TOO MUCH TO SAY GOOD-BYE TO THOUGH I HAD

TOO MUCH TO SAY GOOD-BYE TO THOUGH I HAD

Too much to say good-bye to though I had,

I sat down by a fork in the road and wept

into both my hands like a flashflood

in the dry creekbeds of my lifelines,

lightning over the nerve endings of the shedding trees

my heart shrieking like a red-tailed falcon

with an arrow in its wing, my life

uprooted like mandrake and ginseng

as I remember every woman after that

I ever said yes to was a truce with the pain.

X-rated, vampiric muse with the style

of a chandelier at the death of a candle,

witch of the retrograde sixties, you never age.

The night retains its mystery, though the day

grows old like too many stiff springs

in the matresses of the faith healers in a turf war.

Hellebore, bella donna and deadly nightshade

I’ve kissed Medusa on her eyelids in her sleep

and tasted what she dreamed of before

she became the queen mamba of black prophecy.

Spider on a widow walk, you took the Tarot

too seriously and stopped weaving mandalas

of undulant silk like the aurora borealis

drifting like the fins of Oriental goldfish on the wind.

O it was beautiful to watch you work your magic once.

A transformative experience I still like

to look back upon like a waterlily in a cauldron

of frog soup fit for a prince of darkness

carnal as the starmud of a tenant farmer

on a summer night in the sweat lodge of his pores.

If you empower the dark roots of the mystery

the stars will come as naturally as wildflowers

to the nightsky, or the potpourri of black roses

preparing a deathbed for a lover to lie down upon

with you in their arms like a new moon

things get done under like a spooky affair

with silence it’s a taboo with its tongue cut out

to talk about like shoes gossiping about a firewalk

on the other side of the door where you took them off.

You wouldn’t recognize me now among

the vagrant souls exorcised from this furnace

of life on the first cold night at the end of October

waving farewell on the road of ghosts where

it turns down into the birchgroves and out of sight

having cleared the creosote and starlings

out of the chimney pipes with a voice as thick as fire.

Will I live again? Is it necessary? Did I do it wrong

or was there never a right way to proceed?

Or should I ask for reparations for the tears I shed

like a sundial that foreshadowed its own extinction

like a nightbird on the same wavelength

as a snakey dragon saint in a black boa

of gathering storm clouds summoning

the lightning and then the rain to cool

the burnt heartwood of the pine that once stood

like a man on a hill that looks back over its shoulder

into a valley it just passed through guided

by a surrealistic starmap of dragons with the charms

of fireflies, as he turns and goes down into the one

you apprenticed him to walk, whistling

inconceivably in the dark without you

as he casts the deathmask of his shadow up ahead

as the only path where love was meant

to surpass itself like a moment from the past

that overtakes tomorrow like a light

it can’t run from followed by a night it can’t run to.

PATRICK WHITE

THE GREEN BERRY RED AND ROTTEN

THE GREEN BERRY RED AND ROTTEN

The green berry red and rotten,

the fledgling flown, windfall solar systems

of sun-spotted apples in the stargrass,

the white flower corrosively spoiled

by exposure to the eyes, the stars, the bees

that once doted on it but now abuse

the masterpiece of its unassuming beauty

by using it for a dish rag soaked in vinegar

to clean the windows with. It’s time

to lay your burdens down, give them up

to the earth that shall know you by them,

rose-hip, chokecherry, blackberry or blue,

black walnut, hawthorn or sunflower seed,

whatever the taste of life in your heart,

let the bell fall from the steeple, lower

the boughs of the yoke you’re bearing

like two buckets balanced by an ox

plodding back from the well and let go, let go,

as if you’d come as far as the road goes

and from hereon would have to start

making your own through deep snow

in the moonlight the wolves that follow

will pack down with their cracked

and bleeding pads like a great seal of approval

in hot wax on a night as severe as a scalpel.

