I COULD ALWAYS TELL WHEN YOUR EYES HAD TOUCHED SOMETHING

I COULD ALWAYS TELL WHEN YOUR EYES HAD TOUCHED SOMETHING

I could always tell when your eyes had touched something.

The stars were dazzling through the tops

of the pagodas of the pine trees airing their wings

like totem poles carved into the features of moonlight

on the distant hillsides that swept up from the lake

in waves of stone that broke like an avalanche against the sky.

And by the number of miracles under your feet

as ancient as the wingspans of the stars

I knew all the paths you’d taken like the lifelines

in the palm of the alluvial deltas of my right hand

to make your way to the sea like a leaf with a flightplan

laid on the mindstream like a Nazca pictogram

as if you were waiting for the return of the plumed serpent

like the feathers of the highest weighed

on the scales of the lowest dancing on the balance beam

of the unitive life of a draconian oxymoron.

Per ardua ad astra, I couldn’t look at the starmaps

in your eyes without seeing the blueprints

of a successful paleolithic attempt at rocketry

celebrated by a fountain of fireworks like falling stars

that quickly exhausted my heart of myriad desires

trying to wish upon them all like meteor showers

in the Heavy Bombardment taking the shape of the earth

I was standing on like Stonehenge at the winter solstice

when you reached out and touched my skeleton

like spring in the bone-box of the vernal equinox.

And there were signs of a mysterious calligraphy

on the petals of the roses in your blood

I couldn’t see that directed the sweetness of life

like bees to your heart of hearts. I could never tell

for sure, if you were the spirit of life within me

or the runaway daughter of a wayward muse

that cherished your creative freedom above all else as I did

the inspiration that kept my fires burning long into the night,

trying to write odes to your beauty in evanescent alphabets

in cedar scented smoke from candelabras of driftwood

I burned like the bodies of the drowned that made it all the way

to this far shore on an enlightenment path of their own,

like overturned lifeboats rowing toward land like arthropods.

Sometimes I still wake up out of a deep sleep and think I hear

the clacking of the shells and crutches the sea

handed out like drafting compasses with knee joints for legs

so when they made a side-ways move they clicked their heels

and snapped their claws like the castanets of Spanish dancers

at a bullfight in one of the cratered arenas on the moon

where the shadows drive their dark swords into the hearts

of solar matadors that taunted them with the capes of red poppies

bleeding out in the sands of the gored hourglasses of the dead.

I could easily follow the echoes of your voice after you’d spoken

and left the rest to the silence to explain because

it never took any of your dream grammars long

to master me fluently whenever I tried to open my mouth

to say something when I realized immediately

my vocabulary of sacred syllables stuck in my throat

like tarpaper eclipses of creosote compared

to the inflammable starclusters of your astral eloquence.

You spoke in the tongues of flames that healed

the heretical sunspots on my heart by setting my body afire

and leaving me your spirit to follow suit

as if Joan of Arc had turned pole-dancing

into the religious art of two wavelengths

of healing serpent fire entwined around

the axis mundi of my spine and I were chalking

pool cues with the open chakras of my vertebrae

getting ready to put some English on the planets

in my solar system and take a long shot without sinking

the eight ball of my prophetic skull in the black holes

of the side pockets on the elemental table against the odds

of ever making it without a lot of luck and a kiss

from your risky lips like a chance I was willing to take.

PATRICK WHITE

AND IN THAT MOMENT THE STARS COME DOWN TO EARTH

AND IN THAT MOMENT THE STARS COME DOWN TO EARTH

And in that moment the stars come down to earth

and light up the lanterns of your cells

you’ll finally see that constellation of your self

so many of us have been born under

shining like eyes in your blood, your bones,

your tongue, your skin glowing with starmaps

like the holy books of the fireflies. You’ll

light up this whole night sea of sentience

with a vernal firestorm of essential insights

like the full moon conducting a seance

among the corals, a fertility rite of enlightenment

in which you repeatedly give birth to the universe

moment by moment, cosmic eggs in a halo of comets.

To love the earth in all its mutable variations

is to love the music of your own revelation

playing like a genius in a beauty pageant

with the spontaneous brilliance of billions

of miraculously catastrophic forms of life

with an appetite for adding flames to the fire

like leaves and petals and wings to a wildflower

until the elaborated order of things is a loveletter

chaos wrote in its own beautifully cursive hand.

