IF YOU WERE TO GIVE ME YOUR HANDS

IF YOU WERE TO GIVE ME YOUR HANDS

If you were to give me your hands, break your prayer

and offer each wing up to me, broken halves of the heart,

I would make one burning dove out of them

that would carry a ribbon of flame in its beak,

a comet in the night, a vision of life and love,

a message to God she couldn’t ignore, a wild flower

that emerged out of the ashes of her abyss

like a star waking up from a bad dream

in the skies over the darkening hills of Perth.

If you were to give me your eyes for a moment

like the lily pads of two eclipses, I’d put my lips

to each of your eyelids like the kissing stone of the Kaaba,

and erase all memory of its igneous fall to earth,

and when you opened them at moonrise,

where I touched you, there’d be two waterstars

shining as if they’d just fallen from the Pleiades

among the waterlilies and crazy raptures of the nightbirds.

Spare me a tear, and I’ll return it to you like an elixir

that will dye your grief like the palette of an autumn tree

that’s been painting for years, a sidereal Prussian blue,

with a touch of alizarin crimson, to burn

like the subliminal passion of a dragon in the background.

And when the fish return to their sacred pools on pilgrimage

like water sylphs, even when your mindstream

breaks like a rosary into billions of separate beads

flowing over the precipice of your eyelashes into the void,

you’ll be the bird that amazes the sun and moon

reflected in each of them as they are in your eyes

as you wheel like the phoenix of a double helix

with the Swan and the Eagle across a summer

of clear night skies casting the nets of their constellations

far and wide, like a spell that gathers them up like shepherd moons.

If you were to give me your breasts, your lips,

your arms, your legs, I’d come like spring to a landscape,

clouds and rain to the moon, a hummingbird

to the goblet of your body, water to a wishing well

full of stars and fireflies, even at noon,

that’s just realized all she ever had to do was ask.

I’d make your flesh feel like the shores

of some vast sea of unexplored sensual awareness

and walk them like a beachcomber in a red tide

of radiant starfish pumping light into your blood.

I would not ask for your soul or your spirit,

knowing the eternal sky does not inhibit the flight

of the wild waterbirds startled off the lake,

and even the wind can’t hold them for long

like leaves and kites, when autumn says it’s time to move on.

But if you were to give me their chains,

I’d retool them into royal cartouches,

ellipsoid orbits, halos, and shield-shaped lozenges,

to distinguish your name, like a waterclock

in an hourglass of desert queens firewalking across the sky

by the Milky Way, as if you were on pageant

sailing up the Thames or the Nile in a barge of moonlight.

And should, never perish the thought, you see fit

to offer me your heart, not as a fortune-cookie

with a happy ending, but like the complementary colour

of the world’s biggest emerald, or the red berry

to a crown of prickly holly leaves, never

would any of my thorns ever draw even so much

as a drop of blood from you to gray the greening

of this lyrical innocence that sings in the urns of autumn

as if Eurydice raised Orpheus out of the grave for a change,

or wild geese carrying the souls of the dead south

out of a threshed cornfield under the first frost of the stars,

or awoke the Sleepers in the Cave, to a new age

that believes if you can’t dream it with your third eye closed

it isn’t real. It doesn’t sail. It isn’t champagne that’s breaking

like a bottled wave against the bow of a moonboat

that’s been in drydock long enough to heal its wounds

and drift down the mindstream of the muse

like a feather of life, with a leaf for a starmap,

a message of love, with no astrolabes or compasses up its sleeve

and a fleet of poems flying high over head across

the lifeless sea of shadows below, the crane bags of Hermes

reaching your delta where the river greets the sea of bliss

breaking into bloom like a third eye from its chrysalis,

a dragon at dawn, a planet in the sunset, a dream figure

that woke reality up from a firepit of illusion

like foxfire in the scorched roots of an old growth forest

where lightning sows the seeds of illumination

like fireflies and transformative storms of stars

under the heavy eyelids of the pine-cones

that have fallen into a deep meditation on the koans

that have rooted love like an unlikely windfall

of constellations, whether your walking on stars or their ashes,

in the unsalted soil of its own galactic immolations.

