THIS STRANGE VASTNESS RIPENING IN MY HEART

THIS STRANGE VASTNESS RIPENING IN MY HEART

This strange vastness ripening in my heart

that makes me ache with sorrow like a farewell

to the waterbirds in autumn though it’s only

nearing August, and the loons and the kingfishers

are far from gone. And the stars are all wrong. Why?

A new start or the beginning of giving up?

Life in death. Death in life. Fire in the tomb.

Water in the womb, or is it solely human

to go on failing your way into the unknown

trying to make a gift of a gift and all you’ve got for ribbons

are a few shadows cast like words and longing

for the mysterious silence, the unseen spirit

that bids you leave your eyes in the doorway

and enter a wholly disarming space where

the nothing you’ve become can overhear

in the formidable distance, reminiscent echoes

of who you thought you were. And a mindstream

moving like a hidden nightcreek, a pageant of images

bleeding into one another like a watercolour

being creative about its tears. An evanescent chaos

tinged with moondogs and rainbows, all the homely eternities

of an intimacy with time that never makes a promise to anyone

it can’t break like a tree in a thunderstorm.

And there in the heartwood, a calendar of the springs

that have passed like ripples of rain, grail by grail

because what makes the things of life seem holy

appears to be that they share in being as lost among us

as we are to ourselves among them. Comes a thought

like the silhouette of a bat against the moon

and then it’s gone again as if the seeing of anything

goes way beyond what it means. Gapes with significance

because of its passing away. And where within us,

for all the remoteness of our solitude could we hold it

like water and sand in our hands, without limiting

the openness we pass through like waterclocks

in a labyrinth of locks that may raise our spirits a moment

like a lifeboat on the horizon, but as things approach

three bells are ringing all’s well like a nightwatch

on a shipwreck that lost its sense of buoyancy

the seventh time down? As if the hour had marked its place

in the gills of a purple passage in its last entry in its logbook

with a golden hook like a question mark between

the first and last parentheses of its waning and waxing crescents.

PATRICK WHITE

NO LIGHTNING FROM MY CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING

NO LIGHTNING FROM MY CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING

No lightning from my cloud of unknowing,

now that this season of storms has passed.

Occasionally tears, but a harvest of stars

shining like Spica in the hand of Virgo

and all these dazzling insights into nothing

I hang like wild grapes and chandeliers

above the dance floor where I press the wine.

Not meditative, but darkly absorbed, who knows,

maybe even void bound, drowned or lost,

I’m not trying to seek a way out of the abyss.

Whatever it is, I accept it as it is. Most of the time.

And when I don’t and I’m stuck like a wishbone

in the throat of a nightbird, even my dissonance

is included in the background cosmic hiss.

So I say you don’t have to be attuned to it

to be in harmony with it, and if you’ve gone astray

or been misdirected, maybe that’s a course correction

you didn’t have to make, because all rivers

are flowing the right way to the sea, and as

for the picture-music you hear like a hidden mindstream

talking in a dream in a dark wood, you don’t

always have to hit the right note to be a great singer.

Or name me a bird that sings its heart out off key.

I can feel the stillness moving under my feet

like a road, a mountain path, a rogue orbit,

or Curiosity like a wandering scholar on Mars,

a vagantes, a Druidic refugee intervening in the War of the Worlds

and a machine this time looking for the Garden of Eden

like an alien mirage in the desert, fossils of Dilmun,

the middens of Shangra La, microbes in the begging bowls

of a new myth of origin, where Nasa is God,

and a robot is the first of a whole new race of Martian nomads.

The silence speaks to me in thousands of estranged voices

like leaves on the silver Russian olives moved

by the spirit of the wind tampering with their sterling currency

to lament their passage at the approach of autumn,

though there are only a few flames beginning

to immolate the trees like heretics that had to

bring their own stakes to their auto da fe.

O how easy it would be when I’m down here alone

to slip into this river like an unobtrusive sacred syllable

into a long-running conversation, even if

it’s nothing but spiritual slang, and yet be satisfied

I’ve had my say, I’ve added my voice

like a bird in a birch grove, whether

anything alive tonight answers it or not.

