IF WE MEET AGAIN

IF WE MEET AGAIN

If we meet again, don’t quote your scars at me as if you were the moon. It’s hard to sympathize with the smile of a knife when it’s bleeding. There are some stains on the bedsheets even the light can’t wash away, and a mouth is not a wound you can close with a kiss. And I know some part of me is struggling with this like a cut worm who won’t bless the plough, but many women before you, because I died wholly for them, have taught me that even the most normative caprice of severance is the east of my deliverance, and all I have to do is wait in the cave of the Seven Sleepers for the eras to pass that will restore me like a face to a mask. But you’ll be bones by then, and the nightwind will not rescind the taste of your name just to please the flowers. You need a younger man who knows why he cries as I once did; older, I ache like a stone, but only metals move through me like swords and crowns unsheathed by wizards and kings, the boyish imaginings of my injured prowess when I’m bored with the lies that are inscribed under the eyelids of the wedding rings. And yes, this mute, mouthless, abysmal silence stings and the words that mated in a fury of night have lost their wings like flying ants that busy themselves with smaller dismemberments in the dirt. Or less symbolically rendered, I hurt. Quartered and torn asunder. Down, down, down under where I can look up at the roots and wonder if anything flowers on the bright side, or if my gravestone pops up like toast for another bride of the morning that wakes up glitzy beside my ghost. But this is an old coast I’ve been down before like a fly at a windowpane looking for a passage through the absolute glass of the ice pack in my way. And it’s not a matter of doubting there is a Cathay to be ultimately reached, but if I’ve grown sadder and wiser in all kinds of romantic weather, repeatedly beached, the compass of my little sage is more a map of where not to go than anything, but I don’t preach. Like a wolf above the timberline you can hear but can’t locate, the peaks scrambling the echoes like an early warning defensive missile system, I have learned to stay to the high paths above the radioactive dumps of the emotional melt-downs that glow like the half-life of cities in the dark. Howl there and no one understands the sorrow and the madness that’s drawn out of your blood and soul by the poultice of the moon; everyone’s tuning their bark to a voice coach, and behind every pitbull there’s a pooch. Better, my solitude, better this precipice with a view, than all the sirens and muses I’ve screwed the night before my sacrifice. I will not grovel on the bestial floor in the gore of my wretchedness, nor saint myself in a waste of blood and love just to prove I’ve been true to my hallucination. You can’t churn honey from yeast, or inflate the bread with pollen, and why bother trying to lift the pillars of old civilizations that have fallen into the rubbish and rubble of their kingdom-comes? I was never much of a goat you could tie bleating to a stake to con a tiger, or kill a god. Only a little magician is the fool of his rod, and there are darknesses well beyond sorcery that unmaster even the greatest adept of their demonic clarity. If you want to see into things don’t rely on your eyes. So I grieve; love palls and the flowers fall and I’m sad for the passing of everyone and everything, for the thin vapour of the dreams we keep breathing out like used air, for the unnamed star with dead planets like burrs in her hair, for the agonized cigarette-butt stubbed into the worn wood of the indifferent stair. If once I aspired to a failure beyond my utmost; at least, now, in times like these, when I search my heart like Atlantis for the occasional throne, I’m equal to my own inadequacy, and if I’m alone, I’m alone. Nor do I blame you anymore than I would the eyes behind the e-mail curtains that parted like the Red Sea to take a look at my exodus below into a gloomier theocracy. The same old menu of manna and vipers as the last time I crossed over, and the screening myth of a murder now the press release of a lie, and no sorrow in the eye that washes pharaoh out to sea, and tomorrow always the promised land just out of reach like the face of a woman only fingertips away from the obedience I breach and the breaches I obey. Did I not labour for you like a well in a desert, and bleach the water with sunstruck ghosts before I held it up to your lips like the moon to dispel the fever of a chronic eclipse? I was you and you were me. You said so. Closer than blood and breath. Maybe I just wanted to believe a greater intimacy than I had ever known was possible between people. Maybe the night was bored and sighed and the sigh stirred us into words and a nighthawk shrieked at the top of the moon’s stairwell, higher than it had ever been lifted up before by the bedsprings of its spiritual thermals where you lay down with me, our only skin, the sky. I saw your face once. I saw your tattooed arms and legs. I saw your eye. And the moist star that adorned it. The man and poet that I am are the two footings of the same bridge astraddle the mindstream that has no banks, and most of the time it’s hard to tell whether it’s the water or the bridge that flows, but my heart knows when it’s been touched, and you touched it. I felt you like the sky feels a new constellation crossing over for the first time, fascinated by the dark currents that swirled below, a confluence of voices, and the reflection of stars that mimed your radiance, as, effortlessly, a spontaneous inversion of the night, I returned your shining to you. But now, if you’re gone. Full stop. And this silence that widens in my wake like the compass of a departing waterbird on its way to the next pond, is all that’s left of everything that’s gone, this tremor of time in a dark space that once shone, the light with its tongue cut out learning to sign, I will not blow out the star in your eye that webbed the dreamcatcher in the corner of mine. I will remember you some nights when there’s only the field and me and the night and the stars, and I stand in the vastness lordless and alone, and feel the dark efface my life in its boundless immensity, and all my feelings a halo of black comets that once flared in the sun, I will remember you; I will remember you with intensity, and I will wonder.

