En.Citatepedia^®.ro

By The Time You Say It

By the time you say it, you're a bridge beyond the last river of your lament.
Is there meaning in this, content? Emerging
from this cold oceanic reflection, how good
to wrap the sky around you like a blue woolen robe warmed by a fire,
your lungs two bag-ladies sorting through the trash
of your denuded coffin for any rumour of green.
A back-alley dog sniffs at your limp smile beside a broken wineglass.
Your passions turn into mouths and eat you; your heart
mistakes itself for the apple on the tree of knowledge
and dreads the approach of Eve. Today, for example, over coffee on Gore St.
(just so the peasants don't storm the moat again,
thinking we don't know where we're at)
I heard you wondering why the moon always ends in et cetera.
Just to distract you from gnashing your teeth in the void
and sticking your flavourless gum messiah
to the underside of the flat earth, I showed you a picture of the wind's face
I painted under an overpass on primeval concrete.
A fascist restauranteur enraged by the ulcers on his greed
preached his disease to an unwilling congregation of tables
and jackaled our money away to the squat god of his digital scripture.

Fascinated and hurt, you surveyed the distant puppet-masters
of your own hormonal attachments assemble and reassemble
like constellations at a crossroads and then
got up to give your sad friend an embrace on her birthday,
fingerprinting your own sorrow with someone else's hand. The albino sun
high above, opening doors and burning thresholds, was proud of you
as I liberated another orphanage in your honour.
People on wheels went by, more nonsensical than this watershed of pain
that pushes up a mad flower of poetry
through the startled soil of an intimate, unknown planet
hanging from the first crescent of the moon like a dropp of water
on a blade of radiant star-grass. You. Above the turmoil
of your blood-weather. And now the vast night
crowds into the asylum of my ancient, weeping windows
and the lamps go on like recovering suicides, their light
experimenting with brown-out dosages of prozac
like something electrical trying to live. Alone again on the deck
of an ark of phantoms beached by the flood
on this brutal world-mountain, my field of vision
is heaped with the skulls and skeletons of warrior dragons
who died true to a door that never opened. And if you listen hard enough
you can hear a secret priesthood of serpents
singing the melancholic lyrics of their eerie toxins in lethal shrines
under the foundation-stones of untenable temples
abandoned to a slum of birds, fractured stairs and pillars
a crusade of minerals on their way home, liberated by an infidel.

Is it continuous or do we make it so; the last fifty years of my life
devoted like a lover to the strange face in the moonlight
that beckons me deeper and deeper into her shining as if I were no more
than a ray of her manifestation, each feeling moment
whole to the furthest star, every thought
sufficient as fire, quiescent, an event of fabulous proportions. It's true
things change and change is a clock without hands.
Here now in the jewelled fish nets of satiated gods
that trawl the mind-sea for luminous, translucent fish
that have schooled into vagrant poems
for a gesture of provisional expression
timeless as now, I stop and bend like light to show you
how the black water-lilies are night mirrors
returning your eyes like water to the river. And yet,
most astounding of all, there is neither you nor I to witness it,
nor anything that swims like the language of a lost people
through these imagined depths, not even the gust of a god
over the stillness of the waves. Consciousness is the shadow of a living intelligence
whose awareness and being are purposeless flower and star,
all the worlds in every directionless direction
resplendent in the heart of a single atom, dust kicked up
by a child dancing alone in a dusky summer lane
with the scintillant gnats and fairies
whose lives are neither brief nor long, born or perishing.

Here, by this road of ghosts, touched by a wing,
I offer you this expansive bouquet of galaxies, endless dancers
wheeling joy into joy like love into bread. Do you see?
Nothing approaches nothing and zero gets up to dance.
There is nowhere that isn't a tree, no moment
that isn't the whole of space embracing it, everything in this event
already achieved. Why grieve then as if there were holes in the world
when everything you fall into, someone's else's face,
the violet oceans of an orchid heart, this trance of enlightened play
is nothing more than your own footprint on an Arab moon
full of intoxicated rain. Gently, I lay your heavy head
upon the doorsill of your lover and for the moment, an elder of the wind,
whisper nightbirds of ecstatic seeing
into your abundant emptiness. The point is
that there is no point that isn't already the whole of the radiant point
drawing long caravans, burdened with gifts for a bride,
out of the dream deserts of her lostness and longing
like a star dictating love poems to a viper-scribe in the sand. Just look
at the labour of these fools who contrive a hovel out of a palace
and consult their blood like mud at the mirage of an oasis
for fishtracks. Here, I'll sing it again on a page of water
because you are more beautiful and intelligent than the ones
who stand at the gate and swear by dawn
the light shall not pass, because your suffering is transcendence,
the original home of the many who make one face without flaw,
because I am drunk on the whiskey-fire of autumn leaves
even as the spring tunes its green harps to the high-pitched valley hearts
of ascending birds, every one a nugget of sun panned
from the empty pockets of a generous dawn,
because great sleepwalking moons of faith
are shedding your eyelids like skies and rose petals
releasing mysterious fragrances of time
in the narrow alleys of medieval Bombay where blue-white stars
feed their growing families by cobbling their tongues
like new leather fixed with nails of light
to the worn-out sandals of pilgrim gods on the Perfume Trail,
because even though there is suffering, ignorance, folly and greed,
and death enough to glut any neon highway vacancy,
and hitch-hiking saviours galore to lie down with in darkness
and rise in the light on magic-finger mattresses,
because there is no less of your whole celestial orchard
in the butterfly that lands on a dead branch
like one of your smiles
than there is in all the thundering worlds
that fall like windfall apples or wild horses cantering through the night,
because most people's seeing is a kind of love blind to music
and you are rarer than a radioactive strawberry in that regard,
the divergent snake-roads of your witching-wands, violins of water,
and because your great insight grows a secret heart within the heart
of an embryo word and nudges it into flight,
the ripening celebration in the heart of a dazzled bird
hurled from a thousand nests like rice from a begging bowl
to express the joy she is
at the fathomless wedding of bride and water, drunkard and unknowing wine,
I'll lift my voice again to you and sing.

A black snake swims across the leprous face of the moon
unwrapping her bandages on the water like music
to reveal her concealed beauty to no one.
Isis and the Sphinx cry out like loons.
A singing water-lily offers its severed head on a prophetic platter
to the breeze of a dancing girl, mistress of veils,
who toys with the weakness of kings.
On the slightest tongue of the rain, a feast of maggots and stars.

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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I Have Become My Own Season

I have become my own season
living through these renewable eras of you
that come and go
like the fragrances of passing stars
that sometimes stop by the gate
to talk about the garden blooming late.
Some flowers wait for the moon to open,
to throw their arms around space
as if they could encompass everything
in the brief embrace of their petals,
and their seeing is one eye under multiple eyelids
as they burn like jewels in the night
to keep it all shining and bright.
But I've worn out the elbows
of my insatiable longing
on the windowsills of a different insight.
Saddened by the distance, the time, the circumstances,
delinquent desires still hanging out their shingles
like green apples on a dead branch in winter,
withering like the inconsolable eyes of old men
who have died like sons
and now must die like fathers,
mine is the darker radiance
of the faint halo of light
around a black hole
that summons everything
down into it like the sea
sitting below its own salt
at a stranger's table.
You can't look into
the black mirrors in my house
with your eyes open
because they only reflect
what's on the back of your eyelids
where the only light is your own
and you are the road
and the lantern you go by
and everything you feel and think and imagine
is your own true face without skin
not the gate between outside and in.
How could I ever recognize you
in these dark spaces
if it weren't for the trees
and the stars and the moon
and the night stream that runs through me
like a lifeline on the palm of my hand
down from the mountains
in a rush of diamonds and gold
that pour out like the pent-up emotions
of a sword that's just been pulled from a stone?
And how hugely alone the night is
when you love someone as they are
and you realize without effort
that if you hold them a moment in their transience
you hold them like a star in a locket of water
that tastes like the past.
There are people
like treebound barrels of rain
and then there are people like me
who leak out of their lives
like radioactive water
that couldn't pool the pain
long enough to stop the meltdown
long enough to cool the brain,
long enough to let it kill me.
Now in the darkness
seeded with the dust of black dwarfs
trying to clench a fist of coal into diamonds
my auroras are weeping neon dew
like a cheap enlightenment
all over the watercolours of dawn.
And I'm wondering
what kind of an afterlife is this
that I might have foregone
if I were indifferent
to how my solitude deranges me
like a lost continent
wandering through its own mindscapes
like an extinguished star
that wants to make up
just for one luminous moment
a constellation of its own
that doesn't wait upon anyone's eyes
for the themes of its seeing.
And though the skies have changed
like the slides of childhood dreams
with every blink of an eyelid
whenever night approaches me
and asks to sit by my fire
and let the flames and the smoke
of our past lives
speak for the both of us
I look up to give my eyes
like two drops of water
back to their oceanic immensities
and it's always unattainably you
that is shining
like a woman in the window
of a secret house of the zodiac
far off the beaten path
that leads everywhere like a firefly.
And your stars speak to me
as if my flesh were light again
and my heart
that bumps its way through the dark
already a lamp beyond
the Lazarus of wax
that's buried in his own lucidities
like a candle I left for dead.

