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View From The Top Of Black Comb

THIS Height a ministering Angel might select:
For from the summit of BLACK COMB (dread name
Derived from clouds and storms!) the amplest range
Of unobstructed prospect may be seen
That British ground commands:--low dusky tracts,
Where Trent is nursed, far southward! Cambrian hills
To the south-west, a multitudinous show;
And, in a line of eye-sight linked with these,
The hoary peaks of Scotland that give birth
To Tiviot's stream, to Annan, Tweed, and Clyde:--
Crowding the quarter whence the sun comes forth
Gigantic mountains rough with crags; beneath,
Right at the imperial station's western base
Main ocean, breaking audibly, and stretched
Far into silent regions blue and pale;--
And visibly engirding Mona's Isle
That, as we left the plain, before our sight
Stood like a lofty mount, uplifting slowly
(Above the convex of the watery globe)
Into clear view the cultured fields that streak

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poem by William Wordsworth
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Australasia

Celestial poesy! whose genial sway
Earth's furthest habitable shores obey;
Whose inspirations shed their sacred light,
Far as the regions of the Arctic night,
And to the Laplander his Boreal gleam
Endear not less than Phoebus' brighter beam, --
Descend thou also on my native land,
And on some mountain-summit take thy stand;
Thence issuing soon a purer font be seen
Than charmed Castalia or famed Hippocrene;
And there a richer, nobler fane arise,
Than on Parnassus met the adoring eyes.
And tho', bright goddess, on the far blue hills,
That pour their thousand swift pellucid rills
Where Warragamba's rage has rent in twain
Opposing mountains, thundering to the plain,
No child of song has yet invoked thy aid
'Neath their primeval solitary shade, --
Still, gracious Pow'r, some kindling soul inspire,
To wake to life my country's unknown lyre,

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poem by William Charles Wentworth
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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

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poem by Patrick White
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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

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poem by Patrick White
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A Vision Of Resurrection

I had a dream. The habitable earth
Its continents and islands, all were bare
Of cities and of forests. Naught remained
Of its old aspect, and I only knew
(As men know things in dreams, unknowing how)
That this was earth and that all men were dead.
On every side I saw the barren land,
Even to the distant sky's inclosing blue,
Thick-pitted all with graves; and all the graves
Save one were open-not as newly dug,
But rather as by some internal force
Riven for egress. Tombs of stone were split
And wide agape, and in their iron decay
The massive mausoleums stood in halves.
With mildewed linen all the ground was white.
Discarded shrouds upon memorial stones
Hung without motion in the soulless air.
While greatly marveling how this should be
I heard, or fancied that I heard, a voice,
Low like an angel's, delicately strong,

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poem by Ambrose Bierce
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I Left Your Image Of Me Shining

I left your image of me shining
just where you wanted it
in that glass menagerie
of broken mirrors
you've hung from the ceilings
like chandeliers
like constellations of frozen tears
in the thirteenth house
of the misbegotten
on the wrong side of the tracks
off the beaten paths of the zodiacs
that sometimes like to go slumming down here
when the sun shines at midnight
and the moon's out of town.
I left the light on
but that star is long gone
past these extremities of shining
into the abyss of an unforeseeable future
that disappears into its own illumination
like an eye into its own seeing

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poem by Patrick White
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I Don't Want To Embroider This Straitjacket Of Killer Bees

I don't want to embroider this straitjacket of killer bees
with threads of blood, honey and toxin. I can't stand
the agony, but I don't want to lie nostalgically
about what's happening to me as it is everyone
to dull the pain with the delusional sugars
of an artificial paradise where all the stars are tinfoil.
Sooner succumb with integrity, than subsist
in the shadow of a lie that buffs the experience
as if churning coke in a hive of angry wildflowers.

Half mad with pain I've become so accustomed to,
enculturated by out of the corner of my third eye
as if this were a state of affairs normal as oxygen
for everything that lives, and everything, even the rocks
I've been pushing up this hill since I was born
like Sisyphus to build a pyramid out of an avalanche
of meteoric cornerstones that keep getting away from me
like the quicksand and mercury that have tainted my sacred pools,
I don't want to lose my marbles in this game of Russian roulette.
I don't want to give up like gravity on any habitable planet

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poem by Patrick White
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Bright Morning

