SOMETIMES THE SEA RETURNS ME TO MY DREAMS

SOMETIMES THE SEA RETURNS ME TO MY DREAMS

Sometimes the sea returns me to my dreams

like a drowned man washed up by a wave

like a cinder from under its eyelid on an island

I return to like a message in a bottle from the future

that says don’t risk yourself to save me, it’s hardly worth it

compared to who you wanted to be way back then

when you laboured to amount to more than I’ve ever been.

I’ve been bobbing like this Orphic moon

of a prophetic skull across this dark night sea

for lightyears now singing to myself in the abyss,

the self-abnegating minstrel of my melodious emptiness,

listening for any sign of life in these sidereal realms

that dumbfound the starmaps when I ask

to what point, what for, into a coma of silence

that echoes from mirror to mirror like a spent satellite

that wandered out of orbit like a slack guitar string

that didn’t want to stay in tune with the music

of the usual shepherd moons. But I ask, anyway,

thinking the answers might be quantumly entangled

with the questions somehow it’s impossible to fathom

except as just another poetic lucubration in the void

of what life has made of me for the last sixty-four years.

Maybe it’s all one long beginning that flows on forever.

I hope, of course, though hope isn’t the most reliable horse

winged or not, to bet on, whatever I’ve done

might be to the betterment of God knows what,

but something, whether I’m the last to know or never

and it’s better that way, or, at the very least,

if humanity’s lost the taste for itself and more

robotic sensibilities want to forget who we are

and cauterize their hearts to the civilized savagery

of atrocity, waste, and devastation we’ve wreaked

upon millions and millions of lives throughout history,

poetry was the most graceful and absurd sorcery

of the word I could be apprenticed to like the muse

of a dream grammar that taught me to sing metamorphically.

What a curse humans have afflicted upon themselves

and the robots will be worse, much worse than now.

O may it not be so, but too many languish in the alibi

of inevitability and even astronomical catastrophe

seems to have lost the power to change our minds

like proto-mammals back in the age of the dinosaurs.

And it isn’t if we didn’t see it coming from a long way off.

If you let your oceanic awareness of the multiverse

linger in the shadows of your big, blue, cosmic eyes

there’s still something, isn’t there, perennially true and beautiful

about watching a mother wash her daughter’s hands

in a fountain in a park like the wings of a small bird

when you recall all that had to occur from God particles

to black holes for that momentary act to happen,

all the collaboratively creative annihilations that had

to take place in an unending succession of cosmic events

big, small, incomprehensively, or randomly significant

like fireflies and stars, trace meaning of metaphors

leaving half-lives and contrails of where they’ve been

in the field of view of a few who see them for everyone

like the moon and the sky in a drop of dew, or jewels

in the net of Indra whereby you mark one and they’re

all marked indelibly like a starmap on the waters of life.

Maybe there’s a code-breaker somewhere one day

who’s going to make crystals precipitate out of thin air

synchronistically like a kind of intelligence

that overlooked our starmud as way too sloppy

to be the hard-edged medium their translucency

prefers to work in, but to me it’s this lumpy clump of clay

on a potter’s wheel that can just as soon turn into

a game of creative Russian roulette, this amorphous

nebularity of the vague way each of us is giving birth to stars

within ourselves all the time even if we don’t realize

we’re androgynously pregnant with the inconceivable

like clepshydras breaking water like ripples of rain

in the eyes of a mirror that undulates like the wavelength

of a serpent of mercury, life echoing itself

in the elaborate proliferation of mandalic diffraction patterns,

the evanescence of this endless dream of change within,

without beginning or end, birth, death, cessation or continuance,

beyond ignorance and wisdom, achievement, failure,

the filth we derive our myths of origin from,

or the false dawns of a mythically inflated paradise

that turns its back on the dark energy of the new moon

that inspired it counter-intuitively to conceive of itself

in the first place, this is the dangerous garden I live in

where just to touch a face the mind can feel in astonishment

through the labyrinth of my fingertips and staggered eyes

is a wonder of chaos that it should have been shaped so

out of nothing, I can read it like the face of the moon in Braille

like an ocean where the stars dwell deep within,

light upon light, without any notion of ever having gone

metaphorically blind. However you try to square the circle

of your place among the auroras of air you wear

like the aura of a lifemask that concealed your inner vision

of yourself as adamant as a glacial dolmen

about the size of a thumb stuck in three and a half pounds

of brainmud like a plum pie, o what a good boy am I,

there’s always as much up ahead as you left behind

and take it from me, I’ve tried, just to be true to myself,

however you do, you’re never going to disappoint the mind.

