FREEZING RAIN

FREEZING RAIN

Freezing rain. An incrementally ordinary day

being cruel to spring like a bad mood

that doesn’t understand a teen-ager’s energy.

Everyone’s retro-Blackhawks soaked with slush.

Buds on the trees, but the blossoms have taken

two steps back. Things as they are. Your mind

as it is. Pigeons in the ashes of grey miracles.

Yesterday’s mystery today’s history of erosion.

A thousand years from now, will somebody

try to imagine the way it was now as I have so often

Shakespeare closing the door behind him

at the Montjoie’s on the corner of Fleet Street

and Monkwell, thinking he might check out the bookstalls

at St. Paul’s on his way to monitor the receipts of the theatre?

Pride of London, Lady at the Gate, Bouncing Bet,

did dandelions grow between the cobblestones?

Though all the world’s a stage, and we are such stuff,

as he says, dreams are made on, were there days when the Globe

was a pebble in his shoe that vexed his winged heels?

As many uneventful moments in an eventful life

as there are blades of grass to outnumber

the new recruits of the trees trying to take a stand

in the water-logged fields at the edge of town.

Old ladies breaking their hips when they slip

and the school bus is grounded. House-bound

on a farm out of reach of going anywhere a glacier wouldn’t

with four ansy kids and the internet down

until the power’s restored, is of no less moment

in the history of the world than Shakespeare’s lost years

as a clandestine tutor fond of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

The ordinary takes on the patina of the extraordinary

in the middens of time. We’re intrigued like mirrors

by the reflections of who we were any day on earth,

once we disappear, strangers to ourselves, as if Shakespeare

never had to bend down to tie a shoelace, empty his boot,

or drool when he dreamt. Days like today

with their utter lack of diffidence to what was being written

in 1603 by a jobbing poet with cosmic sensibilities.

Who knows who’ll will be in the minds of those to come?

Maybe some die with an idea of who they were,

putting a little too much emphasis on a good guess,

but the memory of anyone’s always a work in progress.

There’s always the afterbirth of life after theatre

laughing and chattering after the silence of the last act

leaving a funeral imposed upon their affections

like tears of freezing rain, the shadow of terror marring their pity.

Telomerase of frayed chromosomes, I’m writing poems

on flypaper helically wheeling among the stars

trying to make constellations out of houseflies,

and I’m seeking a deeper intimacy between words and my mind

as if all these labyrinths I keep losing myself in

were no more off road from the path that keeps taking me

through life, than my fingerprints are from my skin.

Devoted to failing at achieving the unattainable

as if it could be actualized as an event of little significance,

I collaborate like a sacred clown in the lonely absurdity

of my creative freedom to let things make me up

as they flow along like the waterclock of a narrative theme

as the curtain goes up like a veil of freezing rain

to reveal the screening myth of a character modelled

on my eyes, my heart, my feeling for the part I’m playing

like a bucket the bottom’s fallen out of like a deus ex machina

through a trap door ill-timed to make an exit like Keats

with a awkward bow, having written my name

like a tourist in water to see what it feels like to drown

in your own lungs like a bubble of blood rising

to the moment it disappears as if nothing had happened at all.

Dreams aren’t solid, but even unfulfilled, they’re real.

PATRICK WHITE

IN THE FIRES OF LIFE

IN THE FIRES OF LIFE

In the fires of life stand up for the heresy of your humanity

as if there were no one else to burn for it, but you.

When you’re enveloped in the flames of an estranged loveletter

that embraced you like a flower that bloomed in fire

a long time ago, o how many afterlives has it been

since the hive had a dark queen to attend upon,

whether they honour your urn or spread your ashes

on an icy walkway for more pedestrian traffic,

don’t hitch your dragons to the death cart of a false dawn,

but ride the wind exhilarated as Icarus in your own updraft

like the errant flightpath of a firefly with a mind of its own

knowing there’s more insight in the sun that shines at midnight

than there is in the shadowless noon of a shallow enlightenment.

Listen to your heart as if it were real, not solid

and soon enough you’ll be able to hear with your eyes

what your ears can’t see that far beyond

the aerial perspective of the dark where parallel lines meet

to focus on burning another black hole in the sky

with the congruence of the intensity in the iris of your third eye.

