IT ISN’T THAT I’M LOOKING

It isn’t that I’m looking for eagles in a barnyard

or a phoenix in a match-head

when I observe

by the number of wrecks on the rocks

how few lighthouses there are these days

among so many flashlights.

What can the hair say about the horn

or the feather teach the wind

or quicksand preach

for the edification of the cornerstone?

And must I put a healthy leg

at the service of a broken crutch

to limp along with the mob

at the end of a dying culture

that insists that all roads end

in a cult of cripples?

If I’m walking alone to the stars

on a pilgrimage of one

finding my way in the going,

my heart aligned like the needle of a compass

to a darkness brighter than the light,

and the only map the clarity of my eyes

why should those

who weep in their ashes like rain,

trying to put glasses on a fly,

who have never dipped

the thorn of the moon

in the night of their blood

and written a love poem

to a skull in a desert,

care if I want to roam

in the hills and valleys of myself

like some homeless shepherd of the wind

taking the stone of the earth for a pillow to dream on

in the high grasslands

where the stars walk

whispering eternal intimacies like black swans

barging the ores of a vacant throne

through my bloodstream,

as all along the shores of my flowing

ancient flowers wake mysteriously

like candles in an eclipse?

If I take the sky for the walls of my house

and leave the rest

like an autumn of junk mail

looking for a door and a last known address,

if I choose not to contrive a world

to accommodate my absence

in the available dimension of the future,

wiping my shadows and ghosts

like mirrors off at the threshold,

even letting go of the door

to enter empty-handed

as the applause

for an understudy of the dawn

that never got over its stage-fright

in the abyss of an abandoned theater,

happy to let the river pan itself for gold,

not laying a claim to anything,

making sure the gate-latch

clamps down like a dog on a bone

when I close it up

like a straitjacket in its own thoughts,

not stringing my spinal court to a wishbone

or the warped neck

of an obvious guitar,

but taking my voice with me

like a wounded bird in my hands,

a star struck from a stone,

moonlight in an empty boat,

the taste of silence

in the mouth of a mask,

my name a rainmark

on the eyelid of a dusty bell

I’ve left to the dream it keeps returning to;

why should it matter to anyone

who lies to the bleeding door

that is wounded by their entrance

everytime they say it’s just me

as if a pillar answered?

I can’t find anything

less than everything to call a self

and there are no mirrors

in an abyss more naked than the sky

to consult like the oracular flights of words

that litter the windowsill of this seeing

like flies that spent themselves,

flints on an empty lighter,

wicks on a glass candle,

consuming the ferocity

of their lives against the illusion of the world outside

they brain themselves against again and again

like small meteors

doused like torches in the eye

of the upper atmosphere

just above the open window.

When everything is absurd as this,

and even the tuning forks of the rain

are an era off in their pitch,

and music is merely

the coming and going of ants

in an abandoned syrinx,

and the drum of the heart alone

isn’t enough to start a band,

and the only melody

is a road the wind blew away

like a hair off the shoulder of the night,

and everyone’s trying

to unmarrow the moon like a fortune-cookie,

and every snowflake in the furnace

of this dark fire

thinks it dies like a galaxy

when it’s only an inflection of tears,

am I not free to walk in harmony

with the savage senselessness of it all,

without hanging a bell of advice over my head

like the only corpse

on an island full of gravediggers

who can’t get out of the holes they’ve dug

to bury me in?

I don’t want to live waiting for yesterday

like the light of a star

that’s already gone,

or dream like a seed of constellations to come

like a roll of the dice,

or watch the surplus of your smile

rotting on the docks of a famine.

And don’t think these harvests I leave you

like a trail of breadcrumbs and dead flies

out of this wilderness of thought

are any more than stars

caught in the throat of the labyrinth

that follows itself like a snake with its tail in its mouth,

trying to find a way out of itself

by eating its own head.

And by some chance

if your ever make it out this far,

I’ve mailed back

the same map of fireflies

with its legend of smoke,

three lifetimes a lightyear,

you once handed me to find you

and marked every place I’m not

with a black hole.

PATRICK WHITE

I’LL WEAR THIS ROBE

I’ll wear this robe like a desert;

and release the hinges on the gate

that is closing like a rib cage

on the heart of the nightbird

that returns to the silence

like water taken from a river.

