I'VE ALWAYS THOUGHT

I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT

I’ve always thought a shared vision was best,

the tree, doubly witnessed, sweeter in the fruit,

the star seen rising over the hill by two,

exponentially enhanced in its shining

because it binds more than itself and another

in the herb of its light, because

nothing exists except as the sum of the eyes that have seen it

either side of the mirror, and two watching

in love or friendship

realize the world as a solitary river

with an infinite number of confluent banks

unravelling like snakes in every direction,

none flowing the wrong way, all,

the vivid wavelength of an ancient pulse

that grows a heart like a door in a tree,

a lighthouse in the dark

or the moon on the breast of a wave.

Look at a shoelace or a chromosome

or the wings of a thermalling hawk

to see what I mean:

one and together make three,

and three makes everything a shape of space.

I and you are only two, a mere reflection.

But when you look upon something with love,

one glance is enough to show you

all the rivers and trees and valleys of earth,

all the flowers and mountains and birds,

all the fingertips and bells and tides and tears,

all the planets clustered like cherries

that laboured to make your face

the mould and model of their own,

right down to the urns of the stars

that marrowed the gold of your bones

out of the ashes of their dead, all there

from the very beginning of all

when God said let there be light

and there was only light and God

until the light said

let there be love instead

let there be love instead

let there be love instead

and the dark was filled with eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

ALL THE GOOD REASONS THAT GET IN THE WAY OF WRITING

ALL THE GOOD REASONS THAT GET IN THE WAY OF WRITING

All the good reasons that get in the way of writing,

baby needs new shoes, and you’re conscientious and diligent,

will kill you faster than the bad ones

that brought you to the edge of your mindstream in the first place

to dip your skull like the cup of the moon

in the wellsprings of your own imagination

instead of always sipping spit from other men’s mouths.

I’m not saying don’t do what you must do

to be a decent human being, or as close as you can get,

but when you’re creatively underwhelmed

by the rising Rockies of Circumstance

losing their footing like an avalanche of cornerstones

coming down on you like a barrage of asteroids,

you better find a mountain gear deep within yourself

to power you out of the way of your own collapsing mindscape.

Don’t come to a reasonable truce with the ashen exigencies

of the underwhelming reality love married you to,

or pontificate like a hollow urn on the tragic absence

of even so much as an echo of yourself to make a comeback

or tell me you squandered it all like apple bloom

when everything I’ve read of what you haven’t written

smells like smoke from a distant pyre on the wind.

Remember the fire. Even if you have to burn underground

through the occult roots of the cedars, or bury yourself

powdered in red ochre under the hearthstones

of your prophetic forebears erasing your picture-music

from the cave walls like graffiti under a bridge

between this world as it never is when you look too closely,

and the one that’s working on you like spiritual water on limestone.

Remember the fire. Remember the discipline

of disobedience that tempted you to steal it in the first place

like a Spartan boy with a hot fox, as it

eats you from the outside in without you saying a word

lest you get caught ratting your deepest secret out in agony.

Or regenerative Prometheus chained to a rock like a salamander

born in the fire of his own afterbirth. Know this.

Lightning doesn’t strike the roosters of fire

that crow like weathervanes pinned

like a medal from an old campaign to the axis of the wind

as if the dawn were some kind of triumph over the night.

Cradle that fire in your hands like a bird that’s fallen to earth,

or a lamp of holy oil in a niche of unanswered longings,

a candle in a hurricane of boarded up windows,

the light of your own mind, casting shadows of time

like a sundial with a wilder imagination

than its usefulness might at first glance suggest.

Nor will it do to catch a falling star and put it in your pocket,

or pour gold down your throat like the Parthians did Crassus

and expect to shine like a lighthouse in a diamond mine

with the voice of an oracular canary in a cage.

You’ve got to live inexhaustibly

what you’re going to write about first

if you want to burn down the Library of Alexandria

in a gamma ray burst of creative annihilation

because you can only master as much life

as you’ve surrendered to like a heretic at the stake

or a pine cone germinating the seeds of enlightenment

like a zen hermit in a forest fire. Don’t take

all the beautiful green swords flaming like wild irises

whose beauty you fall upon like an honourable death

and abuse them like the palings of a gate or a fence around paradise.

