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First The Tenderness

First the tenderness; I feel the tenderness,
the downy edge of the leaf, the eyelash,
the green tooth of the leaf
gently opening its mouth to the air,
its flag of being high in the branches
unfurling like a sky of its own,
startled by the taste of the first star.
Every dropp of rain that falls
is a jester's cap,
three bells and a splash and that's me
learning how to swim in this new space
with an ark and a flood, you
the dove with the leaf in its beak, returning.
Then I check a little calendar of razor-blades
to see if any of the days
are holy days circled in my blood,
if I'm late for a sacrifice somewhere,
if there's a landmine waiting
like a spiny sea urchin buried in the sand,
glass petals shed from a broken rose,

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poem by Patrick White
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Silence and Solitude

Solitude and silence. The emptiness of the living moment
subsumed in the mundane middens of the soul, clam shells
and sheep bones, the shucked content of the heart
cherished again as the afterlife of the evidence
I once lived here along with everyone else.

Before I write, this archaeological seance I hold with myself,
this ingathering of everyone I've ever been
flowing back into me where the mindstream meets the sea.
The continuous stillness of this contiguous awareness
where everything is a symbolic event in a dream
trying to wake up from itself to set the dream people free.
Emotional effusions of the moon bleeding among the coral.
Solar flares of conceptual insight returning like ingrown hairs
to the source of their deception like unwanted children
though I've franchised orphanages all over my mindscape
to shelter my rational thought from the persecutions of my intuition.
Serpent's tongues that have been struck by black lightning
humming like a choir of tuning forks half a note off
like a lie they told God, they've been living ever since.

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poem by Patrick White
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As It Begins With A Brush Stroke On A Snare Drum

The plaza was so still in that moment two years ago that
everything was clear,
As if it had been preserved beneath a kind of lacquered
stillness, &, for a while,
I did not even notice the pigeons lifting above the sad tiles
of churches,

Or how they must have sounded like applause that is not
meant for anyone;

I must not have noticed that blind woman on the corner who
begged coins
For a living, who had one eye swelled shut entirely while
the other, a thin film
Of glaucoma over it that had taken on the lustreless sheen
of a nickel,

Was held wide open to witness spittle on the curb. And soon
the band
In their sun-bleached military uniforms were tuning up beneath

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poem by Larry Levis
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I Want To Make A Contribution

I want to make a contribution.
I want to leave something on the stairs of the temple
in the dead of the night and steal away like a shadow,
hoping my small gift of a gift is well-received.
That the stars don't think they're wasting their light
to shine down upon it. Nor the wind resent the seeds it carries.
Fifty years of poetry. Painting the picture-music
the darkness pours into my heart and my heart conveys to my ears.
I can taste thousands of wildflowers like eyes in my blood.
I can taste the homelessness of the rogue stars in my tears,
and pull the wounded swords I cull like thorns of the rose
from the stone of my brain that fell in the farmer's field
like a rock through the window of the abyss
and make it clear as Merlin locked in his tower of glass,
that the stars only look fixed from a distance,
up close and intimate as atoms they're in a frenzy of creation
like a cloud of gnats in the last rapture of the sunset
radioactive with the bliss of being alive to know this.
That we're all longing for home in the lap of an expansive awareness
that threw the starmaps away the moment we were born

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poem by Patrick White
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You're Not Mad Enough

You’re not mad enough to understand my poetry.
Suffering hasn’t twisted you into strange shapes
like a hangman’s apprentice
practising knots with your spine
or driven your innocence out into the desert
like a scape-goat for the sins of others
until you had mastered their evil
and become a great devil
condemned to do good
as if it were the most exquisite torment
of the damned.
You’ve never stood like an exile
at a sleepless window
and listened to the night rain
speaking in a foreign language.
Your electrons have never
been bumped out of their orbitals
like the photonic refugees
of a radioactive element
with half an afterlife

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poem by Patrick White
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Providence

O Sacred Providence, who from end to end
Strongly and sweetly movest! shall I write,
And not of thee, through whom my fingers bend
To hold my quill? shall they not do thee right?

Of all the creatures both in sea and land
Onely to Man thou hast made known thy wayes,
And put the penne alone into his hand,
And made him Secretarie of thy praise.

Beasts fain would sing; birds dittie to their notes;
Trees would be tuning on their native lute
To thy renown: but all their hands and throats
Are brought to Man, while they are lame and mute.

Man is the worlds high Priest: he doth present
The sacrifice for all; while they below
Unto the service mutter an assent,
Such as springs use that fall, and windes that blow.

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poem by George Herbert
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Lightning Hits The Horns Of The Morning Snail

Lightning hits the horns of the morning snail
like the tines of a tuning fork
and the larkspur sees in the ashes of the holy one,
a tiny urn, no bigger than a cigar butt,
a deep connection to the stars
at the root of its ultramarine towers,
the ugly and despised become luminously beautiful
by what they've been touched by. Same
with candles, night, the human spirit, a poem
and the stars and planets
that ride the film of our eyes across the sky
or slide across the poppies of blood that bloom
on the other side of our eyelids in the sunshine
like blue sunspots and serpentine rainbows
on the deft wings of the houseflies aspiring
to penetrate the heights and mysteries of being
as if they approached God like an ineffable windowpane,
and the black mirrors of the oil slicks
that eclipse our faith in our transformative power
to change things. Two petals of violet cosmos,

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poem by Patrick White
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What Bells & Sex Have To Do With Each Other, A Mythic Rendering From Ancient Texts & Dreams, circa 1981

'The bells, I say, the bells outbreak their towers...
- Hart Crane, from 'The Broken Tower'

For Marianne Annur

...I will tell you of Fatima.

She is the bell,
The tintinabulum,
The veil and the will.

Then take me to her.
You can have the tapestry of streets,
The bowls of tint.

Shade the surface black
And she will emerge
The river,

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poem by Warren Falcon
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It's Stranger To Conceive Of Me

It's stranger to conceive of me as I am
than to imagine that I'm someone else.
There's more largesse in the early spring air.
You can tell by the tears that well up in their eyes
the glacial stars are beginning to thaw splinter by splinter
withdrawing their claws from the corpse of the snow
like thorns from the Lion's paw overhead.
I can hear water in the creek tuning up
for the dance to come as soon as
the first violins of the crocuses get here,
the trout lily, the purple passage of the wild violet
under a leaf it took like a page from the book of autumn,
trout lily, hepatica, wood sorrel, grape hyacinth.
I like it here because it doesn't matter who I am.
Things are alert and vivid with life because
they're not threatened by the possession of it.
And time is a lot more honest
here where it lets its hair down
than it is back in town
where it's always now, now, now,

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poem by Patrick White
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Ode to W. Kitchener, M.D.

Author of
The Cook's Oracle, Observations on Vocal Music, The Art of Invigorating and Prolonging Life, Practical Observations on Telescopes, Opera-Glasses, and Spectacles, The Housekeeper's Ledger
and
The Pleasure of Making a Will.

'I rule the roast, as Milton says!'
—Caleb Quotem.

Oh! multifarious man!
Thou Wondrous, Admirable Kitchen Crichton!
Born to enlighten
The laws of Optics, Peptics, Music, Cooking—
Master of the Piano—and the Pan—
As busy with the kitchen as the skies!
Now looking
At some rich stew thro' Galileo's eyes,—
Or boiling eggs—timed to a metronome—
As much at home
In spectacles as in mere isinglass—

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poem by Thomas Hood
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