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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What Do We Know?

for Simon and Samantha

What do we know, what does all our knowledge amount to
in these infinite spaces of ours, within and without,
if not less than nothing, perhaps a single hair
in the endless vastness of these abysmal depths
that keep on blooming within us black rose after black rose,
moon-face after sun-face?
And in these realms of transformation
where everything is once, once only for everything,
no second thought, no second person, no witness
or revision, no retrieval once held like water or sand in our hands,
and gone, implacably, purely, time flowing into time;
in this dream without bridges, what
does all our feeling, all the ore we haul up out of our secret heart-mines
and refine in the fires of our desires and longings
over the long labour of a lifetime amount to
if not the flaring of a match in aeonic fathoms of darkness?
Isn’t this life, for all that we say in silence and words, unsayable?
And when we reach for one another, strange auroras
of light and love coursing through our blood
like the mystical horses that graze in the pastures of the moon,
don’t our hands always turn into water
and the radiance that filled the empty bag of our hearts
like August sugars in an apple orchard
leak out of our exaltations,
a refugee line of dead stars pouring out of a defeated country,
sand from a cracked hourglass?
What can we hold here of one another,
even if we become the high priest of the holiness
that shines in the shrines of another’s eyes; even if
we lay our lives down like a patched robe of blood
on the stairs of the temple, small religions to one another
and walk naked and unmasked down the world mountain
back to the crude hovel of a valley heart
that has spent itself completely; what have we achieved
that is anything more than melting snow and mountain streams
washing themselves clean of themselves?
We can whisper like the sea in another’s ear
vows of forever that are written in water by the wind;
or under the closed eyelids of our private skies,
drunk on the dream-wine, replace all our own most intimate stars
with the bright constellations of another’s being
to live in one house of fate together, abdicating our own
like a northern crown. We can do all this and more, so adept
have we become in our grasping and rejecting,
so ingeniously desperate have we grown over the millennia
at weaving moonlight on the black waters of the lake
into the most elaborate tapestries of delusion,
or hiving sunlight out of wildflowers into white gold
to marry a world that keeps slipping out of our immaculate rings
into a blind, mute night so remote it eludes
even its own shadows and echoes. Constantly
offering ourselves like gifts to love, life, destiny, leaves on the wind,
risking annihilation and immaculate ashes,
why do we keep on waking up, returned to ourselves,
address unknown, slumped across own lonely thresholds?
If the world today, if this little wink of eternity
seems so often like a small black match-head
curled into the charred monk of a question-mark
that has swallowed the dancing flame of its own answer;
if people and events seem vicious, greedy, and ignorant,
junkyard dogs posted around heaps of corpses and cars,
the sprawl and scrawl of wreckage and disappointment,
the litter of flies on a winter windowsill
that exhausted themselves against the ice and glass,
looking for an opening; what is it all,
the violence, the drugs, the indifference, the subtle poisons,
the corporate leeches, if not the desecration
of the unattainable, acid-rain hissing on the rose-fire,
the obscenity of human lovelessness?
And yet, even in the midst of such obvious defeat,
crippled by angels and demons alike, we go on longing
to touch and be touched, dry seas on the moon
waiting, how long, how long now, for the return of even so much
as a single dropp of all the rivers we’ve lost, we go on
yearning to embrace o not just
the fragile vase of her body crammed with flowers,
or the pillar of his, adorned by passionate torches,
but the mystery of the night and the slumped hills
disappearing into the bird-voice of the distance, we go on
aching to have all of it poured insanely into us
like closet drunkards chugging the stars. No feet, still,
we’ll crawl down the coal-road on all fours for a taste of flowing diamond; blind,
yet we’ll paint worlds on the back of our eyelids
and shed them like the petals of peonies
just for a glimpse of the ineffable beloved
always disappearing around the corners of our seeing.
Excruciating razors of pain might slash us open again and again,
clear skies and all their unread, lyrical scriptures
be run through a paper-shredder in hasty evacuations of the heart,
and yet even in the grave, the green leaf of a phoenix wing
stirs, unknowingly, the ashes, so relentlessly are we infused
with this strange and marvelous hunger to love.
It’s easy enough after all these years and weddings for us
to turn the waters of being into wine, but how
to turn the wine into us so that we are always drunk on joy,
the heart an inexhaustible fountain-mouth full of singing birds
because we know, because we have always known, even
before we were born, even before the mind made the body
and we arrayed ourselves as the world,
as rivers, stars, stones and trees, that our very being, every action
and agency of our lives, every breath, every cell,
and the small, silent voice that assents within,
that offers its worldless yes to another, is love, is reality, is
the mountain that makes the valley
it falls from itself to fill. Immersed in love,
we go looking for love with our hands our heads our hearts on fire,
bewailing the futility of the looking, the finding, the losing,
pilgrim waves wandering across an infinite sea of love,
we keep breaking on alien shores in our search for love
only to be drawn back into love. Fish in water
and yet we go on crying out of thirst. How amazing!
Under the stones of ourselves, diamonds; warm rivers of gold,
and even in the clashing of our hardened hearts,
a spark, a firefly, a hundred million stars of love released
like the fragrance of a single flower, or hidden bird-song on a green bough,
love calling out to love so unfailingly
that the whole of the world to the furthest star
is created anew in every second by the instantaneous answering.
That’s what we are, have been, since before
the beginningless beginning of all things, love
revealing itself to itself in the perfection of its own inseparable being,
that’s our original face, our original home, the light-seed
of this orchard world. Do you understand?
This world is so completely, absolutely, nothing but love
that even the darkest sky bends down to kiss the dawn on the forehead,
and not an atom moves in space
but moves burning through the fires of love at the behest of love.
Why look for what you already are; why, impossibly, try
to scoop the moon’s reflection from the water,
hoping to drink immeasurably from love’s elusive madness
when you are already the goblet and the wine, the grape and the vine?
Just this once, turn the light around, and look inside yourselves
as if you were an unmarked box, a secret gift
left on the doorstep in the night by an intimate stranger
and discover for yourself the origin without end
of all your looking. Without thinking, without reasoning
or the torment of why, open yourself up like an orphan’s empty hand
and discover the dark, priceless, living jewel of love
whose mysterious shining has always been the you that is looked for
and the you that has done the looking, love
looking into its own eyes like a star
looking into a flower, or an echo returning to the voice on the branch
that gave birth to it, or here, today,
at this mingling of veils and waters
where love whispers Sam and Simon answers out of the silence, yes,
and soon we’ll all be out dancing together, married to each other unsayably,
ten thousand moons in ten thousand windows,
ten thousand brides of light
in ten thousand grooms of dew
joyfully beyond denial and affirmation
in ten thousand wall-less rooms of light
rippling out through this endless summer night
like the pulse of a single heart, a single jump of the fish,
a small drum of blood beating out in the bright vacancy, dark abundance
of these vast vivid spaces:
not two. not two. not two. not two.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sometimes Think

