pastor james's heart attack

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Pastor James’s Heart Attack


When the bloke hands you the fish’n’chips
He does it coolly over his till,
Takes the money, slides the drawer,
And gets bloody close to the correct change
Without once taking his eyes off the street outside.

After nilly eighty years of fat, salt, starch and sugar,
My Old Man’s in the Royal Adelaide with a dodgy pump;
Scared enough to put away his ancient fear
Of letting humans interfere in God’s Big Plan to
Come down from the hills in an ambulance,
Take their advice and let em put in a Pacemaker.

Pacemaker? Gazing sideways like a fishmonger at
The reflection in that hospital window,
I got Wyatt Earp riding through the chest of My Father The Preacher,
Who’s lying there like somebody’s just handed him his Last Fish,
When this Pisces Dutch fishing shiela I love
- “Who was that Raven-Haired Beauty?” he asked when she’d gone -
Anyway she walks in for the first time beside me
With fresh fish on her breath and my sperm on her hands,
He goes a sort of dishwater grey as his blood remembers,
And he’s kicking his sheets.

After a long careful gaze of this,
She looks at me like her icecream’s jumped
Off its cone into the forty-plus gutter,
And sees me become that old bastard:
Scared and jittery, lustful and fucked:
A rotting King, flat on his silver back.

No chance of fresh black feathers on that helmet.

Pastor Jimmy puts his trust in The Lord,
Whispers prayers over the phone
To Sylvia my Mother each morning
While she kneels with a Bible in her hand
On a mattress on the floor in my attic
Just over the street from the heart ward.

She sleeps as close to sin as she’s got for sixty years those nights,
Near the bed where I’m sliding silently into my fishy Raven,
Whispering about orgasms.

Wondering how many you can get.

Pastor James gets better with his new electric ticker
- Having put an end to his jealousy of his wife,
Who’d sprach too eagerly of the food at my place -
Takes her back to The Purple Valley and goes on with it.

She’s been a bit of a raven in her day, mind you.
Still is, under the fat and the tangled feathers.

After I introduced her to a slimy mate,
My Raven went off to Sydney on whoring work
And everything’s settled down nicely.

Sometimes, when she’s back here resting,
She does the same shit with her eyes as the fish’n’chip bloke.

Maybe she thinks the window is me.


Philip White














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enough fucking psalms

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Enough fucking psalms


This lipslowed bleat on Rundle Street:
grub-thick, jams in my craw.
It knots because my psalm’s so sweet
But you won’t ask for more.


Philip White












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monica on the balcony

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Monica on the balcony


When fantasy takes flesh
and slides her toe beneath the veil,
so sharp she keens the hearts and breath
of ordinary males.

Their chests wind tight and spellbound eyes
glaze dumb with mouths agape,
that toe will totally confound
the ordinary ape.

They stand in mobs and mutter,
hypnotised, thick, moron men,
lined up along the gutter
lest that toe tease past again.

With its sacred scent and whiteness,
and its nail, deep blood-drop red,
it knows no glib politeness
as it taunts the lads with bed.

But they're so dim in passion:
ordinarily they fuck it.
You need a very special man
to take that toe, and suck it.


Philip White












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reeds

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Reeds


The reeds have been talking.

Last year it was the river:
Its cosy gloom below the zoo bridge
Where the lads plunged through the rails,
Waking the animals with their unnatural splash,
Upside down gurgles in the car,
And the lights working sideways in the murk
Minutes after the thumping ceased.

Police wet and heaving, naked on the bank.
Behind the wall, the tiger opened an eye,
Peeled back a lip, and yawned me to the shallows.

Now the reeds are talking.

This is a relief.


Philip White












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gravity

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Gravity


The headspin, shark’s fin,
moonful fly-by-night sin:
Honey, your dark star calls me.

Round the corner, in the car,
chucking darts in Nicky’s bar –
I never thought we’d get this far.

But we do.
The Earth wins through.

The oil by your bed says all:
we only stand until we fall.


Philip White












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pixie

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Pixie


This house holds many souls.
They crowd its bleakest lonely moments.
Their fingerprints live on its stones.

They are pacific folk, and do not jostle.

Now they vibrate with refreshment.
A pixie was here,
Firing something sub-atomic.

It knocked the grain from the memory,
Leaving a picture quickly bright and crisp.

My phantoms love it.

They are massaging my shoulders.


Philip White












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song of relief

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Song Of Relief


The news came first by nightmare:
a vivid, snaky dream.
I reached to touch you in my sleep
and sat up as you screamed
“I’m just not into that scene anymore!
I’m just not in that scene!”

I woke, and like the songs all say,
you were not with me, anyway.


