MOST DAYS WENT BY LIKE THE HELICAL COILS OF THE SUN

MOST DAYS WENT BY LIKE THE HELICAL COILS OF THE SUN

Most days went by like the helical coils of the sun

slowly crushing the life out of you, a ton of chronic anaconda,

swallowing you heart first, not the occasional

lightning strike of a rattlesnake shaking its tail at you

like dice it was keeping warm for a left-handed throw.

Childhood horrors I’ve spent the last forty years

trying to shine like a star in the eye of as if

I were trying to stare down a snakepit to see

which one of us would turn to stone first, me

with my silver bullet, bright shield, and winged horse,

my boyish notion of heroic redemption,

or Medusa loose in the aviary of my voice.

A strange stillness overtakes me in the false dawn

of anticipating my mother’s death, knowing

it must come soon enough, an astronomical catastrophe

to a species already struggling for its life.

And as then, so now, I’m impotent to help

this woman from Queensland who

shipwrecked herself like an island on the moon

we could all live around like fish taking shelter

in the niches of the Great Barrier Reef

she turned her body into, though she had been

beautiful and wild once, an artist, a dancer,

playing strip poker with American cooks

docked in Sydney Harbour in World War II

for a bit of extra food. And seldom lost.

No garden of Eden in my life, but she had Brisbane

as she remembered it more and more as the years went by,

a place to return to, sanctuary for a burdened heart,

all mangoes and passion fruit and bougainvillea,

low hanging fruits of the earth ripe for the picking

as we had the apples, plums and pears

of the abandoned orchards of Victoria

swept by field fires of Plantagenet broom.

A welfare litter of five we came upon food in those days

like birds to overgrown gardens or fish

that nibbled at the drowned when the tide came in.

My mother practised survival like a Zen discipline.

Even when we were wearing our hunting masks

she taught us all to laugh at the crazy things

we had to do to live and say, Paddy, you should

write a book one day and I guess I’ve being doing that

for the last fifty years. And it still isn’t finished yet.

If all the seas were ink, and all the trees were pens,

dusk after dusk, morning into morning, it never ends.

I keep gleaning those gardens, searching

the acres of book-sized stovewood doomed to burn

like the Library of Alexandria, checking out

the back alleys, the back doors, the nightsky

liberating its stars above the condemned houses

smelling of the salacious mildew of beached mattresses

rotting on the floor like washed up whales

dying under their own weight as if they had

their anacondas too in the form of deep sea squid, looking

for words, always words, they pay me for in beer bottles,

words that might make a difference somehow,

though it’s always a toss-up between snake eyes and hope,

to inadvertently help someone get through the rest of the month

and, who knows, maybe a little extra to spend on themselves

like a new pair of shoes that fit, without feeling guilty about it

as my make-do mother always did until she couldn’t walk any more

because she had bunions on her feet the size of gibbous moons.

The palette of the rainbow she put down has reappeared

like a moondog in me, and insufficient in my own eyes,

for not foraging more loaves and fishes to break with her

than I should have, given what I do for a living, trying,

this late February night knows how hard I’ve tried,

to write something so compassionately sincere and compelling

it would bring tears to your eyes as you laugh out loud

at the spontaneous improvement in the quality of anyone’s life

as a standard of the earthly excellence I pursue like a calling

to celebrate even this harvest of shadows and eclipses

in the empty hands of an eldest son’s love of his mother

like chaff in the grain, magpies and kookaburras

in the gum trees of Brisbane, little Edens like fireflies

in every moment I’ve hung on this southern excruciation

of jewels in the ore of the underworld, Aussie enough

to bluff a pair of deuces like snake-eyes

into a royal flush that takes the table and keeps

the clothes on our backs like the feathers and scales

of the best we found in the heart of the worst,

blessed by what we cursed, and could not live without.

PATRICK WHITE

SUMAC IN THE SNOW

SUMAC IN THE SNOW

Sumac in the snow, towers of coagulated blood

for flames, spooky candelabra, what holy day

do your upholstered spearpoints commemorate

that you’ve hung on longer than most leaves

to all these clumsy hearts throughout the winter

like a young woman splaying her fingers

to blow on her nail polish with a witchey smile

of satisfaction in progress? Are you some kind of art?

