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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=477009" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>What Do We Know?</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">for Simon and Samantha </div><div style="margin:10px 0">What do we know, what does all our knowledge amount to <br>	in these infinite spaces of ours, within and without, <br>		if not less than nothing, perhaps a single hair<br>in the endless vastness of these abysmal depths <br>	that keep on blooming within us black rose after black rose, <br>		moon-face after sun-face? <br>And in these realms of transformation<br>	where everything is once, once only for everything, <br>		no second thought, no second person, no witness<br>or revision, no retrieval once held like water or sand in our hands, <br>	and gone, implacably, purely, time flowing into time; <br>		in this dream without bridges, what <br>does all our feeling, all the ore we haul up out of our secret heart-mines<br>	and refine in the fires of our desires and longings<br>		over the long labour of a lifetime amount to<br>if not the flaring of a match in aeonic fathoms of darkness? <br>	Isn’t this life, for all that we say in silence and words, unsayable? <br>		And when we reach for one another, strange auroras<br>of light and love coursing through our blood <br>	like the mystical horses that graze in the pastures of the moon, <br>		don’t our hands always turn into water <br>and the radiance that filled the empty bag of our hearts <br>	like August sugars in an apple orchard<br>		leak out of our exaltations, <br> a refugee line of dead stars pouring out of a defeated country, <br>	sand from a cracked hourglass? <br>		What can we hold here of one another, <br>even if we become the high priest of the holiness<br>	that shines in the shrines of another’s eyes; even if<br>		we lay our lives down like a patched robe of blood<br>on the stairs of the temple, small religions to one another<br>	and walk naked and unmasked down the world mountain<br>		back to the crude hovel of a valley heart<br>that has spent itself completely; what have we achieved<br>	that is anything more than melting snow and mountain streams<br>		washing themselves clean of themselves? <br>We can whisper like the sea in another’s ear<br>	vows of forever that are written in water by the wind; <br>		or under the closed eyelids of our private skies, <br>drunk on the dream-wine, replace all our own most intimate stars<br>	with the bright constellations of another’s being<br> 		to live in one house of fate together, abdicating our own<br>like a northern crown. We can do all this and more, so adept<br>	have we become in our grasping and rejecting, <br>		so ingeniously desperate have we grown over the millennia<br>at weaving moonlight on the black waters of the lake<br>	into the most elaborate tapestries of delusion, <br>		or hiving sunlight out of wildflowers into white gold<br>to marry a world that keeps slipping out of our immaculate rings<br>	into a blind, mute night so remote it eludes<br>		even its own shadows and echoes. Constantly<br>offering ourselves like gifts to love, life, destiny, leaves on the wind, <br>	risking annihilation and immaculate ashes, <br>		why do we keep on waking up, returned to ourselves, <br>address unknown, slumped across own lonely thresholds? <br>	If the world today, if this little wink of eternity<br>		seems so often like a small black match-head<br>curled into the charred monk of a question-mark <br>	that has swallowed the dancing flame of its own answer; <br>		if people and events seem vicious, greedy, and ignorant, <br>junkyard dogs posted around heaps of corpses and cars, <br>	the sprawl and scrawl of wreckage and disappointment, <br>		the litter of flies on a winter windowsill<br>that exhausted themselves against the ice and glass, <br>	looking for an opening; what is it all, <br>		the violence, the drugs, the indifference, the subtle poisons, <br>the corporate leeches, if not the desecration <br>	of the unattainable, acid-rain hissing on the rose-fire, <br>		the obscenity of human lovelessness? <br>And yet, even in the midst of such obvious defeat, <br>	crippled by angels and demons alike, we go on longing<br>		to touch and be touched, dry seas on the moon<br>waiting, how long, how long now, for the return of even so much<br>	as a single dropp of all the rivers we’ve lost, we go on<br>		yearning to embrace o not just<br>the fragile vase of her body crammed with flowers, <br>	or the pillar of his, adorned by passionate torches, <br>		but the mystery of the night and the slumped hills<br>disappearing into the bird-voice of the distance, we go on <br>	aching to have all of it poured insanely into us<br>		like closet drunkards chugging the stars. No feet, still, <br>we’ll crawl down the coal-road on all fours for a taste of flowing diamond; blind, <br>	yet we’ll paint worlds on the back of our eyelids<br>		and shed them like the petals of peonies<br>just for a glimpse of the ineffable beloved<br>	always disappearing around the corners of our seeing.