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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476918" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Leaves Sluicing The Rain Down The Back Of My Neck</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">The leaves sluicing the rain down the back of my neck<br>to put out my candle of serpent-fire <br>like an orchid in an abandoned house well, <br>lightning in its tears, thunder in the hollow <br>of its telescope when the white runaway horse <br>pounds its hoof upon it at four in the morning, <br>the muscled embodiment of moonlight made flesh, <br>the stars running to peer through their windows <br>to see what's making that sound.<br> <br>The sodden path down to the lake, rife with duff, <br>an Orphic descent whose picture-music <br>owes nothing to death, and the moss-pated skulls<br>of the prophetic rocks along the way, every precarious step, <br>the assessment of an omnipresent danger <br>that could kick the stool from out under your noose, <br>though you were foolishly hoping it might be <br>an Egyptian ankh, granting you long life <br>in an underworld where anything that's violet <br>is the toxic shadow of an inconsolable grief <br>that laments that it had ever met the sun eye to eye, <br>and try how it might, can't make a way of life <br>out of suicide. But I didn't come here to grease <br>the hinges on hell like the wings of rusty birds<br>or desecrate the place with my omnipresence.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Once I realized the realm of the dead <br>is no realm at all that can be distinguished from the living, <br>I've returned to this underground river from time to time<br>where the roots try to take hold of my skull like the moon <br>as if it were their last chance at blossoming, <br>and my bones are scattered along the banks <br>like socket wrenches from a dead mechanic's tool box<br>or a coffin that's finally run out of things to fix. <br>This is where I come to return my harp of water <br>to a watershed of indistinguishable wavelengths <br>in homage to the source that handed it on to me, <br>a voice of my own, and there's a bridge I stand on <br>no one's burnt down yet, just a fallen log really, <br>but to me an overarching oxymoron that lets me stand <br>on both sides of the mindstream at once <br>to pay homage to a death I long to be worthy of <br>like a teacher my life is obligated to surpass <br>to fully honour her undisciplined transcendence.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Like water. A carrying away into a carrying away. <br>We couldn't tell time if we weren't all dying. <br>Eternity just a sundial that never closed its eyelids. <br>The wounded serpent of the waterclock bleeding out<br>like a human heart to remind us what hour it is, <br>what windfalls and harvests of the season of our soul <br>to leave in the begging bowls we place <br>at the eastern doors of our autumnal burial huts, <br>hoping we'll see each other again, once are bones are dust, <br>like Canada geese returning in the early spring. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Some bring silver swords minted of moonlight <br>thrusting through the parting clouds <br>and lay them down on the water gently <br>like children they once cherished abandoned for life<br>as the greatest gift their hands had ever grasped. <br>I lay down this gift of a clear voice <br>that no fear or desire's ever broken in like a wishbone <br>pimped out like tinfoil to the glamour of temptation.<br>Whatever storms raged in the crowns of its oracular branches, <br>this tree never injured any bird that ever sang in it. <br>I never hung my lyre like a dreamcatcher over the bed, <br>or used it to seduce butterflies into a spider-web, <br>dolphins into a bay of fishing-nets, nor yet <br>let its strings go slack like the pentatonic spinal cords <br>of a guitar that's lost its nerve in the dark corners of life.<br>Nor did I ever refuse to sing what the dead asked me to <br>anymore than I did the living. Nor let the medium <br>intrude upon the message in such a way <br>the import of the song couldn't exceed <br>the wingspan of the bird that released it<br>into the vastness of its interstellar longing. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Here the dead whisper their secrets to the waters <br>like coy sylphs of the wind flirting with waves, <br>and here where dissolution walks in the same shoes <br>as regeneration, and one step east is one step west <br>and though there's a coming and though there's a going <br>birth and death don't know anything about this, <br>and Prussian blue the wet wind that's been crying <br>about the sturm and drang of things to the broken pines<br>whose excruciations have become part of their character, <br>as if the haloes of the rain rippled through their heartwood <br>like the echoes of old engagement rings<br>from wide-eyed springs that have lasted for light years.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Death isn't the derelict of life's glory. <br>Just as peace isn't the end of passage. <br>Mid-summer squanders as many flowers <br>on the capricious rivers of life as it does <br>the funeral bells of the fallen water birds. <br>And maybe that's all these words are, <br>wild iris and daylilies lifting their skirts <br>above the flowing like troupes of gypsy fires <br>that like dancing to the flutes of their own desires<br>as they burn on the pyres of their floral reflections. <br>Who knows this late in the day, but maybe <br>I'm just trying to approach my own death <br>like an unopened gate to a garden<br>the way I did as a novice to love<br>when I couldn't tell a larkspur from a hollyhock<br>nor what sign the star sapphire of the borage <br>wanted to be planted under like the Pleiades? </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Anyway it pans out is ok with me, though. <br>I like it here where the waterlilies reset their sails <br>like redemption out of their own salvage<br>and after a long, grey day of funereal rain, <br>the clouds begin to clear around nightfall<br>and my eyes are seeded with the stars <br>of unnamed constellations of New England asters<br>that don't conform to any known starmaps<br>I can follow genetically back like a fuse of dna<br>to the Big Bang of my first flowering into life.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And maybe I'm a mutant in the ancestry of death<br>that has always been the subliminal motif <br>of a symphonic life that wasn't immune <br>to the picture-music of the celestial spheres<br>but I can't help noticing how the bones of the muskrat <br>and the skeletal remains of the heron's stilts <br>toppled by the stealthy fluke of a fox <br>all resonate like musical instruments <br>laid down in tribute on the roots of the trees <br>and on the sides of the paths that broke like melodies<br>on the ears of the dead who could taste them <br>like the tears of the moon on their silver tongues.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In this realm of radiant starmud in a state <br>of reanimating life out of its own detritus and decay, <br>I can hear their ghosts returning to life <br>like native atmospheres <br>returning to the songs of the lunar night birds<br>that don't abuse their solitude with a sense of loss <br>without sweetening the music <br>with the ripeness of their silence <br>just before the grande finale <br>of their next windfall of transcendent whole notes.</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=476918" data-title="The Leaves Sluicing The Rain Down The Back Of My Neck de Patrick White" data-description="The leaves sluicing the rain down the back of my neck
to put out my candle of serpent-fire 
like an orchid in an abandoned house well, 
lightning in its tears, thunder in the hollow 
of its telescope when the white runaway horse 
pounds its hoof u..."></div>
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