SOLITUDE AND SILENCE

SOLITUDE AND SILENCE

Solitude and silence. The emptiness of the living moment

subsumed in the mundane middens of the soul, clam shells

and sheep bones, the shucked content of the heart

cherished again as the afterlife of the evidence

I once lived here along with everyone else.

Before I write, this archaeological seance I hold with myself,

this ingathering of everyone I’ve ever been

flowing back into me where the mindstream meets the sea.

The continuous stillness of this contiguous awareness

where everything is a symbolic event in a dream

trying to wake up from itself to set the dream people free.

Emotional effusions of the moon bleeding among the coral.

Solar flares of conceptual insight returning like ingrown hairs

to the source of their deception like unwanted children

though I’ve franchised orphanages all over my mindscape

to shelter my rational thought from the persecutions of my intuition.

Serpent’s tongues that have been struck by black lightning

humming like a choir of tuning forks half a note off

like a lie they told God, they’ve been living ever since.

No piety. But a natural kind of reverence for the life of the mind

breathing me in and out of my body like a bellows

trying to boil spiritual gold out of my default metal of lead

as things begin to heat up like the tongue of a sword

on the anvil of my voice. And by that I know

prophetic heads are going to roll on the growing edge

of an imaginative insurgency nothing flammable with life

can resist for long. I know anything I say about this,

if experience hasn’t cooked you in the same cauldron

I was born in, will seem unpatently absurd, but then

so are thermals in the open fields just before sunset

and the hawks that ride them for the sheer joy of airing their wings

unperturbed by what’s moving in the grass down below.

Infinite grammars. Myriad alphabets. Space talks in tongues.

Everything that is lives and isn’t intelligent, but intelligence itself.

Chaos the mercurial cornerstone of an order that’s lost

the rhythm of life trying to syncopate its heartbeat

to the unmusical paradigms of stone-eared preconceptions.

I see crows with rubies in their beaks as if

they’d just isolated the gene for symmetry.

In this miasmic swirl of images and wavelengths,

third eyes coalescing like starclusters

out of clouds of unknowing breaking into light,

and the shadows they cast no less prepossessing,

how uninhabitable I feel as a planet hoping the night

will prove me wrong and make all things

communicable and clear as a mother tongue

I’ve been speaking for years without knowing it

even when I exile myself like the sacred syllable

of a native son wandering the earth like a rootless tree.

And there, do you see that constellation rising

like a distillation of the starmud I’ve walked in all my life?

Doesn’t it make you want to dance under it with the wind

like a chandelier you’ve thrown rocks because it’s beautiful,

as if someone were standing in it like a window

with the elevated perspective of the Pleiades

shining down in equanimity upon its desecrants

as if by their fruits you shall know the luminous generosity

of a windfall of light that falls at your feet

as if someone were germinating star sapphires in your bloodstream

to give you something higher to aspire to

than just teaching fire how to swim through the blues?

Inside the allegory. The logic of metaphor.

Hidden harmonies in synchronous pictographic fields

that resonate like cave paintings with otherworlds

that are not occluded by the imposition of space and time.

The younger ore of the outer world smelted down

like imagistic strokes of luck into the visionary elders

that transform them in the fires of their imaginations

into the igneous bloodlines that pour out of them

like the mystic metals of swords descended from ancient stars

that can give and take life at the same time

in these homeless realms of sacred ambivalence

before the dark mother tempered the forms she engendered

in tears that broke like the waters of a docetist womb.

Things here don’t relate like thought-trains on parallel lines

that never meet, whatever the destination, they associate

like chords and keys you can hear with your eyes

and see with your ears in a synteresis of the senses

that wash up on the shores of cosmic, island consciousness,

all wavelengths of the same inexhaustible oceanic mind

that doesn’t make things appear so much as emerge

like species efflorescing into the medium they’re working in.

Alloys of light and earth. Hybrids of water and fire.

The sky calling its birds. The river its fish.

And the longing of time in the mouth of the earth

to call us out of the starmud and bathe us in the rain

gentled out of her atmospheric acids so as not to burn

the tenderness she lavished on us like eyes and skin,

a new kind of shining to enhance the radiance of the stars,

light upon light in the skulls of the unbegotten ancestors.

