WHEN MY HEART ISN'T A HUMMINGBIRD ON A KEYBOARD

WHEN MY HEART ISN’T A HUMMINGBIRD ON A KEYBOARD

When my heart isn’t a hummingbird on a keyboard,

it’s a spider on a guitar. The long fingers of a surgeon

my mother used to say, the air bright with potential

and the creature with a purpose, a future it meant,

a destiny it was born to fulfil like a chain reaction.

Now it’s an error of evolution just to make it through another day.

And nights, sidereal ballerinas leaping like Cygnus at zenith

over the toxic wavelengths in this snakepit of street life.

Blessings on everyone’s head, I’ve shed a few lives of my own,

but I mean the nights, sometimes the nights,

scatter my own ashes over my head in mourning

like a nuclear winter that won’t let me forget.

Now there’s nothing perennial about my paradigms

and the flowers don’t grow as imperial as they used to.

Ferocious weeds spring up among the downtrodden

and swarm the gardens of the sun-king, the cattails

impaled, and the heads of the poppies on pikes by the gate.

I’m looking for new moons in the calendars of chaos

to sow the teeth of a dragon under. Soil made vintage

by the dissolution of the dead who are buried in me

as I keep on living their deaths like an impossible ending

to a recurring dream I haven’t woken up from in years.

Red alert. Don’t climb higher than the mountain is tall

unless you’ve got a star in your eye you’re going to follow

for the rest of your denatured life. But no one’s listening.

They’re all taking polls of bad examples on talent shows.

Can’t stand the artificial lights or the trained hilarity

of the audience defrocking sacred clowns at a cult ritual.

But I found a flap at the back of the circus tent

I like to slip out through and let the darkness

wash the patina of blazing out of my eyes

and encounter six thousand stars whose shining

ease the mind by enlightening its unique insignificance.

I like to blunder my way into places alone

where who I am is nobody’s business but the willows

and they’re not saying anything to the wind

that’s heard it all before. One moment you’re the canvas

and the next you’re a paint rag up to your alligators

in muddy oils trying to save an orchid from its own hysteria.

If there’s any rafter of my life left standing

it’s as fragile as a compass needle wobbling on a thorn.

One moment you’re teaching spiders to play the guitar

without barring their chords, and get rid of

those old harps of theirs that have been collecting in the corner

like dreamcatchers they couldn’t hold a note

if it were a velcro butterfly, and the next

you’re boiling strings like spinal cords in a bird bath.

But alone, where there’s no assent or denial,

and the false redeemers are orphaned

in their baskets and mangers among the hay and bull rushes,

I can juggle the crazy wisdom of myriad worlds

bubbling up in my blood like a playful multiverse

without dropping one of them, and swallow the swords

the moon lays down on the lake in tribute.

No blackboards in my freedom. No chalk fossils

among my crayons, I have been schooled

in the ghettos and still life studios of my solitude.

Here where the river emerges from a larynx of dead trees

I can think my way into the most open-minded modes of death

without having to turn around and go home again

or forget I’m just an organ of light that makes things visible

for anyone with an eye to spare, or the time

to listen to the picture-music where their senses meet

like parallel lives that have suddenly come into focus.

PATRICK WHITE

SUMMER TRIANGLE THROUGH THE LEAF COVER

SUMMER TRIANGLE THROUGH THE LEAF COVER

Summer triangle through the leaf cover

of the birches and pines, Deneb, Al Tair, Vega,

a swan, an eagle, and a lyre, and the sun

headed toward Vega at 18 km/sec. Arcturus

sinking into the west. Knowledge disconnected

from the stars. How could they know how

I see them paradigmatically, how they’re shaped

into the legends of our seeing on a starmap,

the powers that have been attributed to them,

though for me my solitude evaporates

into their lucid immensities like dry ice.

I hug my knees on a moonlit outcrop of rock.

More lichens than a suitcase has travel stickers

or a bike gang has patches and rockers. Grey green

and a muted arsenic orange. Alien aspects

of the rags of life from Mars. Cold temperatures

and high carbon dioxide atmospheres and they’d thrive.

