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He Doesn't Really Know What It All Means

He doesn't really know what it all means,
but he gives it access to his heart, free-range of his mind.
Not expecting an answer to the mystery of life
because it isn't petty enough to have one,
he explores its horrors and wonders along the way
making small discoveries like rings and keys in the grass.
He doesn't look at things darkly through a glass anymore
since his binoculars turned into the third eye
of a mandalic kaleidoscope that has a way
of turning his chromatic aberrations into enlightenment.
And if he does it's usually a nightsky squandering stars
on those with the eyes to see them in the starmud
of their flesh and blood, in everyone of their insights,
an intimacy with billions of midnight suns all shining at once.

Mind includes the brain but the brain doesn't include the mind.
Just the way love includes the heart, but the heart
is a mere nugget of love, compared to what there is of love
it takes more than the measure of a universe to contain.
This is the cruising altitude of a submarine

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poem by Patrick White
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A Thousand Years From Now

A thousand years from now
who will remember me
once I've disappeared from this windowpane,
a vapour of breath with awareness,
a nebular stain on the clarity
that will wash its hands of me
like a scar of water that has clung too long?

I'm not trying to embalm
the elegiac content of these obvious sunsets in words,
and it's hard to shake honey out of these mordant bells
that lie like duplicitous lifeboats to the gullible compasses and maps
that keep crashing like doves that don't have the wingspan
to come back with news of land
to this museum of DNA, two of every kind,
I keep scuttling like an ark on the top of every wave.

And what is a grave if not an abandoned embassy
that didn't have time to shred its dreaded secret?
And sometimes, when the emptiness and the silence

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poem by Patrick White
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Living On The Cutting Edge Of The Lunar Waste

Living on the cutting edge of the lunar waste
I made of my last moonrise. A truce
with underwhelming circumstances for awhile,
no apparent pitfalls on a Saturday night in Perth,
too cold for snakes, and the leaves playing their cards
close to earth and the air a knife at your throat,
I can remember when I tried harder to exist,
and it's still a holy war every day just to subsist
and not let it scar your spirit into being cauterized
like a bad tattoo of the moon you had effaced,
but tonight I seek the ease of a solitude older than humans
down in the wetlands of the Tay River just off
Sunset Boulevard before you cross the first bridge.

Waist high in the broken antennae of the brittle grass
yellow as the fossils in a graveyard
of green praying mantes, decultified romantics,
I pad the skull of rock I usually sit on like a prophetic throne
with the old manuscripts of fallen maple leaves,
recalling lines from poems like lyrical snippets of chromosomes

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poem by Patrick White
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Enraptured By The All-Inclusive Mystic Specificity

Enraptured by the all-inclusive mystic specificity
of terrestrial things.
Appalled by the inhumanity of the way
humans can so easily inflict
what they fear the most
upon each other
as if there were some strange alien duty
in their reptilian cruelty,
some small nugget of the meteor that struck the earth
back in the late Triassic
that we've retained like an R-complex
savagely jealous of the rest of the brain.
I can get along without matter
as does most of the universe
and the eastern dawns of Asia do
but mind and form are a different issue.
When water thinks deeply
about what it might be
it's always a sea
with a small stream of consciousness running into it like me.

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poem by Patrick White
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Mc'Clusky's Nell

In Mike Maloney's Nugget bar the hooch was flowin' free,
An' One-eyed Mike was shakin' dice wi' Montreal Maree,
An roarin' rageful warning when the boys got overwild,
When peekin' through the double door he spied a tiny child.
Then Mike Maloney muttered: "Hell! Now ain't that jest too bad;
It's Dud McClusky's orphen Nell a-lookin' for her dad.
An' him in back, a-lushin' wine wi' Violet de Vere-
Three times I've told the lousy swine to keep away from here."
"Pore leetle sing! He leaves her lone, so he go on ze spree:
I feex her yet, zat Violet," said Montreal Maree.
Now I'm accommodatin' when it comes to scented sin
But when I saw that innocent step in our drunken din,
I felt that I would like to crawl an' hide my head in shame.
An' judgin' by their features all them sourdoughs felt the same.
For there they stood like chunks o' wood, forgettin' how to swear,
An' every glass o' likker was suspended in the air.
For with her hair of sunny silk, and big, blue pansy eyes
She looked jest like an angel child stepped outa paradise.
So then Big Mike, paternal like, took her upon his knee.
"Ze pauv' petite! She ees so sweet," said Montreal Maree.

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poem by Robert William Service
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I Have Grown