PATRICK WHITE

PAID THE RENT

PAID THE RENT

Paid the rent. Roof over my head for another month.

Car bills coming up, and contraband cigarettes;

got to feed myself, provide what is needed,

address myself to elemental concerns,

keep my body clean, my clothes, the house, the sheets,

my wits about me on the streets,

and my heart wary of vagrant urgencies

that take a bride like an ambulance to an emergency

just for the ride, and ends up dedicating themselves like a blood bank

to a wound that isn’t in the book

and won’t be healed,

though I apply the moon like a poultice,

like a scar with a dark side that’s always concealed.

Even who I thought I was, more life behind me than ahead,

no more than a passing flaw of feeling,

gusts of birds in the groves of a sacred delirium

where the fools make fun of the saints

and it takes ages to understand

why the blood writes and paints

what the spirit sees of a world

that stains the grace of its mystic absurdity

by forgetting how to play with God, the faceless one.

And things are done that rot like bells

and torture and war and rape and winning sells

peanuts in the Colosseum

and no one knows who I am

because they’re clinging like frost

to their own faces

in dangerously intimate places.

And that’s okay; that’s okay too

because I’m just an empty lifeboat passing through

the eye of a dream that won’t wake anybody up,

just another prophetic crack in the cup

that proposes a toast to its host like a grail

as we fail and fail and fail our way through life

all the way to the top of our decline

like a parachute tangled in a powerline

that didn’t know how to jump toward paradise.

And I wouldn’t advise anyone giving or taking advice,

but I will go out and encompass the day like an accident

that didn’t happen to me,

and there will be moments like mini-blackholes

that will grain my image into the ferocious clarity

of a face that bends space like a lens

to cloak the offence of my rarity

among these others who are less

than mysteriously me.

And I will confess in lonely parking lots

that are abused like hookers

that life is a shabby affair with a disaffected angel

with one wing in and one wing out

of a censored bed on a movie-set

that can’t disarm the camera.

But why defame the rehearsal

if life goes on tour without you,

tired of the timing of the same old lines

and reruns of a mind that was never released?

How many suns, how many moons,

how many shadows cast by Venus ago

was the air sweet, and the light elated

by what it shone down upon

that grew eyes to turn the shining into seeing,

and revelled inconceivably in being

with nothing amiss in the mirrors of bliss

that had never been stained

by a suicide note in smudge-proof lipstick

before it opened a vein with a flick of the moon

to let its blood off the leash like a kiss

with a passion for going all the way?

I doubt if there’s ever been such a day,

but it will do me no good

to widow away the grief

by treating belief to a candle or two

that don’t cast the same shadows I do

when I’m trying to make sense of death

with ghosts on my breath,

and gates in my heart that gape at the fact

that none of us are ever coming back

to expose the disparity between the living and the dead.

And the day is proving horrible

and the little light I hoped to lamp my way along with

is caught by the wing like a star in a spiderweb

and I’m doing everything right

according to the detective in me

but I’m beginning to suspect a clause in my DNA

has defected like an eye through a loophole in felicity

and there’s no way left that even I can be me

and endure this agony that waterboards

everything I have to say

about all the things I haven’t done

and worse, much worse, to come, to unconfess

when I’m indicted like reasonable junkmail

on the threshold of the wrong address

that picks me out of the line-up like a refugee

even though the sun pulled an eclipse over its head

and rendered its blazing blind to rob the dead

who lie like bad credit in wounded wallets

trying to make the down payment on an afterlife.

