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On Australian Hills

Earth, outward tuning on her path in space
This pensive southern face,
Swathing its smile and shine
In that soft veil that day and darkness twine,
The silver-threaded twilight thin and fine,
With April dews impearled,
Looms like another and diviner world.

Here April brings her garnered harvest-sheaf,
Her withered autumn leaf,
Tintings of bronze and brass;
Her full-plumed reeds, her mushroom in the grass,
Her furrowed fields, where plough and sower pass,
Her laden apple bough.
All are transfigured and transmuted now.

The eastward ranges, so unearthly blue,
Bloom with their richest hue;

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poem by Ada Cambridge
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It Isn't That I'm Looking

It isn't that I'm looking for eagles in a barnyard
or a phoenix in a match-head
when I observe
by the number of wrecks on the rocks
how few lighthouses there are these days
among so many flashlights.

What can the hair say about the horn
or the feather teach the wind
or quicksand preach
for the edification of the cornerstone?

And must I put a healthy leg
at the service of a broken crutch
to limp along with the mob
at the end of a dying culture
that insists that all roads end
in a cult of cripples?

If I'm walking alone to the stars

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poem by Patrick White
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The Earth Hides Nothing From You

The earth hides nothing from you
when its time comes to be revealed.
Not the bones of the dead, not the green wind
blowing on the young leaves of the maple
to see if it still remembers how to break into flame
or the loaded horse-hair brushes of the flowers
trying to decide what colours to apply first
to the blue-toned underpainting of the sky on their easel.

And this is the essential freedom of information act.
Walking with a thoughtful, cooly blissful, festive spirit
on a windy night by a spring lake trying on stars
like earrings to go with the season like crocuses
realizing, as if you weren't there alone, though you are,
how inestimably unique and precious it seems
just to be aware of this lake in the moonlight
trying to grow waterlilies in her Mars black hair
and one wild iris, because she's obviously French.

And I can tell by the way the eddies and ripples

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poem by Patrick White
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I Took My Death Mask Off For You

I took my deathmask off for you
to show you the naked absence
behind the past of everything I've ever been.
Real, you said, and meant something squalid.
And I autographed your holy book
with green ink the same colour as your eyes
with a fountain pen that didn't
step into the same poem twice.
Let's be real, you said, but you meant solid,
so we pushed your single bed
over by a window full of stars
and pulled the blind down on enlightenment,
cataracts in the eye, flowers in the sky,
and made love to the picture-music of a candle,
jealous of my gold-nibbed fountain pen
trying to prove it had a voice of its own
and could bleed as easily I could over nothing.
And I remember how you liked to sing to me
with that old cat-scratched guitar
you kept in the corner like an emergency lifeboat.

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poem by Patrick White
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Song of the Guitar.

In the tenth year of Yuanhe I was banished and demoted to be assistant official in Jiujiang. In the summer of the next year I was seeing a friend leave Penpu and heard in the midnight from a neighbouring boat a guitar played in the manner of the capital. Upon inquiry, I found that the player had formerly been a dancing-girl there and in her maturity had been married to a merchant. I invited her to my boat to have her play for us. She told me her story, heyday and then unhappiness. Since my departure from the capital I had not felt sad; but that night, after I left her, I began to realize my banishment. And I wrote this long poem -- six hundred and twelve characters.

I was bidding a guest farewell, at night on the Xunyang River,
Where maple-leaves and full-grown rushes rustled in the autumn.
I, the host, had dismounted, my guest had boarded his boat,
And we raised our cups and wished to drink-but, alas, there was no music.
For all we had drunk we felt no joy and were parting from each other,
When the river widened mysteriously toward the full moon --
We had heard a sudden sound, a guitar across the water.
Host forgot to turn back home, and guest to go his way.
We followed where the melody led and asked the player's name.
The sound broke off...then reluctantly she answered.
We moved our boat near hers, invited her to join us,
Summoned more wine and lanterns to recommence our banquet.
Yet we called and urged a thousand times before she started toward us,
Still hiding half her face from us behind her guitar.
...She turned the tuning-pegs and tested several strings;
We could feel what she was feeling, even before she played:
Each string a meditation, each note a deep thought,
As if she were telling us the ache of her whole life.

