I CAN FEEL THE RAGE INSIDE, A GAMMA RAY STAR

I CAN FEEL THE RAGE INSIDE, A GAMMA RAY STAR

I can feel the rage inside, a gamma ray star,

burning through me like a cigarette heater

through the upholstery of an over-used couch

with enough chump change in its pockets

to set up shop as a parking meter. No fire in your voice,

your song isn’t flammable, you didn’t get

the inside out, your leaflet of a poem doesn’t turn red

in the fall. There’s nothing seasonal about the dead.

But run for office, you might get elected

for all the cheesecake issues and anthems

you stand up for like a reflexive erection

that’s never died, in the Elizabethan sense of the word,

for anything you could bring to consummation.

You should be racked by inspiration just once but well

for treason against the muse. You should have the screws

put to you to get you to open your mouth

and let something out like a scream so high-pitched

it’s beyond earshot, though the voice is undeniably yours.

I see a lot of tattoos that are very fashionably done,

but where are the scars, where are the wounds,

where is the full face of the harvest moon

pitted and cratered by the creative impact

of a meteoric life with its radiant in the Pleiades?

Did you paint that persona of a deathmask

in your own blood, or did it just come that way?

Did you carve it out of the heartwood of a bleeding cedar

on the sacrificial altar of an Aztec table saw,

or is it some kind of medicinal bark

you brought back to remind you of your travels?

And I could go on. But it’s a waste of time.

And you’d go away, please, thinking the dragon’s unkind,

when all it’s trying to do is throw the moon

through your window, vandalize you with a little Zen,

fire up your maple trees as if they were burning heretics.

Get you to trust your own instincts, instead of

relying on books about the way things should look

for advice. You ever sword dance barefoot with razorblades?

Anyone ever ripped your heart out and ate it,

saying grace as a compliment to your nobility

as they chewed on it like gum till it lost its flavour?

There’s always an absence in the truth of what we’re living

as if we were missing something crucial. Beauty

is more deeply revealed by a compassionate action

than a contemplative world in a walled garden

where vagrant states of being fountain and flower

in the third eye of the firestorm sweeping over you

like autumn burning its memoirs. Do you know

how much light you can generate like Venus in the Pleiades

just before dawn, by deepening your shadows

to enhance its luminosity? Enraptured by the darkness

within you like the infernal perfume of a flower

that blooms in fire, you’ve got to break more

than a few taboos like chains on a gate

guarded by angels with flaming swords

if you want to get back to the garden

you and the snake were exiled from

for taking Adam along for the ride of his life.

What kind of a temptation could it have been

if it didn’t bring sin into the world like a deciduous tree

among the evergreens? Be honest with your evil

and you’ll never be called upon to lie to the truth.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU LOOK AHEAD TO THE SLICE OF LIGHT AT THE OPENING DOOR

YOU LOOK AHEAD TO THE SLICE OF LIGHT AT THE OPENING DOOR

You look ahead to the slice of light at the opening door

and you’re tempted to look back at what

you’re not going to be anymore once you walk through it

without knowing whether it’s an entrance or an exit.

A station of change. A bardo state that slipped between the lines

of the Tibetan Book Of The Dead you’re karmically

sowing your way through to synchronize your seed to the harvest.

Dawn soon. False or otherwise blanching the nightblue

like any other day of life upon earth, into the starless hue

of waking up from the mystery of being alone in the dark

shining into a vast solitude of hidden insights

like the eyes of shy animals warily observing you walk

through the woods like a nightwatchman without a lantern

looking for a light to go by like lightning and fireflies.

In vino veritas, mystically speaking, I’ve been intoxicated

by the grails and skulls of life like a drunk for so long

I speak in the oracular voices of my own exhausted honesty.

I squandered my potential on the actual, applying

my imagination to the surrealistic factual aspects of life

like an oyster bed on the moon pearling whole new worlds

out of a grain of starmud. If work is a form of worship

as the Upanishads say, I’ve laboured long and hard creatively

like a heretic at play in the flames of the staked-out starfields.

And the shadows I’ve cast upon the earth like scarecrows

to look after things in my absence have never depended

upon a light source that wasn’t sublimely human.

