En.Citatepedia^®.ro

By The Light I Have Been Given To Go By

By the light I have been given to go by,
I can see how homeless the journey truly is.
How provisional the shrines along the way like milestones
we stop to paint like the inside of our skulls
or the caves we first dwelled in with our dead
buried under fire and the numinosity of our picture music
impregnating the womb walls of a space made sacred by fear.
The darkness bears my secrets, and in the torchlight,
in carbon and red ochre, a diary of shamans
gored by defecating rhinos speared to death.

I have imagined my way into an understanding
that is a rite of passage into a space that is
a vast abyss of intelligence, a nothingness
that speaks through an intuitive grammar of things
as if a galaxy, a star, stone, tree, raindropp were each a thought,
a sign, a word, the syntax of a growing paradigm
of creative awareness that we're completely alone
and lost at sea like fish on the moon crawling out of its tides
as if nothing bound us, not even detachment,
nor a god that exists as a confession of the way we do,
nor any medium we work in as reflection of our presence
labouring away at an unattainable world that won't exist
until we do, and it's 7 to 5 against anyone making it that far.

But what a joy to emerge out of our own nothingness
like a secret we're letting ourselves in on,
making it up as we go along like a deportable myth of origin
we can adapt to our infinite beginnings
because for starters, it has none of its own.
We were born to express ourselves like apple trees.
We were born to see and be happy marvelling at the event.
To enjoy longing for things we were never missing
and be guided by wise men we never listen to
back to a silence that has nothing to say for itself
that we didn't already know in the first place.
Everywhere is the threshold of the return journey.
Life is either an exile, or it stays at home like a follower.
Bless the enlightened apostates of the dangerous religion
that desecrates the mind by worshipping it.
Why make a chain out of your umbilical cord
and get your head wrapped around it like a noose
because you forgot meaning was an art
and not a way to take yourself way too seriously to heart?
Why go to war with your own mind
just to administer to the needs of the suffering
when you can paint a god in blood and ashes
and decultify yourself with the creative freedom
of your imagination deconstructing the fable of your belief
that it's the being, not the becoming, that endures.
And you can do this without even knowing how to draw.
A starmap doesn't shine. A blue print doesn't open a door.
If you ask a crutch to do your walking for you,
it's going to throw you away like a miracle
at the top of the stairs of Notre Dame de Coeur.
Better to be the sacred whore of a thousand profligate gods
than the unrepentant nun of one who shuts the world out,
like art for art's sake, to revel in her own extinction
in a mystical connubium with an unregenerate imagination.

You can burn your gates and cages in a wild field if you like
for not being able to keep the flowers in, or keep the wind
from rioting with the leaves way past curfew,
but there was never any risk of being granted what you ask
because life is the unpredictable moon rise
that deepens the calendars with a renewed humility
towards the extraordinary mutability of time.
What have you ever been that baffled your imagination?
It isn't reason that inspires us to become a stranger tomorrow
to the self we knew today. Genuine faith isn't
an artificial life support system to keep something alive
that should have been allowed to die quietly away yesterday.
Millions upon millions of facts like a graveyard of skeleton keys
to a door we can't find open within ourselves
as if we'd just stepped through it to be here where we live
deciphering the shapes of the clouds as if we lived in code.

Hide your secret deep enough if you want it to be known.
Walk alone as far as you can until you can't
if you want the world to walk the rest of the way with you.
The white demon that knows heaven and hell experientially
mentors the senses in the spiritual subtleties of the black angel
that comes like the new moon of a third eye
to help the exegetes of light see further into the dark
by blowing their candles out like flowers.
All seekers are roads looking for a map to follow.
Preludes after the fact, that set out to look for their own endings.
Be a star. And keep your afterlife behind you
like the shadow of the last form you cast upon the earth.
Be an eye that doesn't leave any room between the moon
and it's reflection so that the substance of life is seeing
not that you're a distinct and separate entity
that cosmically identifies with your exclusion
but that you're wholly within easy reach of everything
that depends upon you for its existence. Just as every leaf
you let fall in the autumn like an adage of wisdom
about how you can know the world by its fruits
first came to the tree like a smile to your face
when you realized your imagination was
the inconceivable dynamic of a creative state of grace.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Blonde Shock

The blonde shock of wild sea grass from New Brunswick.
At first I thought it was your hair.
And tiny beads of iridescent peacock seeds
as small as the myriad hopes of a poppy
she'll come again
that fell out of the envelope
into my coffee
as a muse of patchouli oil
inspired the air like an Egyptian temple
tending to the rites of Isis
when the moon's in the nymph phase
of her ancient seduction.
And a drawing of a rainbow phoenix
in the form of a flower
and a money-order for five hundred dollars
to paint violet horns
on the black inverted star
with its plinths open like legs
giving birth to helical vines and snakes.
A symbolic tattoo
that means you
that will hang like a flag from your spine
down your back
as a sign of whose country it is
should anyone ever get lost.
You're right.
You can't draw butterflies.
But your darkness intrigues.
Your light is true to its star.
Space bends around you like water.
And there's not a chained tree
in the whole of your wilderness.
The gates of your rivers are open and free
as the salmon who jump them
conjured out of the sea
by the siren who sings to them
like a journey of things to come
at the end of the long way home.
Love breathes life into death
and even on the fly
love is the prime circumstance of now.
And I feel the gold of your harvest in every seed.
And there's no scarecrow with a sword
trying to defeat the ploughshare
it was born from
like the moon as it moves
like a white horse
through a wounded valley
looking for its lost rider
somewhere out there like the wind.
I've been blinded by squalls of stars before
the sphinx blew in my face
and I have felt my eyes
evaporate in the blazing
of certain fireflies
who could read the braille of my face
like elegant fingertips of light
deciphering the writing on the wall.
And I've lived through it all like space
whether I was a celestial snakepit of passion
with a mouse for a heart
or I was blowing kisses
like the petals of bruised flowers
into the grave of an enlightened starfish
passing by in a deathcart.
And sometimes the geni gets his wish
by rubbing the lamp on the inside
and asking the night to need him
like water needs a fish
like fire needs a tree
like air needs a bird
like earth an unpoached elephant.
I'm not a species bent on martyrdom
to any cause lesser than the love
I aspire to
and I won't burn my eyes
on insincere candles at a black mass
or the votive fires of delusional crucifixions
that yearn without conviction
for a better infancy in their afterlife.
Things have been tough
but I still go to bed at night
with the door wide open
as hope to folly
to catch a thief
that might put the moon back
she stole from my window
like the coin from my mouth
I had hoped would pay for my passage.
And I've been given up
like the sea gives up its dead
like the ghosts of old cliches
to the voice of a new medium
and I've discovered
that love isn't the forensic history
of a mystery that can be cracked by the truth.
It's apocalyptic lightyears beyond both
like a prophecy
uttered in the secrecy of your solitude
that can only be overheard
with your eyes.
And there is no age in it
no youth that leaves the stage
a wiser happier skeleton
no shrines to spring
no pyres of autumn.
It isn't the beginning or end of anything
that wanders in a world of forms
like a road with all the answers
to questions it never stops to ask.
Love isn't a lost cause
looking for someone to take a risk.
And it isn't the silence
it isn't the singing
it isn't the longing
to be pulled out like the lucky straw
in a random draw among exiles
to decide who should go first.
It isn't a thumb in a plum pie.
It isn't the kiss that lifted the curse.
Or a lifeboat on the moon
that overturns like a blessing
that only makes matters worse.
And it would be unforgivably spacious of me
though I have loved long and intensely
to say what love is
when it wings its own immensity
like a nightbird of blood
that sheds its hood
to fly among the stars
like a fire feathering its own solitude.
But if I were to say anything
I would say
love might be a mighty sword
drawn from a dark ore
tempered in secret waters on the moon
enfolded like time in space
like a worldly loveletter
in a cosmic envelope
with a return address by the sea
that keeps faith with its prey
by giving its word to life
it's not the expedience of the slayer
or the obedience of the slain
not the exaltation of joy in death
or the mystic terror there is in birth
that calls the lightning down
to make the weathervane crow at midnight:
I have tasted the light on my tongue
like the tine of a new direction.
A dragon sheds it skin
like the ashes of a spent fire.
And the serpents of desire
dance to the flutes
of a lyrical resurrection
like words that take
their meaning from us
when love's the native language,
the grammar, the muse, the voice, the silence
the playfully profound way the picture-music
hides like a Rosetta stone
that doesn't want to be found
like a key to the meaning of everything
when we're what it's trying to say.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Seeds Of Fire In A Nightsky

Seeds of fire in a nightsky root like flowers
in the ashes of my eyes I scattered on the wind
like the dust of stars I followed even into oblivion
to remain faithful to the life of the light
whatever transformations within me grew
into the starless darkness of the unknown heart
I've carried in my chest for years like the empty shrine
of a dead lantern to the last firefly to go out.

And this is a seeing without the eyes of the stranger
I no longer recognize as who I thought I was
when I could read the constellations like the Linear B
of the lost civilization that was elaborated out of me
to perish in the mountainous silence of what was abandoned
when I burned my starmaps and entered chaos
like the blackhole of the singularity
that could rejuvenate me out of nothing like a grail
I was seeking at the bottom of the deepest grave
I ever descended into, a spider at the end of its silk,
or a caterpillar like the distant rumour of a butterfly
on a tranformational pilgrimage to an unknown shrine
that crawled with it all the way back to the beginning
of the radical innocence of an radiant world,
before time overran it with arrivals and departures
as if it never meant anything in the first place
to aspire to the light in the hope of a deeper intimacy with life.

And in this darkness, there is no letting go,
or hanging on to what cannot be grasped by understanding
until you realize that understanding only ever finds itself
and the vastness of what's expanding before it
into the unknown, is not a journey with a destination
or a threshold that can be crossed into illumination
like a voice meditating in the silence of its mother-tongue.
I was looking for the light by the light
I was given to go by when the wind blew it out
like a candle I no longer needed
to make my way deeper into this homeless darkness
that does not cast a shadow of time on enlightened extinction.

How can you divine what isn't missing within yourself?
The seeker dies by the side of the road
like a cry for help in the dangerous distance
pleading to be rescued by its own echo, and it comes
but not in a language of its own, not
as the event of anything that could have been anticipated,
not as something you can bring back with you
like the taste of water to the lips of a delirious mirage
to prove there's a reality beyond delusion
where everyone drinks from the same well
the muses of wisdom summon them to without a mouth.

