I SHOULD BE LIGHT YEARS AWAY FROM HERE BY NOW

I SHOULD BE LIGHT YEARS AWAY FROM HERE BY NOW

I should be light years away from here by now.

Too full of shadows. Encyclopedic sorrows

that keep updating themselves. Artistic ordeals

that return me to the world stranger than I was.

More alone. With my indeterminate talent

for living through things like arrows pushed

all the way through to the other side. I should be

out of this raving asylum any day now.

I should be released like a beast from a zoo

by a lightning storm that gnawed its way through the bars.

My last attachment in this zendo of mirageless monks

a rope in the basement, so as not to discourage the kids.

When is enough, enough? Go ask Plato,

or better yet, Plath, Essenin, Mayakovsky, Lao-tzu,

or that ingenuous adolescent down the street

who shot himself in his parents’ laundry room

when his girlfriend said he wasn’t fun enough?

Proved her right. Gouged his parents’ hearts out.

Me? I thought I could shine for the eyeless.

I thought I could make something out of the starmud

of my middle-aged childhood, that honoured my mother.

One time I knew all the names of the stars

in four languages and all their symbolic meanings.

I taught myself algebra on my grade six summer vacation.

One time I could be grinding pyrex parabolic mirrors

with carborundum and a razor blade and a lightbulb

and a catalogue of diffraction patterns to smooth out

the angstroms for ten inch reflecting telescopes

on equatorial mounts, and the next, lighting

a gang leader from Hong Kong up with a jar of gasoline

to get him and his buddies to stop burning cats

or bashing their eyes out with baseball bats

in my Pacific Rim neighbourhood. A Kafkaesque disadvantage

in a cat fight. But I always had this little black pearl

of hope in my heart to go back to like a new moon

that said the spring is bitter, but things are going to get

better sooner than you think. Green apples

still give me gripe. And they’re fallacious when they’re ripe.

Translated Euripides, the Gallic Wars, the Greek Anthology,

seeded thousands of paintings on the wind

like surrealistic milk weed pods from the l0lst Airborne,

and written more poems than even I can remember

that sit stacked in boxes by the thousands in the studio closet

like the segments of a column I haven’t assembled yet

to commemorate my campaign against mediocrity

that no one’s ever heard of yet. Pyrrhic victory

that would have cost as much to lose

as it took to win these spray-painted laurels of tin.

Was a time I worried about myself as an individual

in relation to the tradition of a university literary curriculum

but now there are no individuals and to judge

from what doesn’t get read of the great dead

it’s at least honourable to be acquainted with,

put a poppy and a stalk of wheat on their graves,

no tradition either. Just these club meds of verbiage

when the butterflies land on the lips of their drinks

like cocktail umbrellas. Rimbaud’s eternal cry

of protest against against the calcined fossils

of poetry booking a reading in the Burgess Shale

realities ahead of time. Merd! Merd! Merd!

Like a serial killer stabbing someone to death.

Nothing vatic about the random action of molecules.

No hidden harmonies of earth buried in the astro-turf.

No roots on the plastic flowers, no urgent necessities,

no emergency transcendence, no panicked search

for exits and entrances when the house is on fire,

No mottled fools hoping to bump into a holy grail,

No myths like the Mafia to back every word up

with an offer you can’t refuse. Nothing portentous

as a comet in the flaring of a matchbook

of phosphorus red orchids with daring red eyes.

Dearth. Vacuity. The cynical gratuity

of the gnostic gospels of comic books

no one’s going to read on their way to the grave.

The dependent tolerance of institutional paternalism

bringing the mountain down on everyone’s heads

in an avalanche of awards and grants

that block the road between Terrace and Prince Rupert

as dawn breaks up like ice on the Skeena,

to make sure its forms are quisling enough

to pass a jury if not the way to the sea

of a more dangerous aspiration than a crossword puzzle.

Here lie all those whose names were written in jello.

Whose shrines were Campbell soup can tins.

Whose heart bridged the existential gaps

between hollow and shallow like a reality show

that never went broke underestimating human intelligence

as P.T. Barnum was fond of reminding his circus clowns.

Poetry so fireproof now you could use it

for the insulation of a crack house without worrying

anything is going to break into flames. Or Rimbaud.

Or a Chinese gang leader torching cats.

They’ve pulled the fangs of the moon.

No incisors in their mouths. No thorns on the roses.

