WE'RE WALKING ON MARS AND YET DOWN HERE

WE’RE WALKING ON MARS AND YET DOWN HERE

We’re walking on Mars and yet down here

we’re still treating each other as aliens

we hate. Retrograde biases looping our heads

in a noose. Strange fruit. Did a Boy Scout teach you to do that?

What colour do you think an albino

would paint his skin if he had a palette of melanin?

White paper, black conte, every portrait

starts with an outline, but the face of a human

shines like character from the inside out.

Even the stars move through their lives

from violet to red like the order of the turning

of maple leaves in autumn, or a rainbow.

Eighteen million people kidnapped, enslaved,

worked to death and murdered as if murder were a sport

just to boost production and profits in cotton

to keep up to the invention of the cotton ginn

and wrap the skin of London in whole cloth,

much like Bangladesh even as we speak,

and when that dynastic link eventually broke,

and Reconstruction undid the liberation

six hundred thousand people had died for,

the poor killing the poor for the rights of the rich,

and the economic foodchains that were placed

on the scars of the backs that bore them

tasted just the same as the snakepit of whips

they’d recently thrown off, as the night closes in

on that little white ice-floe in the midst

of the global warning you ignore, you’re still

trying to convince your festering self

you’re a waterlily when, in fact, you’re a corpse flower

with a moral life of pus and a gangrenous spirit.

Let’s say like it is. You hate black people

because your victims learned more from you

than you did from them, and that ain’t creationism,

brother, that’s the straight up skinny on evolution.

PATRICK WHITE

BITUMINOUS BRIQUETTES OF COAL FOR EYES

BITUMINOUS BRIQUETTES OF COAL FOR EYES

Bituminous briquettes of coal for eyes,

and the shadows of diamonds in your heart

the crows delivered like loveletters in the dark.

Spooky and eerie, the Aquarian wyrd

of someone with the emotional life

of a Tarot pack who picked up overlooked skulls

from the forest floor like lost moons

only the undertakers of the rain

and the anthracite ants you blew gently

out their eye-sockets like lunar landing craft

wept over as you placed them in the museums

of your windowsills, artifacts from the firepits

of Stonehenge at an equinoctial eclipse.

The longer I loved you, the younger you grew.

I knew you were coming back from the dead.

That love had dislodged you at the side

of your hospital bed like a snowdrift

sliding off the roof. Death or a hysterectomy

in your early twenties. They tore the bell

out of your steeple, the nest out of your bird,

the promise of dawn out of your La Brea Tarpit

and there wasn’t a lot to sing about after that

but you kept the slash of a smile on your face

like the scalpel of light edged by the new moon.

Blind isn’t a colour, but black suited you best.

A lover isn’t a knife at an occult sacrifice,

but you’d had several that wheeled you

like a butterfly crucified in a circus

where every blade that tried to cut your heart out

after your womb, was the addition of another petal.

Xion flinched, but you had the courage

of a black dwarf that took everything in

they threw at you like a shelter for the homeless.

You healed the shadows of small, broken things.

You took the fallen in like birds of prey

and you mended their wings. And for awhile

they felt like constellations after you left.

In that vast expanse of night that unrolled

like a starmap of your soul, you restored them

to an exalted place of shining in your darkness.

Noble, a few more stars and you could have passed

for a queen of Egypt rummaging for your body parts

in the canopic jars of other people’s hearts,

your beauty, an ancient creation myth restored

after long severance as if the moon in its mourning veils

hadn’t come up in years, and then, in full eclipse

just appeared one night like a sacred prostitute

on the stairs of the Iseum with a fascination

for pyramidal men aligned with the circumpolar

indestructibles of heaven centred on an afterlife

too much like this one to be astronomically credible.

Microcosmically honest, you never fully mastered

trusting anyone, though you smiled at their efforts,

but not once in nine years did I ever doubt you

when my back was turned like a sundial

though there was always something slightly suspect

about the heroism of your compassion for the dead

as you leapt like a genie in an oil lamp

into the calderas of their spent volcanoes on the moon,

to trade their new mirages in for something completely old.

I saw you grow like a religion of dependents

who never wanted to get over themselves

for fear of losing someone like you to worship

like initiates into the coven of a great witch

as many told me you were as if, being a male.

they knew more about you than I did, and who knows,

in retrospect, maybe they did, maybe they did.