Hour of birth and ruination. Fulfilment

and failure. Full moons in the pumpkin patch,

new ones shedding the skin of the most recent

eclipse of their medicine bags like black pearls

ripening in the dark like an active sexual life

that goes on blooming all winter to counteract

the effect of snow and plaster. Hour

of an old man racking black dwarfs

like prophetic skulls on an abacus

he never learned to play like starlings

on the powerlines of musical staves

that keep the snakes dancing circumpolarly

like a hermetic caduceus with the wings

of a dove copulating with the quantumly entangled

wavelengths of dragons that will burn

your eyes out until you stop crying

over spilt diamonds and start to see

your own starmud shining in the dark

like a star that’s been shadowing you for lightyears

through the shedding trees like a spark of life

you could start a galaxy with in the eye sockets

of any one of your visionary firepits.

Hour of letting go in the midst of the abundant silence

of the inarticulate garden that’s said all

it had to say as it waits for the first frost.

Let go of whatever you’re clinging to

like an umbilical cord to the rocket gantry

of the dark mother, and follow your own

circuitous flightpath like a silo on its way to the moon

and when you get there, unpack your suitcase

like a loaf of bread big-hearted enough to feed a famine.

Hour of death in life. Dream seeds under the eyelids

perishing like moonset over the denuded hills,

the maples burning their leaves like the first draft

of a novel they don’t want anybody to read

like a closing chapter in the life of an arsonist

who ends up eating his own ashes out of bird fountain

that holds a merciful spoon up to his lips

like the French kiss of a death wish in an urn

as he dies reconciled to the heresy of his life

in the eyes of the dead who thought he went too far.

Let’s hear it for the stars that made death possible

as the improbability of life that comes of it

that makes much out of the little it has to work with

like poems inspired by the fire in their lover’s eyes.

Marigolds holding out along the widow walks

of lonely souls communing with their solitude

like a family album of sacred tattoos the leaves

left like a last impression on cement gravestones

laid end to end like a road that turns back home again

with a childhood secret it shares with the crossed hearts

of the dead sworn to the perennial silence

of the memories that make life implausibly forgiving

without understanding a word of what’s said

about why it has to be this way, except

it has to be borne like distant hills ageing

under the echoes of lupine requiems mourning

the loss of one of their own as if it were the moon’s fault.

Blame it on the autumn. Blame it on the spring

that turned out to be the false dawn of everything

you’ve ever believed in like a mirage

in the third eye of a hurricane in a desert,

or what your lover said to you in bed one night

when you shared the same pillow like flesh of your flesh,

blood of your blood, bone of your bone,

as you both spoke of a creation myth that was already old

before you were born to mourn for it

like an apostate priest of a profligate abyss

that will swallow you whole like a dragon

the glain of the moon and disgorge it again

like the waterlily of a used condom

or a skin some lake shed like a starmap

to the wistful radiance in the eyes of the dead.

O yes, the eyes of the pervasive dead who fill space

with nuances of the light distilled from past dreams,

who look upon it all in pain and separation

and crack a smile like the scar of a stronger weld

than the original brain stem it mended

like a lighthouse on the moon where you

came to drown the sword you hammered out of fire

like a vow you made to the water sylphs

a long, long time ago before the salmon returned

to the place of their birth to continue dying

deeper and deeper into their awareness

of the mystery of life still throwing cornflowers

poppies and wheatstalks in the hands

of equinoctial virgins like cargo into the lifeboats

of our graves lowered over the side of the sinking earth,

stern up to the sun as it goes down into the underworld

like the Orphic skull of a habitable planet

dismembered by the mad muses of the autumn

for the lenience in his voice the dead

are especially susceptible to this time of year.

PATRICK WHITE

I SEE YOU IN THE EYES OF THE RAIN

I SEE YOU IN THE EYES OF THE RAIN

I see you in the eyes of the rain

and in the broken aspirations of the swallow

that hit the windowpane dead on.

Fire that no longer burns.

Water that no longer drowns.

Earth that no longer receives.

A gust of air that no one breathes.

