Noise Seeping Into The Silence
Noise seeping into the silence.
The apartment groans, cracks it knuckles.
The gas furnace flares, a poppy, a matchbook,
and as things heat up, the tin pipes
keep making spasmodic rimshots on the drums,
then cooling off, you can hear
the last heavy, ripe drops of rain
on a metal roof with no walls
as he imagines it, somewhere in Burma
where the bacteria have such an appetite for life
they eat books down to the spine
and the glue that binds them
like a creekbed of milky honey
that’s cracked with use and time.
And all the letters of all the words,
nothing but flies in amber paperweights.
You take the dirty laundry of a life time
and you wash the blood and semen
off the sheets, the sweat-stained outlines
of a he and a she that made lust
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poem by Patrick White
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Slowly Over The Years
Slowly over the years
like a queen cobra that didn't like
the music she was dancing to,
the right song but the wrong flute,
life has made a big impression on me
by showing me what it can do
to the magnanimous equanimity
of all those who went looking for the Buddha
to explain what they'd just done to themselves
in the late sixties by straightening out their wavelengths
like the curls in their long bucolated hair,
or the creases under the eyes in the mirror
that weren't there yesterday
or the day before whenever I last cried.
I used to tattoo starmaps like blackholes
on the bad moon rising of my skull
like the eye sockets on one roll of the dice.
I put an emergency exit sign over one ear
and over the other. Enter here.
Like the back and front covers of a hardbound book.
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poem by Patrick White
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From The Tree To The Ground The Seed Is Unbound
From the tree to the ground the seed is unbound
as a bird in a space capsule re-entering the earth's atmosphere
like an apple at splash down withering like a parachute.
Or the wind uplifts you like a lion with the mane
of a solar corona, and you roar in the abyss awhile
and then it lets you down like a dandelion
in a windfall of paratroopers crossing the Rhine.
Rags of the flags of last year's nation of leaves
stuck together like the pages of a wet history book
made sacred by the earth I'm walking on bathed in blood.
Nature red in tooth and claw as if the hot passionate colours
that advance to the foreground were more violent
than the more distantly passive violets, viridians, and blues.
Chill out means stop aiming at everything as if
you were a sniper in a belfry with a machine-gun
looking for God with your third eye laminated to the lens
of a high-powered telescope that's got you in its digital crosshairs.
I'm not seeking freedom to not have to look for anything.
I'm not turning over every stone to see where the angels
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poem by Patrick White
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Looking For A Little Black Water After The Fury Of The White
Looking for a little black water after the fury of the white.
Dark energy after the light as peace
settles down gently upon me,
the sediment of the eras and rivers of my life.
And this cool night in early autumn,
a woman in a dark cloak and hood
I could almost caress if I could just breathe
a little more deeply than the abyss
I've been dogpaddling in because
there's nowhere else among all these stars
I can swim from the shallow end of myself
into the watersheds of my last drowning.
And there's an unprescribed silence,
a herb of the moon that's salving the wound
of the lunar thorn I just pulled out of my heart
delicately with my teeth. I'm trying
to tune my spinal cord to the guitar string
of the Tay River, so I can resonate in harmony
with the flow of things. Starfire walking
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poem by Patrick White
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Whether I Languish Here
Whether I languish here in the cold tin rain, everything
black, green, and grey, and the violet crocus
adjusting its bruised crown to the fragile light,
and the willow already an accomplished dancer,
and the sad brooms of the pine
that sweep the stairs of the wind
heavier than ever in their helpless plight, or
tired of the slow exorcism of old Septembers
that still shine blue and gold
in the back of the family bible where people
come and go like migrant doors, I accept myself
like a heresy of rogue stars
and look for a deeper night within
for the honey and wine of the radiant wonder
that walks like a woman in the guise
of a silver herb through the valley of the wound
that life can be when the geese return from the dead,
I am the lament of a pointless mystery,
an intimate namelessness, an unknown agony
that consumes me like an exile, a severance
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poem by Patrick White
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I Woke Up Saying Your Name
I woke up saying your name
but in the course of the day forgot.