This is the morphological matrix of knowledge forms

shaped to the organs of perception like neuronic synapses,

enjoining efferent axons to the walls of nervous villages

waiting for the news of what they’re experiencing

from the abstract receptors of oracular impulses,

construing the world as a dendritic grapevine

tendrilled like Celtic silverwork throughout the mind

rooted in space as the closest similitude

to the emptiness that is the ground of its being

and the great commingled watershed of its subconscious commons.

The simpler the window, the cleaner the view

so I attend to my seeing like a nightwatchmen

attends to his own eyes like the glow of a lantern

warns and reveals the shadows of his presence in the darkness.

Eye to eye with the sky at either end of the telescope

things of the world are things of the mind,

cosmology the bubble-brained psychology of the multiverse.

And there are some nights, waiting for a poem

to bloom like a flower in the flames of my intensities,

I swear I can overhear from stars away

the exhilarated echoes of alien voices ruminating

on how we might have changed the gestural expressionism

of our shapeshifting, river-turning, morphotic souls in their absence.

Probable concourses of multiplicitous insights

into the jewel I’m turning in the light of my mind

like the sun and the moon at midnight and noon

when the measure of words is the wingspan

of whatever sky I happen to be flying in

like comets and birds and maple-keys

that have unlocked my heartwood and set me free

to blossom like an alphabet on a pilgrimage of trees,

to express myself like an inconceivable wind

with wings on my heels in the hermetic shrines

of this unearthly solitude, this estranged silence.

PATRICK WHITE

LISTENING TO THE NIGHTSONG OF THE SILENCE

LISTENING TO THE NIGHTSONG OF THE SILENCE

Listening to the nightsong of the silence

in a clearing in the woods that used to be

a field someone rocked and ploughed for cattle corn,

and left the crooked timbers and fieldstone foundations

of a log cabin to be swarmed by the rat snakes, their blood

as the cold comes on, slowing down into

long red wavelengths of hibernation that drives

the raccoons, the bears, and most of the locals

who can’t afford migration, to dream half the winter away,

soporifically numb by the woodstove, or numb outside

from the air gnawing at their fingertips and noses

as if they were being whittled out of ice

or numbed by food, sex, alcohol, gossip and drugs

into the Land of the Lotus Eaters in the middle of an ice storm.

Chronic boredom of a white screen they’d

rather smear with something than look at nothing at all,

whether cadmium red on a blank canvas,

blood on the snow next to the hollyberries

the foxes and blue jays have been feasting on,

or the mythic inflation of their own personal offal

gone viral on an internet of a sky full of stars

spreading the rumour around. Wonder what

the drunk loggers of Burridge back in the day

when the cops were afraid to go there,

would have to say about their whiskey barrels

being sawn in half for flowerpots of flagging petunias

and forlorn coleus on the streets of Perth today.

Or me out here on my own looking

for the Orionid meteor showers where the dark

hasn’t been distempered by the bottled light of the town.

After thirty-five years of living among these woods and lakes

I still come here as an unrooted stranger to the place

who finds it easier to relate to the wilderness

taking its own back, than the ghosts that abound

like Huron women in the moonlight

beating the wild rice at the edge of the ponds

into the bows of their spectral canoes

silent as waterbirds parting the veils of the waves

before smallpox, Jesuits, and the Iroquois wiped them out.

And yet how beautiful the stars are above the birch groves

just before moonrise, when you see them in isolation,

and you feel your heart gripped by a sense of wonder

so transfixing and sublime, you embody it immediately

as the deepest intimacy of time you’ll ever experience

in your passage through it. And it doesn’t matter

what the message is, whether you can interpret

the signs or not, or come away any wiser for the sight,

or mistake a knowledge of starmaps and constellations

for real light, you’re assured, without ambivalence

of the mortality of the witness, as a deep humility

startles your flesh into realizing its tenuous brevity

is only a temporary deferment of death, long enough

to be stunned by the profundity of these fireflies of insight

as if you’d just dug up your own prophetic skull on the moon.

Death soon. No need to make a fact morbid

by denying it. Right now I’m still a seance

of living fire in the woods the shadows of those

who dreamed and fought, wept, longed, loved,

lived, laughed and died here competently long before me

gather around as if a whole beehive of ghosts

turned out to bid the last flower of the fall farewell

or I were the axial blackhole at the nave

of a prayer wheel galaxy flowing into me

as if the black queen of the sweetness of life

were founding a new colony of natives, exiles,

and immigrants deep inside my soul like the portal

to another world than this one that exhumes and exorcises

all that lives like starmud in a repatriated body.

