DAY FOURTEEN:

DAY FOURTEEN:

I keep waiting for some mountain of gravestones to fall on me and bury me in the valley of death, but it hasn’t happened yet. I’m not terrified or paranoid about it, which may be folly on my part, but I’ve been a poet all my life and so the habit persists of seeing and being this way, buttressed by my almost hallucinogenic fascination with the light as it flowers in astronomy and painting. There is no way in the world I would ever discard my emotions, like trying to cancel the weather of an ocean to save it from drowning as far as I’m concerned, or to alleviate it’s fear of drowning in itself. I entertain no boyish pretensions of cocksure, unambivalent heroism about all this, but I do earnestly hope and am endeavouring to walk this last green mile like a man, like a peasant king, like a poet. You, see? Death hasn’t knocked the playfulness out of me yet? Or I’m flirting coyly with it. There’s a transmorphic aspect about its gender, nothing psychological, but in the way all the abstractions about it metaphorize into a body of feeling-thought in my mind, and in the way I perceive it, and look into its eyes. It’s sometimes as remote as a terrifying father, but more delightfully and more often, seems to manifest as an allurement I can relate to. Unaccusing, unjudgmental, engaging. I think of Odysseus and Circe more in this regard with a touch of mermaid just to keep my attention. And no, I’m not tying myself to any mast this time, not that I ever did much of that. I want to hear. Of course, you wonder, and I do, if there’s some kind of subconscious death wish in all of this I’m overlooking, and the last, cruel last laugh will be on me. If it is, let it be, I’m still going to look. Habit of mine to stare dragons into the eyes straight and see what’s there. Kiss your dragons back into princesses Rilke says somewhere. Think it’s got something to do with looking into a lifetime of telescopes. Pointing them at the stars, my heart, my soul, my poetry, gardens that came up in the night while I slept. Watching the mind walk its own waters within me. Beautiful even when it’s horrible sometimes, eerie or alone. I feel a bit like Chauncey the Gardener here, I like to watch, and so I do, because for the life of me, I have not been able to find any other mindstream within to sit beside. Nor am I about to ask this great sea of unbounded awareness to pick out its favourite waves and streams or direct me to those that are more important than others to keep an eye on. Form through matter. Within. The way a seed manifests a flower. I don’t impose it, and I sense we’re all shapeshifters anyway. Vertumnus, Morpheus, where the river turns. I’ve been meeting my life at one bend in the river after the other for lightyears now. Good place to write in while I’m waiting, musing on the stars, as Dylan sings, watching the river flow. Deepening my relationship with the moon. Peaceful there, though not always, calm most of the time, though I’ve known it to roil as well. Let it. I never ask for anything, so it’s somewhat of a falsehood to me to ever feel disappointed. This experience is akin to that, or perhaps more of the same. Few clouds passing across the moon, but they’ll pass at their own pace, and I’m used to that. Cowboy clouds, you loosen your nervous system, you tighten your spine like a bow some friend taught you to use when all the cowboys and Indians went Zen, and you watch, perhaps that’s all you can do. Watch. Calm, continuous awareness. Sometimes minutely, the mystic specificity of the world, the grain of sand that contains the whole of the universe in each detail. And sometimes macrocosmically when your eyes want to be enlightened starmaps. Not an agenda, a menu, or an expectation. The world like the flowers blooms of its own accord. I let it sleep, if it dreams, and go on quietly contented to work in an adjoining room, pursuing, as Blake so eloquently expresses it, my persistent folly. Surprise it with a poem when it gets up. Even the fool would grow wise if he would persist in his folly. That’s Blake’s line, not mine, but isn’t it true? Once you’ve got your hydra-headed ego delusion out of the way even for a moment, a glimpse, a nanosecond, isn’t it clear every nervous system, tree reaching up to the stars, dendritic notion of evolution and dark matter, empties into a great, vast sea of unknowing, call it the godhead, nirvana, the clear light of the void, dark night of the soul, fana, baqua, the plenum-void, a dream, nothingness manifested as being, or just a bad molecular joke some random, impersonal, indifference played upon you without meaning to, whatever metaphors you’re most comfortable in because they’ve broken you in like a pair of comfortable boots you’ve walked a long way in, listening to the stars jingle like constellations at your heels, for the musical effect on dark nights that make you nervous enough to whistle in the dark, not goading or spurring so much, if you’ve got a good horse, and I fancy I have, you don’t need to do anything but watch it work the herd, be they words, or thoughts or emotions, loosen the reins so you don’t end up making a noose of them and hanging some innocent man or woman in your despair. Not a philosophy, but my bumbling, approximate approach. More intuitive than precise, but things keep appearing out of the mist in the valley the moon’s saturating with light, and I’ve spent a lifetime of agonizingly, intensely, delightfully, mesmerizingly, radiantly, darkly, abundantly, brightly, beatifically, demonically, vacantly watching these fireflies of insight trying to make earthbound constellations out of white-tailed does that step out from behind those veils. Usually after a thunderstorm. I still can’t think of a better or more blessed way to spend my time here. Alone with the Alone, as Plotinus phrases it, but alone together with everyone else the Alone flowers in. That’s you, darlin, you’re on. What’s this? Outside the green room. Forgive the impertinence of my nomenclature, I like to pretend sometimes I’m Gus in Lonesome Dove sometimes. But I hope I’ve made the point clear. What’s this? Angels can’t answer that question without being told, demons have more proficiency because they’ve usually seen more, they’ve been to both places, heaven and hell, but I’m still of the persuasion, that question belongs to humans, indefensibly, imperfectible as they seem they are sometimes, and even just to ask it is answer enough. See Montaigne’s motto carved into his rafter. Que sais je? Perhaps nothing, but you know it, and that nothing is human. A lingering cachet of us, a flavour, a taste, a fragrance, a bouquet, a ghost as it pursues its aimless, musical path among the stars as if they could hear a whisper of flowers singing sweetly to themselves within it that reminds them of a garden they used to tend like a woman as the sun goes down. And the song she’s singing to herself. Alone with the Alone. Is it scary, sometimes, you bet it is, almost inconceivably so, but then so have a lot of things that have occurred in my life. And you know what? The dark shines. I’ve always said so, and more than ever, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I see that more than ever now, in a soggy cigarette butt someone flicked to the side walk, and in the roaring black hole engines of the galaxies. You want to see a star. Look into the darkness it’s emerging from as if someone just handed you a flower, and you’re wondering where to fix to your hat. Put that rose in the skull of your rattlesnake hatband. Between the fangs. Make it a wicked flower pot. It’s oxymoronic, isn’t it? Union of opposites. Two wings on one bird. Actually there’s a third, but we won’t get into that. But include it all, no part left out as some Zen mendicant realized one day watching the moon and the sun at opposite ends of the sky. Moonset, sunrise. The way we breathe, the way we live and die. Do you see a discontinuity in it? I don’t. What do you do with your life then? You celebrate it, you say thanks, even if you don’t know what form of a host you’re addressing in the doorway as you leave. I hear God doesn’t have any characteristics. You might want to think of lending him or her a few of your own. Thanks. That’ll do it, but you say it with your blood and your eyes, and your mind and your heart and your soul. Thanks. Quite a show. And the ticket was free, unless you got more glee sneaking under the fence. But que sais je? What do I know? This is my good guess. What’s yours?

