Don't Know Where I'm Going
Don't know where I'm going.
Don't care who I am.
No place I need to be.
No face I've got to see.
Don't care if I'm loved.
Don't care if I'm not.
What arises arises mindlessly.
What business has it with me?
Imagination's just another word for free.
Free, free, free at last
I've let my people go.
I walk without a shadow.
There's nothing about tomorrow
that hasn't already passed
and yesterday's a prophecy
of what isn't waiting to come.
One thing suggests another
and worlds are arrayed before me
like the stillness
of the lost feather of the moon
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
The Rain's Falling Upwards
The rain's falling upward
and I'm rooted in the clouds.
I'm riffing with the greening of my leaves
without a flute, letting my thoughts grow
like musical serpents each
according to their need.
It's the snake's turn to charm me,
to entangle me in its form
like forbidden fruit
swaying from my highest boughs.
In the chalky, moist grey air
I'm scraping my fingernails
down a blackboard like crows
because my desires are vaguely out of reach
and my mind is a teacher with nothing to teach.
I want nothing more
than the freedom of my own humanity
thumbing its own heart
like a well-read book
or a worn guitar I taught myself to play
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Not Quite Dawn
Not quite dawn, night seeping out of the blue,
troubled sleep, no stars, and you, a week gone,
the whole universe applying its laws to your absence
which is the silence everything returns to like water.
I have never touched you, so my fingertips
can still play you into existence on a keyboard,
though the loss of your voice is a dead bird,
and I am a loose thread of blood in a labyrinth
of motherboards and micro-chips like me
who can’t find a way out of themselves without
turning away like a planet from its own stars.
How quickly the light comes, and the darkness
bleeds away like a love-letter under the door.
No eyes. No hands. No skin. No hair. I am
not even the ashes of a cleft witching wand
that went looking for water and caught fire instead,
and we have shared only the light of the mind
that paints a world with the shadows of a ghost,
and might only be the last habit of an amputee to leave,
a mere mime of the way our eyes make us see.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Just Before Dawn Venus In Leo Between The Moon And The Beehive Nebula
Just before dawn Venus in Leo between the moon and the Beehive Nebula.
The chimney of the old shoe factory reflected
like a toppled obsidian obelisk in the Tay River.
Couldn't sleep. Now I'm heading home with the bats and the ghosts.
I've firewalked enough tonight, and the coals are beginning to dim
in the ashen light of my waning spirits.
The Perth Soap Factory still hasn't managed to imperialize
the fragrance of the last of the wildflowers crowding
the crumbling parking lots and leftover wedges of field,
but it's trying. I envy a squirrel its quick Zen energy.
And three crows think they know something about me.
Happens a lot in a small town, as I know you know,
because someone you know told me. You must think
I'm crazy talking to the air as if it were you,
but even out here, you've been inside of me all night,
and now it's time to make some space for you beside me.
I like the feline water sylphs that follow me home
like feral cats in the early morning when there's dew
on the brass heritage plaques of the lawyer's offices
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
I Move Through The Shadows That Have Their Flowering Too
I move through the shadows that have their flowering too.
I see you blooming through the pale
of the trunks of the black walnuts
like a fire you've been sitting around a long time,
wondering if you're a habitable planet
or a belt of asteroids that hang like skulls from your waist,
orbiting around a middle-aged avuncular sun
as affable as a porch light welcoming you to the abyss.
You don't always need a beginning to get something done
or a sunset to remind you it's getting late.
I can hear your sorrows like waterbirds
down by the lake where the raccoons drowned the coydog
by luring it out of its depths. Dead Dog's Dream Self.
The titles of old poems invariably return
like roads that have picked up their own scent
and follow it like fog and smoke and a seance of stars
high in a darkened lighthouse full of lament.
I want to see you jump your own fire like a witch
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Water Has Its Followers
Water has its followers
but the wind is free of an audience.
It doesn't encourage cults of wild irises and daylilies
along the flowing of its banks.
It sows the orchards with the pollen of stars
it kicks up like dust at its heels.
But my voice isn't the larnyx
of windmills and waterwheels
and when I speak
I'm always one among the crowd
that's listening at the same time
to a conversation with themselves
that took the words right out of my mouth.
My voice is a seance.
The dead use it like a bus stop.
The swallows and the pigeons
drink from it as if it were a public fountain
efflorescing like an Easter lily in Florence.
It's a guitar. But I am not
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
If The Night Were To Remember Me
If the night were to remember me
among all these shadows of lucidity,
for the firefly I burned to become,
for the corpse of the candle I am,
By the scars on the window I swear
By these constellations on my arm
I'm still learning to wear
as if I deserved them,
I always kept faith with the wonder;
even if I took the river
and left the road I was on
to go the rest of the way alone
as if it were better off without me
and fire on the water in fall
enraptured by the mystery
I was nothing at all
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
I Can't Say
I can’t say that my breath
isn’t the lengthening shadow
of a tree burning its leaves
like a candlabra in the sunset,
or the moon hasn’t broken its tooth
trying to open the lotus of marrow
I motherlode in the lockets of my bones
like silver and bread
for the long, lean journey ahead.
Sometimes when I look at the stars and wonder
I feel like a cigarette-butt
in a glass of mystic wine,
my little humanity, a grain of dust
on a sidereal windowsill, if that,
and I remember the ignorant sincerity
of the orchards that sweetened their apples
like a windfall of hearts
under my eyelids as I dreamed
night after night
of unknown thresholds
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Snow On The Eyelids Of The Pinecones
Snow on the eyelids of the pine-cones.
Zen pagodas, meditating. Snow
on the withered stars of the wild rose hips
attaining the unattainable like Buddha
enlightened by what's become of Venus in the dawn.
Beauty in the truth of abject desolation.
There's a war going on somewhere
to judge from the number of amputations
the fingers, legs, arms, toes, hands,
the limbs of the dead trees
lying all over the ground as if the woods
were the collapsed tent
of an army field hospital in the Civil War.
The Fort Delaware Death Pen
if I were to take a wild guess,
or maybe Andersonville, who knows,
but I feel I'm walking more like a warden
doing his rounds through the woods at night
than a visitor among these who lie here
in this graveyard of wounded swans
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Haven't Seen A Star In Four Nights
Haven't seen a star in four nights
and the windows are pining for more than lamplight.
It's darker in than it is out, but suddenly
through the breaking clouds, hey, there's one
and I'm momentarily thrilled by the delight of a child
spotting her first firefly rising like a chimney-spark
above this ashen town on a cold, autumn night.
Small pleasures in the aftermath of great intensities,
the immaculate focus that burned eyeholes
in the sockets of my crystal deathmask
that left me feeling like wounded glass
thawing into the long slow tears I carried back
from the wishing well like the empty buckets
of a waterclock that acts like a volunteer fire brigade
that never put anything out before it was too late.
Wouldn't be the first house of the zodiac to burn down
and probably not the last, but, at least,
it's not a plague door to the past facing east.
It's not blood leaking out of the nostril of a bell,
but who knows? You can never really tell.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