Fire doesn’t burn fire, so you can shine lyrically like the earth

in the presence of your own star without being consumed.

How do I know this? I can taste the words life puts in my mouth

like a prophet in a fireproof furnace steeling the iron in my blood

like the growing edge of a sword tempered in my tears

that kills me back into lightyears of life every time I fall upon it

to save the face of some unknown tomorrow from debasing

the integrity of its sorrows by not hammering out the slag

of lesser stones than we draw the best Damascene swords from

as we do the sabres of the moon to the rhythm of a pulse

on the anvils of our percussive hearts forging fire-breathing dragons

shedding the darkest nights of our eyeless ores,

like a bunting of skin, a ribbon and windsock for the stars

that keep circling the north pole like the exoteric tree rings

of the lost art deep in our heartwood of calling down the lightning

like the roots of a seed embedded in our starmud, waking up

after a long sleep, like a pine-cone in the firestorm

of a germinating desire to live as immensely as possible.

While there’s time to grow the preludes and epilogues

of the next threshold we’re about to cross like refugees

over a bridge that spans the omnidirectional extremes

of our mindstreams getting on with their going

like waterclocks and aqueducts, or nightcreeks

whispering their lyrical way like the ode of a dark road

out of a grove of sacred aspens into a clearing brighter

than the light of the stars that pilot the orbs of the dung beetles

or shepherd dragons to graze on fire in higher pastures

than the world mountain could imagine in its wildest dreams.

Swept up in the fires of life, in this delirium

of inconceivable probabilities sleepwalking among the stars,

clarity isn’t so much a matter of burning your old tattoos off

like constellations that leave scars or cauterizing sunspots

like dangerous moles before they eclipse your immaculate wholeness

with the veils of isotopic ghost fleets raising sail in the bays of the north,

as it is in losing yourself in the picture-music of the lightshows

the mind puts on like an artist who isn’t looking for an alibi

to justify his eyes to what he sees without corrective lenses

like a starmap of fireflies without a fixed place in time and space.

In the fires of life you must be perfectly combustible

like the rainbow bodies of the wise men of Tibet, your eyes

inflammable as two lumps of coal in the skull of a snow man,

dead branches for arms, and your heart so generous

nothing left of it can be found like an ice cream cone

that’s fallen to the ground from the hands of a child for the ants,

and melted away into diverse forms of life that ensure

it doesn’t go to waste. We will all break bread in time

with the worms that shall nibble the crumbs of our dreams

from the corners of our eyes. Maggots overpunctuating

our mouths with too many commas and semi-colons,

necrophagoi editing our hearts and brains like turkey vultures

amending us like roadkill as if we were merely the first draft

of a poem ablaze and scattered with life as rapturous frogs in the rain.

PATRICK WHITE

MORE PURPOSE IN THE ABSURDITY OF SHADOWING YOUR DREAMS

MORE PURPOSE IN THE ABSURDITY OF SHADOWING YOUR DREAMS

More purpose in the absurdity of shadowing your dreams

like a star you vowed to be true to, a small candle of love

buffeted like a starling in a hurricane off path as is

the way of the heart, without going out---off course, lost,

but burning nonetheless like a daylily in a drainage ditch

beside the road that’s taking you on a firewalk among the stars

the long way home, less reason to despair of ever

finding a meaning in life that transcends the banality

of common sense with the longing of a nightbird

for immeasurable joy in the hunger of the fire that consumes it

without destroying the mystery in the irrationality of its song.

You want to burn. Not burn out like the infirm heart

of a waterclock that goes on forever with or without you

as if you were always drumming for rain to hide your tears.

Water-sylph, mistress of mirrors, muse, you who whisper

ecstatic clouds of silver insects into the dusk not

in the likeness of life, but life itself, as the starmaps

of the nocturnal waterlilies put their blooming to good use

like a lost expedition of cartographers trying to find themselves,

it’s too late in the day to betray what I’ve loved most

about my life, not so much to add my say

to the white noise of literature, but to listen deeply

to the voices that emanate out of the heart of the things of the earth

as if there were always something beguiling to celebrate,

an intelligence fascinated by its own awareness of being alive

like a river, a rock, a star, a tree, to wonder like a watershed why.

