Related quotes: AND I WANT TO CRY...

And I Want To Cry Out

AND I WANT TO CRY OUT

And I want to cry out, unburden the bell of my pain,
release the shadow this storm has been walking for years
like a man over abandoned landscapes the earth will never finish,
let the tears flow in a flashflood of ripe sorrows,
tie a noose in a rope of roads I've travelled to the end of
and kick my heart like a chair from underneath me,
fruit on the tree at last, an apple sapped by lightning, black,
but sweeter than stars, ready to fall
from the blasted nightbranch
of one too many devastations, one too many blows
on the edge of a sword of light
that could cut the tongue out of an anvil.
I want to ask for forgiveness for having been a man,
but I don't know why or from whom in the silence
that can't tell the difference between the thief and the theft
anymore than I can peel the moon's reflection from the river.
I want to let go, fall to my death, revive from annihilation,
a sage of silver herbs, words that heal more than they judge,
but I'm bound to the mast of my spine in fire chains
hotter than cold snap radiators
that tighten like anacondas around me
everytime I let another ghost go like a hostage of rain.
And I keep telling myself the singing I hear in the distance
isn't just another firefly in the harps of the willows,
another caprice of light with skillful fingers
that licks the blood of its last painting off with a smile,
but I'm broken and old and too forgotten to care
if it's mine or someone else's, or just another contribution
to the emergency bank of plastic bladders
waiting like silicon for larger breasts.
And the wind now is always a memory,
and I keeping losing my mind like a bookmark
that's forgotten where it left the book,
and there are pleading voices that gather around me at night
like starving children with the faces of wounded cherries,
and I seem to have less than nothing left to give them.
And when I look for a meaning to my life,
I seemed to have lived in the wreckage of an accident
that happened before I was born.
And there is no holiness in loving the earth and the people in it
with a passion honed by desperation;
and I never could see what they did in their laughing mirrors;
mine was always blacker than a sail off the coast of a waiting widow.
And now I'm here in this house of empty ballrooms on my own,
trying to box the essentials of what I'll take with me when I go
to anywhere I'm not, and the ceilings are weeping
all over their plaster rosettes, their second empire sundogs
like blood seeping through the ceiling
while carbon-tipped spears of regret
for all the things I should have done and didn't, or did
and wish I hadn't, pierce my voodoo heart like micro-meteors
from a chance of God. And it isn't as if I didn't try to be good,
or wise or useful for the sake of earning my mouthful of salvation;
I could do what others couldn't because to confess
I had less than nothing to lose. Sacrifice is easy when you're free,
and waterproof stars that don't run in the rain like tears
or the longing lines of homing poems at dusk,
no trick at all if you've been raising yourself from the dead for years
in rented tombs where the angels leave their junkmail at the door,
and the landlord watches everything that's going on.
And I know this will come as a shock perhaps
to a few who tried to care, but the best I could manage of love
was to lead them away from myself
like the stairs of a burning house. I smuggled them in the night
through a hole in the razorwire fence of my heart like frightened refugees
into a better place with a green card that could walk away from me.
And there's nothing more of dignity in this
than if I'd rescued a fly from a toilet
or put a child back on its fallen bicycle
with a warning not to talk to strangers.
No anti-hero, no tough romantic anymore,
not even an arsonist in a volunteer fire-brigade
and the moon too often these days just another cold stone with craters
come of all the goblets I once raised like a branch with a pear
to the women I drank to the bottom of their dead seas
only to fall down drunk under the crash of their smashing chandeliers.
And it's always been something to furrow this acreage
of paper and canvas with gestures of fire and seed
watching the earth turn like flesh under the ox-driven scalpels of crescent moons,
but lately it seems that all I've been doing for forty-seven years
is ploughing a minefield covered in snow with the Big Dipper
to make way for a hearse in a hurry.
So what do you say to your hands when they want to pray
and you don't know what to ask for?

PATRICK WHITE

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Related quotes

Poetry

Poetry isn’t a talking fly
on a one way street in a lightning storm; isn’t the orchid
that issued from the sword in the snakepit
that penned whatever it saw in stone. What does this mean?
Forty-one years of trying to push
the singularity of the universe
through the eye of a needle as large as the reasons why
without twisting the thread of the original theme,
without shrinking the sky to an umbrella
in a glass skull freaked with insistent translucencies.
Poetry isn’t breast-fed by a doting Medusa
who will excuse your wailing with a pat on the back
as you try to configure your verbal relations; it’s not until
the lantern’s overturned and all the stars and fireflies go out
and your mouth is stitched shut like a wound
that will never heal, and the flowers latch their honey-gates
in a surprise eclipse, and even the worm is a lonely comet
in the eye of the rose that called for your annihilation,
that the wonder of having nothing to say for no reason
begins to gather like light in the wishbone of a harp
and sings to amuse the silence
with the posthumous profundities of its own retraction
like a dropp of water crying down a mirror
that didn’t know it cared. Free yourself
of what you think you have to say about anything
to hear the urgent fountain-mouths of eyeless dawns
that write with the beaks of frenzied birds
that have absorbed the night like ink. Live
on the underside of the leaves that never fall
from the unpruned tree on the moon
if you want to know the nightmare of the spider
webbed to the morning like a poem
between two blades of stargrass.
There’s a storm with a candle in it
that isn’t a leftover star, more powerful
than the black-outs of the lightning
that seizes the heart like a hawk
and slashs it open,
a love-letter to the world with a knife,
to see what’s truly phrases your blood to the moon.
Do you understand, do you truly understand;
there’s a firefly in the grave,
a soft, shy light like the glow of a distant city
pearled on a blind horizon, a black mirror
that absorbs the faces it reflects like death,
so much brighter than the white hole
of all that you’ve been saying
that even the stars are maggots of light,
commas in the wake of summer swans,
compared to the oceanic radiance of that shining.
Drown your paper lifeboats in that,
add your grief like a river to the nightsea
you’ve been walking on like a messiah with a map,
and let go of yourself like an apple from a bough.
Do you see the blossoms of the orchard
swept up in the gutters of the busy world
working hard at its own extinction; those
are the withered eyelids of poems,
the useless sails of spineless foolscap
lined with blue horizons
that asked you where you were going
and because you answered like a compass
left you breathless at the equator, junk-mail
on the doorstep. The world has been discovered,
the metal capitals starred like jewels;
the real estate offices crammed with valleys and lakes.
Sink like a continent that can’t be colonized
and show me the thresholds you’ve sloughed like skin,
the footprints of your transformations
where you jumped from the tree
that swung you like a bell
and walked away deranged
by the solitude of your dangerous humanity.
Look for a door with a broken hinge and enter.
Stop carving your name on your bones
like the prows of old shipwrecks, dismiss that harem
of painted figurines you’ve bound
to the mast of your bow like a pen
and learn what it really means
to be destroyed by a living muse,
to hear the sirens singing you to death.
There’s a ram and an altar on the world mountain
waiting for you to drag yourself up there
like an avalanche of dead meteors
and plunge the last crescent of the blood-crazed moon
through your heart like a sacrifice
in the name of nothing at all
if you want to true the wind
to the womb of your ghostly poems
with embryonic whispers of “I am. I am. I am.”

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Meet Me

BRIGHT MORNING

Bright morning, blue, and the clouds gossiping with the treetops and the fallen ladders of the impossible horizons. I sustain six lives simultaneously in a wounded apartment that's been bleeding for years, continents of plaster out of the walls, the cartography of aging, rewriting the maps as the world drifts like a cinder across the seas of its weeping eye. The trees sway in the wind like smoke, and I sit at my desk, waiting for my hair to dry, smoking, drinking black coffee, happy to be enthroned in my solitude as my dreams pale like stars in the extremity of the light. Lost. I couldn't tell you who I was if you showed me, and the mirrors have grown bags under their eyes like the heavy pollen of time in bee-satchels, silver wombs that are still trying to get my birth right. I've become an apostate of reflections, erasing my face with a sleeve; or watching it shrink like a warm breath on a cold windowpane. Maybe the hive of a mind somewhere is turning me into honey. And I remember lovers I've had, and lovers I will never meet, and all the changes of a comet as it approaches each one to glow luminously in the darkness of the bottomless watershed that is always within me, the familiar one-eyed abyss. And there's a wing of my heart that opens and passes over them like a generous eclipse to bless them all for the time I spent in their mansions of blood and tears, for the candles that ached like joy in the mystery and led me to the eras where they wanted me to stay for the night. They left a desert by the bed and I drank it like an hourglass, true to a calling that exceeded us both. Like the wind, I left a note, extolling their beauty to the webs of the morning, hanging on the bell-ropes of the flowing diamonds that wander the labyrinths of the wet peach hair and Appalachian earlobes I dampened with my tongue. A language of one, I drank from their intimate stars and played the skeletons of their burning harps in a controlled fury of power and hunger as the earth convulsed with islands of flesh, bolts of black lightning that illuminated oblivion in a flash of annihilant ecstasy. And habitable planets were born of the encounter, two children, old enough now in their passage of nights and days to know that it's life that flows, not the river, that their wings are bridges of light and blood and breath that once offered themselves like the crutches of winter trees to the sky in a paradox of love that wanted to lay down roots and fly. What a dream it all is; what a vast and amazing hallucination of darkness within darkness, shadow writing on shadow, a confusion of gates trying to enter one another with both eyes closed, fire obsessively trying to coax the hydrant of the heart to open up before the house burns to the sky and the ground, uncertain whether it's a root or a flower, a bone or a star, a desert of light, or the whisper of a billion gestural galaxies.

