LIVING OFF THE GRID

LIVING OFF THE GRID

Living off the grid in the interstices between the threads

of the spider webs bejewelling the sky with stars

like the net of Indra in the morning dew. Mark one drop

and they’re all marked. Subtract from one

and you take from all. Same way with our eyes

when they see like crystal skulls right through

the ruse of themselves to the glassblowers

of fifteenth century Germany. Cool visuals.

The light refracting off the nuanced smear

above their left front parietal lobes as if

they had something as happy and irrational as water

to be clear about in a brittle kind of way.

And that’s ok, that’s ok, that’s ok, too,

but you’ve got to get down and dirty in the starmud

like the root of an optic nerve deep in the dark matter of the brain,

if you want to be what you see in the visionary sense of the word.

If you want to fly with the dragons that bring the rain

you can’t sip like a hummingbird collecting blood samples

from the hollyhocks. You can’t live like a tuning fork

witching for a lightning strike if you haven’t got

the circuitry for it. If your axons aren’t grounded to the earth

you’ll be blown out like the brown out of a power station

that wasn’t a fit companion for the sun

because you couldn’t handle the excruciating transformations

of your own shining, the disciplined ferocity

of a controlled burn. You’re either one of the fire wombs of life

or the ashes of a dragonfly in the furnace of a chrysalis

that breaks like the under-fired pottery of a fortune-cookie urn.

Or a stale koan. Either way you’re not a guru of the absurd

that’s been enlightened by the crazy wisdom standing

in the backlit doorways of delusion, grateful for a hand out

if you’ve never shaken your spiritualism down on the street

to feed your hungry ghosts something meaty and sweet.

If you want to build your house in the back starfields

of an off road zodiac, you’ve got to start like an incipient galaxy

with a big black hole as deep as a godhead in your heart

and the bedrock foundation of an asteroidal avalanche

that brings the mountain down on the valley like a gravestone

that’s waiting for somebody to put their name and return address on it.

Even if you’ve blooded your abstractions with soporific poppies

and you’re sleepwalking through dreamland, you’re still

not homeless enough to be in exile from yourself.

You’re still breathing in and out like a hinge on a gate in space.

And there’s a light in your face that tells me you’re

a lantern in the dark that’s never worn its own deathmask

to a ghost dance without paling like the stars

in the false dawn of the fire that consumes them.

And I’ve noticed you never take

the cranium of your begging bowl

around to the door of an entrance

from which there is no exit.

And that’s ok, that’s ok, that’s ok, too.

PATRICK WHITE  

COMPASSION THE SWEETNESS THAT ENTERS

COMPASSION IS THE SWEETNESS THAT ENTERS

Compassion is the sweetness that enters

the wounded apple of knowledge after

you’ve taken your first bite out of it.

It’s not an antidote to the facts of life and death.

And you should know by now if you’ve suffered at all,

and it’s impossible not to from the moment you open your eyes,

the night is not a reward, nor the lantern of the light

that goes before you on a graveyard shift of the stars.

Compassion is the oldest instinct of the heart

and first muse of the mind that can taste only

the blowing blossoms and bitter green apples of the spring,

gripe brain, before it ripens like a sunset in your blood.

That’s why the heart knows more about it than the head.

And I expect, on that basis, no one is more capable

of loving us who must doubt that we’re worthy of love

to live up to the truth of it than the dead who can open

the tiny koans of the seeds at the core of things

like the lockets of fortune-cookies that break

like twisted cosmic eggs in a rush to spread their wings

like waterbirds who write the lyrics of their songs on the fly.

Words for the eye. Words for the ear. Words

for the voice of the wind like black walnut trees

and kites in a storm. And if you really know how to listen,

I mean if you can hear the wavelength of a black snake

swimming across your blood like a mantra

of terrifying, beautiful wisdom that keeps its secrets

to itself, or hear the unfathomable oceans in the black rose

whose petals and eyelids are always smashing

like white eyelashes in a squall of sunbeams

against the breakwater of a white dawn that passes

like an albino eclipse in a moonlit leper colony

of extinct black rhinos. If you even remotely

hear what I mean when I speak like this sleepwalking

through a dream grammar like a prophetic skull in a trance,

words that dance like light on the mindstream

rejoicing in the clarity of the voice that expresses

the hidden message encoded in the genes of the fireflies.

You have mouths. Speak for yourselves.

Some like lighthouses along the banks of life.

Some like thieves with searchlights for eyes on a bomber’s night

when everyone is underground and the bummers are out

plundering the evacuated houses of the zodiac.