As a holy book said once on a bus, sitting beside me,

when one jewel is marked they’re all marked

indelibly as stars and eyes and planets,

and there’s a Conservation of Data Principle

in this universe, even in the heart of a black hole,

that says once here, here forever

in this great spiritual lost and found

that can read the whole history of life

in the mustard seeds that yellow the fields around here,

or the stars that do much the same

in a commotion of atmospherically aberrated colours,

burning with the urgency of mystic details

being whispered into everyone’s ear

as if each were a hidden secret of God

that wished to be known and expressed itself flawlessly

like a master of mantric wavelengths

or a mute with an overbite pointing out constellations

and the last of the wildflowers, a signage of light

reciting the fathomless poetry that lives in a name,

ignoring all the fancy lanterns in the windows

of the houses of the zodiac, to follow the flame

of whatever light you’ve been given to go by,

wherever it leads, through the star fields or the cul de sac

of a satoric eclipse with no light at the end of the tunnel

as the only way of ever prodigally coming back.

PATRICK WHITE  

YOU MAY. YOU MAY NOT COME. MAYBE TONIGHT. OR NOT

YOU MAY. YOU MAY NOT COME. MAYBE TONIGHT. OR NOT

You may. You may not come. Maybe tonight. Or not.

When it’s not cooking cosmic eggs, boiling heretics

in the hot oil of bubbling cauldrons, the hourglass

is sandpainting sidereal mandalas with stars

to empower the wind to blow them away,

bones of grey chalk watergilding my flesh in ash.

What did I say? What did I say that was so unorthodox

all the bells of your body were left speechless

at the sight of so many grails trashed like empties

from a car window like a litter of roadkill

along the side of the highway? Did I transit

the zenith of the burning bridge of your last loveletter,

or should I have jumped, or fell, or cannonballed in

to make a bigger splash in the blood vats of your heart?

Maybe a meteor to render your old lovers extinct?

I watch the cold windows until they begin to percolate

in an unexpected thaw of disciplined sorrows.

It’s getting late. Your absence, a glacial waterclock

followed by a lot of patronymic colons about who

begat what upon whom. I don’t want to meet your father.

I’d kill him on the spot. I don’t want to prove

to your mother I’m going to be good to you

in ways that she was not as she soaks

the blood from the carpet like gouts

of insincere candlewax. The price you pay

for three meals a day and a creative finishing school

where you can afford the kind of problems

the poor don’t make enough to imitate.

They worry about where the next meal

is coming from. You were born knowing

how far out the soup spoon was supposed

to be aligned from the begging bowl

like a shepherd moon in orbit around Neptune.

And me? I eat out of my skull on the run

whenever I’m writing poetry to the moon

in one long howl of anguished wanting.

Were the diamonds too hard? Wasn’t I

bituminous enough when I entered the dark

to show you how I could shine out of

my own inner resources like two hundred million

urns of light gathered from the firepits of the stars

by the crows that keep pecking out my eyes

like jackhammers looking for the motherlode?

And when I watched you slicing the throats

of your long-necked swans like ballet dancers

and black daffodils on an angle to preserve them longer

as cut flowers on the coffee table, didn’t I

make a Zen comment on the way you’d arranged them?

I’ve been scarred by love like a clay tablet in cuneiform

in the library of Ashurbanipal. The crow

has scratched at my flesh to show me where to bury

my dismembered body parts to guarantee

a higher yield over the ensuing light years.

The cat claw of the moon has caught my eye

more than once. Fireflies in a bird net,

I’ve cauterized my optic nerves on the constellations

of my own signage to keep my brain from seeing

what my heart was afraid to reveal to itself.

I was a blind prophet being led away by a child.

I could witness on the dark side of my seeing

the bird eating arachnids with two red stars for eyes

weaving their wavelengths into low frequency webs

like the bass strings of a slack guitar

to catch the fire of the morning dew in a false dawn

like Cherokee water spiders with hairy down

and scarlet stripes casting magical spells

like the geoglyph on the Nazca pampas

with Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka

in the hourglass waist of Orion trying to squeeze

its abdomen into a whalebone corset

before the Arabs changed its sex

into the belt of a less subtle Hunter

with a trophy line of scalps for wampum.

One of them mine. My eyes transfixed

by the paradigm of an eclipse being peeled back

like a black eyelid of time, or raven tresses

from the skull of the moon. I’ve known

the innocence of the crow when its feathers

were albino white before its failure turned sinister

as a starless night. A penury of insight

pearl diving for diamonds in a tarpit of love

that swore the new moon would last forever

like apple bloom and silver on the inside of the ore.

