THE NEGLECT HE HAD TO IMPOSE UPON HIS LIFE

THE NEGLECT HE HAD TO IMPOSE UPON HIS LIFE

The neglect he had to impose upon his life

to write, to pursue an earthly excellence

to make up for the childhood he was told

was blighted by the time he was seven as if

to be angry in the age of innocence were

a culpable sin of deficiency. A sin of omission

worthy of an imagination pariahed by the truth

not to be as idylically blissful as other people’s expectations

demanded you smile as a child while your heart

was being torn out for adult reasons

by the people who said they loved you

but only as a matter of manners, not fact.

The want and humiliation he endured. The snakepit

of anxieties he slept on like a waterbed

that moved under him like a sunami

as he tried to dream his way back to the stars

to step away from the earthbound nuclear reactors

that kept melting their bells down

into the bullets of a firing squad trying

to make the point it was heresy to act

like a wavelength among so many sub-atomic particles.

Pleasures foregone. The women and kids

who looked at him like a shepherd moon

without any shopping malls. The killer bees

that swarmed his heart like an asteroid belt

when they left for good as if love didn’t matter

anymore than quality had a leg up

on what was being fobbed off as the real thing.

A succession of noble acts by an underdog of integrity

that had to live ten times more dangerously

than the couch poodles with pampered emotions

to express the dark oceans thriving

with unknown life-forms in the depths of Enceladus

within him, or a housewell he dug

like a grave for himself that filled up

like a black hole of galactic mirages

that bloomed in a desert of sea stars

everytime he lowered his heart like a bucket

to draw water he could drink from the skull

of the moon at a Zen tea ceremony with Aquarius?

A hermetic chrysalis in the life of a caddisfly,

always, it seemed, in preparation for a transformation

greater than himself, making a gift of a gift

that didn’t fool people with the mere lustre

of an empty stone that skipped out over the tide

like a pulse that died as if the sea had been crying

all over it even as it tried to revive it mouth to mouth,

but dark matter with a star sapphire for a third eye

embedded in the slag heaps of ore like an eye sore

to those star-nosed moles that couldn’t look upon the light

without wincing. Nightwatchman glowing

like a lantern fish by its own light in the depths

of Pisces, or feeble as a prophet in the belly of Cetus

suffocating under its own weight beached

on the unchained rocks of Andromeda rescued

by Perseus standing up to monsters like a dolmen?

Ambiguities of an echoless vocation, nothing less

than everything all the time, the hidden headwaters

of multi-headed clepshydras that flowed

faster than the towers of the hollyhocks

could bring their microwaves to blossom

as if they couldn’t speak for themselves

without pinging someone else’s thoughts

like bees and hummingbirds cleaning

the wax from their ears. Frogs and anthropods

in the tidal pools and shallow ponds

of the waterclocks dabbling in mosquitoes

like haiku at the beginning of the food chain

as if someone had sucked the enlightenment

out of life by thinning its blood hemotophagously

with feverfew and heparin and a needle exchange

that gave less than it could take fishing for the heart

like a pregnant junkie getting ready to lay its eggs.

Apostate veganism as a radical art of decay.

The jade rabbit sleeps in the clouds at the edge of the sky

watching them prune the tree on the moon with bush hogs.

He stayed up late and wrote like a candle doomed

to die at first light, when the hermit thrush

packed it in with the stars like posthumous insights

on the graveyard shift that dispossessed him of his demons

at an exorcism of fireflies and major constellations.

His eyes began to droop like medicine bags and bells

over the lightyears he travelled alone with his sorrows

trying to enlighten the past with backward looking tomorrows

that always arrived too late to do him much good.

The secret garden he cultivated on the moon

never found a way to put a gate on his solitude

that wasn’t worth walking through alone

like the tusks at the entrance of a kraal,

or a gauntlet of crossed sabres of first and last fangs

that enclosed love in lunar parentheses like an aside

some shadow of a sundial made under their breath as if there were

only a beginning and an end of time, and no eternal moments

in between one heartbeat and the next ad infinitum.

