WHEN THE UNSAYABLE SUPPLANTS YESTERDAY'S WISDOM

WHEN THE UNSAYABLE SUPPLANTS YESTERDAY’S WISDOM

When the unsayable supplants yesterday’s wisdom

it makes it look obvious and trivial in retrospect

and you marvel at the spiritual gestures of goodwill

that swept you off your feet for light-years

as the arcana of a discipline you gave up trying to master,

because you could only see into the matter

as far as the light you were given to go by.

And you didn’t know then that when

you blew the candle out you held

pathetically up to the abyss that you did more,

by blowing it out, to illuminate the universe,

than you did when you fed it your heart

to keep it burning like a night light among the stars,

or a lighthouse paling in the full glare of the sun.

Off the path is the way of the path.

How can anyone be lost? Or found, for that matter?

Midways of gurus with their touring freak shows.

Sacred matchbooks of budding sulphur

throwing humans into the Bonfire of the Vanities,

chasing the bank-rolled Renaissance out of Florence.

Terminal literalism, infectious symbolitis

sweeping down the coast like hemorrhagic fever

from the merchant fleets of Genoa. The wild grape vines

of intuitive insight converted into the razor wire

of paranoid orthodoxies. The heretics bear witness

to the madness in the judgement of their abusers,

and scald the clouds with their blood for it.

The spiritual highways cluttered with exiles,

refugee saints, and scapegoats, where is there

a wilderness left where the tourists don’t go

to gawk at the hermits like wildlife? Back

to the birch groves and the cawing of the crows

like auctioneers that don’t have a thing to sell.

No one’s footprints to follow in. The way things

turn out, at best, a wolf path through the snow

gone by spring, or where you bent the waist high grass

by walking through it like the path of least resistance,

unmapped as the wind. What is it all, when

even the seven-tiered tower of the Scotch thistle

is a mental event, if not open, unknown and empty

in the sense of being indefinable, not missing,

as if anything were there in the first place

it was crucial not to lose? Spare your tears.

Life hasn’t got anything to repent or reform.

The mystery manifest as it is and that’s the whole of it.

What more of it is there to reveal, than the rocks

have already said? Real, not real, the flowers bloom nonetheless

and you’re free to make or feel or think or not

about them as you wish. Mourn the ruination

of the flowers in a passion play as old as the stars

or trust your own mind to mentor you in the ways

of not reifying it into a thing among things,

the source and matrix of your most cherished illusions,

the mirage of the dark mother who eats her own like time.

There is no pattern, path, paradigm, psychodynamic

or unified field theory that the mind won’t

accommodate itself to like a child’s drawing of the universe.

You can elaborate the roots of a tree like a fractal into

a morphology of knowledge forms

that sing in its boughs like sparrows

in the black walnuts of the morning

and then consult it like the grammar of a dream

for the blue print or starmap of the house you’re building

like a screening myth with a built-in library.

The magician gulled in the doorway of his own magic,

having lost the key to the spell he cast

when this desert of stars was merely

the vagrant threshold of a tent in the moon’s back yard.

The folly of sages, the wisdom of fools,

what’s the point of enlightening your own freedom

if you’re too afraid to accept it as the mystical mundanity

that’s under your nose this very moment?

You can hunt your own shadows down like heretics

fleeing the hounds of heaven, you can denounce

an eclipse for being a sunspot on your illumination

and polish the mirror for the rest of your life

and still not wash your face off with a paint rag

like a clown in a green room waxing tragic

to counteract the laughter at the expense of his own wounds.

Look into the eyes of the roadkill for yourself

as if no one else in the world can do your seeing for you

and you won’t see anything very shocking to be afraid of.

No spiritual snake-eyes. No hidden meaning

you have to get at the guts of like a turkey-vulture.

And if you feel compassion, and it’s natural you should,

it’s because there’s something communal about the random

you sense has been going on a lot longer

than the last few thought moments when you showed up

to be misunderstood by your own imagination.

You want some good spiritual advice to get you in the habit

of taking it yourself, whether things are sublimely rough

and death is dying into you, or life is trivializing

the palatial playhouse it was born into? When occasion arises,

and when does it not, learn to call your own bluff

and sit down on the ground, and have a good laugh.

