THE GRAVE UP AHEAD HASN'T CHASTENED MY LONGINGS

THE GRAVE UP AHEAD HASN’T CHASTENED MY LONGINGS

The grave up ahead hasn’t chastened my longings,

nor joy become an offence to the probity of death.

Life’s not a protocol I’m trying to master

to approach the eternal orthodoxy in good form.

It’s important to bow up once and awhile to keep

your gratitude from growing reflexive. Time

might be the shedding serpent that was generated

like a wavelength out of my flashbulb of a skull,

but I’ve always kept a good enough grip on its head

to feed it its tail with no fear of being bit. Besides,

who’s ever known from the very beginning

whose hour this is for anyone though we blithely assume

we’re all living co-terminously. The Pre-Cambrian

just as it is now existed in the Renaissance

or the Middle Ages among the Pre-Raphaelites.

Cosimo Medici greets Dante Gabriel Rossetti

passing through the bus station, eras striating their minds

like glaciers, Viking runes on the back of the mirror.

I analyze my lust sometimes when I think of you.

I muse upon time as a fountain and a gutter in the same breath.

No waterclock is flowing the wrong way.

Winter stars in the heart of the green apple.

Crocuses under the snow. Like our senses, eventually

I came to understand that all four seasons

are wholly focused without distinction on now.

And now can burn a hole through your skin

the size of a third eye if you’re not careful.

But as Janis Joplin and Dogen Zenji said

seven hundred centuries apart,

the lucky day is when you discover it’s all one day.

And ever since I’ve been living this moment as if

it were the afterlife of forever and even meeting you

where the rubber hits the road, the print hits the paper

like a graffiti kind of shorthand, seems to me

written in the indelible hand of the unscripted evanescence

that mingles my mind and heart like blood and ink

in the inexhaustible watershed of my art.

Dreams of you. Fragrances of emotion

from these sidereal wildflowers rooted

along the mindstream that gets to where it’s going

with no hand on the rudder or wind in the sail.

Are those daylilies or wild irises in your flames?

Deadly nightshade in the umbrage of your eclipse?

How many burning bridges did you have to cross

in the shape of a crucified swan

to get here like the Milky Way without dying?

Pandora’s box or the Pierian spring of the muses,

beatific desire in the fire of the witchcraft of love,

or was I born a ghost too late

to attend upon you like a seance,

to get you humming to my unearthly resonance

like the witch hazel of a tuning fork

divining water that breaks

its vow of silence on the moon

to reveal the secret of life is a woman’s body

when she reveals it like a sacred syllable

to open your eyes down to the blood roots of her rose?

I taste the air, and I can sense the enormous vulnerability

that is the inversely proportional index

of how potentially dangerous you are to anyone

who hangs their heart like raw meat

on the first and last crescents of your claws

like a sacrifice to ensure an abounding harvest,

like a lure to a mermaid that’s never been caught.

Who could take hold of you like the moon by the earth?

The golden fish that swims from one extreme to the other,

depending on where it’s being looked for,

jumps into the drifting lifeboat by itself

the same way apples fall into your lap

with no intention on the part of the wind

to knock them down. Whenever I intuit your presence

as if a room just walked into a person,

you’re always such a windfall

stampeding through my gut

like mass amorous extinctions making a comeback.

Neuronic lightning flashes along my axons

like the discharge of a high voltage cloud of unknowing

illuminating the black mirror of the midnight lake

that sees everything through its third eye like a sky

whispering stars intriguing enough to make you

want to overhear their voices like fireflies of insight

that can’t be attributed to any sign of the zodiac.

And as far as I can tell from what I’ve heard so far

you could be the proto-nostratic grammar

of a new mother tongue with the grassroots vocabulary of a star

I have to leave more space in my heart than my eyes

to reach out and touch as if even my ashes

were still the green initiate of these immolations

where the mystery burns like a dragon in love

to prove its heretical innocence, and everything

is only as sacred as its taboo is revealingly dangerous.

PATRICK WHITE

LIKE A RIVER IN ITS RUNNING, LIKE LIFE, LIKE TIME, LIKE MIND

LIKE A RIVER IN ITS RUNNING, LIKE LIFE, LIKE TIME, LIKE MIND

Like a river in its running, like life, like time, like mind

no point of departure that isn’t also a moment of arrival.

Toxic parasols and meteor showers shot precisely

out of the green radiants of the candling umbrellas

and half-hearted parachutes of the water hemlock.

Starbursts of flowers that scald like welding sparks.

Bouquets thrown backwards over the shoulders of mean brides.

Alone in the high, wild grass, I just want to lie down in the sun

until half of me leaks into my watershed and the other half

evaporates into the cerulean bliss of the oblivious sky,

just breathe myself out into unfathomable volumes of space,

a riff of sacrificial smoke from a guitar on a pyre

as unconcerned as fire about where I’m going from here.

