IF I WERE TO SAY MY HEART AND MIND AS I WOULD

IF I WERE TO SAY MY HEART AND MIND AS I WOULD

If I were to say my heart and mind as I would,

no difference between the picture-music inside

I’m singing to myself, I’m being sung by,

and the world as it is when I look under

the stones of my eyes, amazed by how much life

goes unregarded, as if, ultimately, it were

none of our business whether we know about it

or not, but verbal expression is not thought.

Seeing is not the same as saying what you saw.

Life isn’t a state. Death isn’t a state. Being

and existence, and their opposites, are conditioned

by the authorship of those who try to define them.

If you beat the pinata long enough manna

falls from heaven, or the rain cools its lightning roots

with tears the wind will cheer up with a windfall of apples.

Why not? Life’s the engine of every move you make,

not a thing, not a force, but the indefinable

once you get past looking at your corpuscles

as if they were not yours, or worse, your source.

I live as if there were a sight in end to what

I’ve been vaguely labouring toward like a kid

swinging on the garden gate of my hapless beginning.

Chaos built the Taj Mahal. Give it an order

and it’s doomed to fall. Where did the flowers go

that were a moment of who I was for awhile

in this dream that never stops masking everything

in terms of something else. Say one thing, anything,

like a black walnut on the sidewalk that reminds me

of Rumi’s poem about a scorched, black future

where everything’s incinerated in a black hole

or a nuclear holocaust, and you elaborate a world

through the translators of Rumi’s words, not Rumi

as he knew himself before he went on changing.

Be a desert with the choicest mirages

your housewells and hourglasses ever envied

or wrap your mouth in mummy cloth

until the star storm blows over and you’re

not blinded by the blazing anymore

and you’ll start whining like the ubermensch

about nobody listening to Zarathustra

trying to enlighten everybody with his lantern

in the market. If you can’t see the supernova

in the candle-flame, adding more pixels

isn’t going to do you any good. Everybody

set themselves on fire. It’s Arab spring

in the middle of autumn. The nightingale’s wings

are the cage it defends like its freedom to sing

what it wants about the impositions of the deranged.

I’ve come back from a lot of holy wars I’ve lost

and won, that didn’t mean a thing, and what

have I got to show for it but a lost earring

and a child’s shoe? Horror is as intimate as love.

There are snakepits you fall into like a bird bone flute

that has to weave myriad wavelengths

into a flying carpet of picture music if you want

to get out without being bitten by a downed powerline.

Radical changes whose time may or may not have come.

So the year begins in the middle of an ice age

and breaches the Arctic as a sign of global warming.

I take my sleeve and wipe my breath off the window

to polish the stars like gold burnished by fire.

I imagine thrones because I’m a peasant who toils

with his hands in the starmud of his mind.

I wear rubber-boots like an insulated pair of plyers.

If you were to speak your heart and mind

as clearly as it’s impossible, would it make

any sense, even to you? You can make a seabed

on the moon, or you can step out of the crumpled sheets

like Aphrodite who associates sex with

the bloodstream of an earthly tide when the moon

crests like a lunatic with gravitas at a distance.

What did the man say? Intense heat, unusual sprouts?

Are there pilot lights on the stars? How far

to the next stone in the Milky Way do we

have to jump before we realize we’ve cobbled

the way with our prophetic skulls, that our lifeboats

are the ships of state that navigate the whale roads

hoping Moby Dick doesn’t sound like an ice-floe

and pull us all under because we stabbed it in the heart

like the albino eclipse of a utopian third eye?

Waking and dream are so quantumly entangled

in the net of Indra, dolphin drown with their gills

caught in the interstices, when you’re not asleep

and you’re not awake, and it could be

a mandalic spider web, the aura of a magnetic field,

a dreamcatcher, a boring starmap washed in

by the watercolours of the northern lights,

or the collateral damage of fisherman making

a living by walking all over their own tears

at the expense of the sea that sustains them.

My heart doesn’t beat for me alone.

My eyes don’t see a name on the book they’re reading.

I write but my mind speaks in the accent

of everything I do like the Tower of Babel.

Every wildflower in the field is a definition of life

in its entirety. What’s been said? Once you’ve realized.