Philip White












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the desert pea

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The Desert Pea


You would nurse it shut
as Nightingale nursed each night:
fresh dressing at dawn,
mother fingers pressing the purse lips closed for sleep.

Now I am invited (or so my little advisor claims)
to manage its opening, permanent.
One curious inspection leaves the
hospital yearning for a whole Crimea of bleedings.


Philip White












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the electric drum

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The Electric Drum


One hundred and forty times a minute
You bow to this thump you call techno:
Heads down, shoulders round,
Forearms pounding phantom anvils,
You kow-tow to the dark machine grunt
That disemployed your ancestry.

You could attend church
And eat your god.


Philip White












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fleurieu geography

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Fleurieu geography
for Susan Dowie


Lie on your back in a field.
Lie ’til the clover peeks from your eyeholes,
And the capeweed strangles your curved white spine.
Then you can know.
Then you can feel.

Kulultuwi the songwriter tracked an emu,
unaware that behind him was Tjirbruke,
- his mum’s heavy magic brother from the Rapid Bay granite -
following that same special bird for other reasons.

Tjirbruke surprised his nephew - his Njengari - singing
as he cooked that emu with herbs in an earthernware
pressure cooker, a wintjimi.

Suddenly embarrassed that this was no ordinary bird,
Kulultiwi apologised and offered the feast to his uncle.
But Tjirbruke said no thanks,
he had sufficient roo meat,
moseyed on,
and sent back a message of forgiveness,
unaware that Kulultiwi had been blinded by steam when
he opened his wintjimi,
giving his greedy half brothers the chance to kill him
on the excuse that he’d transgressed.

Hunting the wrong bird.

Which they ate.

When he heard the terrible news,
Tjirbruke walked all the way to Gawler searching for them,
then came back south to check out a big show he’d heard
about at Brighton,
where he found them and killed them,
and many of their clan, for lying to conceal them.

He found Kulultiwi’s body, half-smoked,
and took it to Kingston Park to finish the job.
Once it was compact enough to carry,
Tjirbruke took that body down the coast past Scalloway,
weeping fresh clean grievings along the salty gulf to leave
life-giving faucets for travellers.

Then he stowed Kulultiwi in the cliff north of Morgans
where they’d netted snapper as young ’uns,
entered the earth’s crust to emerge at Mount Hayfield,
sealed up his exit hole and walked down to Victor.

There, he became Glossy Ibis on The Bluff,
showing Christ the way by soaring heavenward
where he left his Njengari as a glittering star,
and in an eternal triumphant stoop
plunged headlong into the Tapanappa schist over my
side of the range;
deep and hot and passionate and futuristic enough to
make iron sulphide - pyrites; firestone - at Brukunga
so folk should always have the warmth of fire.

Heaven and Hell in one fell swoop.

His water you watch became Golf Josephine, after their
Emporer’s mistress when Baudin and the post-
revolutionary Frogs arrived some millennia later.
By the time they got home Napoleon had a new girlfriend
who wanted it renamed after her,
and while Josie was growling in her empty salon,
perversely, lonesome Matthew Flinders called that same water
St. Vincent, after his sponsor First Lord of the Admiralty
the Right Honourable John, Earl of St. Vincent,
which Saint turns out to be patron of vinedressers and schoolgirls.

Carrying a name my mob took for their sub-arctic Ness with no hue,
I find myself living by Brukunga,
where Tjirbruke buried his bruke, his firestone.

In China I am Golden Dragon.
They know I don’t know what that means
- I don’t know what any of this means -
but I sport sulphur feathers in my carburetor;
and exude acrid waftage, or moist.

In the land of my clan you dowe, or wilt,
while your highland mob took dowie
- melancholic, dismal, dreary -
from dollie, doll, dull.

Yet you are music-filled champers-fuelled bikini-clad
body-surfing sandfish with little rage but a canny
placitude as thick as syrup,
and certain distance that disappears and you’re perfumed and close.

I risk my feathers to plunge dry through rock and fire to come
out your side and sizzle your fizz and freesias.
You risk steaming away your fishy water through stony fire to be here.

Or by sexy whisper on the phone.

We’ll learn about it all by bone.


Philip White












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stonette-du-jour

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Stonette-du-jour
(for Dr. Michael “Alacrity” Youds,
on his return of some books)


I put the furniture back from whence it came
a life ago, still autumn seeps early. It’s January,
but when I open the doors leaves troop through
the cobwebs to settle in the corners. My

desk grows wings from the feathers I lean to
collect beneath the trees in the mornings from
my bed through here across the washout to the
store. These sky folk are not sea birds, but

they can do the business. A small Dionysiosaur
eats the Portuguese millipedes twice a week;
magpies and rats love my bolognese; I gas
the blowflies before they lay their marching rice,

and great books long aloft return like ancient
condors to shit refreshed upon my shelves.