As unsentimental as an overnight frost on the garden,
the larkspur rimed by billions of cold stars,
as if my seeing condensed out of the air
and every insight were a sign of farewell to the mystery
that urged me to risk everything like a tribute
to the divinity of nothing that had seized upon my heart
like a sacred clown faithful to the folly of experience.
Like the footprints of space and time that stretched behind him
for lightyears like the forced smile and phony tear
of the painted lifemask that convinced him he was not dead
to the ordeals of the journey he was leading nowhere
but to where he was every moment of the way
trusting in the crazy wisdom of the laughter
that regaled him every step of the way
like the cornerstone of the absurdity
that kept looking for new hills of prophetic skulls
to roll over like dice in a bone-box.
To wander like a rogue planet on an aberrant wavelength
of dark matter that doesn't express itself like moonlight
talking to itself like the open-mouthed seed syllables
of the waterlilies at night on the Fall river
writing love poems back to the stars that inspired them.

You want to overhear what the universe
is whispering to itself like a madman in his sleep
in the unbreachable silence of a fathomless dream
of random atoms engendering the forms of awareness
like a grammar of chaos out of its own unattainability
trying to make some sense of what it's saying,
an asylum of paradigms that undermines it own existence
in the arraying of a conditioned universe?
You have to learn to learn to hear it in a language
no one has ever spoken before you, as if
you'd never heard your own voice before
from somewhere deep within you saying
let it be as the stars broke into light
like the distant echo of an unknown wonder
that perceives the source of its own extinction
in the birth of everything, in the slightest conception
of the inconceivable rooting in its own ashes on the wind.

We all listen to the eloquence of things we don't understand
like a secret we're forbidden to tell anyone,
that keeps giving us away death after death,
birth after birth to our imperceptible selves.
Imagination seeds the mind of our uninhibited potential
to flower into worlds where the fruit comes before the blossom
as the harvest precedes the seed, or the darkness
wakes the nightbird up to its longing for love and light
and all our deaths are already achieved behind us
long before anyone was born to suffer them.
And yet we suffer them like a truce with the absurdity of the act
that establishes peace like a third-eye
in the middle of a hurricane that gives meaning
to the dark abundance of our extinction gathering into light
by sacrificing our emptiness like gods to our own creations
over and over and over again, as we surrender to ourselves
like candles returning themselves like fire
to the the light that inspired them
like water to the river it was taken from.

The distance of the journey of life is a wingspan
that cannot be estimated in shadows.
And though you master all the meanings in the world
and learn to love their subtleties like the taste
of mystic wine, or enlightened tea,
you're still the guest that's never met its host face to face
because everything you say is always behind you
like the light of a star whose immediate life
is always ahead of it hidden in the darkness like a jewel
that has yet to know the light of a direct encounter.
If you want to see deeply into the shining
you have to grow your own eyes to accommodate
the perennial insight into the restive vision at hand.
And you must learn to live without knowing
what it is you've come to understand
about the ashes of the dragons in the afterlives of the stars.

Don't let the scars intimidate the innocence of your wounds
as if you could never be hurt again by what
you cherished the most in your search to find yourself
in the absence of anything you could be attached to.
Look at the fireflies emerging from the valley fog
of a passing storm like a shapeshifting constellation
dancing at its own wake like a blissed-out drunk at a funeral.
You can taste the whole history of life
like a wandering myth of origin in every sip of water
flavoured with the reflection of things that changed along the way.
Don't mourn the transformations that enabled you to stay awhile
like snow on the mountaintops, dew on the tongues
of the new leaves of the apple-tree that emerge
like the sacred syllables of lovepoems
to the unknown windfalls of the mystery they facilitate
out of the urgency of their own becoming.

Here, where we speak for awhile, in the diction of things
arranged in the mystic grammars and paradigms
of our own likeness reflected like starmaps
to the shining that ripened our eyes from within
as if the whole world were turned inside out
and you had to descend into yourself to see the stars
like an arrangement of chaos expressed in metaphors,
the liars speak clearly in the language of other men's mouths
that can be easily understood, as the tongue-tied sages
blunder like an ineffable silence into the deepening mystery
of the creative eloquence of the unsayable things
that life speaks through them like the facts of a dream
that trues their wisdom to the disparate harmonies
of the illuminated chaos deep within the heart of life
that keeps contradicting itself like a pulse among the dead.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Trying To Express

Trying to express a more immediate intimacy
with the life of the mind
without attributing a form to madness
might just be another way
of looking for comic relief
from the actual facts
of the tragic folly that confronts us
like a world that won't tolerate any mask
you want to put on it for long
to lie about the atrocity of your irrelevance
and pretend you don't know
what you're looking at.
I dream I suffer the same
corpuscular purpose as a paramecium.
I wake up from these desert mirages
and it's true.
OK it's true.
Next.
Because nothing in life is an endgame.
And despite the full stop like an empty cup
at the end of a thought
with the lifespan of a punctuation mark
my cup runneth over like the new moon
and everything is drunk on the lunacy of its light.
It's not the content of life that matters
as much as the way space bends
to accommodate it.
It's not the wine
it's the emptiness of the cup
that shapes the forms of our knowing
so that they can be grasped
by our eyes and hands
as separate things in the world.
Mind is a poet a potter a painter a parent a prophet
that will not be bound by its own works
or the laws of the defenceless who expound them.
Look out into space
and the furthest you will ever see
is a face in the mirror that's older than matter.
Space is a vehicle of transformation
that doesn't go anywhere
because anywhere it goes
its wheels are centered
in the still points of themselves
as we are to our navels.
And all lifelines
straight or otherwise
are emanations of its radiance.
Order and logic and reason
are the dry wishbones of the fearful
looking for predictability in a world
that can't be contained
by a unified field theory
or an elaborated straitjacket
on the fashion ramps of science.
Physics says one size fits all
but by the time the spiders
are finished weaving it
the sleeves are always too short
to keep up with a universe
that's growing at the speed of light
and I'd rather walk naked
in the skin of my own clarity
than be clothed
in someone else's hand-me-downs.
I'm not out hunting birds and butterflies
with a dreamcatcher.
I'm not looking for peace and healing
by abstaining from myself
like a promise I broke to my ancestors.
Everyone was born a lifeboat
in an abysmal sea of awareness
or they wouldn't be here to know it.
So who needs to be saved?
Or is there some kind of holy war going on
between the lifeboats and the waves?
And where does Jerusalem go
to free itself of infidels
when it goes on crusade?
All waves are waterbells
that never stop tolling
and the mindstream
they're raised upon
is in everyone
the sum of what's holy about life.
Learn to transcend your certainties
if you want to get over your doubts.
Don't hoard the effects of your efforts
in the name of a good cause
that's so blinded by its own light
that it can't see
that there's as much randomness in the wonder
as there is in the horror.
That what's most terrifying about life
is that it's free
of anything you can say or feel or think about it.
That every part in every moment
is not the sum
but the consummation of the whole
that roots and flowers in everyone
as if it were a secret
that bloomed for them alone.
To know the names of things
like the names of stars and flowers
is to look at them from the outside.
Who called you Eve?
Who called you Adam?
If you know your name
you're already in exile.
But it was not us
who were driven out of the garden.
Knowledge drives the garden out of us.
It turns our eyes around
so we can't see Eden from the inside
where our beginnings are always now
and we are no more dispossessed
of our innocence
than the passion expressed by a flower
in a loveletter to the light
can be disenchanted
of the insight that inspired it.
What's truly tragic about life when it seems so
is not that it's evil
but that it's innocent
and its innocence is older than compassion.
The moon sheds its phases.
The flower its petals.
They're always coming and going
from the same abyss they're heading into.
The emptiness engenders this abundance
out of its own potential for growth
and even death is not culpable.
This is space.
That is space.
But the two
can no more be separated
than a wave can be from water.
You don't need a unified field theory
to understand unity.
You don't need to hold a mirror up
to your face
to see your own reflection
when you can see yourself in everything.
What does space look like to space?
Mind to mind?
Light to light?
The dreamer to the dream?
What could God possibly say to herself
that she didn't already know?
There's nothing hidden.
There's nothing secret.
There's nothing that escapes detection.
There's no simulacrum for the void
that elaborates everyone's likeness.
There's no dead metaphor in the word
waiting to be resurrected.
The absolutes may be in denial
about the way things seem
but even when their eyes
burn through glass like stars
lost in their own immensities
they can't impress the darkness
with a theory of cosmic shadows.
They don't need to look
any further into space
than the ends of their noses
to see the constellations
casting them
across the universe
like the shadows of the stars
that aren't there anymore
trying to throw a light on black matter
by noting its absence.
Gravitational eyes devoid of light.
Black holes without keys
in the doors of perception.
Dry wishing wells on the moon
that have never plumbed the depths
of their bottomless longing
to hear something irrevocably truer
than the echoes of their own voices
coming back to them
like crows and doves to an ark.
By the time you know it
any event is over.
By the time you see the dawn
the sun has already set.
In the seed of every insight
you can read your own gravestone.
You can see there's as much death in it
as there is life.
You can feel the spring coming on
as if you were already buried
under the savage tiger-lilies.
And you can ask
until you're as blue in the face as a hyacinth
what it all meant
after you're dead
out in the incredible open
that's closed to the living
just past the end of their fingertips.
Or if it ever meant anything at all.
You can see and be it this way.
You can go on a long journey
to a prison or a shrine or a hospital
and return home
with no more insight
than you had when you left.
And still wonder if it was all worth it.
Because no experience of life
is truer than another
reality is not separated
from our awareness of it
nor subject to reform.
There is no norm
that isn't a prevailing illusion by consensus.
But the desert isn't looking for water
and only the one-eyed fools
mistake their eye-patchs
for an eclipse of the moon
and their own mirages
for a new way of thinking
when it's thinking's best virtue not to have one.
People and things are ok as they are
but they don't realize it.
They keep trying to live up
to their own reflections.
They keep trying to sweep
the stars and the deserts
off their front stairs
looking for a stairway to heaven
where the dust of the world
can't find a place to rest.
But time is a pulse of the heart
not the heavy pendulum
of a grandfather clock
and as Pablo Neruda once wisely said
the poetry is under your fingernails
and I would less wisely add
as is heaven.
No one's on the wrong path
once they open both their eyes
to what's underfoot
whether you're walking
on water stars or fireflies
or riding dolphins.
Whether your road
is a shoelace or smoke
or the lifeline of an umbilical cord
measured in wavelengths and lightyears
or your journey's still
an astronaut in the womb.
Mirrors holding mirrors up
to judgement for their spots.
Narcissus doesn't like what he's looking at.
So what?
The roads don't suddenly
turn back on themselves
because they lack floors
and a place of their own.
Heaven uses the same return address as hell.
But when death comes knocking in Aleppo
and you're out walking your own mile
in your own shoes
to nowhere in particular
free of arrivals and departures
no one's ever home
and every threshold you cross
is not hindered by an exit or an entrance.
Some walk.
Some run.
Some swim.
Some fly.
Some crawl.
Some ride.
Some dance.
And some sit still by the window
growing younger by the moment
the longer they look into the distance.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Things I Would Say To My Daughter If She Were Here

