And The Poems Sit There
And the poems sit there on the tracks,
on the shadows of serpentine ladders,
without engines, though moving, without diesels
to drive them, chain-letters to the world,
to a moment with nothing else to do,
to lonely abuses huddled by the flowering lamp
like fairies in boxes of shy plaster,
to broken windows who rage at the stars
for not accepting their jagged black holes,
to lovers who spend too long in the shower
pruning their gardens,
every ray of light in place
as they go out to pale their shining in the sun,
and the poppy girls with spider tongues
offering little green crowns to the bees, sit there
without moving, though moving,
pulling their hearts on long lifelines out of the void
that fuels their furnaces with crows,
that rescues drowned sailors from the rose of the sea,
that fangs the old lions with light
to pluck the one-stringed jugulars of radiant gazelles.
Two cobras dancing, the hold of our hands,
and the swans revealing their lizard roots,
and the rain a small violet in the rusty passions of the coffee-can
I don’t want to trade blood with the sour wine of the snails,
I’ve always had my own skull to drink from, and the water
of the dirty windows weeping in the morning,
and there are faces I can lap like mirrors for a taste of stars,
and bodies that unfold like single futons
patched with small maps of nocturnal sugar
that glow like prophetic ores from somewhere deeper in the mine.
Every morning I take my eyes out like contacts
and rinse them in the grave, wash off the residue
of yesterday’s visions, the smog and the dew and the soot,
the stagnant waters that cling to them like skies and skin
and the little rivers of blood that show you
an aerial perspective of the lightning, fireflies, stars, dreams
and the cinders of oil drum fires under all-night bridges
and the black commas of what’s left
of the butterflies in midnight webs. And there are cocoons of birth,
of transformations with wet wings emerging among the water hyacinths
and then there are the cocoons that hang like pendants
from the trophy lines of fat arachnids,
webs dripping under the weight of their hourglass stones
like torn suspension bridges and swaying spinal cords.
And it makes me so sad to see a door burn, a helical stairwell
straighten itself out to belong to a fire-truck,
and there are other things, sadder things,
ants with pruned antennae, dreams who think like used stamps,
the rainbow fingers of painted children
washed off under a cold tap,
and the breast of a pigeon undone like a pillow by a hawk,
the sad, abandoned look of heroic fire-hydrants
ready for action, that sigh like empty watering cans
as they pour their newly-enameled transplanted hearts out all over the street
like a wedding rehearsal that stood in for the bride
who’s burning in the walls of the groom like a flower of fire
in the lapel of a black tuxedo; so sad, so indefensibly stricken by grief
to know the paint rags are a better likeness of their sitters
than a face is, that there are tiny screams in the grass for mercy
that are only answered by a praying mantis,
and agonies of crushed centipedes that die like eyebrows
and the hides of mangy crosswalks thrown down on the street
like zebras; so unbearably sad in an avalanche of tortoise shells
excavated for their meat like raped bells with their tongues cut out,
my mouth turns into a wound,
and every word’s a galaxy of salt.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Related quotes
Small, Warm Birds
Small, warm birds of feeling,
a profound tenderness,
something to cherish
in the loneliness of being human
in these vast, cold spaces,
as I read your words
like poppies in my blood again.
What stars could I call upon,
what roses could I ask for their skin,
what darkness charge with radiance,
what ploy of dancing buddhas
could I summon
to let you know
you are all my sky within,
and the assent of my soul in the morning
and the bough of my homing at night,
that there is within me a blind fire,
an invisible flame
that consumes me in the ferocious beauty
of its unseen flowering
even in a flurry of faces
and the business tugging the donkey of the day
braying like a knot in a stream of wood,
and all the objects and forms of the world
are burning mirrors I look into to see
the black pearl of your mystic presence within me,
the irridescent luster of your shining,
how you are a message in a bottle from ultimacy,
and a dark shrine of desire
that can wake the valley dragons
with the fragrance of your eyes on the wind.
I want to kiss your kneecaps;
I want to crush cool mushrooms against your lips
and feel my kisses break like bread,
I want to feel my mouth
blossoming on the nape of your neck
and my breath blowing across the shy wheatfields
of the softest gestures of hair on your skin,
I want to taste the silk
of the inside of your thighs
as if it were the flavour of an intimate paradise,
and approach your breasts like crowns,
and under a full moon
tenderly turn the sacred soil of your sex with my tongue
like a stranger in the doorway
of an infinite longing to make you shudder
like the void into light
with sexual eclipses on the back of your eyelids
that will fill you like a palace of water with stars.
I am the luminosity and shadow
of your green lamp that glows like the sea,
and my voice wants to bleed like black cherries
over the alluvial plain of your stomach
and touch you like a prophet
running his fingertips slowly over the pages of a holy book,
savouring the revelations
that throb like a pulse in space;
and there are storms that want to exhaust themselves
over the blue thresholds of your hills
and root their lightning in your body
like a tree of light, a new map of rivers
for your blood to follow back to me
like the echo of thunder in a well.
And all through the day
with its curbs and functions
I imagine the lilt of your fingers
on the rim of a coffee cup,
the cougar in the glance of your eyes,
the way you put a knife down on the table
like a smile without a script
and what it would be like
to circumnavigate the equator of your waist
with a rosary of kisses
to raise you like a sunken continent
out of your depths
and explore all your tides and passages
with the fervour of a dolphin in a bay of wine.
I want to be tangled like a kite
in the turmoil of your hair,
the night watchman of your dreams,
the one who notices
what no one else looks for,
the stone of the small grave
you sweep with your eyelashes
when the leaves of autumn
lie down with the shadows of spring
and the virgin windows of your tears
that no one has ever looked through
weep like glass over the secret root
of a flower only a child could see.
Beyond reason, gates, words,
where the bridges take off their shoes
to admire their feet in the water
and the waterlilies kiss the thorn
of the star that tore them like skin
and whisper ancient pollens to the night
softer than flour and saffron,
and everything I say to you
isn’t a wound in the light,
a mouthful of shadows,
a bell of water with a fish for a tongue,
fleets of butterflies
learning how to sail the oceans of the rose
like the keels and wings
of love-letters you can read in the dark,
I want to fold you in my arms like the moon
and pan the nocturnal urgencies of your eyes
for a gold rush of fireflies
in the all night boomtowns
of a heart that struck it rich
digging a hole to bury its dead.
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
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.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You, My House Of Burning Thresholds
You, my house of burning thresholds, come
to me written on the breath of urgent windows,
and the palms of the walls that want their fortunes read, come
with palettes and kittens and your blue notebook of poems
that grows through ages of skin and mushroom kisses
on the forest floors of your flesh, the bracken spume
of the fountain that pebbles its tears in the light,
and the thoughtful rocks with moss-covered shoulders.