PATRICK WHITE

WHITE VOID FOR THE MOMENT, QUIESCENT AS PAPER AND CANVAS

WHITE VOID FOR THE MOMENT, QUIESCENT AS PAPER AND CANVAS

White void for the moment, quiescent as paper and canvas,

a little white square in the middle of my heart

as a psychologist once said, startled and wide-eyed,

and there’s no one there, as if I were the simplest

of impossibilities. Could be. But who would be there

to know what it might make a difference to, or care?

Some purposes fulfill themselves or maybe

the quality of peace goes white in the winter

as it does in the dove, so as not to attract

undue attention to itself in a snow storm of poems.

Or maybe, sooner or later, even reality

comes to realize its suprasensual ground of being

is misconceptualized from a word or a name

that has the creative power of one of the shapeshifting lords

of the dead metaphors that get brought back to life

with no idea of where they’ve been in the meantime.

All of genesis in the first word, the to logos,

the whole table of contents of the imagination, now and to come,

the alpha and omega like the short and long vowels

of the sacred syllables of picture music,

apple bloom playing the dead branches of its leafless violins,

and the grammar of a living medium of animal images

and the shamans who entered into their visionary agony

painted on the blackboards of our native skull caves

where we worshipped bears dressed in the hides of humans.

The happy beginnings quit and the hard-line endings go on forever.

I’m back here at Long Bay, like the long story

of a lifemask that’s been passing itself off as me for light years

sitting alone around a daylily of fire

giving a private lapdance to the wind,

scattering stars and leaves and smoke around

all over the place, as if it were looking for something it lost

in a panic to retrieve it from the passage of the mindstream

like time unravelling the seams of all things

unstitching the constellations like the wavelengths

of the enfeebled threads that kept our wounds together

long enough to heal into the crude ores

of terraformed scar tissue that might smoulder

like a starmap of brown stars over the course of time,

even when it’s been mined out like the open pits of the moon,

no light bulbs in the sockets of an empty skull

but never shines the way its eyes used to

when you could look through them

like reflecting telescopes into the sidereal splendours of the soul.

Before it discovered the unbearable solitude

in the nightfall of pain, and the white apparition

that comes like the silence of a nurse in soft shoes

to sow its mouth shut to keep the others

from waking up on the night ward from their dreams

to discover like a wild rose at the end of summer

that everything is terminal, our departures and arrivals,

our exits and entrances alike. That there’s a holy war of one

deep in the heart, win, lose, or draw, day and night

that goes on without respite that even for survival

the crazy wisdom of a compassionate warrior will not fight,

our human divinity not something to be won,

but a birthright, a square of light like a faceless stamp

on a loveletter that melts like a snowflake

as soon as it alights like a star on the furnace of the heart

and the ghosts of our tears return like rivers

to the oceanic awareness of the bays

we sit beside listening to the spiritual white noise

of the cosmic events, in bliss and sorrow,

we once lived through like the mirages and muses

of a tomorrow that came too late to celebrate our absence.

PATRICK WHITE

HEAL SOFTLY, LOVER, BURN GENTLY

HEAL SOFTLY, LOVER, BURN GENTLY

Heal softly, lover, burn gently,

the moon is full on your windowsill,

and the stars haven’t gone down

over the eyes of your bells

or made a fool of your tears

over a jest of ashes. You are

the night branch that reaches for me

and I’m the bird that returns

to your cherry chandeliers,

the ripe goblets of your fire-plums,

and the stars in the quince of your eyes.

And there are blackberries in your blood

thorns and vines, simmering eclipses

broken gates and lonely doorways

where I’ll always come to shine,

where I’ll wait like a ghost beyond death

for the eyelids and bridges

in the breath of your wine.

Eternity isn’t time enough

to hold the sea I bear you

nor a mountain robed in snow

nor a valley heeding voices in the depths,

more than a wound and a toy

to the love I feel for you.

Heal softly, lover, hear me, see

in this dreamtime of the flesh,

how the lanterns

of the lady slippers glow with honey

that fill the hives with light,

and the doe sleeps softly

in the silver grass that jewels the water,

and the fireflies outlive the brass

of graver monuments than these

that write our names on the moon in shadows.

I say it in bees and bruises and orchids

in apples and eglantine,

in roads and doors and thresholds,

in skulls and scars and sunspots

in grapes and scarlet runners,

in the slips of the cucumber seeds,

and the lips of the velvet borage

that kiss and overflow the stone,

you’re the harp in the throat of time

the spider weaves

to hear the morning play.

