IF YOU WORRY ABOUT WHERE YOU'RE GOING

IF YOU WORRY ABOUT WHERE YOU’RE GOING

If you worry about where you’re going

before you go, you’re not worthy of the road yet.

If you’re not having some black-hearted fun

with your worst nightmares, because they’re

just as surrealistically absurd as the bliss

of your most recurring dreams are, how

are you ever going to avoid taking yourself literally?

If you’re not crazy enough to wander

through a cemetery saturated with the moon

in the early hours of the morning, trying

to organize a choir of singing gravestones,

how are you ever going to recover a voice of your own?

That dowdy wren you let go of when you first discovered swans?

If you ever want to sweep across the lava plains of the moon

in a rush of emotion of a homecoming ocean,

but you can’t feel the tide in a single drop of water,

you haven’t cried enough yet to drown in your own sorrows

and see everybody’s life flash before your eyes

as you go down in retrospect, wiser than bubbles

in the way you descend like feathers trying to smile.

O, it’s hard here, isn’t it. Isn’t it brutal at times?

All your beautiful teeth knocked out against a concrete curb?

Inoperable cancer. The savage inexplicability

of the death of children it would be sacrilege

to even think there was an acceptable answer

to appease the loss, to satiate the grief. And I know stones

I’ve turned over I wished for years I hadn’t, things I’ve seen

that make me wish I’d never been born with eyes,

that have rendered my nemetic courage dysfunctional,

estranged from the Pleiadic radiance of my seeing

as if it were a black farce on tour in Taurus.

But if you want to shine like the fire of a pioneer star

in the clear light of the void, as I keep reminding myself

like a mantra over and over and over again,

you’re going to light up the intensity of hell

as readily as you do the cruel immensity of heaven

when it terrifies you with joy. Be a brave boy, I say to myself,

resolved to live all the lives of the Tarot Pack

and then go looking for the cards the Sufis say are missing,

just to say and smile at the end of time, if only to myself,

yes, I played all the stations of my life

as if they were the winning hand of an inveterate gambler

calling my own bluff in an unbeatable casino.

Seven come eleven, I’ve rolled my prophetic skulls

up against the wall like a printer in inky coveralls

in the back alley delivery entrance of a cosmic newpaper

on its lunch hour, throwing snake-eyes around

like the fang marks of a prison tat turning to Braille.

If you haven’t blooded your sword by falling on it yet,

and hemorrhaged by a river wild blue irises, just to add

a little Zen beauty to your death in life experience,

if you haven’t felt love slash its nadir across your wrist

and worn it like the talismanic bracelet of an unmentored initiate,

how are you ever going to transit zenith

as if you were crossing the threshold

of that thirteenth house of the zodiac

you raftered with your bones to accommodate your heart,

to cherish your own ashes like the mystery

of the afterlives you had to live through

until you burned like a star that had learned

the art of shining is the art of inexhaustibly letting go?

More doubt in our joy than in our pain, if

you don’t learn to ignore your certainty to the point

you disappear into the abyss of an expanding universe,

giving no second thought to whether you exist or not,

with no nostalgic attachment hovering over your emptiness

like the halo of a black hole, how are you

ever going to evolve the mystic green thumb you need

to root sunflowers in the darkness like neighbouring galaxies?

How are you ever going to adapt to the things you cherish

if you can’t endure the transformations that come with them?

If you skip the cocoon and go straight to the butterfly,

all you’ve really done is traded your birds in for a kite

that doesn’t know how to sit or sing on the power lines

it’s entangled in, nor how to negotiate the wind with wings.

You may glimpse the unattainable, yes, like a moth

at a closed window, wondering what it must be like

to be annihilated in a candle like an old love poem,

but the vision’s not sustainable as a way of life of your own

until you’ve set fire to your own antennae like wicks

that are not consumed by the flame, or extinguished in the rain.

Spiritual diamonds don’t forget where they came from,

their perishable beginnings, and though they can shine

like water and rainbows, their clarity smeared

by the chromatic aberrations of their colour-blind telescopes,

they haven’t forgotten how to burn like bituminous coal

in a basement furnace, or melt the intensity of their emotions

like a glass river making its way to the sea or how to use

a meteoric explosion as a way of sowing adamantine insights

like seed stars in an immaculate ocean of enlightened awareness,

the life-mask of the inconceivable assuming form

to express itself as an event in time that outgrows itself

transcendentally without a revolution or message for anyone

but itself, thereby ensuring, given our inquisitorial nature,

that everything from stars to rocks to apple trees to humans,

overhears it as a revelation of angelic gossip

waxing the long after-hour halls of a demonic institution

that was founded synarthritically on the cornerstones of our skulls.

