On Into The Next Dimension

On into the next dimension
like a measure of thought
sitting full lotus
on a flying carpet of feeling
that's on the same wavelength as the stars.
I've been an intimate of windows long enough.
I trust them.
But they don't shine.
They're confined to the news
of what's going on beyond them
that's brought to them live
by skies they flip through
like old Time magazines in a doctor's office.
Their eyes are long on views
but shy on visions.
Cataracts in the eye.
Flowers in the sky.
If you look through them long enough
you'll kill all the wildflowers
in your field of vision

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poem by Patrick White
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If Almost Any Leaf Will Do

If almost any leaf will do to prove
the autumn is a flying carpet, then why should you doubt
my heart is a chainsaw buried on the moon with honours
after the last tree was felled, or the sun is the ultimate dumpster
for raving comets in decaying orbits
that want to thaw and cry and unspool the radical rivers
locked in straitjackets and handcuffs of ice, at least once
before they’re extinquished on the windowsills
of voyeuristic telescopes, wear
gardenias in the cold fire of the long hair they rinse in the light
after dyeing their carbon tresses blue? You ask
what ails me, why I won’t publish the silence
I keep revising like the first draft of a broken windowpane,
why I keep trying to root the lightning
in the cloud bed of a quick northern garden
like orchids in a storm, and I have nothing to say but skulls
that fall like apricots and exemplary moons
whose eyes were excavated by the crows
as a warning to anyone who wants to approach your throne like rain.
And it’s not the falling, it’s not the ashes and the mangled weathervanes,

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poem by Patrick White
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When You Listen To A Bird

When you listen to a bird
you should hear the whole of the sky
just as when you look at a star
you should be a fountain of eyes.

Because you cannot see,
the darkness is not blind
and your consensus of conventional abnormalities
is not reality, is not the source
of the hidden halo of comets that afflict you,
nor the crazy constellations of the fireflies that bless.

I don't know if I speak for anyone other than myself
but that's enough to reflect the moon in every drop
of this unvoiced delirium
that surpasses enlightenment and lunacy like old shoes
to walk barefoot across the stars
as if they were no more than cool sand in a desert at night
that's never been bound to a road,
though every single grain is the cornerstone of the world.

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poem by Patrick White
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The Tragic Bliss

The tragic bliss of having loved you
like a lost generation.
The farcical sorrow
of the one that was found
like the other shoe
of a crystal slipper that didn't fit.
What was lost?
What was recovered?
Nothing's lost until it asks where it's going.
I was in love with the knower.
But you loved the knowing.
Everything was as it was.
Only the perishable growing.
Only the stars to clarify
the misgivings of oblivion.
Only you telling me
like a leftover voice in my head
that's been gathering dust in the attic
it's one thing to do what you want to do
it's another to do what you must.

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poem by Patrick White
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Want to Be Brilliant, Want To Shine Like A Black Star

Want to be brilliant, want to shine like a black star.
Trying to bend space with my mind. Trying to stop time
with my heart. Counting moments like beads on a rosary
of skulls, or shepherd moons on an abacus of gravity.
Though I know they're not all strung out like that.
Asteroids on a wavelength of light, or a spinal cord.
Or maybe I'm just trying to bead a guitar string
with a great black hole, or is it a lunar pearl,
in the center of a lyrical abyss? Workaday world
in a small town, who spends their time like this?
Not fortunate enough to have been born a carpenter,
I'm a mystically surrealistic, poetic astrophyicist
trying to come up with a new grammar for the stars
so all they have to do to express their shining,
is say, Metaphor, and as it is in the abyss, so it is everywhere.

Because I miss you like the main clause of my relativity.
The focal point of all my wavelengths. You're the radiant
and I'm the Martian meteor shower that's dying
to bring the gift of life to the Antarctic like the Leonids

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poem by Patrick White
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Fly On The Window

Fly on the window, trying to get out
for hours, incessant erratic movement,
as if it were looking for a parking spot.
Strokes its legs as if it were sharpening carving knives.
Firesticks. Witching wands. Who knows?
Nothing ignites. Cul de sac. Dead end.
Aerial view of Captain Cook exploring Bella Coola,
a kamikaze at Midway looking down
into a totally translucent sea
that proves there's an outside on the bottom
all the way to the bank across the street.
Will undaunted, the ferocity of life,
and its commitment to it,
its savage insistence on
walking itself to death on a windowpane
as immaculate as the grimy glass
even in something the size
of a mythically inflated punctuation mark.

Musca. Fly. Liar. Spawn of Beelzebub.

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poem by Patrick White
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You Can Aim Your Shining But Better To Burn Like A Star

You can aim your shining but better to burn like a star.
A calm continuous explosion. Just like the Big Bang
before dark energy entered the scene
and things started to get interesting
as they accelerated. Space grows.
More light years between stars
until the last firefly goes out like a nightwatchman.