Come like a spoon that sips from the heart
and your blood a riot of sea roses, pink and green,
and the black ashes of the eyes of your secrets
and the locks on the loveletters you wrote on the wind
and I will bury my boat in the waves of your mind,
and be your ghost forever, and live as if I were blind.
There are poppies in your paintbrushes, cherries, wine,
earlobes of blue, and the tongues of mute tattoos
that have pierced your body with sad revelations
of the lives that you leave behind, all the simple journeys
that unravel the keys of the mystery in the dark inks
of another face, another crime, dead trains in the tunnels
caught like words in the throat of a mountain
that forgot what it meant to say, the long, mourning sentences
that carry you away from life to life in the arms of today,
and the bells and the lanterns that swing like fruit
in the lonely midnight stations flowering under their names.
Bring me your love, your art, your wounded past,
your wardrobe of rainbows and scars, and the chaste rings
that chain your body like a planet with mutable orbits
to the vast freedoms of stars in the rain, all the comets
you could never explain to the skies you riddled from blue,
and all the men you’ve married under the fallen bridges
of final farewells. Come in the hour of thieves, in darkness
with your windows open, and the ladders we’ll never climb down,
from our islands in the clouds that call like whales across the moon.
And there are laments we can only say in echoes, in valleys,
in the loose threads of the stream, huge shadowing sorrows
that walk like clocks through our dreams, looking again
for faces in the window that passed their orchards in pain;
looking for tomorrows in the way they came in the night
to a doorway at the top of the stairs, that once was theirs.
There are reasons in the blood that we loose like gloves
and seasons and departures, exits and arrivals
that brave the coming and the going with maps and graves
that lead us each like bees to the heart’s destinations.
Let love guide you through the labyrinths and maze
and putting on wings feathered from the fires of sad silvers
that fall away like water and stars from the herons of our rising,
fly from the old reflections of the mirrors at your feet
out of your face of lilies and fish into a deeper darkness
that waits like a man on a bus with a vase, beside an empty seat.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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It's Not Enough
It's not enough to hinge a new door to your heart
when the house is built on flowerless quicksand
and the chimneys have acquired a taste for books;
poems are the birthmarks of stairwells climbing themselves,
of hawks and serpents boring into the corks of wine
to get at the heart, the passions, the dreams, the rage
of the vine that set out like a road that got carried away
and fell in love with the intimate strangers who took it home
and danced all night among the swords as if they were thresholds.
Born in the shadows of unbearable bells, early I found
they were bound to the cord of my spine, like the moon
among the kelp that oils its tides with the black sperms of creation,
and I learned to pull on their iron parachutes to ease
my harsh, hot descents into wingless, mute oblivions;
I discovered there was a voice beyond mine
that could gather and disperse, celebrate and divine
the secret weddings and deaths of the bridal ghosts that came
like castaway bouquets to the refugee altars of their torn veils.
And there's an indelible secret as old as the eyes of the wind
that can whisper sand into pyramids, that won't receive
the vows of the petty and clever who traffic in the shadows
of the great, wild dead who wore their battered crowns like fire.
Let them crib their poems on the back of another man's eyelids,
real constellations don't shine like this and the wells are mute
whose waters taste of fireflies; and there isn't a river on the moon
that knows how to plead with the sea for a widow that mourns,
that knows whose prodigy of blood unravels on autumn's horns,
or how the waterlily in the mouth of the dragon
is more dangerous than a shrine full of blind snakes.
Behind every name, behind every door with a brass threshold
is a man who was forgotten by his own violated treaties
with the indentured mirrors he consulted to cheat the lakes,
who comes up over his horizons like the solemnities of the moon,
looking for the pillar of his lost reflection in chunks of coal,
in the underfed crematoria of his sacrificial backyard fire-pits
in the lifelines of the empty hands he misread like maps of smoke.
Poetry isn't an orphanage or asylum for the disenchanted,
though there is a deranged abyss under its relentless solitude;
not a showcase Colosseum for famished lions at a petting zoo,
though mauled minds and bodies litter the unwitnessed field;
there are no paths through its unanswerable distances
strewn with petals or thorns, no bridges or waystations,
no branches of hospitable trees to perch in for the night,
no dawns that can erase what's been written on your forehead,
nothing that can blind you to what you were born to see,
no rain that can douse the squandered fire of the poppy,
though the messenger is smashed like a bottle between
the tide and the rock; the star, the candle, the nightflower
snuffed by the morning, the last breath of the deathless moon.
And you must die enough to not be there
when the world picks up a pen like an axis
to spin in the direction of its wounded inclinations,
you must not walk into the house wearing a face,
your breath on the glacial windows of the furious stars
full of secret fingerprints, love-notes, names,
you must be more conversant than a ghost on a bridge
or a rose, or an empty mailbox, or a road that followed you
to where the river turns, with shapeshifting,
with pearling a body around a syllable of sand,
with showing a galaxy its shadow in eyelids and eclipses,
with standing like a scarecrow in the cornfield
that shucked the cob of a smile to batter you with birds,
with lying beside the dead like a lantern in a morgue
as if your blood crossed the threshold for them,
with waiting in the earth a long time, a root
that conceals orchards in the furrows of its dirty hands,
a buried boat that unfurls the blossoms of its sails,
the starcharts of the blind moles that shine underground,
like a voyage in search of the rudder of your tongue
to pilot it safely out of the ports of the moon,
a flame, a breath, a feather you've cradled for years,
the small measures of belief in an oceanic grave
that enrobes the flowing in the wake of severed waves.
Be stone, or be space; the emptiness is the same,
silver ore, or the motherlode of a black hole,
let your heart pan the long rivers of the night
for what the stars value, jewels of life in the light
that can be grown like a menagerie of blood and tears,
the eyes of the blackberries, eyes of the radiant bee
on the flutes of the wind that plays for a handful of seeds.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sweet One, Sapphire Lapwing
Sweet one, sapphire lapwing, killdeer, comet;
how haven’t I seen you in everything, casino stars,
the high fires on the mountain that bloom in the snow,
and the tangerine daylilies like the tents of the street lamps
watching the streaming serpents flow over their roots,
even the razorblades, paperclips and bicycle pumps
have signed your guestbook,
and the rose and the rose and the rose
I left for your poetry, on the grave of your soft eclipse.
You were so gentle about it; the way your words
slipped over and off the light, and your anger
that glowed like igneous subdued cherries, always
just a planet away from the darkness,
and the flaring emergency exits
that soaked the air with poppies:
you moved easily through yourself, kelp in a tide,
trailing your soft blue whips behind you
like the little threads of the stream where it meets the sea,
and something in you ends, and something else begins,
and you were grey and sad as an overcast Sunday morning
blue-greens of pagodas and pines,
and the mist that concealed your shrines.
And I realized I had to be water if I wanted to hear your voice,
and a few fireflies more, and I could see you alone in the haze
you wore like an ashen negligee, or a milky window.
