I Don't Want To Have My Eyes Glazed Over Nacreously

I don't want to have my eyes glazed over nacreously
if I were a grain of sand, a diamond in the rough,
living in a pearly world. Cataracts in the eye,
flowers in the sky. I don't want to live in a spiritual trance
blissed out like the first crescent of the moon
smiling down upon everything as if I weren't
attached to any particular atmosphere and all
the waters of life were frozen like tears in a jewelled locket
I kiss once in awhile in a rush of gushing devotion.

I love the mystic details of the concrete specifics of the world.
The stylus of the birds that can write with their beaks and feet
like cuneiform on the skin of an apple,
and wormholes that burrow even deeper
into the sweetness of the flesh, neolithic barrow tombs
aligned with the vernal equinox, and that soft blue talc
as if the dew had turned to powder that clings to the autumn grapes.
I like the spelling errors fate makes
on the staves of our foreheads where it writes
the picture-music of our destinies in such a way

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poem by Patrick White
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The Serpent

The serpent sits enthroned
at the top of its own stairwell,
helically reposing in its own empyrean
like an August hawk
coiling up its own thermals;
its fangs, a stargate
to an unknown afterlife, emancipation,
and the jewel of its head,
the first stone thrown,
a small planet without
the eyelid of a sky,
a nugget of mystic uranium,
looped in a turban of orbits,
a sacred arrowhead
that flys from itself like a bow
drawn back long before the wind
knew its first feather.
Lethal healer,
the sword that kills is the sword that saves.

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poem by Patrick White
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Making Peace With My Father

You could be dead by now.
How would I know?
Last time I saw you
was fifty-five years ago.
My first day of school.
Your last with us.
You’re the little man now, Paddy,
you said
then got on a greyhound bus
in front of Tang’s Pagoda
as I watched the door close
on that fuselage without wings
as if the whale had just swallowed Jonah whole.
The last time I noticed we had the same eyes.
The end of your reign of terror.
As I remember you fifty-five years later
you were brutal, violent, cruel,
a con-man and a drunk.
You hurt people then laughed at their pain.
You were the lethal meltdown of a radioactive brain

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poem by Patrick White
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This Late In The Day

This late in the day, could I love you, could you
love me? If I made a black rose of my blood,
redshifting into the dark, and gave it to you,
not knowing what to expect, would you counter-intuit
the wounded watershed of the poetic imagery?
Younger I was a lot more dangerous than I am now,
though I wasn't trying to be. Dragons raged in me
in infernal crusades of the bad against the worst
as I stood at the flaming gates of the vulnerable
and said to their worst nightmares you shall not pass.
I used my horns and scales to empower the innocent,
trying to turn a curse into a virtue, the atrocities
of the left-handed legacy of my condemned childhood
into something even a stranger might be proud of.

In Zen it's said that nobody likes a real dragon
and even among those I came to the rescue of
like a Viking long boat with runes like scars
chiselled into stone, and well-seasoned swords
that backed up my word down to the very least detail,

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poem by Patrick White
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I Circumnavigated My Eyes

I circumnavigated my eyes
to wash these ashen rags of grief off
like the torn sails of the Magellanic Clouds.
I knew how deeply I was lost
when I set my starmaps afire
because they got in the way of the shining,
to give them a first hand experience
of lighting things up for themselves
like arsonists playing with draconian desire.
Took me years to get the last shadow
of your misdirected spearhead out of my heart,
make white noise out of the snarling chainsaw
that accompanied you like a seeing-eye dog.

