The Leaves Sluicing The Rain Down The Back Of My Neck
The leaves sluicing the rain down the back of my neck
to put out my candle of serpent-fire
like an orchid in an abandoned house well,
lightning in its tears, thunder in the hollow
of its telescope when the white runaway horse
pounds its hoof upon it at four in the morning,
the muscled embodiment of moonlight made flesh,
the stars running to peer through their windows
to see what's making that sound.
The sodden path down to the lake, rife with duff,
an Orphic descent whose picture-music
owes nothing to death, and the moss-pated skulls
of the prophetic rocks along the way, every precarious step,
the assessment of an omnipresent danger
that could kick the stool from out under your noose,
though you were foolishly hoping it might be
an Egyptian ankh, granting you long life
in an underworld where anything that's violet
is the toxic shadow of an inconsolable grief
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poem by Patrick White
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I Drag On My Cigarette
I drag on my cigarette
and pull the coffee up to my mouth
as if I were officiating at a sacrament
and it were some holy bell
extolling the black wine of the bean.
I am always more in the morning
than I will be again all day
and the light is creative until precisely noon
and I am at peace in the impersonal intimacy
of flowing along like a star or a man or a leaf
in this great dynamic that never goes anywhere outside itself
like a bloodstream, a mindstream, the nightstream
that flashes in the woods like the eyes of a beautiful woman,
and yet all these worlds within worlds move with it
as fluently as thought and feeling
in a mind that is not divided by decisions
or trying to locate itself like a constellation
on a starmap in the rain,
insanely fitting every dropp
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poem by Patrick White
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The Morning After Everything
for Luke Cochrane
Saturday morning rain in Perth
and things seem as intimately far off and strange
as the new maps of water running down the windowpane.
No birds on the black boughs of the November trees
and black mirrors in the empty funeral home parking lot
and on the other side of me
the stalwart bloodbrick of a wet church
that looks better in the nicotine lingerie
and dusky seaspray
of a single yellow floodlight at night
that can't get it up to be a lighthouse.
It would be a lie to say that I'm not in love
and happily alone, but I most wistfully am,
as I excuse myself for being me
and put myself off like the small death of another way
I could have taken to get back home, but didn't.
November's an orphanage after the last kid has left
and I'm sure there's an ancient chthonic wisdom
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poem by Patrick White
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Some Things You Weep Over Forever
Some things you weep over forever.
Fathomless watersheds of infinite sorrow.
Others last as long as it takes the rain
to get a flower to bloom and perish,
with promises of good things to come.
Beauty cherishes a lock of wisdom.
Separation, departure, exile, severance, change,
since the womb, and a good chance earlier,
things coming apart like a mother giving birth
to the ghost of herself she gave up
to facilitate your coming forth upon the earth.
Here you are in the splendour of your mystic specificity.
And who knows how many lifetimes
had to be achieved and forgotten just as they were
so you could show up here so uniquely?
Point is. Goodbye's always half of the greeting
and sorrow uses the same hand to hang on to life
as it does to let go of it with.
Our entrance is a back-handed exit.
We celebrate the seance and mourn the exorcism
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poem by Patrick White
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Even When The Road Is Missing
Even when the road is missing
like the absence of God, or a woman I love,
I praise that emptiness for the freedom it accords me
to create a way of my own like a river of stars
and for the universe it's left me
like a travelling companion I couldn't improve upon.
The gate shut, the door closed, the window locked,
I slip a key to a poem under the welcome mat
and say my house is your house anytime you call
and then go get drunk with the moon down by the lake.
And after awhile we're laughing at ourselves,
rolling in the leaves like the groundswell
of two happy vagrants with homeless hearts
making off with our lives for free as if
we'd just pulled off some cosmic B and E.
without leaving any sign of culpability behind,
except for the joy of our felicitous crime.
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poem by Patrick White
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First The Tenderness
First the tenderness; I feel the tenderness,
the downy edge of the leaf, the eyelash,
the green tooth of the leaf
gently opening its mouth to the air,
its flag of being high in the branches
unfurling like a sky of its own,
startled by the taste of the first star.
Every dropp of rain that falls
is a jester's cap,
three bells and a splash and that's me
learning how to swim in this new space
with an ark and a flood, you
the dove with the leaf in its beak, returning.
Then I check a little calendar of razor-blades
to see if any of the days
are holy days circled in my blood,
if I'm late for a sacrifice somewhere,
if there's a landmine waiting
like a spiny sea urchin buried in the sand,
glass petals shed from a broken rose,
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poem by Patrick White
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When The Spirit Moves
When the spirit moves it's the summation
of everything I am without definition,
the averaging out of all my existential crucials,
the dark matter of the moment
expressing the perennial insight
not as signs in the light, but light itself.
I don't know what it is or it is not,
maybe just an enculturated meme of antiquated emotion,
or a way of hallowing the next breath I take.
I could be cynical and say it's fake.
But then I'd have to eat my own ashes
with a long spoon, and what would I do
for an encore? Boring if the truth
doesn't leave you gaping in wonder at something.
I've seen the wind at night in full moonlight
silvering the hot gold of the wheat
as if it were cooling a sensitive burn on human skin.
I've seen the fireflies in the valley
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poem by Patrick White
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The Young Poets Tell Me I'm Old
The young poets tell me I'm old.
The old poets tell me I'm young.
Is it done, then, the work, time to let the sun go down?
Evaporate? Scatter my ashes among the stars
and out wait the eras to shine again?
Or is there still enough within me to immolate,
Take a firefly like the heater of a cigarette
and kiss the fuses of the supernovas, the wicks
of the unlit candles? I don't feel dead
though I try my extinction on several times a day
to see if it fits yet, if I've grown my way into it.
What the river gives up in speed, in flashing
down the heights of its sharp-edged peaks,
its supple effervescence, it more than makes up for
in the mass and the depth of its movement.
Yesterday, a snowflake on a furnace. Today
an encyclopedic glacier greased by its own melting
all the way to the sea. Yesterday, bright vacancy.
Today, dark abundance. And the days and the nights,
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poem by Patrick White
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First Yellow Leaves On The Black Walnut Trees
First yellow leaves on the black walnut trees.
The original digits on the wristwatch of the sun.
Waterproof to any depth you want to drown in.
The trees are homesick.
You can tell by the way they’re giving up.
Comes the season of the dead in harvest time.
The dark abundance of the light
inspired by the muse of the earth
to write poetry
that touchs everyone
like water and wine
whether the apples are gathered or not.
The mystic grape finds enlightenment
in the mouth of a human
when it breaks like a koan
that tastes of something older than the truth.
It’s good to walk through an open field by yourself
as if home were just over the next hill
as the night comes on.
It’s good to feel fulfilled
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poem by Patrick White
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Silence and Solitude
Solitude and silence. The emptiness of the living moment
subsumed in the mundane middens of the soul, clam shells
and sheep bones, the shucked content of the heart
cherished again as the afterlife of the evidence
I once lived here along with everyone else.
Before I write, this archaeological seance I hold with myself,
this ingathering of everyone I've ever been
flowing back into me where the mindstream meets the sea.
The continuous stillness of this contiguous awareness
where everything is a symbolic event in a dream
trying to wake up from itself to set the dream people free.
Emotional effusions of the moon bleeding among the coral.
Solar flares of conceptual insight returning like ingrown hairs
to the source of their deception like unwanted children
though I've franchised orphanages all over my mindscape
to shelter my rational thought from the persecutions of my intuition.
Serpent's tongues that have been struck by black lightning
humming like a choir of tuning forks half a note off
like a lie they told God, they've been living ever since.
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poem by Patrick White
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