Above everyone’s manger there’s a star

that becomes incarnate in humans

who go looking for themselves like three wise men,

or the trifecta of three wise women in their craft,

Alnitam, Alnilam, and Mintaka in the belt of Orion,

and Sirius updating the calendars of the Dogon

lower down in the southeast such that even those

lost in the deepest black holes a prophetic dreamer’s

ever been cast into, can’t help adding their light

to the darkness by following their own star

back to themselves, to find the light they’ve been given

to go by, was like the mind, like the lantern in their hand,

like the lostness they ever despaired of finding their way out of,

the illumination of their true destination all along.

The mountain was climbing the guide back up

the stairwells of its own elemental genome to the stars

like a child that can’t wait to slide down the bannisters again

or a sparrow hawk riding its own gleeful thermals

like the first star to appear in the sky like the eye

in the moodring of the peacock blue-green of the sunset.

Every time a species is effaced from the smile of the earth,

our own bodies are desecrated by the act

and in every one of our cells, lockets of the galaxies,

where the firmament places its highest hopes

close to our hearts, a star goes extinct, a candle goes out

that’s been burning for millions of years,

and the windows pull down the blinds like eyes in mourning.

The world is more collaboratively communal

than it is solitarily universal. First rule of thumb

in creating life out of its own cauldron, organize,

like starlings rising out of a birch grove.

First law of the heart in cherishing and sustaining it,

is to respect yourself enough to look after it

as if it were the changeling daughter of the new moon

placed in your care by the dark matrix of a passing eclipse

that let’s you in on the family secret the stars

have known all along, that every conception

of your heart and mind is blood of your blood,

flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone. And in your genes

the sacred syllables, relics and runes of your own fossil.

Add your life like lyrics to the cacophonous symphony

of the jungle music you hear going all around you

day and night, the ancient exhilaration of life

sword dancing with the stars to the dangerous riffs

of a predatory lead guitar hunting solo in the shadows

of a game of snakes and ladders that can see like dice in the dark.

Hone your instincts like the blade of the crescent moon

on the stone of your heart in a biochemical state of grace,

and don’t neglect to let your spirit break

like the new dawn of a lobster out of your body armour

or a dragonfly escaping into one sky after another

through the window casement the first night of its moulting.

Compassion is the visionary collagen of life

and imagination is its agent. Its metaphors

graft the trees and the sponges into lungs.

Can you hear the generations of nightbirds

in every single vowel of your voice? Do you know

they don’t sing just for themselves, but in the lament

and longing of their songs, you can hear the faint traces

of the lumbering bells of the dinosaurs bellowing

like the eidolons of carboniferous foghorns in the mist

off the coasts of consciousness? Sometimes

when I hear the bush wolves howling in the hills

I catch a note or two of a pack of killer whales

going deep to recover the black voice box of tetrapods

who preferred dancing in water to walking on land.

Compassion is the recognition of your identity in everything.

You wound the earth, an arrowhead sings in your rib cage.

Can you hear the demure laughter of the willows

walking like geishas along the shores of your mindstream

undoing the ribbons of the stars and waterlilies

to let them fall free from their hair to pale in the moonrise,

the memory of old lovers mingling in the living light

like the ghosts of the waterbirds returning to their shoals and inlets

like the bridge of a song, a waterclock of stars

between one stanza and the next life keeps coming back to

like the refrain of a melody line of the sea

it just couldn’t get out of its head like the reflection

of trillions of stars writing irradiant treble clefs

of the original sheet music in constellations high over head

like a five string quintet for the hymeneal cosmologists

while archaeologists achieve illumination

in the golden ratios of the life and death spirals

of the fossilized bass clefs of the equally alluring

mystery of the vocally earthbound children of the starmud

singing their hearts out like a choir off key as if

they grew by losing their balance against

a background of cosmic harmony so sweetly

that if rain could speak of what it’s like to fall upon

the fruits and flowers of the earth, it would sound very much

like the laughter and weeping of the ungrammatical stars.

PATRICK WHITE

NO ONE WICKED ENOUGH

NO ONE WICKED ENOUGH

No one wicked enough to risk enlightenment

though everyone wants to know what they’re up to

trying to thrive on their wounds like crime,

everyone auditioning for a part in the light

like a candle flame on a wax stage,

aspiring to stardom. If I

were to hold the moon to your jugular

like a straight razor in a back alley,

and demand you turn over everything of worth,

what would you hang on to

even if it cost you everything,

if not your life, that concept

you claim keeps on happening to you

when in fact it’s happening is really

all there is of you. Neither you nor the thief

can grasp it; anymore than you can seize the darkness,

nor the lost spinal cord of the mystic shoelace

that set out like a road to look for its shoe,

will ever bind the eyelets of the stars to its walking

however it thatch itself like a crosswalk to the journey.

