HOW STRANGE TO RECALL CHILDHOOD AS AN AGING MAN

HOW STRANGE TO RECALL CHILDHOOD AS AN AGING MAN

How strange to recall childhood as an aging man

as if nothing had changed for the last sixty years

you’re watching yourself as a young boy

from a point of awareness somewhere in the air

above him like someone he couldn’t have foreseen becoming,

looking back upon him with great tenderness

that I’m what I made of his future as he

tries to reverse the bike chain he caught

his pant cuff in, and I can do nothing to help him

at this remove, except love him as someone should have then

when these strange tears didn’t taste so much of time.

Who could have guessed it would take all these years

to fill the absence in his heart up by becoming

the intimate familiar of the solitude of a child

who could befriend anything that was as lost and wild

and wounded as he was and yet could dream

of doing great things up late in his room at night

to prove he was at least as loveable as any achievement.

He was off to fight a holy war of one with himself

like a single infidel against the whole of Christendom

that I’m the living ruin of because sometimes it’s wiser

to be defeated than it is to prevail supreme

against your own dream of being worthy of love.

Time ripples in the growth rings of a tree

echoing the song of a well-seasoned nightbird

in the heartwood of a shedding maple

that remembers all the lyrics of longing and lament

it sings to itself at times like an arrow, a burnt guitar

struck by lightning, or one of the strong rafters

that uphold the soul like the keel of a lifeboat overturned

on the great night sea of a death in life

it drowned in more than once like moonset

among the corals that tore the bottom of its hull.

And how many cold nights did it take

before the syrups began to run sweetly in spring

and the new leaves forget the history of their roots

as I tried to abandon the child that I was

by the side of a road that led him away from me

because I thought one of us had to go homeless

in order to survive the firestorms of his outraged innocence

and the unaccusing guilt of mine as I grew up

letting him down in ways that only he can imagine

as I spread from one burning building to the next

like a new religion that wasn’t looking for converts?

But if you were to ask me now, I’d say it’s funny

how he turned out to be the Buddha sitting at the base

of the Bodhi tree of my spine, and on a good day,

at my best, before the fall, I’m Lucifer leading

the sun up at dawn like a child guiding a blind prophet

by the hand long before the morning star appeared

like Venus to those who were seeking enlightenment

without me or themselves to witness what neither of us

had attained like the key to the mystery of a universe

that had no locks on it to begin with to shut anybody out

or keep anybody in. The man in me doesn’t blame the child

for existing the way I do now trying belatedly

to embrace his rejection as a way of life

I can make up for by sharing this wounded solitude with him

like an injured animal he can see himself in

as a potential friend he could identify with

as if what had happened to me had once happened to him

and we could both approach each other with compassion.

PATRICK WHITE

AND WHEN YOU GET WHAT YOU WANT, IS IT WHAT YOU DREAMED?

AND WHEN YOU GET WHAT YOU WANT, IS IT WHAT YOU DREAMED?

And when you get what you want, is it what you dreamed?

Did the mirage live up to its reputation, did it exceed

your expectations or is there another award beyond this one?

O endlessly hungry one, pleonaxic emptiness, were you born

like a black hole on a midway of blazing radiance,

a blinding light that serves as a guide to star-nosed moles?

Fulfilment or doom, depression, disappointment, as if

some clown had washed his face off like a painted tear

in a green room mirror, and discovered he was still crying?

You grasp it like the garment of a passing ghost,

sand, water, cloud, and it changes shape in your hands

like the nature of a bird when neither of you understands.

We all wake up to spend the wealth we hoarded in our dreams.

We even greet death with money under our tongue.

In Zen they’d say we’re all stealing the Buddha’s purse

to buy the Buddha’s horse one way or another

whether we can ride it or not, and if today you’re disappointed

you’ll be mesmerized by something else tomorrow,

a junk dealer going through a widow’s private treasures.

You’ll open your mouth again like an oyster farm

trying to breed pearls like the philosopher’s stone

labouring to turn all these new moons of pitted ore into gold.