PATRICK WHITE

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Bright Morning

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Flowers Adrift On The Fragrance Of Their Own Foregoing

Flowers adrift on the fragrance of their own foregoing.
In the night that takes me under its wing
to shelter me from myself, arrival and passage of spring.

Fish nibble at the wafer of the moon on the tongue of the lake.
The wind bitter as a green apple with an innocent cruel side.
Saturn at dawn, Venus at dusk, things abide in their own good time

without knowing for whose sake they shine until the mind
can't keep a secret anymore and let's the heart know
what the heart has always known. Reason is colour blind.

Everything that's hidden out in the open isn't invisibly camouflaged
to look like God at a quick glance. Flowers don't dance
with their deathmasks on. Things may have changed

since I last walked here, but they haven't aged. Autumn
not an older season than spring, spring not younger than yesterday.
Water's never heard of a virgin birth that ends in a real death.

Silence of time as it appears to the spirit in a deepening sea of awareness.
Nothing disfigured. Nothing restored. Nothing scarred.
Nothing wounded in the moonlight, pleading to be healed.

Earth pungent with the expectations of urgent ghosts.
And dust in the eyes of the stars, the cries of Canada geese
with more longing in their voices than celebration

like the wailing of a train disappearing like smoke in the distance
from a sad fire in danger of going out. Exits and entrances galore
there are as many ways out of here as there is space and time to stay.

Bush wolves on a far hill agonizing over something in the night
like blues harps of blood. And in the heartwood of every leafing tree
I can hear the first violins of a symphony tuning up to the light

as if something sublime were about to begin with the first dropp of rain
pinging like a tintinnabulum beside the kettledrum of thunder at the back.
To speak now would be to conceal what I really feel in words.

Lavish with life, I reveal my voice in a rush of waterbirds
startled off the lake like a mantra of sacred syllables
that nuance the ripples they leave in their wake

with a whole new way of phrasing the light with eyes
that see things musically as they fall away from their wings
like the meaning of things when meaning isn't necessary.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Stranger In The Leaving

Stranger in the leaving
than you were before you came.
Is it not always so
when people separate?
Lovers who knew each other intimately for years
close their gates to each other
and say each others' name
as if they weren't philosopher's stones anymore.
And the base metal outweighs the gold that comes of it.
Alone with the alone
in the abyss of the absolutes
what was vivid and vital
turns numb as glass
and what was mystically specific about the other
is no longer a shrine that holds the secret name of God.
Stranger in the leaving
than you were before you came.
You leave with some of my memes
as I leave with some of yours
and we are both no doubt slightly changed for good
by the reciprocity of the encounter
like hydrogen and oxygen make water.
Though now it's all tears frozen on the moon.
Good-bye my lovely
I shall miss your eyes and your skin
and the thrill of your dangerous heart.
I will miss your wounded mouth
I tried to heal with messianic kisses
that never walked on anything but the earth.
And there's no blame
you couldn't fit my lunar month
into your solar calendar.
We had everything in common except time
and our faults were as compatible as our virtues.
I will miss the rumours of alien life in the wavelengths of your hair.
I shall miss losing myself like a firefly
in the wishing wells of your eyes
even if now my own seem more
like impact craters in the prophetic skull of the moon
when I consider what's leaving like an atmosphere from this mindscape.
And I shall always remember
that your heart was as generous as your breasts
and whenever we made love
how the earthly was the envy of the spiritual fact.
You didn't want anyone to know you were gentle.
Not even me.
But I could see through that mask
eyebrow to eyebrow with you
as if we both were intent on showing the same face to the earth
like the crescent fangs of a Georgia moon that said
don't step on me
because we were afraid.
More than enough to have you in the nude
I wasn't a glutton for your nakedness
that demanded you take your illusions off
to prove you loved me.
It would have been an irreverence
beyond the aspirations of heresy
to witness you renewing your virginity
like the new moon bathing in a sea of shadows.
I never tried to pry the petals of the flowers open
before they were ready to bloom.
I was never the ant
that told the peony what to do.
I never tried to look under the closed eyelids of the rose
to see what it was dreaming.
Though I'm not into voodoo
I never desecrated
the bird shrines
of your involuntary taboos.
But now I look in your eyes
and see that yesterday
is less vivid than tomorrow
though neither of them has happened yet.
The new moon is all potential
The full moon all used up.
There are effigies of potential
standing like scarecrows
in late autumn cornfields
and paragons of actuality
who love to star in constellations
that make them out to be the hero.
I try to stay
and I end up going.
I try to go
and the earth moves underfoot.
The root feels the death of its flower
as the autumn stars turn into frost
and burn its petals like old loveletters
to the immensities that didn't have time to read them.
The harmonies of life
are distinguished from the harmonies of death
by a single breath
taken in
and turned out
into the vast expanses of where it came from in the first place.
And the spirit that isn't shy of its own lucidity
knows that everything it illuminates
whether by day or by night
has the lifespan of light
and light is the brainchild of the darkness.
So even when the lights go out
like people and candles
and us
the shadows go on blooming
and even when the stars
are a gust of ghosts at our heels
the dust is rich
with the memory of all the roads
that once got lost in us
trying to find their way back home
like blood and fire and spirit
as if their final destination
were always the place they started from.
And if in the lightyears ahead
you should ever wonder if I remember you
be deeply assured
I shall remember you
as if every footstep I took
were a threshold of this homelessness
I am brave enough to cross without you.
And I shall thank you for this courage
inspired by the muse of your absence
and the feel of my blood Doppler-shift toward
long meditative wavelengths of red
that stream from the intensity
of the wounded white-hot blue of a renewed beginning.
You can't teach a bird to fly in a cage
or snakes to bite other people.
But when I first met you
it was as if the serpent-fire at the base of my spinal cord
that was running to keep its thoughts aloft like kites
suddenly had wings
and all my dirt-bag myths
that crawled on the earth among the lowest
were elevated into constellations
that burned like dragons among the chandeliers.
And when the muses of life well up in me like water
as they will
and ask me back
for all the tears they've shed on the sorrow
of the way things had to be
between you and me
for them and us
to happen the way we did
I will show them the eternal flame
of the nightwaterlily
blooming in the clear fire
of its lonely lucidity
not even the rain
the dragon brings
can aspire to put out.
I will show them the sun.
I will show them the moon.
And I'll say
you see?
That's us forever.
That swan in the heart of a phoenix.
And they will be well-pleased with the beauty of the lies
I use to shadow the truth with compassionate alibis
for why the flowers fall.
Sometimes it's the bird that swims through stone
and the snake that flys
in a profusion of fire and water
shadow and form
darkness and light
intensity and death
madness and wisdom.
Sometimes you meet someone
and you realize
this fallible flesh just as it is
is the deepest longing of the spirit fulfilled
like light in a perishable garden.
That there are no flaming swords
in the hands of the angels
at the wounded gates of our exile
trying to keep anything in or out.
Stranger in the leaving
than you were before you came.
The knowledge we have of each other
might want to keep things the same
but like all living things
in this garden of creation
the only way to sustain our innocence
is change.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Night Of Peace

NIGHT OF PEACE

Night of peace in the midst of trouble, of heavy stones
longing for lighter hearts, and cherries swelling like stars
looking for their lost constellations, mournful train in the distance
tracking the past through dark woods, and the thick, moist air
sweating over its anvils, people everywhere in the hot streets
looking for each other in a trance of water, alcohol, dope,
homing in oblivion, face to face, breathing each other in
as enemy, friend, lover, abused and abuser, rich man, pauper,
all the status of alloys and metals, their hands, gold, their faces
iron and copper, radioactive chatter of leaden half-lifes
trying to empty the loneliness out of their boots like stale wine;
this one drinking sapphires, that, the blood of black diamonds,
and the acids that fall on their own hearts like treacherous rain:
and the pain and the pain and the pain of the horrible masks
pasted together of leeches, newspapers, dead skies, wet leaves,
and the look of the windows, resigned to despair and mannequins,
old wedding cakes, the tels and barrows of a round-headed people in arrears,

I would be down on my knees in tears at altars of bone
if you were not the lantern in the roots of the music, if you
in your distant solitude were not the lily of the way that’s open,
the palace of blood with the frozen chandeliers that once wept like time
in a ballgown, you, the willow and the dancer, and me the shadow that asked you,
trembling with stars that might be ready to marry into life again,
and the mirrors that served the drinks to my courage, confounding
the lines, appointing three mouths ambassadors to the answer,
avatars of lime that sleep in the journals of the skirtless poppies,
and now this, before kisses and signs, your hand in mine
and the black swans back on the living river, entwined
in the flowing scripts and unspooled inks of the knowing
and the suicides back in their boxes with the broken dolls in the attic
and the old angers, the flash re-entries, meteors that smashed the pain
on exhibit in their temples of glass in retributive museums.

