THIS OR THAT DELUSIONAL CHOICE

THIS OR THAT DELUSIONAL CHOICE

This or that delusional choice, great exercises of the will,

chromatic aberration of the optics of consciousness,

must there be a you, must there be an I

for us to understand each other, paint rags of a dream,

fleeting lines of a poem uncoiling like smoke from a candle

a gust of jealous stars blew out to make a bigger impression

upon the dark. Radiant fossils of the constellations,

every star in their eyes down to Albireo in the tail of the Swan,

a brilliant mutation, a masterpiece of evolution

tweaking its own creation with hotspots of genius,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

must our thought waves divide the sea of awareness

that isn’t troubled by its own weather on the turbulent surface,

or the low pianissimos of its kingfishers at peace with the fish

in a halcyon mood with each other like a truce of music

in which we drown like the moon every night,

a sword of light returned in tribute to the waters

wounded by the beauty of an act of grace

like a tiny stone in an oyster shell that lacquered it

into a lunar pearl hanging from the neck of the earth.

Must there be a you, must there be an I,

when our theta-waves are weaving a flying carpet

under both our feet pacing back and forth

like the shuttle-cock heartbeats of clacking looms

in front the windows, worried like needles in haystacks

if someone were going to pop our balloons of laughing gas

like joy’s grape against the palettes of our mouths,

extemporizing Keats at a Grateful Dead concert,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

when the iron in our blood is still

the youngest bell of the sun at the marriage of light

where atomic numbers join together

that which none can put asunder,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

when we’re both children of the same fire-womb,

same dragon mother, same midwife, same wet nurse of the earth?

Separation is not real in an interdependently originated world.

There are quantum entanglements like little knots

in our hair, wild comets that just got out of bed,

hearts being what the other needs as they change

their spin like partners in a dance of stars at the crossroads

of the wind when it gleefully loses its sense of direction

like starmaps and leaves in the euphoria

of an autumn that put its burdens down

on the soft shoulders of the road and walks on

lighter than freedom, more naked than water,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

where two rivers join in an alloy insight and intuition,

is that not the secret meeting place of the imagination

where you know what the rocks are thinking

by the columbine growing out of their prophetic skulls

in the spring, and the vulvas of the visionary crocuses

get a leg up on the nuns of the snow, as if they hadn’t heard of sin,

but merely suggested they must be a good place for spring to begin,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

when the alluvial silt of our starmad settles on the fields

and gathers in the same delta renewed every year

at the annual flooding of the headwaters of the Milky Way?

If we both lied and said we were the victims of war,

there wouldn’t be anything left to fight over any more,

no tilting at the shadows and mirages of words

that don’t realize they all were born of the same mother-tongue

when every syllable was as sacred as a hermit thrush

in an aspen grove, and the wildflowers bloomed

from the bottom of their roots up, without saying a word,

like loveletters to the bees with irresistible R.S.V.P.s,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

and the God particle that doesn’t want to be identified

as the archon of gravity that lavishes on everything alike,

a gift of mass that gives us somewhere to stand in space,

face to face beside each other in the bilateral symmetry of the light

that doesn’t divide us a convenience of consciousness

whenever the mindstream needs a bridge and turns

the blueprint of one reflection toward another in order to build it?

Can you see how the star is the mother of the eye,

and the eye gives birth to Al Tair in Aquila,

as if the indissoluble bond between us and everything were

one long umbilical cord of seeing and being,

thrown out to us like the strong rope

of an unravelling string theory making waves

among the drumheads of the membranes resonating

with the parallel lifelines in a guitar shaped universe

to a lifeboat in the abyss that hauls us into it

so we could all meet each other like music

on this spherical dancefloor of a planet like earth?

Ignorance isn’t ignorant when it doesn’t discriminate

between itself and wisdom, and wisdom isn’t wise

if it does. Both revel in the same bliss

as the stars and the lightning and the fireflies

illuminating the aniconic darkness with mandalic kells

and constellations that never wear the same fire twice

like Isis, the Queen of Heaven, however young her future grows,

remembering all the cosmologies she abandoned in her youth

like lovers that couldn’t keep their eyes off her

as she hinted at dark secrets in her past that kept them glued

to the evanescence of her starmaps like a fragrance of light

reminiscent of many nights in the astral gardens of earth

among the lemons and the pomegranates, the grapevines

and the moon a gesture of water on the limbs

of the naked arbutus trees cooling off their sunburns.

