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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476934" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Painting Finished</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">for Sally</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The painting finished, I sit at my desk <br>and go on painting windows and computer screens. <br>My body is grateful and my heart a submarine. <br>I don't know if I expressed what I meant to mean<br>but there it is and that's an end of it for the night.<br>Time now to rely on my resident metaphors. <br>Stop looking at things that flower in space like stars<br>and coercing the light into compliance.<br>Sit in my apartment and watch the weave of the rain<br>unravelling the loom of the window in tears.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Feel like a seance trying to talk to an exorcism<br>when I address myself in my solitude<br>at cruising altitude over the sirens and car horns, <br>the wailing of long distance freight trains <br>like graffiti art shows on the road all the way <br>from North Carolina, the land of talented spray bombs, <br>and the gleeful shrieking of a gaggle of girls<br>as shrill as apostate nuns of narcissi in the rain <br>that have just broken their vow of silence <br>and are making up for lost time impishly.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Relatively serene, the composure of chaos, <br>I let the starmud settle in the puddle <br>until my mind becomes as clear as<br>a refracting telescope without chromatic aberration.<br>And then you show up in a blur of stars<br>like the Andromeda galaxy, <br>a smudge of shining, a gust of wavelengths <br>and what had been unfocused in me, <br>like the cosmic background hiss <br>when I'm sitting here like this, <br>the afterbirth of a man wondering <br>where the rest of me is, and suddenly <br>I'm whole and focused again on an old wound <br>I had thought was scarred over forever<br>some time ago by the moon <br>that keeps re-opening every spring like a rose<br>as I realize that love isn't done with me yet.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And I say to myself, here comes the mystery again, <br>the fire, the desire, the moon with its black pearl <br>and its white, its eclipse and its harvest, <br>and the one blue one that's too shy to come into the light, <br>but everyone sings and dances under just the same, <br>the harvest in and the labour done.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">With love. That valley of a word that can wound mountains <br>when they get lost in it, as their lifestreams bleed out <br>like gold from the undiscovered ore of their darkness, <br>and they become snowmen riding their own melting like glaciers. <br>Love when it isn't just a sound beavers make <br>when they slap their tails on the water like a warning <br>there are wolves around. And everyone takes a nose-dive <br>and heads for the lodge like Montezuma's capitol in the middle of a lake.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Love. That ghost of an abstraction that holds everyone in its wake<br>like a symphony of seagulls at the stern of a moonboat<br>navigating waterways through the mountains of the moon <br>like a muse or a voice coach, or a lapwing with a broken rudder. <br>Imagine that. A word so mute it doesn't have any senses of its own, <br>and yet it can enflame even an old growth forest with desire. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">And I've had banshees wailing, and ravens saying nevermore <br>at my window before, and felt every beat of my heart<br>like the dull thud of small birds who mistook<br>the mirage of the sky in the window for the real thing<br>and thought even in the body of a swallow, what immensites <br>are contained within such a tiny locket of a heart<br>barely the size of a raspberry, if that, and yet <br>this small thing could ride out a hurricane if it had to, <br>and not even a Boeing 767 can do that. <br>And I buried it in my heart with reverence <br>like an obsidian Clovis-point arrowhead.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Love is the third wing on a bird, the third edge on a sword<br>of Damascene steel forged and folded like the first crescent <br>of a metal from the ore of love-struck moonrocks <br>to kill you deeper into the rapture of life <br>like a loveletter you weren't expecting.<br> <br>Engendered from two extremes, love's the intensity <br>in the middle, the rebel of a third eye between <br>and slightly above the other two, like a star <br>you're trying to point out to the child within you.<br>And then someone comes along out of the anthracite blue<br>of a spring night like a comet <br>out of the black halo around the sun, <br>you can identify with as a radiant omen of things to come.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And you can't believe it, it's inconceivable<br>given the badlands you've just cowboyed your way through <br>like a dinosaur on its own waiting for the sign of a meteor <br>heading toward its extinction like a prophetic skull.<br>And then comes love with its starmaps<br>like this last-minute change of flightplan<br>and you're a warm-blooded mammal again <br>and all your scales turn into the feathers of songbirds <br>waiting for the return of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, <br> <br>in which is conjoined the highest and the lowest <br>in a godhead of opposites that can't be explained <br>any more than desire can explain <br>why it's a soggy matchbook in the rain one moment<br>and the next it breaks into flame like a poppy with big dreams.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And just look at me now, sitting here like a Zen monk <br>in the pagoda of a pine-cone germinating <br>a whole new wilderness to explore <br>out of the seed thoughts under my half closed eyelids<br>sprouting in fire and putting down roots in the rain at the same time.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Love's doing it to me again, and the mirrors <br>are beginning to thaw like Mayan observatories <br>as they open their eyelids at the first sign of a star<br>to make contact with them like astronomers who've <br>been buried in the mines of their prophecies<br>and cosmological calendrical theories for lightyears now.<br>And suddenly the urge to jump zodiacs like orbitals <br>comes upon me like a homeless photon of insight<br>on the threshold of a whole new house of life<br>it's attracted to like a lost starless stranger <br>to a porchlight in the distance <br>in the shadows of the mountains of the moon</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And when I'm in love I smile like the white <br>but in my heart I'm the black Taj Mahal reflected <br>in pool of liquid moonlight. Everything is <br>mystical and intense, full of wonderment <br>in the smallest details, in the cosmic uniqueness <br>of every event, however seemingly insignificant <br>and raises the trivial out of the dirt <br>into the stardust of the universally sublime, <br>and even the antheap of day to day life <br>gets turned into a shrine I lay poems on the stairs of <br>in the name of love, where yesterday I lay like an orphan <br>on the steps of a halfway house to heaven and back.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Love. That can turn your head and your vision of life <br>from a computer screen into an Arizona moonrise <br>of a woman in the Sonora desert, a siren in the sands <br>of an hourglass full of stars that pay no attention to time, <br>and me an old sailor on a ghostship who should know better <br>drunk on the delirium of the song she's singing to me <br>like a seance to summon me back to the living<br>and my whole life flashing before my eyes as they drown <br>in the wellsprings of hers, like a poet in the tears of a muse. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Love and the lack thereof taught me a long time ago <br>there are dark jewels in the ashes, and secret sorrows<br>in the crowns of life, and mystic terrors in every piece <br>of the broken mirrors and exalted chandeliers of love <br>that reflect the radiance of the Beloved <br>after a storm has passed over the distant hills<br>in every dropp of rain that hangs <br>like the sun and the moon and the Pleiades from her earlobes, <br>as if they were the personal Faberge jewellers of her light<br>or as Elizabeth the First said ascending the throne <br>at the beginning of her reign, thanking her god, <br>this is your doing and it is marvellous in our eyes.</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=476934" data-title="The Painting Finished de Patrick White" data-description="for Sally

The painting finished, I sit at my desk 
and go on painting windows and computer screens. 
My body is grateful and my heart a submarine. 
I don't know if I expressed what I meant to mean
but there it is and that's an end of it for the n..."></div>
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