Good luck. Hope you’re the wiser for it. As for me

and my house, I’ve never been disappointed

in my wonder at the world, and what I’m doing here

being aware of it all as the world tracks its starmud in

across my homeless threshold and all these ancient footprints

are dance steps back to a self that’s just a tic of the emptiness

I catch once and awhile out of the corner of my third eye

abrogating credit for a dream it had nothing to do with

because that’s a bird still flapping its wings in a shell

thinking it’s being upheld by the wind until someone

cracks it open like a brittle atmosphere and all that space

comes rushing in and you realize with a cosmic sigh of relief

like a sunflower bowing its heavy head, what a great debt

you owe to the nothing that you are that can’t possess anything.

You’re standing there in all your spiritual bling,

gold necklaces around your throat, chakras and chains

looped like nooses in knots at the end of your spinal cord.

What did you do? Bind yourself to the axis of the earth

to be mistaken for a saint or a martyr, the wobbly snake

of an inebriated caduceus, but where’s the fire, where’s

the heretic, the apostate, the dragon singing in its own flames,

where even one firefly of insight that consumes the universe?

Or are you just another photo op with mermaids

calling you to the soft rocks of a popular song?

A straw dog in the rain smouldering like methane

on a compost heap after another ritual performance?

You’re greedy for joy. You’re greedy for illumination

in the spotlight. But bliss is one of the spices of life,

not the main course. And to want more than this

is to declare you’re a glutton with lousy spiritual manners.

And O yes I know, you think this is like blooming

and having someone throw acid in your face

when you were anticipating rain on your plum blossoms.

You duck through a hole in the fence like a raccoon

caught pilfering corn in a garden, and you want

a Roman triumph with rosewater and slaves

for passing through the gateless gate to liberation

when all you’ve really done is barge through

the emergency exit to run from a shotgun loaded with stars

in the hands of a scarecrow trying to terrify the birds

by shooting straight up into the air until things

begin to take root of themselves, and the locust trees

are feathered with the leaves of nesting lapwings

that don’t have any further to fall though they feign

a dizzying descent of wounded maple keys

and all the shamans have to heal themselves

by ploughing the ground they were born on into bookshelves.

PATRICK WHITE

THE LAMENT OF THE LAST TRAIN WHISTLE

THE LAMENT OF THE LAST TRAIN WHISTLE

The lament of the last train whistle

has disappeared into the distance

mournfully looking for its lost child.

October night in the woods

around an old fire pit of prophetic skulls

blowing ghosts of smoke in my face

that bring me to tears, a neolithic calendar

of all the old and new moons that have passed.

So many, so much, that used to matter

doesn’t anymore. Dream figures

that shed their skins like the longer wavelengths

of watersnakes in an infra-red mindscape

of serpent fire dying like the sun

that can tell the hour by the taste of its ashes.

I throw more well-dried thresholds on the fire

like branches that used to be green with the tears

of sweeter departures and arrivals over the years.

All the light’s jumped from orbitals

of the tree rings that sag like bags

under the eyes knotted like islands

in the heartwood of their xylem and phloem.

Here where the river parts like long hair

on the skull of a stone, I sit like a demon

in a sacred place, clarified, alert, and alone

as any nocturnal animal in the woods.

The chalkdust of my bones trying

to connect the stars to their constellations

snagged in the trees like the rags of spiderwebs

on the blackboard of a starmap as wide as the sky

and deep as the subconscious of the Burgess Shale.

It’s not a betrayal to let go of your faith

when you had none in the first place

and you don’t need a parachute on the edge of space

to plunge from paradise, or a weather balloon

of a bad Christian poet to shepherd Dante

like a moon out of hell. Be yourself,

especially when nobody’s watching

except that same drone in the sky

that occasionally flashes a flake of silver off

its stone cold third eye to flint your awareness

that it’s still there in the cosmic background

like a witness to your dreams and schemes

for a luxuriously appointed life of enlightenment.

Be yourself. The direct copulative imperative

that has supplanted the light as the first word

out of the mouth of creation. Be yourself.

And then let there be light by the side of a good fire

to let you see who that is as acutely

as you can see in the dark who that is not.

