Restless With The Dead Tonight
Restless with the dead tonight.
Old friends, the gates to abandoned farms,
the roof collapsed and the wind with access
to all their windows, overgrown roads
going nowhere I can walk with them now.
Blue-green the evening sky, still,
without direction, island clouds, but unmoving.
Sparse beginnings, and sorrow in the seed.
Relying on the stars to do for me
what I can't do for myself. Pull me out
of this black hole I keep slipping in and out of
on the rim of my event horizon, stray photons,
butterflies ducking in and out of the dragon's mouth,
a halo of X-rays looking brutally right through me.
Down to the musical instruments of my bones.
Flutes and drumsticks. But I'm void-bound,
trying to shed my skin like a chronic illusion,
liberate the chains I can feel but can't see,
numbed by having to say no
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poem by Patrick White
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Manically Slashing Paint Late At Night
Manically slashing paint late at night
on a white canvas.
Blood on the snow.
Chewing my limbs off to get out of a leg-hold trap.
Tearing my heart out like that of a noble enemy
to eat it for the homoeopathic courage
to make something out of the chaos
of conditioned consciousness
like a small tent in this homeless desert of stars
that might let me enter
like a loveletter into an envelope
that’s empty enough to offer shelter to anyone
with a return address on the point of no return.
The dove is bleeding down the handle of my brush.
Insomniac poppies are haemorrhaging on their feet
after they got caught sleepwalking
down the dark alley of a dead end street
and a bad moon rising cut their throats
like a serial killer exploring the creative potential
of blood spatter as an expressive form of forensic art.
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poem by Patrick White
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Long Day Painting By Myself Down By The Lake
Long day painting by myself down by the lake
where I used to paint with you many years ago,
and now your absence haunts my solitude
as I grey my greens with cool alizarin red
and though the trees and the water are the same
it's a much eerier world just to know once
you who were here with me, are utterly gone,
and what has carried on without you, though
I'm affably intimate with its creative characteristics
is wholly estranged from the name I'll write on this painting.
As if an era in art had passed. Dreams and assumptions,
things you take for granted because in living them
you sometimes must, like love and oxygen,
and the presumption of life going on between us,
for the most part unplanned,
but a commingling of waters nevertheless,
a sharing in the other's quiet amazement
that the other exists as they are in your mindscape at all.
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poem by Patrick White
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Silence Here
Silence here, long whispers of moonlight
suggesting things invisible appear,
occult constellations I read in reverse
on the chilly night air. Wildflowers
in the high abandoned starfields
soaked in the dew of ten thousand eyes
as the lone nighthawk of my overview of life
tilts its wings toward you as if the wrist
of the falconer were the bough of a tree
in the sacred groves on the island of Mona,
though I know you sleep in the shadows
of the mountains of Arizona.
Hear me, sweet one, do you in your dream?
I've filled your pillow with clouds
and the whimsy of mystical flight feathers
to replace the hard rock of the world
you lay your head down upon,
and pull the sword out of the wound
like the thorn of a star
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poem by Patrick White
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Since I Was A Child
Since I was a child, this longing in my heart
for something I can't even name, but keeps
drawing me into it like a unfulfilled abyss,
unattainably alluring, but the space
saturated with pain as if time itself were grieving
like the white noise of the cosmic background,
or the love of a created thing for this that has come
would always be left unanswered and unrequited.
Times I've thought the emptiness, because
nature abhors a vacuum, was life's way
of enticing me into the available dimensions of the future,
a furtherance of me as a means of achieving its own ends.
I could blunder my way toward it as the labour of my life
in pursuit of an earthly excellence radiant with stars,
sublime as a root, with the dynamic equilibrium of a tree
that had weathered many storms in the name
of a beautiful absurdity that adorned the heart
with the tenderness of fireflies without losing
any of the impact of a life-changing meteor shower.
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poem by Patrick White
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My Heart Said Yes To Everything My Mind Denied
My heart said yes to everything my mind denied.
Certain women, poetry, doorways, cosmic risks,
a few back country roads that knew enough not
to ask me where I was going that late at night.