Even if you’ve only got a firefly of talent

left in the caldera of an extinct volcano,

a spark in the firepit of a burnt out dragon,

a smouldering ember from last night’s fire in the stove

on a cold morning when the windows are blazing with ice,

you must be crazy and wise enough oxymoronically

to be the benign tyrant of your own Golden Age

like Pericles of Athens, with a politically incorrect

lover for a muse you look upon like the Parthenon

as if she were a phase of the moon. Even if

you love the swaying silver of the wind

over the heavy-grained harvest breaking water

like a bell under a redundant blue moon,

don’t shrink from threshing it if you want to

share it like bread with people as hungry as you are

to eat the heart of the king of the waxing year,

like Wodin made a sacrifice of himself to himself,

or life thrives on itself like a soccer team

that crashed landed on a mountaintop,

or the cosmic eggs of turtles feeds a manger of seagulls,

and the grass eats the grazer, and the grazer eats the grass.

Or if you’re too sensitive to compassionately take life

in order to give it, sharpen the edge of your golden sickle

on the whetstone of the moon, and express your mercy

as Muhammad suggested, with a quick kill

you can hold love responsible for like a spiritual alibi

if you’ve got genius enough to heal it like a inspired liar.

You have to be part salmon. A battering ram

swimming upstream against the flow of circumstance

like the gate of a water castle you’re besieging

to lay your blunted sword down in tribute

among the sacred pools of life that gave it to you

at the beginning of your song, like fire from their eyes

to wage a holy war of one on their behalf

you’re doomed to lose like a conflict that progresses

from one defeat to the next against ever stronger adversaries,

angels in the way, shaitans obstructing the path for your own good,

who realize, too late, with every encounter,

you’re growing stronger than the best reasons

could have anticipated strategically.

Be a good apple tree, lyrically seasoned and epically strong

as Lao Tzu and the Druid aptly described you

like the sacred syllable in the heartwood of the letter Q,

and express yourself completely without intending

the betterment of anything, though all do,

from wasps and birds to bears and humans

with the beauty of your blossoms, the wisdom of your leaves,

and the generosity of the sacrifice that laid you out

like a windfall of dice enshrining the eyes that can see

like seeds in the sibylline books of the apple

the risk they’ll need to take tomorrow like a fire swallower

of the sun and the moon to keep their planets shining

from the inside out in the Goldilocks zone

of a light that’s been sweetened immanentally

by a dangerously habitable life holding up

a lantern in the dark that disappointment, defeat and struggle

could no more put out than a volunteer fire brigade of waterclocks

for the best of reasons could put out the stars in an arsonist’s heart.

Set the world afire like a flame that writes on the wind,

poppies flaring uncontrollably across your field of vision.

Burn like a two-eyed passion for everything

you can see and be on the earth that consumes you

in the equinoctial fires of your vernal immolations,

not a magnifying glass that intensifies the sun into

the capricious focus of an idle boy on a cruel afternoon

shepherding ants like prophetic semi-colons into a furnace.

PATRICK WHITE

PASSING INTO A SWEETER SOLITUDE AS IT GETS OLDER

PASSING INTO A SWEETER SOLITUDE AS IT GETS OLDER

Passing into a sweeter solitude as it gets older

the sunset takes one long last look over its shoulder

like the darkening tree line on a wavelength of hills

back at the valley that it’s just lived its way through

following its mindstream like a pictographic musical motif

through an ordeal of blessings that maimed my ability to believe

in any cave painting that says it’s a found religion.

It isn’t any harder to reverence the stars in a parking lot

than it is in the woods. They can burn inside me

like candles at a black mass, or righteous cherubim

with flaming swords like two nightwatchmen

on either side of the gate that exiles me

from the garden of my heart, and leaves me

with the cornerstone of my skull

to enshrine my homelessness in like an open door

without an entrance or an exit; either way

I’ve never been the poster boy of anyone’s morality play.