Even in the midst of my most private sorrows,

the light’s been a shapeshifting glassblower that made

crystal skulls of my tears I could look into like the eyes of an oracle

and see the sun and the moon still shining

after the flower wrecking thunderstorm passed over the hills

and the sun drenched the dishevelled willows in gold

and the fireflies came out from under their leaves

as the stars from under their eyelids no longer dulled

like a patina of time on the newly washed air

but clear-eyed and shining like a chandelier at a waltz

not a sword hanging over my head should I speak false.

Ask anything from a god to a grosbeak for instruction

and they’ll relate to you didactically as a matter of course

as if you were listening like a sympathetic jury at your own trial

to the immorality of the facts that have been brought forth

but pay less attention to what you’ve got to say in your own defence

and nature will respond to your petition for disclosure of the evidence

lyrically. Ask God who you are. Who she is. And she’ll

start singing to herself as if you reminded her of a song

she used to know when she was a girl growing up like Helen

beside the banks of the Eurotas, like Isis who hides her face

out in the open like a veil of space no one’s ever going to lift

like a hundred billion stars shining eye to eye with you

as if you were the last place you’d expect anyone to look for her.

And, yes, it’s all been lived and felt and said before, but not by you,

not by the mystic specificity of the supranoumenal persona

that lives like a singularity in the black hole

of your insatiable, light-eating, star-swallowing soul

that occasionally loses its appetite for insight

like a blue whale for krill, or the moon for marine life.

Estranged as an undertaker at your own wedding,

or Joan of Arc in the blissed out ashes of a martyr’s urn,

dragon or firefly, prince of the pent house or Jedi in a hovel,

ploughed under like the archival middens of the popular demotic

or stutter like an accent through purple passages of linear B

there’s a mermaid sitting on the skull of Devil’s Rock in everyone

and she’s been singing like Love Potion Number Nine among the muses

for you, in particular, to shipwreck yourself on the eerie sadness

that haunts her song like the foghorn of your own voice

lost like a ghost at sea, passionately annihilated

by an attachment to the picture-music of your own imagination

that is no less of a Buddha activity than letting go

of enlightenment as the beginning of something delusional.

Factor the errors back into your perception the way

the earth receives the dead without disappointment or remorse,

knowing they will sweeten the roots of tomorrow’s flowering.

Follow your own river like a siren to the source

as if for once you were listening to good advice

and wary as you are of the repetitious side-effects

of going mad without fulfilling a fictitious purpose in life

rejoice in the clairvoyance of going with the flow

of your own mindstream, knowing that none

of the death masks in that collection of mistakes

you keep inter-reflectively projecting on the waters of life

ever gets to wear the same bare-faced lie twice.

PATRICK WHITE

O SWEET FREEDOM

O SWEET FREEDOM

O sweet freedom to be nothing for awhile.

To blindfold the clock

with its own shadow

like a masked bandit

and let it get away with something for a change.

I love the cheap thrill

of feeling like a thief

with an ageless sense of timing.

One tug on my serpentine spinal cord

and I unplug my electric identity

like a searchlight

that keeps its eye on me

like a blackhole it doesn’t know anything about.

I’ve stopped looking for meaning

in the flight of the doves

I release from their cages

like words stuck in the throats

of Selkirk chimneys

like harps and hearts and wishbones.

The joy of a liberated dove

I’m out!

seems to be enough of a rapture

to give meaning to the spontaneous outburst

of an enlightened universe

as if it had just broken through

to the other side

of its own koan

like an iron cosmic egg.

Like a Rinzai master shouting Katsu!

and throwing down his horse-hair hossu.

Like me sitting here

in the middle of a small heritage town

without feeling I’m one of the original fieldstones

of the bank across the street.

O the sweet freedom

to let the waters of life

take great liberties with my roots

to let whatever flowers in the wild starfields

hidden in the white darkness of noon

bloom as they will

and whatever comes to fruition fall

like the stroke of midnight

beheading the clock on the wall

so Cinderella

doesn’t have to hurry home from the ball.

Not to be.

Not to see.

