What I Have Not Been To The Few I Loved
What I have not been to the few I loved,
the cost of what I am. Whoever that is.
And the poor boy happy ending
that was supposed to conclude in money
to redeem the aristocratic poverty
of a doomed childhood, scrapped
from the start as slavishly predictable.
I shone for a while, angry and bright
and university was an easy ordeal of guilt
while my mother washed floors in the Uplands,
and I went through culture shock
in my own country to learn that
not everybody lived the way we did
never further than twenty concrete blocks
away from the despair and poverty of home.
Three meals a day and shopping tours
to Europe, with a jaunt to Auschwitz
along the way. My mother would dress up
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Mystic Regency
Blue hole in a swarm of afflicted emotion,
I cannibalize my own event horizons,
to turn off the glare of the lifelight
that boils my brain in delusional bleaches
that present themselves as the truth.
I have known nothing
but the fragility of a tolerable hell since I was born
so I am not fooled into believing
anyone stands on more than quicksand.
And yes, there are women and stars and flowers,
orchids in the shadow of an outhouse,
eclipses that draw the veils
off faces and hearts like shadows and eras,
gold in the bones of extraordinary people
who move like swans across the mind
easy in the grace and dignity of their excellence,
and sometimes, for brief islands of serenity
I am one of those, but only briefly
and only long enough for me to disallow myself
the luxury of thinking I’ve arrived anywhere.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
If You Could See
If you could see into the nature of a single thought,
what it really is, though you think you know already,
if you could for one moment as old as the world
stop casting all these handshadows on the moon
as if they were the birds and bedrock of your intelligence,
as if the waves hauled the sea around in chains,
as if the leaves were a language without roots,
you would stop reading yourself like a prophecy in your own bones,
and be brought to your knees like a bull
penetrated by the seven swords of insight
and realize the unwitnessed clarity of the emptiness
that suggested you to you out of its dark abundance
is also the bright vacancy of this world that keeps you company.
All these intimate secrets of yourself
you keep posting to the sky like stars
or the single shoes and milkcartons of the missing
when you go looking for yourself like knowledge
in the eyeless spirit's lost and found;
why don't you, just for once and ever,
treat yourself to a season of your own, and shed them;
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Something Said Softly
Something said softly in the night
like a tendril on a windowsill
tasting the moon, a whisper, a word
that walked in the light without
abandoning its shadow,
a phrase with wet wings
dreaming itself out of its chrysalis
not knowing whether it's a leaf or a dragonfly
until the whole tree wakes up beside it,
something sought but rarely said
saturated with the meaningless life of meaning
that could touch space like flesh
and make it feel the thrill of new eyes
running down its arm like tears.
And it's not that I want
to unsay the night or God
to define myself as a human,
and it's of little moment to me,
seed on the wind,
what worlds are born of my words,
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Brooding Sunset Before The Storm
Brooding sunset before the storm. Over ripe apricot
left out in the sun too long. Heat brain
boiling its thoughts in their own womb.
The clouds lumber like thundering Diplodoci
Slowly and in herds. Continental rifts in Pangaea.
Black outs and the lightning roots
of unknown blossoms sticking out their tongues
like petals to taste the first drops of rain.
The air menacing, thick, humid as lipstick
foreshadowing climactic things to come.
Sky bound i.e.d.s, and the pigeons scattering
for cover under the eves from overhead drones
that have been circling all afternoon
with the turkey vultures looking for road kill.
The windows set up like easels for the show.
Action paintings of still life with blitzkrieg.
The crackling of glass that layered black over white.
Oleaceous vapours of asphalt on roofs and roads.
I can smell the late Jurassic in rut from here
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Looking For Silence Like The Other Wing
Looking for silence like the other wing
of what I've got to say, landscaping with meteors,
or the planet having a face lift, some of the words
have echoes and some of them proper names,
and a few still homesick for their prison cells,
I keep painting on the white noise of the world.
I keep writing like a wolf in the fleece
of a shepherd moon with a secret life of water.
Scofflaw, a poet, driven into the wilderness
to listen to the voices of disembodied messiahs,
kings of the waxing year, flesh stripped from their bones
like desert shipwrecks waiting for
the providential tide of their tears to return.
God particles that got in their eyes like sand.
I hear them gnawing on their bones like calendars at night.
And I've said it in a flash of demonic indifference
trying to pretend they were listening immaculately
and I was compassionate, as soon as you give
your fulsome assent to a few simple things
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Pure Intensity
Pure intensity. The point of a star. Blue acetylene
to burn out the slag of the soul and burnish the gold
that pours from the ore like the full moon out of the new
without any fear of ever growing old.
Give up it all up like nothing less
than everything all the time
until there's nothing left for death
to get its hands on. Nothing to curse. Nothing to bless.
But you can't always tell which is which
as the witchdoctor minimalist
at the back of the wax museum
steps out of the shadows of his spider-web
and says less is more and more is less, more or less
as the crow flys. But there's deceit in his eyes
and you haven't got time to consider all that
when your hair is on fire like a tie-dyed comet
and everyone's mistaking you as a sign
of their second coming, when all you want to do
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Got A Boulder On My Chest Like A Heavy Heart
Got a boulder on my chest like a heavy heart
someone carried all the way here like a skull
from the river, and I'm buried under the hearth fire
of forty thousand years ago as if somebody
wanted to make sure I never got up again
and did a good job of it despite the grave goods.
Seven times down. Eight times up. Such is life.
I'm as legless as a Bodhidarma doll, a sacred clown.
Pop me in my inflated cherry tomato of a nose
and I bounce right back again because of the way
I'm weighted. I can remember when I had
the footwork of a boxer and I used to duck, weave, and bob.
There's a star still following me through the woods
deeper into the mystery of where I'm going
and what I'll see as if it were ageing right along with me,
shining intermittently through the crowns of the maple trees
as I do these days through the eyelashes
of my intractable third eye, gone, gone, gone, gone,
altogether gone beyond as if my sanity
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
One Side Of My Face
One side of my face what the world
looks like on the inside,
a mindscape I’m walking through
that changes shape whenever I do.
And the other just a clay bust of the moon
that somebody keeps working on
like erosion in Death Valley.
But tonight I’m tired
of looking for signs of life
where there are none.
The air is as smudged with cigarette smoke
as the dirty winter windows
I’m staring numbly through are.
Infra red aura of the town lights
reflected off the big-bellied clouds
as if something were burning
across the highway as those
who are awake yet listen
to the Doppler Effect of the sirens
to know if they’re still safe or not.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
All This Stuff
All this stuff going on in my head all the time.
All my fixed constellations changing like fireflies.
All the burning ladders of my unsuccessful siege of heaven
lying down like crosswalks at the feet of the mob.
And the stars that seemed so aloof and untouchable
settling like dust on my eyes.
I want to go home but home itself is gone
and there is no one waiting for me.
I live in these nomadic tents of my breath
that the wind blows through day and night
and everything I touch
though I long for the will of a pyramid
turns into quicksand.
I observe the life within me going on,
this flux of intimate intensities
as if I were no more than the container
and sentient window of a stranger's house
looking in out of the darkness
of my uninhabitable homelessness
that has always been my last known address.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