One Perseid, my meteor shower on a Saturday night

because I’m sitting on the patio at the Imperial,

with Simon, Johnny, Joe, Sheldon, James

and a jumping bean of a girl whose name I forgot

but who was the house dj checking out the quality

of ipads that were looking up the constellations

that shone so virtually in their hand-held eyes

but had been culled to near extinction like buffalo

by the light pollution smudging the view

of the seventh magnitude sky overhead

that is used to being ignored for its brilliance

by blind star-nosed moles chewing through

the white canes of their electronic roots and nervous systems.

It’s good the watchers are handing out

integrated third eyes of what they want you to see

like Pax genes in the Pre-Cambrian,

a Cyclops enamoured of an observatory,

a Dajal, the one-eyed, red-haired liar,

or those so mesmerized by a tv or computer screen

it’s moot whether it was Perseus or the Medusa

who turned who to stone. Bread and circuses,

the watchers are watching the eyes of those

who are watching them like an iris scan

of the same old documentaries that ran yesterday

when the mystery of the light emerging from the darkness

was still camera shy, and the history

of human insight into matters of moment

such as the death of a comet in the upper atmosphere

wasn’t just the photo op of a warning

no one’s listening to, throwing a wild-eyed tantrum

across the sky for the paparazzi mesmerized

like a frenzy of insects around a celebrity lamp post.

I spy with my little eye, like a small refracting telescope

among the technologically mesmerized,

the deconstruction of holistic ways of seeing

into the programmatic focus of billions of pixels

replacing the cells of our eyes with a visual white noise

of spectacular cataracts milking the homogeneity

of a perilous point of view that will turn on itself

like a retrograde wavelength with the fangs of a new ice age

in the eye of this storm of starless foci. As if

someone took Michelangelo down from his seance

on the Sistine Chapel Roof, and photo-shopped it

on the template wings of a million distracted butterflies,

trying to reconfigure with the IP address

of the wildflowers that have gone offline in a chat room

where nothing, however trivial, gets said

that isn’t indelibly impressed into the cuneiform

of suggestible starmud in the library of Ashurbanipal

keeping an eye on things like an exorcism

of those who don’t believe the medium is the message

with a mute button, texting, the internet, spellcheck and redial.

That said and overheard, I still ping what I write

and feel and think and see, in wonder, bliss and tears,

even if it be so little as one of a hundred meteors an hour

off the stars, knowing the eye by which I see them

is the eye by which they see me synched to the light

like intelligence resonating on the same frequency,

not as an app that can be applied like hindsight to the blind.

PATRICK WHITE

AVERAGING OUT THE CRUCIALS

AVERAGING OUT THE CRUCIALS

Averaging out the crucials, rolling against the odds,

I’ve worn my bones down like dragon’s teeth

grinding starwheat into luminous loaves of bread

that break just like the heart you share with a stranger.

Or a fortune-cookie of fate. Gray seagull of a day,

a deserted beach on Vancouver Island in the morning,

as I recall it from five thousand miles away,

the windows still numb and hungover

from last night’s sunset dispensing with protocol

and letting it all hang out oceanically.

Dying flowers mishandled by the wind like old manuscripts

too wet and esoteric to start a fire with.

Sodden mystics expiring like blueweed in the broken grass.

Fifty years I’ve run before circumstances like a blue fox

being hunted down by crows in the deep snow

but they haven’t dipped their nibs

in the inkwells of my eyes yet and I’m

an excellent broken field street runner with the wiles

of someone who’s good at who they don’t want to be.

Being no one has always been my highest poetic ideal.

Not empty, but full of the world, because

you’ve got space for it. And ageless,

so there’s as much time for everyone as they want.