Our eyes, twin navels of a world of wavelengths

that can never be tied off and cut by the knife

of consciousness if the Conservation of Data Principle

is true even in the deepest black holes, the singularity

of an original insight like the thought in your mother’s mind

at conception that contains each of us within the other,

worlds within worlds within worlds, shepherd moons

in the pearl beds of the elegant dreamers who can take

a bit of starmud and teach it to shine like a black sun at midnight

or an albino one at opalescent noon, a positive and a negative,

both sides of the same moon as the embryo emerges

in the womb of a dark room like a picture of the same music in all of us,

must there be a you, must there be an I, must

we grow heads upon our severed heads like grapevines,

hollyhocks, cemeteries, asteroids and hydras

because we don’t realize we’re all metaphors

seeking our likeness in the eyes of each other

to express the hidden secret in the lifelines of the poem

that wished to be known as the water, blood, light, love, night

of the one mind in all of us so elemental that what it writes,

what it expresses, what it unceasingly sings when it creates,

isn’t an image or sound that acquaints it with its own unlikeness,

but an ear, an eye, a tongue, a fingertip, a nose,

five open petals, five chemoreceptors, five original words

of the one flower that blooms in us like the mind

in all directions at once, like a star that turns its light around

to see itself like the past looking back on the future,

realizes, even after its light is spent and it’s deepening its insight

on the path of the black dwarf that doesn’t mean

there be a you, there be an I, that sprouts a rosary

of heads like prayer beads on a spinal cord

that snaps and scatters the mindstream over a precipice

like a waterfall of separate grains of wheat

ingathered by the wind in the siloes of the abyss

into a single harvest of broken loaves and a string of fish

like baby shoes. That doesn’t mean when the music’s over

turn your eyes out. That doesn’t mean standing here together

in the dark feeling the same astonishment, fear, and love,

three waves of the same mind, that we can’t see, that we’re blind,

that the poem we’re writing to Arcturus in the crowns

of the black walnut trees, or the crows in the sumac, ever

comes down to any one line like a hummingbird in the larkspur,

that isn’t the undiscriminating end and beginning

of everything all at the same time.

PATRICK WHITE

THERE ARE MASKS

There are masks I will not wear,

backstage wardrobes I won’t dress up in,

lives someone else can star in,

fires that will never feather my voice,

or sweep the shadows

from my palace of ice and eyes,

faces that will never hang like fruit

from any bough of my being,

daggers I won’t bury in the wounds

they inflicted like mouths

the tongue has been cut out of,

dignities of desire

that will not circle the roadkill,

my wings linked to the foodchain.

My heart will never labour

like the ox of a bell under a yoke,

though I plough the starfields;

nor will I fill its rivers

with leeches and eclipses

and let it sip the blood of others

to nourish my own lust.

I will not smudge the clarity of my heat

with greenwood, not sacrifice

the hawk’s eye for the ant’s,

cloud the integrity of love with acrid reason.

I will not eat the days

like spoonfuls of my own ashes,

a martyr to my own orthodoxies,

trying to be true to a creed of fire

that moves underground like a root-fire

in a choir of cedars, the forbidden flame

smouldering, trying to bite its own tail,

trying to put itself out with its own tears

for the best of reasons,

for lost earrings in a coffin.

Anyone can see

you’re a raven worthy of silver

who’s roofing her wings with tin,

an urgent orchid with flare

trying to bloom in the shadow

of a nightshift toy factory.

Your wingspan

should be measured in horizons

from dawn to dusk; and you

free to ride your own thermals,

to slide yourself like a theshold or a love-letter

under the door of the wind,

to take the hood off your sky

and explore your own vastness,

all the bridges you built

to lie in the shadows

of the burning cherry trees,

true to your own emergency,

true to your own fingertips and eyes,

the impulse of the serpent at the gate

who whispers to you like skin

when the candles go out,

who comes to you like water to a witching wand

a root-god to the poppy

that shudders with black lightning

to be consumed like a torch in her own flames,

to drown in the black rose

of an exquisite oblivion,

naked in a moist parachute that blooms

like a smile you’d thought you’d lost.