Your life was all islands, and tulips clipped to butterflies,
Voices out of the dark, and the white birds that circled
the gaping mouths of your abandoned towers, like words
you’d left behind to remember the place.
And I recall thinking as I read
how much you drifted through your poems like a capsized boat,
and of all the life that goes on underneath the silver leaves,
and the things that take shelter there from the rain,
and who was in the boat when it overturned.
And I wonder who the woman was under the eyelids that felt
like big, heavy drops of rain where the stars
swam away from their pain, not fleeing
but moving off in easy schools of lantern fish.
You were a lens, a dark translucency,
but you washed things deliberately out of focus like fog
that veils everything in its water skin.
You marveled in shadows,
and there was a fire, a smudge of cedar
somewhere on a lonely beach with starfish,
a small bouquet you were trying to uphold in the wind,
and your life depended on that, that was the part
that couldn’t go out, and I think it was your heart.
And I heard the canary in the collapsed mines
trying to warn the miners to get out
but the warning always seemed to come too late;
And I began to wonder whether you
were coal on its way to diamond
or an ore with the moon inside
but it wasn’t until I stumbled across the smile of a knife
with your fingerprints all over the ivory handle
that I finally understood
that there had been a sacrifice, not a murder,
that you bled in the name of a lamb you once cherished,
and you must be young, or it would have been a goat.
Your poems were quick, impressionistic sketches
of a girl jumping from stone to stone across a creek
with an affection for her loneliness as if
all the dandelions had gone into exile.
I wasn’t quite sure what came out of the silk cocoons
you hung everywhere on the wet branches of your poetry,
sometimes I thought it was just you wrapped in blankets
and other times, dragonflies and violet fairies,
and there was hot honey in the sexual hives of your bees.
And I think I fell in love with your ghost before I did you
when I realized that every poem was the next bucket
of a waterclock that was trying to get something off its skin,
each a small pond where you renewed your virginity
by bathing in mirrors, and that was how you knew
what time it was, and where you had been,
by all the swirling faces that floated downstream.
And now, something has changed,
you open the windows wider
and let the world in, your grey blue-green lichens
are no longer the masks of the moon, and your poems don’t end
with the flags of who you are
flying at halfmast as much anymore,
though I can still hear the odd sparrow
brain itself to death with a thud against a glass sky
and I like the new depth in the guest dimensions of your seeing.
And there are stars showing up everywhere like migrant candles
in all the nebular nests of your being.
And I’ve stood here a long time now
and watched you rise shyly out of your poems
like the orange dancers in the forest who leap like flames
or the starmap of a mysterious constellation
I couldn’t identify above the hills of your body
until I saw it was the nightly journal of a blue panther
who had crept up on me in the invigilant silence from behind
as if two shadows had met in the dark like eyes and grapevines
and tangled up in each other like kites,
neither knowing where they began
or how they would end, if ever,
confessed to the webs and the wines
that they were in love with each other,
that there was lightning in the powerlines at last,
and transformers everywhere going off like landmines
and a voice in the shining, that knew, without a word,
that they were the sign of legends who woke without a past.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Great Mother
Great Mother...
ecstasy dance;
inside the fur of the wolf,
the wings of the hawk
small ants on infinite journeys,
turtles moving to earth time.
water wrapping around rocks,
old tree leaning with time.
blood, sweat, passion's fluids,
the pulse of a cold mountain.
thunder and lightning, clouds hang,
the taste of flesh lingers...
naked by the fire, shadows
on the walls of the cave....
chanting, humming, praying....
with hands bruised and grateful.
poem by Eric Cockrell
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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My Hands Were Once
My hands were once the afterlives of birds
that caressed the cheeks of the sky
and brushed back the wind from its eyes,
and took a finger to intercede with a tear
not to start a pilgrimage without a little laughter,
and I am of the stuff of three stars
and a fire in my loins
that inseminated space with planets
and wrought red iron into bells of blood,
and leaned on calcium for ladders of bone
and taught the four-armed shivas of carbon to grasp life
and dance for the wheat and the grapes and the poppies,
and man lying down with woman
in waters urged by the fires of thought
furiously rooted in the gardens of the stars.
I am the ancestor and offspring of everything
and even my solitude is the loneliness of the mountains
sleepwalking over their own seabeds,
and the way I love, a trigger of oxygen,
and the way I see, a whisper of time and space,
a feather of moonlight dipped in the ink of the night.
I have within me,
deep in the vaults of my wounds,
swords from the wars of the grass and the trees,
and words that sang like arrows in the sacred groves
to answer why I live and what I'm looking for
and why all my foundation stones are shoes worn out with roads,
and who is it looking back at me like a dark echo in a dream
to see if I'm coming like a shadow with a voice.
And there are mysterious robes lighter than a breath of silk,
auroras and lightstorms, waterskins of the water-walking stars
that have plied themselves like the rings in the heartwood of a tree,
journals of light and rain, to sailor my spirit in a chronicle of flesh,
and be a brief thing in a brevity of eras, to know
why the tiger dies looking into the open, its eyes
yellow lamps in the bluing of the early morning
as if its death were already achieved a breath behind it
and a man crawls toward a meaning on his knees.
All the deaths are mine, the births, the names,
and my heart is the shrine of the moonrise and the dawn,
the blue honey hive of the stars and the wildflowers in their fields,
and the wind takes down what the mute rocks repeat for my sake,
and every face is a blossom or a leaf or an apple from the bough
of the orchard that seasons my emotions to advent and passage,
to the transformative oceans that drink to the bottom of themselves
and leave their empty cups on the moon to be filled again.
I have within me a beginning and an end
that open like the wings of a single gate
I passed through long before the birth of time
like the prelude of a world I hadn't read yet
because I hadn't finished living it in tears and blood,
running my fingers over it like the tender braille of a breast,
lapping it like blood from my own skull to see what kind of drunk I was.
And there are lifelines on the palms of everyone's hands
valleys, rivers, nerves, creases, roots, deltas, lightning
that together make a map to every dream I've ever lived,
all the tragedies and joys of fugitive spirits
trying to shoot the rapids with a broken oar,
and secrets that put a finger to the lips of the dead
like the horizontal threshold of a man who stands
like an infinite pause in the doorway of waking up
and just looks at himself with nothing special in mind,
a commotion of swallows in the radiant spoons of last night's rain.
But there's you now, who is not me,
because I long for you like a tide longs for its island,
and can find nowhere within myself the likeness of your face,
and though I know the water knows you like an ancient migration
it leaves no trace of your vines on the lips of its waves,
and there are skys where you shine among the stars for hours
where I've found threads of your shadow
torn on the thorns of the constellations
like rivers unravelled from your wilderness skin,
and even once I found your footprint like a boat on a beach
but you were not in it, and the emptiness was out of reach.