Might be the ravings of a star struck maniac talking to himself

to make sure nobody else is listening. Might be

the surrealistic lament of a Dadaist night bird

singing out loud in its sleep for things it doesn’t know

it longs for, or maybe a lunatic is waxing prophetic

in a labyrinth of his own echoes trying to sound his way out

of the mountains without end he’s being trying to befriend

like a cloud or an eagle silvered a moment

like the ore of a dream in the corner of the eye

of a moonrise coming on like a hurricane

with a black pearl in its teeth. The eclipse of a sacred lie

compassion concedes to an alibi without a myth of origin.

Compassion is the child of imagination that identifies

with its simulacra of suffering by applying the heart

like a bloodbank to the wounded eidolons of eyeless images

that didn’t know how to bleed, or breathe, or cry or see

until compassion tempered their impression of themselves

as paradigms of rationality, by shedding real tears

in an ice age of lenses that kept their illusory distance

from the stars that came out after the rain, wet and shining,

laughter radiating through our tears, because life isn’t a dry fire.

It’s the hand on the rudder of a lifeboat

that keeps you from drowning from the day you were born

in the undertow of the tides of the new moon

until the night of the full when you haul everyone aboard

who’s been swimming through glaciers of tears

like baby mammoths for the last twenty-five thousand years

afraid of extinction if they ever stopped to catch their breath.

Compassion is accepting everyone’s death as a portion of your own.

Everyone’s life as your third eye, a vital organ of your own body.

Compassion is an undisciplined action of the heart.

Compassion arises like a moonrise of inspiration

in the eyes of the older sister of the muses

who walks too much alone as if she’d devoted her solitude

to the suffering of a wounded stranger she met along the way

when she let her hair down like willows of rain

to cool the scorched earth and slake the roots of pain

until they bloomed like foxfire in the shadow of her passing.

Most poets sit around the lesser fires of their art

trying to divine the smoke of what’s burning in their hearts

like autumn leaves they’ve heaped into books

that smoulder in tears more often than they break into flames.

But if compassion turns her eyes toward you

like a star in the darkness beyond your blazing

the Milky Way runs like a bloodstream through your veins

and you see in terrifying clarity the great mystic details

in the deep watersheds of picture music efoliating

like wildflowers and galaxies, grails, fountains,

lunar herbs, and starfish raised up off the ground

to take their place among the shining, radiant with life,

in the low valleys and high fields of an imagination that heals.

PATRICK WHITE

BACKGROUND SADNESS. COSMIC HISS.

BACKGROUND SADNESS. COSMIC HISS.

Background sadness. Cosmic hiss. Cool blitz of the rain.

Too late to do the fossils of the flowers any good. Grim air.

Morose silver-grey homogenous sky. Curds of colour.

Though the trees that have hung on to their leaves

like poets afraid to publish their works on the wind,

hoarding them like flakes of dried blood from previous passions,

remind me of the Library of Alexandria going up in rusty flames.

The drainage ditches are full, and the chandeliers

of the New England star clusters aren’t shining anymore.

This morning I’m the fragrance of smoke

in a bombed out city that’s eaten all its horses.

A drenched scarecrow without a function

wandering through a field of shattered cattle corn.

More smouldering than combustible. The earth

lays a poultice on my heart like green moss

on the skulls of the rocks. And the agony of healing

sometimes hurts worse than the original wound.

Dark starmud clings to my lily-white winged heels.

And though the arrows of my words have been

fledged by the sky like ospreys among songbirds,

I’m still flaking spear heads off the obsidian

of prolific new moons. And it’s hard to know

if I’m weeping like a candle that’s still burning in the rain

or crying long, slow, pungently languorous tears of resin

down the trunks of the dolorous pines.

Wet raw umber leaves stick to my boots

like decals on a guitar case of one night stands

like the lament of a bird moving from tree to tree

without understanding what it’s longing for.

Too many sundials past the equinox

in the season of the dead, I’m hauling

the blue stones of my emotions from distant quarries

as I walk these fallow fields like a crop circle

with notions of refounding Stonehenge here in Lanark County,

stacking pagan trilithons out of heritage Christian cemeteries

as I close the endless gates behind me, chain by chain,

so nothing gets out that isn’t meant to, except me

and the fox that’s stopped to eye me

from the far side of my field of view

that’s been abandoned to its own recourses

for the rest of the year in and year out.

I came for a casual walk, but I find myself

wary and prowling through a carnivorous solitude

like a drenched bush wolf in the middle of too much agriculture

and I’m many long wavelengths away from home.