No widow of burnt guitars,

no journal of summer

pressed between the pages

of the nightshift shales,

no blood on a chain,

or raven lost in the rags and ribbons

of her own black sails, not

frost on a garden that fails,

or a lock that’s lost it keys,

or a rock that grieves for its plundered ores,

you are the candle and the seal

of all my mystic urgencies,

the gentle thief of my confessions

at the circuits and sessions

of a doomed man’s last appeal

to die in the bay of your arms,

a dolphin, a bottle, a snail

that craved its way to you.

Heal softly, lover, turn with the herbs

that follow the sun like clocks

and when your day is done

bathe in the dusk with the birds

that fly through the air like autumn,

and scented by the apricots

and peacock blues that pour out of my heart

like the eyes and inks of a prelude,

a painter, a pitcher of words,

rise from your ancient solitude renewed

and dressed by the wind

in your scarves and veils,

in your nets, your shawls and auroras,

in anklets, chokers, loops and chains

in your nebulae and orbits

and the nippled rain of your earrings,

wait for me as I will wait for you

where the nightjar sings

to celebrate his lover’s soft approach

with every quill and feather of his wings.

And no world will deceive us,

no flame expire, no radiance cease,

no fracture mar the jubilant fire

that recast its heart in the irons of hell

to love you long and well.

PATRICK WHITE

A VISION OF GRIEF IN THE WORLD

A VISION OF GRIEF IN THE WORLD

A vision of grief in the world, so vast and varied,

so intimately specific, so peculiar to each one of us,

we stratify it in our brains like the fossil shapes

of wavelengths and membranes layered

like the flying carpets of the Burgess Shale

or the sediment of a mindstream slowing down

to deposit itself in the book of experience.

Things we couldn’t understand at the time

and still don’t, turmoils of stardust

that fogged our clarity up like a windshield

and taught the heart that feeling

cannot only be a chandelier but a chainsaw

in an old growth forest as well

no matter how many nails for the best of reasons

you drive into the messiah you’re trying to save.

We’re always pouring mirages into

the white gold goblets of the moon

and confusing our lunancy

with the hilarity of being drunk enough

to delude us into thinking we’ve escaped our sorrow

by covering our eyes to outrun the light.

Sometimes I can look at a housefly missing one wing,

rowing in circles on its back on a windowsill,

and my heart overwhelms me with a flashflood of tears

rising from an unknown watershed deep inside,

a subliminal empathy for everything that is lost,

broken, and alone, seriously alone, when

they turn the lights out in the labyrinth for the night,

and the wounded lab rats settle down

in the corners of their cages with their backs

up against the wall, until tommorow when

the lights go on again like a Pavlovian dawn,

and the savage humans come with their tormentive deaths

to kill the way they kill each other

with expedience and enlightened self interest

that whisper like contractors in the shadows

of pleonastic alibis for perpetual war against the world.

No less susceptible than I have been all along

to what is emerging like a dark harmony from my confusion,

my well-informed bafflement, this road I’ve been walking

like a revolution on crutches ever since we lost,

as if there were no other way but love and understanding

even when you’re ready, six times a day

to concede defeat without giving your assent

to the way chaos turned out in retrospect. Time

sweetens the apple into an approximately habitable planet

even if it’s not Eden, and peace beguiles the soul

like someone left alone too long to the intimacy of their solitude

but the sadness of a seasoned overview mingles

in the sugars of life as well, and the heart, the heart

hangs heavily in space with no sight of a planet

under its feet anymore, except the abyss of it all

with nothing to fall toward or away from anymore.

A black sheep shepherd moon with nowhere to pasture

in the starfields on the back slopes of the world mountain,

with nothing to graze on but the symbols

that swarm its breakthrough into the available dimensions

of a future that can’t happen a while longer without it.

Human nature, an alloy of the highest and the lowest,

a three-edged sword, drawn like iron and blood out of the ore,

folded and hammered on the anvils of the stars

and tempered in the valleys of the fireflies

where cooler heads prevail, or the nib

of a silver plough farming the dark side of the moon

as if it were seeding sacred syllables in its wake

hoping they would spread like the hermetic lunacy

of tryng to make bread to share with those who hunger,

out of wildflowers. I was born with a bellyful of those

who try to make what people need seem as beautiful

as the gaping aviomantic fountainmouths they never feed.

