COULD I BREATHE THE STARS

COULD I BREATHE THE STARS

Could I breathe the stars, I would expire in light.

Were I the harvest moon, I would retract my claws.

Were my heart anything other than what it is,

I would be a windfall of silver apples burnished by crows

and not this rag of a man with a mouthy wound.

I would not be this perversion of radiance mutating

in these acephalic mirrors warped by shape-shifting space.

I would see clearly the angry red berries of the hawthorn

and adopt them as a solar system. And think I was blessed.

And, o yes, spiky woman, when love was in eclipse

if I were not so afraid of falling upon you like a sword,

I would notch the moon like a gunsight

with its own valleys and mountains,

and let the light shine through like Bailey’s Beads,

and place it on your head like a laurel of fire,

the enlightened corona of a door I’ve left ajar.

You agitate the spiders in their morning webs

into vibrating like the needles of sewing machines

or the clappers of fire alarms, as the sun

takes the pulse of its dreamcatchers,

looking for signs of life from the night before.

I am a creature of darkness. I know the abyss.

It fills you like a universe you just can’t seem

to get your heart and arms around.

It’s bigger than the wingspan of your spirit,

the one vacuum nature doesn’t abhor.

No end of it. No beginning you can hope for.

You embody the impersonality of it intimately.

The dark mother of the abounding stars

whose beauty adds an edge to the emptiness

that keeps you from pleading for oblivion

in an isolation deeper than the dead.

The irises were surgically removed from your eyes

and you’re out looking for rainbows at night with a match.

But there’s no one to keep your promises to,

and just at the bend in the river, where you laid

a poppy on the grave of the white crow

to pay your respects to the end of the road,

you plunge over the edge of a finger-pointing precipice

like a willow of water into an ocean of awareness

and there’s no one there to catch you. And the dreamcatchers

aren’t the safety nets they said they were.

Were I a witchdoctor that knew the antidote to love

I would come with strange concoctions

of the Pleiades and deadly nightshade

ground with a sexual pestle in the mortar of my skull

and spiced with a measure of the inconceivable

and have you rise from your death bed

like a miracle among roses that escaped the frost.

I’d stroke the back of your hand like the head of a swan.

And you’d feel it melting like ice. The moon would bloom

like a love letter delivered to a dead branch.

The nightmare of the dispassionate fever

would transmutate into an elixir of life

that would thrill every flower into believing they had

lightning for roots. Wondrous blossoms of insight.

Into the Open. Into the Absence, the nihilistic emptiness

of the cup poured out in a hemorrhage of the heart

when the wine went bad. Someone there in the doorway

gone like a shadow from the sundial of the farewell

they left you with like the wing of a bird

that doesn’t sing anymore in the morning.

And even the birch groves don’t feel very strong

when they’ve been cast down by an ice storm

into white canes and crutches of suffering

you once could lean on for emotional support.

I would be a lightbulb in a house well for you

to keep you from freezing and more grandiosely

if I were a pagan architect, I would erect a temple

with pillars of fire for you that even time

when its hair grows out like solar flares

couldn’t pull down in a fury of indignant ions.

There would be no lack of heretics, martyrs,

or Norse gods to sing in your flames

because they would have finally found something

greater than their solipsistic selves to sacrifice to

that consumes them with devotion

axially aligned with you. And wherever you walked

true north would be under your feet.

As it is I follow you like an oriflamme

in a pageant of longing I will not be ransomed from.

And even if the court jester to the queen

isn’t the grand marshal that gets to carry it,

the one who rides first in the wake of your love,

his armour burning like a mirror of your reflected fire,

I have raised a small banner of blood

on the lance of a thorn the white knights

would think was laughably burlesque

were it not for the fact that it pours out of a dragon’s eyes

like the eclipse of a black rose in tears

igneously bleeding in the darkness

to temper its fangs like swords it remits in tribute,

from a burning bridge of fireflies,

to the solitary river of the unhonoured waters of the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

I GRIEVE ELUSIVELY SOLO IN THE COMPANY OF ROCKS

I GRIEVE ELUSIVELY SOLO IN THE COMPANY OF ROCKS

I grieve elusively solo in the company of rocks

whose skulls have been glacially removed

as a chipper breeze intrigues the trees

with the rumours of distinguished extinctions to come.