And I think if I find you, if I look hard enough,
if I stare into space as still as a lizard or a telescope,
if I check every leaf the doves bring back in their beaks,
every eyelid of snow that lowers the pines into sleep,
and lace the wind with fragrant spells and tragic pleas,
if I can break the code of the rocks that ore their silver secrets
like love-letters, like poems, deep in the throat of the earth,
if I grow new eyes for the seeing from the oldest wines of my being,
and the sky has to turn black forever not to have you pale like a comet,
not to lose you like a chandelier of fireflies in a galaxy,
not to reach out and touch you like the creatrix of the creator,
I can part from this life like a gift I left in the night on the stairs.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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And This Night
And this night that is ending,
bruising into the blue of an impossible rose,
and the windows opening their eyes to the light
that pales the stars from the sky like dreams;
and a man trying to keep the starving candle in his skull
from going out, the emptiness of the dark from demanding
oblivion from the day, the mouth of the morning
no beginning, but the start of a busy grave;
how can he tell his heart what his eyes already see
in the mirrors that mourn like hired grief,
some distant galaxy expanding into space,
some island of light in the forsaken depths of time,
that he's already the ghost of a future memory,
that a silo of ashes isn't enough to feed the flame
of the fire he's cherished in the boat of his hands
like a wounded bird he taught to sing for years,
and how to fly higher than the world is kind
like a hawk with broken wings, or an injured mind?
I see eyes in the dark soaked up like rain,
wildflowers in a field, the keys of unbound clocks,
and they're staring at me on a rocky precipice alone,
the lip of a vast abyss where even the winds don't go,
and they seem to know who I am, and why I must suffer
more deeply than the words of an eloquent man
who no longer answers his pain in silver tongues
but stands voiceless in the gulf of the silence before him,
mute, broken, baffled, a ladder stripped of rungs.
poem by Patrick White
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Mad or Enlightened
Mad or enlightened the same, the universe
is an embryo of darkness born in upon itself, everywhere
its own womb breaking into the pulse of stars within stars,
and everywhere, the shining before the light, the dark mirror
showing the light its own face for the first time,
how in an eventually that is always now
it would attain flowers and eyes along the way
and become the skin of the rain as it falls to earth in April.
If I change to fire, these letters burn, blow away as ash
on the tongue of the wind; if water, then the stars put themselves out
in their own weeping like candles drowning in tears.
Every step of the journey around ourselves
is another world, another garden to plant the seed-names
we’ve shaken from autumns in other realms
and carried around like sacred jewels
we forgot in the corners of our pockets and hearts. Believe it;
when I am all stars; you are all the listening darkness
I pour myself into like a drunkard into a bottomless glass
and you raise me to your lips and drink yourself up
until you’re blinded into clarity
by all the open cages of the light.
Why lie in your own coffin, night after starless night,
if you’re not empowered by your long obedience?
Better to open your eyes on the other side
of your horizontal door, better to come knocking from the outside,
deluded vertically, than suffer this poverty of blood within
the hushed precincts of your skyless realm,
the skull-bone basilicas of your private Vaticans and law libraries.
When it wakes up in the morning
there’s no book-dust in the eyes of the light.
Before you now, in your endless beginning, the dream
you thought you had rubbed from your eyes, you
waking up like a key inside the heart of the dream.
There’s nothing you can’t unlock, even
gardens on the moon or the ancient futures of past lives
death only pruned back with shears to bloom again
in the efflorescence of your eyes, early dawns in the new arraying.
Who you are flows into who you are, all one river of seeing,
dizzy and composed in its own running, all
your own eddies and currents, swamps and white-water,
auroral maids of the mist when you fall in separate drops,
weeping’s just a waterfall, and frenzied tides of being
when you crash ashore out of your own wholeness into buddhas and bums.
In the fire, everyone’s crazy with passion and intelligence,
everyone’s smashed on the wine of an unknown guest
trying to be remembered by his friends.
What visions abound in the orchards of the blessing,
What hearts are torn out and thrown upon the fire
like planets called home by the longing of the sun? We are the white shadows
of the someone else who is walking up ahead
like the moon on the path of its own reflection.
Catch up to yourself and drown in the luminosity of your own being.
Who needs a map to the road they’re walking
or sages pointing all along the way, grey as barnboard signs,
or luminaries at night
pointing to the darkness. The pivot of the worlds points to itself.
True north is not a direction. Haven’t you guessed by now; the stars
all circle you like stormbirds drawn to a lighthouse on the coast of heaven,
too in love with your light to heed your warning about
the deep dragon grief that opens the mouth of the wound
that killed it into life, a one-edged sword of light
in the hands of a holy assassin darker than the silence
of the sun at midnight. If you listen with your eyes,
you can hear in that mournful emptiness
God calling out to God, lover and beloved,
through the echoless valley, across the waveless sea,
yours the name on the prow of the ship that breaks through the veils of the storm,
and yours the name of the storm. You are the bird
that answers the green bough; the lightning in the rigging.
You are the sigh of the silence
and the mystic pen in the hand of the saying.
Whatever worlds you dress for, fields and flowers,
or stars and hourglass elsewhere zones, you are the body of being,
and yours the gowns and robes of creation you draw from the abyss
like clothes from a private closet, dignified in your scriptures,
intimate in your jewels. And everywhere you coyly let yourself fall
like earrings of rain, scarves of fire, fragrances of light,
and watch to see who of the many lovers that are you
bends down like the sky to pick them up at your feet
and return them to you like the first crescent of the moon
rising like an eyelid out of sleep
to greet itself reflected in your face.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Not Quite Dawn
Not quite dawn, night seeping out of the blue,
troubled sleep, no stars, and you, a week gone,
the whole universe applying its laws to your absence
which is the silence everything returns to like water.
I have never touched you, so my fingertips
can still play you into existence on a keyboard,
though the loss of your voice is a dead bird,
and I am a loose thread of blood in a labyrinth
of motherboards and micro-chips like me
who can’t find a way out of themselves without
turning away like a planet from its own stars.
How quickly the light comes, and the darkness
bleeds away like a love-letter under the door.
No eyes. No hands. No skin. No hair. I am
not even the ashes of a cleft witching wand
that went looking for water and caught fire instead,
and we have shared only the light of the mind
that paints a world with the shadows of a ghost,
and might only be the last habit of an amputee to leave,
a mere mime of the way our eyes make us see.
And yet the heart hurts as if you once were flesh,
and I am awake as if another bed denied me my own,
and I am angry and sad, scared and alone as if
the universe were shy one comet, one bead,
one firefly among billions who shone for me
and that light was brighter somehow than a galaxy.
The day grows a new skin over your absence,
and I am as out of place, out of time, as a streetlamp
still shining down on its feet in the morning.
And there could be a thousand and one reasons
you don’t write back, why the black crow caws,
the sky is a concrete rose, the blood of the poppy
runs along the gypsy blade of its undulant smile.