Weird gate? A pitchfork in the hands of a crone

with blood on its tines, horns that gored the matador,

burnt burgundy on shamanic antlers guling

down the heel of a paint brush, a mix of alizarin crimson

and night like a maternal Payne’s grey you’re using

to paint a bestiary of enraptured totems on a cave wall?

Where are you going with all your punky torches,

what are you trying to keep alight? Did you lose

something in the woods you’re trying to find

like me intrigued by the way you’ve gone

divining for it like a dishevelled matchbook

for a watershed? Or is that just the way

you coat your nerve endings in red teloremes

to keep your dna from fraying like a strong rope

into a million weak threads? Occultly organic,

what kind of ritual are you that your arms

are stained by wine like evening gloves

up to your elbows as if you’d been pressing wine?

Surrealist phoenix in the spring, the fledgling feathers

of your tender green leaves, the antediluvian wingspan

of a creature that survived the flood by flying over it

like cometary fire in a blaze of blood.

Have you seen October sumac set its wings afire?

I wrote that line when I was twenty-two,

and trying to do the same thing you were

in the autumn rain as if I’d just stolen something

crucial from the gods. A secret of fire I had to master

before they began to miss it like a candle

as if seeing were the first fundamental of love

not even the cold shoulder of the wind

has been able to put out over the lightyears

of heretical fires it’s been trying to rehabilitate

by piling pyres of brambles at its feet

and breathing on them at the auto de fe

of an incorrigibly inflammable martyr

to its own lost cause. Burn through everything

in the dead of winter like a first magnitude star

of white phosphorus that puts the burning snow

to shame like fire dancing on the water in a jester’s cap

because love gets away with the most incredible thefts.

May the altar of the rock never come, the vultures

and the chains, the stem cells of the renewable liver

the undertakers haruspicate by then eat

as if they wanted to consume the same signs

of courage you had to steal life out of the mouth of death

like a secret syllable of fire you fan with every breath

to live like a dragon rising out of the firepit

of its own ashes like the lightning strike

of a forked witching wand with a tongue of serpent fire

tasting spring in the air like the touchy tendrils of a solar flare.

PATRICK WHITE

THUMP, THUMP, THUMP, THUMP, THUMP

THUMP, THUMP, THUMP, THUMP, THUMP

Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, down

the hollow stairs, steel-toed construction boots,

the tenant next door who lives a wall away, five a.m.,

off to work in the dark again, slam, the mechanical arm

pulling the door shut as if something were concluded

like the end of a hardcover book that pulled it off,

a gavel, the decisive beginning of a chronic routine

that must be endured as if he were in charge

of something trivial unrelated to his life.

Out on the streets, Sisyphus with a snow shovel

scraping the sidewalks third time tonight

in and out of the infernal spotlights

in the tungsten stained cones under the lamp posts

alone, alone, alone, with just me looking down

from my window, wondering what desperation

drives him to take his job so seriously.

It’s the man that ennobles the work, not

the work the man. Same way with words.

Truck engines wake the day up before the birds.

Crunch of car tires on ice. Plumage

of carbon monoxide, exorcisms of breath

through the mouth, unrevealing fans of visibility

on the defogging windshields as one vehicle

after another pulls up to the atm machine

in the sterile temple to money across the street

as if they were lighting candles in code

like the name of an unknown god in the niche

of a push button shrine that photographs

every move they make as it welcomes everyone

the same, like a priest at the door of a church,

electronically. Work should be the form

of their worship, not the fruits of their labour.

I’m Upanishadic that way. I abhor the numbing

of the human spirit. I loath seeing jackasses

leading eagles around on a leash. Hooded ospreys

on the arms of falconers assuming their virtues

by proxy. Puppet masters pulling their spinal cords

like the strings of a kite tugging at its life to cut loose

even if it means flaming out in the powerlines

or falling back to earth like an unsuccessful proto-type

of what it was born to be, endowed

with mind, heart, imagination and spirit

and the lifespan of snow on a mine field,

or the lighthouse of a firefly in a hurricane of stars

for greater events than the tyranny of greed

and circumstance allow. Wholly human and free

by birthright to explore the mystery of their own lives

creatively, with only their own hearts to answer to.