for Jody

The important thing
is to stay ahead of the pain
like a debt you'll pay tomorrow with your life
they're calling for today.
Tips for survival:
Luck has nothing to do with intelligence.
Stupid will get you killed faster than evil.
The most dangerous assassins
conceal themselves under the eyelids
of those who say they love you best.
And as any bruised heart knows
there's more power in an open palm
than there is in a fist
and the best way to get someone
to taste their own effluvia
is not to point to it.
A lot of opinions
is the frenzy of gnats in the sunset.
Silence walks like a tiger on soft paws.
Take a hint from the moon
who only bares her crescents twice a month
to show what's she's got up her sleeve
at the beginning and the end.
Keep your claws retracted
like laws you haven't enacted yet.
And never pass judgment on a friend.
A free mind is a godsend
but don't measure your liberty in chains.
And if you feel the need
to attach yourself to someone
attach yourself to them
like the full moon to water when it rains.
Think with your heart.
Feel with your brains.
And don't expect the Red Sea to part
into a thousand miraculous pirate-swept sea-lanes
just to let you get away because you're special.
You turn a legend into a farce
the minute you start to believe in it.
You can't make a commercial for one
of the light that falls on everything alike
so don't abuse your shining
like a fire eclipsed by its own soot.
Greenwood blows the most smoke
and gives the least heat.
Stay a jump ahead of yourself like a real star.
People might point to you and say your name
and write your story into the Pleiades
thinking they're only a finger's length away
from where you are
but cherish your darkness
like a secret you keep to yourself.
And remember when you transit zenith
everything you see in the sentient mirror
isn't having an illicit affair with your eyes.
You should receive your life in every moment
like a constant surprise
if you want to stop aging,
if you want to grow up like the wise
who are always the first born of time
to inherit eternity
like a bloodline without a beginning
that leads to everyone as if they all bore
the creative likeness
of your closest ancestor
like Castor and Pollux in Gemini
like the history of your breath
in every gust of wind
that sows the dust
of countless generations
in the features of your face
as if everyone's story were told by the same voice
in the same spontaneous tone
of all things passing away into fruition.
Don't track a hovel of impoverished thought
into a palace of thoughtless intuition
and expect to be invited back.
Thirty chiefs of autumn
sit around every fireleaf
that's ever fallen
telling stories about things that last
no one believes anymore.
All the reasons for yesterday
turn into today's folklore
and if you're trying to look into the future
from anywhere other than now
trying to separate the light from the darkness
like gold from its ore,
trying to anticipate the harvest before it's sown,
you're only prying the petals of flowers open
before they're ready to bloom.
You're just peeking under the eyelids
of the embryo of a new moon
as if you could crawl into the womb with it
to see what's it's dreaming
before it comes to light
as if you could get an angle on life
to take the shot
without sinking the table
or load the dice in your favour
with the third eyes of prophetic snakes.
Insolent with disobedience
you turn yourself into a slave,
but bound by duty
the great sea of awareness
is mastered by the sloppy salute
of any green recruit
passing in review like a wave.
The stars don't need to convince anybody
they're stars
and the flowers aren't trying to be beautiful.
Live as if your death were already achieved
and lost in the shadows behind you.
Life flowers in the valleys of death
and if our beginnings weren't
our ends are equal
and there's an eternity of a chance
more than not
there's a sequel
but live your afterlife now like water.
You can't pour the universe out of the universe
anymore than your mindstream
can flow out of the sea of awareness
like blood from an irreparable wound
or a theme of unrequited love out of its music.
In what space you don't already occupy
can you bury the corpse of all things
as if you could fit your boundless mind into anything
as if you could dig a blackhole deep enough
to bury God
as if there were ever anywhere to go in the first place
that wasn't already in your face?
The delusions of a coward cast longer shadows
than the things they're the images of.
There are dragons that know more about love
than the doves we send out looking for land
and who among sphinxes knows more than the sand
they come to in time like wisdom?
The mysteries are the mysteries.
They're not looking for answers.
The meaning of life
is the life of meaning
as waves are the life of the sea
or even in late autumn
leaves are the life of the tree.
Let go of things as they do.
Blossom bear fruit and fall.
It's not such a long way down to your roots.
Not long at all.
No further than the boots you're walking in.
And if someone should ask you your name
say it like a constellation
that doesn't shine its light on fame
though everyone sees it rising in the west,
not an inert all night marquee
with letters missing
that burned out like candles
that gazed too long
at their tiny tongue-tied celebrity
as if they were on a visionquest.
Sophocles said never to have been born is best
but he was just trying
to get the world off his chest through denial.
He was a bad guest with tragic manners at a great feast
who had forgotten
because he was born Greek
that life's negation is its oldest affirmation
and what is lost in life is lost solely to those who seek.
Gratitude is the truest measure of wealth.
Squander yourself lavishly like an orchard in spring
knowing generosity is the spontaneous sign
of a spiritual being in good health
that doesn't need money to prove she's rich.
Let life adorn you in its robes and ashes
as if they were just so many cloaks of the moon
slipping from your shoulders
like petals in the starfields of space.
And don't heed the blind fool
who calls for chandeliers
when she's already got tears in her eyes
she's been dancing to for years.
And remember this for the rest of your life
long after my tongue is a leaf
and my eyes are clouds on the wind:
once long before you were born
I asked how I could best return my life to the water
as clean as the reflection of the waterbird
that had just left it
and when the stars of Cancer
granted me you as my daughter
since then I've never needed to look
any further than their light in your eyes
for the answer.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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
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When Imagination And Reality Are One

When imagination and reality are one
and there's no recourse for civilization
to distinguish between them by usage and consensus,
and the light of the stars isn't condemned
to a life of hard labour as a torch in a coal mine
looking for diamonds you can drink by the grailful
until you're as satiate as oblivion, there's no doubt
the mind is an artist riffing on the new strings of the rain
or painting it in picture-music like a poet or a scientist
who look deranged to those who've averaged out
the crucials of the mindscape like the odds of a lottery,
convinced as they are like pilgrims walking
from one end of their sacred asphalt driveways
to the other, that one size fits all, and that these
enlightened journeys without destinations
are just circles that haven't been squared yet.

But if you're off on your own,
making roads with your walking you're the first
to set foot on like the moon of a spaced-out planet
you're trying to turn into something habitable,
remember it's an act of compassion not to lock the door
to the available dimensions of the future when you leave.
Remember that all six of your senses
live in the world you creatively visualize
like the aura of the life that surrounds you
like an ongoing masterpiece of incompletion.
Without them you might be a master of making trees,
but, hey, man, where are the birds?
I don't hear anything singing.
There's nothing to taste or touch or listen to.
No appearances to deceive your consciousness with.

When your eye's got an idea of the kind of star
it wants to be, before it's learned to see, it never shines.
Wondering what flora to root where in the expanding abyss
of the night before you, scatter the stars across the firmament
as if you were sowing the unknown seeds of the wildflowers
that scuttled themselves like arks
in the cracked creekbeds of your neocortical starmud
and waited patiently like hibernating frogs
for the conditioned chaos of the rain
to come like a flashflood of life-nourishing insight.

And when you're annihilated
by the mystic terror of your own freedom
jimmying with the G-spot on your prison locks
to get them to open up like a coven of doves
that want to release their omens like feathers on the wind
that can scry and fly where they want,
don't linger in the doorway of your liberation.
Hesitation is the flypaper of light.
Stare straight into the eyes of the Medusa
until she's the one that blinks first in the savage snake pit
and the stone bird of your heart thaws like a volcano
potting islands in the draconian heat of its bloodstream
and the Gorgons start dancing to the music of their classical hair-dos
as if they could hear the wavelengths
of a pan flute lapping nearby like water.

Kiss the serpent fire on the head
if you want to honour the shapeshifter
that sets your dark energy free to assume the form
of the world that moults the chrysalis of your imagination
that reassembles the rubble of the last gasp
into a house of transformation that fits you
like a bubble of supple skin where you alone
are the myth and physics of its origination.
And whatever world provides you with the mindscape
of your exploration, you recognize by the style
it's painted in as everywhere a work of your own
signed by the wind in the left hand bottom corner of the sky.

Hard to tell the wells from the fountains
in the mingling mindstream that flows like life lines
into the frayed deltas of your palm. And what madness
hasn't always alloyed its backbone to the swords of the sane
defending their indigenous traditions of soft metal?
Don't stare into your cauldron as if you were trying
to read the future by the lint in your belly-button.
Actualize your magic and stir the womb a bit like a master of departures
with an intuitive genius for unitive metaphors.
Mix the paint on the palette into necromantic shades
of new underworlds weeping jewels on the roots
of the fireflowers bearing forbidden fruits
they'll carry by the armful with them out of the garden
like refugees running from an abandoned embassy
that used to give them shelter from themselves with impunity.

No limit. You can live in as many worlds as there are
grains of dust and pollen, where you're not allergic
to the stars, and the constellations come like the empty baggage
of a book that hasn't written a word to anyone,
nor appointed an alpha like the book end of a beginning
to balance the long vowel of omega at the other extreme
to let you know when it's all been said, and it's time
to lay the cornerstone of a myth of origin of your own,
a pebble in the random tide of providential events,
that doesn't need more than one leg to stand on
like a heron hunting fish in the bestiaries of the moon
that's finally given up its dead like a graveyard of Orphic skulls.

Imagine your way like smoke through the eye of a keyhole
into spaces you create by your very being there
to summon them from the abyss, a carillon of dragons
on a holy day of reptiles when the lowest are blessed with wings,
or wall yourself into an aesthetically sealed garden
where the rain perennially washes the blood of the children
who finger-painted the flowers on your thin skin off,
and luxuriate in your fastidious appetite for insignificant details.
Mind is an artist. Able to paint the worlds as a sin of omission,
a sum of destructions, or the negative space of a hand
breaching stone with a spiritual tattoo on its palm,
indelibly invisible as nothing for whom nothing is out of reach.
Make heaven. Make hell. Who you are is where you live.
Nest in a bell like a bird under the roof of your mouth
or root like lightning in a cloud you left unweeded.

