THE FIRE HYDRANTS LOOK AT THE CHANDELIERS OF BLACK CHERRIES

THE FIRE HYDRANTS LOOK AT THE CHANDELIERS OF BLACK CHERRIES

The fire hydrants look at the chandeliers of black cherries

like Leonid meteor showers they’re never going to put out,

a pawn shop of new moons, a rack of tabled cue-balls.

A difference in the quality of heart, if not kind.

The stolid earthbound. The more translucently cavalier.

Hearts that function. Hearts that look for somewhere to dance

against the gathering storm clouds like fireflies under the stars

while it’s still clear enough for everyone to shine.

The galaxies whirling around their black holes

in three four waltz time knowing behind

all that beauty and grace, like a death mask of dark matter,

lies a chaos of rapture, a state of unknowing

that nonetheless knows, a crazy wisdom,

a lucid ignorance in the eye of a draconian eclipse.

Who needs a crystal skull, or a rattle of the spirit filled

with the sacred seed syllables of a dream grammar

that undermines and derails the logic of syntax

like underground rivers of lunar clay moving

under them in the night, not out of radical spite,

or delusionally estranged from a nature

that is neither true nor false, nor any desire

to see the work train topple into the lake as I saw

happen several times in the muskeg when I

was romantically labouring and teaching on an extra gang

lining and tamping our way through the wilderness

from anywhere to here we thought there was a purpose

as useful as a shovel in quicksand. As I said

who needs a crystal skull when you’ve already

got two eyes in your head and a mind behind them

to create endless paradigms and occult cosmologies

of the world as you see it, create it, and it becomes you?

Nights I weep mercury like a broken-hearted thermometer

taking the measure of my own entropy. Nights I weep

blood and water, cruel roses and compassionate rain

for love affairs I’ve never found the exit or the entrance to

though everything was self-contained and understandable,

but for the pain, but for the pain, expanding like space,

there was never a unit of measure or monad for that

when it’s wavelengths were millions of angstroms off

the scale of the Doppler Shift that would let me know,

in relative frames of reference, whether a heart

was moving toward me or apart. The birthmark

of a meteor with extinction on its mind, or a windfall

of black cherries like balloons in mourning released

like laughing gas at a black mass for poets and pariahs.

Tonight is agony without extasis. I may be

a high wire act crossing the void on my own spinal cord,

who knows how to land on his feet like the stars,

but balance is not peace, and tomorrow I’ll be jumping

through hoops of fire like a tiger of a comet in a circus

of endangered life forms when the lightning

cracks the whip like a ringmaster with a boomslang in his hands.

And the night after that I’ll be carving Mayan calendars

out of the petrified bones of my flesh and blood,

fossils in the Burgess Shale, to count the eras off

since I’ve last seen either of my children, feeling

like Stonehenge without a spring or autumn equinox.

A sun dial of the apocalypse, why has there never

been anyone here to explain this endless silence to me?

Why do the lies go on seeking God to justify themselves

and the truth refuses to speak for itself?

Hey, but I’m made of sterner stuff than that.

An adamantine alloy of necessity and imagination,

I’ve evolved a spiritual immunity to a whole range

of emotional insecticides crop dusting the wild harvest

of my jungle heart with napalm and agent orange,

as much by mutation as through transcendence

when I’m not morphing without roots in a salted wasteland

that’s forgotten the taste of bread and the fragrance of flowers

and everybody’s afraid of eating the polluted fruits of the earth.

PATRICK WHITE

TEMPERING THE CARBONIZED STEEL OF MY HEART

TEMPERING THE CARBONIZED STEEL OF MY HEART

Tempering the carbonized steel of my heart

in a drainage ditch hissing like a snake pit

to make it impervious to the pins the colour-blind lepidopterists

keep sticking in it as if it were a voodoo doll

for the projections they keep putting on it

like death masks of their own making.

Tired of hauling corpses like dead weight up the mountain

on a fragile lifeline where they hang

like mummified spider trophies on a thread of fate

swaying precariously in the wind while I drive

my heart like a piton into rock to secure a footing.