But sometimes the Artesian springs we plant

in the starmud of our hearts come up like black holes

and flowers of oil and what’s left of the shining

is the tinfoil of a trickster shaman substituting

his hunting magic to gratify the eyes of fools

that revel in their amorous delusions and spurn

the astringencies of enlightenment that burn

like circumpolar suns at midnight illuminating

nothing but the skins we shed to let the snake

out the box like Draco, without getting bit

by the picture-music of our own motives

trying to charm the serpent fire with backbone flutes

jamming with the downed powerlines

of our badly tuned spinal cords riffing

with the cosmic spiders writing the lyrics

of our myth of origins like electrical dreamcatchers

with toxic pincers like the tuning forks of splintered stars.

PATRICK WHITE

DEEP IN THE NIGHT

Deep in the night that shells its husk of blue

to pan the nuggets of its stars from a darker stream,

the heart an executioner with a fistful of pardons,

and the soft, moist, lulling of the evening air,

the threshing of slow fish,

I’m enthroned alone in a crucial palace of light

that realigns its domains to the borders of the wind,

and I don’t want to feel lonely but I do,

and I don’t want to miss so many, so many faces

stripped from the bough like a savaged telephone-book,

so many feathers of light drifting through the shadows of their names,

and the black granite of the uncarved bell

that turtles the blood under the eyelid of the knowing,

that makes my eyes want to scream

until the pillars of the dead sea fall like rotten salt:

how long can one road endure the passage of everything

walking life off into the stars that measure the miles in skulls?

Was I young? Were you there in the brindled moonlight?

Did I remember how to love you well; did I see with long eyes

how you rose out of the chest of the hills like a spirit leaving,

the blue effulgence of your nebulous departure

almost a cocoon of morning mist, the last breath of a lake

as if an indigo thistle released its silk to the wind

or a dandelion relinquished its ivory mane?

Were you the soul of me that lingered by gates and wharves?

Have you come back now with your bells of blood and lamps of flesh?

Can I feel again the leaves of the silver herbs

in the gardens of your fingertips?

Touch me like the breaking of a fast,

find me like a river in the night,

the dazzled theme of a wandering valley,

and pour your journey into mine like stars into a vine,

shadows running down the worn convictions of the stairs,

the midnight wines of old eclipses in the goblets of your eyes.

Once for the flame that dances on the wick of the tongue,

Once for the orchards that plead with the heart for birds,

Once for the envelope that read the letter it married,

and you, by the river, a sapphire among rocks,

tender blue grass in the translucent water-skin of the night,

loving me once as if your hands were autumns full of departure

and your eyes, the gulf of the world in your eyes, your eyes

were the soft flowing of the dark honeys

that leak from the wounded hives

we carry like knives to the grave.

Distinguished among broken clocks,

sultry and bitter, a quarantined bay of refugee stars,

caught in the threshing blades of a circular waterfall,

a mess of tents I’ve furloughed across the milky distances

like a chain-letter from a secret constellation to you,

I blue the intimate spaces between us with time

and patch the maps with the confluence of our lifelines

and try to restore the eyes in the sockets of our bridges

under a brow of swallows in the dusk. And I remember

all the names of the flowers, all the names of the stars,

all the badges of love that heaven and earth once offered

in lieu of the reasons why

love bares the skin of a poppy

to the teeth of the hunting sun

and then flares like a firefly

over the water-lamps of the moon,

but when it dies of its own self-inflicted wounds,

slashed by shadows among the ripe fruit of its vowels,

and the seed wasn’t asked and the harvest had no choice

there are always two skies,

one bound by roots, the other, eyes,

at the back of every voice.

PATRICK WHITE

THE AIR IS GLUE

THE AIR IS GLUE

The air is glue. I throw the cloak of the last thunderstorm

off my shoulders. The trees drip like musical instruments.

On every street, honour guards of people waiting for a parade,

sitting in doorways like niches of old fashioned saints

trying to beat the heat of a thousand votive candles

burning like daylilies in unexpected shrines

to the rootfires of unknown gods with alcoholic names.

Sacred flames drunk as pie-bald clowns on their own libations.

Bass-mouthed yahoos shouting rebel yells

at fingerling girls giggling down the street

more about meat than love for the moment

and the secret lives of pills and mirrors

in the medicine bags of their purses they consult

like high priestesses of volcanically high oracles

under the aural afterthoughts of the asphodel lamp posts.

No one looks the same in a bank window

as they do in the windowpane of a drugstore.

But, hey, everyone’s trying to approximate

some dream or other that doesn’t give the play away

by waking the audience up to the magic coma

of the spell that’s been cast upon them. Absitomen.

May no evil come of their words or mine.

