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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476949" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Swan Flies Over The Lace Corals Of The Trees</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">The swan flies over the lace corals of the trees.<br>Albireo in Cygnus homing west.<br>The boa of the moon unfeathered<br>by the brittle eclipse of broken shale<br>that shatters its vase upon the waters<br>like a high note cracks an hour glass<br>or a snapping turtle rises <br>from the bottom of a lake <br>to pull the full moon down by the leg.<br>My path is strewn <br>by lunar peony petals, <br>by the twilight of a blue rose, <br>by the silk parachutes of the milkweed pods<br>by the ghosts of the medicine men <br>among the wild poppies <br>shaking their dry rattles at the moon <br>long after the fire's gone out<br>at a ghost dance for rain.<br>And I'm sad like smoke <br>for reasons I can't discern. <br>A peaceful sorrow among <br>the bells in my blood as if <br>we all mourned for the same thing.<br>Tears falling from the departing wing<br>of a waterbird rising out of the shadows<br>like a startling revelation of things to come. <br>Late autumn and the work <br>of fulfilment and loss is done.<br>The winged samara of the maples <br>lie all over the ground<br>in a no fly zone of cancelled flight plans. <br>And there's a silence <br>that isn't the afterlife of sound <br>deeper than the night <br>that's closing in upon me <br>and there's the skull of a snake<br>like a crown without jewels<br>on the top of a ladder of ribs<br>laid out on a rock like wampum<br>it wants to trade for my eyes.<br>And looking up at the stars <br>who can say the word eternity <br>even to themselves <br>without making the world <br>and everything in it feel like a smaller place? <br>And who can say the word love<br>even as a master of metaphors <br>and not feel they're apprenticed <br>to a work in progress<br>like Great Barrier Reefs <br>and Gothic cathedrals on the moon<br>painted like caves in the New Stone Age? <br>The last of the asters <br>exchange similitudes with the stars<br>as tokens of what they have in common<br>like diamond and carbon<br>without really knowing what they are. <br>Whether one is the estranged avatar <br>of the other in exile <br>or merely intimate familiars <br>with good spiritual manners<br>on a first name basis<br>with what they feel they see <br>of their afterlives in each other's eyes.<br>As it is with everything here <br>speaking in an unknown language<br>as old as the hills, <br>older than the moon<br>like a Rosetta stone <br>buried in a desert of stars.<br>The living word, the cursive script <br>of the original wavelengths <br>of a snake with wings, <br>circumpolar Draco, <br>now a pictograph of bones.<br>I've been reading the constellations <br>all my life, the mother-tongue <br>of an alphabet that said everything<br>into existence like braille I can see <br>through my fingertips <br>and read under my feet<br>like the footprints of a long journey<br>I've undertaken to everywhere, <br>dead twigs in the Book of Changes <br>trying to decipher themselves like yarrow sticks<br>and withered leaves, gnostic gospels<br>burnt in the Bedouin fires of fall, <br>all Mayan glyphs of a clockwork catastrophe, <br>Cretan linear B that talks to itself<br>like the dream of a sleepwalking Greek<br>gibbering among the dead? <br>Polyglot grammars in the tree of life <br>trying to make an aviary of words <br>without tongue-tying the roosting birds<br>to any one branch of the mystery, <br>any one note of their infinite vocabulary. <br>Aren't we all trying to express<br>the inexpressible through words, <br>through the sacred syllables <br>of trees, stars, stones, the black swans<br>of our occult history, pine-cones, <br>caterpillars in cocoons <br>foggy as smudged moons. <br>Or dragonflies who make<br>a chrysalis of our throats, <br>this little house of dead things<br>we keep trying to give a voice to<br>like an echo of ourselves, <br>these hovels and palaces of starmud<br>we glue together like perfectly bound books<br>patched from the rags of our tents<br>torn like wild irises <br>in this time-swept desert of stars<br>abandoning our ancestral campfires <br>for a distant mirage in a wanderlust of smoke <br>to undergo our transformations, <br>snakes that have grown wings and sing<br>three octaves higher than they used to crawl<br>like an ambush on its belly<br>through the silence of the river reeds, <br>a shuttle through a loom, <br>the loose thread <br>of an earthbound flying carpet<br>unravelling like the moon, <br>shedding its skin like a myth of origin<br>generation after generation.<br>Here the spirits of the dead <br>are not summoned to answer<br>their names in the mouth of a medium<br>as if a tree in winter <br>were to call its birds back <br>to the abandoned nests, <br>the empty hearts it holds up <br>like begging bowls to the sky.<br>This is not the bone-box <br>of anything's final resting place.<br>This is not the paleolithic tomb <br>of a retreating glacier carving <br>spiritual moats around sacred moraines<br>to elevate the middens of its remains<br>keeping its fingers crossed <br>like the ecliptic and the celestial equator<br>at the spring equinox it will<br>be reborn again like the sun <br>hatching out of its cosmic egg <br>like a phoenix at the winter solstice.