PATRICK WHITE

SITTING ON A WOODEN BENCH IN STEWART PARK

SITTING ON A WOODEN BENCH IN STEWART PARK

Sitting on a wooden bench in Stewart Park

directly behind the jumping statue of Big Ben

frozen in bronze and time beside the black marble slab

that looks like a mini Vietnam wall of corporate sponsors,

staring into the sun at the white water rushing

over the rocks under Little Rainbow Bridge,

under the greening willows, galaxies of stars

winking in and out of existence like fireflies,

whirlpools of radiance spreading out across

the reflection of dark leafless tree trunks

shredded by the blue of the sky then pieced

back together again in the wavelength of a snake

charmed by the muscular undulation of the surface

of the pond rippled like a membranous universe

in some earthbound mode of hyperspace, as if

someone took the Pleiades on a clear winter night

and sowed them like first magnitude wildflowers, chicory

and asters, perhaps, in the troughs and furrows

of the sinusoidal waters moving like supple mountain ranges

toward shore where a clash of wild irises

raised their tender green swords up to the sun,

created and annihilated millions of times an instant

in the blink of an eye, white hot and young again,

and for a moment, as fast as an insight

into the nature of a vast intelligence inspired

by the scintillance of its own light playing

upon the waters of life as if nothing, not the skulls

of the underwater stones striated and webbed

by the waves of the golden webs and nets

dreamcatchers and runes inscribed on the rocks

like a language that never speaks in the same tongue twice

in a world of white shadows in unfathomed depths,

things took off the patina of their deathmasks,

and what was solid and inanimate, even Big Ben

anchored to the earth in the afterlife

of his arcing transit through the air forever,

couldn’t help but be alive and real

in every visionary act of seeing that animated

the whole of my being through the eyes

I saw shining out of everything like aeons of stars

opening loveletters like wildflowers and metaphors

addressed to what’s nameless and illuminating

about the substance of sentience that beguiles everyone

in a world of forms shapeshifting transmorphically

as the mindstream turns and the light burns

for the dazzling face of the stranger behind the veils

of the willows rooted in the spring run off of the Tay River

like a flashflood of life threading the eye of paradise

like the creative rush of the fledgling awareness

of the cosmic unfolding of chaos under the wingspan

of Little Rainbow Bridge reconciling the disparities

of light, love, life, in these recombinant unions

of starmud and mind and the heart that smiles within

to feel what’s liberated thereby like the light upon light

of a million epiphanous suns from one side the mind

reflected like the memory of a face you saw in a mirror

in the depths of a dream where you’re bright and whole

and creatively free to wake up on the other

shoreless river of life to realize there’s only

this small, red bridge of blood you’re standing on

watching the flow of things, without waiting

for anyone to show up who isn’t already arrayed before you.

PATRICK WHITE  

MAD YOU MUST BE AND DELIGHT IN IT

MAD YOU MUST BE AND DELIGHT IN IT

Mad you must be and delight in it

like mating killdeer in the spring,

lyrical love-making in the epiphanous air

and one flys into the bumper and dies.

Tears flowing down your cheeks

as you drive on into the incomprehensible

horror and silence of the act. And later,

your girlfriend will elaborate the fact

into a beautiful piece of art. Radiance

thrusts a shard of glass through your heart

out of the blue and there you are

with a baffled pain in your eyes

crying on the easel in paint. Poor man.

Mad you must be and delight in it.

Revel in the absurd. Logic, the shakey stool

of a man trying to hang himself.

Quicksand cornerstones sinking into a miasma

of conditioned chaos. What does it prove

that would have made a difference to the outcome?

