I SEE YOU'VE MADE A GATE

I SEE YOU’VE MADE A GATE

I see you’ve made a gate

of the skeleton of the wing of the bird

you should have set free.

And it’s closed like a book you haven’t read.

The wall of a garden you haven’t

found your way into.

No one can show you

how to offer your heart

to the black rose of your blood

in total eclipse. I could point out

a few stars, and tell you their names

but that was hierarchies ago

and now they’re waiting for the metaphors

to come from your own mouth.

To say them so deeply

you can’t help breaking into light.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN IMAGINATION AND REALITY ARE ONE

WHEN IMAGINATION AND REALITY ARE ONE

When imagination and reality are one

and there’s no recourse for civilization

to distinguish between them by usage and consensus,

and the light of the stars isn’t condemned

to a life of hard labour as a torch in a coal mine

looking for diamonds you can drink by the grailful

until you’re as satiate as oblivion, there’s no doubt

the mind is an artist riffing on the new strings of the rain

or painting it in picture-music like a poet or a scientist

who look deranged to those who’ve averaged out

the crucials of the mindscape like the odds of a lottery,

convinced as they are like pilgrims walking

from one end of their sacred asphalt driveways

to the other, that one size fits all, and that these

enlightened journeys without destinations

are just circles that haven’t been squared yet.

But if you’re off on your own,

making roads with your walking you’re the first

to set foot on like the moon of a spaced-out planet

you’re trying to turn into something habitable,

remember it’s an act of compassion not to lock the door

to the available dimensions of the future when you leave.

Remember that all six of your senses

live in the world you creatively visualize

like the aura of the life that surrounds you

like an ongoing masterpiece of incompletion.

Without them you might be a master of making trees,

but, hey, man, where are the birds?

I don’t hear anything singing.

There’s nothing to taste or touch or listen to.

No appearances to deceive your consciousness with.

When your eye’s got an idea of the kind of star

it wants to be, before it’s learned to see, it never shines.

Wondering what flora to root where in the expanding abyss

of the night before you, scatter the stars across the firmament

as if you were sowing the unknown seeds of the wildflowers

that scuttled themselves like arks

in the cracked creekbeds of your neocortical starmud

and waited patiently like hibernating frogs

for the conditioned chaos of the rain

to come like a flashflood of life-nourishing insight.

And when you’re annihilated

by the mystic terror of your own freedom

jimmying with the G-spot on your prison locks

to get them to open up like a coven of doves

that want to release their omens like feathers on the wind

that can scry and fly where they want,

don’t linger in the doorway of your liberation.

Hesitation is the flypaper of light.

Stare straight into the eyes of the Medusa

until she’s the one that blinks first in the savage snake pit

and the stone bird of your heart thaws like a volcano

potting islands in the draconian heat of its bloodstream

and the Gorgons start dancing to the music of their classical hair-dos

as if they could hear the wavelengths

of a pan flute lapping nearby like water.

Kiss the serpent fire on the head

if you want to honour the shapeshifter

that sets your dark energy free to assume the form

of the world that moults the chrysalis of your imagination

that reassembles the rubble of the last gasp

into a house of transformation that fits you

like a bubble of supple skin where you alone

are the myth and physics of its origination.

And whatever world provides you with the mindscape

of your exploration, you recognize by the style

it’s painted in as everywhere a work of your own

signed by the wind in the left hand bottom corner of the sky.

Hard to tell the wells from the fountains

in the mingling mindstream that flows like life lines

into the frayed deltas of your palm. And what madness

hasn’t always alloyed its backbone to the swords of the sane

defending their indigenous traditions of soft metal?

Don’t stare into your cauldron as if you were trying

to read the future by the lint in your belly-button.

Actualize your magic and stir the womb a bit like a master of departures

with an intuitive genius for unitive metaphors.

