I'M LEARNING TO DANCE WITH ECLIPSES

I’M LEARNING TO DANCE WITH ECLIPSES

I’m learning to dance with eclipses

and the outmoded ecologies of the sword-rattling windows

weeping rivers of acid rain that hang

like the ragged lace of abandoned curtains

or the tentacles of protozoic jellyfish. My life

is a rock too hard to sweet-talk the larks and swallows,

and the wolf that came once a week

to teach me to sing underwater grew old

and died like the piano he was buried in at sea.

I don’t know what I want from the walls

I’ve designated heritage battlefields

with an array of awards and degrees

and the pitted impacts of meteor-coloured earwigs,

but everything I ask for seems to make

terrorists of the lamps

and the single moth

knocking himself out trying to crash into flames

against the vanilla fez of the shade

is two fanatics shy of immolation. What does it matter

my eyes have congealed into a still-life

with antique ax-handles, a menagerie

of scarred paint, the landscape of the moon

humped and bubbled in contaminated crimson,

I haven’t seen anything for disposable eras

I wanted to drink from a skull. While the shadows and ashes

discuss what they have in common, hoping

for a marriage of convenience,

the blue night sifts my constellations through a spider-web

looking for the penumbral tear of the last life I shed

longing to avoid this one

like black shoe-polish on the pillowcase of a swan.

Even the absurdities have looped into platitudes

and petty thieves have stolen

the mask of the mouth in the imperial mirror

that keeps telling me

I’m the slumlord of my own ambition,

the blighted rind of the moon withering in the garbage,

the sloughed skin of a serpentine condom full of stars.

And how am I to understand my loneliness

and the fools I deploy to deface it

except as one more yearning octopus

with arms like hollyhocks

trying to cross the highway without a line of credit?

I should be bolder, smarter, more mineral

than light, my bones recast in gunsmith plastic,

and my heart a leaking hand grenade, white phosphorus,

unpinned and ready to hurl like a violent dove

through the slutty dreamcatchers in the windows

of strategic brothels, I should stand up

to the apostrophes of Armageddon

and handcuff my voice to a pair of quotation marks

and send all my friends bouquets of radical placards

until my voice is released from isolation, my blood

from intensive care, my mind from death row,

and I’m paid all the back wages I’m owed for the use of my innocence.

When the wind decides to defeat the leaves with poison

and the charcoal women burn their tongues

like meat on the grill of their dinner-bell smiles,

their charms all smoke and cocktail tears,

I should have the metal to drop

depth-charges on the willow cruising the shadows for convoys,

and depose the cult of scorpions marching south

that tried to brainwash me into believing

I’ve aged like wounded shoes.

PATRICK WHITE

I CONCEDE MY FRETFUL BEGINNINGS

I CONCEDE MY FRETFUL BEGINNINGS

I concede my fretful beginnings to no one

because I was with the stars

before they began to shine, before

the first Adam of the primordial atom

stepped out of his shadowless glade,

and the worlds fanned out like birds from water

and the surreal sea dreamed of krill and corals

or the ghastly fumaroles of the expurgated heart

of the labouring earth

taught its thermophiles to live without light

like a memory displaced so deep in the mind

only the convulsions and catastrophes

of sunless winters severed from their vivid chains

like stillborns and candid moons

can waken it again to recall the swell

of the wave that gave it breasts

and its life on land in the mansions

of orphaned oxygen that taught it to breathe

and let its breath be vital to cherries and bees. I affirm

and celebrate my connection to everything

and my foot is not less than my hand

nor my blood merely the flag of my imperious brain;

and often at night when I’m alone

with my own poor, longing self

I can feel my eyes webbing the harp of my bones

with the soft night songs of my ancient minerals

and the sad, dark airs of my gypsy metals

slaying the iron roses in their teeth out of love.

I owe it all to everything, and everything to it,

and I am complete, even in my emptiness;

even in the desolation of galaxies and leaves,

even in the spoiling of my most cherished nativities,

the shedding of eyelids and black pollen

on the naves of the daisy wheels,

I am always full of the world, at home

with everything from the emerald wardrobes

of the friendless algae

to the carbon solitudes of hapless man,

I am the host and the guest

in the black mirror of my shining, the equinoctial eye

of my own arrayed being.