Out of the random ignitions and annihilations of dark matter
bombarding your senses like anti-photonic fireflies
emerges a world of shadows into the light
of your imagination like the rising of a new moon
engendered out of you restoring yourself to it
like a lost atmosphere that got carried away by wings.
You can say things into existence word by word
or you can talk them to death in the silence
that follows the ghost of ideas like darkness follows us.
Or you can let the night bird deep
in the solitude of your heart sing
your fervent yearning for a companionable world
into being sweeter than the immensity of your creative freedom
to long for it as if what were missing
would always seem somehow more real than what was not.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Stand Where The Listening Begins

I stand where the listening begins
as if my voice were just another one of the echoes
and my tongue were the tip of an edgy precipice
that doesn't dare make a move
over an immeasurable abyss of eyes
that nobody belongs to.
This is a seeing that's older than the stars
that were born of it
like a mirror is born of the shining.
Like a body is born of the mind
and takes on the shape of a universe
as an expressionist gesture of classical reserve.
In the great ocean of being before it turned into everyone
our eyes weren't beaded like two drops of water
strung through our nose
like a statement we were trying to make.
They were waves.
Waves of water.
Waves of light.
Waves of thought and feeling.
They were waterbirds that came and went
without leaving.
They were meteorological events
in the emotional life of the sea
when it played alone with itself like weather.
We didn't evolve hands to prove we had a grip on things.
We didn't evolve brains to prove we were intelligent.
We're not nuggets of insight
panned from the mindstream
that runs down the world mountain
in a rush of gold.
I stand where I can hear the night
breathing like a shadow in its own darkness
and whatever I am not
is as real as whatever I am.
And my sorrows dropp away
like the black fruit of ruined bells
and my joys know a freedom
no holy war ever deserved.
Here my death answers to my life
and not the other way around.
My beginnings are not justified by my ends
and my solitude is so wholly itself
it embraces everything
as if it were space
and time were its only friend.
This is a poetic state.
A dynamic mode of creative annihilation.
This is a phoenix blooming in its own fire.
This is life.
This is the universe full of bright ideas
that come to it like stars in the darkness.
This is the white mare of the full moon in the high field
with the gates open
like wings growing out of her shoulders.
This is a space that is so spontaneously immediate
that you receive the reply
long before you've even asked the question.
It doesn't take thousands of thoughtyears
for the light to get here.
A flower blooms.
A star comes out.
It's as simple as that.
You lift one veil of the mystery like an eyelid.
Nothing has a history.
The old man remembers nothing.
The old woman forgets her name.
Once they were seabeds of meaning.
Now they're just water.
And everything is ok with that.
People go grey
and turn into clouds in the mountains
just to catch the last of the light
and give their lives some colour.
And then it's night again
and the dancing chandeliers of the stars
that are burning like legends
to make a name and a myth for themselves
fall like constellations to earth
and shatter like the rainbows of youth.
Every dawn has a taste of the sunset in it.
What's the end of anything
if not the dark side of its beginnings?
I am the fool of a freedom
that lets things be whatever they want to be
deep within the heavy fruit of a compassionate heart
that ripens in its own lucidity.
There are worms.
There are birds.
There's a green star in the apple core.
My skin is the chameleon of the sun going down.
I know how to swim through stone and water.
There are fish in my treetops
and birds in my roots
and when I drown
it's the sun in the sea
and nothing ever really goes out.
Everytime I open my mouth to sing
this is where the muse
puts a finger to her lips
to teach me what I'm talking about.
I'm a star when I write.
First I let go of the light.
And then the children point fingers at me
and say in mutual recognition
of the stories they make up on the go
there you are
just as we foretold.
It's the same way with water
when it's lost in a desert of sand and stars.
Sometimes it takes a mirage to find your way home.
Death gapes like the jawbone of a mummy
and writes like a pyramid
as if it wanted to make all things last forever.
But when life picks up the pen
around the fires of the stars
to whisper into its own ear
things that only solitude
can suggest to the night
its poems are always tents on the move.
The moon sailing paper lifeboats down a river
like waterlilies
blooming in the pale flames
of their lunar immolations
as if each were a white phoenix
rising above its own ashes and smoke
like someone dreaming of swans.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Gray Rain

Gray rain
but the trees
are teaching the stars how to break into leaves.
Good rain on the good earth.
Autumn's a long passage.
Spring is full of thresholds.
Rainbow bridges in the distance
over urgent streams.
Everything's in a rush to become something.
I thought I knew once
who I was supposed to be
but more and more it eludes me
like a future that's already behind me.
I leave it to the world
to finish what I began
and include myself in the mystery
and try to carry on like a man
who looks at a star he won't follow
through the branches of the burgeoning trees
as the history of who I am
now that I'm not anymore.
The less I am the more there is to be.
And one eye doesn't get in the way of the other as much.
There is just this as it is
and what am I beholding
if I'm not looking upon myself as I am
in common with everything
that's changing all around me
like a mind that can't contain itself
in any fixed mode of being
anymore than the eye
can decide what it's seeing.
Everything is burning with life in the rain
and change is the dangerous bliss
we feel when we cease to exist.
The trees might have fingerprints
graven into their bark
and you might accord them
an identity in the dark
and approve of their names
and let them pass as if you knew who they were
but that doesn't make them
any less of a stranger than you are
or the clouds carry passports.
Praise be to the abundance of oblivion
and the cornucopias of blackholes
in the hearts of the galaxies
that keep wounding themselves into life
by falling on their own swords
like a knife that heals.
By day the light gives.
But at night
it steals.
And the mirror lives
and pours water over the eyes of the blind
and suddenly the stars can see again.
And the grape hyacinth is drunk on blue wine.
And I'm walking on water on the moon
even as the moon walks on my tears
without knowing which ones
flowed from the bells of my sorrows
and which overwhelmed me
like birds in the fountains of joy.
First I am a man.
And then I am a boy.
Spring takes itself for granted.
And autumn comes on with regrets.
But they both know
this is as good as it gets
and nothing's missing
in the mind's lost and found.
It's just the way things get around
when you throw the world back in the water
like a life of your own
you gave up years ago
to be who you are now.
Praise be to the stars
that stop by the gate this late
to chat about gardens
and how to keep
the roots of the roses alive
when the ground hardens.
Even if you're a demon in steep descent
or an angel rising from hell
life has the power of a flower
and the genius of a universe
to turn falling into a calling
like planets and Canada geese.
You can walk out alone
into a wide open field at night like I do
and stand there under the stars
that have been staring at you since childhood
like someone they should keep an eye on
and say: This is me. This is who I am as I am
to the whole twinkling lot of them in self-defence
to uphold the savage dignity of the difference.
You can stand there in the vastness
of that one definitive thought
that goes on forever like a silence older than birds
and feel the sweet release of upending joy
trying to master its new freedom
when space morphs into a mouth for a moment
and says softly
o so softly
in a voice that's been singed by compassion:
No.
You're not.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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O No Witness To Me

O no witness to me you can't go,
though I long for it, you don't follow,
my shadow stops leaving itself behind as a sign.
I have been ungrammatized by the madness of scientific magic,
a waterclock of life boats I kept bailing out of
until I threw the baby out with the bathwater, mushy as soap.
I tore down the shrines of chaos as an act of irreverent devotion
and the dead thanked me for stealing what they couldn't give away.
Divine solace without earthly consolation,
I wanted to be crucified diagonally as a random act
of symbolic defiance, but I was buried
under an avalanche of skulls on the moon
and all these voices in my head that swear they're prophetic
keep baffling me with alternative universes
that have no interest in cultivating me as a way of life.

But you my heart, dark star, dying insurgent of my solitude,
homeless door into the open, your eyes more beautiful
than reflecting telescopes on a cold mountain
far from the city, I am a casualty of space, what hands
do I have to hold you with? Time has ripped out my tongue
like an autumn leaf, and the clouds gather, sweetness,
the clouds, hushed like a book-signing at a mortuary.

Whatever value I had once as a man has turned
against the mirror of miracles, the chthonic excellence
of elegizing the teen age suicides and untactical drunks
that curled up in a coma on the train tracks
as the inevitable came into view with a warning whistle.
I poured libations of poetry to beseech the poppy gods below
among their immortal bees, to explain something to them
gentle and soothing, cool honey on a burn. Delusional
but compassionate in a useless kind of way. A gesture
of ineptitude that swept me away in tears for how much
has yet be lost in the abyss of human affairs
that doesn't even taste of us after all these years.

At the window of wonder, if you don't throw
the moon through it, you're going to dropp like a fly.
No more questions to pin down like the head of a snake
to keep it from turning on you like the lethal insight
of a gamma ray burst into the nature of nothingness
across the great divide of the razorwire
that twinkles like stars that are deaf and dumb
to the wishes we make upon them. I wish I may,
I wish I might be seen by you as the missing wing
of your cosmic symmetry, and you, the dark matter of mine.
Could we fly? Could we shine? Could we go mad together
under your bedroom window in a connubium of moonlight
and even the insincere candles from the dollar store seem sublime?
This far out at sea, would you be my island galaxy,
would you let me be washed up on your coasts
among the drowned, my whole life flashing before your eyes
as I reached out for you ingenuously as the tide
leaves things at your door like nomadic starfish
and my fingers, almost touching your face,
as I have so many times imagined
an enlightened savage might your talismanic sorrows,
feathers of joy and sacred dirt in a sexual medicine bag?

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Drag On My Cigarette

I drag on my cigarette
and pull the coffee up to my mouth
as if I were officiating at a sacrament
and it were some holy bell
extolling the black wine of the bean.

I am always more in the morning
than I will be again all day
and the light is creative until precisely noon
and I am at peace in the impersonal intimacy
of flowing along like a star or a man or a leaf
in this great dynamic that never goes anywhere outside itself
like a bloodstream, a mindstream, the nightstream
that flashes in the woods like the eyes of a beautiful woman,
and yet all these worlds within worlds move with it
as fluently as thought and feeling
in a mind that is not divided by decisions
or trying to locate itself like a constellation
on a starmap in the rain,
insanely fitting every dropp
with the axis of a pin
to divine the source of the shining.

And it's always been a mystery to me
how I can be so ignorant and all-seeing simultaneously
but what keeps me alive, breathing, beating, baffled and alert,
a gust of awareness, of wheeling air and images
in a moment of joy and dispersal
where the light touches the dirt like a lover
and the dirt rises,
is this infinite instance
of an inconceivable intelligence so intimately close
the flame leaps from the fire,
and the moon falls from its flower
like the petal of an hour that overslept
and the birds are swimming in the shadow-waters of the trees
like elegant, inexhaustible pens in ink
that leave no trace on the sky of anything
beyond what the mind can think
until it stops turning the days like the pages
of a journal only the wind keeps
like autumn leaves and mindless sages
and learns from the seed-mouth how to sing
of the abundance that flows from its undoing.

