DEEP IN THE NIGHT

Deep in the night that shells its husk of blue

to pan the nuggets of its stars from a darker stream,

the heart an executioner with a fistful of pardons,

and the soft, moist, lulling of the evening air,

the threshing of slow fish,

I’m enthroned alone in a crucial palace of light

that realigns its domains to the borders of the wind,

and I don’t want to feel lonely but I do,

and I don’t want to miss so many, so many faces

stripped from the bough like a savaged telephone-book,

so many feathers of light drifting through the shadows of their names,

and the black granite of the uncarved bell

that turtles the blood under the eyelid of the knowing,

that makes my eyes want to scream

until the pillars of the dead sea fall like rotten salt:

how long can one road endure the passage of everything

walking life off into the stars that measure the miles in skulls?

Was I young? Were you there in the brindled moonlight?

Did I remember how to love you well; did I see with long eyes

how you rose out of the chest of the hills like a spirit leaving,

the blue effulgence of your nebulous departure

almost a cocoon of morning mist, the last breath of a lake

as if an indigo thistle released its silk to the wind

or a dandelion relinquished its ivory mane?

Were you the soul of me that lingered by gates and wharves?

Have you come back now with your bells of blood and lamps of flesh?

Can I feel again the leaves of the silver herbs

in the gardens of your fingertips?

Touch me like the breaking of a fast,

find me like a river in the night,

the dazzled theme of a wandering valley,

and pour your journey into mine like stars into a vine,

shadows running down the worn convictions of the stairs,

the midnight wines of old eclipses in the goblets of your eyes.

Once for the flame that dances on the wick of the tongue,

Once for the orchards that plead with the heart for birds,

Once for the envelope that read the letter it married,

and you, by the river, a sapphire among rocks,

tender blue grass in the translucent water-skin of the night,

loving me once as if your hands were autumns full of departure

and your eyes, the gulf of the world in your eyes, your eyes

were the soft flowing of the dark honeys

that leak from the wounded hives

we carry like knives to the grave.

Distinguished among broken clocks,

sultry and bitter, a quarantined bay of refugee stars,

caught in the threshing blades of a circular waterfall,

a mess of tents I’ve furloughed across the milky distances

like a chain-letter from a secret constellation to you,

I blue the intimate spaces between us with time

and patch the maps with the confluence of our lifelines

and try to restore the eyes in the sockets of our bridges

under a brow of swallows in the dusk. And I remember

all the names of the flowers, all the names of the stars,

all the badges of love that heaven and earth once offered

in lieu of the reasons why

love bares the skin of a poppy

to the teeth of the hunting sun

and then flares like a firefly

over the water-lamps of the moon,

but when it dies of its own self-inflicted wounds,

slashed by shadows among the ripe fruit of its vowels,

and the seed wasn’t asked and the harvest had no choice

there are always two skies,

one bound by roots, the other, eyes,

at the back of every voice.

PATRICK WHITE

SHAPE OF DESIRE. HURT ONE. LOST. HOLINESS, GRIEVING

SHAPE OF DESIRE. HURT ONE. LOST. HOLINESS, GRIEVING

Shape of desire. Hurt one. Lost. Holiness, grieving.

Who could make love to someone as melancholy

and beautiful as you? And that face. Erotic innocence

baffled by a world that doesn’t quite know how

to receive your gift, however happy you are to give it.

Even in a small town where the virgins

who’ve turned everyone down get called slut

by six adolescent boys with the windows rolled down

like purple tinted skies just after sunset

to bluff the bruise out of the rejection by punishing it

as if it happened to someone else, you wear your face

more like a soft, sad atmosphere around an uninhabited planet

than the brittle carapace of an overturned begging bowl

like a turtle on its back most people wear for lifemasks.

I can see a milky aura of white hovering around your face

like an auroral scarf of light glowing with tenderness.

I’ve seen it before in the faces of both sexes, though

I’m heterosexually suicidal, and it lasts

about two years and then disappears for good

between a night and a dawn like the death of morning glory.

I’ve been into seeking other things myself,

but in the whole orchard when I’ve seen it in the past

I’ve often thought this must be the hour of the perfect blossom,

when a face isn’t an expression of anything, but a seance

that calls the gentlest spirits to it like night mist on a lake

and everyone mourns as if beauty were predestined to be forsaken.

