One Last Pilot Light Of A Blossom
One last pilot light of a blossom
on the ghostly candelabra of the blueweed
and the New England asters huddled
like starclusters among dishevelled stalks
of blonde hay dry and brittle as hair
that's bleached its supple green
into a lustreless sunshine of flat bread.
Stripped of their leaves, the Southern belles
of the willows, now sadistic molls
whipping their own eyes like rain in the river
for things they wish they hadn't seen.
Planets scorched into extinction,
black walnuts crushed underfoot,
the air, thick with the ether of decay
and the water's turned mean in the cold.
Pelt of a muskrat in the cattails,
the leatherwork of bush wolves,
and at the foot of the oracular rock
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poem by Patrick White
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Not Imitating Anything Within Myself
Not imitating anything within myself. Not
cloning, replicating, or even confining
the same seeds to the same plants, endlessly
spiralling through space like a galaxy or a hawk,
drift, release, and disperse, condense and shine,
shudder with motherlodes of lightning in the ore,
let the light turn back on itself like a solar flare
or an ingrown hair, let the presence show me
the absolute purity of its absence if it must,
and that which is greatly unknown retain its sublimity.
I seek nothing. And find it everywhere. I make
no appeal to the silence to make something happen
for a change, as if it had a mind of its own
that didn't come with an explanation or an alibi.
Neither indictment nor confession, I'm not listening
to the stars through the black walnut leaves with my ears.
Three blocks away the teen agers sound like
white water in a small rapid, and the heavy night air
can barely keep its eyelids open, and though
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poem by Patrick White
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Barley Moon, Tonight
Barley moon, tonight. Hurt deeply but don't know why.
The threshers and the raccoons and soon the Canada geese
have already done their work, so there's nothing to harvest
but a few cobs and kernels of cattle corn that look like
they have bad teeth. Pale yellow ochre ribbons of the moon
that flake like the acephalic pages of old holy books.
Something unknown is trying to be born of my emptiness.
My heart and my body strain to sustain sufficient gravity
to hold it in its orbit long enough to attain fruition
and hopefully, then, we can both let go of the labour
of trying not to let go of the climber that fell over the cliff
tied to our spinal cord like a burning box-kite
or the arrested development of a corpse past its prime.
For all the fury of their clarity in the cold air,
the stars seem more distant, aloof enough to be cruel,
almost savage like these fields returning to their own agendas,
purple loosestrife and mustard, and the hopeless green
of stunted plants trying to get their time in before the first snow.
I've walked these meandering dirt roads before,
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poem by Patrick White
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All Day The Sun
All day the sun ripens the grape;
all night the wine ripens the cup,
a carrying forth into a carrying forth
of fruit into fruit, sun to grape,
grape to cup, cup to mouth,
life into death, you into me,
and everything drunk with transformation,
and everything crazed with flame and fury
as if the lips of the night were bleeding
as if there were eyes on the limbs of trees
that were nudged by the wind
to let go of their chandeliers
and the fire wanted a creek bed of its own
that could weep its way to the sea
and the wind shook the window
it wanted to be. And there are shoes
that were once the barges of men,
and roads that mistook themselves
for a journey, and hearts in the grass,
hardly distinguishable from other boundary stones
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poem by Patrick White
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Even Before The Daylilies Have Re-opened
Even before the daylilies have re-opened,
walking home in the early morning air,
admiring the blue-green petal
of the new apple of the dawn,
Venus ferociously beautiful, and Jupiter
unusually shy by comparison as Aldebaran
fades faster in Taurus than either of them
in the onrush of light, the town immaculately quiet,
and the traffic light feeling robotically unheeded
and the bloom off the streetlamps
in the parking lot of the new hotel,
the cars immobilized in a coma of stillness,
how clean and eternal the silence seems,
how uncannily pure the bliss of life in the air,
as the birds hidden like celebrants in the trees
planted along the sidewalks, and in the black walnuts
of neglected backyards, sing as if they couldn't
contain themselves like old guitars in the corner,
or books upon a shelf, that have heard it all before.
