterlife than the one we had here,

and reunited families everywhere

break bread together in love and laughter

and every father be a strong rafter

and every mother be a lamp in a tent

and a cool night wind

as intimate and near

as stars in a desert,

and every son

say farewell to his father

as I do now here beside you

on this re-useable illusion of a death bed

where I am trying so hard to listen

to the voices in my heart

instead of the wise-guys in my head:

Father, farewell.

You gave me these empty eyes.

My mother filled them with compassion.

May peace marrow your troubled bones at last

and God soften the stone

upon which you lay your head.

What has passed has passed

like a storm out over open water.

You were my father at noon.

I was your son at midnight.

You withdrew like a shadow

that dreaded the light.

May God grant you a deeper insight

into these lives

we pass along to one another

like candles in the doorway of a dark night

and the courage to see

when they’re blown out

and death comes to sever even this little thread

of earthbound lucidity

that exists like blood between you and me

why even if these eyes of yours you gave me

were washed up like the survivors of a shipwreck

on the eyelids of the same shores

we started out from together,

asked whose son I might be

and who among all the generations

of the unborn and unperishing gathered there

was the road that fathered my journey,

I would answer

my life was a river with only one bank

that flowed from a sea of shadows on the moon.

I would embrace my mother in tears

if I saw her standing there

for all the long, hard, humiliating years

she always sat on the edge of the bed

the last thing at night

before we fell asleep under her eyes

and quietly lowered herself down

like a ladder into a snakepit

so we could climb out

without getting bit by the same viper

that had struck her like black lightning

in the heel in an orchard in spring.

About you I wouldn’t say anything.

I’d swallow my voice like a sword.

I wouldn’t sacrifice a word

on the altar of the silence

that waited like a god

to hear himself named.

I’d shake my head.

I wouldn’t look for you among the dead.

PATRICK WHITE

STEEL TEARS

STEEL TEARS

Steel tears that have hardened out of the April showers

of crystal chandeliers I’ve shed over the years

for others who suffered like me. Pain makes

strange bedfellows, and when you’re twisted up inside

with your umbilical cord wrapped around your neck like a noose

and you know things just aren’t going to come out right,

or strung out like some old shoelace of dna

that’s lost its telomeres at both ends, frayed

and trying to thread the eye of the needle,

because all the cells in your body have risen

from their ashes one too many times. When

some hydra-headed anaconda of suffering

that held you in its coils like childhood,

hunts you down again long after you thought

you’d cut the last head off

like a dandelion gone to seed,

and you see it grinning

like a gleeful malignancy in your sleep

as it crushes the life out of you as if

you were pearl diving for the last gasp

of atmosphere left on the moon,

and you don’t even know why, if you did,

what you did wrong that this background universal hiss

of ancient radiation should have

held a grudge against you for so long

so cold, so vast a vacuum of starless time and space

and then have the guile to plead

that it’s innocence is impersonal

whereas yours is immaterial.

When all your swans are swimming in an oilslick

and the Great Square Of Pegasus is going down

into the La Brea Tarpit like a new moon you were betting on

to secure your passage out of hell like a coin on your tongue

and you come to death and find out

you’ve been tragically short-changed,

and it’s lights out even before the music starts playing

the electric requiem that keeps shorting out

like your own personalized national anthem of one,

and you’re too angry to feel sorry for yourself,

just as a house fire doesn’t ask for water to put it out,

and even when you do coming running, it’s white phosphorus

and it laughs in your face at all your futile heroic efforts

like your reflection in water, and sneers like a nuclear winter

at all your transformations to stay alive creatively against the odds,

you might do what I do and make a mighty effort to dig

the last of my first magnitude stars like spurs into its eyes

the way you do when you’re trying to get a shark to let go,

befriend one of those black holes you alienated from yourself

and ask them to come over and bend time and space a little

and getting a good grip, break its jaws like the pelvis of a wishbone

that got the short end of the stick with the help of a little muscle.

When you find the wings on your heels crushed underfoot

like a killdeer under the weight of the world,

and all your false idols have driven you into exile

like a scapegoat with the sins of the tribes on your back

at the cleansing of the temples in May, and even the Milky Way

sweeps your shining like the gift of an unwanted child

like stars off the stairway to heaven into a dustpan,

don’t stop to ask for an explanation, or as the Buddha said,

don’t ask for the name of the archer

before the arrow’s been taken out, or why

the lightning should kill the messenger like a weathervane

before it’s had a chance to crow at its grand entrance,

come with me, don’t wallow in what you’ve laboured for

and lost like the afterbirth of sorrow, or a wheelbarrow

of what’s been pulled up from the garden like a weed

and heaped on your heart like the death cart

of a spiritual refugee with a starmap to nowhere.

There’s a gate on one hinge, overgrown with wild grape vines

on the far side of the high starfields, that’s an exit out of here

that hasn’t been used by a domesticated animal in lightyears.

And the constellations that burn like shattered mirrors

come to terms with their own tears like gypsies

sitting around their own fires, and break into flower

when you least expect it from the least expected quarter

just to add a little auroral flare to the affairs of the night.

And soon you’ll be up on your feet tripping the light fantastic

in a danse macabre of fossilized constellations

from another era of shining when the whole sky

was a dance floor with a musical sense of timing.

And whatever farce you’ve made of yourself

here in your own mind is the legend

of your own ongoing creative myth of origin there.

And the nails they’ve driven into

your old growth forests here are tenderly removed

and the muzzled chain saws no longer gather

at trunk of the bleeding sequoia

like snarling hunting dogs trying to

break the bones and lap the marrow

of waterproof telephone polls in the making.

Every journey’s a lottery of small steps you take

through a dangerous gate until you’re on the other side

and then you hit your stride like a white-tailed doe of light

the arrows and the shadows of life just can’t keep up to

and take up fletching flowers just to get back to their roots.

I’d tell you a big secret if I could, but saying

nothing about it is the best way to get the point across.

I’m not going to string you along like another spiritual wavelength

from a snake oil salesman who doesn’t even want to taste

his own medicine, too aware of what he put into it,

to take the cure himself like a bath in his own grave.

And I’m not saying the house is on fire, and there’s

only one doorway out to escape being consumed.

You could always jump out the windows of your world view

or stay and hope you’re a phoenix

that can get used to the taste

of eating your own ashes by the urnful

or wait for the prophetic fire-ladders of paradise

to come to your rescue as the windows thaw in the heat

like the pent up tears of an ice-age of bitter emotion.

I’m just saying deep within you there’s a starfield

laid out like an embroidered flying carpet

and at the far end of its boundlessness, there’s a gate

hanging on a single hinge like a killdeer or the loom

of the wild grapevines that weave them and unweave them

like the phases of the moon, and it’s not trying

to keep anything in or out, even if it could

on one wing and prayer, it’s just an entrance to a space,

the pupil of a third eye, where you’re not asked

to scrape the starmud off your shoes when you enter

because even though you feel your roots are homeless

and everywhere you go you’re

walking on quicksand in an hourglass

the trees won’t ever let you forget

you still need somewhere to stand and bloom

and come to fruition like a ripe koan

of compassion and insight into the creative fact

that every beginning is the last step of the return journey home.

Whether anyone’s there to believe it or not.

Or even give it a second thought.

PATRICK WHITE