MY DEATH WAS A QUIET EVENT

MY DEATH WAS A QUIET EVENT

My death was a quiet event.

I entered the abyss with all

the constituents of the first sign of life

to give voice to the silence

that’s been ripening within me for years.

Green bough. Dead branch. Same song.

The apple falls. The moon blossoms.

Everytime we open them, the worlds

sprout from our eyes like seeds.

Close them and it’s an excuse to dream

of sleepwalking on stars like the firmament

of our own breath expiring

like a vapour of light on the autumn air,

a tale of smoke, a road of ghosts,

the purple passage of a fragrance

from the fires of life that bloom

out of the void like stars and wildflowers

deep within where we cast the shadows of the mirages

we are. Poppies in a wheatfield. Fires

in the desert like red-shifting stars burning

with the life of meaning as if shining itself

were meaning enough to engender us

like the myths of our own imaginations.

Life’s not solid, it’s as real as any nightmare

that never came true, any dream that ever kept

its vow to you. Grow vast. Teach space

not to be confined by itself. Grow deep.

Encourage time to root in your starmud

like a river system of lightning flowing

into the great night seachange of your awareness

as wise as the salmon are, we’re not fish

swimming upstream in a waterclock to be

born again to copulate and die. We’re

the sacred syllables of sparrows in a fountain

washing the dust of the worlds off our wings

after many flights, joy-riding the wind,

after many ice-ages in the hourglass of winter,

like the crumbs of a dream from our eyes

when we wake up to the fruits of life

we keep sowing in our graves like the silver bows

of these lifeboats that keep on ploughing

the seas of the moon as the siloes of our afterlives

are filled behind us with the windfall of our flowering.

PATRICK WHITE

SOLITUDE, MY FRIEND, LET'S GET OUT OF HERE

SOLITUDE, MY FRIEND, LET’S GET OUT OF HERE

Solitude, my friend, let’s get out of here.

Sick of looking at the same old deathmask

in the mirror like this afterlife I’ve carved

out of my heartwood like a straw dog

I cling to with too much affection. I forget

who said the mind is an artist, able

to paint the worlds, but it’s true. What

you see in the world is always a self-portrait

of what you look like from the inside.

Some colour within the lines like a choir of crayons

and others mix up a palette of homeless hormones

as if they were putting icing on a wedding cake

they were trying to keep the flies out of

like a seven-tiered ziggurat keeping an eye on the stars,

or a painting knife that slashed at the canvas

like an image of grace that wanted to paint its face

in scars of thick, dry pigment irresistible

as wet cement to a kid before everything goes solid

as ancient starmud on an effluvial flood plain on Mars.

Solitude, you’re the mast I bind myself to

whenever I hear a woman singing through an open window

as if the only way for a heart like mine

to have a long-lasting love affair with life

is to shapeshift my way like rites of passage

through all the stations of being water goes through.

Ice, fog, rain, clouds, seas, glaciers, rivers, mud-puddles,

water droplets, dew, lakes, tears, locked

in the comas of comets, frozen watersheds on the moon,

in these bodies we’re always leaking out of as if we had

more exits than entrances, and never last

and never least, this mindstream I like to sit

with you by like wildflowers in the sunset,

and drown my thoughts as if I were restocking

ten thousand lakes with the stem cells

of small-mouthed bass and northern pike

just to keep the game I’m playing with myself

dangerous and honest. Whether you exhibit or not

all visual art was born with the eyes of predators

painting their hunting magic on the walls

of their caves as if they’d found a way inside

their skulls to petition the great mother

with the mystic signage of their sacred gratitude.

Add a bird bone flute or two and it’s the picture music

that still echoes like a subterranean dream grammar

quoting the chapter and verse of mandalic metaphors

like the farewell of a waterbird to a fledgling arrow

of an albatross arcing through the sky like a paintbrush

with the taste of blood in its mouth, and its wingspan

unfolding like a book of sorrows too deep to curse.

Solitude, my friend, let’s get out of here.

I’m tired of counting the dead on the abacus

of my tears, black as new moons on my spinal cord.