The butterfly can’t be

stuffed back into the cocoon,

the bird back into the egg,

the pearl back into the grain of sand

that grew a palace

out of the tiniest foundation stone.

Fire is not a flower of ashes

that sheds its petals twice.

There are roads that disappear

like stray threads of hair

over our shoulders

even as we walk them,

every step farewell and arrival,

as time yeasts the envelope

with crucial stars that make things happen,

the wheatfield of an autumn letter

in the loaf of the hollow mailbox

rising like dawn out of a dark mouth

over its own harvest.

You can’t live forever like a sentence

balked at the fang marks of the colon

you can’t remember biting you.

Because life is not punctuated

any more than space,

things will follow

the promise of the serpent’s tattoo

to die back into life,

the black lioness

of your passionate constellation,

not a nun at the stake

of a forbidden lust to live,

but a new moon at the opening gates

of the parenthetical secret

between two crescents.

Are you afraid

to let your life graze like wild horses

on the grasslands

of your own transformations,

do you desecrate a greater law

to obey a smaller;

would you tie your last lifeboat,

your last island full of moonlight

to the sunken pillars of a wharf

that aged like a palace,

an endless prelude

to a book of farewell

that collapsed under the weight

of its own hesitation

to read itself to the end?

Even now your foundation-stones

are turning into quicksand

and the abyss

of what you must jump into

to follow your wings

out of the barnyard

opens like a mouth

trying to clear a wishbone

or a song from its throat.

Are you afraid

to give up your collection of hats,

those skies and overturned nests you walk under,

a hawk behind chicken-wire

for a bough in the wild

without a return address?

I want to hear the nightbird sing

that dazzles the serpent

with the joy of her own being,

slowly ascending the tree like a stairwell

to seize her in the dark rapture

of his amorous coils

and drown her in tide after tide of transfiguring wine,

the secret oceans of bliss

that lie hidden

in every drop of blood, every tear

that falls from the thorns

of the black star that burns like a rose

in the mouth of the dragon

that is waiting like wings

at her bruised heel

for her to wash off the old mythologies,

naked in the eye of the rain,

and mount the taboo and eclipse

of her own repealed desire

and fly from the graveyard firepits

of the grounded comets

praying for a match in hell

to light the pyres of their own cremations.

Ill omen or good,

the brush is loaded with red,

with roses, blood, fire,

and the sky is primed

like the virgin seabed of the canvas before you.

Staring will not paint the apple

you want to bite into,

install the serpent like a voice

in the tree that tempts you,

run the fingers of the nightwind

through your raven hair like a mad pianist

trying to tune your keyboard

to the crazed scales of the full moon.

If you want to dance naked

under chandeliers of black cherries,

alive enough to get away with yourself

don’t turn your eyes to glass

and scan the heavens

like the small end of a telescope

to see if you can spot your own approach

like an astronomical catastrophe

that will burn the house down,

the matchbook flaring of a coffin

that docks like a death-boat

to take on a cargo of ashes;

but lay down one stroke of paint,

risk your own interstellar spaces once,

leap like a wounded dolphin

from the wave of the mirror once,

and life will strew stars in your path

that will awake the dreamer

like gardens in the furrows

of your salted fields.

You will stop living

like an arsonist in a volunteer fire-brigade

before the blaze of your own hunger

for heat and light

and run like a sudden thaw of honey

from the frozen hive

that wants to ride its own melting

like a forge pouring out the hot metals

of the enchanted swords

the dark magicians plunge into the stone

to sort the jesters from the crowns.

PATRICK WHITE

I CAN HEAR CRYING ALL OVER THE EARTH TONIGHT

I CAN HEAR CRYING ALL OVER THE EARTH TONIGHT

I can hear crying all over the earth tonight,

sad children in the windows of their eyes longing for things

they dream of growing up to make come true,

fireflies in wishing wells the shadows drink from

on the moon where the spirit’s lost and found dwells

like a small glove shed like a skin of moonlight years ago

as we grew out of ourselves like shells of the dawn in the morning,

waiting for some flesh and blood human hand

to loop back like a habitable planet in its second innocence

and come and claim us like life on Mars again.

