Scouring The Patina Of Time Off With Stars

Scouring the patina of time off with stars
the way I used to grind pyrex plates
with varying grades of carborundum
down into telescopic mirrors, then silver them
with a vapour of aluminum to add
to the luster of their parabolic eyes.
Been looking into the darkness so long
I'm beginning to shine on my own.
Now from moment to moment
there's as much darkness coming out of the light
as there are black holes sand-blasting
the hour-glass shape of this bubble of the multiverse
with firestorms of desert stars as I make my way
from one oasis to the next where the mirages
wander in out of the night to drink
from the reflections of their own faces
with hands cupped like the hulls of leaking lifeboats.

I don't believe a life of delusion is any less painful
than a life of enlightenment, even if

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poem by Patrick White
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Cinder In The Sun's Eye

Cinder in the sun's eye, there's fire in your tears.
You plunge into the light like a moth on a mission
and it's the sun that disappears to shine at midnight
in the black mirrors of your eyes. Dark light, intense,
starling, charred swan, you know as well as I do,
the occult approach to the optimism of an eclipse
is to act radically in the name of things you can
only unattainably conceive of. Love on your wrist
like a hawk whose wing you healed, dwelling
in your homelessness without a fear of eviction.
No truth in the mouth of the snake that's pulled
the fangs of its conviction out of the sky
like crescent moons, pins from the eye
of a voodoo doll you've nursed for light years
on the nightshift of a morgue that's aroused by death.
Milk of your left breast kills. The other practices compassion.
Whole snakepits in the shrines of the wavelengths
mourning the death of Medusa, as if snakes too
had something to mourn that makes them shine within you.

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poem by Patrick White
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I Gently Took The Strawberry Heart

I gently took the strawberry heart
of the bird with the broken neck
and buried it in a shrine of leaves and grass.
And in a low voice, whispered a blessing.

Under the window of an illusion
like a song you can only hear once
and it's good for a lifetime of listening,
I buried you with your wings together in prayer.

And I prayed to know what to pray for.
I prayed to know what to ask that could ease
the burden of the earth on a nightbird's journey
flying solo deeper into the dark

than even the stars or these eyeless words can go.
And I know death returns even the worst of us
to our innocence again, though our bones
come crashing down like childhood kites around us.

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poem by Patrick White
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The World Is Only As Big

The world is only as big
as the size of the life going on in me.
If I wanted to take the full measure of the sky
what could that be
compared to the lightyears it takes
to get from one side of my mind to the other?
And look how huge the darkness is
that can be cast by one star
like the negative of its shining.
And what road has anyone walked
that was ever longer than their shadow?
Eternity's just another way of saying
you've run out of space for time.
I don't think I'm going to live forever
but my life will go on without me
just as it always has.
I'll get up in the morning
like the ghost of someone I can't remember
and I'll have a coffee and a cigarette
as I wait for the obscurity to clear

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poem by Patrick White
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Among The Skeletons Of The Sundials

Among the skeletons of the sundials
what deficits of time remain unlived, unfulfilled?
So much forfeited to what crowded it out.
And the more that was said, the more
fraudulent and incomplete what we wanted to sing.

Too many murmuring windows, too many
trashed doorways to the collusive shelters of the heart.
We saw the stars, and how few learned.
We went to war for reasons
that have forgotten us now
and though there were those
who sternly waited like iron gates
no one returned to their secret gardens
or the silence as they had left it.

I watched from an island as the sea flexed
into the muscle of my generation
to celebrate a dream that hasn't happened yet
and tear the veils off the multi-eyed spiders

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poem by Patrick White
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And Should It Come Time To Speak Of The Sadness

And should it come time to speak of the sadness
that reaches fruition in the medicine bag of the heart,
don't bring a teacher that can't heal by singing and dancing
to the wounded discipline of a lost art that's gone
into the sacred solitude of the secret suffering
that upholds the integrity of the silence in your eyes.
This is a seeing that has nothing to do with truth or lies
or the innovative causality of pain. Don't speak
of its release as enlightenment or liberation,
as if you were uncaging doves from the ashes of your voice.
Don't seek what has eluded you when you're cloaked
in an eyeless night like the screening myth of a lonely alibi.

And should it come time to speak of the sadness
don't humble the message at the expense of the medium you choose
to weep in when the hidden urges you into the open
like a dragonfly emerging from the hovel of a chrysalis
into a palace of air with the wingspan of your diaphanous windows
beaded in tears like the afterbirth of the rain
in the post-natal mirrors of your indefinable awareness of life

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poem by Patrick White
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It's Good To Know

It's good to know you're there;
though the world is a diatribe
of waltzing trains and threshing razors,

it's good to know
a door burns for me somewhere in the darkness,
a bell waits like a nipple of silence
and your blood waits like a language,
a rose of rain in a starfield,
that my mouth alone can say to the night
in a shudder of light that only the blind can hear,
sipping from a chalice of water
spiked with diamond nails.

My heart flashes across the sky
and buries itself like a meteor
at the cornerstone of a sightless temple
pillared by faithless candles
that flirt with the shadows
of the fire in their eyes,

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poem by Patrick White
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Your Face Was A Moon I Haunted

Your face was a moon I haunted, and your body
twisted me into agonies of sexual driftwood
that wanted to burn at midnight under the stars
like the last signal fire of an isolated survivor
high up on your affluent shores.
I wanted to do dark things with you
in the shadow of eclipses that put their hands over
the eyes of the flowers and sent the birds to bed.

With you, I would have asked for closure
from the spring constellations swarming overhead
like free radicals paroled to the wind
tuning up the larnyx of the birch-trees,
I would have lain down with you in the bedlam
of a thousand cares and zirconium delusions
and lived beside you like an island and a telescope
drunk on the wine of your circus mirrors
that crash before they talk; all night, all night,
wave after wave, I would have caressed
the famous reflection of you in black carnation panties,

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poem by Patrick White
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I Sit At My Window

I sit at my window
trying to translate the Kufic script
of the shadows of the trees on the snow,
smoking the invisible ink of the light
over the flame of my mind
to clarify my seeing
by realizing there is no deep or shallow
in the fathomless depths of I am,
nothing hidden, nothing revealed.

And it's not so much that I am in the presence of the world,
but that the presence, the world, is me,
and if I go looking for it,
only my fingerprints will be found
like these violet shadows dusted by the snow
under my multitudinous mugshot in the mirror.

So I open my mind and my eye, my heart and my hand
and let things arise as they will,
knowing that even this is a blunder

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poem by Patrick White
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So Lifetime After Lifetime

So lifetime after lifetime, sorceress of shadows and dreams
you step out of the dark wood of yourself,
a shy doe, a mournful lighthouse and a warning off the coast
of your infinite solitude, you, the singing bird
on the green bough of your flute pouring yourself
like sorrow over the eye of the sea, your tears,
the ancient wells of an eternal longing unanswered by the secret stars
that have entrusted their radiance to you, fireflies
drowning their light in your black candles,
the blind music of your lonely flowing. Is your flute, a bone, then,
and this rose I bring you, this heart, this blood
that has turned into a goblet of luminous wine,
drunk on the wonder and the missing in your phantom music,
is this rose nothing but a wound, a coffin-flower,
the unmarked grave of a mystic embryo?

Do you fear the tenderness, the meeting? Does the moon
strike at her own reflection in the mirror of her midnight waters
to wander like an orphan along her lifeless shores?
Boy and man, you murder me on the steps of your serpent shrine,

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poem by Patrick White
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