The Western Light
The western light
comes right in through my windows
and glows in a golden haze on the dirty panes.
It slashs geometric shadows on my landscapes
like some mad abstractionist
who took them way too personally.
And all they said
was moon tree star light stone flower river sun
as if that were enough of a vocabulary
to say the whole of creation
quietly under your breath
like a secret that’s shared by everyone.
Guess I’m not enough of an ideologue
to comb the swamp for my own skeleton
like the ancestor of modern art.
I’ve gazed too long and hard
at the waterlilies in the Fall River
as if I were meditating on koans
that effortlessly open by themselves
not to waste my mind on anything
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poem by Patrick White
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Begin
Begin anywhere.
Topple fall jump stumble plunge
into the eyeless abyss
into the roadless homelessness
of not knowing where you're going
or who'll you'll be by the time you get there.
Slash your way through the stretched canvas
of a painted sky
like a rogue star
with the blood of Betelgeuse
dripping from your brush if you must
perform your own Caesarian
to get out of yourself like an egg
into the Big Abide Beyond
and stretch your wings from dusk till dawn.
Don't hover like a cloud over starmaps
trying to work out a flight plan
waiting for the weather to clear for take-off.
In an infinite universe such as this
wherever you are
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poem by Patrick White
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So Crazy At Times I'm Exiled From My Solitude
So crazy at times I'm exiled from my solitude.
I disguise my madness as the excruciating discipline
of beading the stars into a lifemask I can wear
like a constellation of fireflies that never arises
the same sign twice. Among all these myriads of me,
not one with an identity I can isolate monadically
and say, see, I'm indefensibly this mystically specific human.
I have an ontological address, and these are my doors,
my stairs, my floors and windows, my local habitation
and a name as the bard suggests. Whatever my magnitude
I've got a place on the starmap. I'm grounded like a garden
in being. The hummingbird thrums sacred syllables
into the ears of the hollyhocks, aum mani padme aum,
the jewel in the lotus, and the crow caws like a black mass,
but even when I walk through the cemetery
up on Drummond Road, looking for a gravestone
with the future of my name on it to prove that I existed once
to suffer the same dissolution as everyone else,
none of the voices I hear like starlings in the elms
are my own. And altogether the dead echo: not here, not here.
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poem by Patrick White
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Trying To Express
Trying to express a more immediate intimacy
with the life of the mind
without attributing a form to madness
might just be another way
of looking for comic relief
from the actual facts
of the tragic folly that confronts us
like a world that won't tolerate any mask
you want to put on it for long
to lie about the atrocity of your irrelevance
and pretend you don't know
what you're looking at.
I dream I suffer the same
corpuscular purpose as a paramecium.
I wake up from these desert mirages
and it's true.
OK it's true.
Next.
Because nothing in life is an endgame.
And despite the full stop like an empty cup
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poem by Patrick White
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Spots On A Paint Rag
Spots on a paint rag trying to figure out
if they're part of a larger picture.
Daubs and smudges and smears of black and red.
Topographies of dry thick ridges of blue acrylic,
peach-coloured mesas bruised
by the encroaching violets of dusk in a painted desert.
Are these the wanna-be windows of life
who failed to achieve a whole and harmonious view
of what they're doing here swiping off knives
thick with the gore of cadmium red,
cleaning off brushes that get to go out
on the field to caress and poke
stars and trees into being? Waterboys, not players.
I say the word, life, and I feel tonight like
the heaviness of a bell that's supplanted my heart.
The right root, but the wrong blossom.
Even though I'd melt that bell
back down into raucous cannon
to defend the concept to my very last breath.
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poem by Patrick White
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The Radiant Nadirs Of The Underestimated
The radiant nadirs of the underestimated,
all these small town upstairs windows at night
where people bloom like flowers,
trout lily, hepatica, wood violet
under the duff of life,
old books and teetering obelisks of magazines,
nobody’s ever going to see
in this hemisphere
unless their clockwise life
has gone down the wrong way
and the world’s been turned
up side down on its head
so you’re compelled to walk on stars
to keep from falling off.
There’s a novelist across the street.
Window to window our apartments stare
blankly at each other
through the dirty winter grime
and the occasional moon
and ambivalent rose of the dawn
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poem by Patrick White
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You Keep Looking
You keep looking for meaning in a world
you say hasn't given you one
worth living for
and you're down and disappointed
and all that red passion
that used to burn like books and leaves
has turned as mystically brown
as the background of a Rembrandt painting
or gone up in smoke
at the Bonfire of the Vanities.
Now you're a copycat Savanarola
in a faculty lounge
trying to turn God back like the Renaissance
for behaving like the Medici.
You used to be a little on the teachy side
but now you're boring and preachy
having settled the whole issue
of what you're doing on earth like a fist.
You once went looking for the point of life like a grail.
Now you plunge it through everyone's heart like a spear.
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poem by Patrick White
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Trying To Put Some Distance
Trying to put some distance between myself and my past
is like trying to stale-mate a cloud with a mountain
by resorting to the last hope of all experienced liars,
objectivity. Third person singular pronouns,
he, she, it. Shipping containers from alien places
stacked neatly on the dock
like coffins and cord wood
you can talk and write about as if
you weren't buried in anyone of them
and none of the stowaways
and none of the illegal immigrants
and none of the corpses
were anymore related to you
than Cantonese graffiti from Seattle that rode the rails
all the way to Jakarta like one long sentence
about something you dreamed last night in your sleep.
Somebody's else's views in somebody elses' language.
You can stand on one side of the tracks
in the red glare of the most serious-minded lights
at the road block with the crossed swords
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poem by Patrick White
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In The Eye Of The Hurricane Rose
In the eye of the hurricane rose
all is as calm as a bee
as my world is shed around me
like eyelids.
The racket of Canada geese
holding a political rally
high over everybody's heads
a thousand feet straight up
as the economy returns like spring.
I know what it is
to be a phoenix of a tree
and lose your leaves
like a fire that goes out in the night.
I used to be a snowman
and purified myself
with my own disappearance
when things warmed up.
Now I'm a scarecrow
with nothing to chase away
except the farmer.
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poem by Patrick White
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Sad To See How We Bait Our Mind-hold Traps With Our Hearts
Sad to see how we bait our mind-hold traps with our hearts,
put all we are on the line, just for a little love, a kiss, a touch
an embrace that doesn't snap shut like the jaws of a great white
we put our trust in not to draw blood at the first bite.
I take people's faces off the shelves as they pass by
like second hand bookstores, and casually browse
their life stories only to find whole chapters ripped out
and sometimes the eyes, so you can see clear through
to the other side of what there was in the way of a view
to look back at you, that someone despised, and cut out
like a number two, twenty pound, book paper death mask,
black holes like the eye sockets of a skull,
slowly eating what was left of a face that yesterday
was the peer of the stars, the great seal of the sun,
the imprimatur of moonlight on the waters of the lake.
And I know those who love love for love's sake
more than they ever have the topsoil of an erosive human,
or the bedrock and watershed of their darker depths
where the fish, like ghosts, or fireflies and stars
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poem by Patrick White
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