PATRICK WHITE

AND IN THAT MOMENT THE STARS COME DOWN TO EARTH

AND IN THAT MOMENT THE STARS COME DOWN TO EARTH

And in that moment the stars come down to earth

and light up the lanterns of your cells

you’ll finally see that constellation of your self

so many of us have been born under

shining like eyes in your blood, your bones,

your tongue, your skin glowing with starmaps

like the holy books of the fireflies. You’ll

light up this whole night sea of sentience

with a vernal firestorm of essential insights

like the full moon conducting a seance

among the corals, a fertility rite of enlightenment

in which you repeatedly give birth to the universe

moment by moment, cosmic eggs in a halo of comets.

To love the earth in all its mutable variations

is to love the music of your own revelation

playing like a genius in a beauty pageant

with the spontaneous brilliance of billions

of miraculously catastrophic forms of life

with an appetite for adding flames to the fire

like leaves and petals and wings to a wildflower

until the elaborated order of things is a loveletter

chaos wrote in its own beautifully cursive hand.

Above everyone’s manger there’s a star

that becomes incarnate in humans

who go looking for themselves like three wise men,

or the trifecta of three wise women in their craft,

Alnitam, Alnilam, and Mintaka in the belt of Orion,

and Sirius updating the calendars of the Dogon

lower down in the southeast such that even those

lost in the deepest black holes a prophetic dreamer’s

ever been cast into, can’t help adding their light

to the darkness by following their own star

back to themselves, to find the light they’ve been given

to go by, was like the mind, like the lantern in their hand,

like the lostness they ever despaired of finding their way out of,

the illumination of their true destination all along.

The mountain was climbing the guide back up

the stairwells of its own elemental genome to the stars

like a child that can’t wait to slide down the bannisters again

or a sparrow hawk riding its own gleeful thermals

like the first star to appear in the sky like the eye

in the moodring of the peacock blue-green of the sunset.

Every time a species is effaced from the smile of the earth,

our own bodies are desecrated by the act

and in every one of our cells, lockets of the galaxies,

where the firmament places its highest hopes

close to our hearts, a star goes extinct, a candle goes out

that’s been burning for millions of years,

and the windows pull down the blinds like eyes in mourning.

The world is more collaboratively communal

than it is solitarily universal. First rule of thumb

in creating life out of its own cauldron, organize,

like starlings rising out of a birch grove.

First law of the heart in cherishing and sustaining it,

is to respect yourself enough to look after it

as if it were the changeling daughter of the new moon

placed in your care by the dark matrix of a passing eclipse

that let’s you in on the family secret the stars

have known all along, that every conception

of your heart and mind is blood of your blood,

flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone. And in your genes

the sacred syllables, relics and runes of your own fossil.

Add your life like lyrics to the cacophonous symphony

of the jungle music you hear going all around you

day and night, the ancient exhilaration of life

sword dancing with the stars to the dangerous riffs

of a predatory lead guitar hunting solo in the shadows

of a game of snakes and ladders that can see like dice in the dark.

Hone your instincts like the blade of the crescent moon

on the stone of your heart in a biochemical state of grace,

and don’t neglect to let your spirit break

like the new dawn of a lobster out of your body armour

or a dragonfly escaping into one sky after another

through the window casement the first night of its moulting.

Compassion is the visionary collagen of life

and imagination is its agent. Its metaphors

graft the trees and the sponges into lungs.

Can you hear the generations of nightbirds

in every single vowel of your voice? Do you know

they don’t sing just for themselves, but in the lament

and longing of their songs, you can hear the faint traces

of the lumbering bells of the dinosaurs bellowing

like the eidolons of carboniferous foghorns in the mist

off the coasts of consciousness? Sometimes

when I hear the bush wolves howling in the hills

I catch a note or two of a pack of killer whales

going deep to recover the black voice box of tetrapods

who preferred dancing in water to walking on land.

Compassion is the recognition of your identity in everything.

You wound the earth, an arrowhead sings in your rib cage.

Can you hear the demure laughter of the willows

walking like geishas along the shores of your mindstream

undoing the ribbons of the stars and waterlilies

to let them fall free from their hair to pale in the moonrise,

the memory of old lovers mingling in the living light

like the ghosts of the waterbirds returning to their shoals and inlets

like the bridge of a song, a waterclock of stars

between one stanza and the next life keeps coming back to

like the refrain of a melody line of the sea

it just couldn’t get out of its head like the reflection

of trillions of stars writing irradiant treble clefs

of the original sheet music in constellations high over head

like a five string quintet for the hymeneal cosmologists

while archaeologists achieve illumination

in the golden ratios of the life and death spirals

of the fossilized bass clefs of the equally alluring

mystery of the vocally earthbound children of the starmud

singing their hearts out like a choir off key as if

they grew by losing their balance against

a background of cosmic harmony so sweetly

that if rain could speak of what it’s like to fall upon

the fruits and flowers of the earth, it would sound very much

like the laughter and weeping of the ungrammatical stars?

