Just Before Dawn Venus In Leo Between The Moon And The Beehive Nebula

Just before dawn Venus in Leo between the moon and the Beehive Nebula.
The chimney of the old shoe factory reflected
like a toppled obsidian obelisk in the Tay River.
Couldn't sleep. Now I'm heading home with the bats and the ghosts.
I've firewalked enough tonight, and the coals are beginning to dim
in the ashen light of my waning spirits.
The Perth Soap Factory still hasn't managed to imperialize
the fragrance of the last of the wildflowers crowding
the crumbling parking lots and leftover wedges of field,
but it's trying. I envy a squirrel its quick Zen energy.
And three crows think they know something about me.

Happens a lot in a small town, as I know you know,
because someone you know told me. You must think
I'm crazy talking to the air as if it were you,
but even out here, you've been inside of me all night,
and now it's time to make some space for you beside me.
I like the feline water sylphs that follow me home
like feral cats in the early morning when there's dew
on the brass heritage plaques of the lawyer's offices

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poem by Patrick White
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I Move Through The Shadows That Have Their Flowering Too

I move through the shadows that have their flowering too.
I see you blooming through the pale
of the trunks of the black walnuts
like a fire you've been sitting around a long time,
wondering if you're a habitable planet
or a belt of asteroids that hang like skulls from your waist,
orbiting around a middle-aged avuncular sun
as affable as a porch light welcoming you to the abyss.

You don't always need a beginning to get something done
or a sunset to remind you it's getting late.
I can hear your sorrows like waterbirds
down by the lake where the raccoons drowned the coydog
by luring it out of its depths. Dead Dog's Dream Self.
The titles of old poems invariably return
like roads that have picked up their own scent
and follow it like fog and smoke and a seance of stars
high in a darkened lighthouse full of lament.

I want to see you jump your own fire like a witch

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poem by Patrick White
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Water Has Its Followers

Water has its followers
but the wind is free of an audience.
It doesn't encourage cults of wild irises and daylilies
along the flowing of its banks.
It sows the orchards with the pollen of stars
it kicks up like dust at its heels.
But my voice isn't the larnyx
of windmills and waterwheels
and when I speak
I'm always one among the crowd
that's listening at the same time
to a conversation with themselves
that took the words right out of my mouth.

My voice is a seance.
The dead use it like a bus stop.
The swallows and the pigeons
drink from it as if it were a public fountain
efflorescing like an Easter lily in Florence.
It's a guitar. But I am not

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poem by Patrick White
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If The Night Were To Remember Me

If the night were to remember me
among all these shadows of lucidity,
for the firefly I burned to become,
for the corpse of the candle I am,

By the scars on the window I swear
By these constellations on my arm
I'm still learning to wear
as if I deserved them,

I always kept faith with the wonder;
even if I took the river
and left the road I was on
to go the rest of the way alone

as if it were better off without me
and fire on the water in fall
enraptured by the mystery
I was nothing at all

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poem by Patrick White
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I Can't Say

I can’t say that my breath
isn’t the lengthening shadow
of a tree burning its leaves
like a candlabra in the sunset,
or the moon hasn’t broken its tooth
trying to open the lotus of marrow
I motherlode in the lockets of my bones
like silver and bread
for the long, lean journey ahead.
Sometimes when I look at the stars and wonder
I feel like a cigarette-butt
in a glass of mystic wine,
my little humanity, a grain of dust
on a sidereal windowsill, if that,
and I remember the ignorant sincerity
of the orchards that sweetened their apples
like a windfall of hearts
under my eyelids as I dreamed
night after night
of unknown thresholds

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poem by Patrick White
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Snow On The Eyelids Of The Pinecones

Snow on the eyelids of the pine-cones.
Zen pagodas, meditating. Snow
on the withered stars of the wild rose hips
attaining the unattainable like Buddha
enlightened by what's become of Venus in the dawn.
Beauty in the truth of abject desolation.
There's a war going on somewhere
to judge from the number of amputations
the fingers, legs, arms, toes, hands,
the limbs of the dead trees
lying all over the ground as if the woods
were the collapsed tent
of an army field hospital in the Civil War.
The Fort Delaware Death Pen
if I were to take a wild guess,
or maybe Andersonville, who knows,
but I feel I'm walking more like a warden
doing his rounds through the woods at night
than a visitor among these who lie here
in this graveyard of wounded swans

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poem by Patrick White
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Haven't Seen A Star In Four Nights

Haven't seen a star in four nights
and the windows are pining for more than lamplight.
It's darker in than it is out, but suddenly
through the breaking clouds, hey, there's one
and I'm momentarily thrilled by the delight of a child
spotting her first firefly rising like a chimney-spark
above this ashen town on a cold, autumn night.
Small pleasures in the aftermath of great intensities,
the immaculate focus that burned eyeholes
in the sockets of my crystal deathmask
that left me feeling like wounded glass
thawing into the long slow tears I carried back
from the wishing well like the empty buckets
of a waterclock that acts like a volunteer fire brigade
that never put anything out before it was too late.
Wouldn't be the first house of the zodiac to burn down
and probably not the last, but, at least,
it's not a plague door to the past facing east.
It's not blood leaking out of the nostril of a bell,
but who knows? You can never really tell.

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poem by Patrick White
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Dying Young In Autumn

Dying young in autumn,
the ideal death of a flower or a star
whose beauty's still as obvious
as a door that's been left ajar at night.

The fireflies are search parties
out looking for someone
who's made an escape through the woods,
or they're lamp lighting deer
out of the dark into the glare of their insights.

Train whistle in the distance
works its ghost to death
Doppler-shifting its lament
into an infra-red eclipse of existence.

And then the stars in the eyes
of the recurring storm of the trees,
flaring over-eagerly like candles and dragons
to burn for the sheer delight of it.

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poem by Patrick White
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Patinas Of Distinction

Patinas of distinction trying to green the terminated poets.
Death drools its cruel elixirs. Perfume
from ambergris, whale vomit for those
who have the stomach for it, dung
under the snow, then come the squabbling sparrows
to tend upon God in her rehabilitated ruins.

Literary forensics putting flesh back on the skull.
Red threads of blood in the nests
they build for themselves like pyres of cosmic eggs
in the tree where the poet hung
like a poached bird, a plumb bob of the depths,
a pendulum in a still life with choreographed knives.

The cooing pigeons who write with flight feathers
plucked from fledgling suicides. Water has a voice
of its own, the blood, the wind, three octaves
of fire. Here come the uninspired
with insulation, rebar and cement.
And even road kill's got an undertaker.

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poem by Patrick White
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And It's Funny How

And it's funny how we carry each other
within ourselves like mingled waters
that taste of the moon,
that taste of bruised orchids
in the shadow of all those glass greenhouses,
Eden in a Mason jar,
that learned to throw stones,
and mysteriously engaging
that we go on creating each other as we have
forever inseparably each on his own
alone together with everyone
wondering why we exist
to know one day we won't.

Gates and roads and miles and whispers away
and a longing that can only be measured
in the lightyears of a star
and all the eras, all the trances of time
of passion and extinction,
of despair that turned on hope like a toxin

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poem by Patrick White
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