Nothing to stand on anymore. Even less

to lie down for. Nature a postcard.

A recurring calendar. And one of those months,

a close-up of a killdeer in intimate detail.

Mad you must be and delight in it.

Uproot your hidden harmonies. Give up

your golden chains. Throw the swill

out of your fountains like wine

from the night before. Ignore your dreams

as the phantasmagoria of sacred clowns.

Everything passes in a riot of stars

before you’re aware of it. Where are they now?

The aerial ballet of the killdeer. Roadkill.

Random encounters with the irrational.

The clarity cruel. The darkness immense.

Mad you must be and delight in it.

Stare at the wall until something appears.

An orphan of mirrors. An estranged elopement

trying to get away with it all. Throw

the moon down from the tower first

and after it your skull. The hearse awaits

and the horses are plumed with black feathers.

Space is warped. Time’s corrupt. And the light

isn’t on some kind of goodwill tour.

Over the newly ploughed field,

where are the killdeer that were there

a moment ago, a year, forever, a figment of time?

So beautiful in the way they impressed each other.

First warm day of the spring. Even the silence

overjoyed with the liberation of water

of earth, of sky, as the stitches came out of the wound

and winter, the scar of a worn out topic.

One of those moments it was intense bliss

to be alive on earth, unasked for,

and delightfully irrelevant the reason.

Mad you must be and delight in it

to embrace the crazy wisdom of the incomprehensible

as a spontaneous medium you’re not involved in

except as the one who suffers what you see,

the terror and the lucidity, the rapture, the monotony

and the worst you could imagine it could be,

the abyss, the car, the killdeer, the unreality

of there being no amends for the tragedy

to fall back upon, not even the pity of the poetry

or the beauty of the painting. And the tears?

What of the tears? What are we to make of them?

Water off the wings of the killdeers? Time

just another water clock that heals nothing

it wounds by accident? Annihilations

of the spirit encountering anti-matter?

You can entertain yourself as delusionally sane

by explaining the stars to the stars,

or you can spend hours trying to decipher the scars

like glyphs on the stone calendars that knew

timing revealed the content in the blink of an eye

and in the cherry-sized heart of a bird

smashed against the sun and the sky

flashing off a chrome bumper at 80k,

who knows, a moment before impact,

if it felt it had desecrated the absurdity of the event

by dying inchoately innocent of its own bewilderment.

PATRICK WHITE

THERE'S A WOMAN IN THE DOORWAY

THERE’S A WOMAN IN THE DOORWAY

There’s a woman in the doorway

flaking like a rose of red paint

with eyes that have been weeping

the shadows of dead saints, a full eclipse

of mascara, sloppy sorrows, and a mickey

she quotes like a Bible, chapter and verse,

though the Bible’s mickey-mouse

compared to how bad it can get

as I notice there’s a pink Glock in her purse,

the arthropod of an uncalibrated shrimp

that isn’t going to let her lover off the hook.

I’m engraving poems on the frosty windows

with a crow’s claw as they whisper to me

like the moon among the corals when I dream,

strange omens of incipience I always mistake

for a sign I’m about to cry though it’s seldom

revealed why. The earth is a sad, sad place

sometimes as you’re ushered to your seat

by a starmap of waterlilies that can see in the dark,

a bouquet of wildflowers in a funereal movie-house

at the first screening of a cosmic prequel

featuring your life as you’ve never seen it before.

Reruns in the multiverse, I’m standing

on a million streetcorners all at once

trying to hawk my theory of fiscal surrealism

to a bloodbank trying to hang on to the Iron Age.

I turn the page like an eyelid to exorcise

the ghost of the jinn in the lamp, and the cupboards

are as bare as the vow of a celibate wishing well

the watercolour lovers have lost interest in

now that the stars have evaporated from it

like the spirit of yesterday’s perfume in a purse.

Where is the lost atmosphere of the moon going

like the shrinking ferns and bonsai trees of my breath

as if it were revising nirvanic haiku until all that was left

were parings of nothing, lunar phases

and fingernails of glass that could scratch

your eyes out like nature red in tooth and claw

as you rake wavelengths in the sand

like a Zen garden in Kyoto waiting

for enlightenment to germinate the rocks,

hard-scrabble farmers with almanacs of crystal skulls.

