Related quotes: And when you get what...

And When You Get What You Want, Is It What You Dreamed?

And when you get what you want, is it what you dreamed?
Did the mirage live up to its reputation, did it exceed
your expectations or is there another award beyond this one?
O endlessly hungry one, pleonaxic emptiness, were you born
like a black hole on a midway of blazing radiance,
a blinding light that serves as a guide to star-nosed moles?
Fulfilment or doom, depression, disappointment, as if
some clown had washed his face off like a painted tear
in a green room mirror, and discovered he was still crying?

You grasp it like the garment of a passing ghost,
sand, water, cloud, and it changes shape in your hands
like the nature of a bird when neither of you understands.
We all wake up to spend the wealth we hoarded in our dreams.
We even greet death with money under our tongue.
In Zen they'd say we're all stealing the Buddha's purse
to buy the Buddha's horse one way or another
whether we can ride it or not, and if today you're disappointed
you'll be mesmerized by something else tomorrow,
a junk dealer going through a widow's private treasures.
You'll open your mouth again like an oyster farm
trying to breed pearls like the philosopher's stone
labouring to turn all these new moons of pitted ore into gold.

Good luck. Hope you're the wiser for it. As for me
and my house, I've never been disappointed
in my wonder at the world, and what I'm doing here
being aware of it all as the world tracks its starmud in
across my homeless threshold and all these ancient footprints
are dance steps back to a self that's just a tic of the emptiness
I catch once and awhile out of the corner of my third eye
abrogating credit for a dream it had nothing to do with
because that's a bird still flapping its wings in a shell
thinking it's being upheld by the wind until someone
cracks it open like a brittle atmosphere and all that space
comes rushing in and you realize with a cosmic sigh of relief
like a sunflower bowing its heavy head, what a great debt
you owe to the nothing that you are that can't possess anything.

You're standing there in all your spiritual bling,
gold necklaces around your throat, chakras and chains
looped like nooses in knots at the end of your spinal cord.
What did you do? Bind yourself to the axis of the earth
to be mistaken for a saint or a martyr, the wobbly snake
of an inebriated caduceus, but where's the fire, where's
the heretic, the apostate, the dragon singing in its own flames,
where even one firefly of insight that consumes the universe?
Or are you just another photo op with mermaids
calling you to the soft rocks of a popular song?
A straw dog in the rain smouldering like methane
on a compost heap after another ritual performance?
You're greedy for joy. You're greedy for illumination
in the spotlight. But bliss is one of the spices of life,
not the main course. And to want more than this
is to declare you're a glutton with lousy spiritual manners.

And O yes I know, you think this is like blooming
and having someone throw acid in your face
when you were anticipating rain on your plum blossoms.
You duck through a hole in the fence like a raccoon
caught pilfering corn in a garden, and you want
a Roman triumph with rosewater and slaves
for passing through the gateless gate to liberation
when all you've really done is barge through
the emergency exit to run from a shotgun loaded with stars
in the hands of a scarecrow trying to terrify the birds
by shooting straight up into the air until things
begin to take root of themselves, and the locust trees
are feathered with the leaves of nesting lapwings
that don't have any further to fall though they feign
a dizzying descent of wounded maple keys
and all the shamans have to heal themselves
by ploughing the ground they were born on into bookshelves.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

Related quotes

Things I Must Say To You The Crystal Said

Things I must say to you the crystal said.
Jewels I must turn in the light.
Things I have gathered
like wild herbs from the starfields
to make a cool poultice of the moon
to draw the pain out of the wound
like a child that got turned around
when she was born
on the nightside of her blue eyes
to colour outside the lines of her constellation
like one of the original watersheds of Aquarius
that didn't take to the bottle and spoon of lesser wells
that warily sip from themselves
as if they were testing for poison,
but poured herself out
in an elation of so many lifelines
so many rivers vital with beginnings
the world mountain discovered her
like gold in the stone
gold in the mindstream
gold in the ore of its bones
gold that shone even in the darkest of valleys
wherever she flowed
like the white moon
when it wants to be mistaken for a swan
and sheds her eyelids like the petals of a waterlily
that's gone, gone, gone beyond herself
like a waterbird into the undetectable mystery of things
that lifts us up from our own reflections
and calls us to exceed ourselves
by flying beyond our own wings
past the last lake at the end of the universe
we could bask in like a keyhole
in the third eye of an unrelenting sky.

There. That's a breathful.
A dust-devil in a gust of stars.
A precipitous river of my own.
But I like listening to the green mountains
talk about things that are perennially true
that no one ever believes.
There's inspiration in the fires
that inspires their leaves
to burn like old myths
and poems that went up in flames
true to the muse of autumn
that has forgotten their names.

And I'm listening to this little world mountain
this dolmen of a crystal you gave me
this palace of mirrors
that sits above my desk
and tells me things about you
only an older spirit than the road I'm on could know.
It whispers to me at night
like a fragrance of light
from the unseen flowers
behind your eyes
flowing down from the high fields
and unscalable facets
of the mystic mountain you live upon
planting trees.
Abruptly enlightened medieval Rinzai Zen masters
did the same
in the mountains of Japan
as if they were rooting their pupils
like worlds within worlds
within a grain of sand
like the cornerstone of it all.

Trees are the future memories
of a prophetic skull
that stays true to its ancestors
like pines in the fall.
Anyone who plants a tree
raises a temple to the wisdom of birds
who will speak to you
in the native tongue of a new language
in voices older than words.
Anyone who plants a tree
attains what lives beyond them like an afterlife
that's always rooted in now
and even the dead branch
that holds the autumn crow in the rain
when things are bleak with the passage of things
will turn into a strong rafter in the house of life
and the moon will add its blossom to it
and the sun its butterfly
and everything that grows
will greet you as a child of its own.
And life will hold you up
like a candle
like a Douglas fir
like a star
like the tiered pagoda
of a pine-cone
like a mirror
like a bird
like a quiet smile
in the sweetest of solitudes
and well-pleased with what you've sown
hang you like a thousand shining chandeliers of rain
in the sacred groves of the Pleiades
to show you what has grown over the years
from the labours you undertook
from the tears you shed
to green the wounded mountain back to health
by adding your life to its life
is you returning
like a prodigal daughter of water
to the mystic springs
of your own starcrazy source.

Ride the wave.
Ride the snake.
Ride the wind.
Ride the fire.
Ride your own eyebeam
like a sword that delivers
the boon of life
like the first word
of a new universe
that's just heard its name called
like an endless beginning.

You are comet. You are wheat. You are starwheat.
You're a comet in the starwheat
making crop circles.
Aquarius.
Aquarians can take their skin off
and put it on again like water
and pour themselves out forever
like the sea in every dropp
so when the tide returns
it's never empty-handed.
I see a naked watersnake
swimming through the moonlight
like the path of something perpetually true
and inconceivably beautiful
as if time itself had learned to move like that
and every ripple was an era
widening its wingspan in its wake.
Hic sunt dracones.
That's how dragons learned to fly.
The highest and the lowest all in one.
The snake in the claws of the eagle.
Wisdom in the lawlessness of insight.
God.
You.
Me.
The Mysterium.

For those who haven't opened
the eyes in their blood yet
to see the bloodflowers
the bloodstars
talking to each other
like variations of the same light
these visions are the lost dream grammar
of an ancient madness
you can't recover from like a fever.
But to those who know the fireflies
are lamps on the road
the stars are not useless
and everywhere is the clarity and passage
of a river that forever arrives.

And I can see the wounded child
who's brave about her pain
but feels like a ladder in the rain
no one will hold for her
to climb down like the moon from her window.
And those that should have been waiting down below
to catch her if she falls
have scattered like stars
on the insides of her eyelids when she blinks.
Abandonment is that hollow shell
you find washed up somewhere on a beach
and raise to your ear
to hear the sea far off
like a life that's going on without you.
Even the sea can't fill that cup.
Only another emptiness
could feel at home
in the homelessness of that space.
Abandonment is getting up every morning
and putting your face on inside out
and thinking of it as some kind of good luck
you're on the other side of the universe
all on your own.
And though you howl like a wolf on the wind
the moon still cannot hear you.
That's how longing is born
in the fires of separation;
that's how the universe is called
every moment out of the nothingness
like someone to love,
and the deeper and darker the emptiness
the higher and brighter the mountain.
The watershed holds the fountain up
like a bouquet to the rain.
Emptiness doesn't stand like a god
in the shadow of an unknown definition.
It's the selflessness of everything that is.
Unborn it lives without distinction in the heart of things.
Unperishing it dies for everyone
without leaving anyone out.

When insight blossoms
like the moon
on a dead branch
compassion's the fruit
that's always in reach.
Life doesn't practise
what the heartless teach.

This morning
I'm sitting at the feet
of your little crystal buddha
enthroned in full lotus position
as he turns my heart in the light
like a jewel in the eye of a diamond-cutter.
And the sky is generous with tears
as it clarifies the windows of perception
with eyes as old and wise
as the sun at midnight.
And every thought I have of you is a fierce peace.
And every feeling a black mirror
deeper than white
that has extinguished my face
like one of last night's stars
in the bliss of a greater illumination.
The mystic specificity of my mind
pales like the moon
in a blinding abyss
of no-minded indistinction.
And the stars that shone down on nothing for so long
like an indecipherable language
are now looking up at you
like the fountainmouth
high above the treeline
in the mountains
of an Aquarian understanding
of what they've always meant to say.
There are no echoes in the voices of love.
No avalanche of Rosetta Stones.
No scoffing crows.
No genuflections of the dove.
There are no shadows hiding like daggers
under the cloaks of day
to get even at noon
for things that happened at midnight.
Love is a feather
from a passing bird in flight
life puts into the scales
and the earth turns eastward toward the light
and death takes its finger off the measure
of life's most cherished treasure.

And now the buddha turns into
two lovers sitting upright
face to face
in a lotus embrace
of enlightened connubium
in a coincidence of the contradictories
as if two were not the extinction of one.
And when desire opens its flames like petals
and blooms like a phoenix
there are no strangers in the fire.
And love doesn't burn its feet
by making a firewalk
of the nameless constellation
rising from the dark innocence
of its sweet dreamless sleep
like the thirteenth house of the zodiac
with two people home from everywhere
with myths of their own
like Venus and Mars
turning the lights on and off
like lovers and stars
while the neighbours stare in amazement
through closed windows and locked doors
at the bright vacancy of the rumours
the dark abundance of the night
that knows all we are and do
and will and have done
is true to the overproof joy I take
in this lyric of a jewel in the light.
It turns me like your eyes
turning the key in the dark gate
of a mystic moonrise
where fate elaborates the worlds
like pearls from grains of sand
and time refires its last hour
like a master glass blower
to make more space
for stars in the desert at night
by breathing on the flames
that feather the ashes of the moths
in the urns of our names
with the wings
of a dragon
the wings of a phoenix
the wings of a sphinx in the rain
planting trees on the slopes of a pyramid
to watch the dead mountain grow green again
and know all the secret paths down into its afterlife
like a river running through the wilderness
or this theme of stars on the mindstream
beguiled by the mystic wiles
of a cougar caught in the moonlight
like a jewel in the eye of a dreamcatcher.
Or the seasoned seer in a mirror like me
enraptured by the anarchic fireflies
beading themselves
like the mandalic stars
of a new constellation
only the enlightened can see
enflamed like a prophecy
empowered by love
to rise in the night of your name.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