PATRICK WHITE  

PINE GROVES ON THE BATTERED HILL

PINE GROVES ON THE BATTERED HILL

Pine groves on the battered hill

giving birth to a bell on the nightwatch

as the moon rises like a midwife with a clean towel.

Pine cones like pagodas enlightened into life

like the eyelids of a fire that passed through

this summer like a poet with a seed bag

of first drafts. Ancient melancholy, lachrymose

secret, I can feel the ghosts of things

I don’t understand, slow tears at the edge

of the grasslands they’re lost in at the river’s edge.

Should I care for a darkness I’m not meant to know

as the bears are stuffing themselves on town dumps

and windfalls to fuel the winter in their layers

of candle fat as if they were still worshipped in caves?

I sit around the lotus of my many-petalled fire

blooming in mythic shadows enlarged

by the coven of trees they’re dancing with.

Here evil isn’t deliberate, and violence is innocent.

The thieves take what they need to live

and leave the rest. I’m afraid sometimes,

but the beast in my blood is in accord with the risk

and the cold air smells engagingly dangerous.

A warm rose spills from the throat of a quick kill,

the only mercy available to a snow owl that has to eat.

There’s more integrity in dying alone

in the woods at night for indiscernible reasons

with perfect timing than there is in dying en masse

in a drone strike as collateral damage.

It may be preyed upon but the white-tailed buck

doesn’t feel victimized by the unlicensed culls of the wolves.

Nothing can happen to me out here

that the beaver and the muskrat don’t

have to live with as well where skulls

are flowerpots and the ants mulch the Monarchs

too old and late to make the trip back,

that sipped on milkweed unfouled by pesticides

until they pressed themselves, intact,

between the covers of a collectible chapbook.

I like poems from the heartwood

with the bark still on them and a growing edge

more than those that have been pulped and milled

through a creative writing school

that sits in the corner like a piece

of erudite furniture meant to impress

more than unjam a logboom with the pike of a pen

or offer anyone a chance to take a load off.

I sit on a glacial rock and it feels like

the throne of the Stone of Scone returned to the Scots.

I hear a twig break like the wing of a tragic nightbird

in something’s teeth, or the dead are walking

the way the Algonquin used to along this riverbank

without ever imagining someone like me

camped here painting their features in smoke

as if all we had left of our common humanity

were the stars that looked down upon us

with the impersonal compassion of the tears

of the pines in their eyes hardening like a river

in the approaching cold of the dragon that shed them

like incense over the pyre of a coniferous miscarriage.

PATRICK WHITE

PEACE A MOMENT

PEACE A MOMENT

Peace a moment. A bubble of cool bliss

in the skin of a tear. Grace, with a green thorn.

The moon as I’ve never seen it before.

A ghost in the willows feathers down

upon the dark waters of the Tay

in an aura of moist summer air,

indelible as chalk on a blackboard

as if it were trying to write its name.

Solitude’s a priestess leashed to a water snake

that meditates on the moonlight

like a theta wave on its own path through life.

Look where you will, even the search parties

you organize like poems with real candlepower

are still lost in the labyrinth of your homelessness

looking for your true address until

you realize it’s been under your feet all the time.

You are the road. And there’s no one on it.

The shadows of the trees lie down

like thresholds that sense someone’s

been crying in a derelict doorway for years.

Severe sorrow. A bell for a bucket

bailing out the empty lifeboat of the moon

long, long after it’s set. Love. No help for it.

White sweet clover, swan’s plumage,

both sides of the road. The wind

in the vocal cords of the wild grape vines

overgrowing the half closed gate

of someone who meant to return one day

like a loose page of a book to its binding.

An unfinished loveletter to the fire that wrote it.

The maples reach out to touch me

to see if I’m real. Nocturnal enough,

but who’s to judge? The dream

doesn’t have a dawn or dusk. The end

goes on forever. The beginning never happens.

