BEGIN NOW. THE LIGHT WILL CHANGE

BEGIN NOW. THE LIGHT WILL CHANGE

Begin now. The light will change. Get the rain started.

Let a few tears fall. Open the aviary of your heart

and let the doves and the nightbirds out, and if

liberation isn’t enough to sing about, celebrate

the next best thing, escape. Get out of here.

Isn’t there enough open space within

to include worlds within worlds begetting worlds?

Or has your mind become the slumlord

of a run-down tenement you converted

from that ark you built like a lifeboat for everyone

in the flood myth of a lava flow on the moon

before you bled out like a wounded fish

in the Sea of Tranquillity and decided

like a feeding frenzy it was a shark eat shark world,

everyone for themselves? Nature red in tooth and claw.

Every star in the sky aspires to shine like a starfish

washed up on the sentient shores of a pre-dawn awareness

like pilot lights of life navigating by the starmaps

of the fireflies. The sea has its constellations, too.

Drown if you must in the unanswerable sorrows

of the accidentally innocent fate of love in the world,

or go up in flames in Vietnam or an Arab souk

as if someone had just confiscated your cash register

like an officious autumn in the Adirondaks. Or a tax

on your eyes, how much you can see in the course of a life

from the bottom of the mountain up like a haiku,

or the dangerous lyric of a northern river with muscle and mind,

making its way to the sea like a savage waterclock

that knows it’s never going to turn out of time.

Paralysed by atrocity, our sensibilities trashed

like polluted loveletters of junkmail advertising

toxic food as the soul of joy and satisfaction,

indulgence, the suicidal compassion of despair,

desecration, the alternative aesthetic to no one

ever being there to show you how to empassion

your wonder into an insight humbled by awe

at the mystery and magnificence being here at all.

Madmen punching holes in the ozone

like the only lifeboat heading for an ice floe

calved by global warming like a glacier in the North Atlantic.

Paradigms the abstract ghosts of fossilized metaphors.

Logos instead of symbols that resonate like a seance

among the living and through perception

change the spin of atoms and rearrange galactic seastars

like the seeds of sunflowers opening like the eyelids

of a total eclipse. No one needs a prophetic skull

to see how horrifically surrealistic it all is. Even

the sacred clowns aren’t laughing like Zen masters anymore.

Ryokan gets home to his hut in the shedding woods

and this time the thief did steal the moon from his window.

What now? You fold your poems into paper airplanes

and let them blunt their noses like sparrows

on the false dawns in the windows of your stem cells?

You live in a crack in the wall, you excavate

a grave in the caldera of an inactive volcano

and hope the poppies and wheat that are left

of the crumbs of your dreaming grow better

where you’re buried like the Burgess Shale that’s come

of your starmud avalanching down like the asteroids

of a rockslide of headstones in a vandalized cemetery?

PATRICK WHITE

I COULD NEVER REMEMBER YOU IN GARISH PACIFIC SUNSETS

I COULD NEVER REMEMBER YOU IN GARISH PACIFIC SUNSETS

I could never remember you in garish Pacific sunsets

or the luster of opalescent Ontario dawns.

These would be ill-fitting gowns, wrong

wardrobe of metaphors to clothe you in, you

who loved to wear the moonlight like water on your skin

and your heart like the blood of a black cherry on your sleeve,

that the rain, and I saw how hard it tried like a watercolourist,

could never wash out. When I looked

as deeply into the nightsky of your eyes as I could,

six thousand stars lavished on the dark to the naked eye,

I always saw a white tailed doe looking back at me

from the brindled woods where they opened into the starfields

and I let the silence surmise old dangers had made you shy.

I could never remember you as you were and fix

the image in amber like a butterfly in a paper weight

as time wept glacially by like an ice-age in an hourglass.

Shapely as the cedar candelabra of a passionate forest fire,

you were the elegant daughter of dragons, the willow witch

of your own desires, and you spoke to my body

in the occult languages you kept alive for the sake of the dead

who were always with you like voices in your sleep.