A Creed For The Desperate

Don't let your bones be softened by fear.
By the time you hear it the lightning has already struck.
Don't listen for the echoes of things you haven't said.
And stop breaking your fortune-cookie skull open
like an old prophetic head
that claims it's been to the dark side
without being dead.
Don't let disaster define you.
You're not the bouquet
of a second class vinegar
hovering over a first class wine.
No crisis ever comes with its own identity
until you give it yours.
Move calmly over your own waters
like clouds in the eye of a puddle.
Walk as if you were already
following your own funeral
and lost your way to the grave.
People make much of being
but seeing is enough
to save you sometimes
from your own obscurity.
And when was there ever any security
in security
as if this flame were safer than that?
How long has the universe risked being you?
Take a chance on your own magic
and pull your life like a tiger
out of your own hat
to eat the rabbit you've become.
Then there's nothing to run from.
Become the sword
and you won't cut yourself.
Become the fire
and you won't burn.
Become life again
and you won't pass away
breath after breath after breath
wishing you could stay
in the negative space
of a comfortable death
that eulogizes your lies.
There are full moons
that don't weigh
like pennies on your eyes
to keep you from seeing too much.
And there are things of the earth
that have followed you into exile
like a new birth of things you can touch
that are wholly yours in passing
like music from a keyboard
or a fire in church.
And you may be down
to your last black beatitude
and righteously uphold the sanctity
of your will not to listen
to anything but the clinking of your own chains
and the mournful whistle
of your distant dying derailed thought-trains
giving up the ghost
but you're just sucking on the tit
of a perverse purity
and you're milking it
like the bitter truth
for all it's worth.
And it's not worth much.
And you may have flattened
all the mountains
and filled all the valleys
of your flatlining event horizons
but there's still life going on
in the crooked back alleys
of secret dimensions
you don't know about
stuck in the house all day
like a child afraid to go out.
You look at a tree.
You see a crutch.
You look at the moon.
You see a scar.
You look at a star
and you're lost for good wherever you are.
And it's not really a dysfunction of your imagination
that you can look at the Taj Mahal
and see a one-room hovel with slumlords
jacking up the rent.
It's good to look both ways
at any spiritual crossing.
But you see a stick in the water
and you think the water's bent.
And to shrink anything as the Tao says
you must first expand it.
But I think the Tao meant the universe
not a used condom on the death's-head
of a stillborn resurrection.
But you'd have to fall
further than you have
to understand it.
You'd have to fall
from your present plight on the world mountain
all the way down until you came to a space
where there were no more opposites in the abyss
and nothing in order
nothing amiss
nothing is meant
to scare you into being
and nothing is trying to hold you back.
What's your lover's mouth
if not a wound
you can kiss into healing?
You can see it that way.
Or you can harden the bruised fruit
with brittle tears
and flint knap chandeliers
to fall from star-crossed mirrors
like rain from broken glass
that hasn't fired up a single root in years
to dream of flowers.
The mind's an artist.
The painting's yours.
A self portrait in the image of God
whom no one's ever seen.
I see a black star in the bottom of a tulip
shining up at me
like the direction it took
to get to the other side.
You see a poisonous spider
like the leftover lees
of a flowerless wine
in the eye of a toxic goblet.
And you might raise it to your lips
like a lunar eclipse
but you never drink up.
And even when you do
it's a bad guest in the house of life
that drinks from his own skull
like the grail of a grape on the vine
with one eye open
as if he trusted the wine
but not the cup.
You're not the cure
that failed the ailing kingdom.
And you're not the miracle
that got up and walked away
to spread the word like a bird at sea
that had just discovered a tree to perch in
you might have sinned as a crow
but now that you've been saved
you're a carrier pigeon.
You can sit here all day if you want
like a buddha on his tatami mat
thinking bituminously
about burning enlightened diamonds
back into eyeless coal.
You can squat like a tree in rings of fat
smashing small thoughts
like eggs on the rocks
trying to read your fate
in their misfortune
like a chromosome
you hold in common
with all those who hate
having been born.
You can heap your afterbirth with scorn.
You can turn your eyes
into a pair of gravitational lenses
like dark matter
and wince at the stars
like cinders of light
that contradict your seeing.
And you wouldn't be wrong
because you can see it that way too.
The same eye by which I see God
is the eye by which She sees me.
Two creative geniuses in one studio
painting each other in the nude.
And she shows you hers
and you show her yours
as she enflames your solitude
by not putting her name on it
though it's a perfect likeness of you.
Your face warped into
a convoluted starless space
like the opening gala
of a staged extinction.
And your soul shrouded in lampblack
like a candle
that soils its own light
by putting on a deathmask of night
like a snakeoil salesman
selling skin to ghosts.
And there where your eyes used to be
two black holes
surrounded by random haloes of light
like lipstick on the mouths of star-nosed moles.
And look at that scar of red she's used
to catch your ambiguous smile.
That's the kind of genius
that leaves the asylum gate open for awhile
for everyone to get into your style
of imploding your eyes
like black dwarfs
with abstract depressionist astigmatism
as if gravity couldn't dig a grave deep enough
or matter make a stone heavy enough
to put on your chest to keep you from rising again
or the gold of the moon in your mouth
ever prove true enough to pay the ferryman
to get you to the other side of nowhere
as if he knew somehow
you huffed life like a paint thinner
trying to escape the race a winner
by never crossing a starting line
that wasn't already
a dark horse lamed by life behind you.
And he couldn't be bothered with anyone
who would fix their own death
and lay a bet against everyone
their pain could outrun their compassion
and in the second heat
their bitterness the truth.
But if you want a way out
like an emergency door
I'll let you in on a little secret.
Life doesn't grow into death
and death isn't waiting
to take your next breath.
And there's an eye of liberation
in the darkest hurricane roses of despair
that frees the light like life enough to care
that all it falls upon alike
should see its own face everywhere
through a crack of black lightning
in the white mirror
where everything that appears
evaporates like a ghost off a lake
or cataracts from the eyes
of the orthodox
who couldn't see straight enough
to thread their keys through their locks
like mystic heretics
to have known
the deepest wounds give birth
to the sweetest spears
that life has ever thrown
like light on a roadless night
or insight like a bird through the sky
that enters the sunset
like a planet following the sun
through the seven coloured doors
of the seven blind seers
who disappear in a vision of one clarity
with many more eyes
than there are lightning bolts and fireflies
whose age can be measured in light-years.
If a fraction of nothing is nothing.
Then a fraction of eternity
isn't a brevity less than the eternal
and every fraction of anything is all.
There now that's not too hard to follow.
The white face of the moon
veils the dark other you never see
because it's all been timed to turn away.
The moon and its month are one day.
Things might be empty
but they're not hollow.
And you're free to go or stay.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

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
Vote! | Copy!

One Day Your Mouth

One day your mouth just opens
like a rose or an eye or an oyster
that bloomed in the night
when you weren’t looking
and whispers things you should have said
in the defense
of your own innocence
and didn’t, things
that should have been defended with fire
but were washed away with tears
and the bitter acids of high ideals
like a poem in the rain.
I lie, but never out of fear;
and when I lie it’s always
an attempt to heal, to clean, to dress
that gash of a murderous fact
or remove the thorn, the claw, the fang
the sickle of the crescent moon
from a wounded heart
that hasn’t tasted life enough to know
why the blood is made of iron.
I mingle a little shadow in with the light,
a little wine with the vinegar
when the truth has no eyelids
and the bitter cup is full of bleach; I let love
sweeten the green apple
and err on the side of compassion
when the windfall needs a face-lift.
I don’t grow gardens
in the dirt under my fingernails
or drive a golden chariot through a slum,
but a few geraniums on the windowsill
can’t hurt the view.
And what can come of trying to pour
the ocean into a tea-cup
when all that’s needed
is a quick rinse in a bird-bath,
or a few drops of holy water
through a sieve? Terminal
literalism and contagious symbolitis
are the snake-oils
of fraudulent medicine-men.
The truth is a scaffolding
to climb up on and paint
and I never sing in the same tree twice.

But I steal, from everyone, chronically,
dreams, visions, glimpses, insights,
the little jewels of wisdom
that fall from their signet rings, plunder
whole mansions of emotion
in a single night,
a cat burglar on the fifteenth floor
of a tower of moonlight, seeds,
feathers, leaves, flowers,
names and faces, I’m a thief of fire,
a pickpocket and klepto-crow
with a passion
for the silver things of life,
a b. and e. artist with an ear
for encrypted vaults
where they keep the safety deposit boxes
like black holes crammed with stars,
a grave-robber looking for afterlives
to fence to the living, a professional booster
who can walk into any solar system
in a t-shirt
and amble out with a planet.
I once sold Mars in a bar
to a drunken movie-star,
but I’ve never wanted anything
that wasn’t mine, or the wind
couldn’t get its hands on,
or I wouldn’t receive if I asked,
like certain hearts that have accused me
of being in possession
of stolen property. Even the poems I flog
are hot, but like the rain and the sun
I lifted them from
I give to the rich and poor alike
with an empty hand
and the budding daffodil
of an open mike, stealing the Buddha’s purse
to buy the Buddha’s horse.

And it’s true, I’ve been violent,
cracked a few skulls, deviated
more than one septum, but only
when attacked or cornered
or on behalf of the weak and hapless,
gone out to the parking lot
and given as good as I got,
stood up and got counted
then quickly dismounted my rage,
turned the page, not
my cheek and in a week or two
when the swelling’s gone down
and the teeth marks on my knuckles
haven’t turned into aids,
like any cosmic ape or alpha chimp
with gargantuan glands
tried to play the sage
and walk away with a cosmic limp
and eons of blood on my hands.

But as I said, I lie,
and now that I’ve written this
to set the record straight
thinking I had good cause
to touch up my portrait a bit
I confess
between the cracks and the flaws
and the lines around my eyes
I can see another face
that isn’t a disguise
beneath the layers of paint
staring out at me
like a demon in the heart of a saint
who knows what I am
and scoffs at what I ain’t.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

If I Ever Get To Look Back On All Of This

If I ever get to look back on all this
even if it's just to show me how wrong I was
about so much, how much I risked for so little,
I don't want to have been mean and petty here,
I don't want to have lived short-minded
as if my brain never grew to its proper height
and I had to live close to the ground
with burrowing wasps and centipedes
trading toxins in the grass like slumlords.
Tried to live like a magnanimous man
with an open hand whenever my luck kept pace
with my generosity. Didn't want to die
knowing nothing about the stars, that shining
that grew in time even brighter in the dark within.
Wanted to know the fury and compassion, genius,
the affable kindness, madness and love of humankind.

Used to say we were born to see and be happy,
and if you couldn't find a meaning that suited you,
make one up of your own. Don't waste
the great creative potential of the absurd
and try to fit yourself like a little polyp of sentience
into the fossilized coral reefs of the past.
Go for the galaxies. What's to lose?
If you're going to fall, fall from a height.
Sooner a brilliant failure than a mediocre flight.
You'd be surprised at what the timing of one comet
falling out of the black halo around the sun
can mean to millions watching down below for signs.

Sensible shoes, or starmud on your winged heels,
Icarus or Neil Armstrong using his foot
to take a big step for humankind, walk your mile
standing up as if you were scanning for leopards,
your simian continuum at a fork in the road.
Danger is a capricious muse, but it can still
rivet you with inspiration. The hunters get eyes.
You grow an exoskeleton, then rib
the walls and rafters of the house and soon
the sun decides where the windows are going to go.
The Hox genes talk, and you're the topic of conversation.

You start listening as if
you were listening in on yourself,
all those voices and things
for words you don't understand,
bliss, butterflies, sorrows and assassins,
the victimized heroes of egoistic tragedies,
and the poetry in the pity of unexpurgated passion.
Lovers in the last throes of unmitigated catastrophe.
The rush and turmoil of the picture-music
going on all the time, shapeshifting
from one musical scene into another
and even you with your hands over your ears
sick of listening to the cosmic hiss,
climactic cymbals in the great performance
just waiting to come together like a hadron collider
deep underground where black holes in space
are born of the impact. If you're not already
too calculating, or mesmerized like a stone bird
by the snake-eyes of the dice, put some money
down on yourself as if you had one to lose,
and if for nothing more than the exercise,
kiss your prophetic skulls for luck and let them roll.

