Sometimes The Heart Buries Its Sorrow

Sometimes the heart buries its sorrow
like a bell or an hourglass beside the road
as if it came upon a dead bird it couldn't name
and returned it to the earth like unread mail.
There's no gate where I'm going, the air
will tremble a bit and that'll be it. Maybe
a firefly or two, to liven things up,
but no sign of lightning tearing its hair out.

I shall evaporate like a dream someone
couldn't remember having, and what seems
so crucially significant now shall disappear,
disperse, dissipate like smoke from of a fire
and all that will remain of this passionate burning
will be an odd fragrance among the stars
that doesn't arrest the attention of the bees.

And these things of my mother that she gave to me,
Blood, flesh, bone, breath and my love of poetry
and compassion for the world you need to write it,

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poem by Patrick White
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You, My House Of Burning Thresholds

You, my house of burning thresholds, come
to me written on the breath of urgent windows,
and the palms of the walls that want their fortunes read, come
with palettes and kittens and your blue notebook of poems
that grows through ages of skin and mushroom kisses
on the forest floors of your flesh, the bracken spume
of the fountain that pebbles its tears in the light,
and the thoughtful rocks with moss-covered shoulders.

Come like a spoon that sips from the heart
and your blood a riot of sea roses, pink and green,
and the black ashes of the eyes of your secrets
and the locks on the loveletters you wrote on the wind
and I will bury my boat in the waves of your mind,
and be your ghost forever, and live as if I were blind.

There are poppies in your paintbrushes, cherries, wine,
earlobes of blue, and the tongues of mute tattoos
that have pierced your body with sad revelations
of the lives that you leave behind, all the simple journeys

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poem by Patrick White
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Averaging Out the Crucials

Averaging out the crucials, rolling against the odds,
I've worn my bones down like dragon's teeth
grinding starwheat into luminous loaves of bread
that break just like the heart you share with a stranger.
Or a fortune-cookie of fate. Gray seagull of a day,
a deserted beach on Vancouver Island in the morning,
as I recall it from five thousand miles away,
the windows still numb and hungover
from last night's sunset dispensing with protocol
and letting it all hang out oceanically.
Dying flowers mishandled by the wind like old manuscripts
too wet and esoteric to start a fire with.
Sodden mystics expiring like blueweed in the broken grass.
Fifty years I've run before circumstances like a blue fox
being hunted down by crows in the deep snow
but they haven't dipped their nibs
in the inkwells of my eyes yet and I'm
an excellent broken field street runner with the wiles
of someone who's good at who they don't want to be.

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poem by Patrick White
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I Don't Think The Wind Sings For Me Alone

I don't think the wind sings for me alone
even in this isolated space where it
silvers the leaves of the Russian olives
like musical scales. Or every thought and emotion,
every image, symbol, or insight
shares the same myth of origin that I do.
Nor all the words that I call my native language
weren't rooted first in someone else's garden.
As the air I breathe was, as the light that has entered
through many more eyes than mine. What I hear
doesn't belong to me, nor what I see,
my private vision. But when I don't grasp
at clouds and water, everything is my reflection
looking back at me as if there were no one there.

I disappear. And I feel my presence everywhere
as real as the sceptres of Queen Anne's Lace
growing old in the moonlight, or the blue fury
of the wild irises burning in their own fires
like the Pleiades. Who can understand

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poem by Patrick White
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Humbled On Earth, Exalted By A Star

Humbled on earth, exalted by a star,
I say nothing and wait for the echo.
It's bad with me tonight, more than I can bear.
I'm in isolation, but I don't know where.
And there's a half moon apricot blossom
over the roof of a bookstore that swears
that it's a scar. Maybe so. But there you go.
Why blame your eyes for what they see?

Venus earlier tonight, that was the key
to a thousand doors of insight
without a threshold among them
to say how far the light had travelled
just to get to me. O, yes, no doubt, beauty,
and time-shares in eternity you can't forget
all that easily. Something sharp and cold
and romantically aloof, diffuse, smeared
like a name on a window someone signed
in their own breath, as the night cooled down
like a glorious life into a homely death.