PATRICK WHITE

I STILL BELIEVE IN THE PURSUIT OF AN EARTHLY EXCELLENCE

I STILL BELIEVE THE PURSUIT OF AN EARTHLY EXCELLENCE

I still believe the pursuit of an earthly excellence,

not in name alone, but in the act of elucidating

even so much as a firefly’s insight into the darkness

to add your experience and confusion to the abyss

like a myth of origins in progress, is a noble calling,

a privilege accorded by the moon to wear the hide

and head of a wolf when the spirit howls in longing

to lift the agony of humans up to the stars as if

there were no greater sacrifice we had to give than this

that makes us peers of those fires, eye to eye, mirror to mirror

as above so below, the jewel of compassion in the slag

of our suffering, the beauty of the rose in the midst of its thorns

weeping holy blood on the skulls of her prophetic children.

A poet among people, a voice, a hermit thrush or an owl,

a red-winged blackbird on a dead branch or a crow

on the cabled bridge of the green blackberry,

or an indigo grackle, the eclipse of the mourning dove,

regardless of who or who isn’t listening to the wind

rasp over this desert of stars in an hourglass

like the wavelength of a serpent of fire as a sign of intelligence:

Say what is uniquely human about you so that

others might recognize themselves in the music.

Mourn as you must as if it were your funeral

you were going to as one day it will be,

your ashes in the locket around a loved one’s neck,

and break trail along the way as you explore

the wilderness of your loss so that others might follow,

assured by the dolmen of your presence in their solitude

the dangers of the journey are humanly surmountable.

A poet among people, that’s what you can say to yourself

on your deathbed and mean it in gratitude with a smile

at whatever shape of chaos you’re worshipping at the time,

you had a summons to suffer, praise, rejoice, mean and go mad

on behalf of other people, you, a self portrait of them.

Your love of them voluntarily going into exile,

or driven into it by the very ignorance you’re dying to overcome,

to know their homelessness as if it were a threshold your own,

to sow the available dimensions of the future

with metaphoric weeds and wildflowers in the starfields

so we don’t forget what all the fuss about enlightenment

means to a species rooted like a waterlily in its starmud

as if that were the dark genius behind all that shining,

the apex, the acumen, the anthos, not the denouement

of our flowering, and no future habitable that isn’t freely human

to express its awe and wonder at being imaginatively alive

like a purpureal crocus under an eyelid of opalescent snow.

Poetry is the discipline of a crazy person

who walks wisely among people half-fearful

of how fiercely vulnerable you must become to love them

as if there’d never be anything in it for you,

the most indefensibly human of them all

o so much more substantial than your dream figures

once you wake up, stubbing your heart on the rock of the world,

a razor blade to the artery of the rose that bleeds

just a profusely as you do when death cuts obliquely

into the stem and presents it like the ear of a bull

to the moon in a sacred brothel around the corner

opposite the Iseum where they make the partial whole again.

Incited by life to be demonically playful in the darkness,

angelically withdrawn like the stars and shadows at noon,

cherish the inconceivable nights that are not rewards

for anything you could have done or earned, as love

and inspiration aren’t, and marvel the more

at the strangeness of the miracle that things are this way.

Exhausted mid stride between the noon and dusk of your life,

don’t underestimate the mysticism of action

in the mundane labours of the day responding like bees

to the floral opportunities of tending the larkspur

like a voice coach pinging a tuning fork on their stamens.

Work at nothing that isn’t a form of worship

that demands your passion. Not to be fascinated by your life

is a child labour sweat factory of human enslavement.

The petty won’t brave their own happiness

nor that of anyone else, but the generous will

who understand that happiness is a grace of the heart

that happens to you from the inside out like a fortune cookie

not a law of causality misery is endlessly trying to repeal

beyond a reasonable doubt of ever coming true.

But seldom a joy without a bruise for a poet

whose bell of sorrows depends like most humans

as much upon the rain as the light to ripen

into the warm sugars of life like wild apples at sunset.

