When The Sky Speaks

When the sky speaks
it's stars sun moon
but when it sings
its voice is full of birds.
This morning I saw
two white tulips
hovering above the grape hyacinth
like angels that could still feel
where the moon left
cool wet kisses on their skin.
And cosmic events
are going on in the grass
that make the galaxies shudder
with unimaginable significance.
The trees have fingerprints
but no one takes them.
And every ant
is a prophet to all the others
as everyone follows everyone else
to the nectar and honey.

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poem by Patrick White
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On The Wolf Path Around The Lake

On the wolfpath around the lake,
a narrow-eyed moon keeping an eye
on my intrusive solitude, my equivocating silence.
I can feel the air saturated with wet noses.
I try to imagine how the stink of a human
must impinge upon the wild things that live here.
Mustard gas in No Man's Land.
I listen to the recombinant rhymes of the nightbirds
to see if I can remember them by name.
I hear the water moving like a rat snake
through the stuffy cattails
standing like an honour guard of cannoneers
from Napoleon's Grande Arme beside me.
Encylopedic duff of decay. Wet black leaves
of last November's body found six months later
perfectly preserved under the snow,
cling like leeches to my leather jacket and boots,
trying to patch me with their colours
like skin grafts, as if there weren't already
enough constellations and starmaps on my back for that.

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poem by Patrick White
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I've Always Thought

I've always thought a shared vision was best,
the tree, doubly witnessed, sweeter in the fruit,
the star seen rising over the hill by two,
exponentially enhanced in its shining
because it binds more than itself and another
in the herb of its light, because
nothing exists except as the sum of the eyes that have seen it
either side of the mirror, and two watching
in love or friendship
realize the world as a solitary river
with an infinite number of confluent banks
unravelling like snakes in every direction,
none flowing the wrong way, all,
the vivid wavelength of an ancient pulse
that grows a heart like a door in a tree,
a lighthouse in the dark
or the moon on the breast of a wave.
Look at a shoelace or a chromosome
or the wings of a thermalling hawk
to see what I mean:

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poem by Patrick White
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Nightbird On A Winter Branch

Nightbird on a winter branch.
Dark blossom of the new moon,
Last kiss on the eyelids of the dead
As the snow falls like apple bloom.

I see you’ve left the door ajar:
The backdoor of an eclipse
To let the first crescent of the light out.
The sacred syllable of the mistfits

Lost in the silence and the solitude
You raise like heretical mystics into songs
That only you alone can sing
So that each in their homelessness belongs

To the false dawn of the same secret
They weep over like empty lockets
That stole the moon from their windows
As they burned at the stake, rockets

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poem by Patrick White
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Someone's Cut The Tongues Out Of The Bells Tonight

Someone's cut the tongues out of the bells tonight.
Even the silence isn't singing to itself.
The windows are generously tolerant of intruders
but I'm locked into the splendour of my isolation
empathizing with things I don't love.
Full moon. Fruit moon. Moon of berries and grain.

I thought I'd be happier at this time in my life,
but I'm threshing a harvest of shadows
for having sowed all my wild oats on the moon.
I'm intrigued by the fragrance of occult raptures on the air.
Dark intensities that can only end in immolation.
Black roses that only bloom in fire. Mystic disobedience
that lifts the flesh and blood taboos off
whatever comes to it naturally
as a late night 24-7 convenience store
or the fire that started in the kitchen of the Chinese restaurant
three doors down from my apartment yesterday.

Late night moods. The mind dogpaddling in its immensities.

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poem by Patrick White
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Let Go Of My Mind, Like A Kite, Like A Snake

Let go of my mind like a kite, like a snake
I've grabbed by the tail to make a daisy chain of eternity.
Take the bit out of the Great Square of Pegasus
and pour myself out like the billions of stars in the Milky Way.
I'm hemorrhaging poetry. I'm bleeding to death like a rose.
Let it go, let it go, let it go. Blood knows its own way home.
I'm not weaving straightjackets of circumstantial vetch
into an embroidered chrysalis that never opens up.
I'm not trying to pour the sea back into the cup of the moon.
There's more to me than I could ever drink up.

You can put a burning candle in the window and wait for me
but I'm going to follow the smoke wherever it leads
like stardust on the chalkboard of accelerated space
in a burning schoolhouse that had nothing much to teach
about the unknown in the first place. Order's
only a special mode of chaos like a straight line
is a special form of a curve, and there are snakepits
of wavelengths that only serve as flying carpets
growing thin under the windows the dragons look through

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poem by Patrick White
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January Sunset

January sunset, clear blue sky,
peacock viridian with a wash of ultramarine,
warm for this time of year.
Ninety-nine percent of a full moon
waxing maculately ivory white in the east.
The threads of the little black creeks
that have frayed away from the strong rope
are the dissonant wavelengths
of baby snakes in the snow.
The willows orange against
the burnt umber backdropp
of a grove of pine, birch, maple
trying to keep some desperate secret to themselves.
Unkempt, wind-swept fields,
under an archipelago of snow,
the exhausted afterbirth
of cattle-corn and sheep
as if that were all they had to show
for the long hard labour of bringing forth life
as the stars are beginning

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poem by Patrick White
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Don't Know Where I'm Going

Don't know where I'm going.
Don't care who I am.
No place I need to be.
No face I've got to see.
Don't care if I'm loved.
Don't care if I'm not.
What arises arises mindlessly.
What business has it with me?
Imagination's just another word for free.
Free, free, free at last
I've let my people go.
I walk without a shadow.
There's nothing about tomorrow
that hasn't already passed
and yesterday's a prophecy
of what isn't waiting to come.
One thing suggests another
and worlds are arrayed before me
like the stillness
of the lost feather of the moon

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poem by Patrick White
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The Rain's Falling Upwards

The rain's falling upward
and I'm rooted in the clouds.
I'm riffing with the greening of my leaves
without a flute, letting my thoughts grow
like musical serpents each
according to their need.
It's the snake's turn to charm me,
to entangle me in its form
like forbidden fruit
swaying from my highest boughs.
In the chalky, moist grey air
I'm scraping my fingernails
down a blackboard like crows
because my desires are vaguely out of reach
and my mind is a teacher with nothing to teach.
I want nothing more
than the freedom of my own humanity
thumbing its own heart
like a well-read book
or a worn guitar I taught myself to play

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poem by Patrick White
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Not Quite Dawn

Not quite dawn, night seeping out of the blue,
troubled sleep, no stars, and you, a week gone,
the whole universe applying its laws to your absence
which is the silence everything returns to like water.
I have never touched you, so my fingertips
can still play you into existence on a keyboard,
though the loss of your voice is a dead bird,
and I am a loose thread of blood in a labyrinth
of motherboards and micro-chips like me
who can’t find a way out of themselves without
turning away like a planet from its own stars.
How quickly the light comes, and the darkness
bleeds away like a love-letter under the door.
No eyes. No hands. No skin. No hair. I am
not even the ashes of a cleft witching wand
that went looking for water and caught fire instead,
and we have shared only the light of the mind
that paints a world with the shadows of a ghost,
and might only be the last habit of an amputee to leave,
a mere mime of the way our eyes make us see.

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poem by Patrick White
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