Anywhere you want to go just say the word

and I’m there. Let the dark evaporate like a black hole

if Stephen Hawking is right, and if he’s not

we’ll work out some kind of cosmology along the way

of smoke and mirrors like a working telescope.

Make something up out of the ashes

of our former insights like a habitable planet

that doesn’t rely on the reflected light

of a middle-aged star for an exterior light source.

Let’s wander down that road no one’s ever

given a name to, forever further than we can go

like a new universe breaching the waters of life

with a birthpang of light that doesn’t wash

the baby out with the bathwater in the normal course

of love and life like a cradle or an ark

in a Red Sea of bloodlust that keeps saying to itself

apres moi le deluge. Let’s keep things in perspective

and make it huge enough to let parallel lives

meet like rivers mingling their way into each other

like the slim threads of one big tapestry

of marine life in a membranous multiverse.

Let’s go write crop circles in the abandoned fields

that read like the journals of the farm wives

that once lived around here as if there were

more intimacy in their solitude than there was

in the estranged company of their communion with town.

Let’s make a starmap out of the broken windows

that we’ve looked through as if someone

smashed their crystal skull like tears on a rock

scarred by glacial striations of the last ice age

that taught us to dance around a fire at night

to keep warm under the palatial chandeliers of the Pleiades

as if we had something to aspire to in life

that was higher than us. And it might sound weird

to someone who’s never haunted a house of life

they haven’t lived in, like a shrine to their own solitude

founded on a tradition of chaos that kept

the whole thing afloat like an empty lifeboat

anyone was welcome to crawl into anytime

they needed to without a passport to the moon.

Out of nothing, my solitude, we have both been made,

and that makes us wholly compatible

with the best and most abysmal in life,

this vapour of patchouli incense in the nostrils of God,

the smell of burning tires like black haloes

around the necks of humans nailed like crosses

to their bodies and minds like an excruciating witness

to their life and times. O who’s to say awareness

isn’t a miracle because they live like a lab rat

under a periodic table? If only with you, my solitude,

just to be here, however long it goes on

explaining itself with every thought and emotion

you’ve ever had it’s that close. A breath of stars

on the air at night, as if someone were breathing

inside you, every moment, the inconceivable absence

that fits you like the skin of an iridescent,

supersensible spherical mirror of a soap bubble

of intelligence, or a contact lens at one end

of the Hubble wearing glasses among the celestial spheres

to focus the multiverse and all of hyperspace

into the endless immensities of one single life

in any form, whether it’s candled out like a black dwarf

or blazing like the Pleiades, because one

flash of life across the nightsky of your deepest intuition

and you’re the stem cell that envisions

all the others like people and trees, fish, birds and animals

that all speak the same dream grammar as if we all see

through the same eyes, we’re the arcane wisdom

of an abyss singing to itself in the dark

as if it were well understood by virtue of our solitude

it spoke the same language as us, whether

we’re here to hear it or not. I’ve got you, my solitude,

like the cup-bearer of the muses, topping me off

as I watch the full moon tangled like a nocturnal waterlily

in the waterfall of the willows rinsing the stars

out of their hair into the river like bubbles of light

pierced by a thorn of joy in the cool abyss of the night.

PATRICK WHITE

BROODING SUNSET BEFORE THE STORM

BROODING SUNSET BEFORE THE STORM

Brooding sunset before the storm. Over ripe apricot

left out in the sun too long. Heat brain

boiling its thoughts in their own womb.

The clouds lumber like thundering Diplodoci

Slowly and in herds. Continental rifts in Pangaea.

Black outs and the lightning roots

of unknown blossoms sticking out their tongues

like petals to taste the first drops of rain.

The air menacing, thick, humid as lipstick

foreshadowing climactic things to come.

Sky bound i.e.d.s, and the pigeons scattering

for cover under the eves from overhead drones

that have been circling all afternoon

with the turkey vultures looking for road kill.

The windows set up like easels for the show.

Action paintings of still life with blitzkrieg.

The crackling of glass that layered black over white.

Oleaceous vapours of asphalt on roofs and roads.

I can smell the late Jurassic in rut from here

as black pearls roll off my skin like new moons

sweating tar. And now it’s as dark as a crucifixion

on daylight savings time, as the opalescent grays

homogenize into Bosch armies on the Western Front

just before a rolling barrage in No Man’s Land.