Orchids in the rain that bloom beside the rusting knife
like a slash of blood that rosed the silver with sainted veils,
we shall drink the mystery of our faces from grails
that have kept their secrets safe in the hearts of fools
that know how to love what the others can’t see to lose,
this menagerie of scars and chasms that says me into you
in a voice that was always ours under the bridge of broken choirs
where we lived like token fires fluttering in the ashes.
You, fountain, you, starwheat, you, silk and nightshade
with your small bouquets of linked tears learning to seed
your wounds with mirrors that bleed the arrows away
and the sad pilgrims who wrote in reverse on a puppet-stage,
gone like the children who laughed in their own mad faces.

Gone the black bell full of bees that drowned in their honey
and the darkness that swallowed its stone roads to the fair,
and the bruise in the corner nursing her lyrics of hair
and the blind tree that tore off its clothes in the fire
and went up in a blaze of worms, naked, to the stars.
How can the night know your shy defense of the wind,
and these soft events of light that stagger me with bliss
when I say your name in marrow, in silence, in thresholds and lips,
and oceans wash their keyboards up on the shores of my fingertips
and the only thing I know how to play for the eye of an island
is the gusty phosphor of fireflies that burn like notes in the air?
You, love, you, most, you, dove-fire in the walls of my heart,
You the blue shadow on the stairwells of my life and art,
You the sky that binds my voice in a skin of red auroras,
You, child in a wild apple crown, and you, the lynx by the river,
You more than the me when the moon’s a golden sliver,
You the new magic of waking wizards, you, dawn and dispersal,
You this dolphin tide of leaping seas without reversal,
You the tree where all my words are birds asleep in your branches;
And you, and only you, the candle in the shrine of the mystic chances
I take to know your flame on my water, as the stars grow hotter
and like a stream, like a hand, a vine, a man who loves blue,
this night of peace advances toward the gates of the radiance
he longs to step through like a poet enraptured by fate into you.

PATRICK WHITE

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Morning After Everything

for Luke Cochrane

Saturday morning rain in Perth
and things seem as intimately far off and strange
as the new maps of water running down the windowpane.
No birds on the black boughs of the November trees
and black mirrors in the empty funeral home parking lot
and on the other side of me
the stalwart bloodbrick of a wet church
that looks better in the nicotine lingerie
and dusky seaspray
of a single yellow floodlight at night
that can't get it up to be a lighthouse.
It would be a lie to say that I'm not in love
and happily alone, but I most wistfully am,
as I excuse myself for being me
and put myself off like the small death of another way
I could have taken to get back home, but didn't.
November's an orphanage after the last kid has left
and I'm sure there's an ancient chthonic wisdom
under the duff and detritus
of all these slick, leechy leaves
that the earth has applied to herself like a poultice
to draw the violets and worms out in spring,
but right now my mouth is not a wound
with anything deep to say
about things too deep to be said
and there are memories of women and friends in my head
sleeping like keys in the bottom of a drawer
that I have saved for when the day comes
to open the flowers and doors
that I've forgotten,
all the soft sorrows that rime the radiance
of the halo around a black hole
haunted by these ghosts of light.
I am absorbed like tears in a tenderness of grey
and there's more healing than thorn
in the cool aloe of the air
moist with a seance of emotions
that gust lightly around me
as if yesterday were merely a fragrance
hovering over an eye of wine
like the dust and smoke of today
that bottles its purity like water.
Sometimes love passes like a glacier over you
and there are runes and scars and striations on your skin
and lakes and craters and eyes the sky fills in
and the sun comes out like an exorcist
and you feel like you've been baptized in ice
or tucked into the crevice of a wailing wall
like a baby mammoth, or an unanswered prayer
and you try not to care
that you're a freak of your own evolution
trying to clone yourself out of the museum into a zoo
and that all these people are staring at you
like a missing link between the parentheses of your tusks
that have unhinged you from the gate of time
you once swung on like your next breath,
and if you were asked about the extremes of mercy
you would say, without hesitation, death.
Sometimes it's that hard to accept
that nothing that happens here, including death
is ever over, and that the absence of something or someone
doesn't mean they've ceased to exist
like footprints that lead down to a river.
Because we all live the same beginningless beginning
that is the once and forever of this universe
even if it should call itself home occasionally like an eye,
we go on living and dying each other alone
like an extinct species always asking the time
when the moonlight burns like lime in a grave
and then, once more, absurdly never the same
riots of flying fish leap from every dropp of rain
that remembers the passion of the wave
offering itself in the life of every moment
like a jewel thawing, or an icecap over the eye
or the opening of a brittle window
to be scoped out by the nightwind
that longs like a thief for the sea
to gather him up like one of its belongings.
But you can't pour the universe out of the universe
where the whole is sustained by every part
anymore than you can empty the human heart
that is renewed by its own exhaustion like a tide.
Time is always prelude
and death has never known when
to take down its sail like a tree in the fall.
And because things are never the same twice
and the road back is not the road taken
the world and everyone in it
just as they are, have always been here.
Things don't come and go
like migrating geese ascending southward out of a field,
or things fallen returning to their leaves
because there's nowhere to come from
nowhere to go to
that isn't now and here
as intimately far as it is impersonally near.
Ask almost anyone who they are
and they'll look down a well in a mirage
to haul up their reflection on a wheel
and insist it's real
when they ladle their face to their lips
like the moon on dark water.
Or they'll tell you a story around an unending fire
where the shadows are always truer than the flames
and the most illuminating themes burn like stars without names.
Mind is space and there is
nowhere inside or outside of anything
that is closer or futher than anything else
because everything is mind as far as you can be.
So I can stand here in my lengthening shadow
like a long departure
turning into the wind like a sail or a sundial
as if I were the last of my species of eclipse
and life were merely the long, hard discipline
of unmastering the art
of saying hello to the living
and good-bye to the dead,
or turning the telescope around
and saying good-bye to the living,
hello to the dead as I please,
but I'd rather shed myself
like all these falling maps to anywhere
that once arrived like the fleets of the leaves like me
on the shores of this rootless tree
that doesn't let go of things for its own survival
but lives in itself like a stranger come
to the opening gate of an endless arrival.
I let the birds come and go, the apples fall,
the stars build their webs in my crown,
and grow like a holy road I take as my own,
like geese passing overhead at night,
or the small birds that come to me like voices
a moment here then gone
who taught me that it's always dawn
because there's no end of the beginningless beginning
and it may be a green bough
or a dead branch
you hop up and down on like the hidden notes
of something you're singing
on the rungs of these crazy snakes and ladders
that long like flesh and bone in the night
for things they can't see anymore in the light,
or fish dying of thirst in a fathomless pond
or a fire putting itself out in its own eye
or someone dying and someone else asking why
and the whole of creation left alone at home
feeling it doesn't belong under its own sky
like this Saturday morning rain in Perth
the day after your death
that falls like a loveletter too late upon the earth
or the harvest moon of a delinquent heart
above an untimely skeleton
that can't decide whether it's a tuning fork
or a witching wand
looking for answers like water
under every stone on the moon,
the way we cry for people we think are gone,
but green bough, dead branch, Luke, same song.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Not Even The Light

Not even the light of the stars
shining like the keys to the ancient love-letters
bound among the secret jewels
of the queen of heaven
penetrates me as deeply as you do.

The planet wheels into the night
bearing its burden of humans
murdering each other
to enforce one state of ignorance
upon another
as the rabid bees
strafe the demented flowers
on the far side of the world
for enriching their radioactive pollen,
convinced in their madness
more honey than blood will flow from the wound.

I walk by myself
along the brittle banks of a frozen stream
among the detonations of the cattails
waiting like Napoleonic cannoneers
to stoke the charge of the next volley.

The snow in the sunset
is stained a spectral apricot
that disappears like breath on a cold window
and the sky is vast with my insignificance.
Two or three decades of life left,
if I'm lucky,
and though I have tried to use my time
to leave a gift for someone I will never meet,
long ago I realized
there is no way of assessing
what they will find
after the coffin closes like an eyelid
on this long, dark, radiant brevity
that once shone like the moon
in the ores of my blood.