I put this albino abyss of a snowblind canvas on my easel

like the negative starmap of the nightsky I imagine

death to be, so the wind can colour outside the lines

of the constellations as you were fond of doing

with an elfin kind of glee like a happy bell

you’d hung around the neck of something bleaker

as you often did with your life as if you were

bending space to your will like a black hole

at the nave of your galactic prayer wheel

turning in the wind like the golden ratio of a sea star.

I paint you in the picture music of a wounded heart

punctured like a matador on the thorn of the moon

as I looked upon you haunting your solitude

and knew like the last crescent in the book

of waning scars, there were some roses

just too beautiful in what they’d made of their pain

to heal. The eyelids of black roses shadowed

by penumbral eclipses of carboniferous mascara.

The deepest starwells of our sorrows flower

into the most expansive fountains of compassion,

and what a tender champion the small things of the world

found in you. The starling under the windowpane,

the Monarch butterfly that just stopped like

a slim volume of poems, intact, at the moment of perfection

denying death its deconstruction, and those

dozens of shepherd moons that showed up

like the skulls of racoons and groundhogs in the grass,

relics of a tragic past you arranged like asteroids

on the windowsills of your studio like the eastern door

of an Ojibway burial hut you adorned with the feathers

of red-tailed hawks until the autumn moon

could free their spirits from their bones.

I could never remember you as a blue-jay

among the sunflowers, you were never as abrupt

and decisive as that. You beaded all parts

of the disassembled world into the flowing

of one long continuous wavelength of a rosary

like different skulls with a variety of names

for the same spinal cord of a narrative theme

that whispered, like your life, louder

than the savage sparrowhawks of your emotions

shrieking out in predatory pain and as I remember well

how your eyes would grow wider than owls

or the new moons of Spanish guitars

when you were astonished by the symbolic depths

of some black pearl of transformative wisdom

you’d discovered dreaming on the seabed of your heart

like a lunar eclipse among the feathered corals.

The red violet that lingers over a city on a cloudy night

and saturates the air with tinctures of iodine and diluted blood,

I will add that hue to the palette of your likeness,

and glaze the bricks in the sphinx gate of your moonrise

with ultramarine blue and fleck the lapis lazuli

of your nightsky with gold paint on the bristles

of a toothbrush to simulate stars pouring out of

the watersheds of Aquarius to cool the scorched roots of things

in sacred pools and fountains inextinguishable pain

found its way to as if you were some kind of Gothic cathedral

cratered out of the moon like a river of stone

that taught the outcasts and the damaged fruits of life

how to flow up the stairwells of their renewal

with the courage of wild salmon called home from the sea.

I knew it was crucial not to make a mess of my dying

the night you left, to honour the spirit of the life

we had lived together, to make the end

as charismatically intriguing as the beginning had been.

So something inspired by our separation

could keep growing beyond us like a bridge

where incomplete solitudes could meet as strangers

and say farewell to one another like full siloes

in the plenum-void, whole as the sun and the moon

who go on shining in the darkness of ten thousand lonely nightfalls

not as the undoing of the dawn in the broken mirrors of the stars

but as a way of housing the buckets and bells of their tears

under the strong rafter of the well by the locust trees

blossoming among its thorns in the spring to summon the bees

that once sang to us, as if honey had a voice so poignantly sweet,

however deeply gored the heart by the horns of the moon,

waxing or waning, full or eclipsed, it never left scars on the music.

PATRICK WHITE

IT ISN'T RESIGNATION SO MUCH AS HALF AN ASSENT

IT ISN’T RESIGNATION SO MUCH AS HALF AN ASSENT

It isn’t resignation so much as half an assent

to the inevitable I know so little about

as I’m becoming it, living it like a lamp in my hand

shining in the dark to illuminate what’s there,

not by reflecting it, but creating it on the fly.

My eyes are bubbles on the mindstream.

