Related quotes: Weary of lies and the...

Cocoons

Weary of lies and the soap operas of fruit on the verge
of their due dates, weary of men and women and breezy friends
with smiles like illegal fishing nets across a river, bored
with the multiple personalities of stale bread growing pools
of blue-green bacteria like a bad imitation of the moon, the people
who landed safely from a long way up
but drowned in their parachutes, the earth-bound
curb-worn excuses that never learned how
to park a star without getting burnt; and nowhere to go
with all of this unspooling of an old documentary
that isn't me anymore than the echo of a diamond is;
sick of approaching the vital signs of every oceanic dilemma
with the heart of a well, the mind of a winch
and the balls of a bucket, without malice
and I repeat it, without malice
because my mind is not a shoe full of interrogative scorpions
and my blood has never gone white long enough
to call itself an ice-age and there's always a clown
to warm things up with sad defeats and comic thawings
and most things are just old bottles in a barn anyway,
tired of witching the watersheds of mystic sublimities
that are always flying away like herons startled in the moonlight,
or stars with the eyes of fish, lovers
washing the doves of their hands in the blood of a rose,
jaded by the black translucencies of hell
that smell like cordite and lightning
and leave ambivalent messages on a storm-coloured mirror
lustrous as the eyes of a horse from a paid familiar
amused by the fool he courts, I write this
to no one in particular knowing it's a way out of the stone
I'm swimming through like ore, a dream key
to a cormorant fountain of elegant transformations
that haven't been born yet, faces that return from childhoods
yet to come, roads to go down that aren't roads
until I walk them, all here now in the lifespan
of a heartbeat, singing like sirens of oxygen
to seduce the wind away from paler tresses
and rattling windowpanes. Little matter
who the return journey is if it ever gets there, finds its way back,
there are fires along the way so intensely
beyond the last farms of colour
their serenity is their fury
and all this world of discernible form
in the light of that light,
a pilgrimage of shadows. And by that, do not think
there is a secret eclipse up the sleeves of flame
that rise from the candles of my adoration
because it was the world in the profundity of its playing
that lit them in the first place to celebrate
the way it hides from itself when anyone's looking
and the way it looks when anyone hides. So I hide my wave
in the water and hang my fleece in the sky
on the branch of a dangerous star tree
to test the nerve of the neophyte sailors
who come from ports like me that are
no more than a dropp in the bucket
of all there is to be. Now everyone is an effusion
of this nullity, the creative efflorescence of a cosmos
suggesting dandelions and dishevelled magnolias to the dark,
releasing black cherries and bells of deadly nightshade
to wander the forsaken labyrinths of the moon,
or shaking chandeliers of water out of the light,
worlds within worlds, fire harps in tears, and the brief urgencies
of the eyes that put them out flung out over the grass like silver seeds
in the way a dog shrugs off a lake, in the way
I've just emerged from the palace in the rock like a sullen metal
stapled to a wound in a tight-lipped corner
of a memorial shrine to unknown spiders,
and looking up at the stars rinsed out of the willow's hair
released myself from this web of torn horizons
by handing out cocoons to everyone for free.

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

Related quotes

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
Vote! | Copy!

The Wind Wild

The wind wild with jubilation at its escape from the asylum where it's just killed all the windows, but not a flower moves, not a leaf is shed. Come this far, you should know what hour it is, what stars time sifts through its fingers like sand and gold. And though you've stepped away from your face in the mirror, you're still inconceivably reflected in everything, oilslick and orchid alike. And how strange it must seem to touch your own skin and everywhere caress the sky, all wonderful, all a dark radiance without obstruction, a secret night of silver feathering the moon with the cool fires of a forbidden wilderness. And yet this isn't free enough, this isn't yet pouring out the sea to breathe in the light, this isn't eating the dark with your water-mouth and spitting out worlds like seeds. Do you see everywhere around you, now, the worlds? Who but you could they have ever been? And, yes, you have selected a destiny, in assent to this one spontaneity, this one act, a letter in the mail, set all the axes of the planets spinning like a dealer at a roulette wheel. In one dropp of water, the Nile; in one death of potential, birth into a universe that didn't exist before you adopted this exile from yourself into a rage of becoming, whether ashes or gypsies on the moon bathing in their own shadows. Wherever you walk is the way; whatever you say, a school.

