My Eyes

My eyes have turned into clouds on the moon
too proud to cry
and my tongue is a leaf on the wind
and this may be my last voice, everything said
in a single word not god enough to begin me again,
but I’m grateful for the ride back into town,
and there’s only one river left
that hasn’t poured the peasant
out of my patrician poverty,
these refugee lines of evacuated stars
that just made it out with their lives
and a couple of planets they wouldn’t let go of.
And I’m down to the last firefly in my grave,
a sea-witch a desert away from the coast
who’s keeping an eye on my pulse
and my amateur heart is doing cosmetic surgery
with volunteer razorblades on my mind
to undo the Red Cross facelift
they flew in to give my emergency passport
the last time I asked the mirror

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poem by Patrick White
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You Read My Poetry

You read my poetry
and you need a locus,
something to hang on to,
a familiar milieu, a focus,
right ascension and declination,
a starmap and astrolabe,
and the usual pictures painted
on the lens of the usual telescope.
If I had wanted you to follow me
I would have dropped breadcrumbs,
I would have spray-bombed the trees
an adolescent cadmium red
to show you where the road goes.
I may have been pulled like a weed
from the garden of Eden
and tossed to the wilder side of things,
a meteor among boundary stones,
but that doesn't mean my darkness is tar,
or all these stars are a kind of quicksand
you're sinking through like a sculptor

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poem by Patrick White
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Come Some Moments In The Squalls Of Time

Come some moments in the squalls of time,
however flammable the orchids are
behind the burning woodshed,
your life turns into an inert gas
and you're not holding hands with anything.

Singly the waves go to their graves
like trombones in a rock band
as harmonicas rave at the moon
like lonely dogs that have lost a faithful owner.

What can you say, what can you say
to fill such a vast silence
with gravitational eyes that can bend
time and light back around your way
instead of sending the usual flowers?

Sometimes in the brutal shallows of life
you find yourself out hunting dragons
with a butterfly net that's gentle on their wings

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poem by Patrick White
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Cosmologist With Tweezers

Palace after palace of blood I feed my idiot heart
to the fish and the cannibal stars
from a barge of funeral swans sullen as books.
I told myself not to look for this death when I dropped it
the day I was born, to leave it lie in the violent grass,
a key to a door that doesn’t exist yet,
an insect crushed between the pages of the sky
that reads like the failing eyes of an ancient astronomer
compiling an expanded preface
to an encyclopedic suicide note. O I can say anything
when the mirror is having an affair
with the moon’s oceanic face.
I can put lipstick on the corpse of a rose
and die for the whole cemetery like a callous messiah
sick of being resurrected at the take-out window.
My love forsaken, a beggar reaching into a serpent’s nest
for an egg that longs to be turned
like the handle to a door
that might be a way out, I consult
the crazy wisdom of the crows,

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poem by Patrick White
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I Don't Want To Embroider This Straitjacket Of Killer Bees

I don't want to embroider this straitjacket of killer bees
with threads of blood, honey and toxin. I can't stand
the agony, but I don't want to lie nostalgically
about what's happening to me as it is everyone
to dull the pain with the delusional sugars
of an artificial paradise where all the stars are tinfoil.
Sooner succumb with integrity, than subsist
in the shadow of a lie that buffs the experience
as if churning coke in a hive of angry wildflowers.

Half mad with pain I've become so accustomed to,
enculturated by out of the corner of my third eye
as if this were a state of affairs normal as oxygen
for everything that lives, and everything, even the rocks
I've been pushing up this hill since I was born
like Sisyphus to build a pyramid out of an avalanche
of meteoric cornerstones that keep getting away from me
like the quicksand and mercury that have tainted my sacred pools,
I don't want to lose my marbles in this game of Russian roulette.
I don't want to give up like gravity on any habitable planet

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poem by Patrick White
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Anything Goes At Three In The Morning

Anything goes at three in the morning.
I'm dogpaddling in the salvage of the day
after the sun went down like a shipwreck
with all hands on board. A train whistle
mourns its lonely mile and I've known
since I was twenty six, the night is not a reward.
And the heart not a starfish you can easily drown
to keep from shining as if it had
a sense of direction all of its own
even if its just a momentary flashback
of a life you'd forgotten on your way down.

The darkness bruises my solitude.
I bleed like deadly nightshade
and talk to myself and the stars, the lamp posts,
the glassy-eyed windows with smut in their eyes
like the rose of life with a wounded mouth.
Trying to express the silence through the afterlife
of my voice, as if I were the ghost in the machine
of a transfixed medium you could get your bearings by

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poem by Patrick White
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Living Off The Grid

Living off the grid in the interstices between the threads
of the spider webs bejewelling the sky with stars
like the net of Indra in the morning dew. Mark one dropp
and they're all marked. Subtract from one
and you take from all. Same way with our eyes
when they see like crystal skulls right through
the ruse of themselves to the glassblowers
of fifteenth century Germany. Cool visuals.
The light refracting off the nuanced smear
above their left front parietal lobes as if
they had something as happy and irrational as water
to be clear about in a brittle kind of way.

And that's ok, that's ok, that's ok, too,
but you've got to get down and dirty in the starmud
like the root of an optic nerve deep in the dark matter of the brain,
if you want to be what you see in the visionary sense of the word.
If you want to fly with the dragons that bring the rain
you can't sip like a hummingbird collecting blood samples
from the hollyhocks. You can't live like a tuning fork

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poem by Patrick White
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The Night In The Wounded Mirror

The night in the wounded mirror
is only a childhood away from my face
and there's always a shattered window
between me and my starless shining,
and a dead bird upturned on the sill
as if the sky, too, had its quota of roadkill.

Looking back from all these
lightyears and constellations away,
on the black day I was born under an eclipse
like a flower clenched into a fist,
an eye without an iris darker than a shark's,
I suspect there was a lot more suffering back then
than I was able to live my way through,
estranged in the corner of a kitchen
that was a feeding frenzy of knives.

I still can't leave one out on the counter
without fearing it's just another punctuation mark,
the claw of a comma in a long sentence of blood.

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poem by Patrick White
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Spiders In Bubbles Plumbing The Depths

Spiders in bubbles plumbing the depths
of a new medium. Looking up from the bottom
the stars aren't stars, they're water-striders.
And me? I'm walking on the surface of my mind
like a very light-footed telescope. An antelope
who's just woken up from a dream
of a touring ballet company run by lions.
I'm sitting on a skull of rock close to the river
like some bare-footed prophecy
eating locusts and honey in the wilderness
that doesn't know whether to make heads or tails of me.

Anxieties of surviving the way I am mingle
with lyrics of longing to change
like the metamorphic passage of the river
flowing by me like the not so Milky Way
of my mindstream trying to clarify itself
in the course of its own running. But it's
as hard to part the waters with the wind
as it is with a sword, and I'm not looking

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poem by Patrick White
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The Earth A Message

The earth a message in a blue bottle
someone threw into a desert of stars
for help,
I'm stranded on the island
of a single thought
in the galactic archipelagos
of a deconstructed myth of origin.

There is no myth.
There is no origin.
I am free to write what I want
in invisible ink
on virgin mirrors
in an indecipherable alphabet of stars
because every mouth
was first a bird of the void,
the echo of a scar
that wrote with a knife
how testing it was
to cut the throats of the yearling bells

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poem by Patrick White
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