There’s a brutal exactitude about a life that doesn’t love you

because you were born with fangs, even when

you lie down with the lamb to share vulnerabilities.

Some like it high above the timberline

where everything is as sublime as nightfall

on a good seeing night and the stars are so ferociously hot

they cauterize your eyes like focused fireflies of blue acetylene

so you never have to cry again quite the way you used to,

or if you do, your tears shatter like chandeliers of dry ice

and weeping glass. And then a black walnut tree

that’s been unfeathered by the wind like a snapping turtle says

the trouble with wild predators is they never

get down to the roots of things. Come the autumn

they’re still wandering homelessly in the shallows of life alone.

Too sad to argue, I nod my assent, and think to myself

so do your leaves, your blossoms, your seeds, your windfalls,

the burnt planets of your scattered solar systems

strewn at my feet like black cue balls that break for us all.

I allegorize the woods to humanize my lupine mythologems.

And then there are some. Siloes of dark abundance

standing in the starfields of an emotional famine

that have been living on nothing but the crumbs

of the forgivable shining of their former dreams.

Sometimes think I’m one of them as well, among

so many fortune-tellers reading the lifelines

of the open palms of the trees. But I don’t get fixed upon it

for fear the fireflies of insight I revelled in this summer

stop burning holes in my starmap that lets me see

clear through these obvious paradigms of the light

to the shapeshifting constellations of chaos on the other side

that unravel these monstrous myths of human origin

as quickly as they weave them out of nothing

so that in the end we’re always the beginning of something else.

And there’s a hidden compassion in all of that. Mercy

in the mobile protocols of passage that initiate us

into a deeper awareness of the pathos of our passions

emptying the urns of our hearts like the ashes

of the Canada geese flying high overhead above the clouds

that our pristine emptiness might be renewed again

by the yellow leaves we’re kicking through in the rain

like sodden flames strewn across the trail

beside the mindstream I’ve been following like the Tay

where the fleets of sulphur butterflies

timed to the weather reports of the dying flowers

have taken down their sails like the wings of old loveletters

to walk alone with the Alone without saying

anything short-sighted or humanly intrusive along the way.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU WERE THE INTIMACY

YOU WERE THE INTIMACY

You were the intimacy

of the things I loved

that were so impossibly far away

I could never reach out and touch them

except by touching you.

In the long silence of these past thirty-seven years

I have never been able to look at people again

the way I used to see them before I met you.

There’s a fear in the way I love them

that I learned

from living your absence.

A deep black wounded space within

that has sadly outgrown the stars

like October outlives its fireflies.

And every threshold I’ve crossed ever since

has turned into a long road

with a precipice at the end of my spinal cord

swaying like the first night I met you

on the Capilano Suspension Bridge

and you said

the only way

to overcome your fear of falling

is to have the courage to jump.

And I laughed and said

staring into the gorge

and the thin silver water down below

what’s to fear

if you know how to fall toward paradise?

And you knew right away

I was your kind of challenge.

And I knew you wanted

to sword-dance with razorblades

you laid out like the Tarot

later back at your place

as if you wanted to convince yourself

you were still silly enough to believe in tomorrow.

The candle beside the cards on the floor

didn’t turn out to be

enough of a lighthouse

to warn us of the approaching storm.

We were sincere in the darkness

for a little while

astounded by the expert innocence

of our mindless flesh.

You shone like the sun at midnight

and I came undone like Icarus

to prove I was falling

without regrets

like a spent star

into the singularity

of a whole new universe

where everything that didn’t happen in this one

came uncannily true in the next

for both of us

as if we were at last worthy

in each others’ arms

of our own happiness.

When happiness is brave

it’s bliss.

And when it’s afraid

there’s nothing sadder

than a gift that was never opened.

Joy is a warrior that risked hoping

there was nothing left dying for.

Sorrow comes up with a million reasons.

The only way of life

is not making a way of life.

Nor making

not making a way of life

a way.

One day you just get off the road

and start taking the long way home through the starfields.

You stop looking in the mirror

to see if you still have eyes.

For years after your death

no matter what I looked at

I always saw the same thing.

The black clarity

of your existential absence

staring me in the face

without turning me into stone

because that would have been mercy.

Try how I might

I could never quite

shut the lid on your coffin

or accept

that you were buried in me for good

or that my blood burned

like the infernal red

of an emergency exit

to show me the way out

of heaven and hell

by falling on them both

like a two-edged sword

that killed me deeper into life

than your death ever did.