The migration of the Canada geese might seem

a broken rosary of new moons calling out

the names of God to you, and one unknown,

or silhouetted against the moon they might

suggest the afterbirth attached to a cut umbilical cord

and your heart might feel reborn somewhere

in the autumn of your life, a child of the fire,

a flower in the full bloom of its solitude

dancing with its own mercurial apparition

on the waters of life in the mindstream

always out of season enough to lag behind

so it can tell the time by the widening gaps in its passage

as it’s waiting for the night to catch up to its own shining

like a thief of fire unchained from the rock

that broke the glass window of its transfixed seeing

with a meteor in the hands of an enlightened delinquent.

Or you might read the falling leaves as occult lifelines

on a Tarot deck of overlapping lifespans

like the scales of a dragon playing solitaire

beside the small inferno of a signal fire to the stars,

to let them know you’re coming faster

than the time it takes for a thought to make it

all the way to death and back to birth again

as if you were pinging your emotions

like stray wavelengths from the oceans of your awareness

off the horns of the moon the way

you used to skip rocks out over the sea as a boy

to see how long they would keep on going

like a waterclock of stone before they sank

like the flying fish of the hard, cold facts of life back into

the numinous depths of your collective unknowing

where the stars aren’t fixed to anything that isn’t

flowing along with them like the wind on the mindstream

or a small fire catching its breath in the silence and the solitude

of so much radiance, before it’s on its way again for good.

PATRICK WHITE

PLAYING CHESS WITH MUNDANITY TO SURVIVE TO WRITE

PLAYING CHESS WITH MUNDANITY TO SURVIVE TO WRITE

Playing chess with mundanity to survive to write.

Evading destroyers disguised as Everyman

who hates what I do because he thinks he can’t

and ignores it, forgetting I’ve been trained for oblivion

and writing poetry is the only way you can breathe

when you’re swimming in it and the moon is in the corals

trying to grow gills. All the useful functions I serve

I had to make up for myself. I express things

with no regard to having a useful function

though things shape themselves around me as a result.

Let them. I’m as supple as space on a balance beam.

Younger, I sought a name in the fountain mouths of humans

to actualize the pretension of what I hoped I was,

real carrot, real stick, real donkey, by consensus,

like reality, until I began to smell the methane,

and the swarms of squabbly seagulls, and uncover corpses,

and realized the pursuit of fame was just trying

to be something shiny in the garbage dumps

of other peoples’ mouths and minds, and any thought

of a literary career came candling down after me

like a collapsed parachute that felt like a punctured lung.

I don’t really care how many books you’ve got published now.

I’d rather howl like a wolf on my own above the timberline lamenting

the loss of the wild spirits that used to animate this wilderness

where my instincts are not blunted like swords of moonlight

on the skulls of first edition gravestones. All those books,

songbirds in an aviary of caged words that have turned you

into a voice coach. I’d rather howl with the wolves

than chirp with the birds, or teach the pigeons to sing

under the eaves of the safehouse built on quicksand

that’s taken up residence in you. Moonlight feathers the tarpit

and the rat snake’s scales gleam like sequins in the dark

as it slips like a wavelength back into the lake of the abyss.

Try writing four lines that are remembered for nine hundred years

because they intrigue the human heart with the sincerity

of our mortality caught in a rainstorm of bleak sorrows

far from anywhere, and the struggle of blood

to keep a small fire burning in the encroaching solitude.

Humans will keep your memory alive only so long

as they need you to hold out your lantern into the emptiness

like a lighthouse teetering on the brink of a vertiginous precipice

to see if you grow wings on the way down when you jump.

Experiment and experience. Though the former’s

old science by now. Objectivity is as obsolete

as a steady state universe with a planetesimal theory

that sank like a cue ball in the pocket of a decaying orbit.

Mystical science. All phenomena are numinous things of the mind.

Two of an infinite number of windows in a palace of water looking out on

the leafless autumn trees like coathangers stripped of their wardrobes.

All seeing is creative. And the dark, a beginning

that isn’t trying to upstage the stars it engenders

out of its own inconceivability with waterless mirages

that reflect nothing but what they depend upon for a living.