Michelangelo at Sotheby’s, Shakespeare at the Bodleian,

how many families could culture sustain

if it actually got as real as grain in their bloodstreams,

instead of auctioning off the windows

as if Galileo painted something as obscene

upon the corrective lenses of his Dutch telescope

as pockmarks on the moon and sunspots on perfections

as one cardinal suggested he did

instead of looking as far as any of these three

into what is well beyond any of us to comprehend and forgive

insomuch if it’s done unto these,

it’s done unto the rest of us as well?

We should worry about a lot more than just cholesterol

placking the heart at its tinkling soirees

suggestively pointing out the gestures

of meaningful insignificance that beset our labours.

We should check out, to maintain our own well being,

whether our art has a green thumb or not,

or we’re just leaving

the crumbs of our dreams in the corners

of other people’s eyes to nibble their way

out of a dark wood into the threshed gardens

and empty silos that ring as hollow as a carillon of bells

summoning a sad, sad seance to leave ghost food out for the dead.

PATRICK WHITE

OVER HERE, YOU SEE

OVER HERE, YOU SEE

Over here, you see, this is where I keep

a hospice for the strawdogs and voodoo dolls

that wander in off the road like spiritual emergencies

that have had enough of being used at sacred rituals.

I made peace between my blessings and my curses,

blew the angels off the heads of the pins

they were dancing on like the axes of uninhabitable planets

stuck through my eyes, the splintered glass

of wreckless stars it took more than light years of tears

to wash from my seeing when everything looked so painful

and the angels were grinding reflecting mirrors

to give corneal transplants to the way I looked at things.

Away with the blessings. Away with the curses.

The doves and the crows, the veils and the bars,

and the way some stars burnt like meteor showers,

chimney sparks, with the radiant of a welder’s arc

trying to repair the rip in the hull of my heart in drydock

whenever I scuttled it like the moon on a coral reef.

And this is the matrix of the lost and found

of all I’ve known and seen and couldn’t find

any other context for other than the artificial paradise

of this womb in waiting everything that hasn’t happened yet.

There are generations of orphans here

with toyboxes full of the enduring relics

their mothers left like endearing fossils

of a love that never came back to claim them.

Petrified butterflies among the sea life of the Burgess Shale.

I keep a place for them in my heart like a pressed flower

until they can root on their own, and bloom

like a star they can follow anywhere, and it’s home.

This is the dark closet where I hang my skeletons

like a wardrobe of mannequins that have worn

my skin from time to time like the flying carpets

of world-creating cosmic membranes blowing

shapeshifting bubbles into hyperspace like alternative lives

that occasionally pop on the razorwire of their umbilical cords

like prophylactic thorns on the miscarriage of a rose

as never to have existed, as Sophocles said,

is the best part of life, bar none. Whether you’re dressed

like a zodiacal king in the cochineal robes of the universe,

or wear the richer rags of a man who walks naked.

And you don’t want to know what’s in there,

but over here in this chamber next to where

the picture-music has a sound proof room of its own

when its rehearsing the silence of the mystery that beguiles it

like a lyric of blood in deep irreconcilable exile,

if you look through this little mica window

you can see the dragons glassblowing their tears

as delicate and fragile as the rain that falls

like chandeliers from a lunar watershed just below

the manic desiccations on the sun-baked surface

of a reflected glory that doesn’t come

with dedicated flowers devoted to hummingbirds

that showed them the sweetness of life in surreal replication.

And this water palace has a thousand rooms

with great bay windows and walls that can speak

of the great events of tragedy and bliss

they’ve witnessed discretely in a cosmic context,

hung with heavy velvet curtains of blood

and tapestries of loose ends the moon unweaves at night

into a million separate wavelengths of enlightenment

it will gather on a loom of blood into the narrative unity

of tomorrow when the tide draws back like an arrow on a bow.

But there’s one floorless, wall-less windowless room

ageless as eternity and bigger than the abyss

that’s lit by the dendritic candelabra of fireflies and stars

coming into blossom nocturnally like an apple tree

on a cold night in spring, I especially want you to see.

This is the doorless niche of my solitude I burn in like a candle.