<br>		Excruciating razors of pain might slash us open again and again, <br>clear skies and all their unread, lyrical scriptures <br>	be run through a paper-shredder in hasty evacuations of the heart, <br>		and yet even in the grave, the green leaf of a phoenix wing<br>stirs, unknowingly, the ashes, so relentlessly are we infused<br>	with this strange and marvelous hunger to love.<br>		It’s easy enough after all these years and weddings for us<br>to turn the waters of being into wine, but how<br>	to turn the wine into us so that we are always drunk on joy, <br>		the heart an inexhaustible fountain-mouth full of singing birds<br>because we know, because we have always known, even<br>	before we were born, even before the mind made the body<br>		and we arrayed ourselves as the world, <br>as rivers, stars, stones and trees, that our very being, every action <br>	and agency of our lives, every breath, every cell, <br>		and the small, silent voice that assents within, <br>that offers its worldless yes to another, is love, is reality, is<br>	the mountain that makes the valley<br>		it falls from itself to fill. Immersed in love, <br>we go looking for love with our hands our heads our hearts on fire, <br>	bewailing the futility of the looking, the finding, the losing, <br>	 pilgrim waves wandering across an infinite sea of love, <br>we keep breaking on alien shores in our search for love<br>	only to be drawn back into love. Fish in water<br>		and yet we go on crying out of thirst. How amazing! <br>Under the stones of ourselves, diamonds; warm rivers of gold, <br>	and even in the clashing of our hardened hearts, <br>		a spark, a firefly, a hundred million stars of love released<br>like the fragrance of a single flower, or hidden bird-song on a green bough, <br>	love calling out to love so unfailingly<br>		that the whole of the world to the furthest star<br>is created anew in every second by the instantaneous answering.<br>	That’s what we are, have been, since before <br>		the beginningless beginning of all things, love<br>revealing itself to itself in the perfection of its own inseparable being, <br>	that’s our original face, our original home, the light-seed<br>		of this orchard world. Do you understand? <br>This world is so completely, absolutely, nothing but love<br>	that even the darkest sky bends down to kiss the dawn on the forehead, <br>		and not an atom moves in space<br>but moves burning through the fires of love at the behest of love.<br>	Why look for what you already are; why, impossibly, try<br>		to scoop the moon’s reflection from the water, <br>hoping to drink immeasurably from love’s elusive madness<br>	when you are already the goblet and the wine, the grape and the vine? <br>		Just this once, turn the light around, and look inside yourselves<br>as if you were an unmarked box, a secret gift<br>	left on the doorstep in the night by an intimate stranger<br>		and discover for yourself the origin without end<br>of all your looking. Without thinking, without reasoning<br>	or the torment of why, open yourself up like an orphan’s empty hand<br>		and discover the dark, priceless, living jewel of love<br>whose mysterious shining has always been the you that is looked for<br>	and the you that has done the looking, love<br>		looking into its own eyes like a star<br>looking into a flower, or an echo returning to the voice on the branch<br>	that gave birth to it, or here, today, <br>		at this mingling of veils and waters<br>where love whispers Sam and Simon answers out of the silence, yes, <br>	and soon we’ll all be out dancing together, married to each other unsayably, <br>		ten thousand moons in ten thousand windows, <br>ten thousand brides of light<br>	in ten thousand grooms of dew<br>		joyfully beyond denial and affirmation<br>in ten thousand wall-less rooms of light<br>	rippling out through this endless summer night<br>		like the pulse of a single heart, a single jump of the fish, <br>a small drum of blood beating out in the bright vacancy, dark abundance<br>	of these vast vivid spaces: <br>			not two. not two. not two. not two.</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=477009" data-title="What Do We Know? de Patrick White" data-description="for Simon and Samantha 

What do we know, what does all our knowledge amount to 
	in these infinite spaces of ours, within and without, 
		if not less than nothing, perhaps a single hair
in the endless vastness of these abysmal depths 
	that keep ..."></div>
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