Hear that northern river of raven hair

is long and white now, that you’re still beautiful,

that the guys in motorized wheelchairs line up at

the entrance of the mall to compete for who

gets to drive you across the overly waxed floors

as you jump laughing into their laps on your way

to work in the morning, and you keep

the hotshot owners of the chic clothing stores

leaning in their doorways wondering why

you choose them over them. Had to smile

when I heard that. The spirit of love lives in you yet.

You still know how to raise the dead.

Prayer wheels, hot wheels, wheels on meals,

training wheels, wheels and deals, cogwheels,

wheels of birth and death. Where the rubber

hits the road, I could have told them how it feels

to stand there like a crop circle in a labyrinth of rain

that goes round and round, spinning its wheels

like a red-tailed hawk sliding down the banisters

of its thermals, remember, when the sunsets

painted their eyelids over the alder groves?

You want a beautiful witch to ride shotgun

with you, brother, you better learn to shift

that four on the floor as if you were riding

that golden chariot of yours through a slum

and everyone were hitchhiking, and you stopped

to pick them all up to remind you that you’re mortal.

Your driveshaft better be yoked to six white moons

and every spoke of the tree rings in your heartwood

better be a broom that knows how to do cartwheels in the dark.

PATRICK WHITE  

WANT TO BE BRILLIANT, WANT TO SHINE LIKE A BLACK STAR

WANT TO BE BRILLIANT, WANT TO SHINE LIKE A BLACK STAR

Want to be brilliant, want to shine like a black star.

Trying to bend space with my mind. Trying to stop time

with my heart. Counting moments like beads on a rosary

of skulls, or shepherd moons on an abacus of gravity.

Though I know they’re not all strung out like that.

Asteroids on a wavelength of light, or a spinal cord.

Or maybe I’m just trying to bead a guitar string

with a great black hole, or is it a lunar pearl,

in the center of a lyrical abyss? Workaday world

in a small town, who spends their time like this?

Not fortunate enough to have been born a carpenter,

I’m a mystically surrealistic, poetic astrophyicist

trying to come up with a new grammar for the stars

so all they have to do to express their shining,

is say, Metaphor, and as it is in the abyss, so it is everywhere.

Because I miss you like the main clause of my relativity.

The focal point of all my wavelengths. You’re the radiant

and I’m the Martian meteor shower that’s dying

to bring the gift of life to the Antarctic like the Leonids

did in the first place as I look at my face in the mirror

and think it’s time for a change of species. Sometimes

it’s crucial to sustain a few pathetic fallacies about yourself

so when you’re under the moonweather of an estranged planet

and a black star breaks through the clouds like the anti-matter

of a waterlily, so do you. Funny how the flowers close their eyes

because none of them wants to miss the eclipse.

One of them said we’re all looking through a glass darkly

but I don’t see any soot on their petals,

and none of the telescopes are wearing shades.

I like to keep things clear in the light of the void.

I’ve come along way from the coal mines of space

to shine through your diamond so you can feel

a different kind of translucency that’s eleven parts cheap thrill

in all the dimensions I can see you in, and one,

not even you, has discovered yet, that’s the orphan of an exile

singing to himself to people the dark in a desert of stars

like a gnostic gospel in the mouth of a cave

to keep the evil jinn and bad spirits away

from the watersheds of my wishing wells

where the angels gather to mingle with the demons like water

they’ve just turned into wine. As for the other eighty-nine

realms of seeing and being what you see, they’re shrines

I’ve devoted to you, swearing in blood and devotion

on the sidereal plinth of my sword, as I dedicate

all my prophetic skulls from the dark side of the moon

where the crows are wiser about lunar things than the doves,

to the enhancement of your radiance, your love and your art,

by deepening the dark, with a full heart, with things to harvest

that will make the abyss seem like a silo of stars you can break like bread.

PATRICK WHITE  

THE LIGHT DOESN'T TALK TO THE FLOWERS ANYMORE

THE LIGHT DOESN’T TALK TO THE FLOWERS ANYMORE

The light doesn’t talk to the flowers anymore

the way it used to. I can feel a lot of shadows touching my face

as if it were written in braille. Acid in the rain.

Tears of dry ice in the housewell. Weathervanes

knocking at the door to get out of the storms

they used to revel in, and the storms themselves,

no kamikazes riding a divine wind against the Mongols,

at best, a mango-flavoured tempest in a Japanese teapot.

And even Zen can’t put an edge on the full moon

to cut through everything like a harvest being threshed.