Why is compassion reserved for the weak

who just want to fall backwards into the abyss

taking the strong with them who endure

greater agonies in climbing than they do in falling off?

Enough is enough. Time to cut bait

and throw the little fish back into the depths

like minnows of the moon bottom-feeding on shadows

though they aspire like the vernal equinox

to a constellation of their own where everybody

can see them shining like the Circlet of the Western Fish in Pisces.

Sick of lighting other people’s fires and blowing on the flames

until their star is blazing, and then having them turn around

and throw acid in my eyes that burns like white phosphorus

through metal, even under water. All my life

I’ve pulled one shipwreck after another into my lifeboat

only to watch them punch holes in it to sink us all

behind my back as I was trying to swim through stone.

Why is that? Why do people cut off the hands of those

who were trying to help them like Che Guevara in Bolivia,

and kiss the asses of all those who are sitting on their faces,

who squat enthroned on the garbage can lids they’re living in?

I don’t make cages of gratitude for the doves and the crows

I’ve opened the door for so they can sing for themselves

when they get out of the egg and see how vast the sky is.

And I’m not a warden of aviaries trying to brain wash the parrots

into saying the same things I do to myself

when there’s no one else to talk to in the dark.

I’m not passing out little executioner’s hoods

to trained falcons perched on my arm like cuckoo clocks

timed to go off like i.e.ds at midnight at the stroke of doom.

Shakespeare might have been happy enough to teach the alphabet

to grammar school boys for seven unknown years,

but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have been happier

writing a comedy of errors of his own. I’m not

drawing any analogies here to my own state of affairs,

but if you ask and I say yes. I will. And I do as if

it were just as important to me to see you learn to address

your own potential as it is crucial I apply myself to mine,

why should anyone try to make me the dupe of my own ideals

just as a little black dwarf of a punk who thought himself

the legend of his own matchbook did yesterday on Gore Street

when he asked me politely, hey mister can you spare a cigarette

and not wanting him to go through nicotine withdrawal

because I remember what it’s like, I gave him a handful,

one to smoke now, and the rest to tuck behind his ears,

and the next thing I hear as he returns to his buddies is

hey, did you see how I hustled that old man over there?

Two days of intense heat at the end of May,

the next time he leans on my generosity, that black fly’s toast.

Just because the lion lies down with the lamb, and the lamb

gets an attitude that abuses the parity of all sentient beings

doesn’t mean the lion’s forgotten it’s got fangs and claws

and knows how to use them, or that the golden fleece

can presume upon the dragon that guards it with its own teeth.

And if I were a sheep in the company of flame-throwers

I’d worry about getting my wooly parts singed if only

in the name of strategic self-interest if I weren’t capable

of anything else higher than the grass I’m grazing on.

I’ve been a sacred clown ghost dancing with Sitting Bull

just before Custer’s last stand, and I’ve been demonically possessed

by the best consiglieres hell has to offer, powerful familiars

with surgical minds as sharp as scalpels, black holes in space

the galaxies plunge into without hesitation as if they were jumping

from paradise into a mystery older than light, and I’ve made

my way out again with my own prophetic skull in my hands,

howling at the moon for the agony of this death in life experience

that might have broken me and my harp like a wishbone

that didn’t have anything to sing about anymore,

but the deep cover singularities that exist in the darkness

of everyone’s heart, whether they’re looking for God particles or not,

and never been so twisted by any space I’ve ever been in

as to practise emotional espionage against my own feelings

or turn back on myself like a solar flare that festers

in its own light like an incestuous ingrown hair.

When Blake wrote that the tigers of wrath are wiser

than the horses of instruction, do you think he said it

with his tongue in his cheek? Or jumping through hoops of fire

in a flea circus with stagefright on tour through the boonies?