And work you could recognize anywhere by its logo,

its celebrity brand name, outdated as soon as sought,

cotton candy befuddled in Lindsay Lohan’s hair.

No birds in their cosmic eggs. No Big Bangs

to get anything started among the membranes

of their birth sacs. Just this endless steady state theory

of still borns deriding anything apocalyptically

coming out of a self-induced coma without a headache.

Want to hang the medal of the moon around

the throat of a night bird, or a choir of wolves,

to see how it estranges their singing from their longing,

their immaculate solitude from a mob of voyeurs

with the hasty tastes of a locust plague of troubadours

that long for nothing so much as a literary career

in a colony of towering termites, with or without a queen.

The democratic revenge upon sidereal exceptionalism.

The whole barnyard full of muddy eagles at ground level.

Or being lead around by donkeys, in chains.

And the muse? The muse never visits you

if you don’t sacrifice your first best goat,

put nothing less than everything on the line all the time,

and never having had a taste of that kind

of apostate creative freedom sweeter than sin,

you’re just another fly buzzing at the windowpane

as if it were a vision of life based on punctuation.

PATRICK WHITE

BROODING SUNSET BEFORE THE STORM

BROODING SUNSET BEFORE THE STORM

Brooding sunset before the storm. Over ripe apricot

left out in the sun too long. Heat brain

boiling its thoughts in their own womb.

The clouds lumber like thundering Diplodoci

Slowly and in herds. Continental rifts in Pangaea.

Black outs and the lightning roots

of unknown blossoms sticking out their tongues

like petals to taste the first drops of rain.

The air menacing, thick, humid as lipstick

foreshadowing climactic things to come.

Sky bound i.e.d.s, and the pigeons scattering

for cover under the eves from overhead drones

that have been circling all afternoon

with the turkey vultures looking for road kill.

The windows set up like easels for the show.

Action paintings of still life with blitzkrieg.

The crackling of glass that layered black over white.

Oleaceous vapours of asphalt on roofs and roads.

I can smell the late Jurassic in rut from here

as black pearls roll off my skin like new moons

sweating tar. And now it’s as dark as a crucifixion

on daylight savings time, as the opalescent grays

homogenize into Bosch armies on the Western Front

just before a rolling barrage in No Man’s Land.

The hemorrhaging, the deluge, the venting, the rage,

a welcome relief to holding it all in though

everybody’s not going to like what they hear

and the fire hydrants are jealous of the rain

and the end of the world is more American than Mayan

bring it on like the hillbilly hippies drunk at the Imperial.

Anticipation. Latent exhilaration. Acoustic guitars

meditating in the corner, chanting aum to resonate

with the positive ions of a punk rock band on the rampage.

The cows plop down in the fields, and the seagulls

for the duration of the saturation bombing run

are grounded like kites on a reconnaissance mission.

Hilarity of chaos outflanking the usual order of things.

Mosquitoes and blackflies biding their time

under the monstrous leaves of the soft basswood trees.

Wrens and swallows in their medicine bags and begging bowls,

bees in their hives, prophets in the belly of the whale,

here comes a delegation of lightning rods to reason

with the open-handed extravagance of the revelation

that we’re as vulnerable as we ever were

in a time of stagnation to cooking the books

when the gods come to get even with us ethically

and the imagination asserts its ancient privileges

over the prophylactic rituals of our own worst case scenarios.

Some to dance naked in the rain. Some to stand

under lone trees in open fields trying not to get bit

by a snake pit of oracular lucidities with the aloofness of a lottery.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT I HAVE NOT BEEN TO THE FEW I LOVED

WHAT I HAVE NOT BEEN TO THE FEW I LOVED

What I have not been to the few I loved,

the cost of what I am. Whoever that is.

And the poor boy happy ending

that was supposed to conclude in money

to redeem the aristocratic poverty

of a doomed childhood, scrapped

from the start as slavishly predictable.

I shone for a while, angry and bright

and university was an easy ordeal of guilt

while my mother washed floors in the Uplands,

and I went through culture shock

in my own country to learn that

not everybody lived the way we did

never further than twenty concrete blocks

away from the despair and poverty of home.

Three meals a day and shopping tours

to Europe, with a jaunt to Auschwitz

along the way. My mother would dress up

for three hours to go to the corner-store.