The eyes that look the deepest are usually the saddest

like housewells anyone’s free to draw from

but god, what poignancy of light smiles favourably

upon the faces of the tragically fulfilled

who lived out their singular prophecies

to purge everyone’s terror with empathy for their fate.

Arete, excellence. Aristos of merit. Beauty of soul, mind, body, heart,

the quality of your awareness, the largesse of your experience,

the natural humility of the bow you return to the mystery

of a tree in bloom, and the wisdom of an old stump,

not in the way of perfection, but the brilliance and courage

of your failure to attain the unattainable, enlightenment

the ultimate defeat for the benefit of all because it’s never complete

even when the Buddha goes straight to hell like an arrow.

Not void bound, bless the intuitive disobedience of the poet

who burns in the flames of her most sacred heresy,

savagely curse with compassion the erosive injustice

of the greedy legislating impoverished standards of living,

raise your voice when you see murder being done

so your silence isn’t complicit and the power of your rage

mollified by the slag of association that blunts

the edge of your sword when the only mercy is a quick kill

with a sharp blade and you go to it like your own execution.

I don’t care if you’re a junkie sleeping on a car seat

on the back porch of a crack house in the summer,

wondering in a moment to yourself if the stars ever weep for us,

or an associate professor of English at the University of Victoria,

cherishing a pair of thin leather gloves some raving beauty

left in your office and though she never returned

to reclaim them and you as for years you hoped and hoped

still rot like black banana skins on your windowsill,

a divorced housewife doing investigative forensics

on what happened to her life at the kitchen table,

share whatever starfields you’ve sown with tares or wheat

as if there were always enough bread to break with everyone.

Take the gold coin you call a career from under your tongue

like a false moonrise and washing your corpse

in your own grave, take the edges off your sphericity,

average the crucials out like a pebble or a planet

in the great tides of life you’re immersed in

like a human panning their own starmud for a little more light

to be shed in the depths of their oceanic awareness

than there was before you showed up like one bright fish

and lit your cells up like votive candles dedicated to the dark

and started seeing things by the light of your own life,

not the Rosetta stone of three dead languages

that never spoke from the heart about the ruses

of being human that get us through the darkest nights of ourselves,

so when someone takes a greasy volume of poems

down from the shelf, the cover worn off, the glue

of the perfect binding crumbling like dreams

in the corners of their eyes as they wake up,

and they’re shuffling loose pages as if they were

paginating a deck of cards, or trying to keep

the leaves of an autumn tree together, though you’re dead,

though your tongue is a leaf on the wind

and your eyes are clouds, your breath gone proto-nebular,

and it’s three in the morning, and the solitude is withering,

and insanity is grinning in their face as if to say

you always knew this is what it would come to,

and they reach for you like a home-brew of magic syllables,

yarrow sticks and tea leaves, liver spots and fossils

in a bonebox at the bottom of your skull cup,

write in such a way they don’t just read what you’ve said

but sit down on the ground with a friend they can share things with

and break your book open like a loaf of bread

spiritually cooling on an open windowsill as fragrant

as white sweet clover growing along the roadsides of paradise,

but as substantially nurturing to life as compassion for the flesh.

PATRICK WHITE  

YES, I LEFT YOU, CRYING IN THE NUDE LIKE INSPIRATION

YES, I LEFT YOU, CRYING IN THE NUDE LIKE INSPIRATION

Yes, I left you, crying in the nude like inspiration

at the end of the driveway while the trees

were tearing up a manuscript of leaves

they’d written like silver Russian olives for the moon.

I could hear you trying to smudge my name

like the misbegotten house of the zodiac

from the blackboard of your teaching starmap

several Magellenic Clouds down the dirt road

swearing my first magnitude stars were all tinfoil

not worth the light they were confederately printed on

as I drove away like a space probe into the dark,

trying to keep ahead of my own prophecy

and never come back, no, never like a chimney spark

to that smouldering fire that never broke into flame.

I wept in the smoke of your acrid oak

that hissed and bubbled like spit from a cobra’s mouth

long enough. Go, little woman, like a landmine

that thinks everybody’s dying to step on you

all the time and have their arms and legs blown off

listening to you apologize for not recognizing me

even though I called out that night’s pass word,

love, love, love as if I weren’t behind enemy lines,

as you stitched my body parts back together

like a prickly pear or spiny sea urchin with a defensive attitude,

trying to shine your best light on it like a candle

in a concentration camp you held my feet to

like birch bark and a funeral pyre of kindling

to the heat of your fireproof desire to be inflammable.