Focus like a telescope on any star of your choosing,

steady your tripod like a body in meditation and just sit

like a clay owl on the roof of a barn to scare the chickens away

until you’re flooded with an inundation of clear light

from the inside out of your usual direction of prayer

and you realize the crazy wisdom of what you’re doing here

is neither random nor absurd, nor particularly instructive

given you can’t step into the same mindstream twice,

but an occult chance to revel in the light of secret meanings

all of which are your own hidden paradigms of a shapeshifting universe.

I’d rather drown in an outrageous northern river,

slash my wetsuit and puncture my raft

than sail around the rest of my life in a system of locks

in a game of snakes and ladders. Money talks

and the silence walks like the darkness away from the stars.

Don’t devote your immensities to the sparkling of tinfoil.

But if that’s enough. It’s enough. Just as long as you know

that the shamans aren’t going to waste good magic on you

if an obvious fraud is enough to satisfy you

and the water sylphs won’t reveal their picture-music

like muses with something to sing about if you’re afraid

to plunge in and get wet pearl diving for the new moon

that’s been growing like a sacred syllable under your tongue

for more light years than you’ve had occasion to regret

you couldn’t hold your breath in your own depths for that long.

The mystery of the wellsprings of life and inspiration

is that it only receives swords that have been broken in tribute

to the fact that everything must be returned in time

not words or lives that can be retrieved from the river

to be used again in a recycled holy war that never leaves a scar

worthy of the blood you had to spill to lose it

as if the singularity of your devotion didn’t mean it

or the gatekeeper hadn’t informed you on your way in

that poetry, like the heart it takes to live it, is all entrance. No exit.

PATRICK WHITE

LADY MENAGERIE'S HEART TINKLES LIKE GLASSWARE

LADY MENAGERIE’S HEART TINKLES LIKE GLASSWARE

Lady Menagerie’s heart tinkles like glassware.

I think of the rain as a musical prodigy

but Lady Menagerie listens and hears

little chips out of her tears. We walk

through a squall of spider webs suspended

like veils and bridges over the chasms of Capilano,

and she’s lost in a fog of cotton candy

and I’m trying to get them out of my hair

like evil stars, black dwarfs in the deathtraps

of their slipshod constellations turned like dreamcatchers

to the dark side. Lady Menagerie is precociously precious.

She’s a thermometer of sensitivity. She sees

the dew in the morning and breaks into a sweat

because she thinks the grass has got a fever

she doesn’t want to catch. The world for Lady Menagerie

is never a crying three year old wandering alone naked

through the gauntlet of road kill some computer in Colorado

has made of her family, or, nearer to home, the neighbour’s god.

There are no blackflies in Lady Menagerie’s honey.

She’s a cult of fanatical translucency and if

it doesn’t smell like sandalwood incense and Patchouli

it’s not the fragrance of a real flower.

Lady Menagerie is a starmap of chandeliers.

A one-eyed aesthete. If you tell her that the moon’s

cratered like the pit of a peach, that every falling star

isn’t a sign to wish upon with the benign intentions

of a celestial midwife, that sometimes, predictably,

they’re astronomical catastrophes bent on her extinction,

she’ll call out the thought police of the Vatican

and accuse you of molesting her pristine psyche

by painting pictures on the lens of her mind,

So you only point your telescope, hooded like a falcon,

at the robin’s egg blue of the chicory growing by the side of the road.

You don’t mention the turkey vultures in pathology

operating like undertakers doing an autopsy

in a seventeenth century Dutch operating theater

huddled around the cadaver of a dismembered squirrel.

Lady Menagerie says she resisted being mistreated

as a girl, and now the rest of us have to make up for it

because she’s a wound in arrears to her psychiatrist

and if she’s ever going to heal, it’s important

to be hurt sincerely. Lapwing or judas-goat,

Real suffering is too messy an ore for her

to get her rainbows dirty, so she cherry picks the jewels

out of the eyes of her experience to go

with the flower arrangement she’s made of her still life.

She draws a drape of tasteful discretion over the albino fog

of her auroral see through curtains smudging the gauze of sunlight

into a cataract over her world view, closing her eyelids

like an observatory on the black holes and dwarfs

that maculate her radiance within like sunspots

that no one could possibly mistake for a beauty mark.