O my prophetic heads, my exilic deaths,

is the moon an ally or not as she adds

her waterlily to the swamp like a nautical poem

that agitates the ricocheting shadows of the bats.

Witch broth looking for human body parts.

The night broods over the death of a wren

like someone just getting into the arts

hangs on the hook of the muse with bookish allure,

but nothing bites. The fish are wide-eyed and wary.

The wonder of stars applies a poultice to my heart.

We reciprocally heal for a moment. Dark woods

and the wolves are howling over the corpse of the hills.

Snapping turtles sleep in my starmud like the helmets

of World War One, and I dream of wild swans

passing overhead like Albireo and Deneb

in the Summer Triangle wedging its way west.

My life inches toward its setting like an astrolabe of bones.

Mortal arcs of dubious exaltations. No constellation

marks the spot like a seeing eye dog in the dark,

and love dies cowering in sighs of lyrical bewilderment.

PATRICK WHITE

BLAND PERFIDY, YOU WILL NOT MASTER ME

BLAND PERFIDY, YOU WILL NOT MASTER ME

Bland perfidy, you will not master me. I shall

cultify my resentment into a an insurrection of one

and feed you like keys to the fireflies in the zoo.

And the black lions savage you like a fake rose of blood.

I shall write about the colours of the flowers you abused.

The lethal spreading of your goodness like manure

over a garden that hasn’t bloomed since childhood.

The way you’ve gagged the mouth of the sun

with toxic clouds that don’t remind you of anything.

Distractive lie, polluted moonlight, I shall

turn the oranges on your breakfast table

you write about in grisaille, into the black dwarfs

of imploding stars, ambush your newsreels

and sword dance on your grave in a wreath

of stinging nettles just to hear you howl once

like a real poet when I rip the stitches out of your heart.

How will you angle your toes like a misstep in a dance

when you hear the harpsichord of shattering glass

as I throw the moon through your window

and watch it bleed like a beer bottle in a street fight?

Nuclear winter in a wasteland, the dawn

of a new species of fire with poetry in its glands.

A violet wind will sweep you like mirages off the sidewalk

into the dunes of the shad flies of North Bay,

and even the thieves who’ve come to melt

your gold death mask down into nose rings

won’t bother to exhume your pyramid

like a publishing house not worth breaking into.

By the immutable coincidence of the contradictories

because you did not breathe life into the drowning

and fed your mouth in the mirror before you

even heard the child-faced birds dying in the trees outside,

I shall use your skull as a doorstop in a hurricane

to keep the backdoor open to the weatherfronts of the furies

that are mustering under your windowsill,

black holes without an event horizon.

And the unapproachable night air we let out

of your mythically inflated tires will be saturated

with the oracular apostasies of hostile prophecies,

and your proverbial drop out and crawl all the way back

into your anthology of nepotistic verdicts

that are afraid to tell the judge what they really think.

I see how you slaughter the playful intensities of life

by throwing bad meat down the wells of the muses

and the effluvia of your poems contagious as radioactivity

slyly insinuating yourself into the drinking water.

The spider I wear like an eye patch on my third eye

wants to get you out of the way of the sun

like the slag and cinders of orbiting dirt

you kick in everyone’s face like a meteor shower

that fizzled out even before it took the plunge.

Someone’s got to tell you like a warning from your shrink

you’ve got the emotional wingspan of a scenic calender

for places to be when you’re reading out west

they give away for free in a real estate office.

I want to chew on a wad of your heart to see

if its’ really gum or not, and if it is

I’ll cut it out of my hair with the same scissors

you use to clip and paste the spinal cords of your poems.

I want to stick C-4 to your incisors

as if I were blowing up a bridge in preoccupied Toronto

and see if anything explosive might come out of your mouth.

Fire-swallower in a circus morgue, hic sunt dracones,

snakes with wings, flame-throwing wiverns

angered by the desecration of their shrines

and fangs like flowering scalpels rooted in their jaws.