Such were the serpentine mainsprings of inspiration

he drank from like golden ratios of water when the moon

shed her skin like white petals of wind blown peonies

and Apollo lyrically tightened the strings on his turtle shell

as he sang like an abandoned housewell enthralled

by the mysterious voices of the birds on a prayerwheel

lucky enough to be blessed by the jinx of their calling.

Angels dancing on the heads of the pins

in the eyes of a voodoo doll plummeting like Icarus

through the false dawn of the sun toward nightfall in paradise.

PATRICK WHITE  

SITTING IN THE NIGHT AT MY DESK

SITTING IN THE NIGHT AT MY DESK

Sitting in the night at my desk, trying

not to intrude on my silence and solitude

I’m beginning to glow like a motherlode of gold

hidden deep in a heart of dark, dark ore

as the gas furnace cracks its pipes like the Tin Man

learning to play drums with brass knuckles on

and my cat chirps in her sleep beside me

and the goldfish are grazing on oxygen

at the surface of their becalmed tank,

three flames of a water ballet hanging

like the bent tines of a trident or the inverted candelabra

of some flower that blooms in fire as if

a quiet comet were passing through the room

uncertain whether it’s an arsonist in a library

or a funeral home, depending on the ghost you talk to.

Big night out there. No stars. Nothing moving.

The clouds are holding a pillow of snow

over the face of the town as it sleeps.

I can’t see anyone’s eyes and there’s

nothing I can say to the dreamcatchers in the windows

about the quality of the picture-music their listening to

that’s making them feel like spiderwebs other than

spring’s coming, the butterflies will be out soon

and we’ll all hang out like flypaper sticky with stars.

But in here where I’m witnessing my awareness of I am

as if I were swimming in a sea of nocturnal sapphires,

the first draft of a deciduous starmap caught

in the vertiginous eddies and whirlpools of the black holes

and supernovas exploding like fireflies and lighthouses

in distant island galaxies trying to warn me away from the rocks,

I go along with things like moonrise on a lake when there is one,

or mermaids singing like the Burgess Shale on the mountaintops

of lunar shadows creeping across their dead seabeds

like the long wavelengths of an outgoing tide.

The life of the mind isn’t mine though I’m

still delusional enough to think I’ve taken

possession of my heart. Let the wind blow

like the spiritual broom of an enlightened rehab center

and try to sweep my mirage away like stars

from the stairwells of a desert, let it huff and puff

as it will, no matter, it stays like a mirror that’s been kind to me.

It’s as important to have a fool in your life

that makes you laugh at yourself or at least break a smile

you can be loyal to, as it is to honour a wise man

with garlands and laurels and words he has no need of.

I’d rather be denuded by the fingertips and lips of love

than skinned by the manicured nails and scalpels of clarity.

Or let it make this scarred wolf-hide into a drumhead if it must

but once the duststorm in the hourglass has passed

and time has come to the end of its traplines like a good thing

that couldn’t last, I’ll still be standing here as I am tonight

in my tattoos and starmaps with the tears I painted

in my own blood under their eyes like ripe plums

about to thunder like a pulse in the ears of the abyss.

The banshee of the train whistle goes looking for her lost child

like an orphan she abandoned in the woods. Even

under the duff and detritus of last year’s works

the wet night bleeds of light by putting leeches on their eyelids

to draw the four humours of their infectious visions out,

I can feel the wild-eyed crocuses blooming

like the cervixes of spring unashamed of their sex.

I can feel the heat of the sun like a bemused caress

on the grey cedar driftwood of my arm as if

all these puppets in chaos beside the lake

were made of flesh and bone as small snapping turtles

lay their shields against the gunwales of a half-sunken log

in the warrior hall of a Viking funeral ship on fire

at Lance aux Meadows in Newfoundland

watching the ice bergs drift by like lazy, white whales

in search of the Titanic and the Pequot caught

with their lifeboats down like the typical hubris

of an anachronistic biblical death wish

to drown like Narcissus in their own ship-wrecked reflections,

like critical questions left unanswered

by the Attic dialect of a chorus of satyrs

celebrating life at a sacrifice of tragic scapegoats.