Philip White












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friday 13th november 1987

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Friday 13 November 1987
(on meeting Tyronne Phillip Fischer)


So sweet the meat, the hallowed arc
His forehead flashes to my nose;
To cleave, to cabbage-crunch. So sweet,
The bloody dump of pumping me:
So hot agush my shocked throatdown,
And crimson bursts my shirtfront.

Wall eyes abrim with sinblack faith,
His smile a yard of tombstones with
No earthly breath to dry their moss-
Damp postscripts from the void - that sharp
Skull suck gives only weight to tilt
His business lean to toe-tips,

For the extra leverage he
Needs to swing his club up through my
Balls. Shoulders bulging, head down now
As if he were some shunter, some
Giant engine strained to push a
Hundred coalfull trucks through points

All rusted since the war. Which war?
I ask, aghast to think of more,
Of bigger, badder, more fucked war -
Shit! This mad cunt's for real! He's killed
My cods! His waddy whacking bone
Not hit like this before, my

Baby cradle there where mothers
Have no cods at all - just hollow
Swamps where killers crawl and simple
blokes like me. Or did. No more of
That delight, because tonight, I
Meet our Father which art Death

On the End of a Stick. And now
As the body retches forward
Across the broken cock, the face
Still squirting hot artery blood,
The mind screams panic orders to
Slam the fucking firedoors and

Shut the receptors down clunk! clunk!
Clunk! He swings back in his singlet
Torso, guts now ruts of tightning
Muscle furrows, murderous in
Their tension, chrome springs stretched against
Blue cotton, his hair trigger

Filed off from the start. There is no
Stopping now. So from away back,
A yard behind his warrior frizz
And triumphant jaw, from the end
Of his cartooned sledgehammer paw,
Rain down the finishing shots:

One, two, three, four - each breaching so
Easily the skullflesh, each swing
More gold for Australia, each
Blow a psalm of victory, a
Sweetener for the bloodfilled throat,
A scytheman reaping braincells

By the lobe, chopping the cushion,
The last crop of hair, the final
Tight helmet of flesh. The smooth thought
Creche peels back, layer by layer,
Opening the mains of life, to
Let these dogs of me run free

At last to sky, in great red bursts
Of lifedog, the sprinkler of the
Heart, flooding here the street outside
The pub, where, drained atop the bar
My pintglass slides its endfroth down
Its sides like a nice slow piss.


Philip White












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forgotten guests like phantoms

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Forgotten guests like phantoms


Forgotten guests like phantoms filled my house
while you were at the opera.
Three times I turned my back and strode the hall,
my arms outstretched to greet you;
but you were at the opera.
I couldn't eat, but drank,
'til there in the chatter and rattle of plates
your face swooped in before me,
and slid me to that perfumed hush,
snug with the rustle of curtain and skirt,
and the cascade applause of the opera.


Philip White











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she comes down

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She Comes Down


“They’re those little wispy bits we get before she comes down”
Michael told the telephone in a voice too dry from the waiting.

Like frozen shards off the edge of some mighty shattered sword
the advance droplets shrieked silently through our cheeks
by the time we reached the garden.

Annabelle was in her dressing gown in the roses
as we picked and packed petals for my soap.

Between gasps, the lowering sky gulped vacuums of still deep grey,
Leaving silence, as if it might snow.


Philip White












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i choose to take this risk of writing

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I Choose To Take This Risk Of Writing
(for Francis Bacon)


Those arms I felt:
softened they were by Death;
but sorrow warms them too,
and I could feel your strength coming through.

In those arms.

When it happens, nobody understands.
The anchor in the heart
suddenly pulls tight as
the ship draws away,
and great steaks of flesh and rib
drag pumping down the pier.

Now the cables are drawing tight.

The garbage men are banging in the street.

It’s not so much the muscle that goes,
but the bone.
Eaten and eaten and eaten.
From the arms, I mean: the loving arms.

The bastard sits there smoking,
nonchalant, on the bed,
while the bone goes out of your arms
and your chest is dragged pumping
down the pier.

He puts his hat on, jerks down his cuffs,
and stalks out,
swelling thinly against his shoulderpads.

Leaving us.

When you curl your throat like that
And I’ve got my fingers soft in the back of your knee,
That’s when we pull the wadding of the sky
back into the wound and shoot those
stainless cables down the marrow to the future.


Philip White












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the prairie home companion

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The Prairie Home Companion


Between the hand and the handle,
the soup and the nose,
the notion and the voice,
enters the comforting idea
that things will soon return to normal.

His clothes should betray him.
The suit and the shoes.
The death of a salesman
who fades while suggesting
that things will soon return to normal.