Leprous the white fire of the lotus, a pale fire, until it's touched by the wand of the dragonfly, until you drink from the black mirror, the night-well that has never shown anyone their face looking back. Drink deeper than you've ever drowned before, and take the stone embryo of the delusion in your womb to an abortion clinic run by ghosts. At this point all percipients go insane, trying to save the seer and the seen. And the demons that had made a shrine out of every muscle of your body, reflexively catechizing every thought and emotion until you were bound by a theology of yourself, interred in the garbage of your own sanctity, spontaneously understand the invincibility of the sword in your spine, and release hell into effortless obedience to the void, falling, out of joy, to the sky. World disappears, seer disappears and all that's left is a pervasive, unbounded, eyeless seeing, the moon flowing in a dry creekbed. This is the unending return to the source, the unborn cosmos that is the mother and afterlife of itself, all childhoods and every coffin, flowers and fish. Emptiness and form make one hourglass; overturned are they two? What arms to receive the worlds like sand if not this vacancy, this generosity of space being nothing at all? Now, tell me, what hour is it when a clown strikes a bell of water and the sun at midnight shines alone on you?

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

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
Vote! | Copy!

Black Fire

Evaporating in a black fire.
Don't want to drink the night from the window again.
Won't be a chain trying to escape itself
when I'm already free,
but what an affront of mirrors to be so diminished
because the lions of fire, the dragons
that flare from the eye of the black sun,
their shadows spanning the heartless abyss
of their ferocious lucidities,
pitched their wings like huge, black tents of night
at the gates of the wide-eyed gazelles of emotion
they could bed freely under the moon,
unspool in the blue grass silvered by the wind,
their eyelids waning like a glass of wine.
In the obvious light of the morning
they will run from lesser hunters
mistaking the truce of nightblood
on the horn of the moon
for a rag of surrender, a gesture of clarity
like a star in a well,
the signet of an ancient moment
when the abyss returns to itself
like the echo of a wounded voice
to heal at the foot of a throne of shadows.
Though I could have stung like a serpent,
I was the wind at your heel once, once
like the wind I would have sowed the path before you
with seeds that would have bloomed like the eyes of the stars,
I would have saturated the air with lachrymose diamonds,
and poured the oil of the only lantern of my afterlife out like rain
so you could have shone like a rainbow at night
and your roots were luminously charged
with vital urges of mystic lightning.
I would have come to you like a flashflood of silver on the moon
and run the labyrinth of dry creekbeds
that scar the lifelines on your palm.
I would have kissed the black rose awake from its dream
of being stoned for a miscreance of the light,
and held the nightsky up to its beauty
like the forbidden side of a mirror
to jewel the eclipse you wear like a face.
I would have lain down beside you
like the shore of an unmapped island beside the sea
and answered every wave of your incoming tide
with a nightbird in the mouth of a bell of blood
that ripened in a watchtower on the moon,
but every kiss was a translucent jellyfish,
the auroral rose of an ambivalent Medusa
rooted in the lethal snakepit,
the toxic electricity of her stoned hair,
the trawling storm of her decapitated tresses
when the truth struck like an unexpected fang of light.
Now you spend your time
trying to tie knots in your spinal cord
like the severed filament of the moon,
trying to wick amputated candles in the darkness
that might help you grope your way
back to your head
like the black hole that became of the star
that went looking for its lost planet
like a blind shepherd startled awake by the howling of wolves
running across the sky in a wilder freedom
above the timberline of your eyelashes,
tinkling in the glass womb of your brittle shining
like the tungsten crumbs of a burnt-out dream.
Even now you don't understand
how you can pour so much of yourself into yourself
like an ingrown hair, your love
merely an idea infatuated with itself
that your eyeshadow festers like a palette of gangrene
and like me the vision won't paint you again
in the vivid constellations and kells of braille
you insisted on reading backwards
in the troubled mirror of your own perversity.
No rose in the shadow of the black Pegasus
born from the blood that pours from the vase of your neck
like a dead bouquet of poppies, no inspiration
in the petrified skulls of your past lovers
scattered like the beads of a broken rosary at your feet
you once fingered carelessly
like the writing on the wall.