And who knows? Maybe there’s an afterlaugh as well

peached and primed with salt and slime for the cynics.

Or maybe I should spend the last twenty years of my life,

if there’s that much left of myself to pass on,

surfing women like channels to find one I’m on.

Or if all is delusion, absurdity, and despair

and only those too fearful not to, care,

and the air is noxious and the water obscene

and the earth too bilious to bear,

and meaning only the thorn of the facts

and the beauty of the wounded rose is treated

like just another heart attack,

and powerful leaders are seated on skulls

throwing leftovers like people behind them to gulls

hovering in the widening wake of their sterns

as the national garbage barge drifts rudderless downriver

like a corpse in the Ganges

snatched like laundry from the line

by sacred crocodiles,

why shouldn’t I dispose of myself like surgical waste

or crush cigarettes into my arm in self-disgust

until I am all sunspots and craters on the moon

or master all the tongues of PsychoBabylon

slashing drastic alphabets with cuneiform razors

into the moist, starmud tablets of my flesh

like the tight mouths of new moons

unspooling the same old shit.

Sometimes I think I must be out of it

to still be here, to hang on, not to let go,

like those autumn leaves that cling all winter

like gnostic gospels in the snow

to the only tree they know.

Time isn’t an abstract concept

when it’s happening to your face

and space is closing up behind you like holy water

that washes you off like a bloodstain

and heals itself

by vetting your name to forget you

like an unwelcome tenant at an old address.

And the day is a Nazi fire hydrant on standby

in a blizzard of ashes from the chimneys of Auschwitz,

and even the fires in the mouths of the lion furnaces

are disgraced by the taste of the human deformity

that waters its womb with glass

and bubbles with eyes that are blown and cast

like fanatical jewels through storefront windows

that shatter like ice storm chandeliers

and scapegoat constellations,

or the only eye-witness to a murder of mirrors,

or nations.

Who lacks so much light at noon

that they withdraw like black holes

into the bloodlines of their shadows to hate

everything their glory can’t illuminate?

The candle in the lamp can’t soil the eye

and the sun burns all day without soot

and the flowers may keep the bees like golden chimney sweeps,

and creosote turn to honey in the mouth of the hive,

but genocide vents like money and no one is left alive.

And of this infectious darkness is the day composed

and my spirit in the background nothing but the universal hiss

of the deaths of millions, and hardly a tear,

except for the pathetic mercy of thoughts that come down one by one

like blunt windows and the eyelids of the quicker guillotines

that couldn’t stand to look at the horror

of what a species with a view can do to advance pain.

And there are skulls like sterile moons among the vegetables

that blight the food the starving grow to feed me

and atrocities in the bank that certify my cheque

and wash the blood off with diamonds

that shine with the lustre of rain

in the gutters of pain.

And it occurs to me in a shopping mall

in a flurry of wayward consumers

that there’s always a quota of people somewhere in the world

who must labour and live and give and die like aphids

for every ant here chatting up the cashier like yogurt.

But those are not cherries in your cheese, my friend,

they’re body parts in death carts, crushed hearts

in the makeshift morgue of your pantry.

And the day takes an evil, surrealistic twist

like asphalt and licorice and the odour of snakes

and I don’t have what it takes

to pull up stakes

and find a new grave for the vampire

and every princess I meet has already been kissed

and every rib of the child I used to be

is the rung of a burning ladder

that hasn’t grown enough to rescue me.

And I’d put my hand on the news and swear

I’m not the man in the videocam nightmare

in the jackpot airport

with the backpack on,

tweaking his pixels with lightning

to avenge the death of his mirrors,

but there’s no end, no end, no end

to this labyrinth of bull-leaping shadows

that threads me like blood through the eye of the needle

to mend what I didn’t tear

like this day’s black sail

that spiders across the web lines of my horizons

at a slip of a stitch in time

to poison my voice with moonlight and lime.

