Your Face Among Many, A Blossom
Your face among many, a blossom.
Let it go. Let it go. Let it go.
The sun can't understand why it can't
open the buds of the parking meters.
Some people worry they don't have talent.
Given a name, who isn't a masterpiece?
A perfect self-portrait of what they're becoming?
Talent, the worst superstition of all.
That lullaby you sing to your voodoo doll
at bedtime, to let her know she's special
when, in fact, she's blind. Talent.
That estranged mix of an eclipse and an oilslick
that isn't sure of its standing in life.
Sensible shoes wishing they had wings on their heels.
The redundant navigator of mountain streams
that would have found their own way to the river
all by themselves. You ask if I think you have talent.
To me that's like a flower asking
if I think it will ever come to bloom,
a star wondering if it's shining or not,
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poem by Patrick White
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Easy
Easy to extract oneself from the climacteric of doom
that will absolve humanity of its horrors
by placing its destiny in its own hands
like a loaded gun in the hands of a child
by taking long nocturnal walks by the Tay River
among wildflowers full of farewell.
To watch the moonrise glowing
on the Texas toes of my wet black boots
as if they'd just been spit polished by morning snails
and sense the just proportions
and inchoate eloquence of eternity
in the trivialities of sublime coincidence.
How randomly everything fits
into this urgent medium of life and death
as if it played the tailor to its own emergence seamlessly
the way the mind stream cuts a path for itself
among a bewildering array of rocks and fallen birch
or a startled rat snake adds its wavelength
like a higher frequency to the laconic water
and yet no river has ever flowed the wrong way to the sea.
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poem by Patrick White
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So Far Down This Road
So far down this road
without a destination
my childhood doesn't
recognize me anymore.
So far into this life
I've never been outside of
I can speak to myself
in a foreign language
that no one can understand
as if it were the ancient dream-grammar
of a past tense
that talked its way into the future.
So far into what I've become
the peduncle is lost
in the ensuing phylum
and of all thought
I'm the first monkey
to look for its origins in an asylum.
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poem by Patrick White
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The Birth Of Rain
Drifting on a drab Sunday in Perth among the ashtrays and leftover sublimities of the church bells. My studio window above the rooftops a smear of willow and wet pine undulating gently in the stillness that followed the rain. Wolves on the easel, waiting to pay the rent. May of the fifth year into the twenty-first century, fifty-six, I sit in a blizzard of tobacco crumbs because I'm too poor to buy tailor-mades, coughing at the computer, wiping small drops of water like pygmy tears from the Cyclopean eye of the screen that glows with the same effulgence as the dirty sheet of the sky. The main migrations are over, but maybe these words are rosaries of late-returning birds. Two anthracite, boat-tailed grackles on a branch just beyond the grimy glass and a gust of sparrows chirrup like squeaky alternator-belts, manically elated in the wake of the storm that has just passed. My freedoms are more sober, my resurgencies probably less profound than the gray roses I give birth to here at my desk, waiting for one of these terminal urgencies of insight to sway me like a bell.
Maybe Louise later today with her Cola and cassettes, and her rough, voluptuous, laughing humanity scorning the random acids of the vulgar world that schools her, a muse who doesn't take requests, a generous longing that's been through a lot. So I sublimate the root-fires of my leafless batons into an auto-de-fe of white canes tired of trying to tap their way through a maze of sexual creeds, blind. The result? A novel and dozens of poems apples above the worms. And I keep her cats, Morgan and Rain, mother and kitten almost fully grown. There are no humans Louise loves more.
The kitten was born beside me on the couch at one-thirty in the morning while Louise was in the hospital and I read La Mettrie, d'Holbach, Diderot, d'Alembert, Voltaire, Rousseau and Helvetius, eighteenth century French les philosophes. Two days ago, remembering, she asked me to write a poem to celebrate the birth. And it's two hundred and fifteen years since the French revolution went into convulsions and mothered daggers out of its wounds, and we are neither free, nor equal, nor brothers, and the birth of Rain, by association, is only the smallest of iota subscripts below the voluminous pretext of that slaughter, hardly, if at all, a mote that matters; but in a way she was born while the peasants stormed the Bastille, and time sent corpses and ideas floating facedown on one of its more famous rivers of blood all the way to the embryonic comma of this tender, contrary event. And there was honour in being a witness when Morgan jumped up beside me
and lay her head upon my right arm as a pillow, the great red text
with ivory pages open to the public like the Vatican before me
as the soft, gray satchel of her body shuddered with the natal lightning
of a different storm, the quickening eruptions of a different riddle
than the one that dropped its answer like a blade
on the necks of the cropped carnations as I kept on reading, thinking
to run for a towel before deciding not to disturb her,
that a little blood on the couch wouldn't hurt anything
compared to the streams of gore that caked the pages of my book.