Either life’s unfair

or I’m not man enough

to live up to your suicide

but I remember how I used to love

feeling the weight

of the nightstream of your hair

as it poured through my hand

like a landscape that could feel

for the first time in a long time

water running in the dry creekbeds of its lifelines.

Things woke up.

And I saw the flowers

among the thorns

that had been guarding them

like the secret names of God

you had to know

to get past the burning angels

through the gates

of your sad return to Eden alone.

The eloquence of your flesh

when you walked on the earth

as if your heart danced to your blood

like an old song we both knew

now a broken harp of bone,

a wounded guitar,

someone laid down for good.

A prophetic skull

without a future

anyone can foretell.

The full moon going down

like a spare penny

into a dry wishing well.

Me looking at the dark hills

like the contours of your corpse laid out

under a collapsed tent

as they wheeled you into the ambulance

to spend your first vast impossibly long night in the morgue

among the dead

who don’t catch their breath

or break their bodies like bread

alone in the stillness

that can’t distinguish one death from another.

However I wept for you

all the hard bitter baffled tears

all the sweet radiant wellsprings

that washed the dust like stars

off the wings of the birds

that had laboured to carry the souls of the dead

far to the west

when I remembered

how blessed I really was

that things had been

so beautifully dangerous for awhile.

And all the dark fathomless watersheds of lucidity

I drowned in like a eye in a grail

looking for butterflies in a suicide note.

All the black pearls

the diamond skulls

the eclipsed chalices

all the precious jewels of my grieving

that death hoarded underground

nothing in the end

but nameless water

frozen between the cracks

of a gravestone as old as the moon.

I remember how I loved your ice-blue eyes

and how they burned with an Arctic clarity

you had to dress warmly for

if you didn’t want to suffer from frost-bite

but there’s more nightshade in them now

than chicory

when I look into them like tundral flowers

and the light turns hurtful and eerie

when I recall how the melting snow

washed itself clean of itself

all those years ago

when we didn’t know

what all this meant.

It’s of little relevance

that we once loved each other

the way we did

and once you’ve exhausted

the meaning of signs

like galaxies expanding

ever more deeply into space

less significance.

What does it look like from Mars?

Your death was a koan

not a fortune-cookie

and the koan broke me

like a man it couldn’t understand

rationally.

There is no scar for you.

You will always be

this open wound inside of me.

When I look at the stars

I can’t dissociate beauty from absurdity.

I cherish their clarity

as something that can’t be

contaminated by my eyes

when they’re nothing

but two black holes in space

a snake-bite of the light

in the middle of my face

like a colon without the following:

the kind of faith

that makes what little is left

so incommensurably greater than what’s been lost.

I can see the blue morning glory in the garden

as if moonlight had turned to skin

just to feel what it’s like to flower

but I can’t forget the frost

that fell like your death over all of it

when I went so numb

space turned into glass

and time pulled the blind down on the window.

I closed my eyes like a mirror

content to let the stars make sense

of their own reflections.

I gave up on directions

and burned my starmaps

and followed who I was

without caring what I became.

Absolutes of ice

spread like cataracts

over the relativities of the river

that went on flowing

as if nothing had changed

and my life was still a dream without eyelids.

A ghost would be easier to deal with

than the fact

that you don’t exist anymore

except as bare bones

denuded of the world

like yarrow sticks

thrown before the Book of Changes.

But then I expect

you’d exorcise yourself

at a suggestion of the night

that the stars would be so much brighter

if you only blew out the candleflame.

You’d do it just to see

if things got better.

You’d leave me in the dark again

staring at the stars

like white ink

on a black loveletter

you left unsigned

as you disappeared into death

like your last breath on a cold windowpane.

I’ve long since forgiven you my solitude.

I’ve long since forgiven you

the severity of the wisdom

that hardened my eyes

like diamonds in the darkness

that could cut through anything

except my attachment to you.

I have forgiven you

for the way I have grown through suffering

to realize

how much I owe your death

and the terrible eyeless abyss that followed it

like an enlightened insight

into the impersonal nature of compassion.

I have forgiven you

the way I am spontaneously compelled

to love a world that is so estranged from me

I feel like water on the moon

trying to imagine what it must be like

to fall like rain on the intimate earth

with a reasonable expectation

of coming up flowers

that weren’t destined

to be laid on your grave.

I’ve gone grey gathering them up

and bringing them to you

like bouquets of paints and brushes

that are ready at hand

should you ever wish

to pick them up again

and show me what the world looks like

without a body for a picture-frame

as you play the part of the upstart genius

who lived the black farce of creative pain

like the agony of the wick

burning at the stake like a heretic

between the flesh of the wax

and the spiritual aspirations of the candleflame

thrusting spears into space at the stars

as if the only way you could ever know God

if you ever met up

was by the scars.

