THE MYSTERY DOESN'T COME WITH WINDOWS AND POINTS OF VIEW

THE MYSTERY DOESN’T COME WITH WINDOWS AND POINTS OF VIEW

The mystery doesn’t come with windows and points of view,

errors of perception, smudges, smears, labyrinthine fingerprints

on grimy glass, half-legible runes of names people longed for

last year, breathless palimpsests under a glaze of nicotine

varnishing the pane like an old masterpiece to keep it

from being washed away by our tears. Nothing to argue about.

Nothing to sour your clarity over by washing your eyes out

like mirrors with vinegar, instead of tears, wine, and blood.

Nothing to feel impure or unworthy of if you go home

to take a bath and you turn the faucet on and stars don’t pour out.

If you’re standing in a field of broken corn stalks on

an immaculate winter night looking up at the ferocious radiance of the stars

wishing you could trade your feet of clay in for winged heels

as you go inside to attend to being mortal and notice

the wheelbarrow stuck in the ice like a baby mammoth in a glacier

flowing like frozen time to calve in a sea of awareness,

your insight is no more or less pristine than a fish monger

watching the sun going down in the smog of Beijing.

The mystery floats into your field of view like a gravitational eye

that wraps itself up in a skin of oleaginous space like the silks

of the aurora borealis, a bubble of life that parts the light a moment

like the wavelengths of a lover’s hair. Comets, curtains, veils,

rivers of red cedar, the flowing of the mindstream around

the rudder of the rock, the shark fin of the circling sundial,

just to add the buoyancy of a bell to the emptiness without

weighing you down with the gravitas of starmud in the human heart.

It humbles and exalts simultaneously. Nothing to crow about,

no need to wake the neighbours up, nothing to found a cult upon

like a meteoric foundation stone entering the upper atmosphere

like a flashback of Mars throwing a rock through the window

of a glass house it doesn’t live in anymore. The wings of the housefly

and the scales of the oilslick are no less stained by rainbows

than the rose windows in the eyes of the most famous, beatified cathedrals.

Do you see the ruby-throated hummingbird at the larkspur,

the maggot eating the meat of your tongue like a sacred syllable

you could never pronounce for fear of choking on the name of death?

One’s not enlightened and the other ignorant. One doesn’t

cancel the other one out by adding a blessing to a curse,

an acid to a base, Gomorrah to Gethsemane, to nullify the bad

with the good like a pillar of salt the wind doesn’t waste time on

sowing the seeds of life like rapturous wildflowers and apocalyptic blights.

Seeing deeply into the mystery of life isn’t a matter

of choosing one eye over another. What discipline has to be mastered

to see a tree, a star, the moondog haloing the detached retina of the moon?

Life doesn’t summon you to a burning bush like a fire extinguisher

to put the fireflies and chimney sparks of insight out for fear

they might catch on. Look at how long the field fires of the stars

have been burning like revelation in the ashes of a waterclock of urns.

There’s no lost skeleton the light’s looking for to unlock

the keyholes of your pupils to open the door to the darkened room

where you live like a recluse behind your eyelids like a rose-bud

that’s going to bloom any day now if you die faithfully long enough

trying to second-guess a cultivated vision of what’s just outside your window.

What’s the difference between a deluded mujahdin

and a corporately funded cosmologist trying to tailor

the desert of stars in the hourglass wombs they were born in

to the mirages they kill professionally like scholars in the name of?

There’s no holy war between the silence and the solitude of what you see

when the mystery of life opens the eyes in your blood

to deepen your ignorance of the ineffable by suggesting in secret

there’s no need for the visionary to transcend the visual

like a moonrise on the waters of life it’s reflected on,

no need for the fish to ask what’s true or false, far shore or near,

about the oceans of wary sentience it’s swimming in.

When was the last time a dream ever lied to anyone?

How often have you known a nightmare to tell the truth?

I look at Vega in the constellation of the Lyre in the summertime

and I see the birth of a fossil of light. In the winter,

walking brutal country roads, I’m the altar of a sacrificial mailbox

shot full of black holes like rusty stigmata without a return address.

I can smell the incense of loveletters burning in the flames

at the autos da fe of old roses martyred by venerable heresies of the heart

and like a river as it approaches the sea from the wellspring

of inspiration on the mountain top it’s all one continuity of flowing

like autumn leaves and cherry blossoms on the same mindstream.

Haven’t you ever felt there was something draconian about butterflies

and pellucid about crows ever since their feathers changed from white to black?