I like the metaphors that spring up like wild irises

along the mindstream, so I guess this is flowing,

though I could as easily be walking down a dirt backwoods road

feeling many of the same things, as I exalted

in the early blossoming of the chicory as a cosmic event

with mystic implications for those who can see

eternity embodied in the earthly simplicity of flowers

and that time, in the long run, has nothing to do with enduring.

I’m going to trample out a deer bed and lie down here

sketching starmaps of this year’s flotilla of waterlilies

until the light of the isoscelean Summer Triangle breaks

like chalk on a blackboard. I want to clear my mind

like the Nazca Plateau and let the fireflies build runways

like well lit jungle zodiacs for the extraterrestrials.

Not expecting the wind to whisper secrets in my ear.

The trees can keep their secrets to themselves.

I’m not here to read the private life of the moon

left open like a diary of telescopic wavelengths

too intimate to be revealed to the one-eyed peeping toms.

Just want to settle into my own wake awhile

like dust kicked up by a wheel, numb the turmoil

on the wonder of things that embrace me as if

I were a stranger to myself the same as them

and our chief function in life, if there’s one at all,

were merely the expression of our presence here

arrayed in the eyes of all like moon rise in a drop of water.

Things flashing into this openness like constellations

of fish and dragonflies in a mirror elaborating their ripples

into flying carpets of musical effusion

that are never out of hidden harmony with chaos

even when seeds are scattered like dice

on the ghost of a chance on the wind lamenting its luck.

Don’t want to mean, or be, or do.

I’ve been through those doors so many times

I’m beginning to think my feet are retrogressive thresholds

or stone mill water wheels grinding out my daily bread

like a Mayan calendar with a new moon at harvest time.

Nothing’s resolved except perhaps you perceive

how the sublimities of life arise like Arcturus

out of its utter insignificance through an opening

in the crown of the black walnut tree you’re lying under.

Whatever I am, whether I bear a message or not,

or I’m just a witness that wasn’t called upon to testify,

comes a time when it seems more fruitive to let

the medium adapt its grammar to me to say what it wants

than I should try to shape it to the unsayable

that always leaves the taste of abandoned books in my mouth.

It’s possible to flute your emptiness through the top

of an empty whiskey bottle making nautical sounds below decks

like the s.o.s. of a lifeboat in distress. Or you can percolate

like a breakfast clutch of black-capped chickadees in the willows

trying to get them to take something seriously for once,

or mock the crows like lumps of coal too cynically short-sighted

to spot the diamonds in their soul. Or you can

stop imitating yourself as if you were the proto-type

of someone who hasn’t made it to the showroom floor yet.

They’re all feasibility studies in pragmatic absurdity.

Given time, any lifemask you’ve carved out of your unlikeness

will grow to resemble you as space

has become a similitude for the dead.

Me? I just want to lie here until all I’ve got left for a voice

is a bird homing in the twilight, and when I roll over

to look in the water and see what remains of me, is a face

as unrecognizable as the universe.

PATRICK WHITE

IN YOU

In you I come to the end of roads,

and an alphabet of burning wings

falls from an indigo sky

like meteors trying to write

the unsayable in a slash of light,

in a language of luminous scars

the night beatifies with mystic knowledge

that wants to name you

so deeply in thresholds and stars

the charged silence

is giving birth to an indelible mouth,

a doorway of blood,

an ancient grammar of fire

the wind puts on like a robe

to scry the darkness for a voice

that could fill the goblets

of the moon’s dead seas

with the wine of a radiant wound,

so much within me

already the tongue of a bell

that can taste you like blackberries.

The whole of you

in every single drop of your eyes,

you are the black swan

of the eclipse that rares its reflection in water,

the dark orchid in the shadow of the dragon

that sways like a bell in the night,

even your absence a shape of cherishing,

a harvest of shadows beyond the light

of the lamp that burns for you.

Within the deepest abyss of myself

where the heart stands alone

like a single black pillar

in the twilight wasteland of the world,

a mysterious temple to the ultimacy

of having been here once

to suffer the passage of form and time,

everything a gesture of space

that thaws back into itself,

I have written your name

in the hourglass of my blood

like a whisper of secret ink

that once voiced the light to be

and shook the stars like wheat

out of its blind abundance

and will be remembered forever

as the first intimacy of the sea,

and there is the rumour

of a dream in the air,

the fragrance of an approach,

that out of an ocean of light

the tide will embody a woman

like the shore of an island

littered with fingertips and kisses

enmeshed like galaxies and starfish

in the exhalation of her veils

and our lips will meet like archers,

and our bodies will sing like arrows

sunk like orchards through the heart

and long after the last flame of life is shed,

the night will silence the birds

in the groves where we bled like poppies

to open the gates of the mystery

like keys and rain, or the rosary of black pearls

that chants its prayers to the night

like the slow alarm of autumn geese

in the eyes of a human face.