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poem by Bai Juyi
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You Are Crazy

You are crazy and beautiful
and wounded and wild
and the youngest daughter
of a coven of poetic sea-witches,
and dangerous as the moon in your changes,
the fragrance of night
hovering over the blue star-honey
of your seductive hive of candles,
the skulls you drink from naked,
anointing the fire
with libations of blood and wine,
dancing to the passionate lament
of ancient serpents
unfolding their wings
like eras in the lives of stars,
constellations that have come and gone like leaves,
seasons that are only distant whispers
in the hourglass of the hills,
voices that have outlived the ears to hear them.
And we are no more contained

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poem by Patrick White
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Chewing On Memories Like Broken Mirrors In Her Sleep

Chewing on memories like broken mirrors in her sleep
tears of blood run from her eyes.
She doesn't know I'm watching
but I've got windows everywhere.
But for her
just for her
because nobody else cares
third eye satellites with unlimited airspace
in her choice of skies to match her eyes.
A haemorrhage of sunsets.
Fly little bird fly
as if you weren't the shattered sparrow
God took his eye off
when you fell.
Sometimes the mystic oversights
have more to say
about the great revelations of the world
than all the burning bushes in the valley of Tuwa.
Rumours and news.
Fly little bird fly.

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poem by Patrick White
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No Matter How Far

No matter how far into the past the star travels,
plunging its white fingers into the expanding womb of the past
to pull its own damp head out of convulsive space,
it will never find a beginning, the widening cleft between two thoughts
opening like a mouth full of silence, a sluice gate of thick water,
a dark prelude, the first letter alpha breaking like an eye
out of the eclipsed envelope into a splendour of light
to hang its jewel, its dropp of flammable water
from the incredible webs of the night,
to shine alone in the dark with millions,
the elemental heart of an abandoned lover. The void
became a tuning fork and struck itself, became
a nugget of gold and dropped itself into the world pond
sinking like a throne through a center of infinite haloes,
disappearing into the origin of its own undulant pulse,
a fish leaping out of the stillness of the mirror
into the encircling waves of its own event
or an arrow into the target of its own ripples,
or God lost in his own universe without a return address.

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poem by Patrick White
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Patronym

And relieved to be vast again, stepping through the backdoor
of the murdered house where I left my heart
inscribed on the studio floor
in a rosary of chalk, martyr to a rage of freedom,
I fathered a gentle nation in the eyes of bellicose stars
humbled by the failures of the wise.
Venus in Virgo and eras of birds in the trees, my blood
proclaimed propitious omens of a thriving solitude
to the knife of light that candled in my hand.
The ghosts of dead wolves padded through me like a pulse
and as far as the night could see into the blind water
of the flowing clock that aged like the moon
on a pilgrimage of tears, I was saved by the bleeding bell
of my own sorrow, a lifeboat in the desert,
the colossus of the sky bridge in my brain
that spanned two hemispheres with owls of inquisitive light.
And though I’ve agreed to disagree with fate
and account my eloquent wounds
the restless graves of dark angels buried in sacred mirrors,
there’s no point in desecrating the obvious,

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poem by Patrick White
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The Morning After Everything

for Luke Cochrane

Saturday morning rain in Perth
and things seem as intimately far off and strange
as the new maps of water running down the windowpane.
No birds on the black boughs of the November trees
and black mirrors in the empty funeral home parking lot
and on the other side of me
the stalwart bloodbrick of a wet church
that looks better in the nicotine lingerie
and dusky seaspray
of a single yellow floodlight at night
that can't get it up to be a lighthouse.
It would be a lie to say that I'm not in love
and happily alone, but I most wistfully am,
as I excuse myself for being me
and put myself off like the small death of another way
I could have taken to get back home, but didn't.
November's an orphanage after the last kid has left
and I'm sure there's an ancient chthonic wisdom

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poem by Patrick White
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