Quotes about locket, page 7
When Grief Grows Savage And There's Nothing To Hunt
When grief grows savage and there's nothing to hunt
and all your mandalas are turning back into cave paintings
running down a limestone wall like spears
in the tears of weeping shamans, and you want
to tear your heart out and eat it to nourish your emptiness
but you're not sure if it's still the noble enemy it used to be,
or if the power of its sympathetic magic has past
the expiry date, and you think you might be
the last of the big mammals to go extinct in the ice-age,
time to sit down on the ground and have a good laugh
at how the things we take most seriously in life
make sacred clowns of us all in the last analysis
just before enlightenment. Put your lifemask on again,
coax a star or a firefly out of the tinder of that nebula
you're blowing on until you've got a good blaze going
then throw all your grave goods on it as if
you were sending them on ahead of you
while you danced the pain away like the sky burial
of the ghost of another age that's been haunting you
like a glacier that's slowly beginning to wash itself clean of itself
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poem by Patrick White
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I Have Become My Own Season
I have become my own season
living through these renewable eras of you
that come and go
like the fragrances of passing stars
that sometimes stop by the gate
to talk about the garden blooming late.
Some flowers wait for the moon to open,
to throw their arms around space
as if they could encompass everything
in the brief embrace of their petals,
and their seeing is one eye under multiple eyelids
as they burn like jewels in the night
to keep it all shining and bright.
But I've worn out the elbows
of my insatiable longing
on the windowsills of a different insight.
Saddened by the distance, the time, the circumstances,
delinquent desires still hanging out their shingles
like green apples on a dead branch in winter,
withering like the inconsolable eyes of old men
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poem by Patrick White
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Out Here Alone
Out here alone so late at night
with all these spectacular stars
burning through the clean glass
of the freezing winter air
I can almost hear them thinking
behind the myths of the cover stories
they've told for years
dark truths about life and light
it would be madness in a man to understand.
Don't try to stuff the impersonal secret
of the universe
into your sentimental heart.
How could you ever fit its likeness
into a locket
and finger it lovingly as your own?
Out here alone so late
even if you have come
like a thief in the night
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poem by Patrick White
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Every Step I Take
Every step I take either a crossroads, an impasse,
or a dubious suspension bridge that looks like
the work of spiders swaying over an abyss.
Eerie thresholds that don't scare me the way they used to.
I take them now as if I were dancing
with clear-sighted surrealistic suicidal abandon
and what used to threaten me so deeply
I laugh at now as if it were just another buffoon
that overdid it, and turned its legend into a farce.
The furies that swarmed me once for things
I couldn't even imagine doing at my most bitter
have mythically dwindled into black flies of the mind.
Now I smile at them like a miniature Pearl Harbour
dive-bombing a rotten piece of fruit. Malignant pests.
Even in my homelessness, kamikaze pilots
drunk on sake, bad house guests binging
on a divine wind that sweeps them all away
from the brittle sky above the windowsill
that fakes them all out eventually, though it's sadder
on the other side, to witness the death of birds.
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poem by Patrick White
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Tryst With The Muse At An Ungodly Hour
A tryst with the muse at an ungodly hour.
The past creatively adapts to the moment
as readily as the future does. The bronze age flames
of your auburn hair, withered petals
of a fire flowering in the rain
that may be down, but not out.
The wellspring of a muse is always
the third eye of a woman overwhelmed by tears
at the approach of spring. Last night,
pink-lilac Mercury on the short leash of the sun,
Venus as bright as I've ever seen it
and nearby Jupiter dim by comparison,
Sirius southeast of Orion, then Mars,
and shortly before dawn, Saturn.
I stood for an hour at the backdoor
of the all night laundromat, out
in the parking lot behind the Chinese Restaurant,
while the streetlamps held their heads down in reverence
as if they'd all taken vows or something,
and I, cigarette in mouth, looked up
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poem by Patrick White
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The Interrogation Of The Man Of Many Hearts
Who's she, that one in your arms?