Like the wandering of this rivulet
my heart has always been
a pilgrim without a shrine
and the direction of prayer has encompassed all
like a man getting up off his knees
and walking through an open door
to drink from the cup of his lover
in the shadows of the autumn willow
that sways like kite-tails
from the flights of fire
she ignites among the stars
that gather in the dark like strangers
before their own ghosts.

What the wind
has torn away from me like apple-bloom,
like poems, like smoke and leaf, like skies,
like tears and blood and faith
it has replaced
with these deeper revelations of you
that hang like a windfall of scarlet bells
from the branch of a dead tree in winter.

The wine of your life and light
has matured in the ferocious crucibles of the sun
and you have been poured out
like the passion of a sword
to cleave the stone of my heart
with these truant rivers of wounded silver
that flow through me like blood.

A young breeze
tries to hone the edge of its blade
on the rising moon
as a black ribbon of water
runs like a snake of oil
between the enclosing jaws
and cataracts of ice,
tiny wavelets scaling its skin
scintillant with the small commotions of stars overhead.
The bush wolves
have been nosing for muskrat
and you can almost taste the steam
rising from hot meat on the air.

I squeak like a pulley through the virgin snow,
following the banks of my own meandering,
owing nothing of myself to anyone,
wholly my own solitude,
as I pass through the gates
of the enclosing darkness
trying to enter the abyss and the mystery
of what I have lived so precariously
over the last sixty-three years,
what it means, if anything,
to be a human among these paper birches
on an island in the stream,
looking up at the intimate unattainability
of the stars,
knowing you are growing old,
that death is more populous with friends
than life, that love
has sloughed you so many times
like a viper's skin,
like the phases of the moon,
like a shrine of smoke and ashes,
that the phoenix hesitates
to robe itself in the full glory
of its former plumes of fire.

My mother will die soon.
I must say it,
voice it in my blood
to be able to bear it
and my children are clouds in the world
that no longer look for their reflections
in the eyes of the lake they arose from
as if they were merely breathed out.

And how in any god's name
can a man define the absence
he has grown to be,
except he standardize his own spinal cord
as the only measure of loss
he has to go by?
And even after
all the millennia of my walking,
standing up,
I'm still only six feet closer to the stars
though my mind can embody all of space
in a solitary thought.

And the deep, inner silence
in the empty throne-room of my heart
where even the most profound events of my life
are seen to be ultimately no more
than the antics of a jester
playing with shadows,
turns out after all to be
just another mode of weeping.

It takes a lifetime
for a dropp of water
to gather the courage to fall
from the tip of a blade of stargrass,
and the tongue has tears
the eyes know nothing of.
I admire the cool crimson
on the brushes of the ground willow
as they try to catch my likeness
on the ice-primed canvas of the snow,
but suggest
to portray me as I lived
they need to be loaded with blood not paint.

Like the moon
I have worn the same blossom
as a face
for years now
and I still don't know the fruit
that ripens beneath it;
whether my life has sweetened
in orchards of light,
or black dwarf of the forbidden apple
on a dead tree,
I taste like a full eclipse.

And what could it change even if I did know?
When the diaspora of my starseed
breaks bread
at a harvest of thorns;
who is the host
and who is the guest
and who asks for a menu?

And no matter how far from home
the journey takes him,
whether down a dead-end alley
or further than the stars
was there ever a man
who didn't walk to his own funeral
like a bell
looking for any beginning
that might not be lost in the end?
Or does the snake
that takes its tail in its mouth
as a gesture of eternity
eventually end up swallowing
its own head
like this stream before me
making its way to the sea?

I stepped across a star sill
through a vertical door into life
and in the leaving of it
I shall knock from the inside
on a door that's horizontal
to continue my descent toward earth
down a ladder of thresholds;
and what began so earnestly
among family and friends and lovers
will be concluded by a stranger
who will wear my name like a gravestone.

But here among the tangle
of these fallen trees, their roots
fleshed out
and washed like a corpse
by the water and the snow,
Venus peers through the fingers
of the branches above
where two crows have paired
like quotation marks
around the hearsay of the night
though I am left speechless
by the random beauty of the scene,
as if my voice had been released like a bird
into its own most intimate, inward vision
and that vision were everywhere you like the sky
it disappears into like I do
everytime my heart is opened
like one of the lockets of time
and I stare into your eyes
and the universe stares back
as you breathe out the night with all of its stars
and then I breathe you in
just as a golden feather of the moon
lands without a ripple
or unravelling wake
on the mirror of these lonely, black waters
I have followed deep into the darkness
like the urgent secret of my own lifestream,
and I know it's you. I know it's you.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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It Isn't That I'm Looking

It isn't that I'm looking for eagles in a barnyard
or a phoenix in a match-head
when I observe
by the number of wrecks on the rocks
how few lighthouses there are these days
among so many flashlights.

What can the hair say about the horn
or the feather teach the wind
or quicksand preach
for the edification of the cornerstone?

And must I put a healthy leg
at the service of a broken crutch
to limp along with the mob
at the end of a dying culture
that insists that all roads end
in a cult of cripples?

If I'm walking alone to the stars
on a pilgrimage of one
finding my way in the going,
my heart aligned like the needle of a compass
to a darkness brighter than the light,
and the only map the clarity of my eyes,
why should those
who weep in their ashes like rain,
trying to put glasses on a fly,
who have never dipped
the thorn of the moon
in the night of their blood
and written a love poem
to a skull in a desert,
care if I want to roam
in the hills and valleys of myself
like some homeless shepherd of the wind
taking the stone of the earth for a pillow to dream on
in the high grasslands
where the stars walk
whispering eternal intimacies like black swans
barging the ores of a vacant throne
through my bloodstream,
as all along the shores of my flowing
ancient flowers wake mysteriously
like candles in an eclipse?

If I take the sky for the walls of my house
and leave the rest
like an autumn of junkmail
looking for a door and a last known address,
if I choose not to contrive a world
to accommodate my absence
in the available dimension of the future,
wiping my shadows and ghosts
like mirrors off at the threshold,
even letting go of the door
to enter empty-handed
as the applause
for an understudy of the dawn
that never got over its stage-fright
in the abyss of an abandoned theater,
happy to let the river pan itself for gold,
not laying a claim to anything,
making sure the gate-latch
clamps down like a dog on a bone
when I close it up
like a straitjacket in its own thoughts,
not stringing my spinal court to a wishbone
or the warped neck
of an obvious guitar,
but taking my voice with me
like a wounded bird in my hands,
a star struck from a stone,
moonlight in an empty boat,
the taste of silence
in the mouth of a mask,
my name a rainmark
on the eyelid of a dusty bell
I've left to the dream it keeps returning to;
why should it matter to anyone
who lies to the bleeding door
that is wounded by their entrance
everytime they say it's just me
as if a pillar answered?

I can't find anything
less than everything to call a self
and there are no mirrors
in an abyss more naked than the sky
to consult like the oracular flights of words
that litter the windowsill of this seeing
like flies that spent themselves,
flints on an empty lighter,
wicks on a glass candle,
consuming the ferocity
of their lives against the illusion of the world outside
they brain themselves against again and again
like small meteors
doused like torches in the eye
of the upper atmosphere
just above the open window.

When everything is absurd as this,
and even the tuning forks of the rain
are an era off in their pitch,
and music is merely
the coming and going of ants
in an abandoned syrinx,
and the drum of the heart alone
isn't enough to start a band,
and the only melody
is a road the wind blew away
like a hair off the shoulder of the night,
and everyone's trying
to unmarrow the moon like a fortune-cookie,
and every snowflake in the furnace
of this dark fire
thinks it dies like a galaxy
when it's only an inflection of tears,
am I not free to walk in harmony
with the savage senselessness of it all,
without hanging a bell of advice over my head
like the only corpse
on an island full of gravediggers
who can't get out of the holes they've dug
to bury me in?

I don't want to live waiting for yesterday
like the light of a star
that's already gone,
or dream like a seed of constellations to come
like a roll of the dice,
or watch the surplus of your smile
rotting on the docks of a famine.

And don't think these harvests I leave you
like a trail of breadcrumbs and dead flies
out of this wilderness of thought
are any more than stars
caught in the throat of the labyrinth
that follows itself like a snake with its tail in its mouth,
trying to find a way out of itself
by eating its own head.

