WHEN I GET TO THE ROOT OF WHAT I REALLY WANT

WHEN I GET TO THE ROOT OF WHAT I REALLY WANT

When I get to the root of what I really want

it all comes down to the nothing that I’ve got.

If a mirror were to publish me the way I really look,

I’d look like a rootless tree, scattering all its leaves

and dropping its fruit like tears that got too heavy to bear.

I look at a beautiful woman now as if she were art,

a Caravaggio in a gallery, as my eyes are

just as happy to see, as my hands once were to touch.

Noli me tangere. Because I don’t love anyone,

not even myself. Love is a double-edged sword

that can’t dance solo, and my longing’s been

a wandering troubadour for so long now, I can

mark the eras of my life by the number of windows

I’ve stood under singing to the waxing moon as it opens up.

I’ve always been a foolish dream weaver

trying to make a waterbed out of a snakepit for two

knowing how long it takes for the flying carpets to wear through.

I’m Pictish enough to live with a blue body

covered in lunar tattoos, or play the sacred clown

so I can use my absurdity as an alibi for the loss of my innocence,

and everybody’s innocent at the beginning of love,

as if the moon were renewing her virginity in you.

I’ve lived with a lioness, two witches, an apostate madonna,

a beast mistress, one demon with juno, a couple of butterflies

that landed on the tip of the split dragon’s tongue

divining for water in hell a moment or two

before their flightpaths got so erratic I couldn’t keep up

and not wanting to fly wingman anymore,

tilted my wings good-bye, and banked back

into the depths and the heights of my reptilian solitude.

If things aren’t perfect after you get over the shock of moonrise

believe me, the night you stop blaming

the flaws in your telescope

or the cinders in your own eyes

and realize how much dark ore it takes

for a nugget of gold to cast it

like a mountain of shadows behind it,

you’d make a much better astronomer than you are now.

You’d be able to relate to the asteroids

as easily as you do the radiant rings and shepherd moons

with their alluring promise of a mysterious life

just under the eyelids of their ice-caps,

as you peer through the cracks in their cataracts.

My heart’s been savaged by firestorms of stars

sweeping across deserts of volcanic ash and pumice

by thousands of delusions arming themselves like mirages

to wound the very water they depended for their lives upon

because they didn’t think there were enough bubbles in the hourglass.

You wake up one morning and find the skull of the moon

polluting your wishing well, it’s time to pack up

and take your lute on the road again like uprooted rain.

Try for a graceful exit but if it’s a little more brutal

than your entrance, do the best you can one abyss at a time

so that when you’re on your death bed reviewing all this,

you won’t have to wince too hard

at all your futile attempts to remain indefensibly human.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN GRIEF GROWS SAVAGE AND THERE'S NOTHING TO HUNT

WHEN GRIEF GROWS SAVAGE AND THERE’S NOTHING TO HUNT

When grief grows savage and there’s nothing to hunt

and all your mandalas are turning back into cave paintings

running down a limestone wall like spears

in the tears of weeping shamans, and you want

to tear your heart out and eat it to nourish your emptiness

but you’re not sure if it’s still the noble enemy it used to be,

or if the power of its sympathetic magic has past

the expiry date, and you think you might be

the last of the big mammals to go extinct in the ice-age,

time to sit down on the ground and have a good laugh

at how the things we take most seriously in life

make sacred clowns of us all in the last analysis

just before enlightenment. Put your lifemask on again,

coax a star or a firefly out of the tinder of that nebula

you’re blowing on until you’ve got a good blaze going

then throw all your grave goods on it as if

you were sending them on ahead of you

while you danced the pain away like the sky burial

of the ghost of another age that’s been haunting you

like a glacier that’s slowly beginning to wash itself clean of itself

as the numbness in your heart thaws like a baby mammoth

that fell into a crevasse of ice, and your fingertips

are melting like elk horn candelabra at a native exorcism.

And, yes, it stings for a while just as things are starting

to warm up, but that too will pass like a wet snowfall in April,

when your blood will begin to flow again

as if it were teaching the wild columbine and gypsy poppies

to waltz to the picture-music of the wind without banshees

howling and scratching at your eyes like dead branches

as if they were raking their fingernails against the glass

of a cold, crystal skull disappearing like an ice-cube in a night cap.