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

The Serpent

The serpent sits enthroned
at the top of its own stairwell,
helically reposing in its own empyrean
like an August hawk
coiling up its own thermals;
its fangs, a stargate
to an unknown afterlife, emancipation,
and the jewel of its head,
the first stone thrown,
a small planet without
the eyelid of a sky,
a nugget of mystic uranium,
looped in a turban of orbits,
a sacred arrowhead
that flys from itself like a bow
drawn back long before the wind
knew its first feather.
Lethal healer,
the sword that kills is the sword that saves.

This morning,
the drubbing of the rain on a tin roof,
the hiss of traffic
flaring like matches down the sleek asphalt,
if I were to say
I want the emotional life of space,
I don't know if I'd mean it,
but I'm so weary
of being this slow crisis of a bird
mesmerized by the swaying eyes
of the black lightning
that has caught me in the net
it weaves of my own nerves,
I want to douse my heart
in the next providential tide of tears
like a torch I put out in the night
to see better in the dark.

I asked for wings
and my spine was adorned with fire.
I asked for water
and I'm a fish on the wind.
and now this desert I hoped to remain,
a craze of sand,
has grown teeth
and is overgrazing the starfields like pyramids.

I don't think
I will ever recover
from the wound I received
like the hidden twin of the moon,
trying to love the world, myself, women, people.
Every word was a road, a pulse, an eye,
a dropp of blood
I could ride to the end of and beyond
into the implacable subtlety
of my own empty, ageless temples
where even the silence isn't ghost enough
to conjure a medium
to jar the table as a sign,
and death is buried in its own vacuity
like an embryo in a mask without eyes.

I was bound by my own boundlessness,
my nerves, wicks in the abyss
that enhanced the darkness
by cleaving me like a tree
vision after vision,
another world
with every blink of the eye
that wiped the mirror clean of me like an ax
until I understood
that even the most enlightened watersheds of wisdom
are just a smear of perception
on the least dropp of that splendor
I went looking for like a cloud
saturated with the ancient seas of the moon
that was covered by my own looking.

I lay at the bottom
of my oceanic odyssey,
trying not to sink,
but I wanted to give something back
for what I felt I had received;
not an ethic or a metaphysic,
but a spontaneous action of the blood
that remembers it was once a rose.
I wanted to return spring like a water-key to the moon;
I wanted to harvest the shadows
of my own non-existence
and break bread
with the famine of ghosts
that came like royalty to beg food from their servant,
blind doors standing on the thresholds of awareness
asking me to address myself
to the terrible openness
of their unanswerable need.

I have eaten my own ashes
in the furnace of every star
I have ever looked upon.
I have drowned in the wells
of the faceless, fathomless mirrors,
and every woman I have ever drunk from
was a grail with an enigmatic black pearl in it
lustrous as the moon in eclipse.

O promises of bliss
that tuned the webs of the spiders
like a guitarist with perfect pitch
to the frequency of my spinal cord
that I might entangle a star
in the silk of my conceiving;
that I might seize a firefly
in the fangs of my thought
and taste the honey of the lantern
that lit my dark corner
in the era of the moment.

O sweetest of lies to ripen with longing
like the eyes of a child in the darkness
far from home.
I was trying to find a road
that fit my walking like shoes on a mountain;
I was trying to walk on water with mystic crutches;
I was looking for an arrow
dipped in the blood of a serpent with wings,
set aflame by a demonic star
and feathered by spiritual fire
to restring me like a bow
severed like the branch of a sacred grove
by the oracular blade of the moon.

I was too deeply sheathed in the truth
to appreciate the arcane sagacity of my lies.
I stood like a shadow in the burning doorway of my own fire
and looked deeply into the night
to answer my own knocking
like the echo of a stranger in the darkness,
walking away from someone who didn't know
how to greet himself.

I was a tree crucified on a man,
a vandal in the shrine of the moment,
bleeding like stained-glass,
a rosary of vertebrae and skulls
reconstructed in the future museum of now
I played myself into like a funeral plan.

Now everywhere the wind is a pilgrim,
I leave my heart like a shrine
I will never return to.
And the sadness, and the solitude
and the vastness of my insignificance
is the shadow of a bird on a cloud.
The only way to perfect my defeat
was to sit at the feet of my most cherished delusion
like a rootless flower watching over a coffin,
then rise like the wind
from the rubbish of the shedding,
the loneliest pillar and sole cornerstone of the sky.