Stop trying to prune the rose with its own thorns.
You can't put serpent fire out with water
or grasp a question by the neck
to milk the crescents of the moon for an antidote.
Would you put a bit in the mouth of the wave?
Would you uncoil your cravings like flypaper
to catch a star
then green it through the glass of a canning-jar?
Is the you of what you do
the you of who you are
or deep inside is there a blind jewel
that's waiting for you to turn the light around
and give it eyes
so you can see through yourself
and stop trying to net fish with the moon's reflection?

But if you think the answers will put the matter to rest,
get the world off your chest
like the shadow of the stone twin
that mimicked you into self-consciousness
and stalks you even now unseen
like a dog or the moon or eclipse of the blood
closing the mouths of the lilies that speak for the starmud,
you have not followed the questions
far enough into your life
where you have never been
to understand how little the answers really mean
when the ant moves the mountain
and the grass is green.

I stand in the furnace of the worlds like wax
and know the fury of the fire is everywhere at peace with itself,
and the only holy wars are lonely and creative.
As I am, as I am, as I am,
my singular appeal and pulse,
my homely simulacrum for the event I call me
when I knock like waves on my own door
to ask whose footprints line the shore
and only the moon's face on a threshold of water
rises like the gentile coast of a skull
to say I don't live here anymore.

You can't wash the night off
by taking a bath in an eclipse
and there are darknesses so intensely clear
that colours would only pollute the brutal purity
of the eye that dispossessed them,
poured them out like a delirium of words and wine
that could no longer dumbfound the emptiness
with the enlightened delusion of being forsakenly me.

And to say whatever this is before me now is nothing
is wrong
and to say this darkness myriads into form
and lucidly fills the world with things
is wrong,
and it is not mind or death or dark matter
nor me nor you nor God nor the devil
and yet its utter stillness mountains into mushrooms and fountains
and the whole issue is apparent in every event
like the taste of salt and stars
in the mouth of an open wound.

Is your skull honoured by what it must contain,
is the stone you lay your head upon
appalled by what it props up
when its metals reveal
the swords and crowns
you've poppied with blood,
or is your head still cooling
like mystic bread on a windowsill
like the universe
straight from the ovens of hell
in a purgatorial breeze
your goodness defanged like a whip?

Or maybe you're writing love poems
on the sails of a boney ghost ship
to a lifeboat on the moon
bobbing in a sea of shadows?
Or the leaves at your door
who show up with maps to save you
don't know what autumn is anymore
or how to follow the wind to the far shore
where the straw keeps faith with the grain
and the scarecrow is feathered with fire
and there is no distinction between joy and pain
and the stone dances as fleetly as moonlight
silvers the vein of the garden snail
that smears the slow stream of its going
across my radiant path
like the enlightened thought of a tiny brain?

Have we not already come again and again
to a place we have never existed,
is this not the effusive locus of every moment,
the inceptive finish of every breath we give back
to the sustaining intimacy of the unconceived
who nourish conception with their emptiness
and confide themselves like seeing to the seen
and shape space like water into eyes
deeper than a full eclipse of the moon?

You cannot fathom the strangeness of this moment you are,
you cannot assess the span of your being with wings
or appeal to a god like a bloodstream
you can pour yourself back into like wine
seeking tomorrow's delirium with yesterday's vine,
when the whole of creation is the merest suggestion of you
out to the furthest star
that puts itself out like a torch
in its own reflection of who you are.

You don't have to study your eyes to see
or cultivate your features like a holy book to be.
Because there is no intention in the emptiness
there is no karma to redress
and nothing to bind or separate
and no witness to affirm or deny
and nothing to diminish or enlarge
and no wisdom in the waterlily
nor ignorance in the swamp,
and the clouds let go
and the chains lay hold
and the lead doesn't taste of gold
but the union doesn't differentiate
among its exquisite distinctions
and the old woman is not old
and the cripples run
and the road outpaces the racers
like a long finish line
and there are no fractures when everything is whole
and no god when everything is.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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It's Not Like The Face In The Flower Of The Star

It's not like the face in the flower of the star
grows more beautiful the more times it's looked at,
it's just that it's humanizing
the vast, cold spaces within you
with your own awareness of it so that
when you spot Arcturus shining through the trees
as you have since childhood and call out its name
it's you that shines brighter
a magnitude more for the moment.
Affable familiars in a big, lonely space
acknowledging each other in passing
as if, animate and inanimate, the same,
what we all hold in common
since we started kicking in the womb
is this life of perpetual exile. Shape-shifters,
driven out of the bliss of oblivion, to bury the bell
of our agony in the stillness of an alien place
and try to love everyone who'll let us
as if they weren't a stranger at the gate.

O the appellations the mind applies to its formlessness
in a world of forms to befriend its cosmic isolation.
That fills space up with stars and birds
suggested by its senses and then casts a spell
like a grammar of things to turn them into words
to start a conversation with chaos as if we weren't all
talking to ourselves. We put lifemasks on everything
like an old Greek play and act out our tragedy
like a dilemma gored on the horns of the goat gods
as if they had a clear grasp of what we were talking about.
Asking a question doesn't change
the ambiguous nature of the issue
and when no one answers isn't proof
the silence is divine. Bright vacancy, dark abundance,
nothing includes everything in it
like a table of contents for the mind
that plays host to its own imaginary guests.

The door bell rings and the world's
standing in the doorway bearing gifts
that have no other meaning other than
they're addressed to you the way life
nourishes itself on its own emptiness
as if every moment were a cause of celebration
engendered by your own inspiration.
Every song in the distance is the ancestral echo
of your own voice in an abyss
you're trying to relate to by listening
as if you were sounding the depths
of the mystery you must be to yourself
to live among your own creations as if
someone signed you too. Your name
scrawled in cadmium red blood across
a white canvas of albino eyes in the dark.
Imagination obedient to the freedom
of its own lawlessness to create as it is urged to
on a caprice, a gust of stars, the nudge of an atom,
whole new paradigms of space and time
it will answer to as if someone called its name.

If the same eye by which I see the star
is the eye by which the star sees me,
then who's the creator, who's the creation?
So if someone were to ask me the colour of my eyes,
I'd show them a painting I did
of blue weed towering beside a dirt road
or a moonscape I dashed off one starless night
between the clouds. Or even further afield,
if I felt they'd been siderealized sufficiently,
the blue auras of trace elements grinding galaxies
into mirrors they can see themselves in
like leggy gazelles come down to the shore
to drink from their own reflection of themselves
like telescopes alert to the eyes that lie in wait for them.

Everywhere I wander down these pathless ways
through my homelessness, I meet myself
like a mirage at the end of a cul de sac,
and I walk through it like a wall
or two galaxies passing through each other
without disturbing a star, I embody such distances,
and I encounter hypnotists from all quarters
that call themselves seekers of the truth
trying to wake up from their own magic
as if they hadn't caught on to their own minds yet
and were still underestimating the power of their illusions.
Why wash the stars off the windows, or sweep
the scars of the autumn leaves off the stairs
expecting the enlightened arrival
of the lord and lady of the manor any day now
as if you could get a grasp on the nature
of your own emptiness like a servant
looking for a master in your own image?

Everything nasty and blind,
everything beautiful and sublime
are the facets of a clear jewel
turning in the light of the void.
All that is separated, all that is enjoined,
all that are searching and finding
and losing themselves again like solar flares
on a return journey back to the sun
or rivers flowing into themselves
as if every wave crossed the threshold of itself
into an openness exhilarated by
the expansive gesture of its presence,
are just the hidden secret of you
wanting to be known by a world
you whisper into your own ear
as if you'd never heard the sound
of your own voice before the wind
began to throw the sea into turmoil
and you were swept ashore out of
the inconceivability of your own emptiness
like a myth of awareness sadly in need of an origin.

So you end up creating a world
out of your own inner resources and calling it
mother or father in the hopes it might be able
to explain what you're doing here by yourself.
And that's how you get lost in the labyrinths
of your own being, that's how your wires get crossed
in the short circuits of your lifelines
tangled up in kites like morning glory
that wouldn't fly. You keep asking simulacrums
of your own creativity about things
that only you on your own, lonelier than God,
projected imaginatively like a lifemask
you created in your own image
onto the formlessness of an invisible space within you,
can be the answer to. The moment
you say I am to yourself and realize
that you're not even there to recognize it
the little thumb puppet in three pounds of starmud
dematerializes like something solid
into the presence of the real. You revel like a child
in the creative liberty of not keeping your own distance
from anything in existence, knowing
in the crazy wisdom of your second innocence
the only thing that binds you to it
or separates you from it, is a sense of play.
That everytime you say I am without
including the whole universe in it as well
it becomes the wayward paradigm
of another brilliant mistake with feet of clay.
Or as Archibald Lampman said
dead of a heart attack at thirty-six,
poor shining angels whom the hoofs betray.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I look Into People's Faces

I look into people's faces
and I see the same wound
under many different scars.

I look into their hearts
like a stranger at night
through a passing window
and I see how suffering through
the agonies of life
has ripened some
with sweetness and compassion
and others are already
rotten before they fall.

I look into people's eyes
and some are vast starlit skies
and some are the iota subscripts
of scholarly fireflies
that footnote the constellations
at the bottom of the page
with details off the beaten path
of their MLA mainstream cosmic thesis.

And some are like moons
with parenthetical crescents
with nothing in between
both sides of their smile
that isn't a cynical aside
about the lost innocence
of a phase they've already gone through.

And some stare back like eclipses
that have pulled the blinds down
over their eyes
like sunglasses disguised
by a witness protection program
but you just know
they're oilslicks
on the Sea of Shadows
as they were in the womb
and in the Gulf of Mexico
the black blood
of an incorporated miscarriage
that hemorrhaged like the pot of gold
at the end of the oleaginous rainbow.

I look into people's souls
and I see how afraid
they must be of life
to hide out in the open
like an ocean
that hasn't kept faith
with its own depths
and tries to pretend it's
as airy and light as the sky.

The birds are flying through the roots.
The fish are swimming in the treetops.

I see judas-goats chained
to the stakes of their ego-Is
like sacrificial tiger bait
devoted to their cunning.

I see the anti-muses
that shadow Mt. Helicon
like black holes
in the death valleys
of human imagination.
And I wonder how they ever got here.

What bend in space
led them to this twisted place
like a forsaken road
they keep taking
like a wormhole through time
into the womb
of a stillborn universe
where the moonlight
burns their embryos
on pyres of lime
beside the dry creekbeds
of nameless rivers going nowhere?

Along their flowerless banks
I see the rib-cages of dead snakes
that went witching for water
with tongues and tines
of Kundalini lightning
that ran up their spines
like time through a waterclock
and the hulls of empty lifeboats
that died in the desert
at the bottom of the mirage
they drowned in
hoping to find themselves
among those who survived
by learning to swim through sand
like fish in an hourglass aquarium.