Government by dead metaphor. Reality the consensus

of a habit. We don’t walk anywhere without

coffins on our feet like shoes in a cemetery.

What can other species expect when we squander

each other on nothing, on death, on a waste

of the wonder that we’re here at all in the presence

of so much else that managed it as well as us

by doing what it knows how to be best.

Me? I got up because I couldn’t sleep, falling

into the crack between a dream and being awake,

lying in the dark of a false dawn, my mind trying

to pick out the chords of the picture-music by ear

in a cosmic collaboration of gestural constellations

jamming with diamond spiders on blood red jazz guitars

carved out of the heartwood of a mad man

troubled by compassion for the extreme chaos

of conditioned consciousness, as he answers the call

of an unsummoned inspiration, to resign himself

to getting up estranged by his own will, sit

in the interrogative glare of a one-eyed computer

in the dark, and write it all down as if

that were somehow crucially important somewhere

to someone who’s never felt this way before

without feeling so alone, so alone, with messages

they received lightyears before they understood them

from someone crazed enough to risk his mind to know

while there’s time yet to listen unintelligibly open

to what was being said by a voice out of the void

as if that’s what he did, without making a sound.

PATRICK WHITE

IF YOU WERE TO GIVE ME YOUR HANDS

IF YOU WERE TO GIVE ME YOUR HANDS

If you were to give me your hands, break your prayer

and offer each wing up to me, broken halves of the heart,

I would make one burning dove out of them

that would carry a ribbon of flame in its beak,

a comet in the night, a vision of life and love,

a message to God she couldn’t ignore, a wild flower

that emerged out of the ashes of her abyss

like a star waking up from a bad dream

in the skies over the darkening hills of Perth.

If you were to give me your eyes for a moment

like the lily pads of two eclipses, I’d put my lips

to each of your eyelids like the kissing stone of the Kaaba,

and erase all memory of its igneous fall to earth,

and when you opened them at moonrise,

where I touched you, there’d be two waterstars

shining as if they’d just fallen from the Pleiades

among the waterlilies and crazy raptures of the nightbirds.

Spare me a tear, and I’ll return it to you like an elixir

that will dye your grief like the palette of an autumn tree

that’s been painting for years, a sidereal Prussian blue,

with a touch of alizarin crimson, to burn

like the subliminal passion of a dragon in the background.

And when the fish return to their sacred pools on pilgrimage

like water sylphs, even when your mindstream

breaks like a rosary into billions of separate beads

flowing over the precipice of your eyelashes into the void,

you’ll be the bird that amazes the sun and moon

reflected in each of them as they are in your eyes

as you wheel like the phoenix of a double helix

with the Swan and the Eagle across a summer

of clear night skies casting the nets of their constellations

far and wide, like a spell that gathers them up like shepherd moons.

If you were to give me your breasts, your lips,

your arms, your legs, I’d come like spring to a landscape,

clouds and rain to the moon, a hummingbird

to the goblet of your body, water to a wishing well

full of stars and fireflies, even at noon,

that’s just realized all she ever had to do was ask.

I’d make your flesh feel like the shores

of some vast sea of unexplored sensual awareness

and walk them like a beachcomber in a red tide

of radiant starfish pumping light into your blood.

I would not ask for your soul or your spirit,

knowing the eternal sky does not inhibit the flight

of the wild waterbirds startled off the lake,

and even the wind can’t hold them for long

like leaves and kites, when autumn says it’s time to move on.

But if you were to give me their chains,

I’d retool them into royal cartouches,

ellipsoid orbits, halos, and shield-shaped lozenges,

to distinguish your name, like a waterclock

in an hourglass of desert queens firewalking across the sky

by the Milky Way, as if you were on pageant

sailing up the Thames or the Nile in a barge of moonlight.