Genius ever was so. And I suspect good people, too,

with quiet virtues kinder than plants returning oxygen

for carbon dioxide like new lamps for old, are just as betrayed

by the anonymous sacrifices they make in private

as they are commended in public by people who hate them.

I’ve got to be careful here because I don’t want

to dig a black hole in your heart, when I was out witching for water.

I’m trying not to use lightning bolts of insight

when a gust of intuitive fireflies would do the job.

I don’t want to be an unwieldy dragon among

the blue glass menageries of your exquisite tears.

Aggrandize the thorns and diminish the rose.

You can judge for yourself by the capacity of your eyes

to hold so many stars all at once that shining

can’t be stamped out like a cigarette heater on the carpet

anymore than the heart can doused like a burning house

and learn to live like a fire hydrant out of gratitude.

There’s definitely something seeking about the way you look.

Explore the loneliness. The sadness. The abyss.

Don’t lose the opportunity to learn to mindscape your pain.

As they say in Zen, intense heat unusual sprouts.

Orchids have been known to bloom in the shadows of outhouses.

Listen attentively to how even the most buff bells of life

seem to swing between the sentimental and the vicious

like two extremes of the same enzyme when it’s hard to tell

whether love’s still the lifeline it was reputed to be

or at the end, doubles back on itself and loops into a noose.

And don’t kid yourself. Not all waterclocks make it to the sea

nor do the salmon, however nobly they answer the call

to a higher vocation of oceanic consciousness, make it back up.

Spring no more favours the fledgling in its nest,

than a baited leg hold trap a wolf in mid-winter.

Many people talk and act as if they know what they’re doing,

but most of us are living like a secret that keeps us going,

so don’t be afraid when the unknown becomes inevitably vast

and space turns into glass you’re trying to swim through

like a goldfish or the flamingo fantail of a comet

and everyone’s got a precipitous attitude about what you should do.

It’s your cliff. Jump if you want to or enjoy the view

like a star that’s just been given your eyes like its first telescope.

But don’t let yourself be pushed. Make sure

you’ve got the feathers for it because timing in life

is synonymous with the whole of its content, and suicide?

That’s like asking antimatter to come to the rescue

of a lifeboat with a positive outlook going under

as your life flashes before your eyes like lightning without thunder.

If you want to respect yourself for the immensities

of the myriad annihilations you’re willing to risk,

go all the way like a dragonfly uncurling from its chrysalis

like a question mark that crawls out onto a limb

into an exclamation mark that unfolds its wings and flies

when there’s no where else to swim. Do it creatively

and take a much more dangerous leap of absurdity

by risking it all on a beginning that starts with a fall

and ends up a mountain climber with a base camp among the stars.

What aviator laments the broken egg-shell on the ground,

cosmic or earthbound, when the whole sky lies before it

with a smile on its face as wide as your wingspan

and a heart as big as any abyss, as if it always knew,

as the wind comes to the fireflies and the stars

in a perpetuity of unperishing perennials that refuse

to bloom like traffic lights and triggers, one night,

maybe now, in a blaze of self-immolating transformation

as surely as the Pleiades coming up like the chandelier

of a lost earring in the east, just as beautifully,

in the great lost and found of sorrow and bliss

you, too, no less bravely, would come to this.

PATRICK WHITE

SO MANY MORNINGS

SO MANY MORNINGS

So many mornings I want to be done

with waking up as if it were always winter

and rifling through my pockets to see if

I’ve got enough cash to buy me and the cat

another day or two of life she can spend

chasing paper balls of the poems I roll up

to expend on her amusement, and for me

a microbubble of space and time I can

write and paint in without feeling hungover

from the chronic sobriety of my last encounter

with a swarm of killer bees retooled

from the dirty thirties smuggling prohibition

through the Thousand Islands. Return me to exile.

I’m the King of the Outcasts, a pure blood pariah,

a leper of the moon, a sacred clown who dances for rain

to help him recall how to cry. I’m a blue flower

in No Man’s Land someone ploughed with a cannon.

It’s a kind of protest sign I hold up

like a placard of chicory that means no surrender.

I sheathe the moon in my scabbard like a blood-stained blade.

I am the lunar trifecta of aquiline talons that grasp at nothing.