It’s the remnants of self, the rags of blood you tore

on the thorns of the last eclipse hoping to leave a trail

some other lost soul might be able to follow

taking heart from the fact that a stranger’s suffering

has already humanized this dark space before his

was called upon for a sacrifice to prove he knows how to give

not just take. I gave my emptiness back to the abyss

that hadn’t noticed it was missing, and made

a peaceful transition like a lifeboat drifting in the moonlight

to the other side where the fragrance of the spirit

that still lingers about you, evaporates like a cheap cologne

into the infinite boundlessness of the starless void

that awakens you by an optical sleight of awareness

to the fact that you’re the only one that’s shining here

by contrast. And for the sake of a greater harmony,

you blow the candle out. You shine without eyes

like the blind prophet of your own demise

and all your foundation stones turn to skulls

and the long journey back isn’t strewn

with thorns or rose-petals, but flows intuitively

upstream from the sea against the current creatively

wise as a battered salmon that’s frustrated a gauntlet of grizzlies.

Mythologem 1a. for a gray day washed up

on the coasts of my abdicated solitude

like the displaced Polaris of a dead starfish

misguided by its followers into believing

it got lost along the way it meant to guide them.

The lion can lie down with the lamb

but who fears the eagle being

led around on a leash by a jackass?

The light of the spirit is dangerously real

not benignly blind and harmlessly amenable.

You take the edge off the sword

so no one can get hurt;

you take the risk out of the dance

you want to ask it for.

PATRICK WHITE

AS MUCH AS I LOVE THE STARS

AS MUCH AS I LOVE THE STARS

As much as I love the stars, I know

the spirit must seek its lost radiance

in the midst of the filth of this world,

even when its third eye is trying

to wash it off in tears it really means.

Under the half-closed eyelid

of the pine cone pagoda in oceanic meditation

is a fire-seed waiting for immolation

like an overdue urn about to give birth.

And do you see how the moon

feathers the waves with silver,

and the breathing waters so much

like the flesh of a woman undulating

under the caress of an unaccustomed hand

shines back like fish swimming through a starmap?

As above so below. Same with inside and outside.

Astrophysics is psychology. Noumena, phenomena.

Are you looking for a unified, field theory of your mind?

Study that small sacred syllable of a black ant

with the torn wing of a butterfly

under full sail in its mandible

it’s taking back to the heap

of a thriving passage tomb burial

like a high card it’s going to lay on the table

without intending to call anyone’s bluff.

The moon on the lake isn’t timed.

Death’s not too late. Life’s not too early.

Not all the flowers bloom at once

in a wave of mass hysteria at a sports stadium.

Time is as generous to the dandelion

as it is to the hyacinth or the rose.

When a total eclipse of the soul

can be as illuminating to a firefly

as the enlightenment of the full moon

can be to the mad at harvest time

and the night bird sings on the same branch

out of the same longing

as the mourning dove does

on the burgeoning bough,

how far must a wave look for the grail

before it realizes it’s swimming in it

and by virtue of it having never been lost or found,

like the universe you’re surrounded by

dipping its other wing in the cup you drink from

like blood from your own prophetic skull

or an elixir of love from the goblet of a black tulip,

as an antidote to falling into a cult of trances,

trying to teach rattlesnakes to ghost dance for rain

when everywhere you look as far as the eye can see,

nothing but the bleached bones of their vertebrae

crumbling like aqueducts across a sea of sand

looking for the holy hourglass to green it again?

When things are like this, why send

a caravan of mirages like thought-trains

on a pilgrimage for water on the moon?

Is a course correction more innocent

than its original direction or is it

just another change of heart on the part

of a weathervane that thinks linearly

it’s got its hand on the rudder of the wind?

Best thing to do in a storm

is let go of the wheel of birth and death

and either go down with the ship like a constellation,

or trust in a bubble-shaped universe you still might float

like a turbulent waterlily above the turmoil of it all,

anchored to the bottom like a key on a kite

to lure the lightning to your spinal cord

the way copulating snakes make their own caduceus,

twin wavelengths from the same inner matrix

ascending like helical thermals under a dove’s wings,

so that dragons are born of cosmic eggs

that know how to heal fire with fire

that can consume itself like life

without ever getting burnt out

even when autumn’s coming on

and you can begin to smell

the smoke and ashes on its breath.