And when you love, don't approach a seabed on the moon
with a spoonful of water you can both sip from.
Return like an ocean with a convincing atmosphere.
If fools rush in where angels fear to tread
the angels will follow soon enough, with blessings
on the horns of your head. Learn
every gesture of her eyes like pictographic signage,
of her heart, a grammar for two, of her mind
be the no one to lift its veils, of her body,
apprentice yourself to the genius of her starmud.

Everything that lives is a gesture of the absurd
the imagination delights in elaborating
like people with the personalities of apple-trees
or the encyclopedic prolixity of the Burgess Shale.
I am is not the cornerstone of anything.
I imagine. And the wind is the threshold of the tent
that sheds the desolation of a self like a flower
that blooms in fire. Why water a mirage? Live large.
Squander stars on your vision of this, swallow the abyss
to keep your emptiness well fed, let your wisdom
be the private life of space, your time on earth
be passage and transformation, and your heart
cherish the bliss of all, animate and inanimate alike,
who suffer the same dream of being awake that you do.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

As above so below. Same with inside and outside.
Astrophysics is psychology. Noumena, phenomena.
Are you looking for a unified, field theory of your mind?
Study that small sacred syllable of a black ant
with the torn wing of a butterfly
under full sail in its mandible
it's taking back to the heap
of a thriving passage tomb burial
like a high card it's going to lay on the table
without intending to call anyone's bluff.

The moon on the lake isn't timed.
Death's not too late. Life's not too early.
Not all the flowers bloom at once
in a wave of mass hysteria at a sports stadium.
Time is as generous to the dandelion
as it is to the hyacinth or the rose.

When a total eclipse of the soul
can be as illuminating to a firefly
as the enlightenment of the full moon
can be to the mad at harvest time
and the night bird sings on the same branch
out of the same longing
as the mourning dove does
on the burgeoning bough,
how far must a wave look for the grail
before it realizes it's swimming in it
and by virtue of it having never been lost or found,
like the universe you're surrounded by
dipping its other wing in the cup you drink from
like blood from your own prophetic skull
or an elixir of love from the goblet of a black tulip,
as an antidote to falling into a cult of trances,
trying to teach rattlesnakes to ghost dance for rain
when everywhere you look as far as the eye can see,
nothing but the bleached bones of their vertebrae
crumbling like aqueducts across a sea of sand
looking for the holy hourglass to green it again?

When things are like this, why send
a caravan of mirages like thought-trains
on a pilgrimage for water on the moon?
Is a course correction more innocent
than its original direction or is it
just another change of heart on the part
of a weathervane that thinks linearly
it's got its hand on the rudder of the wind?

Best thing to do in a storm
is let go of the wheel of birth and death
and either go down with the ship like a constellation,
or trust in a bubble-shaped universe you still might float
like a turbulent waterlily above the turmoil of it all,
anchored to the bottom like a key on a kite
to lure the lightning to your spinal cord
the way copulating snakes make their own caduceus,
twin wavelengths from the same inner matrix
ascending like helical thermals under a dove's wings,
so that dragons are born of cosmic eggs
that know how to heal fire with fire
that can consume itself like life
without ever getting burnt out
even when autumn's coming on
and you can begin to smell
the smoke and ashes on its breath.

Enlightenment the inspiration of the search,
the spirit returns to the candle in your hand,
to dance with the flame of life within you
on your own threshold, in your own doorway as you realize
like someone waking up from a dream
in their own bed, their head on a softer pillow
than they imagined a moonrock could be
at one sixth the gravity of earth, what
was there to aspire to that could possibly be
higher and wiser than a cloud circling a mountain
or down in the valley where the stars slum
once they get off the night shift, more compassionate
than a honey bee in the eye of a stargazer lily
smothering it in a rusty ochre dust storm of pollen
the way we prepared our dead when we lived in caves
to bloom like a hive when its spirit returns to matter
in its next incarnation as a gust of wildflowers on Mars.
Hawkweed and Indian paintbrush I would think.
And the unusual fruits and flowers that can sprout
from a windfall of intensely radiant meteor showers
flung out of the darkness by the hands of generous sowers
that were ploughing the moon for themselves
long before the ox of the mind showed up
like the blessing of a delusional dependency
that makes you think, gone to seed, you need it.
When the truth has always been mindful
and mindlessly green as the thorns and the leaves
of the locust trees in spring coming into blossom
as easily as the mindstream follows its own lead everywhere
with nothing but its own flowing for a navigator.

No gate, no lock, no pivot, no hinge, no waterclock
trying to put the fire of life out in a bucket brigade
of community-oriented arsonists, departure
never any further off the beaten path from home
than its arrival can be lead astray
by the shadow of the return journey
it casts behind it like the widening wake
of a waterbird's wings unravelling
the flying carpet of the water that wove it
like wavelengths of the hidden harmonies
that are on your side like your eyes are
when you step out of the blazing house of life
once in a while, into the expansive solitude
of your own inimitably creative darkness,
without a candle, a firefly, a lightning strike
for a guide, and look up, just look up
in any direction you wish, and don't pick any one
of the six thousand stars you can see
with the naked eye in the country,
no matter you don't know their names
or myths of origin, or much about shepherd moons,
or what an antikythera is, then run around
looking for an underground circumpolar sage
to show you on a starmap where your shining is at
like the light of the star, though you cry
in bliss and sorrow, delusion and insight,
you can't wash out of your own eye
anymore than you can Venus in the dawn
when you're sitting on a mountain under a Bodhi tree
trying to attain the unattainable empty-handed
in the same breath that's been giving it all away
for light years, inexhaustibly, like a flower-mouth
of enlightenment in everything you say or do,
the world in the creative wake of whatever medium
that's shapeshifting into you like water into fish,
darkness into star, sky into a bird on the wing
in a homesick sunset, or the shining of the source
like the lantern in your hand you needlessly labour
at keeping lit to go look for it without realizing
it's your own blazing that blinds you to the gift
of what the darkness arrays before you like candles and stars
and nocturnal waterlilies opening like a new moonrise
amazed by the occult mystery of the fire that burns
in the subliminal watersheds of your fathomless eyes.

In this boundless space, why should you be surprised
behind all the masks of God, her best disguise
when the hidden secret wished to be known
and she revealed herself, was your own face,
your eyes, your mouth, your ears, your voice alone
pouring the universe like the light of picture-music
into your own ears like the spirit of a word
that can't be enlightened until it's been heard by you.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

I Wish I Knew You Well Enough To Say

Trying to get centered in the middle of chaos
isn't going to turn me into the third of eye
of a hurricane rose, or square the circle
with the clarity of a lens with a seeing-eye dog.
The rags of the clouds are teaching the dandelion seeds
how to drift with a good conscience,
just let things go awhile. What's done, what's not.
Why labour at either when together they're just
the human way of walking away from things
one moment after another? Chaos has a way
of conditioning itself into people like me
who relax because they know it's all out of control.

Been feeling like a dead branch, a maple witching wand,
these past few days, because I've given up
divining water with a snake's tongue,
and I thought I was blossoming again
when I saw the first bud of the moonrise
but now it seems to have gone down
behind a screening myth of eyelashes and trees
and my heart is so disappointed in me
there's no help for it, it's crying in my bloodstream,
and when all my childhood insecurities
come mocking me like a fox in my sacred hole,
I don't even bother licking my wounds anymore.

Hope. But it's dogpaddling just beneath an airhole
in the middle of a seal hunt on a bloody ice floe
that's grinding its molars in its sleep like sheet ice.
Always hope. A crack in the door left ajar
for the light to get in and the darkness out.
Only a fool would make the exceptional a rule of thumb,
and hope is a palace of water with so many windows
even the best thieves of moonlight
don't know whether they're breaking in or out.
Just the same, my blessings on everyone's head and house.
The wingspans of two birds hinged to a gate
that doesn't need a guru to teach it to open,
where I'm a stranger who stopped to talk
on the roadside of the fence, and on the other,
I'm a nocturnal wildflower in a secret garden of bliss
that doesn't notice the difference in the way I bloom.

Anyway, who's got the eyes to see any further
into their fate than a pair of dice do, and if things
don't break your way, you're not washed up
on Circe's island like a love affair with the moon,
the manuscript of your first loveletter doesn't
regrettably meet anyone's needs at the time
but feel free to submit again if you're a masochist,
so what, there a more mirages of fish in the desert,
and the star you wished upon digs its spur into your eye,
Giddy up. After you get over a little death,
an emotional stone age when Perseus meets Medusa
on his way to rescue Andromeda from a killer whale,
rejection can be the burr under the saddle of Pegasus
and there's nothing in the way of these high, wide open starfields,
that have never known a fence or a gate, to obstruct you
from burning a little dark energy off
by taking to the air like a mythically deflated weather balloon
in an expanding universe that's just taken
its thumb and forefinger off your throat to let you breathe out
as if you'd managed somehow again
to exorcise yourself from your own self-possession.

A lot of gurus have to like that. But I'm sick of the sound
of one hand clapping like an overly-disciplined seal
with one flipper left while Orca eats its trainer.
I want to take a leap of faith, not death, like the rain
through a circle of my own making whether
it amuses the crowd or not. Or meets the approval of rainbows.
Attachment too is a buddha activity once you get back
from the sad, cold, desolated shore of enlightenment
and the spell has unsilvered the back of the mirror
like flakes of moonlight, and effaced it with a clarity
that lets you see right through yourself
like the stars in an autumn sky into nothing.
What is it Dogen Zenji said in medieval Japan?
When the truth doesn't fill your body and mind
you feel you've had enough. But when it does
you always feel as if something were missing?
God, what a lot of empty truth I must embody
to be so hungry for the taste of all my lost illusions.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

