SOMETIMES YOU START OUT DIGGING A GRAVE

SOMETIMES YOU START OUT DIGGING A GRAVE

Sometimes you start out digging a grave

and it turns out to be a black hole that fills up with stars like a house well.

Sometimes you want to write something insightful, beautiful, sad,

and you end up scribbling death threats to yourself

in the margins of an eclipse. You ask the rain for a dance

and you bleed to death waltzing with a leg-hold trap in three four time.

I burn my sermons from the pulpit of a sun dial

and then some cult of shadows I’ve never heard of before

steps forward and says why did you do that?

I set out to love you barefoot on a long pilgrimage to an unknown shrine,

walking on stars, thorns, rose petals, broken beer bottles,

roads cobbled with prophetic skulls like uninhabitable planets

that don’t know what I’m talking about when I open my heart about life

and every move I make explodes like a minefield covered in snow.

I say something crazy off the top of my head

and the plagiarists accuse me of being too original.

I read through an entire library of windows just to deepen

my understanding of Orion shining over the rooftops

and I’m inundated by a flashflood of glass in a downpour of weeping chandeliers.

Try living a life of purpose as if you made a vow on a star

you intended to keep and your last words will be those

of a freak in a flea circus of the absurd on tour.

One foot in the boat, one on shore, your topknot tied

to the overhanging bough of a willow like a sacrificial comet,

salmon swimming all around like wise-cracking Druids

and you’ll break like a wishbone where the rivers meet and the roads divide

and everybody forgets what they asked for, what you died for

as if it were all for nothing. And the wildflowers in the starfields

shocked by the worst frost since the beginning of death concur.

Metamorphic wavelengths in a snakepit of terrors

that keep you awake at night like a gnawing death wish without respite

like a scarecrow banging off punchlines like a stand-up comic for crows

that sets your nerves on edge like the uprooted molar of an oak with bad teeth.

Creatively bound to the quantum entanglements of the felicitous agonies

that inspire my life, I can never tell from one desert to the next

if I’m witching for water with a hazel branch or a mine-detector

as the long nights stretch time out like an hourglass full of tar.

And, o, don’t think for a moment, I don’t try reconcile my selves

and anti-selves in a conjunction of marital bliss between

my animus and anima like the nightsweats of fire-breathing dragons

in the crematoria of dead star parts and stealth butterflies

but I’m beginning to think my blood is deficiently unpositive,

either that, or I’m trying to keep too many eyes open at the same time.

O, what I’d give to be happily unambiguous about the lies

I tell myself to get through another night of vacillating

like a suspension bridge between the tender and gruesome

where the skydivers dispense with their safety nets

to commit suicide like adrenaline junkies teaching spiders to fly.

Why, why, why is life so relentlessly this way

all these sacred syllables I keep throwing into the Bonfire of the Vanities

keep rising out of the flames like the incinerated papyri of ancient ravens

that persist in playing genetic scrabble with the cartouche

of my untranslatable name. Was there a time I believed in one goddess

pervasive as darkness like black Isis behind the multiplicity of the stars?

I feel like the obelisk of a famous gravestone carved in scars.

Late at night, in the Rubrick’s cube of a confessional

to distract myself from listening to the rats scratching

at the continental shelves of the plaster in the walls

that dried too soon for a fresco or cuneiform, I hear

the mantras of old lovers trying to brainwash their young boyfriends

with platitudes of love and life and light, and more power to them,

I don’t say a word, wryly remembering when I was with them,

barring the occasional fiasco of joy, the sweetness of life

always seemed to peak like the Mons Veneris in a hive of killer bees.

Just the same, I lick the sticky-fingered honey of my bittersweet memories

like an oilslick off the feathers of my black swans

with honourable grace and generous obsequies that bespeak

the largesse of the latent surrealism in my late Romantic ideals

about love being big-hearted enough to understand

why the intense pleasure of the mysterious rose

is pierced by the inglorious thorn of some unknown militancy

that insists it’s more existentially germane to be

excruciatingly right all the time than unconditionally loved

in a contingent democracy where everyone gets a fair shot

at being fanatically wrong. Peace, peace, peace, my troubled spirits,

my mystic orchids, my deadly nightshades, my urban guerilla sunflowers,

I’m not trying to wipe your makeup off like the face of the moon

in the two-way mirror of the muse that looks at life from both sides

not to make a one-eyed liar out of a two-eyed truth

like icing sugar on a blue-blooded steak. Eat what you need.

