IF ONLY I COULD REMEMBER YOU WAS YOU WERE

IF ONLY I COULD REMEMBER YOU AS YOU WERE

If only I could remember you as you were

for a few, brief radiant moments as indelible

as light in space and not as time would have it

the way things have changed. To see you

lingering in the doorway on a winter night,

the snow lying lightly on your hair like the Pleiades

over your shoulder descending below the treeline

as if it knew more about saying good-bye than you did,

and o how I loved you for it. If only I could

remember that lonely ghost of a mirage

that hovered over the watershed of your tears

and looked at me like the first lifeboat

you’d seen in a thousand years respond

to your s.o.s. in a hourglass. If only I could remember

the fragrance of the summer rain on your skin

as if it had mistaken you for one of the flowers

and how I used to like wiping your tears away

with my opposable thumb like plum blossoms from your cheeks.

Eternity coming to the surface of time

like old corduroy roads and bones in a makeshift graveyard.

Not likely I’ll ever see you again in this life

but if only I could remember you before circumstance

underwhelmed itself and killed the ambiance

of our last dance by turning all the lights on at once.

But there you go, no help for it. The nightbird

transits the moon and the eternal sky as is said in Zen

doesn’t inhibit the flight of the white clouds.

And this moment, too, though it’s endured

a thousand deaths to come to this afterlife,

always saying good-bye to some aspect of you

that symbolizes the evanescence of love and life

in metaphors that buff the open wound

like scar tissue on the moon, like fireflies

welding living insights into the dead brain coral

of this encyclopedic coma life

can sometimes seem without you, even after

all these ensuing misadventures it would take a fire

and half a dozen bottles of wine to tell you about

if only I could remember you as you once were

like the lamb that laid down with the lion without fear.

For light years, images of you have flashed out of the abyss

as sharp and quick and vital as moonlight

wielding a sabre, or a bird quickened by a purpose

out of the unknown into the unknown

and I recognize them as blossoms that have blown

far from the tree that was lovelier

than the whole orchard to me, though angels

attended upon it like scripture from its roots to its leaves,

you were the locust tree with your demonic thorns

I wanted to tear my heart on like a rag of blood

on the galactic razorwire that encircled your heart

like a storm of dark matter with unlimited potential

for creative destruction that got the light out of the way

long enough for us to see what glowed behind it.

If only I could remember you as you were

when we both made eye-contact with each other

like exo-planets in the void, and understood spontaneously

it wasn’t going to take much of a wavelength

for either of us to understand this immediately

as if we could read each other’s shadows like Mayan calendars.

Water hemlock, wild parsnip, sometimes

the memories scald like volcanic dew on bare skin,

but seldom have I ever regretted

that I lived through you for awhile,

when the stars raged in my heart like a madman

obsessed by the crazy wisdom of a woman

who had the wingspan of a bow on a bent event horizon

but knew enough about compassion

to push the burning arrow of my fascination with her

all the way through like a blood sacrifice to love and life

and the mystery that moved in the darkness up ahead

like the fork in the road that separated us,

like a wishbone that had granted all it had to give.

How tenderly painful the brevity of what

we actually relive again as if some moments in life

are illuminated by a different light than that

we read by in bed late into the night

looking for translucency in the windows of insight

that keep on opening their eyes in this recurrent dream

like the black waterlilies of new moons coming into bloom.

PATRICK WHITE

RESTLESS WITH THE DEAD TONIGHT

RESTLESS WITH THE DEAD TONIGHT

Restless with the dead tonight.

Old friends, the gates to abandoned farms,

the roof collapsed and the wind with access

to all their windows, overgrown roads

going nowhere I can walk with them now.

Blue-green the evening sky, still,

without direction, island clouds, but unmoving.

Sparse beginnings, and sorrow in the seed.

Relying on the stars to do for me

what I can’t do for myself. Pull me out

of this black hole I keep slipping in and out of

on the rim of my event horizon, stray photons,

butterflies ducking in and out of the dragon’s mouth,

a halo of X-rays looking brutally right through me.

Down to the musical instruments of my bones.

Flutes and drumsticks. But I’m void-bound,

trying to shed my skin like a chronic illusion,

liberate the chains I can feel but can’t see,

numbed by having to say no

when all I want to do is say yes

over and over again to the picture-music

to the themes, the hints, the clues, the nuances,

the radiance, sorrow and horror of the mystery

wherever it leads, whatever occurs,

be so fully here, I don’t exist, not even

as a witness, and be nothing but the listening.

I suffer crucial impasses of circumstance.

My heart is blocked, the way isn’t clear.

The emptiness is leaner than usual, longer

than a plague of Egypt living up to a penurious dream.

Third eye of the hurricane slowly closing.

My friends at the end of a tunnel of light.

