If I Could Cry Again
If I could cry again, as once I cried for you, if
I could saturate this dark fist of a heart that closed up
and hardened from that flower so long ago, trying
to hang on to the jewel, the pearl, the star, the eye of the issue;
if I could turn this stone rose freaked with harsh minerals,
back into that night you drew the blade of the moon
across the wrist of the bridge you were standing on, waiting
it seemed your whole lifetime, trembling
like a dropp of shadow-flavoured water
from the tip of a spear of stargrass
for the wind to shake you loose from your agony,
a lost earring, I could put out this root-fire
that runs underground from cedar to cedar, person to person,
consuming its way without flame
through the long valley of the sorrows and years
where I buried you like a storm that had swallowed the hot sword
of its own lightning; I could affirm the black ash
of that night that has gone on dying in me ever since,
I could green it with daylilies and vetch
and the frog splash of lachrymose junipers beginning to rain.
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poem by Patrick White
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Tired Of Supplying The Stars
Tired of supplying the stars their skeletons,
or webbing them into constellations
like love-letters written in prison,
or dusting the hieroglyphics of their fossils
pressed between the pages of nocturnal shale,
looking for signs of original life,
this brevity of perilous confusion
that sits on a throne of fog,
its quicksand foundations
the filth of fanatics and fools, my skull
a paperweight in a laurel of razorwire,
and every gesture of purity, every
symbol, emblem and image of light,
every effort to labour for greener domains
heart by heart, just
another mode of murderous betrayal,
lipstick on toilet paper,
a bullet hole in a swan, I long
for the clarity of mornings that don’t exist
to assure me I haven’t wasted my life
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poem by Patrick White
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Too Far From Sorrow And Tears
Too far from sorrow and tears, and the terrors,
old blood on the blade of the moon, and the faces I wore
too long in the sun, my eyes peeling like paint,
and even the shadows of the bridal cherry the dull afterword
of a book that’s done its laundry, and all the crimes
that outran their statues and imitations, fossil fingerprints
that laid down their own tracks against the law
with ladders and portable crosswalks, buried
in unsanctified ground with question-marks for gravestones,
decapitated hangers, my heart rudders in the shadows
of the mindstream just enough to counter the flow
without moving, a fish in the tiger-stripes
of the river-reeds just below the drunks on the fieldstone bridge.
Maybe the gravestones will turn into hooks
and a corpse will catch me napping in the shadows,
take possession of my soul and show me where I belong
on an outdated starmap or some water sylph
come floating downriver with a lily in her teeth
and touch up my portrait with a glaze of emerald eyes.
And it’s okay to be this nullity for the moment,
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poem by Patrick White
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Salt Trucks Out On The Street
Salt trucks out on the street. Black ice.
Noah’s wife salted like Carthage.
The town encased in a glass patina.
The storefront windowpanes are jealous.
Orange pygmy snowplows
seeding salt and gravel on the sidewalks.
Ladybugs about their business.
Butter on a black mirror smeared
like a palette of streetlights and logos.
One misstep and you’re on your ass again.
The night is sumi ink.
There are no revisions.
Who didn’t expect
to die on the highway tonight?
Whose heart breaks like a poppy
glazed by the freezing rain?
Whose been broken off
the brittle tree of life
like a twig that snaps underfoot
to give the nightbirds under the eaves a warning
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poem by Patrick White
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Snow On The Streets
Snow on the streets grooved by tires
into a bar-code. A band burning its first c.d.
Garbage bags humped against the parking meters
like terraformed drunks in an albino mindscape.
I want to sleep. But savage clouds are fuming
with moonlight. Oblivion's sweet, my little death,
gentle as a snowflake but the prelude to it
is pierced by cauterizing anxieties
like a needle park for voodoo dolls.
I'd rather be a butterfly, a pinwheel
spinning on an axis through my thorax
but you can't have it all. I tilt away from the sun
at perigee and try to stretch the night out
like a budget of meds for the month.