Or as the Ojibway figured out, ten years

of leaving me food and cigarettes at the sunny side

of my burial hut before my bones turn to dust

and my ghost is free of my fire, before the Canada geese

embody my migratory soul on a long journey south,

there are rituals and protocols of life and death

that must be upheld with a patience and grace

born of understanding how vital it is to adorn

what can’t be understood with osprey feathers,

cedar boughs, sage and sweetgrass, growing wild

in the starfields of our dream mothers

leafing the alders in the spring with new metaphors

for the wind blowing through the catkins.

In the beginning was the imagination.

Imagination is the mindscape we’re all aboriginals in.

Reality is still a theory fasting on a mountaintop

looking for a totem of itself while it remains awake.

Imagination is a three-feathered chief at peace

with whatever it dreams, even if it dreams it’s awake

when the elders gather to name the newborn

after the dancing waters and fire talkers

consult the wisdom of their silence and solitude

in the presence of the inexpressible events

that create the things of the world

like the sensory simulacra of a story

that always dying to be told around the fires of life

in a voice full of distance and time and sorrow

like the wind blowing the blossom of the moon

out of the leafless crowns of the trees

so death might wax fruitful when life is all ears.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN THE UNSAYABLE SUPPLANTS YESTERDAY'S WISDOM

WHEN THE UNSAYABLE SUPPLANTS YESTERDAY’S WISDOM

When the unsayable supplants yesterday’s wisdom

it makes it look obvious and trivial in retrospect

and you marvel at the spiritual gestures of goodwill

that swept you off your feet for light-years

as the arcana of a discipline you gave up trying to master,

because you could only see into the matter

as far as the light you were given to go by.

And you didn’t know then that when

you blew the candle out you held

pathetically up to the abyss that you did more,

by blowing it out, to illuminate the universe,

than you did when you fed it your heart

to keep it burning like a night light among the stars,

or a lighthouse paling in the full glare of the sun.

Off the path is the way of the path.

How can anyone be lost? Or found, for that matter?

Midways of gurus with their touring freak shows.

Sacred matchbooks of budding sulphur

throwing humans into the Bonfire of the Vanities,

chasing the bank-rolled Renaissance out of Florence.

Terminal literalism, infectious symbolitis

sweeping down the coast like hemorrhagic fever

from the merchant fleets of Genoa. The wild grape vines

of intuitive insight converted into the razor wire

of paranoid orthodoxies. The heretics bear witness

to the madness in the judgement of their abusers,

and scald the clouds with their blood for it.

The spiritual highways cluttered with exiles,

refugee saints, and scapegoats, where is there

a wilderness left where the tourists don’t go

to gawk at the hermits like wildlife? Back

to the birch groves and the cawing of the crows

like auctioneers that don’t have a thing to sell.

No one’s footprints to follow in. The way things

turn out, at best, a wolf path through the snow

gone by spring, or where you bent the waist high grass

by walking through it like the path of least resistance,

unmapped as the wind. What is it all, when

even the seven-tiered tower of the Scotch thistle

is a mental event, if not open, unknown and empty

in the sense of being indefinable, not missing,

as if anything were there in the first place

it was crucial not to lose? Spare your tears.

Life hasn’t got anything to repent or reform.

The mystery manifest as it is and that’s the whole of it.

What more of it is there to reveal, than the rocks

have already said? Real, not real, the flowers bloom nonetheless

and you’re free to make or feel or think or not

about them as you wish. Mourn the ruination

of the flowers in a passion play as old as the stars

or trust your own mind to mentor you in the ways

of not reifying it into a thing among things,

the source and matrix of your most cherished illusions,

the mirage of the dark mother who eats her own like time.

There is no pattern, path, paradigm, psychodynamic

or unified field theory that the mind won’t

accommodate itself to like a child’s drawing of the universe.

You can elaborate the roots of a tree like a fractal into

a morphology of knowledge forms

that sing in its boughs like sparrows

in the black walnuts of the morning

and then consult it like the grammar of a dream

for the blue print or starmap of the house you’re building

like a screening myth with a built-in library.