And it isn’t as if I haven’t tried to cool

these feverish jewels of seeing

in the eyes of the dragon sages

and worn out my share of straitjackets

and picked the psychological lice

out of my golden fleece on the funny farm

as if I were panning for mountains in the mindstream,

looking for the dicey cornerstones of the lost worlds

that have slipped from my shoulders like an avalanche

or the stools I’ve kicked out from under me

when I found a good branch

to upstage the star of the posse

like the understudy of a dying art

that knows its part, and hangs on every line.

PATRICK WHITE

I HAVE GROWN

I HAVE GROWN

I have grown significantly to understand that every throne I’ve ever sat upon was quicksand and that I am living leniently on the match-head of a planet waiting for the thumbnail of the moon to ignite it with one quick flick of a crescent. Equine and apocalyptic as hell, and the irony is, more than possibly accurate. I’m running out of doors where I can billet my assassins; I keep giving my heart to women who reject it like a bloodbank without an overdraft. I’m a diffraction pattern in the twilight zone, in media res, between this world and the next, and that’s not the one where the herders and the hunters are having it out in a range war of religions. Like a page torn out of the multiverse, I’m just a zone of local cooling, a sunspot, and my neighbour is another, though we know we’re both just fooling when we call each other brother. Forty-eight years a poet and a painter, intoxicated by the picture-music threading the fog of the sirens like a theme I couldn’t resist. Foolish, I suppose, not to have tied myself off like a lifeboat and rowed and rowed for years just to stay where I am, but I had to jettison my landing gear to achieve cruising altitude in the oxymoronic abyss that the sirens demanded, saying, live this, if your poetry isn’t just the romantic bloodletting of a rose from a vein that you’ve slashed on the moon, prove you’re not a lie to us, and conduct yourself like a terrorist, prepared, are you prepared?---to die for us. I cut the eyes out of an eclipse and wore it over my face like a ski-mask, and walked around in the busy market, weighing the world like a tomato in my hand, the original primordial atom, packed with explosives, ready to detonate on command, to delete and improve the world by splashing myself against the wall like a bucket of paint and see what I could make out of myself in the mess of the ensuing vision. It’s amazing how suggestive a real siren can be when you’re lying in an ambulance without any legs. So I learned to swim like a fish among the stars; the last archon of an extinct species from Mars, evicted when all the water went south, and I had to come up with a completely new medium, new atmosphere, new idiom, out of myself, ingeniously, given what I had to work with. I adapted to the solitude and silence of my own vast spaces within, and vowed like a candle, to root my flower in the dark like lightning. Now there’s a squad car outside the candy-store and a swan that barks like a god. Make of it what you will. The pebble doesn’t enquire after its ripples. I write without feedback, without telltale bubbles of meaning rising to the surface like survivors who want to crawl back up on land and start it all again. There’s not much point in panning for gold in an asteroid belt when the only way to tell one nugget from the next is to break your teeth biting into them like fortune-cookies enshrining the haloes and the horns of the prophetic comets that dash by like bunting on a campaign tour. Elect me your fate, and I promise to find a place for your day old reflection somewhere on the plate, and a way to flag the fools down for easier detection. But I won’t tweak your mountainous erection like a gunshot when there are avalanche warnings all along the road, and the echoes return, born again, rehearsing their own names like fleeing refugees on a rosary of boulders that were left overs from Soddam and Gomorrah. Better to write this way than to lie buried like the last laugh of a kingly line in the barrow of a dunghill, pleading like a seed for an upgraded resurrection. I may well be the last extant defect of a fallible perfection, and all the mistakes of the bruised morning glory are mine, and the snakey tines of these tendrils of blood get tangled up in the twine of my thought and no one knows how they got in nor how to get out, and the homologous combs of the mentally coiffed are useless against the love knots that have coiled into nooses around the neck of the wind that’s run out of excuses for inciting the spring to riot, but at least I don’t snitch my way through a poem like a hydrophobic divining rod rooting out the terrorist wells of the watershed in order to secure some heartland in the back pastures of God. It’s dangerous wherever I am. And flawed.

