God, I Hurt Sometimes For Reasons I Can Only Guess
for Sally
God, I hurt sometimes for reasons I can only guess.
Don't know what it is, too much love, too little,
but it feels like I'm giving birth to fog,
or my heart is standing in the doorway
of an abandoned chrysalis asking if
we could do it all a little differently this time,
and ingather like the nebulae of the stars
instead of the circus tents of these gypsy moths
swarming the Dutch elms like fake starmaps
that don't know much about shining in the dark,
but eat mini blackholes through the leaves
that have known greener days of radiance,
and more creative things to do with the light.
I can see the stars even in daylight
from the bottom of this fathomless well
only the snakes and the frogs and the fireflies
descend into to drink from the dark watershed
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Things I Must Say To You The Crystal Said
Things I must say to you the crystal said.
Jewels I must turn in the light.
Things I have gathered
like wild herbs from the starfields
to make a cool poultice of the moon
to draw the pain out of the wound
like a child that got turned around
when she was born
on the nightside of her blue eyes
to colour outside the lines of her constellation
like one of the original watersheds of Aquarius
that didn't take to the bottle and spoon of lesser wells
that warily sip from themselves
as if they were testing for poison,
but poured herself out
in an elation of so many lifelines
so many rivers vital with beginnings
the world mountain discovered her
like gold in the stone
gold in the mindstream
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
When You Look At A Star
When you look at a star
can you see
how the night leaves
the intimate doors
of intuitive eventuality ajar?
I'm all future with a prophetic past.
Aviomantic signs of liberated doves.
So many lifespans in a single moment.
How many light-years to the nearest star?
And how many shadows back?
Trying to say the inexpressible in words is like
to trying to thaw a snowstorm
on the tip of your tongue
flake by flake syllabically
or trying to explain bubbles to a glacier
in a momentary suspension of disbelief.
When you look at a star
do you see
that's it's you
that's shining up that far
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
It's Writing Me
It’s writing me.
I’m not writing it.
It’s got nothing to do with obedience
and there’s no chance of betraying it
even now that I’m three thousand miles
and forty light years away
and all the fireflies and lightning bolts
in my mystic cloud of unknowing
have turned into a frenzy of fanatical killer bees.
I’m swarmed by anxieties like mental space junk
and snakey wavelengths of yesterday
still trying to shed the sky like sunburnt skin.
Like the mythic names of old lovers
tattooed on our foreheads and firearms forever
and the obsolete starmaps in braille
that we followed like the magi
across this friendless desert of stars
as the signage of something divine.
And it isn’t the ironic sublimity
of the implacable circumstances of fate
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
My Eyes Are Getting Better
My eyes are getting better
as I get older
despite the sunspots
and leggy eclipses
and when I look back
I can see further than I ever did
except it isn't the light
that illuminates things any more
it's time
and that's a whole other palette
with colours of its own
wavelengths faster than light.
When you see things with your eyes
the past may be red deepening into black
and the future a furious white-blue
that pushes the darkness back
a T Tauri star or two
but when you see things
with the whole of your being
it isn't time that's passing
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Because I Don't Confront You
Because I don't confront you
doesn't mean this tree
doesn't know how to stand up to the wind.
If I bend like a river reed in a current
I'll still be here
long after the current has passed.
To the unenlightened it's inconceivable
there's nothing to win
because both opposites are empty.
Take empty from empty it's still empty.
No reason to put a gun to your head to check it out.
Just because you've got a trigger
like the first crescent of the moon
doesn't mean you have to pull it.
Three for three.
Blood and cartridges.
Strange lipstick.
But you're still banking on the one that's empty.
Those that have the power to hurt
but will do none.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
You Don't Come
You don't come. Your absence is a guillotine. My heart
plummets from the altitude it risked in looking forward
to a day with you outside of time and circumstance, jumps
from the edge of paradise, the flat earth, the back
of a winged horse. You don't come and such
is the nature of love
I go out of the plane not knowing
if I've got a parachute on and my heart
pulls the rip cord to see if there's any salvation in the fall,
any flowers for me in the bag, morning glory
or dandelion seed, or this is just another
mode of acceleration to death. You don't come
and my heart candles without a reserve,
I haven't packed a spare dawn
and though I will make every effort to understand
there's a grave waiting down below like an open mouth
and the void is laughing at the persistent folly
of my believing you would come,
and my fear of not being worthy of love anymore
sends my mendicant self-image out
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Your Face Among Many, A Blossom
Your face among many, a blossom.
Let it go. Let it go. Let it go.
The sun can't understand why it can't
open the buds of the parking meters.
Some people worry they don't have talent.
Given a name, who isn't a masterpiece?
A perfect self-portrait of what they're becoming?
Talent, the worst superstition of all.
That lullaby you sing to your voodoo doll
at bedtime, to let her know she's special
when, in fact, she's blind. Talent.
That estranged mix of an eclipse and an oilslick
that isn't sure of its standing in life.
Sensible shoes wishing they had wings on their heels.
The redundant navigator of mountain streams
that would have found their own way to the river
all by themselves. You ask if I think you have talent.
To me that's like a flower asking
if I think it will ever come to bloom,
a star wondering if it's shining or not,
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Easy
Easy to extract oneself from the climacteric of doom
that will absolve humanity of its horrors
by placing its destiny in its own hands
like a loaded gun in the hands of a child
by taking long nocturnal walks by the Tay River
among wildflowers full of farewell.
To watch the moonrise glowing
on the Texas toes of my wet black boots
as if they'd just been spit polished by morning snails
and sense the just proportions
and inchoate eloquence of eternity
in the trivialities of sublime coincidence.
How randomly everything fits
into this urgent medium of life and death
as if it played the tailor to its own emergence seamlessly
the way the mind stream cuts a path for itself
among a bewildering array of rocks and fallen birch
or a startled rat snake adds its wavelength
like a higher frequency to the laconic water
and yet no river has ever flowed the wrong way to the sea.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
So Far Down This Road
So far down this road
without a destination
my childhood doesn't
recognize me anymore.
So far into this life
I've never been outside of
I can speak to myself
in a foreign language
that no one can understand
as if it were the ancient dream-grammar
of a past tense
that talked its way into the future.
So far into what I've become
the peduncle is lost
in the ensuing phylum
and of all thought
I'm the first monkey
to look for its origins in an asylum.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