I’ll pour the moon out of its stone cup

and let this vine of eyes,

this bone of light

wander where it will

in search of a face in the darkness

sweeter than the blood-vows of wine.

These flowers aren’t the rags

of the legends of radiance

and a dragon doesn’t waste eclipses

on the blind.

The wind opens its hand

and I disappear like a gust of crows

in the startled nightgroves.

I will drag this empty robe of blood along the ground

like a wounded sky,

a desolate poppy

broken like a kite

on the powerlines of its dreams.

I don’t know what hurt me;

so long, so long ago I was a child,

and now I am a man, and aging

and the water snarls

and bares its fangs of frost,

and impales my heart

inflamed with grief for so much that has passed

without understanding

on the horns of the moon.

My ignorance has been

deeply authorized by life

and more and more often now

my blood coagulates into roses

and seals my mouth with wax

like a regal mandate

to succeed myself in silence

and let my throne

avalanche down the mountain

like just another rockslide,

another round of asteroids,

another fallen temple

freaked with mystic ore that never made it to the surface.

You ask me where I’ve been

like a road you befriended along the way,

but I’d have to know where I was going

to tell you that

and I’ve come to the end of myself

like starlight in a loaf of bread,

a candle that burnt like a voice in the night

to obviate the emptiness,

to warm the abyss momentarily

with the glow of our human divinity,

to say we were here once

like the flower in the field,

the star over the hill,

the face in the window

that watches as we pass

like the shadow of a bird

cast by the flames of a hidden fire,

a pulse of the moon,

the eyelid of a wave

that imagined the sea beneath it

before it broke like a vision

on this shore of flesh

where everything must be abandoned.

I want to be with you

like your eyes are

if you’ll let me be.

I want to silver my breath

in the longest night

of your loneliest fountain.

And many have sworn,

and many along the way

have perished like echoes and flowers

at the insistence of a rootless word.

And there have been nights,

eras of darkness and sorrow

drawn from a stranger’s well

that have bent the path I took,

and scattered my footprints

like refugees and colonists

that turned native

like an exhausted emotion

when their loneliness went wild and crazy

in a solitude even the moon couldn’t fill.

And I have stared

long and deeply into the abyss of the night

and felt the stars stub themselves out

in the sandy hourglass of my ashtray heart.

How desparately

I have rummaged through

this encyclopedia of lives

to find one that wasn’t a prelude to tears,

my heart a lost boot,

laced with a snapped spinal cord,

its mouth

muzzled like a junkyard dog

with an elastic band

to keep body and soul together,

only to proofread sky after sky,

page after page of stars

pricked out in braille,

fingering my name

carved in funereal kells and runes

on another boundary stone.

Nothing binds me.

No one wants my heart enough

to consult it like a map

to where I’m buried like gold

under the tongue of a dangerous angel

who wants to wake up beside you

like a spear of fire

I will fall upon like life, like a lover,

to wound my way back into paradise.

PATRICK WHITE

LONG AGO

Long ago I learned to forgive

yesterday’s shadows

like the daggers of a dead assassin

I melted down into bells

without occasion to sing.

I was tenderly adamant

about the need for compassion

and hung them from the loftiest towers

like iron fruit or rain frozen in its descent.

Only the conceptualists

indulge in perfect virtues

and mine, at best,

are improvised approximations

of the dark whispers

of the blind fish

that swim in the watersheds of my heart.

And there was no other way

of pouring the infection out of the wound

except by inviting the maggots to the feast.

I reproached them all

with the wisdom of a mirror

for relishing the worst of me.

It’s hard to remember sometimes

that even flies have a dignity of their own,

if no honey,

and even the city rose

turns into an old, well-thumbed book eventually,

an index of celebrity desecrations.

I kept my eclipses and dragons

up my bounteous sleeves

and took the trembling stagefright of the stars

cowering behind their cardboard hills seriously.

Whatever the mind realm,

whatever facet of the jewel turning in the growlight,

whatever feather of the spirit

soaring overhead with a twig of fire

or groping below like a star-nosed mole,

my heart turned into a lifeboat, a well, a telescope,

and I hauled everyone up and in and out of themselves

until the moon began to look like a pulley

and there was an echo in the siloes

of my exhortative sufficiency.