I try to say what can’t be said,

pouring my spirit

into the wineskin of every word,

but my heart is a larger apple

than the bough of my voice can bear,

and the silence

that would erect temples everywhere like flowers

spun from the auroral silks of my soul

and perfume the air with the pollen of sacred fireflies,

every emotion a priest with a shaven head

to honour the moon

climbing the stairwell within me

of a million horizons at once

in every breathless step,

falls away behind me like the wake of a sinking ship

that lowers me into my coffin like a lifeboat

or a message in a bottle

that pleads like wine with the emptiness

for an alphabet that isn’t in arrears to time

to say you to the night

in a lightning breath of life beyond

these elemental likenesses I carve

from a quarry of stars.

And I know I ask for immortal children

from a human womb,

and wide as my powers are

to exceed the sky with homing birds,

to adorn the dead branch with windows

that dazzle the roots of dawn,

I am the ashes of a black star in daylight,

a stone man with a chain for a tongue

when I try to swim like Atlantis

through the depths of your shining within

and the last word, the last life

to flash across my mind as I drown

again and again like a pulse

in the embrace of your beauty

is always the world as it is

before anything was said.

PATRICK WHITE

IOTA SUBSCRIPT

IOTA SUBSCRIPT

Devoid of everything but metaphors,

the bread gone hard in the tasteless cupboard

littered with bees and flies

that struggled alone with death

on the plains of the upper shelf,

I enrich my patrician poverty

with poems and painted moons,

dreaming of the unlikely day

without anticipation

all things will be corrected. Hope is a lichen,

a sea of shadows on the moon

that drains the water from the stone,

the siren from the rock. Despair

is a cuff of black blood

caught in a bicycle chain,

and if there’s a dawn to all of this,

a day when it promises to change,

it always comes up like a bride

getting married at her own funeral,

my heart waiting,

alone with the flowers

in an empty limousine.

And madness is not an option

in these days of disintegration;

the asylums are full

and they’re handing out straitjackets

in the lifeboats of the survivors

who jumped ship

when the sea got rough.

I could drink or shoot up,

but that’s a parachute without a rip-cord,

and besides, who’s got the elevation

to get off on the rush

of their falling? And I’ve grown old

as a foundling

on the stairs

of an abandoned church; I have no faith

in miraculous adoptions

or the emergency exits

out of hell, and the deacons of absurdity

long ago gave up passing me around

from heart to heart

like a collection plate

when they saw how little I rendered

as the lean scythe of the harvest moon.

Now the mirrors leave pamphlets,

celestial junkmail

on the threshold of the mornings

left to live. The years fly by

like an abacus of birds

on the sagging powerlines

that weave compliant lightning

into spider-webs.

And everything I’ve caught

has poisoned me

as the women came and went,

different styles of voltage,

brown-outs and butterflies

surging through my heart

like a new transformer.

Now I remember them gratefully

as so many incubators and used cocoons

beyond conversion

I must be a lousy messiah

or one of the lost wise men

to have come this far

beguiled by an elusive star

without finding a manger anywhere

or saving anyone

from their unsalvageable selves,

least of all me, baffled

as I always am poetically

by these luminous rumours of clarity

that arise like women and waves

to dispose of what I am

and enlighten what I’m not

in the bedrooms and Babylons

and spiritual snake-pits

of a dozen sacred brothels.

Aging is not incremental,

drop by drop,

a succession of moments;

it’s precipitous, a stairwell

of continental shelves

I keep stepping off

into deeper, darker, colder depths,

each, a longer fall than the last;

or it’s like the rain

that fell on me as a child,

and falls on me now,

and will fall tomorrow

to open the flowers

that will languish on my coffin

before they launch my moon-boat

crammed with farewells

into the grave. On good days

poetry is an encyclopedic obituary

you can’t take out of the library,

on bad, a suicide note you can

as soon as you pay your late fees.

My devotion has made me absurd;

and my famous pursuit

of an earthly excellence

has treed me like a pack of hounds,

the chronic yapping

of a literally-minded audience

who want the word made blood.

Out on a leafless limb

I linger here

with only the rising loaf of the moon

to sustain me, believing

for lack of a better delusion

as I scramble the stars like code

it somehow keeps my life

hopelessly important

to bait my own dismemberment

by maintaining this fire-watch

throughout these long nights

in a collapsing wooden tower

erected by reformed arsonists

looking for revelation in a lightning strike.

If I have stayed true to the stars,

to fireflies and candles,

and poems that flare like a book of matches,

and preferred instead

to read in the upturned palms

of the passing storms

not the judgment of a god,

but a cheiromancy of luminous life-lines,

the humour is not lost upon me

nor the danger discounted

that the way I’m going

I might very well end up

reaching out for a rescue

that condemns me to hang

from a rope of my own, as usual

the last to know

in the name

of my misplaced loyalty to everything

I took my own life

to consecrate

the unhallowed ground

of an exalted footnote

wandering from page to page,

looking for a cigarette

and a purple passage worthy

of its illuminating irrelevancy,

its penny of qualification

in the back-rooms, sewers,

short-cuts, by-ways, alleys and gutters,

the addenda, appendices

and mystical errata,

the epilogues and variant recensions

that wait like empty cupboards

and extravagant cemeteries

to annotate these endless drafts

of the unpublishable book of life.

PATRICK WHITE

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