<br>Here, if you listen, if you see, <br>if you're a windwatcher like me, <br>or the crows in the tops of the aspens, <br>you can read what the dead are writing <br>in waves shuddering on the waters of life <br>like the lines of a poem<br>that has just touched your startled heart <br>with a feather of breath so poignant, <br>everything you see before you, <br>from the hidden wisdom <br>in the bones of encrypted snakes, <br>to the runic striations <br>on the prophetic skulls of the rocks, <br>is the lyrical masterpiece of the dead <br>to the living that it's dedicated to<br>like a genius to an unknown muse<br>that whispers something in the crowns <br>of the leafless birch that feels as if <br>even as winter approaches like a new moon <br>everything here in this cradle <br>of life, light and insight<br>can hear the ancient lullabies and requiems<br>of the hidden nightbirds of the dead<br>blossoming in their roots long before <br>they're published on the wind<br>like tomorrow's waterbirds returning <br>to the dead seas and mindstreams<br>of the harvest moon that inspires them.<br>Not the coffin, not the trilithon altars <br>and gates of red-winged sky burials, <br>not the pyres of the sumac <br>cremating a phoenix with a flight plan, <br>but this crucible and cradle of earth<br>is where it all happens like honey <br>pouring out of the dark ore of death<br>indelibly as gold, and water, and breath.<br>This holiest house of transformation<br>where the dead hold the new moon<br>in the arms of the old, not <br>to teach them how to exit hell<br>like a bell of light out of the darkness <br>but how to enter heaven<br>like a thread of insight <br>through a needle in the dark<br>with your eyes wide open <br>like the seedbed of the dead<br>to a clearing by the side of a river <br>they know as well as the names of the stars<br>that bloomed here last year<br>like the constellations <br>of the New England asters<br>who didn't wear a black halo of comets <br>this far off the beaten path, <br>or a crown of thorns like splintered glass<br>chipped from the lens of a telescope<br>but handed out new zodiacs <br>like superannuated tree rings <br>in the heartwood of an early spring<br>like fish jumping <br>through their own ripples <br>to add a little bling and flash<br>like starstruck earrings<br>to hang like vital signs<br>from the lobes of the new moon in Pisces.<br>Here in this place <br>where the arrow hits the target <br>like the wavelength of a hawk <br>sparing the morning dove <br>with a sprig of peace in its beak, <br>isn't the end of the journey, <br>isn't the acquisition of anything we seek<br>but precisely where the bulls-eye<br>of the expanding universe begins<br>under these eyelids of water and light<br>living us all like shapeshifters <br>in a dream of transformation <br>where the preludes of our beginnings<br>are already nudging their way<br>like a crocus of thought, <br>a moonrise of emotion, <br>out of the earth, out of <br>the spring thaw in our hearts<br>even before the first snow flake falls<br>like a distant star on the eyelids <br>of the darkening hills <br>or this nugget of a snake's skull<br>exchanging wardrobes with the moon<br>swallows it whole like a cosmic egg<br>that has swapped the bright vacancy<br>of the first and last crescents of its fangs<br>for the dark abundance of the new<br>as if death and life were <br>the particle and wavelength phase<br>snowflakes and stars, waterbirds <br>and the serpent fire of red-shifted dragons, <br>were the life and death masks of the same face, <br>the same breath, the same bone, blood, flesh, <br>the scrolls and gnostic gospels of skin <br>we abandon like the myths of origin<br>of our last avatars, our last incarnations<br>as if the same size of life and death fits all<br>even as our skeletons are raised up<br>like hot dice in the throw of a winning hand, <br>snake-eyes, or seven come eleven the same<br>up into the stars like circumpolar constellations<br>as if they were nothing but thresholds <br>and event horizons shining radiantly <br>in all directions at once with no fixed place<br>that lets anyone stand in the doorway for long, <br>whether you're exiting your coffin like a seed, <br>or making a grand entrance among the stars <br>of your vast, palatial homelessness <br>as if you'd just returned<br>to this prodigal house of life <br>a moment ago, and hadn't gone far. <br>No further than the front and back doors <br>of your next life, your next death, pulse, breath, <br>radiance of bright vacancy, <br>eclipse of dark abundance, <br>like the new moon in the arms of the old. <br>Mortal ore with a lifespan of imperishable gold.</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=476949" data-title="The Swan Flies Over The Lace Corals Of The Trees de Patrick White" data-description="The swan flies over the lace corals of the trees.
Albireo in Cygnus homing west.
The boa of the moon unfeathered
by the brittle eclipse of broken shale
that shatters its vase upon the waters
like a high note cracks an hour glass
or a snapping turt..."></div>
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