NOT SITTING HERE TRYING TO FLINT KNAP THE SPLINTERS OF A MIRROR

NOT SITTING HERE TRYING TO FLINT KNAP THE SPLINTERS OF A MIRROR

Not sitting here trying to flint knap the splinters of a mirror

into Clovis points for pygmies to go hunting mammoths with.

Maybe if I can make them small enough to go on Twitter

or Facebook, two minutes with a hook in the imagination

and I might be able to make of a little stardust, a big constellation

of gaping fish dying of thirst beside a freshwater lake.

I might make a big splash, like Basho’s frog,

for the lifespan of a haiku in prime time for nitwits.

I want to lay my vision out like a surrealistic starmap,

I don’t want some lazy idiot laying its egg on my forehead

like a carnelian, or worse, a contact lens on my third eye

to cure my astigmatism by eating little peep holes in my vision.

I don’t want a news feed for an intravenous muse

spoon feeding me whatever she wants me to hear

like a distant rumour of inspiration running like an opioid

at the end of a morphine drip with fangs.

Beauty’s not an ephemerid, nor the truth

a media fashionista on a catwalk, or an anchor’s desk,

that doesn’t so much as illuminate and deepen

the darkness and the light, but distract the heart with agiprop

and show off its lipstick as if Van Gogh just ate his paint again.

God bless the insane glorious souls dying alone in vain

as the old order changeth and giveth way to the new

and the language of the spirit that expressed itself

in a grammar of wildflowers breaking into a purple passage

of New England asters, is all thorns but no roses

on a bouquet of razorwire that was born without leaves

but still fits the brow of some silly poetling like Apollonic laurel

for having enough money to buy a good book review

if you don’t have the breasts or the chest or the talent

to get it for free.

Why make a mockery of the lie poetry used to be

when yours is so trivial and petty your pretty snowflake

is going to piss in its pants if it ever encounters

an emotional blizzard or a spiritual avalanche?

And that little night light of yours you keep on

like a dream journal beside the bed, isn’t going

to seed the darkness with stars when all you’ve got to sow

is artificial sugar and organic sea salt. And even then,

you’re not Carthage, though you share the same impotence.

What does the candle know of the calling

of a lighthouse on the moon, waiting for light years

or why the foghorns are always in mourning

for the ghost ships it exorcises with a warning

not to come near, or its all downhill from here to the bottom

of a housewell with the literary ambitions of a black hole

the fireflies won’t come to sip from without going out

because they won’t drink from any fountain mouth the stars don’t

and you haven’t even gotten drunk on the blood

of your own skull yet, singing by a river to a moonrise.

Let the strong rope unravel as it will into a million weak threads

clinging like a mountain to a spider web, or a spinal cord

that’s never been frayed like the delta of a river or a mindstream

that can smell the great nightsea of awareness up ahead,

or even a shoelace passing like a needle through an eyelet.

The planet’s on fire, this is Dresden, this is Hamburg,

this is Gaza in a squall of white phosphorus, this is the inferno

that sweeps you off your feet like a whirlwind of igneous Sufis

and evaporates your eyes like dew off the grass in a flash

of inflammable insight that not even your guru or your shrink

are fireproof enough to live through this astronomical catastrophe.

And you, you want to write and tell me, in poems

that make me want to ask them to come over and do my hair as well

how domestically troubled you are by the pebble in your shoe.

You blindfold yourself with a no smoking sign

in front of a firing squad that thinks it might be a good career move

to make a literary martyr out of you like James Joyce

going blind in Trieste while Ezra Pound

sends him cabbages and shoes to survive on.

Bathetic, trivial, irrelevant and effete, you think

it’s radical not to explore the roots of things

like an underground fire in a valley of cedars,

or immolate yourself like the sumac in the fall

hoping to ignite an Arab spring in the middle of your perishing.

Two parachutes on your back, and one in the trunk of the car,

and still you won’t jump, even when the stars

are underneath you expecting you to join in the firewalk

and Icarus hands you a fire-extinguisher

and says, here, put them out if things get too hot.