And by some chance
if you ever make it out this far,
I've mailed back
the same map of fireflies
with its legend of smoke,
three lifetimes a lightyear,
you once handed me to find you
and marked every place I'm not
with a black hole.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Your Eyes For Awhile

Your eyes for awhile
were the only eyes
I could see through
to catch a glimpse of god;
were windows into my own soul
that I could look through from the outside
without throwing the moon
through my reflection like a stone
in the hand of an angry boy.
And it was always as true
as the way your heart grew
that you could love strangers
easier than I do even now
after all these years of learning how
to talk to mirrors in their own language.
And you were not one woman
but all women forever
when I saw you once
bending down like the dusk
to touch the last of the flowers
as if you would never see them again.
As serene as the evening
there was no labour in your beauty
and I swear when I saw you that night
I felt as if I were the whole world watching
time put a finger to its lips
and pour its fountain
into the flow of your body
as if it were the sum of all passage.
And though I was your friend in all things
every evening since
the candle went out
in the lantern of a lost tomorrow
I have walked out into abandoned fields alone
and asked the saddest questions
of the most distant stars
knowing there is not enough light sometimes
even in the eyes of God
to be a companion of our sorrows.
And the questions grow longer
as the darkness deepens
the echo of my longing
in a well as dry as my skull
and closes its gates like scars.
And then those nights come
like a life or a day
or even just this moment
when I stop asking
why human suffering
is always indescribably true
and joyful as an irreproachable buffoon
sword-dancing alone with the moon
who writes me dangerous loveletters
as if she were the Lady of the Lake
receiving me back
like a funeral ship
into this mysterium of you,
I can almost believe that you know
even though the night mocks the crow
that pines for mercy
and turns its lightless face toward you
as if it could still feel
the warmth of the sun at midnight
in your eyes again
like the afterlife of light
playing with fireflies in the abyss
now that the summer constellations have gone down;
that somehow you must know
like a guitar
on the far side of a room
where someone is singing
as if they had their ear
to the womb
of your irrevocable absence
that binds me to you with every breath
I take for two
as if I had learned to live on death
to keep you alive in me
where you still flow through the seasons
on the nightstreams of my blood
like blossoms and leaves and stars
and the moon leaves no scars on the water;
must know. Or a demon’s a kinder face
to bestow on the darkness
than a black hole without eyes,
though it’s taken many, long, painful years
for the night to share the light with its jewels again
and as many schools as there are fools to fill them
that even just one
of those slightly compassionate smiles
you would send across the room
to cool the furnace of my heart
with the lightness of one snowflake,
one feather
gracing a change in the weather,
knew more about love
as a raindropp knows the sea
than all of us
who have been washed up
on this cold, lonely shore together
thinking we may have been saved
for something more
than this tidal longing
to brave the sea again
and even if doomed to drown
as I have learned
from this shale of pain
that has carbon-dated the eras
of my missing you
like a life that didn’t
flash before my eyes
as I went down for good with everything,
to thank-you, o, yes,
with nothing but love and light in my heart
and your face in the eye of my solitude
as I stand before the sea in gratitude
to thank-you
as you well knew one day I could
for the generosity of the wound
that has run like my life
down these eyes
these windows
this page
these empty mirrors
of autumn rain
that have wept for years without you
just to see you again
for one moment more
than the time I have left
to know that I never will.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Apparitions Of The Muse

Apparitions of the muse
hanging her stars
from the end of my nose
like an exotic fragrance of night
more revealing than the light.
There. That's mine.
The constellation of the donkey,
and there beside it, do you see
that red-haired star
blazing like a woman with a carrot and a stick?
I've followed that star for fifty years
always a mountain away from the valley
like a passionate Sisyphus
rolling the earth up a hill like a stone
happy with my own absurdity,
happy to go mad for her sake alone.
Elixirs of moonlight
mingled with strange waters
and I drank until I drowned
in the ferocity of my own delirium
like a myth that's forgotten
which stars it belongs to.
I've never been much of a martyr
and bored with lies
I've always been two hells shy of a messiah
but I have fallen on the thorns of the moon
more than once
after my long descent
down the burning ladders
of God's last word on the matter.
So there's no splinter of the true cross
to needle the issue
like a compass or a crucifix.
And it still puzzles me
why it's always my blood
that rushes to the end of my emergency
like a volunteer army
but it's always somebody else's flag
that gets raised above the rubble.
Pyrrhic victories at best
when I'm not feeling cursed or blessed
by any kind of mystic meaning
convincing me I can firewalk
barefoot on stars
when I can't even get
this blue pebble of a planet
out of my heart like a shoe.
But even letting go of all their leaves
like starmaps home from spiritual refugees
the trees can only go so far
as the wind and streams will let them.
And then there's a darkness that doesn't taste of stars.
And decisions that cut like the smiles of broken mirrors.
And turmoil in the snakepits of desire
that are thrown like angry acids
in the eyes of the seers
who saint the rain with their sorrows
like old calendars of crossed-out tomorrows
playing x's and o's with the moon.
It's a freak of enlightenment
to turn love into a discipline
inspiration into a law
and godless wonder into superstitious awe.
So I listen and say nothing,
see and don't reveal,
understand but never think I know
the gates that pass through me
when I call out to the wild geese in the fall
and I am startled by the loneliness of the answer.
I've seen you in the nightstream down the mountain,
the river and the sea
that sits below the salt
at her own table,
and I still suspect it was you
that turned my bitter tears
into the brittle chandeliers
that fell like ice-storms in a fountain
to silence the voices of the mirrors
the birds kept flying into
like windows at war with the sky.
I was out of the egg.
I was out of my mind at last
like a gift I didn't deserve
and the universe was full of your absence
because you were the embodiment of my longing,
the darkness in the light
that stood aloof from the meaning of everything
as if your only proof were your eyes
and that were enough
to answer the empty skies with stars.
You may put on flesh and blood
and in your human proportions confess
you don't believe this,
but you can never be attained,
never be embraced
never be contained
by any avatar of who you are
because like space in all directions
you are limitless
and even time is consumed
in the root fires that grabbed you by the ankle
and pulled you underground
to dress a goddess of light
in the nocturnal jewels of the dead.
And it is not a prerogative of the beatifically born
to be demonically wrong,
but I have heard the skulls in the song
that allures the unwary sailors
to the lunar horns of your fishbone harps
to smash them on the rocks
as if you took a tragic delight
in the sheer delinquency of your power
to arouse and extinguish desire.
Anyone can come up
with a meaning for life
but you are the muse
of meaning itself,
the meaning of meaning
when anyone asks
without expecting an answer.
What woman that I've loved
like a river reaching the sea
have you not been
over these long, intense years
of radiant tenderness
and creative commotion
and an ominous darkness out over the ocean
when the moon turned around
like a bride in bed
and revealed the far side
she kept to herself like stars?
And it's still a shock and a marvel to me
when you disappear into the air
like a breath someone neglected to take
when it bloomed on the window.
I don't doubt your capacity to devastate
and I have the urns and the burns
and the ashes to prove it
and know on a whim of your arrogance
you could leave the phoenix out in the cold
and douse the dragon like a torch
in your fire-proof waters.
But lately, out of the flesh,
I look for you behind the eyes
of every woman I meet
and it's rare that I find one
whose blood and passions
you've worn as your own,
whose mind is a jewel of yours
that flows like a star sapphire
down a dark mirror
older than the meaning of life
that relflects you in the light of a black sun.
And I know enough not to ask
about those lockets of blood
you hang like thorns
around the neck of your mystic rose
like the first and last crescents of the moon.
I opened one once to see
whose picture you carried inside
like a butterfly you were working on
like message in a bottle you never sent
like a ship to the rescue
and I'm still not certain
I was demon enough
to survive the miracles
you released upon me
like a hive of angry angels
but I came to know
what the loss of heaven meant
when I ran from the garden
through the closing gates
of the harp you stuck in my throat
like a voicebox of sacred syllables
and came up on the short end of a wishbone
like another rib I was happy to lose
like third on a match
in trench warfare with any muse of a woman
who catches me blindfolded out in the open
in the crosshairs of an inspiration
she knows I can't help but surrender to
like a white Russian iris of a poem
to a firing squad of stars aimed at my heart
just to see if I were as ready to die for her
when she put her finger
like a moment of truth
on the trigger of the moon
up to my temple
as I claimed in thousands
of Zen haikus and enlightened alibis
that fell like Japanese plum blossoms at her feet
I was ready and willing to die for any art
where she wasn't the medium
that fired me up with mystic urgency
to write long loveletters
like a moth in a window
to the candles she inspired in my heart
like the fairest flames of life I have ever expired in.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Something Deeper Than Stars