And it was everything I could do

to keep from laughing out loud

at the pygmies of pain in English Honours

who cried their eyes out in the library

because their mothers were social butterflies

and it was the sixties on the West Coast

when no one was suppose to live in vain.

And I remember the little wet doctor’s sons

who used to remind me of who

they thought I was, asking me, at the end

of an advanced Shakespeare seminar,

at the end of a creative writing class,

after a three hour oral exam on Marlowe,

to sell them heroin I didn’t use or deal

to make them feel, like the postcards of Auschwitz

that showed the skulls in the furnaces

and read Arbeit macht frei,

they were slumming with reality, lest

I forget despite how well I did in class,

where I came from. And the difference

was obvious and lasting. So many things

I had to master just to wear a plausible lifemask

into the golden future of the middle class.

How to sit down at a table and eat

with cutlery as if I were doing surgery.

How to relate to the trivializing of the poor,

listening squeamishly to the screening myths

of how the rich suffer at their hands.

How my mother with hands and knees,

cracked like lobsters boiled in bleach

was leeching them dry on welfare.

I broke up with their daughters.

I punished their sons atavistically

and losing my taste for trying to prove

you could find diamonds in the coalbin

of everyone’s ancestry, and I could stand

eye to eye with the stars as well as anyone,

I ran with a wolfpack of ex-cons

who accepted me as a well-educated

one of their own. And through it all

I returned to poetry after every brawl

and threw everybody off my back

to climb a private mountain of my own

while my mother said do

what makes you happy

and went on scrubbing floors.

PATRICK WHITE

THIS LATE IN THE DAY

THIS LATE IN THE DAY

This late in the day, could I love you, could you

love me? If I made a black rose of my blood,

redshifting into the dark, and gave it to you,

not knowing what to expect, would you counter-intuit

the wounded watershed of the poetic imagery?

Younger I was a lot more dangerous than I am now,

though I wasn’t trying to be. Dragons raged in me

in infernal crusades of the bad against the worst

as I stood at the flaming gates of the vulnerable

and said to their worst nightmares you shall not pass.

I used my horns and scales to empower the innocent,

trying to turn a curse into a virtue, the atrocities

of the left-handed legacy of my condemned childhood

into something even a stranger might be proud of.

In Zen it’s said that nobody likes a real dragon

and even among those I came to the rescue of

like a Viking long boat with runes like scars

chiselled into stone, and well-seasoned swords

that backed up my word down to the very least detail,

even among the exiles who felt compelled to love me,

even among those who didn’t want to be seen

as hypocrites of their fashionable memes if they didn’t,

I could see people backing away from me

like an expanding universe running on dark energy

and that was ok, I was raised to bite the bullet

whenever my heart was liberated by amputation.

Free of me, I am unencumbered by concern.

I can solo in the night skies I return to without fear

of estranging the stars with my intensities.

Now there’s more mage than king in my immensities,

and time, sorrow and death have blunted my edge

like broken glass rounded in the turmoil of the tides

and Merlin has returned Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake,

I feel more like a rodeo clown in a barrel

with a funny hat, a painted tear, and a flower on my head,

a floppy poppy in red, trying to turn the crescents

of the moon bull on me like a Mayan calendar

to keep from goring the fallen who were mounted

above me like heroes that took a fall. A dragon

sheds its deathmasks like petals of the moon.

So if I presented myself to you as I am

could you learn to love an enlightened buffoon

with the injured nobility of a distinguished demon

guarding a small boy’s notion of doing

some good in the asylum of the raving world,

intrigued with the urgency of innocence

to redeem itself like a mutant gene in the fuse

of an occult chromosome that’s always

about to go off like a bomb buried

in the Milky Way of a fanatical supernova?

Was a time I’d hang the heads of my enemies

like Al Ghoul from my earlobes if they dared

to threaten anything I loved that couldn’t defend itself.

Was a time I’d start a fight at my own funeral

just to stand up for someone when I couldn’t.

Now I’m hemorrhaging like amaranthus

on an infernal summer day and my heart

is a coal bin of all the things I used to be

and there’s more tears in the diamonds than blood.

I don’t dip my pen in the trough of the world,

and I don’t shepherd wolves to graze on the mountain.

Even when space turns to glass, and water leaks out

of the reactor like a constrictor from an aquarium

I endure the inverted question marks

of the hooks I hang on in a deep freeze

as if just to endure were to spite in spades

the cruelty of conditions taking their natural course.