I labour at life with an effortless effort of intensity

that makes Rasputin look like a slacker among mad monks.

I have been dispossessed by more spirits I’ve never met

except as an anonymous urgency to write something

as if I were here to listen, not speak, and my voice

were merely the microphone everyone popped their p’s in

as if they were French kissing electricity, than any man I know of.

I wholly understand experientially what the Zen master meant

when he said he didn’t like poems written by poets,

cooking prepared by cooks, or paintings done by painters.

Leftover carbon in a half-hearted fire. Boulders of coal

instead of diamonds for the adamantine eyes

of an enlightened snowman wondering

what it might have been like to have been born a scarecrow,

a strawdog, on a hot summer evening in the flesh instead of

made out of stars on an immaculate winter night harder

than moonlight on the lake ice. I’ve found my way

out of this labyrinth of dead ends more than once.

The crows and the wolf gods know all the backtrails out of hell,

but it was a sadder day than I ever imagined

clarity and freedom could be. The solitude is interminable.

And even the moon doesn’t truly understand what you’re howling at.

You’ve probably never heard of Archibald Lampman

but he was the warrior minstrel of the forlorn hope

a hundred and fifty years ago plus in Ottawa

at the Council of the Three Fires where the rivers join

and I smear the same kind of war paint on my face

though the feathers in my topknot I plucked from Pegasus

to see if I’d forgotten how to write with ink and quills.

Poetry is the last sanctuary of savage dignity in the Black Hills.

I’m a hold out from way back when the Chinese

taught the Haida to carve cedar totem poles like the power nodes

of the chakras in their spines. I’ve got knots and nooses in mine.

But the principle remains the same. Having tried

shattering a few celestial spheres into the crystal chandeliers

of a wine glass falling everywhere like the fine mist of an ice-storm

with my voice to see if I could make something habitable

out of this shepherd moon that might surprise everybody yet

with life forms that defy uninspired expectations, I

turned my attention to Tibetan prayer bowls

that hummed in spirals that made a mantra

out of every line of picture-music I wrote after that

placing the emphasis on the assonance of my sacred syllables

I kissed and placed in the pyx and lockets of my consonants

as if I never wanted to forget a face that had meant

something to me sometime like an eclipse of the full moon.

Now I’d never undertake a journey

that didn’t leave me homeless at the end.

That’s what I do in life. That’s how I honour

all the prophetic skulls that have brought me to this moment.

Some things I reveal like a candle in a morgue.

And when I fall like a stone bird out of the heavens

you can be sure Medusa’s been stargazing again.

Pain to me is a naturally renewable resource,

and if I were ever to write my autobiography,

it would read like the Burgess Shale.

Hail, fellow, well met in the flea markets of poetic vision.

Here you can tinker with your revisions like hex-keys and lies.

It’s difficult to know what you’re going to say next

given there’s no connection between thought and emotion

and verbal expression, and you realize they’re not sharing

the same dream grammars when one calls you to prayer

and the other to take notes at a seance of all your former selves.

All I know is whenever it was my turn to jump out of the plane

engulfed by the abyss, to test out my winged heels, it always

seemed like bad faith to reach for a parachute as if

there were something left to save. Be brave, young Icarus,

be brave. Daring said feathers and falling took flight.

Though I’m afraid I’m beginning to repeat myself

like the white noise of an old man remembering the past.

I’ve been plunging with the dolphins on the moon

in this shadowy sea of sentience since I was first conceived.

And it’s not so much that madness became a way of life

as it was a matter of sharing what I saw without asking

or expecting to be believed, if I lived it by myself for everyone.

PATRICK WHITE

SHOCK ONE BIRD INTO TAKING TO ITS WINGS

SHOCK ONE BIRD INTO TAKING TO ITS WINGS

Shock one bird into taking to its wings

and all the others will fly up out of the sacred woods

into an emergent symphony of spontaneously choreographed words

like rivers reeds dancing in unison to the music of a distant sea.

Fish do the same. And the fans of the corals before the moon

turns them into stone. Listen. Aldebaran

bellows from the heart of the bull sacrificed to creation

like the gift of a gift to itself. It’s raining blood

in some parts of the world. If I don’t look for asylum

in reality it’s because I completely trust my imagination

not to schedule any dress rehearsals for my dreams

as if you could improve the play by upgrading the stage.