Everything's like that, people, love affairs, gardens
at the end of summer, suicides, girls
that have never worn purple before, wisdom
and the love of knowledge, honour in a life of crime,
flying carpets that never made it any further than the windows,
fruit trees, the eyes of luck fixed on a starmap of dice.

Everything's evaporating into a breathless abyss.
One day every cell in my body is going to feel
like the lone survivor of a homeless colony on the moon.
The trees, the birds, the stars, everything will have
transcended itself spontaneously including

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poem by Patrick White
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The Wind Wild

The wind wild with jubilation at its escape from the asylum where it's just killed all the windows, but not a flower moves, not a leaf is shed. Come this far, you should know what hour it is, what stars time sifts through its fingers like sand and gold. And though you've stepped away from your face in the mirror, you're still inconceivably reflected in everything, oilslick and orchid alike. And how strange it must seem to touch your own skin and everywhere caress the sky, all wonderful, all a dark radiance without obstruction, a secret night of silver feathering the moon with the cool fires of a forbidden wilderness. And yet this isn't free enough, this isn't yet pouring out the sea to breathe in the light, this isn't eating the dark with your water-mouth and spitting out worlds like seeds. Do you see everywhere around you, now, the worlds? Who but you could they have ever been? And, yes, you have selected a destiny, in assent to this one spontaneity, this one act, a letter in the mail, set all the axes of the planets spinning like a dealer at a roulette wheel. In one dropp of water, the Nile; in one death of potential, birth into a universe that didn't exist before you adopted this exile from yourself into a rage of becoming, whether ashes or gypsies on the moon bathing in their own shadows. Wherever you walk is the way; whatever you say, a school.

Leprous the white fire of the lotus, a pale fire, until it's touched by the wand of the dragonfly, until you drink from the black mirror, the night-well that has never shown anyone their face looking back. Drink deeper than you've ever drowned before, and take the stone embryo of the delusion in your womb to an abortion clinic run by ghosts. At this point all percipients go insane, trying to save the seer and the seen. And the demons that had made a shrine out of every muscle of your body, reflexively catechizing every thought and emotion until you were bound by a theology of yourself, interred in the garbage of your own sanctity, spontaneously understand the invincibility of the sword in your spine, and release hell into effortless obedience to the void, falling, out of joy, to the sky. World disappears, seer disappears and all that's left is a pervasive, unbounded, eyeless seeing, the moon flowing in a dry creekbed. This is the unending return to the source, the unborn cosmos that is the mother and afterlife of itself, all childhoods and every coffin, flowers and fish. Emptiness and form make one hourglass; overturned are they two? What arms to receive the worlds like sand if not this vacancy, this generosity of space being nothing at all? Now, tell me, what hour is it when a clown strikes a bell of water and the sun at midnight shines alone on you?

poem by Patrick White
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The American Flag Just Below My Studio Window

The American flag just below my studio window
one floor down, a real estate office carrying the colours
on the left and on the right, the Maple Leaf,
stubbornly clinging to its flagpole like the bough
of a tree that won't let go of it even in a storm,
are both snapping in the air like two mad dogs
at the end of their chains, as if they smelled bush wolfs
moving through the dark without any respect for property.

Poor dogs. Poor wolves on a night like this.
Store lights smeared on the black asphalt streets,
a Fauvist palette, or the trail of a snail of lipstick
on a mirror in full eclipse. Everything tonight,
a jaywalker, a refugee, an exile, or a pariah,
with a mind shattered like pottery into any one
of a hundred ostrakons. No country for him,
his identity ends at the limits of town
as the willows rave in the asylum of Stewart Park.
The windows are rattling and the doors are banging
their pots and pans to keep the ghosts at bay

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poem by Patrick White
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Don't Cover Your Eyes

Don't cover your eyes when the stars begin to fall; don't
orphan your fire in a well. Your heart is not a museum of roses,
your love not a misdirected airdropp over a refugee camp.
Friend of these sidereal affinities we spread like table-cloths across space,
friend of these lonely silos in my eyes and this blood that breaks like bread,
still, you are the flower in the vase, impassioned, an urgent poppy.
All the blind librarians of the morning star agree
you are not who you say you are
when you show the shadows of authority your passport rainbow.
Sometimes the tongue of a forsaken seer dances like a drunk at a funeral
down the liberated allies of a sleeping ghetto
while the moon watches like a cat on a windowsill
high overhead. Shy bird feathered by your sudden flaring, your heart,
young and quick, darts easily from branch to branch
barely a presence behind the green jubilation
of a million silver leaves trembling with rain on the reborn tree.
Before the bird sings, we hear it. Before the star shines,
the night is fully enlightened. And home is always a bridge
where we wait to be rescued from hurling ourselves off
into our own desperate reflections. Let the fall save you.

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poem by Patrick White
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