The hemorrhaging, the deluge, the venting, the rage,

a welcome relief to holding it all in though

everybody’s not going to like what they hear

and the fire hydrants are jealous of the rain

and the end of the world is more American than Mayan

bring it on like the hillbilly hippies drunk at the Imperial.

Anticipation. Latent exhilaration. Acoustic guitars

meditating in the corner, chanting aum to resonate

with the positive ions of a punk rock band on the rampage.

The cows plop down in the fields, and the seagulls

for the duration of the saturation bombing run

are grounded like kites on a reconnaissance mission.

Hilarity of chaos outflanking the usual order of things.

Mosquitoes and blackflies biding their time

under the monstrous leaves of the soft basswood trees.

Wrens and swallows in their medicine bags and begging bowls,

bees in their hives, prophets in the belly of the whale,

here comes a delegation of lightning rods to reason

with the open-handed extravagance of the revelation

that we’re as vulnerable as we ever were

in a time of stagnation to cooking the books

when the gods come to get even with us ethically

and the imagination asserts its ancient privileges

over the prophylactic rituals of our own worst case scenarios.

Some to dance naked in the rain. Some to stand

under lone trees in open fields trying not to get bit

by a snake pit of oracular lucidities with the aloofness of a lottery.

PATRICK WHITE

BASKING IN THE SILENCE OF THE COOLING DAY

BASKING IN THE SILENCE OF THE COOLING DAY

Basking in the silence of the cooling day,

sunset in the blood of a snake on a rock,

coiled into its own thermal like the hawk

in the twilight eye of a peacock past its prime,

I go out of my way, by the railroad tracks,

where the adolescents lay their lives on the line,

to accord it the dignity we all hope for in time.

The acrobatic swallows have finished

their aerial attack on the cults of the gnats

and now the nightshift relinquishes the sky

to the dog fighting gypsy moths

and the stealthy dive-bombing bats.

Every evening, the same, their finest hour,

shooting each other down in flames,

and the stars and heritage lamp posts looking on

as if they couldn’t be any less concerned.

Crackheads in khaki shorts pass me,

caps askew, and smile nervously at my earring,

though they’re baffled by the cowboy boots,

but it’s got nothing to do with me

whether they can read the memes right or not.

I just want to mesmerize the ocean

of lunar commotion in my brain

by the rhythm of walking as if my body

held sway over the tides for awhile.

Rage, sorrow, love, my judicious attention

to being fastidiously kind especially

if I suspect I don’t really like the person,

just to keep the record clean with myself

and outwit my pettiness just because I can.

Goes with being a poet trying to live generously

among thieves who’ve never heard

of magnanimous humans weakening themselves

like the chiefs of the Potlatch as a sign

of power leap frogging itself to the top of the totem

by giving it all away with an expansive hand.

Not really sure I understand it myself,

but I live a life of isolation in between

trying to make things mean way more

than they deserve to or not just to hear

the scarecrows mocking my absurdity

like straw dogs on the pyres of existentialism.

Voices like scalpels in my head,

chainsaws in my heart, razor blades

nicking my starmud like cuneiform

into a library of Assyrian incisions

made by Ashurbanipal to cook the books.

Living in the twenty-first century

has taught me to mistrust all the others.

Double back to the health food store,

up the road to Sunset Boulevard

that taught me how to paint moonrises,

five miles to Glen Tay and back again.

And if I’m lucky there shouldn’t be anything

left of my brain by then but a reflexive flunky.

Someone’s addiction is following me

like a rat in the shadows of my ancestors.

My rotten father maybe, his rubber cheques,

that deaths head of brutal alcoholics

with the insolvent grin on its face

that said I have nothing to give you

but violence and heart benching wretchedness?

Or my saintly mother the day she turned on me

for nailing Michael Jones square in the third eye

with a stone David would have been proud

to have thrown with such authority and finesse?

And I still am for the way he transgressed my fort

by throwing dirt at it like the Taj Mahal.