Imagine that as if you were one of the voodoo dolls,

strawdogs, or a scarecrow of smouldering hay

that smells like methane in the sun as the snow

rots around you like an archipelago of lunar leper colonies

trying to imperialize the moon as they lose

sight of the last of their shorelines to global warming,

I say to myself in compassionate tones of Wilfred Owen,

the poetry’s in the pity, not the wherefore of the atrocity.

Mine moves in like the shapeshifting wraiths of a cool fog

into a no man’s land of dead trees sticking out of the lake

like crucifixes and stakes where my ghosts

can breathe freely like comets at their own wakes

in a detoxified upper atmosphere of northern lights

whose veils are neither a seance nor a summons

to a mystic exorcism in the green sunsets of ochre mustard gas.

I lay a wreath of cedar boughs down on the lake

like a poultice of moonlight to remember them by

and cool their eyes kissing each of them to sleep

to keep them from feeling like bats smoked out of an attic

where we keep the dismembered toys of our childhood memories

we’re not in the habit of playing with anymore

as if we grew bored with trying to destroy them.

A shudder of cobalt blue in the sky, and here comes

the sun like a burning bush of vagrant tumbleweed

in the ghost town of a deserted zodiac, thinking

it can tell me what to do again like a prophetic errand boy

with messages for a pharaonic reality of lesser magicians

trying to drive the golden chariot of the sun

like corporate executives and spin doctors of Amun Ra

through the gunshot slums of a great wound in the side

of the Red Sea in the morning that’s about to overwhelm them

in sunamis of fanatical holy blood on the wings of a burning dove

consumed by self-immolations of savagely righteous indignation

that the night should end in exile, and the day

that’s journeyed so far from what it used to know

wake up alone and homeless as a love lyric in ashes to this.

PATRICK WHITE  

COMET IN THE WEST JUST AFTER SUNSET

COMET IN THE WEST JUST AFTER SUNSET

Comet in the west just after sunset

between the Great Square of Pegasus and Pisces,

breath on a windowpane, a smudge of light

as a warning, a blessing, a curse, the Ides of March,

a flightfeather releasing as many doves of meaning

as anyone cares to give it walking into the woods

along the packed-down wolf paths to see,

while there was still light, resolve in my legs,

if the red-winged blackbirds had returned yet.

What the river had been doing in my absence

that would help me take my mind off the world awhile

and forget there’s more pain in my laughter these days

than the joy of freedom from being me that used to

efface me with a smile that had travelled lightyears

from where it was born, a message to a man

who was still a child at heart, who could read

comets and smiles like keys to the indecipherable art

of bridging the gap between them like a unified field theory

of metaphors that could sing to the stars

as if there were a patina of meaning and beauty

that made everything glow with radiant significance

in the mystery of being alive in love with a muse

who traded the moccasins she’d walked a mile in

to know me, for a pair of winged heels, easier on her feet

than the long firewalks of thorns and stars in an ice storm

she used to have to take to follow me into exile barefoot.

Gone like a loveletter I once received in a dream

and set fire to like a poem I meant to keep

in the urn of my heart forever like a dragon

in a deep sleep of oblivion it never wanted

to wake up from disenchanted by the awareness

of what haunted it like the ghost of a lotus

at a seance of the sun. Gone those nights and days

that ran their course like the draconian serpent fire

of scarlet runners entwined around my spine

as if the axes of the earth were three poles in a garden.

Gone the long soporific nights with the cats and the dogs

brought in from the cold beside a woodstove you could trust

like a habitable planet orbiting Aldebaran in Taurus

before I had a vision in high definition of the Burgess Shale

in colour that made everything seem as vital

as the aspirations of Opabinia with its five eyes

and vacuum hose with claws in the brine seeps

of the Middle Cambrian taking the high, hard road

up the mountain that below might be as above.