And the things that I say in the dark like planets

to amuse the night with motion and appease

my secret need for migrant harmonies,

are the foundation stones, the organs and skin

and kidnapped statuary of my summer palaces among the stars

and I am content with my solitary progress

through the wind-taxed realms of poppies and wheat;

I am the composite serenity of the night sky

that does not inhibit the flight of its cloudy owls

or its magnetic transfusions of bats.

If something troubles me, if there are distant seabirds

shrieking their warnings out over a turbulent sea,

or ants in the grass divining the lightning to come,

or the swan of the moon torn like a white peony

by something rising up with a beak and a shell from below

like the hungry turtle of the snapping world,

I take shelter in the roots of things,

in the watersheds of the relentless rivers

that press on with their dreams of eloquent deltas

in mystic union with the sea.

I summon the shields and shales of my radical nature

to renew their loyalty to the heights of land I stand on

battered but unbeaten like a northern pine.

And I shall live as long as there are rocks to cry on,

and fireflies to keep their homely constellations close to earth.

PATRICK WHITE

IF I COULD CRY AGAIN

IF I COULD CRY AGAIN

If I could cry again, as once I cried for you, if

I could saturate this dark fist of a heart that closed up

and hardened from that flower so long ago, trying

to hang on to the jewel, the pearl, the star, the eye of the issue;

if I could turn this stone rose freaked with harsh minerals,

back into that night you drew the blade of the moon

across the wrist of the bridge you were standing on, waiting

it seemed your whole lifetime, trembling

like a drop of shadow-flavoured water

from the tip of a spear of stargrass

for the wind to shake you loose from your agony,

a lost earring, I could put out this root-fire

that runs underground from cedar to cedar, person to person,

consuming its way without flame

through the long valley of the sorrows and years

where I buried you like a storm that had swallowed the hot sword

of its own lightning; I could affirm the black ash

of that night that has gone on dying in me ever since,

I could green it with daylilies and vetch

and the frog splash of lachrymose junipers beginning to rain.

I could stop meaning what I say when I say

crueller solitudes are born of the pain that’s endured

like a grave with no eyelid staring into the sun

waiting for eclipses to fall out of the light

like coins from a one-armed bandit

that gashed the vein of its motherlode

to die in a windfall of poppies, a junkie of luck,

than the strange loneliness of the losers

who cash their winnings in, and bleed to death.

I could mean something else other than heroin,

I could mean a new religion, a successful skin graft

of happier metaphors and cooler tattoos,

brighter constellations than the needle tracks

that loaded the deck of your dark zodiacs

with star-crossed lovers in public washrooms

tying you off with the spinal cord

you carried around in your kit. I could stop the bleeding,

I could put the fire out, I could look at your death

square in the eyes

and haul in a god to answer it

like you did me that last night

when I asked for signs of life

and you quoted maxims to live by from the razor-blade

revealed to you alone on your holy mountain

before you dumped on paradise

like a shovel full of dirt, a spoonful of ashes,

an avalanche of hurt. I could open my hand

and fill your absence in

with things that begin. I could scrawl

a reason to live on your mirror in lipstick

and marry you in our honeymoon coffin

behind closed doors

in a downpour of wedding rings

I stole from the dead.

O, baby, my lost one, my fire in the wood,

you could be my candle-holder

and angel-food for good

if only I could cry again,

as once you knew I could.

PATRICK WHITE

TACKING INTO THE EMPTINESS

Tacking into the emptiness

like a sail, like a lonely bird

grown bored with carrying love-letters

from tree to tree, star to star,

none of them with my name on them

or a return address

that wasn’t light-years out of date,

to amuse the wounded river of my flowing

I try to get outside myself,

exceed the gates of the black constellations

that govern me from within,

squeeze out through a hole in the fence,

through my pores, eyes

of blood, amber, pitch

weeping out of the pine,

trying to read through the page

with tears of fire,

leaking out of the tree, the pillar,

the plaster Christ that exalts the peasants,

an emotional blackberry

ripened by many nights,

seeping through a makeshift womb of jam,

trying to decide whether

I’m a miscarriage or a delivery.

I feel sorry for myself.

No one will miss me much

when the shadow of the last dragon

passes like a lifelong eclipse of the heart.

The infinite folds

of the hair’s breadth edge of my clarities

demanded blood, not pressed flowers,

and there is a special solitude reserved

for the Promethean thieves,

for those who dare

to spread their arms like a propeller

at the axis of the wheeling world.

