Even When Life Sometimes Seems Like A Black Hole

for Rebekah Genevieve-Dolorese Garland

Even when life sometimes seems like a black hole,
a dark furnace full of the ashes of burnt roses,
it shapes the galaxies into sunflowers and starfish
and it's whirling with stars like a Sufi in rapture.
All my life I've tried so hard not to be afraid of my joy
and at home with my grief like a comfortable chair
that was beginning to take on the same airs as my body.
A holy war of one, carrying the true cross of the sixties
I thought was worth fighting for even long after
I realized I was doomed to dancing to the music
for the rest of the duration. And it's been as true
as Jim Morrison living the afterlife of Arthur Rimbaud
in deserts so desolate even the stars were shy of the darkness.

And I have wept bitterly as the moon went down
like a toxic goat skull into the only wishing well
for light years around, and it seemed, and it's
still dangerous to remember because time doesn't blunt all knives,

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poem by Patrick White
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Promethean Contentions

My life the wardrobe of a shabby star; here,
take this carnelian pomegranate
that has hardened into a heart
and appease what blood you can, take my tongue
that turned yellow with arsenic in the fall
and was torn down like the flag of an ancient catastrophe
by the denuding expletives of the wind.
I'm tired of the ashes and the cemetery wine
that pollutes them; I'm weary of the view,
this worm-eaten map to nowhere
and the lies it must live to fulfill.
I've exhausted the patience
of the bookish rain,
waiting for my shoes to stop talking
about journeys they'll never take,
so that I can tell them I was a man
with a tarnished direction
that led me off the known roads
to taste the wild blackberries
that ripened in brambles of razorwire.

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poem by Patrick White
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Answering The Wolf

Answering the wolf.
Its agony, my own.
Its long howl of irreproachable pain
enough to silence the mountains
with trepidation before something holy.
Desecration. A photo. Two dozen wolf corpses
pouring over the tail-gate of a pick-up.
The bounty of two happy hunters
kneeling beside their rifles
as if something had been accomplished
it would be worth telling their children about.
Hard truth. Here is a human. My species.
It can do this to anything that lives.
From blue algae to Auschwitz,
Uganda, Syria, Wounded Knee.
Whales, buffalo, Sabra and Shatila, the Amazon,
twenty-five million famished children a year,
an avalanche of wolves at the back of a pick-up.
Beyond wanting to know why
there's this black spot

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poem by Patrick White
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What Chains We Rattle

WHAT CHAINS WE RATTLE

What chains we rattle in our own emptiness.
The void gnashes its teeth to dust. Is there love
Anywhere that I'm worthy of?
I want to scream in this straitjacket of anti-matter
but you are not here; your person is absent;
so I scream into this paper ear;
I abandon my own blood, turn red white
in my fear of losing you, witnessing your anger,
the small glaciers that inch through my heart
like ice-ages. Maybe I'm crazy, maybe I'm old,
maybe I'm burnt out, maybe all these words
I throw at you mean absolutely nothing to you
or to anyone else, or even me, but there you have it.

I'm sloughing my old skin like a star-riddled universe
and I don't know what I'm turning into.
When I want to know who I am I look at your face.
Lately I've felt like some kind of eclipse, some darkness

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poem by Patrick White
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Every Word Turns Away

Every word turns away
shame-faced and a liar
when you try to say things so true
they could only be contaminated
by a mouth.
And the tree in your voice
may be its own guitar
and every flower of your breath
be rooted in stars like the wind,
and you can spend a whole lifetime
trying to say everything
as if words could exact living destinies
from the names on the scrolls of the dead
to save everyone, to save
everything that exists
from nothing,
but when you're done,
when the tree falls silent
and the bird has flown away,
everything, just as it is,

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poem by Patrick White
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Apparitions Of The Muse