Mix the paint on the palette into necromantic shades

of new underworlds weeping jewels on the roots

of the fireflowers bearing forbidden fruits

they’ll carry by the armful with them out of the garden

like refugees running from an abandoned embassy

that used to give them shelter from themselves with impunity.

No limit. You can live in as many worlds as there are

grains of dust and pollen, where you’re not allergic

to the stars, and the constellations come like the empty baggage

of a book that hasn’t written a word to anyone,

nor appointed an alpha like the book end of a beginning

to balance the long vowel of omega at the other extreme

to let you know when it’s all been said, and it’s time

to lay the cornerstone of a myth of origin of your own,

a pebble in the random tide of providential events,

that doesn’t need more than one leg to stand on

like a heron hunting fish in the bestiaries of the moon

that’s finally given up its dead like a graveyard of Orphic skulls.

Imagine your way like smoke through the eye of a keyhole

into spaces you create by your very being there

to summon them from the abyss, a carillon of dragons

on a holy day of reptiles when the lowest are blessed with wings,

or wall yourself into an aesthetically sealed garden

where the rain perennially washes the blood of the children

who finger-painted the flowers on your thin skin off,

and luxuriate in your fastidious appetite for insignificant details.

Mind is an artist. Able to paint the worlds as a sin of omission,

a sum of destructions, or the negative space of a hand

breaching stone with a spiritual tattoo on its palm,

indelibly invisible as nothing for whom nothing is out of reach.

Make heaven. Make hell. Who you are is where you live.

Nest in a bell like a bird under the roof of your mouth

or root like lightning in a cloud you left unweeded.

Out of the random ignitions and annihilations of dark matter

bombarding your senses like anti-photonic fireflies

emerges a world of shadows into the light

of your imagination like the rising of a new moon

engendered out of you restoring yourself to it

like a lost atmosphere that got carried away by wings.

You can say things into existence word by word

or you can talk them to death in the silence

that follows the ghost of ideas like darkness follows us.

Or you can let the night bird deep

in the solitude of your heart sing

your fervent yearning for a companionable world

into being sweeter than the immensity of your creative freedom

to long for it as if what were missing

would always seem somehow more real than what was not.

PATRICK WHITE

I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN

I have not forgotten

the asters that bloomed in the wake of your smile,

the torn bridal veil

you were always shaking free of the spiders

that wanted to pin themselves like badges,

like mushroom crowns

to the polygonal thrones of your web;

or the way you would walk through doors,

swim through windows

as if my life were your own personal dream

and I was the only horse on the moon

that had ever survived your thorns,

nor the way your fingers could turn into

the horns of a garden snail

or the green tendrils of imperial strawberries

that slowly colonized my skin

with small mystical villages

on the slopes of volcanic dragons,

and how you were always quicker than pyramids

to extinguish the fire

with emergency kisses

that turned the ambulance into

a newspaper tossed on the doorstep

announcing the terms of the armistice,

the swaddled folds

of a nursing iris in bud,

or the cross you swore was a bridge

between a coffin and a cocoon.

Did you ever finish painting your wings,

or that likeness of death

you said was a portrait of me?

Drifting for years

in the stone lifeboat you left me

like an island of my own

where I was the king of shadows,

the disconsolate wizard

of my own ruined magic,

and my heart was a cauldron of skulls,

I often thought of you

to keep myself from believing in love again;

the blow, the money, the music,

the secret sauce

of the Malaysian black current cheesecake

sliced into portions of the moon

robed in the folds of a regal eclipse,

of how you made everyone feel

they were better for you than me,

crazed by the panties you threw everywhere

like the fragrance of a smouldering rose

to prove you were hot and a rockstar,

and then grab me like a mike stand

and give me head in a song no one else could hear,

as if I were a hit long before you were born

and evolution hired a publicist.

I always thought you were a dangerous child,

a bouquet of fireflies

you were trying to give

to the ghost of a death that hadn’t happened yet,

a bee of blood that drowned

in the angry chalice of a broken mirror

that lied to your face about flowers.