I never stared at the playbill

of a cancelled sky for long

without trading my scales in for wings.

I cared dangerously for people

who took from the orchard like wasps

drinking from the bruise of my fall.

Their hearts were punctured

by sidereal omissions,

needled like a doll

into occult distortions of pain.

I will spend the rest of my life

learning not to care for them.

Their pulse tolled like the echo of a soggy bell,

souls and minds,

palettes and telescopes

who wanted it both ways

without really taking a look

to see how they broke

the harps of the longing between them

like the wishbones of impoverished peacocks.

I will master the heresy

of consoling their lovelessness with indifference.

I will apply poultice after poultice

of sensitive lies

to their gangrenous sunsets,

knowing the infection will never come out.

I will be the spirit of a bird

carved in rock,

and I will let the ores of my insight

lie idle in the earth

like the dream of a sleepless god

tired of hearing the universe go off

like an alarm clock that can’t be reset.

I am aging, I age, I grow remote,

I thaw like a bird in the sky,

an eye boiled like a grape

in the wine of its own tears,

and no one lies well enough

to surprise me anymore

with a face more original

than the masks it trades in,

and I’m sick of the knots and nooses of vinegar

that sour the shapely waters of life

by insisting the moon

is only a dead sea in a returnable bottle.

And there is a sadness in everything

like the memory of someone loved

walking away like a leaf down a rainy street

through the gleam of oleaceous carlights

and everything I have ever cherished

is a cameo of the void in a locket,

a portrait of an abyss

everyone is chained to

like a dog in a junkyard of delusions,

howling at the moon

smeared on a bumper of dew

that never put a dent in anything.

PATRICK WHITE

SMALL, WARM BIRDS

Small, warm birds of feeling,

a profound tenderness,

something to cherish

in the loneliness of being human

in these vast, cold spaces,

as I read your words

like poppies in my blood again.

What stars could I call upon,

what roses could I ask for their skin,

what darkness charge with radiance,

what ploy of dancing buddhas

could I summon

to let you know

you are all my sky within,

and the assent of my soul in the morning

and the bough of my homing at night,

that there is within me a blind fire,

an invisible flame

that consumes me in the ferocious beauty

of its unseen flowering

even in a flurry of faces

and the business tugging the donkey of the day

braying like a knot in a stream of wood,

and all the objects and forms of the world

are burning mirrors I look into to see

the black pearl of your mystic presence within me,

the iridescent lustre of your shining,

how you are a message in a bottle from ultimacy,

and a dark shrine of desire

that can wake the valley dragons

with the fragrance of your eyes on the wind.

I want to kiss your kneecaps;

I want to crush cool mushrooms against your lips

and feel my kisses break like bread,

I want to feel my mouth

blossoming on the nape of your neck

and my breath blowing across the shy wheatfields

of the softest gestures of hair on your skin,

I want to taste the silk

of the inside of your thighs

as if it were the flavour of an intimate paradise,

and approach your breasts like crowns,

and under a full moon

tenderly turn the sacred soil of your sex with my tongue

like a stranger in the doorway

of an infinite longing to make you shudder

like the void into light

with sexual eclipses on the back of your eyelids

that will fill you like a palace of water with stars.

I am the luminosity and shadow

of your green lamp that glows like the sea,

and my voice wants to bleed like black cherries

over the alluvial plain of your stomach

and touch you like a prophet

running his fingertips slowly over the pages of a holy book,

savouring the revelations

that throb like a pulse in space;

and there are storms that want to exhaust themselves

over the blue thresholds of your hills

and root their lightning in your body

like a tree of light, a new map of rivers

for your blood to follow back to me

like the echo of thunder in a well.

And all through the day

with its curbs and functions

I imagine the lilt of your fingers

on the rim of a coffee cup,

the cougar in the glance of your eyes,

the way you put a knife down on the table

like a smile without a script

and what it would be like

to circumnavigate the equator of your waist

with a rosary of kisses

to raise you like a sunken continent

out of your depths

and explore all your tides and passages

with the fervor of a dolphin in a bay of wine.

I want to be tangled like a kite

in the turmoil of your hair,

the night watchman of your dreams,

the one who notices

what no one else looks for,

the stone of the small grave

you sweep with your eyelashes

when the leaves of autumn

lie down with the shadows of spring

and the virgin windows of your tears

that no one has ever looked through

weep like glass over the secret root

of a flower only a child could see.