Apparitions of the muse
hanging her stars
from the end of my nose
like an exotic fragrance of night
more revealing than the light.
There. That's mine.
The constellation of the donkey,
and there beside it, do you see
that red-haired star
blazing like a woman with a carrot and a stick?
I've followed that star for fifty years
always a mountain away from the valley
like a passionate Sisyphus
rolling the earth up a hill like a stone
happy with my own absurdity,
happy to go mad for her sake alone.
Elixirs of moonlight
mingled with strange waters
and I drank until I drowned
in the ferocity of my own delirium

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poem by Patrick White
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I Feel The Thorns Of The Rose Making Inkwells Of My Eyes

I feel the thorns of the rose making inkwells of my eyes.
It's me that hurts. But without meaning to,
I'm bleeding for everyone. A watershed of blood and tears.
A reservoir of pain. Not all my own, I drink
before anyone like a hummingbird, or a canary in the mine,
to make sure it isn't toxic. No goat skull in a well
of rotten water. No blood on the horns of the moon.

What a disgrace it is to be a human sometimes.
What a sorrow when your heart wobbles like a drunk bell
and there are perturbations and precessions in your orbit
it's hard to explain except as the flawed configuration of a dream
with your waking life, though they're both just two waves
of the same sea of awareness, feathers and scales.

Oxymoronic maple keys vertiginous as Sufis
at the crossroads of everywhere and here. My heart
is a bone-box full of elegies for Arctic swans
shrinking like ice-bergs from global warming.
And I'm not as mindless in love as I should be,

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poem by Patrick White
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Five Dolphin Swimming Off The Bow Of My Forehead

Five dolphins swimming off the bow of my forehead,
glancing encounters with the moon that lacquers their skin.
I'm in a lifeboat under the full sail of a blank page
just to keep up with them, though I know I'm moving
into deeper night seas of awareness, too far out
to make it back to shore in time to make the curfews
of the lighthouses trying to keep the shore-huggers apart
from the salvagers who run down to the shores in a storm
taking over from the mermaids like a nightshift of scavengers,
who want to run you up on the rocks just as surely
by holding their lanterns out like the tinfoil constellations
of false hopes on the event horizons of precipitous cliff walls.

I revel in the glee, the ecstasy, the rapture
that doesn't mean anyone's coming to save me
of running free with my imagination for the pure joy
of living with it as the only known antidote
to the decrescent moon that had its fangs pulled.
I give my flightfeathers up to the wind off the sea at night
like a seagull to a sky burial that sheds them like apple bloom.

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poem by Patrick White
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Some People Like To Take A Water Droplet

Some people like to take a water droplet
and turn it into a haiku.
Some people like to write
like the loose thread
of a quick-witted alpine stream
trying to unravel the mountain all the way down
with dazzle and flash.
But when I shoot my mouth off
about what I don't know about nightingales
it always comes out ice-hot stars
above a rush of northern rivers,
the Mackenzie, the Fraser, the Thompson
and when I want to risk
my cowboy B.C. French in public,
the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Some people like to weave their mindstreams
into lakes with their third eyes open
to the flight of the white clouds
and the sky that doesn't inhibit them,
but me I like to flow and fall and crush

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poem by Patrick White
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Wait. Wait. Wait For It To Come

Wait. Wait. Wait for it to come,
the mad folly of my creative destruction.
Bleak the flowers in this ruinous garden
and my psyche speaking in tongues
like gates someone left open banging in the wind.
Bring on the storm. Uproot the lightning.
I will not run. I'll stand here steadfast
as an amputated stump in this open field
with a ghostly feeling I can grow my arms back
like a faith healer sitting like Stonehenge
in solstitial silence at the last broken window
snarling at the fixed stars that keep drifting
in and out of the asylum like a seance of fireflies
that's turned into an angry mob
looking for stars to martyr for not taking
their fanatical starmaps as literally as they do.
I'm an heretical astrologer tied to the axis mundi
of my own imagination. I read my doom,
cowled in candlelight like the skull of the full moon
scrying the entrails of a wounded bull

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poem by Patrick White
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