Trying To Get Centered In The Middle Of Chaos

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

My Lonely Island Music

My lonely island music,
already I see in your eyes, devastation in the dead zone,
skulls littering the field, autumns wandering away
weeping like windows that mistook themselves for the sky
and murdered a bird. Mystic September, vamp of this vision,
how could the moon not leap from my tongue
in praise of the world that shines through you
bathing alone in the dawn of every moment, utterly
alive, your beauty the page of a unwritten scripture
poised in the ink at the nib of every blade of grass to say
beyond the saying
what can’t be said. How unbearably sad
in this defeated hour that so few know the truth
that walks ahead of them like their own footprints
returning to the door they left by, already lost,
their houses, foundation stones of quicksand. Get it right in the seed,
get it right in the root of the eye, let the wind
take the ashes, sweep the shadows from the stairs,
and all the moons of yesterday are caravans of blossoms on the water.
Get it wrong and you’re a widow plundering corpses
for wedding rings and pocket-watches, black rain
on the open eyes of the dead. Devoid of transcendence
in the mirroring awareness, on a diet of fire,
you’ll end up combing your hair with a ladder.
Can you hear this bell of green before it rings, can you see
the painting in your blood before the brush is lifted
like a maggot of consciousness to the rose?
If you can, then check your shadow at the threshold
and walk naked into the far fields of your seeing, your feet
on the ground, your head in the stars; if you can’t,
you’re deepening your ignorance by ignoring your depths,
your light passes over itself like an eclipse or the hand
of a black magician, conjuring. Peril in the seeing.
A mask of frost over the surgical face of the heart. Understand
deeply and with authority that this dream cannot be understood,
taste this dream for yourself and look once
into the brilliant darkness that lies beyond wisdom and forsaking
and acknowledge in a crown of water
you are queen of that, your own teacherless realms.
Can’t you feel the roots of the black orchid of this space
wounding the soil with the stars of another night-sky
already opening above and below you? Rightly and brightly,
you are that opening, the sum of all the awareness of the whole of your life
expressed in the unborn no-point of a star of perception in space,
blue knowledge beyond the scope of the death-sighted.
Why study your own legends like snapped twigs on the trail
and send yourself in a straitjacket to school
when you already know by heart
the book of the breath you must live? Open your fist. Where
did it go? What’s in your hand? Do you understand? Our lives
are the shadows of birds sown like seed across the skies,
fish-maps printed on water, compasses looking for directions
that don’t exist. We are brief and we are vital, pilgrims
on a bridge of ancient zeroes, angels under every stone,
gypsies at home. Hold your life up like a match to a mirror in a dark room
to see whose face it is
then blow yourself out like an orchard
before blazing becomes a kind of blindness.
Put the world to your lips like a finger
in the black clarity of the silence. Do you see, do you see
the white songbird of the moon enter the throat of the well
to flaunt its plumage privately in an empty theater,
the roar of the ghosts of the infinite aeons for applause,
the sound of one hand clapping? Anciently, you were so
and now you are so
and tomorrow after tomorrow you shall be so, hidden
right under your own nose, calling yourself like a girl to her friend
when the game is over to come out of hiding. Most people
never understand more than a keyhole and a whisper of themselves,
trembling behind the dangerous doors of their own names
when they’re called to come out and play
with a universe that begins in every moment,
a fire-fly in a canning jar. They graze on the fodder of illusions,
domesticated by their own cupboards and cowardice,
peopling the wilderness beyond their artificial paradise
with demons that threaten to behead them in a palace coup
for the genuine liberation of an empty throne.
The blossom doesn’t know its own beginning,
nor the snowflake, its end. Can you find your true face
in this mirror of echoes,
the one you wore before the birth of silence?
I shall come looking for you like the wind
and I shall find you among trees and flowers
and among the grasses of the fields
and in the living light that breathes over the harvest
and in the water-mind of the stream that flexes the reeds
and playfully graces the ripe honey of the sun
with a sweetness unknown to the business of bees. No inside, no outside,
everywhere I step is the arrival and the walking of my blood
the whole of the way to you from whom I cannot be separated,
slipped like a letter under a door that opens, a mouth in space,
to paint the moon on an eye of scarlet water. One leaf falling,
the whole history of the world
in the way I love you by letting go; in the way
when you are closest, your heart, the thunder
of subtle intimacies in a lost well,
I drown in the vastness like a bird in the reflection of the sky,
happy refugees all along the side-roads of my nerves,
my mind, a fool of the moon, all parade and passage.
Do you understand? Not different, not the same,
we are rain on a window, faces beyond
the blindness of mirrors that use our eyes to see.
In every feather, in every leaf, in every flight of the word
ten thousand dawns, all of the earth,
this emptiness within emptiness singing to itself in the void.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

No Ray Of The Star

No ray of the star in the lead,
none following, no one vector of light,
the compass needle for all the rest.
Eye to eye, side by side,
like the spikes of an onion gone to seed,
companionship and parity,
even after billions of light years,
every one's still shining among their peers.

Even your best efforts
to make it all into one when it already is,
are in musical harmony
like dissonance in jazz
with every wavelength of heart and mind
in a great creative collaboration
with every thread on the loom of a flying carpet
as big as the universe, growing
into the vast expanse of the chaos
it's spinning itself out of like the three fates,
the daughters of night with their thread and shears
severing the lifelines of passion birth and death.

Let them. Because there's a little green thread of love
coiling around your spinal column like serpent fire
that can't be cut by scissors or tears,
a dragon of dna with rainbow chromosomes
riding the stairwells and thermals of its own flames
like a wild grape vine, or trout lilies
down by the night creek
holding up their blossoms
like masterpieces to the stars
apprenticed to their shining
like one genius to another
revealing what can be done with light
when everyone's working in the same medium.

Every star, a kiss on the eyelids
of a wildflower in a far field
that's gone back to seed for a while,
every rose and mushroom alike.

Every ray of light, a mystic spear
through the heart of a disbelieving telescope
that's just had a major revelation
not only about the true nature
of the radiance within
but the ore of the darkness
that includes it like a diamond close to its heart.

Every lucid needle in the haystack,
in the pin cushion of every star,
laying out the pattern of a constellation
like a star map with a ray of light in its teeth,
and every angel that dances thereon,
and every angel that keeps its place under a stone
as a junkie London poet once wrote,
and every demon of a black dwarf
that gave its all and everything up
until there was nothing left but a black hole
or a massive cosmic match head that's burnt out
like the ashen bud of a heretic that bloomed in fire
like the seeds under the eyelids
of the pine-cone of a Zen pagoda,
and returned the universe to the darkness it came from
like a child it discovered wandering
too far from home without a threshold of its own,
is patching the wounds of the sacred clowns
with the whole cloth of the rags they're standing in
with roses and rainbows at midnight
and big ripe tears in a windfall of pears
that keep falling to their destiny
without realizing they're plunging toward paradise
every time they lose their grip on things.

In my unified field theory,
whether you call it fana, nirvana, tauhid,
the godhead, the plenum void, the blaze,
the rapture, dropping off body and mind
once the Japanese plum blossoms
have turned into fruit and realized
no sweetness in the apple bloom
no ripeness in the apple, God,
Brahma on his lotus, Muhammad on Buraq,
Jesus on the cross, Moses on the mountain,
or you've just had a serious falling out with your lover,
in a world so boundlessly unified
we have to resort to stars for boundary stones
like illusory barriers between too much and too little,
where the sweet water meets the salt;
in my intimately impersonal skew
of the crazy wisdom of what's happening here,
the most accurate thing
you can whisper like a poem
into your neighbour's or lover's ear,
is not two, not two, not two, like the vital pulse
of a musical cult of oxymorons
at a gathering of opposites in the wilderness,
everything clings to one another inseparably
like the primordial atom to its table of contents,
like a fish to water, a bird to air,
a star to the darkness, the heart and the mind
to every thought and emotion
of the space-time continuum it works in,
or insight into the mystery that inspires it
to go looking for more grails
than there are ailing kingdoms
to hold them up to their lips
like rain on ripe blackberries
or the full moons of magic mushrooms
because every dropp of rain's a grail in itself.

For every star, an imaginary number
of lifemasks like metaphors
as many as there are flowers
and children of the earth to wear them
as if dressing up for life were the embodiment
of how awareness made its first appearance
like a hidden secret that wished to be known
through an infinite number
of ongoing myriad things all at once forever.

Ergo: we're all in the same lifeboat together
looking for one and the same threshold
in our homelessness like rogue planets
dancing around one another as if each
were in reach of the sun of the other,
sister, brother, and lover, mother and father,
bonded by the light and life
we've all been looking for long before
we were born to shine upon one another like this
as if there were no difference
between the crests and valleys
of one wave and another,
our fullness and our emptiness
on the great night sea of the abyss
that is always as pregnant with us
as it is with the membranous wombs of the multiverse
whenever we kiss in deep hyperspace
and a whole new world gets off on us.

In this realm everyone receives one another
like a gift they weren't expecting
and are never sure they deserve,
down to the last atom of the drunk in the doorway,
the exile in the embassy yard
looking for sanctuary in his own country
by asking you to let him in
like the angel of immigrants in disguise,
like a teen age girl on the sidewalk,
crying like a star-crossed chandelier of rain
shattered like a crystal slipper at her feet
into the plinths and shards of a constellation
you can only see on the dark side of the mirror
like the secret reflection of who she is
inside the locket she hangs around her heart
like the moondog of an innocent suicide
no one would have ever guessed she had in her
like a conversation that never took place, face to face,
heart to heart, when timing was as important as content.

If you hold up a mirror to your own lifemask,
a puddle where the starmud's settled down
like the cornerstone of the moon in a tent
that's comes to flower in the backyard
of a house of the zodiac, you can see in your own face
the faces of everyone who's ever been, or is, and will be,
you will see in the single eye of a seed
how many Japanese plum blossoms had to be
scattered down the street like a Milky Way of the ancestors
you're descended from, to implant their vision
of light and love and life in you. And how
transience learned from the wind
how to let go and give it all away
like the passage of birds and the winged samara
of maples across the full moon, all the fruits
and flowers, stars and seeds of a generous autumn
shaken like the apple orchards of the Hesperides into your lap.

And to begrudge one atom
of this inexhaustible plenty to anyone
is to starve to death in your own garden
is to deny your own children bread
you didn't break with them like a harvest of light
so their darkness wouldn't hunger
for stars the rest of their lives.
Is to live in the shining
and grow possessive of shadows.
Is to break off a love affair with the waters of life.
Is to never feel your eyes ripen from
something green and bitter
into a mirage of wine in the desert
that drinks time spiced with stars
from an hourglass of a blissful delirium
where even the vipers have learned to dance in the sand
among the bones of skeletal keyboards.

Anyway, you get the point, and once
you've got the point, you've got the wavelength by the tail
and you're centered everywhere in a boundless universe
and the circle is as complete as a dropp of rain,
or the growth rings of a tree
making ripples in the heartwood of spring
to give the birds and the stars and the trees
something to sing about they weren't expecting.
That no sum of zeroes ever added up to nothing
as if something were missing from the very start
like blackholes that don't write their names
on the galaxies they make out of their emptiness.
Out of nothing, one, and in that one
that includes everybody you can see
how the zeroes got carried away by the billions
into an infinite elaboration of their radiant vision
of a universe of overlapping circles making waves
and all it takes is one insight
into the creativity of compassion
that steals the breath of the stars away in amazement
that one ray of light from the least expected quarter
when you least expect it is more than enough
to touch your heart with a feather of love
fallen from a passing nightbird above
that has been calling to you all night in the darkness
to see how enlightened everything is as it is
when you open up the black holes
in the wild irises of your eyes to it.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

And The Rose

And the rose of someone else’s dawn,
a warning to drowned sailors,
mingling in the shadows and the leaves
just beyond the bay of the window where I stand
with my last afterlife
like a star in a shoe.
And there are voyages I’ll never make
and ones I have
for the sake of the going,
for the islands and the witches, the sirens
and the green flames of the fairies
that crept out from under
the stone of my heart
like a crown of petals, eyelashes,
cool palings of fire.,
and danced for the honey and the gold
from the paper hive
softened from stone
they had made of my life in ashes.
And there’s not much difference
between a sky and a sea,
no two wardrobes ever the same,
an expanse of space and skin,
wide palms of water,
and the confluence of lifelines
the deltas and the rivers,
the arteries and veins
the lightning and the branches,
weeping on a windowpane,
the fossils of leftover tears
that winced like an eye
in the hair of the jellyfish
that washed up out of their agony
like rain. And there are fools I’ve been
that don’t remember me
and lighthouses on the moon
that didn’t heed their own advice.
But there was always something
truer in the absurdity,
a mystery or a jewel, the memory
of a face I’d never seen,
some annihilation
with a threshold of stars
I’d never crossed, a whisper
of light, a fragrance, a voice
singing to itself in a lonely place
that put my caution to shame.
And it’s been my life to go,
to cross, to enter, to know
the lostness as my own,
and the darkness and the solitude
where I begin and end
like water taken from the river
and the river returned
as the moorings of the emptiness
I took for a boat
like a face
between the pages of my hands,
and all in the name of some nightbird
some shadow of a wing
that covered my heart
with such a quick eclipse
that no one even noticed I was gone.
Poetry, love, life; the shore is one thing
but the sea another,
and it’s not that I was brave
or thought I could walk on water
or had a secret starmap,
wiser than the rest;
I looked into the abyss with a shudder,
as if I had to kiss
a cobra on the head
or enter a spider’s womb
without being caught,
for the terrible acceptance
of what I sought
beyond the starless gates
and moth warnings
of the usual taboos. Every terror
scales a treasure, and the dragon
masks its secret,
not meant for the circumspect,
in risk. The sane prefer heaven
but heaven isn’t for the sane
who don’t know how to die enough
to answer the sphinxes and grails.
And it’s made me
a heretic of the heart,
a rogue star, a poet,
to live this way,
drinking the black wine
that was offered me
from the skulls
that lined the mouth
of the mysterious death
in the doorway
of every true entrance.
And it’s not the lies
that kill you,
nor the truths,
or looking through
a hole in the fence
at things you were never meant to see,
the medusa making love
to an apple-tree,
or Isis naked behind her veils
that no one’s ever lifted;
it’s returning
the way you came
from the wells
of the transformations,
the mountains of the muses,
the islands and the trees
of seduction and death,
unchanged, your tears still tears
not jewels of the blood,
and your voice,
not the fire of poison-tipped spears.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

Things Might Be Drifting Away

Things might be drifting away
like an empty lifeboat
with nothing left to save
but the memory of moonlight
on the rush of a wave of the heart
that rose and fell
like a bell of insight on the night watch
that said all's well all's well for the night.
And so it was for a while.