From the heights, I can see a small, blue egg
smashed on the rocks below, a gesture of ruin;
from the depths, the remnants of a shattered star,
and all I can do is stare into the relentless images,
a word without a mouth, like the new moon
shucked from my tongue like a black pearl.
poem by Patrick White
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Black Thunder
black thunder/ broken pieces, tired eyes.
church bells silent ringing, crow feet scarred pillows.
small children walking, without tongues praying,
wagon wheels bogged down in sand.
black thunder/ second hand lives, worn out lies.
dead soldiers mournful singing, borrowed tomorrows.
blind mouths moving, talking without saying,
unlit rooms forged by fugitive hands.
black thunder/ pregnant women without faces.
waves lapping orphan feet, ships lost in the storm.
refugee stars lost in unmarked skies,
an old tree dying rotting on the ground.
black thunder/ families disappearing without traces.
trash blown deserted streets, old men waiting to be born.
molded crucifixes, covered with flies,
clouds chant scriptures without a sound.
(guns silent weeping,
angels prayerful sweeping.
dreams born dying, dreams unfolding,
looking without seeing, touching without holding.)
black thunder/ hungry barefoot ghosts whisper.
priests covered in blood, empty windows open.
tiny infinities wrapped in colored matchsticks,
nowhere standing lost by the road.
black thunder/ brothers burying virgin sisters.
dialogue without talking, homeless heroes smoking.
ants' prophecies well hidden, time worn bricks,
strangers huddled against the cold.
black thunder/ salvation starved borrowed clothes.
smoke charred walls, forever dripping to the floor.
flesh tokens paid, lifetimes yet unforgiven,
candles dressed in cemetery suits.
black thunder/ nobody cares, nobody knows.
horses stomping stalls, doors open to doors.
while the dead barter for the living,
with bayonets and religious boots....
black thunder!
poem by Eric Cockrell
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Black Fire
Evaporating in a black fire.
Don't want to drink the night from the window again.
Won't be a chain trying to escape itself
when I'm already free,
but what an affront of mirrors to be so diminished
because the lions of fire, the dragons
that flare from the eye of the black sun,
their shadows spanning the heartless abyss
of their ferocious lucidities,
pitched their wings like huge, black tents of night
at the gates of the wide-eyed gazelles of emotion
they could bed freely under the moon,
unspool in the blue grass silvered by the wind,
their eyelids waning like a glass of wine.
In the obvious light of the morning
they will run from lesser hunters
mistaking the truce of nightblood
on the horn of the moon
for a rag of surrender, a gesture of clarity
like a star in a well,
the signet of an ancient moment
when the abyss returns to itself
like the echo of a wounded voice
to heal at the foot of a throne of shadows.
Though I could have stung like a serpent,
I was the wind at your heel once, once
like the wind I would have sowed the path before you
with seeds that would have bloomed like the eyes of the stars,
I would have saturated the air with lachrymose diamonds,
and poured the oil of the only lantern of my afterlife out like rain
so you could have shone like a rainbow at night
and your roots were luminously charged
with vital urges of mystic lightning.
I would have come to you like a flashflood of silver on the moon
and run the labyrinth of dry creekbeds
that scar the lifelines on your palm.
I would have kissed the black rose awake from its dream
of being stoned for a miscreance of the light,
and held the nightsky up to its beauty
like the forbidden side of a mirror
to jewel the eclipse you wear like a face.
I would have lain down beside you
like the shore of an unmapped island beside the sea
and answered every wave of your incoming tide
with a nightbird in the mouth of a bell of blood
that ripened in a watchtower on the moon,
but every kiss was a translucent jellyfish,
the auroral rose of an ambivalent Medusa
rooted in the lethal snakepit,
the toxic electricity of her stoned hair,
the trawling storm of her decapitated tresses
when the truth struck like an unexpected fang of light.
Now you spend your time
trying to tie knots in your spinal cord
like the severed filament of the moon,
trying to wick amputated candles in the darkness
that might help you grope your way
back to your head
like the black hole that became of the star
that went looking for its lost planet
like a blind shepherd startled awake by the howling of wolves
running across the sky in a wilder freedom
above the timberline of your eyelashes,
tinkling in the glass womb of your brittle shining
like the tungsten crumbs of a burnt-out dream.
Even now you don't understand
how you can pour so much of yourself into yourself
like an ingrown hair, your love
merely an idea infatuated with itself
that your eyeshadow festers like a palette of gangrene
and like me the vision won't paint you again
in the vivid constellations and kells of braille
you insisted on reading backwards
in the troubled mirror of your own perversity.
No rose in the shadow of the black Pegasus
born from the blood that pours from the vase of your neck
like a dead bouquet of poppies, no inspiration
in the petrified skulls of your past lovers
scattered like the beads of a broken rosary at your feet
you once fingered carelessly
like the writing on the wall.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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In You
In you I come to the end of roads,
and an alphabet of burning wings
falls from an indigo sky
like meteors trying to write
the unsayable in a slash of light,
in a language of luminous scars
the night beatifies with mystic knowledge
that wants to name you
so deeply in thresholds and stars
the charged silence
is giving birth to an indelible mouth,
a doorway of blood,
an ancient grammar of fire
the wind puts on like a robe
to scry the darkness for a voice
that could fill the goblets
of the moon's dead seas
with the wine of a radiant wound,
so much within me
already the tongue of a bell
that can taste you like blackberries.
The whole of you
in every single dropp of your eyes,
you are the black swan
of the eclipse that rares its reflection in water,
the dark orchid in the shadow of the dragon
that sways like a bell in the night,
even your absence a shape of cherishing,
a harvest of shadows beyond the light
of the lamp that burns for you.
Within the deepest abyss of myself
where the heart stands alone
like a single black pillar
in the twilight wasteland of the world,
a mysterious temple to the ultimacy
of having been here once
to suffer the passage of form and time,
everything a gesture of space
that thaws back into itself,
I have written your name
in the hourglass of my blood
like a whisper of secret ink
that once voiced the light to be
and shook the stars like wheat
out of its blind abundance
and will be remembered forever
as the first intimacy of the sea,
and there is the rumour
of a dream in the air,
the fragrance of an approach,
that out of an ocean of light
the tide will embody a woman
like the shore of an island
littered with fingertips and kisses
enmeshed like galaxies and starfish
in the exhalation of her veils
and our lips will meet like archers,
and our bodies will sing like arrows
sunk like orchards through the heart
and long after the last flame of life is shed,
the night will silence the birds
in the groves where we bled like poppies
to open the gates of the mystery
like keys and rain, or the rosary of black pearls
that chants its prayers to the night
like the slow alarm of autumn geese
in the eyes of a human face.
