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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476984" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>To See The Glee In Your Eyes At Eighty</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">To see the glee in your eyes at eighty<br>as if you were about to achieve something as big <br>as you did at three.<br>And you, there, shy one, freaky adolescent<br>day after day in the same corner of the restaurant<br>like a bruised mermaid <br>riding the clock out like a sea turtle <br>until it’s time to go home again and face the music; <br>you who drive your pen so deeply <br>into the fleshy paper <br>of your black arts journal <br>as if you were carving up a body <br>or intensely wedging the tiny bird tracks <br>of your hieroglyphic footnotes <br>like some bitter aside <br>into the shin of that Ramsean gigantism <br>you’re standing in the shadow of <br>waiting for it to get dark enough <br>the fireflies might come out.<br>To see you light up like a rainbow at a black mass <br>when I ask if I can look <br>and you turn your book over like a leaf <br>and show me a breakthrough masterpiece <br>that’s good enough to start a school of crocuses<br>with no instruction from anyone. <br>To see you afraid to believe in your own excellence<br>the juno of your aristos<br>yet risking the possibility it might be a fact <br>you’re the mysterious matrix <br>of a genuinely creative act; <br>that you might feel <br>like you’ve got a lump of coal for a heart <br>and a La Brea tar pit for a mind<br>but when the mascara comes off<br>like a Gothic eclipse <br>you’re a new moon<br>and you’re starting to shine like a diamond.<br>To see the black dove in your eyes <br>liberated from the cages of disapproval<br>imposed on you by white crows in disguise<br>is to know <br>what human beings are doing on earth. <br>To see what softens the angry blue eyes <br>of the next generation <br>of gram masters of Gore Street<br>with their heads shaved like Auschwitz <br>or the Stalinesque inmates of the Thief’s World<br>with its rock pile laws<br>trying to stay true to the Rosetta Stone <br>of their prison tattoos<br>like the sacred syllables <br>of the mother tongue of darkness.<br>To see in the glee in their eyes <br>when their girlfriends take them back<br>that their hearts are not hard enough yet <br>to be immune to alienation<br>and for all the rocks that blister in spoons <br>the occasional angel still keeps its place <br>as Francis Thompson knew better than these<br>under the stones that love turns over<br>like eclipses of the moon <br>that weren’t indelible enough to last. <br>To see the glee in the eyes of a child<br>when it looks at an animal <br>and sees the same instinctive innocence <br>that’s just as wild as it is<br>and watch their minds go crazy <br>trying to give their tongues <br>a jump up on their amazement<br>at meeting a senient life form <br>that speaks the same language they do <br>and shares in the original parity <br>of the undifferentiated freedom <br>they still enraptures them in Dilmun<br>Shangri La<br>Queensland <br>and the Garden of Eden.<br>To see such ecstasy in their eyes <br>is to know how much wonder is lost <br>how much joy in just being here with everything else<br>is driven out of us<br>as we age our way into separation <br>deluded by the truth<br>that perfects our isolation<br>from the small and big furry things with startling eyes <br>and the Bolshoi Ballet of fins and veils <br>that makes my gold fish Toke a dancer <br>or an underwater comet <br>high above Atlantis <br>like a good omen on the eve <br>of some catastrophic decision <br>to rise again with more imagination to live <br>than the dead have reason not to.<br>To see the glee in the eyes of a friend in winter <br>like the bouquet of good brandy <br>beside a warm fire mythologizing <br>the first drafts of the stories <br>that are being told and retold <br>by the blind poets of an oral tradition <br>sipping red gold <br>from the snifters of inspiration<br>they swirl like the whirlpools of the muses <br>warming to their palms like the head of a glass rose<br>with its stem between their fingers. <br>To see in their eyes how good it is <br>to recognize we’re all linked like tree rings <br>to the same heartwood<br>through all four seasons of our lives <br>is to make a friend of your own human nature<br>by remembering even in the midst <br>of this blitz of blazing that blinds the world<br>on the frantic midways of its cheap thrills <br>like a heart under a roof heavy with snow<br>the best things in life <br>like fires and friends<br>and goblets of auburn Courvoisier <br>still glow without diminishment. <br>To see the glee in the eyes of the rain <br>that they can behold the whole of the sky again <br>and all its stars <br>in the single dropp of a tear<br>though the rain doesn’t know who it’s crying for<br>is to understand in a flash of insight <br>even though you fall<br>like the small flower at the tip of a blade of stargrass<br>like a grain of sand down the slopes <br>of the oxymoronic mountains in an hourglass<br>you contain it all within yourself <br>and you can’t pour the universe out of the universe <br>anymore than you can be driven out of paradise <br>or be obliterated out of existence <br>whether humanity immolates itself <br>or dark energy accelerates us <br>into an entropy of starless ice.