PATRICK WHITE 

ENROBING MY NOBILITY

ENROBING MY NOBILITY

Enrobing my nobility

in the aloofness of a spurned beggar,

or a musician on a street-corner

opening the coffin

of his exhumed guitar for change

to keep his humiliation

enraptured and alive,

his song denied its bough

by a warning

from the window of a squad car

enforcing the petty complaint of the loveless

who douse

the flaring of the flowers in law

as if all that unimposing ecstasy

were merely another match

that failed to consume them,

I conceal the generosity of the stars

that urgently lavish their light

on the deepening night that reveals them

in the lordly pockets of my impoverished repose.

I want to want something again

that isn’t an expletive of acquisition

that ages into the accusing silence

of an unattended toy.

I want to knock down all the probabilities,

all the odds and evens

of the gravestones placed like bets

in a cemetery of bookies

that have hedged their deaths

with double or nothing on the long shot.

Love bides its time in me

like fire in a stone

that rings the ashes of its last revelation

and over the clamour of ghosts at war,

I try to live up to myself in the silence

like the impossible conditions of an unsigned truce.

I have plucked the wings of angels

and feathered my heresies

in the tars and flammable shadows of the night.

If I have withdrawn into myself

it is only to advance and transcend and array

like a wave or a breath

when the abyss gathers me into its unassailable immensities

and then sprawls me out like a map

on the shore of an uninhabited island

to discover what I’ve buried.

I am always curled

like the sickle of a harvest eclipse,

a question-mark, an imported executioner

over the pure, black point of my existence

even as I offer myself up

to the hidden face of the moon

as the first, shining stalk of wheat

to venture out of the tomb

under her inscrutable auspices.

But I am not the redivining of an old sacrifice,

I am not a child in the attic

playing in the valley of the kings

with the castaway cargoes of a rudderless moonboat

scuttled in time.

I don’t dress up in the abandoned wardrobes

of the oversized past

to practice the mute afterlife of my future.

Denied the bough of the day,

I am the nightbird perched in your roots

and singing,

not to summon,

not to warn anyone away,

and even less to convey

the bitterness of unrequited beatitudes

or the serpentine intoxicants of unanswerable longing.

Sometimes it feels as if

I were an extremity of fire

frozen in the ice of hell,

or I find myself lingering

over the petals of the pimped-out magnolias

like the pages of a torn book

or old Venetian blinds askew at the window,

to look for eyes between the lines

I might add to the watersheds of my seeing like rain,

but I’m never a pilgrim on a road of smoke for long.

And I don’t know

if I have enhanced the waters of life

with the tears that fell inwardly

from the lightless side of my eyes,

but I am not the urgent miscellany

of the misunderstood

and I have always been suspicious of the bread

that calls itself good

and founds its thunderous, empty silo

on a curse in the cradle of the grain.

I don’t peck like a pigeon

in the holy squares of the doctrinal,

and it’s been an ironic consolation at times

to wryly affirm with a quizzical smile

that only my uncertainty is certain.

My life may have been blown about

like the windswept froth of a pathetic guess,

and everything I know

be phantoms of foam clinging to ruinous rocks,

but I have that in common with the stars,

and there are tides I ride bareback without a bit

like my own bloodstream

that fly like wild horses on the moon,

muscling the dead seas of the heart like waves

that expound no more

with the gavelling of their hoofs

than the astounded pulse of the running.

I am no longer estranged

by the parsecs of solitude

that are the true measure of my age,

once I realized

it was my only way of meeting everyone.

And I have never mistaken a chain

for the rosary of a dead liberator

and linked the name of God

to anything that is bounded by what it binds.

My freedom is slanderous,

lightning and a star,

but my devotion glows like a firefly in a jar

when I consider that I owe more

to the things I got away with

like a fugitive

compelled to cross the unknown badlands

by a posse of judicial compasses,

than I do to the foghorns and lighthouses

that bellowed over my unsalvageable corpse

because it rose on its own

like an unschooled coast,

there’s still a morning in my smile I can’t regret.

PATRICK WHITE

A THOUSAND YEARS FROM NOW

A THOUSAND YEARS FROM NOW

A thousand years from now

who will remember me

once I’ve disappeared from this windowpane,

a vapour of breath with awareness,

a nebular stain on the clarity

that will wash its hands of me

like a scar of water that has clung too long?

