This Late In The Day
This late in the day, could I love you, could you
love me? If I made a black rose of my blood,
redshifting into the dark, and gave it to you,
not knowing what to expect, would you counter-intuit
the wounded watershed of the poetic imagery?
Younger I was a lot more dangerous than I am now,
though I wasn't trying to be. Dragons raged in me
in infernal crusades of the bad against the worst
as I stood at the flaming gates of the vulnerable
and said to their worst nightmares you shall not pass.
I used my horns and scales to empower the innocent,
trying to turn a curse into a virtue, the atrocities
of the left-handed legacy of my condemned childhood
into something even a stranger might be proud of.
In Zen it's said that nobody likes a real dragon
and even among those I came to the rescue of
like a Viking long boat with runes like scars
chiselled into stone, and well-seasoned swords
that backed up my word down to the very least detail,
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poem by Patrick White
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I Circumnavigated My Eyes
I circumnavigated my eyes
to wash these ashen rags of grief off
like the torn sails of the Magellanic Clouds.
I knew how deeply I was lost
when I set my starmaps afire
because they got in the way of the shining,
to give them a first hand experience
of lighting things up for themselves
like arsonists playing with draconian desire.
Took me years to get the last shadow
of your misdirected spearhead out of my heart,
make white noise out of the snarling chainsaw
that accompanied you like a seeing-eye dog.
At first the intensity of the pain
clued me forensically into thinking
the sheer immensity of your crime of passion,
the number of times you stabbed me through the heart
meant you loved me more than you cared to let on
but then I noticed all your knives were smiling
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poem by Patrick White
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It's Stranger To Conceive Of Me
It's stranger to conceive of me as I am
than to imagine that I'm someone else.
There's more largesse in the early spring air.
You can tell by the tears that well up in their eyes
the glacial stars are beginning to thaw splinter by splinter
withdrawing their claws from the corpse of the snow
like thorns from the Lion's paw overhead.
I can hear water in the creek tuning up
for the dance to come as soon as
the first violins of the crocuses get here,
the trout lily, the purple passage of the wild violet
under a leaf it took like a page from the book of autumn,
trout lily, hepatica, wood sorrel, grape hyacinth.
I like it here because it doesn't matter who I am.
Things are alert and vivid with life because
they're not threatened by the possession of it.
And time is a lot more honest
here where it lets its hair down
than it is back in town
where it's always now, now, now,
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poem by Patrick White
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Thirty-nine Children
Thirty-nine children destroyed.
Four of them, sisters.
Their blood a red atlas, spattered roses
on the bedroom walls they cringed behind,
their unfinished bodies and minds,
finished. Does anyone remember
what a child is
when it is not collaterally dismembered
into small feet and hands and faces
that had no choice but to trust the world
that savaged it like roses?
Five toes, an ankle and a heel
still occupy the floral running shoe
that never made it all the way to school.
Your bootprints on the throats of baby swans
like the bombpits of mass graves
where the hysterical mothers rave
in grief and rage
over what you have damaged
like ferocious boars who wear
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poem by Patrick White
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By The Time You Say It
By the time you say it, you're a bridge beyond the last river of your lament.
Is there meaning in this, content? Emerging
from this cold oceanic reflection, how good
to wrap the sky around you like a blue woolen robe warmed by a fire,
your lungs two bag-ladies sorting through the trash
of your denuded coffin for any rumour of green.
A back-alley dog sniffs at your limp smile beside a broken wineglass.
Your passions turn into mouths and eat you; your heart
mistakes itself for the apple on the tree of knowledge
and dreads the approach of Eve. Today, for example, over coffee on Gore St.
(just so the peasants don't storm the moat again,
thinking we don't know where we're at)
I heard you wondering why the moon always ends in et cetera.
Just to distract you from gnashing your teeth in the void
and sticking your flavourless gum messiah
to the underside of the flat earth, I showed you a picture of the wind's face
I painted under an overpass on primeval concrete.
A fascist restauranteur enraged by the ulcers on his greed
preached his disease to an unwilling congregation of tables
and jackaled our money away to the squat god of his digital scripture.