Zen might be the taste of tea. But if you’d rather spice the water,

do it with all the flavours of life, dip an eclipse

in the full moon of your cup now and again,

and let the darkness work its cure upon you like a spell

deeply steeped in your imagination like a school bell.

Attend to your shadows, not as a theft of flowers,

or the clone of a brighter garden you’ve lost your way back to,

but as mute voices with a grammar all of their own

deep enough to show you the stars you wish upon

from the bottom up of a well with fireflies caught in its throat

it articulates like chimney sparks, even at noon,

or when the black sun shines at midnight

through a clearing in the tree-line of the starfields.

The snake that takes your life grows wings

and turns into the bird and the dragon that uplifts it

with oxymoronic lyrics of fire and rain that are as real

as any symbolic gesture that plays suggestively with your heart

in the cauldrons and fountains of being

that elaborate you as you are, slack water in a mirror

that neither ebbs nor neaps, as the tides reverse direction

like a heartbeat or the flow of your breath.

This mysterious third extreme in between life and death

where everything you sought among the mountain peaks

finds you at the moment of your withdrawal

from your circuitous passage through the valley of longing.

And in every emotive thought, the serpentine wavelength

of the immensity of the transcendent silence

overwhelms you with the intimate impersonality

of its approach to you in every risky step you take toward it.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU WERE A HOOKER BY SIXTEEN

YOU WERE A HOOKER BY SIXTEEN

You were a hooker by sixteen.

Your mother, your madame

The navy at N.F.B. Esquimalt, your john.

In the triplex, next door, upstairs

on a Friday night, all the windows

broken from the inside by whiskey bottles.

My friend, since you were seven,

how we struggled to keep our innocence

out of the world’s greasy hands.

Oil slick on the rose.

White peonies of blood-stained Kleenex

in the toilet bowl. Eclipse of the flowers

in a city of gardens. Even when the stars

were out, the darkness lurked, the doorways

housed strangers like trap door spiders.

Joy held a grudge against our wariness.

The windows didn’t trust us, and the street

was a firewalk of ordeals to test us

for things we really didn’t comprehend

but sensed, like broken glass, were crucial.

Painful to remember even now,

grey, grey, grey, the middle-aged children

trying to inch their way through the concrete

like dandelions or blades of grass,

or when it was wet, wrote their names in it,

each the founding member of a different slab,

gravestones with graffiti epitaphs

laid like bets against a future

that had been conditioned

by violence, poverty, disappointment.

The mythic inflation of human extremes

venting fumaroles of pent up emotions

entrenched like killer bees in their hearts

swarming the children in the agony of their perversity

as if they were always trying to get even with God

for something that drove them mad

with distemper and spiritual rabies.

Desecration always the answer.

Smashing beautiful things, debunking

the rare gestures of human divinity

that reminded them of who they weren’t,

fouling the waters of the children

with the effluvium of their own degeneracy.

I can see the chestnuts of your big brown eyes,

your helical blonde hair, your mulatto lips

and the pearl of your nacreous smile

when we walked through the wild broom fields

at the edge of town, and you forgot

how much your life hurt. Your mother.

Your body. Your corrosive acquiescence.

I should have made love to you

when you asked me why I hadn’t

and all I could say, because it was true,

I wanted to be different for you.

I wanted to show you what water couldn’t manage,

if you filled a bathtub up with tears,

you could always wash off in the stars.

You could burn off with light.

You could polish gold in the fire.

You could get out of the net

like the Circlet of Western Fish in Pisces,

out of the fetid uncleaned fish tank,

and see for yourself how vast the ocean is.

I didn’t know of a better way to be with you

especially when you showed up on Saturday morning

with wounds you’d keep to yourself

the rest of your life, and I wouldn’t ask,

it could have been anyone of a dozen men,

who bruised the beautiful blue eyelids of the rose,

and how, phosphorus and dry ice in my heart,

I wanted to give them a sex change

and turn them out like working girls on car seats

in the badlands of the Hindu woodlots

that reeked like seaweed on the moon.

