Watching The Sky Turn Blue
for Steve Forster
Watching the sky turn blue
in the last hours of the night.
Up like the stars dreaming myself awake.
Insomniac watchman making the rounds
of my own private zodiac
on the graveyard shift
looking for signs of an afterlife
that’s in spiritual alignment with the pyramids.
Tabla rasa.
A clean slate.
A new day.
The world a new creation every morning.
Empty streets empty stores empty sidewalks.
The vertebrae of bridges sheathing the Tay River
like a spinal cord that’s stopped
sending messages to the brain
like wavelets and rain
to put the serpent fire out
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poem by Patrick White
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The Swan Flies Over The Lace Corals Of The Trees
The swan flies over the lace corals of the trees.
Albireo in Cygnus homing west.
The boa of the moon unfeathered
by the brittle eclipse of broken shale
that shatters its vase upon the waters
like a high note cracks an hour glass
or a snapping turtle rises
from the bottom of a lake
to pull the full moon down by the leg.
My path is strewn
by lunar peony petals,
by the twilight of a blue rose,
by the silk parachutes of the milkweed pods
by the ghosts of the medicine men
among the wild poppies
shaking their dry rattles at the moon
long after the fire's gone out
at a ghost dance for rain.
And I'm sad like smoke
for reasons I can't discern.
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poem by Patrick White
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Paid The Rent
Paid the rent. Roof over my head for another month.
Car bills coming up, and contraband cigarettes;
got to feed myself, provide what is needed,
address myself to elemental concerns,
keep my body clean, my clothes, the house, the sheets,
my wits about me on the streets,
and my heart wary of vagrant urgencies
that take a bride like an ambulance to an emergency
just for the ride, and ends up dedicating themselves like a bloodbank
to a wound that isn't in the book
and won't be healed,
though I apply the moon like a poultice,
like a scar with a dark side that's always concealed.
Even who I thought I was,
more life behind me than ahead,
no more than a passing flaw of feeling,
gusts of birds in the groves of a sacred delirium
where the fools make fun of the saints
and it takes ages to understand
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poem by Patrick White
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Ever Since I Became A Poet
Ever since I became a poet
my whole life is an open wound
I've been bleeding out of
like a ribbon on a gift addressed to everyone.
Started out an astronomer
and then came poetry and painting.
And ever since, on days like this,
feels like I'm hanging in mid air
like Sri Lankans do to prophesy at New Year
with a great hook of a question-mark
through my gut. And I do. I prophecy
just to get a grip on the blinding pain.
Probably prophesy too much.
Wish I was talented enough to say nothing
and wasn't compelled to scream out like this in agony
like a screech owl with blood on its claws
and huge wise eyes that can see in the dark.
End times. Sixty three years closer
to being reborn again as someone
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poem by Patrick White
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The Rain Tonight
The rain tonight
a gentle carillon of afterthought
pensively lingering like eyes in the window.
The town unusually quiet
even for two a.m.
Asphalt with the albido of a wet rat snake
or a black bull
and blades of garish light
thrust through its back
like the swords of the streetlamp matadors
poised over its haemorrhaging
like solar daffodils
about to deliver the coup de grace
to the new moon.
The farmlands and the pot patches flourish.
Everything's wearing the mirror of everything else
like skin
and the leaves
pour their hearts out
like spouts without pitchers.
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poem by Patrick White
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There's Nothing Cozy About Real Beauty
There’s nothing cozy about real beauty.
That’s why it scares you to death
when you’re around it. You sense
that it disdains to kill you
simply because it knows it can
but that only makes you beg for the knife
even more, even deeper, until
you’ve suffered more death
than you ever knew there was to suffer.
It’s the same with the truth. The truth
isn’t the act of a well-meaning
coffee-table sentiment,
a hundred dollar book
of recycled paper
to help save the Caribou,
an a chequered impressionist table-cloth
with compositionally balanced butter-knives
that have never tasted blood in their lives.
If you can’t hear the shriek
of the red-tailed hawk as it plunges
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poem by Patrick White
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Everybody Says I'm Too Intense
Everybody says I'm too intense and I say
you sure as hell aren't.
And since I was sixteen in highschool
and before that in the local neighbourhood
in the bosom of my family
people have always thought I was mad.
My highschool graduation yearbook says
most likely to become
a mad teacher mad scientist mad poet mad.
An oracular assessment of my peers
that has haunted me for years.
But I say crazy is the only antidote
to the extreme chaos of conditioned consciousness.
Look at the world.
Lies lies lies.
A coalition of lies
that calls itself
the history of civilization.
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poem by Patrick White
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Poetry Used To Live In A Forbidden State Of Courageous Grace
Poetry used to live in a forbidden state of courageous grace
but now it's palpably culpable of cowardice.
Paper-mache lifemasks with all the characteristics
of a gaping sin of omission. As F.R. Scott said of E.J. Pratt
in his poem about the building of the CPR
where are the coolies in your poem, Ned?
The ten thousand that died lining and tamping track.
Now the real subject matter of most works of art
is not what was put in, but what was left out,
where's the heart, the soul, the imagination,
where's the grief and the longing that slowly matured
into the black flames of the charred roses
that immolated themselves in their own fires
for the love of someone they couldn't live without
like the other wing of the song of a bird
maimed by the oversight like a tree in chains.
The applause of trained seals isn't praise
and celebrity isn't fame. Everyone's good
at divining the well, but who takes the time
to dig one any deeper than their own shallow grave?
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poem by Patrick White
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I Remember The Bees
I remember the bees
moving like heavy slow notes
among the sunflower microphones
two octaves lower than the fireflies
on late August afternoons
perishing in the light.
And the irrelevant felicity of being me
with nothing to do but time.
Many roads and years away now
and this is another life
another town
and I'm staring out of a window
that's been forgotten by the eyes
that used to look through it
at the bleak winter rain
trying to distinguish the oases
from the mirages
in this glass-blowing desert of pain.
I remember white sweet clover along the dusty roadside
overwhelming the still hot air with its sweetness
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poem by Patrick White
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Now Halcyon Seas
Now halcyon seas, the Kingfisher Star, Alcyone.
No sign of ever having drowned here. Most
are as unaware of the sentient space they're immersed in
as a fish is of the water it wears like skin
or a bird of the air it plunges through. I was
given a brain. The universe was rolled up
into a ball of starmud, a planetesimal of my own,
that was meant to receive a lot more than it
could ever transmit. The way this bursting bubble
of a multiverse gets you to listen to it
once you get sick of listening to your own voice
trying to lift words and feelings like an ant
with a butterfly wing in its mandibles like a sail
that knows more about which way the wind is blowing
than it does. I may be only a whisper
of the shriek I used to be in a much denser medium
than this when I felt my lungs being crushed like bag-pipes
by the implosions of a black dwarf. Thirteen tons
per cubic centimetre of mass. Things weighed
heavily on me back then like basso-profundo bells
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poem by Patrick White
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