I see you in the tender, green tendrils

of the wild grapevines clinging to life

like the last plank of a shipwrecked lifeboat

washed up on the shore of the moon.

The most bitter farewells are those

compelled by understanding

to cry a little in the open doorway

and leave as if there were nothing more to say.

Words lightyears beyond communication.

Metaphors like burning bridges

that never quite make it to the other side.

And o how gentle an eclipse comes

to a lover’s coltish eyes

when it’s time to say good-bye

and if you’re a bad man, it’s revenge,

and if you’re good, it’s a sacrifice.

Good-bye, get out, be gone,

I’ll live on in my palace of lonely windows

like a man with class in an hourglass

and I’ll write faceless songs

to the passage of time as autumn approaches.

Leave me now to the pain

I must wrestle with alone

like an angel in my way

that knows I don’t have what it takes

to pull up stakes like a heretic

before I burn for the mistakes I made

on your invigilated test of love.

Once I feel like a loser again

I know I’m at home with myself

and I can feel the clouds laughing in tears

as I get around like rain.

I loved your body like a wishing well.

You loved my brain like an occult spell.

Three afterlives of a star, once you left me

holding the medicine bag of your absence,

I named a desolate street after you

like some kind of municipal gift

to the run down ghetto of a sub-prime heart.

My pain is consoled by my art

like a weather vane is comforted by the weather.

I ghost write the lyrics of the storm.

I incite riots against the norm.

I blood my poems like spearheads

in a wound that never scars the moon.

I shall be the nightwatchman

who makes the rounds of the zodiac

inspecting doors and windows

that are steadfastly closed to him

like lilies in the festering gene pools

of the idle rich in their bridal tents

spawning into money like goldfish.

I shall be an eagle at the extremity

of my wingspan and soar over the smoke

of burning cities like a cinder of freedom

in the eye of a failed revolution

and I will not lament my own extinction

when my starmud settles like a constellation

into the hearsay of bloodshot mirrors.

I will linger in precipitous heights

then shriek like the paper airplane of a poem

down on some bumptious homing pigeon

that was promised a comfortable flight

from here to there, until it was

snatched from the air like a pillow fight.

I will do this because I can feel the glee

of my talons sinking into hypocrisy

like the three crescents of the moon

with an eyrie full of skeletal snakes

that look like a pit full of twisted combs

without any meat on their bones.

Liars convince. Communicators convey.

It isn’t what I say. It’s the way I say it

that makes all the difference to the meaning

that tones me like a moody chameleon

resonating with a tuning fork of colour

that flickers like a photo-op of lightning

trying to get a glimpse of itself in the mirror.

And then I’m an illiterate divinity student

with a heart as big as an orphanage

full of baffled pilgrims that have lost their way

crutching through the labyrinths of the divine

on a cross that walks them to the end of the line

like the rapture of an apocalyptic anti-climax.

I talk to God about you and she talks back

like a comprehensive alibi for the way things are.

She’s got a scar as big as the smile

on the dark side of her face she keeps

turned away from me like an embarassed moon

she doesn’t want to reveal to anyone.

But I can see it in the rear view mirror

of my infernal lucidity leading me away from her

like an atomic Sufi reversing my spin

in the charged particle field of my happy sin.

I walk on the wild side in cowboy boots

in a truce with the shadows of Zen

that says a great general may establish peace

but that doesn’t mean he gets to enjoy it.

And I’m resigned to the sternness of my discipline

like salt to the earth, like a sail to the wind,

like a ferocious heart to a gentle mind.

PATRICK WHITE

DREAMING STRANGE

DREAMING STRANGE

Dreaming strange on a mattress of snakes

slowing down in the early autumn

like the hour hands of cold-blooded clocks.

They’re winching yachts out of the water

like sharks at Rideau Ferry Dock.

“Winter is icummen in, icummen in”

as life braces to take a bath in its own grave,

but nothing, I mean nothing matters

very much right now to the crickets and frogs

mesmerized by Indian summer into

an encore of white noise in the unleafing woods

and the whole town doped out on opioids

like a clean needle exchange for sunbeams.