Lady Menagerie is all for peace if peace is pretty,

but she’s an aggressive sin of omission against the humanity

of the starmud that has sunk too deeply into the earthbound

to shine. Her compassion is shallow. Her insights

ricochet off the fortified mirrors of the blind

as she milks the cattle of the sun like solar flares

grazing on the upper ionosphere of the tear-shaped earth.

Beauty is a Japanese screening myth for the lies

she tells about ugliness, Tokugawa spring in Hiroshima.

A tea ceremony where the cracks in cups are patched with gold

in the middle of a cannibalistic religious ritual where you

pass your skull around like a half moon

every blood drunk lunatic can drink from

while the plum blossoms fall all around them.

Lady Menagerie is a private elevator with celestial aspirations.

There’s no thirteenth floor in her high rise

and her door has never opened on to a slum

it couldn’t transcend at the push of a button

until she got off on the view from her zodiacal penthouse.

But this rose is a unicorn with a poison thorn

she’ll dip like bella donna in your wishing well

to turn it toxic if the hummingbirds aren’t sipping nectar

from her happy bell, the bluebirds aren’t housed by the hunters.

Dark physical energies, only dark to the mind,

are the muses the body sings for with unfabricated bliss.

Lady Menagerie is gushing like a galactic sprinkler

with lyrics she’s writing for the cosmic hiss.

She was hurt at one time. The abyss made an impact.

And ever since she’s bathed in a crater of nanodiamonds

to renew the virginity of the light that’s been soiled by shadows.

Rage is a pariah. Grief’s a pariah. Intensity, danger, risk.

Chaos, conviction, despair, doubt, honest unknowing,

The dark’s a pariah. The firefly in the dragon mask.

Aging, changing, solitude, the black mirrors

of enlightened heretics she can’t see herself in

she has so scrubbed, and expunged, bleached and effaced

the dark side of the moon she’s erased herself

like a spray bomb with a concrete message

under a busy overpass of traffic and trash.

I wish Lady Menagerie translucent blue birds

that look as if the glass were crying, iridescent

supersensitive soap bubbles filling hyper space

like a nacreous multiverse smearing the oilslick

of everyone’s third eye in eclipse with west coast rainbows

that still haven’t earned their stripes of black and white even yet.

When Lady Menagerie dreams everything is indefinite.

Even her most hellish nightmares taste of burnt sugar.

She would rather smudge the world with sage and sweetgrass

than admit there are demons in the world

who are not estranged by the rarity of their enlightenment.

The cold goes through your bones. And then the fire.

And then the stars put on the lifemasks of the flowers

so they can see through their eyes how deeply rooted

their radiance is like brittle waterlilies shattering in the dark.

I wish Lady Menagerie the dark beginning of a new moon.

Black Isis. No more veils and widow’s weeds. Just a night sky

where the dragons are flying with the swans and the eagles

and the Great Square of Pegasus, and they’re all burning,

they’re all shining down upon the messy starmud of earth

giving up their light like a ghost with a lantern

come looking for us in the cold furnace of human desires,

created and cremated in the cradles of our own funeral pyres.

PATRICK WHITE

WERE THERE STARS

for Salem

Were there stars in your hair that night?

I cannot remember,

so taken with your face

and the mystery and the silence and the sorrow

of the tender bell in your eyes

that could summon ghosts

of yesterday’s embodiments to the fire

of any passion that lost itself prophetically

at a rave of shadows among the trees.

You eased out of your wardrobe of rivers

like a snake on the moon

sloughing its skin like the eclipse

of a far more vulnerable shining,

and I couldn’t tell if you were

a doe or a lynx

stepping out of the alder groves warily

to lap the moonlight

that flaked the shore

with the silver petals of an undulant rose

older and darker than nightblood.

I could feel the danger within you,

the abyss of the early grave

that waited for you like a key

to come in out of the pain

that bled you like a shadow

pouring out of an open wound,

that whispered to you like a secret scream

only the dead who owned you could hear.

Your hunger desperately sought salvation

from the eyes

that pleaded with you

to blow yourself out like a candle,

cancel the inevitability of your suffering

with the shudder and sigh of sex.

We lay down naked together

by the willow-stained waters

in that summer of flesh

and sought oblivion from each other

like two compatible cremations

that concealed a ravenous phoenix

ending its fast of fire.