I’m flattered by the unnecessary attention I receive

from the two sylphs of my silence and solitude

I’m teaching how to paint rainbows in a bloodbank.

One mounts candelabra on my head like antlers on a shaman in an ice age

so I can see what I’m painting at night without being gored

on the horns of the stalactites of limestone and ashes I work in

like a the visionary medium I’m most apt to be adapted to,

or accidentally eviscerating myself on a stalagmite

like a vision of the moon trying to save her many-petalled face

by committing seppuku on the throne with the slash of a last crescent

she keeps in her sash precisely for that ghastly purpose.

And the other one? She’s a natural genius that does

watercolour portraits of me in sepia tones of rust and dried blood

then washes what she found inexpressible about me

off her brush like a sunset hemorrhaging in a coffee can.

I celebrate the likeness of her art to the heart of life

that creatively imitates a negative space that eliminates the best part.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU, MY HOUSE OF BURNING THRESHOLDS

You, my house of burning thresholds, come

to me written on the breath of urgent windows,

and the palms of the walls that want their fortunes read, come

with palattes and kittens and your blue notebook of poems

that grows through ages of skin and mushroom kisses

on the forest floors of your flesh, the bracken spume

of the fountain that pebbles its tears in the light,

and the thoughtful rocks with moss-covered shoulders.

Come like a spoon that sips from the heart

and your blood a riot of sea roses, pink and green,

and the black ashes of the eyes of your secrets

and the locks on the loveletters you wrote on the wind

and I will bury my boat in the waves of your mind,

and be your ghost forever, and live as if I were blind.

There are poppies in your paintbrushes, cherries, wine,

earlobes of blue, and the tongues of mute tattoos

that have pierced your body with sad revelations

of the lives that you leave behind, all the simple journeys

that unravel the keys of the mystery in the dark inks

of another face, another crime, dead trains in the tunnels

caught like words in the throat of a mountain

that forgot what it meant to say, the long, mourning sentences

that carry you away from life to life in the arms of today,

and the bells and the lanterns that swing like fruit

in the lonely midnight stations flowering under their names.

Bring me your love, your art, your wounded past,

your wardrobe of rainbows and scars, and the chaste rings

that chain your body like a planet with mutable orbits

to the vast freedoms of stars in the rain, all the comets

you could never explain to the skies you riddled from blue,

and all the men you’ve married under the fallen bridges

of final farewells. Come in the hour of thieves, in darkness

with your windows open, and the ladders we’ll never climb down,

from our islands in the clouds that call like whales across the moon.

And there are laments we can only say in echoes, in valleys,

in the loose threads of the stream, huge shadowing sorrows

that walk like clocks through our dreams, looking again

for faces in the window that passed their orchards in pain;

looking for tomorrows in the way they came in the night

to a doorway at the top of the stairs, that once was theirs.

There are reasons in the blood that we loose like gloves

and seasons and departures, exits and arrivals

that brave the coming and the going with maps and graves

that lead us each like bees to the heart’s destinations.

Let love guide you through the labyrinths and maze

and putting on wings feathered from the fires of sad silvers

that fall away like water and stars from the herons of our rising,

fly from the old reflections of the mirrors at your feet

out of your face of lilies and fish into a deeper darkness

that waits like a man on a bus with a vase, beside an empty seat.

PATRICK WHITE

THE SNOW LAYS A WHITE BEDSHEET, A FACELESS FUNERAL SHROUD

THE SNOW LAYS A WHITE BEDSHEET, A FACELESS FUNERAL SHROUD

The snow lays a white bedsheet, a faceless funeral shroud

over the buildings and the cars parked for the night at the side of the street hoping

the irresistible force of the snowploughs will respect them

as immovable objects, and leave them buried in their foxholes at the Battle of the Bulge,

everything taking on the mordant atmosphere of a ghost town trying

to keep the furniture from fading, dust off the velvet armchairs

until some unknown owner returns from a long journey

that’s demanded his absence for the last hundred and fifty years.