Sometimes the galaxies were easier to save than the candles,

but I applied my whips and swans lovingly

I was a good oar on a seaworthy vessel

and eventually my heart turned into a rudder.

I launched every pulse in the name of the unknown

and soon found myself a stranger

in the eyes of the people who had climbed to safety

up the nets and rope-ladders

I learned to fashion from my spinal cord.

I wasn’t a rudder on a lifeboat anymore;

I was a dead shark, dorsal down,

lethal, a meat-plough.

Nobody knew me as I was.

I struggled deeply within myself

to assume the throne of my isolation,

my heart freaked by the hazard of random lightning strikes,

challenged by demons

I could not win against,

crescent moons that broke off in my throat and voice like teeth.

I became the nightwatchman

of pleading shadows laid out

like corpses in a morgue,

a lamp in the arms of its own journey,

while their bodies walked around delinquently.

And the shining was black, the light,

an eerie pollen of the night,

an indelible soot lasered like destiny

on the sheets and sails of a soul I could never wash out,

a luminosity that just didn’t open

the moths and flowers like letters

but rewrote them, a transformative mirror,

an eclipse of the sun

that rises within at midnight,

an illumination that didn’t just reflect

but imagined the things of the world into being

and went on changing them,

mutating them,

seer and seen alike

on the same side of the mirror

that suggested them into existence inconceivably,

though there was no existence

or non-existence

to exit or enter by.

My seeing grew cold and impersonal,

space, a straitjacket of glass,

my heart, an ancient ice-berg on the moon,

and with a shriek of mouthless perception

my blood was blanched into flowing diamond.

I dared to look upon suffering,

my own and the pantomime of others,

as the flaring of a brutal creative fire

that wracked the world in an unwitnessed dream

lonelier than the wind without a star or a candle.

And I knew it was saying me

behind the mask

of every hopeless word I uttered.

And I saw at the dark gate

that reason was only another peer of the realm,

and there was an infinitude of skys and windows beyond

that my eyes hadn’t grown into yet,

flying like a bird into the vision

until only the vision remained,

and there were intimate metals in every rock

that had been confided into being like a secret.

Reason was merely a prim shadow

in the cosmic fire-womb

of the original madness

to make the hidden known,

whispering the world

into its own ear like a blasting cap.

Everything exists to know the hidden

as a robe of its own blood,

the taste of stars in the sap of the sugar maples in spring,

whether the cool mushrooms of her lips

that she offers up in the night

under the evergreens

are dangerously hallucinogenic,

or tenderly toxic, white angel or fly agaric..

I found it important to learn

what doesn’t make me happy,

and then to learn

that there isn’t anything that would

as I long as I persisted

in looking for the meaning of my joy,

the replicable reason

that would let me breed it

like a butterfly or a silkworm in captivity.

Now bliss comes when it does

naked and adorned,

impoverished and squandering,

and my heart is more of an empty, open hand

than a fist clenched around

something it feared to lose.

Haven’t you noticed the sad drinkers

in the all night taverns

who age faster than the wine in their glasses

as soon as they start

to con the god into staying,

make a cage of the tree

to snare the elusive nightbird

that enhances their darkness

with a voice hinged to a doorway of light?

And the theorists trying to sweep

the ashes of stars

immolated in their own light like moths

off their thresholds with tweezers?

And those who live like pharaohs

under pyramids of quicksand

they’ve made of their hearts

anticipating afterlives

that look a lot like this one

when the bandages will come off

like the brittle eyelids

of a shedding rose

and the bull harps will seed the moon again

and the echo at the end of the dream

won’t be just the voice of another used beginning?

PATRICK WHITE

GONE SOON ENOUGH

GONE SOON ENOUGH

Gone soon enough. To who knows where,

though I suspect the question answers itself

if there’s a there to get to at all. Deal with this now

and maybe that, given opposites engender

one another out of their procreative union,

will be tended to as well in every mystic detail.

Mark one jewel and they’re all marked.

Do unto one of these and you do unto me.