She's the one I carried my bones to
and built a house that was just a cot
and built a life that was over an hour
and built a castle where no one lives
and built, in the end, a song
to go with the ceremony.
Why have you brought her here?
Why do you knock on my door
with your little stores and songs?
I had joined her the way a man joins
a woman and yet there was no place
for festivities or formalities
and these things matter to a woman
and, you see, we live in a cold climate
and are not permitted to kiss on the street
so I made up a song that wasn't true.
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poem by Anne Sexton
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The Log Jam
1 Dere 'a s beeg jam up de reever, w'ere rapide is runnin' fas',
2 An' de log we cut las' winter is takin' it all de room;
3 So boss of de gang is swearin', for not'ing at all can pass
4 An' float away down de current till somebody break de boom.
5 'Here 's for de man will tak' de job, holiday for a week
6 Extra monee w'en pay day come, an' ten dollar suit of clothes.
7 'T is n't so hard work run de log, if only you do it quick--
8 W'ere 's de man of de gang den is ready to say, ` Here goes?''
9 Dere was de job for a feller, handy an' young an' smart,
10 Willin' to tak' hees chances, willin' to risk hees life.
11 'Cos many a t'ing is safer, dan tryin' de boom to start,
12 For if de log wance ketch you, dey 're cuttin' you lak a knife.
13 Aleck Lachance he lissen, an' answer heem right away
14 'Marie Louise dat 's leevin' off on de shore close by
15 She 's sayin' de word was mak' me mos' happies' man to-day
16 An' if you ax de reason I 'm ready to go, dat 's w'y.'
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poem by William Henry Drummond
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The Stars Will Not Devise
The stars will not devise a way out of your life
that they haven’t already offered you
and the sprawl of green fountains
that hallows you now, the victorious trees,
will later dropp all their keys
like a nightwatchman too drunk to get in.
You must stand in the ashes if you want to study orchids,
you must fill your body up with clouds
and red-tailed hawks, and autumn leaves
torn from the pages of the history of fire
if you want to follow what the wind is saying
back to its mouth in the sun.
Everything else is the source of everything else
and the rain knows more about circles and arrows
than all the bows and compasses
of the sad magician who’s stripped his purities of flesh.
Stay close to the earth if you want
to look deeply into the eyes of the stars
and see the golden maggot that hangs from its lifeline
like a message in a tear delivered with wings.
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poem by Patrick White
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These Days, This Late At Night
These days, this late at night, I'm usually a lone wolf sage
high above the timberline in a sanctuary of solitude
that occasionally breaks the silence
with the elegaic echo of the anquished shriek of a hawk
wheeling in the abyss like the stars overhead
feeling as if its flightfeathers just caught fire
and for a few brief moments no longer
than the wingspan of a wavelength
it was shining like them and there were jewels
like a woman's eyes cracking the rock
of a heart that's been more of an asteroid
than habitable planet with a few ancestral skulls of its own
for moons and a creative atmosphere where the clouds
can move mountains to tears with the beauty
of what can bloom spontaneously out of nothing
like wildflowers strewn all over the starfields
as if they were expecting someone to come
of the things we really feel are worth crying for.
These days, this time of night, I delight
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poem by Patrick White
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There Was Nothing Ever To Forgive You For
There was nothing ever to forgive you for
I'd say to you now if you were still alive.
Pain doesn't maintain an agent,
though as many who have lived
have been named as perpetrators;
it just occurs
like happiness just happens
like a stroke of luck, a touch of grace
in an astronomical lottery of famished chances.
Voices arise in my head to address you
in the immensities of time and sorrow
like spokesmen for my heart
and another part of me
listens from the audience to this play
that's been going on for light years without you.
I suspect I'm still trying to perfect the way I loved you
out of force of habit, knowing how
redundant and absurd that is
long after the play closed
and the plaster cherubs
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poem by Patrick White
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