I’ve reflexively responded like a shapeshifter

to any fixed image it’s been imperatively suggested

I was created in the name of to mimic like a dead metaphor

I was living like the lyric in the heart of a man

with nothing left to lose when I breached the boundary stones

of the usual taboos like a labyrinth of seawalls, locks and dams

in the liberation path of an emotional tsunami

of oceanic awareness after every earthquake that shook

my foundation stones into an avalanche of quicksand

sliding down the unstable slopes of the world mountain

like an otter down the mudbanks of my own mindstream.

Compassion’s a ruby. Innocence, an emerald. Insight,

a star sapphire. And I wore those like the corona

of an eclipsed crown on the head of a pauper prince,

but it was the diamonds that intensified out of the darkness

like coal in the furnaces of the star clusters I beheld

like luminaries in the black mirrors on the far side of my eyes

that intrigued me the most as an adamantine example

of how to live my life in the midst of decay

with feet of clay and my head among the stars

like the catalytic agent of my own transformations,

the mercury and sulphur of the royal quaternion

of the philosopher’s stone I was enthroned upon

like a beggar king with a dynastic history of self-abdications.

I got down in the dirt under my fingernails

where Neruda says the poetry is. I planted

the withered crescent moons of zinnia seeds

in the furrows of my brow like terraced gardens

I ploughed with the needle of a boustrophic lp

like a palindrome that sang the same

whether you were coming or going either way.

A Satanic message from the angel in the mirror

trying to play both sides of the fence in reverse.

Like the moon, I’ve never lingered in the window

of enlightenment for long, without looking

for an unlocked, backdoor I could enter with effortless ease

like a thief returning what had been taken from me.

PATRICK WHITE  

NO GRAVEGOODS IN MY SOLITUDE

NO GRAVEGOODS IN MY SOLITUDE

No gravegoods in my solitude, no trinkets

from any spiritual world inside or outside this one.

The totem belongs to the dream that’s buried with it

as the flower’s engendered by the root it’s taken from.

Mind is matter. Matter is mind. And it isn’t as if

one is blind to the other because one shore

isn’t parted from the other by the flowing

of the mindstream in between. Try to separate

the reflection of the moon from water in a dream state.

The moon is a characteristic of water as the water

is a feature of the moon. If you want to mediate

until you turn the vertebrae of your spine into a bridge

to get to the other side of a life you’re already standing on,

that’s ok as long as it’s burning. Otherwise it’s just going

to obstruct your path when you’re shooting the rapids

of the Milky Way like your own spring run off

trying to saddle a rush of stars with a rudderless liferaft

and oars for spurs. Better to be a waterbird

with wings of your own, but what a thrill

to ride the snake until you can fly like a dragon

among the stars like Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider,

in the handle of the Big Dipper like a warrior Bedouin

testing his eyes on the dune of a tribal hourglass to see

if he can tell what hour it is by the dance of a distant binary.

It’s getting late. Nightwatch at the well. The town

unpeopled by sleep. A choir of train whistles

practising their inquisitive requiems at every crossing

like Canada geese migrating south when the autumn stars arise.

More lonely than mournful, I can taste the shadows

in the honey of life as readily as the light. I can smell

the fragrance of time like the first snowflakes

in a lover’s hair, trying to turn her into a constellation

to sweeten the night air. And even in the ashes

of the starmaps the shining sets afire

and scatters like a library in the urn of the heart

on a wind that carries away the passions of this art

of exhuming more life out of a shallow grave than went into it,

I can still burn in the dark like the ore

of undisciplined diamonds. I can still squander my light

on the eyelids of the fallen flowers like a final kiss farewell.

Time wastes a death on me. Years ago the wind arose

and blew that candle out in the open window

of an abandoned house and ever since I’ve been

drifting like a ghost of smoke in a diaspora of stars.

I bequeath to the rose, the blood of my wounds.

To the thorns of the moon, my scars. To the night

I leave my eyes. To the wind, my breath. My voice

to the nightbird whose longing put my lyrics

to the picture-music that’s haunted me all my life

like the song of someone who loved me once

before I was born and began to forget. But my heart

that I could judge the worth of like a bell bound to the earth,

or a feather of fire in hell, in the palm of my hand,

I give that to everyone like the windfall of a tree in a storm.