Comets, smiles, the metaphors that unite them,

Pikaia gracilens at Pika Peak in Pisces, chordates

into backbones, fragile filaments, the spinal cords

of life, light and love, the hair of a star on the shoulders of night

like the sign of an ongoing love affair

with the depths and the heights of who we are to each other

highlights of the downtimes plunging

like angels and heretics, new moonrises

into the ageing dawns of the setting sun

between the eyelashes of the treelines beginning to sing

like red winged blackbirds on the dead branches

of seasoned guitars leafing into spring.

PATRICK WHITE  

SPRING RAIN IN THE SMALL HOURS OF THE MORNING

SPRING RAIN IN THE SMALL HOURS OF THE MORNING

Spring rain in the small hours of the morning,

exlixir of leaves, tears of anthracite on the asphalt streets,

drumming circles rippling out of every pulse of the heart

that makes an impact, ghosts of gasoline thrown

on the pyres of the rootfires trying to ignite the lampposts

that have never known what it was to shine on their own

like daffodils and crocuses, trout lilies and wood sorrel,

without someone else telling them when and when not to.

Water music in the iron vocal cords of the gutter

free-flowing into its own underworld echo

like a mind stream making found art out of

accumulated garbage that announces it has no soul

though the dolmens of the pygmy fire-hydrants

stubbornly refuse to believe it. Some nights so brutal

the moon knocks its teeth out trying to take a bite

out of the curb like a crust of bread made of cement.

Corpses of soiled swans sculpted by the rain

lying like road kill in the parking lot of Mac’s Milk

like a ghoulish leper colony in fluorescent light.

The powerlines weeping like mandalic spiderwebs

on their own, melancholic dreamcatchers letting it out

like broken necklaces of tears filling the moats

around the throats of crystal skulls losing it

like glaciers to global warming, prophetic windows

thawing out their frost-bitten eyes by disappearing

from sight as the cedars sweep chandeliers of light

from their wings as they try to take off the lake,

the rain packing down the starmud of the path

they were meant to take, their feet on the earth,

their heads in the clouds like totem poles and pagodas.

Soaked to the skin, the bloom of the rose with thorns

like silver buckles off my black leather jacket

heavy and sodden as the flesh of a rat snake

that’s been run over by some stupid farmer

as it was coming out of hibernation like a wavelength

pariahed by rainbows, as water droplets tap

their fingers on the rim of my gangster hat

tilted on its axis like a total eclipse of the rings

of Saturn trying to look tougher than it actually is,

there’s nowhere to go but down to the rising river

where the willows are rinsing their hair

under the faucet of a kitchen sink the way

my sisters used to before our blood parted

like the waters of the Red Sea that never closed up

behind me like a wound that’s gone on hemorrhaging

for lightyears like hydrocephalic Al Gol in Perseus

holding his sword down like the reflection of a headlight

trembling in tribute to the ladies of the lake who hold

their bare arms out like the boughs of drowned trees

to receive it. The snowman with eyes of bituminous coal

disappears in a bath of warm, carboniferous tears

that appeal like black diamonds to the evergreens

for understanding and compassion not to come too late

as I open the floodgates of my heart like a lockmaster

white water rafting the spring runoff in a lifeboat

he’s trying to bail out like a waterclock that’s jumped

an hour ahead of itself to wander in the light

like the narrative theme of a real dream character

trying not to drown in its own mindstream

this close to waking up like the ghost of a sleepwalker.

No one in my bed I long to return to like a shipwreck

No poem in my heart I’m trying to protect

like the dishevelled bouquet of a wet matchbook

trying to keep love alive like a dying art long enough

to catch fire like the vernal equinox in the imagination

of an underground flowergirl setting my roots aflame

with blue hyacinths and wild irises of tantric sex.

My solitude seeks no mercy from the rain.

No dilution of my blood that runs like a watercolour of pain

vainly trying to unskein the black and red threads

of a passion for life from the bass riff of a death wish

blinded by the approaching light of the eerie beauty

of the black sun eclipsed at nadir in the Circlet of the Western Fish.