NOW NOTHING. THE DREAM FIGURES HAVE GONE TO BED

NOW NOTHING. THE DREAM FIGURES HAVE GONE TO BED

Now nothing. The dream figures have gone to bed.

The painters have have entered their dreams as if

everything were better said in the morning and they’ve

left their half-finished paintings of muscular women

into Tae Kwon Do sex on their easels, and they come

and they come and they come to nothing with

a pretty little idea of the flower in their head

blooming like ball lightning in the rear view of the night.

Peace. Relief. Poof. And it’s gone as the mirages

come on for more. Something settles. Is it dark?

Is it dust? Is it light? Are there stars on the tarpaper roofs?

Quiet. You can hear the silence breathe. Me wheeze

softly with death and ashes on my breath. God

I wish there were stars on the tarpaper roofs.

But that’s the way of it. Does anybody need any proof?

There are memories that recoup the moment.

Birch trees and gardens shaped like icons of a woman

I knew once I was trying to please. Elecampane

and eglantine, and always, always, always

the wild grape vine. Locust and apple trees. The moon.

When it’s up. The way I’m edging this like a fluid

jeweller with my tongue to make it run. So nicely

it almost seems like compensation for taking

my breath away. Ting. Ting. But it’s lower than that.

The hospital ward is absorbed in it on the nightshift.