Now they’re a wardrobe paupered by the Canadian Shield.

Fossils of moondogs. Decals of lunar seas.

And underneath the pines, a graveyard of compass needles,

rusty eyelashes, amputated hands of analogue watches.

The woods are alive with shaking cattails

and snapping branches, shedding and falling,

the occult hunting magic of the lake

that keeps everything eerie, wary, and estranged

as they take what they need from each other

with a yelp, a howl, a shriek, a squeal to sustain

the lives they’re meant to be living at life’s expense.

You come to mind as the reason why I’m here.

Just a fragrance, the auroral cachet of your image

on the temperate night air. The great blue heron

might embody the silence and the stillness,

spearfishing among the nocturnal water lilies

but me, I’m catching these glimpses of you

like a seance of fireflies among the birch

as if happenstance had a hidden theme up its sleeve.

A resonance, a nuance, as if I blew on a dandelion

and it scattered like a gust of stars out of an urn

into a constellation waiting for me to adorn it

with a myth of origins that might explain it to us both.

The old ashes of the fire pit strewing

dragons of passion again, and it’s ok to speculate

but I keep a bridle in their mouths. I’m not riding

bareback yet. I’m not rescinding my last immolation.

Though there’s something ingenuously thrilling about

the creative commotion of the approach of another galaxy

and the way the fireflies keep stoking my devotion

as if my intensities were about to go supernova

after so many years of emotional implosion, I’ve been

singing lullabies in braille to black stars

just to get to sleep at night without anyone noticing.

I’ve been wearing a halo of X-rays around

the omnidirectional event horizon of a black hole

I thought I’d given myself up to by acclamation

like the incommensurable solitude of a singularity

that had escaped itself into an alternative universe

every bit as absurd as I was, with equanimity.

I’m sick of pain. Too many squalls arising

out of nothing, too many red dawns, too many

shipwrecks turning into coral reefs that rip the hull

out of the moon like Caesarians, hearts bashed

like pinatas at the birthday parties of the sacred cartels

and everyone’s simple, quiet dream of everlasting love

and all its attendant protocols, observed with genuine feeling,

lovers mesmerized by the shadows of the things they want

but can’t quite be. Unconditional love, if its abstractions

are blooded by experience, crueller than

the sado-masochistic discipline of a saint.

Never abandoned love, just somehow came to feel

erosively disqualified, as if my starmud,

though it bore other fruits, yielded harvests

and danced under a blue moon like a scarecrow

left out to face the winter alone, would never bring forth

those flowers again. As they faded

like Confederate money into a more perfect union

of absurdity at peace with itself. Approximately.

Everything being the interpretation of an interpretation.

PATRICK WHITE

SOME FEW OF THE WOMEN I'VE LOST

SOME FEW OF THE WOMEN I’VE LOST

Some few of the women I’ve lost

and it was like giving birth to the moon

so much was ripped out of my heart

I had not known I had so much to lose.

Still shudder like space with certain wavelengths

of a gamma ray burst that burns like a memory

of an abyss all my rivers flowed into

like my mindstream plunging off a precipice

into the haze of the maid of the mist

down below the falls, a ghost of ice,

my blood unravelled from my heart,

tears flowing from my eyes like hot glass

on a good day when I could melt time

with the absolute intensity of the way

I stared at things like a mad child

transfixed as a lens on the tragic onceness

of change that threshes the antennae

of the swallowtail butterflies that used to

touch the world so lightly in love, eyelids

and fingertips, with the last crescent

of the full moon at harvest time, reaping

the burnt loaves of what love sows

like starwheat at the vernal equinox,

spring as much a gate of departure as fall.

Love is stranger than plutonium

and only the greatest of mystic heretics

can stand in its fires and not be utterly consumed.

O how enviously young I must have been

to believe that nonsense. Each, after

their own nature hangs on the same hook

prophesying in voices that are devastated

by what they communicate. Too late. Too late.