PATRICK WHITE

THE RICH WON'T EAT WHAT THE POOR DO

THE RICH WON’T EAT WHAT THE POOR DO

The rich won’t eat what the poor do.

The rich have always thought throughout history

the poor are why they suffer.

The rich pass laws in frozen Toronto

to have the homeless picked up off the streets

like dog poo they don’t want to step in.

The rich don’t pay taxes

but they bitch about a mother on social assistance

receiving fifteen hundred a month

while they wait for billions on Wallfare.

And it’s socialism for the rich

like a tax break on a corporate lifeboat

if they go under

and free enterprise for the poor

whose bodies are washed ashore

like jellyfish on public beaches

where the rich don’t swim in their own pollution.

The rich believe they’re a season unto themselves.

They resent the poor like winter.

In all kinds of private weather

the poor must suck

the milkless dugs of the earth

like a foodbank with empty shelves.

The rich sink their money

into old continents like Atlantis

christening the hubris of another Titanic

with champagne on icebergs

and when the market panics

feed the children of the poor

to the jaws of the economic laws of a praying mantis

then jump ship like plague rats in Genoa.

The poor know that most of the rich are thieves.

Like the Inuit do for snow

the rich have twenty-six words for greed.

The poor have one for need.

The rich think you can turn a maggot into a butterfly

if you invest your worm in the right cocoon,

that you can wash blood off with blood

and dirt with dirt

with the shirt off another man’s back.

But even when the rich reek

like waterlilies in a swamp

trying to pretend they’re loveletters they’re not

the poor can still smell

the stench of the rot they’re rooted in.

The rich indulge in plastic surgery and Hollywood implants

and lavish their poodles on manicures.

They give their death masks a facelift

and change their socks like chins,

but the poor can still see the lies in the eyes

beyond the cosmetic spin

of the tucked-up buttocks

of the tight-assed politicians.

The poor know their are cures in the world

for what kills their children,

they know there is food to eat

and water to drink

and land enough to build a house

on the ancient cornerstone

of the unshakeable mother

who shelters us all like a planet.

The rich take up both sides of a war

like a nightshift quota of guns

to arm the poor against the poor

by the hundreds of millions,

children against children like hand grenades.

The rich give the poor cancer

and then sell them bandaids.

The rich have only one answer

when poverty questions privilege.

An air force general in shades

with a camera crew in a bombed-out village.

The poor eat bitter bread with the dead.

The rich eat the living like locusts.

The crumbs of the dreams in their eyes

when they wake up to the next nightmare

fill the larders of the poor

with a harvest of thorns

as if there were no past or future

in the timeless plight of the moment.

The rich fill their siloes with missiles

that live off the fat of the land

like serpents live off liposuction

or surgeons off the thighs of Rhode Island.

The poor plant their seed in quicksand.

The rich plant theirs on the foreheads of the poor

and breed their young to feed

on the nanny of the living host

like a caterpillar with a butterfly ghost.

The rich have lawyers to break the law for them.

The poor are doing eight to ten

in a maximum security pen

with razor-wire and weights.

The rich are swinging golf clubs at the moon

without fences or gates

doing their time like June in a white collar

laundered like the crisp new dollar

that feathered the misdemeanors of their fates

like summer snowflakes.

The poor come to the garden

like birds to the leftovers

that have fallen to ground in Eden

from the tables of the rich

who trickle down the foodchain

like mosquitoes in a gangrenous ditch.

The rich say to the poor

the more we eat

the more there is for you to taste.

The poor say to the rich

thanks for the shit sandwich.

You could educate a province or a state

with what the rich waste.

The ants tax the poor like aphids.

The poor have a monopoly on despair.

The rich are still rich without money.

The poor swallow killer bees with their honey.

The rich invented evolution

to justify the ways of their species to the poor

who live like Neanderthals on the brink of extinction

who bet on the wrong bear

to survive the genetic distinction.

The poor are too often corrupted by compassion.

The rich feign poverty like a nose-ring of fashion

that pays the children of the poor

to put holes in their clothes

in the sweatshops of Hong Kong for Armani.