The lustre of the empty stone, the jewel in the eye of the ore.

The bright vacancy, dark abundance of our quantum entanglement

with the full moons and eclipses of what’s arrayed before us here

like a hidden secret that wanted to be known in the stillness

of a liberated heart alone with the Alone walking beside a river

running like a starmap of ancient sky burials and resurrections of the mind

as the Pleiades go down dancing into exile like homefires on the waters of life.

PATRICK WHITE

THE NIGHT WITH THE PERSONALITY OF AN INDELIBLE INK BLOT

THE NIGHT WITH THE PERSONALITY OF AN INDELIBLE INK BLOT

The night with the personality of an indelible ink blot

that just leaked into my pocket no doubt trying to print its own money

as a fast lane to prosperity as the dumptrucks, snowploughs, snow blowers,

front loaders raise and lower their blades and buckets

like weightlifters with a grunt and a thump, authoritatively

clean the streets of Perth like an occupation army after curfew.

Too many windows looking back at me with nothing in their eyes

but half-priced mannequins wearing black sequined dresses

like the scales of wet rat snakes anticipating the spring.

Signs of attrition everywhere, no stars, every third store

empty or on the verge of economic seppuku, two in the morning,

purged of people, I’ve lost interest in trying to befriend

the fire hydrants, garbage bags, crosswalks and traffic lights

that never stop talking about the importance of having a function in life

as a measure of human worth while I’m going incalculably mad

irradiated by too much chronic sanity hermetically sealed

in a downscale upstairs apartment like a mason jar of firefly jam

put up in the meltdown of autumn by people who know how

to look ahead to yesterday in the eternal recurrence of tomorrow.

I’m writing poetry in self defence. I’m bailing my heart out like a lifeboat

trying to stay afloat in a squall of undermining metaphors

that want to kick the stool from under my feet like the sealegs

of a man trying to drop anchor on suicide watch trying to weather it out.

Bring on the rocks. Bring on the mermaids I once heard singing to me

in an avalanche of meteors that buried my species alive.

Of what use am I when I’m the Mohican omega of my kind? I survive.

Driven out into the wilderness to live among the scapegoats and the prophets

on honey and locusts, staghorn sumac, bitter choke cherries frozen in the snow

and not even a local Salome to go dancing with every Tuesday night

before I serve my head up to her on a platter to prove she has no reason

to be jealous of the menage a quatre I’m having with the three sybillant muses

of my solitude, silence and stillness. It’s only a lyrical fling

with the freedom to despair as I please without consulting anyone

since I was nineteen. I’m beginning to look up to myself when I’m down.

Go ask the river I nose my way along like a lone bush wolf

looking for muskrat in the cattails. No waterlilies walking on water

like jumpy stars in a telescope, I can bloom like the sail on an iceboat

skimming a patina of moonlight on the thin ice of a lake about to break

like a fortune cookie with no risk averse wisdom inside. Luck

of the abyss, I guess, because necessity says when you’ve got to jump

you’ve got to jump and you’ve got to get it right seven out of ten times

if you want to live on the razor’s edge that close to your jugular.

No odds on your side but the counter-intuitive fact

you haven’t got as much to lose living on your own

as you do when someone you love is walking out the door

because she can’t be famous in your shadow or live off the superflux of nothing

like a mystic with a fat soul. But over the intervening light years

of shining over my shoulder into the dark behind me

I’ve come to appreciate the constancy of the discontinuity of love

like the ever-fixed mark of an asteroid belt as the north star of a sonnet

whose height has to be taken with a plumb bob in a dry wishing well.

As above so below. It keeps me from being embittered by the truth

after these last fifteen years in hell paying for the virtues of my youth

bleeding out like the oceans in the rose of a matador gored on the horns

of garden snails with floral sensitivities. Now I carry two swords

like the hands of a clock in the sash of a samurai

living up to the Zen code of a warrior jester with a laughable hope of delusion

and when the hour comes around again to draw straws at midnight

I emotionally eviscerate myself on the shorter blade to save face

in the long run of so much pain I have to take a short cut

through a heritage cemetery to get to where I’m going on time.

Ah, if only it were the dark, dark, dark, of another starless winter night in Perth.

And not the measure of a man opening his heart up like a pinata

to see what his life was worth after years of living dysfunctionally

like a nightwatchman in the black holes of nirvana, trying to keep the lights on

in an eyeless space with big dreams of never waking up again.

PATRICK WHITE

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