Yes, I left you, with your mouth gaping with incredulity

like the larger land mammals at the end of the last ice age

glorying in the freedom of their new found extinction

like a Dyer wolf pack tired of howling at the moon

that kept turning her back on them like lunatics

that couldn’t carry a tune like that chip of a bluebird

you carried on your shoulder to piss the world off.

The buzzing of innumerable onomatopoeic Tennysonian bees

isn’t a guarantee that your locust trees are full of honey.

Or the bulb of the moon you buried in my starmud

like a prophetic skull you never wanted to listen to again

was always the best judge of the daylilies that kept

breaking into flame between us like a rootfire of unquenchable sex.

Even when my lighthouses were turned thumbs down

on the latest of our famous west coast shipwrecks

I was only ever trying to put the torch of stars I bore for you

out in a tarpit with the eyes of a volatile dragon

to get you to spread your wings like a field fire

that knew how to green the short straws of a scarecrow

at a ghost dance that could rain on the ashes of everything

we wanted to bring back to life again and again and again.

Because when you said yes to being loved, firefly,

your light was inextinguishable and I could feel in my blood

as I approached you like a heretic the axis mundi of the stake

he was happy to immolated at like a Luna moth driven mad

by a female jinn enflamed by desire without smoke,

a thousand buddhas regretting they ever escaped suffering

by refusing to climb a ladder of thorns for the sake of the rose

they uprooted like three wishes any one of which

could annihilate you in joy wholly absorbed

in the false dawn of nirvana the distinction was lost upon.

You could overwhelm my body at will from the inside out

with the spell you cast on my blood like a hunter’s moonrise,

a lotus unspoiled by the slum she was rooted in

like enlightenment in a swamp of delusion

where the snakes swallowed the frogs like koans

head first until all their cannibalistic taboos

reversed the course of the curse and started

speaking in tongues of serpent fire like kundalini haikus.

I bent the blade of my sword in tribute on the waters of life

I had tempered it in like an igneous alloy of carbon and iron.

Night and blood. The mysterious appeal of a woman in hell.

Not so much dangerous because she was beautiful.

But beautiful because she was a risk I had to take

as she, for her sake, so an angel could fall from paradise

and a demon could rise from the underworld of half-lives

that could look the light straight in the eyes

like a black hole or full eclipse that was never the first to blink

when she spread her cowl like a Venus fly trap

and began to dance like a wavelength for my prophetic skull.

More Orphic, I think, than Judaic-Christian served on a silver platter.

I’ve always preferred to wane gibbously past my prime

like a ghost returning to the scene of my lyrical dismemberments

to add a few light touches, metaphorically, like star sapphires

to the mystic ferocity of the dark desires in the eyes of the myth.

PATRICK WHITE

WILDER TIMES THAN WE THOUGHT THEY WERE IN THE MOMENT

WILDER TIMES THAN WE THOUGHT THEY WERE IN THE MOMENT

Wilder times than we thought they were in the moment,

savage intensities cultivated in the name of art,

the children of the bourgeois afraid of violating

the mystique of genius as if there were a lumpen proletariat taboo

like a magic circle drawn around it, cordons of spinal cords

at a premier of the polymorphous perverse

melting down like emotional nuclear reactors

irradiating Pleiadic insights of white phosphorus

like jelly fish trying to plug into the scene.

First magnitude stars that weren’t quite sure

whose legend they were shining in

as long as there were something Icarian about it

and infallibly tragic, as if to be destroyed by your gift

were certain proof you were a snakecharmer

with a talent dark enough to curse your own blessing

in the sacro-sanct way sacrificial heroism

is a judas-goat for the gods to coax them out of hiding.

What addictions, what madness didn’t we tolerate?

No weirdness, no twisted perversity of fate

unacceptable in order to keep up the morale among ourselves

that our own derangements were liveable humans.

Stoic sobriety with a touch of the infernally noble

as long as there were enough star power

to be derived from it extemporally to fool yourself

you’d been to hell, you’d conversed with the gibbering ghosts

in the underworld, and now you were ascending from Hades,

empty-handed, except for an abalone inlaid guitar,

a voice, a repertoire of songs you used to sing

from coast to coast like a ghost at your own seance,

or if you were a poet, three books under your boa skin belt

like wampum, a wounded heart channeling Horatian odes

to staunch the bloodflow like a hemorrhage of fire.