The soles of Nike running shoes

have more of a fingerprint

than the logoless identity

in the eyes of the skinny kid who made them

so that the rich could stay fit.

The rich sport full bellies in heaven.

The poor are boiling dice to make a thin soup

of the snake-eyes

that scaled their seven come elevens

like bad risks in the back-alleys of paradise.

Heaven’s the slumlord of hell

where poverty’s a vice

and there’s no doorbell.

The poor experience the worst.

The rich quote chapter and verse.

The rich build Taj Mahals of the spirit

with other men’s hands.

The poor build their own hovels

in ghettos of consumer quicksand

that anyone can own without warning.

The rich tell the poor they have a future

that looks like them in the morning.

The poor know how hard it is

to make the most of a present

like a dead lottery ticket

where everything is missing.

How can you get from now till then

as if less were truly more on easy street

when the future’s already been turned out like a whore

on a sleazy block of sexual charades

where the rich pimp their floats

like civic parades they ride

like golden chariots through the slum

that came of the kingdom on earth

the poor were promised

like the afterbirth of their afterlives hereafter.

In the house of life

the rich know they’re the rafter.

The poor know they’re the falling plaster.

Flesh and bone.

Blood and marrow.

One, a limousine.

The other, the empty stomach

of an overworked wheelbarrow

that’s been coupled like a locomotive

to the front end of the gravy train

for the long haul

up the world mountain

that keeps avalanching like Sispyhus

down upon all of us

like a banking failure

that walks all over us with our own feet.

The rich sell hope to the poor like the front door

on a piece of real estate.

And over the full moons of their harvest plates

the rich say grace for what they’ve received.

The poor curse the blighted grain of the pre-emptive eclipse

that swallowed the moon like the cosmic glain

and disgorged them like the withered shells

of cosmically empty wallets.

The rich squeak like the hinges on a prison door

to the poor about liberty,

but the poor are not deceived.

They take their seat

below the salt of the flat earth

like anxious dogs under the table

hoping some scrap of life will fall off

like the fat of the superflux

from the overstated laps of luxury

where one planet’s never enough

to fill the insatiate siloes of a black hole.

One, a peacock with Persian eyes.

The other, a star-nosed mole.

The rich are the new theocracy of economics

and free enterprise the creed of their holy war.

Pleonaxia is a Greek word

adopted into English to denote

the disease of more and more and more.

But the poor understand the politics of the trough,

the bread and circuses,

the breaking of loaves,

the fish and the fishing nets

that drag the Dead Sea for humans

and how the laziest lions are first to the feast

and the vultures and hyenas and jackals

must wait with the worms

to snatch their fill of what’s left,

knowing full well that one man’s meat

is another man’s roadkill

and the obesity of the glutton is a kind of theft.

The poor understand the free-for-all laws of supply and demand

are subjunctively simple and neat.

All over the world tonight

if the poor weren’t hungry

the rich wouldn’t eat.

PATRICK WHITE

BEAUTY IN THE ALOOFNESS OF MY USUAL SORROWS

BEAUTY IN THE ALOOFNESS OF MY USUAL SORROWS

Beauty in the aloofness of my usual sorrows.

A respite in time and care. A hole in space

I can escape through without setting off any alarms.

And I don’t care what this poem is going to be about

I can write it with no preconceived deceptions,

no utilitarian intent, no split lip ego-defects.

For a moment, the ice age is thawing

and the blue chicory and English ox-eyed daisies

like the taste of the air, and the drainage-ditches

are a riot of Queen Ann’s Lace and Viper’s Bugloss.

Temperate consolations modify my mood

into a truce with the bleaker conditions of life.

I’m gulled by the sunshine. I’m a schill of the mindstream.

The killer bees are away from their hives.

Amber tears of Baltic honey flow in my veins

without attracting flies. Life is unconscionably reasonable

in the efflorescence of its mystically specific details.

Even my dragon skull basks in the beatific wavelengths

of a better attitude toward its own martyrdom

in the greener fires of earth like salt in a flame.