Absolute pain splits everybody’s tongue

with a razor blade like a cedar shake

witching for water in a private hell

so impersonal it’s not even interested

in punishing you for mistakes you may

or may not have made. No point in trying

to improve the mirages of polluted water

by taking a bath in your grave everyday,

but you do just the same to approach

your absurdity proactively to distract yourself

from a black hole enticing you to let go and jump in.

Even if it’s radioactively surrealistic

eat the pain as you lie down in your bower

of stinging nettles trying to cauterize your heart,

no secret love potion, no sword of moonlight

between you and your beloved now foresworn

not to violate the taboos of the mythic diminishments

that have come between you incontrovertibly as you realize

how many eras of darkness it takes for the light

to cast a single shadow in the shape of someone

you loved as indelibly as the night loves its stars.

Mundanity becomes a feature of mercy,

an anodyne of pettiness, a placebo that helps

you brush your teeth in front of the mirror,

wash your face and comb your hair as if

you were performing some kind of religious ritual

by scrubbing the blood off the altar that tore

your heart out, a hefty directory from a telephone booth

you consult like an oracle in a Pythian snakepit

and then hang up for fear of disturbing the bones

of the dead you buried in the deserts of the moon

swearing you’d never dig them up again like a dog,

though there you are, caught red-handed, lapping

the marrow out of the receiver in your hand.

We all get dropped off eventually on some

lonely dirt road in the abandoned countryside

with half a chance of surviving the excruciation

like a declawed pet no one wants anymore

without knowing what our offence was or

how to fend like a beginning without end

against the odds of having been disarmed by love

like a sword thrown from a bridge in tribute

to the elixirs of the water sylphs we surrendered to.

But let me tell you this from the heartwood

of a tree that’s been made sacred by lightning

and rootfires more than once, love, like poetry,

isn’t for petty people, daunted as they should be,

by living through their own incommunicable death

like the unwanted poster child of their estranged absence

longing for someone to call them back

out of the vastness like a seance that could

channel the ashes of the cremations that fill

the urns of their heart like the last trace of smoke

from the firepit of a dragon weeping in the rain

for what befalls whenever you swallow the moon

like a cosmic egg from the love nest of a widowed crow.

Like the other wing of the fly that falls in the milk

of human kindness like a meteorite in Antarctica

you’ll eventually find the cure in the heart of the disease

by dipping the other wing like an antidote into it,

or going down on the Medusa without turning into stone,

hoping it doesn’t wear off before the sands

of the albino tattoo of an hourglass on her back runs out

and the world is overturned again like the shocks

and changes Shakespeare says keep us sane,

though love’s an occasion to doubt that at the extremities

of an oceanic devotion dismembered like a sea star by pain.

Or Orpheus rent asunder, gone insane on his own music.

As anyone who’s ever mainlined the stars

of the Via Galactic knows, love is more

of a dangerous gateway drug than lust is.

If the surfeit of joy in the mystery of the spell it casts

doesn’t kill you bobbing out of your depths

like a prophetic skull in the deep end of reality,

then the withdrawal of all your life masks

from the artificial paradise of fool’s gold

and tinfoil badges of star-crossed milk caps will

as you shoot up the sheriff and die like a wounded deputy.

But if the curse isn’t lived immensely you give birth

to a feeble star, a penumbral blessing, disappointed

as a shepherd moon you’re not shining down

on a habitable planet of your own where love thrives

like an afterlife in the open star fields of a great wind

that once passed through your life like a wildfire

that consumed everything in its path like a comet

dislodged like a jewel from the black halo around the sun,

o the bright vacancy of the radiant coronas,

o the dark abundance of the total eclipses,

impacting the earth in the Gulf of Yucatan.

PATRICK WHITE

KISSES INSTEAD OF SCARS IF YOU CAN MANAGE IT

KISSES INSTEAD OF SCARS IF YOU CAN MANAGE IT

Kisses instead of scars if you can manage it.

Love, not a science. Still an art. Though a dying one.

The discipline of staying a constant beginner.

As if the morning glory had never felt the light before.

You want to love or be loved? Make up your heart.