Time might seem
that it's overstaying its welcome
and you've become the estranged guest
of a bad dream
in your own bed
in the thirteenth house of the zodiac
where the dispossessed
shack up with the misbegotten
and the ghosts of everything you've forgotten
don't give you any rest
until all that you've cursed
out of anger and need
has been immensely forgiven and blessed.
And perhaps it appears
you've been the rogue star
of a sign in long exile
far away from now
and that might account
for your misplaced trust in mirrors
and your lack of confidence in star maps.

Happiness just happens
like good luck and grace
and the creative inspiration
to rejoice in your time and place here
as if the purpose of your voice
were always to praise
even on the darkest of days
when the only thing
that shone in your eyes
weren't the stars you kept
locked away in your tears
like the face paint of clowns
or the crown jewels of the Pleiades
but a bitter farce of black holes
in the veils of the mirage
that eclipsed your enlightenment
with a starless night
it's impossible to get beyond.
And so it may well be
for those who've been
as far gone for as long you have.

But even the blind are shining
though they can't see it
and the deaf are still singing
though they can't hear it
and the dead are still living
though they can't feel it.
And those who have given up seeking
still find what they were looking for
like a loveletter with a return address
and an open door that recognizes them
like the prodigal threshold
of a homeless human
about to cross one more
like the last step of a long journey
that lost its way back in all directions
like the radiance of a star in space and time
that never took its eye off the past.

We cherish the flowers of summer that bloom last
more poignantly than those of the spring
because we feel our own hour of farewell
in the progress of their passing.
The sadness of an earthly excellence
fulfilled and surpassed
we see in the shedding of the aster's petals
and in the lowering of the wild rose's eyelids
and in the lengthening of the black walnut's shadows
that move like cool water
across the dry grass of a late afternoon
signs of the same night approaching us.
And we know it will be dusk soon.

We'll look up at the blue moon in late October
and whether the silos are full or empty
wonder if every harvest
wears the same death mask we do
with the smile of a scythe on its face
or if the goddess of the grain
bears true witness to
the perennial innocence of death
in the way she enhances
the white spectre of the first frost
to shock the garden down to its roots
with the same koan she uses
to enlighten the dew on the stargrass.

And you might dread the coming excruciations
of the scarecrow immolated on the pyre
of its own substance
like the short straw of flesh
that once sustained it
lost in a draw with death.
And come to scorn your heart like an urn
filled with ashes in the aftermath
of the same fire that once filled it
so full of desire to bloom
it could no more contain itself
than a seed can keep a secret from the spring.

You could see it that way.
And who among those clinging
like a blue atmosphere
to this homeless grain of dust
in the vastness of these sidereal immensities
within and without
that animate us like starmud
to join in this dance of life and death
like a legacy of shining
that can't be washed out of our eyes
though tears have fallen for lightyears
on the root fires of what we've loved and lost.
Who among these
could say you were wrong?

Because no river's flowing
the wrong way to the sea
in this reunion of arrivals and departures
at the stations of our afterlives
on this wheel of birth and death.
We're all going to make it back
to where we came from
one way or another.
Some like rain.
Some like ice.
Some like snow.
Some like the lingering ghost
of morning mist on the lake
that's gone before noon
and some like water on the moon.
The flowing of the river
summoned by the sea
to the source of its coming and going
is the calling of life everywhere
to transcend itself
by passing into the unknown
like the available dimension of a future
that's no further beyond us
than the past is
in the light of distant stars.

The sword doesn't wound itself.
Fire doesn't burn itself.
Water doesn't drown in itself.
And life doesn't bleed out of itself
like the dream of a fortune-telling poppy
or a water clock that's run itself to ground.

The eye isn't the seeing.
The ear isn't the hearing.
The tongue isn't the tasting.
The skin isn't the touching.
The voice isn't the saying.
The brain isn't the thinking.
The heart isn't the feeling
anymore than life
is the carrying in
and death is the bearing out.
The darkness isn't a lack of light
and the light isn't the absence of night.
Death is unborn.
Life is unperishing.
Formless in a world of forms.
Two wavelengths of the same awareness.

You say you can see night gathering
under the door you're afraid to answer
long before anyone knocks
and though you dream by your own light
you don't know who's casting the shadows.
Is sorrow any younger in the heart of a child
than it is in the memory of an old man?
Joy any less vivid in the eyes of an old woman
attending to the flowers in her garden
than it is in a girl having tea with her dolls?
Is this day not as new to the widow
as it is to the newly-wed?
Experience is the capstone and dunce-cap
of the sum of destructions
that made us who we are today.
And in life it's the brilliance of our failures
that throws more light on the dark matter
of the issue before us
than all the star power
of the blazing successes
that blind us to our own shining.

You step out of a backlit doorway
into the dark
and slowly the darkness grows
the eyes you need to see the stars.
And maybe death is like that.
Nothing to look at but black
until we blow the candle out
that's been misleading us all the way.
Maybe that's why the jaws of skulls
are always caught gaping at something
that's more than they can say.
But look at the expressions on their faces.
Maybe their eyes
are too overwhelmed by what they're seeing
to want to get in the way.
You could see it like that.
You could see it through the eyes of the rain.
You can taste it on the tongue of a candle flame.
You can read it from right to left
in the Kufic script of the wind.
You can hear it in what the stars are whispering
through the keyholes in the pyramids.
You can feel it all around you
like bubbles of skin and air.
Like empty rooms with atmosphere.
As many ways and roads and rivers as there are
that flow into it down the world mountain
back to the sea
back to the same undifferentiated watershed
of these myriads of mystic specificity
and who could number them all
as many as the stars
or all the grains of sand
of all the deserts and beaches on earth
as many as the dead of every kind who've come and gone
all that blood mind passion dream and imagination
all those tears all that despair lucidity and apprehension
love and familial affection
all that waste and hatred and emotional sewage
dissolved wholly back into the sea
like a watercolour left out in the rain
like a name written on water
by a poet who died young
in a foreign language far away from home
just as birth arrays the universe before us
and says make of it what you can
so death approaches no less a peer of life
than we are in our relationship with all things
and offers us
the same great creative opportunity life does.
Green bough.
Dead branch.
Sunset.
Moon rise.
The hidden night bird alights
on either alike
and folding its wings
like gates and books
and the eyelids of those who dream
at the beginning and end
of a long dark radiant journey,
sings.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

For All The Seers And Seekers Out There

For all the seers and seekers out there,
all you bright seeds on a blind wind
looking for a vision of life you can root in
and express yourselves like willows in the moonlight
to the night creek nearby that listens
when you cry out in mystical bliss
at the surprise of waterlilies gathered at your feet
to catch a taste of the same essence that makes you weep,
deep inside, inside, inside, look there for paradise,
where the stars are dazzled by your eyes
that don't fade away in the blazing like Venus at dusk.

Looking for the spirit with the spirit
like a breathless wind looking for the wind
to give it mouth to mouth resuscitation
is a snake with its tail in its mouth
enchained to its own liberation.
Is a candle in the sun living on borrowed light
when it's already well-provisioned with its own shining
for the long nights in the heart
of an unknown radiance within?
Long nights on the high slopes
of the world mountain you're sitting on alone
like a pauper with kingly second thoughts
about abdicating the ancestral throne of your ego.

For you who are not stuck
like a false idol the size of your thumb
through a three and a half pound brain of starmud.

For you who are not voidbound by your freedom,
or cower in the shadows of your solitude
afraid to read the messages that flower under your doorsill
from anonymous admirers passing in the hall.

For those of you who learned to read and write
in an alphabet of loveletters waiting for a reply
that could answer them all like a return address on the silence.

For you who have taken the splinters of a shattered mirror
out of your eye and replaced them with stars
that have gone on giving light long after
the chandeliers of light-winged sorrows
have stopped waltzing in three four time with their
club-footed candles for the night.

Follow this goat bell up the high dangerous trails
where even overcoming your fear of heights
isn't enough courage to guarantee your footing
and I'll show you the jewelled hoofs of the wild horses
kicking up the dust of stars on the open plains
of an inconceivable spiritual vastness where wishes are horses
and beggars do ride and you can hear the jingling
of constellations like the wind-chimes of Spanish spurs
that get under your skin where the spiritual junkies shoot up
like selflessly motivated thorns of starlight
potent enough to keep them high for the rest of the lives
on the antidote they derive like the milk of human kindness
even from the toxic serums of the most dangerous mystical snakes
that have ever poled danced like a winged caduceus
around the axis of the most habitable planet you've ever been inclined to.

Whether you're a blissed-out gardenia of God
or just another double agent doing espionage for the Devil
to see when the next whirlwind of revelation
is going to sweep you up like a chimney spark
into a maelstrom of cosmic events against your will,
look at how the radiance shining out
from the clear void of an unknown light source deep within you
illuminates heaven like the moon in your window
as surely and truly as it does the prophetic skulls of hell.

And this is the point I've been missing
and trying to make simultaneously throughout this poem
like a tattoo starred on my forehead
that leads me like a lantern into deeper and darker spaces
than any abandoned shrine in a sacred wood
I've ever existed in before like a swallow
among the quake-proof columns of the trees.

We're all three-winged songbirds under the leaf-cluttered eaves
of the temples we brought with us like spiritual refugees
overstepping the bounds and borders of ourselves
like prodigal sons and daughters on the thresholds of exile.

And each of us weaves, after our own fashion,
on a loom of lunar wavelengths of shadows and light,
a crown of thorns we leave with wings
like the mangers of the earthbound killdeer and English skylarks
after we've cracked the koans
of the cosmic eggs we were born from.

We fly away home like ladybirds and dragonflies
whose house is on fire and kids are alone
to have it burned into us like a prison tattoo
that enlightenment is just as white
on the dark side, as it is black on the light.

And though you were to look like billions of fireflies
for millions of lightyears, you'll never find enlightenment
up ahead of you because it will never be found
anywhere other than behind and beside you
where it's always been from the beginningless beginning
like a shadow that's been following you
on the blind side of your third eye that set out
the moment it first opened up to you like a flower to the stars
to look for the other two like a shepherd
looking for lost goats on the altars
of the unblooded sacrificial mountains of the moon.

You just have to look at the stars
and feel them staring back at you on the inside
with the same inconceivable wonder at why and what you are
as you return the light that was given to you back to them
realizing every insight into the nature of life,
every word, every star, every bird, firefly, every
lighthouse and clocktower of the moon
is a sign of mutual greeting that can't be ignored.

For those of you who cry for the earth that is moved
by the same agony you are, as if you were born
to be its tears, its wounds, its scars,
to suffer like flowers for the beauty you aspire to.

For those of you whose seeing
will become the substance of the world tomorrow
though you should lose your eyes for it today
like apple-bloom, for the sake of the root of the light within.

For those of you who are always seeking
the things that belong to all of us, the dreams
the visions, the insights, the perfect expression
of what we have to say to the silence
that's always listening to us
talking to ourselves like a sleepwalking stream
or a wild grapevine putting out tendrils
like Korans of Kufic script and Books of harvest Kells.

