HIDDEN JEWELS IN THE ASHES SKINLESS AS LIGHT

HIDDEN JEWELS IN THE ASHES SKINLESS AS LIGHT

Hidden jewels in the ashes skinless as light.

It’s a big place when you only see it through your eyes,

but see it through your heart, and even

your deepest tears are a wound shy

of the bell of silence that overturns the fountainmouths

of even the most efflorescent of the arts

so many paint on their windows so as not to see it.

It’s crucial to be a sincere sword in any holy war,

but how rare it is to meet anyone with

the courage of their clarity to peer beyond that

and look up at the stars from a dark, open field

and see, despite the way the light shatters like chandeliers,

we’re not living in a world of broken mirrors.

You can look into the eyes of the dragon

that weeps like rain. You can feel compassion

for flying reptiles and then you can kneel

at the end of the futon in front of the beaming window

and add your own ray of light as if your were humanizing

prismatic power mandalas through an antique kaleidoscope

by adding your eyes to the sand painting the next moment

is going to be erased at the zenith of fulfilment

and all the apple bloom like the circus tents

of the enlightened clouds and clowns,

are going to blow away, as if time weren’t

just the younger sister of space, but a kind

of sad, lyrical wind as well that keeps

shedding our lifemasks like the petals

of the wild roses and the wings of the flying ants,

as autumn comes looking for the maple keys

that could unburden your heart and sweeten your sleep

like a windfall of the fruits of life that replace it all

with a better return journey than when you went into exile.

Mentored by suffering the improvised myths of our origin,

keeping our third eye on the twists and turns

of the washboard road we’re driving home on,

not to be surprised about what’s around the next bend

or the rock like a hidden chip on a soft shoulder

waiting to be knocked off, wondering if life

has just provided you the occasion

to love again as inexhaustibly as you once did,

as if someone’s just uncovered you like a hidden housewell

or a buried telescope in a graveyard of famous constellations

with an afterlife of born again stars, you turn a corner,

bemused to be alive, as if you’d forgotten the feeling,

and your truly surprised, startled even, when you look to your left

that there’s a field, half-returned to the bush, beyond a cedar rail fence

patched by lichens that look like the seas of the moon

eclipsing their wounds as if time really could heal all things,

and the last of the common mullein were flowering

out of an urgent dream just before dusk, and the light,

I swear the light was making making everything

glow like effulgent honey, as the leaves on the trees

were on the verge of burning, and the goldenrod

and the purple loosestrife stood out like complementary colours,

mutually enhancing hot spots on the wheel of birth and death,

and the star clusters of New England asters

and blue chicory blooming by the side of the road

like floral prototypes of the new starmaps as the night comes on,

each as original as the last, and you’re mystically entranced

even in passage, of how reality, even in the midst

of its dissolution, can sometimes take your breath away

with the beauty that’s immanent within us all revealed

spontaneously like a stranger at the open gate

swinging on its hinges of hello and good-bye

that I took as a sign this was always the right path to be on

after all these light years of driving through the dark on my own.

PATRICK WHITE

THE CLOSER TO DEATH, THE MORE RISKS YOU TAKE IN LIFE

THE CLOSER TO DEATH, THE MORE RISKS YOU TAKE IN LIFE

The closer to death, the more risks you take in life.

Whatever’s left of your dark abundance, you spend it here

on things you know you won’t be able to take for granted

in a few light years, windows and wildflowers, dragonflies

and Venus going down blazing blue-white in a tangerine sunset,

the haiku novel you write spontaneously in your head

about the future of the red-haired kid with floured skin and freckles.

The way the light waxes lyrical about the larkspur.

Even the hairy scab of the spider you found

stranded in the bathtub after he’d put himself in peril

to come out of the darkness for a drink. And the long

pathway to heaven you laid over the side

like a two ply Milky Way of toilet paper

so it could be gone, as it was, in the morning

with blessings on its head and house. So much time

and then there’s forever. We don’t run out of it

we just plunge into one hell of a lot more of it

than we can use.

So given what I know

as one of the few certainties that have

brutally enhanced my intensity for life,

is going to happen to me sooner than later,

twenty springs, twenty summers, twenty autumns

if I’m lucky beaded out like new moons

on the optimistic abacus of my fingers and toes,

how could I not, like Tolstoy walking with Turgenev,

at the crepuscular end of an epic life,

crush flowers against my face, or let the stars

tattoo my skin with whatever constellations they wish?

How could I not admire the immensity of the light

thinly smeared on the delicately leaded stained glass window

of the fly’s wing, lying like a black maple key

on the windowsill at the foot of the sky it couldn’t unlock?

I absorb every mystically specific detail

the way I breathe. The inconceivable uncanniness

of its being here, just as it is without amendment, at all,

and me as well, to witness that all there is

to my unlikely presence is the fly on the windowsill.

Is the unknown star I’m trying to name

the constellation it’s so furiously from

shining through the crowns of the birch groves

pulling their leaves up around their throats

as autumn approaches for all of us. So far

not moribund about death or the passage of the flowers.

If it were a bad thing, the animals would know,

and be afraid of it, and yet I’ve witnessed

some of the highest summits of dignity

in the way an animal dies, accepting what must be,

with such grace and dignity, even in the clutch

of great agony, I just have to remember

what I saw in their eyes as they looked at me calmly

as death underwhelmed them on the inside

without the slightest disappointment

that this was the end of life. And no panic,

no sense of possibly having lived it wrong.

Just the calm of a flightfeather making a soft landing.

All my life I’ve tried to have the courage of my calling

and look into dark spaces and forbidden realms,

fathomless abysses that staggered the imagination

with their imageless prolixity, the hidden harmonies

of archetypal starmud subliminally suggesting

themes and metaphors of picture-music that might

shed light upon my emptiness and yours as if

we, too, were hidden secrets that wished

to be known creatively, the way the moon is,

when the seminal dew is on the grass like the waters

of a breaking womb, though a lunar life is strictly visionary,

or there’s an orgasmic frenzy of silver fish

flashing their lunacy like sabres of light

in their urgency for life in the rising tide

of a providence that inspires them when it’s high

to do or die, or expire in a tidal pool of shore-huggers.

I’ve looked into the dragon’s eyes directly

like two switchblades in a back alley

and recalling Rilke’s advice, tried poetically

to kiss them back into princesses I’ve neglected too long,

to humanize them back into my good graces again

like the dark side of the moon taking off its deathmask,

and turning around, showing me its face, eye to eye,

as if mirrors hadn’t been invented yet,

and I wasn’t a bird that had to be afraid of turning into stone.

PATRICK WHITE

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