PATRICK WHITE

NO LIGHTNING FROM MY CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING

NO LIGHTNING FROM MY CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING

No lightning from my cloud of unknowing,

now that this season of storms has passed.

Occasionally tears, but a harvest of stars

shining like Spica in the hand of Virgo

and all these dazzling insights into nothing

I hang like wild grapes and chandeliers

above the dance floor where I press the wine.

Not meditative, but darkly absorbed, who knows,

maybe even void bound, drowned or lost,

I’m not trying to seek a way out of the abyss.

Whatever it is, I accept it as it is. Most of the time.

And when I don’t and I’m stuck like a wishbone

in the throat of a nightbird, even my dissonance

is included in the background cosmic hiss.

So I say you don’t have to be attuned to it

to be in harmony with it, and if you’ve gone astray

or been misdirected, maybe that’s a course correction

you didn’t have to make, because all rivers

are flowing the right way to the sea, and as

for the picture-music you hear like a hidden mindstream

talking in a dream in a dark wood, you don’t

always have to hit the right note to be a great singer.

Or name me a bird that sings its heart out off key.

I can feel the stillness moving under my feet

like a road, a mountain path, a rogue orbit,

or Curiosity like a wandering scholar on Mars,

a vagantes, a Druidic refugee intervening in the War of the Worlds

and a machine this time looking for the Garden of Eden

like an alien mirage in the desert, fossils of Dilmun,

the middens of Shangra La, microbes in the begging bowls

of a new myth of origin, where Nasa is God,

and a robot is the first of a whole new race of Martian nomads.

The silence speaks to me in thousands of estranged voices

like leaves on the silver Russian olives moved

by the spirit of the wind tampering with their sterling currency

to lament their passage at the approach of autumn,

though there are only a few flames beginning

to immolate the trees like heretics that had to

bring their own stakes to their auto da fe.

O how easy it would be when I’m down here alone

to slip into this river like an unobtrusive sacred syllable

into a long-running conversation, even if

it’s nothing but spiritual slang, and yet be satisfied

I’ve had my say, I’ve added my voice

like a bird in a birch grove, whether

anything alive tonight answers it or not.

As a holy book said once on a bus, sitting beside me,

when one jewel is marked they’re all marked

indelibly as stars and eyes and planets,

and there’s a Conservation of Data Principle

in this universe, even in the heart of a black hole,

that says once here, here forever

in this great spiritual lost and found

that can read the whole history of life

in the mustard seeds that yellow the fields around here,

or the stars that do much the same

in a commotion of atmospherically aberrated colours,

burning with the urgency of mystic details

being whispered into everyone’s ear

as if each were a hidden secret of God

that wished to be known and expressed itself flawlessly

like a master of mantric wavelengths

or a mute with an overbite pointing out constellations

and the last of the wildflowers, a signage of light

reciting the fathomless poetry that lives in a name,

ignoring all the fancy lanterns in the windows

of the houses of the zodiac, to follow the flame

of whatever light you’ve been given to go by,

wherever it leads, through the star fields or the cul de sac

of a satoric eclipse with no light at the end of the tunnel

as the only way of ever prodigally coming back.

PATRICK WHITE

I DON'T WANT TO EMBROIDER THIS STRAITJACKET OF KILLER BEES

I DON’T WANT TO EMBROIDER THIS STRAITJACKET OF KILLER BEES

I don’t want to embroider this straitjacket of killer bees

with threads of blood, honey and toxin. I can’t stand

the agony, but I don’t want to lie nostalgically

about what’s happening to me as it is everyone

to dull the pain with the delusional sugars

of an artificial paradise where all the stars are tinfoil.

Sooner succumb with integrity, than subsist

in the shadow of a lie that buffs the experience

as if churning coke in a hive of angry wildflowers.