I try to say what can't be said,
pouring my spirit
into the wineskin of every word,
but my heart is a larger apple
than the bough of my voice can bear,
and the silence
that would erect temples everywhere like flowers
spun from the auroral silks of my soul
and perfume the air with the pollen of sacred fireflies,
every emotion a priest with a shaven head
to honour the moon
climbing the stairwell within me
of a million horizons at once
in every breathless step,
falls away behind me like the wake of a sinking ship
that lowers me into my coffin like a lifeboat
or a message in a bottle
that pleads like wine with the emptiness
for an alphabet that isn't in arrears to time
to say you to the night
in a lightning breath of life beyond
these elemental likenesses I carve
from a quarry of stars.
And I know I ask for immortal children
from a human womb,
and wide as my powers are
to exceed the sky with homing birds,
to adorn the dead branch with windows
that dazzle the roots of dawn,
I am the ashes of a black star in daylight,
a stone man with a chain for a tongue
when I try to swim like Atlantis
through the depths of your shining within
and the last word, the last life
to flash across my mind as I drown
again and again like a pulse
in the embrace of your beauty
is always the world as it is
before anything was said.
poem by Patrick White
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It's Good To Know
It's good to know you're there;
though the world is a diatribe
of waltzing trains and threshing razors,
it's good to know
a door burns for me somewhere in the darkness,
a bell waits like a nipple of silence
and your blood waits like a language,
a rose of rain in a starfield,
that my mouth alone can say to the night
in a shudder of light that only the blind can hear,
sipping from a chalice of water
spiked with diamond nails.
My heart flashes across the sky
and buries itself like a meteor
at the cornerstone of a sightless temple
pillared by faithless candles
that flirt with the shadows
of the fire in their eyes,
and I'm bridges beyond any way back the way I came,
my wake the scar of a vapour trail
in yesterday's cherry sunset,
and I still catch myself at my worst
whenever I'm good;
there's always a thread of blood on the water,
and a half-finished suicide note on the mirror
scrawled in manic lipstick,
and a gravestone
I carry around on my shoulders like a skull
that feels like the weight of the world,
and a child leftover from an ancient crib-death
that is often afraid of me,
and a ferocity of freedom
that thaws my deepest thoughts like chains,
and bleaches every feeling like a wound
in the antiseptic of the sun
that bites like a mystic arrow
that was feathered with a message
before I was born to find me;
but it's good to know
your fury and your gentleness,
the glow and heat of your chimneys and fireflies,
your altars of wind and smoke
spuming across the vastness of the solitude
like blood and chalk
and lines written after school
on the blackboard shale of my river skin
still trying to reform its way to the sea;
it's good to look at the moon
through your passionate windows
and taste the fragrant honey of your darkness
attuning the tines of my tongue
to a fork in the road of your body,
to the delta of an unknown civilization,
to the mystery of rivers entwined like serpents.
And the vines of the words
that have sought me out
like blood vessels and burning bushes
and the blossoming fingers of someone
kneading a face
out of the huge volume,
the pure space of my unattainability:
o you have said things to me
in ink and water and brandy and fire,
in night and moonlight and poppies and tears
that have made the hardest rocks
on the highest slopes
of my mountains and cloudy ladders bleed
to be opened like a harvest of love-letters in a bomb-shelter
by the tenderness of your knives again and again,
urgent with beauty and joy
to be overthrown
by the whisper of your voice in the valley
triggering this skyborn avalanche
of nocturnal thrones.
And the bells turn into vases
and the vases into urns
and the urns back into the wombs
of a thousand terminal exiles
tolling like a heartbeat
with a passport and a threshold,
and though I am no longer
the leaf of hope
that aspired to rudder
the firestream of these volcanic transformations,
it's good to drift awhile
in the dreamtime of this endless night
like recoverable salvage
among the lanterns of your searching lifeboats
and the reaping eyes
of your eloquent islands of light.
poem by Patrick White
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Deep In The Night
Deep in the night that shells its husk of blue
to pan the nuggets of its stars from a darker stream,
the heart an executioner with a fistful of pardons,
and the soft, moist, lulling of the evening air,
the threshing of slow fish,
I'm enthroned alone in a crucial palace of light
that realigns its domains to the borders of the wind,
and I don't want to feel lonely but I do,
and I don't want to miss so many, so many faces
stripped from the bough like a savaged telephone-book,
so many feathers of light drifting through the shadows of their names,
and the black granite of the uncarved bell
that turtles the blood under the eyelid of the knowing,
that makes my eyes want to scream
until the pillars of the dead sea fall like rotten salt:
how long can one road endure the passage of everything
walking life off into the stars that measure the miles in skulls?
Was I young? Were you there in the brindled moonlight?
Did I remember how to love you well; did I see with long eyes
how you rose out of the chest of the hills like a spirit leaving,
the blue effulgence of your nebulous departure
almost a cocoon of morning mist, the last breath of a lake
as if an indigo thistle released its silk to the wind
or a dandelion relinquished its ivory mane?
Were you the soul of me that lingered by gates and wharves?
Have you come back now with your bells of blood and lamps of flesh?
Can I feel again the leaves of the silver herbs
in the gardens of your fingertips?
Touch me like the breaking of a fast,
find me like a river in the night,
the dazzled theme of a wandering valley,
and pour your journey into mine like stars into a vine,
shadows running down the worn convictions of the stairs,
the midnight wines of old eclipses in the goblets of your eyes.
Once for the flame that dances on the wick of the tongue,
Once for the orchards that plead with the heart for birds,
Once for the envelope that read the letter it married,
and you, by the river, a sapphire among rocks,
tender blue grass in the translucent water-skin of the night,
loving me once as if your hands were autumns full of departure
and your eyes, the gulf of the world in your eyes, your eyes
were the soft flowing of the dark honeys
that leak from the wounded hives
we carry like knives to the grave.
Distinguished among broken clocks,
sultry and bitter, a quarantined bay of refugee stars,
caught in the threshing blades of a circular waterfall,
a mess of tents I've furloughed across the milky distances
like a chain-letter from a secret constellation to you,
I blue the intimate spaces between us with time
and patch the maps with the confluence of our lifelines
and try to restore the eyes in the sockets of our bridges
under a brow of swallows in the dusk. And I remember
all the names of the flowers, all the names of the stars,
all the badges of love that heaven and earth once offered
in lieu of the reasons why
love bares the skin of a poppy
to the teeth of the hunting sun
and then flares like a firefly
over the water-lamps of the moon,
but when it dies of its own self-inflicted wounds,
slashed by shadows among the ripe fruit of its vowels,
and the seed wasn't asked and the harvest had no choice
there are always two skies,
one bound by roots, the other, eyes,
at the back of every voice.
poem by Patrick White
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There Is One Voice
And there is one voice among many,
one I remember as mine
among so many drops of rain, so many stars,
so many leaves, flames, feathers, flowers,
and the teen-age girl in so many corners of her darkness
skeining her pencil webs across the page
to catch something, a butterfly hunting spiders
that won't understand her,
and the lovers that have sifted downstream
from the radiant watersheds of their mountain plateaus
like silt over the laryngal deltas of my saying,
black pollen of extinguished stars
I carry around in the medicine bag of my afterlife
like mystic winds to keep the sails up
like the eyelids of a blind rose.