Purified by the depth and darkness

of your intensities,

I burned in you

and felt the flames

of a dangerous angel

who had broken her afterlife like a curfew

flow over me

like dawn at a keyboard of feathers.

Your breasts still come up overnight

like supple mushrooms against my chest

and the moist heat of your mouth

throbbing with flowers like July

as you seized your joy

from the agony of the roots you tormented

to give up their dead

like bruised cherries.

I have never died as fully since

at the insistence

of any woman’s appetite

nor known a night so final,

so brutal with time and beauty

as the pendulous moon swung

like an executioner’s ax

over the nape of its own reflection

swanning on the waters.

We made love as if

we were both defying

the truth we didn’t need to say.

I wanted to plead with you,

I wanted to call out into your emptiness

like a beseeching bird

disappearing into a dark valley,

but my voice ran ahead of its echo like light

and the things I would haved asked you

not to do

had already been achieved.

Heroin, your asp,

at the funeral I stood back

beyond the baffled wreaths of flowers

and the ambivalent silence

of the modest gathering that mourned you,

maculate in the shadows

of the Japanese plum tree

we once made love under

and I kissed the rose of your blood

shedding in mine

like a wound

my love was never sword enough to heal

as they closed

and boarded you over like a well.

I spent the night like an empty vase

beside your grave

until the stars that bloomed above you like wildflowers

thawed my tears in the morning light.

I walked out of the cemetery

through the hard harps and spears

of its iron gates

and I have never been back.

The years since have been

chameleonic as a hooker

who plys her art

on the stairs of a temple

even the priests of my lust

are forbidden to enter,

but as you said I would

as you lay with me that night

like a knife beside the sea,

I have returned to you over and over again

like a witching wand

looking for water in hell,

like a cult of one to a lost island

that holds you like a secret

and wept like a candle of honey

in the dark hive of your unasnwerable silence,

intoning the names

of an impossible god

on a rosary of black suns

until my heart hangs like a bell

dumb with grief

looking up at the stars

you rinsed like a tide from your hair.

And I lean on the crutch and the crook

of a shepherd’s question,

looking everywhere for you

like the wind

sweeping the shadows of fireflies

like the fall of hair from your eyes

that night you tore yourself away from me

like a veil of blood and sorrows

wounded by the terrible light

of the black pearl

that ripened within you like the skull

of a full eclipse.

O my poor, broken angel,

you might have been fat and frumpy by now

if you had lived.

I could have watched your beauty

shed like the moon over the years,

and smile like an island

to remember how lost I was in your tides once,

a constellation of starfish

tumbled like dice in your dark undertow,

trying to shine, god, how

I tried to shine for you, how

I ached to embrace your planet safely

in the mandala of an empowering radiance

that could show you

I was worth living for

if nothing else.

Given the freedom

of the emptiness that engulfed us both,

we could have lived within each other,

we could have evolved our own atmospheres,

appointed our own stars,

written our own myths of origin

on the black pages of that journal of skies

where you scribbled down the events

of your pre-emptive afterlife

as if you wanted to make your ghost indelible.

As it was, the only thing I could do,

was take you in

like the last breath of a summer night

I could never let go of

without following it

like a shadow of you into death.

I haven’t wished for much over the years,

and the dreams have come and gone as they will,

and my hair has gone gray

and my eyes are looped like powerlines

and the sad bells of a heavy solitude

that has yoked me to the grindstone of the turning world

to mill the stars like a tide

on the bloodwheel of a worn heart.

I finally burned and broke all the weeping mirrors

I consulted like half-assed mediums

to see if I could restore you somehow

to the more intimate shining of that last night

you turned and ran back,

your shoes in your hand,

to make sure your final kiss would endure like a temple.

You pitied the agony of shapeshifting

you knew the black water ahead

was about to go through

as it smashed like goblets and crystal chandeliers

on the roaring skulls of the rocks;

you pitied me because you knew I loved you,

because you knew you were already

a future memory

and I was a prophecy from the past

that had ridden beyond itself like light

to illuminate nothing but your absence

measured in the filaments and lifelines

of eyeless oceans

like a seabird

circling a blind lighthouse on the moon.

PATRICK WHITE