I had to throw my heart out

like a corpse at sea to love you,

and lean back and watch as if I didn’t care

as one by one the stars o.d.’d like candles

in the black hole

that was swallowing you

like a snake with its tail in its mouth,

the eternal recurrence

of your father with you in bed.

And now it’s twenty years later

and life is a crosswalk in a dream

where we pass each other like bells on parole

from the spires that plunge through the past

like daggers through the eyes and the skies

of our isolation cells,

and it’s law not love

to go for a drink

to compare the opulence of our solitudes

like trees shedding their leaves to the bone,

and you undo your hair

like ribbons of fire at the foot of my grave

because you remember while I lived

I liked it long,

and reach across the table like wine

and take my hand in yours,

the other half of a split wishbone

that didn’t come true,

the head of a dead swan,

the last bugle of a dying civilization,

and quote from memory

a poem I wrote for you

chained by lightning

to a sacrificial rock in an old abyss

catastrophes ago

to make sure

the moon always had eyelids

when it stared into the lights

that obliterated all my faces

in the dark blaze of planets on tour with the dawn.

And I was moved like blue grasslands

as I always used to be

to witness the eerie beauty of your tears as you spoke,

sweeping out of the open window

of your abandoned heart

like curtains of rain you stood behind

to see if the wind would bring you roses again.

PATRICK WHITE

I WANT TO WRITE

I want to write something that will impress you,

a blue virgin with a silo of hand-picked stars

for a heart that we might begin with,

the soiled velvet of my collapsed parachute

that came down like the night over everything,

the miscreant sky of an ancient descent

that keeps snuffing the candle of blood

I keep using to draft poems on the mirror

that suggests an emergency of fire and ink.

I want to write something like a pulse

that doesn’t belong to anything in existence,

the mythic inflation and collapse

of a sail or a lung or a womb

that might engender something extraordinary

among the plaster cherubs

and efflorescent gargoyles of this abandoned theatre

that no longer stages the improvised encounters

of the demons or the angels,

whose silence is the salted earth of a city

that traded its wilderness in

for a cemetery of clowns and scarecrows

and traffic jam of golden crutches. I refer,

of course, to the plastic bag

someone put over the mouth of my longing

and the cyanotic agony of trying to breathe freely

under the asphyxiating skin of the sky

that adheres to my eyes and voice like dew.

I want to write something fine and wild and exalted,

and enlighten the hinges of a vastly open door

with the raw ore of my meticulous urgencies.

Supple and eloquent, a sapphire river

flowing effortlessly through the night,

a rose of fire ashing on its own roots,

tendering its green thorns

like the fangs of an innocent moon,

I want to wash off the mud of the road with stars

that only bloom for those with the eyes to be them,

and throwing off the yoke

of all these sad windows

I collect like dogtags and discount coupons

of spiritual junkmail,

plough the moon with my tongue

and in a whisper of opening eyelids

weep like a silver tree

for the beauty of the dark-side jewels

that water my roots.

You must be in bed by now;

you must be mourning your lost lover,

lamenting the blizzard of ghosts

that coats your heart in the burlap and chainmail

of another winter that must be borne on your knees.

May I hover, may I linger,

may I spectrally request an audience,

pour this star-flavoured darkness into your ear,

can I be free without intruding

and rattle this chandelier of dragon tears

like a spell across your last shadow?

I want to astound you with the risks I take,

walking on my hands down this guitar string

keyed to the gaping annuity of the abyss;

I want to shed my skin

and stretch it like a playbill

over last year’s cancelled play;

and write you certified cheques

on the petals of luxuriant flowers

for exotic causes

only the homeless clouds could believe in.

And I don’t want to be loved for who I am,

I want to be loved for what I do;

as the wind is loved in its passing

for clarifying the sky like a rag of air,

for winnowing the grain from the chaff

after the threshing of the harvests of the dead

into feathers, waves and leaves,

for the muffled thunder of cannons and apples

going off in the distance

like a holy war of one

trying to overcome its own stratagems.