Black walnuts and wild apples. Solar systems

of peaches and pears in the leftover orchards

of organic gardens bearing the fruit of a habitable planet

at the autumn equinox of the New England asters

and modest suns of the Jerusalem artichokes

for the birds and the squirrels and the bears.

You can’t keep what you won’t give away

and it’s no good to you in a grave when it comes time

to throw yourself overboard to stay afloat

and weather the squalls on your own sea of awareness

like an empty moonboat drifting through the fog

calling out to anyone who’ll listen on the coast

of a new universe that discovers you like Atlantis

to a ghost of the old world looking for a passage

back to the more familiar labyrinth of home.

Liberation is freedom through creative form, not from it.

Liberation is life. And life is all entrance, no exit.

And you weren’t asked at the door for any i.d.

And no one’s going to stop you from lowering the fire escape

to get away from yourself. And if you were to ask

the mirrors of your own awareness, they’d stop staring at you

as if they’d never seen a new world savage before.

Everyone’s going to leave an empty chair at the table

sooner or later. Like the skull cup of the moon

you’ve got to pour your prophetic lees out upon the earth

if you want to give your abundance another chance.

You can make lanterns out of fireflies in canning jars

or you can abandon them to the spiders

in the corners of your eyes like dreamcatchers and kites,

but if you want to shine of your own accord,

albino fish in the darkest depths with stars in their eyes,

you’ve got to see the sun flowering at midnight,

you’ve got to greet Venus in the Pleiades at dawn.

You’ve got to unsilver the mirror like a stripper

until you disappear like a bird in the house of life

through an open window like a crack in a cosmic egg

to feel the vastness of the sky that transcends

the limit of your wings. Despite the eye-witness

in the mirror, where time is always in arrears to eternity,

you’ve got to give it all up like your shining reflection

if you want to stay here for your own protection.

PATRICK WHITE

I WAKE UP LATE AGAIN. 3 PM

I WAKE UP LATE AGAIN. 3 PM

I wake up late again. 3 pm. More afraid

of what the world can do to me in the light

than in the dark of the night. Depressing grey

of the clouds smeared on the windows

like the salt and dirt of last winter

still clinging to my third eye where the rain

can’t reach to wash it off. Why is dread

always the alloy of the pain I feel

as soon as I open my eyes to the devastation

I have made of my life, to write something real

in fire and roses and ashes and blood, to pursue

an earthly excellence from world to world

well beyond the bounds of an ugly life

out of the suicidal folly of staying true to an art

that’s keel-hauling me like the moon

over the hull of my own heart encrusted

by the corals and worms of my worries and griefs,

the gnawing anxieties knotting nooses

in the frayed shoelace of my spinal cord?

And the only ray of light at the end of the tunnel,

this stoic sword that’s always tempting me

like an exclamation mark, to fall upon it like a man

and put an end to this long apprenticeship

in a guild of sacred clowns. Put the pen down.

Leave the page blank. Take my hands off the wheel

of this apocalyptic moonboat in a pyschic storm

of stars arising in the desert every hundred years

like the lost imam of a long-awaited mahdi

surrounding Khartoum like a galaxy of dust and doom

being swept up into the black hole of a vacuum

nature abhors. I steel my will like the sabre of the moon

and imagine I’m anti-heroically carrying on

this long-standing, counter-intuitive aesthetic tradition

of winning every battle and still losing the war.

Just once I’d like to surrender before

shooting out the stars, raise this white flag of a page

and say here, take my sword, give it back to the lake

I found it at the bottom of beside the herb of immortality

the snake stole from Gilgamesh, bursting his bubble

as soon as he came up and fell asleep on the beach,

exhausted by the trouble he’d gone to to underwhelm death.

As I do, night after night, in a living coffin

of a smoke-filled room, shedding my life

like the scales and skin of an old circumpolar dragon

trying to keep the horns and stars of its constellation,

dry as powder above the uneventful horizon

of the false dawns in the whites of their albino eyes.