I have grown significantly to understand that every throne I've ever sat upon was quicksand and that I am living leniently on the match-head of a planet waiting for the thumbnail of the moon to ignite it with one quick flick of a crescent. Equine and apocalyptic as hell, and the irony is, more than possibly accurate. I'm running out of doors where I can billet my assassins; I keep giving my heart to women who reject it like a bloodbank without an overdraft. I'm a diffraction pattern in the twilight zone, in media res, between this world and the next, and that's not the one where the herders and the hunters are having it out in a range war of religions. Like a page torn out of the multiverse, I'm just a zone of local cooling, a sunspot, and my neighbour is another, though we know we're both just fooling when we call each other brother. Forty-eight years a poet and a painter, intoxicated by the picture-music threading the fog of the sirens like a theme I couldn't resist. Foolish, I suppose, not to have tied myself off like a lifeboat and rowed and rowed for years just to stay where I am, but I had to jettison my landing gear to achieve cruising altitude in the oxymoronic abyss that the sirens demanded, saying, live this, if your poetry isn't just the romantic bloodletting of a rose from a vein that you've slashed on the moon, prove you're not a lie to us, and conduct yourself like a terrorist, prepared, are you prepared? -to die for us. I cut the eyes out of an eclipse and wore it over my face like a ski-mask, and walked around in the busy market, weighing the world like a tomato in my hand, the original primordial atom, packed with explosives, ready to detonate on command, to delet and improve the world by splashing myself against the wall like a bucket of paint and see what I could make out of myself in the mess of the ensuing vision. It's amazing how suggestive a real siren can be when you're lying in an ambulance without any legs. So I learned to swim like a fish among the stars; the last archon of an extinct species from Mars, evicted when all the water went south, and I had to come up with a completely new medium, new atmosphere, new idiom, out of myself, ingeniously, given what I had to work with. I adapted to the solitude and silence of my own vast spaces within, and vowed like a candle, to root my flower in the dark like lightning. Now there's a squad car outside the candy-store and a swan that barks like a god. Make of it what you will. The pebble doesn't enquire after its ripples. I write without feedback, without telltale bubbles of meaning rising to the surface like survivors who want to crawl back up on land and start it all again. There's not much point in panning for gold in an asteroid belt when the only way to tell one nugget from the next is to break your teeth biting into them like fortune-cookies enshrining the haloes and the horns of the prophetic comets that dash by like bunting on a campaign tour. Elect me your fate, and I promise to find a place for your day old reflection somewhere on the plate, and a way to flag the fools down for easier detection. But I won't tweak your mountainous erection like a gunshot when there are avalanche warnings all along the road, and the echoes return, born again, rehearsing their own names like fleeing refugees on a rosary of boulders that were left overs from Soddam and Gomorrah. Better to write this way than to lie buried like the last laugh of a kingly line in the barrow of a dunghill, pleading like a seed for an upgraded resurrection. I may well be the last extant defect of a fallible perfection, and all the mistakes of the bruised morning glory are mine, and the snakey tines of these tendrils of blood get tangled up in the twine of my thought and no one knows how they got in nor how to get out, and the homologous combs of the mentally coiffed are useless against the love knots that have coiled into nooses around the neck of the wind that's run out of excuses for inciting the spring to riot, but at least I don't snitch my way through a poem like a hydrophobic divining rod rooting out the terrorist wells of the watershed in order to secure some heartland in the back pastures of God. It's dangerous wherever I am. And flawed.

poem by Patrick White
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A Poor Joke

‘NO, you can’t count me in, boys; I’m off it—
I’m jack of them practical jokes;
They give neither pleasure nor profit,
And the fellers that plays them are mokes.
I’ve got sense, though I once was a duffer,
And I fooled up my share, I allow,
But since conscience has made me to suffer—
She’s pegging away at me now.

You notice I’ve aged rather early,
And the wrinkles are deep on my face?
That’s sorrer—I’m sixty-nine, barely.
Jes’ camp, and I’ll tell you my case.
It was here on The Springs, we had hit it,
And we working the lead on this spot—
And we were, to my shame I admit it,
A rather unprincipled lot.

‘We were drunk all the day on the Sundays—
No wickeder habit exists;

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poem by Edward George Dyson
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Catching The Coach

At Kangaroo Gully in 'Fifty-two
The rush and the scramble was reckless and rough;
'Three ounces a dish and the lead running true!'
Was whispered around concerning the stuff.

Next morning a thousand of fellows or more
Appeared for invasion along the brown rise,
Some Yankees, and Cockneys, and Cantabs of yore
And B.As from Oxford in blue-shirt disguise.

And two mornings later the Nugget saloon,
With billiards and skittles, was glaring with signs,
A blind fiddler, Jim, worked out a weak tune,
Beguiling the boys and collecting the fines.

Then tents started up like the freaks of a dream
While heaps of white pipeclay dotted the slope,
To 'Dern her -- a duffer!' or 'Creme de la creme!'
That settled the verdict of languishing hope.

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poem by Alfred Thomas Chandler
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The Prospector

I strolled up old Bonanza, where I staked in ninety-eight,
A-purpose to revisit the old claim.
I kept thinking mighty sadly of the funny ways of Fate,
And the lads who once were with me in the game.
Poor boys, they're down-and-outers, and there's scarcely one to-day
Can show a dozen colors in his poke;
And me, I'm still prospecting, old and battered, gaunt and gray,
And I'm looking for a grub-stake, and I'm broke.

I strolled up old Bonanza. The same old moon looked down;
The same old landmarks seemed to yearn to me;
But the cabins all were silent, and the flat, once like a town,
Was mighty still and lonesome-like to see.
There were piles and piles of tailings where we toiled with pick and pan,
And turning round a bend I heard a roar,
And there a giant gold-ship of the very newest plan
Was tearing chunks of pay-dirt from the shore.

It wallowed in its water-bed; it burrowed, heaved and swung;
It gnawed its way ahead with grunts and sighs;

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poem by Robert William Service
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The Explorer

"There's no sense in going further --
it's the edge of cultivation,"
So they said, and I believed it --
broke my land and sowed my crop --
Built my barns and strung my fences
in the little border station
Tucked away below the foothills
where the trails run out and stop.

Till a voice, as bad as Conscience,
rang interminable changes
In one everlasting Whisper
day and night repeated -- so:
"Something hidden. Go and find it.
Go and look behind the Ranges --
Something lost behind the Ranges.
Lost and waiting for you. Go!"

So I went, worn out of patience;
never told my nearest neighbours --

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poem by Rudyard Kipling
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