Seven come eleven, but I can look at things

through the snake eyes of frost bitten dice

and not end up piping on a stone flute.

I was born standing in the doorway of an exit

that glowed red at night like a miscarriage of the light

but still the road sign of a back way out of hell.

So if I wrote you a poem you couldn’t understand

would you exalt in your power to unman me

or would you feel the tenderness of the beast

behind the eclipse of the black lion that wears

the corona of the sun for a mane, a sunspot for a face?

Would you trust that the darkness is full of eyes

and some are hunting you, and some are shy

in your presence like wolves that have been shot at

because they’re wild and as cunning as life?

Would you bait the meat with poison in a leg hold trap

or would you defang me into affability

and teach me to lower my voice when the moon was full?

Would we lie in the same bed with a sword between us?

I could befriend your fireflies. I could mitigate your thorns.

I could get behind whatever you dream

like dark matter behind a light filled universe

and when you were sad, let the rain play my scales

like a harpischord or a guitar with a black hole

in the middle of it I would descend into

like an Orphic underworld to sing you back to life.

I would lift all my taboos for you and give you

an exemption in the night to approach me as you wish

and even if your hand weren’t brave enough to ask

I would fill it full of jewels with magic properties

that tempt the thieves of light to risk the labyrinths

of the inviolable graves on the dark side of the moon.

I would beatify you like a grail in a secret society

of warrior saints that haven’t had a drink in years.

And if your chandeliers ever had a nervous breakdown

in a lightning storm, I would dig up the bulbs

of the crystal skulls I buried in your garden for next year

and let you talk to them yourself about your fears

of what’s to come, and how to heal the shattered

with the dark clarity of compassionate crazy wisdom

drifting on the oceans of your tears

like a hydra-headed lifeboat empty but for you.

I would plunder spiritual islands in the wake

of extinct volcanoes to bring you

the rarest herbs of insight prophecy could afford

to see you dancing again like a constellation

rising over my event horizon with no fear of the abyss.

I could do this, I would be this, and will and more

and mean it if you’d let me. I could be the quicksilver

water of life and you could be the white sulphur

substance of the great work, its spirit and activity.

Or the other way around, if you like, given I was born

on a Wednesday with wings on my heels and head.

I could be the dragon trickster, infernal and divine

the hermaphroditic hidden secret

buried in the earth, creature of fire and air,

and you could be the salt, the anima mundi,

the philosopher’s stone, the light of the soul,

the wisdom that gives life and energy their forms,

mistress of the planets and the stars, the divine energy

that moves all things around to bring things about.

What an experiment we’d make, what an art,

what a conjunction of life and love and bodyminds

what signs we could reveal, what prophecies scry,

what freedoms take we could be burned at the stake for.

And the sand paintings we could pour through an hourglass

that would blow away like the dust of the road

and the comets that fell from their black halo

around the sun, and the lifting of waterbirds

in the pewter moonlight feathered on a lake

we could observe, and the scores of new constellations

we could form like new houses of an alternative zodiac

for the dispossessed stars of the homeless

burning their hearts out around oil drums under bridges

that span them like the Egyptian sky goddess Nut,

and the poems that would flow like spiritual transfusions

into the carnal bloodbanks of the burning rose

with a needle exchange of thorns, and the transmutations

of base metal into gold and back again, of dragonflies

gleaming like anthracite in the birth fluids of their chrysales

drying the filigreed silver of their wings in the sun,

paper clipped to the waterlilies like pencils behind their ears,

and the light years of passion and devotion

this would take to be done in unison, in chaos,

in wonder and bliss, in fingertips, eyes, skin and lips,

two alchemists in the Vas Hermeticum of a conceivable abyss.

PATRICK WHITE

THE PALE MONTHS

THE PALE MONTHS

The pale months discharge their attributes of green

in the gripe of small, bitter apples

and the white blossoms

have got their laundry done like nursing caps

and the bonds of friendship with the young

have grown sticky and black, almost obscene,

as they lash the willow like bad actors and beauty queens

with long, drawn-out rehearsals of sappy plays

and the busy wavelengths

of petty mind worms inching toward the virgin cocoons

that might lark their threnodies with real wings

and flammable paper if the little mummies

ever make it to their afterlives. As it is, when they weep

their tears fall like the cold lenses

of leftover concentration camps

they may or may not have read about,

and the split seeds of their careful, furtive eyes,

the tender shoots of agile semi-quavers

run to the black and white keyboards of vinegar

thinking the moon’s just an old whole note,

and the silence that lies in state

like wine in the dark cellars of the sublime

is just another waste of time.