And later tonight, if I’m still so entranced,

I’ll make my way down to the Tay River

to see if the fireflies are out dancing pianissimo

with the abandoned lighthouses of the stiff-necked cattails.

I’ll sit on a rock that doesn’t aspire to lord it over

anyone’s kingdom, and I’ll stare at the stars

until they’re tattooed like an indelible starmap

on the back of my eyelids, to keep my tears

from diluting them like smeared watercolours

or my more igneous aspects, from shattering them

like the menagerie of a zoo with glass bars.

And o, basking in the freedom of my own madness,

hilarious as peace, the infinite homelessness

of knowing I come from everywhere all at once,

and there’s nowhere I’ve walked alone in my life

down any road beset with assassins, or feathered

like strippers in boas of white sweet clover,

I haven’t been stepping across the threshold

of another wilderness always as vast

and cautiously intriguing as I am mysteriously lost

when the human intimacy of a longing heart

encounters the sentient impersonality

of an infinite mind that isn’t aware of anything

the heart doesn’t bring before it like a child’s drawing.

And there are themes you can follow

like bush wolves through the back woods

trampled down by the padding of their circuitous descents

into the dangerous pantries of the farms

pseudomorphically nestled between the hills.

It’s an itinerary that’s serviced the pack for years

with a sufficiency that’s got them this far against the odds.

And each to their own way, go with the gods

and I’ll rejoice in hearing you howl among the trees

to the chagrin of your detractors listening

with a begrudging admiration a civilization away

from what’s been bred out of them like freedom

under a full moon in heat. As for me

and my homeless approach to the ghost towns

of future zodiacs, I never want to know where I’m going

until I get there inconceivably as the only path

I could have taken in the first place,

because that’s always the way it is

even when you delight in the wiles of going astray.

Signs of your emptiness in the midst of the great unknowing.

Time and space mindscaping the exploration

you keep thrusting into the dark like the light and the lamp

of an estranged nightwatchman, hoping

you haven’t been here before, and anything

worth keeping an eye on has already been given away for free.

PATRICK WHITE

MAYBE IF WE ALL STARTED OUT

MAYBE IF WE ALL STARTED OUT

for Pat, Jeremy, Sarah and Sean

to the memory of their mother, Linda Robertson

Maybe if we all started out relating to each others’ deaths

we’d do a lot better loving one another while we’re alive.

Even in the heart of the swallow, the great finality

of our blood dropping the heavy red curtains on the play

stepping out of them from a womb like the sea

contained in a medicine bag of water with nine holes in it always

leaking out of itself like a body learning to walk on land,

loosely mastering one medium after another, water for land,

land for air, air for space until we get to the gateway

of the clear light of the void where the masters unlearn

their wisdom to go skinny-dipping in their eyes again

forgetting everything about what it was they were supposed to know

as they revel in being more buoyant than innocence or bliss.

Before we step back behind the curtains to listen for an encore.

This is the floating world where the waterclocks

run like wavelengths, serpents, Pleiosaurs, Loch Ness monsters,

as if someone were stitching the seam of a lake up

like a sail they intend to raise like a moonrise

on the masts of the tree line anchored in earth like a fleet in port.

And the waterlilies rooted like the rigging

of our lifelines, umbilical and spinal cords

to our starmud, are what the hands of a clock do

in their off time, or when they withdraw their shadows at noon

and time stops as if its petals had returned

to the bud again like a snake with its tail in its mouth.

Dark abundance fulfilling the potential of its bright vacancy

over and over again like a stranger walking down

a long road alone, all her thoughts and feelings,

shadows of the moon, stars breaking unspeakably beautiful

through the crowns of the trees intimately whispering

to one another, Who is she? Who is she?

As her imagination welds the wounded shards

of the constellations, gathers up every splinter of a star

she’s washed out of her eyes in tears, or plucked

like a thorn from her foot that pierced her

like the path she was on at the time like a firewalk

and makes of all that light, not a broken starmap,

but a mirror she can see her face in like a housewell

scanning the sky for fireflies like the first signs of her arrival.