I don’t want to swing the planet like a wrecking ball

against the condemned tenements

that sweat from the pores of a selfish mirror,

and bury the poor in doorways

that exhale the nocturnal vapours of the hopeless

who rummage through hand-me-down poppies

for an affordable dream that might fit.

I only want to wear you once

in a mansion of water and moonlight

like a nakedness of space and cherries

I can’t take off,

and from the orchard of these black blossoms

that scatter like heretical doves from a fire,

this migration of the white phoenix

to a burning branch in a combustible solitude

that roots its holiest ladders

in the ashes of its own blazing divestment,

offer you the fruit of the crazy wisdom

of the fool who drinks from my eyes

as if the grail of this all night feeling

were a bar that never closed.

PATRICK WHITE

MY THIRD EYE OPENING OCEANICALLY OF ITS OWN ACCORD

MY THIRD EYE OPENING OCEANICALLY OF ITS OWN ACCORD

My third eye opening oceanically of its own accord.

The wingspans of the flowers bloom omnidirectionally.

The blue sky lays a balmy smile upon my flightfeathers.

Blood hums to the blissful resonance of being alive.

Even the glowing concrete seems benign. The gates

with their rusting guns triggered like locks, the fences

holding the occupying gardens with their placard poppies

back like riot cops. Time without haste. Consumed

by a moment as perennial as summer on earth.

Nothing urgent in the fulfilment of small destinies

in the grass, no antecedents necessary to know

how to live this, no event trivial or especially significant,

I’m as open-minded as the wind on a shoreless afternoon

that tastes of the stars gusting in the dust at my feet.

Wild parsnip, Queen Ann’s Lace, mullein, goldenrod,

purple loosetrife and cattails in the ditches along the roads,

Lichens of the moon on the staves of the cedar rails

where the red-winged blackbirds sit

to paint their picture-music on the unprimed air

like the musical notes of a cadmium red and yellow song

with overriding tones of nocturnes to come.

Sweetness of life when it takes its mind off of everything

and requires nothing of the living but attendance.

Just to be here like a vagrant wavelength of awareness

among things as they are without trying

to gouge your eyes out like bluejays at the sunflowers

to get at the roots of the flowering mind deep in the heart

of the hidden harmonies basking on the surface

they’re joy riding like the elegant riffs

of the dolphins and flying fish that leap out of the shadows

into the enraptured atmosphere of their own auras

like blue damselflies and green tree frogs and old guitars

working their necks like weavers, or fleet-footed spiders

walking on water like heavy metal on a Ouija board,

like thorns in the eye of a bubble, hoping it doesn’t

wash them out like tears in the eyes of a voodoo doll

looking through the keyhole of a needle it couldn’t find

like paradise on the other side of its blind blessing.

Not for long or far, I’m still walking a habitable planet

full of wonders. Though the road keeps getting shorter

like a fuse behind me the further I travel down it,

and the asteroids keep making newsbreaking fly-bys,

and there are rosaries of bubbling methane rising

from under the shrinking skull caps of the poles,

and people are still trying to keep each other’s attention

by stabbing one another in the eye, but for a moment

that isn’t concerned about whether anything lasts or not,

there are no omens stuck in the throats of the rocks,

or blood of children splashed on the hollyhocks. A re-run

of provisional innocence in a few hundred acres of woodland

swept under the rugs of abandoned farms as not worth the trouble.

Lapwing gates hanging by a hinge to distract

the wild grapevines away from her empty nest

as if it still cherished its emptiness out of a force of habit.

I look upon the Tay River at sunset, the reflection

of the darkening hill quivering in the cooling breeze

like the more mercurial downside of itself,

and the sky opening the blue-green eyes of the peacocks

like stars with too much make-up on, and a handful

of charred crows flying through the roots of the trees,

trying to make sense of themselves like a burnt manuscript.