Bright morning, blue, and the clouds gossiping with the treetops and the fallen ladders of the impossible horizons. I sustain six lives simultaneously in a wounded apartment that's been bleeding for years, continents of plaster out of the walls, the cartography of aging, rewriting the maps as the world drifts like a cinder across the seas of its weeping eye. The trees sway in the wind like smoke, and I sit at my desk, waiting for my hair to dry, smoking, drinking black coffee, happy to be enthroned in my solitude as my dreams pale like stars in the extremity of the light. Lost. I couldn't tell you who I was if you showed me, and the mirrors have grown bags under their eyes like the heavy pollen of time in bee-satchels, silver wombs that are still trying to get my birth right. I've become an apostate of reflections, erasing my face with a sleeve; or watching it shrink like a warm breath on a cold windowpane. Maybe the hive of a mind somewhere is turning me into honey. And I remember lovers I've had, and lovers I will never meet, and all the changes of a comet as it approaches each one to glow luminously in the darkness of the bottomless watershed that is always within me, the familiar one-eyed abyss. And there's a wing of my heart that opens and passes over them like a generous eclipse to bless them all for the time I spent in their mansions of blood and tears, for the candles that ached like joy in the mystery and led me to the eras where they wanted me to stay for the night. They left a desert by the bed and I drank it like an hourglass, true to a calling that exceeded us both. Like the wind, I left a note, extolling their beauty to the webs of the morning, hanging on the bell-ropes of the flowing diamonds that wander the labyrinths of the wet peach hair and Appalachian earlobes I dampened with my tongue. A language of one, I drank from their intimate stars and played the skeletons of their burning harps in a controlled fury of power and hunger as the earth convulsed with islands of flesh, bolts of black lightning that illuminated oblivion in a flash of annihilant ecstasy. And habitable planets were born of the encounter, two children, old enough now in their passage of nights and days to know that it's life that flows, not the river, that their wings are bridges of light and blood and breath that once offered themselves like the crutches of winter trees to the sky in a paradox of love that wanted to lay down roots and fly. What a dream it all is; what a vast and amazing hallucination of darkness within darkness, shadow writing on shadow, a confusion of gates trying to enter one another with both eyes closed, fire obsessively trying to coax the hydrant of the heart to open up before the house burns to the sky and the ground, uncertain whether it's a root or a flower, a bone or a star, a desert of light, or the whisper of a billion gestural galaxies.

poem by Patrick White
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Meet Me

BRIGHT MORNING

Bright morning, blue, and the clouds gossiping with the treetops and the fallen ladders of the impossible horizons. I sustain six lives simultaneously in a wounded apartment that's been bleeding for years, continents of plaster out of the walls, the cartography of aging, rewriting the maps as the world drifts like a cinder across the seas of its weeping eye. The trees sway in the wind like smoke, and I sit at my desk, waiting for my hair to dry, smoking, drinking black coffee, happy to be enthroned in my solitude as my dreams pale like stars in the extremity of the light. Lost. I couldn't tell you who I was if you showed me, and the mirrors have grown bags under their eyes like the heavy pollen of time in bee-satchels, silver wombs that are still trying to get my birth right. I've become an apostate of reflections, erasing my face with a sleeve; or watching it shrink like a warm breath on a cold windowpane. Maybe the hive of a mind somewhere is turning me into honey. And I remember lovers I've had, and lovers I will never meet, and all the changes of a comet as it approaches each one to glow luminously in the darkness of the bottomless watershed that is always within me, the familiar one-eyed abyss. And there's a wing of my heart that opens and passes over them like a generous eclipse to bless them all for the time I spent in their mansions of blood and tears, for the candles that ached like joy in the mystery and led me to the eras where they wanted me to stay for the night. They left a desert by the bed and I drank it like an hourglass, true to a calling that exceeded us both. Like the wind, I left a note, extolling their beauty to the webs of the morning, hanging on the bell-ropes of the flowing diamonds that wander the labyrinths of the wet peach hair and Appalachian earlobes I dampened with my tongue. A language of one, I drank from their intimate stars and played the skeletons of their burning harps in a controlled fury of power and hunger as the earth convulsed with islands of flesh, bolts of black lightning that illuminated oblivion in a flash of annihilant ecstasy. And habitable planets were born of the encounter, two children, old enough now in their passage of nights and days to know that it's life that flows, not the river, that their wings are bridges of light and blood and breath that once offered themselves like the crutches of winter trees to the sky in a paradox of love that wanted to lay down roots and fly. What a dream it all is; what a vast and amazing hallucination of darkness within darkness, shadow writing on shadow, a confusion of gates trying to enter one another with both eyes closed, fire obsessively trying to coax the hydrant of the heart to open up before the house burns to the sky and the ground, uncertain whether it's a root or a flower, a bone or a star, a desert of light, or the whisper of a billion gestural galaxies.

PATRICK WHITE

poem by Patrick White
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Buried Under An Avalanche Of Tongueless Bells

Buried under an avalanche of tongueless bells,
I want to scream. I'm an oyster shell in the midden
of an archaeological dig. Who shucked my pearls?
Trying to weep my way into singing away the pain.
What happened to the Algonquin village that once stood here?
My skull's an empty locket at the end of the foodchain.
I've given more than the less I had to give in the first place.
What do the takers know about sacrifice?
I'm not a strawdog with a deathmask for a face.
My emotions aren't tinfoil. My tears aren't wax.

I embroider my dreams in blood on a pillowcase
of razorblades. That way they'll last like a dye
that holds fast against fading in the bleaching sunlight.
But my varnish is cracking along the agitated fault lines
of my nerves. My shining freaked with gaps
like the dry creekbed of a splintered mirror.
I'm trying to condition the split ends
of the uprooted lightning I transplanted into an urn
of fertilized starmud with enough death in it

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poem by Patrick White
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