Half mad with pain I’ve become so accustomed to,

enculturated by out of the corner of my third eye

as if this were a state of affairs normal as oxygen

for everything that lives, and everything, even the rocks

I’ve been pushing up this hill since I was born

like Sisyphus to build a pyramid out of an avalanche

of meteoric cornerstones that keep getting away from me

like the quicksand and mercury that have tainted my sacred pools,

I don’t want to lose my marbles in this game of Russian roulette.

I don’t want to give up like gravity on any habitable planet

and come unravelled like a lunar cloud of unknowing

or an atmosphere evaporating into the abyss

of a vast space as if I couldn’t hold on to my breath long enough

to bubble up from the bottom again like a pearl diver

with a new moon in his hand and a knife in his teeth

he bites down hard on to ensure its not a counterfeit smile.

Anyone can walk their mile standing up

but who knows how to fall for light years

and never come to a stop within themselves

where their hearts are exposed to the stingers of the stars

that approach them like tattoo artists on a binge.

Whether I’m waning or waxing, or just being taken in again

by a snake oil salesmen promoting a dragon of bliss

with stitches in his eyes, I don’t want to be unhinged

like a gate that thinks it’s a bird without a flight feather.

O I dream, I speculate, I ruminate and scry.

I wonder what it would be like to live in a world

where nothing cries out for anything it’s missing,

or counts its blessings on a rosary of tears and skulls

that know all ninety-nine names of God, but not the one

she likes to go by when she’s slumming with you personally.

It’s far too crucial to me, to the spiritual footing

of this palace of stars I’m trying to raise like a tent in the sky

of an hourglass sharing drinks with itself

like housewells in a mirage inspired by life in the desert.

It’s easy to be kind-hearted to your delusions,

but it’s altogether another mode of upended discipline

to be brutal about enlightenment until your eyes thaw

and your glacial heart begins to move on its own melting

and unnamed fathomless lakes are gouged out of your mindscape

like a new cosmology of seeing that perfectly reflects

your being like stars in a firmament of illuminating flaws.

PATRICK WHITE

HOWEVER WE EMBRACE IT INTIMATELY TO HUMANIZE IT

HOWEVER WE EMBRACE IT INTIMATELY TO HUMANIZE IT

However we embrace it intimately to humanize it

and make it ours, ingratiate it into our hearts and minds,

to understand it, and through understanding befriend it,

suffering remains impersonal, oblivious to tenderness,

faceless, a dragon without compassion for our appeals.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods:

they kill us for their sport. Shakespeare. But suffering

is not what we think about it, not the way we feel,

or the little human why of the fact that it exists at all

we shriek into the unlistening abyss, or keep to ourselves

and cry behind whatever lifemasks we care to put on it

as if it were happening to someone else we didn’t recognize.

These are my eyes and they’re weeping blood.

This is my mouth but the tongue’s been torn out

like the flame of a black candle at a mass for the mute.

And the holy men say suffering purifies. The poet

makes something transformatively creative out of it

as if he had a reptile for a muse that can shapeshift

all around him like a caduceus but doesn’t cure his ills

however he try to dull the pain with an anodyne of symbols.

Two women electrocuted in a pool of water running

to rescue a woman in a car on fire that’s just

brought down a powerline like a cobra from a branch.

The noisy bliss of a school bus smashed at a train crossing

like a beer can in a drunken fist that spares no one,

regardless of age, innocence, karma or the satin in the coffins

to prove that heaven’s a better place than this one

where all we ever see is bloodstains on favourite cotton dresses

little girls with ribbons in their hair are killed in every day.

I’ve opened myself up to the suffering of others

and I’ve seen the waterlilies of compassion

gaping at the stars as if waiting for an explanation

that would make it all beautiful and sane again.

I’ve seen friends go methodically mad trying

to gnaw through the glass lenses of the telescopic eyes

they feel they’re caged in like a spider mount

or a live rat in an aquarium with an exotic trophy snake

blunting the bullet of its head off the walls

until one of the ricochets strikes its exhausted mark.