Sit down on the ground and have a good laugh

on the tab of everything that’s ever wounded you

and you just watch how easy it is to wipe

that gruesome grin off the face of the moon

like the sabre-toothed Smilodon that mauled you

and replace it with the smile of a Chesire cat

that just ate the canary in a coal mine of fossilized constellations

because grief can intensify the darkness into diamonds

that can see through the translucency of the tears in your eyes

new stars breaking out all over like waterlilies in the night skies

waiting for you to name them and give them myths of origin

derived like starmaps from the legends of your own shining.

Eventually the jesters of crazy wisdom will come to us all

and wipe the tears from our eyes and paint stars in their stead

we can point out to the cloaked ones

under the covers of their death beds

as if the deeper and darker the night the better to see

trillions of fireflies flung off the wheeling

of the celestial spheres like compassionate insights

into what we suffer for, what we lose whenever

we try to possess forever by trying to pour

the universe out of the universe like a waterclock in Aquarius

when we’re already swimming through eternity

like Pisces and there’s never a moment that passes in life

that isn’t a vernal equinox in a locket we hold close to our hearts

that doesn’t bloom in the fires of enlightenment

like star seeds hidden under the eyelids

of last year’s dolorous windfall of pine cones

because however the wind screams

through the broken wishbones and harps

of our shattered limbs, our torn dreams,

the eighth time we get up from our seventh time down

we get up and stand our ground like evergreens in the starfields.

PATRICK WHITE

I DON'T WANT TO HAVE MY EYES GLAZED OVER NACREOUSLY

I DON’T WANT TO HAVE MY EYES GLAZED OVER NACREOUSLY

I don’t want to have my eyes glazed over nacreously

if I were a grain of sand, a diamond in the rough,

living in a pearly world. Cataracts in the eye,

flowers in the sky. I don’t want to live in a spiritual trance

blissed out like the first crescent of the moon

smiling down upon everything as if I weren’t

attached to any particular atmosphere and all

the waters of life were frozen like tears in a jewelled locket

I kiss once in awhile in a rush of gushing devotion.

I love the mystic details of the concrete specifics of the world.

The stylus of the birds that can write with their beaks and feet

like cuneiform on the skin of an apple,

and wormholes that burrow even deeper

into the sweetness of the flesh, neolithic barrow tombs

aligned with the vernal equinox, and that soft blue talc

as if the dew had turned to powder that clings to the autumn grapes.

I like the spelling errors fate makes

on the staves of our foreheads where it writes

the picture-music of our destinies in such a way

that everything that’s written there, over the course of time,

our eyes will live long enough to see.

I don’t want to turn my spirit into a cosmic perfumery

and extract my essence from the ambergris of my presence.

I don’t want to transform whale vomit into an alluring fragrance

that isn’t naturally its own. Or suggest to certain flowers

they gargle the rain like mouthwash, or smear

the eyelids of the rose with a snailtrack of stars.

What did the Zen master say? The stone is lustrous,

but there’s nothing inside. The ore is different

but from it comes gold. Why hide the bruises and scars,

sunspots like black eyes, or the pitted complexion of the moon

from the third eye of Galileo’s telescope trying futilely

to show a Vatican cardinal the mutability of the firmament?

Things are rough out there, and happenstance is neither fair

nor unjust. Things pass into their return like the earth

going around the sun in a five billion year old roulette wheel,

and every asteroid might dream it could grow up to be

the cornerstone of a planet, and then come down

on the dinosaurs like an avalanche without sin

that threw the first rock at Mary Magdalene.

I don’t want to disperse every breath I take and exhale

aurorally like veils, as lovely as they are, over the face of the sky

as if it had something indecent to hide like snow on a dungheap.

I don’t think the dung needs to be dressed up like a festering virgin

that needs to be purified. Snowflakes on a slow methane furnace

I think the dung and the snow go the way of all flesh

though some walk, some run, some flow, some evaporate

and some are just inflammably combustible, but all

know their own way back to their roots as well as anyone.

Never known a river that needed a guru

to find its own way back to the sea, or a cloud

that was ever unhappy about the way it was shaped by the wind.

I wash my hands, and I’m bathed in the waters of Jordan.

I open my eyes, and God says fiat lux, let there be light.

I walk over to the window and look down on the morning street

and Muhammad makes that my quibla, my direction of prayer,

and under the eaves there’s a mourning dove

singing the shahada like a muezzin to its young.