I play with my kitten. I talk to my goldfish.

The walls are lined with a thousand books

I never want to read again, including my own. I attend

to the voices in my head by the third summons

and wait for the mercy of nightfall to put an end

to my relentless beginning. I never wanted

to suffer the humiliation of another art martyr,

still too angry at what happened to the solitude of Van Gogh

for the cheap consolation of a guilt-ridden reputation

he doesn’t even know he has. I live and work in protest

of all the good reasons I have not to paint and write.

I know I’m diving for pearls on the moon.

I’m saying a mantra of sacred syllables over and over

again to myself, like a rosary of eclipses I made

to remember the names of God in the echoless valleys

of an eyeless abyss. But she doesn’t care

if I can’t bring myself to paint another panicked wolf

to make up what I owe on the rent. Or feel like the farce

of another domestic morality play of my uncommon sense

in overcoming my biological imperative to live

by writing another poem in my own breath

diminishing on the cold window

in this neglected orphanage of literature

where I’ve grown too old to be discovered,

and too accurate about my darkest prophecies

to believe that Venus is ever going to cast my shadow again

like the lyric of another heartwarming loveletter

on this blanched page of snow on a moonless night

at twenty below the worst case scenario

of the frozen thermometer that’s become of my bloodstream.

O, yes, I still dream of some random fluke of circumstance,

some crumb of luck in the corners of my eyes when I awake

every day to the same recurring nightmare of white magic

sounding the depths to find Moby Dick and remove

some of these harpoons like tacks from a starmap,

needles from the eyes of a voodoo doll, axial pins

through the thorax of transfixed butterflies

like the critically acclaimed collected works

of a posthumous die hard with a rock solid alibi

for what I’ve done to myself in the name of poetry.

If it weren’t for the indignity of the past fifty years

of my prolific life in art, I wouldn’t have

any self-respect left to live up to the aristocratic penury

of the birthmark on my heart that singled me out

to wear this laurel of stinging nettles to the grave.

Three bucks for a loaf of genetically modified

twelve grain bread, two cans of tuna, 1.07$ each,

ranch dressing, 1.57$, and a buck for three lighters

because I haven’t got matches to light a candle

to smoke a cigarette-butt from the midden of the ashtray

at three in the morning, when nothing’s open

but Mac’s Milk and the wound of a penniless poet,

contemplating maggots in place of commas

to keep it as clean as a run-on sentence

as he searches the lean windows for a star

like a blue jay gleaning a leftover sunflower

over the blockade of tar paper rooftops

starving the eyes until one window asks another

for news of the sky out of sight of the heritage lamp posts.

The silence sings like a stave of hydro lines in the rain

this dark hour of the morning dogpaddling toward dawn

when the ghouls will fill my mailbox

with discounts on a funeral I still can’t afford,

as a way of thinking ahead on behalf of a family

that doesn’t belong to me anymore if it ever did.

And God forbid I importune my loved ones with death.

And the longer you live, the less your suicide means

to anyone interested in the arts. I’m intrigued

like a landlocked sailor in the desolate music

of irreconcilable extremes as the furnace pipe

knocks and taps and snaps its untimely rimshots

like someone practising the drums like the pulse

of a damaged heart, or ice cracking like my lifelines

under the next step I take toward the blowholes

of the mermaids who don’t sing to me as well as they used to

clubbed to death like baby seals shrieking in e minor

the moment they come up for air and open their mouths.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT I WANTED TO SHOW YOU

What I wanted to show you,

you will not see.

What I wanted to give you,

you will not receive.

The wind may mourn your passing

like an abandoned dog

and the leaves of the silver Russian olive

may be baffled into silver

by the way you left the gate open

to a bigger, colder, darker world than it was

before you told me you loved me

like an arsonist in a wheat field,

a comet above the willow tree

that wept its way into autumn.

Go. I lay no claims or obligations

at your feet anymore than I would

try to smudge space

with the black rose of the night

that tastes of old eclipses in my blood.

You say ebulliently

you want to know passionately

the depths of love,

but like the fools before you

who blundered into the fire,

you’re only witching for volcanoes

with the tongue of a snake.