If someone offers you a clear, cold drink of water for free

from his own wellspring in a desert sweating mirages,

and you spit it in his face like acid rain on the flowers

after its’ been polluted in your own mouth, what do you think

your chances are of not dying of thirst beside a fresh water lake

when all you had to do was roll over and drink the whole thing

in a single gulp, instead of pissing into the swimming pool

we’re all trying to stay afloat in, as if you were an oilslick

sticking like an eclipse to the waterlilies in the last oasis

you’re ever going to get another chance to frack

before the desert hangs you out to dry on your own bone rack

like a fish fry still trying to fly through the smog

of your own smokehouse like a ghost long after

you’ve been cooked on the pyre of your own matchbook?

PATRICK WHITE

I HAVE NEVER SAID

I have never said to anyone that I loved them

and not meant stars, not meant soft green lanterns, not

meant the light coming out of the dark

and fireflies on a windy summer night by a black lake

or the lamp that draws the doe out of the shadows

or the moon drunk quicksilver in the inebriated window

warping its image through the delusional weeping

of dirty winter glass signed like a guestbook

by everybody’s tears, inside and out, and this

still the case though I’m old enough to know

all that crying never turned into a single chandelier

and sad ink’s a bigger liar thread for thread

than the dyes of joy that colour the whole head hopeful.

And I have lain like an island of flesh in a coven of candles

beside cool dolphins with seabird hands

off the coast of my longing, and marvelled

at the amazing bridges of their bodies

and how they nudged my shipwrecked heart ashore.

I have never said to anyone that I loved them

and not meant the mountain ribbon of a bloodstream

that could fill to the brim the infinite cosmic goblet

of an eye, emptier than a telescope dying of thirst

in a desert of stars, with the wine of its endless flowing;

never said I love you to a tree or a door or a cat

or the chain of footprints I drag through the snow like the past

and not meant some era of a woman

who came and stayed awhile with me

in the desolate shadows of a late afternoon apartment

like the first rising of a second moon

I could live on alone in a garden of skulls and fountains.

And even when I draw the suicidal hypotenuse

of love’s descresence across my left wrist

to bury myself in an alma mater of unsanctified ground,

having given a hand to the death of a savage passion,

or swept my continental vision off the table

back into the coffin like an archipelago

of missing jigsaw pieces, more vacancies than a honeymoon hotel

everytime I try to assemble it, I still know

even if it isn’t vouchered to me,

that love is life, and life is a bride

that walks to the altar of her mysterious sacrifice alone,

trailing her ancient veil of stars

along this endless road of ghosts, and somehow

even when I’m the corpse of a fox in the ditch

among the white, sweet, wedding clover,

having been struck from the glare of her highbeams,

it is always somehow strangely okay and foolishly worth it.

PATRICK WHITE

THE IRONIC SMILE OF A SWORD THAT'S TASTED BLOOD

THE IRONIC SMILE OF A SWORD THAT’S TASTED BLOOD

The ironic smile of a sword that’s tasted blood.

Bless the slayer who wounds me. I’ve been

hemorrhaging roses ever since. And bless

the tormentors of the heretical truth, voice coaches all

who taught me to sing in the fire to no one

without feeling the pain. Bless the executioner

for dropping the double-bladed axe of the moon

on the nape of my neck. I transcended thought,

tore all the wire-mesh down from

the home-made aviaries of my voice

and released all my cages from the grasp of my doves

in a slum of rapture that pitied the landlords

who had none. I bless the manipulator who taught me

how to love the joys of spontaneous chaos without contrast

and the psychosexual sadist with the intimate private life

of an X-rated hardware store who sold me a sabre saw

that allowed me to cut my umbilical cord to the puppet masters

and fly without strings like a burning box-kite among the birds.

O, and the long erosive sorrows of an afterlife

with nothing to hope for anymore, what gifts

have they not arrayed before me like wine to a grape,

enlightenment sweetening my heart

with the fluid fruits of compassion?

Namaste, my old teachers, namaste.

I sing it from a low-hanging bough

like the new moon in the heart of a nightbird

and when I went like a wolf to dig up

where I was interred, to give myself

a decent sky burial, I discovered

a motherlode of constellations had replaced

the dusky, sad marrow of my bones

that lay all around like the clappers of bells

that had their tongues cut out by the silence.