So many skies have enthroned themselves within me over the years,
so many waves and planets and legends of darkness
and the shipwrecks and shores of the weather,
and the storms and the birds, and the shriek of the lightning,
so many dawns and sunsets
and the strutting peacocks in the twilight,
and the sumptuous nights with their illicit luminosities,
so many banners of burning straw
as I look for the one needle of light
that was the gate and the eye and the mouth and the voice
of what most closely resembled me for awhile,
before I learned how to slough my skin
and the hauntings of the black poppies who long to be clear began,
and what was one threshold for a poet in solitude
turned into a palatial labyrinth of doors
that swung on their hinges in space like birds and tongues and bells
all the homeless whose last address will be a gravestone,
all the hapless, broken wretches
who keep trying again like losing bottle-caps,
and the women who came to the mike
to sing like an ambulance,
and the atrocities, the murders, the obscenity, the weeping,
that grabbed at my throat like severed hands
to scream of the horrors and sorrows
in the bloody braille and crippled signage of slaughtered flowers.
There was a boy. He was sixteen. And a prelude
that grained him out of a black cloud
that swirled around his feet like a snakepit
and pearled him into an eclipse
that time held up to the moon like a crow,
like a telescope silvered by the eyes of the night,
a black mirror that parted the veils of the obvious
like a woman's legs
and went looking like a silo of infinite space
that echoed like a famine
into what he was the name of.
And he discovered he was nothing but the shadow of the world,
deaf mailmen, reluctant debutantes, car thieves
with the souls of hunted deer,
hookers whose blood glowed like neon
to fill the pleading mouths of a nest of empty wallets,
and the arrogant, the boring, the vicious,
the scholastic tidal pools who conjectured
about the existence of the great sea of being
that overwhelmed them day and night,
and the arsonists who walked in the rain of their distant exile
playing with their hearts like matches,
and the bruised violets who hide their eyes
under the sodden leaf of an autumn journal
that reads like the last ocean on the moon,
and the treacherous, the bitter, the liars
whose quivers of feathered asps
broke like arrows against the stone lions of the truth,
and the assassins who waited
like the thorn of a sundial to blood their shadows
in the eyeless witnesses of the crimes of noon
and the reformers who wanted to cover the earth in leather,
put shoes on the world
and wore out like flying carpets,
and those who were born to salt the field
and those who were born to sow,
and the rootless wildflowers
that gathered on the corners of concrete cities
like fire on the wind
only to be threshed by the blades of the moon,
cut down by the scarlet scythes of harvest squad cars.
And he has lingered among the opals and sapphires
and on the stairwells of water
that coiled like rivers and women
through the hovels of fire and ash
that consumed him like the memories of a phoenix
that had gone out like a pilot light,
and drunk the stars and eaten the radioactive meat
out of his own skull
like an enlightened begging bowl,
and come undone like a bell of wine in space
like a drunk shapeshifter, a staggering compass
on the high wire of his spinal cord
when his locks were moved by one of the keys of the mystery
that attuned him to the voice of his freedom
in a vast, starless abyss
that wiped the universe off the mirror
like the last breath of the light
to prove he was irrevocably dead.
And through all of this he has been a podium, a stage,
the gaping ellipse of the clear light of the void
auditioning another dream for the talent show,
an advance scout in the night
following rumours of stardom
across the appellant deserts of the moon
like thought chains of migrating geese
trying to remember their lines
like the secret names of God
on the rosaries of their long farewells,
and the only way to be anything
when he turned the light inward
was to agree that everyone had the answer but him,
that even the darkness that dyed
the clarity of his waters with night
to detonate the fireflies like blasting caps
wasn't a robe of his own
but the nocturnal paint rag of the sky
that has been making him sit for his portrait like space
for the last forty-seven years
of writing shadows on the road like poems.
And I haven't stopped crying for him since.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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And There Is One Voice
And there is one voice among many,
one I remember as mine
among so many drops of rain, so many stars,
so many leaves, flames, feathers, flowers,
and the teen-age girl in so many corners of the darkness
skeining her pencil webs across the page
to catch something, a butterfly hunting spiders
that won’t understand her,
and the lovers that have sifted downstream
from the radiant watersheds of their mountain plateaus
like silt over the laryngal deltas of my saying,
black pollen of extinguished stars
I carry around in the medicine bag of my afterlife
like mystic winds to keep the sails up
like the eyelids of a blind rose.
So many skies have enthroned themselves within me over the years,
so many waves and planets and legends of darkness
and the shipwrecks and shores of the weather,
and the storms and the birds, and the shriek of the lightning,
so many dawns and sunsets
and the strutting peacocks in the twilight,
and the sumptuous nights with their illicit luminosities,
so many banners of burning straw
as I look for the one needle of light
that was the gate and the eye and the mouth and the voice
of what most closely resembled me for awhile,
before I learned how to slough my skin
and the hauntings of the black poppies who long to be clear began,
and what was one threshold for a poet in solitude
turned into a palatial labyrinth of doors
that swung on their hinges in space like birds and tongues and bells
all the homeless whose last address will be a gravestone,
all the hapless, broken wretches
who keep trying again like losing bottle-caps,
and the women who came to the mike
to sing like an ambulance,
and the atrocities, the murders, the obscenity, the weeping,
that grabbed at my throat like severed hands
to scream of the horrors and sorrows
in the bloody braille and crippled signage of slaughtered flowers.
There was a boy. He was sixteen. And a prelude
that grained him out of a black cloud
that swirled around his feet like a snakepit
and pearled him into an eclipse
that time held up to the moon like a crow,
like a telescope silvered by the eyes of the night,
a black mirror that parted the veils of the obvious
like a woman’s legs
and went looking like a silo of infinite space
that echoed like a famine
into what he was the name of.
And he discovered he was nothing but the shadow of the world,
deaf mailmen, reluctant debutantes, car thieves
with the souls of hunted deer,
hookers whose blood glowed like neon
to fill the pleading mouths of a nest of empty wallets,
and the arrogant, the boring, the vicious,
the scholastic tidal pools who conjectured
about the existence of the great sea of being
that overwhelmed them day and night,
and the arsonists who walked in the rain of their distant exile
playing with their hearts like matches,
and the bruised violets who hide their eyes
under the sodden leaf of an autumn journal
that reads like the last ocean on the moon,
and the treacherous, the bitter, the liars
whose quivers of feathered asps
broke like arrows against the stone lions of the truth,
and the assassins who waited
like the thorn of a sundial to blood their shadows
in the eyeless witnesses of the crimes of noon
and the reformers who wanted to cover the earth in leather,
put shoes on the world
and wore out like flying carpets,
and those who were born to salt the field
and those who were born to sow,
and the rootless wildflowers
that gathered on the corners of concrete cities
like fire on the wind
only to be threshed by the blades of the moon,
cut down by the scarlet scythes of harvest squad cars.