This is the inexplicable emptiness in my heart

that’s learned to cherish the abyss with open arms,

not just as space, though learning that is wisdom,

but as living people and inanimate things, stars,

leaves, ants, wolves and windows expressing forms

to console themselves in the pervasiveness of their isolation

by taking a hidden secret and making it known

as the black waters of earth long for the moon as a companion.

And this is where I have enshrined your dark radiance

like a telescope in an observatory buzzing with stars

at the prolixity of wild flowers opening themselves up

like loveletters they received anonymously in the night.

This is the sacred grove of the silver-tongued silence

where the birds of insight ripen the fruits of their longing

like windfalls of jewels in the ores of the darkness like eyes

that have sweetened and deepened their seeing enough

to orient the Parthenon to the rising of the Pleiades

liberated like a flock of doves flying off everywhere

in the ubiquitous directions of prayer voiced by the light

of the sailing ones nursing the catasterism of the heart

risking a more enlightened suicide

by falling in love from ever greater

mythologically inspired heights in the depths

of my astronomical awareness of the shining that is you

as if you were the only mirror in the room I can look into

and see way more than the eclipse of myself

than I ever expected to.

PATRICK WHITE

THE BRIGHTER THE LIGHT, THE DEEPER THE SHADOW

THE BRIGHTER THE LIGHT, THE DEEPER THE SHADOW

for Rebekah Garland

The brighter the light, the deeper the shadow.

Shine. And anyone who can see will follow.

Just make sure the stars are real and not tinfoil.

You don’t need to know where you’re going

to be a good guide when you yourself are the path you’re on.

Shine. You’re the blue orchid in the Pleiades.

You’re the firefly in the skull that kicked in

like a bioluminescent emergency light

when the dead woke up to discover they had no eyes.

You’re the last candle dancing to the pulse of the dragon’s heart.

You have suffered and lost. Suffered and won.

Suffered and healed like wounded water on the moon.

Shine like a fountainmouth. Shine like a watershed

that can feel the galaxies swimming through it like starfish

whirling like Sufis at the crossroads of a black hole

like the navel of the wheeling world with the singularity

of a hidden jewel in it like the third eye of a lump of coal

shining out like a diamond of the first magnitude.

You can do cartwheels across the sky

as if your legs and arms were spokes.

You can listen for a voice in the abyss of time and silence

until your ears turn into radio telescopes

turning like calla lilies on a jinxed prayer wheel

looking for signs of extraterrestrial rural life

like pendulous Zen pagodas hanging like bird feeders

on the errant limb of a locust tree, waiting for birds.

Shine like a sword of fire outside the gates of your re-entry

from a long return journey of the smokey dove

that wasn’t sacrificed, but volunteered

to go see what happened to the crow that was sent out first

to witch for land with an olive branch of lightning in its beak

as a sign of the truce we seek with the rain,

we seek through our tears, we seek like the new moon

wholly reflected in every plinth of our shattered mirrors

of what appeared to be real, until, like hungry ghosts

we tried to grasp it and it slipped through our fingers

like an hourglass full of stars, a rosary of Canada geese,

a slaver’s neckchain made of gold like a Celtic torgue.

Shine. I know there’s a genie of blue hydrogen in your lamp

and you don’t need a nightwatchman to ignite it every night,

though I expect you’d meet up later at a seance,

like the creative medium of a spiritual adept at sensual silence.

But when you do, you fire up hell like a school furnace

as easily as you illuminate paradise with a poppy and a sunflower.

Shine. This is your hour. When it’s darkest and it matters the most.

Be a lighthouse off your own shipwrecked coast.

Be the many-petalled matchbook of a flower that blooms in fire

once every seven thousand years, and when the wind

doesn’t feed it anything but the milk and bread of ghosts,

I know you’ve got the ferocious courage

not to blow it out just because you can. Shine

like a wavelength ploughing the dead seas of the moon

like a garden it intends to plant in its wake

that will keep on expanding like the growing edge

of tree rings emanating like cambium from the heartwood

of a cosmic tree that never stops bearing fruit

even when it feels like a Pre-Cambrian tree in a petrified forest

under the Arctic ice of a new polarized ice age.

Don’t hide in the weeds and the shadows

of the star you were meant to be at this zenith

of your ascendency whether you’re peaking or at nadir.