I put my clothes on, slowly rising to consciousness

until my thirteenth year and I’m wearing my tallit and tefillin

at my own bar mitzvah, listening for the Aliyah

to call me up and recite the Torah. I admire the stamina

of the petunias still brimming over the rims of the whiskey barrels

municipally placed between the parking meters

in a biting autumn wind, and the Buddha hands

Ananda a flower and smiles as if I could understand him.

I rescue a fly from drowning in a toilet bowl

with a piece of kleenex like something it can cling to

because I think one day that could be me

praying for a lifeboat, and Beelzebub commends me

for my lack of discrimination, and Lucifer’s intrigued

while Jesus befriends me because my compassion isn’t fastidious.

What’s so unspiritual about mundanity as it is?

Samsara is nirvana. Delusion the door to enlightenment.

Every chore, a religious ritual, a do, a path in a participatory world.

Every farmer in the Perth Restaurant at their daily coffee clutch

a sage as wise as the rocks and stumps he’s cleared

like a backhoe from his fields laid out like scripture

covered in mustard, goldenrod, vetch and purple loosestrife.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. You want to touch the soul,

it’s not out there out of palpable reach, it’s

the starmud between your fingers and your toes,

under your nails, the sweetmeat of your brain

in a black walnut shell, the very stuff your hands are made of.

And this is more of a mystery than looking for it anywhere else.

The black-eyed Susans, the New England asters,

the last of the wildflowers aren’t just things to look at

but seers in themselves the stars consult like oracles

of what’s to come, and when you look at the maple trees aflame

who needs anymore martyrs or heretics than that,

and sometimes you can even see Raphael throwing his paintings

in the Bonfire of the Vanities while Savanarola rails like the wind

against the Medici he’s trying to drive out of Florence

or the Taliban trying to purge what’s she’s reading

out of a young girl’s eyes with the formic acids

of stinging nettles and ant heaps clinging to the Koran

like a no trespassing sign at all the crossroads of life

where the Sufis whirl like galaxies into rapturous extinction

and Allah sends no more rasuls like prophets with books

and forgoes the words for the grammar of natural things

as signs of the Friend within and without

and everything’s a metaphor of the tauhid and unity

of the worlds within worlds in light upon light.

Work is as much a form of worship when you see it right

as the Hindus do, as love is. So when you’re feeding the cats

or putting out oats for the horses, this is the mysticism of action

beyond the contemplative, actualizing the abstract

in an act of devotion such that for every roofing nail

a carpenter drives into a rafter, a temple is built in the heart,

and hundreds of loveletters are released for free

like doves and flamingoes or sidereal swans and eagles,

Japanese plum blossoms into the sky that writes back like the moon.

And, yes, there are times when I go mad in my isolation cell

and fling my inkpot at the wall like Luther at the Devil,

and want to get out of here so badly I set my desk afire

and let it drift like a Viking funeral ship all the way to the bottom

and the next thing you know coral’s trying to grow

a Gothic cathedral out of it, complete with angels and gargoyles,

virgins and saints, and grief turned fluid once more

is flowing like a river of stone back to the sky again

as all the masons and their families that laid the heritage field stones

dance around it like fish in the Great Barrier Reef

as the cardinals stand around in their bifurcated, goose-necked,

bi-valved barnacle hats astonished by what metaphors can achieve

polyp by polyp, drop by drop in a limestone cave, star by star

in an expanding universe, or cell by cell in the body of a human

when imagination is free to work in tandem with the random

like genetic mutations on helical stairwells of dna

sliding down the bannisters as if even evolution

were a game of spiral snakes and ladders with oxymoronic rungs

and if you’re lucid and want make things clear as starmud

you have to resort to speaking in tongues.

PATRICK WHITE

QUARTER MOON IN SAGITTARIUS AT THE AUTUMN EQUINOX

QUARTER MOON IN SAGITTARIUS AT THE AUTUMN EQUINOX

Quarter moon in Sagittarius at the autumn equinox.

The ecliptic intersects the celestial equator

at the equinoctial colure. Sagitta. Arrow in Latin.

Toxos. In classical Greek. Attic dialect. As in

toxin. Or toxologist. Archaic word for archer.

I’m a little teapot short and stout. Here

is my handle. Here is my spout. Tip me over

and pour me out. Zen is the taste of tea.

And maybe those aren’t stars, but flower arrangements

at a Chanoyu ceremony with raku tea bowls,

where even the cracks where the stars leaked out

are cherished like scars on the moon. The porous face

of someone pitted by smallpox. One stone

in a sand garden of stars raked into wavelengths.