But you want to sword dance with queen cobras in heat

like a lapwing in a snake pit, two egg-layers

at opposite ends of the same extreme, you better not

step on anyone’s toes, and if you do, hope

the wing you favoured with a false wound

like a collapsed bridge you lay down like a joker

to trump your Tarot pack, is as long as the other

royal flush you neglected to play like a winning hand.

Human, you might be the measure of all things,

but believe me when I tell you, love’s got a bigger wingspan

than Cygnus and Aquila in the Summer Triangle have light-years

to get a fix on the wing tips of their feathers by parallax.

Love with class if you want to make something elegant

of your absurdity, diamonds of your dirt, if you want to

water flowers with your tears without salting the seed bed.

If you want to steal a little fire from the mystery

to enlighten your nightmare, if you want to be the star

that everyone points to in your lover’s eye,

don’t enter it like a dirty needle of light washed up on a beach,

you keep overdosing on like a starmap with a bad addiction.

Love is a retroactive prediction from the past come true at last.

Even after dismemberment, love is Orphic, a prophetic skull

bobbing like an apple all the way to Mytilene from Thrace,

that can still sing the dead back up out of hell

until they realize the light of love’s too strong

for the eyes of gibbering shades and turn around

as if they’d come too far down the wrong road.

As a working stiff, love is kind, generous, trustworthy, loyal,

like the smell of heartwood after a carpenter has built

his own sturdy cross. Not acrid oak, but terebinth.

As a thaumaturge, love works miracles with silver herbs

cool as moonlight laying its feathers on the sacred pools

you return to like a battered salmon or a sword in tribute

to give back in gratitude what was given to you.

O, yes, you can be a nice guy or an agreeable woman

for a moment, and bask in the whole wheat sunshine

of a promising harvest, but love is the blue,

the second full moon in October and it looks down

on what’s been threshed to see what you’ve left for the birds

and if you ever get so drunk in your delirium

you went dancing with the scarecrows as if you

were all martyred by the same cause like a prelude

of watchdogs to the white nights of the living dead.

Love’s a celebrant high on the bliss of poppy wine

but it doesn’t turn the dancing floors of the starfields

into a bride catalogue for impoverished wallflowers.

Love’s got the eyes of a snake, the voice of a bird

and the wings of a vampiric bat in an unpredictable eclipse.

And when love mystically sublimates its appetites

like black ice into more beatific ionospheres of solar flaring,

the poetry goes aurorally absurd, but nobody cares

because everybody’s more awed by the picture-music

of the rippling veils than they are by the face behind them.

You make love safe. You take the danger out of it,

you defang the lightning storm, you brainwash

the theta waves of the turbulent night sea

where the soul journeys alone, into saying aum

every time there’s a breathless squall of stars in the southwest,

though you might think in your lustreless way

you’re throwing sacred holy oil on troubled waters

you’re just another oil slick running a nunnery of pearls.

You want your honey without a stinger. You want

your rose without a thorn. A one-eyed oxymoron.

I’ve made it a counter-intuitive point of survival

most of my occult romantic afterlife

to never fall in love with a woman until I’m absolutely certain

it’s well within her power to kill me outright

without a word of warning. But she abstains

and in that moment of hesitation you can live

three full lifespans on the cutting edge of a black hole

without a fear of lights or vertiginous heights.

You can ride the helical stairwells of your mutual d.n.a.

like the parallel bannisters of two hawks wheeling

synchronously on the twisted ladder

of their thermophilic passions for the highs and lows of love.

When did Icarus ever fly too close to the sun

with a parachute or a safety net? What fool

shot out of a cannon like a fly into a spider web

doesn’t expect to get entangled in the details

of hedging his bets instead of taking the fall on his chin.

If you fall in love, and you’re not a clown,

or someone who bumbled over the cliff by accident,

be prepared to fall deeper than any place

your death has ever descended into before, and darker,

and more intense than the petty sentiments

of people dropping stones in wishing wells

to fathom the abyss by staring into the eyes of a telescope.

PATRICK WHITE

A LITTLE THOUGHT IN A BIG SPACE

A LITTLE THOUGHT IN A BIG SPACE

A little thought in a big space, I’m falling

through my own immensities here at my desk,

one of my Icarian propensities for plunging into things.