May your labour come to love you like a bad habit
that's grown fond of you over the years
because you made an art of your life
that brought the merciless desert to tears
to see how even a delusion or a mirage
with a big enough heart and a taste for compassion
that gives it an eye for how sublime beauty really is
as deep as the watershed at the bottom of a wishing well
it turned into the moment it cried on behalf
of everyone's efforts to make themselves
in all the glory of their schemes, dreams and delusions
streaming out behind them in victory parades
put on by their own minds
like the emperor's non-existent clothes
for knowing how to turn a defeat into a celebration,
come true to life. The seeking life. The seeing life.

The just life like dry oak on a good fire.
The life of thought that eventually forgets
what there is to think about. The wasted life
whose gifts were mistaken for flaws in its character,
The anonymous life of a spiritual blood donor
that sent a single red rose to a dead child
and restored her back to life. Life returning to life
like crocuses and killer whales through the ice,
seeking itself out in every corner of our lives,
and under the stones of our own starmud minds
lodged in the earth like meteorites
that once flashed across the sky like insight
from an unknown radiant i
in the eye sockets of prophetic skulls
as if strange new life forms were going on in there
it knew nothing about and was dying to see.
And who knows? Maybe even something
unspeakably precious it thought was lost for good.

And most especially a life that feels life
has shapeshifted it into the dupe of its own ideals,
that all its disguises and deathmasks were removed
like painful tattoos only to reveal a rodeo clown
dressed in a barrel with a red poppy for a cape in its hat
to draw the bull away from the rider that's down.

To feel like a clown in all your actions
to judge by the crowd's reactions,
but to put your life on the line anyway
as a funny kind of sacrifice that saves the hero
you risked as much to rescue, as he did
to put you in harm's way when he faltered.

And you embodied the human condition with compassion,
running away as a way of coming to the rescue,
without realizing, as you laughed at yourself,
it doesn't get anymore divine than that.
Trying to get a smile out of the bull
you're running before on someone else's behalf
in a funny hat with an artificial flower
is a sublime act of devotion
and the truest form of worship
from the human divinity in each of us to another.

Because getting up after life's been struck to its knees,
is how everything grows, even when its roots
are watered by delusions and its butt gets kicked up
into the grandstands of the amused demons and angels,
that funny little dejected flower in a rodeo clown's hat
that steals the show like the Buddha's purse
to buy the Buddha a horse to get back up on,
regardless of what you, the bull, the Buddha,
his purse, the horse or the thrown rider feel,
still blossoms from the heart it's rooted in for real.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

City Rose

City rose, you don't bloom like the other flowers
the sun coaxes into unclenching their fists, you unfold
like an ocean at night lingering in your dark depths
behind a veil of fish hooks swaying
with the bullwhips of the kelp to the pulse of your tides.
How suburbanly garish you look all trashed out
like the black farce of a substitute for love.
A poet and a prostitute. Doesn't get much more skinless
than that. We're both walking through the world naked
in a blizzard of thorns blunting themselves
against our ice-age hearts in an interglacial warming period.

Dying on the instalment plan to make a living,
there's a glint in your eyes like moonlight on a knife,
and you're armed to the teeth with fingertips and lips
and hourglass hips and here you can have my sword
even before I surrender as you know you can
when you walk into my life like an eclipse of the moon
with mascara running down your cheeks
and ask me if I still love you as I ever did
and I say, lady, you're an innate releasing mechanism for me.
I sublimate you into poetry like dry ice.
I may be the bullet. But you're the trigger.
And what's a voice without a tongue but a gutted gun?
How could I ever use you on myself when the day comes
if you weren't here with me in this wilderness
dancing for my head like a mirage in the skull
of a vast abyss that's gone on dreaming all this
like a boy with a book under the covers way past lights out?

You give me that funny look like I'm half mad
or I might be making light of you, but your spinal cord
resonates like a guitar strung with powerlines
on the same wavelength as the crystal in your dreamcatcher
and I know your listening for disturbances in your web.
And I remember when two roads diverged in a yellow wood
like a wishbone the separated the song from the bird
and that night you came pleading to me out of the rain
to let you into my homelessness, and I took you in
like a wet kitten with claws and needle sharp teeth
that never knew when to let go of my heart
like a piece of raw meat you were always snarling over.

And you weren't exactly the noble enemy
I always hoped would eat it, more a foodbank as I recall,
but you can't always choose the heroic sacrifice
you give yourself up to, and I gave it up to you,
saying to myself you don't always need to believe
in the witchdoctor to take advantage of the medicine,
and I'm always moved when your sunflower
turns toward me like a full-faced friend into the shining
and I'm the one who feels I've been following you
like a starmap to the dark matter shaping the universe.

But tonight the rose is bruised. You're crying
like a broken window pane over the death of the wind.
Your eyes are funeral bells and your body language
is indecipherable, and I don't know what's hurt you so deeply,
and it's only worse when I guess, but there's
a dragon in the heart of the firefly I'm trying to be
that's got a scorched earth policy toward anyone
who tries to lay their hands on you for any reason
other than lust. And though I'm an intimate of the oracle,
I never ask. You franchise your body like a fast food business
with crooked books, but I'm not your spiritual accountant
just because I died before you did and I don't
think of the unknown as something impenetrably mysterious.
You, for example, whenever you discover
the young woman in you that isn't looking
for vengeance upon herself for lying about
the things she wanted to be to her dolls.
Voodoo dolls or not. With marbles or buttons for eyes.

And you abuse her like a country mouse for reminding you
how you used to live off the crumbs of everybody else's dreams
but now you're a cultivated rose of bling and tinfoil
that wins all the garden shows they weed in Eden
like the bad girls from the good, but, off-stage
when there are no lights shining on you, and the rose
wipes her lipstick off like blood on her sleeve,
I've seen you mesmerized like a stone bird on a fountain
staring into the eyes of a snake pit of venomous regrets
for the way you abuse your innocence as if
it were subject to experience and time, all used up,
too much scar tissue over the wound that kept its mouth shut
like dawn over the ashes of a dollhouse you burned to the ground.

Did you ever go back in for your dolls?
It's not too late, you know. It's never too late
to stop treating yourself like a straw dog at a black mass.
It's not a religious ritual. It's just a bad habit of misperception.
And however much sulphur dioxide there is in the acid rain
of your tears, the rain still doesn't fall in pentangles
and the stars and the wildflowers in the abandoned fields
still don't attend opening night rehearsals
to improve their appearance on the catwalk of the zodiac.
They're still walking the same old fence they always were
like gold medallists on a balance beam at the Olympics.
And I can see that the moon, as it does in you,
still dies inside them like a swan at a ballet except
you come to the climax of the dance dressed in Satanic black.
And that's just the scarlet letter of a dead alphabet
you've carved into your forehead with a fingernail,
not the Rosetta stone that's going to open you up to yourself
like Egypt with the eyes of a mood ring. O yes,
I know how many thresholds you've crossed,
how many taboos and cracks in the desolate sidewalks
you've stepped on to break your mother's back,
but she wrote her alibi on a gravestone a long time ago
and she's well beyond anything you can do to disappoint her now.

Born into sin, isn't death a drastic enough measure to take
to clean the slate with the tears that should have been shed
while we were alive? The roots that should have been
watered with stars, the hands that should have been revered
like gnostic gospels even in a time of persecution and exile.
Maybe the blossom was betrayed by the roots
and the fruits were ruined. Who can say for sure
whether the tree's a strong rafter or a coffin door,
or you're just punching holes in your own lifeboat
to be spiteful, but I suspect you're tired of sinking by now.

Three bells and all's not well. And you remember
how you wanted to fly with the effortless beauty
of an arrow straight through the heart of a falcon prince
who came when you called out like a night bird
for someone to hold you against the dark like a door
love leaves ajar like the place in the book
where you left off reading and started dreaming again.
You're taking a bath in the squalor of your own grave to renew
the ambiguity of your innocence as if you were
holding your breath underwater until you turn blue,
but there's an expiry date that doesn't matter if you're late
and you don't need a passport to walk through the gate unchecked.

The mindstream doesn't cling to what it reflects.
It clarifies itself like flowing diamonds in its own running,
like crystal skulls thawing like honey in a blast furnace.
You can project yourself imaginatively like clean water
on the moon, and still feel the rain is a message
to someone else more like a watercolour than you are an oil
but before you begin painting in pain again,
look in the mirror. Isn't that mascara running down your face
like a black willow rendered in sumi ink by a sad geisha
or is that just you washing off another eclipse
like a dirty window you've got to break to look through?
The light will find you all on its own if you stop
using the night to cover your eyes with shadows
when there's something you don't want to look at
that shines like a waterstar in the face of a sewer
blindfolded to the beauty and grace of its own imperative to change.

Be that as it may. Just because the exit's false
doesn't make the entrance unreal, and I can see how
you're looking out the window for something
to fix your gaze upon like a reflection from a bridge
you let go of like the hand of someone you loved
to wear this blossom of a painted life mask
like a screening myth for the reason you let her drown.
Hurt, and lovely, and sad, battered down
like an orchid in the aftermath of an unexpected storm,
you make me want to cry for everything in existence
all at the same time, for what happens to us here.
I feel my vulnerability in yours. Half-insane for a moment
looking out the same window you are I become the pain.
I embody the sorrows of the trivial and sublime alike
and there's no one to scream out to who isn't wounded themselves
and I've died repeatedly not to make a philosophy out of love
just to satisfy death with a verifiable alibi for what
I was doing while I was alive, and none of it
lessens the sum of our suffering by a single tear.

We can put cushions around it and bank it up with dolls
and throw a warm blanket over it and kiss it
goodnight on the forehead as somebody else should have done
when childhood was wholly the timing of the content,
and go to bed with a will like a broken arrow
and a heart bruised like the blue rose of a starless sky
waiting for some small light, even a firefly of insight,
even a black hole on the negative of a starmap back to our eyes
to emerge from all this like Venus sinking down
over the darkening hills of her eyelids as if to dream
in the solitude of her beauty of rescuing her voodoo dolls
from the fire she threw them into, casting spells
like the shadows of moonless nights on earth
when pain had no value, and love was of little worth.

But in the face of it. Staring it in the eye
like a star or a reptile, trying not to lie like a placebo
to the spiritually hysterical about to give birth to the new world
out of their apocalyptic expansionism, not minting
cosmic keys to things that are not necessarily locks,
mustering my dusky yellow blood into the fire sage of a dragon,
and foregoing my penchant for self-destructive optimism,
the deepening of the terrible silence of our suffering
is the only reason I can come up with that our burning doves
don't come back like loveletters we write like waterbirds on the wind.
There's a silence within that is slowly ripening into the new moon
of the black pearl we're making of the dirt in our hearts.
It's not a third eye, or a rosary you can say the names of God on,
not even a sacred syllable of a secret that keeps to itself,
but something distinctly human that sacrifices its suffering
on the dark altar of the absurdity there's no metaphor
to cling to like the lifeboat of a shipwrecked paradigm.
That everything's been left relentlessly unexplained
as if only the silence were pure enough to receive our sorrow
the way our roots can't conceive of the fruits of their labour,
or the sea receives the rain like a mirror of eyeless tears.