And should, never perish the thought, you see fit

to offer me your heart, not as a fortune-cookie

with a happy ending, but like the complementary colour

of the world’s biggest emerald, or the red berry

to a crown of prickly holly leaves, never

would any of my thorns ever draw even so much

as a drop of blood from you to gray the greening

of this lyrical innocence that sings in the urns of autumn

as if Eurydice raised Orpheus out of the grave for a change,

or wild geese carrying the souls of the dead south

out of a threshed cornfield under the first frost of the stars,

or awoke the Sleepers in the Cave, to a new age

that believes if you can’t dream it with your third eye closed

it isn’t real. It doesn’t sail. It isn’t champagne that’s breaking

like a bottled wave against the bow of a moonboat

that’s been in drydock long enough to heal its wounds

and drift down the mindstream of the muse

like a feather of life, with a leaf for a starmap,

a message of love, with no astrolabes or compasses up its sleeve

and a fleet of poems flying high over head across

the lifeless sea of shadows below, the crane bags of Hermes

reaching your delta where the river greets the sea of bliss

breaking into bloom like a third eye from its chrysalis,

a dragon at dawn, a planet in the sunset, a dream figure

that woke reality up from a firepit of illusion

like foxfire in the scorched roots of an old growth forest

where lightning sows the seeds of illumination

like fireflies and transformative storms of stars

under the heavy eyelids of the pine-cones

that have fallen into a deep meditation on the koans

that have rooted love like an unlikely windfall

of constellations, whether your walking on stars or their ashes,

in the unsalted soil of its own galactic immolations.

PATRICK WHITE

I SHED SKINS LIKE ECLIPSES

I SHED SKINS LIKE ECLIPSES

I shed skins like eclipses and black latex gloves

peeled back from the new moons of unravelling snakes

that have outgrown their starmaps. Fire-sage

of a surgical dragon wound around circumpolar north,

there’s freezing in my fangs, little arrows of toxin,

and the milk of human kindness in my anti-venom.

I’m a wavelength unto myself, not a path

for anyone to follow. There are aimless rivers for that.

Poets skilled at setting paper funeral boats afire

as if they were burying their dead like real Vikings.

When you’ve left everything behind, you get used

to not leading anywhere. A cul de sac is as useless

as a labyrinth when you’re lost like the wind. Yarrow sticks

in all directions. Dishevelled stalks of dry summer grass

broken like the sarissas of a phalanx on a hillside.

You take the lowest of the low and join it

to the highest of the high and you have the makings

of a dragon that never overinflates or underestimates

the mythic potential of the quantum entanglements of life.

Scales and feathers. Winged horns ascending

over the birch groves of the lake like a dangerous moonrise

as I try not to cut my eyes on the talons and the sabres,

the Damascene crescents of clarity I’ve been running

across my tongue like the folded edges of ancient blood vows

to risk nothing less than everything all the time

making peace in a holy war of dead metaphors

buried too deep in the collective unconscious

to ever rise again with the same perceptive innocence

of their first alchemical revolution. The bloom

is off the rose. Beauty bares its thorns. Monks of gold

mine their own base metals for lesser transformations.

They unhinge their jaws to swallow their cosmic glains.

To them its all eggshells in a manger at Easter,

the two crows of Egypt, the triune identity

of three faces in one of St. Hillary, the Catholic Druid.

I sleep in my coils like a pagan hill fort

at the center of a mandalic crop circle

with occult starmaps tattooed under my eyelids.

I’m writing a grammar of symmetrical unlikenesses

to give my dissimilarities a chance to express themselves

without peristaltically swallowing thousands of contradictions

like the moon in a single gulp to bring the rain down

on the serpent fire of the lightning that engendered it.

Once you’ve passed through the monoliths

of dualistic reasoning like stone labia

at the Medusan entrance to the cave, you don’t suffer

the metamorphic uncertainties of what you were born to be,

quite as much. You’re free as a forest fire

to immolate yourself like a heretic at your own sky burial

on a pyre of crutches you threw away like the Tunguska meteor

radiating out in all directions like compass needles

from the unmarked grave of an auto de fe that made an impact

without gouging the eyes out of the truth like an unbearable fact.

PATRICK WHITE  

AWAKE AS THE DAWN APPROACHES

AWAKE AS THE DAWN APPROACHES

Awake as the dawn approaches, my cat

curled up on the desk beside me in her liferaft of a bed,

three goldfish sleeping at the bottom of their tank.

Ashen-blue in the urn of a sky burial wounding space

with the lament of a nocturnal bird disappearing

into the distant hills like the moon and Jupiter.