Who among the evergreens has ever been

so intimate with death they know enough to fear it?

Hasn’t life been carrying us forth as long as death

has been eloping with the bride? The empty bucket

of the new moon tangled in morning glory

is lowered like a coffin into the dark waters of life

and winched up by the wheel of birth and death

comes up like the lost coin we retrieved from the river

like the one they place between our teeth when we die

full and bright as the harvest moon everytime

we take a bath in our own graves without holding our breath

like pearl divers seeking the white and black eyes of the moon

in the depths of their souls as we rise and fall

like Orphic skulls, shipwrecks and eclipses

bobbing and sinking on our own thought-waves,

the mountains we climb as high as the valleys we plunge into

are deep and inexplicable. Everyone, even a Buddha,

is a sophomore of life on earth. Foolishly wise, wisely foolish,

but look how dangerous it is to send our children to school

to learn about death as if it were something

you couldn’t hide from them by closing your eyes

like the happy ending of a fairytale they’ll out grow

believing in like garden snakes shedding their skin

as if you lied to them without meaning to because

death isn’t anything you can live your way through

without accepting the dark wisdom of the enlightened eclipse

even at noon that folds the tents of the flowers up

and sends them back to their beginnings

like the unopened loveletters of the pine cones

that bloom in fire, and the night lilies that open

the eyes of the water to the mysteries and metaphors

they hold in common with the root fires of the stars.

Our seeing is a living turmoil of mud and water

not a glass shard we’re looking through darkly

to protect our vision from the sun in eclipse

as if you had to wait till you got to heaven to clean your lens

or wipe the dirt and crumbs of a bad dream out of your eyes.

Whenever we occasionally come to peace with ourselves

like a sea of awareness on good terms

with its own mental weather, kingfishers in the sunlight,

skimming the fire-gilded waves, or no one

in the wheelhouse of the zodiac in a great, Pacific storm,

everything is reflected clearly in the stars and the clouds

that pass overhead like the prayer beads of the Canada geese

returning like empty urns in the spring to gather up

the dead again when the leaves begin to fly in the fall

and take them somewhere eternal where they get

to shine a light on it all like a new medium

they’re learning to work with to express themselves

as sentience always will like a hidden secret

that wanted to be known by whispering whole galaxies

in the black holes of our ears listening like seashells

on the far shores of the islands of light we’re washed up on

like a message in a bottle we sent to ourselves in a past life

like the Cutty Sark, and arks of doves and crows under full sail

we sent out looking for land, knowing full well, one

would be delayed by what it found as its feathers changed

from white to black, and the other would be sent back

like a sign of peace that rinsed the bloodstain of the red sky

in the morning like a false dawn out of the white flags of surrender

that blow like curtains of snowbunting and white star

from the open windows of spring gaping in incredulity

at what time it is with so many hands of the wildflowers

pointing at all hours of the clock, day and night, as if there were

time enough for everything when the mindstream

weathers the flashflood of its own tears and comes to rest

like the Burgess Shale at the top of a mountain far to the west.

Sophocles once said never to have been born is best

as if death were the solution to the tragic horror of a painful dilemma.

When has life ever not been just as open behind us

as it is up ahead? But surely his one-eyed advice is the crutch

and flying buttress lambda leans on and not to die

like the Conservation of Data Principle in a black hole doesn’t

is the better of two worlds when less is more and more is less

and death doesn’t spread the lungs of the hourglass out

like the wingspan of a blood eagle or the waters of the Red Sea

closing up after us like wounded curtains healing after the play.

More like immortal bees returning to their hives at night

to churn honey out of the eyes that looked upon them in the light

and tasted the sweetness of life at work in the starfields

in the belt of Orion, in the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades,

in the Mons Veneris of the Beehive star cluster between

Regulus in Leo and Castor and Pollux in Gemini

gleaming like first magnitude insights into why

we die to live and live to die like fireflies and stars

rising like new constellations over the event horizons

of our eyes that never fail like waterlilies to take us by surprise.

PATRICK WHITE