I’ve ploughed the moon monkishly long enough

with a silver tongue to know when

to sow, tend, reap, the skeletal crops

of the dragon’s teeth that police the secret

of a green thumb trying to hitch-hike out of here

on a long, dark, estranged, radiant byway

lacquered in black ice like the gleaming mirrors

of a snake uncoiling like the full eclipse of an oilslick

waiting for me to slip up like an apostate

of my mystical ineptness long after

the last sacred clown sat down on the ground

and had a good laugh on the house

at the expense of the unamused abyss,

remarking how absurdly child-like all this is.

Medusa, armed to the teeth, tries to tell me

she’s tired of crossing swords with her own fangs

over a point of honour someone has to die for

like a crescent of the moon she’s going to pull

out of the mouth of her lyrical liar with pliers,

every one of her vocal cords tarred and feathered

like the black swan of a stone guitar

reverberating in the Martian canyons of her heart.

Ars longa. Vita brevis. Hatred and angry grief

so much easier to master than the impossible art

of keeping your evanescent fireflies of insight

undisciplined enough to ride the lightning

like a pale horse with the wingspan of the universe

without tampering with someone else’s specious curse

or plotting a course by the stars on your Spanish spurs.

Not on the dance-card of her spite and ego,

I listen compassionately to what

the white noise outside is trying to teach me

like the universal hiss of the afterbirth of road kill

about the ontological misfortunes of being born

to long for nightbirds and hear the rattling of crabs

lugging their armaments to the front lines of love

like lunar castanets, or the horns of a bull

narrowing the gap between parentheses

like the clashing dooms of Scylla and Charybdis,

a whirlpool and a rock, gravity and mass,

the crone phase of the moon having it out

with the vernal equinox at a calendrical toredo.

I see the first crescent and I want to put it up

to my head and pull the trigger to put an end

to the incommensurable agonies of fractious decimals

repeating themselves like mantric alibis

until nothing’s left of the original cartel

except the amputated torso of the fire hydrant

that tried to put the blaze out like a voice coach

who didn’t know all the words to the hysterics

of an anonymously amorous narco ballad

mythically inflating the legend of a famous love affair

out of the redoubtable details of a few bad superstitions.

Pity the fool who begrudges even the grubbiest delusions

of the quixotic heart tilting at the stars

like the precessional axis of the wobbling earth

come round again to the eternal recurrence

of the stratagems of spring in a Great Platonic Year.

Love is as much of a companion to death

as murder is to sacrifice or genetics to loaded dice.

House wine or love potion number nine,

pink guns with clips of rose-petaled lipstick,

everyone’s upholding the incriminating honour

of their uncontested heart defended by their folly

to the death as if the mystery were about to be

lost upon them for good as they rend each other asunder

shooting out the stars like a fashionable crime of passion.

As for me and my tent, the dancing girls

with coral lips and wishbone hips have come and gone

like serpentine wavelengths red shifting into

the shadows they left behind like signs of intelligence

alloyed with carnal desire like a nocturnal mirage

of the moon laying its broken sword down on the water

like a vow we didn’t let come between us

as if we didn’t belong to ourselves

which made the theft of fire we stole from each other

a greater blessing than the hurtful consolations

of obedience to the thorns at the expense of the rose.

What can you say about the nature of crazy wisdom

when the heart is bemused enough to cherish someone

barefoot beyond the bounds of common sensical shoes that pinch?

Some people would rather be loved than right.

Others more righteous than touched. Majnun

had his Laila. Love limps beside others like a crutch.

And though he sipped from many goblets

encrusted with star sapphires from the Pleiades,

none of them tasted like the night until he drank

from the reflection of the beloved from his own hands

and knew a darkness brighter than enlightenment

and the music of rain in the eyes of a desert

more beautiful than water imagery on the moon.

The mad man knows a secret even the deepest stars

can’t understand without losing their way to the well.