The dark's a cool poultice that draws
the infection out of my dreams. It
sublimates my sorrows like dry ice
that skipped the tears. I don't want to get wet
in an ice-age. Crucified by icicles
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poem by Patrick White
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Sometimes Think
Sometimes think I'm always
a life too late
to catch up to my own
walking away weary of waiting for me.
Or I'm a star too far ahead of my own shining
and that's why it's always dark.
I know the agony
in the stones of an abandoned bridge
that shoulders the world for nothing,
upholds nothing but its own mass
and waits for things to pass.
And even when I fall into the river
to flow along with my own mindstream
without consulting the leaves like maps
I still can't get the moon off my back.
Look at all these orchards
littered along my banks
from the tent of a single blossom.
And there are nights
when I can smell snake on the wind
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poem by Patrick White
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And Should I Recall Whose Eyes
And should I recall whose eyes made the stars most beautiful,
and set the mindstream that flowed though us aflame with fireflies
a moment there and gone and come again like light
in the keyholes of the feral cats that prowled the graveyardshift
wholly to the top of the broom-swept path up Heartbreak Hill,
where the bones of the seven hanged men lay buried
in the duff of our childhood legends, a shadow and a name,
trying love on shyly like new clothes in the shadows of the pines,
where we lay down with the dead on beds of rusty compass needles,
out of sight of the windows of the town, how could I not feel,
here alone now by the Tay, thousands of miles away,
and more years later than it takes to walk a burning bridge,
waiting for the flower moon to appear above the horizon,
the waterclock in the nightbird's song of longing?
And if I were to say what it was like to be touched by her
when she was brave with hunger and my body
all loaves and fishs in the innocence of her hands
and her breasts and lips magic mushrooms without the flies
that swarmed the garbage cans in the back-alleys below,
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poem by Patrick White
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Come To Me In Rags Of Blue Fire
Come to me in rags of blue fire, you, muse, you,
the gardenia face on the other side of the black gate
whose ancient spears are tipped with the taste
of wounded moons and iron roses; do not be swayed
by the blossoms on the cherry bridge,
or why the shadows of the brick children
on the walls of atomic decisions
haven’t been signed by the artists; give up
your fixation for amateur comet-watching in the rain
and come to me, touch me, hold me, consume me
in the flames of your igneous dispositions,
pierce me with stars, tear me on the thorns of your light,
as you have loved me in revery, distress, and tears,
as you have loved me in horror and humiliation
and then yourself lain down with me
in the mass graves of the student guitars
that were raped and murdered in the limelights
of the show-bizz army trucks,
antidotes weeping all night from the crescent of your kinder fang
to keep my heart alive like a toad in winter,
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poem by Patrick White
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It' A Gesture Of The Heart
It's a gesture of the heart
that no one can explain
that lays its words down like cool herbs
gathered on the moon
to silver someone else's pain.
We lie down in the same wound
like two stones in the same river
that might make it to the other side
without drowning in the stream
and I speak to you of shores you can reach if you try
and you add yourself like a dropp of water to a shoreless sea, and cry.
And for a moment you are the devastated solitude
of a runaway in the rain
who can't abide the stranger she's become
as a lipstick butterfly emerges
from the shell-casing chrysalis of your rage
and you put your lips on like wings.
You're a princess with a white flag
approaching the ashes of a dragon
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poem by Patrick White
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The Stars So Near
The stars so near it seems the approaching morning
could wet its thumb and forefinger
and pinching their wicks like intimate candles
that have held the lovers close
and the ghosts at bay all night
put them out with a hiss.
An ancient mirror deep within me
I couldn’t bring myself to bury
with the woman who once looked into it
is beginning to flood like a river of eyes with autumn rain
and I want to cry for things
that have departed like water birds
from their circuitous reflections on the mindstream
and leave the heart knocking
like an empty lifeboat against the rocks
that no one sings from now.
I’ve stared at the moon several nights in a row
as if we drank from the same skull
and I want to elevate my tears to a higher level
as a rite of passage worthy of what I mourn
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poem by Patrick White
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