Peace comes to those for whom all things are meaningless.

No reason to take offence. You go for the music.

You go for the grave or the girl like an accompaniment

of events for five or six hours or so that fantasize

you’re not an eagle on a leash being led around

by a jackass that thinks you’re the control freak

because you want to spread your wings a lot and fly.

In a small town the red-tailed hawks soon turn into poultry,

not the other way around, modelling like weathervanes

in a pose they strike like fashionistas in an approaching storm.

The street I live on is a catwalk of cover stories

that go from wrong to wrong like the changing styles

of the way they see the world as if they were

trying to beguile it like a morphology of cosmetic mirrors

that look deeply into their eyes past the chandeliers

of frozen tears that hang like eyelashes and icicles

outside the lair of their ice-age desires and disappointments

and see the holy wars of their mirages predicated

on the heat waves of a waterless future that doesn’t

leave a dry eye in the house of life they bring down on themselves

in gales of black laughter to the insincere applause

of fairies, trolls and elves in a farce of ghoulish enchantments.

Abstracted from complicity for awhile, I welt

like the moon in the secret windows of the Masonic Lodge

(Or is it, Oddfellows?) across the street at eye-level

with my occult apartment looking down

on the burning waters of life rising into the air

like the vapour of a dream at a seance of sleeping ghosts

enamoured of each other’s apparitions as one by one

the lights of the firefly heaters of their cigarettes go out

like the half-finished s.o.s. of the shipwrecked lifeboats

in the lees of their beer bottles beached on the front steps.

PATRICK WHITE

IT'S NOT LIKE THE FACE IN THE FLOWER OF THE STAR

IT’S NOT LIKE THE FACE IN THE FLOWER OF THE STAR

It’s not like the face in the flower of the star

grows more beautiful the more times it’s looked at,

it’s just that it’s humanizing

the vast, cold spaces within you

with your own awareness of it so that

when you spot Arcturus shining through the trees

as you have since childhood and call out its name

it’s you that shines brighter

a magnitude more for the moment.

Affable familiars in a big, lonely space

acknowledging each other in passing

as if, animate and inanimate, the same,

what we all hold in common

since we started kicking in the womb

is this life of perpetual exile. Shape-shifters,

driven out of the bliss of oblivion, to bury the bell

of our agony in the stillness of an alien place

and try to love everyone who’ll let us

as if they weren’t a stranger at the gate.

O the appellations the mind applies to its formlessness

in a world of forms to befriend its cosmic isolation.

That fills space up with stars and birds

suggested by its senses and then casts a spell

like a grammar of things to turn them into words

to start a conversation with chaos as if we weren’t all

talking to ourselves. We put lifemasks on everything

like an old Greek play and act out our tragedy

like a dilemma gored on the horns of the goat gods

as if they had a clear grasp of what we were talking about.

Asking a question doesn’t change

the ambiguous nature of the issue

and when no one answers isn’t proof

the silence is divine. Bright vacancy, dark abundance,

nothing includes everything in it

like a table of contents for the mind

that plays host to its own imaginary guests.

The door bell rings and the world’s

standing in the doorway bearing gifts

that have no other meaning other than

they’re addressed to you the way life

nourishes itself on its own emptiness

as if every moment were a cause of celebration

engendered by your own inspiration.

Every song in the distance is the ancestral echo

of your own voice in an abyss

you’re trying to relate to by listening

as if you were sounding the depths

of the mystery you must be to yourself

to live among your own creations as if

someone signed you too. Your name

scrawled in cadmium red blood across

a white canvas of albino eyes in the dark.

Imagination obedient to the freedom

of its own lawlessness to create as it is urged to

on a caprice, a gust of stars, the nudge of an atom,

whole new paradigms of space and time

it will answer to as if someone called its name.

If the same eye by which I see the star

is the eye by which the star sees me,

then who’s the creator, who’s the creation?

So if someone were to ask me the colour of my eyes,

I’d show them a painting I did

of blue weed towering beside a dirt road

or a moonscape I dashed off one starless night

between the clouds. Or even further afield,

if I felt they’d been siderealized sufficiently,

the blue auras of trace elements grinding galaxies

into mirrors they can see themselves in

like leggy gazelles come down to the shore

to drink from their own reflection of themselves

like telescopes alert to the eyes that lie in wait for them.