The return journey of the morning glory to unmapped islands

we set out to explore, each to our own star,

like the lifeboats of newly-hatched turtles running

from the cosmic eggshells of our abdicated crowns of creation,

toward the abysmal shore of our oceanic aspirations,

each of us enduring the transformative initiations

of our shapeshifting hearts on the thresholds

of the endless event horizons of the black holes and rainbows

that beguiled us with their joy and despair deeper

into the mirage of the music believing in this desert of stars

even here we could hear the mermaids singing,

and pluck pearls of enlightenment from the third eyes

of oysters open on the beach. Or the mouths of books

that had lost their place in the universe, left open

gaping in the sand at the incontrovertible signposts of the stars.

So many echoes from home you can’t help but lose track

of your soul sometimes along the way trying like the rain

to better the world like a green tree ring pinging

the heart wood of a petrified forest like a tuning fork

or a witching wand that might break into blossom yet

if only we don’t give up like grails and constellations

looking for the watersheds of the shining whether

they’re dragons that swallow the moon to bring the rain

or the bell weathers of irreversible delusions

that fill the abyss with the elixirs and love potions

of our intoxicating affair with our own laughter and tears.

Over the course of the intervening lightyears

the lost flightfeathers of many strange skies

under our wings, lonely prayers in the moonlit tents of the doves

growing like morning glory all over the childhoods

we abandoned like buckets beside the wells we fell into

like hourglasses of quicksand leaking out of ourselves,

like stars from the perfect bodies of contiguous time and space.

We’re exalted in the midst of our humiliations. We’re humbled

by the excess of our celebrations. We ghost dance against

the gathering thunderclouds of preeminent war

like a guild of sacred clowns and shepherd moons

on tour in protest against the bulwarks of gravitas

enslaving third world planets, and for a time, our hearts

feel like angry strawberries glowing in the starfields

as if Aldebaran had just blue-shifted toward the spiritual life

of the Pleiades, and were young again, the red flame

of the poppy in its blood that dreams of sustaining

and renewing life, even if it be just the tender green placard

of a leaf unfolding in the ashes of our urns, one

shy tendril of morning glory seeking the light

in the terrible stillness of an implacable abyss,

we are made young again, clear again, by the gusts

of a moody, blue muse of emotional hydrogen

flaring up in us like the inspiration for goblets and fountains

of cool white flowers hanging our bells and trumpets

like music growing all over the cedar hedges in the early morning.

Can you listen with your eyes? Can you see with your ears

how the ghosts of the stars walk the earth at night

in the flesh of flowers blooming like chicory along the roadside

in the blue irises of the eyes of September, or in gardens on the moon

left untended by the gentle rains of our imaginations

for more childhoods than there are watermarks in the heartwood

of the tears it took to get here like rootless trees

spreading across the earth like an unplanned pilgrimage

of exiled immigrants returning to the ancestral shrines

of their prophetic skulls burning like prodigal stars

in the spacious windows of our visionary homes?

Realizing at last, if nothing else from our insights into life,

the starmaps of the fireflies at the headwaters of our source

aren’t bounded by the hearthstones of our wandering hearts

where the vagrants lay their heads down at last

on the hard pillows of the moonrocks they brought back with them

to dream of breathing new life into the lost atmospheres

of their childhoods returning like the lyrics of the nightbirds

to a wheeling mobile hanging like a windfall of planets

and dancing apples from the rafters and boughs of the ceilings

that couldn’t keep the lid on the toy boxes of their bedrooms

or the hoods on the marvelous third eyes of the falcons

perched on the tree limbs of their telescopes in the corner

trying to see into the dark as far as the wingspan of their light will let them.

PATRICK WHITE  

THREE YEARS OUT OF FOUR

THREE YEARS OUT OF FOUR

Three years out of four, I’m a piano tuner

for the Julian calendar, gone like the extra day

of a leap year with nothing but time on my hands.

I’ve been seeking sanctuary among the stars

since I bought my first telescope as a boy,

and started working at leaving the earth,

but I haven’t found an embassy that will take me in.

So I languish in this self-imposed exile

holding long conversations with windows and lenses.

One day I’m Spinoza. And the next day, I’m Ovid.

When I’m not lying down like the threshold

of a humiliating synagogue, or grinding glass in a garret

in between bouts of philosophy, I’m polishing

the Tristes of my tears with bitter carborundum.

Jewelled perfection of cold Botticellian blue outside.