Sweet one, sleep without redressal. in the quietude
of what appears to include you in its innocence
like sugar in apricots when the locks fall away like ripe fruit.
The rained out peonies weeping their eyelids away
like phases of the moon by the open gate always
look ravished by the wind's indifference to bliss.
The nightwatchman's in the next room playing
solitaire with the scars of a wound as old as the stars.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

Brutal Blue Of Twenty Below

Brutal blue of twenty below,
a serial killer with angelic eyes.
The light slashing off the snow
like sabres in full gallop reaping throats.
Even the windows going through
a mini nirvanic death-in-life experience
to catch a glimpse of the fireflies
of enlightened diamonds
that let them warm their hands awhile
around their blazing, hoping
they’ll catch on and be back soon.
O sweet one, hurt one, wounded blue rose,
your eyelids have turned brittle in the cold.
Your heart’s a baby mammoth
caught in a glacier
that’s exposing you to the wolves.
Your tears flow like slow rivers of glass
all the way to the sea that rejects them
like holy oil on the wrong forehead.
Blood on the snow, lipstick on kleenex,
a haemorrhage on the bedsheets
at four in the morning,
a flag of the rising sun
flying over the miscarriage of a virgin birth.
You’re the Pearl Harbour that sank
your volcanic battleships in a sneak attack
in a sea of shadows on the moon
and now you’re waiting for the birds
to seed them with new life
like islands stuck in port for the duration,
waiting for prophetic skulls
to wash up like coconuts on shore
where you go bobbing for the head of Orpheus.
And you’ve learned that your body
can only say so much
and you’re stuck in the doorway
like a word in your throat
for something you can’t quite
put your finger on like a braille starmap
of where to go next,
a morning dove
in a chimney,
out looking for land,
smoke without fire,
that won’t sully your shining with creosote.
And it seems your life’s gone on ahead of you
into the starless abyss of a forwarding address
and left you as homeless as a loveletter
in an abandoned mailbox
that’s beginning to get the feeling
no one’s going to answer you back.
And even though you’ve mastered
several zodiacs like Druidic sign language,
the finger ogham of L.A. Gangs,
to make yourself well understood to the mob,
you keep being reborn facing west
and you don’t know how to turn
the baby around in the tomb.
Your singing voice is baffled
by the dawn that rises at midnight
like the silence of a zoo with open cages
where someone let out all the animals out
like nocturnal animals to fend for themselves.
And it’s not hard to miss
the forty days and nights of flood in your eyes
you’ve been lost at sea
like an ark washed out of your tears.
And now you appear here like Morgana la Fey
trying to con Merlin out of his art again
by thawing you out of that pillar of ice
you’ve been locked into
like a butterfly in an ice age
that’s booked like Alice in of the Looking Glass.
But I’m not the Mad Hatter, Merlin
or the Wurm-Reiss interglacial warming period.
Nor yet an aristocracy of trees
in the democratic grasslands
of a Saharan savannah
where the deserts come
like crude beasts slouching toward Jerusalem
for the restoration
of their delusions and mirages
in a worn-out hourglass
with eyes in the sides of their heads.
And even the crazy wisdom
that drips from the tongues
of enlightened clowns like rain
from the gutters of a house
that’s been stuffed with too many leaves
from the book of the trees with knowledge
can sound like utter foolishness
by the time it traverses the universe
to bridge the gap
between your mind and your ears.
So I’ll just suggest you start listening
to that small, inner voice of yours
that’s been speaking
softly to you for light-years.
You know, the one you keep ignoring
like a candle among the illuminati
whenever you can’t take your own advice
and go looking for mentors and gurus
like a first magnitude star
seeking the advice of flashlights.
Stop looking at stardom from the outside
and turn the light around
until you come to the omnidirectional edge
of the known universe
and then instead of balking
on the threshold of the gateless gate
take your shoes off
as if you were going swimming
and plunge that torch
you’ve been carrying for so long
into the fathomless darkness ahead
like a sword you’re tempering
in the great night seas and watersheds of life,
not the wishing wells
you’ve been exorcising like steam
trying to cool your demonic magma
into the islands of the blessed in the mindstream.
Be brave. See what the oldest stars see
on the growing edge
of the expanding universe.
Nothing but darkness before them
and nothing for a lifeboat
a starmap or lighthouse
but the shining they brought with them
like those bioluminescent fish
that find their own way of illuminating
the sunless depths of the sea
where each is their own north star.
Here you deepen the darkness more
with your eyes open
than you can with them closed
like coffins in a graveyard of eclipses.
Here the light of one star
doesn’t fall upon another
to enlighten it like a wounded flower
at the side of road in a tragic attempt
to catch the eye of what’s passing it by
only to render itself ripe for the picking.
The clear-eyed light of the void
is as invisible as space
and hidden as time
under an executioner’s hood
whose blood runs bluer than death
when something gets in it way
like the lightning flash
of the double-bladed axe of the moon
falling on the nape of your neck
to separate your head
like a prophetic skull
from the long wharfs
of its earthbound mooring.
Here the solid becomes real,
and the corpse of thought
is reanimated by insight
like a nightlight in a morgue
like a canary in a coal mine
like a firefly with a longer lifespan
than the flash in the pan of a starmap
that thinks it’s the beginning of a gold rush
when it’s just the same old iron pyrite in chains
that you walked in here with
your your heart up your sleeve
like a dreamcatcher
in a broken windowpane.
I’d give you the answer
to life and death and love if I had one
that wasn’t just another
rusting weathervane on the roof
trying to lay a windproof cosmic egg
with a cast iron flight plan
to improve the direction of prayer.
But what would be the use of it
even if I had one that wasn’t seized
upon the axis of the turning world
like a bird wheel that’s lost its bearings?
But you’re a pretty girl with cold blue eyes
this winter sky that drives its icicle
through your heart like a sword
you keep deluding yourself
you’re falling on like a samurai
to uphold the honour of your defeat
at your own hands in Tokugawa Japan
is jealous of.
So I’ll tell you what I tell myself
not for love, or art, redemption,
or a polyp’s place
in the Great Barrier Reef of history,
not out of ignorance or enlightenment
when the silence snatches my name
right out of the mouth of my solitude
like a baby hawk in a crown of thorns
tearing the heart out of a morning dove
like a locket of blood; say
what I say when no one is listening
to the rain on the roof with me
and there’s only a homely echo of longing
in the valleys of death I’ve passed through
like the blade of bird slashing through
the air of its wounded passage.
There is no message.
There is no meaning but that
you make for yourself
on your way to finding one.
Ignorance and wisdom
write and paint
in the same creative medium.
The heart is a fire alarm
for arsonists and poppies alike
Tattooed snakes on a scaffolding
of burning ladders aspiring to dragon fire.
Angels in the ash buckets
of Icarian over-achievers
who fell to their deaths
from the skyscrapers of heaven
like an accidental gargoyle
from a demonized Gothic church.
Just to be walking around on the earth
huddled in your flesh and bones,
or swimming with stars
through the white-water
of your own mindstream,
or salting your own good nature cynically
until the baby gets turned around in the womb
and you look upon birth
as nature’s way of keeping death going.
You can curse. You can bless.
You can live like a heretic in joy.
Or die like a saint in rage.
From a single wavelength of thought
you can grow a thirty foot oracular python
you end up consulting
about everything you do
as if it had already been done
by somebody else with a bigger snake than you.
Or don’t blink until the stars do.
No matter. It’s your face.
You can wear it anyway you want to.
But just to be here, do you understand?
To have passed through
so many lion gates already
that were only meant for you to enter by,
whether you came in through
the backdoor or the front
or through the window like moonlight,
or a thief that did b. and e.s from the inside out.
You’re indebted to the roads you’ve walked.
You’re indebted to the things you’ve seen,
the elements, the moon
and what it revealed to you,
and you’re way in over your head
in what you owe to the ocean,
trees, stars, the children who
came and went like fireflies
before and after you.
They’re all the embodiment of you.
And you, you’re all
that they’ve achieved to date
and they’re neither guilty
nor innocent of you.
Because everything in this universe
is complicit with everything else
including the judges,
and that means there’s no one
to answer to
but your own questions
and when you do
you’re only ratting yourself out to you
like a woman hanging out laundry
singing an illicit love song under her breath.
All this and everything that’s missing
the physics, the math, the art,
the myth, the mystery,
the lyrical picture-music of your mind,
all the wisdom, the ignorance,
the cosmological theory of you
shape-shifting through your own space and time.
This is the starmud you were born of.
This is the chaos and order of you.
This is the harmony.
This is the dissonance.
This is the house of pigeons
that would rather be haunted by doves.
This is assent. And exile.
This is the lost and found of existence.
This is where you come to claim yourself.
And this is where you give it back.
This is where the losers
aid and abet the winners
by wanting to be one of them
and when they can’t even manage that,
hope, at least, they’ll inherit their afterlife.
Now take everything I’ve said
and throw it up in the air
and let the wind winnow
the chaff and the grain alike.
What will root will root.
And who knows what bloom
will come of that?
When you’re ploughing
and sowing the moon
as I am here with all these words
I occasionally look up from my labour
when my blade strikes a rock
and remind myself
from a lunar point of view
at the other end of the telescope
I’m looking at you through
just to be walking around on the earth
making tracks in the snow
no one’s ever walked on before
is proof positive
you’ve got the right stuff.
And even to live in vain here is enough.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

O Who Will Speak From a Womb or a Cloud?

Not less light shall the gold and the green lie
On the cyclonic curl and diamonded eye, than
Love lay yesterday on the breast like a beast.
Not less light shall God tread my maze of nerve
Than that great dread of tomorrow drove over
My maze of days. Not less terrible that tread
Stomping upon your grave than I shall tread there.
Who is a god to haunt the tomb but Love?

Therefore I shall be there at morning and midnight,
Not with a straw in my hair and a tear as Ophelia
Floating along my sorrow, but I shall come with
The cabala of things, the cipher of nature, so that
With the mere flounce of a bird's feather crest
I shall speak to you where you sit in all trees,
Where you conspire with all things that are dead.
Who is so far that Love cannot speak to him?

So that no corner can hide you, no autumn of leaves
So deeply close over you that I shall not find you,
To stretch down my hand and sting you with life
Like poison that resurrects. O remember
How once the Lyrae dazzled and how the Novembers
Smoked, so that blood burned, flashed its mica,
And that was life. Now if I dip my hand in your grave
Shall I find it bloody with autumn and bright with stars?
Who is to answer if you will not answer me?

But you are the not yet dead, so cannot answer.
Hung by a hair's breadth to the breath of a lung,
Nothing you know of the hole over which you hang
But that it's dark and deep as tomorrow midnight.
I ask, but you cannot answer except with words
Which show me the mere interior of your fear,
The reverse face of the world. But this,
This is not death, the standing on the head
So that a sky is seen. O who
Who but the not yet born can tell me of my bourne?

Lie you there, lie you there, my never, never,
Never to be delivered daughter, so wise in ways
Where you perch like a bird beyond the horizon,
Seeing but not being seen, above our being?
Then tell me, shall the meeting ever be,
When the corpse dives back through the womb
To clasp his child before it ever was?
Who but the dead can kiss the not yet born?

Sad is space between a start and a finish,
Like the rough roads of stars, fiery and mad.
I go between birth and the urn, a bright ash
Soon blazed to blank, like a fire-ball. But
Nothing I bring from the before, no message,
No clue, no key, no answer. I hear no echo,
Only the sheep's blood dripping from the gun,
The serpent's tear like fire along the branch.
O who will speak from a womb or a cloud?

poem by George Barker
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

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
Vote! | Copy!

If You Had Any Compassion For Yourself

If you had any compassion for yourself,
others wouldn't have to suffer for you
and the world wouldn't show you
such a sad, woeful, wounded face.
You wouldn't see the withering leaves
and petals of the rose in autumn
as merely the scar tissue of its thorns.
In winter, mend your severance.
In spring, attend to your joys.
Like fishing nets and snow fences.
Like delphiniums in a garden bed
that's beginning to bloom like a starmap.

And you know that stranger inside
that's always witnessing everything we do
like a perfectly clear mirror, even in dreams?
Take another look, you might be surprised
at whose face you see at a meeting of eyes.

It's important not to pass judgement on yourself
for fear of condemning the world.
Show me a mirage that isn't a friend to water
or a wishing-well that resents a rainbow
for the pot of gold at the end, though
no one ever knows which end at the time.

Be kind to your delusive paradigms of life,
as you would an old skin you shed like the moon
when your serpent-fire could no longer contain itself
and broke out of its sacred chrysalis like a dragonfly
that had made itself a house of life out of matchsticks
and went up in flames like a snake with wings.