Everywhere I wander down these pathless ways

through my homelessness, I meet myself

like a mirage at the end of a cul de sac,

and I walk through it like a wall

or two galaxies passing through each other

without disturbing a star, I embody such distances,

and I encounter hypnotists from all quarters

that call themselves seekers of the truth

trying to wake up from their own magic

as if they hadn’t caught on to their own minds yet

and were still underestimating the power of their illusions.

Why wash the stars off the windows, or sweep

the scars of the autumn leaves off the stairs

expecting the enlightened arrival

of the lord and lady of the manor any day now

as if you could get a grasp on the nature

of your own emptiness like a servant

looking for a master in your own image?

Everything nasty and blind,

everything beautiful and sublime

are the facets of a clear jewel

turning in the light of the void.

All that is separated, all that is enjoined,

all that are searching and finding

and losing themselves again like solar flares

on a return journey back to the sun

or rivers flowing into themselves

as if every wave crossed the threshold of itself

into an openness exhilarated by

the expansive gesture of its presence,

are just the hidden secret of you

wanting to be known by a world

you whisper into your own ear

as if you’d never heard the sound

of your own voice before the wind

began to throw the sea into turmoil

and you were swept ashore out of

the inconceivability of your own emptiness

like a myth of awareness sadly in need of an origin.

So you end up creating a world

out of your own inner resources and calling it

mother or father in the hopes it might be able

to explain what you’re doing here by yourself.

And that’s how you get lost in the labyrinths

of your own being, that’s how your wires get crossed

in the short circuits of your lifelines

tangled up in kites like morning glory

that wouldn’t fly. You keep asking simulacrums

of your own creativity about things

that only you on your own, lonelier than God,

projected imaginatively like a lifemask

you created in your own image

onto the formlessness of an invisible space within you,

can be the answer to. The moment

you say I am to yourself and realize

that you’re not even there to recognize it

the little thumb puppet in three pounds of starmud

dematerializes like something solid

into the presence of the real. You revel like a child

in the creative liberty of not keeping your own distance

from anything in existence, knowing

in the crazy wisdom of your second innocence

the only thing that binds you to it

or separates you from it, is a sense of play.

That everytime you say I am without

including the whole universe in it as well

it becomes the wayward paradigm

of another brilliant mistake with feet of clay.

Or as Archibald Lampman said

dead of a heart attack at thirty-six,

poor shining angels whom the hoofs betray.

PATRICK WHITE

HOMOGENOUS GREY WITH VIOLET TOWERS OF DELPHINIUMS

HOMOGENOUS GREY WITH VIOLET TOWERS OF DELPHINIUMS

Homogenous grey with violet towers of delphiniums

so intensely purple, they’re an imperium unto themselves

in a twilight zone between night and the dawn,

a mystic state of blood when the eyes in your heart

climb down from their firetowers like stars, vacate

their watch without leave weary of being on the lookout

for two bullets to the back of your head as if

it were better all were lost than to proceed by rote

at someone else’s peril. If only we could bleed

like the masterpiece of these waiting for our eyes

to catch up to the sleeping visionary within us all.

Would we see our dreams dying in the vastness

like the fragrance of flowers that exhaled themselves

like forbidden passions in a garden of moonlight and lemons

as if every moment of life were an encounter

with what’s most strange and mystifying about us

as the cowled shadow of the figure by the blind sundial

turns as if to ask at last, can you see me now? Am I not

more beautiful than anything your imagination

was afraid to meet for fear of falling in love irreparably?

Would the seed build the rafters of a new treehouse for us all

by impregnating the earth with more intimate metaphors

that embrace their own perishing like an enduring love affair

with what remains most daringly inconceivable about us?

Easy enough to explain, but whoever understands it,

inherits a dynastic empire of afterlives in a silence

so profound no one without the bloodseal of the delphiniums

in their heart has attempted it yet as a way

of inhabiting the unattainable by reaching out

like the stars in a spearhead of flowers

to the aimless distances in a passing stranger’s eyes.

The mercy’s in the blooming and the planets

gather around like the fruits of why it should be so.

The mindstream divines the way of water as it flows.

And what could the light that unites what’s most remote

from us to the aniconic images of love that bind us

to one another like delphiniums and gardeners

to the hidden suns of the seeds in the starmud

of our shining but inspiration, that wounded joy

made manifest in the eyes of the way we express ourselves

when we encounter love as if it were never meant to happen

like the royal house of the delphiniums in inexplicable rapture

they can trace their bloodlines back to the stars

as each of us, enthroned like the king and queen,

the prince and the pauper, the singer and the thief,

the sage and the fool, for a day and a night of love, ours?

PATRICK WHITE