Something deeper than tears to weep for you.
I weep blood. I weep the silence
on the backstairs with the screen door
that bangs like the sound of one hand clapping
all through the night at the slightest gust of wind
as if a constellation were trying
to strike up a insightful conversation
with a wet match, the sceptre of a spent blossom.
I need a moon deeper than water to drown in.
I need to dance the pain away
in a sword dance of serpents
that know how to carry a tune
like a well fledged arrow, a beautiful toxin,
straight to the heart of the mysterious apple
that's sitting on top of my head like a prophetic skull.
No flower can say. Not any number of song sparrows
returning to the budding tree in spring,
no green leaf of an innocent tongue,
not even this dry leaf of mine in autumn
writing lyrics on the wind no one can read,
not even among ghosts, can find a voice
that isn't already the dead language
of an absence that can't be adorned
by a seance of words.
I light no candles. I summon no gods.
No pretence of knowing where you've gone.
No black hole that's as empty as
your ring on the table, no halo
that ever fell as far from heaven.
Good-bye's too optimistic and farewell's
the rudder of a grave on the rocks.
And if I were to raise the paper sail
of another poem like the waxing phase
of the funereal moonboat
that carried you away,
I'd make it black. I'd raise it
like the shroud of a black magician
that can make things disappear,
like an eclipse at half mast
and patch it with the skull and crossbones
of a different phase of the moon on the dark side.
I wouldn't return your personal belongings
back to the morning like starlings and doves.
But there aren't enough sacred syllables
swimming like moonlit fish
in the watershed of the silence
to open this fountainmouth of grief
like an aviary of flightless birds.
Nor would I risk having you remember me,
and turn around like a false start,
supposing you can still recall anything at all,
like a light you left on in the hall
the night you left home for good.
You were magic while you were here to work it.
You were the black nun of an enlightened cult of one.
You were the black mass of the sun at midnight
and the blood sister of the moon
that nicked your finger
on both her crescent thorns at once
so one was the cure to the other's wound
like the eyes of a cat, the fangs of a snake.
Given how close to the moon you were
it didn't come as a surprise
when you started writing me loveletters
inscribed in bone as if you'd just invented
a whole new language out of your claws
to make love to a poet in the nude when the moon
didn't lay its silver sword down between us
to keep us a threshold apart from our fingertips.
And it wasn't long before the elixir began to work
and I lost count of the number
of consensual metaphors I had for your lips,
similitudes for the night skies
that surrounded your eyes in a delirium of stars
that revelled in the crazy wisdom
of their mystically inspired atmospheres.
As just as beautiful as they were,
so were they irresistibly dangerous.
How many light years now
have I poured this memory of them
like a love potion over my roots
and waited for you to bloom in my bloodstream
like stars and blossoms streaming
through the heartwood of an ageing tree
that has as many dead branches on it as it does leaves,
and like an orchard anticipating moonrise,
knew you weren't coming anymore,
and the night bird had no one to sing for?
But, hey, I'm still a better seance
than I am an exorcism and if you can hear me
calling the faithful to prayer
in all directions at once like a paper airplane
the boy in me has sent out to search for you
like a loveletter in a hurricane of razor wire,
dripping with clusters of blood
the size of hemorrhaging grapes,
fireflies caught in a spider-web
of starless constellations that aren't a sign
of anything except I miss you worst at night.
If you could sense the tremor
in even the slightest wavelength of light
I'm trying to shine on the darkness to find you,
I'd write you a holy book of sacred silence
inspired by the shadows in my blood
that overtake me like strangers from behind
with an urgent message not to return home
to what isn't there anymore.
I'd sit out here all night by myself
beside the black waters of this night creek
unravelling like a ribbon in mourning,
that's been talking to itself
as it walks in its sleep on the water,
and I would beseech the stars with my eyes
to let me know if they've seen you,
and in my heart I would entreat them
with the solo of a wounded wolf
raising its head up in a wild prayer
to catch a trace of you on the chilly night air,
to give me a starmap to when and where
I can see you face to face again
and touch your eyelids in your sleep
like crocuses coming up through the snow.
Like moonrise in the apple blow of the storm
that scattered us to winds like all these poems
I've tried to write for you ever since
as if you were still somewhere nearby
like another pair of eyes
in my pain and my solitude
watching from the woods
the stars, the water, the moon,
under the stones in the river
that mark your grave and name
above the flowing of this endless epitaph
of leaves and blossoms and poems
as if you alone could still read them,
like the comings and goings,
of waterbirds on the moon,
the first draft of words on the wind,
maple leaves and keys on the mindstream,
and still understand what I was trying to mean.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Are You Sad

for Alysia

Are you sad, mauled like a morning web
by the shadows of things that were said
to make the candle sorry
it couldn’t shine on alone,
the ray of its affection
lavish with the light of a life
that isn’t a star in a vault of bone?

Strangers in the doorway,
love-letters without a home
that knock like footprints in a blizzard
to marrow the telephone
that no one ever answered
with a voice as raw as gold,

are you sad, are you cold,
is there a dolphin and a wound
between the spaces of the secrets
that mend their nets on the moon?

Oceans in the rose of night,
and poppies in the starfields
that burn like distant nebulae
with all the radiant reasons why

the heart is a better swimmer
than a lie with exits of its own
and when we cry it’s always summer
and keys on a chain in the grass
that fall like cherries and chance.

Are you sad, is there a silence
in the eye of the storm that advances
like a bird that is new to the distance
between the green boughs and the dead,

and bells that kneel in a watershed
to appeal the lightning’s chandeliers,
the roots of an unknown flower
or a sword with a severed head?

Are you sad, alone with the alone;
is there a coast on the verge of tears,
and someone bleeding the starfish
and a ghost on a borrowed throne?

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Faceless This Time Of Night

Faceless this time of night, my skin evaporates like dry ice
into a deepening sense of containment
by a dark space with distant cities of light
trying to colonize the Pythagorean fireflies of Cretona,
or the shimmering mirage of Port Angeles
dancing like a seance at the foot of the mountains
across a hundred miles of the Georgia Strait at night,
the immensity of the freedom that dwarfs the stars
with the sheer magnitude of the labour before them.

The fragility of a spinal cord traversing the abyss
of a one-stringed box guitar made of cardboard
when you were a kid, the mere filament
of an anachronistic light bulb with the lifespan
of the wick of an apostate candle at a black mass,
disappointed it wasn't born a flower,
but a weed more at home among the stars
that uprooted it from its intimacy with the earth
like a kindred spirit of light
that must wander through its own solitude
like music at night from an open window
in the life of the mind to reach out to them
like a tendril of smoke from the embering nugget
of the heart nesting in a private crown of fire
that abdicated its empire of ashes for a single note
of the night bird's longing to sing back up
like a bell for a sad universe that's always on the road.

I hear crying in the distance, the dark lament of the hills.
The night creek weeping unseen through hidden valleys.
I can taste the deaths and sorrows, the broken promises
of the rain, drifting like the fragrance of a waterlily
like a star reflected on the undivined watershed of its tears
saturating the air. Matter a condensation of the light,
I can feel life moving through this body, this flesh,
this scrap of starmud, a rush of water, a gust of stars,
a purple passage of blood, a breath of fire and wind,
and the earth, not solid, but real, animating all my limbs,
my vital organs like the ripening fruit of a rootless tree
as if time wept like a bell in me as well, and its tears,
heavy with the weight of too many separations,
yet wise in the ways of the sky, sweetened the fall to come.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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After You Leave