Reptilian as a camera shutter. I howl

for stars and fireflies, the accoutrements of my bliss

and the pleasure I take in the hidden harmonies

of my drifting, my circuitous blossoming.

Someone is using my skull for a door stop.

Too grounded by the shadows of the impending,

Even here by the river, the sound of distant trucks,

the occasional train bemoaning its way through the dark.

Snakes out hunting the frogs, slide and splash

back into the lake at my approach, estranged enemy,

walking in my place, face covered with ashes

of a man-shaped urn that’s avoided me for a while.

The way I like to live. Overlooked by the world.

Unregarded. Obliviously free to disappear

without worrying about what I’m coming back to

or who’ll be waiting for me when I do

to tell me while the idiocy of this languor

has got its hands on my throat, I should learn

to get a grip on myself, eat the pain, swallow the bilge,

live like a bear nibbling on the edges of a garbage dump,

give up this discipline of doing nothing

as if mere being were a form of worship

though to what is anyone’s guess and why

is just the nature of the mind reveling in itself

the way the stars make me guess their names

peering through the crowns of the trees,

dissociated from the features of their mythologem.

Time with their lifemasks off to be uncontained.

To go mad and not be held to account for it

because it doesn’t excite the attention of the crowd

when you’re unattainably available to live

as if your eyes were the way the stars touched you in tears

to see how the light labours for its flowering in you.

Thought-moments and light years bringing news

of friends from the past, bats and owls

flashing through the inadvertent moonlight,

the whole of existence in every locket of my cells,

freedom born, creatively, with a starmap for a genome.

PATRICK WHITE

OPEN WINDOW ON A SUMMER NIGHT

OPEN WINDOW ON A SUMMER NIGHT

Open window on a summer night.

Petting my cat on a cool windowsill.

Standing there in my underpants, not

caring whether anyone can see me,

it’s hot in the apartment. Though I try

to calculate the line of sight

from the street below, old enough now

to have run out of reasons to hide,

there’s a frenzy of drunks in the doorway

of a bar they’re standing in like a voice box

of cacophonous laughter, ego and hormones.

Riotous life going on all around me,

as if the wine had taken its bloodstream

off the leash and let it run wild with the dogs

that have wanted to get away all winter,

I was listening to the white noise of the dead

like the cosmic afterbirth of their microwave radiation

for any speculative pulse of a wavelength of life

to say yes, yes, yes, something survived

the initial blast that’s older than time itself.

Born and unperishing. Perishing in a womb

that tastes of life contemplating its own absence.

Throw in the deus ex machina of Hamlet’s father

wailing like the ghost of a train whistle through town

like the longing of a love lyric for revenge

that’s withered and gone brown as the leather

of the human manuscript of flesh

that prompted it in the first place,

I resurface a moment from the distractive

motherlodes of my insightful madness

like a canary in a mine on a shepherd moon

that’s tired of dying like an Orphic lighthouse

first in an underworld of beguiling eyes

that shine like jewels in the dark. I’m weary

of playing this aviary like a harp from the inside out

like the black box of a plane crash

that might afford me a clue of what it is

I’m still trying to survive like aviation fuel

in economy, wondering if I can tell by the ashes

whether I was a phoenix or a firefly.

I don’t usually give my secrets away

like a starmap but tonight I’m wearing

the whole of the nightsky for skin

and I’m more naked than I’ve been in a long time

without making my way to bed. I can feel

the moon water-gilding the leaves

of the silver Russian olives as if it were

breathing light into the lanterns of their cells

as flirtatiously assertive voices outside

overcompensate for how scared they are

there’s no star in the ore worth digging out of its grave.

Nothing to shine for. Everything lustrous and empty.

PATRICK WHITE

A SCAFFOLDING TO CLIMB UP ON AND PAINT THE WORLDS

A SCAFFOLDING TO CLIMB UP ON AND PAINT THE WORLDS

A scaffolding to climb up on

and paint the worlds, my bones.

I climb the ladder of my ribs

like the hull of a scuttled shipwreck

on the moon, to highlight the stars.

And I sing as I work as if

I were being unsaid by everything

I’ve ever meant and I’m grateful

in a wary way because freedom

from all constraints, the golden chains,

the iron straitjackets of expertise

in residence like the Great Barrier Reef,

is always a work in progress

I never want to take for granted.

I’m not in love. Nor do I long to be

and I’m still more ingenuously grateful

than bitter for the poignancy

of the women I’ve loved like a pilgrimage

to a shrine in a holy war for my liberation.

I remember the nights the apricots froze

in a flash frost, but comes the dawn

of your next afterlife and things thaw out.