I'd rather walk on stars
reflected in the shattered mirrors
of my last self-image
than repay
the generosity of my solitude
with mass ingratitude.

I listen to people's voices
and they all seem like the same echo
with many different mouths.

I've tried to respect
the mystic specificity
of the thousands of fierce individuals
I've met over the years
but the more I've learned
about myself and others
the more I see the same mind
in many different skulls.
The same genius of inspired water
that poured an ocean
of sentient awareness
into everyone of our cells.

Union differentiates.
Separation binds.
I look into people's faces
however young or old they are
and I see infinite spaces
moonlighting as time
on the nightshift of the stars.

I see horror and compassion.
I see butterflies sipping
the nectar of diamonds
like honey in the promised land
and maggots born in excrement
thriving on offal
like the janitors of the dead
because everything grows best
in the soil it was born into
like karma in the fortune-cookies
of wombs and eggs and cocoons.

I look into people's eyes
like sad stars
through the generous end
of the telescope
that brings the far near
like impact craters
and I see how some people
cling to the memory of themselves
like underground seas
in frozen lockets
of water on the moon.

I look into people's secret shrines
they build like birds
in the eye of the storm
looking for salvation.
And I can hear
the echo of their prayers
bouncing back off hydrogen clouds
like a nineteen twenties radio show
thousands of lightyears away
as if they just said them yesterday
and the universe as usual
threw the words back in their face
like the cosmic background hiss
of snowflakes on a furnace
going out like stars.

I've seen the innocence of fireflies
making halos
and the blood-rose weaving thorns
around the massive blackholes of death
as if they were merely
a pinprick in a voodoo doll
that got into white magic by mistake.

I've looked into
the nuclear blaze of madness
like an A bomb with shades on
and seen the flash and shadow
of embryo silhouettes
spit out like cave paintings
on the firewalls of the fusion wombs
that give birth to the heavier elements
it takes to survive.

But the water's not mad
just because the moon's a lunatic.
The mirror might seem
just as angry as you are
but it doesn't feel a thing.

Learning wisdom is learning space.

It doesn't eat flowers
and the weeds don't sting.
It takes everything it embraces to heart
and nothing's left out
from the very beginning.
Like the whole of the moon and the sky
in every eye of water
that's ever looked into me
and seen that everyone
is the heart of a mystery
whose lucidity
is their only true identity.

It's our seeing
that makes the flowers open
and the stars shine.
It's our hearing that gives
the wind something
meaningful to say
and the grass something
to whisper about.
Whatever you touch
walks in your skin from thereon.
Whatever you taste
be it roses and nettles
or sulphur and wine
or the sour-sweet radiance
of the stars on your tongue
you're the flavour of the day
in everything.

It's your nose
that gives the burning leaves
in the urns of autumn
the spectral fragrance
of chrysanthemums
that are barely holding on.

And it's your mind.
Your heart.
Your blood.
Your body.
Your imagination.
Your intuition.
Your wisdom.
Your ignorance.
Your darkness.
Your light.
Your spirit
enlightened or deluded
whatever you think or feel
is abundantly missing
or dream you're waking up to
that makes the world real
in every mystically specific detail
of who you are.

Who else?
I look into myself
as far as the stars
at the edge of my seeing
fourteen point five billion lightyears away
and I can see how much time and space
how many species of life
generation after generation
have been born to give birth and die.

All the roses swept
from the stairs
of our hopeless tomorrows
because they were a tribute to love
meant for someone else.

All the spontaneous joys
that cast their long random shadows
like occasional fireflies of insight
across the lunar mindscape
of this afterlife of sorrows
where every church is the gravestone
of an unsuspecting god.

I look into my own seeing
like light upon light
in the vast expanse
of an unknowable night
and I'm cosmically astonished
by how many worlds within worlds
eyes within eyes
minds within minds
lives within lives it takes
to make a single habitable human being
meaning everyone of us sacred fools
fit as a genius
for the crazy wisdom
of a creative life
in a self-inspired universe.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Amazing As The Stars In The Darkness My Eyes

Amazing as the stars in the darkness, my eyes,
though I've never seen them directly, only
as a reflection I take at its word they're blue.
And when I look a little deeper, there's
no part of me that isn't eventually invisible.
Everything's like that, the seer and the seen,
so wholly absorbed in each other,
there's no sign of either of them, just the seeing,
the heart and its feeling, the mind and its thought,
the flower and the eye, crocus, turk's cap, tiger lily, lilac
all one spontaneous happening without distinction,
one infinitely collaborative creative event flashing
out of the dark resources of the plenum-void
to give it a name for the sake of rendering experience
communicable through a delirium of form.

If you've ever walked by a mirror and the mirror's disappeared,
mercury into mercury, water into water, fire into fire,
a mother into her child, an unsuccessful lover into his longing,
that's something like it. You're everything
and in that everything you're nothing, you're selfless
to the point of not even knowing what that means anymore
except it's of no significance whatsoever. There's just
this star flashing out of a night it's surrounded by,
just these dark hills where the dead buried themselves
as they did their children, as they had lived, secretly
under the leaves that covered their gravestones,
lichens, moss, growing hundreds of wild columbine
on a modest rock of ages with the sensibilities of a butterfly.

If you stand by a gate that doesn't latch by itself anymore,
and the garden's been left to its own inner resources,
because no one lives there any longer, as, perhaps, even you once did,
o in a dream, how long ago was that? And watch the moon rise,
as if the healer and the wound were remembering
an old love affair that's gone well beyond the inseparable
because there never was a time, a prelude to seeing,
they were ever apart. You'll understand passing
as a perpetually new approach to things, you'll see birth in why
the flowers fall, and death, in why they rise again.
The simultaneity of the life and death of all things.
How present you are in the midst of your longing.
How clear in the absence of everything you're missing.

I've spent much of my life preparing gardens for planting.
Shaking out roots, rocking fields. Wondering
whose house of life the bones I dig up once belonged to,
cornerstones and rafters in arrears
to the temples they once upheld to themselves.
And come nightfall, my work finished for the day,
I've paused and looked to see if I could identify
through the trees, the whole of a constellation
from a single star. As if gazing in wonder at it
in the mutual solitude and hugeness
of the unknown immmensities that surround us both,
and bind us to a weary body and a still heart
leaning on a shovel in a garden, as if the silence
could look up or down, either way, were made sacred
by the poignancy of a momentary insight
that penetrated both our hearts as if time and space
were mere bubbles of awareness in a dream.
And in a differentiated union of not-two,
I saw myself shining through the eyes of a star
as it laboured over what flowers it intended to grow.

Without a thought or a feeling I could call my own
I was a desert of stars without a mirage
to keep up appearances. I was a single point of light
with infinite distances in it, and even the word, one,
had gaps in it I learned to jump like a star.
And I saw with the certainty of water, that
when one was a wave, the other was an ocean
and separation was simply the blindfold we put on
at midnight in front of an imaginary firing squad,
as if our whole life depended upon it, to watch
the stars shoot flowers at the sun like blanks
I seeded the garden with like constellations
breaking ground through the tree tops like Vega in Lyra.
Astro-flowers. The Pleiades approaching
the larkspur like bees. Honey in a new hive.

Light years of perceptions in a garden of starmud
encompassing strangers only an insight away from home.
It's an immensely intimate universe. Go out.
Get down on your knees in the soil. Plant flowers.
And when you go in look at your hands, at the stars
shining under your fingernails as a sign
of some honest cosmic work well done.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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
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Undevoted, Free, And Wild

Undevoted, free, and wild,
no one to answer to, no one to answer for,
the urns shattered, and the ashes scattered,
and the fire liberated to perfect its own combustion
and the stars without anyone to walk home,
and the solitude silent, dark, and deep, cool
as the bliss of a wine-cellar talking in its sleep,
I have grown mad in the heat of the purple sun.
I have spoken from the mouths of the caves in the desert
and not expected the echo of my own voice
to return to me like a pilgrim stashing a gnostic gospel
deep in the sand, without realizing
how much closer to the stars dirt is than I am.

When you're no one but the wind in disguise
you don' need to be humble, you don't need to wise,
nothing to trust, and no one to rely on,
you can watch the dead at night
streaming toward Orion
like a blue-white ribbon of light
undoing the gift wrappings off the bodies and eyes
of people who can see and be again.

And you know it comes to everyone
like a nebular orchid with a fragrance of stars,
that the Sahara will green and bloom again
and the wind sing hymns to the grass
and the gazelles sport their elegant legs,
adolescents in the spring brush,
running like violins succulent with beginnings,
and it doesn't matter you're alone out here
listening to the ashes of a mirage
make up legends to tell the fire
about its ancestors buried on the moon anonymously
and how their blood once stained the earth
like a scarlet letter even the stars couldn't wash off.

The mystic anti-hero of my own dragon myth
I exalt in my isolation like a shriek of revolution
and overthrow myself like a book in the flames
to keep something I don't understand alive in me
as if I had to keep on dying to sustain myself
and the distinction between one and the other were lost upon life.
It's a touch, it's a feel, it's a hole in veil
with one eye looking out at me to see
if I've intensified the dark enough to break into stars,
if I can unravel my heart like smoke like water like fire
and perfectly disappear into the atmosphere of my dispersal
without a shudder of farewell to the masks I wore like scales.
Not to be constrained by even so much as
the single thread of a straitjacket, the husk
of an abandoned sanctuary left to the imagination
of the hermetic flowers to do with as they wish.

I shriek freedom across the heavens like the death cry
of a hawk waking the valley up in the morning.
I whisper to the water things the wind was never meant to hear.
So faithful to my calling, I lead those who come, away from me,
as if it were the perennial custom of the universe
to meet like this for a moment in time and space
and then disperse into the darkness alone like a unlit candle.
I'm a riot of fools in the sublimity of the presence within me
that elates the crazy wisdom of my spontaneous ignitions
and schools the black lightning of its absence
in the folly of trying to enclose my spirit in gates
like a candle in the niche of a tempestuous vision.

Yeeeeeeessssss, I scream into the face of nothing
like the efoliant scripture of my confession and protest
that life doesn't need an alibi to live and die by,
no extraneous, no outer, no other, no object, no subject
no flying buttress to act as a bridge
over a flowing river of Gothic stone,
no strong tree standing on its own to cut down
and carve into a crutch, no cork to keep the ocean out,
no bucket to bail the moonlight out of the lifeboat,
no jade Buddha to make your supplications to,
no footprints on the water Jesus walked,
no cave in Ramadan to receive the angel of light,
no Kabbalah to baffle your way through the night,
no Schmidt-Cassegrain reflecting telescopes
on clock driven equatorial mounts geared to the heavens
to thread the golden needle of the mystery
without any knots in your spinal cord,
to penetrate the vulva of the sea like a sacred shell
that once gathered armies on a burning hillside
to contest their revelations with the tongues of swords.