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poem by Patrick White
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If The Bread Got Any Harder
If the bread got any harder I’d be buttering stone,
and it’s morning again, cooler than yesterday
that licked my face like a dog
with the mosquito-breeding breath of a reeking ditch;
and maybe there’s a cabal of stars or confidential angels,
a thirteenth house of the zodiac
that no one’s ever heard of, with a garden of black suns
overrun by weeds, blooming along the walkway
up to the sagging porch, a place
where the dispossessed gather to own each other, a hidden harmony
that manages my affairs along with the stars and the ants
and knows with the confidence of a nightwind off the sea
that I am supposed to be here, broke, aging, alone,
dreading the landlord at the door like the beginning
of another ice-age, cataract, polar cap,
the shifting of a continental plate
as I wait like a fault in apprehension
of the final jolt that will tear me down.
And all of this in the name of poetry in a world
that holds the tail of the new moon like an old black bull in one hand
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poem by Patrick White
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In Lieu Of A Funeral
in memoriam: Steve Forster
Death has nothing to do with skulls or bones
seeping into the earth like widows
horded behind windows and doors,
nothing to do with the crumbling aqueducts of arches and vertebrae
that used to carry serpent fire and a thread of water,
and the gentler lightning of the little god
who was rooted in our flesh like an apprentice in a studio
learning to paint the world through our eyes, not
the gaping sockets, the oracular shrines of calcium
the blind worms probe like calendars and soft pencils
for signs of our former lucidity, the charred wizards
etched on our cave-womb walls, not
the rotten jaws and teeth we primed like leg-hold traps
and baited with roses of meat and fragrant blood
to tear and grind our daily bread
from the inquisitions of raffled animals we demonically possessed
until, unmuscled by time, unstrung like an old guitar
they lie forever open in amazement,
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poem by Patrick White
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The Flowers Of The Street People
White trash with their faces punched in like catcher's mitts
mooning the flowers of the street people as they drive by
like a float in a pageant of ignorance having a good time
at everyone else's expense. Pygmy heroes of their own irrelevance.
Annie, the bag-lady, puts the avalanche of her head down
and spits like salt as if she just survived Sodom and Gomorrah
as she passes by, sullen and resigned to the blackflies
that have swarmed her like the shadows of commas for years.
You just have to take one look at her face to know
she's the dried rose of a gnostic gospel that went flakey
long before women were forbidden from invigilating
their own spirits. Given the protocols of the bleakness,
even the city can serve as a shrine of sorts. Man bulls
in lunar labyrinths, and the Princess of Spiders,
unweaving her thread in a moment of desire
waiting to have her webs elevated among the stars
in cosmic reprisal for the betrayal of her abandonment to love.
And there's Peter, the architect turned shipwreck,
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poem by Patrick White
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You Don't Need To Tell Me You Don't Care
You don’t need to tell me you don’t care, not caring
is an environmental condition since humans became
too dangerous to trust their own minds as the world,
let themselves be morning doves in the phoenix-fire of the sumac,
or a light within a light like a planet in the dusk,
the pink lilac of Mercury, the flashing white
gardenia of Venus. Killing only lets you be
one thing else
after you’ve deleted all the rest. Not caring
is the shape of a final heart, the rose recast by the minerals
as stone, cell by cell, nest by nest, petrified
by the cuckoo whose young shoulder the eggs of its host out
like refugees that take over the government
that gives them shelter. Not caring
is an ancient battlefield in the morning
where crows and old women, idiots, wretches, dogs
plunder the dead lying like islands in the mist,
a cemetery of maggots that froze before
they could finish eating the horse. Not caring
is deciding to live without punctuation
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poem by Patrick White
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Never Alone With A Candle
Never alone with a candle
a firefly in a valley,
a star above the hill,
is your seeing less beautiful
than that stranger in the mirror
who takes you by surprise?
Can you hear your eyes
your eyes your eyes your eyes
falling like rain
on the plectra of the flowers?
Is that a coffin or a harpsichord?
Scarlatti playing the columbine
or the midnight requiem
of a dolorous pine longing
for a nightbird that never comes?
I can sense you count yourself
a dandelion among delphiniums,
a brown star without solar flare,
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poem by Patrick White
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