Sick of the train whistle moaning it way past the War Vets Hospital

like a wounded dog outside the window of a heart attack

at four in the morning, chronically grieving what’s never coming back.

More mystery in the way the bush wolves howl or the wind

when its knocked off the caps of the Selkirk chimneys

silver towers of moonlight when it’s out, a syrinx of empty whiskey-bottles

a drunk’s playing solo in a back alley to amuse himself

until the liquor store opens like the ochre rose of dawn from the inside out.

Like me he’s trying to remember all the words to the song

that makes us companion night owls together perched

on the same leafless bough of the clock. Who? Who?

As if we were both interrogating our own emptiness sychronistically

about where everybody’s gone and having lived this long

why we’re still denied access to our forbidden childhoods

though they were meant to be lived by our eyes only

and the corollary of tears that invariably follows knowing for sure.

If you’ve got a thorn in your heart, a worm in the rose your bloodbank

like a bullet you haven’t been able to remove since World War II,

if you don’t pluck it out like Androcles and the Lion, in the course of time

the body will nacreously adjust to it like a holy relic, a nocturnal pearl

of a black madonna weeping dark tears into the pyx of a total eclipse

that opens and closes like an eyelid on a sacred coffin.

But tempting as it is to have something private to cry about like a train

don’t turn it into a religion until all the chimney sparks

and starmaps have been wholly disclosed like the flipside of revelation

lest you start trafficking in black holes that will suck all the light out of your fireflies

and leave you spiritually destitute in a vacuum nature

doesn’t give a damn about let alone abhor enough to bury you decently

in the dark abundance of your distinguished starmud in a tarpit of bright vacancy

if that isn’t too oxymoronic to grasp like water and sand

passing through your fingers like a waterclock in an hourglass, bottoms up.

Here’s to time. And all the surrealistic spearheads it thrusts like a hour hand

through the heartwood and tree rings of all the things we stopped cherishing

like the return of spring to a hilltop oak that’s been struck by lightning twice

as if one pin in the eye of a voodoo doll weren’t enough for the angels to dance on.

Can you hear the mandrake shriek when it’s uprooted? Or how

I cauterize my pain with vicious herbs like stinging nettles

that aren’t any less medicinal just because they burn

like the horns of dragons ground up into a ferocious cure for what ails me?

Dogen Zenji once said if the medicine doesn’t make you dizzy it’s not strong enough.

And I’ve been wheeling like a galactic Sufi around this black hole most of my life

in a gust of stars I wash out of my eyes in luminous tears

that taste of a hidden rapture imploding into jewels of insight

in the intensity of my suffering like starlings nesting

like lightyears locked away in the ores of creosote

in the Burgess Shale of a dead chimney that wakes you up every morning,

spring in the bedroom of an abandoned farmhouse in the backwoods of the zodiac,

to listen to what the night brought forth as if it had taken the words

right out of God’s mouth like a simultaneous translator speaking in birds.

By the time you’re mad enough to understand your life

it doesn’t matter all that much anymore. Exit or entrance

you stop throwing rocks at coffin doors to see if anyone’s awake yet

to come to the window and tell you their dreams

like a sleepwalker on this road of ghosts the way

a river talks to the stars when it’s alone in the woods far from home

trying to realign its solitude to the waterbirds in a moonrise

welling up in tears at the reproach of a beatific mood

that asks in telepathic silence if you’ve dug enough graves yet

to understand the waters of life ripening in the bells of your sorrows.

PATRICK WHITE  

NO JOY IN THE NIGHT, NONE EXPECTED

NO JOY IN THE NIGHT, NONE EXPECTED

No joy in the night, none expected, black ice lacquered on asphalt outside,

March slush before the two week warm-up, black coffee, cigarettes,

I sit where I always sit, snowblind Inuit in front of a glaring computer-screen

letting my mind fly eyeless through a hurricane of stars, no pilot

in the keyhole of the door, staring through the windows,

trusting in the sincerity of their slow, brittle tears

calving like glaciers in the craters of a lunar landscape

railed by the snowploughs like razors on a black mirror

into lines of coke weeping hot tears into the gutters that cook them

like the faces of young women in a small town who grew up milking cows

raging at the boredom of their sorrows in a riot of cherry blossoms and stinging nettles.