And my religion can’t bring itself to believe in a god

that created the world just to let herself be victimized by it.

I don’t take the universe as a sign of intelligence

because I can’t look at a stone without feeling I’ve added

a little wisdom to my thoughts, an earthy, sage laughter

to the unworldly seriousness of my moonrocks.

Life in the universe, elaborating its redundancy

through sex and fractals into an order of complexity

that weaves every wavelength of its picture-music

into a lyrical tapestry that would otherwise

be hanging in hyperspace like a blank membrane. Life

is intelligence in action like a mystic that got up off his knees

to fix the church roof by opening it up to the stars

that keep falling like the mercy of a transcendent rain

to wash the starmud off the roots of life with light

until they shine like lightning breaking into blossom

from the bottom up. Whether things are good or bad

synchronicity reverses the spin of my atoms

like the turn and counterturn of matter and anti-matter

dancing creatively as if love could be measured

in direct proportion to its potential for annihilation.

That’s how things have always gotten done around here.

Someone manages to peel their snowblind reflection

off the mirror like the sunburn of a coronal halo

a throne too close to home, and the night begins

to cool things off with the moonlit salve of a herbal darkness.

Everything lives, animate and inanimate alike,

the lotus eaters, the condottieri of the vulture capitalists,

and in the great reservoirs and watersheds of memory

that generated muses to inspire the living with the fires

of the dead, to keep them from going out, everyone, everything

down to the last mystically specific detail of scarlet paint

flaking off a fingernail as if someone painted a window

to cover up a moonrise with a sunset, lives, endures, thrives

in the well springs of an expansive mind that celebrates

its regeneration out of the magical black holes and top hats

it’s been pulling itself out of like rabbits by the ears for lightyears

while supernovas go berserk with applause just to tempt itself

into finding out how the trick was done by its own sleight of hand

without anyone catching on. Whatever it washes its hands of,

science is still an antiseptic magic that keeps reminding itself

of where it came from the harder it tries to deny its roots,

but there are other vital organs of the body that can

lay claim to being children of the mind as well, not just

this one changeling of a brain child laid on the steps of a temple

or found among the bullrushes. Eye-child, the bird

that lives like a larynx in your throat, heart child,

and the shy child that can feel the light breathing on her skin.

We are the neurons and axons of a galactic intelligence this week

and we’re communicating with shepherd moons and starclusters

that are as alien as we are sending out space probes like genes

unlocking the secrets of the universe like wardens and nightwatchmen

breaking koans like keys to the cosmic eggs where they’re imprisoned

like seven sleepers in the cave of our genome. If you

can put up with that many similes in a row like variations

in the evolutionary bush that might or might not catch fire

like sage brush happy to lay back on the wind and drift, just drift

in the wanderlust of not really knowing what we’re doing here

but taking it on faith, it’s blind luck to be aware of it.

And the available dimensions of tomorrow will have recourse

to these metaphors poured out of the heart like a waterclock

and new dinosaurs will walk the earth among the emotional mammals

in boas of ostrich feathers and suggestive snake-skin sequins

that shimmer like the waves on a lake at night, liquid anthracite,

dark tears with black diamonds for eyes burning heretics

in the unconfessed fires of their adamantine translucency.

Maybe it’s time to let the caves we enter like carbon-based life forms

paint us for a change in colours that have yet to be seen

in anyone’s paintbox like the bulbs of wildflowers about to bloom

in the starfields with a rainbow coloured thumb for gardens.

Let’s turn our astral portraits inside out as if the stars

were embodied within each of us like a starmap

in the crystal skull of a drop of water on a spinal blade of grass.

Mind only. Everything is mind. Not two. Not one. Not nothing.

In every part, in every grain, the whole of the harvest moon.

And the formlessness isn’t inchoate. And the form

is as homeless as the mind looking for its lantern

with its lantern, as if it wasn’t accompanied by its own light

like an honour guard of stars and fireflies the whole way

to the gate and the threshold of an endless beginning.

That’s what’s inconceivably beautiful and playful

about being alive in a mind as aniconicly vast as this.

We only hide the secrets from ourselves

that we must urgently want to be known

like mirages breaking water in the wombs of our wells.

We’re rummaging for grails in our own spiritual lost and founds.