I shall tell you, my brother, I shall hasten to you my sister
like moonlight through your window, I shall not
hold back from you the least shadow of the furthest star
releasing its dark wisdom like the black doves
of its own excruciating ashes glowing like the pain
of horrendous transformations into light.
I shall not bring you the skins of the dragons I've shed
but inspire you with a fire you've never been burned by before,
a spiritual immolation into a godhead without a metaphor
to guide you by, a torch you can't drown in your tears,
a long firewalk down to a river of stars,
and there you shall cross on a burning life raft
of the bones you've been carrying around for lightyears like a body.

And it's a heresy of silence to say, but there
you shall you shall lie down in the nocturnal emptiness
in the long blue seagrass of the moon
and empower out of your own creative abundance
whatever worlds your longing inspires you to embrace
to amuse the bright vacancy of eternity with time, like love,
and the dark abundance of unperishing potential
with space, like wisdom, and the clear light of the void
and the unspeakable absence of any other voice
to ruin the silence with the bliss and sorrow of seeking
the mystic night you found within you longing like a bird
for the stillness to write it like a lyric of the wind,
a passage of blood through the labyrinth of the heart,
a shadow against the moonrise of a compassionate awareness
there's a divinity that sings like a human
in the heart of everything that breaks its long fast of nothing
with praise and celebration, with fire and light and rain
with the firstt sacred syllables to touch the lips
of the black rose charred in the heart of the dragon, like poetry.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Late Spring Snow

Late spring snow on its way.
Dead ochres and colourless greys
that have never heard of the impressionists.
It's a landscape
it's a mindscape
but it behaves like a still life.
I've been staying up late
trying to paint my way
out of my life
until dawn every morning.
The windowpane a ripening phthalo blue.
It's compositionally deranged
to hear the birds singing
when you're totally exhausted.
Mentally physically spiritually emotionally financially
gone gone gone altogether gone beyond.
All my happy endings orphaned.
A sum of depletions.
I'm living this creative life
scribbling down the notes of the picture-music
that doesn't just run through my mind
but is my mind
colours and words
down on canvas and paper.
When I'm writing
when I'm painting
when I've wholly disappeared into what I'm doing
for a few holy hours of life
immensities open up like the multiverse
and I've got a window a wormhole
I can fly through
and out out out among the starfields
with the evanescence of smoke
or a bird
putting itself in the picture
as a finishing touch to the sky.
And I am free to explore the intensities
of my own creative peace
as I keep saying to myself
one eureka moment after another
turning into a mantra
no no I can't leave that.
I've got to bring that back and show them.
They'll be delighted with that.
They won't believe it.
You've got to write and paint with an open hand.
Let the brush hold you.
Let the pen.
Then you're the meaning
of what the words are trying to say
and it's o.k.
you don't have to look any further than that.
Sublimity slips into the mundanities of the world
by creative accident
and you stand down from bliss
and spend a reverential moment
in its presence
just looking at it
not knowing where it came from
or whose work it is.
And it's the wonder of that depth of ageless being
expressing itself as a gesture of time
that's kept me at it
for forty-eight excruciating years.
I get off this chain gang
where I've broken down more rocks than a junkie
or saxifrage in the rain
and the pain the labour
the enervating futilities
and terminal successes
of all those ambitions
that run counter to the flow of life like salmon
disappear from my bloodstream
like apparitions in the morning.
And I am more me
the less I grow aware of it.
When I consider the chronic agony of life
I sometimes think that God created the world
not because she was a hidden secret
that wanted to be known
but because she wanted to forget she was God
and lose every cosmos and atom of herself wholly in it.
Paint till dawn and you'll know what that means.
As the great Zen master sort of said
you can swallow the whole of the river you're painting
with a single gulp.
You can chug the well of the muses
with every drop.
And just when you think
you're working in a medium of illusions
that are playing you like a gravedigger
that likes to get to the bottom of things
they all begin to taste of life.
The mirages water the flowers
in this desert of stars
and everything blooms.
You're back in the garden again
before anybody knew anything but the names of things
to distinguish them from the angels
and life was too vital to need an explanation.
As you go to write
you can take all your dark energy
and intensifying it
by letting it empower you
bend space into a gravitational eye
that gives you a deep insight into
how even a blackhole can be creative.
How what's been left out of the shadows and lights
says as much as that which was included.
Who you are not
is just as much of an artist
as the one who signs the painting.
And don't think you can do things by half measures
one foot in the boat
and one foot on the shore.
Talent knows the tear
but genius knows what hurt
the feelings of the watershed that let it fall.
It's the same in art poetry love enlightenment life.
You've got to let a mask every now and again
wear your face just to play fair
and see how things look from the inside out.
You've got to let the fireflies
make up stories about the stars
that haven't got anything to do with shepherds.
You got to be free enough
to let the world be all kinds of things it isn't.
You can only hex yourself
by taking a voodoo doll out of the arms
of a sleeping child
like the new moon out of the arms of the old
because you deny the darkness within you
its return to innocence
and try to separate the roses from the thorns.
Living your life
as if you were always
applying yourself to the world
like the task of the business at hand
is as destructive
as trying to pry the petals of a flower open
with a crowbar
because you haven't got the time to wait.
Paradise is effortless.
It doesn't have a gate.
It doesn't have a custodian.
It doesn't maintain a teacher.
Adam was born knowing the names of things.
Not how to keep books
on the comings and goings
of the saints and the miscreants.
The first lie out of a tempter's mouth
is to ask Eve if she believes
she's worthy of the truth
as if it were something that could be acquired
without her.
There's more innocence
in running the risk of being left out
than there usually is among the deluded
who play it safe by dissing their doubt
to be included.
You've got to take your church your mosque
your zendo your synagogue off at the door
as if they were hats and shoes
when you enter a holy place
or you'll track the world in
like starmud at your heels
and desecrate it with religion.
And this is as true of Druidic birchgroves
in an abandoned Westport field
with the wild geese flying overhead
just as the stars are coming out
as it is of a poet climbing burning ladders
up to his beloved
as if every rung were the vertical threshold
of a mutable transformation
that estranges and illuminates her face like water
as it changes his eyes.
Don't add your feather of flame to the fire
like the flightplan of a faint-hearted phoenix
with ambulances standing by
in case things get out of hand
but light yourself up like a Buddhist monk in Vietnam
or a filial vegetable seller in the souks of Tunisia
who set the Middle East on fire
and consume yourself wholly
until there's nothing left of the geni but the lamp.
When you let the way come to the end of you
how can you say you're lost?
That's where your freedom begins.
When the object of your quest
can't find anyone to look for it
and there's no one there to know,
King Lear writes Shakespeare.
David sculpts Michelangelo.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Practical Uses Of Poetry

Not to be practical, not
to mean, be, do,
no more than the wind
to insist upon itself, to
move like the wind,
like a disembodied intelligence
over the mindfields
practicing the twin disciplines
of light and rain,
scattering the mystic pollen
of intuitive seeds
that bloom like roseate fire
in the shadowless gardens of the abyss
arranging the cosmos like a wild bouquet
in the blood vase of the human heart.
To remind us
we're not fireflies or stars
stuck on a chromosome
of intellectual flypaper,
a buzzing that will stop,
but a passion of native iron
in the arms of alien oxygen,
urged into creative consummation
by carbon.
Free as water, free as God
the night she put the universe on
like make-up
to attend to the beginning of everything
with a cosmic efflorescence of fireworks,
to speak for the stones, the stars, the trees,
to say them into being,
to say us, to whisper us
into the enormity of her solitude,
the inconceivability of her darkness,
a secret she couldn't keep anymore.
Experience is a child playing,
not function, not a job, not a career.
What's practical about singing alone
because the mysterious nightbird
has come like a blossom of joy
to the bough of the tree in winter?
Or must dancing have a use,
music be enchained to the stone ear of utility?
Bleeding isn't very practical either
but how would you ever know
you were a rose scarred by your own thorns
if you didn't?
Sooner renounce the sweetness
of the star-flavoured summer night air
or teach the wind a compass and a map,
the sky to consult a control tower
than try to grind the stars of poetry
with a stone and an ox
into a function and a fee.
The wages of poetry are always a gift
that takes the recipient by surprise
with the beauty of its subtlety
and a coin as true as the moon.
Who asks to be paid
to dance alone with God?
And even the abyss
has provided you with a world
like a passport to anywhere you want to go.
Among the birds and the leaves
flowing along with this pilgrimage of stars
to shrines that are older than knowing,
if the sun or the moon
should open your voice like a flower
in the deep woods
to hear you singing in the light,
and you are urged into poetry
through a gate as open as the cosmos,
and you discover colours have echoes
and the notes of your song
are a palette of gardens,
and everything you paint with your picture-music
is the portrait of someone you're becoming
until you look like everyone
from the inside out,
every passion
the longing of a planet
to burn with life,
and the deepest watershed of your humanity
is itself
the fountain
where the goddess drinks from her own reflection,
and you understand
that the word in the morning
is the word at the end of the day,
and that the life that adorns your body within
is the wine of the worlds
in a cup of clay
encrusted with stars
and you are the delirium the dream seeks,
the lightning and lucidity of the dark sage
your roots consult like a storm,
would you then look upon the first crescent of the moon
and try to fix it to a plough,
would you look forever
into the wells of now
like the eyes of a lover
who combs out the tresses of the willow like the wind
as if he played the whole of the night
on the blue guitar of your heart,
would you renounce the music as impractical?
To walk through this world aware,
with a spear of moonlight through your heart
like a poet, to feel
everything a human can feel
and have the courage and the art
to sing
the joys and sorrows,
the gardens and intimate hells alike
with compassion and understanding,
even when you often don't understand
because the shadow of the world
eclipses your eyes,
or the windows are saturated with pain,
to be able to do that, to be that
is beyond assessing
because there is no intention to life
or the running of the river
or the unspooling of a poem
that conceives of its seeing as progress.
What the eye writes
on these pages of percipient sky
that bring the world to a focus in us
is not a reality in advance
of the dream that shadows it.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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White Void For The Moment, Quiescent as Paper and Canvas

White void for the moment, quiescent as paper and canvas,
a little white square in the middle of my heart
as a psychologist once said, startled and wide-eyed,
and there's no one there, as if I were the simplest
of impossibilities. Could be. But who would be there
to know what it might make a difference to, or care?
Some purposes fulfill themselves or maybe
the quality of peace goes white in the winter
as it does in the dove, so as not to attract
undue attention to itself in a snow storm of poems.