Enlightenment the inspiration of the search,

the spirit returns to the candle in your hand,

to dance with the flame of life within you

on your own threshold, in your own doorway as you realize

like someone waking up from a dream

in their own bed, their head on a softer pillow

than they imagined a moonrock could be

at one sixth the gravity of earth, what

was there to aspire to that could possibly be

higher and wiser than a cloud circling a mountain

or down in the valley where the stars slum

once they get off the night shift, more compassionate

than a honey bee in the eye of a stargazer lily

smothering it in a rusty ochre dust storm of pollen

the way we prepared our dead when we lived in caves

to bloom like a hive when its spirit returns to matter

in its next incarnation as a gust of wildflowers on Mars.

Hawkweed and Indian paintbrush I would think.

And the unusual fruits and flowers that can sprout

from a windfall of intensely radiant meteor showers

flung out of the darkness by the hands of generous sowers

that were ploughing the moon for themselves

long before the ox of the mind showed up

like the blessing of a delusional dependency

that makes you think, gone to seed, you need it.

When the truth has always been mindful

and mindlessly green as the thorns and the leaves

of the locust trees in spring coming into blossom

as easily as the mindstream follows its own lead everywhere

with nothing but its own flowing for a navigator.

No gate, no lock, no pivot, no hinge, no waterclock

trying to put the fire of life out in a bucket brigade

of community-oriented arsonists, departure

never any further off the beaten path from home

than its arrival can be lead astray

by the shadow of the return journey

it casts behind it like the widening wake

of a waterbird’s wings unravelling

the flying carpet of the water that wove it

like wavelengths of the hidden harmonies

that are on your side like your eyes are

when you step out of the blazing house of life

once in a while, into the expansive solitude

of your own inimitably creative darkness,

without a candle, a firefly, a lightning strike

for a guide, and look up, just look up

in any direction you wish, and don’t pick any one

of the six thousand stars you can see

with the naked eye in the country,

no matter you don’t know their names

or myths of origin, or much about shepherd moons,

or what an antikythera is, then run around

looking for an underground circumpolar sage

to show you on a starmap where your shining is at

like the light of the star, though you cry

in bliss and sorrow, delusion and insight,

you can’t wash out of your own eye

anymore than you can Venus in the dawn

when you’re sitting on a mountain under a Bodhi tree

trying to attain the unattainable empty-handed

in the same breath that’s been giving it all away

for light years, inexhaustibly, like a flower-mouth

of enlightenment in everything you say or do,

the world in the creative wake of whatever medium

that’s shapeshifting into you like water into fish,

darkness into star, sky into a bird on the wing

in a homesick sunset, or the shining of the source

like the lantern in your hand you needlessly labour

at keeping lit to go look for it without realizing

it’s your own blazing that blinds you to the gift

of what the darkness arrays before you like candles and stars

and nocturnal waterlilies opening like a new moonrise

amazed by the occult mystery of the fire that burns

in the subliminal watersheds of your fathomless eyes.

In this boundless space, why should you be surprised

behind all the masks of God, her best disguise

when the hidden secret wished to be known

and she revealed herself, was your own face,

your eyes, your mouth, your ears, your voice alone

pouring the universe like the light of picture-music

into your own ears like the spirit of a word

that can’t be enlightened until it’s been heard by you.

PATRICK WHITE

FIREFLY, WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?

FIREFLY, WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?

Firefly, what are you looking for

in every corner of the third eye of the world?

Are you looking for the missing children

of another realm who fell into this one

through the trapdoor of a lullaby

enigmatically enciphered in totemistic code?

Are you the star someone was following

like a spark plug that leaked out of their dreams,

a swan in an oilspill? Were you unhappy

with the constellation you fell from

like one of the crown jewels from Corona Borealis,

or are you just a vagrant like me, one

of those aligned to wandering as the next place

to shine a little light on, your life like a lantern in hand,

wondering what’s been written under the leaves,

or under a bridge, that it takes a madman to understand

or it takes a whole tree to play the mystery of its cards

so far from its chest, when they’ll all be scattered to the wind

like ancient starmaps and waterlilies soon.