Sometimes think I'm always
a life too late
to catch up to my own
walking away weary of waiting for me.
Or I'm a star too far ahead of my own shining
and that's why it's always dark.
I know the agony
in the stones of an abandoned bridge
that shoulders the world for nothing,
upholds nothing but its own mass
and waits for things to pass.
And even when I fall into the river
to flow along with my own mindstream
without consulting the leaves like maps
I still can't get the moon off my back.
Look at all these orchards
littered along my banks
from the tent of a single blossom.
And there are nights
when I can smell snake on the wind
as if everything were about to happen again
and I still haven't milked the fangs of the moon
for an antidote to the pain
or put out the third eye
of the irrational surveillance camera
that oversees the sorrows of the insane
when it's full.
I like my perfections whole enough
to include what is not
and if I am immoderately empty
it's so I can make space for the world
like the blood-sea of the rose
that flows out of nothing
into tides that shed their waves
like the eyelids, brides and petals
of a human heart.
My breath is silver.
My breath is gold
I've mined from the mystic mountain
that got in my way
whenever I tried to cross
the valley threshold.
I had to evaporate to rise to the top;
I had to get myself together like a cloud
to transform my own delusions
into a glimpse of the other side
that didn't take a scapegoat for a guide.
Now space is my only familiar
and the being behind the face
of who I was a moment ago
is just another snake in the furnace
of this star that sheds my skin like fire.
Streams of insight
that are not predicated like mirages
on deserts of thought
trying to spin themselves
into mirrors and silks of glass
like a new religion
sweeping the world like sand
advance the gardens
of the water-givers underground
who teach the flowers how to bloom
and drown like stars
in the infinite opening of their eyes.
And I've mauled the nets of the constellations
like a man in the morning
walking through a high field
radiant with spiderwebs
and if there's anything
left hanging in the wardrobe
that used to house my masks and cloaks
they're veils I've torn from the light
to better see into my darkness.
I'm still looking
but nothing has appeared yet
and no sleight of mind
that's ever mastered me
has ever taught me how
to realize the inconceivable
except in the proportions of a human
whose mere existence is utterly unbelievable
whenever I turn the light around
and discover the dispersing stars
I have followed so long and far
into the unborn darkness where I begin
shining within.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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In You

In you I come to the end of roads,
and an alphabet of burning wings
falls from an indigo sky
like meteors trying to write
the unsayable in a slash of light,
in a language of luminous scars
the night beatifies with mystic knowledge
that wants to name you
so deeply in thresholds and stars
the charged silence
is giving birth to an indelible mouth,
a doorway of blood,
an ancient grammar of fire
the wind puts on like a robe
to scry the darkness for a voice
that could fill the goblets
of the moon's dead seas
with the wine of a radiant wound,
so much within me
already the tongue of a bell
that can taste you like blackberries.
The whole of you
in every single dropp of your eyes,
you are the black swan
of the eclipse that rares its reflection in water,
the dark orchid in the shadow of the dragon
that sways like a bell in the night,
even your absence a shape of cherishing,
a harvest of shadows beyond the light
of the lamp that burns for you.
Within the deepest abyss of myself
where the heart stands alone
like a single black pillar
in the twilight wasteland of the world,
a mysterious temple to the ultimacy
of having been here once
to suffer the passage of form and time,
everything a gesture of space
that thaws back into itself,
I have written your name
in the hourglass of my blood
like a whisper of secret ink
that once voiced the light to be
and shook the stars like wheat
out of its blind abundance
and will be remembered forever
as the first intimacy of the sea,
and there is the rumour
of a dream in the air,
the fragrance of an approach,
that out of an ocean of light
the tide will embody a woman
like the shore of an island
littered with fingertips and kisses
enmeshed like galaxies and starfish
in the exhalation of her veils
and our lips will meet like archers,
and our bodies will sing like arrows
sunk like orchards through the heart
and long after the last flame of life is shed,
the night will silence the birds
in the groves where we bled like poppies
to open the gates of the mystery
like keys and rain, or the rosary of black pearls
that chants its prayers to the night
like the slow alarm of autumn geese
in the eyes of a human face.
I try to say what can't be said,
pouring my spirit
into the wineskin of every word,
but my heart is a larger apple
than the bough of my voice can bear,
and the silence
that would erect temples everywhere like flowers
spun from the auroral silks of my soul
and perfume the air with the pollen of sacred fireflies,
every emotion a priest with a shaven head
to honour the moon
climbing the stairwell within me
of a million horizons at once
in every breathless step,
falls away behind me like the wake of a sinking ship
that lowers me into my coffin like a lifeboat
or a message in a bottle
that pleads like wine with the emptiness
for an alphabet that isn't in arrears to time
to say you to the night
in a lightning breath of life beyond
these elemental likenesses I carve
from a quarry of stars.
And I know I ask for immortal children
from a human womb,
and wide as my powers are
to exceed the sky with homing birds,
to adorn the dead branch with windows
that dazzle the roots of dawn,
I am the ashes of a black star in daylight,
a stone man with a chain for a tongue
when I try to swim like Atlantis
through the depths of your shining within
and the last word, the last life
to flash across my mind as I drown
again and again like a pulse
in the embrace of your beauty
is always the world as it is
before anything was said.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Something Said Softly

Something said softly in the night
like a tendril on a windowsill
tasting the moon, a whisper, a word
that walked in the light without
abandoning its shadow,
a phrase with wet wings
dreaming itself out of its chrysalis
not knowing whether it's a leaf or a dragonfly
until the whole tree wakes up beside it,
something sought but rarely said
saturated with the meaningless life of meaning
that could touch space like flesh
and make it feel the thrill of new eyes
running down its arm like tears.
And it's not that I want
to unsay the night or God
to define myself as a human,
and it's of little moment to me,
seed on the wind,
what worlds are born of my words,
what ends, what begins,
what comes of what I cannot say,
but I want to say something
with the savour of time in it
that's worth living for a little more each day
like a small tree rooted like a thought
in a crevasse of eternity,
greening the moon.
Late at night, in the darkness,
while the silence is off preserving something,
and all I can hear is your breath
off in the distance like an ocean,
I want to unpack my vagrant heart
like a patched guitar-case,
a grave-robber in a pyramid,
and attune my afterlife
to the key of this one
in such a way
I can play like a new star in Orion
to all the sad, beautiful fireflies of the moment
that hover over us like living constellations of our own
not bound to any paradigm of light
that can only be touched by a mountain of stone.
I want to paint something
that feels like the flower
that just brushed against your hand,
I want to be inspired by the mystic blue of midnight
like window glass fired in the kiln of a star
that has looked upon the suffering of humans for so long,
their atrocities and deprivations,
their terrors and wrecked joys,
compassion has turned it into an eye so clear
you can sip water from it like tears
that taste of the history of blood and wine
that danced alone like a vine at its own wedding
with a bride of rain that unveiled herself
like falling chandeliers.
Unfailingly, absurdly, obsessively human
in the shadow of thundering magnitudes
that feel like the extinctions of gods
that time has wheeled out
to the enormity of the gravepit
that limes every abyss of the heart
with the stars of a new universe,
I want to add one candle to the shining
in a folly of insight so illuminating
even the earliest galaxies
forever entering the darkness
on the threshold of their first shedding
could see it, something
so profoundly vernal and intimate
even I can believe in it.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Don't Cover Your Eyes

Don't cover your eyes when the stars begin to fall; don't
orphan your fire in a well. Your heart is not a museum of roses,
your love not a misdirected airdropp over a refugee camp.
Friend of these sidereal affinities we spread like table-cloths across space,
friend of these lonely silos in my eyes and this blood that breaks like bread,
still, you are the flower in the vase, impassioned, an urgent poppy.
All the blind librarians of the morning star agree
you are not who you say you are
when you show the shadows of authority your passport rainbow.
Sometimes the tongue of a forsaken seer dances like a drunk at a funeral
down the liberated allies of a sleeping ghetto
while the moon watches like a cat on a windowsill
high overhead. Shy bird feathered by your sudden flaring, your heart,
young and quick, darts easily from branch to branch
barely a presence behind the green jubilation
of a million silver leaves trembling with rain on the reborn tree.
Before the bird sings, we hear it. Before the star shines,
the night is fully enlightened. And home is always a bridge
where we wait to be rescued from hurling ourselves off
into our own desperate reflections. Let the fall save you.
You are the priestess in the shrine of mysterious apples,
sybil and empress of opulent oranges. No matter how many alphabets
enshroud the fairies in the legendary brilliance of ancient skies
and over the telephone cancel the sacred islands in their eyes,
your blood will bind them to this vital afterlife of now like fish
swimming through the flawed water palace
of a drowned engine. You can bet your lies on it;
your sorrows are not the face-paint of weeping clowns,
nor your natural humanity a moat around a zoo for dwindling dragons.
When you sprawl like a wave of wine across the living room floor,
unspooling the honey and gold of your body's flower-mine,
I see orchards in your guitar, wheat fire,
the landscape of a small, borderless country
trying to decide which of all its trees should form a government.
Compassionate zero, water your only foundation stone,
you string a harp between your fangs
between the unblooded crescents of the moon
and sink your music deep into the heart of your astounded prey.
Little killer, don't you know, little killer,
let me tell you,
the saints are crueler than the sinners, the virgins
cheaper than the whores, and reason in its nest of crows
a bird that never soars. Through dangerous doorways, under
lethal skies, the ghost dance of the blind tiger, the white faun
while the widows of light pawn their eyeless rings
in the brutal crucibles of dawn. You want some advice?
Only the great fools who plead for nothing
know all the words to the song.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Turn Out The Lights

I turn out the lights and lie down to sleep
and you open up within me like a lotus of fire
blooming in the darkness of a vast inner space
that has become my only skin, tattooed with stars
as I play solitaire with destiny, using your Tarot
of chameleonic constellations as a firing squad.

