The Young Poets Tell Me I'm Old
The young poets tell me I'm old.
The old poets tell me I'm young.
Is it done, then, the work, time to let the sun go down?
Evaporate? Scatter my ashes among the stars
and out wait the eras to shine again?
Or is there still enough within me to immolate,
Take a firefly like the heater of a cigarette
and kiss the fuses of the supernovas, the wicks
of the unlit candles? I don't feel dead
though I try my extinction on several times a day
to see if it fits yet, if I've grown my way into it.
What the river gives up in speed, in flashing
down the heights of its sharp-edged peaks,
its supple effervescence, it more than makes up for
in the mass and the depth of its movement.
Yesterday, a snowflake on a furnace. Today
an encyclopedic glacier greased by its own melting
all the way to the sea. Yesterday, bright vacancy.
Today, dark abundance. And the days and the nights,
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poem by Patrick White
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First Yellow Leaves On The Black Walnut Trees
First yellow leaves on the black walnut trees.
The original digits on the wristwatch of the sun.
Waterproof to any depth you want to drown in.
The trees are homesick.
You can tell by the way they’re giving up.
Comes the season of the dead in harvest time.
The dark abundance of the light
inspired by the muse of the earth
to write poetry
that touchs everyone
like water and wine
whether the apples are gathered or not.
The mystic grape finds enlightenment
in the mouth of a human
when it breaks like a koan
that tastes of something older than the truth.
It’s good to walk through an open field by yourself
as if home were just over the next hill
as the night comes on.
It’s good to feel fulfilled
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poem by Patrick White
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Silence and Solitude
Solitude and silence. The emptiness of the living moment
subsumed in the mundane middens of the soul, clam shells
and sheep bones, the shucked content of the heart
cherished again as the afterlife of the evidence
I once lived here along with everyone else.
Before I write, this archaeological seance I hold with myself,
this ingathering of everyone I've ever been
flowing back into me where the mindstream meets the sea.
The continuous stillness of this contiguous awareness
where everything is a symbolic event in a dream
trying to wake up from itself to set the dream people free.
Emotional effusions of the moon bleeding among the coral.
Solar flares of conceptual insight returning like ingrown hairs
to the source of their deception like unwanted children
though I've franchised orphanages all over my mindscape
to shelter my rational thought from the persecutions of my intuition.
Serpent's tongues that have been struck by black lightning
humming like a choir of tuning forks half a note off
like a lie they told God, they've been living ever since.
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poem by Patrick White
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All The Good Reasons That Get In The Way Of Writing
All the good reasons that get in the way of writing,
baby needs new shoes, and you're conscientious and diligent,
will kill you faster than the bad ones
that brought you to the edge of your mindstream in the first place
to dip your skull like the cup of the moon
in the wellsprings of your own imagination
instead of always sipping spit from other men's mouths.
I'm not saying don't do what you must do
to be a decent human being, or as close as you can get,
but when you're creatively underwhelmed
by the rising Rockies of Circumstance
losing their footing like an avalanche of cornerstones
coming down on you like a barrage of asteroids,
you better find a mountain gear deep within yourself
to power you out of the way of your own collapsing mindscape.
Don't come to a reasonable truce with the ashen exigencies
of the underwhelming reality love married you to,
or pontificate like a hollow urn on the tragic absence
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poem by Patrick White
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Softened By The Spirit
Softened by the spirit of the elegant day,
saturated colours and the bluing of shapes
in the distant mist,
homogenous grey sky
and the last green leaves of the sumac
consumed in their own fires
(that's enough of a local habitation and a name)
there's a sweetness in the choirs of the ashes
that fall everywhere like feathers
from the passage of my emotions
as I consider the course of my life
like the tenderness of smoke
unspooling from a blue hill
I've been driving down
this snakey dirt road
forever on and on and on toward
without really knowing who lives at the end of it
or even if there's an end of it
or a door and a threshold and a fire
that speaks the same language I do
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poem by Patrick White
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O Igneous Rose
O igneous rose, are you the furnace or the urn of the butterfly?
Or should I ask the vatic wind which pyre is mine?
Will I be be food for the stars again, will I mulch
the dark matter of the roots with my remains
or will my ashes retain some semblance of the light
like the ghost feeling in the heart of a spiritual amputee
or linger among archetypes like fossils in the Burgess Shale
that haven't reached their full potential yet?
Not Hell, not Heaven, not Hades, Sheol, Tartarus
Dis, Avernus, Jana, Jahannum, Nirvana, Samsara,
or the great abyss where nothing is even in the slightest,
and presence, and absence, and time aren't even
anachronisms of their past lives. I'm not going
anywhere when I die, because death is not discontinuous
from life in the known universe, though one's a lifeboat
and the other's what you need it for to stay afloat.
Wherever your mind walks in unison with your heart
deep in emotional thought without too much attention
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poem by Patrick White
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Things I Would Say To My Daughter If She Were Here
for Jody
The important thing
is to stay ahead of the pain
like a debt you'll pay tomorrow with your life
they're calling for today.
Tips for survival:
Luck has nothing to do with intelligence.
Stupid will get you killed faster than evil.
The most dangerous assassins
conceal themselves under the eyelids
of those who say they love you best.
And as any bruised heart knows
there's more power in an open palm
than there is in a fist
and the best way to get someone
to taste their own effluvia
is not to point to it.
A lot of opinions
is the frenzy of gnats in the sunset.
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poem by Patrick White
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Not A Black Wind On A Blue Day
Not a black wind on a blue day
but definitely grey.
Enter image of a slumping gas pump
with red paint flaking off it
and a coca cola sign just as old
hanging lop-sided
above an abandoned grocery store
across a small wooden bridge on a dirt road
beside an old stone mill with a seized waterwheel
that stopped turning in the flow of the river a long time ago.
Now take it a step further
and try to imagine a black pot-belly stove
in the middle of the wooden-floored grocery store
with people warming their hands around it
like petals turned toward
this black sun that shines at midnight
almost cast iron cherry red when its stoked
with two year old red oak
and it's snowing thick and heavy outside
as if someone got into a pillow fight with swans
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poem by Patrick White
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Living On A Planet That Kills More People Than It Heals
Living on a planet that kills more people than it heals.
And the most dangerous of predators, our own ideals
turning on us like ingrown hairs, solar flares the wind
blew in our faces without any of the veils or auroral graces
that used to adorn our amazement at what our eyes
in creative collaboration with victimized ions, could do
with the last breath of an expiring sun god to make it
mystically beautiful and awe-inspiring. Just
to be a witness to it was enough to keep your mouth
shut for the next ten thousand years, the silence
before the sublimity of being in the presence
as convincing to the farmer as it was to the astronomer.
As civilization progresses into an improved savagery
and people grow more bovine in their living rooms
as the one-eyed liar at the nadir of the third eye
entrances them into believing they're still
grazing in the starfields of genetically modified astroturf
they were raised on, slowly, from a moon cow's point of view
it's beginning to dawn on people that civilization
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poem by Patrick White
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Prima Noctis
Of human misery what’s left to tell
the single bead of the moon
that makes a lonely rosary of revolutions,
one face always turned away
as if it refused to look upon
its own imploring features
in the brutal, breathless, garish light of day,
or those of the earth
reviewed in the turning below?
I am nothing, a man, a microbe on a skull
picked clean by immaculate cannibals
whose hands are greased with brains,
my much vaunted, cultivated consciousness
and sterling will, free, or spontaneously
predetermined, the leaf of an afterthought
enhancing my passion for light
and periodic sentences.
Look where you will
and tell me this is evolution; tell me
this is that continuum of used mutations
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poem by Patrick White
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