No songs from the birds that used to wake me up in the morning,

only these spiders weaving their smokey laryngeal webs

like a voice that got stuck in the throat of a chimney

when it forgot, when you sing from the heart,

you don’t need a medium or a seance. Not even an art

that’s interested in what you’re saying unless

you’re obeying a grammar of headstones that don’t know

what you’re talking about until it’s not worth

bringing up anymore in anybody’s language

whether the metaphors are living or not. Words in a bonebox.

Locks and bars on our eyes. Dumb-bells stuck through our tongues

like someone was doing voodoo on the leaves

or the baton of a drum major in a parade

that’s never going to come, afraid to leave home on its own.

Since I was a boy in the late Cretaceous,

I’ve always wondered about the timing

of the asteroids and comets and why

they had such an impact upon the dinosaurs.

But I hear they were already on their way to extinction

because of the earth’s own volcanic activity,

and, at worst, the asteroid just accelerated

the flywheel of birth and death a bit.

Bad spin on an antiquated myth of origin.

Better luck next time, but right now the mammals

have evolved so far beyond that they’re destroying themselves

in a long, slow nuclear winter of attrition

that’s putting a pillow over everybody’s face

like the cloud cover of a screening myth with an air force

that buffers the light with our own ashes

and much prefers smouldering to ignition.

What did Berryman say in a letter to Wang Wei,

centuries after the fact, just before he jumped from a bridge

into an ice-covered river with the Pulitzer Prize in his hands?---

O to talk to you in a freedom from ten thousand things.

Be dust myself pretty soon. Not now. Or words to that effect.

But just the same, it’s hard to get into the skull

of the man anymore without the flame of a candle or a dragon

to see where you’re going in case you nudge an atom the wrong way

and bring on another astronomical catastrophe inadvertently.

Minefield covered in snow like a pioneer cemetery

buried on the hilltop of an avalanche with a view of the valley below.

Dangerous, too, to move among the stars freely

like a rogue planet without a starmap, causing perturbations

in the orbits of the shepherd moons on an exploratory flyby

to see if there’s any kind of intelligent life you can identify with.

The nights are getting darker. The stars are moving further apart.

Sooner or later everything tends toward empty space

until there isn’t even any room left in it for itself.

And nothing ever dawns upon you there but endless entropy

and time comes to a sudden halt where spaces runs out

and the bones of the fossilized stars are left like empty chairs

in a dark auditorium with bad acoustics.

I’ll write it on the wind now, while I have the chance.

I’ll write it like a fire in smoke at a ghost dance.

I’ll write it in blood and tears and rivers and stars.

I’ll write it in scars and wounds as deep as roses.

I’ll write it on the skins of the snakes that I’ve shed

like serpent fire running up the lunar thread of my spinal cord

like a lightning rod tattooing the clouds of unknowing

with the insights of fireflies into the mysterious darkness of life,

who know that one glimpse is enough of a Big Bang

to satisfy even the blind who go looking for their eyes

with their eyes like a windfall in a thunderstorm of picture-music

though they’re still hanging on to the same old lifeline

like an umbilical cord between the backdoor and the barn

in blizzard of stars and butterflies. I’ll write it in light.

I’ll write it on the eyelids of eclipses and occultations alike.

I’ll write it on the foreheads of the mute rocks

in runic striations of glaciers retreating north in tears,

I’ll write it on my bones before I’m buried under the hearthstones

with a big rock on my chest like an asteroid

rolled over a cave to make sure I’ll never rise again

like Jesus and Muhammad said I would if I was good,

or Ali Baba and the forty thieves muttering their shibboleths

on the thresholds of an artificial paradise, in case I wasn’t.

Now is the light. Now is the loving and the living.

Now is the hour for the hidden nightbirds to raise their voices

in the sacred groves of the moon to celebrate

the brevity of their own longing for the unattainable

blossoming on the dead branch of their aspiration.

There’s only so much time, and then, in a moment or two, forever.

The heart sings awhile like a red-winged black bird on a green bough.

And then the eyeless silence of the stars

who have looked down upon nothing for 14.3 billion lightyears

and watched the fireflies dancing to the music

of their own tiny hearts, lockets of light, of insight,

that open like seeds and eyes sown into the abyss

to let all winged things, and even star-nosed moles can fly,

out of the cages of their earthbound solitude like dragons

taken down like occult books from their hardwood shelves,

with the wingspan of constellations singing in the night to themselves.

PATRICK WHITE

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