My absurd familiarity with sacred clowns
and this ghost dance of stars I see in their eyes
whenever one of them makes me cry in remembrance
of some old rag of laughter that ran before the bulls
like a rodeo clown in a whiskey barrel of fermented sorrows.
I said yes to exile. I said yes to my homelessness.
I said yes to the reflection of the kid
in the broken window of the burning orphanage
he'd just pecked his way out of like the shell of a phoenix.
I said yes to the abyss, to nothing, to emptiness
to the purr of the tides of sand in a desert
combing out the manes of lion-fire
that bloom like spiritual ferocities on the wind.
And I said yes to the rocks on the mountainside
who repeated what my secret teachers had said.
If you're still clinging to one placard of your freedom
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poem by Patrick White
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Deep In The Night
Deep in the night that shells its husk of blue
to pan the nuggets of its stars from a darker stream,
the heart an executioner with a fistful of pardons,
and the soft, moist, lulling of the evening air,
the threshing of slow fish,
I'm enthroned alone in a crucial palace of light
that realigns its domains to the borders of the wind,
and I don't want to feel lonely but I do,
and I don't want to miss so many, so many faces
stripped from the bough like a savaged telephone-book,
so many feathers of light drifting through the shadows of their names,
and the black granite of the uncarved bell
that turtles the blood under the eyelid of the knowing,
that makes my eyes want to scream
until the pillars of the dead sea fall like rotten salt:
how long can one road endure the passage of everything
walking life off into the stars that measure the miles in skulls?
Was I young? Were you there in the brindled moonlight?
Did I remember how to love you well; did I see with long eyes
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poem by Patrick White
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The Silence Overtakes Me
The silence overtakes me, I had almost forgotten,
and I am disembodied again, awareness
with no fixed abode, and it's sweet and sad
this passage of the mindstream through the darkness.
Memories of childhood, collecting bruised potatoes
fallen off the conveyor belt of the vegetable factory,
thousands of muddy spuds like asteroids in orbit,
being rinsed off by fans of sharp-edged water
spread out like the wings of translucent birds,
smell of wet burlap bags and how proud
I was as a kid of seven to be a good hunter for my mother
and haul a bag of potatoes home as if
I'd killed and skinned the carcass myself.
When you're seven you're still a wolf-pup
and the game isn't quite as dangerous as it will be.
The faces of past lovers bloom on a midnight lake
and then the wind scatters their petals. Or they glow
by the light of a fire lotus burning in the window
of a Napoleon airtight on a snowed-in winter night,
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poem by Patrick White
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If I Were To Give You A Black Shawl Of Woven Rivers
If I were to give you a black lace shawl of woven rivers
would you wear it over the moonlit hills
of your bare shoulders like a spell I cast
to keep you as warm as a firefly on a cold night?
Or would you mistake it for a bird net or a spider web
or think I'm fishing in the depths for the black pearl
of a new moon to hold in an old moon's arms?
Or milk your last crescent as an antidote to your charms?
If I were to show you a back road out of hell
as Orpheus did Eurydice, would you look back again
at the long path that came to this and think
you'd rather drink black cool aid in Jonestown
than follow a goated footed sherpa up
into the mountains of the moon that cast their spells
like the shadows of sundials in a flowerless garden?
Would the stars that are flowing between us
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poem by Patrick White
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Painting Native Masks All Day
Painting native masks all day. Concrete.
Poured into a mould, their supple souls set
into the permafrost like a mammoth's skull.
I don't know what they were the gods of,
two of them. Could be a life or a deathmask.
Possibly Nootka, Salish, Kwakuitl, Chinook, Cowichan
Fossils, their faces, ferocious and threatening
though I doubt I've got the good sense to be scared.
Red for blood. Green for always. Black
for the night they were absorbed back into
like crows a moment in the moonrise, then gone
to some grove where they've driven the squirrels out
of their rookery. There but anyone's guess where.
Terrorist hyperbole, or totems from darker realms,
one, perhaps, more human than the other,
an eagle shaman with a salmon moon in its talons
and the other, bucktoothed, like a nasty beaver,
but almost sacred clowns, as if they were designed
to scare the children like grandfathers
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poem by Patrick White
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