They can’t imagine how many stars and planets and lives it takes

to sugar the black holes of their photographic depressions,

how much light must give itself up to the night

to get one drop of translucent honey

flowing through the narrow veins

of their slim contingencies

and into the green flutes of their bones

like marrow and music. Okay, they’re not

the red wizards of autumn yet

forging swords out of the ores and eras

of the igneous sunsets that have purified their fury in the fire.

They’re too busy looking for their place

and white surplice

in a travelling choir with portable pews

and souvenir crosses of wood.

They’re young and imagine because they say the word good a lot,

they’re good. Let them stand for their hymns and anthems

as they will, it’s natural, it’s right

and there’s even a beauty

in their platitudes and repertoires, their reforms

of ancient hydrogen

that looks like the birth of stars,

the seven spoon-fed sisters of the Pleiades perhaps,

or the reluctant debutantes torn on the horns of Taurus,

white dwarfs and cepheid variables,

young pulsars turning their diamonds in the light

to see if they’ve been cut right, if all the facets

are correctly interfaced

to download easy solar systems from the night.

They’re goldfish in a sharkbowl,

flamingo fan tails and neon tetras

in a cannibal aquarium

of tiger-barbs and brutal dime-angels,

they’re an army of baby turtles

holding on to their helmets

as they run for the beaches of Normandy,

strafed by the Stuka seagulls,

black panzers in heavier armour on the cliffs,

black wolves swinging their muzzles into the wind.

It’s a hell of a way to begin

the rites of spring,

but the best steel goes through the fire

and there’s a chastening beyond virginity

that’s got nothing to do with victory

or the peevish tempers of first violins.

And I look at the old women, the derelicts, the crones,

and the roadkill along the highways of life

unstrung by the turkey vultures like dead guitars

and the sad veterans of spring in the swan park

staring themselves to death like foodbanks for birds,

all the lamentable carbons of human existence

down to the last embers of their spent hearts,

the spare change of cogs and bobbins

taken apart like watches, and I see

another kind of beauty, the deeper innocence

of worn bannisters spiralling up like smoke

in the stairwells of old hotels panned by junkies,

sibilants of wood aged and polished

by the sweat and oils of ten thousand different hands

that steadied their ascents and fallings

through years of snakes and ladders

on the chromosomes and rungs

of these who’ve bleached their peptides

in the caustic salts of the sea.

Born a beachcomber among wasted, cast-off things,

the second-hand bins of the stranded performers

and dismantled wild-west shows of the wave,

a seahorse, a Pacific cowboy from the lunatic fringe,

I look efficiently into the secret urgencies within

the pre-cambrian tidal pools of their fossils and shells,

tears the ocean left behind in the undertow of a thousand farewells,

and a I see a darker kind of flowering

and the mysterious purple fruits

of a second innocence sweeter than the first

long after the apples are out of their diapers

and their blossoms are fouled by rust,

swinging from a dead branch of boney vertebrae

like bells, and moons, and chandeliers

clustered in an eclipse of black cherries,

and windfalls of seasoned planets

waiting to be pushed through the doors

of the hungry dead

in a jubilee year of pious offerings.

See yourself reflected in the face of an old man

if you truly want to understand what grace is,

or the well-used wood of a faithful chair

with a view of forever

beyond plans, if you’ve got the juice

to make something of yourself in the light and the rain

that can embrace the whole of the night,

can hold it like a syllable under the tongue,

a coin of insight, and not go insane. That’s what

courage is, not the charades of the young

besieging the sweetmeats

of moonlight in a nut,

raising their arrogant hammers

like stone gavels on the anvils of the heart,

mistaking their juvenile bias

for the robes of an older law

that presides without judgment

over everything that lives, not the breezy sail

of a quick voyage into the depths,

a love-boat cruise among enchanted islands,

but staring into the eyes of the Medusa

in the snake-pit of an oceanic abyss,

and greeting every grinning serpent

with an antidote and a kiss.