We lived as if we were always spitting into the face

of librarians moved by poetry enough to write about

making raspberry jam in their amazingly savoury kitchens

and that wasn’t very right or nice of us, regardless

of whether they deserved it or not, but it would be

less than frank not to admit how alarming it would be

not to be able to muster a cobra of spit the same way now

to punish the eyes of the snake-oil salesmen

with a taste of their own medicine for fouling

the housewells of the muses with all that bleach and brine

they scour their poems with as if they were keel-hauling them

on the hull of the moon out of fear of drinking

from the same skull cup as everyone else on the nightshift

deep in the mines of their starmud working with

a candle and canary to bring the occasional jewel to light,

out of fear of getting some life under their fingernails

or contaminating their lips with human elixirs.

At least we killed like tigers, not tapeworms,

though needless to say, because that’s the way the world is,

we did more damage to ourselves trying to stand out

like someone real from the mob of the middling and maudlin

to suffer the black farce of our former radiance

lightyears later in this ventriloquial dawn

where wooden dummies have mastered the art

of throwing their heartwood around like the voices

of decoy waterbirds in front of a hunter’s blind

trying to bring the words of those who can fly

down to their level of poultry and pettiness.

Every quarter asked, every quarter given,

a disastrous expression of compassion,

but when you’re trying to live with largesse

as if you had a soul that was more mammal than reptile

of course you’re going to err on the side of generosity,

your winged horse spurred on by pussywillows and burrs

until you’re thrown off by a star under your saddle,

the dupe of your own unaccountable gesture

as you ride off into the sunset with Don Quixote

feeling like Sancho Panza tilting at the futility

of counter clockwise windmills on lifelight savings time.

Too many swine. Too few pearls unwilling to be trampled

like the grapes of wrath getting indignantly drunk on us.

Don’t offer your tears and sacred oils to someone

with a drinking problem. Though I encourage you

to ignore my advice so you can be what I mean for yourself.

Incandescent ingratitude. As if genius

took its tragic lifemask off, stepped out of its skin,

tore the curtains off the windows like the northern lights

and showed you the blackhole of the ego in the spider web

that spun a myth of origin like a starmap that knew

only a few chords and barred its Fs as an excuse for music

that maintained the world began with an arachnid

but kept that fact hid from the frenzy of friends

around the streetlamp of a public image on the radio.

Ego. That paper dragon that likes to play with matches

creatively, a brush dipped in paint, a nib in blood

that flared up like a bouquet of sulphurous little chapbooks

straining to convince you their personality is black magic

once you get past the alibi of words that smack

of saccharine and formic acid, ants and stinging nettles,

and taste how shallow and unclever a cynical lack

of sensitivity to things ego doesn’t understand is,

to that mess of neurotic avarice that sticks like gum

that’s lost its flavour in the tresses of a flypaper muse

as it lackadaisically strums the guitar like a Ferrari

warming up, to disguise the fact, if you go by the work,

it can’t really play and the wheel hasn’t been invented for it yet.

Dramatic brawls at midnight, out on the street,

at the top of our lungs, embodiments of nemetic karma

defending principles willing to settle the score here and now

if you were crazy, drunk, or daring enough to risk

losing more than you ever had or intended to give

to substantiate your reality with fists that would later bloom

like bruised crocuses and waterlilies lyrically inclined

to deadly nightshade and moody orchids in an eclipse.

But most edged the Texas toe of their cowboy boot

up to an unseen line drawn in the stars like a Tropic of Capricorn,

that said for all your talk of figs and horns, a coward

goes this far and no further for self-preservative reasons

that have been canning him like jam since childhood.

More than one night I lay in the dark sobering up,

proofreading my name in the sooty contrails

of bic lighters on the ceilings of Ottawa city jails,

Orphically exalted to have left my mark

in an underworld anthology that didn’t depend

on a political jury of friends who elected things into print

as if they were pensioning off candidates for the senate

with two free copies, fifteen minutes max

at a mass reading, a minute on the local news

and enough notoriety to incrementally con

a few more false friends they might have been

wrong about you, and accordingly adjust

their parallactic affiliation with your twinkling.