I’m not trying to embalm

the elegiac content of these obvious sunsets in words,

and it’s hard to shake honey out of these mordant bells

that lie like duplicitous lifeboats to the gullible compasses and maps

that keep crashing like doves that don’t have the wingspan

to come back with news of land

to this museum of DNA, two of every kind,

I keep scuttling like an ark on the top of every wave.

And what is a grave if not an abandoned embassy

that didn’t have time to shred its dreaded secret?

And sometimes, when the emptiness and the silence

are beyond bearing,

I hold myself up like a passport at the panicked gates

that have made me an exile and a wounded threshold in my own home

and clamour like a continent

to be repatriated anywhere

that isn’t a country whose borders are stretched out like refugee lines.

But it’s a foolish wish.

And if there’s a dragon to slay,

I realize it’s only more shadows and swordplay,

and I think of the return of the rain lifted from the sea

and how the sea never feels anything is missing,

and everything is passage without arrival or departure

and how the arrow never leaves the hand of a good archer.

It’s human nature to understand,

a sacred mode of disobedience

to look into the eyes of our worst fears

even if it’s just to flare like a star without rescue

and scream out in light a moment against its own extinction.

But who or what or nothing is ever there to listen

as we go out like flies and stars in a toilet bowl?

And a love of laws is not the law of love

and there have been so many dragons

left out of the chrysales of their questions like answers

that the heart is not sustained by the impersonal blessing

of ubiquitous entropy in a long, lab coat

as the spirit longs for transformations

a star and a night beyond itself

that might astonish a human

with something enduringly human

like a next breath that can’t be smudged by death

or something drastic in the dust that remembers us

when we were stars

that thawed through the windowpane

as if we were looking through the lenses of our own eyes

to discover everything we live is how we die

and we’re always a plight and a plea away from knowing why.

Imagine, one night, looking up at the sky

and there were no death to raise the moon

like a calendar above your neck,

and everything you saw around you,

crows, kites, keys,

last year’s pine cones on this year’s trees,

were not denuded of their mystic specificity

in this mortal profusion of origins

that ends where it begins. Imagine,

one morning, not getting up from the dream

to pan the mindstream for the nugget of a skull

that might be gold, and the luster of the radiance

never grows old like the taste of the moon in your mouth.

Wouldn’t this onceness then be eternal,

and what I’m saying now, indelible

as the space that prompts the stars to shine?

Learning wisdom is learning the universe

as if it were your own face, on the inside,

and you were its only eyes,

disappearing from view so that all that remains is you.

Birth, a breathing in; death, a breathing out,

before the first and after the last, this pulse and suspiration,

muses around the wellspring, witches around the cauldron,

planets fluttering like moths

at the windows of the constellations. Like the moon

I pass my hand over like an eclipse as if it were my own skull,

I have been creatively maintained from the start by my own expiration.

Are there no orchards in the hearts of old women?

Are there no graves in the eyes of a child?

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN YOU LISTEN TO A BIRD

WHEN YOU LISTEN TO A BIRD

When you listen to a bird

you should hear the whole of the sky

just as when you look at a star

you should be a fountain of eyes.

Because you cannot see,

the darkness is not blind

and your consensus of conventional abnormalities

is not reality, is not the source

of the hidden halo of comets that afflict you,

nor the crazy constellations of the fireflies that bless.

I don’t know if I speak for anyone other than myself

but that’s enough to reflect the moon in every drop

of this unvoiced delirium

that surpasses enlightenment and lunacy like old shoes

to walk barefoot across the stars

as if they were no more than cool sand in a desert at night

that’s never been bound to a road,

though every single grain is the cornerstone of the world.

How unsayably me I must be

that so many thoughts and emotions,

so many vital themes of blood and time,

years that have returned their fields to the wild,

have enshrined my namelessness

in this abandoned palace of shadows

I’ve pitched together like a chrysalis out of words.

A true muse is a well

that finds its own way to your mouth,

and I accord mine the perfect freedom to be me,

and drink deeply of the night she pours into me,

until neither of us knows who the other is

though we whisper like leaves on the same tree.

What’s crucial is not to offer yourself up

like a tourist map to the wind

but to let go. To find out where you’re going

not by giving up everything that you know,

but the knowing.

I let my thoughts follow the path

of a snowflake in a blizzard

until they melt like eyes on earth

to show my roots how to flower,

this one a waterlily opening

like a diploma in a swamp,

and that, the devil’s paintbrush.

