And I Don't Know If I Succeed
And I don’t know if I succeed myself
in every moment, a hereditary dynasty;
are ashes the continuum of fire, sorrow
the natural legator of joy, one thought
the progenitor of the next? How
can the mirror reflect itself
unless all things are mirrors
drinking from their own faces; unless
there are roses even as we speak
growing the eyelids and lips
of young women elegant
as eighteenth century herons and willows,
a poet who once dedicated himself like rain
to the battered body of the moon,
trying to turn his visions into atmospheres
that she might breathe again,
that the atrocity of her nakedness
might be clothed in orchids and grass
that shuddered in the gentle foreplay of the wind,
now bagging grams like the loaves and fishes
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poem by Patrick White
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Flowers Adrift On The Fragrance Of Their Own Foregoing
Flowers adrift on the fragrance of their own foregoing.
In the night that takes me under its wing
to shelter me from myself, arrival and passage of spring.
Fish nibble at the wafer of the moon on the tongue of the lake.
The wind bitter as a green apple with an innocent cruel side.
Saturn at dawn, Venus at dusk, things abide in their own good time
without knowing for whose sake they shine until the mind
can't keep a secret anymore and let's the heart know
what the heart has always known. Reason is colour blind.
Everything that's hidden out in the open isn't invisibly camouflaged
to look like God at a quick glance. Flowers don't dance
with their deathmasks on. Things may have changed
since I last walked here, but they haven't aged. Autumn
not an older season than spring, spring not younger than yesterday.
Water's never heard of a virgin birth that ends in a real death.
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poem by Patrick White
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I Left Your Image Of Me Shining
I left your image of me shining
just where you wanted it
in that glass menagerie
of broken mirrors
you've hung from the ceilings
like chandeliers
like constellations of frozen tears
in the thirteenth house
of the misbegotten
on the wrong side of the tracks
off the beaten paths of the zodiacs
that sometimes like to go slumming down here
when the sun shines at midnight
and the moon's out of town.
I left the light on
but that star is long gone
past these extremities of shining
into the abyss of an unforeseeable future
that disappears into its own illumination
like an eye into its own seeing
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poem by Patrick White
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I've Gone Somewhere
I've gone somewhere
wherever this is,
and I don't know how
the roads I knotted to mark the way back
came undone
like a bagful of snakes,
like lightning in a cloud,
ribbons of fire
leaping like wolves
from ripples of wood,
all the targets
stumps of charcoal
in the ashes of the arrows.
I can breathe the whole universe in
with a single breath
and let it out again just as easily.
There are bells in my blood so heavy
they feel like iron oxen
grinding their teeth in the void.
And I am hurt inexplicably
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poem by Patrick White
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As If Beyond Death
As if beyond death today,
as if I lay already under the eyelid of the moon,
the echo of my heart
pumping shadows
through my perfectly preserved corpse
in a silence that's never known the wind,
a fallen wharf without arrivals or departures,
and sad enough not to care why,
blood on the dolphin in the black tide
that pours me out of the horseshoe of the bay
like a road from its boot,
wipes me like the pollen and dust of dark matter
off the windowsills of the constellations,
my unknown mass crucial
to the cosmic contractions
that might give birth to the world again,
and I'm here alone in the high field
drowning in the twilight with the wildflowers
and the sky a last exhalation of the blue-green luster
that flirts with the mystic violet
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poem by Patrick White
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In A Journal Of Blood
In a journal of blood that doesn’t exaggerate my breath
to the mythic proportions of distant nebulae,
I have tried to record my nights on earth
as an apostate astronomer with a two way telescope
embedded in the sexual cupolas of Venutian mountains,
the ultimate observatory, the only understudy church
ever built by the stars from the roof up, the split skull,
the nursing cotyledons of my white, enamel gun,
my mechanical shoot that wants to put out a vine
or turn into an insect. And the women have come
in a turmoil of hair, with their extraordinary ascensions
and terrifying declinations like commas, comas, and black comets
streaking across my field of vision
with its damsel-winged chromatic aberrations
smearing the light with rainbows, and I have held them
spectroscopically in a clock-driven parabolic begging bowl
benching butterflies with the dumb-bells of my intersection axes.
Maybe creation is a forsaken remnant
of apocalyptic extinctions so fine-tuned to the dimpled atoms,
one would have to be a tattoo on water
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poem by Patrick White
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Over And Over And Over Again
Over and over and over again
you return to me each time
made more beautiful by the pain
I embrace you with
like the aura of fireflies
in the afterlife of the lightning
that was struck by you.
Over and over and over again
I have watched the birds leave in the fall
and come back in the spring
and whether they were coming or going
especially at midnight when you couldn't see them
high overhead like the souls of the dead
I've always heard the same longing in their call
for something I've never been able to wholly comprehend
except as the way I miss you
on this journey without end
where the destination isn't always
the friend of the road
as the stars foretold it would be.
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poem by Patrick White
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There, You See, I Let You Go
There, you see, I let you go, just like that, open my hand
like milkweed, like dandelion, a grave full of ghosts
and let space take the parachutes and parasols,
chimney-sparks and fireflies in a gust of wind by a dark lake,
and I wonder if the stars, too, are a way of saying good-bye,
if the blood drapes its lanterns in black
after the light has fled
and latches the gate with a question, if
the sun dies in the apricot after it falls,
if the branch is sadder by the weight of one bird
or if the fruit it bears like tears is enough
to go on conducting the requiem of your absence,
because we are just an eye of water at the end of a leaf,
a match plummeting down a well,
a tiny fury of seeing that scalds the watershed
with the hiss of a cat, a feather of flame, and dies,
the dreary slag of a dwarf moon, a black, pitted skull.
And who would believe such a desolate thing,
was once a red bud on a paper stem, dreaming of flowers,
imagining the dawns that would come of its flaring,
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poem by Patrick White
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Every Path
Every path is as wide with compassion
as the planet that you're walking on
so there's really never any danger of falling off.
I didn't lie
and you didn't tell the truth:
two sins of omission
trying to fit lenses to clarity
like fashionable eyewear.
It's what people do
when they don't want to see too much.
And I'm sure you've recreated me in your own image long since
I discovered good-bye was older than eternity
and more absolute than space.
I remember you asking me once
after we'd finished making love in the red tide
as the breakers dashed their galaxies against the rocks
and we both sprawled there naked dripping with stars
what I thought a human was and I replied
an interpretation with a face.
And you asked why we were here
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poem by Patrick White
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Burning World, Take Me
Burning world, take me, fold me in your flaming arms
and let me disappear into the unforgiving night.
Among these blind, here, in their black eggs,
eyeless birds who nest in their own ignorance,
I am the leper of light they drive out
with the stone of the moon, the wolf
with the mystic wound that will not heal until the last star
is born of the bleeding. Return me to the cold, brutal beauty
of your mineral wilderness, my bones on Venus
and my skull an abandoned planet circling the sun at midnight.
Let my eyes be the last of my tears to fall
and my blood be strewn like a gypsy scarf across the darkness.
Erase all trace of me as you do the path of the water-stars
who walk here among the dead like spirits from another world
intrigued by our passing. Pygmies in a circus,
cannibals and emperors all, leaping from thought to thought
rock to rock in the lifestream
to the applause of future funerals, o let them fade
like the idiot savants of last night’s dream, meaning nothing
but what they meant to themselves,
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poem by Patrick White
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