I should have forgiven you sooner
but my tongue was a noose and a knot.
I should have let you fool my eyes
but not my heart. No Grecian urn
but just the same
I loved the shapely vase of your body
and the fact that my ashes weren’t buried in it.
But those bouquets of angry snakes
you kept trying to arrange
into a Zen garden in Kyoto
or a hair do in Mycenean Greece
kept me looking for an antidote for years
to all those estranged wavelengths
of a gamma ray burst
I stood like a nuclear meltdown in the way of,
though I poured my blood out like heavy water
to get you to stop and cool down.
What it is is what it is only
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poem by Patrick White
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I Concede My Fretful Beginnings
I concede my fretful beginnings to no one
because I was with the stars
before they began to shine, before
the first Adam of the primordial atom
stepped out of his shadowless glade,
and the worlds fanned out like birds from water
and the surreal sea dreamed of krill and corals
or the ghastly fumaroles of the expurgated heart
of the labouring earth
taught its thermophiles to live without light
like a memory displaced so deep in the mind
only the convulsions and catastrophes
of sunless winters severed from their vivid chains
like stillborns and candid moons
can waken it again to recall the swell
of the wave that gave it breasts
and its life on land in the mansions
of orphaned oxygen that taught it to breathe
and let its breath be vital to cherries and bees.
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poem by Patrick White
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Enlightenment Isn't Lumpy
Enlightenment isn't lumpy
even if sometimes you've got your heart
stuck in your throat
like a bird in a chimney
warming up like a phoenix
to go the way of the sumac leaves
and the ghosts of smoke
on the pyres of the sky burials
of the Canada geese.
Just because November
can't feel its pulse
and the garden snakes are nesting
like a sloppy knot of wavelengths
deep in the cold heartwood
of a rootless tree that can feel
the brutal chill of serpent fire
running up its spine like a lightning rod
doesn't mean enlightenment's a placebo
you have to keep away from the kids.
It's real enough to be unattainable
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poem by Patrick White
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Crucial Delusions
Thinking sometimes I may have gone in too far
and rendered myself mad on metaphors, thinking sometimes
the river’s turning has degraded into a metaphysical noose
and I’m the prime candidate for some kind of exotic extinction,
with or without enlightenment, and considering too
the exponential myriads of incommunicable interpretations,
as many as the radiant directions of a single shining, though even that
is saying too much, too little, or nothing at all,
I sit here in front of a computer screen,
smoking, drinking black coffee, priming the morning
like an eerie stranger to spring, even the willow
under the church spire, exalting
in its being poured out of something into something
like a waterclock. Over my life, as far back as I can remember,
even in daylight, even in the green morning,
I have always walked under a dark shadow of sky, a long night
that has fallen like a palladium, or radioactive dust
from an ancient, nuclear winter I must have survived
to wonder what food-chain I’m part of now. Who
can understand the myriad selves in a single moment,
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poem by Patrick White
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Feel Lost Sometimes
Feel lost sometimes, abandoned, a loser
that's been fighting a guerrilla rear guard action against myself.
Light years of shining and I feel reduced
to these colours and words crawling across thresholds
that recede like inconceivable farewells into the past.
No human touch, but three goldfish named after
the Greek city states of Athens, Thebes and Sparta,
in an expanding solitude that's all womb, and no embryo
however the stars swim through the Milky Way upstream
like salmon to the creative wisdom of their sacred spawning pools.
We're all sharing the same aquarium like a life support system,
a lifeboat that knows it's a shoreless life
so it's highly unrealistic to expect to be washed up anywhere
except on the moon, there's always the moon,
where the mad go berserk in the shadows of its tides.
There's a pettiness about my wounds, though
several go deep, that makes me feel like a creep sometimes
when I consider that I'm alive enough
not to have been finished off by them
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poem by Patrick White
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