Shine. And let me see if I can recognize by one star alone

what constellation you’re shapeshifting into

like a starmap with flightpaths and insights of her own

through the eye of the hurricane

in the crowns of the black walnut trees

where the nightbirds are waiting as autumn’s coming on

for you to show them how to make their own way home.

Be a lamp in the arms of your own journey.

Just as the moon that’s apprenticed like a sorceress

to all the phases of your beautiful, crazy wisdom is.

PATRICK WHITE

COMING OUT OF A BLUE FUNK

COMING OUT OF A BLUE FUNK

Coming out of a blue funk, this seal,

under a sky thickening like sheet ice all day

has found an airhole it can breathe through for awhile.

Been wondering about my life. What

it’s been doing to me for the last fifty years

for the sake of poetry, for the sake

of pursuing an earthly excellence

though it hardly matters why anymore.

I used to have an answer on the tip of my tongue

when I was young and thought more

with my mouth than my heart. Less so now.

Time, death, suffering, love and the devil,

certain intense realms of creative bliss

attuned to the dark harmonies of hidden roots

that flow back like the delta of a river

to the watershed of a single drop of water

that got it in its head to do something big with its life

and turn something trivial into the sublime.

Did not the sun and the moon, the whole of the sky,

fit it like skin? And that was just the outside.

It would take more than light years to measure

the wingspan of the abysmal spaces within.

Even time would run out of itself

before it got to the end of anything.

My life in art has been like keeping a fire alight outside

in a rainstorm of tears. To see clearly

through windows that thawed in the heat

of looking through them with the compassionate ferocity

of a crystal skull poured out of a terraforming meteor impact

like a prophetic lump of coal, a diamond in the rough,

that refused to burn in the furnace to prove it had the right stuff

to shine like a star, no one could follow, on its way to somewhere else.

Not a sign post. Just a sign. Your eyes

once you see it, are never going to be the same again.

You won’t look at a starcluster like the Pleiades

as if you were waiting for the traffic lights to change.

You’ll take your three and a half pounds of brainy starmud,

like a meteoritic kissing stone, a falling star,

and run it through a diamond tipped bandsaw

and discover the jewel of life that’s been glowing

in the core of the ore since time immemorial

like a dna molecule wasted on space

that transforms the medium and the messenger

into a voice, free of content, that’s the whole of the message.

I walked out to this dark, deserted place, redolent

with the duff and detritus of life, the flotsam and jetsam,

where the half life of the rate of decay of my insights

into your heart, eludes being used as an atomic clock

to determine the agelessness of either of us.

I came out to look at the stars but I’ve been startled

by the photonic discharges of your bioluminescent fireflies

ever since I started looking up like a starmap to make sure things

were where they were supposed to be. One moment

you get in my eyes like the sandstorm of a mandalic power painting,

a masterpiece of the wind, and the next,

I can feel the intransigence of your vulnerability

dyeing your hair like a comet to attract the attention

of the sun at midnight looking for asylum from a black hole

where it’s third eye used to be.

You’re a mermaid on the rocks of Andromeda singing to a telescope

to look up to see how far its got to sink in an ocean of stars

before it hits bottom like a shipwrecked moonrise

gone pearl diving for habitable planets

that can say I love you and mean it like an atmosphere

it’s not going to lose again. Only in the Braille

of the scars on your heart so far, but I can read your pain

like the glyphs of an Aztec temple

I’m still clearing from the jungle of my indirections,

that recorded in imported stone how many times

it’s been torn out to please the gods with a kidnapped sacrifice

worthy of the priestcraft in the sacred abattoirs

of modern drug cartels when you’re too susceptible

to feeling too much, the same as me, when I’m thinking mythically

about what I’ve endured to be acceptable in my own eyes

that might shine across these aloof distances like a star into yours

that lights you up from the inside like an intimate familiar

whispering into your ear like a dream grammar of sacred syllables

that have liberated themselves from the syntax of the stars

just to speak subliminally in the same sign language as you

like the chaos of fireflies I see in the black mirror of my mindstream

bending space like the surface of a lake at night

where you can hear the echo of a loon ululating

like the wavelength of a mysterious love song

among these dark hills shapeshifting in the moonlight

toward you like a mirage of picture-music

emerging as something real in this wilderness of transformation

like a new constellation of fireflies I want to overhear with your heart.

PATRICK WHITE