Praise be to the assassins on top of the world mountain

and the Old Man who wheels and deals

in sex and drugs like a false prophet who casts

a shadow upon the earth like a tarpit

where the trophies of extinction sink into time

and the abattoirs are redesigned as museums of the mind.

I decultified myself like a contract killer

and rehabilitated my existence by letting a full moon

kiss your eclipse on the lips like the birthmark of a man

who’s about to die at the hands of an apprentice

he raised like an orphan as one of his own.

Ever since you died, the flowers don’t mind coming to my wake.

I shall always sing lyrics of acid rain over your grave

that sting the heart like a child choir of scorpions.

And I want to honour the pettiness of all the maggots

and leeches and tapeworms and high-minded parasites,

who pitched their love like tents in the place of excrement

as Yeats remarked, and spoke like monostomes

out of the same mouth they ate and eliminated with

for teaching me that karmic retribution is instantaneous

and reincarnation isn’t a single event of birth

but a kind of regressively transformative justice

that can swarm one lifespan with many afterlives

like a law of diminishing returns. And that a lion

can learn as much from its unlikeness to these

as it can from all its shining solar affinities.

And humans are known not only by their friends,

but the qualities or lack thereof of their enemies.

Which is why wolfpacks don’t hunt flies.

Out of the effluvium of the swamp I was born into

I broke into poems like nocturnal waterlilies

and even as the eyeless night darkened around me

my fireflies of insight deepened their radiance

into first magnitude stars. And all the lunar deaf-mutes

of my scars opened their mouths for the first time

in a long time, and my blood begin to sing

to the picture-music of songbirds returning

to a sacred grove of first violins branching out

to watch the bud of the moon blossom like a whole note

at the tips of their horse-hair pernambuco sticks.

Praise be to the krill that nemetically created the blue whale.

I’ve learned to fractalize the singularities of black holes

into radiant galaxies lavishing themselves

on billions of life forms upon as many worlds.

Out of a single atom being told it won’t amount to much

by the encroachment of the abyss, I have

elaborated myself out of a dangerous contradiction

into a creative heretic disciplined by the unconditioned

without making an orthodoxy of a lack of tradition

like a great barrier reef of dead polyps mouthing

sacred syllables to the lunar seas they’re buried in like cement.

My eyes have been guided by the shadows of sundials

toward the light. Born with nothing

but the love of a mother who taught me

even a breadcrumb can be as generous

as loaves and fishes on a compassionate hillside,

I have been squandering the riches of my poverty

like a scarecrow on the hungry ghosts of the unfulfilled

like an inexhaustible silo ever since,

growing sunflowers for the blue jays in winter

corn for the raccoons that come with their kits in the night,

and whatever they like for the white-tailed deer

who enter the garden I’ve laid out for them,

shy as moonlight, with no intention

of ever harvesting anything but the wind

that sowed it in the first place with the teeth

of a dragon with starmud in its heart and mind

that brought the rain to temper and heal

the starfields of grain that had felt

the forge and blade of an igneous heart

that knew the dark abundance that would come

from the bright vacancy of the crazy wisdom

that evolved out of adverse nothing

the sublime absurdity of its efflorescent art

of breathing in coal dust like the black lung of a mine

and exhaling diamonds as expansive as a palace of water

to house the homeless radiance of the stars

in the largesse of a mind you could only enter

like a wound through the heart you could feel

in the pain of everything else like steel through your own.

Born like a star or a dragon in a cold furnace of your own ashes,

when you come across a muse chained in a dungeon of ore,

is it not a mystic act of love and compassion to fire her up

and pour her out like gold from the crucible of a base metal

with wings like bellows to fan the flames

of your own extinction into the creative immolations

that illuminate these dragon paths out of hell

with fireflies, stars, and the deeper insights of the night

burning like enlightened serpent sages

up the spinal cords of black candles

dancing on their own funeral pyres like heretics

sacrificing themselves to their own shining

well off the beaten paths of the orthodox nightwatchmen

who make the rounds on the graveyard shift of the zodiacs?

PATRICK WHITE

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