After you leave, a bell
deeper than the sea strikes once
and my blood thinks it's a ghost of fire
and tries to evaporate; gusts
of the most graceful emotions,
eloquent clarities of the heart,
shake me free of myself
like leaves and petals and pages,
the tender radiance of nightskies,
and I am astounded in the openness
of an embrace without limits,
of boundary stones being hurled delinquently
through the windows of ice-age mirrors
that have wept so long and slowly
over the silver river locked in chains.
How easy in this solitude
to declare myself to you,
to undo the delusions and the fears,
to flip through the chapters of the onion,
take off this last layer of skin,
and shed the final masks of snow
in the warming recollection of your presence,
in the way your beauty exhilarates me
then thrusts me like a torch into a deep silence,
and my heart sets out by itself toward you
scintillant everywhere, gold
flowing out of the dark ore,
as if the moon rinsed out its own reflection,
the legend of a secret constellation
behind the vital starmap of fireflies
that makes me want to shine for you so intensely
in this dark doorway of pain and passage
that the light hurts with the poignancy
of its longing to fall like a key
from the spirit's lost and found
upon your planet;
to open gardens that have no word
for fence or gate,
to bridge your streams
with the pillars and roots of inspired stars.
My heart sets out for you all by itself
like a lantern on a road
that unspools with arrival at every step.
After you leave I am possessed of the will
of an anvil and a forge
to become a chalice for you, a sword,
an axle and a plough, a strong bolt
against the miscreance of battering circumstance.
I raise your reflection to my lips
like a cup from a watershed of wine
and in every single sip
swallow an ocean like a potion
from the tears of the moon,
knowing how dangerous it could be
to miss you, to become
an addict of your light at the first taste,
to wait for eras for the return of the dawn
that unravels even now like mystic lightning through my veins.
No more than the sun from the vine,
the moon from the dreaming apple
the stars from the ripening vowel of the apricot,
could any torn net woven of knotted lifelines
undo the vision you have already mingled
like a night rose of fragrant fire in my blood,
Not to drift again alone
like an empty boat
ferrying the corpse of the ferryman
through the fog to a cold shore
now that I've been washed up on your island
like the voice of a salvaged star in a bottle,
a frenzy of light and love in your tides,
a drowned lighthouse
coming to life in every wave of you.
I want to be brave enough
to risk the possibility
of listening to the night together
with the unveiled bride of the moon
in the bay of my arms,
I want to be the sail, the flame,
the gull of her breathing,
the blue dolphin off the coast of her mouth.
I want to swim like a mirror
the sea holds up to her face
to do her hair up with starfish
she tresses like galaxies in the depths;
I want to devote myself like a candle
to the shrine of the September moonrise
that saturates the far sky over the sad hills
like a warm breath glowing on chilled glass
when she smiles
like the wind over the abundant harvest
of the ashes I've stored against
this famine of passion
in the silo of the blue guitar.
I want to place my life
like a feather of fire
on the mysterious altar of lunar rain
that splashes like stars everywhere
in the telescopic silvering of the well in her eyes,
and turn these deserts of space and time
back into grasslands
crossing her thresholds
in whispers of pollen and dust.
She walks into the room
to help me paint the bedroom walls,
as I try to cover the grafitti
of my vandalized soul with white,
and a dove in a cage
panics at her approach
before an open door.
She climbs the ladder in rags with a brush
like the moon over a lake,
behind a cloud,
through the branches of a leafless willow
and everything in the room
is enhanced by her shining
and I'm rolling new skies over
the scars and fossils of old stars,
worn faces with plaster patches
to rewrite the shepherding lies,
the myths and symbols of my solitude
in the sidereal headlines of her transformative light.
Now it's four a.m
and I'm pacing from empty room to empty room
like the pendulum of a heavy clock
that aspires to be a bell,
threshing words like wild rice
under an eyelid of peacock blue
to fill the empty hold of a buoyant heart,
the small boat of her hands,
with the eyes of a precious gathering.
And the tender snow falls quietly outside
on the crow limbs of the winter trees
like flesh returning to the bones of the dead
in a silent resurrection
more unsayable than a veil of white
that puts its finger to its lips
like an arrow of fire to a bow of blood
to hear what the hidden nightbird
under the eaves of a burning house is singing.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sappho

The twilight falls; I soften the dusting feathers,
And clean again.
The house has lain and moldered for three days.
The windows smeared with rain, the curtains torn,
The mice come in,
The kitchen blown with cold.

I keep the house, and say no words.

It is true I am as twisted as the cactus
That gnarls and turns beside the milky light,
That cuts the fingers easily and means nothing,
For all the pain that shoots along the hand.
I dust the feathers down the yellow thorns,
I light the stove.

The gas curls round the iron fretwork. the flame
Floats above the lace,
And bounces like a dancer stayed on air.
Fire does not rest on iron, it drifts like a blue blossom
And catches on my breath;
Coiling, spinning, the blue foam of the gas fire
Writhes like a naked girl;
Turns up its face, like her.

She came to me in rain.
I did not know her, I did not know my name
After she left to bed her children down,
To phone her husband they were gone asleep.
And she, lying, a pure fire, in the feathers,
Dancing above the ironwork of her bed,
Roaring, and singeing nothing.
She had not wound her arms about me then,
She had not dared.
I only took her coat, and smiled to hear
How she had left her purse and her umbrella
In the theater, how she was sopping cold

With the fall rain; and mine was the one light
In the neighborhood. She came to my gas fire
And lay before it, sprawled, her pure bare shoulders
Folded in a doze, a clear, cold curve of stone.

I only leaned above the hair,
Turned back the quilt, arranged the feet, the arms,
And kissed the sleeping shoulder, lightly, like the rain;
And when she woke to wear her weathered clothes,
I sent her home.
She floated, a blue blossom, over the street.

And when she came again,
It was not long before she turned to me,
And let her shawl slide down her neck and shoulder,
Let her hair fall.
And when she came again,
It did not rain.

Her husband came to pluck her like an apple,
As the drunken farmer lurches against the tree,
Grips the green globe not long beyond its bloom,
And tears the skin, brutally, out of the bark,
Leaves the whole bough broken,
The orchard torn with many footprints,
The fence swung wide
On a raw hinge.

And now it is said of me
That my love is nothing because I have borne no children,
Or because I have fathered none;
That I twisted the twig in my hands
And cut the blossom free too soon from the seed;
That I lay across the fire,
And snuffed it dead sooner than draft or rain.

But I have turned away, and drawn myself
Upright to walk along the room alone.
Across the dark the spines of cactus plants
Remind me how I go—aloof, obscure,
Indifferent to the words the children chalk
Against my house and down the garden walls.
They cannot tear the garden out of me,
Nor smear my love with names. Love is a cliff,
A clear, cold curve of stone, mottled by stars,
smirched by the morning, carved by the dark sea
Till stars and dawn and waves can slash no more,
Till the rock’s heart is found and shaped again.

I keep the house and say no words, the evening
Falls like a petal down the shawl of trees.
I light the fire and see the blossom dance
On air alone; I will not douse that flame,
That searing flower; I will burn in it.
I will not banish love to empty rain.

For I know that I am asked to hate myself
For their sweet sake
Who sow the world with child.
I am given to burn on the dark fire they make
With their sly voices.

But I have burned already down to bone.
There is a fire that burns beyond the names
Of sludge and filth of which this world is made.
Agony sears the dark flesh of the body,
And lifts me higher than the smoke, to rise
Above the earth, above the sacrifice;
Until my soul flares outward like a blue
Blossom of gas fire dancing in mid-air:
Free of the body’s work of twisted iron.

poem by James Arlington Wright
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I've Stopped Mistaking My Life

I’ve stopped mistaking my life
for evidence I exist.
I’ve stopped watering
palm-trees in a mirage.
I’m leaking out of myself
like sand through a crack
in a wounded hourglass.
I’ve stopped doing my time
standing up
and approach things more
like a circle
that’s been squared
by a reclusive hypotenuse.
I’ve stopped asking
how many legs are on a snake
or what does it mean
when things don’t mean anything.
For all the auditions I held
I never did find a stand-in
for the meaning of meaning.
I can hear crutches breaking
like dead branches
from the tree of knowledge
that rails like an ice-storm in hell
there’s no light for its chandeliers.
How many voices are in a secret?
How many theories in a thought?
How many lovers had to die
to keep one feeling alive?
I deserted the circus of high ideals.
I unfeathered my heels
and stopped trying to invent
new alphabets that would read like birds
before the first snow.
When you’re everywhere
there’s nowhere left to go.
I stopped telling time to its face
what hour it was and wasn’t
and started listening to it
as if it had nothing to say.
I stopped asking space for i.d.
and it stopped showing me
an old picture of me
with one eye.
A voice spoke
out of the purposeless undoing of the fire
and everything went up like smoke
trying to get a little higher.
I wasn’t on a mission
to save the souls of the trees
like native peoples
by converting them
to doors and ladders.
I swept through steeples
like a forest-fire
And the judgment came down:
Nothing matters.
And I knew I was free
to take liberties with the abyss.
And everywhere I rode
a flying carpet of karma
through the infinite darkness
unspooling like a wavelength of light
I made up my own myths
about the stars that were passing
clandestine lovenotes through my eyes
as if they were doves
sent out to look for me like land.
But I had a hell of a flood
of my own going on
and took wing for Atlantis.
I’ve given up trying to walk on water
but I can go for miles on quicksand.
Stars are another matter.
A firewalk you take alone.
I live in a house
where the windows
are lightyears across
and a black hole
is my last known address
surrounded by trees
that keep opening my mail
like leaves of their own
to see who signed
what the light confessed
when it wanted to get
the night off its chest.
Tell me your sorrows.
Tell me your fears.
Tell me your hopes and passions
and I’ll listen like a universe
to its own afterbirth
like a flawed soul
listens with compassion to the rain.
Illusory cures for illusory diseases
perhaps
detailed maps
of rivers that never flowed.
But I take a deep breath
and put my shoulder to the wind like a bell
that’s taken on a heavy load
like a backhoe in heaven
excavating graves
to see if anything
can truly save us from ourselves.
I come up like the full moon
of a mushroom in the night
and I wait for elves
to enthrone me like a footstool
under everybody’s feet
as the last of the hanging judges
takes his seat.
But I know like a man
who wrestles with angels
how to grow stronger with every defeat.
I am no longer defined by things
that don’t know the limits
of what I’m becoming
now that I’ve dropped off my body and mind
like a demon jumping from paradise
without a parachute.
And this is the anti-papal decretal
of the fallible man
they stone with churches on earth
for showing up blessed like a human
who took the shape of the world
from the inside out
not the outside in.
This way lies redemption.
That way, too.
Fire’s not a heresy
that’s committed to its flames
anymore than autumn consumes
the heartwood of its orthodoxies
when it burns the trees.
Desire doesn’t cut the tongue
out of the mouth of love
for saying the secret name of God
as if it weren’t junkmail
on the threshold
of the old neighbourhood
the cornerstones of sounder reasons
had torn down like a slum
to make room
for better things to come.
There are still scarlet geraniums
blooming in red brick clay pots
on the windowsills of longing
that haven’t lost their faith
like leaves yet
one day they’ll return to the garden.
And baby boys born
like heartsongs with hards on
that are not the cliches
of impish cherubs
in a painting of original sin
but angels holding burning swords
at the gates of the mothers
they’ve been driven out of
to guard the way in.
It’s deeply ontological.
But if things didn’t happen this way
how could you ever find
your own way back
to that shortcut you took
like time off at the beginning?
And haven’t you noticed yet
how the universe keeps showing up
a star too late for the end of things
making up excuses along the way
like a touring playhouse on wheels
rehearsing what to say
for the long delay
in catching up to itself like a thief?
You can tell a lot about a man
by what he steals.
You can tell a lot about a world
by the way your life feels
when there’s no one around
to make a sound
as you fall like a tree in the forest.
How many koans need to be cracked
like skulls full of insight
before you get the gist of the joke
that everything you see
is whole and perfect and broke.
Hell and heaven
are only the first two stairs
on this fire-escape
the stars have lowered to earth.
And then there’s a bridge to the other side
of a river that’s given up looking
for its lost shores
to put an end to its weeping.
And I don’t know who she is yet
but beyond that
there’s a woman on her knees
crying like one of life’s immensities
for her dead baby
as she washes its blood off the floors
with her hair
for safe-keeping.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Someone Lingers In Your Absence Like An Icon

