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

IS IT IN THE NATURE OF LIFE AND LIGHT

IS IT IN THE NATURE OF LIFE AND LIGHT

Is it in the nature of life and light

that if you look deeply enough into their eyes

eventually you’ll begin to cry?

If you turn over enough skulls

in a cemetery of shepherd moons,

if you exhume enough gravestones

it’s not the angels that keep their ancient places

but maggots in a charnel house with no return address?

Fountainheads of enlightenment

rooted in a watershed of sorrows.

I’m tired of bringing bouquets to the dead.

Listening to the lies we’re compelled

to tell ourselves like waterlilies in a swamp.

Lachrymae rerum, some nights life shrieks

like a mother that’s lost it’s only child.

Try being blissed out in a secret garden

in Auschwitz as if morning glory grew

on the barbed wire fence. It was ashes, not snow

that fell on the dungheaps of human flesh.

Lampshades of human skin that flowered

on the desks of bureaucratic offal, not chrysanthemums.

So much innocence swept aside before it was born

like the rape of a bride by the mirages of power

that claim the right of prima nocta to the waters of life

on the first night. Lion kings kill the progeny

of the old to put their genetic seal on things

in gules of blood on the claws of dynastic genocides.

Disneyland specializes in pseudomorphic fairytales for the kids.

Politics, court intrigue in a cloak of creosote at a dogfight

for the amusement and profit of savage fools.

Justice a screening myth for the real play

that goes on behind the scenes the curtain

never goes up on like the permanent fix

of an eclipse of blackflies blotting the sun

like the inkspots of unprincipled signatories

to see who gets which half of the cadavers of Poland.

Hitler sleeps with Stalin. The red army stalls

outside the abattoir of Warsaw burning

then Churchill sneaks off to the same brothel

without telling the Americans he’s got loose morals

as an iron curtain falls across Europe by rhetorical arrangement.

The history of the world. Mining gold teeth

on a battlefield. Old men and women

metastasizing their avaricious senility by sending

the young and poor of one gutter

to redress unemployment in the slums of another

as the factories work overtime on behalf of the rich

on the patriotic nightshift to stick their thumbs

in the profiteering pies of market shares

improving the instruments of death

like a windfall of plums and cluster bombs

the growing limbs of children play among like Orphic dolls

you can’t call back from the dead like the songs

you used to sing to them as they lay in their deathbeds.

The night appalls and after sixty-four years

of swimming in this ocean of toxic fumaroles

I’m numbed by the effluvium of megalomaniac volcanoes

erupting like boils of capitalitis and commucarcinoma

of deficient immune systems on the skin

of the body politic lionizing plague rats

according to the effect they have

on the general well-being of the public.

The shilling under the arms of those who died for money.

The tubal ligations of budgets like welfare mothers

by the eunuchs and castratos of fiscal tapeworms

against the propagation of any but their own kind.

It blisters the eyes out of my soul to be irradiated so.

To walk among the houses of the zodiac alone at night

even out in the woods where death has a more honest smell

and know it’s only the earth among planets, fouling the footpath

with corpses it hasn’t got enough body bags for.

Free people fighting and dying, giving up the gift of life,

in the vital interests of a few who take from the many

the morgue of birthrights in a time of plenty

defended by a holy war of lies to death against

the infidels of perjured ideals sacrificed for the common good.

Labyrinths of vertiginous spin at Sufi crossroads

and the crooked path out of here baffling the starmaps

of the direction of prayer like aluminum constellations

of confetti foiling the radar of early warning systems

of pink mornings like cherry blossoms in hell.

Fireflies, stars, compassion, illumination, poetry,

the disarming generosity of genius in a few humans

with hearts large enough to think bigger than an ego,

wildflowers in the eyes of certain women

who intrigued me like hidden secrets I longed to know

like the dream grammars of sacred syllables

in sensual temples only the wind and the nightbirds

knew all the lyrics to. The candlepower of mystic insights

embodied in the starmud under my fingernails. Now

were it not to leave forensic evidence of my homicidal silence

I don’t even want to write this in tears of blood.