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poem by Patrick White
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Obliterations Of Beauty And We Weep
Obliterations of beauty and we weep
for what cannot long abide in us
because we, not the rose, are the ones
who are passing so irrevocably away
into an abyss that doesn't
take the measure of anything.
The lake knows the time
by the wingspan of its waterbirds.
I note the location of the stars
in the rotation of the Big Dipper.
And there are crickets
that will yield the time as well.
Time, too, like human solitude
is embodied in the things of this world.
Time perishes when we do,
is born with us, matures,
and embraces our ends as its own nature.
Time sets its pace to the passage of us.
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poem by Patrick White
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I Have Never Said
I have never said to anyone that I loved them
and not meant stars, not meant soft green lanterns, not
meant the light coming out of the dark
and fireflies on a windy summer night by a black lake
or the lamp that draws the doe out of the shadows
or the moon drunk quicksilver in the inebriated window
warping its image through the delusional weeping
of dirty winter glass signed like a guestbook
by everybody’s tears, inside and out, and this
still the case though I’m old enough to know
all that crying never turned into a single chandelier
and sad ink’s a bigger liar thread for thread
than the dyes of joy that colour the whole head hopeful.
And I have lain like an island of flesh in a coven of candles
beside cool dolphins with seabird hands
off the coast of my longing, and marvelled
at the amazing bridges of their bodies
and how they nudged my shipwrecked heart ashore.
I have never said to anyone that I loved them
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poem by Patrick White
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Writing Graffiti On The Blue Walls Of Heaven
Writing graffiti on the blue walls of heaven
to bring them back down to earth.
Seven come eleven in reverse
I'm rolling my skull like snake-eyes
against the odds of finding my afterbirth
buried on the dark side of the moon.
Cygnus transits zenith and I've
desanctified a small cross
I retrieved like a corpse from the river,
a mere splinter of a skeleton, poor thing,
to remind myself where I
begin and end like a crosswalk over
one Rubicon after another.
But great bridges
from little crosswalks grow
like rainbows at midnight
and you never know
when the wind's going to blow on your luck
like a butterfly cupped in your hands
and you're going to bump into
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poem by Patrick White
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It's Not Mad
It’s not mad to ask directions from the lightning
and these clouds and roads of unknowing
that unravel like threads of blood
in the refutable hands of time, not mad
to follow the wind anywhere like the blind
or someone in love. Follow the feathers, the leaves,
the weathervanes of the flowers, the lifelines
on the palms of your hands that go nowhere
you haven’t already been, it’s all the same eventually:
there’s nowhere to go, just the going.
And there are crossroads of the mind
and intersections of the busy heart
with clocks in uniforms timing the traffic
that still can’t tell you where things begin and start,
or if you’re progressing backwards into behind.
And there are voices you can trust to lead you like streams
out of your lostness, and books, and maps, and dreams
and stars over the endless horizons of eyelids and hills
that end in themselves like shoes and roots.
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poem by Patrick White
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Are You Born Yet
Are you born yet, you who will understand this
when I have receded like a wave into the foam
of oncoming stars, no more than a cachet
of this remote flowering in the darkness,
one man’s indeterminate attempt
to carry the cherished fire
of his own indefensible humanity
like lightning in a battery
with umbilical cables and fangs
to jumpstart yours in a dark, cold time
that hasn’t happened yet? Are you there sometime
up ahead beyond this boundless falling
ignorantly pure and ferocious as I was
springing out of the nebular hypothesis of your own breath
like a tiger of light on the jugular of the judas-goat
life chains to a wounded cross of southern stars to catch you,
the crux australis of the issue? How many times
have I pictured you in the albums of futurity
tracking these words of mine back to me
in the lair of this particular day
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poem by Patrick White
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