I See You've Made A Gate

I see you've made a gate
of the skeleton of the wing of the bird
you should have set free.
And it's closed like a book you haven't read.
The wall of a garden you haven't
found your way into.
No one can show you
how to offer your heart
to the black rose of your blood
in total eclipse. I could point out
a few stars, and tell you their names
but that was hierarchies ago
and now they're waiting for the metaphors
to come from your own mouth.

To say them so deeply
you can't help breaking into light.

poem by Patrick White
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The Widening Compass Of Pain

ations.

At war with the world and yourself
like two halves of the same unbroken wishbone,
teach the children how to approach their crossroads
in peace, and speak of the sword of the slayer
like a sacred syllable in the mouth of the slain
that cut through your umbilical cord
like a link in a golden chain that held you back
from the liberation of a lyrically unbounded life.

Mollify the poison of the thorn with the cure
in the medicine bag of the other fang.
When the wedding gown of the Japanese plum tree
is ruined in the rain and the dust like blossoms
blowing down the road like the happiness you hoped for,
be the nude in the doorway of a darker bliss
that roots its revelation like lightning in the soil
of your flesh, like deltas of insight greeting
an ocean of awareness at the end of a long pilgrimage,

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poem by Patrick White
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Midnight Canto

Young, you weep the falling moon,
Luminous willow, beside the black river
Where I drown in your pale ghost,
Each small wave, the eyelid
Of a scattered rose, silvered by the light.

You are everything that time could steal
From me, brought back, an afterlife
I had not thought possible, a birth
Beyond the debt I owe to anyone,
These hauntings, these crucial exorcisms.

In me, wheat, honey, white gold,
Your sad summer made mystery
By night, in me, when perfect solitude
Paints your face upon its raven waters
And the watching stars discuss conspiracies

Of love that terrify the sleepless hour.
Servant of the dream that spins the world

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poem by Patrick White
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Gentle The Stars And The Town Asleep

Gentle the stars and the town asleep.
No stranger at the gate. No door ajar.
The windows deep in their own affairs.
Flowers thicken the hot night air
with pheromones of sex and death
that follow you all the way down the street
like homeless kittens and lonely junkies.

Walking my solitude off alone,
the cold stone of the moon overhead,
the first night bird I've heard tonight
singing high in the leaves of an elm
strung like a guitar with power lines
and in my heart, a child of longing,
the half-finished spectre of a poem to you.

The streetlamps bud like day lilies
but nothing blooms in the tungsten light
though insects gather in impotent frenzies,
my poem to you makes love through its eyes

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poem by Patrick White
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I Grieve Elusively Solo In The Company Of Rocks

I grieve elusively solo in the company of rocks
whose skulls have been glacially removed
as a chipper breeze intrigues the trees
with the rumours of distinguished extinctions to come.
O my prophetic heads, my exilic deaths,
is the moon an ally or not as she adds
her waterlily to the swamp like a nautical poem
that agitates the ricocheting shadows of the bats.

Witch broth looking for human body parts.
The night broods over the death of a wren
like someone just getting into the arts
hangs on the hook of the muse with bookish allure,
but nothing bites. The fish are wide-eyed and wary.
The wonder of stars applies a poultice to my heart.
We reciprocally heal for a moment. Dark woods
and the wolves are howling over the corpse of the hills.

Snapping turtles sleep in my starmud like the helmets
of World War One, and I dream of wild swans

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poem by Patrick White
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There Are Neon Vacancies

There are neon vacancies in our squalid eyes
and letters missing from our garish names
that eloped like snakes in the night
with a bridal catalog of juvenile trains.
For once in our left-handed lives
let's concentrate on the salted cities
of the nightshift snails in the wounded factories
that scald the bolts on the cannibal cornucopias.
Let's chalk our bodies to a sidewalk somewhere
and pretend we're Renaissance artists
trying to put our pillars in perspective.
Let's stop flogging the moonlight with razorwire
for rhetorical misdemeanors of mud
and see what the drowned man wouldn't let go of
when they fished him out of the mirror:

O my love, you are nightwater and torn mushrooms,
and there are chandeliers of ruined cherries
that stain the light that sleeps in the seed
on the shores of your abandoned kisses, and your intrepid flesh

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poem by Patrick White
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Are You Sad

for Alysia

Are you sad, mauled like a morning web
by the shadows of things that were said
to make the candle sorry
it couldn’t shine on alone,
the ray of its affection
lavish with the light of a life
that isn’t a star in a vault of bone?

Strangers in the doorway,
love-letters without a home
that knock like footprints in a blizzard
to marrow the telephone
that no one ever answered
with a voice as raw as gold,

are you sad, are you cold,
is there a dolphin and a wound
between the spaces of the secrets

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poem by Patrick White
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Matter is Music. The Atoms Sing.

Matter is music. The atoms sing. A frog
leaps into the water and strings a guitar.
Tree rings like odes in the heartwood of the apple.
The rain breaks like tears into tiny harps.
A gust of stars, a lyric of dust wheeling
into galaxies like symphonies in hydrogen alpha.
And the light, too, playing the flowers
like the stops of a flute, and the leaves
like semi-quavers, and their fruit, like whole notes.

Adagios of colour, bass runs of taste,
and sound the echo of a shape shifting mirror
that touches the light like a lake
touches the moon inseparably playing
on the plectra of its waves like an encore
among lovers mastering each other's bodies
like first violins. Or red-winged blackbirds,
the woodwinds, or the wavelengths of disparate stars
resonating with the eye into lyres, and eagles, and swans.

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poem by Patrick White
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And This Night

And this night that is ending,
bruising into the blue of an impossible rose,
and the windows opening their eyes to the light
that pales the stars from the sky like dreams;
and a man trying to keep the starving candle in his skull
from going out, the emptiness of the dark from demanding
oblivion from the day, the mouth of the morning
no beginning, but the start of a busy grave;
how can he tell his heart what his eyes already see
in the mirrors that mourn like hired grief,
some distant galaxy expanding into space,
some island of light in the forsaken depths of time,
that he's already the ghost of a future memory,
that a silo of ashes isn't enough to feed the flame
of the fire he's cherished in the boat of his hands
like a wounded bird he taught to sing for years,
and how to fly higher than the world is kind
like a hawk with broken wings, or an injured mind?

I see eyes in the dark soaked up like rain,

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poem by Patrick White
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Garbage Bags On The Street At Dawn

Garbage bags on the street at dawn
as great fronds of light unfold.
Venus washed out of the Hyades in Taurus
near Aldebaran, but Jupiter the first to go,
first casualties of the new day,
somnambulists outwalking their dreams.
The honking of Canada geese overhead
like ninety-twenties cars. Rites of passage,
thoroughfares of destinal traffic.
Me here, the sleepless witness
to the untimely birth of the morning,
ashes in the urn of the new day
I scatter like pigeons and doves
from the roofs of the unearthly buildings,
a wraith late for the grave, and the rest,
the unlabelled waste of a good beginning.

Bad spiritual protocol for a ghost
to haunt the cradle, to outlive the candles
of the night before, writing suicide notes

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poem by Patrick White
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