Intimate, almost hallowed, the stillness of a bell

hangs in the air, breathing through the gills

of the local steeples under the eyelids

of their half-opened air vents. Cerulean seepage,

venal blood that’s lost its way back to the heart.

Awareness quiescently strange, I’ve been listening

to the silence of solitary voices all night,

the medium of a seance I never summoned

but attend by acclamation at the urging

of natural selection. Meditations of a mutant gene

observing the red shift in the wavelengths of its blood line.

Haphazard paradigms, astigmatic mandalas

trying to take the guesswork out of being alive

as my thoughts run their numinous fingers

over the chasms and cracks that have been appearing lately

like a prophetic earthquake in the sign of my crystal skull.

My brother’s leg amputated by tree-cutters

to keep him dying from number two diabetes.

My mother, ninety-three, I’m afraid of her death

like a species fears extinction and I can’t help wondering

why I’ve wandered like a rootless tree so far from home

for so many years as if it fell to me to be the exile

in the family, so they could stay together on the island

and I could pursue the inanities of a lonely excellence

with Chaplineque holes in my tragic socks.

The rough-hewn complexion of heritage field stones

flushed by a beatific rose of the flowering light

glowing like a mood swing warming up to sunflowers

in Naples yellow. Even at the beginning of the day,

I feel displaced as a winter constellation paling

brilliantly in the west by the advent of the vernal equinox.

An epilogue of the ice age receding like a glacier

into an underground watershed on the moon

that hangs me like a polar locket around its neck.

Has there been a hidden purpose in the shining,

a gravitational eye that bent the light

of this long, dark journey way off course

the original flightplan to return back one day

along the path I made behind me, a comet

looping around the sun, a moth around a candle,

enraptured by the fire of the stars in the sails

of seagoing dragons set like blossoms on the wind

for the coasts of anywhere, warrior land namers

carving their totems on the dolmens of runic asteroids

falling like first stones without sin on the heads

of the dark glassblowers in the pellucid menageries

breaking the limbs of the evergreens like a fragile paradise

in an ice storm? Black sheep surviving on wild islands

in the desperate straits of their shipwrecked shepherd moons?

Life thaws. The mind thaws. The heart weeps

and the viscosity of the melting windows turn into rain.

The body is a medicine bag of wounded seawater

leaking out of nine stigmata. Time can walk one foot

after another geared robotically to the mainspring

of a wind-up, mechanical, alarm clock, but mostly it flows.

Even given you can’t step into the same river twice,

but wanting to clarify the ambivalence that most people feel

about the things they do in life, what are you going to do?

Run back with a monkey wrench and tighten a bolt on the river

to keep it from wobbling up ahead? Regret what you said

because you’re practising silence and sitting still?

Train the lightning to bite other people, or discipline

your emotional currents and mental whirlpools,

to accommodate themselves to your navigational charts?

You want to make a change to change, that’s ok, too,

but it won’t make a difference. Change just comes upon you

like morning to the nightshift retiring with the stars.

Everyone’s going to make the sea in time their own way

even if it isn’t to care whether they get there or not.

No river’s flowing the wrong way, every vein

is a path back to the heart, every drop of rain

is a jewel of the sea, oceans in its eyes. We’re swimming in

what we’re on our way to. You can’t pour the universe

out of the universe, and which of all the rays of light

from a star is heading off in the wrong direction? You can’t,

nor is there a need, scrub the darkness out of the light.

I remember getting up as a schoolboy in the morning

and seeing my mother’s, sisters’, grandmother’s slips,

bras, underwear hung out to dry like morning glory

blossoming on an eight foot long unplaned board

gradually being pushed through the open hole of the hot plate

with the portable teapot handle into a roaring black woodstove

with curd-coloured enamel chipped like teeth

as each of them collected their lingerie like mail.

Now I’m sixty-four years old and it’s millions of words

and thousands of miles later than I think. And my absence

accuses me like a sin of omission I wasn’t there to commit.

Like the sound of a small town waking up to what it rarely wants to do.

PATRICK WHITE

COMPASSION IS THE SWEETNESS THAT ENTERS

COMPASSION IS THE SWEETNESS THAT ENTERS

Compassion is the sweetness that enters

the wounded apple of knowledge after

you’ve taken your first bite out of it.