No one mad enough to realize clarity,

to feel the intimacy of the ocean in every water drop

or the enormity of the universe

in the slightest whisper of a star.

No one mad enough to risk their madness,

no one suicidal enough to rise from the dead.

No one made cruel enough by compassion

to let the bottom fall out of the bucket

your heart has carried far from the well

like a bell or a seabed to revive the moon.

To be alive is to be constantly baffled by joy,

to be alive is to be terrified in the dark shrines of the mystery,

to be alive is to fall like an eyelash

from the sunset above the far fields beyond your awareness

like a bird that disappears in the distance

in the dwindling of an eye.

When will you ever

teach your clubfooted sorrows to dance;

or unhobble your gazelles of joy to run

if not now while you’re alive enough to be lost

like the wind playing an abandoned labyrinth like a flute?

I am pathetic. I am profound.

I am the grief of the storm

scrying the will of my life with lightning

and all that I have said, and all that I have written,

dust on the tip of my tongue, the taste of stars,

and what I have been, that I am now,

as tomorrow isn’t a future but a feature

no more indelible than a shadow crossing a threshold,

as everywhere I flow like water, I enter by the right door,

and the only direction I’ve ever followed, my next breath.

To be alive is to kick the encyclopedic cornerstone

out from under the building

and let it fall like an old casino;

to be alive is not to know why things happen,

but not convert to a chessboard when they do,

trying to second guess your life as if it were a covert operation.

It isn’t your eloquence, thought, intuition, or emotion

that carves out a voice like a harp

from the heartwood of your walking tree,

and tunes its nerves to the constellated sheet music of the stars,

and plays it like fire into the echoless unknown;

you, the singing, you, the listening,

to be alive is a star in the generative silence,

a song that writes you like a lyric.

If you want to know God, if you want to know

meaning, know life, as conversantly as you know yourself,

listen to yourself as if you were all ears,

and open your eyes until all that’s left is the sky.

The past and the future alike are keyholes

in a door that doesn’t exist; history, a way of forgetting

and what’s to come, hinged to this moment now,

the forwarding address of an ambient threshold

you cross with every step, every breath, every pulse

like a bell unlocking itself to celebrate

the miscreant of limits who lives

to wonder his way beyond why.

I am nothing, but everything I see

is what the beginning of the world looks like

from the inside, everything I hear

is that original rupture of the silence into being

before the first bird sings in the morning

to dispel the windows from their darkness

like water from its wings.

PATRICK WHITE

BECAUSE I'VE BECOME AWARE OF

BECAUSE I’VE BECOME AWARE OF

Because I’ve become aware of what my cells knew

three and a half billion years ago does that make me

wise and sonorous? Some days I’m a ripe apple

in a big-hearted sunset basking in my red shifting shadows,

and whatever’s spiritual about me, it seems,

though I’ve never been able to put my finger on it,

lingers like a warm buzz of animal contentment

as if life and time were the synonymous friends

of a tranquil atmosphere where just to be here as it is, right now, this

sense that everything, suffering and the bliss of insight alike

had already been wholly achieved billions of years ago

and we’re just remembering our way into the future again

without going anywhere because nothing’s left out.

How can the magic circles of the dreams we draw in the rain

like the geometry of water, ever be over if they

never had a beginning when not having a beginning

doesn’t mean you don’t exist? Inconceivably

from all appearances. The powder blue damselfly

a mascara pencil on the eyelid of the larkspur

with a white star instead of a moondog for an iris.

And then something you once loved in your own

peculiar way, makes you cry and eternity breaks the circle

like a cosmic egg you’re trying to fly out of

and you look at time and change and passage

as you wash a gust of molecules like gold dust

to rinse the dazzling blindness out of your eyes in tears

at not knowing where they’ve gone. Some died.

Do they live on? Some just drifted away like smoke

from the wick of the candle they used to dance upon

in the upwelling of the flame that melted it down.

Hunger first. Then desire. Then suffering. It’s more

the compassion of the poet in me that says that

than it is the Buddhist heretic. Evolution eats itself

to transcend death as fast as possible creatively.