No one’s wearing their flying carpet out

under the window quite yet, though it’s hard

not to be reminded of what’s icummen in

when the blueberries have the same look

in their eyes as roadkill and just because

time stops to admire its own reflection

doesn’t mean it’s forgiven us for wasting it

on the trivial pursuits of our own survival.

The moment shapeshifts and I change with it

not knowing whether it’s dusk or dawn,

if it’s time to go to ground or pull up stakes

like the heretical scarlet runners and sunflowers

that flamed out like pilot lights with big dreams

of setting the world on fire with seeds and beans.

How odd that passions I was ready

to commit suicide or die for yesterday

have faded like the watercolours of the falling leaves

or old, grey barnboards, warped by the sun

and the rain, pulling the nails out

of their stigmatized crossbeams with their teeth

and spitting them on the ground like pine-needles

or Androcles and the lion. A cedar rail fence

on the south side of an unrocked field

with nothing to keep in or out anymore

since the last cow was trucked off to auction.

The Indian paintbrushes are matchbooks in ashes.

The rosaries of the Canada geese leaving

at midnight like tenants sneaking out on the rent

are birds on the jinx of a prayerwheel

heading home like white-collared Jesuits to France

leaving the pagans to their own resources,

dancing around the firepits of the spirits

they return to like default salvations

that will get them through the winter

like ten cubic cords of hardwood and a moose

in the freezer like a baby mammoth in an ice-age.

I’m trying to grow old elegantly like a sunset

the fighter pilots at Trenton would want to spray bomb

with contrails, or a troubled soul might want

to disappear into like the denouement

of a long road around the knots in its heartwood

obstructing the flow of the grain from finding

the dynamic equilibrium of its own level at rest,

be it among the dark roots of things, or leaves

burning on the water of the lake as the stars emerge.

Not for fame or to embroider the descending drapery

of the dream to fool the last act of the play

into thinking it’s forever spring. Not for the laurels

I’m just as happy to have fall from the brick walls

they cling to like ivy after the burning of the books.

Not believing the night is a reward I’m entitled to

for anything I deserve or have earned,

or might haven fallen to earth like a windfall

of wild apple trees with no effort on my part,

but simply to honour the anonymous starmud

that rooted Venus in my eyes like the fire of love

on the green bough of the morning, and in the evening,

approaching me now, like a doorway that’s

opening before me, just as incomprehensively beautiful

through the dead branches still blossoming and bearing

behind the abandoned farmhouse the ghosts

of the previous tenants beside the Jerusalem artichokes left

like the sign of an afterlife that would go on thriving without them.

PATRICK WHITE

SOFT LIBERATION

SOFT LIBERATION

Soft liberation going on underground

as if someone left the gate to my heart open

and the horses are grazing in sidereal pastures

and there’s no turmoil in the wind blowing

the leaves around burning off their idle energy.

Don’t know what it is. The stump of the candle

shedding the spirit of its flame, the way life

dreams at this station of my eyes like a firetower

on an autumn night, or just the stars celebrating

something that has ended well without my knowing.

Bliss in the freedom of this night to keep

its secrets to itself as the mystery deepens

in my blood like wine that’s been sleeping

a long time in a cool, dark place that smells

as if it’s been smothered in moss and now

it’s time to breathe easy under the stars

and marvel at all a human has to go through

to ripen into the second innocence of the return journey

when exile turns around, and almost without noticing

you’re no longer bound by the prodigality

of your homelessness firewalking the thresholds

of the burning ladder that let you down

from paradise, unscathed like the eye-witness

of a window you had to break to see out of.