If Zen is the taste of tea, then Islam must be

the flavour of coffee. The Christians have

their blood and wine. And the Jews drink deep

of the fountainmouths of their tears by the rivers of Babylon.

Suspiciously symmetrical thought for a heretic like me,

More that of an engineer than a seer watching stars.

A dog barks at sly shadows farms and forms away.

The leaves are brittle and tense. They scratch cold runes

like glacial striations on the wind in passing.

All the waterlilies have candled like parachutes.

The willows are using a lot more hairspray than they used to

and their supple tresses now sway like arthritic rivers

that stiffen up in the damp weather. But soon

you’ll see the stars shining through the veils

of their branches, and the pathos of their ruined beauty

will be renewed by the mystery of a high priestess

that taught Medusa how to dance gracefully

like Algol in the hand of Perseus, in a radiant ballet

of whips and wavelengths. The river seems

more hermetically aloof, withdrawn, removed

from itself as if some deep insight preoccupied it

and even the longing of the nightbird’s lyrics

seem coarsened by hunger in the predatory air.

As for me and my house, I come here alone

where I can turn a hovel of solitude into a palace

of water and wonder and sit until the silence

grows inhuman, and nothing of me remains

but the impersonality of the universe

that’s traded its feathers in for sequins and scales again.

Warm ostrich boas of pampas grass

for sleeker gowns of snakeskin.

Revelation of the burlesque for something

more alluring and dangerous. And the darkness

a northern siren calling me to the rocks like a muse

to the occult grammar of her body language.

I am Hermes Trismegistus the Thrice-Blessed.

I am Thoth who brought the alphabet.

Who only a moment ago as old as the universe

was wholly unmanifest. A fountain asleep in its watershed.

A bird with its head under its wing. Not anything.

Not one. Not two. A wide-eyed, gaping, open-mouthed

zero of an awareness that had burned my identity away

by reaching out to the stars like a thief

torching his fingerprints off like like tiny labyrinths

with search warrants effaced like moths and maple leaves in a candle.

I was out of here like the constellation of the swan

going down over the eyelashes of the western treeline.

After defaulting to the sensuality of the dark all night

who wants to wake up beside the dawn, wincing in the light?

I was out of here like Auriga, the Charioteer.

I always reveled more in the role of guide to the dead

and messenger of the mystery and its eloquence,

master of the occult visionary sciences expressing themselves

as a physics of metaphors, not numbers, the intuitive logic

of synchronized happenings in a charged particle field,

not syntactically linear paradigms that strive fruitlessly

to make things perfectly clear, as if they’d rinsed

all the nectar of life out of them and the light that was left

were the direct result and residue of spiritual erosion.

The sun can boast of the number of sunflowers

it’s got for followers all it wants.

When she appears, a thousand mirrors open

like the third eyes of observatories capstoned

on cold, lonely mountain tops with only one road down or up

and all the reflecting telescopes on clock drives turn their heads her way,

affixed to the mysterious trajectory of a new moon rising in the north

in the thirteenth house of a zodiac that baffles the starmaps

with a darkness that’s brighter than any of their high hopes.

PATRICK WHITE

AN ANT

An ant carrying the last bell of a flower,

the heavy weight of knowing how it ends,

the autumn left to clean up after the party,

I have nothing to say to the crows in daylight,

sitting a bough above me like quotation marks,

the heart afraid of its own farewells

as the geese stream across the sky like a shoelace,

and I am more alone in the world than space

as time shows me passage after passage

of wounded poppies bleeding like a hooker’s lipstick.

I’m tired of pushing the sail of my life

like a solar wind to the edges

of the knowable and over

into the unintelligible abyss

of a dictionary compiled for the dead.

And the stars are beginning to look like nails

in a large coffin without a rudder

that sank in drydock,

and stone by stone the cemeteries chatter about life

as they did among shadows, hoping and guessing

the pious vehemence of their chiselled certainties

doesn’t drop a dime

on the number of urges they’ve had

to fuck a teen-age girl into oblivion.

And there are clarities quick enough

to open the lovers like letters that never came,

and mental corals

that will rip the hull out of the moon,

and hives of venom and honey

that hang like lanterns and ambivalent kisses

above the tongue that’s fool enough to taste them,

and a night so dark ahead

only the most star-struck understudies

of last year’s constellations

are eager enough to shine.

I wish I didn’t know,

I wish I didn’t insist on seeing

and my blood didn’t set out looking for me

with a message to assassinate anyone who hides.

