Musing In The Aftermath
Everything sings, the shadows of the winter branches against the streetlamp
laced on the windowpane ribboned by dirt, backddoors and rooftops
and yet I am enveloped in this silence without wings, this voice
that valleys the universe like a dropp of water down the spine of a leaf
to the root of no flower, no heart, no simple mystery of the night
maturing into stars. I’m in a room with books, paintings, lamps,
plants, computers, easels and cats. Things are neither right nor wrong
though I flatter myself that I have grown from mistake to mistake,
defeat to defeat and cloak the sum of all my failures
in the unconvincing authority of experience.
It’s rude to take your masks off in the light.
I try to see myself in the darkness like a star
with too much to say that loves to give its hiding place away. Forgive
this indiscretion of my solitude, but my name has obligations
and there’s nothing in the house to eat but swans.
Soon enough there’ll be a term to all these spectral visions
that add their shadows to the lead migrations of my thought
and traverse the motionless deserts of the skull-faced moon.
And what can I say to the pilgrims who come to visit my heart,
all these lean feelings without deceit or art
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poem by Patrick White
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Adolescent Bridal Spiders Webbing The Doorway
Adolescent bridal spiders webbing the doorway
with laughter and tumescent sex,
waiting for the hilarious rain.
Waitresses with overly bleached hair
and melting chocolate roots. Young men in wife-beaters
orbiting their pheromones like shepherd moons.
The air is a Venus fly trap saturated
with the violet wavelengths of an unexpurgated murder.
Sheet lightning rooting in the nervous system
of teenagers dogpaddling in the heat without a lifeboat
between the iodine logo of the antiseptic bank
and the unpainted stairs with their garish fire-doors
that ascend into hell like most of the local ghettoes
dancing with their fans to cool off,
or drinking beer in the parking lots,
or passing spliffs to potted plants on the fire-escapes.
Exorbitant flesh sticky with sweat and deodorant,
And the heritage streetlamps haloed
in a frenzy of mesmerized insects
like comets falling into the epiphanous sun at midnight.
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poem by Patrick White
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Drunk On Nettle Wine
Drunk on nettle wine, alone, scalded by stars
that harass my sense of wonder like blackflies
with the atomic futilities of transformation,
the broken windows of their radiance,
an ice-storm of splintered glass
that catches me in a downpour of histrionic chandeliers,
the legends of enlightenment, a farce of words,
and the only thing the night has said for hours
that makes any sense in my patrician isolation,
an ambulance, a cat in heat, and the click of a loaded zippo,
I sit in a ghetto of upwardly mobile elements,
and confess to myself there's little left of my life
that shines in a way that isn't buffed
with time and separation and sorrow.
And I want to set fire
to the heavy theatre curtains of my bloodstream
that are always sweeping closed
like capes and lilies and weather-fronts
on the tragic premiers of my inexorable flaws,
and the decrescent scars of my cosmic screenings,
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poem by Patrick White
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You Don't Need To Put A Supernova In The Window
You don't need to put a supernova in a window
like a candle in a telescope
to help me find my way back to you
from the next galaxy over. I'm gone
like a sixties light show after the music was over.
But I didn't close you like a door behind me,
I didn't find you like a threshold
in the spirit's lost and found
and try to return you to the house you belonged to.
I've always been a little ahead of myself
so when I said good-bye, it will be light years yet
before you know anything about it.
It's just that time doesn't linger in the doorway
of enlightenment, and eternity isn't any closer to God
than the next moment is. A hundred billion stars
two thousand lightyears away and you,
checking the wiring on blasting caps in a beaver dam
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poem by Patrick White
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Still Life With Clown
Lost, but deliberately so, and every bridge a contradiction,
the water walking on me, and the stars
fingering this abacus of planets with emergency dial-tones,
celestial spheres with lunar polyps on their vocal cords,
how can I tell the comet with the black hair,
portents of carbon at noon
as the shadows disappear into their coffins like wedding-rings,
that she can’t sing, that the moon isn’t in the corals,
and if I were to touch her, slip my hand over her breast
and whisper clefs of adoration into her dangerous labyrinths,
enrole the sphinx in my riddles, I would still be a stranger
when we woke up in the rain?