Or maybe, sooner or later, even reality
comes to realize its suprasensual ground of being
is misconceptualized from a word or a name
that has the creative power of one of the shapeshifting lords
of the dead metaphors that get brought back to life
with no idea of where they've been in the meantime.

All of genesis in the first word, the to logos,
the whole table of contents of the imagination, now and to come,
the alpha and omega like the short and long vowels
of the sacred syllables of picture music,
apple bloom playing the dead branches of its leafless violins,
and the grammar of a living medium of animal images
and the shamans who entered into their visionary agony
painted on the blackboards of our native skull caves
where we worshipped bears dressed in the hides of humans.

The happy beginnings quit and the hard-line endings go on forever.
I'm back here at Long Bay, like the long story
of a lifemask that's been passing itself off as me for light years
sitting alone around a daylily of fire
giving a private lapdance to the wind,
scattering stars and leaves and smoke around
all over the place, as if it were looking for something it lost
in a panic to retrieve it from the passage of the mindstream
like time unravelling the seams of all things
unstitching the constellations like the wavelengths
of the enfeebled threads that kept our wounds together
long enough to heal into the crude ores
of terraformed scar tissue that might smoulder
like a starmap of brown stars over the course of time,
even when it's been mined out like the open pits of the moon,
no light bulbs in the sockets of an empty skull
but never shines the way its eyes used to
when you could look through them
like reflecting telescopes into the sidereal splendours of the soul.
Before it discovered the unbearable solitude
in the nightfall of pain, and the white apparition
that comes like the silence of a nurse in soft shoes
to sow its mouth shut to keep the others
from waking up on the night ward from their dreams
to discover like a wild rose at the end of summer
that everything is terminal, our departures and arrivals,
our exits and entrances alike. That there's a holy war of one
deep in the heart, win, lose, or draw, day and night
that goes on without respite that even for survival
the crazy wisdom of a compassionate warrior will not fight,
our human divinity not something to be won,
but a birthright, a square of light like a faceless stamp
on a loveletter that melts like a snowflake
as soon as it alights like a star on the furnace of the heart
and the ghosts of our tears return like rivers
to the oceanic awareness of the bays
we sit beside listening to the spiritual white noise
of the cosmic events, in bliss and sorrow,
we once lived through like the mirages and muses
of a tomorrow that came too late to celebrate our absence.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Hidden Jewels In The Ashes Skinless As Light

Hidden jewels in the ashes skinless as light.
It's a big place when you only see it through your eyes,
but see it through your heart, and even
your deepest tears are a wound shy
of the bell of silence that overturns the fountainmouths
of even the most efflorescent of the arts
so many paint on their windows so as not to see it.
It's crucial to be a sincere sword in any holy war,
but how rare it is to meet anyone with
the courage of their clarity to peer beyond that
and look up at the stars from a dark, open field
and see, despite the way the light shatters like chandeliers,
we're not living in a world of broken mirrors.

You can look into the eyes of the dragon
that weeps like rain. You can feel compassion
for flying reptiles and then you can kneel
at the end of the futon in front of the beaming window
and add your own ray of light as if your were humanizing
prismatic power mandalas through an antique kaleidoscope
by adding your eyes to the sand painting the next moment
is going to be erased at the zenith of fulfilment
and all the apple bloom like the circus tents
of the enlightened clouds and clowns,
are going to blow away, as if time weren't
just the younger sister of space, but a kind
of sad, lyrical wind as well that keeps
shedding our lifemasks like the petals
of the wild roses and the wings of the flying ants,
as autumn comes looking for the maple keys
that could unburden your heart and sweeten your sleep
like a windfall of the fruits of life that replace it all
with a better return journey than when you went into exile.

Mentored by suffering the improvised myths of our origin,
keeping our third eye on the twists and turns
of the washboard road we're driving home on,
not to be surprised about what's around the next bend
or the rock like a hidden chip on a soft shoulder
waiting to be knocked off, wondering if life
has just provided you the occasion
to love again as inexhaustibly as you once did,
as if someone's just uncovered you like a hidden housewell
or a buried telescope in a graveyard of famous constellations
with an afterlife of born again stars, you turn a corner,
bemused to be alive, as if you'd forgotten the feeling,
and your truly surprised, startled even, when you look to your left
that there's a field, half-returned to the bush, beyond a cedar rail fence
patched by lichens that look like the seas of the moon
eclipsing their wounds as if time really could heal all things,
and the last of the common mullein were flowering
out of an urgent dream just before dusk, and the light,
I swear the light was making making everything
glow like effulgent honey, as the leaves on the trees
were on the verge of burning, and the goldenrod
and the purple loosestrife stood out like complementary colours,
mutually enhancing hot spots on the wheel of birth and death,
and the star clusters of New England asters
and blue chicory blooming by the side of the road
like floral prototypes of the new starmaps as the night comes on,
each as original as the last, and you're mystically entranced
even in passage, of how reality, even in the midst
of its dissolution, can sometimes take your breath away
with the beauty that's immanent within us all revealed
spontaneously like a stranger at the open gate
swinging on its hinges of hello and good-bye
that I took as a sign this was always the right path to be on
after all these light years of driving through the dark on my own.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Want To Make A Contribution

I want to make a contribution.
I want to leave something on the stairs of the temple
in the dead of the night and steal away like a shadow,
hoping my small gift of a gift is well-received.
That the stars don't think they're wasting their light
to shine down upon it. Nor the wind resent the seeds it carries.
Fifty years of poetry. Painting the picture-music
the darkness pours into my heart and my heart conveys to my ears.
I can taste thousands of wildflowers like eyes in my blood.
I can taste the homelessness of the rogue stars in my tears,
and pull the wounded swords I cull like thorns of the rose
from the stone of my brain that fell in the farmer's field
like a rock through the window of the abyss
and make it clear as Merlin locked in his tower of glass,
that the stars only look fixed from a distance,
up close and intimate as atoms they're in a frenzy of creation
like a cloud of gnats in the last rapture of the sunset
radioactive with the bliss of being alive to know this.
That we're all longing for home in the lap of an expansive awareness
that threw the starmaps away the moment we were born
into the radiance of things that let go of the light
as if they knew something they just couldn't keep to themselves
without doing great injury to the flowers of life
that space was mind, and time was its emotional life
and as the dark mother said to her last incarnation
as it was stepping through the doorway into a stranger,
we're just going to wing it from here on end.

I want to be a strong storm tree twisted and bent by the wind
like the last letter of a sacred alphabet with no alpha or omega
to mark where things begin and end like death in life.
And wind up like a windfall of sweet fruit without end.
I want to make something of my falling, I want to honour
the table I eat at like iron and carbon and oxygen
by bringing something back for what I have received
without asking, or making a decision when I was not aware
of some unimaginable god that holds me personally responsible for it.
What a sleight to humans everywhere matter enjoins them
in a common labour to resonate so perfectly with the light
that lucidity isn't the exclusive property of the unknown,
and just because it's dark, the new moon of the black swan
shedding the feathers of the white, doesn't mean, it's not enlightened.

Though I come like a bird to a windowsill, though I pass
like a star from the window, though I sing of death
on the green bough, though I sing of life on the dead,
though I have been a dragon, a kitten, and a bee,
though I have floundered in sorrows like a lifeboat
way over my head, and lived through starless nights of fear
pulled down like executioners hoods over my eyes,
waiting to see what the morning brings that's vital,
I have not trafficked with my life like a pimp in a flower bed.
I have endured whatever excruciating transfigurations
I've ever had to go through, naked as a knife of light
unsheathed from the ore of this body that can no more
be cast off on the slag heap, than my spirit can paint in blood
a mural of all the changes we've been through like stars and mud.

I want to deepen the roots of the flowering night.
I want to beseech the poppies with my eyes
for more luminous experiences of cadmium red light
for more mystery among the stars than even they're aware of,
for more moons in the apple, more suns in the bread,
for more crazy wisdom than there is the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
I want to show the pine-cones they're pagodas as well
and point out where the mourning doves nest under their eyelids
and the shamans dwell in the upper branches of their evergreens
waiting to see if down will come cradle, baby and all,
or the next ascent is a red-tailed hawk at liberty
to fall upon whatever it likes, raising the snake of the lowest
up into the mystic delirium of the highest
to feather its scales in boas of oxymoronic light.

I want to intensify the dark until people can find
their way home by it, stars that broke into themselves
like morning glory tangled in an old bicycle wheel.
A pine-cone would do, a locket of sky, a piece of straw,
I could offer anything I wanted to, all those nests and pockets
I made in my pillow for years like a cat with a catcher's mitt
trying to find the perfect spot for its nightmare to sleep.
Or any one of a hundred cornerstones that were never built upon
or were torn down before the first brick laid.
Or I could lay my life down like a grain of wheat
among millions, at the feet of a silo so immaculately empty
it's never needed a single one of us, or all the animals
that bleated and bellowed and bled upon the earth
because we started drinking blood long before
we turned to bread like a better body to sacrifice.
Or my eyes like little thumb-drives of everything they've seen.

A gift of a gift as was given to me without a giver,
the ashes of a dead butterfly on a pyre of autumn leaves,
without ritual, celestial spin, I just want to come by myself
like a human in confusion we make the labour of our lives
as if I were stepping out of the trees like a white-tailed buck
come down to the river to drink from the moonlight
and add my reflection to the water that gave it to me,
with my head bowed toward the earth like a broken branch
heavy with the scarred fruits of life that have sweetened
like the moon over the years, poems I can recite by heart,
like the names of the stars and the flowers and the birds
and the ghosts of all those sad, passionate women who
tried so hard to be happy their tears clung like eyes
to the mystery of the windows they kept looking through
as if they were resilvering the mirrors of old telescopes
with the dew of a morning from a long time ago
witching in the dark for stars to explain their loss.

I want to bring a word that's been so deeply hidden in the open
like the flower of a rootless tree, it's got no colour of its own,
no seed, no leaf, no humming bird or bee, the tuning fork
of the nightbird, but no song, no honey, no nectar,
no likeness anywhere to compare it with, demonic or benign,
no meaning no mouth has ever wrapped itself around
like the atmosphere of a habitable planet, though the wind has tried,
a word so indelibly original it can't be washed out
like the whisper of a watercolour in the ear of a solar flare,
a word so private it gets said over the graves of the sacred syllables
that died in the mouths of men like the names of their gods,
not a prayer, not a mantra, not the shriek of a war-cry,
not a curse, not a blessing, not the answer to anything,
and I want to say the unsayable so unsayably free of veils
no junkie in the snakepit of a burning spoon, no lover
thawing virgin watersheds in the nunnery of Madame Moon
has ever stood so naked in their own eyes
even the emptiness inside felt overdressed for the occasion.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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