Little threads of joy and fear shudder through me,
revelation and lightning, fireflies going off,
the blasting caps of greater detonations yet to come,
and your face is before me, apparition and aurora,
the moon reflected on undulant water,
a jewel turning in the light of itself, blue eyes, full lips,
the blonde smoke of your hair on your cheek
disappearing somewhere as if a match had just been put out,
and your smile, your beautiful, wide, forgiving smile
that seems to flow from the warmest sugars
of an abundant heart; what dawn over a lake
has ever touched me silently like that?

One look at you and I am hurled into another more spiritual dawn
like a bird bewildered into singing by the strange joy
that threatens to consume him in the soaring radiance.
And though I cannot say you, you are the secret
I discern in the stars when they stop to whisper through the trees
to the bones of the holy man humbled on the hill
of his own insignificance; and then you are the only exaltation
that can raise him up again to shine above the night.

Always within me you summon like a bell; you
draw me out of myself like a genie torn from a lamp; my blood
heaves helplessly to the urgent clock of your tides,
teems with life and washes up on the shores
of mysterious realms where you are always the enchantress of the island;
what man or creature could I not become for you,
immersed as I am in the wine of your being? You are
the fullness of woman in the prime of her mystery, the vase of your body,
the shrine of a human divinity that generation after generation
inspires adoration from the brute
that comes, awed and shy of first fire, to lay pink tulips on the staircase,
grails and goblets gathered to be filled by the reeling honey
of your presence, the fire that burns without burning
and leaves even the wind love-sick and longing for ashes. Human,
you are five petals of fire; divine, one flower.

Break, then, if I must; in loving you, I'll break.
And should you never love me back and the air turn glass
and shatter
into a million splinters of emotion that settle at the bottom of the heart,
the broken wineglass, the crippled flower,
severed from its stem, or the moon,
scoured from its reflection on the eyeless river by clouds,
never know the laughter of your fountain, still
in every fractured piece of me
the whole of your face, in time and out, would shine
as it did in the dark before the light began. You are not a mirage
shimmering over vipers in these circumstantial sands
and I am not a candle in a hurricane. Though I love,
I know the world, its gardens and atrocities, its wounded doors
and urgent windows flowing with lace and longing.
It doesn't have much time for itself, busy as it is,
trying to hide the loss; it's looking for its eyes with its eyes,
its head with its head, its feet with its feet.

I've pulled the thorn from my heart, the worm from the rose,
the nail from my hand. I've gone mad and madder still,
looked up at hell out of the depths of my despair
and envied such exalted heights. And then it's all turned radiant
for no more reason than a dream, something nameless changes,
even as we plan a way into ourselves, or out,
suddenly an unknown light breaks through, and we have our eyes.

One moment of you, one firefly, in the vastness
I was falling through and galaxies ignited all around me;
the dead branch blossomed, the singing bird came
and the day was no longer a spoonful of ashes. Call it
what you will, pour it into any cup, plastic, crystal, or clay,
or drink it from your hands: it's still the wine, it's still the moon; it's still
always and only you that makes this confusion of stars and birds
in the treetops, this picture-music, this drunk dream, this tavern
that is an outcast's shrine to joy
raise a glass
to the sun in his blood that shines at midnight.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A Whole Galaxy Lights Up

A whole galaxy lights up for the sake of a single planet; for
the sake of a single flower, the entire earth turns itself
into a loom and weaves for a million years.
How many oceans have died to hang one dropp of water
at the tip of a blade of grass; and can you see in that blade
the untold dawns and sunsets that have risen and fallen like bread?
How many skies have bloomed and shed themselves
like the petals of blue roses
and how many birds have expired in their songs and wings
and fallen to earth like broken harps
to open up the space and voice within you? Have you
ever considered the endless generations of faces
that have come and gone, weeping themselves slowly into oblivion
like the crying glass of windows
just for the sake of one of your fleeting smiles;
or the billion nights that trembled in their dreams
for the colour of your eyes? And your blood
that is sweeter to you than any wine and floats
the boat of your heart down the rivers of its infinite flowing;
have you ever listened, deep within yourself, to the echo
of the hammers on the anvils of the aeons of volcanoes
that laboured like sacred smithies to pour and purify
all their skill and metal into your living iron? How are you not
in the least pore of your being
this miracle of so much? But tell me, you who can instantly travel
to the ends of the known universe and forever beyond
without leaving yourself, even
as you sit waiting for a bus, or brushing your hair;
what vastness of space and silence
has honed itself to a non-existent point
and entered like a gracious guest the tiny house of your bones and skin
and laid out all these thoughts and passions,
these clothes and jewels like gifts? And there
in the resplendency of the black mirror that illustrates your soul
and holds it up to you like the moon to the moon on midnight waters,
isn’t that the universe you’ve just pinned like a rose to your hair?
Beloved, I have lived ten thousand lifetimes
and discarded them like worn-out shoes,
fallen and risen from the dust of the road over and over again
just to make my way to this moment of you. Eternities have passed
and time itself has grown old and been forgotten
gods and civilizations, known and unknown
have worn away like stones like wildflowers since I first set
my vagrant heart on you, my every step, a grail, every breath,
Jerusalem, following you through the days and nights,
every sea, sky, and desert, your footprint, until I could bathe,
washed clean of myself and the journey
in the resurgent light of your beauty, that fountain
that has turned every atom of my being into a pilgrim
as if a million worlds went off in all directions like rays of light
or fingertips
to touch God’s face
as if they had raised a hand up to their own. Beloved,
where are you when I am so lost
everything looks like a strange home you once slept in for a night
and then abandoned, even the dishes, even the light,
even the small keys to your presence
you keep dropping everywhere like tears
that lock nothing in, nothing out; where are you now,
as I write this, longing for you, turning this beggar’s agony
into words that might rise like a glorious new constellation
full of grace and destiny
over the beautiful dark hills of your seeing
that are your eyes and the woods I wander in. Beloved,
I am your shadow; I am your ghost, coming and going from you
like a gate that yearns to be a wing
on any bird hurled, singing, into the dawn of your smile,
even if it be reflected on a windowpane. You, who are my life,
though a hair’s breadth seperate us, though
no more than the depth of the moon’s reflection keeps me
from drowning in your mysterious waters, I am nothing
but unheeded suffering outside your garden walls, nothing
but a phantom caravan in a desert of worlds outside
waiting to enter with gifts from a distant spirit
for the queen of the city. Beloved, look over your walls
like the moon walking its own heights
and gaze down upon the passion of my tents and fires
as if they were the flowers of the starfields
that snag in your veils of light, happily torn from their own shining
so might they adorn your passage. In your presence,
I am the mystic wind that wants to sport in your hair
and sweep through the valleys and along the curves of your body,
caressing every flute, shrine, and bell of your being
until all of you starts ringing, crazy with joy,
and all your leaves, all your secret lilies,
shudder silver side up in the sunlight after the storm.
Beloved, grant me freedom. Assent. Put an end
to the eloquence of this divine poverty
by blowing me out like a candle flame
that has danced on its own dying long enough. Without you
all my seeing and saying
is a rose and a word I’ve placed
on my own dejected coffin, drifting like an empty boat.
Beloved, open this door of darkness like the first crescent of the moon
and make an end of me in you as you have
so many stars and asylums and longings before me; let me
cross your threshold like a tide you have raised and sent
rushing up your slopes of life within, and when I am spent,
draw me back into yourself like a wave or a breath or a world,
or, deeper yet, this ocean of shoreless oceans that has swayed me into being
without beginning, end, or separation,
this extravagance in the form of the man who loves you.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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What I Would Say