Not to do anything

that wasn’t already done in the first place

and all the bonds that baffled the dawn

with too many horizons to overcome

undo themselves like vapour trails in the sunset

and I’m as free as space

to be ubiquitiously anywhere at once.

I don’t need to eat through the bone of one leg

caught in a trapline

to free the other.

I don’t have to go mad

trying to kill myself

to save myself from death.

I don’t have to be shamed by mirrors

that bear false witness

against my own reflection.

I can look at my own face

and casually ruminate

about whether it matters

that either of us is here or not.

I can be lead astray by poems

that come on like gold rushs

but end in lead

like the philosopher’s stone

and still be intrigued by the passion

of getting there

without worrying about

finding my way back alone.

Inside every man of great renown

is a frustrated clown

that takes him far too seriously.

I have laboured like an ox

to keep grinding out starwheat

on the millstone of the daily grind

but comes a time

when you sit down on the ground

among the grain and the chaff

exhausted by your fruitless attempt

to turn your mind

into loaves and fishs for the multitudes

and have a good laugh

at your own expense

when you see how few people

are truly hungry enough

to eat.

How many are dying of thirst

beside a freshwater lake.

Open your mouth and eat.

Roll over and drink.

And go read Ecclesiastes

if you want to know why.

Mithras Tauroctonus the bull-killer

can put all the horns on the silo he wants

like the first and last crescents of the cornucopias

on a harvest moon.

I’m at large in the zodiac

playing with poppies

as if I were slaying matadors

that flare like scarlet capes in my blood.

Moon.

One.

Sun.

Nothing.

The thistle bristles with swords.

Van Gogh cuts off his own ear

and gives it to a brothel rose

as if that were the only way she could hear

his endearing words

and that little gesture of the heart

were the beginning of expressionist art

or the artist as mummy

if you stretch your canvases like bandages

and mistaking yourself for a model

paint with them on

to keep your blood

from running into the colours

like a red sky in the morning

that doesn’t give you any warning

though Gaugin was sailor enough to know that

and beat a hasty retreat back to Tahiti.

O sweet freedom

not to have to whitewash

the truth of the graffiti under the bridge

with the genocidal lies of scripture

that paint in blood

with the same brush

they use to sweep whole nations

under the rug.

I kick the empty spraycan of my heart

down the road

like the hollow shell casing

of a losing revolution.

In order to establish

my vision of life

I had to overthrow my eyes

to justify the way I see things.

Been alone so long

it looks like love to me.

I don’t know how else to explain this

to the winners who doubt my word

except I’m a loser in bliss

for reasons you’d find absurd.

Not to have slammed the door in my face

just as it was opening

would have been a complete and utter disgrace

to the people who were waiting to be impressed.

My future’s just another afterlife

that hasn’t been made aware

of my arrival.

Still I have a lot more fun

getting around as a pauper

than I ever did a prince.

I have no interest at all

at dying in line

to inherit a dead man’s office.

I’ve learned to get along

on my insufficiency just fine

by mimicking the appetites

of a self-exiled poetic refugee

with the aristocratic poverty

of an intellectual past

and the emotional life

of the last dynast of my homeless ancestors

none of whom made it this far.

O sweet freedom

not to be related to anything

like the key to someone’s heart

lying in the grass at the side of a road

that no one’s taken in years.

You can answer the call.

You can respond to a summons.

But my calling’s

the falling of mirrors

that have run out of tears

like doorbells

that don’t cry hard enough to be sincere.

Some I smash like a pinata.

Al Capone with a baseball bat.

And others come crashing down like chandeliers

that thought they were better organized

than what appeared to be

a minor uprising

of disordered angry stars.

I take a broom to the cobwebs of the constellations

and sweep their reflections

like bad imitations

of outmoded myths

from the mirror.

I like to keep things clear

between me and the light

so there’s no duplicity in what I see

and no darkness in the night

that can claim to be the ancient shadow

of my spontaneous lucidity

without cooking their fire-bug phoenix

in its own flames.

The fire god comes looking for fire.

But I don’t spend much time

dwelling on the event

like a fire-hydrant in a cathedral

afraid of falling into hell.

I’ve fallen down hilariously drunk

sipping mystic elixirs

from my own skull

as if it were the holy grail

but I’ve never gotten off on

drinking from a bell

that keeps pouring me out on the ground

like bad wine

that didn’t turn into sacred blood.