Nothing else to compare it with you can’t says it’s wrong

though you’re troubled by the rightness of it,

and though we do, it’s still fearful to cherish what

seems so randomly expendable like the strawdog

of a work of genius you throw on the fire as soon

as you’ve finished with it. Who is being worshipped

that so many have to die like feted sacrifices

to a hunger that devours the galaxies like starfish?

Infinite appetite at a bone dance that knows the music stops

when it does. Witness the euphoria of the crazed book of life

in the Burgess Shale, pressed like a flower between

the pages and pages of time without a narrative theme

it’s left to us to make up sitting around like solar systems

the boundary stones of the fires of our hearts, as if we

we’re the ones telling the story, not anxiously listening to it.

The desperate and the damaged, the shell-shocked, maimed

and mutilated, no chivalry in the struggle for survival,

and even beauty, a snare it’s wise to be aware of,

all the mistakes a Hox gene can make, even poetry

the most resplendent delusion of my heart and art,

a way of whistling lullabies in the dark when you really need

your mother, consolation philosophies we’re addicted to

like the endorphins of our own creative imaginations

sweeter than any drug a junkie ever o.d.’d on. There’s

a big gap in the story we’re trying to cross on the bridge

of a burning guitar, a caesura the equal of anything on Mars.

And every cable of the way strung out like nerves and spinal cords

on the suspension of our belief in the totally believable extremes

we’re facing with affectionate daubs of starmud on our nose

trying to shine our way across on the liferafts of our eyebeams.

The Great Divide. Everyone standing on one bank of the abyss

calling out in the night to another not sure if they, or this,

or that bank even exists, of if things just go through the ice

and disappear for good. For worse. Or neither. Ingathered

or scattered, or the mindstream returning to its watershed,

or we just wash the starmud off our noses so thoroughly

the snowman gets thrown out with the bathwater, and there’s

just a carrot, six lumps of coal and two sticks to show for it

as we step off into our empty omnipresence like mirrors

into the tears of their own reflections, air out of the parachutes

that housed us like ants and bees in the daylilies.

Or as I’m doing now, the blindfold off. Looking

down the barrel of a firing squad of stars like a black hole

at the singularity of the one blank among so many bullets,

to see if it’s got our name on it, while the others go off

in a game of Russian roulette with the Leonids.

Vodka double. Straight up. Fire. Courage or suicide?

Definitely brutal in the eerie finality of the endless outcome

if you’ve got the eyes for it, falcons under the hood of your eclipse.

Or maybe nothing can be separated from the intelligence

that divined it in the first place like the surest sign

of evolution riding its inspiration out the way a star rides

its own light like the wavelength of a single thought

blossoming like a tiny blue flower throughout the universe.

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 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

POETRY ISN'T A SALVE I PUT ON MY BURNS

POETRY ISN’T A SALVE I PUT ON MY BURNS

Poetry isn’t a salve I put on my burns,

an ointment of the moon, though it can help

like a afterword, it’s the original shriek of pain itself.

The moment the talons tear into the rabbit,

the rose snarls and bares its thorns and bites

and the owl that seemed so wise in its nest of carrion

turns out to be, no more no less than what it always was,

a feather pillow plumped up around a scrawny raptor.

Sweet dreams. The night tossed in its sleep like a snakepit

trying to get on the same wavelength as the big names

on a starchart though everything ends in a colon

as if something were to follow like a fangmark

or a binary of black holes. If you’re going

to punctuate things, do it like a firing squad.

Born a tiger, born a puff adder, born

with the claws of the moon like an anthropod

clacking across the seas like top heavy castanets,

how did you ever manage to underwhelm yourself

and evolution, and learn to kill like a tapeworm?

Not a morning I’d enter in a new age beauty pageant.

Mercifully grey, but too exhausted to put up much

of a pretence. Mr. Bluebird’s opening a chic boutique

of organic food he’s gleaned from his many years of experience

hand picking seeds out of the teeth of vegetarians

like a sparrow dragonflies in the grilles of cars in parking lots

while the mandalic carpet of the forces of life

are swept from under his feet at his office desk

as neat as a moonrise on his fingernails

is aerated by earthworms the size of vacuum hoses.

Ex-hippie vulture capitalists with their third eyes open

like the fractals of a peacock collecting

emotional enlightenment experiences like the badges

of a cub practising knots he’ll later hang himself with

as soon as he masters a noose. Wonder what the Buddha would think.

I’m not moaning Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani from a cross

or a pigeon with the messiah complex of a dove

betrayed under the eaves of my apartment

and I wish I could forgive everyone for not knowing

what they do, but simply put, this morning, it just isn’t true.