New England asters blooming among

the apples in the hair-braided grass in a shaft

of morning light that shocked the beatitudes

out of you, as if something inconceivably remote

had just expressed itself in the intimate beauty

of the moment and you understood something

profound about life without knowing what it was,

but it didn’t matter because it would be with you

for the rest of your life and further if there’s

an eternity with wildflowers in it that can

fix your gaze on the radiance of being possessed

by your eyes like dark angels that arose

out your starmud, cloaked in light, hidden secrets

that let it be known to each of us in silence

they’re manifest in every breath they take away

in an ambush of wonder that’s less like prayer than play.

Maybe it’s perishing that mends our estranged childhoods

as a concession to the abyss at the end

of the passage up ahead that roars like a waterclock

plunging over a precipice, but for the moment,

I’m clear again as a boy in the Indian summer of my soul

and I’m appreciatively intrigued by my fascination

for the way all things are the way they are as if

I’d wholly forgotten what it is I used to compare them to,

long ago, do you remember, when our shadows

didn’t come forward like undertakers measuring us up

for our graves and we broke curfew under the moonrise

and all death ever meant to us was all it would ever mean?

PATRICK WHITE

WARM SEPTEMBER MORNING

WARM SEPTEMBER MORNING

Warm September morning. Autumn

preps the heart with the sweetness of death

there is in perishing, in the great shedding

as the wind stirs a flurry of leaves and I watch

the elm across the street turn yellow.

Blue soporific oblivion of Indian summer,

like the dust on grapes that haven’t

hemorrhaged yet or withered like the dugs

on a nursing dog trying to wean the winoes.

The aura of a beautiful sorrow, the pathos

of an ancient longing to follow the geese

the stars, the leaves, the wildflowers,

into a dreamless sleep at peace with its own

creative potential to wake up like a waterlily

in a sacred pool of its own tears, not far from here,

to the fact that all that has passed was just

a sad window we were looking at the world through.

Perennial farewells, the pulse of a backbeat

to the rhythm of life, the waterclock of the rose

flowing like a bloodstream over the rock of the heart

like a prophetic skull foreshadowing its own extinction.

The labour of a lifetime to live fruitively

cannot be appeased by the mere relief

of letting go of the heaviness of the windfall

like a bell in a steeple or a needle

on a long playing new moon on the gramophone

of the stars going round and round, white noise

in the ears of the darkness that thought it could hear

the surf of the ocean for a moment there but maybe not.

It’s the unconditional embrace of the earth

unjudgementally accepting the cradles and coffins

of our starmud like a black hole back into its shining

that makes you want to lay your head down

like a planet on the breast of the dark mother

and still the racket that bruises the silence

not just of your ears but your eyes as well,

the struggling and surviving to wonder

like a sceptic with a mystic doubt if it wasn’t

absurd in the first place to go looking for an insight

into the nature and tenure of life as if there were

some kind of spiritual lost and found

for the unclaimed unitive life of a blissful orphan.

Can you still your questions long enough

to hear the answer? The abyss roars with stars

and the doorbells sound like a carillon of wild columbine

on a mammoth bone from the last ice age

as if they were about to be killed off

like the first frost on the paisley windowpanes

Ophelia drowned in like a blue water hyacinth.

Come the bestial orgies in the nunneries of winter

trying to fight off the boredom and the curfew

of living under house arrest at the whim

of the indifferent inclemency of the weather.

Sweetness on the face of a day on earth that senses

the agon of the summer to live beyond its means

as a fundamental of growth is coming to an end

in a solar flare of sumac immolating itself

like the shamanistic death of a dragon sage,

the ashes of the dream wiser than the flames

of the daylilies it lets overwhelm it like a cremation

that goes on blossoming long after the fire’s past.

PATRICK WHITE

BY THE LIGHT I HAVE BEEN GIVEN TO GO BY

BY THE LIGHT I HAVE BEEN GIVEN TO GO BY

By the light I have been given to go by,

I can see how homeless the journey truly is.

How provisional the shrines along the way like milestones

we stop to paint like the inside of our skulls

or the caves we first dwelled in with our dead

buried under fire and the numinosity of our picture music

impregnating the womb walls of a space made sacred by fear.