One man’s agony is the way another makes up for

a personality deficiency by enjoying the kill.

Thirty dead wolves in a pick-up truck culled

by two redneck goofs with egos like guns

to protect the cattle on their way to the abattoir.

And when I drove cab, every morning from six

until noon when even the shadows had to turn away,

I was amazed at how many sick and injured people,

young and old, I drove to the hospital as if there were a war

going on somewhere not far from here,

but the only way you could tell was by

the number of wounded and refugees being carried

back from the front lines to the War Memorial Hospital in Perth.

I was the mobile stretcher bearer for the pilgrims

of the Canterbury Tales seeking salvation from pain

in a secular shrine of excruciating cures.

And I grew angry at a god I don’t believe in

that so many, if not all, were born to suffer

in this way at the whim of a psychopath at play.

And for what? To refine a bit of character

like a nugget of wisdom out of a ton of dark ore?

To attribute a loving cause to a tragic effect?

Clinging to desire in a passing world

might explain a lot and get you by for awhile

in the specious present of mirroring thought-moments

but when you realize you’re just dogpaddling in space

off your leash, and that attachment too is a Buddha activity,

who would dare sit at the bedside of a dead child

and void bound in its absence, quote desire

as the cause of nine cancer treatments

that didn’t send suffering into remission?

War, genocide, disease, poverty, ignorance, perishing,

lock-step ideological synchronicities of power-mongers

murdering whatever they set out to govern

that uphold the very principles their power base

was founded upon by the opinions of their inferiors.

And lovers on either side of the river, their hearts arcing

like bridges Running Bear and Little White Dove

will later jump off of. Pain as transcendent as oxygen.

Mice nibbling through the insulation of the wiring

between the walls like the nervous system of an arsonist

shorting out like a chemical fuse to burn

this hovel of a fire trap in ashes to the ground

and rise from annihilation like a culpable mystic in hell.

Maybe I wasn’t raised to be a good bell, a fire-alarm,

or even an air raid siren hoarse with warning,

and my voice is as useless as a lighthouse on the moon,

and I don’t know enough about any gods

to spiritually gossip behind their backs about

who’s on the nightshift of the terminal wards

and who’s shining like a night light in the morgue

and who’s walking in soft shoes as if

the whole world were a hospital that could attend upon

but not mend a heart that’s ticking like a time bomb

walking through a minefield covered in snow

pushing an electric chair to the edge of futile despair

intent on giving suffering some of its own medicine

like a lethal injection of what we’ve been compelled

to live through with smiles on our deathmasks most of our lives.

I want to see the horror in its eyes, I want it to become

the empath I have, I want it to taste its own tears

pacing a widow walk on its hand and knees

waiting for the sea to give up the drowned.

I want to wound reality for making the pain the rule

and the joy of life a school that doesn’t maintain a teacher

to ask a guru how to dance again without fear

its happiness is going to be shackled to a spider

by a dancing master on the other side of the mirror.

PATRICK WHITE

THERE'S A BLACK LOTUS IN MY HEART

THERE’S A BLACK LOTUS IN MY HEART

There’s a black lotus in my heart, black hole

of enlightenment, black waterstar, sacred eclipse.

Nothing worth attaining that isn’t unattainable.

And all the gates are upside down and backwards.

Albino starmaps with black dots shining

on the other side of the mirror, zodiacs

of black matter looping back on themselves

like solar auroras of the sun that rises at midnight.

I don’t know what all this means. I may have gone

too far into exile and actually managed to get

to the dark side of the moon. Or I’m a warehouse

of shadows at noon that have lost track of the time

like blind sundials that feel they’re being followed.

The light illuminates, but I bloom nocturnally.

I’ve got the burn marks of stars all over my skin.

I work on the nightshift at the foundry of a constellation

busy pouring itself out like iron and oxygen, blood and air,

forged out the afterlives of hydrogen I’ve gathered over the years.

A fire-womb engendering one you fill with water.