Gratuitous infirmity. Termites in the foundation.

Too much straw in the haystack to go looking for

your needle of identity pointing true north

to a vast pristine land of squalor and drugs.

The quicksand cornerstones of your unzippered fixes.

Moonrise and sunset on the blacklists of your eyelids.

I should compile a hive of killer bees

and when I’m talking to you without a grant

charge admission to the Eleusinian Mysteries

of how to write without a camera or a mirror,

and start a buzz that would leave you

with nothing unmagnanimous to say

about the dangers of pouring curdled honey

into a wound as raw and vicious as you are dull.

PATRICK WHITE

RED SHIFT SOON INTO THE DARK, BUT NOT TONIGHT

RED SHIFT SOON INTO THE DARK, BUT NOT TONIGHT

Red shift soon into the dark, but not tonight

out of these longer wavelengths of insight

into the ongoing mystery of everything I’m aware of

and what I’m not in the lifelines on the palms of my blossoms

and in the roots of these abandoned orchards of stars.

Unattainable the things of the earth that were given for free,

I long for dark abundance, bright vacancy.

Beauty meets me everywhere eye to eye

on my own terms, and we speak in metaphors

that occur all around us like fireflies and wild irises.

O evanescent river of night, unpartitioned waterclock,

keep time with my heart even as you unravel the past

like a ribbon of blood I’ve brought to you as a gift.

Keep it supple and fluid and let the light on your waters

mingle in the sweetness of its fruit. Let no cruel day

embitter the wine of the efoliate nerves

of the wild grapes greening their tendrils

like the treble clefs of a living music

that can only be heard with the eyes when you listen.

Off road awhile, let me wander as you do

through these labyrinths of circuitous blossoming

and lose myself in people and things and wonder

at the black and white wisdom of being here

to marvel at all, and give the stars a reason to search.

Keep my wits close to my senses and my instincts

like holy books written on the wind like the smoke

of distant fires I will sit around again

listening to stories told in the tongues

of the polyglot flames. May I always

cherish the pain of separation as my most

sincere teacher, the one who beat me the hardest

for the foolishness of trying to come up for air

while I was still in the womb. May compassion

always come on the winged heels of insight

the way pears come of their leaves

or the heart grows in the hands of its thieves.

Hard, the longing to know. Harder to know you don’t.

Hard to be the dunce in the corner of your own illumination.

The persecuted voodoo doll of a witch hunt.

The shabby philosopher with a heart of gold

who took the long way round to the back of the abyss.

Or an eclipse with its thumb out trying

to hitch hike down the Milky Way like a punk rocker.

And those who live to see death in their children’s eyes,

as the ferocity of their frozen tears breaks

into little plinths and roseate splinters of shattered sky.

Hard to see people uncrazed by their own creativity

like a wet book of matches frowning at solar flares,

sceptics doubting the crazy wisdom of their own stars.

To see friends who were the pillars of the wharves

you said hello and good-bye on, pull away one last time

like empty lifeboats with nothing left to save.

And the lovers who know each other like junkies

on the same drug, love potions using the same alibi

to excuse the mystic delirium of being caught

by their third eye, exalting in their passion

for whispering old-fashioned things into each other’s ears

on the thresholds of enlightened taboos. Imagine

going through withdrawal from your own imagination

burning little black holes through the windows

until they look like starmaps that forgot the way back home.

And the hasty bones that were buried en masse

like yarrow sticks in an incriminating Book of Changes.

Poverty, atrocity, war, disease, and these we ignore,

and these we praise for trivializing our attention span.

Hard to be human and embody all this in your heart.

But don’t stop. Keep flowing. Making your own path up

on the fly as you go, knowing it’s going to get harder yet.

Let me live it like a dream I’m always waking up from

with no regret. Let me cherish the terrors

for the dark jewels they sowed like dragon’s teeth

in their wake, and celebrate the fools of my doubtful virtues

like a poet in autumn dancing with the last of the flowers

as if they still had the voices they had in the spring.

PATRICK WHITE

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