What I would say to you if you were near,
if this definitive namelessness that walks me down to the river
to add my tears to the flowing, to sit on my rock
and stare at my self in reverse on a throne of water
enrobed in my star-dazzled solitude, setting fire
to poems I never wanted to own,
every burning lily of paper floating away
like another crown I've set free
from this domain of air and shadows
to seek its own regency, its own unknowable moment of shining,
weren't the eyeless oblivion that engendered us both.
I would say to you in the pyres and the petals
of these wild wounded swans, in the black down and ash
of these exorcised ghosts, in the dream wakes
of these poems that confess their love to the flames
with every exhalation, with every feather of smoke
gone to smudge the sky of the stars that brought them here
in the form of a man, I would say,
it was always the hive of your silence
that was the fairest likeness of you, the bluest honey
rarer than night, I've ever tasted.
And I'd try not to talk too much,
letting the fish jump for the two of us,
and the winged serpents of the luminosity slip away
like things not said into the water
and I'd draw you in under the bough of my arm
that was never much of a yoke
as if you were the fruit of an astounded tree,
and hold you a long time in the vastness
before I turned to kiss you for everything
and fall down back into the silver grass
to make love to you on the moon.
And you in my arms again, your cheek on my chest
your leg across mine, my hand, a wing of tender caresses,
I would mingle blood and starlight
with the wine of your body and being
like a chalice lying empty by the river
that has brought us both to drink from one another
like the deer that will come out later from the grove
to drink from their own reflections. And gestures of life and death
would flutter through me like the red-winged blackbirds
among the sceptres of the cattails,
and I'd want to thank and accuse the incomprehensible sky
for this night of being human long enough
to understand its brevity is its beauty
and its brevity goes on forever like you and I,
burnt poems, wounded swans, lovers, indelibly.

Life is suggested to us, never proclaimed,
like the course of the river, as the limbs of the fallen oak
look as if they're trying to swim, and one poem
more enduring than the rest,
floats downstream under a frozen elbow
raised to take the next stroke,
and with a final flare as it comes to the end of itself
levitates up into the air and disappears like a buddha
into the absolute perfect emptiness of an enlightenment
that grasps at nothing. Form
is emptiness; emptiness is form, and the poem
had a good death I suppose as a lifeboat in flames,
and though you're not with me now,
we've never been apart, as the shadow of an unknown bird
lands on the water, and then another,
and I think of them as you and I
arriving somewhere together out of the sky and the night
and the bright vacancy
between the sidereal knots
in the nets of the constellations, to drift among the stars awhile
weary of flying, two poems back from the dead.

And I wonder what love is, knowing
love is I wonder what love is,
as the fireflies flash their assent,
and the cars pass in the distance on highbeam,
and the frogs spring away from their flints. And I come here
as much for the island that spreads the stream
into the water legs of a woman
like the orchid of her sex, as to be alone with myself
like a wharf deeply saddened by a thousand farewells,
to launch my fleet of poems
like the blossoms of the abandoned orchard on the far bank.
I like being a child alone on the shores of things,
turning the stones over, lost like a fragrance
among the whispering flowers, ruling my loneliness like a stick.
And I've always asked questions no one could answer,
awed by the fact of being here at all
under stars I can name like personal friends, but here,
everything's got a mouth of its own to answer,
and the answers seem more timeless for being left unsaid.

And I'm never as old by these waters
as I am anywhere else, and the dusty apricot of the moon
you told me to watch as you would
is always so much more on this undulant black mirror
than a window will ever be able to say to a man at a desk.
There's a birch and three willows
and the third of the three is you
dipping your hair in the water
as if your roots weren't enough for the glass.
And it's no surprise to know you know how
to drink the whole river in a single gulp
and swallow a whole star with your eyes
in a single glimmer
the way a solitary dropp of water
at the tip of the tongue of the stargrass
entirely fits the entire skin of the sky
because I already know how you can consume the whole of me
from the night song in the flight of the bird in my voice
and from a single hair of your head,
or the eyelash on your cheek
that is all that separates us now,
from the ashes on the last breath of a single burning poem.
I can be here with you as I have always been
on the other side of death
where everything in creation
above and below this river of night,
from the furthest galaxy
to the dragonfly on my right
is expanding like a lily of fire into us,
as if we were the emptiness that receives the light.
So it's easy to know where it's all going,
releasing these little fire-boats on the stream,
raising themselves up like the breathless flowers of a dream
rooted in the infinite depths of the knowing,
it's always, like birds and stars and fish in the flowing,
been going to us.

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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What I Would Say To You

What I would say to you if you were near,
if this definitive namelessless that walks me down to the river
to add my tears to the flowing, to sit on my rock
and stare at my self in reverse on a throne of water
enrobed in my star-dazzled solitude, setting fire
to poems I never wanted to own,
every burning lily of paper floating away
like another crown I've set free
from this domain of air and shadows
to seek its own regency, its own unknowable moment of shining,
weren't the eyeless oblivion that engendered us both;
I would say to you in the pyres and the petals
of these wild wounded swans, in the black down and ash
of these exorcised ghosts, in the dream wakes
of these poems that confess their love to the flames
with every exhalation, with every feather of smoke
gone to smudge the sky of the stars that brought them here
in the form of a man, I would say,
it was always the hive of your silence
that was the fairest likeness of you, the bluest honey
rarer than night, I've ever tasted.
And I'd try not to talk too much,
letting the fish jump for the two of us,
and the winged serpents of the luminosity slip away
like things not said into the water
and I'd draw you in under the bough of my arm
that was never much of a yoke
as if you were the fruit of an astounded tree,
and hold you a long time in the vastness
before I turned to kiss you for everything
and fall down back into the silver grass
to make love to you on the moon.
And you in my arms again, your cheek on my chest
your leg across mine, my hand, a wing of tender caresses,
I would mingle blood and starlight
with the wine of your body and being
like a chalice lying empty by the river
that has brought us both to drink from one another
like the deer that will come out later from the grove
to drink from their own reflections. And gestures of life and death
would flutter through me like the red-winged blackbirds
among the scepters of the cattails,
and I'd want to thank and accuse the incomprehensible sky
for this night of being human long enough
to understand its brevity is its beauty
and its brevity goes on forever like you and I,
burnt poems, wounded swans, lovers, indelibly.

Life is suggested to us, never proclaimed,
like the course of the river, as the limbs of the fallen oak
look as if they're trying to swim, and one poem
more enduring than the rest,
floats downstream under a frozen elbow
raised to take the next stroke,
and with a final flare as it comes to the end of itself
levitates up into the air and disappears like a buddha
into the absolute perfect emptiness of an enlightenment
that grasps at nothing. Form
is emptiness; emptiness is form, and the poem
had a good death I suppose as a lifeboat in flames,
and though you're not with me now,
we've never been apart, as the shadow of an unknown bird
lands on the water, and then another,
and I think of them as you and I
arriving somewhere together out of the sky and the night
and the bright vacancy
between the sidereal knots
in the nets of the constellations, to drift among the stars awhile
weary of flying, two poems back from the dead.

And I wonder what love is, knowing
love is I wonder what love is,
as the fireflies flash their assent,
and the cars pass in the distance on highbeam,
and the frogs spring away from their flints. And I come here
as much for the island that spreads the stream
into the waterlegs of a woman
like the orchid of her sex, as to be alone with myself
like a wharf deeply saddened by a thousand farewells,
to launch my fleet of poems
like the blossoms of the abandoned orchard on the far bank.
I like being a child alone on the shores of things,
turning the stones over, lost like a fragrance
among the whispering flowers, ruling my loneliness like a stick, .
and I've always asked questions no one could answer,
awed by the fact of being here at all
under stars I can name like personal friends, but here,
everything's got a mouth of its own to answer,
and the answers seem more timeless for being left unsaid.

And I'm never as old by these waters
as I am anywhere else, and the dusty apricot of the moon
you told me to watch as you would
is always so much more on this undulant black mirror
than a window will ever be able to say to a man at a desk.
There's a birch and three willows
and the third of the three is you
dipping your hair in the water
as if you were trying to root in glass.
And it's no surprise to know you know how
to drink the whole river in a single gulp
and swallow a whole star with your eyes
in a single glimmer
the way a solitary dropp of water
at the tip of the tongue of the stargrass
entirely fits the entire skin of the sky
because I already know how you can consume the whole of me
from the nightsong in the flight of the bird in my voice
and from a single hair of your head,
or the eyelash on your cheek
that is all that separates us now,
from the ashes on the last breath of a single burning poem,
so I can be here with you as I have always been
on the other side of death
where everything in creation
above and below this river of night,
from the furthest galaxy
to the dragonfly on my right
is expanding like a lily of fire into us,
as if we were the emptiness that receives the light.
So it's easy to know where it's all going;
releasing these little fire-boats on the stream,
raising themselves up like the breathless flowers of a dream
rooted in the infinite depths of the knowing,
it's always, like birds and stars and fish
been flowing into us.