PATRICK WHITE

GREY DAY AFTER GREY DAY

GREY DAY AFTER GREY DAY

Grey day after grey day, little nicks and slashes

of insight, the Mongol compound bows of her lips

or the angel, Jabril, when he enveloped Muhammad in Hira

like two bows placed symmetrically opposite each other,

embraced by a Sufi experience of inclusiveness,

or was it the neck of a black swan enthroned in its own reflection,

free association of the word made light, but at this late date

I don’t think I can forget anymore than I already have.

Nor really want to, wholly, though the pain

sometimes burns like a matchead of white phosphorus,

tentacled jellyfish when I think of the translucency

of her aquiline eyes, the terrorism of their beauty

when they fixed on me like an innocent walking by.

I sleight nothing. Not a hair on her head, not one plinth

of the starmaps she smashed at my feet like chandeliers

in a sudden ice-storm in November. I was her tree.

She was my nightbird. Things were always as clear

as a glass menagerie between us when she wore her horns

like the moon in a china shop, or a viper, or a garden snail.

Always knew a day would come when

all I’d have left of her would be these memories

like fossils of the constellations we used to walk under

as I pointed out through the gaps in the wild apple trees

the Andromeda Galaxy, two million lightyears away,

as the furthest thing in life the naked eye can see,

though it was obvious to me at the time, once gone,

o is it still so inconceivable, she would be.

Just look at me, I’m weeping like a window

for the lost phases of a moonrise that’s never

going to startle me again with the same madness

I felt around her as if I could see for the very first time

in eras of trying to imagine, what a dangerous drug

love is to be addicted to after a single taste for life.

Demons revel in their sins in the darkness and dance

with slumming angels on an eye-level with paradise in hell.

The temperate homogeneity of these grey days doesn’t know it,

but I remember, I’ve lived it, apocalyptically

when joy grows so intense it’s a darkness that burns

like the portal of a blackhole hourglass that tears

the sea star of your soul apart galactically

like trillions of stars passing into a whole other world,

worlds within worlds in every one of them

and life and love and wisdom and who you

thought you were reverses spin omnidirectionally

and you can see more deeply into the heart

smeared like a rage of lipstick on a black mirror

than you ever could into the guileless blazing of the white.

PATRICK WHITE

I SHOWED UP WITH A ROSE

I SHOWED UP WITH A ROSE

I showed up with a rose and you said

it was the wrong colour. I showed up

with my head on a silver platter

and you asked as you danced for another

where I’d buried my heart

like the last love affair of the summer

as I watched your body move

like the moon on a famous river

where others before me had drowned

like fish in a dead sea of shadows,

shipwrecks thirsting for the waters of life

you denied them like the taste of your reflection

in the oceanic deserts of their tears

as they died in a graveyard of wine.

I brought you the fallen leaves

of my latest book of poems like autumn

but you swept them off the thresholds

of your hidden doorways like junkmail

and said, yes, there’s fire in their longing,

but if I’m the muse who refuses you,

next time edge the razor of your tongue in blood.

I retreated like a hermit for awhile

into the severed candle of my solitude

that burned like a comet to return

on the day of my death in your eyes

like the last known address

of my homelessness on the lost gospel

of the loveletter I sent you lightyears from paradise.

O how much I couldn’t second-guess loved you then,

like a weathervane loves the wind,

how much I learned and took to heart

like the golden fossils of sorrow and regret

that lie buried like sundials and hourglasses

in the secret gardens on the moon

where I used to wait for you life after life

like midnight at noon when the earth

stood still and the light held its shadows

like a drowning man holds his breath,

like content delays the timing of its heart

until it’s too late for anyone to show up

like a water-gilder to mend a broken cup.

PATRICK WHITE

ONE EARTH, ONE THIRD EYE, ONE WILD IRIS OF LIFE IN SPACE

ONE EARTH, ONE THIRD EYE, ONE WILD IRIS OF LIFE IN SPACE

One earth, one third eye, one wild iris of life in space.

Nacreously pearled out of the darkness of death,

no, not even death, but the godhead of nothing,

this our crib, our grave, when our flesh falls like snow

from our leafless limbs in the spring and dissolves

back into the womb we’ve never been out of.