PATRICK WHITE

THE NIGHT COMES ON

THE NIGHT COMES ON

The night comes on like a bayonet in the eye of a baby. The mirror shatters. Shards of shining try to get their act together like small Balkan countries practicing their traditional viciousness. And yes, the world is dark, brutal, treacherous and you’re walking skinless through a field of nettles, your heart exposed like an igneous stone to the dead nun weeping in the acid rain. Buried alive in your own avalanche of judgment and delusion, do you hope to send down roots? Poor baby, you think I’m cruel, that when I tell you the diamond is mud, I’m trying to transplant you into some mythic crystal clarity you have not yet attained. Wrong where there is no wrong, because you’re there already. Isn’t it obvious your roots are in the sky; isn’t it perfectly clear that everything is perfectly clear. Don’t talk to me about confusion and chaos and the seven crossroads to nowhere that lie before you like a crippled starfish. I’ve pushed deathcarts in the morning through the back-alleys of Calcutta and evicted squatters from the satin slums of the cemetery. There is no sin or virtue in my seeing, no little coffin of concept waiting at the end of the boat-tour for a corpse.

You’re not innocent; you’re not corrupt. You drink the purple blood of night like everyone else and think it’s a secret. You love the criminal because you think it’s more sublime than intelligence, but you don’t see that you’re only a butterfly in the dragon’s mouth; you don’t understand that ritualizing heresy is not a bridge to the other side, not the crossing of any real taboo. Be absolutely certain, you’re the only firefly in this man’s dark vastness, but you’ve cranked your own ambivalence too long not to go through withdrawal into the deep assurance of the unseen light that wants to befriend you like a small green planet glowing with life. And screw the man who thinks he’s a guru when he says this; burn the mask he wears to his own funeral along with the rest of his tainted marrow. Why cavil?

If the thorns think they’re the crown of the rose, should the rose care, disposing of itself petal by petal, sky by sky, like the pages of an over-read book about the dangers of reading? Do you see? The wind shimmers like waves through the tall summer grass; and at night, the stars shine down on everyone alike, ignorant of their own burning legends. Deep within you, there is a hidden moon, a blind pearl, one of the lost ruby eyes of the phoenix who put himself out like a torch in the darkness of your holy waters. Why do you look outside yourself for the world you already are? Hate me if you must, but don’t curse the absence of someone who loves you outside of the net. If I’m cruel, if I’m mean, if I risk the obscenity of human lovelessness to love you; don’t ask me to forgive your hive of killer bees because it’s so painful to get near the honey. I’m not the Titanic and you’re not an ice-berg and the worst of tragedies are those that never happen. Live, if you can, beyond the billboards you call yourself; walk out into the fields of being beyond and see, truly see, what the rest of your life’s been doing while you posed like a freak in a circus tent for three grams a day. Or persist in your shadows like some third generation Nazi who can’t get it up enough to hate with any authority, but, likewise, is too fond of his designer straitjacket to love. What’s the point of using your head for a doorstop when you’re afraid to cross your own thresholds? Why lick the paper-plates for morsels of thought at a garabage-dump and call it a feast of sages? I might be stupid, I might be wrong, I might be the willing dupe of your most cherished delusion, but at least I can see you in a clear heart, your depth and beauty and agony, three flowers growing in a crevice of your well-wall. Haven’t the fish already learned to walk; the birds to swim. Don’t the stars drown, drunk, in you every night, and not one in the morning with a hangover? Go ahead, tattoo hell on your eyelids and pretend you’re awake to the world that’s hanging from the end of your nose. I love your tears when they fall; you’re a steep mountain in spring, the end of an ice-age, a fountain that’s learningto crawl.

But I’m not looking for your tears, and I’m almost as sorry as you that I am who I am under this gravestone in this six-storey cemetery of your fears. Do I die well or do I disappoint your witching wands when you come looking for me like a personalized parking space in the city of the dead? And don’t tell me you’re fragile, you’re young, you’re smudged across your own reflection like lipstick on a junkie’s bathroom mirror. I think too much of you to believe you. Here, here’s a new dagger, a clean knife, stronger metal and a more acute blade than any you’ve got in that soft copper arsenal of yours. I’ll even provide the forge and a blacksmith and the knowledge to fashion your own. Love isn’t love that doesn’t offer its artery to the beloved or complains when it’s being killed. O you who think the world is such a bad place, an ugly face, go ahead and try with your space-razor to separate the moonlight from the water. You want the flower and the fruit but you despise the root. You set fire to your own nerves like fuses and try to convince me it’s the work of mystic terrorists. Who knows; maybe you’re trying to overthrow yourself like a repressive regime and there’s no place in your politics for a firing squad still loyal to the wishes of a raving queen?

