MY CAT LIES FULL LENGTH OUT SLACK ON THE GLASS COFFEE TABLE

MY CAT LIES FULL LENGTH OUT SLACK ON THE GLASS COFFEE TABLE

My cat lies full length out slack on the glass coffee table

but for her head poised like a minor sphinx looking

into the long, foggy distances of grey longing

blued by a mood of moving away from things

in a kind of emotional aerial perspective the same

as I’m looking into the open with about as many answers

maybe less than she does. Female feral cat three month

old kitten unfleaed unfixed on facebook I think

I saved a little bit of both our lives that day

I could still drive and got in the car and picked her up.

Took her right out of Rain Dumoulin’s good moon arms

in the embryonic studio of someone who was

learning how to paint to celebrate and counteract

the widow walk dance of her husband’s recent suicide.

What a cruel world that has such lovingly tragic fools in it.

Bang the screen door and we were all the way

back to my red Starfire and you to the back window

to see where you might be going now that

you’ve been captured again all the windows done up

until you learned that I fed you because I intended

to love you and I wanted you to live as an affable familiar

of me who’s got goldfish but they’re awful hard to caress

when you want to reach out and just touch something soft

as smoke wafting across your cheek like the echo of a dream

somebody’s having about being loved in bad economic times

and I was willing to clean up your methane mess for it.

I’m pampering you. You’re living almost exclusively

on treats. If not now when? When do you get a small

special consideration for the emptiness that’s going

to build a little coffin in your heart

and put a picture of me in it like a locket

of Temptations seafood medley singing

softly to you from the tower of Cohen’s song.

Simon’s going to take you. He’s a good man. Loves cats.

PATRICK WHITE

I CAN'T SLEEP IN THIS BEAUTIFUL STORM OF TEARS

I CAN’T SLEEP IN THIS BEAUTIFUL STORM OF TEARS

I can’t sleep in this beautiful storm of tears

that keeps showing me how much love there is in the world

now that I’m leaving it through the rose trellis exit

where there’s a drop of water on every

anointed thorn of my thoroughly wet eyelashes.

It’s beautiful loss that’s sad and scary all at the same time.

It’s a flashflood of emotion that thaws the frogs out

and gets them singing like small ice floes in a lily pond

clinging with polar bears to what’s left of the Arctic ice cap

that’s unravelling all around me like a snowman

riding its own melting into an oblivious mindstream.

Easy to love ordinary things now as if they were sacred,

domestic rituals, chores, objects, dust in the air,

dirt in an organized drawer, cracks in the plaster

diversifying the dinosaurs like fractured Pangaea’s skull.

The thunder and pulse of a lost drumbeat in the jungles of time.

Everything glows. Even the dark shines.

With an aura of beautiful mysterious numinosity

that polishes the dawn like a dusty abalone shell

on an opalescent day at deserted beach as long and wet as yourself.

PATRICK WHITE

WASTED IN THE MORNING

WASTED IN THE MORNING

Wasted in the morning luxuriating in the semi-comatose

numbness to the last ghost you’ve seem returning

to its grave without being bothered by it like an immune system

you could take for granted as a sign of the state

of the health you’re in when you can’t get to sleep with tumours

and all you want to do is disappoint pillows. Vita brevis. Arta longa.

Look out the window at the enlargements of the dawn

as much as you can when you’re able to stand.

Pet the cat. Have a long blue drag on a fat cigarette

that’s beginning to look like a pregnant guppy

humping a seahorse in my hands. Remark

to myself that I’m not the first man

to see the pigeons flying over the tarpaper roofops

as if it were fun to be a pigeon with the northern lights

around your neck and I wished I was one of them

waking up in a happy town to throw myself around

like wedding confetti at a morning marriage of bells

or a scrapped manuscript torn to bits because it’s got talent

or apple bloom and mailmen trying to get some coffee into them

cooped up in a restaurant like one of hidden wonders of the age.

PATRICK WHITE

HOW MUCH PAIN CAN YOU HOLD INSIDE UNTIL THE RESERVOIR EVAPORATES?

HOW MUCH PAIN CAN YOU HOLD INSIDE UNTIL THE RESERVOIR EVAPORATES

How much pain can you hold inside before the reservoir evaporates

into the great sky of awareness like a watershed waterbird

crying out in anguish for something that’s frightened it

looking into the long dwindling journey ahead.

The distances. The distances. The distances

from one sea to the next like a waterclock that never stops.

Like the human heart with a wheelhouse pulse.

The eye of the storm your only oasis for miles around.

You become spectral, dissociated, unglued, unbound

as a Promethean god freed by Shelley,

metastasizing in your liver like vultures eating it

for crimes of fire you were a good thief at.

The damage unto the privilege of the fatuous gods

you have done and there’s nothing but nothing

they can do back to you now for it but chain you

to a rock in the Caucasus and hope it hurts.