The magician gulled in the doorway of his own magic,

having lost the key to the spell he cast

when this desert of stars was merely

the vagrant threshold of a tent in the moon’s back yard.

The folly of sages, the wisdom of fools,

what’s the point of enlightening your own freedom

if you’re too afraid to accept it as the mystical mundanity

that’s under your nose this very moment?

You can hunt your own shadows down like heretics

fleeing the hounds of heaven, you can denounce

an eclipse for being a sunspot on your illumination

and polish the mirror for the rest of your life

and still not wash your face off with a paint rag

like a clown in a green room waxing tragic

to counteract the laughter at the expense of his own wounds.

Look into the eyes of the roadkill for yourself

as if no one else in the world can do your seeing for you

and you won’t see anything very shocking to be afraid of.

No spiritual snake-eyes. No hidden meaning

you have to get at the guts of like a turkey-vulture.

And if you feel compassion, and it’s natural you should,

it’s because there’s something communal about the random

you sense has been going on a lot longer

than the last few thought moments when you showed up

to be misunderstood by your own imagination.

You want some good spiritual advice to get you in the habit

of taking it yourself, whether things are sublimely rough

and death is dying into you, or life is trivializing

the palatial playhouse it was born into? When occasion arises,

and when does it not, learn to call your own bluff

and sit down on the ground, and have a good laugh.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT'S BEYOND THE TRUTH ALWAYS MAKES A LIE

WHAT’S BEYOND THE TRUTH ALWAYS MAKES A LIE

What’s beyond the truth always makes a lie

of what you can say about it. You can feel it

even as the words fall from your mouth like a bird bath.

However beautiful, however clear, translucent, well-meaning,

there’s always one syllable more that’s missing

that everything turns on like a black hole at the nave

of the wheeling galaxy, an unsayable singularity.

Love the radiance of the spokes, but where’s

the vehicle you were trying to assemble

from the yarrow sticks in the Book of Changes?

We get as far as the scaffolding we piece together

out of the bones of the snakes and ladders

we climbed up on like monkey bars to paint

our last masterpiece, and when it’s done,

however admired, it’s a paint rag of the original vision

by comparison with what flashed through our heart

like the spearhead of a life-changing insight

into the nature of chameleonic shapeshifters

mimicking our gestures like mirrors in a game of charades.

I’ve spent most of my life listening like a liar

to what I can’t say. The eclipse of an ink blot

on the silence even when the hummingbirds

gather like tuning forks to sample the larkspur.

I can say it like a star, a flower, the black swan

of a new moon making its first incision of light

like the slash of a scalpel across my throat,

but when the summons of the nightbird

stops singing on its green bough, realizing

no one’s ever going to come who understands

the inspiration and the longing, the Slavic solitude,

for all that I’ve tried to express as lyrically as I can,

I still feel the inarticulate urgency of an abyss

with its tongue cut out of what I tried to say

kicking me from the inside like the embryo

of a stillborn sky burial silently mouthing the wind

like the autumn leaves of a lonely death song.

Always an ear out of reach, a flightfeather

of a voice shy of the saying, a secret letter

of the alphabet without a likeness born of the eyes.

As if I used a blackboard and a bullet of chalk

as an understudy for the shining of the stars

or gummed the anthem of the sea like a brittle-lipped shell

I found washed up among the sea stars

like a larynx at my feet. Though I can sing

like the trees in the morning without forgetting

that every aubade is also a farewell to the stars

as sincere a field of nesting skylarks as I try to be,

my earthbound starmud rising like a constellation

of arcane serpent fire burning at the eastern doors

of the black wisdom of life arising out of the death

of what it engendered it. As with the flesh, so the spirit

salvages the detritus of what remains of its disillusions

and labours to enclose its emptiness in a chrysalis

of meaning and matter that might induce a transformation

of nothing into dragonflies. Stranger things have happened.

Truth is, according to the uncertainty principle,

the universe isn’t a metaphor, it’s a simile

for something you can’t quite put your finger on

like mercury trying to keep a starmap together in an earthquake.

I’ve looked into the future through a window

into an empty room no one’s booked into yet

and I’ve sometimes felt the same agony of stillness

being prepared by space and time as an available dimension

life hasn’t arrived to occupy yet, too busy in the present

to anticipate what’s coming like luggage from the past.