<br>To perceive the stars and the fireflies in the eyes of the rain <br>is to comprehend that your mystic specificity <br>is so unique and broad-shouldered <br>that down to the slightest detail <br>what makes you so crucially you<br>is that it upholds the whole of the rest of the world <br>in every cell and grain of gold and dirt<br>like a mountain of a cornerstone <br>that’s as boundless and high <br>as its bottomless valley is deep.<br>To look into the eyes of the stranger <br>the child the friend the lover the corpse<br>the eye of the hurricane the enemy the Medusa<br>the wounded white tail buck in the barbed wire fence<br>the black-eyed Susans the English ox-eyed daisies<br>or the yellow suns in the hydrogen clouds <br>of the New England asters<br>or the white eclipse of the black holes <br>in the eyes of the shark as it rolls to kill<br>or to attune the expression <br>to the sensibilities of the moment <br>as a fourteenth century German mystic once wrote <br>the same eye by which I see the multiverse <br>are all the eyes by which the multiverse sees me.<br>What you see<br>everyone sees.<br>When you understand<br>everyone understands.<br>Lost causes flaws and imperfections. <br>The lamp the road the night the light the journey. <br>You can ask the fireflies. <br>You can ask the galaxies. <br>But when you’ve exhausted all your cul de sacs<br>it’s going to be your own seeing <br>without starmaps <br>that gives you the right directions <br>like true north on the inside <br>and then reminds you in a gentle aside <br>that it’s impossible to be off the path <br>because it’s as wide as your field of vision. <br>When you see for yourself <br>who’s watching you in this dream of life<br>even the blind are enlightened<br>and as many as the ways <br>and as myriad as the eyes there are <br>to see in and through your mind <br>like a jewel turning in the light <br>it reveals like infinite insight<br>from the dark source of its own radiance<br>we rejoice in the genius <br>of compassion and courage<br>who took a Pax gene and a moonbeam <br>and in a moment of omnidirectional inspiration<br>that included all points of view at once <br>made it the muse of our eyes. <br>When you realize <br>that sight is a kind of love <br>as I once read on a poster in the sixties <br>everyone realizes <br>when you open your eyes <br>like an expanding universe <br>even our imperfections shine <br>in the available dimensions of the darkness before us <br>and born from the very beginning of everything else <br>to see and be happy <br>eye to eye with your own vision of things<br>as they appear and disappear <br>like thorns and roses from your heart <br>like leptons axions and quarks <br>like the stem cells of your own creative potential <br>to enter the dark spaces of your own imageless realms<br>and revel like a child in the art <br>of making worlds within worlds<br>like an opening night that everyone’s invited to. <br>Comets bombarded the earth <br>and the waters of life <br>broke from their fire wombs <br>and for the children of that union <br>there’s never been a way <br>to look into the eyes of their opposite<br>without seeing themselves. <br>Whether in sorrow or joy <br>whether in love despair ignorance or wisdom <br>out of our minds <br>or biding our time within them <br>like a flower that knows when to bloom <br>our shadows cast on a winter night <br>by the approaching light of Venus <br>or exalted by the crazy wisdom of life <br>in the thriving tides of the moon <br>eyes in the sky<br>like spy satellites extraterrestrials<br>and Hubble telescopes <br>eyes in the water<br>eyes in the blood <br>eyes in the wine<br>eyes in the wheat the apple the pomegranate <br>eyes in the forbidden fruits <br>that make all things believable<br>two eyes and a third <br>in the word for imagination <br>to conceive of the inconceivable.<br>When you see this <br>through your own eyes <br>even the mirages the delusions the lies<br>confess to themselves creatively.<br>Don’t judge the immensity of the world within<br>by the grain of sand it comes in<br>or the density of the pyramid<br>by what the thieves left of its grave goods.<br>Imagination is a dragon fly<br>that can take the fallen and broken <br>the duff and decay<br>the twig the leaf the petal <br>and glue it into a small house of transformation <br>so the worm comes out breathing fire <br>like a burnt matchstick with wings.<br>Point is. <br>Don’t waste the creative potential <br>of your own imperfections.<br>You can find holy water in a tainted well<br>if you know how to look for it. <br>The moon dips her cup <br>in the waters of life <br>because she has none<br>and as she raises it to her lips <br>what looked like a skull <br>turns into a long-stemmed goblet. <br>Doorways of light. <br>Doorways of night.<br>We open them both alike.<br>White sails. <br>Black sails. <br>We part the veils of space<br>to see who’s wearing our face <br>like a mask in the guise of a universe.<br>Bad. <br>Worse. <br>Perfections. <br>Imperfections. <br>When you understand<br>everyone understands.<br>We weep rivers of stars <br>into our own hands <br>to drink from our own reflections<br>just to taste the light and the life <br>of the mysterious insight <br>that burns within us<br>when the sun shines at midnight.</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=476984" data-title="To See The Glee In Your Eyes At Eighty de Patrick White" data-description="To see the glee in your eyes at eighty
as if you were about to achieve something as big 
as you did at three.
And you, there, shy one, freaky adolescent
day after day in the same corner of the restaurant
like a bruised mermaid 
riding the clock ou..."></div>
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