As you get older everything goes more crimson

than grey, Betelgeuse in Orion,

and the thresholds you once leapt across

like a photon jumping orbitals, feel more

like sway-back stairs you’ve worn down

on your knees, carrying crutches to Cavalry

like relics of the true cross returning like skeletons

to the Hill of Skulls, the unfeathered wings

of birds that crash-landed in an early attempt

at the transmigration of souls in the bone-boxes

of the aviaries they were buried in.

There are only so many bells in the world,

so many swans and moons and lion gates,

so many superlatives you can compare

the body of a woman to, and even fewer

the mystery of the starmaps of her mind

she binds you to like a firefly

in a labyrinth of night before she

elevates you into a constellation

and lifts her veils like Isis to show you

what her face looks like in your own light.

If I’ve had a quarrel with life at times

it’s been like a cloud of sheet lightning

rooting its lightning in the air like a dragon

in defence of all the wildflowers it remembers

drinking from the hidden watersheds of its tears.

In this life, less is a lot more grateful than more

for small things that happen in the microworlds

like off-handed miracles of a sort

that aren’t trying to convert you to anything

you weren’t already like the mirage

of your own creation myth as you gather

the waters of life up in both your hands

and drink deep from the wellsprings of your eyes.

Elixirs and potions of seeing and being,

eddies and currents, tidal surges and undertows

in the nightstreams of space we’re

white-water rafting like the spring run off

of the Milky Way. It doesn’t matter as much

to me whether it’s a dream or not as it used to.

Whether I wake up or I don’t. The gate’s open

or closed, or hanging on like a lapwing by a hinge.

In joy or sorrow, there’s only so much time

and then there is forever. No one ever arrives

completely. No one ever departs without leaving

something of themselves behind, be it a heart

that holds you dear as the ashes in the urn

of an old love affair, or just a sign carved

by a boy on the rafter of an abandoned barn

you were up here once when your daring

was an eagle that lacked the foresight

to keep its feet on the ground like poultry

that’s had its flightfeathers plucked for convenience.

Go ask the iron rooster that got fried

like a weathervane by the lightning

the other night. All my life, daring

has said feathers and falling has taken flight.

I’ve been a cinder of a crow

in the third eye of the storm

that washed me out as if it had been

crying all night without knowing why.

I’ve been the larynx of a waterbird caught

in the throat of a telescope that gorges on stars

to sweeten the picture-music of its voice

as Cygnus and Aquila rise in the east

of indelible summers ago that still taste

like the eyelids of the ocean in a mystic rose

in a deep sleep I once bent down to kiss

for dreaming of me as if I actually exist.

PATRICK WHITE

BEAUTY IN THE ALOOFNESS OF MY USUAL SORROWS

BEAUTY IN THE ALOOFNESS OF MY USUAL SORROWS

Beauty in the aloofness of my usual sorrows.

A respite in time and care. A hole in space

I can escape through without setting off any alarms.

And I don’t care what this poem is going to be about

I can write it with no preconceived deceptions,

no utilitarian intent, no split lip ego-defects.

For a moment, the ice age is thawing

and the blue chicory and English ox-eyed daisies

like the taste of the air, and the drainage-ditches

are a riot of Queen Ann’s Lace and Viper’s Bugloss.

Temperate consolations modify my mood

into a truce with the bleaker conditions of life.

I’m gulled by the sunshine. I’m a schill of the mindstream.

The killer bees are away from their hives.

Amber tears of Baltic honey flow in my veins

without attracting flies. Life is unconscionably reasonable

in the efflorescence of its mystically specific details.

Even my dragon skull basks in the beatific wavelengths

of a better attitude toward its own martyrdom

in the greener fires of earth like salt in a flame.

And later tonight, if I’m still so entranced,

I’ll make my way down to the Tay River

to see if the fireflies are out dancing pianissimo

with the abandoned lighthouses of the stiff-necked cattails.

I’ll sit on a rock that doesn’t aspire to lord it over

anyone’s kingdom, and I’ll stare at the stars

until they’re tattooed like an indelible starmap

on the back of my eyelids, to keep my tears

from diluting them like smeared watercolours

or my more igneous aspects, from shattering them

like the menagerie of a zoo with glass bars.

And o, basking in the freedom of my own madness,

hilarious as peace, the infinite homelessness

of knowing I come from everywhere all at once,

and there’s nowhere I’ve walked alone in my life

down any road beset with assassins, or feathered

like strippers in boas of white sweet clover,

I haven’t been stepping across the threshold

of another wilderness always as vast

and cautiously intriguing as I am mysteriously lost

when the human intimacy of a longing heart

encounters the sentient impersonality

of an infinite mind that isn’t aware of anything

the heart doesn’t bring before it like a child’s drawing.

And there are themes you can follow

like bush wolves through the back woods

trampled down by the padding of their circuitous descents

into the dangerous pantries of the farms

pseudomorphically nestled between the hills.

It’s an itinerary that’s serviced the pack for years

with a sufficiency that’s got them this far against the odds.