PATRICK WHITE

IN EVERY FACE I PASS, THE INSUFFERABLE SMOTHERING

IN EVERY FACE I PASS, THE INSUFFERABLE SMOTHERING

In every face I pass, the insufferable smothering

of human potential to achieve great things,

take the jewel out of the ore and let it shine

in the light of their eyes, their hearts, their minds.

As if a new star had been added to the night

and they had lived a life that enhanced

the radiance of their insight. Wouldn’t that

be happy? To see these dead apple trees

in an abandoned orchard suddenly break into bloom

and bear fruit? To see the bears and the birds

the wasps, the humans, gathering it up

like a windfall of small, habitable planets

among the New England asters of a fertile galaxy?

If only so much didn’t depend upon subjunctives.

If only chance were incorruptible, if only

things had gone your way instead of their own.

If only we hadn’t been born into everything

we’re missing, if only our longings had less to do

with what we actually want. If only our words

weren’t links in another chain of iron or gold.

If only we stopped chasing our mirages around

like water in a turmoil of starmud that smudges

the view, and stop dying of thirst like fossils of fish

in a freshwater lake that tastes of our fear of death.

Would the deserts bloom so the children

can be fed? Would the stars efoliate into

cures for cancer like the occult herbs of a jungle

that dipped its arrows in the honey of life?

Would old men waste their time on useless dreams

and the children not be taught to mistrust the rain

for the lies we ourselves told about the nature of gain

as we stepped on a ladder of everyone’s throats

thinking higher was safer than lower

when we’re caught like birds in a chimney?

Are the stars in our eyes antithetical to the black holes?

And our irises lifesaver rainbows? Isn’t

just to be here aware of what we’re seeing

so that every grain of dust on this long, strange road

shines as if the Milky Way were under our feet,

and everything were neither far nor close

but the whole of us in every single part?

I keep thinking you only need to touch the heart

of someone, like ants tell peonies when to bloom,

and everything will be revealed like moonrise.

How incredible it is there’s so little wonder

in our eyes, so little tenderness toward

the brevity of the lives that suffer along with us

into an abyss where we don’t even know

if we’ll ever exist again to see all this as it is.

Even to suffer, even to fail, even to dread the darkness.

Even to ask what place is this you’re passing through

and be undeterred about not accepting

your own dead silence as an hospitable answer

worthy of the mastery of being able

to pose the question as if someone else

were there with you who knew what you meant.

Express yourself. Shine. Bloom. Rain down

on everything alike to show the abstract eye

of the truth, what new beauties can come

of your starmud when it’s sown by you as freely

as a child gives you a leaf or a twig, or the head

of a poppy as if you hadn’t forgotten how to dream

along with her that your amazement is as good

a reason as any to be here. Write poems

to the opalescent sunrise of your toe-nails

or what the thorns of the rose mean

to a dead matador awash in the blood of a bull.

Irrational in the mirrors of reason, perhaps,

fill your emptiness up with the fullness

of your own absurdity and learn to laugh

at the unattainability of the things you aspire to.

Learn to play wavelengths on your spinal cord

as if the shape of the universe when it’s not a woman

is an eleven stringed guitar in the corner

where the spiders are walking its strings like bass runs

and every thing is singing along to the words

of a song that only they know like an aviary of voices

in asymmetrical harmony with the dawn.

Adorn your sorrows in the laurels of sacred wounds.

Now is the time to utter wow under your breath

and include the woman standing beside you

in your astonishment as well as the stars arrayed

to entrance your sense of the inconceivable

by giving you something to compare her to.

Lift up your head like a dormant dragon

that smells the moon on the wind and roar

like the solar flare of a flower that blooms in fire.

Sooner a brilliant failure than a mediocre success,

accept your incompleteness as a sign

of spiritual progress, your terminal homelessness

as the path of the wind among the flowers

of the starfields that depend for their lives

on your passing beyond the gates of their gardens

with letters back to the wilderness they came from.

Be the black sheep that burned the maps

in a flurry of chimney sparks and wandered off

like an irrevocable planet into the immensity of the stars.

And whether you sleepwalk on the thorns of life

or tread lightly across a river cobbled in skulls,

however the rose bleeds, don’t belittle

the mouth of its wound with with a grammar of scars.

PATRICK WHITE