We’re sending telescopes into space like foreign embassies

acting as plenipotentiaries for our eyes only

as if our seeing had to be diplomatic about

the infinite number of ways there are of deciphering the stars.

Make it a loveletter from a bride catalogue of Asian mermaids

if you want to hear the lyrics of what they’re singing to you

about the music of the mind walking on the waters of life

like the Pleiades webbing the constellation of Taurus

among the leafless boughs of the horned locust trees

standing in the moonlight gaping like gored matadors.

Or make up stories to keep the fires within you amused

with a ghost of smoke on a rocky road rising

out of the ashes of its deathmask on a distant hillside

with a nebular glow on its face and a secret syllable

you have to hear with your eyes before you’ll believe its yours

hidden like a jewel in the folds of its veils like a prefix

that isn’t just another false dawn on the mother tongue

of the word for bliss because no one yet has even known

how to say it in the silence of waiting for it to speak for itself.

PATRICK WHITE  

SUPERSYMMETRICAL FLUCTUATIONS IN MY GOD PARTICLE FIELD

SUPERSYMMETRICAL FLUCTUATIONS IN MY GOD PARTICLE FIELD

Supersymmetrical fluctuations in my God particle field

are oxymoronically balancing my asymmetrical

quantum mechanical relationship between matter

and antimatter into sacred syllables of sibilant sparticles

so I can go on living substantively losing my balance

by creatively annihilating myself against a background

of perfect harmony. Is it love? Is it poetry? Is it

the amorphous music of becoming someone mystically specific

with mass throwing its weight on the side of my humanity

by loading the dice with one eye more than the perfection

of my non-existence knows what to do with,

or is everybody playing the part of an extra in their own life?

Languid apples of knowledge dancing naked

to the wavelengths of snakes playing moonlight sonatas

on the plectra of their pentatonic scales as if my photons and photinos

were all blissed out by Liszt. It’s as hard listening to a painting

that doesn’t know how to sing, as it is to see

how an omniscient secret could hide from itself

until it wished to be known. But as every dragon intuits

it’s not an elixir if you’ve got a formula for it,

and when the universe wants to speak if it isn’t

talking to itself in its sleep, or trying to come up

with a poem or an equation to fit all occasions

like a unified field theory with a burning bush

for a voice box addressing an indentured prophet

in a desert gully, pleading his brother’s superior eloquence,

it’s mourning the ashes of books that were burnt at the stake

for interrupting the silence. It’s harder to break the rules

after you’re dead than it is to discipline your disobedience

to the greater challenges of rising from Pandora’s box

to the greater miscreance of not surrendering

your insights into life like real stars refusing

to give up shining for the sake of a false dawn

the roosters and the wildflowers aren’t paying any attention to.

The flower bows to the butterfly. The shadow

enshrines the sundial and the star reveres the eye

as a child of its own. Nothing could be clearer than that.

The opposite of mindlessness isn’t the death of intelligence.

And the complement to love has never been hate.

Hate wastes too much energy underwhelming

its own inspirations like a pornographer

with a home movie camera, starring himself.

A swerve of the God particle and love

one in seven times has no opposite to collide with

just to keep a preponderance of creativity in the world.

And the rest is just nemetic lust out for a good time.

Everytime you whine for a muse to help you celebrate

this little potsherd of eternity that keeps turning thumbs down

like an ostrakon at your exile, you shame the Big Bang

into believing that she wasn’t muse enough to keep you occupied

over the last 13.5 billion lightyears of your lifespan.

But I would tender, respectfully, of course, it’s not the world

but you that have lost your charisma. Your shabby sense of wonder

is wasted on a face like that, and your tongue talks

like an old shoe that’s never wandered very far from home.

Enlarge yourself like a plenipotentiary paradigm

your children will be able to look up to like a constellation

that refused to stay within bounds but coloured outside

its fifteen degrees of separation in a sexigesimal zodiac.

Reverse the spin on your mirrors once and awhile

and take a good look at yourself on the inside as if

you weren’t trying to build an empire founded upon

the quicksand of somebody’s else’s miracles. Who doesn’t

love dancing with the Persian silks of the aurora borealis

their flesh shapeshifting like lamias and snakes under their veils,

cyanotically blue moodrings turning the pallor of death

into the irises of a chameleon that’s learned how to paint

a supernaturally toned oil of whatever comes before it?