As well look for fishroads

under the dead seas of the moon

as follow the path you’re on.

And your beauty is no excuse,

your body no sanctuary,

your blackberry heart

no pilgrim to anywhere

you can’t stand in the light

trying on shadows like lingerie

in the mirror of the delusions

you’ve clarified like the skin of a bubble

that has smeared the reflection of the world so long

you think you’re a planet with trees.

You’re a spiritual junkie

jonesing for suffusions of the inconceivable

to animate the dust and galaxies

you have no life or love to breathe into

other than that little wind

you carry around in a bottle

in case you’re ever stranded

without an emergency exit

from all the lies you tell in paradise.

You suffer the mythically inflated gigantism

of your own unbearable insignificance,

and abase yourself prophetically

before the mountain of your own lostness,

hoping for a map

of your wandering in stone

that would authorize your confusion

as holier than the rest.

Lonely for converts,

you tell me I’m sure of heaven.

Just as lonely I reply

if someone like me

were to show up in heaven,

it couldn’t be much of place to aspire to

and how could the blessed

not feel cheated?

But you don’t get it;

you really don’t understand

that life isn’t an auditon of angels

and the black cartoon

you’ve made of yourself

to win a feather

isn’t a prelude

to the main feature

when the lights go out

and the ushers

who conducted the dead to their seats

evaporate in the aisles

and you upstage the movie

with your nakedness

as if God couldn’t see

the snake-flute of your body

dancing with serpents in the dark.

Lust alone would have been enough

to keep us together

but waking from your dream

of forbidden undertows,

washed ashore again

on your oracular island,

you kept trying to weld the right light

to the wrong shadow,

and eventually

even the most exotic futility grows boring.

You dipped the stone-flaked arrowhead

of your aboriginal heart

in the toxic fires of your own undoing

and pointing it at mine

tried to deceive yourself into a direction.

And now you want,

now you long,

now you want to come back

and immerse yourself in the life

you once stepped over

like a drunk asleep on the sidewalk.

You’ve suffered and grown,

you’ve wept and derived humility

from irreparable loss;

you’ve trembled before

the first, terrible intimations of the vastness

of the sky in your heart

like the virgin flight of a lost bird,

and you want to be given another chance

to surrender yourself at the gate

you once walked through backwards

so enamoured were you of your shadow.

And you promise the river your tears,

the moon your scars, me

the rarest of your orchids in the night.

But when I ask you

what the drunk was dreaming

you still look blankly around the room

as if everything in existence

were merely the baffled clue to your beauty

and the answer

something black and revealing that clings.

You still can’t imagine

how easy it is

to say no to you.

PATRICK WHITE

I FEEL THE THORNS OF THE ROSE MAKING INKWELLS OF MY EYES

I FEEL THE THORNS OF THE ROSE MAKING INKWELLS OF MY EYES

I feel the thorns of the rose making inkwells of my eyes.

It’s me that hurts. But without meaning to,

I’m bleeding for everyone. A watershed of blood and tears.

A reservoir of pain. Not all my own, I drink

before anyone like a hummingbird, or a canary in the mine,

to make sure it isn’t toxic. No goat skull in a well

of rotten water. No blood on the horns of the moon.

What a disgrace it is to be a human sometimes.

What a sorrow when your heart wobbles like a drunk bell

and there are perturbations and precessions in your orbit

it’s hard to explain except as the flawed configuration of a dream

with your waking life, though they’re both just two waves

of the same sea of awareness, feathers and scales.

Oxymoronic maple keys vertiginous as Sufis

at the crossroads of everywhere and here. My heart

is a bone-box full of elegies for Arctic swans

shrinking like ice-bergs from global warming.

And I’m not as mindless in love as I should be,

though a muse is still pure oxygen distilled

from a thousand undiscovered plants in the Amazon

as beguiling as the ghosts of the fragrances

along the Perfume Trail. And sometimes, I swear,

I can smell the weeping of wild blackberries

eclipsed by the shadows of voracious crows

pecking out their eyes like dark jewels

in a crown of thorns. And there’s a feeling

with too low a frequency for words like the afterbirth

of an orphaned universe that resonates within me

like the poignancy of the embrace of one

of the saddest graces of compassion limning its tears

with a star’s worth of beauty glowing through the clouds.

