Crazy Man Dancing With Fireflies
Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
Another one trying to shoot out the stars.
I hear the woman next door weeping again tonight.
I don't know what for.
Desire's a phoenix in love with water
if that's what it is.
The torch is plunged into the wound
to stop the bleeding
and the ashes get carried away.
I've loved nine women for years
and they've all buried me in a different place.
Or saved my skull to consult the dead
about a future that wasn't living up to the moment.
The white poppy of the moon
bats her eyelashs through the pines.
I've never been as innocent as a cynic
nor quite as susceptible
but I remember the pain of separation
like the mirror of the lake remembers lightning
as the most brutal of all its revelations.
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poem by Patrick White
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The Day An Empty Envelope
The day an empty envelope, the clouds
islands of their own in a slow wind,
gathering out of nothing, going anywhere
the blue conception of the dispersing sky urges
above the green, summer turmoil of the trees.
I wake up wondering if love is just a word
or a whisper of smoke from distant mountains
or a tuberous begonia someone tore up last night
in their madness to dramatize their exit out of ecstasy,
their roses, scalded lobsters, their heart
torn like a soggy dawn in the pincers of the moon.
And I have been here before at the end
of these long wharves pillared in departure,
standing firmly fixed in the tides of sorrow,
saying goodbye to the sky and the sea
that have cried enough stars for the night
to remember its light is the taste of oblivion.
The air breathes you in like an anchor of mist
and all the words we released like vows
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poem by Patrick White
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However Gratified I Am
However gratified I am, always I'm left with a hunger
for something more than I've tasted before
as if my emptiness were not perfect yet and I were
ready to let everything ride on a single throw of my skull
up against the wall just to see what falls out of its own will,
or change my species once in a while. Over-reaching
perhaps, spiritual pleonaxia, something amiss with my heart
or maybe I just don't want to be left behind, resigned
to an expanding universe I can't keep up with.
Things are as they are. It's clear. My mind's a hawk
with the blinders off. I've thawed the diamond.
Enlightenment flows through my heart like electricity.
I'm shining. I don't need a star to find my way home in the dark.
I can look upon the earth demonically.
I can see it through the eyes of the angel.
But the fireflies have taught me all they have to share.
And the lightning looks like a slacker compared
to the discipline I exact from myself just to
shock me out of the old growth forest in my heartwood
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poem by Patrick White
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The Painting Finished
for Sally
The painting finished, I sit at my desk
and go on painting windows and computer screens.
My body is grateful and my heart a submarine.
I don't know if I expressed what I meant to mean
but there it is and that's an end of it for the night.
Time now to rely on my resident metaphors.
Stop looking at things that flower in space like stars
and coercing the light into compliance.
Sit in my apartment and watch the weave of the rain
unravelling the loom of the window in tears.
Feel like a seance trying to talk to an exorcism
when I address myself in my solitude
at cruising altitude over the sirens and car horns,
the wailing of long distance freight trains
like graffiti art shows on the road all the way
from North Carolina, the land of talented spray bombs,
and the gleeful shrieking of a gaggle of girls
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poem by Patrick White
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Some People Go Looking For Happiness
Some people go looking for happiness.
Some prefer power or beauty wealth and fame.
Some crave intensity.
Some seek peace.
Some search for food and shelter.
Some want to die with a good name.
Everybody takes their lead from the way they came.
And everyone says they're looking for love
though no one knows what it looks like.
They try to fit their thoughts to their words
like skin they can touch
that doesn't scar like the moon
or shed like a petal too delicate for the senses
but most just end up trying
to mummify the mindstream
by laying thousands of years of starmaps
down on troubled waters
like autumn leaves
that don't know where they're going.
Eventually everything's swept away
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poem by Patrick White
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Lady Nightshade's Suicide Wasn't Vain Enough
Lady Nightshade’s suicide wasn’t vain enough.
She insisted on dying for the world.
She finally stepped through the black door.
She took all that splendour of mind and flesh
and instead of going supernova to make a statement
let it shrink down into
the single snowflake of a white dwarf
in a spring thaw.
She died as unobtrusively as a wild flower perishes.
Lady Nightshade died like a whisper in a hurricane of razorblades
a candle flame
a toy in the corner
that knows when it’s time to let the child go.
She knew her greatest claim to fame
was perpetual silence.
There are some eyes so clear and radiant
the light’s too shy to enter.
There are some mirrors
that have to turn their backs on you
to show you what you’re looking at.
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poem by Patrick White
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I'm Flying Under The Light
I'm flying under the light to avoid detection.
There. That's the first line. A cornerstone.
Maybe water, granite or quicksand
but the cosmic glain
is cracked open like a skull
to extract the message from the fortune-cookie.
The second line comes easier
though it hasn't come yet.
I'm waiting like a crematorium at the end of my cigarette.
Yes. Hot coffins for cool people.
Like it. Where's the rest?
A mirror looks into my face
and sees the enlightened folly of creation
is not the work of a clown.
Forgive the little arrogant flag of flame
I've been trying to raise
out of a nation of ashes
like an arsonist with noble aspirations.
I've looked up at too many stars over the years
not to see beyond my next breath
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poem by Patrick White
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They're Hanging Flowerpots From The Lamp Posts Again
They're hanging flowerpots from the lamp posts again
like a change of stars every spring, and between
the young trees that held their allotted postage stamp of ground
on both sides of the street, through a long winter,
they're turning up the soil in the whiskey barrels
as if they were digging up the corpse of a drunk
to see if he died sober or not or just accidentally fell in.
And I remember a man, used to live up there,
the second story window on the right, at the top
of a flight of sway-back stairs from carrying
two hundred years of the weight of the world
like the worn chakras and vertebrae
of a beast of burden that never woke
the serpent fire at the base of its spine
in time to free itself, but as the Arabs say
the donkey at the end
is in the lead when the line or the spine
which ever comes first, turns round.
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poem by Patrick White
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Unlost When I'm Writing
Unlost when I'm writing, the going's enough
and any path will do for the shining. Everywhere
space for the mind to move of its own accord,
dead bodies in the tide, waterbirds returning to the lake.
The pictures crowd together in the flames
and a flower blooms in the fire the fire cannot burn
and myriad themes are mingled in the same fragrance.
How else say it? I'm an alloy of stars, a weld
of metaphors that healed stronger than the original wound.
I don't wholly understand this, but I'm changing
bodies on the fly, dying even as I grow,
and the more radiant I become the less visible I am.
The mindstream in its flowing is a flying carpet
woven of eddies and currents, of thought, of feeling
the heaving, fall, and rush of many waters
animated by the going, inspired by the approach,
and some bring an easel, a loom, a telescope
and when the moon is shining, there are feathers
scattered on ten thousand lakes at once
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poem by Patrick White
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Each Window Its Moon
Each window its moon,
and a thousand lakes around here
each wearing it like a medallion.
The spirit of a woman haunts me
as the starlings head for home
and I just want to go down by the river awhile
and sit among some companionable bones
while the daylilies tender their buds
to the hot night air, and the river runs by me
without any notion of what I see in it.
No waterlilies yet, but the wild irises
are protruding out of their blue green sheaths
like cartridges of lipstick, and the clouds clear
and the stars get me thinking about her again,
and all the tender lucidities held in abeyance
I would say to her if she were here.
My heart startles me and jumps like a fish.
The fireflies play a game with me
where I have to guess what constellation
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poem by Patrick White
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