And each to their own way, go with the gods

and I’ll rejoice in hearing you howl among the trees

to the chagrin of your detractors listening

with a begrudging admiration a civilization away

from what’s been bred out of them like freedom

under a full moon in heat. As for me

and my homeless approach to the ghost towns

of future zodiacs, I never want to know where I’m going

until I get there inconceivably as the only path

I could have taken in the first place,

because that’s always the way it is

even when you delight in the wiles of going astray.

Signs of your emptiness in the midst of the great unknowing.

Time and space mindscaping the exploration

you keep thrusting into the dark like the light and the lamp

of an estranged nightwatchman, hoping

you haven’t been here before, and anything

worth keeping an eye on has already been given away for free.

PATRICK WHITE

UNBUCKLE YOUR HEART

UNBUCKLE YOUR HEART

Unbuckle your heart, undo the luggage strap.

Wash the smell of old lovers out of your laundry.

Sow the dreams you’ve carved from your skull

like dice in sacred ground

and let’s see what springs up.

There’s the bathtub you can renew

your virginity in, and there’s a corner

you can stand your bass guitar in

like an Irishman at his wake in a coffin.

And there’s the garden for that persona

you took on the road like a scarecrow

for a travelling companion with a limp.

All the flowers taste of hummingbirds.

And it’s ok the raccoons come for the corn

like second storey cat burglars in the night.

They never take more than they need

and in a world of greed, that’s integrity.

I always leave a smile ajar to let them in.

But with you, my heart’s an open doorway

the moon’s standing in, and my blood’s

a transfusion of black roses into the occult.

My eyes, a rare conjunction of fireflies

that won’t happen again for another hundred years.

Doom can spend all the time it wants

messing with its calendars to co-ordinate

the apocalypse in all zodiacs at once

so the year of the rat and the year of the swan

don’t synchronize their prophets to the dawn

like waterclocks who think things are

just going to go on and on as they always have

like imperially inclined aqueducts without a rupture.

Eclipse, millennial poseur, you’re a lyric of carbon

that makes the diamonds flow like tears

to realize there’s galaxies of white sweet clover

more to you than appears under the cloud cover

of a hundred billion stars burning into the silver nitrates

of the photographic plates I take of you

in the humbled mountains of my all night observatories.

And even at this distance, alone in the cold company

of these one-eyed telescopes, I’m tempted

to cross your event horizons into your black holes

and see what worlds might come of us

on the other side. Throw caution to the wind

like a rodeo clown and take the ride

as if you were not too wise or wild for tenderness.

Even when you hurt I’ve seen how you wear

the corona of the sun so lightly in full eclipse

all the haloes shining by a reflected glory

seem mere brassy moon dogs by comparison.

Out of fury you insist upon your originality

like a gamma ray burst in the path of the earth

as you weave your interlocutory wavelengths

into the flying carpets and labyrinths

of an alien cartographer mapping out the stars

with your third eye open to the loneliness of beauty

and how everyone’s threatened by an intelligent orchid.

I imagine sometimes you’re almost as unloveable as I am

when I’m at my best, when I’ve been accurately blessed,

not too much, more or less, beyond my aspirations

and I see at the speed of light how time stops,

and my mass and volume become as infinite

as my body and mind, and everything

is perfectly inconceivable in a fallible eternity

that’s adapted to us like the medium of a mystery

in a graveyard of dead metaphors we keep giving

new meaning to as if we were all randomly immortal.

Are you the supple bubble of effervescence

in a tsunami of sorrow that could keep my spirits up,

or a methane moon waiting for an airlift of oxygen

to light you up. You’re too incandescent

to shine like a brown star, too imaginatively immense

to be a black dwarf. Are you the omnipresence of a particle

or the oracular wavelength of an apostate saint

when no one’s looking but me and you

through your holy books to see if what we said

came true or not? If we kept our word

to the innovative absurdity of it all in peace and war

or threw the moon through the window

like an alarm clock that didn’t go off in time

to save the earth? I know you’re not

the existential bricklayer of the paradoxically sublime

outside the gates of Babylon, nor the whore within.

I’ve seen you wing your way from one planet to the next

trying to thread your lifelines into a nest

that wasn’t a begging bowl in the hands of tree

that came on like a slumlord in a ghetto of birds.

There are no aviaries for the hopelessly free.

But could you live with me in this homelessness

like a tent in the wind that scours Mars for survivors

of the last expedition of seeds that tried to bloom here?

I’d build you a palace of black water that eclipsed

the beauty of the Taj Mahal and plant stars

all around it that would fountain into waterlilies

and we’d be so full of moonlight and solitude

in the silence of each other’s eyes, the darkness

couldn’t help but envy us the danger of the enterprise.

PATRICK WHITE

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