PATRICK WHITE

O LITTLE SISTER

O LITTLE SISTER

O little sister you’re an alley-cat alto-sax

howling on the fire escape

under a blue moon

that’s driven you into heat

just outside my window

for that arsonist boyfriend of yours

who used to puke in my potted geraniums

every time the two of you got drunk enough

to crash across my coffee-table laughing

even with each other for a crutch

you haven’t got a leg to stand on.

I was charmed by your romantic desolation.

I was intrigued by how much original sincerity

you both saw fit to squander on a cliche.

C’est la vie, c’est l’amor, c’est le guerre.

Elvis Presley is well and living in Tweed.

And Arthur Rimbaud is running guns

with Jim Morrison in Ethiopia for Al-Shabab.

Most people work harder at hope

than they do at achieving their downfall

and you were a fire hydrant

and now you haven’t got a hose.

No pun intended

I’ve known you too long

to see you this upended slurring your words

like the simultaneous translator

of an hourglass speaking

out of both sides of its mouth at once.

I don’t know why he left you.

Maybe there was nothing left to put out.

You burned out.

A piece flew off your heat shield upon re-entry.

Maybe any man who couldn’t hold his liquor

realizes sooner than later he couldn’t hold you.

I don’t know.

Go ask my geraniums.

They’ve got more to say about him than I do.

You make your death bed.

You got to die in it.

Next time build your house on stilts

in Stanthorpe Queensland

to keep the snakes away from your pillow.

What can I say?

He had a shoulder on his chip

that just couldn’t hold his end of the world up?

And don’t get me wrong.

I’m not laughing at your pain.

I don’t laugh at pain.

Pain is pain.

Different planets.

Different moons.

Who hasn’t gone swimming with dolphins

in the saturnine seas of Titan

or dropped a comet like a match

on a methane moon of Neptune?

Endomorphs and dopamines

can make you do a lot of funny things

that love is at a loss for words to justify.

Even if just for one wild night

of occult hunting magic

everyone longs to run with the wolves.

And howl, o little sister, you can hear them howling

in their blood agony at the waxing moon

as if something had died within them

that was so deep and crucial

it tore their hearts out

in an ecstasy of unrepentant pain.

And many many years later

when the solid abyss and hollowness of life

has grown even greater

you can still hear their voices

screaming like winter winds

above the timber-line

so high-pitched no echo

has ever been able to reach that high again

without shattering like a night bird

against the mirage of the open sky in the window.

Like you, little sister, now.

I’m not a sump-pump for anybody’s tears

not even my own

but I’ve been known

to throw a little heavy water

on a nuclear meltdown every now and again.

Pain. Separation. Loss. Dream death

you keep reliving like an afterlife in your sleep

you’re dying to wake up from

like a coma that’s lost everything worth waking up to.

Not two. Not two. Not two.

That’s the way it is here.

That’s as far as words go.

That’s where Statius takes over

from Vergil on the nightshift

and the stars nod off like children

who couldn’t finish the story

and the quality of the poetry drops

as dark genius opts out

of the company of bright mediocrities

trying too hard to make it a better world

than it needs to be.

For things it didn’t do.

And in a merciful world

that lived up to its teachings

and didn’t shrink the heart

with fear of its own extremes

while everything else is expanding

shouldn’t be asked to suffer like a placebo

in the glands of spurious cure.

And, yes, I know sometimes

it’s hard to keep up with the mysteries

like the elements of life on a geometric scale.

How many jugulars does a woman have

for someone to cut

like the downed powerlines

of the Medusa’s head

for having cast the first stone at herself?

You can wake the serpent fire

at the base of your spine

just above your coccyx

the hardest bone in your body

the little throne

the modest gravestone

you’ll be resurrected on

when you’re summoned from the dead,

but you can’t train love

to bite the people you want it too

and run like an antidote to the rescue.

That’s why you’re getting high

on your own poison right now.

That’s why your drunken tears

oscillate between a broken chandelier

that’s bleeding out

and acid rain that burns like love

congealing into a new ice age.

However deep you dig the grave

to bury someone you once really loved

even a desert at night

when the stars weren’t looking

wouldn’t be enough to fill it in.

It’s a wound without scar tissue

for the rest of your life.

The ghosts keep being pulled out of the box

like that kleenex you keep using

to dry your eyes at this seance

you’ve called on the spur of the moment

to be appalled by how lonely it is

to plead with the dead for severance.

PATRICK WHITE