Someone lingers in your absence like an icon, a gate
to an open field where the white horse
that stood in the tall grass, grazing on its solitude
like a phase of the moon come to earth
is gone. A bird, a purple martin with so much
distance and disappearance in it wings
and the open vastness of the skies it was absorbed by
I can barely hear you singing from here
over the raving of an unkempt wind on a crazy night
when the ghosts are rioting in their graves
like old leaves without attachments at the feet of the new
and gravity receives the grave goods of the tree
as do I these strange epiphanies of you
that haunt me retroactively like apple-bloom.

And the depth of the emptiness that informs
the substance of my imaginings, devastates me
like an eclipse slowly swallowing my heart
like a black cataract of snake skin I keep
trying to shake like a cosmic egg without much luck.

As if I were bleeding out like a rose after
the green thorns have hardened into fangs
that are killing and curing me at the same time.
Some nights I just want to join my emptiness to yours
and be done with it, no more of this, no more.

No more of watching the beauty of the world
burn out into a dark radiance that makes me
want to gouge my eyes out so I can see it without wincing.
Without feeling so wounded by the abundance of the rose
that blooms and disappears like the auroral apparitions
of a widow in veils of spider webs and black lightning,
thinking it might be you under there somewhere I can't go
without losing you again. Check-mate. Pain.
And it isn't anything either of us can do anything about.

It just goes down that way. The absence of your shining,
small nonrenewable gestures of your heart and hands
vividly recalled like modest butterfly volumes of poetry
blowing down an abandoned street at night in the rain, you
sewing a patch on my heart with the delicacy of a needle
mending a flying carpet grounded like a wavelength of light.

As I am now that you've become that rip in my heart
all the stars are pouring out of like a puncture wound
I let go right through me like needles and gamma rays
piercing the heart of a voodoo doll of dark matter
that makes me feel like wooden puppet of light
carved out of one of these black walnut trees.

Endure. Participate. See. Wonder.
Praise. Celebrate. Mourn. Do the next best thing.
And when you're hurting your worst, sing.
And even when I'm soldiering my way through stone
like a flying fish in the wrong medium,
or walking alone with the Alone through the woods,
just to meet you where you ask me to when you call
and I come like a burning bridge down to the river,
wondering if I might have lived here once in another lifetime,
I do say these things to myself like medicinal chants
and preventative medicine, healing totems with benign effect
hung in the medicine bag slung around my neck.
Sweet grass and a pinch of sacred earth, just in case
I forget how to dance on my own grave
with grace and flare and style and an enigmatic smile
that really means it if it really means anything at all.

Or not succumb to this ice-age of a bell
my tongue is stuck to like a child's to a wire fence,
or this black diamond nightbird
that cuts my darkness to the quick
because it's got nothing to sing about
that can answer the call of the living for someone
on a foggy hill to come to the rescue of the empty lifeboat
drifting like the corpse of a dead swan downriver,
except the dead air of this strange place
where space is indelibly bruised by the passing
of the beauty it once contained like stars in a Mason jar.

Like a candle in the lantern of a skull
I've carried before me like a nightwatchman
on the edge of a dangerous precipice for lightyears
until I lost my footing and fell in one night,
as I once did into love, and learned to see in the dark
I was growing wings where I had none before
and looking up from the bottom of an empty wishing well
noticed the dead still blooming like stars
in the white shadows of the sun at midnight.

And out of the corners of my eyes
when what I can't see what need to know about being alive
comes looking for me like the sacred syllable
on the lips of a pearl diver on the moon in total eclipse
like a kiss out of nowhere, comes like the singing bird
to the dead branch in my heart
that's having trouble remembering how to blossom
after a long winter, as if you'd summoned me to the trees
like a purple passage in the Book of the Dead,
to teach me how to take the pain
and through the alchemy of the grief
that flows through my heartwood like light and rain
turn it into life again, as if every leaf
were a new loveletter from the dead
I've been saving for years like expurgated starmaps
illustrated by exiled constellations in Braille
to a spiritual lost and found at my fingertips
where they know who you are, and they've seen you
like a soft moonrise glowing through the willows
down by the river that weeps like a black mirror
for the stars and waterbirds in passing
that appear and disappear each in its time
and you wait for me like the longing of the dead
to make some kind of sign, however simple and austere,
the withered star of a wild rose without a flower,
that let's me know you're near, you're here
rooted in me on earth where we've both come
to renew our shining from the bottom up to the blossom.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sometimes The Heart Buries Its Sorrow

Sometimes the heart buries its sorrow
like a bell or an hourglass beside the road
as if it came upon a dead bird it couldn't name
and returned it to the earth like unread mail.
There's no gate where I'm going, the air
will tremble a bit and that'll be it. Maybe
a firefly or two, to liven things up,
but no sign of lightning tearing its hair out.

I shall evaporate like a dream someone
couldn't remember having, and what seems
so crucially significant now shall disappear,
disperse, dissipate like smoke from of a fire
and all that will remain of this passionate burning
will be an odd fragrance among the stars
that doesn't arrest the attention of the bees.

And these things of my mother that she gave to me,
Blood, flesh, bone, breath and my love of poetry
and compassion for the world you need to write it,
deeply involved in an unrestricted love affair,
will be scattered like urns on the wind as if
my ashes had no respect for their individuality.
The waterclock ended in a desert of mirages,
not the afterlife of an embryo off to a good start.

The death of an art, the extinction of a species,
not the fall of a sparrow anyone notices,
and I'm not even saying they should if they don't
anymore than they feel the loss of a skin cell.
Some people prefer umbrellas to wild flowers.
Icons of the moon without the dragon.
A mouthful of fire to the taste of water.
Tigers in a zoo, to the dangers of an open door.
It's wrong to make love, music, poetry, colour,
compulsory, anymore than you can demand a friend.
Got to give time and space to the black swan
of a nugget of coal to realize it's a motherlode
of diamonds born out of its progressive dissolution.

Translucent effusions of insight into
a speculative nothing, a flying carpet of wavelengths
unravelling on the loom of the moon,
just because the stars have left their genes
on a helical stairwell of flypaper like a chromosome,
doesn't mean you're a replicant of eternity,
or to see the onceness of life in everything
it's becoming without consulting you
is some kind of exemption you can seek for yourself.
Enlightenment isn't a ticket to pass, it's
not to see the beauty of the chains in the bliss of delusion.
Not to make choirs out of your Maenadic desires.
When have you ever not done this, when
have you ever not realized you were the summum bonum
of your own conspicuous consumption?
But who asks you to die before you're dead
to sabotage your artistic pursuit of happiness
whether you achieve it or not? The absurdity
of the search is enough in itself to make it profound.
Enlightenment ploughs you back into the ground
you came from like grass on the moon
and as a bigger fool that I could ever hope to be
once said: if the cold doesn't go through your bones once
how can there be apricot blossoms in the spring?

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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