Born into perishing my way through life

what could death mean but another night

of living my passage through it

as the juniper sweeps my tracks

from the trails I cut down to the river

like deer paths, and the stars

in the shrine of my eyes devote their candles

to the same darkness that inspires the fireflies,

or my insights into the nature of love

as the way the nightsky is transfixed

by what is born of it like the mystery

of why life shines on its own likeness

without going blind or turning into stone

as if imagination were the first sign,

black walnut trees losing their voice

like Lyra in the west, as above, so below,

autumn approaching, o, yes, the autumn

and the poignancy, almost the flavour

of creation, that what we love last

and the deepest, is the perennial beauty

of our own passing, galaxies and waterlilies

embedded in our hydra-headed starmud

like a blue moon inseparable from

the dark waters of life it blossoms in.

A nightbird shrieks. A ghost kicked up

by the dust of the Milky Way in my wake

weeps like a sad loveletter that’s taken the words

right out of my mouth like an empty mailbox

standing at the side of the road, listening

when there’s nothing, not even an echo,

a whisper of my own innermost voice,

to the silence that lingers in the woods

for asylum from the intimacy that has

forsaken it, and the love in its heart

that trues it like an arrow fletched by the light

to a rapturous wound that hasn’t,

as the fish at both ends of the equinox

jump back like bulls-eyes into the targets

they made of their exits from one medium

to hit in the next like the tree rings

of the grand entrances we make on our way out.

Love perishes like apple bloom in the spring

to be born again among the windfalls of autumn,

the burning bridges of the maple trees

between the fountains on the moon, with birds,

and the housewells we dig like graves

here on earth, to drink our own tears from

like sacred syllables pouring through

the open floodgates of the moonrise

like a prophetic skull trying to hit

all the oracular high notes of the shrill treefrogs

celebrating the dark abundance, bright vacancy

of our corporeal entrances and disembodied exits.

PATRICK WHITE

THE BLUE POTENTIAL OF A GREY, GREY DAY

THE BLUE POTENTIAL OF A GREY, GREY DAY

The blue potential of a grey, grey day.

The bikers have flown away like starlings

emerging fractally from the woods.

The driveway is clear though my car

is not going anywhere. They’re middle-aged men

the way I used to be, black leather

and cowboy boots where the rubber hits the road,

and though things take shape like Canada geese

rising out of a threshed cornfield, you run

like an unbaffled, four stroke wolf pack

that plays havoc with your testosterone.

Snow on the roof. Fire in the furnace.

It’s a winter wonderland when it isn’t a Quaalude.

Age is like that. It’s not a daffodil in late autumn.

It’s a Blackberry Moon given to heart attacks

and hemorrhages, an understanding the heartwood

shares with the tree rings that are keeping it alive

like leaves and birds grazing on what they can

in common, knowing the dozy tree never gets cut

for the keel of a ship, or a mast that will snap

like a dislocated hip on an icey, unsalted sidewalk.

I’m trying my senescence on like adult shoes

in childhood playing dress up in a dark closet.

More glibly, seance. I’m summoning all the ghosts

of the people I used to be, maybe that’s why

it’s grey, and I’m asking each of them what perishing

means to anyone. And I’m not interested

in tedious arguments, but I want to know

if they’re going with me into the legends of oblivion

at the bottom of a starmap. On board or not

with this shipwreck that would rather go deep

than far as the moon approaches the earth

cataclysmically every day it turns on its axis

like a weathervane secured at the peak

of a barn roof like a mermaid at the prow of an ark.

Initial response. I don’t want to lie

in a heritage cemetery with the leaves

passing over me and the grass always

an unusually moist green that’s supernatural.

I don’t want to be screen-tested for

my physical response to pain or disease.

Emotion always hurt me more. I don’t

want to be grateful for the idiocies

of the stereo-types I’ve had to suffer

at the hearts of lovers and well-meaning friends.

What did Yeats say he had to comfort him

in old age? Rage and lust? I can’t help either

when they arise, and though I’m supposed to be

forbearing and wise, I don’t object too strenuously

when I’m led astray by my eyes or repulsed

by the filth that’s caked to justice like a travesty of starmud.

Don’t help me unless I sincerely need it. Most

of the time that’s cash. I’m not muscled

like a rocking chair close to the stove.

Don’t bore me with your plans for the future

and I won’t bore you with my plans for the past.