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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I Miss You

I miss you like a burn victim misses his face, misses the sky he used to wear like skin. I think I'm dying tonight; Friday night, wandering from unfinished room to unfinished room, trying on coffins, looking at death in the shedding mirrors, wondering what my life has amounted to, a raindropp in the desert, trying to green the hourglass time raises to its lips, twin goblets, drunk on sand. I want to bleed like a bell for the unfathomable reservoirs of human pain that have yet to be endured as the original tears of life, the rocks weeping, and even the mountain eventually burying its proud face in the hands of its valley. I have heard the stars weeping, and been crippled by compassion for the wounded rose of blood, all the petals and eyelids and tongues that have tasted themselves on the thorn. If I have ever been a lantern on the road, a star you could follow home like a river, a tree that stood over you for the night, a shadow that summoned you into the light, black honey buffed with the flowers of revised constellations taking their seats in the revolutionary parliaments of the night, now I'm a kind of indecipherable braille hanging like black holes and severed chandeliers of pleading cherries beseeching wicks and filaments from astringent space. Look at what life has done to me; look at what happened to the candle. O just once more to yearn like the moon for a beginning, for an eyeless passion that hasn't seen itself out to the end like a ladder of worn thresholds ribbed like a man. I have drunk from the fountains of great teachers, great spirits, enormous suggestions of the soul that have emptied me like the echo of the world into a vastness as impersonal as the first word of creation and I have tried to be brave enough to see deeply into the night in my voice, the clarities and luminosities that have their seasons in the high fields, the wells that lament the aging of the morning brides torn like tents, the cocoons of the light abandoned like the exhalation of a last breath, I have tried to add my understanding like a planet that could thrive like a torch in a mansion of secret wines. I have tried to say whatever I was becoming without wringing the moonlight out of the tide. I have not lied about the poppies in their dream gowns of evanescent fire; or transgressed the humble shrines of the grass, or forgotten the progress of the girl robed in swans and willows in the eyes of the crone. And I have been withered too much by suffering to be flattered by the tendril of my name growing like smoke on the lips of the seeds. I assumed my throne like a pauper where the fire burned the clearest, and established the realm of my seeing in the crumb of a dream I rubbed from my eyes whenever I awoke to the illimitable domains of my nothingness. And I have counted the prophetic skulls of the demon moons as if they were a forbidden rosary that pearled the darkness, and been amazed at my affinity for the hopelessness of their vilified freedom. I sleep with an eyelash like a sword between myself and evil, one fuse unlit, one world that hasn't gone off like a rocket at Halloween. But when I consider true goodness in others, cooling like sweet bread on the summer starsills of their openness, I am always left feeling dangerously intelligent by contrast, and lacking, as if all modes of virtue were the happy sluglines of compromised yesterdays I use to start fires in an iron heart on a winter morning. Though I be condemned to the subtleties of the most intimate torments, incommunicable agonies of erosive condemnation, there is still a lie I won't tell myself to be worthy of heaven, because I will not dust the earth with my wings, I will not corrupt the integrity of the suffering of my humanity with any paradise that isn't born of its substance. I will not fail the rag of my poor flesh even on the eve of defeat, the tattered sail of blood that turns this boat of bones into the wind to come round again in a salvo of ferocious defiance. A gesture of the air, no doubt; a lethal folly, but the plank of my nature. So keep your angels away from me until I am a peer of the struggle, until I have won a parity from intensities I could never defeat. Until my humanity is an indelible word in the mouth of God, an ink, a wine, a thread of blood, that stains the lips of God with the inexplicable mystery of my contradictory existence. So much undergone, so much of becoming and transcendence embodied and dissolved in the shapes of shadow, blood and water, and love through it all, tears and laughter, the mingling of illumination and eclipse, one firefly of the spirit thawing glaciers and fierce eras of brutal evolution, one thought snuffing the stars like an eyelid. I love the heresy of vaulting the horns of the moon, the first and last crescents of the dilemmic parentheses that enclose me like an aside to an actor prompted offstage by the whisper of his own understudy dying ambiguously in the very next scene. What's a flower, what's a life, but a play on tour, directed by the cuts and takes of the wind and the light? Everyone in the audience, alive and wounded, sentenced, is on death row where every star that shines through the bars is the sprinkling syringe of a fatal injection, or the motherlode of the mystically deranged.
I miss you. I could love you so perfectly; even the errors in harmony. I could be the pillar of a temple of water; I could be sufficient for your sake, a curtain of shadows on the moon to cool the hot swan of the light that sails through a window wide as space. I could be something more in your presence, something I've never been before; the whole cosmos out to the most estranged star, hanging like a dropp of water from a heron's beak, a witching-wand that trembles with watersheds everytime it divines you. I think of gently taking the moon in my teeth, of kissing you on the neck behind your ear, of the season in your hair, the supple concession of your lips, undoing the star yokes on the beast that draws the wagon of this corpse to wander off road in the bestial freedom of its ecstatic vagrancy. I could know you like a fish knows the moon, underwater, could swim to you from here, or rise to your hooks as if they were stars, and swallow, or be a dragon heaving off its lake like a robe of water with wildflowers and the open eyes of the rain shaken from the folds of the eclipses and eras of its wings. You could empower me to risk an excruciating excellence of devotion; an eloquence and exquisitivity of perception that would compel my eye to turn the light around and look inwards like a black hole for the firefly in the casket of its telescope. However far I walked through a desert of lunar salt, excoriated by ferocious purities like a bone with the wind for marrow, no two footprints of mine would ever be the same, nor would the moon, so much like the heart, ever drink its own commingling of light and shadow from the same cup twice. I think of the things that could be; the air saturated with light trying to fall like rain; the blood efflorescent with poppies, with gypsy profligates, outraging the startled goodness of the wheat by dancing lasciviously with fire. Out of the air, out of space, out of time, living on nothing, I can almost make you happen before me like an event so intensely imagined the curtain had to open on a troupe of improv stars on tour among the constellations. The abyss of an eyelash away, I can almost touch you, taste you, feel you reach out for me like a bay of space, hear you call my name like a homing bird sliding like love-letter under the doorsill of the wind. Grief can call people like that, but it is love that is the gate-mouth of my answering, it is love that conjures you out of this galactic cauldron where I cannot pull this sword of light from the stone of my heart like a letter without bleeding like a crimson sea of candlewax to verify the seal of your enthronement in the kiss of every impression. The truth is too brief, and the lies are too long to be the suitable luggage of love. I'd need something like a seed, a cocoon, an eye, a lantern, a star to travel radiantly through this darkness as fragile as a kite held aloft by a feather of fire, my spinal cord in your hands, or strung across the musical snakepit of a lifeboat guitar like a powerline, or a clown riding the bicycle of his glasses. The seas once gone from the moon, love alone can keep the whisper of water alive.
I saw the full moon in the window through black winter branches, and I thought of you in sadness and love, and wondered if your eyes fell upon it like rain as mine did.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Lighting It Up And Blowing It Out

