Faceless This Time Of Night
Faceless this time of night, my skin evaporates like dry ice
into a deepening sense of containment
by a dark space with distant cities of light
trying to colonize the Pythagorean fireflies of Cretona,
or the shimmering mirage of Port Angeles
dancing like a seance at the foot of the mountains
across a hundred miles of the Georgia Strait at night,
the immensity of the freedom that dwarfs the stars
with the sheer magnitude of the labour before them.
The fragility of a spinal cord traversing the abyss
of a one-stringed box guitar made of cardboard
when you were a kid, the mere filament
of an anachronistic light bulb with the lifespan
of the wick of an apostate candle at a black mass,
disappointed it wasn't born a flower,
but a weed more at home among the stars
that uprooted it from its intimacy with the earth
like a kindred spirit of light
that must wander through its own solitude
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poem by Patrick White
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Wolves Out Tonight
Wolves out tonight.
The smart dogs are stay-at-homes.
No berries. The bears have torn up
the garbage dumps and heaped
what fat they could manage in caves
to sleep their hunger away
in whatever a bear dreams of.
The natives are predicting a hard winter
by counting beads on an abacus of holly.
Corrugated drifts of the first snow,
wavelength after wavelength of a frozen tide
even if you were to take it at the high
would lead to nowhere but here
where the common mullein
whose cobs and towers of yellow flowers
are now rags of light
thrown to the back of the closet of the sun,
its grey-green felt leaves
too brittle and withered
to insulate an Ojibway’s moccasin.
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poem by Patrick White
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I Could Bring You A Shattered Windowpane
I could bring you a shattered windowpane,
I could bring you a musical whip that's been trained
to read the stops of your flute
and how your fingers move like windproof spiders.
I could bring you the red brick of dried blood
that was left of my heart when I threw it through the window,
and it broke into a thousand chips of rose petals
that shed like flakes of dried paint off the eyelids
of a revolution that hasn't woken up yet
to finish what it started in a recurring dream
of mystic junkies flagging their fits
until Faustus sees Christ's blood
streaming across the firmament like mother's milk.
Should I ever come to know you well enough
to let you drink from my hidden starwell in my field of view,
I could raise your spirits up like a candelabra
to be whatever constellation you wanted
among all these myriad stars dying to be given a focus.
And if at first you didn't know where you were, I'd be your locus
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poem by Patrick White
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Gnats In The Sunset
Gnats in the sunset,
drunk on the light,
women like comets and vapour trails everywhere
flaring across a skullful of sky
like the omens of a toppled throne,
like the inspired slashes of a mad painter,
the deathbed confessions of an expired mirror,
but no planet with the blue rose
of a sustainable atmosphere in sight,
nothing worth naming, no heart
that isn't the black hole of an eclipsed pearl
mired in stars like quicksand.
So many the gate to a garden they'll never enter.
So many waiting for the mountain
to circle the burning cloud, so many
choking to death on their half of the wishbone
that got caught in their throats like a harp
they once tore apart
like the crescents of the moon
going off like mutually aimed triggers.
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poem by Patrick White
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These Huge Vast Thoughts Of You
These huge vast thoughts of you
prove nothing
except they're too hard to carry.
They're the same old Sisyphean stones
I've been rolling uphill
ever since you left me
standing on quicksand
like a half-finished pyramid
that just lost its reason for dying.
And I'm way past crying.
I'm dark water locked in the heart
of a distant planet
that doesn't support life.
I look up at the nightsky now
remembering you as you were then
and I'm always one house shy of a zodiac.
There.
At the end.
There's a space
where that last sign of you
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poem by Patrick White
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These Words Turn Homeward
These words turn homeward
toward you, my dark wood,
because of all assignations of the night
you are West, you are dream and secret
you, deeper than jewels, sweeter
than the taste of stars
in the eyes of wounded black berries.
You, longing and lucidity,
singing in the last of the shadows
of the sacred trees for the unattainable
that summons me to you.
Endless, the farewell, endless
the dusk the nightbirds follow
after the swallows
have danced for the stars
in an aerial display of their own.
You, my star field, my wildflower,
whose skin is the skin of lunar waterlilies
and the tide at the tips of my fingers.
My new moon, my despair,
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poem by Patrick White
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Full Moon Behind The Broken Femur Of A Jack Pine
Full moon behind the broken femur of a jack pine
shattered by the wind on the ridge of the hill,
its pagoda of boughs, nothing but a lean-to now
for deer mice, fox, rabbit, groundhogs.
Old manuscripts of rock striated and stacked
by retreating glaciers
washing their hands of themselves.
The hill has never known a messiah
and the glaciers wrote for themselves.
The mast of the moon boat wrecked,
The rectal stake of Vlad the Impaler.
The axis of the world for the auto de fe
of some future heretic
with a penchant for the tragic.
No culpability in the event.
Hawk with an injured wing,
molar, stalagmite, Cinderella
sweeping up the pieces of a broken chandelier
so she won't cut her feet on the stars.
This tree talked to God.
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poem by Patrick White
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The Last Draft
There never was a way I could say it;
impossible from the first. The night
opened my mouth and poured its stars
down the well of my throat so I could say it in light,
but all that came out when I tried to sing
was silence and darkness
and a solitude that pawned the wedding-ring
that slipped from the finger of the wind
like a punctuation mark.
I envied the leaves that could say it in rain,
and the stones freaked by fool’s gold
so much like my own brain
but able to say it with ease
like the birds in the morning trees
shuddering with eloquence.
Women could say it, and children, and dogs,
and even the spider could play it
on its lethal guitar,
and the moon by stealthy increments
draining its cup to the lees,
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poem by Patrick White
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Walking Straight Through The Cobwebs
Walking straight through the cobwebs of old emotions,
trying to get these straitjackets off me, these
brown starclusters that stick but never seem to shine.
Don't care if I'm in or out of my mind, enough's enough
and comes a time to take a bath in your own grave
to wash all these ghosts off like the smoke of old fires
that returned to their urns like shepherd moons a long time ago.
And I still can't tell if that's a rose petal or an eyelid of blood
under the fingernail of the crescent moon
when she scratched the eyes out of her prophetic skull.
Tired of asking for clarity and being answered in labyrinths.
The more I see the more alone I feel. I've been
disciplined by catastrophe long enough to know
how to build bridges of fire across the mindstream
without extinguishing my reflection like a torch
in my own awareness. Suspension bridges
woven of spinal cords like the suicide nets
around the Peace Tower. Dream catchers, yes,
but who can stop the nightmares from falling to their deaths?
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poem by Patrick White
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Putting It Down To Some Impact On My Heart
Putting it down to some impact on my heart
in my sleep, this sunny afternoon edged
with cold anger like a residual hangover
from some dream I don't remember having.
Did you visit me again last night like an albino nightmare?
Was Venus in Virgo? Were we unaligned?
Was I talking through a window embedded
in heritage brick? Did I mutter things at the sky
that were indignantly unjust without meaning to?
I wonder if the stars after all these light years
they took to get to my heart, are completely happy
with an afterlife without flowers or hermit thrushes.
Who knows why anybody looks back on their past
and risks turning into a pillar of salt,
or returning to the dead by default
but did you let go of my hand again last night?
I'm sick of your absence always being the prelude
to my dismemberment. And those eyes
that always rebuke my poverty as if they'd
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poem by Patrick White
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