And what can you say to the stars that are beginning

to look for themselves in the approaching night

except this too is the world where even the lost,

in attempting to return to themselves through

the unattainability of the past, shed light all along the way?

Nightfall and the silence intensifies the conversation

with bioluminous insights of the radiance

blazing out of the darkness of a white coma

as if it depended upon the contrast oxymoronically

just to be noticed like waterlilies in the shallows

of the conscious mind anchored by a spinal cord

to the reptilian epodes of its own illustrious starmud

as every thought moment is, like kelp and kites

and river reeds swaying like synchronized swimmers

to the currents and wavelengths, the turns

and counterturns, of thematic waters with a musical motif

that plays to its own depths from the bridge

of a burning violin dancing like fire on the water

with no fear of ever being drowned out by the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

NOT AGAIN, TONIGHT, THESE FIN DE SIECLE BLUES

NOT AGAIN, TONIGHT, THESE FIN DE SIECLE BLUES

Not again, tonight, these fin de siecle blues

that subsume all my blossoming overviews

into the mystic specificity of concrete things

I stub my heart against as if I’d just had

a head on collision with the moon. Impact.

Emotional meteor showers, the Virginids, perhaps,

I’m being stoned by my own congenital radiants

as if I were being driven out of somewhere

like an extinct species. Bad memories, lifeboats

that didn’t make it back to shore, things I’ve tried

to mythologize like a shipwreck in coral on the moon.

Subtle childhood fears that run my tongue along

the shadows of their blades, when I was scared and young,

and the words would come out like drops of blood

sliding down the length of the stargrass I grazed upon

alone as now in my high wide starfields.

The same ones that are seeking me out tonight

like a rogue planet that’s never quite known

where it’s belonged, or with whom, if anyone

or where at all. Looking for an exit sign

in the infinite labyrinth of the nightmare

that’s walked me like a shadow through all these years.

Most of the past, a waste of good innocence,

and the people and things I loved about it

I cherish more now than I did back then,

usually wounded irreparably in a way

I would have suffered for them if I could have

in order to have my love of them hurt me less,

given I always thought I was more worthy of the pain,

because more deserving of what they endured

than they were. Maledictions of draconian experience.

Miracle of miracles, I transcended everything so savagely,

it’s hard to forgive myself now for ever being a child,

but I try. I put my arms around people when they cry

even frivolously, and offer them a few blue ribbons of wisdom

in exchange for their butter-fingered nooses

and the occasional smile at the antics of a sacred clown

who left his tears painted on a dressing room mirror

as if it had been raining for years without anyone

but himself, a circus of one on tour, getting wet.

I’ve fallen through more cracks in the earth

than most earthquake zones, whenever the continental plates

of my tectonic skull put their hands together in despair

but couldn’t manage prayer as I jumped in on horseback

to save someone’s cornerstone, like Rome, whether

I was delusional or not. A few people lit candles in remembrance,

but just as often as the fireflies light their lamps

they blow them out to return to the darkness

as the closest thing to home. I’m inured to the intemperance

of selfishness as well as gratitude. People approach me

with their secret charade, and I cancel myself out

like a circus parade I’m sure is never going to come,

a kid kicked to the curb who’s been waiting too long,

and we’re both a little estranged by our mutual equilibrium.

Wild parsnip in the drainage ditch boils the flesh and leaves

permanent scars. And when I don’t see them as arsonists

and flammable gypsies, I see the poppies as

the blood-soaked rags of solar flares that have staunched

and cauterized the bleeding awhile. Hot knives

applied to the heart’s excruciations like a brutal code of mercy

to distract me from the agony of my indifference

to the end of an era of unacknowledged supremacy

as the occult master of mirages on the nightshifts

of intensive care, the terminal ward, desolation row,

a fencing master of scalpels who knew more ways

of cutting the heart out of himself and offering it up

to someone who needed it more for the moment,

thinking they had a better use for it than I ever did.