My legs are growing heavy and numb

and I’m running a gauntlet of road kill

through an ordeal of toads and turkey-vultures

unravelling the complexities of the dead

thread by thread until the loom is dismantled

that wove the big picture of the details

into a prayer rug of sectarian wavelengths.

Man of my age, or son of an old adage,

someone once said I was born a hundred years

too late, though late for what is lost upon me,

if I’m already a century ahead of my time.

The lucky day is when you discover it’s all one day.

This specious thought moment of the mind.

It’s all emanating out of the same radiant

simultaneously. Nothing gets left behind.

Haven’t you seen how the mountains

synchronize their spontaneity to the birth

of butterflies like waterclocks of being-time?

There’s no hour of doom for every era of redemption.

My ends aren’t shorter than the beginnings were long.

Eternity’s the rule of thumb and time’s the exemption.

Ten miles just shy of two hours whether you

measure it in tame avalanches or rogue asteroids.

Coming back the way I went as if I’d gone nowhere at all,

blueweed in the ditches, and loosestrife

in the moonrise of the river through the drowned trees.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMEONE LINGERS IN YOUR ABSENCE LIKE AN ICON

SOMEONE LINGERS IN YOUR ABSENCE LIKE AN ICON

Someone lingers in your absence like an icon, a gate

to an open field where the white horse

that stood in the tall grass, grazing on its solitude

like a phase of the moon come to earth

is gone. A bird, a purple martin with so much

distance and disappearance in it wings

and the open vastness of the skies it was absorbed by

I can barely hear you singing from here

over the raving of an unkempt wind on a crazy night

when the ghosts are rioting in their graves

like old leaves without attachments at the feet of the new

and gravity receives the grave goods of the tree

as do I these strange epiphanies of you

that haunt me retroactively like apple-bloom.

And the depth of the emptiness that informs

the substance of my imaginings, devastates me

like an eclipse slowly swallowing my heart

like a black cataract of snake skin I keep

trying to shake like a cosmic egg without much luck.

As if I were bleeding out like a rose after

the green thorns have hardened into fangs

that are killing and curing me at the same time.

Some nights I just want to join my emptiness to yours

and be done with it, no more of this, no more.

No more of watching the beauty of the world

burn out into a dark radiance that makes me

want to gouge my eyes out so I can see it without wincing.

Without feeling so wounded by the abundance of the rose

that blooms and disappears like the auroral apparitions

of a widow in veils of spider webs and black lightning,

thinking it might be you under there somewhere I can’t go

without losing you again. Check-mate. Pain.

And it isn’t anything either of us can do anything about.

It just goes down that way. The absence of your shining,

small nonrenewable gestures of your heart and hands

vividly recalled like modest butterfly volumes of poetry

blowing down an abandoned street at night in the rain, you

sewing a patch on my heart with the delicacy of a needle

mending a flying carpet grounded like a wavelength of light.

As I am now that you’ve become that rip in my heart

all the stars are pouring out of like a puncture wound

I let go right through me like needles and gamma rays

piercing the heart of a voodoo doll of dark matter

that makes me feel like wooden puppet of light

carved out of one of these black walnut trees.

Endure. Participate. See. Wonder.

Praise. Celebrate. Mourn. Do the next best thing.

And when you’re hurting your worst, sing.

And even when I’m soldiering my way through stone

like a flying fish in the wrong medium,

or walking alone with the Alone through the woods,

just to meet you where you ask me to when you call

and I come like a burning bridge down to the river,

wondering if I might have lived here once in another lifetime,

I do say these things to myself like medicinal chants

and preventative medicine, healing totems with benign effect

hung in the medicine bag slung around my neck.

Sweet grass and a pinch of sacred earth, just in case

I forget how to dance on my own grave

with grace and flare and style and an enigmatic smile

that really means it if it really means anything at all.

Or not succumb to this ice-age of a bell

my tongue is stuck to like a child’s to a wire fence,

or this black diamond nightbird

that cuts my darkness to the quick

because it’s got nothing to sing about

that can answer the call of the living for someone

on a foggy hill to come to the rescue of the empty lifeboat

drifting like the corpse of a dead swan downriver,

except the dead air of this strange place

where space is indelibly bruised by the passing

of the beauty it once contained like stars in a Mason jar.