Words were the negative space. I worked in absence.

And something would always be missing. Words

were quantumly entangled like fish in the nets

of assent and denial, like spaced out fireflies on their way

to the stars, enmeshed in the torn spider webs

dripping under the weight of the panicked choirs

of dissonant frequencies strung like trashed guitars

with stagefright at the karaoke microphones of the streetlamps.

The medium beats around the message like nocturnal insects

against a window screen between them and a scented candle.

Young, my words were Luna moths and astronauts

that ached to immolate themselves in the stars

but as I got older, looking back over my shoulder

at the ashes of the winged heels of my nobler aspirations

compared to this long firewalk I’m travelling barefoot now,

and the largesse of the mystery that tunes celestial spheres

to the sound of mosquitoes whining in the woods at night

like dental drills and the villanelles of pubescent poets

that set your teeth on edge, I realized, at best,

words were just a way of whistling in the dark

with the rest of the nightbirds when the stars were out

and the moon was casting shadows as revealing as the light.

That’s when it began to dawn on me the worst lies

are always the clearest, simplest, easiest to understand

like straight lines to curves, highways to serpentine rivers,

things seen retinally from the outside like artists

with eyelids like the shutters of cameras with no feeling

for what they were looking at like reptiles

with third eyes that rarely ever blinked at anything.

Eye on the object reality when poets took notes

in white lab coats as if they were experimenting with fruitflies

under a lens instead of experiencing life as a vision

they’re collaboratively involved in like the dream grammars

of zodiacal alphabets written like eleven dimensional starmaps

on the backs of their eyes, hidden harmonies of the unseen

shining from the inside out like an emerald star

in the heart of an apple, under the skin of the sunset,

liberating the seed syllables of new myths of origin

from the straitjackets of a dysmorphic reality

that insists it’s the true shape of the universe

when it’s only another mirage of water trying

to put out a cosmic root-fire of underground stars.

Listen like an empty lifeboat to the mermaids

singing in the fog. Turn the light around and see

the evanescent shadow of smoke emerging

from the urn mouth of the chimney silhouetted

like lyrical dark matter on the roseate field stones

of a new morning closer to the vernal equinox

raising the level of the bright vacancy of consciousness

even as it lowers the dark abundance of the night

in a lock of light across the street opening its floodgates

on the walls of a heritage bank like a rite of passage.

Here on earth I’ve learned to reason surrealistically

according to the logic of asymmetrical similitudes that occur

in the dark of the mind like starfields of fireflies

all talking to each other at the same time

in a conversation about the next constellation

they might possibly be and what to name it after

once inspired by the muse of their prophetic memories

to remember what associative insights they forgot

when they first learned to write like cracks

in the archival creekbeds of their neo-cortex.

Next time you put words to a page like a loveletter

to a mysterious black rose that’s eclipsed

by the light of a one-eyed liar, trust your own nose

and ask yourself if they’re alive enough to smell the silence.

If the absence that surrounds them lingers in the air

like the aurora of an ancient solitude fragrant with light.

If there’s any joy of life in the starmud you blood with insight.

PATRICK WHITE  

AND THESE LINES

AND THESE LINES

And these lines like the opening wake of a boat I’m not in.

Or is it the opening of an old wound unsealing itself like a loveletter?

Or the world held up to the lips of this fever like a spoon?

There are shadows in the valley of a scar

that sometimes mistake themselves for leaves

and turn their sewers into wine

and reel in the unmoving delirium of a black noon

when the hands of the clock disappear

into the cool centre of their turning

and time is sheathed like mercy in the darkness.

Suffering shadows my blood like a map

and so I look for joy in everything

as if my death were already achieved and behind me

and I could linger over the morning and end of everything

like a wet winter fog that doesn’t try to cling.

The tree outside the window in my writing room

is the axle of existence

and every ring of its heartwood

is the expanding wheel of the world,

as it is with every breath. But this is precisely where

I keep losing myself in the ineffable urns and ashes

of the unsayable beyond, not just of death,

but of all that life hasn’t been

to one who loved it like his only chance.

A firefly agitates the darkness more

than all the lightning of my awareness

when I consider the spectral vagrancy of my thought

calling to me like a hill to an unmoored lifeboat

to see if anyone survived the last sinking of the moon.