And I’m trying to hang on like a weed that’s never known

its proper place in life except as a cosmic diaspora

in the context of everywhere, but they’re killing the bees

to protect the genetically modified crops of the parasites

that own them like oil in the flour of bad bread.

The pleonasts are abusing the antiseptic honeys of life

with corporately commiserating insecticides

who say, even so, in the peacetime atrocities

perpetrated on the elemental joys that combat

the blight of the private sadness in the superstitious facts

of the public madness, by law, not love of the land

nor what lives upon it, you have no choice,

despite the stingers in the poisoned apiary of your voice,

despite the hand you put over the mouths of your abducted hives

to keep them from giving themselves away

to the leaves and flowers that lie in ambush

like judas-goats bleating to kiss them on the cheek

like a patent on a garden on a hillside of skulls

blessed by the money-changers on the benches

in the the temples of life for thirty pieces of silver

and the noose of a chromosome to hang from

like seedless fruit in the medicine bags of their funeral bells.

PATRICK WHITE

PAINT ALL OVER ME, FLAKEY NIGHT SKIES

PAINT ALL OVER ME, FLAKEY NIGHT SKIES

Paint all over me, flakey night skies

and the histrionic hemorrhage of red roses,

blue bruises, violet orchids under my eyes,

Hooker’s green brooding in the foliage

of a rootless man who greys the spring

with the cadmium orange of burning maples

subjectively correlating my autumnal moods.

Motley to the crowd in the deconstructed rainbow

of my Joseph’s coat, the cobalt blue on my jeans,

conveniently sincere, I may look like a palette,

but I’m an oneirologist at the bottom of the well,

who can interpret dreams in jail.

Plagues of famine, plagues of the fat kind,

locusts and snakes and olegarchic corporations,

blights of the heart, when has it ever been else?

Don’t like your nightmares? Change pillows.

I put my ear down on the rock of the world at night,

disgusted more by what I see in the light

than I paint in the dark. Maybe Rothko was right.

A black hole is the only way out of here.

It’s funny how the liars are always the ones

trying to make things clear. I keep

the savage indignation of my pit bull on a leash

though I want to rip and tear like the French revolution.

Beauty is truth. Truth is beauty. That is all ye know

on earth, all ye need to know. I love Keats

but that’s pure bullshit. An allergic reaction.

I know a woman, twenty-six, skeletal with cancer,

with two kids she’s been raising on her tips as a waitress

since her husband committed suicide at Christmas.

She knows more about the debts and depths of life

than most poets bleeding to death like paper cuts,

diluting the wine of poetry with the bottled water

of unvivid prose and opinion, clothes pegs on their nose

to avoid the smell of life, no lightning singeing

the positive ions of their happy, happy atmospheres

the poxy moon would rather do without, than breathe.

Sometimes it’s the skull of the earth, not a pea

under the bed of the princess who frets over

her hyperbolic sensitivities at tea under the willows

just like Rimbaud or Van Gogh. How do you scoff

in terza rima without coming off as a cur

chained at the gates of hell because you know

you have to wake up lost in a dark wood

before you can ape and gape your way into paradise

and the rungs of the burning ladders up to

the seventh realm of light aren’t trellises of scarlet runners?

Spare me the narcissistic visions of your tiny crucifixions

flying into the third eye of your Cyclopean anti-depressants

looking for a gold rush in a dust bowl on the verge of extinction.

There are thieves at your side, dadaphors,

a binocular way of looking at things, one torch up,

one torch down, where parallel lies do meet

in a single focus lightyears out of your field of view

that work like hinges on a door, wings on a bird,

two feet going in opposite directions, one mile east,

one mile west, exit and entrance, to the end of the journey.

All true mystics are misfits in an uneasy truce

with what’s popular. The frauds are huckstering

scented snakeoil on a midway of miracles

where the penny of the full moon gets you in

for a peek at the freaks you astigmatize

by closing your eyes to what’s ugly about you, not them.

PATRICK WHITE

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