Soft-shoed silence. And the musings of the dead

in a hospital bed on what they’ve lived, what they’ve loved,

what they died for. My turn. I’ll try to be their equal

not peer of anything. Maybe a fun companion at the end

to help relieve my suffering with their laughter. It’ll work out.

I’m almost sure. I can bumble my way through this

black out with a kiss on the forehead for good luck.

Full stop. No more birch trees. No more gardens.

No more full stops. Isn’t that ridiculous? No socks.

Is it brutal as a snowflake? Does the soul leave

the body when it dies? Have I got one. Do you?

Is it bearable, durable and wise? Does it lie to you?

Mine does sometimes. I wonder about that. Not much.

But some. This is creation. Who knows what to come?

Court jesters in a heavenly kingdom? Or sunflower angels

with deadly nightshade in their eyes to make up for it?

See? It lies in the way it tries to make me feel better.

It doesn’t have to try so hard. I’m mellow as a bride

of the lamp posts outside. I’m wise as a blade saw

that knows how to cut its own umbilical cord. Midwife.

Not trapline I’ve got to eat my way out of. Or be eaten alive.

But that’s another matter. What’s everything for now

is looking into this while the night surrounds me

as if I were a gold fish in the submarine pens of my aquarium.

Digits of time. Thumbnail sketches immersed in it.

Should I say the waters of life? The evanescent

exit and entrance. You breathe it in you breathe it out.

And then you die. No trick to it if that’s all there is to it.

I’ll try. Take a good run at it and fly like a waterbird

with nothing on my mind but taking off on time to go blind

or enter another space, maybe a lot like this place

where I’m fine for the moment unlocking the sky

like a diary of stars way back in the woods of my mind.

PATRICK WHITE

EPISTOLARY FACEBOOK MESSAGE NUMBER THREE

EPISTOLARY FACEBOOK MESSAGE NUMBER THREE

No pennies on my eyes this morning. But I slept with these

on my eyelids like bells, like moons, like kisses on the forehead of a bruise,

as I fell through a mist of pharmaceuticals in a cloud of unknowing,

weightless with both my children in my arms like shepherd moons

and tumours. Two poems, two hills, two tombs, listening

to the anapestic trill of my mindstream hair braiding its way

through the woods. And the silence and the silence and the silence

that scans. When I see a skull there’s always a flower in it

and a star that wants to start a constellation in my eyes.

Shaking like an aspen in the rags of its last leaves in a frosty wind

hoping this chassis of a body can live up to its engine. Time

to look under my tongue. So I can tell the morning

how grateful I am to be so warm inside here with everyone

like a cat or a bird or man in the pewter lustre

of another morning on earth. Where did all the flowers

come from? I swear, Gus, I love the way the things of the world

are always getting out of hand. And the silence, and the silence

and the silence that scans.

You can’t imagine how much love there is in my heart

for you right now. All of you, though I’ve known many of you

since I was an upstart. New friends in the schoolyard, all of you.

I’m going to see what my mother packed for lunch.

Love, Patrick

DARK SHEDDING

DARK SHEDDING

Dark shedding. Translucent shadows of the leaves

on a lake without a name you once made famous for nothing

because you saw it dance in your awareness of enough

and touched it with your eyes like a secret that was meant

to be kept like the silence in the roots of the bracken.

Regrets? What was there to cry about that didn’t bloom

in retrospect? Did you miss the moon? Did you run

to the window in time? Have you seen it yet

through the rain and the smoke? Do you see a woman

or do you see a ghost in the garden that reminds you

of someone you knew when were young among

the sunflowers you grew? And the moon and the locust tree

you hung from like someone pendulous and blue

as time on the air of the unweaving hills? Is that

still true as a road that goes nowhere without you

like the sumac in the fall when it fails? Do the gates

still open as if they recognized you by the grace

and the colour of the bouquets you made of your skelton keys?

Gardens of scars in your eyes. Did you leave the stars

to the sage when you wept like smoke at the feet

of everything it didn’t say but you could foretell

by the silence that befell you before and after that you

heard it anyway like the flight of a homing heron

to the shrines of its sacred syllable in the heart of time,

in the eye of the light, in the mouth of the wind,

in the crowns of the fire, in the flowers weeping

on the dark waters within as if you’d been their only friend

to understand their solitude as a gift from their wayward ends?

