When Imagination And Reality Are One

When imagination and reality are one
and there's no recourse for civilization
to distinguish between them by usage and consensus,
and the light of the stars isn't condemned
to a life of hard labour as a torch in a coal mine
looking for diamonds you can drink by the grailful
until you're as satiate as oblivion, there's no doubt
the mind is an artist riffing on the new strings of the rain
or painting it in picture-music like a poet or a scientist
who look deranged to those who've averaged out
the crucials of the mindscape like the odds of a lottery,
convinced as they are like pilgrims walking
from one end of their sacred asphalt driveways
to the other, that one size fits all, and that these
enlightened journeys without destinations
are just circles that haven't been squared yet.

But if you're off on your own,
making roads with your walking you're the first
to set foot on like the moon of a spaced-out planet

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poem by Patrick White
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Were There Stars

Were there stars in your hair that night?
I cannot remember,
so taken with your face
and the mystery and the silence and the sorrow
of the tender bell in your eyes
that could summon ghosts
of yesterday's embodiments to the fire
of any passion that lost itself prophetically
at a rave of shadows among the trees.
You eased out of your wardrobe of rivers
like a snake on the moon
sloughing its skin like the eclipse
of a far more vulnerable shining,
and I couldn't tell if you were
a doe or a lynx
stepping out of the alder groves warily
to lap the moonlight
that flaked the shore
with the silver petals of an undulant rose
older and darker than night blood.

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poem by Patrick White
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Late Spring Snow

Late spring snow on its way.
Dead ochres and colourless greys
that have never heard of the impressionists.
It's a landscape
it's a mindscape
but it behaves like a still life.
I've been staying up late
trying to paint my way
out of my life
until dawn every morning.
The windowpane a ripening phthalo blue.
It's compositionally deranged
to hear the birds singing
when you're totally exhausted.
Mentally physically spiritually emotionally financially
gone gone gone altogether gone beyond.
All my happy endings orphaned.
A sum of depletions.
I'm living this creative life
scribbling down the notes of the picture-music

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poem by Patrick White
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The Leaves Sluicing The Rain Down The Back Of My Neck

The leaves sluicing the rain down the back of my neck
to put out my candle of serpent-fire
like an orchid in an abandoned house well,
lightning in its tears, thunder in the hollow
of its telescope when the white runaway horse
pounds its hoof upon it at four in the morning,
the muscled embodiment of moonlight made flesh,
the stars running to peer through their windows
to see what's making that sound.

The sodden path down to the lake, rife with duff,
an Orphic descent whose picture-music
owes nothing to death, and the moss-pated skulls
of the prophetic rocks along the way, every precarious step,
the assessment of an omnipresent danger
that could kick the stool from out under your noose,
though you were foolishly hoping it might be
an Egyptian ankh, granting you long life
in an underworld where anything that's violet
is the toxic shadow of an inconsolable grief

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poem by Patrick White
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I Drag On My Cigarette

I drag on my cigarette
and pull the coffee up to my mouth
as if I were officiating at a sacrament
and it were some holy bell
extolling the black wine of the bean.

I am always more in the morning
than I will be again all day
and the light is creative until precisely noon
and I am at peace in the impersonal intimacy
of flowing along like a star or a man or a leaf
in this great dynamic that never goes anywhere outside itself
like a bloodstream, a mindstream, the nightstream
that flashes in the woods like the eyes of a beautiful woman,
and yet all these worlds within worlds move with it
as fluently as thought and feeling
in a mind that is not divided by decisions
or trying to locate itself like a constellation
on a starmap in the rain,
insanely fitting every dropp

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poem by Patrick White
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The Morning After Everything

for Luke Cochrane

Saturday morning rain in Perth
and things seem as intimately far off and strange
as the new maps of water running down the windowpane.
No birds on the black boughs of the November trees
and black mirrors in the empty funeral home parking lot
and on the other side of me
the stalwart bloodbrick of a wet church
that looks better in the nicotine lingerie
and dusky seaspray
of a single yellow floodlight at night
that can't get it up to be a lighthouse.
It would be a lie to say that I'm not in love
and happily alone, but I most wistfully am,
as I excuse myself for being me
and put myself off like the small death of another way
I could have taken to get back home, but didn't.
November's an orphanage after the last kid has left
and I'm sure there's an ancient chthonic wisdom

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poem by Patrick White
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Some Things You Weep Over Forever

Some things you weep over forever.
Fathomless watersheds of infinite sorrow.
Others last as long as it takes the rain
to get a flower to bloom and perish,
with promises of good things to come.
Beauty cherishes a lock of wisdom.
Separation, departure, exile, severance, change,
since the womb, and a good chance earlier,
things coming apart like a mother giving birth
to the ghost of herself she gave up
to facilitate your coming forth upon the earth.
Here you are in the splendour of your mystic specificity.
And who knows how many lifetimes
had to be achieved and forgotten just as they were
so you could show up here so uniquely?
Point is. Goodbye's always half of the greeting
and sorrow uses the same hand to hang on to life
as it does to let go of it with.
Our entrance is a back-handed exit.
We celebrate the seance and mourn the exorcism

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poem by Patrick White
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Even When The Road Is Missing

Even when the road is missing
like the absence of God, or a woman I love,
I praise that emptiness for the freedom it accords me
to create a way of my own like a river of stars
and for the universe it's left me
like a travelling companion I couldn't improve upon.

The gate shut, the door closed, the window locked,
I slip a key to a poem under the welcome mat
and say my house is your house anytime you call
and then go get drunk with the moon down by the lake.

And after awhile we're laughing at ourselves,
rolling in the leaves like the groundswell
of two happy vagrants with homeless hearts
making off with our lives for free as if
we'd just pulled off some cosmic B and E.
without leaving any sign of culpability behind,
except for the joy of our felicitous crime.

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poem by Patrick White
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First The Tenderness

First the tenderness; I feel the tenderness,
the downy edge of the leaf, the eyelash,
the green tooth of the leaf
gently opening its mouth to the air,
its flag of being high in the branches
unfurling like a sky of its own,
startled by the taste of the first star.
Every dropp of rain that falls
is a jester's cap,
three bells and a splash and that's me
learning how to swim in this new space
with an ark and a flood, you
the dove with the leaf in its beak, returning.
Then I check a little calendar of razor-blades
to see if any of the days
are holy days circled in my blood,
if I'm late for a sacrifice somewhere,
if there's a landmine waiting
like a spiny sea urchin buried in the sand,
glass petals shed from a broken rose,

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poem by Patrick White
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When The Spirit Moves

When the spirit moves it's the summation
of everything I am without definition,
the averaging out of all my existential crucials,
the dark matter of the moment
expressing the perennial insight
not as signs in the light, but light itself.

I don't know what it is or it is not,
maybe just an enculturated meme of antiquated emotion,
or a way of hallowing the next breath I take.
I could be cynical and say it's fake.
But then I'd have to eat my own ashes
with a long spoon, and what would I do
for an encore? Boring if the truth
doesn't leave you gaping in wonder at something.

I've seen the wind at night in full moonlight
silvering the hot gold of the wheat
as if it were cooling a sensitive burn on human skin.
I've seen the fireflies in the valley

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poem by Patrick White
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