And my sorrows are bells of water that toll like the sea

for all the incredible dead who are buried in me

like marrow in the bone.

Which is to say no more than another

labouring under the weight of being human.

And I know of a lyrical clarity that’s free to sing what it wants,

that lifts the snake up with wings

and enfolds it in the infinite solitude of the sky

and lets it shine eyes beyond the reach of the light.

Here words jump like fish on the moon

and the dead branch is an orchard in bloom

and yesterday picks up its shoes and roads behind it

and there isn’t a shadow born of the light that can follow me

and tomorrow isn’t the ambassador of my next breath

arriving with urgent news

to wake up the dead

like a poppy or an ambulance in a nightmare.

Here the lucidities ripen like eyes with every eclipse

and the bright vacancy of the glaring moonskull

is broken like the bread of a dark abundance

that feasts in the seed of everything.

I watch the snowflakes fall randomly outside

and try to assess the chances

of finding the moon in an oyster,

remembering the unattainable has no threshold

to blunder my way across like spiritual junkmail.

The world is a drop of water flowing out of its own eye.

A squirrel natters and gnashes its annoyance

at my propinquity and for a moment

affirms that I exist by the intensity of its denial.

And it wasn’t just seas that the moon lost, not just seas,

but the sky that softened her stars as well.

The thought falls like a key on rock,

a fly at a winter windowpane,

forgetting what it once could open,

and I let it take its place at the table

like a ghost of salt that looks a lot like me

because we both mourn for the same lost sea,

born of the same bell. But let the starmud settle,

the dust compose what it will, thoughts fall

like the flightfeathers of passing birds

that do not stop to sing because my voices

echo in the cocoons of ten thousand transformations,

and who I was in the prelude that just walked past,

is now the likeness of my dissimilarity,

hobbling like a bridge on crutches downstream

or a disoriented pilgrim on the smokeroad to fire

as all the Gothic glaciers evaporate like churches.

Do you see how space conforms me like the wind

to the shapes of my own faceless emptiness

as I stand over the silence like a heron or a pen

waiting for fish that slip away like waves on the moon?

Madness or enlightenment? Asylum or shrine?

I have deepened my ignorance enough not to care.

My flesh, a wardrobe of ghosts.

My mind, the gesture of a star in the dirt.

My heart, blood on the thorn of the moon.

And still, my spirit cries out like an abyss

for the dead wasp on its back on the windowsill,

as if there were a will to my foolishness

tangled like wild morning glory

in the trellises of the constellations

where the great roses of the night

are enthroned in their bloodlines,

and do not acknowledge the passage of the small urgencies

that are dotted like periods at the end of their own sentences.

I accord the wasp, the squirrel, the tree,

full rights to my identity

in this agony of being,

this fellowship of suffering,

and with no more authority than the spontaneous value

a jest of compassion attributes to my clownish humanity

and the solitudes of anguish it must endure

to keep on approximating its life

like the long draw of the straw in a hurricane.

I have lived and wept long enough

not to trust any insight

that doesn’t feel the pain

growing eyes like a gate in the rain.

How have any of us not suffered

and cried out in our alienation

I am human, I am human,

as if our despair could voice

the violence of our relentless insignificance?

And when I say this, understand,

there isn’t anything it could possibly mean

if it doesn’t heal, if it doesn’t say

to the widow alone for the first night

or the scar of the moon in the window,

or the child savaged by atrocity

who was left torn and alone in the dark,

there is no one to whom we can plead,

no one who could hear

the scream of the hell

poured from your blood

like the iron voice of a misshapen bell,

no one who can unseed the life you’re rooted in,

no one, not even you, to know your need

for intimate fires in the ashpits of your stars

that suddenly flare up like flowers

to consume that which surpasses itself in wonder,

but when you’re wounded by the horsemen in the night

who trample you like a pulse, know this, I bleed

like the same resonance of ruptured atoms

and my harp is split like a wishbone

and my heart is the wilted lily, the failed parachute

of a sidereal hemorrhage, and I

am darker than the eyelids of the gods

with anger that you should suffer so

and not know, not know

the delirium of the seed

that is buried in your wound

like the herb of the eclipse that lived you like enlightenment.

PATRICK WHITE