It’s not an antidote to the facts of life and death.

And you should know by now if you’ve suffered at all,

and it’s impossible not to from the moment you open your eyes,

the night is not a reward, nor the lantern of the light

that goes before you on a graveyard shift of the stars.

Compassion is the oldest instinct of the heart

and first muse of the mind that can taste only

the blowing blossoms and bitter green apples of the spring,

gripe brain, before it ripens like a sunset in your blood.

That’s why the heart knows more about it than the head.

And I expect, on that basis, no one is more capable

of loving us who must doubt that we’re worthy of love

to live up to the truth of it than the dead who can open

the tiny koans of the seeds at the core of things

like the lockets of fortune-cookies that break

like twisted cosmic eggs in a rush to spread their wings

like waterbirds who write the lyrics of their songs on the fly.

Words for the eye. Words for the ear. Words

for the voice of the wind like black walnut trees

and kites in a storm. And if you really know how to listen,

I mean if you can hear the wavelength of a black snake

swimming across your blood like a mantra

of terrifying, beautiful wisdom that keeps its secrets

to itself, or hear the unfathomable oceans in the black rose

whose petals and eyelids are always smashing

like white eyelashes in a squall of sunbeams

against the breakwater of a white dawn that passes

like an albino eclipse in a moonlit leper colony

of extinct black rhinos. If you even remotely

hear what I mean when I speak like this sleepwalking

through a dream grammar like a prophetic skull in a trance,

words that dance like light on the mindstream

rejoicing in the clarity of the voice that expresses

the hidden message encoded in the genes of the fireflies.

You have mouths. Speak for yourselves.

Some like lighthouses along the banks of life.

Some like thieves with searchlights for eyes on a bomber’s night

when everyone is underground and the bummers are out

plundering the evacuated houses of the zodiac.

Might be the ravings of a star struck maniac talking to himself

to make sure nobody else is listening. Might be

the surrealistic lament of a Dadaist night bird

singing out loud in its sleep for things it doesn’t know

it longs for, or maybe a lunatic is waxing prophetic

in a labyrinth of his own echoes trying to sound his way out

of the mountains without end he’s being trying to befriend

like a cloud or an eagle silvered a moment

like the ore of a dream in the corner of the eye

of a moonrise coming on like a hurricane

with a black pearl in its teeth. The eclipse of a sacred lie

compassion concedes to an alibi without a myth of origin.

Compassion is the child of imagination that identifies

with its simulacra of suffering by applying the heart

like a bloodbank to the wounded eidolons of eyeless images

that didn’t know how to bleed, or breathe, or cry or see

until compassion tempered their impression of themselves

as paradigms of rationality, by shedding real tears

in an ice age of lenses that kept their illusory distance

from the stars that came out after the rain, wet and shining,

laughter radiating through our tears, because life isn’t a dry fire.

It’s the hand on the rudder of a lifeboat

that keeps you from drowning from the day you were born

in the undertow of the tides of the new moon

until the night of the full when you haul everyone aboard

who’s been swimming through glaciers of tears

like baby mammoths for the last twenty-five thousand years

afraid of extinction if they ever stopped to catch their breath.

Compassion is accepting everyone’s death as a portion of your own.

Everyone’s life as your third eye, a vital organ of your own body.

Compassion is an undisciplined action of the heart.

Compassion arises like a moonrise of inspiration

in the eyes of the older sister of the muses

who walks too much alone as if she’d devoted her solitude

to the suffering of a wounded stranger she met along the way

when she let her hair down like willows of rain

to cool the scorched earth and slake the roots of pain

until they bloomed like foxfire in the shadow of her passing.

Most poets sit around the lesser fires of their art

trying to divine the smoke of what’s burning in their hearts

like autumn leaves they’ve heaped into books

that smoulder in tears more often than they break into flames.

But if compassion turns her eyes toward you

like a star in the darkness beyond your blazing

the Milky Way runs like a bloodstream through your veins

and you see in terrifying clarity the great mystic details

in the deep watersheds of picture music efoliating

like wildflowers and galaxies, grails, fountains,

lunar herbs, and starfish raised up off the ground

to take their place among the shining, radiant with life,

in the low valleys and high fields of an imagination that heals.

PATRICK WHITE