A PAINT RAG OF THE MASTERPIECE I USED
TO BE
A paint rag of the masterpiece I used
to be.
Is this humility? Or time to quit? I
refuse
to listen to my muse as if she were a
whistle
on a graveyard shift. A nightbird or
nothing
but the white noise of the cosmic hiss
cooling its afterbirth off ? I make a
point
when I write, or paint, or make love
of never knowing where my mindstream’s
going with me, and everything sings
mysteriously
as if it were oracular. I let the world
come upon me by surprise, expecting
nothing
beyond the moment or behind me, and
it’s twice
as spectacular for being unanticipated
than if I were in up over my head
in an ocean of notions of what it was
all about.
I’m on an enlightenment path through
the gutter.
I’m swept along with things like log
jams
of cigarette-butts and dud lottery
tickets on the rain
and then things pan out expansively in
my flowing
and I’m able to reflect the
constellations again like a starmap
of mirroring consciousness, and I’m
utterly astounded
by the beauty of a peace deep within
that makes me think,
despite the apparent facts, the most
prevalent element
in the universe, is an exquisitely
subtle intelligence
that gives to everything that exists,
and, I suspect,
doesn’t, as well, not a God particle,
but to each
its own measure of a wavelength from a
firefly of insight
to an apocalyptic supernova of
mind-blowing revelation
so intense, you glimpse it once, and
your eyes evaporate.
What a way to spend your life though.
A poet on the road
he took at a fork of his own walking on
stars, thorns,
the eyelids of black roses in eclipse,
night seas
that forbid the false hopes of
lifeboats
and the buoyant despair of the
shipwrecks
that lay on the bottom like a black box
that had lost
its voice in the depths calling out to
the fish for help.
Maybe you have to drown first to be a
good lifeguard
with gills you can trust, or return to
the womb like I do
from time to time to hear the allure of
the mermaids
singing me up onto the rocks of my
birth
as if the waters of life had to break
like an urn
before the dragon could be born again
like a star
out its own ashes. The light out of the
dark like Draco.
Hic sunt dracones. The eye out of the
shattered lamp
it used to go by like a nightwatchman
among the shadows
it cast like soot on the dark glass of
windows into the heart
as it made sure the doors were locked
on what
was stored inside like the unknown
potential
of the collective unconscious in the
comatose warehouse of life.
In order to be all inclusively lyrical,
I learned a long time ago
to pipe on a hollow silo like the wind
or a drunk
on the neck of an empty whiskey bottle
beside the canal
in the spring because it was too late
to fish for evolution
and satyr I may have been, there was no
other syrinx
or turtle-shaped guitar or lyre within
immediate reach.
Sooner or later, your Dionysian past is
going to catch up
to your Apollonian future, and the
measure of a human
won’t be the palm of a planar hand
laying out the Parthenon
caryatid by caryatid, but a starmud
temple of sacred prostitutes
leaping naked through the fires of Isis
at a rave
of tattoos in a mosh pit of esoteric
constellations
dancing on the dark side of the moon
like a cult of fireflies
initiating your imagination into
different altars
than those you’ve been knocking over
for lightyears now
like the pillars of false idols that
call down the mountaintops
of nemetic avalanches to bury you in
for calling their bluff.
I’ve lost count of the number of
times I’ve been
carried home on my shield like the
phase of the moon
I was gored by like an island-hopping
mercenary
quixotically tilting at prayer wheels
fighting to right
the toppled axis of Neptune with its
head stuck in the seabed
like a tent-peg in a desert of stars on
campaign
in a holy war with myself I knew I was
doomed to lose.
What did Archilocus say? Some
Thracian’s got my shield.
O, well. That’s tough. But
comes a time you’ve had enough.
You just want to
sit like moss on the rolling stone
of a prophetic
skull and listen to what the crowns
of the elm trees
swaying in the wind are whispering
to the deep violet
storm clouds mobilizing at the edge of the sky,
embedded like a
third eye in a hurricane of razor blades.
These days I give
hermetic poetry readings open
to my solitude,
after keeping my mouth shut for years,
nacreously knitting
my broken skeleton in a bone-box
into the black
pearls of sacred syllables dawning under my tongue
like new days of
darkness ahead expanding like space
in the heart of a
voyageur that’s left the solar system
like an explorer
that’s breaking twigs like blips and beeps
along the way
should anyone back on earth be following
what I’ve seen
and been to have gotten as far as I have in life.
My heart is free.