PATRICK WHITE

I TOUCHED THINGS DEEPLY TO REMIND MYSELF THEY WERE NOT MINE

I TOUCHED THINGS DEEPLY TO REMIND MYSELF THEY WERE NOT MINE

I touched things deeply to remind myself they were not mine

but the fingerprints and echoes of time the way

the mind seizes whatever it befriends,

a handful of nothing that clings to the wind,

the ghost of the moon when its bones are dust

and the juniper weeps at the eastern door

of a stranger’s burial hut deep in its heart

and love, love must come and depart

like a curse and a blessing from the miraculous occult

and wonder is the atmosphere we wander in

wounded by the blessings of a hurt metaphor

that waves its crutch to the silence and says farewell

to the candle in the lantern with the wick of midnight

still in its spell. You don’t have to doubt it anymore, you can tell

as the words fall sweetly from the urn and the bell.

PATRICK WHITE

WATCHING MY MIND WALK ITS OWN WATERS

WATCHING MY MIND WALK ITS OWN WATERS

Day 13:

Two hours sleep out of the last twenty-four. Exhausted. Blurred.

Even the smudges have medicinal value. The lightning definitely

hit the transformer yesterday. Here are the fireworks. Ignore, read,

scratch your head, speculate on the comparative creative psychodynamics of

Sisyphus and Chernobyl, whatever you want to do. Ok with me.

Read them serially like a totem pole. Or pick them up individually

like an occasional interesting leaf you findd at your feet. These

poems feel supercharged with a significance that seems to be

resonating throughout out everything I say, do, love, write, think and feel.

Pages turning, but the book’s a tree. Given the number of poems

from yesterday I’m about to post, and how taxing and time consuming the act

of posting them seriatim en masse is, I think from now on, I will post them

as they’re tentatively finished. Easier on you, that way. And easier

on me. Matter of husbanding chores and energies. Also think it’s more

open that way for both writer and reader. Puts more unbounded sky

into each flightpath and gives them room to shed, flap, fly. Or decide

they’re not a bird, they’re a tent. Doesn’t monumentalize the air with an avalanche

or meteor shower of gravestones at a bingo of extinction events, keeping,

in mind, we owe one them, at least, partially, our own mammalian proliferation.

Solar flaring, then, not publishing. I’d love to hang on to a fat head. Carry it

around with me under my arm. Consult it at parties like a Ouji board. But, I

don’t have the space for it. And if it starts to develop an ego where am I going

to put it? Lot of space out here, but I’m not sure about the living room yet.

Little tight I’d say at this point for an ego. Letting the light go. Though

no less care I assure you goes into writing one of these than has gone

into anything I’ve ever written. Possibly more because I am surgically

curious to know how deeply the meds have dug down into Mt. Helicon to establish their own wellspring, inclusive, but separate from the others I’m used to drawing upon. See if

the pharmaceuticals are fracking my good housewells. Good. This part done.

Never thought I’d ever be so happy to see prose on daylight savings time again. Lol

Nurse called. Pulmonary esophogeal biopsy in Kingston on Friday. Feel like

Dorothy skipping down the yellow brick road to defrock the Wizard of Oz

in a strange kind of way. Possibly a black lightning bolt from the brain pan

of the Sahara. But I’m staying as open and alert to whatever comes next.

Till then plan to use the unperturbed time in between as wisely and vividly

as I can. Write poems in the eye of the hurricane happy as a bird enthroned

as a peasant king on one of his own thermals. Ride the bannisters. Love, Patrick.

Watching my mind walk its own waters

like a long-legged spider off the wharf of the moon at Long Bay.

A syringe just before it breaks the skin.

The moon’s a junkie. So am I. But it’s called medicine.

Ghostly, lonely, blue aura rise like the spiritual life of milk.

Glow softly. Shine. Teach all these tears they’re light.

Veils. Melancholic solar flares bruised by the night they entered.

Marigolds among the waterlilies. Stars in the dark when they’re wet.

How easy the water pulses through its own veins like love

and a dark circus on stilts. Horror with a thorax

and a tumour to compare to. Perish the thought,

Yorik’s got better things to do than be afraid of you.

Gonna fly. Gonna fly over the whole earth

and prove there are extraterrestrials though that’s a sad joke.

Ambivalence wrecks everything like crumpled tinfoil.

Should have been a star. But I never wanted to shine like that.