I listen more to my body than my mind

when it comes to taking a nap which I admit

gets sweeter the more it ripens than I thought

it would be when I first conceded to longer,

less radioactive shadows than the meltdown

of my dreams as they ran out of heavy water to cool

them off like eyes staring too intensely

out of the darkness of the doorway like stars.

Not for lightyears schooled by a compass set

and a rule I learned in a classroom. I relate

to chaos in a larger frame of reference beyond

the surreality I project upon it as if my pineal gland

had stopped showing horror flicks on the weekend.

Freer than I used to be. Running out. Running down.

Until time stops at the speed of thought

and light’s just another also ran. Which bend

in the hourglass is upstream? I scheme. I scheme.

And what goes down has so very little to do with me.

I pay attention when I want to and get on

with how meaningless everything is, until

you give it one as gradually the fresco begins

to fade like a sacred roof over your head when it rains,

and the oils are bleeding too deeply into

the wet plaster, and the candles and censers

treat you as if you’d lived your life too colourfully,

and dyed it sepia-tinged, like a beer bottle

or a radiant stain-glassed window in a brown out

that played with the light bars in an art gallery

in Kingston that had a habit of playing dead

as if a black bear were in the neighbourhood

and death was the only way to save yourself from being food.

I’ve come to cherish my work as the less

of many evils, and much more fascinating

than the worst, like a junkie eyeballs the silverware.

I say starmud, but half the time I’m as big

a clod as I ever was when I pulled a plough

on the moon. I don’t underestimate women

in the name of love as much as I used to,

the stillness and the stealth of a halcyon hurricane

waiting to happen like an ocean in a rose

with the dorsal fins of sharks, thorns and sundials.

But God, I love the way I’m defiled like a sinner.

No angel that never floated a lifeboat down

a bloodstream ever had it so good as all that

like an incredibly long amen to a very short prayer.

And not mean, and bitter and cynical. Self

destructive as I’ve been for poetic reasons

I wouldn’t do that to myself. I might carry

vinaigrette on a long march with the legion

to keep from getting sick as an eagle on what

swims into his ken like Herschel or the Pacific

or a salmon struggling to make ends meet

and make sure the circle remains unbroken.

I don’t live recklessly enough anymore

to step on God’s toes when we’re slow dancing

to a song neither of us have heard before, alone.

Besides, everything is looping into its second innocence

like the moon on replay taking a bath in her own grave.

PATRICK WHITE

NOW THAT I'VE GOT MY LITTLE SANDCASTLE OF AN APARTMENT

NOW THAT I’VE GOT MY LITTLE SANDCASTLE OF AN APARTMENT

Now that I’ve got my little sandcastle of an apartment

nearly complete with what I’ve got to work with,

I’ll wait for the tide to wash it all out to sea,

though it’s getting harder every time to begin again.

Ebb and neap. Neap and ebb. A kind of breathing

with a brief pause full of peace just before

it returns to its former state, irrevocably changed.

A pulse, a penumbral eclipse of the Hunter’s moon

in the northern hemisphere. I look for Venus

in the west just after the sun goes down and it

doesn’t really matter if I don’t see it, but if I do,

it always renews my sense of wonder affirmatively

at why I’m making such a fool of myself going

through all this over and over again like

the most recent definition of the insane, looking

for a different effect, irrevocably, as I said, changed.

The poetry lives, but I’m losing interest in a future

that doesn’t include death. I don’t peel

my oranges anymore to get at the fruit of the moon.

It’s bittersweet, but I get the taste of the whole thing.

There’s a moonrise in my soul that works the nightshift.

I haven’t grown any older than my afterbirth

or baby teeth, or the booties my mother had bronzed,

but I’m tired of the north light in my windows

waking me up in the middle of a dream

to find all the birds gone forever with many

of my friends ailing like unhinged gateways

to gardens that never existed except

in their imaginations, though it isn’t compassion

to say so, or speak ill of the weeds. Find

what a human cherishes the most and you’ll

be amazed how few metaphors it clings to

like crown jewels for an apocalyptic coronation.

Corona Borealis soon overhead, and Gemma,

the jewel, shining like a maiden voyage

in the window of a tower in the whirling castle

of the Celts who spent their afterlife in Arianrhod.

