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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476561" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Even When The Road Is Missing</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Even when the road is missing<br>like the absence of God, or a woman I love, <br>I praise that emptiness for the freedom it accords me <br>to create a way of my own like a river of stars <br>and for the universe it's left me <br>like a travelling companion I couldn't improve upon.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The gate shut, the door closed, the window locked, <br>I slip a key to a poem under the welcome mat <br>and say my house is your house anytime you call<br>and then go get drunk with the moon down by the lake.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And after awhile we're laughing at ourselves, <br>rolling in the leaves like the groundswell <br>of two happy vagrants with homeless hearts<br>making off with our lives for free as if <br>we'd just pulled off some cosmic B and E.<br>without leaving any sign of culpability behind, <br>except for the joy of our felicitous crime.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And when my moonboat's in port for repairs <br>like bedsheets in a backyard fleet of laundry on the line, <br>I don't mind being land locked for awhile.<br>I just take a walk along the shore of the lake <br>and gather moonlit feathers <br>from the scales of the waves<br>that have evolved from raptors into swans, <br>and binding them together <br>like Daedalus did for Icarus, <br>take a joy ride into the sun at midnight<br>not really caring too much about whether<br>I'm at zenith or nadir as long <br>as I'm transiting something akin to a threshold. <br> <br>The sun can hold Venus on a short leash, <br>and me on the chain of my spine<br>like a barnyard dog barking at wolves <br>trying to tempt it deeper into the night<br>but the last crescent of the moon <br>will cut right through them both <br>like the umbilical cords of a new life <br>where we can both roam free <br>like rogue planets from star to star.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Empty-handed and full-hearted I come by day <br>to a low place looking for fire <br>from the daylilies with a bucket and an urn, <br>because I'm so tired of what I've had to do<br>to stay alive for the past fifty years as a serf of poetry <br>to keep it a calling, instead of a career, <br>and suffer the consequences of not attending to it <br>as a business that makes a profit off the stars, <br>but by night I'm a starling of creosote in a chimney<br>singing my heart out as if I wanted to eat it<br>because it has all the virtues of a noble enemy<br>and there's no poetry or protein in the junkfood of fame, <br>though I think that might be a trifle ingenuous. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Impoverished Druid, you lean on a crutch for a tree, <br>as a flying buttress to your sacred folly, <br>and running out of time to avoid<br>a head-on collision with eternity<br>all your devotions the ghosts of yesterday, <br>you kick the stool from out under your feet <br>and garotte yourself from the bough of an oak, <br>like the berry of a single moon of mistletoe<br>and the last crescent of a golden sickle just out of reach<br>of the harvest season of the King of the Waxing Year.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Poor heart, what a battered shoe<br>of a vital organ you've become, a bone box <br>for the sacred skeletons of hummingbirds and elephants, <br>a Burgess Shale for the creative fossils and footprints <br>we both had to evolve through to come to this<br>inconceivable moment without a time scale<br>to measure how far it is from then to now <br>like the last leap of faith of the waterclock of life <br>into the abyss without a bucket for a safety net <br>or any deep assurance of even having a bottom anymore <br>to fall out of the ongoing over the edge of a precipice<br>as if even the rivers of Eden sometimes <br>had to seek release from it all and fall <br>even without a parachute to candle <br>like an exclamation mark all the way down, <br>a descent into hell creatively much to be preferred <br>than stagnating in paradise with nothing but apples to eat.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But still you know you won't do it, given<br>the number of times now I've come running <br>with a chair and a rope to let you down <br>out of the window of a burning building <br>not knowing whether we were committing suicide <br>or I was running to your rescue as I always have.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Your daring has always said feathers and falling <br>has always taken wing like Pegasus before, <br>and what a wild strange radiant white water ride it's been<br>across the high unbounded starfields of the shining <br>with Vega and Deneb goading us on <br>ever further like spurs of Spanish silver<br>just you and me, my blood brother, together <br>in the vastness of a mutual solitude.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">My God, when I think of the flights we've taken. <br>When I think of the things we've seen, <br>and the orchards of sorrow that found more bliss <br>in the fruit than they did in the blossom. <br>And what did we ever write about all those stars <br>that didn't declare how impossibly illiterate we are <br>compared to the lyrics of light and time and wonder <br>they've been singing all these lightyears <br>since I first opened my eyes to why I'm conceivably here, <br>though here can be anywhere by now like a bird <br>that loses its bearing under the stars everytime <br>it tries to get a fix on where it's going like a photon <br>jumping orbitals like tree rings in a flash of insight. <br>When you're light, when you're foolhardily alive <br>you don't need to pay heed to where you're going<br>because there isn't a single stage, place, or phase<br>that isn't the destination of what you're shining up at. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">And I never thought the day would ever come <br>when sadness would sweeten into wisdom enough <br>to take pity on the mirrors like the eyes under our lifemasks<br>when we went down to the river to drink <br>our own reflections like faces from the lifeboat of our hands, <br>like a rain of mercy far out at sea far from the sight of land, <br>when we first began to understand how clarity like unity<br>can be broken down into little pieces of sand<br>that reflect the whole universe as readily <br>in their mystic particularity <br>as the stars and the sun and the moon do<br>when they lay their swords and feathers <br>and flying carpets like wavelengths of light<br>down in tribute to our third eye weeping its way to the sea.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And you were surprised, admit it, weren't you, <br>to find so many white horses like you running ashore, <br>mustangs from the waves, to check out the new guy's wings.<br>And me standing there like an avalanche of winged heels <br>wondering why I didn't make as big a splash<br>and if all we walked away with was a detailed starmap <br>who could say the journey really wasn't worth it? <br>Let the shore-huggers do what they want with it <br>to find their way around in the dark like fireflies. <br>Leave it to them. We were ever explorers <br>from the beginningless beginning to the endless end, <br>and we'll rise up again on a gust of stars <br>caught up like a dust-devil at the crossroads of earth<br>and ascend on a thermal of the sun, the stairwell <br>of a star-studded chromosome that could <br>take a coil of flypaper and turn it into a poem.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Patrick+White">Patrick White</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476561" data-title="Even When The Road Is Missing de Patrick White" data-description="Even when the road is missing
like the absence of God, or a woman I love, 
I praise that emptiness for the freedom it accords me 
to create a way of my own like a river of stars 
and for the universe it's left me 
like a travelling companion I cou..."></div>
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