A poultice of water applied like an oasis to a desert’s forehead

until even a corpse could rise up out of the glass-blowing heat

like the inexhaustible amphora of an Aquarian among the stars.

One of the dark jewels of my childhood

in the ashes of a dragon that left me its eyes

by eclipsing mine so I could see

where the black holes were ahead of time

and warn the well-meaning lighthouses that clung to the coast

not to trust their starmaps to get their bearings

or ask for directions from the mentors of the lost and the blind,

but to turn the wheel of life and death loose in a storm

of demonically dispassionate clarities intense enough

to weld diamonds by staring through them

with the ironic compassion of an empty lifeboat

lowered from the deck of an enlightened shipwreck

on the lunar bottom of the Sea of Tranquility

I can weave like a flying carpet of real water

out of the wavelengths of high frequency mirages

like a homoeopathic wolf shaman in shepherd’s clothing.

PATRICK WHITE

SO LIFETIME AFTER LIFETIME

SO LIFETIME AFTER LIFETIME

So lifetime after lifetime, sorceress of shadows and dreams

you step out of the dark wood of yourself,

a shy doe, a mournful lighthouse and a warning off the coast

of your infinite solitude, you, the singing bird

on the green bough of your flute pouring yourself

like sorrow over the eye of the sea, your tears,

the ancient wells of an eternal longing unanswered by the secret stars

that have entrusted their radiance to you, fireflies

drowning their light in your black candles,

the blind music of your lonely flowing. Is your flute, a bone, then,

and this rose I bring you, this heart, this blood

that has turned into a goblet of luminous wine,

drunk on the wonder and the missing in your phantom music,

is this rose nothing but a wound, a coffin-flower,

the unmarked grave of a mystic embryo?

Do you fear the tenderness, the meeting? Does the moon

strike at her own reflection in the mirror of her midnight waters

to wander like an orphan along her lifeless shores?

Boy and man, you murder me on the steps of your serpent shrine,

your eyes, cold glass, eclipses of crystal, your spirit

that once drew in the light like breath,

now a slow glacier, an age of ice

pushing your heart before it like a boulder,

like a temple-stone that one night flew out of the abyss

and buried itself like a meteor, a charred jewel, the demon seed

of a religion without saviours, your implacable creed

scriptures of blood in a mouthless book

that only love can open. Once there were swallows in the tree of life,

asylums of celebrants greeting the morning in their madness,

in the garden, in Eden, hurled through that first dawn

like a young girl’s heart trembling like a drop of light on a blade of grass.

Now your voice is a gypsy-crow on a dead branch,

your music, confession without atonement, your flute

without leaves, without orchards, an eyeless spring,

buried in its manger-cloth for years, nothing

but a crib-death, a broken wand, a phoenix

that has lost its faith in fire under the weight of its own ashes.

Beloved, again and again you kill me

in this dance of slayer and slain, tear out

this page of love like a like a child’s tongue, like a mute heresy

you are doomed to rewrite forever

in the indelible inks of your seeing.

Do you dip your pen like a water-bird drinking

from its own image, putting out your eyes

to deepen the darkness, the scars of your sin

the lightless letters of a hidden language

pricked out on your skin, black stars and braille tattoos?

The pages and the years may turn like wings and hinges,

and a thousand deaths, all your own,

tome the field with gravestones,

breathless flutes and hollow bones, ancient futures;

and you the only mistress of those solitary realms; still,

your legend will remain moonless and sunless,

the story of a night sky, the eyelid of a black rose,

that couldn’t break into light. Until

love stands beside the heartwell of another

as if it were its own sacred fountain,

one blood, one wind-mingled music

playing the waves like plectra, and raises the rim

of the single goblet to its lips and tastes,

only silence answers the terrible vastness,

only death graces the obscenity of these loveless wastes.

PATRICK WHITE