Ice placked snow drooping on the windowsills.

The greasy sidewalks lying in wait for hip transplants.

I don’t belong here as much as it seems anywhere else.

I’m holed up like the last of the Neanderthals in Gibraltar

with a bigger brain than I know what to do with,

looking for Venus above the decorative buttresses and rosettes

of the fieldstone rooftops in the sunset of my extinction.

Poor me, I mock myself, as a retort to self-pity.

Poor bears. Poor squirrels. Poor homeless cats.

Poor people on the street with happy faces for lifemasks

they wear like man hole covers over gutters of disappointment.

Busy chores I should be attending to like a good gene

labouring to insure and advance my survival,

but I’m close to despair and my heart lies heavy and idle

as a lunar hand-axe I flint knapped out of an eclipse

like a new moon chipped from obsidian. Shaky. Irritable. Unstable.

The winged quarter horses of my emotions

yoked to a death cart like breakers to a constellation

of dead sea stars. I’m trying to sow wildflower seeds

in the fissures of glacial earthquakes cracking like mirrors

but it’s the wrong time of year for anything to come up.

No faith. No dreams. No expectations. More of the same.

Dusty mobiles dripping with crystals against

a grimy windowpane with milky cataracts

letting less and less light in, diurnally, and the stars

smeared and smudged like the spider-mites of time

on the stalactite unicorns and sloppy, one-horned chandeliers

on the underside of my tears dying like unwatered plants.

But I’m trying. I’m attempting to shoulder

this heavy lift of a world like a rafter up over my head,

and if not a rafter in a sound house of the zodiac

with honourable foundation-stones quarried from cemeteries

that go back deep into the heritage past, then, at least

the keel of the moon passing over the Great Barrier Reef

I seem to have become like a fossilized spine of coral polyps

as brittle as the vertebrae of a lunar archipelago

of surviving dinosaurs huddled around their dying serpent fires

like the homeless around the mattresses and burning oildrums

under a highway exit ramp. Down, down, down, they

all go into the down like London bridge. And then

I remember the voice of an old Bodhidharma doll I met once

who was quadriplegic having lost his limbs meditating,

who said seven times down eight times up, such is life.

Such is life. But I’m punchy as a boxer who didn’t throw the fight.

Off road emotionally, I’m jacking up my drive wheel

to swing it out of this ditch and back on to the thoroughfare

I’ve salted like Carthage with kitty litter, ashes, and sand,

to keep on spinning my wheels, true to an illuminated way of life

on the greasy mirrors of an enlightened ice age. Hot damn.

Something to look forward to at last. Penquins in the Galapagos.

The smell of diesel narwhales and nuclear submarines in Frobisher Bay.

I’ve got to find higher ground than that to drain my grave

on this spiritual flood plain. I’ve got to screw a brighter lightbulb

into my housewell to keep it from freezing. I’ve got to grow

another layer of skin on the pearls of my nacreous mystics

beseeching shamanistic dolmens in the Arctic not to keep

their mouths shut about Silla, the indwelling spirit of life,

who says that you can trust the universe completely

in a voice so soft children aren’t afraid of it

though they’re often led astray out into the tundra.

Come dark. Bring me your stars like constellations

in the Burgess Shale of the night. Lift my seas up

into precipitous mountains riddled with subliminal secrets of starmud

that could pack these scars and cracks in my prophetic skull

with motherlodes of gold the way they do in Japan

to show respect for their broken tea cups as if somehow

to drink from the lips of the mended and restored made the tea

taste sweeter than Zen. I’m hanging this white flag of snow

out of my window, asking for a cease-fire and a truce,

and maybe if it isn’t over-reaching, a peace treaty

between who I am and who I am thinks I should have been.

I asked my cat to be my guru when I got to the point

I wanted to fling things around in a road rage of asteroids.

I wanted to go out in blaze of light like a comet from the Kuiper belt,

or a tantric boy with a matchbook in a fireworks factory

but my cat just looked at me with the first and last crescents

like parentheses around the black moon in her eyes

and said it’s up to you to fill in the blanks

of your own waxing and waning. And, of course, she’s right.

Who knows more about the ebb and neap of the tidal flows

and undertows of life, love, and light than a fully illuminated cat does?

PATRICK WHITE

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