Fire the midwife of its own daughter. I’m envious

of creative immolations I know I’ll never attain.

Though my left brain is in full communication with the right

and I’m a full moon of the bright vacancy, dark abundance

of both sides, and the harvest is ripe, I’m always

a star ahead of my light, so I don’t end up

like a dead school furnace in the basement

writing my memoirs like a manuscript of ashes in an urn.

Deconstruct me wholly down to my last atom

and I promise you, if that’s all I’ve got to work with

like one stem cell to another at the beginning

of a matrix of causes and conditions into which

we’ll be placed by a Hox gene assessing the chi

of which direction our eyes should face, and how many

degrees of separation there should be between our ears,

I promise you, I’ll still burn with the fireflies

and the supernovas like a blind prophet

who saw two wavelengths copulating like snakes

and has been tied at this stake of of a spine,

an oracular heretic of both sexes in synchrony

like the hybrid of a phoenix and a waterbird

burning in visionary serpent fire ever since

for the sake of a muse that always comes

in the nick of time like rain on the moon to my rescue.

When it’s night in the diamond of my third eye

is the light not more mystically enhanced by the darkness,

more mystically specific than the white wash of the sun?

The moon is the mitochondrian that tempers

the toxicity of the light so the nucleus of the solar system

can blaze with alien oxygen meteorically across the night.

The black mirror, brighter than the white,

shows you your reflection on the inside

where you’re arrayed like a faceless world

that’s given up trying to second guess

who’s the unerring witness under the lifemask

of the surreal cosmology that doesn’t recognize

it’s not a self, at first glance, and that all physics

is the psychology of ridding yourself of the delusion

you can, even if you’re riding a flying carpet

out into this desert of stars to sweep the constellations away

like mirages that have been throwing bad meat

down your holy wells like sacred crocodiles.

Ignite even so much as a matchbook at this distance

or turn on a flashlight to see what’s in the dark

as if you were looking for your mind with your mind on the light

even though it’s as abundantly clear as your eyes it’s night out,

and the billions of stars in the next closest galaxy,

Messier 31, at eleven o’clock above the middle star

in Andromeda on the rocks, and two million light years

of enlightenment will gently recede back into the cosmic hiss

and disappear from your field of view subliminally

knowing, because the timing’s yours, you’re a daylily

covering your insight with the petals of your own hands

because you don’t know how to open them sidereally yet

from the outside in, where your darkness shines

and the night you turn your face away from

like the bright side of the moon blinds you

by a reflected glory to the radiance of the origins

of your own vision, deep within, where it all begins

emanating stars of the darkness of your own eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

LET GO OF MY MIND, LIKE A KITE, LIKE A SNAKE

LET GO OF MY MIND LIKE A KITE, LIKE A SNAKE

Let go of my mind like a kite, like a snake

I’ve grabbed by the tail to make a daisy chain of eternity.

Take the bit out of the Great Square of Pegasus

and pour myself out like the billions of stars in the Milky Way.

I’m hemorrhaging poetry. I’m bleeding to death like a rose.

Let it go, let it go, let it go. Blood knows its own way home.

I’m not weaving straightjackets of circumstantial vetch

into an embroidered chrysalis that never opens up.

I’m not trying to pour the sea back into the cup of the moon.

There’s more to me than I could ever drink up.

You can put a burning candle in the window and wait for me

but I’m going to follow the smoke wherever it leads

like stardust on the chalkboard of accelerated space

in a burning schoolhouse that had nothing much to teach

about the unknown in the first place. Order’s

only a special mode of chaos like a straight line

is a special form of a curve, and there are snakepits

of wavelengths that only serve as flying carpets

growing thin under the windows the dragons look through

like dark energies that can turn space to glass

like gravitational eyes bending the light to their point of view

as if fire were as good a medium as water to see through.