The darkness bears my secrets, and in the torchlight,

in carbon and red ochre, a diary of shamans

gored by defecating rhinos speared to death.

I have imagined my way into an understanding

that is a rite of passage into a space that is

a vast abyss of intelligence, a nothingness

that speaks through an intuitive grammar of things

as if a galaxy, a star, stone, tree, raindrop were each a thought,

a sign, a word, the syntax of a growing paradigm

of creative awareness that we’re completely alone

and lost at sea like fish on the moon crawling out of its tides

as if nothing bound us, not even detachment,

nor a god that exists as a confession of the way we do,

nor any medium we work in as reflection of our presence

labouring away at an unattainable world that won’t exist

until we do, and it’s 7 to 5 against anyone making it that far.

But what a joy to emerge out of our own nothingness

like a secret we’re letting ourselves in on,

making it up as we go along like a deportable myth of origin

we can adapt to our infinite beginnings

because for starters, it has none of its own.

We were born to express ourselves like apple trees.

We were born to see and be happy marvelling at the event.

To enjoy longing for things we were never missing

and be guided by wise men we never listen to

back to a silence that has nothing to say for itself

that we didn’t already know in the first place.

Everywhere is the threshold of the return journey.

Life is either an exile, or it stays at home like a follower.

Bless the enlightened apostates of the dangerous religion

that desecrates the mind by worshipping it.

Why make a chain out of your umbilical cord

and get your head wrapped around it like a noose

because you forgot meaning was an art

and not a way to take yourself way too seriously to heart?

Why go to war with your own mind

just to administer to the needs of the suffering

when you can paint a god in blood and ashes

and decultify yourself with the creative freedom

of your imagination deconstructing the fable of your belief

that it’s the being, not the becoming, that endures.

And you can do this without even knowing how to draw.

A starmap doesn’t shine. A blue print doesn’t open a door.

If you ask a crutch to do your walking for you,

it’s going to throw you away like a miracle

at the top of the stairs of Notre Dame de Coeur.

Better to be the sacred whore of a thousand profligate gods

than the unrepentant nun of one who shuts the world out,

like art for art’s sake, to revel in her own extinction

in a mystical connubium with an unregenerate imagination.

You can burn your gates and cages in a wild field if you like

for not being able to keep the flowers in, or keep the wind

from rioting with the leaves way past curfew,

but there was never any risk of being granted what you ask

because life is the unpredictable moon rise

that deepens the calendars with a renewed humility

towards the extraordinary mutability of time.

What have you ever been that baffled your imagination?

It isn’t reason that inspires us to become a stranger tomorrow

to the self we knew today. Genuine faith isn’t

an artificial life support system to keep something alive

that should have been allowed to die quietly away yesterday.

Millions upon millions of facts like a graveyard of skeleton keys

to a door we can’t find open within ourselves

as if we’d just stepped through it to be here where we live

deciphering the shapes of the clouds as if we lived in code.

Hide your secret deep enough if you want it to be known.

Walk alone as far as you can until you can’t

if you want the world to walk the rest of the way with you.

The white demon that knows heaven and hell experientially

mentors the senses in the spiritual subtleties of the black angel

that comes like the new moon of a third eye

to help the exegetes of light see further into the dark

by blowing their candles out like flowers.

All seekers are roads looking for a map to follow.

Preludes after the fact, that set out to look for their own endings.

Be a star. And keep your afterlife behind you

like the shadow of the last form you cast upon the earth.

Be an eye that doesn’t leave any room between the moon

and it’s reflection so that the substance of life is seeing

not that you’re a distinct and separate entity

that cosmically identifies with your exclusion

but that you’re wholly within easy reach of everything

that depends upon you for its existence. Just as every leaf

you let fall in the autumn like an adage of wisdom

about how you can know the world by its fruits

first came to the tree like a smile to your face

when you realized your imagination was

the inconceivable dynamic of a creative state of grace.

PATRICK WHITE