Peace for awhile this time of night, skinless in my solitude,

my restlessness intrigued by the stillness of my estrangement

from everything that moves with a purpose in chains of thought.

Dying swans in a Bolshoi of smoke from a puff on a cigarette

I watch how they uncoil like a path through their afterlife

disappearing into the air like the albino auroras of the northern lights

untroubled by their exorcism as soon enough I, too, anticipate

being dispossessed of the dream in my heart that keeps me awake tonight

as if I owed it to life to be here, just as I am, without trying

to better my diminishment like a mirage in a sea of awareness.

Dawn, the suicidal blue of a homogeneous mass of indistinguishable clouds,

and the unfortunate buildings coming into focus, eyebrows

of fieldstones over the gaping eyes of their disinterested windows

like the eyesockets of the skulls of dead oracles fixed

on the one prophecy of continuous extinction that came true

long before it was foreshadowed by the random course of events on the inside

of the abandoned rooms they’re fronting for like a visionary tradition.

I can feel the pragmatic madness of a thousand utilitarian farmwives

getting up to start the fire like sleepwalking ghosts inured

like a habit of smoke to a dream of not being dead if there’s still a voice

snapping in the larynx of the cedar like God from a burning bush.

People using their panic as an excuse, the busy, busy day begins,

bullied by obligations and chores, debts, repetitive emotions

sighing competitively for something more from the world

than the world’s prepared to give in compensation for enduring it.

And they, too, serve who only stand like parking meters, lamp posts

and fire hydrants in the snow and perish, each according

to the lack of urgency in their convective lives, everybody

imagining there had to be more to them as they’re remembered retrospectively

after they pass and the patina of time and compassion for the dead

puts a little make up on their face in the minds of those who live

dreading the same fate as if life were an amphibian on a lilypad in a snakepit.

Though they’d deny it with earnest apple piety and I mean

no insult to any exit or entrance they lived and died by,

not having a grave of my own yet to get back to

before the stars beyond the squalls of the snowflakes pale

like the tungsten candles in the lanterns of the nightwatchmen

going out like streetlights in the waxing din of another lustreless beginning.

Black noise at night, white noise by day, too much permafrost yet

to be out digging graves, but maybe I can engage my spirit

that knows me well enough by now to overbid the odds

as the only chance we have of staying alive, to remodel

this elegy like the premonitory mood of extinction crossing

the waning wolf moon you can’t see, into a few sparse birds

of an aubade that didn’t go south for the winter. Absurd, I know.

But what does it hurt to drink mirages from a wishing well now and again

and vitiate the tactless clarity of mundanity by celebrating

the great variety of the means and modes of insanity

available to a creative imagination that can’t find anything lyrical

about road kill, but is in the habit of listening to people sing next door

like extraordinarily ordinary metaphors for the joys of life

that make no sense to anyone they weren’t meant for.

I see the three pots of Arum ivy on top of my closet

have picked up again since I watered them, green, green, their leaves,

what is it that wearies the heart of a human so much

that I envy their intent to live? Why do I always feel

I’m contributing to something collaboratively vast I’ll never be a part of

or indulge this tolerant affection for the mystic peculiarities

of the things in my apartment like a prisoner that’s learned

to pay attention to the smallest things in life that slip through the bars

he regards with the unpossessive curiosity of unobtrusive love?

I bluff the infinite with the intimacy of a knife I hold to my throat

like a crescent moon to the voice box of a nightbird

I’ve never known the name of nor felt the need to ask

as long as it’s singing as if neither of us had a care in the world.

Uncompelled, I remember the recent dead incredulously

as the embodiment of so much longing and pain

swept away like reflections from the puddles of starmud

on this back country road we’re all walking down alone together

where even the animals are dubious about accepting us for who we are

whatever that means. Are. To future phantoms making plans for now

as if it were already yesterday. How can it be we’re

mere bubbles of awareness in an abyss full of thorns

when we spend all our lives like fireflies trying to shine

like stars in the dark for a glimpse of the going before we’re gone

to less inept enlightenments than these we’re trying to stay afloat on?