And he has lingered among the opals and sapphires
and on the stairwells of water
that coiled like rivers and women
through the hovels of fire and ash
that consumed him like the memories of a phoenix
that had gone out like a pilot light,
and drunk the stars and eaten the radioactive meat
out of his own skull
like an enlightened begging bowl,
and come undone like a bell of wine in space
like a drunk shapeshifter, a staggering compass
on the high wire of his spinal cord
when his locks were moved by one of the keys of the mystery
that attuned him to the voice of his freedom
in a vast, starless abyss
that wiped the universe off the mirror
like the last breath of the light
to prove he was irrevocably dead.
And through all of this he has been a podium, a stage,
the gaping ellipse of the clear light of the void
auditioning another dream for the talent show,
an advance scout in the night
following rumours of stardom
across the appellant deserts of the moon
like thought chains of migrating geese
trying to remember their lines
like the secret names of God
on the rosaries of their long farewells,
and the only way to be anything
when he turned the light inward
was to agree that everyone had the answer but him,
that even the darkness that dyed
the clarity of his waters with night
to detonate the fireflies like blasting caps
wasn’t a robe of his own
but the nocturnal paint rag of of the sky
that has been making him sit for his portrait like space
for the last forty-seven years
of writing shadows on the road like poems
that haven’t stopped crying for him ever since.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Every Word Turns Away
Every word turns away
shame-faced and a liar
when you try to say things so true
they could only be contaminated
by a mouth.
And the tree in your voice
may be its own guitar
and every flower of your breath
be rooted in stars like the wind,
and you can spend a whole lifetime
trying to say everything
as if words could exact living destinies
from the names on the scrolls of the dead
to save everyone, to save
everything that exists
from nothing,
but when you're done,
when the tree falls silent
and the bird has flown away,
everything, just as it is,
will still be left unsaid
and just as there is no likeness for the living
there will be no likeness for the dead.
It is the unsayability of the mystic theme
that runs through us like a road through a dream
or the poem in our bloodstream
that is the cosmological constant
that keeps on expressing us
like waves of its own water
though we go looking for ourselves
like empty cups
to fill the topics of our names
forgetting like the moon
that water is its own chalice.
Why kneel by the water like the moon
to drink from your own face
as if it tasted any different downstream
than it did when you were a cloud
high on the mountain
when you can taste
the facelessness of the sea in everything
if you drink deep enough?
And there are eyes full of wine
waiting to get drunk on you
that haven't bloomed yet
and wells that your tears
are still falling through
like plumb-bobs and pennies
that haven't reached bottom yet,
and deaths that are antiquely your own
you must rise from
like the hosts of the morning glory
to show the gaping bells of your irrefutable ghosts
it can be done.
Words have bad memories.
Words are troubled sleep and nightmares.
Words are dead trees in a winter swamp
that couldn't wake a mosquito up.
Words are the ring of the gold on the counter top
that tells you it isn't true.
Words are a snakepit of spray bombs
that go off like terrorists
on any average day
in the market-heart of the silence.
Words are wanted posters
nailing their own likenesses
to the crucifix of a telephone pole
to divert their detection like water
from the tines
and witching wands of the lightning
that seeks them out like humans alone in the open.
And if you try to say the unsayable
by smearing the view
with a new holy book
what have you said
that isn't just more graffiti
scratched on a face reserved for God,
or the vast scream of the dawn
just before you wake up from the dream
to discover you're gone?
Words are the negative space
we use to delineate
the shapes of ourselves
when we talk ourselves
like water into fish,
like infinite, open-mouthed skies
that have winged their way into words
like autumn rain in the hearts of the waterbirds
that leave no trace behind.
Words are blind. And eyeless.
Words are boulders
in the throat of the impasse
when the mountain tries to speak
of things that last,
or mud in the stream of the valley
when it lowers its gaze like a poem
to whisper of things that pass.
Words turn the spell
on the sorcerer
and dangle him
like a participial puppet
from the strings
of his own grammar,
his own magic,
like stars in farcical cocoons
on the trophy-lines of his webs.
Why rummage through
the wardrobe of a wave
for something to cover your nakedness
when every time you go swimming
you can wear the sea?
Take a page out of the book of the stars
and keep words behind you
like seagulls in the wake of your shining
so by the time anyone can see you
that's not who you are.
Words are living creatures,
words are all eyes and ears
as vivid and vital as yours
looking out from under the autumn leaves
like a flower pressed into a book
that gives it no meaning
that it didn't have in the fields.
Ignorance doesn't eclipse the light
and enlightenment doesn't illuminate.
You may talk forever around it
but what's the meaning of fire
or sit by the mindstream all night
making constellations of the fireflies
that come together like words
and there may be no separation
between the water
and the reflections of the stars
that ride it like long-legged spiders,
or between you and the earth,
not so much difference
as a razorblade of stargrass,
but what's the meaning of water,
what's the meaning of the earth under your feet,
what's the meaning of that blade of chlorophyll?
Words speak for themselves,
not anything else.
Words are living voices
not harps in the throats of the dead.
A word is not a thought,
not an emotion,
not a stand-in for reality
not the verbal version
of the stem cells on your tongue,
or the eloquent fragrance of a brain
recruiting bees to chafe their pollen into honey.
You can spend a whole lifetime saying
and still not know what a word is,
a whole lifetime feeling
and not know what emotion is,
a whole lifetime thinking
and not know what a thought is.
Beyond appearances
that are not wholly
at the discretion of the depths,
nothing is the likeness of anything else
in the unity of their uniqueness,
the oneness of their oneness,
the mystic specificity
of many rivers
unspooling the mountain
to weave this infinite sea of awareness
into the myriad forms and tongues and waves of us
who take on minds and hang
like empty cups and water droplets
as if we were mere slips of the tongue
on the leaves of the morning glory,
from our own hooked fingers,
the black crescents of the lunar triggers
that play Russian roulette with our heads,
and the dreams that fit us like skin
and the lean watercolours of our sweat
on form-fitted sheets
when our separation troubles us
like waves trying to say the unsayable sea
to islands that already flow
like clear diamonds
that have mastered the yoga of tears.
Everything's like that
when things turn from solid to real.
Even these words.
Even in the fireflies
no one ever sees
deep in the well of the word,
even in the human heart,
the star, the rock, the tree,
in the smallest eye of water
that ever looked upon a summer sky,
the unsayable sea
of the whole of this multiverse
that sheds worlds like cool petals
from the sea mouths of the mind,
the life of everything
effortlessly exists
to explore its own weather
like water, to hold
its own life like a jewel
up to the light
and see everyone crowned
in a palace of water
whenever you say your name
to the stars
just to let them know
that you were here once
as if you meant it.
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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