My spirit as uncontained as a flame
that paints outside
the lines of the mirror I used to look through
like a reflecting
telescope on a cold mountaintop
trying to escape
the light pollution of cities in the valleys
I once rose from
like a coffin of a comet over Sodom and Gomorrah
or the mushroom
cloud of a nuclear explosion
looking straight
into the eyes of the sun like the vapour
of a rainbow that
went blind looking back like a pillar of salt
at what time can
wreak when the light gets turned around
like an ingrown
solar flare of a mind that’s lost at sea
on a liferaft
surrounded by the fins of circling sun dials.
I’ve privately
reprieved all the doves on the death row
of the aviaries of
my voice, and released the stars
like chimney sparks
from the bad contracts they’d signed
early in their
musical careers with the managerial blow hards
that pumped the
volume up on the celestial spheres
until you couldn’t
hear anything but the sound of your eardrums
breaking like
chandeliers of hard rain in an ice storm into the scene
with big dreams of
shining one day like creosote
in a crematorium of
genuinely undiscovered talent stars
that burned the
whole house down like a zodiac
over the slums of
London in 1666, or Rome
while Nero fiddled
his way through 180l literary awards
on tour in Greece
lying through their eye teeth like Corinthians.
My childhood a
progressive demolition of norms.
No regrets. I was
born like a heretic into this madness
of homicidal
fictions dismembering Orphic corpses
in nondescript
bathtubs after hanging them upside down
to bleed them like
roses and acoustic guitars, ear to ear,
their vocal cords
cut like downed powerlines
that used to
accompany the starlings on their staves.
I have a lot in
common with extraordinarily ordinary people.
Art for art’s
sake is akin to masturbation and about
as productive, so I
don’t try to prove when I write
I’m so unique you
have to ask someone else for an explanation.
No people. No
painting or poetry. No communication.
People come first.
Art is for people, or it’s just the wind
moving the sand
around in an hourglass to no effect
like moments of
life lived on the seabeds of the moon,
cul de sacs, dead
ends with no time to reflect
on the possibility
of pearls rolling like dew off their tongues.
Everyman is No one,
the same who lifted the veils of Isis
and revealed
himself to the Cyclops. Poetry’s
the long, hard
discipline of learning to forget your name
going beyond the
unpublishable lovers of fame
with one hand down
the muse’s pants like an amanuensis.
You’ve got to sit
at the side of your deathbed at every moment
in order to be
fully alive and free of yourself
so you can sing for
the dream figures on the corner
of Gore and the
universe as if they were listening
to their own voice
in the crowded solitude of their passing.
There’s mercy in
this, a way of life, a form of worship,
celebration,
devotion, sacred circus clowns, ghost dancers
elated by the crazy
wisdom of praying off the reservation
like poetry
readings in the basement catacombs of busy bars.
Reality wholly
conformable to the surrealistic facts
of an active
imagination looking at the way things are
as they pass from
one transformation to the next
like the waterclock
of a mindstream pouring itself out
into the empty
forms of dry housewells waiting
for water levels to
rise on the moon like a temple of sandbags.
I write like a
river overflowing its banks like the Milky Way
or the soft
shoulders of the Road of Ghosts to flood the earth
with the alluvial
silt of burnt out stars that renew their light
by breaking bread
with Spica in the hand of Virgo
like the dark
abundance of the autumn equinox
pouring its bright
vacancy like a harvest moon
into the
inexhaustible silo of an hourglass
the wind plays its
picture music on
like the urns of
starlings born like a voice box
caught like a song
in the throats of exorcised chimney pots.
True to my
circuitous blossoming I refuse
to give up the
ghost of my evanescence
like the smoke of a
draconian fire roaring down below
to keep this house
of life warm by laying down
on the pyres of my
cracked heartwood like a fossil of rain
singing to the
beatific stars like a heretic
in an auto de fe of
blue jays and sunflowers
blooming in the
creative wake of my self immolations
as a way of
exacting as much ecstasy as I can from the pain.
Absurd as it seems,
I’m trying to live up
to the aspirations
of rogue fireflies untethered
like a dream of
what could be released
like grains of wild
wheat in the starfields of a feast
from the treadmills
of conditioned consciousness
like constellations
of the usual myths of origin
rising and falling
like life and death from the east to the west
while everything
that thrives on earth is aberrantly turning
against the flow of
things like salmon summoned from the sea
by the mystery of a
counter-intuitive voice upstream the other way
as my embryonic
stem cells listen to what it suggests
and pro-creatively
hearing what its eyes have to say
about the
immanental vision of life that burns within me, radically obey.
PATRICK WHITE