PATRICK WHITE

OLD SORROW, I'VE FORGOTTEN YOUR NAME

OLD SORROW, I’VE FORGOTTEN YOUR NAME

Old sorrow, I’ve forgotten your name,

you’ve been with me so long, pouring

the iron in my blood into the heavy bell of a heart

that’s climbed back up this sad tree of my spine

so many times out of the afterlives of my windfall,

these sad planets collapsing in on themselves

under the decaying weight and water of their own tears

from the inside out, and gone to seed

like a small fleet of lifeboats in this floating world,

trying to make it up out of these watersheds

to run the vertical deltas of this autumn orchard

whose roots I keep falling upon like a radical place to begin

climbing back up toward the stars again,

until one night I’ll raise my sail

like the moonrise of a blossom on the Milky Way

and be gone like a ghost ship in the fog of a nautical legend.

Old sorrow, I know you like the smoke of a thousand fires

I’ve danced around alone like the only child

of a midnight sun that abandoned me on the threshold

of a black hole I orbit like the rain in a broken mirror.

Who did you bury that we weep for, what

did you aspire to that you were too earthbound to reach,

what love of yours was so betrayed when it had

its eyes pecked out by the song birds

you never sing anymore when the bees

are in the locust trees, and the ants are opening

the peonies like loveletters from the Pleiades,

except there’s a wound in your voice the lyrics

are bleeding out of like a thorn in the eye of a hurricane rose?

Old sorrow, are you the tears deep down in things,

the lachrymae rerum that fill the wishing wells

with oceans of disappointment like the run-off

of our hopes and dreams descending the world mountain

after we’d talked to God like bathyspheres

trying to get to the bottom of our tears

like glass bubbles in our crystal skulls,

our third eyes frozen like the lenses of a telescope

fixed on a star above a shipwreck in Arctic ice,

looking for a northwest passage out of ourselves

toward a mythic Cathay beyond our continental shelves?

And what did God have to say that you kept to yourself

when you came back down from your tete a tete,

and returned your commandments like a library book

that was way overdue in Alexandria?

Old sorrow, I can sense in you how many seasons

have scarred you like a calendar of crescent moons

as you hang like the pine cone of one dolorous note

of the silence you sustain like a blues guitar

ripening in the corner of the room where the spiders

are writing music you’ll never play like the wind

in the hair of the willows down by the Tay River

when the black walnuts are floating by

like the scorched planets of sunless solar systems.

Old sorrow, I know you like a heavy boot cloyed in the starmud

of all these roads we’ve walked together to get

nowhere in particular but wherever we are now

in this graveyard of shadows

that talk to the stars who have none

about how to wash our names and faces off

like deathmasks that are tired of trying to light up the darkness

like a candle at a black mass at high noon

with an eclipse high overhead the flowers won’t look at

for fear of burning their eyes. Compendious companion,

you bend my boughs toward the earth

with the low hanging fruit of a giving nature

seasoning your inconsolable wisdom with compassion.

Immoveable buddha, are you the ancient echo

of the birth pang of life, the groan of sentience

being torn up by the roots out of the indwelling forms

of things you used to take shelter in like lenses and mirrors

you could blow into bubbles of the mind

like the multiverse through a keyhole into the abyss of hyperspace?

Old sorrow, were you rounded like a shepherd moon

in the undertow of time, your teeth blunted

like the molars of the asteroids eating stoney wheat

growing wild in the starfields of the neolithic grasslands?

Sometimes I can feel you possessing my heart and body and mind

like the corpse of an ancient ancestor, my spirit

like a prophetic skull on the dark side of the moon

lamenting the loss of its atmosphere like one of its eyes.

Other nights, I look upon you like the ruins

of a palace of water that once greened this desert of stars

like a Persian gardener that ruled an empire of flowers.

Venerable exile, do you despair of ever

finding your way home again through your lion gate

or have you encamped like so many other nations

to weep like Zion beside the rivers of Babylon?

Is your diamond corona occluded by the protocols of coal

that sully your face like the memory of darker days ahead?

I shall call you, friend, given how long

we’ve known each other like shadows of the valley spirit

blinded by the sundials of the unaging mountains of the moon.