Insight, synteretic spark, semaphoric lighthouse,

blackout and ignition, which phase of you

shines more intensely, the light or the dark?

Do you just have the one good eye, or two?

It would take someone just as lost at sea in their awareness

to get their bearings from you, as it would

to consult the compass of a flower like a waterclock

because time, when it’s free, like light,

expands in all directions at once like tree rings

dilating the apples of their eyes in the rain,

surrounding the lore of their heartwood with growing pains.

Metaphor, glow worm, do you find what you seek,

are you a chandelier burning in the palace

of a mason jar after the last waltz has packed away its cellos,

a tear of the sun that shines at midnight

like a canary in an underground diamond mine

or do we share the same mind, one neuron in the net

reflecting the other, an effect of the optics of thought?

Intimate familiar, little prophet, rogue planet,

singularity at the bottom of a black hole,

are you looking at me, as I am you

like a thought on the outside, an underwater welder

trying to heal the damage done to the hull of the moon

crossing the Great Barrier Reef of the brain?

Wavelengths of water and light sway the river reeds,

silver the fallen limbs of the statuesque birch

that leaned out too far over the edge of the lake

to pluck the moon from the sky like an apricot.

I watch the cults and spiritual congregations of the fireflies

gather, shape and dissolve, each with its own flight path,

and I wonder if there’s a shape-shifting constellation

that would cover us all under the roof of the same sign

like a zodiac of homeless exiles we all had the keys to

but didn’t know where the locks were hidden

until we took off our starmaps like blindfolds.

No extinctions in the gentle meteor showers

of the fireflies, nor any discernible radiant,

for them or me or the universe, given

everyone embodies the whole of the Big Bang

in and of themselves, just as the New England asters do,

everyone shining for all their worth

through the translucency of their own space,

even when they’re trying to hide from their own eyes,

like daylilies at night, or the gold of full moons

under eyelids of ore, under the overturned lifeboats

of their beached hope chests that have nothing

to look forward to anymore that isn’t any further away

than the telescope they use on top of a cold mountain

to measure the wingspan of their dreams.

The light will out as if it couldn’t keep itself a secret

from the darkness it illuminates with its own flowering.

PATRICK WHITE

WATER HAS ITS FOLLOWERS

WATER HAS ITS FOLLOWERS

Water has its followers

but the wind is free of an audience.

It doesn’t encourage cults of wild irises and daylilies

along the flowing of its banks.

It sows the orchards with the pollen of stars

it kicks up like dust at its heels.

But my voice isn’t the larnyx

of windmills and waterwheels

and when I speak

I’m always one among the crowd

that’s listening at the same time

to a conversation with themselves

that took the words right out of my mouth.

My voice is a seance.

The dead use it like a bus stop.

The swallows and the pigeons

drink from it as if it were a public fountain

efflorescing like an Easter lily in Florence.

It’s a guitar. But I am not

the medium, the message, or the master.

Sometimes my voice comes in the mail

like a self-addressed suicide note

I wanted to take a cheap form

of copyright out on. Be dead

by the time it got here

like the light of a star that’s gone on ahead

so I won’t need to open it to the public.

No echo. I know it’s a black hole

with nothing to say to anyone

who isn’t as singularly empty as it is

cowboying aeons of dark matter into galaxies

that won’t stray from the herd like starfish.

Still life with clown, sometimes

it finds me meditating among the pears

or half-lotus in the nunneries of the waterlilies

praying for something important to come down

like Jesus or a ufo and take me away

just take me away for good from this alien place.

When it talks as if it’s been insulted

I’m the one who loses face when it decides

it would be more honourable for me to die

facing in the direction of my chi,

gutting myself on a compass needle

that’s been in the family ancestrally,

than waste my death as I have my life on poetry.

And when it’s in a less ceremonious mood

it holds a broken beer bottle up to my throat

and threatens to cut my heart out

like a bird stuck in a chimney

putting wings on its jugular like a one-stringed harp.

PATRICK WHITE