A Canadian Poet Since You Asked
A Canadian poet since you asked.
I’m madder than the landscape.
Glaciers have scarred me
retreating north like my father.
My heart has been shaped by neolithic chisels
into a dolmen of Michelangelo’s David
with a silver bullet and a rock in his hand
and the determination of a statue
who refuses to be intimidated by a scarecrow.
The end of an ice age.
No leftovers.
The platter scraped clean as the Canadian Shield.
Savage runes carved in rock by rock.
Older than the Rosetta Stone
my silence is indecipherable.
I mean marrow.
I mean broken bones.
I mean blood on the snow.
The moon comes like a nurse to the wounded pines
and applies a cool poultice of light to their limbs
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poem by Patrick White
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He Kept Saying To Himself
He kept saying to himself
it’s not that hard to know the truth.
The truth is what you see
when there’s no one else there
to witness you witnessing it.
When your nakedness lets you be you
without worrying too much
about who that is.
He kept saying to himself
the truth is the infinite elaboration
of an archetypal fractal.
Keep it simple and austere.
The truth is a subatomic shapeshifter.
When you look at it it acts like a particle.
Turn away and it’s a wavelength beyond comprehension.
The swords of the cannoneer cattails
banged on him like a shield in passing
as he covered his eyes
to bull his way through the underbrush
heaving his mud-caked legs
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poem by Patrick White
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Flowers Are The Clocks Of The Light
Flowers are the clocks of the light.
Spring grey. Clouds. Half smoke, half crocus.
The rivulets are carrying last November's leaves away
like long lines of ants bearing the gnostic gospels
of the snow thawing into a spiritual life of water
back to the shrine of their colony
to be chewed over by the divines
masticating the mystery into something
like an edible orthodoxy of mystic impiety.
My heart is a bruised apple with purple blood today.
Neither passionate, nor aloof, clinging
nor unwilling to let go if that's what I must do.
One foot on shore. One in a lifeboat.
O what funny bridges we make as if
we were trying to balance the axis
of heaven and earth upon our nose
like the calves of giraffes learning to walk on stilts.
But there you go. What are you going to do?
That's the way it seems.
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poem by Patrick White
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