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poem by Patrick White
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When I Get To The Root Of What I Really Want

When I get to the root of what I really want
it all comes down to the nothing that I've got.
If a mirror were to publish me the way I really look,
I'd look like a rootless tree, scattering all its leaves
and dropping its fruit like tears that got too heavy to bear.
I look at a beautiful woman now as if she were art,
a Caravaggio in a gallery, as my eyes are
just as happy to see, as my hands once were to touch.
Noli me tangere. Because I don't love anyone,
not even myself. Love is a double-edged sword
that can't dance solo, and my longing's been
a wandering troubadour for so long now, I can
mark the eras of my life by the number of windows
I've stood under singing to the waxing moon as it opens up.

I've always been a foolish dream weaver
trying to make a waterbed out of a snakepit for two
knowing how long it takes for the flying carpets to wear through.
I'm Pictish enough to live with a blue body
covered in lunar tattoos, or play the sacred clown

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poem by Patrick White
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The Reason Most People Are Unhappy

The reason most people are unhappy
is that they love their misery.
They cling to it
like a voodoo doll of themselves
they've been poking pins in since childhood.
They derive their identity from it.
They wouldn't know who they were without it.
They drive pins through its eyes in the mirror
to make things clear as rain
and then refusing to go along
with the flow of life
seek shelter in the pain
of never going anywhere.
They cast curses
on fate on God on life on love
on the impure selflessness of blue knowledge
but they're spitting into the wind
and their curses come back on them
like chapter and verse
of an infernal bible

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poem by Patrick White
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A Day Of Writing

A day of writing, trying to clarify myself
to Alysia, myself, Alysia, to the night rain,
trying to hang the universe on the tip of an eyelash
without blinking, pulling handfuls of the stagnant dimensions
of my apparent magnitude off
like the dead undergrowth
of a plausible star to try as an antidote
to the junkmail perfume samplers
that keep heaping themselves up on my doorstep
like the fake leaves of a tree somewhere on acid,
mini-nirvanas that reek in the dark of enlightened snake-oil.

Tonight I like the windows black, starless,
but keep the company mellow with my rendition
of musical lamps, one lightbulb less everytime
someone asks me what I feel most when I write.
I look at the trinity of faceless wolves on my easel
that accuse me of eyes, and punish myself by taking note
they’ve moved since I last looked at them,
and there’s a poppy of blood on the snow that’s atavistic.

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poem by Patrick White
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Permian Impacts

When I turn the night around in this lonely room
where a thousand books hang like a footnote on the silence
or buckets above the wells of life
from which they cannot drink, sounds we make in the dark
to convince our suffering and fear they do not exist,
or do exist, but in a way that makes us grow
from defeat to defeat like some quixotic advance of the planet
tilting at delusional windmills, I see how the light
has hardened angry minerals in the irises of my eyes
from so much staring into the intimate distances between myself
and the man I like to imagine is always there
being me as I was meant to be
before I drowned in this ocean of mirrors
and saw my life flash before me,
a doomed encyclopedia of pre-natal mistakes.
And who can know the emptiness they return to like a watershed
that daily issues them out of the void,
the eyelids and headlines of a dirty rose of blood?
I could accuse my own tears of infidelity,
I could stand up at a session of misguided stars

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poem by Patrick White
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Every Leaf, Every Page, Every Poem, A Patch

Every leaf, every page, every poem, a patch
that's been ironed on to a leak in the mindstream
I've been watching from the stone bridge on Gore Street
while the Perth Water Tower stands astride the Tay River
like a Martian colossus out of the War of the Worlds,
its reflection wavering like the dissipating wavelengths
of watersnakes as the moon ascends like a pearl
above the ragged willows pouring their hearts out
along the shore where a long overhanging veranda,
an iron stairwell and several backyards end at.

A commingling of poetry and prose, I've got
to walk several miles out of this sleeping town
before a Zen cowboy can take his spurs off in the wild
and wrestle his boots like sections of chimney pipe
in exchange for a pair of winged heels that can fly by night
like an autumn waterbird. Let my life flow on without me
like a spinal cord I've been hanging on to
like a rope I used to try to climb up to heaven on
like serpent fire entwined around the axis of my backbone,

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poem by Patrick White
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