And maybe this is the belief of every leaf in the fall,

but with me when I’m trying on ghosts

to go with my death mask, it’s merely one

of a myriad passing thoughts and scenarios

impassioned by the inspired absurdity

of trying to conceptualize the inconceivable.

Not void bound, though I’m free, I still hope,

more love and loyalty than clinging to mirages,

to take all the stars with me, and the moon and the sun,

the wind, the stone, the flower and all the sorrows

I’ve venerated over the years as shrines

to unknown lovers who suffered as anonymously as I did

to accord their solitude the dignity of a sword

and their silence the clarity of a window into the soul

transfigured like space by the nature of its contents

into the bodymind of a human who’s given up

looking for signs of greater things to come

since he followed the breadcrumbs out of a dark wood

into a clearing where he realized, looking up at the stars

for paradigms of light he might be able to recognize

to get his bearings, the whole of his awareness

from the beginningless beginning was revelation

out of nothing, rootless blossoms on the wind,

emptiness with a thousand stamps on it

like a loveletter he wanted to be sure got there.

No message. No medium. However you parse

the expression into a million punctuation marks

like traffic lights of the silence, and the stillness

irremediable, and the stars not the measure of their light.

The many return to the one and the one returns to transcendence,

as the doge of Zen once said, out of everyone’s mouth at once

as he did in twelfth century Tokugawa Japan.

When the Japanese plum tree blossoms,

it’s not speaking for itself, it’s an expression

with as many voices as the universe has atoms to say it,

solo or in chorus, acapella or accompanied by the wind

lamenting the ashes of the blue guitar of the moon,

neither an urn, nor a womb, or the rain improvising

Scarlatti on a harpsichord of plectral thorns attuned

to our tears and spinal cords. If the painting, the poem,

the life doesn’t lead you to the unattainable within yourself,

if you try to contain the feeling, the image, the insight

in the Mason jar of the brain like the spooky green lights

of the fireflies riding their own eyebeams like Einstein

the clock on the town hall tower, until time stops

and space becomes infinite, and nothing outweighs

the feather or the flower, you won’t be struck down

by your own light. Things are retaliatory and petty like that.

But it will be awhile before the Canada geese leaving now

bearing the souls of the dead south and west,

return for you bereft in this realm of arrival and departure.

Death, too, has its muses, its nightbirds,

and none of them are widows at the window or the well.

None of them part the curtains or the veils like a death shroud.

They’re not the screening myths for what

we dare not say out loud lest the silence is listening

in a deathcart parked across the street. You are

the corpse telling you your own life story

and you’re the green fire of the living bough

that lights the funeral pyres of its own ancestral stumps

to burn them out with the intensity of your life

paying homage to your own transformations.

Though everything I’ve just said is smoke on the wind

to the living, that isn’t a sign of its evanescence,

because to the dead, it’s an imperishable lyric

sung by a ghost of picture-music so free and unconstrained

they can hear their hearts still beating like the echo

of distant thunder or wild moonlit horses

running through the high fields like Pegasus

flying with eagles and swans among the stars,

albino periods shining at the beginning of endless things

the middle extremes of every moment of the mindstream

rising like a waterbird with unborn life

and imperishable death for wings, and in its voice

all the silence, sacred syllables, and wavelengths

of everything that sings a child to sleep in its dreams

like a new violin safe in the arms of the mystery

that seasons it like the heartwood of a broad-leafed maple,

spruce, or the willow with lyrical eyes down by the river

trying to write a song for the waters of life

in the shadows of birds in passage across the moon

as if she’d just taken the words right out of my mouth.

PATRICK WHITE  

DON'T COVER YOUR EYES

DON’T COVER YOUR EYES

Don’t cover your eyes when the stars begin to fall; don’t

orphan your fire in a well. Your heart is not a museum of roses,

your love not a misdirected airdrop over a refugee camp.

Friend of these sidereal affinities we spread like table-cloths across space,

friend of these lonely silos in my eyes and this blood that breaks like bread,

still, you are the flower in the vase, impassioned, an urgent poppy.

All the blind librarians of the morning star agree

you are not who you say you are

when you show the shadows of authority your passport rainbow.