At first the intensity of the pain
clued me forensically into thinking
the sheer immensity of your crime of passion,
the number of times you stabbed me through the heart
meant you loved me more than you cared to let on
but then I noticed all your knives were smiling

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poem by Patrick White
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It's Stranger To Conceive Of Me

It's stranger to conceive of me as I am
than to imagine that I'm someone else.
There's more largesse in the early spring air.
You can tell by the tears that well up in their eyes
the glacial stars are beginning to thaw splinter by splinter
withdrawing their claws from the corpse of the snow
like thorns from the Lion's paw overhead.
I can hear water in the creek tuning up
for the dance to come as soon as
the first violins of the crocuses get here,
the trout lily, the purple passage of the wild violet
under a leaf it took like a page from the book of autumn,
trout lily, hepatica, wood sorrel, grape hyacinth.
I like it here because it doesn't matter who I am.
Things are alert and vivid with life because
they're not threatened by the possession of it.
And time is a lot more honest
here where it lets its hair down
than it is back in town
where it's always now, now, now,

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poem by Patrick White
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Thirty-nine Children

Thirty-nine children destroyed.
Four of them, sisters.
Their blood a red atlas, spattered roses
on the bedroom walls they cringed behind,
their unfinished bodies and minds,
finished. Does anyone remember
what a child is
when it is not collaterally dismembered
into small feet and hands and faces
that had no choice but to trust the world
that savaged it like roses?
Five toes, an ankle and a heel
still occupy the floral running shoe
that never made it all the way to school.
Your bootprints on the throats of baby swans
like the bombpits of mass graves
where the hysterical mothers rave
in grief and rage
over what you have damaged
like ferocious boars who wear

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poem by Patrick White
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By The Time You Say It

By the time you say it, you're a bridge beyond the last river of your lament.
Is there meaning in this, content? Emerging
from this cold oceanic reflection, how good
to wrap the sky around you like a blue woolen robe warmed by a fire,
your lungs two bag-ladies sorting through the trash
of your denuded coffin for any rumour of green.
A back-alley dog sniffs at your limp smile beside a broken wineglass.
Your passions turn into mouths and eat you; your heart
mistakes itself for the apple on the tree of knowledge
and dreads the approach of Eve. Today, for example, over coffee on Gore St.
(just so the peasants don't storm the moat again,
thinking we don't know where we're at)
I heard you wondering why the moon always ends in et cetera.
Just to distract you from gnashing your teeth in the void
and sticking your flavourless gum messiah
to the underside of the flat earth, I showed you a picture of the wind's face
I painted under an overpass on primeval concrete.
A fascist restauranteur enraged by the ulcers on his greed
preached his disease to an unwilling congregation of tables
and jackaled our money away to the squat god of his digital scripture.

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poem by Patrick White
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If The Bread Got Any Harder

If the bread got any harder I’d be buttering stone,
and it’s morning again, cooler than yesterday
that licked my face like a dog
with the mosquito-breeding breath of a reeking ditch;
and maybe there’s a cabal of stars or confidential angels,
a thirteenth house of the zodiac
that no one’s ever heard of, with a garden of black suns
overrun by weeds, blooming along the walkway
up to the sagging porch, a place
where the dispossessed gather to own each other, a hidden harmony
that manages my affairs along with the stars and the ants
and knows with the confidence of a nightwind off the sea
that I am supposed to be here, broke, aging, alone,
dreading the landlord at the door like the beginning
of another ice-age, cataract, polar cap,
the shifting of a continental plate
as I wait like a fault in apprehension
of the final jolt that will tear me down.
And all of this in the name of poetry in a world
that holds the tail of the new moon like an old black bull in one hand

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poem by Patrick White
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In Lieu Of A Funeral

in memoriam: Steve Forster

Death has nothing to do with skulls or bones
seeping into the earth like widows
horded behind windows and doors,
nothing to do with the crumbling aqueducts of arches and vertebrae
that used to carry serpent fire and a thread of water,
and the gentler lightning of the little god
who was rooted in our flesh like an apprentice in a studio
learning to paint the world through our eyes, not
the gaping sockets, the oracular shrines of calcium
the blind worms probe like calendars and soft pencils
for signs of our former lucidity, the charred wizards
etched on our cave-womb walls, not
the rotten jaws and teeth we primed like leg-hold traps
and baited with roses of meat and fragrant blood
to tear and grind our daily bread
from the inquisitions of raffled animals we demonically possessed
until, unmuscled by time, unstrung like an old guitar
they lie forever open in amazement,

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poem by Patrick White
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