If you could see your life for what it is,
a teaching device for mentoring your own enlightenment
you might read the books of all the sages
rooted and flowering in you like the wisdom of a seed,
or the star in the ore of a panspermic universe
that was planted in you like the garden you've been from birth.

You might think that the wildflowers
are looking up at the stars to understand themselves
but, in truth, they're looking up at their roots
like rain reveres the lightning that engenders it.

You don't need to convince the wind of your freedom,
you've just got to ride it out to the end,
a friend to yourself, a worthy companion,
the intimate familiar of a cloud with a clear blue sky
or a subliminal lover of the darkness
love mushrooms up in like a moonrise.

If you knew how to nurture yourself
by breaking bread with the spirit of life within you
there wouldn't be millions of children
all over the world who will go hungry tonight.
They'd be licking the spoon with stealthy laughter
like cookie-batter out of the begging bowl of your heart.

Enlightenment isn't going to add one ray of light
or a single star to the night you're already shining in,
and whatever wavelength you're on, regardless
of the mystic polarities your potential flows between,
like dark matter and light, whether the journey you're on
is orange or infrared or the blue white violet of the Pleiades,
absorption or emission spectrum alike, no wave
of thought or mind, light, heart or water
is discontinuous with the oceanic consciousness
they rise upon, so why turn back to the source
like a solar flare to ask for directions from a starmap
that sent you out like a bubble in the multiverse to look for land.
You know, if you were more of an explorer
without a preconceived destination, more
of a space probe leaving the solar system periodically,
the rest of us wouldn't feel so lost or out of place at your table.

And even if you've made a vehicle
of the wheel of birth and death
and think you have a firm grasp on things
with your arm out the window in the driver's seat,
enjoying the passing view with the wind in your hair
without clinging to anything along the way
it still might be a good idea to learn how
to come down off your throne like a pauper
and change a flat tire now and again.

Your life is not an untimely interruption of eternity.
The eternal sky does not inhibit the flight of the white clouds,
and it even bends down sometimes toward the earth
to pick up Venus like a lost earring in the sunset.
It's your point of view that turns your back on yourself
like the retrograde motion of Mars, not
the planet itself playing rope tricks with your spinal cord.

Why go looking for your mind
like a lighthouse with a flashlight,
a flame for the source of the fire
or a star for the constellation it belongs to,
or the homeless for a home when everyone's
the foundation stone of their own habitation
wherever they are at the moment.

If you chase the wind, it will be you
that loses its breath like the atmosphere of the moon.
And when you run out of air, breathe light, breathe space,
and don't try to fix an expanding universe
to your nostrils like a bicycle pump
to get you back on the road again.
Or you'll find you're swimming out of your depths
to run to the rescue of an empty lifeboat
that's already unloaded its contents ashore.

If you don't want to go blind as a starless night
it's prescient to eclipse your blazing from time to time,
turn the lights down low, snuff the candle,
and learn to see in the dark there's just as much reflected
in the depths of the dark abundance
of a black mirror, though it takes time to focus,
than there is in the expansiveness
of the bright vacancy of the white
that takes things in at a glance.
The seed of a every glimpse of insight contains
the whole of the vision in advance,
and at the core of the apple of the issue
is a green star with dark auburn eyes
on the nightshift of the maternity wards of spring.

And o come on now, how long can you hang on
to being this box kite on a string
watching another phoenix ride your thermals
like inspiration on the wing, without feeling
like the premature ghost of yourself at the onset of spring,
all smoke, and no fire, your flightfeathers smouldering
like a pyre of wet maple leaves who haven't got the courage
to break into flames and flap their wings and rise above it all.
Better to be a weather balloon losing altitude like Icarus
or even a candling parachute taking the fall for all of us,
as daring said feathers and falling took flight,
than not risk falling through the black holes of life to paradise?

And what if I were to tell you're they're just the pupils
the light enters through like your eyes into your imagination
to be transformed from a visual into a vision,
the visible form into the invisible shining of the spirit
that raises everything in the known and unknown multiverse,
and the trees and the stars, the rocks and the clouds
are all counting on you to do this for them,
because this is what you're here for,
if you've ever wondered,
to raise them up to eye-level
with a human who knows the names of things
like parents know the names of their own children
running toward them down the street. It's how
we were meant to meet and greet the universe.

So if once, just once, for my sake, your sake, the sake
of the forsaken with their elbows on the windows of the world tonight
watching it all go by like stars on the firewalks beneath their noses,
that are not embedded in cement like a mausoleum
of movie-stars that refused to become fossils
before their shining was spent,
you took a chance, and that's all it would take,
one step forward with no return address,
to risk falling down at the dance,
and seven times down, eight times up,
such is life, get up on your own two good feet again
and discover you've got wings and spurs on your heels
the rest of us wouldn't feel so lame
when we came over to your place
like a riot of erratic fireflies to celebrate
the lightning moves of the rain that's dancing on our graves
where the dead lie down like the corpses of candles
knowing they'll be reincarnated
as wildflowers and Luna moths
because nothing that's ever given its life up
to this business of shining on everything alike
from a first magnitude star, to the night light in the hall
that shoos the ghosts away from their portraits on the wall
so the whole world can bloom in the tears of your eyes,
the fire in your heart, and in the human divinity
of the spirit of your imagination, can ever be put out
because every shadow of doubt
leads back the light that cast it
in love and sorrow, time and space
like the life and death mask of your own face.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

And It Comes And It Takes, It Levels And It Defies

And it comes and it takes, it levels and it defies.
And not all the sorrow in the world
is enough to cool the burn. Will death make
as big a splash as birth did when it jumped in the pond?
How will you die? At home in bed
with your kids banked around you
like a zodiac of grieving signs, head on
at seventeen into a drunk ambulance
like a suicide you backed into like a ventriloquist
afraid to call your own bluff? Heart attack, cancer,
eating the Angel of Death like the wrong mushroom
in a rainy spring, your extinction, one of seven
horrible oddities of random selection to make the news
like a public health warning not to take the chance?
And you, having just finished medical school?

The wise man dies, the fool, the lover, the glutton and baby.
Death plays solitaire by opening and closing doors.
Death is not amused by the meaning of our lives.
Death doesn't read the menu
of what we've avoided and cherished.
It comes and it takes, it levels and it defies.
Are you going to die like an old woman
evaporating in her sleep like a dream lingering on a lake
until the dawn mistakes her for a ghost
and brushes her aside like a spider-web?
Pity the poor body's infantile helplessness at the end.
Pity the terror in the eyes of the imprisoned one
who could feel his chains slipping away like a spinal cord
into an immaculate freedom ungoverned by circumstance.

Even the stars, chalk on a blackboard, and death,
the brush that wipes them away before the next class.
As it is with the flowers, the jewel of life is slowly
pried out of our hands with soft crowbars of sunlight.
God, how we labour to leave something behind
like a fragrance of our having been here once
like a human on a hillside deeply in love with the clouds.
Death panics us into believing we're achieving
something enduring and benign, but truth is,
given that one good can adumbrate another that's tragic,
we're just setting our heads on fire like matches
to add our blazing to the darkness of the blind.
We strike, we ignite, we flare, we fade like a daylily
into an abyss of stars we're all apprenticed to
and the light goes out like a firefly in a black hole.

Or we're as indelible as a menage a trois of water.
The triune identity of existence, three phases of the moon.
No onceness to our being here forever.
Persist in beginning and you condemn yourself to death.
The jewel turns you in the light of your infinite facets.
Your eyes turn to you and ask what they're looking at.
Death wants an explanation for what you're up to.
And life couldn't care less whether you had one or not.
A dead child can lead you to enlightenment
and a live one to despair. Two hinges of the same gate,
putting their hands together in prayer like birds on the wing.
We live in pain. We live in unexpected bliss. But what we are
is imaginations beyond this. We embrace life. We dis death.
We separate. We hold lanterns up to the fog
like empty lifeboats far out at sea at night but what if
everyone swam safely ashore as they did
in their mothers' wombs? We aren't drowned out
like the cosmic hiss of negligible wavelengths
that once accomplished mighty things. The senses
don't age into old colours and old sounds.
Whatever you reach out to touch is as new and forever as now.
Has it ever been this day before you woke up to it?
Did yellow die overnight? Did red have a heart attack?

Inside. Outside. There are no walls in this palace of space.
No doors you have to enter seriatum. No locks to undo.
No ordeals to endure. No sod to turn over like a gravedigger
to lay a foundation stone that's the whole of the building
as if you buried a turtle under its own shell.
A song bird under an iron bell. The sacred syllable
of a black pearl under the tongue of an oyster. To no avail.
The wave rides you like a flying carpet, not a sail
that has to wait for the wind to arise again or the tide to crest.
It's just like a photon of insight. When you look at it
trying to grasp it as something fixed in your mind,
it acts just like the particle you were expecting to see,
but as soon as you turn your eye away from it,
it slips away from you like the cosine of a snake
back into its own chameleonic medium of water and light.
Everywhere is the centre of your boundlessness
like the nave of a wheel on a hearse
that doesn't equate once around the sun on its axis
with the distance of the journey in time and space and mind
it takes to realize, whatever size of the circumference you make
like the ripples of interlocking bracelets of rain
or tree rings in the heartwood of a black walnut
that all fixed points in the wheeling world turn on zero.
That there's not a wavelength of difference between
what is and is not, that you've been attributing an identity
to things that emerged with you from the polymorphous perverse
in order to recognize a self distinct from the universe
that mothered it into existence out of nothing
but the dark nature of life to fuel the mind
with the radiance of diamonds burning in the light
without anyone or anything ever being consumed
or the night diminished like an ageing constellation
by even so much as a single vital sign
of unending exploration carrying forth of its own accord
The lamp bears the flame that lends the lamp its eyes.
When the flame goes out, everything it's every seen
and been and tried to mean goes with it into
worlds within worlds that keep adapting themselves to you
like stars to the eyes of those who keep looking back at them
as the source of their own shining by a river
that's constantly changing shapes in its flowing
to reflect the mind's protean approach to the inconceivable.
And it comes and it takes, it levels and it defies,
but you can look upon it with the luminous eyes
of enlightened mirrors that can see whole worlds
abounding in every piece it breaks to improve the view.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

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
Vote! | Copy!

En.Citatepedia^®.ro

And When You Get What You Want, Is It What You Dreamed?

Related quotes

Things I Must Say To You The Crystal Said

A Creed For The Desperate

Faceless This Time Of Night

One Day Your Mouth

If I Ever Get To Look Back On All Of This

As Much As I Love The Stars

I Wish I Knew You Well Enough To Say

Trying To Get Centered In The Middle Of Chaos

My Lonely Island Music

No Ray Of The Star

And The Rose

Things Might Be Drifting Away

For All The Seers And Seekers Out There

City Rose

Brutal Blue Of Twenty Below

O Who Will Speak From a Womb or a Cloud?

Stranger In The Leaving

If You Had Any Compassion For Yourself

And It Comes And It Takes, It Levels And It Defies

Someone Lingers In Your Absence Like An Icon

En.Citatepedia®.ro

And When You Get What You Want, Is It What You Dreamed?

Related quotes

Things I Must Say To You The Crystal Said

A Creed For The Desperate

Faceless This Time Of Night

One Day Your Mouth

If I Ever Get To Look Back On All Of This

As Much As I Love The Stars

I Wish I Knew You Well Enough To Say

Trying To Get Centered In The Middle Of Chaos

My Lonely Island Music

No Ray Of The Star

And The Rose

Things Might Be Drifting Away

For All The Seers And Seekers Out There

City Rose

Brutal Blue Of Twenty Below

O Who Will Speak From a Womb or a Cloud?

Stranger In The Leaving

If You Had Any Compassion For Yourself

And It Comes And It Takes, It Levels And It Defies

Someone Lingers In Your Absence Like An Icon

En.Citatepedia^®.ro