Who fouls their own mother like the place where they live?

Who would climb up their umbilical cord to heaven

like a waterlily anchored in a swamp and sever the connection

like the jugular of their mother’s throat, before, and before

is as endless as forever after, amen, she’s brought them to term

under a blue eyelid smeared by a patina of air as thin

as the mirage of the dream she conceived them in?

Five billion times around the sun, that star

we’re all courtiers in the presence of, five billion times

hung like the earring of a shepherd moon in an orbit

through your earlobe and we’ve managed to turn it

into a game of Russian roulette with the microbial dawn

of our own existence when she conceived of us

like a water palace of life out of her own translucency,

the firefly of an inspired thought that crossed her mind

and nudged us into being, this sentient seeing we smear

with the effluvia of our own offal then turn away in revulsion

from what we see in the mirror that repels us from us,

from each other, trying to get away from the loss of face

we made ourselves in the image of. This military-industrial,

late Bronze Age megalith of warring heroes who

distorted our vision of love by fletching it with arrows

we’re as vulnerable to as an Achilles heel.

It’s time, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to upgrade

our metaphors to more peaceful myths of origin

we create among ourselves so every thought and act

every ocean of emotion that neaps and ebbs in our tidal hearts

is in accord with the facts of who we imagine ourselves to be.

Time to swim out of the hourglass we drown our sorrows in

down to the last drop, and learn to live galactically

or what was the point of getting high in the first place?

Nature doesn’t abhor a vacuum as much as she must us by now.

Let’s clean our act up so our lover doesn’t turn away from us

toward another that doesn’t offend the protocols

of her incomparable beauty and inconceivable intelligence.

Hey, you, who put the longing in the nightbird’s song?

Who put the awe in your heart when you’re kissed by stars?

Who humanized you out of the ore and oxygen of meteors

stone by stone on the grave of an Archaic native

with a bird bone flute that still wasn’t enough weight

to keep the music of life from arising out of death

like a poem out of the mouths of deaf-mutes that spoke

for trillions of stars through their eyes? When

you look at a river can’t you feel the melody line

of your own blood and mind behind the picture-music?

One earth, one third eye, one wild iris of life in space,

iron, stone, water, air, ion and this the frailest

sphere of mind, this aura of awareness,

these neurons and dendritic axons of our cities at night

we all resonate in like the wavelengths of fish

jumping for the stars, fireflies over the water,

this sentience of ours, this exalted mode of dirt

we’ve been raised out of by this earth breaking

into consciousness, a young planet waking from a dream

she had of us to find we’re all as true as she is

to the same roots she’s welling up out of like apple bloom,

like the spine-stems of ladders to the moon,

like the interdependent origins of insight and stone,

all one body, born of the same cells, to shine, do you hear me,

back at the stars, the trees, the sky, rivers, clouds,

thermophilic bacteria in hot diamond mines,

fire like the mad passion of a genius swept up

like a poppy immolated in the blooming of its own flames,

as if we were opening our eyes to look upon our mother’s face

like the very first dawn, and we had only one smile

like the fertile crescent of a waxing moon to spend

on recognizing everything and everyone alive and dead

as we are to the whole, every grain to the harvest

in the full siloes of our dark abundance, the source

that hides us out in the open from ourselves like stars

so we never have very far to look for the efflorescent fountainhead

of our evanescence, or the foundation stones under our feet

or what keeps us afloat like the lifeboat of a hand

when nothing else reaches out to us but the earth itself.

Learning wisdom is learning space. One mile east

is one mile west, my teacher said. Quantumly entangled thus,

we linger in the doorway of this available dimension

of the future in our house of life, like a palatial room

we’ve never entered before and the crucial hour come round

like a waterclock breaking from the womb, will

someone die in there, and we mourn our own demise,

or will someone be born of the metaphors we spread

like the seeds of wildflowers in the starfields

on the wind that issues like the breath of life and death

out of our own mouths and hearts and minds

as one of the most inspired ways yet the light turns around

removing the veils of endless night from its face

to look at itself, one earth, one third eye, one wild iris of life in space.

PATRICK WHITE