Assurance without insurance.
The phone rings next.
You’ve hit a kangaroo
and can’t complete the run
to get back here to normal.

He came in low enough
to knock a wheel out.
If he’d crashed on your lap,
through your low windscreen,
that would be the new normal.

More and more pointillism.
More and more dots.


Philip White












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heroin

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Heroin


Somebody’d popped an artery in the bogs.

Wrong tube.

Sprayed floods of their latest reddest blood
across the white tiles,
the floor and the cistern;
unravelled about forty feet of shitwipes
to sop the wound
then fled in blind white panic.

“Oh have they?”
enquired the publican,
taking his bar cloth in for the wipe-up,
sleeves rolled up to the elbows.


Philip White












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gabriella

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Gabriella


There is no wind.

Smackfucked Adelaide explodes her warmth
to the cloudless chill heaven,
and when the warmth goes
there is no sound or sign.

The half moon’s snapped in frozen blue.

I got no trouble with you, gone Gabriella.

Gone good is where you are.

But not one breath of wind?
No cloud? No sound? No sign?
Only half a moon?


Philip White












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the tussocks

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The tussocks


Well into the tussocks I interrupted ducks
One flightless teenager galloped across the water
And then an explosion of babies
And a mother who did the broken wing trick about a chain away
While I tipped an old cassoulet out for the fish

The rain dug itself in this afternoon
My smoker smouldering some McCubbin into a shin of beef
While ibis rose from the bottom vineyard
To perch on trellis posts in prehistoric rows
And Peter fed his horses as if everything was normal


Philip White












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two beach poems

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Two beach poems


1

Head burning heart hours to ragged rhymes each blue
hard time writing love
This feeling I can't hold in pours to you

But see it washing on the empty beach morning with
centuries of seaweed -

I wonder where the water took it
And why it comes in cold


2

Stumbling thoughts

Sadder than lame gulls

It's as if they've lost forever the taste of earth-free flight
and spend their summer hurling dry curses downwind
with blowing papers and sharp white sand and rancid kelp


Philip White
Summer 1971












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falco longipennis

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Falco longipennis


What maddened verse gives raptors the rhythm
To thrash through shrubbage and scrub
Risking wings to get at the tucker
And peck the brains from pigeon, parrot, and bat?

I just looked an Australian hobby in the eyes.
She’d done a wing on a vineyard wire,
Humping through the trellis to get the wee birdies
The vigneron erected plastic falcons to scare.

Her falconer had set her up well,
Never holding her down like the dreaded vet,
Keeping her weight up, earning her trust
’Til she up and off, one crook wing tip hanging just

Enough to attract that peregrine that
Drilled a shocked silent hole in the sky,
Smashing all sound of bird into nothing:
A sudden feather-free vacuum of death.

But she came back, that broken one,
Now setting herself on her ground crew’s glove,
Staring black and yellow to my soul, as if to say
“You thought I was fucked then didn’t you”.


Philip White
1 April 2002












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breakfast

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Breakfast


before came her Sun Earth drew us from bed
pen and her poet in time for John Cargher’s final show
with soy milk and muesli
and Zbigniew Herbert on Marcus Aurelius

“good night Marcus put out the light”
he wrote in the scorched gullies of his blitzburgh
as dead John croaked on about the deficiencies of coloratura

genetically modified
breakfast replaced the morning dung

outside in the frozen vineyard of drought
foxes sprint for last low swallows

she’s wondering whether to flick us off
teased by the notion of a nice new start

“We know there’s plenty of time”
she whispers to her brother

Mars

who’s rueing his last sweet drink
while this tiny machine scratches holes in the top of his head

the sort of gadget Gordon Barton and Paul Hamlyn
dream of securing at auction
for strategic fucking purposes

hi boys

kookaburras laugh us back to our shroud


Philip White

bits fly away

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Bits fly away



This autumn is so unsure of itself
I feel like I should be cold.
As quiet as science you do not come.

We were going to the ocean.
But beside the cutting horses at Kangarilla,
I watch the bulldogs fucking on the lawn,

knowing that you will not come.
When farmers watch their livestock hump,
they think of wives and lovers.

Bits fly away from me very quick now
as the windscreen shatters.
I was in another direction.


Philip White












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laundering

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Laundering


After the funeral I took all your shirts
and scrubbed the collars and cuffs
with lemon and eucalyptus, so they shone
brighter than they’d ever done before.

I soaked your work trousers then washed them,
edging the temperature to the boil,
feeding the copper with kindling you’d cut,
while that old wringer surged and sang

like you did as we laughed those years
away, surprised at our hunger and lust.
The starching came next, and the iron.
Handkerchiefs, cravat - even your ties.

Now that they’re hanging on the rack
it’s obvious: you’re never coming back.


Philip White











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