My elders, the ghosts of older owls, the afterlives

of stars that had burnt out romantically on alcohol,

who spoke like legends of themselves in a refugee camp

for broken chandeliers and abused constellations

performing off Broadway like the loveletters of a mailman

who delivered them like the wind in a tree in the autumn,

since imprinted like the cambium of last year’s spring

in the hall of famous tree rings that have stopped growing.

Honoured with urns. But for awhile, precociously,

peers of mine, fish dying of thirst beside a freshwater lake,

artificial respirators crying out for back-up parachutes

because they thought it was poetically cute

to always be the one who was rescued from themselves.

Ego grease. Black farce of a circus on tour

with drugstore carnies, clutching at straws

like the rungs of a trapeze someone was always

falling from like a star you caught and put in your pocket

like a safety net that counted on your friends’ sense of timing

to save you from your own web like the spindle you made of fate.

Metamorphic larvae in the coffins and cocoons,

the lifeboats and chrysales these shepherd moons

moved into as if they were on a grand tour of the zodiac.

Pageants of wrecked talent showing up like queens

of stage and screen, who adorn your table

by letting you sit at it with them below the salt like a foodbank

as they told you lies about the famous fireflies

they used to cavort with like radical root fires.

Memories of the last literary scene I ever wanted to be in,

eyeless images of overcast dreams, the business

of art spinning the lack of imagination into

some tear drop of a bauble for public consumption

that made evaporation look deep by comparison.

Treacherous metaphors. Nasty similes

that thought they were teaching you a moral lesson

through petty betrayals of the trust you placed in them

against your better judgement, only to ignore

with Olympian indifference the kind of dung heap wisdom

that tried to disenchant you from ever trusting your likeness

in another again like the alienable bonds of mutual opportunism.

Old men now, many dead at the hands of their vices,

nine dog paddlers for every synchronized swimmer, prima ballerinas

that could really write and paint, sing and dance once,

crucible steel hammering out the slag of their impurities

like sparks that shone for a moment like starclusters

that hung in the air and then disappeared

into the great reservoir of one-eyed mirrors.

I can remember when that bag lady was a rose.

I can recall when his charm partially concealed and compensated

for what is so obviously feeble about him now

as he waxes mellifluously nostalgic, trying to squeeze

a drop of honey out of his stinger like the good old days

when he used to hang himself from the green boughs

and dead branches of poetry like a pinata of killer bees

coming on like a kite or Black Hawk sneakers tangled

like bolas and medicine bags in personably contemporary powerlines

you can still hear humming and hissing

like a red shifting snakepit gone long in the tooth

whenever it rains on the ashes of a smouldering guitar

trying to serenade the moon under her Medusan window.

PATRICK WHITE  

AFTER THE LONG LABOUR OF ASHES IN THE RAIN

AFTER THE LONG LABOUR OF ASHES IN THE RAIN

After the long labour of ashes in the rain

the phoenix is shrieking like fire into life again.

I can hear it in the valleys auditioning the mountains

like a voice torn out of the heart of pain.

My shadow is in complete empathy with the ghost

I cast like an imaginative projection of myself

into the emptiness of my crowded solitude

where everyone is recognized by the inside of their faces

in the light of the return journey to the seasoned innocence

of my homelessness beyond the gates I’ve passed through

like an earthly garden blooming in the star fields.

Singing again, as if the stars knew all the lyrics to the song

long before I opened my mouth to swallow their fire

without setting myself ablaze like a funeral pyre

gone supernova in a neighbouring galaxy.

As if a lighthouse off the dark coast of the shipwrecks

knew that timing was the medium of the message

and it was time to rise again on the updrafts

of these buoyant adagios of picture-music,

like a heart immersed a long time in the depths

of its own crazy wisdom abounding

in the bliss of an unknown treasure

rising like a lost continent that drowned in its sleep.

And even in the weeping for things that have passed

through the immensity of the solitude I was the last to leave

like the captain of a lifeboat going down on the moon,

an undiscovered joy in the way I learned to breathe underwater

in the ocean of sorrows that overwhelmed me

like the beauty of a rose that burned

like a torch of blood in the rain.

I’ve given up trying to save the world like a moral ransom

I pay to the one-eyed pirates of circumstance

for the redemption of a self that was more a mirage on the moon

chained like an empty cup to a wishing well

than real water that flows like the tears

of diamonds thawing like glaciers from my eyes.