And there was a humility in the act of watching, and a trust,
as if a great secret were demanding something of her
she was willing to go through hell to give. And my heart
laboured with her like a sympathetic strawberry, convinced of a miracle,
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poem by Patrick White
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O My Mother, O My Father
O my mother, O my father,
I stand at this Y in the road,
the hybrid son of an angel and a demon,
two halves of the same chromosome
splitting like the left side of my brain
as a squad car took, you, my father, to jail,
and you, my mother, my right half,
were rushed in an ambulance,
a bruised and battered rose to emergency
as if you'd just barely survived
a hailstorm of meters intent
on making your species extinct.
And it was hard to tell if flesh of my flesh
blood of my blood meant the same as
flesh upon flesh with a dull thud
upon the untempered anvil of a child's heart,
or not. So is it any wonder
when you split the atom that day between you
like Charles Manson and Mother Theresa
and our nuclear family turned out to be
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poem by Patrick White
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I Like The Feel
I like the feel of the new heels on my cowboy boots.
I like the feel of breathing in joy like oxygen,
of moving from one small joy to another
without pomp or pageantry
like the constellation of a black swan
on a midnight mindstream
drifting through the small torches of the stars
that won't go out in any kind of water.
And I don't know why I'm wounded
deeper than tears by joy
whenever I witness any undoubted example
of human excellence
and penumbrally share in the triumph
remembering how truly astonishing
a human being can be
when compassion and insight
are the fruit and roots of the tree.
So much in the world I abhor,
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poem by Patrick White
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Brutal Blue Of Twenty Below
Brutal blue of twenty below,
a serial killer with angelic eyes.
The light slashing off the snow
like sabres in full gallop reaping throats.
Even the windows going through
a mini nirvanic death-in-life experience
to catch a glimpse of the fireflies
of enlightened diamonds
that let them warm their hands awhile
around their blazing, hoping
they’ll catch on and be back soon.
O sweet one, hurt one, wounded blue rose,
your eyelids have turned brittle in the cold.
Your heart’s a baby mammoth
caught in a glacier
that’s exposing you to the wolves.
Your tears flow like slow rivers of glass
all the way to the sea that rejects them
like holy oil on the wrong forehead.
Blood on the snow, lipstick on kleenex,
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poem by Patrick White
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I Am A Dragon
I am a dragon,
but I’ve got cloudy teeth.
You are a vase among jars,
a feather among scales.
Obviously you are the sea
and I am the seabed.
In the darkness you are the shining.
I come to you
like lead to an alchemist,
base metal to gold.
Already I am transformed
by your mirrors of fire.
There is a light, a glow,
invisible but more illuminating,
not of the moon, or sun, or a star,
but of the heart and mind,
the light of life itself
when it’s the only candle in the room
dancing behind its veil of shadows,
and in the least filament
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poem by Patrick White
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City Rose
City rose, you don't bloom like the other flowers
the sun coaxes into unclenching their fists, you unfold
like an ocean at night lingering in your dark depths
behind a veil of fish hooks swaying
with the bullwhips of the kelp to the pulse of your tides.
How suburbanly garish you look all trashed out
like the black farce of a substitute for love.
A poet and a prostitute. Doesn't get much more skinless
than that. We're both walking through the world naked
in a blizzard of thorns blunting themselves
against our ice-age hearts in an interglacial warming period.
Dying on the instalment plan to make a living,
there's a glint in your eyes like moonlight on a knife,
and you're armed to the teeth with fingertips and lips
and hourglass hips and here you can have my sword
even before I surrender as you know you can
when you walk into my life like an eclipse of the moon
with mascara running down your cheeks
and ask me if I still love you as I ever did
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poem by Patrick White
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Meditations In A Snake Pit Of Dissonant Wavelengths
Meditations in a snake pit of dissonant wavelengths.
An anti-Zen photo-op of enlightened dark energy.
Does a clean slate mean
there’s no starlight in the windows,
no fossils in the Burgess Shale,
no kings with any grave goods in any of these hills?
And I suppose I forgave you some time ago
but if I did
you’ll forgive me if I forgot.
Things have been intense over the past few years.
I’ve been living secretly underground like a nail
driven into the heartwood of an old growth forest
I don’t want them to cut down
whether it’s the tree on the moon
or Clayquot Sound.
Most people’s relationships
are mediocre books with purple passages.
Ours was a purple book with all the pictures torn out.
And that’s o.k. too, and that’s o.k. too,
and that’s o.k. too
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poem by Patrick White
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