Murder too good for the likes of them

in the ferocity of what was left of my boyish purity

I wanted to introduce them to the kind of agony

that feeds on itself, a root-fire, an inflammation

that can’t be contained by remorse or forgiveness.

Thorns on the roses they use to wipe their asses.

How many gates ago was that, how many

forbidden thresholds crossed, how many

long sidewalks you walked down alone

like a gazelle in the rain

with your stilettoes in your hand

thinking about nightschool

to become a nurse’s aide. Gone now,

noxious vapours from a street vent.

Heard you dumped a trick in Montreal

as soon as you got off the plane.

I went on to university which was

a different kind of whoredom without the fun

and then deepened my alienation as a poet

by refusing to forget about you

when I entered the witness protection programme

and disguised myself in my solitude

to keep the nightmares from seeping back in

like radon gas summoned to a seance in the basement

where all the bodies were buried

that had made their bones at our expense.

Still doesn’t make sense to me after all these years.

Surreal atrocities and ironic black farces

you didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at.

As I get older, little archipelagoes of memories

surface from that lost continent of childhood

before it broke up and went its separate ways.

I take little doses of depression everyday

to immunize myself against the poison

of all those people who threw themselves

like bad meat down the wishing wells of the children

we did an unconvincing job of being,

so little joy in the way we looked at ourselves

when no one else was. Salvage and shipwrecks.

Time insulates and buffs, brokers and deals,

but it does not heal. You love someone,

and you loved them even before

you learned how to feel, and they’re in

a worse mess than you are, and you burn

to help them out like one constellation to another,

a bear trap in a marijuana patch baited

like Andromeda chained and helpless on the rocks

and you want to slay the inevitability of dragons,

but all you’ve got for a sword is the hand of a clock

and the courage of a badly mauled heart

and thirty-seven light years of remembering

your unspeakable silence on a Saturday morning

and the tenderness of you leaning your head

against my shoulder as we walked

as if I were the mountain and you

were the avalanche looking for someone

to hold on to you like a meteor shower

at the end of an era of one-eyed telescopes.

Hope you’re a nurse somewhere now in the world.

Clean sheets and a compassionate bedside manner.

Maybe staring out of a window on the nightward

at the stars above and the city lights below

as we used to look down from Mt. Tolmie

to see the firefly of Port Angeles across the Georgia Strait

like a sister galaxy, Messier 31,

in the Great Square of Pegasus

where I buried our new myth of origin

in that constellation I made up for us

like a time capsule of what we could save

of our childhoods, and never dig up again.

O but that fathomless silence on Saturday morning

like a black hole in the sunshine, and the sky,

the injured bird in your eyes, has taught me more

about the crazy wisdom of compassion

and the injustice of suffering before you had a voice

to shriek it as if your nails were striating glass

like a diamond-cutter or a snow blind glacier

or a mirror you clawed until it bled red roses,

than my last eight books and four awards for poetry have.

Every anti-hero needs an anti-muse of dark energy

to fire things up like a cold furnace

in a lighthouse on the dark side of the moon,

that doesn’t listen to its own storm warnings

and goes off in a lifeboat to look for you

as if I could still keep you from drowning

in a sea of shadows after all these years.

Three bells and all’s well, I hope.

Though probability’s seldom esteemed

for the prophet it is. You left me your silence,

as if nothing else could answer me,

and I’ve been listening in my solitude ever since

for the hush of your shoes coming down the hospital hall.

PATRICK WHITE

AT PEACE WITH THE SADNESS OF MY SOLITUDE

AT PEACE WITH THE SADNESS OF MY SOLITUDE

At peace with the sadness of my solitude

I sense your presence like the estranged music

of a mood drifting out of a miasmic abyss

that almost overwhelms me as intimately as it did

lifetimes ago when the thorns were still green

on the rose and I wasn’t quite as sure then

as I am now they’ve hardened enough to penetrate

the heart with how immensely someone

can long for the dead like an empty lifeboat

appearing out of the soft glow of the fog

in a blur of moonlight, the fragrance of an apparition

that ferries me back in the undertow

of oceanic emotions like an s.o.s. at a seance

intimate with the prophetic sincerity of your absence.

More springs than I have left to live

I gave up judging the insufficiency of my love

to break the generic grip of death

you so severely desired to die in the arms of.