And may all the wildflowers of this circuitous blossoming

astound the nostrils of God like a fragrance of music

growing like white sweet clover along the roadside.

May every firefly and lightning bolt of insight

illuminate the whole universe like the flaring of a single match.

Let the dead whose souls I bear toward the south

know that I remember their names like loveletters

I’ve sent on ahead like the return address of the future

that waits to encounter them again like birds

that came to the windowsill of this burning house of life

like the notes of a song from a voice well beyond

these spinal cords that bind us like kites to the sky.

I scatter my cremations like ashes on mirrors of ice

for those who would follow me to ground

like the cornerstones of a tent

pegged to the wind like a flower.

I gnaw on the dice of my bones

like a wolf above the timber line

mining the white gold of a motherlode of marrow

and I let tomorrow sing of the things tomorrow brings

like hungry lovers to the round table of feasting stars.

And bless the sword that guts me like an envelope

that bleeds like a wound of love that never scars

the words that are written on a magnanimous heart

that doesn’t pace the rate at which it gives itself away

like a poppy dreaming in a field of leonine dandelions.

And though I fall like an oak on a hill in a lightning storm

let me not live on my knees dumbstruck by the revelation

that burns in my heartwood like a calendar of fire

where somebody’s fixed the dates of spring

as if they didn’t want to forget how to be taken by surprise

like a scholar that can’t bring himself to believe

in the chameleonic nature of his own eyes.

Though I fall like a waterclock of rain from the sky

into the deepest blackholes of time, let no root say

it was ever denied access to my watershed

that even the dead were the guests of a living host

that welcomed them like the voices of a familiar solitude.

Uplifted by spirits of fire, stone, and water,

I’m flying through stars with my wings ablaze

like a comet that exalts in jumping for the sheer joy it

from the black halo that encircles the beatified sun

like the prophetic zero of the final outcome.

And I shall not set my circumpolar throne

on the hills of the skulls of my traditional enemies

nor abide by the jinx of the birds on a prayer-wheel

turning in the direction of cosmic destruction

like an ill wind fouled by the contagion of time.

Every moment of the day, every era of the night

I shall remember the infallible atrocities of blind religion

that gouged the eyes out of the light like gravediggers

cooking rocks in the shovels of the backhoes

rummaging through the remains of the resurrection

for the relics of the names on vandalized gravestones

weathered by the acidic rain of the great desecration.

A little bit of joy balancing on a perilous precipice.

I know about falling. I know the risk. Not a mandate

nor anything I choose to take as if the danger were all mine.

But just a little sweetness in life, a wild grape, the eye of the wine.

A moment stolen from behind the backs of the calendars

like a man in space, with no time to reflect on the outcome

of being younger than when he left. Not listening to signs

but resonating with the hidden harmonies of myriad symbols

arranging picture music for the eye and the ear and the tongue

like dew in the night, whole notes and semi quavers

on the staves of the dreamcatchers and spiderwebs

when the shining comes to the morning as unprepared as swallows.

All my Platonic ideals, the black matter of desire

in a goldrush of the heart that can’t hold anything back

in a Zen panic to stake its claim on nothing

as the fairest jewel of all to give back

to the ocean of awareness you retrieved it from

and hope the moon among the corals appreciates the gesture.

Buddha, too, had an ill-advised attachment to the unnattainable .

I won’t starve my delusions, just to please my insights.

My mirages drink at the same well I do without condition

and it’s ok if they want to leave their veils on too.

And I’ll observe an ethical truce with society

But more goes on in the dark, inconceivably,

than even the light could possibly visualize

on a cold seeing night from a mountain top

with an asphalt road that coils all the way around

like a serpent doing research into the seven ages of man

trying to keep its credibility up with the times.

On my left palm, the star of Isis, keeps me from drowning,

and in my left ear, enough gold, if I’m washed ashore

on some galactic island after another shipwrecked exemption

to burn me down by the sea on a pyre of stars this time.

I want to ingather my ghost out of the smoke, and watch it shine

like fireflies in the fog, like lighthouses along the coast

off the starboard side, looking for moonboats

on the slopes of the swells heaving easily

like bells full of emotion swinging out over the edge

to prove it’s not afraid of falling back

to the ground it arose from like a boy

daring the devil to an apple fight

in the crowns of the trees to see who

can climb high enough to scare the other down.

PATRICK WHITE