And even if I knew, how could I begin to explain
that eventually reality thaws like a bar of soap,
dissolves like the flesh of the drowned
whose bodies were never found,
and jams itself into the mouth of the morning
to disinfect the exuberance of probationary heretics
who have fallen into a cult of birds? Is it spring, again; what year,
what universe; are there buds on the coat-hangers,
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poem by Patrick White
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Under This Black Umbrella
Under this black umbrella, the eyelid of the black rose
that eclipses the pearls and starfish that I feed it,
my second skin tattooed with a map of undiscovered constellations,
this black poppy of a sky ribbed like a tent
with the bones of bats and dragons, stalked on the spine
of an interrogative scorpion who reverses questions
like a fishing hook, my heart feathered for sacrifice
and pierced by its stinger for bait, though I never know
what god I’m dedicated to, what ghoul of the depths
rises to swallow me whole, I have risked my whole life
against the run of my luck, open in the house
under the shadow of its wing, following a funeral for years
that has lost its way to the grave. No need to tell you
that the mourners have turned to salt
and wandered away with the rain; no need
to tell you that I never knew the deceased
except as an elegant sorrow famous among clowns.
Under this black umbrella, this widow-veil,
this pygmy parachute, this mistaken sail of a lethal love triste
that jumps from attic windows, a deacon of descents,
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poem by Patrick White
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The Voices Of Dead Friends, Departed Lovers
The voices of dead friends, departed lovers
aimlessly feather the night air like the fragrances
of wildflowers and burning guitars thriving in the dark.
I'm out to see the Delta Aquarids down by the river,
leaping like a man with faith in his precarious footing
from skull to skull like a chessboard of oracular rocks
keeping their heads above water like a half-hearted bridge
dog-paddling in its own collapse, trying to cross
the same mindstream they're in up to their eyes
for a better view of the sky in the clearing on the other side.
Clouds of cometary junkyards in decaying orbits.
Placental remains of unilluminated afterbirths.
I delight in watching how wasted things shine the brightest
on their way down like blossoms of paint
flaking off the windows of heaven like rose petals
revealing these thorns that gore and slash the night
like matadors and meteors with razorblades
hidden under the screening myths of their eyelids.
It's natural when opposites come together,
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poem by Patrick White
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Old Gate Off Its Hinge
Old gate off its hinge.
Matted like a lapwing in the long blond grass.
What is there to distract me from?
I pass, but not as a predator.
I seek the high field at the end
of this narrow dark road at dusk.
I’m out for stars. I’m out for solitude.
Like these deep cuts in the road
my scars have taken me out for a walk
in the gathering darkness,
nothing to keep in
nothing to let out.
The sumac denuded.
The last of the asters ruined.
There’s a farmhouse back here
abandoned years ago
like an old book in the basement
under the covers of its collapsing roof.
And the ghosts of two children
hidden deep in the woods
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poem by Patrick White
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Innocent As Gravity And It's Raining
Innocent as gravity and it's raining.
Trying to paint a Monarch butterfly into a starscape
where all the wavelengths have been woven
by a third eye into a spider web. This morning
the left and right hemispheres of my brain
are separated like an hourglass undergoing
the meiosis of galaxies whose lustre's greyed
by the senile pearl of the sky. I want to play
aspirationally like fireflies among the stars,
but a gust of shadows has snuffed all the candles
and if I'm seeing stars at all, it's like a rainbow
wearing a Joseph's coat of colours
at the bottom of a well that hasn't granted a wish in awhile.
My heart's a loom of dissonant wavelengths
trying to weave my bloodstream like a carpet
it can fly away on braiding all these weak threads
and the light of all these images they carry
like the genomes of the souls of the dead
into the d.n.a. of a stronger spinal cord
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poem by Patrick White
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Rubies Of Blood Running Like Ruptured Cherries
Rubies of blood running like ruptured cherries
down my arms. The night swarms
like a feeding frenzy of junkies
all in for a little taste. The heat hangs
like something dangerous in the air
as if the atmosphere were on a short fuse
and you can feel the fangs of its potential bared.
Like a bear to berries, I come here for stars.
It's a lair of sorts for wounded wolf hearts
gored by the moon, and it's healing
to look upon the waters when you're in pain.
There's nothing undisciplined about the chaos here.
Everything just seems to fall into place
of its own accord without anyone having
to explain anything to the animated silence
about how it all works effortlessly
in an unintended harmony of living and dying.
The trees understand like an alphabet
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poem by Patrick White
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