Not sharp. Blunted by the heart. I took an edge off.

Looks better on me I think than all that warpaint.

How to teach scalpels to build their own aquarium.

Flowers how to make the bed. And live through the leaves.

Startling I said that like a star in the east above the treeline.

Such a small space to couch enormity in

as if it had seasons. My mother knows about this. She’s wise

as a bell that’s been crying. Me? I’m a waterbird

when I want to be. My solitude’s almost a woman.

So that’s me. I was curious. And little fella I think we’re fucked.

No more riverboats. Maybe one, but it sunk. Glad

I got that out of the way of that old, Medusan tree stump.

And got away with a rhyme that makes me look cleverer

than I am, but I think I’m going to take the bow anyway.

I’m feeling sorry for myself. You, too, if you want to know the truth.

Milky moonlight. It’s Celtic as snow in summer, beautiful

but cold as a flower that treasures its loneliness.

I’d rather sleep with a rose than a waterlily.

But I suppose that’s all over now, baby blue.

Let the feelings come through as they will

like freshwater dreams from the woods. Hey, that’s pretty good.

What am I looking at? Data. Raw data. Brutal mercy

with a quiet told you so. As if it was my fault

and I don’t care if it is. I got to see this, didn’t I?

Picture it as a kind of beautiful blue moon in late October

that sings in a choir of razorblades that haven’t

been threshed yet. Ever see a cornfield of trashed ribbons?

That’s what I’m afraid of. The snapping turtle

that unfeathered the moon. Feels a little bit like rape to me.

Am I in prison? Or is this Promethean? What do you say?

Want to look at the moon with me? Hear me expiate

on everything under the sun at midnight as if it had gone somewhere?

I sing like time got stuck in my voice like a grackle or a black box

in a morning chimney pipe. And so it goes, and so it goes, and so it goes

like a waterclock. Is there meaning in that enough

to drink from your skull cup down to the lees of your heart.

That old fortune teller with an eyepatch and a scarf

for a bloodstream. Can you see the sphinx underneath

her mascara? She’s wearing midnight with partial eclipses.

And it’s a delusion. I’m sure about that. But I think

she just winked at me like a starmap. Old bat. Imagine that.

I’m showing off. And it’s sad as the tears deep down

in the nature of things. The lachrymae dolorosae that beads

the leaves like lampshades and party clowns.

Hand me that waterfall. I think I want to drown.

Be serious. There are people around. Listening

to the shedding of the leaves that whisper something about autumn

in their ears. Eyes like the embers of an old fire

going through its jewels in the dark. Who loved you?

Did he treat you right? Or do you still carry a bruise on your heart

like a poison apple you want to give somebody as a surprise?

And miss all this for that. I’m the plague rat. You

be somebody else. And we’ll look at the moon together

on the edge of the world. We’ll resonate with our assessment

of what it is to stand here and just look. Just look.

PATRICK WHITE

IN THE GREEN ROOM WITH THE HAY OUT OF A MAGICAL SCARECROW

IN THE GREEN ROOM WITH THE HAY OUT OF A MAGICAL SCARECROW

In the green room with the hay out of a magical scarecrow,

I’m putting tarpaper on my pyramid like a suspicious eclipse.

Tar and honey on a biscuit that breaks like a stale cartouche.

Swoosh. That’s the wing of a sabre in the saddle. The moon’s

in Pegasus. I didn’t think that was possible. Has my head

come off like a narcissus bud at the end of a golf club?

Am I liberated enough? Or is this still the foodstall?

Gotta stop asking that as if I didn’t know any better.

It doesn’t matter. And I’m happy about that. Peasant King

when I’m not Buddha Pinocchio. Wouldn’t want to hurt

his feelings. He’s a friend of mine. I don’t take him for granted.

But you relate to him as the mood suits you. Ah, Cohen,

you lovely man, he’s flexible as a Zen ventriloquist.

An embarrassment of riches. A motherlode. Mountain gold

gleaming in the fissures of the night like a mended teacup.

Mystic scar tissue. The shining goes dark before it blinds you

into a supercharged photonic significance of covert insight

into the nature of life resonating with everything

like an old guitar humming to itself in a corner of dust

though that has a way of making me feel like the sex life of the Hubble Telescope

in a degenerating orbit. Quick. A candle. A moth. Luna.

What are you willing to die for as a way of life?

PATRICK WHITE