There’s a fire in the starfields I can see from here

and a scarecrow poet try to blow the flames out

on his jester’s long sleeves. The fire god came looking for fire

and he found it under my t shirt like a burning fox

I didn’t tell anybody about on the bridges I’ve crossed.

PATRICK WHITE

YOUR EYES ARE A BLUE CRACK OF SKY TO ME

YOUR EYES ARE A BLUE CRACK OF SKY TO ME

Your eyes are a blue crack of sky to me at the bottom

of a very deep mine. And when your heart shines down

it’s not a flashlight but a majestic sunset I’m looking up at.

Under this avalanche of gravestones

I’m trying to sing the dead back to life.

I’m beguiling the gibbering shades with picture music

that sings like deadly nightshade

to the bruised darkness within me

people keep stepping out of

like the ghosts of white nocturnal orchids

pale as the ghoulish moon on the limbs

of the naked dead trees the herons build their nests in.

It’s the function of a prophetic Orphic skull

to walk among the dark jewels of the underworld

with all the eyes open in its blood

but none to see into the blue sky above

what you’re looking at when when you

see how blind I am to the wavelengths copulating in your eyes

like the twining of two snakes on a caduceus

topped with the snowflake of a dove.

Hermes Trismegistus for a companion guide

and a little girl who leads me around like a seeing eye dog.

I’m sort of the Teresian Orpheus of my own hybridization

who keeps falling back like Sisyphus with a gravestone

when nothing’s coming back above ground

but the stars in another round of your zodiacally clear eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

OFF INTO THE MORNING

OFF INTO THE MORNING

Off into the morning like a bird with insomnia

that sings its choral part in the tree as it sleepwalks

into the dawn not knowing if it’s the beginning of a new day

or the end of a dream it was having about flying away

forever forever forever free as a shadow on a cloud

before it ruins the radiance of the dawn shining in its blood.

Blood Drop. Cardinal? You push the limits of scarlet

way over into the infrared redshifting into a total black out

during a saturated firestorm of British Lancasters

over Hamburg trying to sow the whirlwind with incendiaries.

For a little flag you go way too far with the banner oriflamme

of dragon fire heating up the furnaces of your heart

with prophets and art and burnished gold as white

as the eyes of the diamonds looking out from the coals

with tears in their eyes they’re so happy to see you

so clear and adamantinely insistent upon staying fluid as tears.

I waited three years once looking out my studio window

in winter at the slim lone candelabra of a tree with a bird feeder

as I painted for you to come to the candle and assume

your proper place as the flame. Even wrote

a ten page poem about it. The Writing Lesson.

How to take a little spark like you and start a forest fire

with someone who’s distantly related to the stars

and the chimney sparks in a high wind that keep flaring

incendiarily against the pines as if they were lashing them

with whips of fire with stars for barbs like the rainmaker Pleiades

at the end of it all. Star shower. Phosphorus power. Cocked spur.

The ability to shine underwater as if you were burning

it was that hot and you had nothing to cool off your blue stars with

like Fukushima trying not to kill the fish or evacuate Tokyo

or curtail the tinny blue fish tin business on the west coast

with laving tides of radiation to counteract the filth

of having tumours to contend with when all you want to do

is fly off into the morning with an intense infernal glee

your shadow comet and you are immensely free.

PATRICK WHITE

I'M DROPPING ASHES ON BUDDHA PINOCCHIO

I’M DROPPING ASHES ON BUDDHA PINOCCHIO

I’m dropping ashes on Buddha Pinocchio.

Brushing them off his lap, sweeping them off the desk,

trying to keep urns of them away from the keyboard

with a stubby little brush that looks like Hitler’s moustache.

Or Goring’s toothbrush. So much soiled purity.

In the acts of love we attend to. So much swamp

with the waterlilies. So much ore with the gold.

So much rain in a glass of trees. So many ashes to scatter

like a dead storm that’s snuffed itself out on a grey wind

that rises like a smoke bandanna over the sun on the horizon.

Cherry red. Like a tumour. But enough said. It’s not

about that eraser head. Pink nibbling nipple.

It’s about lunettes and nibs like spearheads that penetrate

your heart like Clovis points flint knapped plalanged in Solutria

as they inched around the ice age page

by snow white page by page by glacial ice sheet

to make it all the way to North America

in time to disappoint the natives in the Bering Strait

as founding peoples of two entire continents

with what a dust storm induced by the Younger Dryas ice age

can do to wipe people out with most of the larger animals

buried whether they lay down for or stood up to the dust.

Whole two continents kissing an hourglass isthmus

just like an image in Buddha Pinocchio’s blind mind.

You’ve got to attend to this as if you were responsible

for the death blossoms of his pygmy apple trees

and Japanese plums losing their eyelids to squanderous visions

that rain back down to earth volcanic down

like Pompey and Herculaneum sculpting dogs in agony.

PATRICK WHITE