I see you in the feathered war bonnets

of the new leaves of the trees I’ve forgotten

the names of since I stopped sitting under them alone

too numb to be troubled by the lightning,

too cold to rise above the absolutes

like a thermometer filled with frozen blood.

Land-locked among the ten thousand lakes

of a shattered mirror I held up to my broken nature,

I followed you as far as I could like a train whistle

into the distance where time and silence

are indistinguishable destinations, and then

I sat down like a drunk with a lantern

at the side of the tracks, and I waited, o

it must have been eras for you to come back

before I lifted my head off the rails

of our parallel thresholds and returned

to the spiritual hovel of my homelessness

grateful to touch something solid again

as if all I had to lose was a key to a door

that didn’t recognize me on the inside anymore.

Nor would you any of the death masks I’ve shed

like the eyelids of the white peony of the moon

scattered in diaspora on the waters of life

when I woke like a ghost from a recurring dream

of the way I once imagined you returning

to the surface like the buoyant skull of a moonrise

asking me if I still remembered your face

and could I love you now like a leper colony.

It’s still easier for my heart to make sense of your love

than it is for my mind to attribute a meaning

to your death as you once said it wouldn’t have.

But whenever I grow weary and irritable at

the chronic torment of casting lifelines out to you

that have inadvertently rescued many for your sake

like dolphins cut out of the fishing nets of the constellations,

I bury you in pearls like new moons among the coral

in the lunar gardens of dead seas swaying

to the music of water snakes among the shadows of kelp

beyond the range of the wavelengths of the nightbirds

that haunt my voice like a mindstream whispering its way

through the hidden watersheds of the willows

with stars in their hair as bright as they were in your eyes

when these clouds of unknowing were dispersed

like nebulae breaking into light with every breath

you took in and let go like a woman swimming away from shore

as if we’d all learn to live out of our depths at last.

Diving bells among the shipwrecks that don’t ring

when they mourn. Foghorns that don’t bother to warn

ships in the night there’s no shallow passage

when they encounter each other on the Road of Ghosts

like the lights of Port Angeles across the Georgia Strait,

heavy with a cargo of imported coffins, and the heart,

as always, ballast they’re trying to throw overboard

to lighten the load and rise above the waterline, float

like waterlilies umbilically moored in our starmud

or the Little Dipper of the north star bailing glaciers

like delinquent waterclocks out of a sinking lifeboat.

PATRICK WHITE

WATERLILIES SOON AND A PLEIKU OF DRAGON FLIES

WATERLILIES SOON AND A PLEIKU OF DRAGONFLIES

Waterlilies soon and a Pleiku of dragonflies.

Shipwrecked fleets of the naked limbs of the trees

gone long in the teeth, buried at sea wrapped

in a starmap of the sky they’re anchored in

like the remains of old bridges that made the crossing alive.

I’ll read the runes of the watersnakes

like an indecipherable language that uncoils

like a sacred syllable rolling off the alphabet blocks

and mute rocks of the tongue lying dormant in the sun.

I will thrive on the beauty of life awhile

as a spontaneous counterpoint to its quantum entanglement

with the death stars in the steeples of the white hyacinth

entrancing the bees with honey in the hives of shepherd moons.

These are the killing fields of life empowering

its own annihilation at the expense of its own creations.

I will walk warily around the bones of the muskrat

and the fox, and the feathers of the wild swan

scattered like moonlight by snapping turtles

entrenched in their starmud like World War 1 helmets.

I won’t think about all the Orphic dismemberments

that taught the birds to sing as if there were prophecy in their words.

I’ll follow the same trails I did last year but

they won’t know me as the same man

who wandered here off the beaten path

with a maple branch for a divining rod

looking for something deeper than a watershed,

or the dusty stars kicked up on the Road of Ghosts

gravelled with gravestones. I’ve changed since then

like a mirage of rain in the deserts of an hourglass

that bloomed in a flashflood of unsummoned tears

as if its cup runnneth over like the full moon at sea

longing for its lost atmosphere and its genius for making waves.

I’ll marvel at the windfall of scorched planets

rooting under the leafing boughs of the black walnut trees

and I’ll set up my French easel like a fawn

getting up on its legs and paint the evanescent patinas

on the wings of the starlings in the willows

as if the northern lights were mirrored in chips of anthracite

like the mysterious veils of a woman with black eyes

that shine like occluded sea stars at the bottom

of a widowed housewell bemused by the sunlight,

nocturnal silk on the looms of the mulberry moons that weave it.

