He Doesn't Really Know What It All Means
He doesn't really know what it all means,
but he gives it access to his heart, free-range of his mind.
Not expecting an answer to the mystery of life
because it isn't petty enough to have one,
he explores its horrors and wonders along the way
making small discoveries like rings and keys in the grass.
He doesn't look at things darkly through a glass anymore
since his binoculars turned into the third eye
of a mandalic kaleidoscope that has a way
of turning his chromatic aberrations into enlightenment.
And if he does it's usually a nightsky squandering stars
on those with the eyes to see them in the starmud
of their flesh and blood, in everyone of their insights,
an intimacy with billions of midnight suns all shining at once.
Mind includes the brain but the brain doesn't include the mind.
Just the way love includes the heart, but the heart
is a mere nugget of love, compared to what there is of love
it takes more than the measure of a universe to contain.
This is the cruising altitude of a submarine
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poem by Patrick White
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What A Shadow
What a shadow walks in the aftermath of realization;
I don't want to know what I know,
I don't want to sing what I sing
to the harp of the sagging powerlines
and the burnt guitars of naked trees.
I don't want a music that shatters like glass,
the broken coal of a menagerie of black strawberry hearts
reeking of sulfurous roses.
And there's a sword in the rain
with blood on it
dispersing like an explanation.
And it's hard to tell the true from the crazy
in this infinite solitude of awareness
that sways me like a bell or a willow
between one extreme and the other,
a kind of walking through arboreal mythogems,
Druidic tree alphabets, whistling in the dark.
Tender, eerie, and promising
the light that saturates the air after a storm,
the infernal glow of dark fire-gods
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poem by Patrick White
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Bright Morning
Bright morning, blue, and the clouds gossiping with the treetops and the fallen ladders of the impossible horizons. I sustain six lives simultaneously in a wounded apartment that's been bleeding for years, continents of plaster out of the walls, the cartography of aging, rewriting the maps as the world drifts like a cinder across the seas of its weeping eye. The trees sway in the wind like smoke, and I sit at my desk, waiting for my hair to dry, smoking, drinking black coffee, happy to be enthroned in my solitude as my dreams pale like stars in the extremity of the light. Lost. I couldn't tell you who I was if you showed me, and the mirrors have grown bags under their eyes like the heavy pollen of time in bee-satchels, silver wombs that are still trying to get my birth right. I've become an apostate of reflections, erasing my face with a sleeve; or watching it shrink like a warm breath on a cold windowpane. Maybe the hive of a mind somewhere is turning me into honey. And I remember lovers I've had, and lovers I will never meet, and all the changes of a comet as it approaches each one to glow luminously in the darkness of the bottomless watershed that is always within me, the familiar one-eyed abyss. And there's a wing of my heart that opens and passes over them like a generous eclipse to bless them all for the time I spent in their mansions of blood and tears, for the candles that ached like joy in the mystery and led me to the eras where they wanted me to stay for the night. They left a desert by the bed and I drank it like an hourglass, true to a calling that exceeded us both. Like the wind, I left a note, extolling their beauty to the webs of the morning, hanging on the bell-ropes of the flowing diamonds that wander the labyrinths of the wet peach hair and Appalachian earlobes I dampened with my tongue. A language of one, I drank from their intimate stars and played the skeletons of their burning harps in a controlled fury of power and hunger as the earth convulsed with islands of flesh, bolts of black lightning that illuminated oblivion in a flash of annihilant ecstasy. And habitable planets were born of the encounter, two children, old enough now in their passage of nights and days to know that it's life that flows, not the river, that their wings are bridges of light and blood and breath that once offered themselves like the crutches of winter trees to the sky in a paradox of love that wanted to lay down roots and fly. What a dream it all is; what a vast and amazing hallucination of darkness within darkness, shadow writing on shadow, a confusion of gates trying to enter one another with both eyes closed, fire obsessively trying to coax the hydrant of the heart to open up before the house burns to the sky and the ground, uncertain whether it's a root or a flower, a bone or a star, a desert of light, or the whisper of a billion gestural galaxies.
poem by Patrick White
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Meet Me
BRIGHT MORNING
Bright morning, blue, and the clouds gossiping with the treetops and the fallen ladders of the impossible horizons. I sustain six lives simultaneously in a wounded apartment that's been bleeding for years, continents of plaster out of the walls, the cartography of aging, rewriting the maps as the world drifts like a cinder across the seas of its weeping eye. The trees sway in the wind like smoke, and I sit at my desk, waiting for my hair to dry, smoking, drinking black coffee, happy to be enthroned in my solitude as my dreams pale like stars in the extremity of the light. Lost. I couldn't tell you who I was if you showed me, and the mirrors have grown bags under their eyes like the heavy pollen of time in bee-satchels, silver wombs that are still trying to get my birth right. I've become an apostate of reflections, erasing my face with a sleeve; or watching it shrink like a warm breath on a cold windowpane. Maybe the hive of a mind somewhere is turning me into honey. And I remember lovers I've had, and lovers I will never meet, and all the changes of a comet as it approaches each one to glow luminously in the darkness of the bottomless watershed that is always within me, the familiar one-eyed abyss. And there's a wing of my heart that opens and passes over them like a generous eclipse to bless them all for the time I spent in their mansions of blood and tears, for the candles that ached like joy in the mystery and led me to the eras where they wanted me to stay for the night. They left a desert by the bed and I drank it like an hourglass, true to a calling that exceeded us both. Like the wind, I left a note, extolling their beauty to the webs of the morning, hanging on the bell-ropes of the flowing diamonds that wander the labyrinths of the wet peach hair and Appalachian earlobes I dampened with my tongue. A language of one, I drank from their intimate stars and played the skeletons of their burning harps in a controlled fury of power and hunger as the earth convulsed with islands of flesh, bolts of black lightning that illuminated oblivion in a flash of annihilant ecstasy. And habitable planets were born of the encounter, two children, old enough now in their passage of nights and days to know that it's life that flows, not the river, that their wings are bridges of light and blood and breath that once offered themselves like the crutches of winter trees to the sky in a paradox of love that wanted to lay down roots and fly. What a dream it all is; what a vast and amazing hallucination of darkness within darkness, shadow writing on shadow, a confusion of gates trying to enter one another with both eyes closed, fire obsessively trying to coax the hydrant of the heart to open up before the house burns to the sky and the ground, uncertain whether it's a root or a flower, a bone or a star, a desert of light, or the whisper of a billion gestural galaxies.
