Matter is Music. The Atoms Sing.

Matter is music. The atoms sing. A frog
leaps into the water and strings a guitar.
Tree rings like odes in the heartwood of the apple.
The rain breaks like tears into tiny harps.
A gust of stars, a lyric of dust wheeling
into galaxies like symphonies in hydrogen alpha.
And the light, too, playing the flowers
like the stops of a flute, and the leaves
like semi-quavers, and their fruit, like whole notes.

Adagios of colour, bass runs of taste,
and sound the echo of a shape shifting mirror
that touches the light like a lake
touches the moon inseparably playing
on the plectra of its waves like an encore
among lovers mastering each other's bodies
like first violins. Or red-winged blackbirds,
the woodwinds, or the wavelengths of disparate stars
resonating with the eye into lyres, and eagles, and swans.

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poem by Patrick White
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And This Night

And this night that is ending,
bruising into the blue of an impossible rose,
and the windows opening their eyes to the light
that pales the stars from the sky like dreams;
and a man trying to keep the starving candle in his skull
from going out, the emptiness of the dark from demanding
oblivion from the day, the mouth of the morning
no beginning, but the start of a busy grave;
how can he tell his heart what his eyes already see
in the mirrors that mourn like hired grief,
some distant galaxy expanding into space,
some island of light in the forsaken depths of time,
that he's already the ghost of a future memory,
that a silo of ashes isn't enough to feed the flame
of the fire he's cherished in the boat of his hands
like a wounded bird he taught to sing for years,
and how to fly higher than the world is kind
like a hawk with broken wings, or an injured mind?

I see eyes in the dark soaked up like rain,

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poem by Patrick White
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Garbage Bags On The Street At Dawn

Garbage bags on the street at dawn
as great fronds of light unfold.
Venus washed out of the Hyades in Taurus
near Aldebaran, but Jupiter the first to go,
first casualties of the new day,
somnambulists outwalking their dreams.
The honking of Canada geese overhead
like ninety-twenties cars. Rites of passage,
thoroughfares of destinal traffic.
Me here, the sleepless witness
to the untimely birth of the morning,
ashes in the urn of the new day
I scatter like pigeons and doves
from the roofs of the unearthly buildings,
a wraith late for the grave, and the rest,
the unlabelled waste of a good beginning.

Bad spiritual protocol for a ghost
to haunt the cradle, to outlive the candles
of the night before, writing suicide notes

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poem by Patrick White
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When The Sky Speaks

When the sky speaks
it's stars sun moon
but when it sings
its voice is full of birds.
This morning I saw
two white tulips
hovering above the grape hyacinth
like angels that could still feel
where the moon left
cool wet kisses on their skin.
And cosmic events
are going on in the grass
that make the galaxies shudder
with unimaginable significance.
The trees have fingerprints
but no one takes them.
And every ant
is a prophet to all the others
as everyone follows everyone else
to the nectar and honey.

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poem by Patrick White
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On The Wolf Path Around The Lake

On the wolfpath around the lake,
a narrow-eyed moon keeping an eye
on my intrusive solitude, my equivocating silence.
I can feel the air saturated with wet noses.
I try to imagine how the stink of a human
must impinge upon the wild things that live here.
Mustard gas in No Man's Land.
I listen to the recombinant rhymes of the nightbirds
to see if I can remember them by name.
I hear the water moving like a rat snake
through the stuffy cattails
standing like an honour guard of cannoneers
from Napoleon's Grande Arme beside me.
Encylopedic duff of decay. Wet black leaves
of last November's body found six months later
perfectly preserved under the snow,
cling like leeches to my leather jacket and boots,
trying to patch me with their colours
like skin grafts, as if there weren't already
enough constellations and starmaps on my back for that.

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poem by Patrick White
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I've Always Thought

I've always thought a shared vision was best,
the tree, doubly witnessed, sweeter in the fruit,
the star seen rising over the hill by two,
exponentially enhanced in its shining
because it binds more than itself and another
in the herb of its light, because
nothing exists except as the sum of the eyes that have seen it
either side of the mirror, and two watching
in love or friendship
realize the world as a solitary river
with an infinite number of confluent banks
unravelling like snakes in every direction,
none flowing the wrong way, all,
the vivid wavelength of an ancient pulse
that grows a heart like a door in a tree,
a lighthouse in the dark
or the moon on the breast of a wave.
Look at a shoelace or a chromosome
or the wings of a thermalling hawk
to see what I mean:

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poem by Patrick White
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Nightbird On A Winter Branch

Nightbird on a winter branch.
Dark blossom of the new moon,
Last kiss on the eyelids of the dead
As the snow falls like apple bloom.

I see you’ve left the door ajar:
The backdoor of an eclipse
To let the first crescent of the light out.
The sacred syllable of the mistfits

Lost in the silence and the solitude
You raise like heretical mystics into songs
That only you alone can sing
So that each in their homelessness belongs

To the false dawn of the same secret
They weep over like empty lockets
That stole the moon from their windows
As they burned at the stake, rockets

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poem by Patrick White
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Someone's Cut The Tongues Out Of The Bells Tonight

Someone's cut the tongues out of the bells tonight.
Even the silence isn't singing to itself.
The windows are generously tolerant of intruders
but I'm locked into the splendour of my isolation
empathizing with things I don't love.
Full moon. Fruit moon. Moon of berries and grain.

I thought I'd be happier at this time in my life,
but I'm threshing a harvest of shadows
for having sowed all my wild oats on the moon.
I'm intrigued by the fragrance of occult raptures on the air.
Dark intensities that can only end in immolation.
Black roses that only bloom in fire. Mystic disobedience
that lifts the flesh and blood taboos off
whatever comes to it naturally
as a late night 24-7 convenience store
or the fire that started in the kitchen of the Chinese restaurant
three doors down from my apartment yesterday.

Late night moods. The mind dogpaddling in its immensities.

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poem by Patrick White
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Let Go Of My Mind, Like A Kite, Like A Snake

Let go of my mind like a kite, like a snake
I've grabbed by the tail to make a daisy chain of eternity.
Take the bit out of the Great Square of Pegasus
and pour myself out like the billions of stars in the Milky Way.
I'm hemorrhaging poetry. I'm bleeding to death like a rose.
Let it go, let it go, let it go. Blood knows its own way home.
I'm not weaving straightjackets of circumstantial vetch
into an embroidered chrysalis that never opens up.
I'm not trying to pour the sea back into the cup of the moon.
There's more to me than I could ever drink up.

You can put a burning candle in the window and wait for me
but I'm going to follow the smoke wherever it leads
like stardust on the chalkboard of accelerated space
in a burning schoolhouse that had nothing much to teach
about the unknown in the first place. Order's
only a special mode of chaos like a straight line
is a special form of a curve, and there are snakepits
of wavelengths that only serve as flying carpets
growing thin under the windows the dragons look through

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poem by Patrick White
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January Sunset

January sunset, clear blue sky,
peacock viridian with a wash of ultramarine,
warm for this time of year.
Ninety-nine percent of a full moon
waxing maculately ivory white in the east.
The threads of the little black creeks
that have frayed away from the strong rope
are the dissonant wavelengths
of baby snakes in the snow.
The willows orange against
the burnt umber backdropp
of a grove of pine, birch, maple
trying to keep some desperate secret to themselves.
Unkempt, wind-swept fields,
under an archipelago of snow,
the exhausted afterbirth
of cattle-corn and sheep
as if that were all they had to show
for the long hard labour of bringing forth life
as the stars are beginning

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poem by Patrick White
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