I shall open my heart like a fire to you

and we can share the silence together for hours at a time

on long winter nights when the wind is howling outside

and there’s no need to speak of things

that neither of us understand about why

the fountains with the deepest watersheds

are always sadder than the last of the flowers

in a late autumn rain, or the willows along the Tay.

Slowest of rivers, you can sit saturnine and soporific,

red shifting into the longer wavelengths

of the oldest of your dreams, if you still dream yet,

and I’ll work on a poem in the shipyards of the mindstream

that will displace its weight in tears, and hopefully,

though you probably know better, keep us both afloat

like a paper boat shooting the rapids of a waterclock

that’s been running a little late like the two of us for light years.

PATRICK WHITE 

IF YOU WORRY ABOUT WHERE YOU'RE GOING

IF YOU WORRY ABOUT WHERE YOU’RE GOING

If you worry about where you’re going

before you go, you’re not worthy of the road yet.

If you’re not having some black-hearted fun

with your worst nightmares, because they’re

just as surrealistically absurd as the bliss

of your most recurring dreams are, how

are you ever going to avoid taking yourself literally?

If you’re not crazy enough to wander

through a cemetery saturated with the moon

in the early hours of the morning, trying

to organize a choir of singing gravestones,

how are you ever going to recover a voice of your own?

That dowdy wren you let go of when you first discovered swans?

If you ever want to sweep across the lava plains of the moon

in a rush of emotion of a homecoming ocean,

but you can’t feel the tide in a single drop of water,

you haven’t cried enough yet to drown in your own sorrows

and see everybody’s life flash before your eyes

as you go down in retrospect, wiser than bubbles

in the way you descend like feathers trying to smile.

O, it’s hard here, isn’t it. Isn’t it brutal at times?

All your beautiful teeth knocked out against a concrete curb?

Inoperable cancer. The savage inexplicability

of the death of children it would be sacrilege

to even think there was an acceptable answer

to appease the loss, to satiate the grief. And I know stones

I’ve turned over I wished for years I hadn’t, things I’ve seen

that make me wish I’d never been born with eyes,

that have rendered my nemetic courage dysfunctional,

estranged from the Pleiadic radiance of my seeing

as if it were a black farce on tour in Taurus.

But if you want to shine like the fire of a pioneer star

in the clear light of the void, as I keep reminding myself

like a mantra over and over and over again,

you’re going to light up the intensity of hell

as readily as you do the cruel immensity of heaven

when it terrifies you with joy. Be a brave boy, I say to myself,

resolved to live all the lives of the Tarot Pack

and then go looking for the cards the Sufis say are missing,

just to say and smile at the end of time, if only to myself,

yes, I played all the stations of my life

as if they were the winning hand of an inveterate gambler

calling my own bluff in an unbeatable casino.

Seven come eleven, I’ve rolled my prophetic skulls

up against the wall like a printer in inky coveralls

in the back alley delivery entrance of a cosmic newpaper

on its lunch hour, throwing snake-eyes around

like the fang marks of a prison tat turning to Braille.

If you haven’t blooded your sword by falling on it yet,

and hemorrhaged by a river wild blue irises, just to add

a little Zen beauty to your death in life experience,

if you haven’t felt love slash its nadir across your wrist

and worn it like the talismanic bracelet of an unmentored initiate,

how are you ever going to transit zenith

as if you were crossing the threshold

of that thirteenth house of the zodiac

you raftered with your bones to accommodate your heart,

to cherish your own ashes like the mystery

of the afterlives you had to live through

until you burned like a star that had learned

the art of shining is the art of inexhaustibly letting go?

More doubt in our joy than in our pain, if

you don’t learn to ignore your certainty to the point

you disappear into the abyss of an expanding universe,

giving no second thought to whether you exist or not,

with no nostalgic attachment hovering over your emptiness

like the halo of a black hole, how are you

ever going to evolve the mystic green thumb you need

to root sunflowers in the darkness like neighbouring galaxies?

How are you ever going to adapt to the things you cherish

if you can’t endure the transformations that come with them?

If you skip the cocoon and go straight to the butterfly,

all you’ve really done is traded your birds in for a kite

that doesn’t know how to sit or sing on the power lines

it’s entangled in, nor how to negotiate the wind with wings.