My voice intimidated by the violence of the silence within.

I’m on the dark side of my eyes.

No one’s ever been here before.

No window, no wall, no door,

I’m on the threshold of my homelessness again.

I’m looking at stars, but I feel like rain.

I’m talking to ghosts that I don’t remember.

Might be the wrong medium, but it’s the right seance.

I don’t even know what I’m doing here myself

but it seems I’m free to go or stay as I wish.

I’m wearing my shadow like a candling parachute

that didn’t step back from the edge in time.

No point in pretending you’re an airborne dandelion

when you feel like a rock with a message

someone just threw like the moon through a mirror

disguised as a sky the night birds keep flying into blind.

No one asks your name here on this pyre of a sky burial

if your birth certificate says you were born in fire.

Desire anything you like. It was all written in smoke

before you came. And these words that are saying me here

have been out of the aviary of the lantern for light years.

Who knows where the light goes or what if falls upon?

Trying to shine in a dark time without taking anything away

from the lunar eclipses that aren’t in need of enlightenment.

Don’t know if I’m a solar flare, a firefly, a matchbook,

or a lightning bolt that keeps stressing my starmud out

by sneaking up on it from behind and overdoing things a bit.

If you find yourself trying to pry the flowers open

with a crowbar or a koan, and it’s nightfall, it’s

time to turn your hourglass in for a waterclock

and see how the stars emerge out of nothing

as soon as you deepen the dark with a more acute sense of timing

that let’s everything happen spontaneously by itself.

Even if you’re the lighthouse of your dreams

that doesn’t mean you’re the nightwatchman

keeping his third eye on you in the shadows

like a theft of fire you can get away with

this second time around with only a warning.

If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.

And if you did, whining about it in your sleep

isn’t going to help and who’s Spartan enough these days

to stash the fox under their tunic to keep

from being caught while it eats them alive?

If you want to be a dragon you’ve got to learn

to swallow people’s hearts like hot coals as if they were chocolates,

without wincing. The stars don’t come out

like emergency candles you’ve been saving

for exactly this kind of situation. And if

you really want to know the truth about illumination,

try and blow one out. Quick, now, look

and see immediately into the clear light of the void

what it’s like to shine without a metaphoric reflection.

The stars here don’t hide their nakedness under a cloak

of black holes and dwarfs that take it all in

but give nothing back like the second hand clothes

of serpents shedding their skin. One size fits all

like a bubble in a watershed of dark worlds

dazzled by how much a single eye can contain

whether it’s hanging from the lip of a flower in the fall

or going down the drain in spring. I know

you hit it like a snowflake on a furnace

and do your damnedest not to cry. Thing is

as unique among billions as you think you are,

there’s not a star in the sky that isn’t a rite of passage.

PATRICK WHITE

SERIOUS AS A BELL, DEEP AS A HOUSEWELL, I WAS YOUNG

SERIOUS AS A BELL, DEEP AS A HOUSEWELL, I WAS YOUNG

Serious as a bell, deep as a housewell, I was young,

too big for my skull, tight as a nut in my shell

with the sweetmeat of the moon, immense

among the stars, intense, angry, almost scary,

seething with ambitions I took for granted,

like discipline and talent, love I’d be fulfilled by one day.

Blue fire didn’t shoot out of my eyes like a sky dragon,

but I was born in a low place and I liked to put wings

on the snakes I could relate to, scorned as they and I were,

I answered my detractors with brilliant oxymorons

that baffled them into thinking I was mad. Nine in the fifth place.

Of course, I was. Gone, gone, gone, altogether

gone beyond the history of scars that was my childhood,

though I was too experienced at the time to remember

what innocence was and how it doesn’t always

make you vulnerable when you’re nine in a garbage can

where they throw people like body parts and rank orchids

that didn’t get invited to the dance because

they never learned to step on anyone else’s toes

but their own and those immediately closest to them,

crushed hearts like strawberries someone heeled into the dirt,

cigarette butts, left to rot among the black rosaries of the ants

from the enterprising world that carried them away

piecemeal as if they cared, and that was the best

they could hope for. Baby never got a new pair of shoes

and the second hand ones never quite fit

like a yoke of oxen coupled to your feet as they grew

into the tumuli of bunions like moonrises on your toes.