Should it be otherwise?

Can you turn your eyes back like a clock

and unsee the things

that have looked so deeply into you

the skull of an impersonal space

wears the atmospheric intimacy of your face

like the ghost of an unknown planet?

I have felt poppies of blood

hotter than any prophetic furnace

rend my flesh like starving lions

for things I never knew I believed,

for the heart I laid down like a sword on the altar

to the inexplicable gods of the misconceived,

when I realized that not even my homelessness is shelter

and the only country under the flag of my blood

that might have claimed me as its own

has caged me like an undocumentable alien

in a holding cell of bone.

But it’s foolish to look for passage

when nothing’s in your way,

or seek enlightenment with a candle at midday,

not knowing you’re only washing a mirror with shadows

and handing out wicks to the stars.

And what’s the sound of one hand clapping?

Be compassionate. Be generous. Be kind.

This is the only way to forgive your mind.

PATRICK WHITE

EVERY MORNING OF THE MOMENT, A NEW CREATION

EVERY MORNING OF THE MOMENT, A NEW CREATION

Every morning of the moment, a new creation,

the distillation of the dreams of the night before

when the moon was as fertile as the dew we were born from.

I start out each day with a new face. By nightfall

it’s just another phase of the same old ageless deathmask,

heavier than a bell that’s been talking through my mouth

for more light years than I’ve got tears to measure in mirrors.

That’s usually when I start thinking like a potato about stars.

Blood sugars in my mindstream ripening me like a vision

I’ll only ever get to see backstage like a forlorn clown

trying to hang on to his faith in laughter.

You can pursue happiness, but it will only

run from you like the light, or you can cover your eyes

and try to avoid it for fear of losing it like the last time,

but when you turn around, it’s right behind you,

flirting with your shadow. Better to let it come and go

of its own accord, like a waterbird in a moonrise

reflected on a lake. Then when you speak of things

you increasingly know less about the more

you’re intimate with them, your voice isn’t

a bird net trying to cage words on the fly

but an aviary as open as the sky when

Cygnus and Aquila are up, and the Lyre’s

a larynx for the asking. And you’re free

to sing your heart out as if no one were listening

but you and the trees and the stars you hit like high-notes.

Or shriek like a rabbit seized by the coydogs

if you run out of lucky feet and that’s what comes up

like snake eyes. Lap the experience out of the bone

until there’s nothing left to eat but your appetite itself

and among the myriad flavours of life you’ve exhausted

that will taste the sweetest of all to that emptiness

that harvests the world like a blue moon that’s never full.

Is the moon not the equal of its waxing and waning alike?

Is it trying to enlighten its dark side?

When the candle goes out, does the light have any trouble

handling it? Fear returns to what it knows the best.

It hugs the shore like a tidal pool beside the sea,

a dead starfish or two it can get its arms around

like a worm’s-eye view of the galaxy, and the shell

of a red sunset in the morning on the carapace

of a crab that left its hovel for a house in

a more upwardly mobile zodiac. Sometimes

it comes down to that. Quantum level gravity.

A gravitational eye with myopia that bends the light

like a stick in the water, a mirage of sand in an hourglass

that’s afraid of being swept out to sea

with nothing to hold onto but the lifeboat

of a shucked clam Venus just stepped out of onto land

to have sex in a new medium like an artist

who’s just switched from water colours to oils.

You’ve got to accept the down times as all part

of the same wavelength you’ve been riding

like a snake scaled in white caps of light

that break on shore in a turmoil of kelp.

The cosmos doesn’t need to be put in order

and chaos doesn’t need any help. Listen to your sorrows.

Summon them to a seance of yourself

and apologize to their ghosts for not having the voice

to let them speak through you about

learning to swim with the stars further out of your depths

than you’ve ever been before. First you drown

in the fathomless immensities of even the smallest detail,

and then you bubble back up to the surface

of a multiverse with an oceanic awareness

of what’s been hiding under every eyelid of a wave

like a overturned lifeboat that’s waking up

to the fact that everything floats like the moon

in the reflection of its own mindstream.

And whatever sail you spot coming up over

your event horizon, whatever constellation

or black hole you take for a sign of salvation

or salvage, it first had to sink

before it could rise to the rescue.

PATRICK WHITE