PATRICK WHITE
poem by Patrick White
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I'm Learning to Dance With Eclipses
I’m learning to dance with eclipses
and the outmoded ecologies of the sword-rattling windows
weeping rivers of acid rain that hang
like the ragged lace of abandoned curtains
or the tentacles of protozoic jellyfish. My life
is a rock too hard to sweet-talk the larks and swallows,
and the wolf that came once a week
to teach me to sing underwater grew old
and died like the piano he was buried in at sea.
I don’t know what I want from the walls
I’ve designated heritage battlefields
with an array of awards and degrees
and the pitted impacts of meteor-coloured earwigs,
but everything I ask for seems to make
terrorists of the lamps
and the single moth
knocking himself out trying to crash into flames
against the vanilla fez of the shade
is two fanatics shy of immolation. What does it matter
my eyes have congealed into a still-life
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poem by Patrick White
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O No Witness To Me
O no witness to me you can't go,
though I long for it, you don't follow,
my shadow stops leaving itself behind as a sign.
I have been ungrammatized by the madness of scientific magic,
a waterclock of life boats I kept bailing out of
until I threw the baby out with the bathwater, mushy as soap.
I tore down the shrines of chaos as an act of irreverent devotion
and the dead thanked me for stealing what they couldn't give away.
Divine solace without earthly consolation,
I wanted to be crucified diagonally as a random act
of symbolic defiance, but I was buried
under an avalanche of skulls on the moon
and all these voices in my head that swear they're prophetic
keep baffling me with alternative universes
that have no interest in cultivating me as a way of life.
But you my heart, dark star, dying insurgent of my solitude,
homeless door into the open, your eyes more beautiful
than reflecting telescopes on a cold mountain
far from the city, I am a casualty of space, what hands
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poem by Patrick White
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Clacking Home From High School In My Rugby Cleats
Clacking home from high school
in my rugby cleats, metallic castanets
clicking like crickets on the cement sidewalk,
battered, soiled, blessed. The anger
expurgated by violent body contact.
Knees, green, bleeding. Grass stains,
mud. My black and gold-striped jersey,
a wasp. I'd see them, on their backs,
perfectly intact, the filaments of
their black legs extended like oars,
delicate fossils of tv aerials,
looking for better reception in death
out in the open. Death, are you
still vulnerable? -scuttled lifeboats
where anyone could crush them,
the mysterious beetles, heritage jewellery
that seem to die for no reason.
An old woman drops a brooch.
Iridescent greens and pigeon pinks,
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poem by Patrick White
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No Muse Around, I Sit Down By The Side Of The Road
No muse around, I sit down by the side of the road
and let my solitude inspire me, insights
flashing like unnameable night birds
across the occult intuition of the moon.
The dark matter of nocturnal words
like the nerves of the light, the hidden scaffolding
before the light begins to shine like neurons
or the superclustering of galaxies strung out
along my axons rooted in 120 billion cells of starmud.
The silence revels in its unpredictability.
Moonrise over the birches, great blue herons
reflected in the waters of the swamp,
and a parity among wild things that makes us all
equally susceptible to each other
as we charge the air and ionize the shadows
with our sentience, everybody with blood in the game.
No rules. Just instincts. Life neither fair, nor sly
when the snow owl snatches the purse of the mouse
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poem by Patrick White
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All These Bottles With S.o.s. Inside
All these bottles with s.o.s. inside
but not a genie in a lamp among them.
Occasionally the Cutty Sark
in a forty pounder of whiskey,
but the masts snap like matchsticks
whenever I try to pull them out
as if I were trying to give a caesarian
to the chrysalis of a dragonfly
that got turned around somehow. Too often
a viper body surfing the dunes of the Sahara
in the hourglass of a gamma ray burst.
A lot of starfish that have quit shining
that I pick up off this sad, far shore
and bury them in the starfish cemetery
each in their exact place in a starmap
that replicates the constellations perfectly.
It's what the enlightened do when they're bored
and there hasn't been a word
they don't want to hear from anyone
for lightyears. All the sages
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poem by Patrick White
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Heal Softly, Lover, Burn Gently
Heal softly, lover, burn gently,
the moon is full on your windowsill,
and the stars haven't gone down
over the eyes of your bells
or made a fool of your tears
over a jest of ashes. You are
the nightbranch that reaches for me
and I'm the bird that returns
to your cherry chandeliers,
the ripe goblets of your fire-plums,
and the stars in the quince of your eyes.
And there are blackberries in your blood
thorns and vines, simmering eclipses
broken gates and lonely doorways
where I'll always come to shine,
where I'll wait like a ghost beyond death
for the eyelids and bridges
in the breath of your wine.
Eternity isn't time enough
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poem by Patrick White
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