PATRICK WHITE

AFTER YOU LEAVE

After you leave, a bell

deeper than the sea strikes once

and my blood thinks it’s a ghost of fire

and tries to evaporate; gusts

of the most graceful emotions,

eloquent clarities of the heart,

shake me free of myself

like leaves and petals and pages,

the tender radiance of nightskies,

and I am astounded in the openness

of an embrace without limits,

of boundary stones being hurled delinquently

through the windows of ice-age mirrors

that have wept so long and slowly

over the silver river locked in chains.

How easy in this solitude

to declare myself to you,

to undo the delusions and the fears,

to flip through the chapters of the onion,

take off this last layer of skin,

and shed the final masks of snow

in the warming recollection of your presence,

in the way your beauty exhilarates me

then thrusts me like a torch into a deep silence,

and my heart sets out by itself toward you

scintillant everywhere, gold

flowing out of the dark ore,

as if the moon rinsed out its own reflection,

the legend of a secret constellation

behind the vital starmap of fireflies

that makes me want to shine for you so intensely

in this dark doorway of pain and passage

that the light hurts with the poignancy

of its longing to fall like a key

from the spirit’s lost and found

upon your planet;

to open gardens that have no word

for fence or gate,

to bridge your streams

with the pillars and roots of inspired stars.

My heart sets out for you all by itself

like a lantern on a road

that unspools with arrival at every step.

After you leave I am possessed of the will

of an anvil and a forge

to become a chalice for you, a sword,

an axle and a plough, a strong bolt

against the miscreance of battering circumstance.

I raise your reflection to my lips

like a cup from a watershed of wine

and in every single sip

swallow an ocean like a potion

from the tears of the moon,

knowing how dangerous it could be

to miss you, to become

an addict of your light at the first taste,

to wait for eras for the return of the dawn

that unravels even now like mystic lightning through my veins.

No more than the sun from the vine,

the moon from the dreaming apple

the stars from the ripening vowel of the apricot,

could any torn net woven of knotted lifelines

undo the vision you have already mingled

like a nightrose of fragrant fire in my blood.

Not to drift again alone

like an empty boat

ferrying the corpse of the ferryman

through the fog to a cold shore

now that I’ve been washed up on your island

like the voice of a salvaged star in a bottle,

a frenzy of light and love in your tides,

a drowned lighthouse

coming to life in every wave of you.

I want to be brave enough

to risk the possibility

of listening to the night together

with the unveiled bride of the moon

in the bay of my arms,

I want to be the sail, the flame,

the gull of her breathing,

the blue dolphin off the coast of her mouth.

I want to swim like a mirror

the sea holds up to her face

to do her hair up with starfish

she tresses like galaxies in the depths;

I want to devote myself like a candle

to the shrine of the September moonrise

that saturates the far sky over the sad hills

like a warm breath glowing on chilled glass

when she smiles

like the wind over the abundant harvest

of the ashes I’ve stored against

this famine of passion

in the silo of the blue guitar.

I want to place my life

like a feather of fire

on the mysterious altar of lunar rain

that splashes like stars everywhere

in the telescopic silvering of the well in her eyes,

and turn these deserts of space and time

back into grasslands

crossing her thresholds

in whispers of pollen and dust.

She walks into the room

to help me paint the bedroom walls,

as I try to cover the graffiti

of my vandalized soul with white,

and a dove in a cage

panics at her approach

before an open door.

She climbs the ladder in rags with a brush

like the moon over a lake,

behind a cloud,

through the branches of a leafless willow

and everything in the room

is enhanced by her shining

and I’m rolling new skies over

the scars and fossils of old stars,

worn faces with plaster patches

to rewrite the shepherding lies,

the myths and symbols of my solitude

in the sidereal headlines of her transformative light.

Now it’s four a.m

and I’m pacing from empty room to empty room

like the pendulum of a heavy clock

that aspires to be a bell,

threshing words like wild rice

under an eyelid of peacock blue

to fill the empty hold of a buoyant heart,

the small boat of her hands,

with the eyes of a precious gathering.

And the tender snow falls quietly outside

on the crow limbs of the winter trees

like flesh returning to the bones of the dead

in a silent resurrection

more unsayable than a veil of white

that puts its finger to its lips

like an arrow of fire to a bow of blood

to hear what the hidden nightbird

under the eaves of a burning house is singing.

PATRICK WHITE

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