Lighting it up and blowing it out
I try to make my way through the dark
by beginning at the end
as if the coming and the going
were the same door
or good-bye were the first thing
you would say to a friend.
I approach things like a night stream
as if my death were already achieved
and behind me.
And all the atoms of my being
dancing like frenzied gnats
in the sunset glow of a last eye-beam
are certifiably primordial
and any one of them
when they lose it in the light
could begin a world.
And what can you say more of a life
that dreams of what it is
than it's the taste of the same wine
in many different cups?
And as any fox knows
the grape is always sweetest
when you can taste it with your eyes.
Though why foxes eat grapes is anyone's guess
but life makes itself up as it goes
like music in a fish's earlobes.
It feathers its themes in fire and light
and goes up in smoke
like the ghost of a tree
looking for habitable planets among the stars.
New wounds with innocent root-room for old scars.
Chalking the cue to bank the long shot
you're trying to spin off into
the deep, dark pockets
of your game-winning afterlife.
And I don't believe in much anymore
though that hasn't stopped me from crying
like a slow window trying to keep
the stars from leaking out of me
as if there were a black hole
somewhere in my heart
waiting for an iris to make it an eye
whose seeing might be a new way of healing
what can't be healed.
Once here. Here forever.
But whether we're the eternal children of forever
or just another breath on the night air
that doesn't even know we live,
even death is just another way of killing time here.
When everywhere's the center of everything else,
the centre holds,
things don't fall apart.
They disappear.
And that's the mystic art
of knowing how to make the most out of existence
by offering no resistance
to the rocks in your own mindstream
that part the waters like the thoughts
of an exile in the promised land
who can't go back the way she came.
The river can't step into the same you twice.
And in every direction
your eyes have ever burned like stars
you can see the dark jewel of your own life
from the inside
before it breaks into light.
Sometimes I'm the lonely sign
on the only path to nowhere
and others I'm positively amniotic
with the schools of my blue lucidity
the albino dolphins of the moon leap through
without a chance of changing their colour.
A flower of prophetic blood bleaches my skull.
I swallow the snakefire of my last eclipse
like a lump of coal
I'm trying to turn into a diamond
that doesn't burn
and never sloughs its skin.
Reality isn't a religion or a science,
or the back and front of a mirror
that doesn't know whose eyes its looking through.
Religion: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Science: how many pins can dance on the head of an angel?
Totem poles on a telephone booth where no one ever picks up.
Voodoo dolls that hex the cause of their effects.
The apple bloom on the tree of knowledge
lets go of its flightless wings
and follows the wind
like the eyelids of unfeathered angels
who opened their eyes like flawless fruit
as they fell toward paradise
without a parachute of smokey virtue
or the scale of a snake for a vice.
Emergence into the open
like a hidden secret revealed
is the engine of evolution
that empowers the dark matter
of this incorporeal starmud
to arise like the high note of a bird
that's flown beyond the night in its voice
like light beyond its myth of origin.
And the peduncle is lost in the ensuing phylum
as a madman is lost in the scream
that woke up the asylum,
or a god is lost in his own creation.
And the mountains listen
to the holy voices
in the valleys of their shadows
they deepen as they arise
like the guests of an echoless calling
to greet the unknown host.
It's what the moon feels
when she fondles her locket of water
and memories pull at her heartstrings
like tides on earth
and music is the way she recalls
the sirens that used to sing
like the brides of empty lifeboats
that prayed like smashed guitars
for the night to sow the seedless sea with stars.
And in every fish that swims through fire
like the sacred response of life
to the longing in its own desire
she knows they got their wish.
Fireflies in the ashes of the phoenix tree.
And the eggs of cosmic words
like serpents in a bird's nest
learning to fly like dragons
that have just swallowed the moon.
And it's one thing to pull the sword from the stone
but it's a greater power than magic and proof
with no urge to rule
that summons the butterfly from its cocoon
by giving the fool who inches toward the truth
along the green branch toward the apple-bloom
that already tastes like the forbidden fruit
of some radical insight
the whole orchard in a pair of wings
and more than enough night and light on its palette
to start a revolution in seeing among the flowers
who still labour in the chains of their roots
to turn their earthbound lucidities into stars
who might look back for a change
with eyes that have gathered like water out of the shining
and taste the light in the honey
that kissed their eyelids into gold
long before the night was old
and it wasn't enough just to see them.
When you opened your eyes
in the burning clarity of your lone vision
before this matrix of space and time
gave birth to the world
you were free to be whatever you could see.
That's when the light first spoke to you
in the mother-tongue of your seeing
and your voice broke
like a secret name in the mirror
that didn't know who you were
and the moon on nightwater
the thief at the window
your breath like stars on the cold, night air
summoned the whole of being
in every particulate shard
and radiant plinth of the mirror
to drive your shining into the shadows
so myriad things can appear as they are.
Many eyes open. Night. An eclipse. One star.
And the darkness an anti-romantic
in love with the moon from afar.

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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To Be Alive Here

To be alive here
is to suffer the godspear of light
that enflames your breath with life
through the heart, the night
of its knapped shale
embedded in every part
like a mystic jewel in a wound that never heals
or a hidden nightbird in the far fields
when only the stars are listening.
To be alive here is to know
your only here and now
is to be alive.
Born into the lifeboat,
who needs to be rescued?
Is the fish afraid of drowning,
does a bird implore the sky;
is there not enough room in your eyes for stars?
Images, thought, symbols, feelings, words,
we live behind billboards illuminated
by artificial daffodils of light,
and walk our own midways alone
from tent to tent of sensation,
from mutant perversity to mystic elation,
blind in the blazing: come in, come in,
to the darkness under a flap of your skin.
How much has not changed for how long
inside the cocoon that diapers your reluctance
not to hump out of yourself with wings,
not to jewel the maggot with stars,
not to let the swamp hold up its waterlily,
not in overcoming or advancement,
not a white diploma of moonlit skin,
but a symbol and a celebration of what became of you
elaborating the world generation after generation
until, not enough just to see it,
your eyes immersed in the sea like rain
that has known the roots of the flowers
and opened the golden mouths of the grain
and washed the stars out of the hair of the fool,
and rinsed the age like a bloodstain off the stage,
you can finally be it.
You are empty.
Blood unspools like a thread
drawn out like a river unravelling the oceans of you
that used to lap these flesh bound shores
and flaunt this palace of bone on loan
from an absentee owner.
There is no face under your name
that isn't looking away from itself
like light from the sun.
Utterly subjectivized, the imagination
reverses its spin
and things come undone,
and the skies that have dropped like petals from their eyes
to see without seeing the unseeable
are neither many nor one
nor the ineffable sum of the unbeable
because all things have already been achieved
and the world returned like water to the mindstream
it was taken from
like a snake that startles the stillness
before it flows away into the silence
or the light of a star that shines within
that doesn't trouble the day.
But to live here in irrefutable bliss
you mustn't confess to anyone
you were born knowing this.
To live here truly is to live
as if you had never existed,
though there are lifetimes behind you
like footprints on the road of ghosts
to say where you've been,
and every breathless glimpse is the eye
of someone you've never seen.
Here is the everywhere of is
and there is no shadow of another,
no map of blood to follow you like a pilgrim,
no sister, no father, no mother, no brother
you could possibly mean
to the photo-album of an ageing gene
that doesn't remember you
except as someone who was passing through
who didn't know what things could lead to
when the stranger in the dangerous valley
took the highroad out of the mountains like an echo.
To be alive here
is to suffer one day, and dance the next,
to pass by rooms within yourself you never open
like tiny lockets of rain you weep alone in the shadows,
among so many furious stars,
trying to seed the pain with flowers
or patch new skin, a cool herb of light
over the burnt face of the moon like waterlilies
so the black mirrors will reverse themselves in the night
and turn your eyes away
from the things you can't shatter with looking.
To be alive here
is to know you are dying,
the whole breath of the moment in every death
baling like overwhelmed boats to stop your crying.
Where do we go? Does anyone know?
Are we cinders and crows in the eyes of this shoreless sea
that watches us like a dream
no one can wake up from alive,
is this disproportionate night the jewel in the hive
that eclipses this rapture of honey
with more space than the flowers and stars can face?
Is a dead thing the king of its own skull-throne
or a toy of the ants lugging dismembered butterflies through its eyes
like sails crushed in the ice of a northwest passage
to be reassembled like moonboats on the other side?
We are islands and waves
and we close our eyes like the sea
in the imageless depths of our own inconceivability.
We are humans, worlds within worlds, and each
with a light of their own to know them by.
We are stars circling the lighthouse of our own knowing
like words off the coast of consciousness
that all mean, like birds, the same boundless sea
that slowly wound its aeons up like alarm clocks
to set us off like an insurgency of thought.
We are humans, bells and hells of blood and water that walk
upright like lightning rods wired to a brain
that the sea panned like a nugget of light
freaked with night, from the ore of a lunar vein
and everywhere we fall upon our own roots
and wash our own skulls clean of ourselves
like rain that was once alive
to raise them again like the moon to our lips, and thrive.
Long-winded brevity; brief longevity,
to be alive here is to be constantly giving
without knowing what your true gifts are,
like rain and rocks or the light of a star,
because even to share
is to set us apart divisively,
to break the plough like a wishbone.
There's silver in the voice of the rock when it speaks of change
and though the rain doesn't really know what it seeks to be
it gives itself everywhere inexhaustibly like a hinge
to the turning of everything,
and how could the night have guessed
the enlightened fury of a star
under the scars of its own elements
would lead to us in all our radiant intelligence
like something it got off its chest?
To be alive here is to know
that a single dropp of water is enough
for the moon to swim in her own seas again,
and there are tides in the windowpane she transits
flashing with life, tiny glass fish
that make a turmoil of devotion
by seeding the ocean with eyes.
To be alive here is to know the wise
know less than you on both sides of the mirror
that lies in pieces at their feet like waves
that have learned to hold their tongues.
To be alive here
is to read a book on transcendence
while you're sitting in the sun,
to ask why the moon is crying
when you've already drowned in her tears.
Is it holy? Is it joy? Is it real?
And look at the way it takes the whole of itself
from beginning without end to end without beginning
to make a single eye, all the measureless aeons of the myriads
that stand behind and before the seeing
timing the shutter-release
like someone taking their own picture,
running to get in the shot
before the flash goes off like light in the abyss
to illuminate the billions upon billions of faces
shed like apple-bloom in the orchard
from the radiant tree of its rootless being.
What is this without antecedent
I so urgently need to know
that I have poured the stars into me
and the starlessness of long, autumnal nights
and slept like the eyes of the rain in the roses of hell,
and grown black pearls out of a grain of dirt
like new moons in the mouth of a funeral bell
and hurt and hurt and hurt until
I could not tell who or what
was suffering me in and out of existence
like a dream in a fire that burnt without consuming,
my eyes in space twisted like melting windowpanes,
and darkness running down the blade of my solitude
like a night dew of black blood on the tongue of the moon
as I shook in my chains like an avalanche
imprisoned in the heart of a mountain
where I wept like a metal in the cold abyss
of a horror without eyes or a name
that is everywhere this
that keeps killing me into bliss
by striking me like fire from a rock,
like the rainbow from its lock,
like a sword from the stone of the moon.
The universe pours itself out like a fountain
into its own inexhaustible mouth
like a drunk with a jewel in a bottle in a brown paper bag
up against the writing on the wall
in a dangerously infinite back alley
where Peter pretends to love Sally.
In each and every part it gives and takes
the whole of itself like a gift, like an ocean,
like an ocean breaking into eyes,
or the squirrel in the bluebells,
or me sitting here with the trees, waiting for leaves.
And everything is so eloquently
this effusion of transformation
as if fire were a music all its own
and in every flame and face,
thread, star, thorn, leaf, flower and voice,
in every feather and wave of awareness,
in every thought, feeling, and delusion,
and in what is beyond what we think,
the whole of the tapestry, the whole of the sky, the sea, the vision,
the mystic specificity of the indefinable,
the creative urgency of the uncreate
dropping worlds like pebbles in a pond
where every ripple opens its horizons like an eye
and even the rings of the tree are a slow pulse,
and the waterbirds shed their jewels in moonlight
and beyond beyond into the immaculate darkness of the thriving night
is the way their wings beat, the heart flows,
a star reaches out to touch the skin of a grape,
or a wave greets an island in a new language,
or a god drowns in himself so again and again and again
he can review his whole life flashing before his eyes
through every one of us,
through the rose and the bloodstain,
through the doorway and the window and the dream,
through everything that seems and unseems itself
like roads of light that move like snakes in the water,
like the holy paths of the unnamed ones
who return like memories of coal converted to diamonds
dancing with fools in the translucent bliss of their clarity.
One existence. Many. None. Three waves of light.
The sea. The sun. I am manifested
by everything I've ever been
like the running of a river
without beginning or end,
not old water behind, and new ahead,
but the whole universe, my watershed,
I am drawn from the well in this bucket of a body
enflamed by this fierce urgency of stars,
inextinguishable fire on the water,
growing eyes like ambassadors
from everything I am
to the empty throne
of the infinite bloodline
that delivers me like a message to me,
worlds within worlds like the sea in a bottle
bobbing at my feet.
And everything is always teaching;
every tree runs a school, every star
is a private tutor, every flower
a sage in a brothel, this harlot of blood
the wine of an unknown church,
and every bone in my body
the rung of a descending saint.
And what do they inexhaustibly teach
if not the youness of you to you,
if not the dark abundance
of your formlessness through forms
as if the world, and all that are in it
were your native language
and you were the ancient future of everything,
and every seed, a betrothal; and every flower, a bride?
Why suffer like a refugee at the gate
of your own estate
by refusing to let yourself in
through the open doors of the trees;
With eyes that are wider than space
where can you hide from your own being,
or wash the seeing from your face?
Does ubiquity look for a place to stand,
a place to call its own, a seat at the table,
when everywhere it's the homeless host
of these world-bearing guests who bow like trees
on the branching thresholds of a boundless feast?
In the furthest fields of yourself
you are the star, and the flower, and the seeing,
and it's the namelessness of everything
that grows a mouth without saying like a word
that gathered overnight on the tongue of a leaf
that can taste you like the nascent stars of an old belief;
you have shone so long alone in the dark
to be alive here in every inseparable part.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If Only I Could Remember Things For Awhile