I won’t feel precious and aesthetic, radiantly exquisite

in an abattoir of pleading flowers whose petals

have been splashed with the blood of children

like fingerpaintings smeared like poppies on the wall

of an enclosed garden trying to keep the world out

like an embassy of one when a junta’s out hunting.

Just as soon be initiated into the corporate cults

of mystical pharmaceuticals handing out drugs

like the angelic heirarchies of prescriptive states of grace

available to the neo-feudal dimensions of medieval futures

yet to come. I’ll be a post revolutionary in a world

that made a bad start and if my art’s a weapon

I’ll tilt at windmills like jinxed prayer wheels

and swing from bells like Quasimodo playing to the crowd

like a carillon of columbine before the heat grows too intense.

I’ll pretend I’m in Eden again and I won’t

put my winged heel to the snake without making it

my dragon familiar, my spiritual vehicle, not large or small,

who knows the road like a rat snake knows a farmer on a tractor

and reminds me from heartbeat to heartbeat

like a friendly oxymoron that those who like to fly

as high as I do, sometimes find things get so vertiginous

their only recourse is to get down in the dirt and crawl

as if high and low were two wheels of birth and death

on a death cart pulled by dragons plumed with flowers

that only bloom in fire every seven thousand years or so

though the pine cones pray for conflagrations that will come

much sooner than the rejected stones of the pagodas could disseminate.

I’ll trample down a deerbed behind the pale of the cattails

and I’ll rejoice in peace for awhile as a natural birthright

to celebrate a world I’m surrealistically adapted to

like a mother tongue I haven’t addressed myself in

since childhood stopped delighting in its own renewal,

incoherent with wonder at the silence of the stars in its voice.

I will forget I am aging. I will be a medicine bag

of healing metaphors and powerful occult charms

with oracular effects on the crazy wisdom of the inconceivable

and lie down upon the earth in the unassuming grass

after I’ve finished painting, fascinated by the prodigality

of the stranger I’ve become to myself listening deeply

to the picture music of the life of the mind like a kid

with forty-eight crayons and the whole of the sky to draw on

as I wait for the stars to make themselves apparent

in the sweet, sweet darkness that envelopes me

in the green flames and violet shadows of another

vernal martyr to the cause of keeping their fires alive within me,

a dragonfly in a chrysalis, a hermit thrush in ecstasy,

a sulphur butterfly with antennae like burnt match sticks

looking for a light from the lanterns of the nightwatch

reigniting the passions of old poems like fireflies

inspiring the ashes in the urns of the stars to enlighten their afterlife

with incomparable myths of origin that have yet to be written

by the root fires in our starmud breaking out like lightning

fracturing koans like diamond insights into

a labyrinthine gallery of mirrors that see me

with the same eyes by which I see signs

of the disastrous happiness of life in them.

PATRICK WHITE  

MAD PEOPLE TRYING TO IMPRESS ME

MAD PEOPLE TRYING TO IMPRESS ME

Mad people trying to impress me with the quality of their souls.

Ego-slurry alienated radioactively from the rest of the world

trying to compensate for the meltdown of their lives

by glowing bioluminescently in the dark like the tiny zodiacs

of their watches allotting one star each to all of their signs,

or colourless fish in the depths of the seas of their own awareness

that have no need of the sun to shine by their own lights.

No river’s flowing the wrong way to the sea whether

it goes underground, evaporates, flexes its flowing

in the froth and fury of whitewater turned rabid, plunges

over a precipice into a misty ghost of itself or

trickles down through the faults of old earthquakes

to lie dormant for two billion years in its own watershed

like a dream waiting to wake up in a different hourglass

than the one it drained to the lees of life. And here comes

a cloud in a bong that’s troubled she’s not more of a river

and keeps looking for a lover that will fulfil her like an ocean

she’s dying to drown in. Modes of water all, glaciers

calving into the sea like nervous breakdowns,

or a drop of water trying to leap from the fiery tongue

of a burning leaf in the fall she can’t put out

with how beautifully she reflects the moon in every tear

that hangs on the moment like a glassblower stretching a point.