Do you see how enlightening it is to turn

the high-livers on the catwalks out in the street in homespun?

Get back to the the roots of things like the radical

you’ve always told yourself you were from the late sixties on?

If you’re not worthy of the madness, how can you reasonably

expect to live up to being sane? Nothing worse

than a careerist with the ambitions

of a prophetic skull in an asylum

trying to listen in on cosmic office gossip

like the afterbirth in the background hiss of the universe.

Come withering, come fire, come hungry flames of desire

that will apocalyptically transmogrify your limbs into a great forest

consumed by lightning into a flash of insight

that knows enough about annihilation not to light

a match in a black hole that’s teaching you how to see in the dark,

or, more recuperatively creative, resilvering,

as the progenitive dew of the moon was once reputed to do,

or moonlight on the Byzantine leaves of the metallic Russian olives,

parabolic mirrors with an aquiline view of the stars.

Get ready for this. It’s approaching as if it were already

behind you like the light you see from Al Tair tonight

is merely the shadow of what it’s becoming without you

knowing anything about it like a surprise birthday party

that doesn’t leave your tears singing in the rain among

the myth floods of Babylon crying out like uterine waters

breaking all around you for arks to lullaby your cradles

of civilization on a Turkish mountaintop that’s about

to put its forehead to the ground in an avalanche

of asteroids and shepherd moons surrendering

to their foundation stones like an unmastered ship

going down in its oceanic awareness of the Pleiades,

or a humbled man, who realizes belatedly,

at the drop of a heart, the mermaids were always

singing to him as if he could swim without taking lessons.

PATRICK WHITE

SET UP FOR THE NIGHT, THE CANDLE IN ITS NICHE

SET UP FOR THE NIGHT, THE CANDLE IN ITS NICHE

Set up for the night, the candle in its niche,

Jupiter a long way from the moon by now,

cat and goldfish fed, my mind never is

but my heart seems to be in the right place,

smokes, coffee, heat, a loaf of whole wheat bread,

not quite Omar Khayyam, a jug of wine, and Thou,

but the bough is on the fire and I’ve got the Pleiades

to make me feel like a sexy astronomer

if the life mask I’m wearing isn’t convincing enough.

The moon’s off aloofly waning below the horizon.

There’s a commotion of ghosts below my apartment window

and the furnace is cracking its knuckles as if

it were getting ready for a fight. And I want to write

from the least expected quarter when you least expect it

in a space where my heart isn’t just another synonym for solitude.

Explore my mind in its omniabsence by handing out

free telescopes to the fireflies and asking them if they can see

two stars over at eleven o clock from the dim one,

the same thing I’m looking at. I want to

investigate the morphology of knowledge forms

among the mad, wholly absorbed, nothing left out, by my work.

That’s what I call it for the want of a better word

but most of the time it’s a kind of dangerous fun

that keeps me warily engaged on full alert

listening to a voice singing in a lighthouse

on the coast of the moon that laughs

nervously like a lifeboat at the weather.

Or Shelley in the Gulf of Leghorn. If I didn’t say anything

how could the silence know how beautiful it is

to experience the world as an aimless, drifting intelligence

at ease with itself as it toys lightly with elegant distinctions

that burn like paper boats origamied out of Zen poems

that come and go as they please like the moon in the window?

True excellence doesn’t rule like an aristocracy.

There are too many wonders in the world to be distracted by.

And there’s an hour. It doesn’t come often. But it never

fails to return. One disquietingly beautiful daughter of time,

lying down in the cool summer grass looking up at the stars

as if her whole body were vivid with light

as she savoured the ages that went into every single flash

of the beauty of her brevity. Firefly eyes in a lightning storm.

You can lie down nameless with her like a secret syllable

and speak in a voice older than words about things

you both know there are no answers to, and why

the shared sadness grows more beautiful the less it clings

to the lucid delusions we precariously cherish the most.

You can rendezvous with her at zenith on the hyperbolic arc

of a burning bridge or a comet that’s only going to come once

and your detachment’s a deeper intimacy

than anything you’re ever going to experience

with anyone in life ever again however hard you try

to rinse the ashes of the falling stars out of your hair for good.