Don’t look it up if you don’t have a mind to,

or freebase your own associations as if your face

just caught fire thinking about it. Out of

my comprehension now as I watch my erudition

slip away like a thief in the night that’s left me

inconceivably at the mercy of my own resources.

As if that were something new to labour at

like turning coal into diamond, darkness into

six months of the midnight sun out of the ore

of six more months of noon in total eclipse.

Of making my longing beautiful before

the unanswerable as if I were making the best

of my house arrest here on the earth until

I learn the knack of wearing an ankle bracelet

as a crown in the kingdom of freedom where

the poets reign an an eye to eye basis

of lunar calendars with cosmic views

of their mindscape abandoned in

the shabby kitchen of a collapsing farmhouse

where they grew up to get away as fast as they could

with curtains torn like spiderwebs littered

with the empty exoskeletons of the stars

scattered like ashes from their urns on nothing,

nothing at all, the cold chimney of a dead fire,

with their creatively ungovernable state of chaos

delegitimized by the lack of laws it made up

just to break to show you how to thrive on nothing.

PATRICK WHITE

IT'S GREYING OVER, BUT IT'S STILL A FREE DAY

IT’S GREYING OVER, BUT IT’S STILL A FREE DAY

It’s greying over, but it’s still a free day,

no rent, no hydro, no gas, no car insurance,

to write, to paint, to let time grow like a weed

as I pace my apartment from studio to scriptorium

where I write apostate holy books in the margins

of my colas and kells. And not care if I’m a cult or not,

if I’ve got any followers, if there’s a stake somewhere

with my name on it, in Venice, Giordano Bruno,

writhing in flames because he believed

everything was alive and should be greeted as such

and so do I. Hunter’s moon again when

the heretics are culled. What did the wolves do

before the hunters came? Licensed to kill,

but it isn’t the same. No red dye or cellophane.

The flowerless daylilies are buried in leaves.

They paint carbon copies of themselves

on the walls of their cement caves. I wonder

if solar panels will ever know what autumn means

to these that are banked like cornflakes

out of the box. Is there a prize for the most

graceful swan dive into yesterday’s junkmail?

Blood and bone, does leafmeal keep

the rabbits and deer away from a garden

with budrot because the grower’s greedy

and feckless? A matchbox of pot from the sixties,

for free believe it or not, unschooled in the tactics

of the gram masters of Gore Street keeping

the price of peace with a smile on its face, high.

Mary Jane, the holy. Street queen without

portfolio, the pimps have turned you out

under a lamp post, packaged for a trick to double-park.

Are you the Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene?

Leaned into any power windows lately?

The world corrupts the gifts it didn’t steal.

I can remember the west coast in l966

but what’s the point? The mortgage came due

on those ideals, and the creative imagination

has been squatting on Crown land ever since.

Liberation. By accident. But how do you

chain water up like a dog to a fire hydrant?

I let my mind skate two lengths of the canal.

I pity the poor watersnakes whose nightmare

is Alexander the Great’s solution to tying

yourself up in knots for the winter months to come.

Nothing else to do when you don’t drink,

in a small town, at fifteen below zero, but chill out.

Dealers do, but humans don’t live by bread alone.

You need a boost that lays you out like your girlfriend

or a bear skin rug that’s given up on the dump

and gone into hibernation. Wonder if Krishna

were ever mauled in his sleep by a grizzly

who eats you like a lotus that moved in a dream

of salmon swimming up the foodstream to die

in the sacred gene-pool of a waterclock timed to sex?

I can smell the leaves burning from here. Come

the snow, ten cubic cords of acrid two year old

red oak no one’s ever prized for its mistletoe.

Depends on who lies down on the pyre

the message the wind sends about the afterlife

of the fire that’s blazing like a furnace in a funeral home.

Black smoke or white, everyone’s infallibly

been elected pope. Except for the heretics

who are in on the joke. Whatever gets them through

the night, mortally wounded by their own boredom.

A secular kind of tolerance that doesn’t reform anything.

But gives death as wide a berth as life.

That observes, for the most part, the desperation

in the chokecherries and berries of most people’s hearts.