Sometimes the tongue of a forsaken seer dances like a drunk at a funeral

down the liberated allies of a sleeping ghetto

while the moon watches like a cat on a windowsill

high overhead. Shy bird feathered by your sudden flaring, your heart,

young and quick, darts easily from branch to branch

barely a presence behind the green jubilation

of a million silver leaves trembling with rain on the reborn tree.

Before the bird sings, we hear it. Before the star shines,

the night is fully enlightened. And home is always a bridge

where we wait to be rescued from hurling ourselves off

into our own desperate reflections. Let the fall save you.

You are the priestess in the shrine of mysterious apples,

sybil and empress of opulent oranges. No matter how many alphabets

enshroud the fairies in the legendary brilliance of ancient skies

and over the telephone cancel the sacred islands in their eyes,

your blood will bind them to this vital afterlife of now like fish

swimming through the flawed water palace

of a drowned engine. You can bet your lies on it.

Your sorrows are not the face-paint of weeping clowns,

nor your natural humanity a moat around a zoo for dwindling dragons.

When you sprawl like a wave of wine across the living room floor,

unspooling the honey and gold of your body’s flower-mine,

I see orchards in your guitar, wheat fire,

the landscape of a small, borderless country

trying to decide which of all its trees should form a government.

Compassionate zero, water your only foundation stone,

you string a harp between your fangs

between the unblooded crescents of the moon

and sink your music deep into the heart of your astounded prey.

Little killer, don’t you know, little killer,

let me tell you,

the saints are crueler than the sinners, the virgins

cheaper than the whores, and reason in its nest of crows

a bird that never soars. Through dangerous doorways, under

lethal skies, the ghost dance of the blind tiger, the white faun

while the widows of light pawn their eyeless rings

in the brutal crucibles of dawn. You want some advice?

Only the great fools who plead for nothing

know all the words to the song.

PATRICK WHITE

INNOCENT AS GRAVITY AND IT'S RAINING

INNOCENT AS GRAVITY AND IT’S RAINING

Innocent as gravity and it’s raining.

Trying to paint a Monarch butterfly into a starscape

where all the wavelengths have been woven

by a third eye into a spider web. This morning

the left and right hemispheres of my brain

are separated like an hourglass undergoing

the meiosis of galaxies whose lustre’s greyed

by the senile pearl of the sky. I want to play

aspirationally like fireflies among the stars,

but a gust of shadows has snuffed all the candles

and if I’m seeing stars at all, it’s like a rainbow

wearing a Joseph’s coat of colours

at the bottom of a well that hasn’t granted a wish in awhile.

My heart’s a loom of dissonant wavelengths

trying to weave my bloodstream like a carpet

it can fly away on braiding all these weak threads

and the light of all these images they carry

like the genomes of the souls of the dead

into the d.n.a. of a stronger spinal cord

I can use like a rope to climb up to the sky and beyond.

All my gravitational lensing has turned into bells of glass

and I’m walking on the splinters and plinths

of things that have come and passed, bearing these urns

transmigrationally like amphorae on a shipwreck

to the bottom of a subconscious watershed.

More sad than depressed, but dark just the same

as if all the dazzling suns and lapidary moons

with stars in their eyes that went into the wine

had just closed them in eclipse. Gone back to sleep

as it seems so many flowers to dream a better dream.

What need of my acceptance of what comes or doesn’t

when my denial or assent are absorbed in its presence?

As if I had a say in my own solitude. Or the birds

could get in the way of their own singing. Or the rain

could choose the window pane it wanted to look through.

However I labour to refute it, my awareness

is as spontaneously inclusive as time and space,

or closer to home, the sea its own weather, foul or fair.

I can’t extinguish the desert that burns within me

in a mirage of water, nor drown the stars in my tears

like the tiny insects that sometimes fly into my eyes

that wash their wings out like sodden punctuation marks

uprooted like sprouting seeds in a sudden flashflood of insight.

I can’t catch up to the light. And I can’t run from it.

Whether it stings like a nettle or soothes like an aloe

it’s always the muse, the mysterium of here and now, as it is,

firefly, or dragon that brings the rain, that I follow

in this discipline of disobedience to what I know and let go of

so that it rains just as often from below as it does from above.

PATRICK WHITE