You may glimpse the unattainable, yes, like a moth

at a closed window, wondering what it must be like

to be annihilated in a candle like an old love poem,

but the vision’s not sustainable as a way of life of your own

until you’ve set fire to your own antennae like wicks

that are not consumed by the flame, or extinguished in the rain.

Spiritual diamonds don’t forget where they came from,

their perishable beginnings, and though they can shine

like water and rainbows, their clarity smeared

by the chromatic aberrations of their colour-blind telescopes,

they haven’t forgotten how to burn like bituminous coal

in a basement furnace, or melt the intensity of their emotions

like a glass river making its way to the sea or how to use

a meteoric explosion as a way of sowing adamantine insights

like seed stars in an immaculate ocean of enlightened awareness,

the life-mask of the inconceivable assuming form

to express itself as an event in time that outgrows itself

transcendentally without a revolution or message for anyone

but itself, thereby ensuring, given our inquisitorial nature,

that everything from stars to rocks to apple trees to humans,

overhears it as a revelation of angelic gossip

waxing the long after-hour halls of a demonic institution

that was founded synarthritically on the cornerstones of our skulls.

Zen might be the taste of tea. But if you’d rather spice the water,

do it with all the flavours of life, dip an eclipse

in the full moon of your cup now and again,

and let the darkness work its cure upon you like a spell

deeply steeped in your imagination like a school bell.

Attend to your shadows, not as a theft of flowers,

or the clone of a brighter garden you’ve lost your way back to,

but as mute voices with a grammar all of their own

deep enough to show you the stars you wish upon

from the bottom up of a well with fireflies caught in its throat

it articulates like chimney sparks, even at noon,

or when the black sun shines at midnight

through a clearing in the tree-line of the starfields.

The snake that takes your life grows wings

and turns into the bird and the dragon that uplifts it

with oxymoronic lyrics of fire and rain that are as real

as any symbolic gesture that plays suggestively with your heart

in the cauldrons and fountains of being

that elaborate you as you are, slack water in a mirror

that neither ebbs nor neaps, as the tides reverse direction

like a heartbeat or the flow of your breath.

This mysterious third extreme in between life and death

where everything you sought among the mountain peaks

finds you at the moment of your withdrawal

from your circuitous passage through the valley of longing.

And in every emotive thought, the serpentine wavelength

of the immensity of the transcendent silence

overwhelms you with the intimate impersonality

of its approach to you in every risky step you take toward it.

PATRICK WHITE

SWEETER THAN THE BEGINNING OF A DELUSION

SWEETER THAN THE BEGINNING OF A DELUSION

Sweeter than the beginning of a delusion

it wouldn’t be wisdom to resist, I see

waterlilies burning votive candles on the Fall River.

Even in winter, chandeliers of blood red chokecherries

feting the pheasant, the quail, the hermit thrush.

Mutable mind, mutable heart, out of this bleak night

of frozen waterclocks, I summon irrevocable time

to break the ice on my eyes and let me drink the stars again

from the unattainable grails of a prophetic skull

tormented by impossible longings the way I once was

when I walked with you beside the whisper of this river

after a summer rain, knowing it wasn’t me

you were crying for. You befriended the cure,

but you were in love with a wound, and I,

unwise in the way a lover’s blood

could taste of thorns forever as if each

were the gravestone of a rose you tried

to bury deep inside yourself like a moonrise

that came up every night to shed its petals on you

like the phases of the dead opening the fresh scars

of their eyelids over and over again to shock you

with the hydra-headed budding of your pain---I

who was an exorcism, could never hurt you like that,

even as you were a seance summoned by a ghost

I never tried to dispossess you of. Love, but not with me

as my voice disappeared into the silence

like a waterbird through a curtain of broken prayer beads

falling away like tears from my wings, like a carillon

of tiny bells that knew they’d never have anything

sweeter to sing about than that moment

they held their tongues and listened to the way

you talked about the moonlight gracing the waterlilies

as if you were addressing a loveletter to someone

so deeply embedded in your heart it made

the distance to the stars almost seem intimate

though it was your eyes I listened to in silence

as the river passed for the next thirty years not certain

if I bloomed like a man or died beside it like a child that night.

PATRICK WHITE