Beyond reason, gates, words,

where the bridges take off their shoes

to admire their feet in the water

and the waterlilies kiss the thorn

of the star that tore them like skin

and whisper ancient pollens to the night

softer than flour and saffron,

and everything I say to you

isn’t a wound in the light,

a mouthful of shadows,

a bell of water with a fish for a tongue,

fleets of butterflies

learning how to sail the oceans of the rose

like the keels and wings

of love-letters you can read in the dark,

I want to fold you in my arms like the moon

and pan the nocturnal urgencies of your eyes

for a gold rush of fireflies

in the all night boom towns

of a heart that struck it rich

digging a hole to bury its dead.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN THE GERIATRIC DRUNK NEXT DOOR

WHEN THE GERIATRIC DRUNK NEXT DOOR

When the geriatric drunk next door who was

raising chihuahuas to make a living,

but couldn’t part with one them when it came time to sell

came over one day in my childhood,

shaking like an aspen leaf in the fall,

going through withdrawal, to ask if he could borrow

a few bucks, I watched my mother give him five

of the last ten she had to raise four kids

for half of the rest of the month before

the next welfare check arrived, and say,

Here. Don’t hurt yourself. Something to ease the pain.

Though she didn’t drink and he’d been drinking too long

to turn the herd that had trampled him around.

She didn’t judge. She didn’t try to give advice.

She didn’t belittle the man in the way she gave.

She didn’t count how much the giving took off her plate.

She wasn’t indulging her progressive, liberal, altruism.

She wasn’t breaking loaves and fishes on a hillside

or trying to win a popular election.

She just gave like the sea, the earth, the sky,

like fire gives heat and light, all in one easy action

of a heart that has suffered enough on its own to know

we’re all in the same lifeboat on the moon

white-water rafting through the rapids of a waterclock.

And that has been my religion ever since.

Though I’ve never said anything to her about it.

How much I loved her in that moment

of compassionate tenderness, how she pulled

one thread out of the straitjacket of despair in his eyes,

and rewove it not on a loom like the moon but a harp

into a flying carpet of joy so another human

in as much of a mess in her own way as he was

could gain some altitude for a little while above the misery,

and hang on to at least one single wavelength of threadbare radiance

that could still fall on the shit everybody was living in

and turn it into a flower. Indelible,

the understanding in their eyes when he

looked at her incredulously for a moment

and she knew exactly what he meant

as she laughed at herself with a soft, wry smile

as if she’d just seen the sacred fool behind her best sentiment.

That was the whole of enlightenment to me.

The beginning of a spontaneous discipline

and still is, though it’s sometimes bitter to practise,

when your giving is mistaken for having been taken

and you lament how many people can’t tell the difference

between a theft and a gift anymore. How they deprive themselves

of so many jewels of inestimable value,

and that human touch that can pour the heart like gold

from the darkest of ores, the deepest of mines,

or bring meteors to shed hot tears like diamonds upon impact.

Or oxygen and the bases of protein.

Though it be a nuclear winter outside.

Though the bride was left standing at the altar

and there was no one there to lift the veils of Isis

to see the stars in the eyes of the Queen of Heaven even at nadir

like a chance someone wasn’t willing to take.

Though common sense dictate a rational sacrifice,

and Ayn Rand and the Union of Spiritual Snakeoil Salesmen

preach that you’ve got to learn to love yourself first

as if you had a self to nurture that wasn’t rooted

like a mirage in a desert in an hourglass that poured

through your fingers like water when you tried to grasp

the delusion of the flower. Though all the mystics

try to annihilate what doesn’t exist to see God as she really is

as they come before her like busy, busy bees

with money in their pockets and honey in their hives

and all their martyrdom proves to be just another mode of suicide.

You can give a piece of garbage you’ve picked

out of a dumpster like the bruised fruits of the earth,

and when you give it to someone you can eat

from the Tree of Life with impunity without having to choose

between the serpent and the apple, the evil and the good,

or the knowledge you must suffer to be understood

as a human, who can gain altitude by erring on the side

of someone else’s plight without even wearing wings,

to the wonderment of the angels and demons alike,

and occasionally, like me, your angry, eldest son,

who didn’t know until that one moment whether

he should approach the world like a fist

with teethmarks on the knuckles, or

an open palm with lifelines thrown out to another

like billions of umbilical cords woven like a strong rope

into a mother who didn’t need to build an ark to be a lifeboat.