Like a candle in the lantern of a skull

I’ve carried before me like a nightwatchman

on the edge of a dangerous precipice for lightyears

until I lost my footing and fell in one night,

as I once did into love, and learned to see in the dark

I was growing wings where I had none before

and looking up from the bottom of an empty wishing well

noticed the dead still blooming like stars

in the white shadows of the sun at midnight.

And out of the corners of my eyes

when what I can’t see what need to know about being alive

comes looking for me like the sacred syllable

on the lips of a pearl diver on the moon in total eclipse

like a kiss out of nowhere, comes like the singing bird

to the dead branch in my heart

that’s having trouble remembering how to blossom

after a long winter, as if you’d summoned me to the trees

like a purple passage in the Book of the Dead,

to teach me how to take the pain

and through the alchemy of the grief

that flows through my heartwood like light and rain

turn it into life again, as if every leaf

were a new loveletter from the dead

I’ve been saving for years like expurgated starmaps

illustrated by exiled constellations in Braille

to a spiritual lost and found at my fingertips

where they know who you are, and they’ve seen you

like a soft moonrise glowing through the willows

down by the river that weeps like a black mirror

for the stars and waterbirds in passing

that appear and disappear each in its time

and you wait for me like the longing of the dead

to make some kind of sign, however simple and austere,

the withered star of a wild rose without a flower,

that let’s me know you’re near, you’re here

rooted in me on earth where we’ve both come

to renew our shining from the bottom up to the blossom.

PATRICK WHITE

COUNTING THE BRICKS IN THE WALL ACROSS THE STREET

COUNTING THE BRICKS IN THE WALL ACROSS THE STREET

Counting the bricks in the wall across the street.

Full sunlight. Noon. Blue sky. Bikers

revving their throttles like angry sheets

snapping in the wind on a clothesline

as if they had their hands on the throats

of their ex-girlfriends. No gender bias intended.

I can’t hear the pigeons cooing under the eaves

over the snarl of old men on fourstrokes.

I’m just sitting here like the flagging waterlily

of a collapsed parachute that doesn’t want

to jump up anymore like a dandelion seed

at the least gust of wind. For the moment, at least,

no more descending toward paradise

like a counter-intuitive guess at which way is up.

I’m tied like a hooded hawk to the arm of a swamp.

Icarus is not all that unhappy with where

he crash-landed in a farmer’s field. Could

have been a kite in a powerline, a bat

velcroed to the burdock in a porchlight

that messed up its flyby. Here is there everywhere

if you’ve got enough imagination to lose yourself

in the extraordinary ordinariness of things

close to your heart. The eery patina of time

is always as young as once and once only

and like eternity, gone in the flash of an eye,

casting its shadow of now or never over everything

with the urgency of a fire hydrant

that thinks of itself as a heart transplant.

Lightyears left to go in my winged heels

without a flightplan to deliver the messenger,

but it isn’t the journey, today, it’s my shoes, my shoes

that are wearing me out where the rubber

hits the road like a poem late at night on

a hot asphalt highway reeking of dead frogs

like popcorn in the cinematic highbeams of a joy ride.

My feet sore as if I’d been firewalking on asteroids

down some long dirt road that would sweep

a biker right off his wheels if he cornered too sharply.

An intensely temperate day. The great sea

of awareness is not displeased with its own weather,

though I can hear the rootfires of dragons

growing underground like the cosmic eggs

of island galaxies about to hatch out

from the crude ore that’s being refined

like the psychodynamics of a sacred volcano

in my subconscious, I’m more curious than perturbed.

I’m going to stretch out here in the grass

at the side of this road. Let the ants worry

about how to get me back to the colony piecemeal.

Only the dog on a short foodchain wants to get away.

I’m going to dump this heavy load I’ve amassed

like a god-particle backpacking along the trail

like an alloy of a red wolf and a coyote weary

of keeping the shepherd moons around here on their toes

without meaning to in the struggle to survive.

I’m not even going to bother to lick my wounds

like a herbalist among the wild roses and the words

that sting like the antiseptics in my mouth

and the thorns I usually staple them up with

without leaving too much of a scar on the moon.