Fifty years, a poet, it’s not hard to relate to their shapeshifting

or see the fear in the eyes of the paradigms that transmutate

like a seance without a medium into a chaos of evocative stars

that blur and illuminate the nebulae of their vision of life

by the way they associate metaphorically with a darkness

indelibly schooled by the shadows of night into one

apocalyptic revelation after another going off like fireflies

as if they were blasting caps in a beaver dam

they wanted to blow up like terrorists to liberate their mindstreams

like a rush of dopamines in the fractured creekbeds

of their starmud exhilarated into life again like frogs

singing in the climacteric of a seven year flashflood.

Extremeties of heart and mind quantumly entangled

in the disorder of conditioned consciousness, and I’m

no less susceptible to hearing voices in the genius of the rain

suggesting wild irises and extemporaneous lilacs

to the insanity within me that makes a petty life great.

In the company of rootless trees, what’s to get right,

what’s to get wrong? The lightning doesn’t lead

a moving target and birds aren’t the first draft

of the dawn I’m carrying like a sheaf of poems

under my arm to see if they’re in tune with the croup

of shore-hugging swans and astigmatic peacocks

changing their prescriptions like world views every two years or so.

Like powerlines every octave’s a stave of wayward words,

crows, wrens, swallows, bolos of old running shoes,

even when they’re a snakepit hissing on the ground

or just humming to themselves in a summer rain,

as long as you’re singing you’re not sane or insane,

timid as a whisper or so sure of yourself you leave

the whole universe in doubt. Weird as it sounds,

it’s going to work out, I swear, like a jam session

between you and the stars, Vega on the electric harp,

Orion burning its axe like Jimmy Hendrix and o

go quietly, my soul, into the mosh pit

of the Day Glo Abortions singing galactic lullabies

to the cacophony of black holes eating the light

out of the eyes of the picture-music that echoes

in the nightclubs of anarchic Neanderthals

teaching the nightingales to sing like blood-stained buckles.

Chaos isn’t a miscarriage of the dancing star in my soul,

the diffraction patterns of a spider on acid

messing up its webs like mandalic ripples

to empower neo-expressionist bass runs

that like to colour outside the orthodoxies

of its dreamcatcher casting the nets

of starstruck constellations far and wide

as if it were dragging the great sea of awareness

for the corpses of the dead it can haul up

into the empty coffins of the lifeboats on a shipwreck.

Estranged friends, I cherish the negative intimacies

you’ve shared with me over the intervening lightyears

like a blizzard of fireflies trying to make the darkness visible

deep inside the occult priestcraft of your temple telescopes

scrying the stars like eyes in the back of your head

where the shadows enlighten your paranoia

of being left out in the dark alone with no one

to see how bright you are when you shine

like a starmap of lighthouses in the gravitational eyes

of your intensities, bending the light like Beckham and Einstein.

Old pond. Frog jumps in. Splash. Basho

jumping to conclusions like the sacred syllable of a haiku

that’s gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond

the boundary stones of the prophetic skulls

that set an acephalic limit to the taboos

of the wandering scholars among the mad and homeless

born to bloom like wildflowers and mushrooms

beyond the fence of cultivated gardens

that don’t make any more sense than the untampered seeds

the wind scatters like weeds driven into exile

for tasting the wheat, pomegranates, fly agaric and apples

of the forbidden windfalls under the fruitless tree of knowledge

even the bees couldn’t churn into honey

in the asylum of their hives without a black queen

to colonize the stars like the crazy wisdom of a dark mother.

Freedom isn’t bound like a motive to itself

and the abysses of love we fall into like diminished I.Q.s

remedially reading the writing on the wall

by plunging deeper into the darkness beyond

the blindness in the blazing of a one-eyed midway

might be the portals to another universe

more lucidly irrational than this turmoil

of common sensical chaos labouring to order itself

like an elephant graveyard of gateway precedents

poached like tomb robbers for the tusks of the moon.

Who isn’t a lunatic, each after their mystically specific fashion?

Enlightenment isn’t bound by the heretical vows

it makes to its own disobedience, just as the mad

aren’t the repeating decimals of cosmic incommensurables

running on forever like rapids in the waterclocks

of their mindstreams as Heracleitus reminded us,

if you were paying attention, you can’t step into twice

anymore than pi can build a bridge to the other side

of this shoreless river of life or your third eye can visualize

through its tears what it’s like to have the stars

kicked in your face by the bullies of random chance

because some are born to walk upright on their knees

and others, more wisely, have taught their crutches to dance.

PATRICK WHITE

I STILL BELIEVE 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