Who could see lucidly through a glass darkly

the veils of her own nebulosity breaking out of the fog

like the search lanterns of the stars

out of the most ancient mystery of love

hidden in her heart without the aid of a teacher or telescope.

PATRICK WHITE

THE NIGHT DANCES WITH ITSELF LIKE AN ONLY CHILD

THE NIGHT DANCES WITH ITSELF LIKE AN ONLY CHILD

The night dances with itself like an only child

to the sounds of its own silence

when it thinks no one is watching.

Every falling leaf, a gesture of the hands,

poised, a word, a bird, a butterfly on a branch,

a sacred syllable from an alphabet that can dance,

caught in the updraft of a momentary insight

of falling to paradise like a flightfeather of light,

and landing the move just right, just so, with perfect timing.

The maples by day, easels for hot palette paintings,

red shift through red, orange, yellow, green

from the outside in toward the trunk, same

as a rainbow, same as the dynastic colours of a sunset.

Same as the fires of life returning to the root.

Same as the starmaps of the visionaries

flying like shamans from the nests they were fledged in.

Same as the ripening of the fruits of the earth,

or roses with green stars under their eyelids.

Different instruments, different voices,

the wind, the rasping of the leaves, the beaver

slapping the startled flesh of the water at my approach,

a twig snapping its drumstick on a rim shot

and the crow, and the squeaking bats, and the lapping

of the waves like the plectra of an aquamarine harpsichord

at the whole notes of the rocks, but a confluence

of picture-music washing the roots of the dead violins

of the wild irises and the timpani of cattails along the mindstream.

Merrily, merrily, row your boat, life is but a dream.

But to judge from the windfalls of green planets

shaken from the black walnut trees, it’s a dream

that’s urgent with the myriad realities of a multiverse

waking up in a place like here, and a time like now

with a lavish appetite for inhabiting itself

as if appearance weren’t just the rind

that had to be peeled away like the skin and the shell

of the meat of the real, the shapes of the known worlds

the rat snakes shed like intimate illusions

that have naturally outgrown themselves,

the new moon in the arms of the old, like a nightsky

leaving the Milky Way, a mythically deflated windsock

tangled in the tree line like a runway that tried to fly by itself.

Now the Great Shedding as the earth turns

like the old abandoned mill wheel upstream

like a circular waterclock making linear time

take its tail in its mouth like an eternal recurrence

that’s always pouring itself out of itself like life

into the emptiness between the equinox of one thought

and the solstice of the next like the silence between heartbeats,

the night between the stars, like the inseparable gap

between the distant moon and the intimacy of the moon’s reflection

on the newly surfaced dark skin of the water sequencing

its pentatonic scales to the seasonal themes of the mindstream

you can’t step into twice, as Heraclitus said in Ephesus long ago,

though it seems that way if all you’re doing is dogpaddling

like a delinquent green apple on a snow covered bough, instead

of going along with the perennial renewal of the flow

by letting go of your water skin with its lunar tattoo

like the bright vacancy of an old silo of the light

for the dark abundance of the new insight

into the nature of life when it full in October.

The fall. This hour of my becoming

when everything is burning like the sumac

with the fires of life but nothing is consumed.

Because fire doesn’t burn fire and death is unperishing.

And autumn is no less of a transformation than spring

as this new day dances as readily with the old woman

watching from her kitchen window as it does the young girl,

than the rain is to the tides of a lunar ocean

swaying in its shadows as if it were dancing

with its river reeds like a lonely child

in the embrace of her imagination,

like a poet in the grip of his crazy wisdom

flirting like a firefly with the dragons of his madness

without listening to the search parties of the lighthouses

bellowing like the foghorns of mournful trains back on shore

being swept away into the distance like nightwatchmen

and unconvincing ghosts. Things are unmooring

like lifeboats full of seeds and the souls of the dead

taking to their wings like the oars of waterbirds,

and the lowest of earthbound snakes

are dreaming of feathering their scales

into the vans of a dragon firewalking with stars

around the wobbling axis of the earth

on a potter’s wheel, turning it like sentient starmud

that’s fired up in autumn like an urn that burns like a kiln.

PATRICK WHITE