If only I could remember things for awhile
as they were before they changed. Savour them.
Let the flavour of the jewel
that's been ripening in my voice
wash through my mouth
like the mystic blaze of a star sapphire
and every word I say be a firefly of insight
that can shed some light on dark matter.

Would that my tears fell fruitfully enough
to feed the world, that one dropp of my blood
after years of preparing the potion, were enough
to immunize a whole planet from affliction.
And what marvels would my eyes not delight
in showing anyone, if they could astonish the blind
like an orbiting telescope that's just had
its cataracts removed
like the reflection of the moon peeled
like an albino eclipse off the black mirror of the lake
only to discover that all this time they groped through the dark
like star-nosed moles, it was their own face that got in the way
of what was shining. If only my hands
knew how to build like the birds
and my bones were strong crossbeams and rafters,
what palaces of light and water and air
would my heart not offer to the homeless
like the growth rings of a maple tree
that threw them the keys like winged samara
and said, move in, its yours. It's built on bedrock
not the quicksand cornerstone of a slum lord.

For the lonely sitting with their cats and their elbows
in half-opened windows, observing
the pigeons and the stars for memorable events,
I would break this long fast of my solitude
like black Slavic peasant bread with strangers
who sat above the salt at the table
as my honoured guests, and ask them, eye to eye,
heart to heart, all ears, as if I were a radio telescope
listening like Seti, if they've heard any news back yet
from Bellatrix or Rigel, and which
of Jupiter's shepherd moons is hiding
a secret affair with life that everyone's dying to know.

It's heart-breaking that we can't all bring our tears to bear
into one cloud weeping over a drought like a dry creekbed
where we're all hibernating in our own starmud
like toads and frogs waiting for flashfloods of the next rain
to underwhelm us like gravestones in a makeshift cemetery.
What would the world be like if we could
walk up a long country road at night far from ourselves
and not have to ask the roadkill for directions in life?
As if we were sure enough where we were going
to risk being followed by the lost like a starcluster of fireflies
within the compass of everyone's bearings, not
out there somewhere like the ghost of a spaced-out lighthouse
but like the porchlight of nearby farm on a summer night
that draws living things out of the dark like the full moon to it,
even if it just be gnats in the air, bats, or Luna moths,
what a seance of life we could be to each other
as if we left the screen door unlatched
for any lunatic of the light on the road this late at night
who might wander in like the seeds of new themes on the wind
to enrich the bright vacancy of our dark abundance
with a starmap to where our buried treasure lies hidden
like diamonds in the ore of the hearthstones of our hearts.

If I could take the whole of my darkness
and enchant its snakepits into the wavelengths
of the light I would have emanate out of me
like the rainbow body of a Tibetan rinpoche
entrusted with the wisdom of the Himalayas
to seek a low place among the stars like a sea
that all things flow down into like the shining images
we retain of ourselves like the reverberations
of experienced luminaries echoing
like seasoned birds to each other
in the valleys and black holes of tears and death below.

Sacred syllables of immortal butterflies
in the orchards of morning and moonrise.
I would shine down upon the abyss of the lovers
like a water star from the bottom up
of all the burning bridges they have yet to cross
like Aldebaran at zenith, or Cygnus at nadir,
to get them to the other side
of what binds them to each other
like water and air, light, earth and fire,
and each moment of my life, every step
I risked anew, I would become the way
that's never taken itself before this deep into the mystery
of what it means to be alive and everywhere
be endangered by the beauty of our own awareness.

Instead of breathing for the dead as long as I can
underwater on the moon, I would invite them
to make a new birthmark in new medium
that calls them back from the night like light
from the scattered ashes of the empty urn of a star
coming together again in a gravitational womb
of their own remains, where everyone achieves
the all consuming illumination of their endless afterlives
by opening the koan of a single flower
in the light of their darkest hour of perennial insight.

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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