One foot in summer and the other in a lifeboat

crushed like a milkweed pod or a hull

from the Franklin expedition in Hudson’s Bay

until the first snow overwhelms them like a morphine drip

supported by a human fighting for its life

and that’s the end of their nostalgia for dislocated hips.

The crosswalks get wiped out. The Iroquois

still make us run through a gauntlet of sticks and stones

to get to Giant Tiger on a Wednesday when

everything’s been marked down like a cemetery on sale.

The road is doing figure-eights with a bull whip

in each hand as if it were trying to imitate a snakepit.

The journey stings, Momma, the journey stings.

My nerves sing like downed hydro lines to the rain and the ice.

But never let me forget the way a country road

one car wide, winds with a mind of its own

that’s superior to mine, whatever I’m driving

like a Ford l50 or the sun god’s chariots in eclipse

so everything looks fine until the diamond cutter’s

Vajrayana, reveals to the little and big vehicles,

no one knows the road better than a shot-up mailbox

knocked over by a snowplough with a blade

that reflects the moon like one of its phases

or a planet like earth at odds with its own ecliptic

twenty three and a half degrees off upright

with the solar plane of its own dinner table

so both sides of the pig on the spit get done

as if someone were glazing an oil painting

in translucent lacquers that didn’t yellow

except for the dog stain and the wild siloes

of the long grain and grasses that stuck it out in the snow.

PATRICK WHITE  

THE RAIN MAKES THE NIGHT LOOK BLACKER

THE RAIN MAKES THE NIGHT LOOK BLACKER

The rain makes the night look blacker.

Wet anthracite. Panthers and lacquer.

Slash of the storelights in efflorescent

water gardens that fountain and gutter

with every passing car. A poor man’s

Alhambra. A mistake to drive the Muslims

and Moriscos out of Spain like poets

you’d been plagiarizing to give Platonic court

to unattainable, wealthy patrons you adored

because they could afford it. Not much

of a troubadour if your heart hasn’t got

a voice of its own. Or your lute’s a guitar

with a broken neck. Or is it an origami swan?

Lamp-posts reflected in the double pane

thermal windows like deep sky objects

in the narrowing field of view as if

someone threw a spear in the eye

of the Hubble telescope in the time-honoured

tradition of what to do if you meet

a Cyclops in orbit and you’ve just jettisoned

the third stage of the rocket you’re tied to.

Got to be a church around here somewhere

like a Neptunian shepherd moon fish farming.

God’s a wild salmon full of eggs. Fingerlings

of the traffic lights streaking their colours

clean as dawn. You can muzzle science

like a dancing bear in a political circus,

but you can’t stop the dharma of the disease

when people aren’t free to move around

mentally at ease with their unlikely similitudes.

There’s a lady singing up the street

at a bar a friend of mine owned before

he killed himself and left the rest of us

to wonder how sad it can get, and she

really belts like factory on the graveyard shift.

Her voice seems to carry further in the wet

than the wind on Fridays trying to teach

dry leaves on a brittle day to sing the blues.

Not missing anyone tonight. Not even

who I was yesterday anymore than I will

this idle delusion trying to track fish

upstream while everything’s flowing

the other way, and the small rain down can rain.

Not callous, indifferent, or aloof. Alone.

Though solitude’s not much to write home about.

It’s still perilous for me. I’d say the point it makes

is elusive if it ever flashed me a sign

I wasn’t living in a medieval guildhall

for stone masons who died a hundred

and fifty years ago devoting their skills

and their lives to permanence for the rich.

And a canal to keep Kingston supplied.

And a lodge to go occult in before you died.

Something else the west stole from the Arabs

like a secret Mechanic’s Illustrated to symbols.

I believe in live and let live. It’s all water

anyway, whatever way you flavour it

to make it more palatable to the life that wastes it.

The rain is a spider with the briefest of webs.

Water music sweet enough to bring tears to your eyes

in a glass palace of home-made harpsichords

and self-styled mirrors at the end of October.

A good rain that washes out the road.

Not drizzle to keep the dust down.

A flood myth not the eye of blood

that spiritualizes the post mortem of the rose.

PATRICK WHITE