Physician heal thyself. Either way, let the roses bloom

or bleed out like red skies in the morning

that burn like iodine, or put lipstick on the clouds

at twilight to the delight of lovesick sailors.

Just want to lie here like the figure head of a fallen tree

or a shipwreck in port with a cargo of failures for awhile.

What I must be only a fool would try to do

anything about. The rain falls and the housewells

are full. I raise my crystal skull to the stars

like hidden secrets veiled by the light and I drink it

down to the lees of an emptiness that tastes

like the cast off afterbirth of wine on my tongue.

PATRICK WHITE  

LOOKING FOR A STAIRWELL OF STARS

LOOKING FOR A STAIRWELL OF STARS

Looking for a stairwell of stars in a labyrinth

of fire escapes I can slide down the bannisters of

like a childhood planet in an aberrant orbit

as if I’d wandered off somewhere like an unattended kite

or the black sheep of a shepherd moon

into the same vast spaces where the stars

graze like dragons on the ashes of themselves

and all along the river, fleets of waterlilies

break into light as if they were hauling their sails up

into the wind like the flightfeathers the moon sheds

like a waterbird lending its plumage to the waves

so they can soar in the depths of a borrowed wingspan

or swim through the stars on the oarpower of their own fins.

I’m parasailing in the Pleiades like a dandelion seed

that’s about to ignite into a big yellow sun

with planets all around it coming into consciousness

like life losing its innocence by becoming

aware of itself like a secret it shares with a stranger.

I’ve freed my dreams from the tyranny of mirrors.

My windows into the soul are breeding

with my mirages in a happy connubium

of appearances with the way things are

deep down underneath the rock you turn over

like your heart for the pale, yellow worm

of a meaning to life once you’ve come to mistrust

your senses into making better spies than friends.

I take as much delight these days in the way

things end, as I ever did in the way they began.

I rejoice in my impurities like sunspotted beauty marks

on the coronas of my crazy wisdom

and the alluvial laughlines at the deltas of my eyes

flowing like some soft-spoken waterclock into the abyss.

I sink and rise like the tides of a bell on a shipwreck,

despite myself, and sing out like a pearldiver

that drowned on the moon trying to open its shell,

all’s well, not, hell, maybe heaven, but only for awhile.

I beat myself up like a pinata of the heart

to be a righteous gift at a poor kid’s birthday party,

but I always feel deluded by the sacrifices I have to make

to transform the dupe of my morals into the sacred clowns

of the high ideals that have been making a fool of me

most of my life. Nobody trusts anyone anymore

if they can’t discern a reason for why you’re good to them.

Sad embassies on the moon waiting for a terrorist attack.

Whether you pour an ocean of compassion

into a teacup with a crack in it that’s as seismic

as the one in your crystal skull, or measure it out

drop by drop like some kind of Chinese water-torture,

even if your right hand gets caught spying on

what you’re doing with the left, things ebb and neap

like tidal shadows in the Sea of Tranquillity

where emptiness is always full, and maybe,

we’ll prove most useful when we’re not even here.

Not indifference square in the middle of things,

ignorant of its embittered self satisfaction

trivializing the aesthetics of its own solitude

by carrying the angry placard of a wallflower

in a protest parade that reads, I don’t care,

though it’s never true. When you most expect it to be.

Like a silent majority looking into their cellphones

like the third eye of God making collective decisions

for the mob that’s itching like the internet to flex its authority.

You can say you’re committed to a cause

you’re life’s been a long preparation to die for,

but the greater discipline is enduring the agony

of living it as if it were something beautiful

forever passing away. Like night on the face

of someone you love when you’re not trying to possess it

like a starmap on the black market to happiness.

Or the solitude that binds your quantumly entangled vines

to the wine in the eyes of an opposite,

blood of your blood, bone of your bone,

flesh of your flesh like the shadow you cast

in the form of the other as if it were a mask

with the eyes missing to see deeply

into the dark waters of the mystery of life

that sight is the kind of love that includes

the absence of itself like an old moon

that once knew what it was like to hold

and let go of the new moon in its arms.

PATRICK WHITE