On a cold night like this, even an eclipse gets creative

and she’s the crow silhouetted by a moon blossom

rising in the west of a dead branch still lamenting

the loss of its songbird as she leans down

low on the green bough of the east and suggests

maybe it’s time to get over your grief by learning

to sing for yourself. It might feel like confusion at first.

But at heart it’s an infusion of growth and compassion.

All relationships with a muse are illicit. Like blue moons

it’s not good to conduct business under. So you don’t.

And mundanity’s at a premium only a mystic could ill-afford.

It’s like taking the future for a test-drive before

the vehicle’s on the market. And at daybreak,

whether you look upon it as an entrance or an exit,

by example, living it, it’s much like mentoring a star

that always woke up too late to greet its own light

how to say farewell in the dawn and really mean it.

PATRICK WHITE

IF IT'S A TRUE RELIGION, IT HASN'T GOT A HISTORY

IF IT’S A TRUE RELIGION, IT HASN’T GOT A HISTORY

If it’s a true religion, it hasn’t got a history, it’s wholly

of the moment. No time for a teacher.

No martyrs, saints, apostates or heretics.

No Summa Theologica trying to proof-read the spirit.

Like a star, it’s always ahead of the light

it lavished on yesterday. It advances into the dark

like the root of a flower without nightvision.

The moment you say anything about it

you’ve flawed its silence with a lie. Like

the light of the star in its eye on a long road

after midnight, you can’t fly toward it,

you can’t run away. Whatever it shines upon

is true north, and the wind is its only direction of prayer.

Make a shrine of it, and it’s empty. Deny it

and it returns your voice like a bird in a valley

to a bough that lets you overhear yourself.

The world is construed from the absence of a self

like a mirage on the moon that doesn’t affect the tides.

If you want to paint the worlds the way the mind does

lay your brush aside, and watch what unfolds.

Show me a leaf that isn’t a masterstroke of your seeing.

Show me a starmap that isn’t a mindscape of your being.

Show me a book that isn’t trying to decipher the silence

as if you were written in code to disguise

the enigma of your unlocatable presence everywhere

without a sign of yourself that depends upon your magic markers.

The moment you say it is, this is it, and mistake it

for the foundation stone of a nacreous paradigm

for the new moon beading rosaries of black pearls

like the bright beginnings of a born again eclipse

you’re anointing quicksand with a desert of holy oil

and all the pyramids you took to heart, start to thaw

like the eternal recurrence of an hourglass that lost track

of history when it abandoned its perspective

for a telescope among the stars, no three alarm fires

to rush off to like a volunteer waterclock in scuba gear.

If you want to grasp becoming stop trying

to take a hold of it like like a hydra-headed snake

shapeshifting in the noose of a solitary question.

Stand away, let it go, let it flow like the wavelength

of a black river through the undergrowth of your sacred woods.

And don’t throw koans at it in the last moments

as it disappears, if you meditate in a glass zendo.

Every accusation is a confession and the karma’s

meted out in full immediately as your feathers

revert to scales, and opposites are conjoined

like dragons in cosmic eggs with wings

on both sides of their extremes such that

as it is above so it is below, a matter of starmud.

The earth in harmony with the light that shines upon it.

And you who are lost upon the nightseas of your own awareness,

whatever terrors of the deep sleep under your lifeboats

dreaming of bobbing their way to rescue

like prophetic skulls washed up on an insular beach

like green Japanese fishing floats picked like early grapes

from the vines of the nets your dolphins are tangled in,

what is there to fear from your own weather

that isn’t a reflection of the kind of love life

you’re deriving from an affair with oceanic notions

of keeping aviaries of kingfishers to quell the commotion

of the storms that pass through your life roiling

your thought waves with turbulent reflections

on the surface of your awareness rooted in the music

where fumaroles toot on the bottom of the sea

like the stops of a flute playing the dangerous lyrics of life

in different keys, making them up on the fly?

In an interpendent universe whatever your eye falls upon,

stars above, dragons below, versatile enough to reverse

the telescopic spin of your perspective of what’s high

and what’s low, anything you see is the mother of the matrix

even when you turn the light on yourself to discover

there’s no one there, just this creative absence, this

dark abundance that’s goddess enough to fill her bright vacancy

with worlds within worlds that unveil her immediate intimacy

as if she were telling the truth to herself like a secret that didn’t exist.

PATRICK WHITE