And goodness arises within me like a loaf of bread

left out to cool on an August windowsill, and I’d

break it into as many pieces as my heart to share it

if only for one instant, with the hungry and the suffering

as I’ve heard several people did inconceivably even in Auschwitz,

just to make things better a little bit, if I could,

though I feel like fog trying to put out a forest fire,

knowing among the selfish and indifferent,

a gift is a kind of minority protest

that you have to keep an eye on before it gets out of hand.

Reality’s just a truce people make with the way things seem

and what they don’t understand, a consensus

of poll-watching dilettantes who average out the crucials

in advance of random happenstance. Perhaps.

Reality can be any kind of copulative verb it wants,

The chimerical fire is whatever you imagine it to be,

but what it does, whether you agree or disagree,

is what moves me to underground rivers of tears

that flare up like the pale fountains and grails of the morning glory

to want to put it out, snuff it like a black candle,

or smother it in a pillow of its own smoke.

To die, yes, the wildflowers can do that better than us,

and the animals enter death as if they were observing

the protocol of an instinctive nobility greater than ours

but to die, to suffer and die inexplicably, to see

the labour of billions of light years of stars, enduring

extinction after extinction to express their shining in us

as if we were the content of the message

they sent on ahead of themselves and we can read

so much so intimately like the ancestry of the universe into it

like a child’s eyes, or the luster of a lover’s hair

in a moonrise, or the second innocence of an old man

who smiled upon us because he knew he was younger

than we were, and the return journey

was better than the first because from cradle to grave,

he knew the beginning walks with us all the way

like a star through the leafless trees

that’s following us home at night down

one long, shapeshifting road of shadows and dreams

to one particular gateless gate that unlocks us from our chains.

To die in ignorance of why, though we guess convincingly.

To love deeply and see what we’ve cared for,

unspared and squandered as if time had no more use for it

and there was nothing rare or precious that wasn’t rendered

more fatally vulnerable than a bubble in a world of thorns

for the cherishing of it. In the brevity of our becoming

who could ever claim they were who

they were supposed to be in the eyes of the mystery

of what we’re doing here in the first place

trying to wake up in time to find out why we doubt

our own presence sufficiently to labour a lifetime

to love the unknown well enough like a stranger in passing

we’ve never met, to enlighten our disappearance?

What doorways of farewell must linger in us yet

for all the graves we’ve already filled

with everything we’ve ever loved, autumn after autumn,

like wild grapes or a waterclock of hearts,

each trying to fill another’s bucket of emptiness

with the rush of their own blood

like the emergency exit out of a burning theater

featuring a seasonal re-run of the lies

we tell ourselves in the dark to make it through another night?

Yet here we are, like it or not. Unborn. Unperishing.

Delivered and flawed. Mortality longing for eternity

like a darkness it’s already the ore of waiting to be refined

like stars emerging in the night, flowers

from the starmud of the earth and though

we have unbelievable conceptions of ourselves

that are capable of breathing in the light

of mystic atmospheres one planet isn’t enough to cling to,

most of us still candle back to the earth we arose from

like weather balloons with the tail of a comet between our legs.

As a playwright looking back in anger once said.

Poor bears. Poor squirrels. Compassion kisses the burn.

We get lost in ourselves looking for the grails of better days.

The secret’s out in the open which is the best place to hide,

if you had a mind to, in this spiritual lost and found.

Now you see it. Now you don’t. It sees you.

And you draw the blind. But the sunflowers

turn with the sun, and the waterbirds wait for the moonrise

and in the autumn of our lives, the flowers are extinguished

like the blue fires of the wild irises along the Tay River,

and there’s a scent of smoke in the air

that makes your soul weep for the evanescence of life

and how there’s even a palpable beauty in the passage

of the fallen leaves among our gravestones

that’s always a prelude to the great unknowns ahead

that can’t shake the habit of haunting us like a ghost

from the future, summoned to this seance of now

by a mind reader channelling the wavelengths of the stars

light years before either they or we will even know we’re dead.

PATRICK WHITE