The jewels of an animal in the shadows of the woods.

The star makes the eye it wants me to see it with.

Not just retinally with my iris like a moondog,

but interiorly in the heart of my imagination

where sight is a kind of love, and seeing

is dusty with stars clinging to the windows

the mercy of the rain cleans off when it’s time

to let the world see me anew as the light turns around

to look at me from the inside out, not two, not two, not two.

Music from the cover band across the street.

Apocalyptic hilarity of drunken ordinariness

extraordinarily trying to sing along to the lyrics

of the chantreuse who makes them feel special

about having everything in common with everyone else.

We can sing about pain. We can sing about joy.

And by the way we cry and laugh, know what we mean.

An apartment away, a man is endearing himself

to his own solitude without any separation in the tone

of the farewell he’s preparing, and nothing perennial

about the sacred syllables of that imaginary first hello.

He watches people’s voices rise like incense into the night air,

mystic paths of smoke disappearing down a road

into the intimate distances that deepen the darkness within

with the afterglow of humanity lingering among the half-cut stars.

PATRICK WHITE

O, AN OASIS IN A TARPIT

O, AN OASIS IN A TARPIT

O, an oasis in a tarpit when being alive

is more than enough, and happiness doesn’t scare me

half as much as it used to. It’s only an eyelid,

an opening and closing of doors, a Cepheid variable,

the blinking of the moon, blue chicory

among the stinging nettles, not the horrific beatitude

it used to seem when I was too young---

When was that? Yesterday?---to let it come

and go. A waterlily of joy, it blossoms among the stars

but its white fire is rooted in the lowest detritus

of the swamp that lives on its own perishing.

Happiness isn’t a reason to live. It’s living

beyond reason, unreasonably. Life without a buffer zone

when you can walk skinless in the moonlight

like a smooth stone in a medicine-bag of stars

that sends you skipping out over their reflections

in a lake without a name as deep as the mystery of life

and then you sink as if you’d been looking Medusa

in the third eye. And what are you, then, if not

a lifeboat of a fish swimming through the nightsky

of a bejewelled underworld resonant with soft laments?

I feel the effervescence of the Pleiades

carbonating the waters of my life. A great blue heron

flaps off like the headlines of yesterday’s newspaper,

or the first draft of another poem inspired by the abyss,

and I’m not unmindful of the sorrows of the world,

and that this is recess, a sparkle in the eye of eternity,

the exuberance of a boy on a dolphin in a great night sea

of perilous awareness, not lightyears of bliss

shed by a firefly that came looking for me in the dark.

I haven’t been rescued from anything. The depths

and the surface are one for the moment,

the highest and the lowest, the silly and sublime.

A dragon. A plumed serpent with a circumpolar outlook

a peacock of a dinosaur flaunting its boas

like a Fauvist painting of sex in the eyes of love and death.

A ghost dance, of sorts, where my beginnings

partner with my ends and together they make

one bird, one candle in a cowled plumage of flame

that took a vow of poverty but has the flightfeathers

of an heretical phoenix to spare just the same.

The nighthawk is riding its own thermals, the owl

isn’t encumbered by its wisdom. I’m free inside.

All the aviaries are empty and I’ve got an open door policy

on my voice-box. The chimney’s mellifluous

with bluebirds in the morning, and by nightfall

even the most feeble sparks of insight are exalted

by the constellations of the Eagle and the Swan.

No companion but my solitude is pleased with itself.

Everything I see and hear, down to the smallest

pale-green frog chirping in the cattails, silvered

in moonlight and water as the black snake tastes it

like a ripe strawberry on the warm, summer air,

is ancestor, bloodline, wavelength woven into

a flying carpet of picture-music I’m riding

like the multiversal destiny of my membranous mindstream

and because I love starmaps and leaves, I’m riffing off

the leit motifs of the stars, I’m writing poems in the glyphs

of the scars like birthmarks on the bodies of good guitars.

PATRICK WHITE

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