You wanted to learn to walk, you had to get up on your own.

You wanted to learn to see you had to know

what you had to close your eyes to. I could read

books and faces, and which of the housewives

with rollers in their hair, hanging up the laundry

with clothes-pegs in their teeth, hands raw with bleach

and four kids in the yard like manic laughing gas and blasting caps

would be washing her face in the bitter tears of her hands

tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow that never came

like a husband home from the pulp mill who wasn’t drunk

with a paycheque in his hand that wasn’t clenched in a fist

for having to return to her, the kids, the dismal job

that underrated him two rungs under the burning ladder

he tried to climb out of the cesspool on like a spider

fighting for its life in the death trap of a toilet bowl

he flushed like the last word he had to say about himself.

I could read the stars. I could read danger leaning

in a doorway like a social worker, a Sunday school teacher,

a truant officer for delinquent offenders, an ex-con

out on a weekend pass who thought my mother

had been waiting for him all her life in isolation.

Egypt and Mesopotamia amazed me with the mystery

of all those lives I could wonder my way into

like the mirages of time, planets I’d never live

to walk on to see how different and strange

everything could be beyond the windows

of my boarded-up bedroom to keep the ghouls

and the pervs and the thieves out. Shadows

on the other side of the curtains that made me lie

very, very still under the covers hoping they

didn’t hear me breathing so I wouldn’t be called upon

to be more afraid of being afraid again than I was brave.

PATRICK WHITE

LOST AND BROKEN, LONELY HOUR OF THE NIGHT

LOST AND BROKEN, LONELY HOUR OF THE NIGHT

Lost and broken, lonely hour of the night. Wounded,

but it doesn’t matter by what anymore.

Intimate estrangement with the sleeping town,

don’t know whether I’m a streetlamp or a window,

but it’s all right, all right for the moment.

Enticingly sweet, almost peace, when

I remember my exile isn’t dishonest

and how far I had to come to believe in my solitude.

Hard not to betray your imagination sometimes

by resenting what you had to lose to stay true to it.

I don’t. There’s a soft beauty like an autumn night,

though it’s spring, in the voice of the ghost

of the train whistle howling by and a distance

even space can’t conceive of that comes close

to breaking my heart like the rain acquainted through tears

overflowing with the sorrows of too many eyes

to care whether it’s a freshly dug grave

or a garden it falls upon. Things we attribute

our mortality to bloom and perish like the new moon

I can’t see through the clouds tonight, but trust is there.

This is the rose of dark abundance. This is the thorn

of bright vacancy. If I saw a star right now

I’d think it’s light were a mode of longing

for something beyond love and death it doesn’t

even know about on the neither side of its shining.

Maybe it wants to whisper something into the ears

on the towers of Pleiadic larkspur that will change their lives.

Maybe it’s just tilting at a galactic windmill

that keeps quixotically turning and turning

over and over again in its heart like a gust of time

blowing on a prayer wheel as fixed as a sundial

following its own shadow like a direction to the light.

Or maybe in some kind of indeterminate way

we’re both wavelengths in synch trying

to sprout wings for the immensities ahead,

fireflies and dragons alike, staring into the darkness,

hoping to open the eyes of wildflowers on a hillside

that have reclaimed the far fields no one’s ploughed under for lightyears,

me, for a bit of blue sky that’s never witnessed a false dawn,

and it, for a loveletter that finally wrote back

though there was nothing but solitude and silence inside,

and the fragrance of burning doves in the emptiness

that take shelter under the eaves of this house of life

that keeps rising out of its own ashes at the faint sound

of the half-familiar song of a sacred syllable

we derived an inalienable solace from once as if

the only way to respond to pain were, indelibly,

with flowers, waterlilies and wild irises down by the river,

blooming in the urns of our childhood like pyres in the rain.

PATRICK WHITE