Try a troll under a bridge by the fieldstone embankment

at the side of the Tay Canal trying to spiritualize his anti-matter

by putting a happy face on a total eclipse. Sometimes black

is the only colour my rainbow body can resort to

to reinvigorate my soul, though it’s reticent to admit it.

My mother’s ninety three. Afraid of what that means.

My brother just had his leg amputated for number two diabetes.

I haven’t seen either of my kids in thirty plus years

such that the distance between my tears and theirs

would have to be measured in parsecs and lightyears

and I’m so sick of not having any money

I’d tar and feather another night owl with it if I did.

It makes me queasy sometimes remembering

how wonderful life used to be before I entered

this isolation cell in the name of a solitude bigger than me

that would demand nothing less than everything of me

all the time, so that when I died from all the things

I’ve given up in life to write, I’d have to ask someone

if they noticed an appreciable difference in my line-breaks.

I’m imminently qualified and well published enough

to say that what I do, before another donkey begins to bray

about the anti-social function of my heretical wisdom

sticking the stars in their eyes like the spurs of a man

broken by a winged horse, is unpatently absurd

though I still don’t think there’s any other way to learn

to ride a word like a wavelength instead of a particle

and when I talk to God in the valley at the foot of the mountain

about what she’s doing to me, I’m still humble enough

to remember to always use the indefinite article in her presence.

Though I’ve had love affairs with other muses, poetry

has always been my most committed relationship to life.

Say it beautifully. Say it tragically. Exalt like a stranger

before the open gates of your metaphors. Don’t step

on a crack in the sidewalk that will break your mother’s back,

and when shining comes to zenith like a firefly in a lighthouse,

never respect a threshold that hasn’t got it fingers crossed

or darken a burning doorway with a firehose at nadir

until all the houses of the most influential zodiacs

go up in flames like the taste of a slum in a spoonful of ashes.

And if you get mistaken for a cult leader of one

in a small town of succubi, leave a garbage bag

full of used voodoo dolls one night outside the Salvation Army

and watch the passersby steal the burnt effigies of your childhood

without attempting to save anybody from anything

like the curse that cast aspersions on King Tut’s throne.

I didn’t come to poetry like an immigrant to a foreign country

but I’ve tried so hard over the years just to belong

except for a few benighted souls, no one visits me

unless their unremarkable absence wants something

it’s impossible to give them as long as their hands are full.

I try to balance their bright vacancy with my dark abundance

but how few on a spiritual path ever truly realize

that scales are the first step on your way to feathers

and if you’re not dragon enough to swallow your own eclipse

don’t try the full moon unless you’ve got dental insurance.

Your fangs would break like the first and last crescents

of soft, graphite pencils biting into stone like the fossils

of Anomalocaris in the collected works of the Burgess Shale.

And that’s ok, too. As I’ve often said my brother used to say.

Unrequited goodness is the sign of a successful sacrifice.

Do ut des. I give so that you give. Or, more savagely,

do ut abeas. I give so that you go away. With blessings

on your head and house of course, and a small shrine in my heart

where I keep the relics of all your best ideals

like the needles of baby teeth that fall like thorns

from the mouths of kittens that roar like crematoria

though I’m demonically amused that the flamethrowers

they mistake for real dragons never seem to bring the rain

in time to put their pyres out like new age fire brigades.

Just the same sumac in the fall is still more of an arsonist

than the naphtha of paper birch in the dead of winter.

Knowing what I know about how little much there is to know

about nothing, I won’t disrespect myself by becoming bitter.

Someone asks, I show up like a genie with a lamp

and we talk about matchbooks like the haiku of a dragon

or a crow on a branch in the void bound autumn rain.

I listen to the world dispassionately as if I were

absolutely certain there wasn’t a quantum self to the atoms

that wasn’t certifiably insane according to its own lights,

as I show them my arcane starmaps with albedos of chrome

and carbon, so they can see for themselves in the dark

how much deeper a black mirror is when the lights go out

than a white one that’s in your face all the time

as if it didn’t trust you to take your eyes off it once and awhile

like the broken link of a shepherd moon on a short chain

that wants to howl with the wolves, free of the flock,

still labouring under the delusion it’s got something to do

with where it’s going and where it’s been and tomorrow’s

already so far off the path, every prophecy you ever make

is just the future memory of your erratically inspired aftermath.

PATRICK WHITE