O sweet freedom

what a treat

not to meet me in my solitude.

Not to lead people

like a starmap

that puts them on the wrong track

so they can learn their own way back

through all the labyrinths and lightyears

they’ve been away

and though they might recognize

the old place as home

it’s not the same threshold

the doors don’t answer

to their names anymore

and the windows have forgotten their faces

like phases of the moon

that bloomed and passed

like warm breath on cold glass.

I have looked at the stars

and sweetened the night air with wonder

that we both collaborate

in exploring the mystery of our being here

without knowing why.

The question longs

to experience the answer

the way a dancer longs for music

to go with the words

or a painter tries to explain the light

to his eyes.

But not two is the closest anyone can get

to knowing the world from the inside out

and the silence is polyglot

not a universal language

and what it can’t define

it expresses.

Seeing paints its own eyes

on the prow of a lifeboat

that’s been washed out to sea

with nobody in it

and nothing to save

but these endless waves of moonlight

swimming through stone

like ancient hieroglyphs

for water and fish

adrift in a desert of stars.

The intimate personal history

of the mystery in each one of us

the way the same moon

is cherished by every rosary

and millions of lockets of dew

as if it could only be known by you alone

like the absence of a lover far away

that brings you closer together.

Seeing doesn’t belong to the eye

anymore than a house belongs to the hammer

that built it

or the mind

to the starmud foundation stone of the brain

that laid it like a cosmic egg

in a phoenix’ nest.

There’s more to insight than meets the eye.

O sweet freedom

even one of your mirages

is more than enough

to appease the lightning with fireflies.

My feelings have never looked for sanctuary

in a safe heart

because the best place to hide

is out in the open

where the sea doesn’t run from its own weather

and the night isn’t overwhelmed

by a riot of stars

smashing every telescopic lens in sight

like the priest of a false god

with only one eye.

O sweet freedom

to be the only rodeo clown

in the annual funeral march of martyred icons

parading down Gore Street

with a police escort

and red lights screaming

like an ambulance

going through withdrawal

trying to overcome its addiction to poppies.

I breathe time

and burn my fingers in the eternal flame

of my blood playing with a fire it couldn’t put out.

God might not love me yet

not recognizing the genius

of her own work

but that doesn’t mean

I’m any less of a masterpiece

than any of these other jerks

or that I don’t know how

to conduct myself accordingly.

It’s just that you won’t find me

hanging out in a gallery

or behind the cover of a book

with my shirt off

as if that were really

all I had to say.

It’s not a sign of true freedom

if your zodiac is still under house arrest.

Or you’re still sending

that old refrain of madness to school

to learn to sing in the dulcet tones of a lucid voice

on phenobarbitol.

Success is the quickest way to underwhelm yourself.

Ripeness kicks the stool from under the apple.

Failure has more enduring effects.

A dead tree can lie down longer

like the hull of a ship

than a strong rafter

can stand up

like a mast on the bridge.

You might take matters

like the wheel of birth and death

into your firm hands

and try to weather the storm

like a feather in a hurricane

but the waters of life

still slip through your fingers

like stars and clouds and rain

and your grasp on any rival circumstance

that might threaten your survival.

The dispossessed are freer than those

that are standing in line

waiting for their own arrival.

O sweet freedom

not to send my thoughts out like missionaries

to preach to the dissipated

the importance of staying in focus.

Not to go divining the source of the light

with a prism

that enshrines its Catholic colours

in see-through Protestant glass.

There are no sundogs

under my atheist eyes.

I don’t project what I believe

like an eye-beam on a dark world

and expect to be conceived

like the image of God

as if I was born

the way I appear

from a cracked mirror.

I slip through the fault-lines

on the palms of my hands

like a hero plunging

into a gaping abyss

with legendary decorum

to save Rome from an earthquake in the Forum.

And O sweet freedom

that there’s nothing sacrificial

about taking my own advice not to.

And no disappointed expectations.

Age disappears.

Origin disappears.

End disappears.

Being without disclosure.

Seeing without design.

Emptiness without intent.

No I

or its opposite.