I’m shucking the worlds off my fur like a wolf

on the far side of the river I’ve just swum across

and I’m howling at the moon reflected in every single drop

as if I were a mad multiverse of permutations and combinations

that could be everywhere at once, above the timberline

where I can’t be hunted into extinction like a black dwarf

that knows there’s another kind of shining on the inside

deeper than the obvious scintillance when the moon

plays the lake like the nightbird of a lonely harpsichord in vain.

PATRICK WHITE

I COULD LOOK AT IT WITH SWEETER EYES

I COULD LOOK AT IT WITH SWEETER EYES

I could look at it with sweeter eyes.

The way boys and cowards romanticize war.

I could emphasize the honeysuckle and fireflies.

I could say that’s not a noose in my hand, it’s an ankh.

I could run an extortion racket of jukebox mirrors

and have them placed in all the best cafes

so when you put a quarter moon in

they reflect anything you ask them to.

You’ve got a beautiful face. Man

are you smart. Yes, you’re the son of Zeus

and I’m the oracle of Amun at Siwa.

And every occasion I can with integrity

I try to. I praise the larkspur.

I’m exhilarated by the waterlilies

that have almost come to mean

as much to me as the stars on a summer night.

I rejoice in extraordinarily ordinary events

between people, I don’t expect to experience again

the way he walks beside her like a green crutch

coming into bloom and leafing like a loveletter

trying to be a strong tree she can lean on,

and so much is so crucial to a blessed few

or a father walking down the street,

listening to his daughter as if she were the Buddha

or middle C and he had to keep his eighty-eights straight.

Born a cellular optimist or too stupid to be a cynic,

though there are days I live like a dog,

and I know that denying this suggestive reality

is to summon its affirmation as if

something in the context of life heard you

and though you’re never certain, out to prove you wrong.

And likewise endorsing it, invites its denial.

This is the middle extreme and it should be lived

immensely with intensity like a Sufi gyroscope

in dynamic equilibrium with your wingspan

whether you’re homing to a sacred grove for the night

and your heart is a bell of shadows

or you’re one of the good sugars of life

fulfilled by the dawn where all the birds

sound like one harmony, but if you listen a little harder,

they’re all out of tune with each other,

this one a bass run and that an arpeggio

on a water flute that can hold a note like a drop of dew

on the tongue of a blade of stargrass when it wants to.

When the long wavelengths of its tears

aren’t breaking ashore like a menagerie of glass horses.

My mystic guestimate is. In the dark beyond

the blazing memes that have yet to light a candle to the stars,

love silvers the harvest of the heart in moonlight

and comes by day with a golden scythe to thresh it,

and an understanding that puts its trust in the future of life

like a windfall of apples swarmed by wasps like a train

that had jumped its tracks, or dozens of whales

were beached overnight and crushed their lungs

under their own weight, though that wasn’t as buoyant

as the previous metaphor, nevertheless it’s not

an injudicious verisimilitude for what I’m getting at.

If your passion for anything is ferocious enough

sooner or later you’re going to meet a nemetic dragon

though I’m sure that’s just a dream cloak

for projecting my anxieties onto a blaze

of cold-blooded reptiles with inflammable wings,

and you’re going to look deeply into the fangs of its eyes

as if you had to go through this ordeal

to suffer for what you love to prove you’re real.

Today I lived like one long mouthless scream.

I could have kicked stars in someone’s face.

Too much of a black farce to be the credible dream

of the air corridor I’m trying to sustain

like a black hole to the other side of the hourglass

that’s timing all this like a heartbeat of picture-music.

Now I’m writing poetry beside an aquarium

at two in the morning with three goldfish

hovering in their sleep beside me like hummingbirds

gone back to the sea as we all do eventually.

And it feels good to see the likeness in disparate things

and bring them together like the moon on the mindstream,

maple fire dancing to the rhythm of northern water,

and though it’s impossible to assess the worth

of what I’m doing as a poet in the twenty-first century

I can feel the compassion of a crazy wisdom

in every feather of light that falls to earth like Icarus.

PATRICK WHITE