And nowhere a sign

of what someone somewhere once meant.

Less than empty

a measure more than enough

to keep one tiny human heart

as perishable as a strawberry

full to eternity

with the sweetness of life on earth

when there’s no birth

no death

in the taste of the moment.

PATRICK WHITE

TENDERLY THE EVENING DESCENDS INTO A DARK BLISS

TENDERLY THE EVENING DESCENDS INTO A DARK BLISS

Tenderly the evening descends into a dark bliss

and lays its poultice like a cool leaf against my forehead

and draws the fever of the day out of the night.

I ease back on my elbows like an easel down by the river.

When I’m burnt, I make a blister

and cushion myself with water,

a more useful approach to tears.

The mosquitoes swarm like insistent circumstances

that thin my blood, but a soft wind

is blowing them away from Pearl Harbour.

The long blue grass yields as easily to a man as a deer.

I want the stars near enough to overhear what they’re whispering.

Still amazing to me I can embrace all of them with a thought

as if they were my idea in the first place

and feel humbled and exalted at the same time

by the sublimity of their radiance and the strangeness of my own.

The river sustains its clarity by wandering.

Single male in the autumn of life, I’ve let go of so much

the only thing left to let go of is the letting go itself.

I’ve forgone the commotion of inducing myself into creation.

Things will fall out by themselves. Playfulness

return to surrealistic perversity

to explain the shape of the universe

and fools like me counter-intuit the crazy wisdom

of squandering their lives on voices in the distance

leading them on deeper into the subtleties of a poetic narcosis

that haunts them like the face

of a beautiful woman they once knew.

Don’t we all belong to a nobility of longing, even though

we don’t live up to it, and start to grasp and scratch

like dead branches screeching across

an intransigent windowpane on a stormy night

that let’s us look at the fire, but doesn’t let us in?

Where do you go with your serious spirit

when you’ve been rejected by your solitude?

Do you know the secret art of being enhanced

by the qualities of anything you’re not attached to,

without killing off the desire for what you’re missing?

Live with gratitude for the abyss in your heart

it’s impossible to fill like a grave

that took more out of you than it put back in.

You can be adorned by your failures.

You can be humiliated by your victories.

Coming and going, your path can be strewn

with roses or thorns. You could be walking on stars.

You could be lying down beside a river at night like I am

savouring a sorrow you like the poetic taste of,

because it includes everything within it

like the skin of the dew and the moon as the source of life.

Even sweeter than a rainbow body of light

or an atmosphere with ocean to match,

this last touch of clinging before you evaporate

into the mystery of everything you’re leaving behind.

No more than you can pour water out of the universe

through a black hole, can your mindstream be poured by time

into the uncomprehending darkness of the black mirror

you’re looking for an image in tonight

in the eyes of all these stars shining down upon us,

knowing our starmud is just as old as their light

and we’re not wandering orphans lost in their shadows.

We’re firewalking on water like stars in the shapes

of self-immolating swans, two parts flammable

from the start, and one of oxygen like a toxin

we depend upon for life like an alien export we adapted to.

Same with death. Until you include it in the nucleus,

inviting your enemy in to feast behind the gates

that laboured like water to keep life in the seas,

you’re vulnerable to the delusion of your own exclusion

like the face of an exile in your mirroring awareness.

Don’t underestimate the creative potential

of the dark genius of death to come up

with new paradigms of seeing and being

that make us feel we lived our whole lives

confined and blind in the coffin of a seed

that stored a harvest of what we’ve reaped in a silo.

Out of the dead ore of the moon

pours the white gold of wheat

like metal from a stone in a starfield

that yields more life than can be lost

in the living of it. Without a sword. Without a ploughshare.

Isn’t it in the nature of our evanescence to move

like light and water and wind from urn to urn

of one sky burial to the next at sea and then the earth

like a water clock that runs so urgently

from full to an emptiness that has to keep expanding

like the human heart just to contain it

so when the cup’s broken like a skull

you can drink the whole of the sea and the sky

in every single drop of your mindstream

and the stars will still be climbing your roots

up to the flowers within that bloom every year

like a deepening insight at zenith into

the dark generosity of becoming something

even beyond the scope of death to imagine extinct.

PATRICK WHITE