Now my apish profundities
no longer crack fleas of light like stars
I picked out of God's burning beard
with the forceps of the moon.
Now I am infested with constellations.
I no longer turn the pages of the waterlilies
like the holy books of an inspired swamp.
I no longer seep down to the river
to drink from the moon
like a serpent at the water's edge
and watch the panicked angels jumping
from the reflection of an uncrossed bridge
that collapsed like a covenant with hell.
I no longer shred my heart
like a secret document
in an abandoned embassy of swans
looking for asylum further south,
tormented by the unattainability
of a woman's beauty,
looking for sanctuary
in the ashes of a black sail
that flared like a poppy with passion
at every gust of desire
that silvered the trembling grass
with sidereal aspirations.

Why bother to laminate your lovers, your legends?
Let them go like autumn leaves and smoke,
the last breath you took
before you were interred
like a scream in the larynx of a deaf-mute,
a foreign currency you couldn't spend at home.
Naked is the only way to dress for the rain,
but it doesn't matter which
from the wardrobe of all your many lies
you wear to the fire that waits for you
like a fledgling waits for its plumage.

And this is a long river
and this is a long day and a night
and maybe only the silence is listening
to what the stars are preaching
from the pulpits of the flowers,
and this that says me now
is just the promo for the intensive care ward
of a new religion
the founders are always the first to betray;
but when I truly let go
it was my falling
that taught me to patch my shoes with the sky.

And have you come this far,
passed through this many gates
for wisdom, compassion, freedom,
wandered aimlessly until you could not tell
the stars from the sand,
the journey from the arrival,
suffered worse than all the things you cannot say
until you forgot what you were looking for
in the first place, until
you despised what you craved the most?

I don't remember how long I slept
before my dreaming woke me up
and I realized
no fool could defame my solitude
and that life
was only the story of a scar
looking for the knife that inflicted it
like a shadow
in the forsaken valleys
of the mountains of the moon.

Looking for a pearl of light
I had to plunge into a darkness
deeper than anything
my eyes had ever given birth to before.
I had to swallow the key before I could open the door.

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

Burning World, Take Me

Burning world, take me, fold me in your flaming arms
and let me disappear into the unforgiving night.
Among these blind, here, in their black eggs,
eyeless birds who nest in their own ignorance,
I am the leper of light they drive out
with the stone of the moon, the wolf
with the mystic wound that will not heal until the last star
is born of the bleeding. Return me to the cold, brutal beauty
of your mineral wilderness, my bones on Venus
and my skull an abandoned planet circling the sun at midnight.
Let my eyes be the last of my tears to fall
and my blood be strewn like a gypsy scarf across the darkness.
Erase all trace of me as you do the path of the water-stars
who walk here among the dead like spirits from another world
intrigued by our passing. Pygmies in a circus,
cannibals and emperors all, leaping from thought to thought
rock to rock in the lifestream
to the applause of future funerals, o let them fade
like the idiot savants of last night’s dream, meaning nothing
but what they meant to themselves,
trying to jump their own distorted shadows.
What difference between the venom of the bee and its luminous honey
to these whose flaring in the vastness
was the kingdom of a match? At most
lightning on a water droplet shaken from a blade of grass.
Did they think the great fires of being flowed like blood
around their carbon hearts? Sweet world,
bestow your flowerless garden upon me and let me forget
the holy wars of their tiny gods against my solitude.
Didn’t they see, so full of themselves,
there was never any room in their arks and shrines and coffins
moored like lifeboats to the rotting dock
they built like a bridge to nowhere?
I never meant to be unkind or rise from the depths
in waves of light and blood that wiped them out
like the mythical monster of a shore-bound sailor
too far out deep down to be confirmed by their disbelief
or worse, their shallow faith. Leave them, undisturbed
to the shadows of things they trade in
like spiritual money. I wish them no worse, no better
than who they think they are, little prophets
inveighing against the purity of my absence.
The dark mirror is better, brighter, more abundant
than the poverty of their trembling reflections,
mere nothingness more tender than their lies.

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

Not To Be With You

Not to be with you,
not to know your breathing beside me,
not to be able to put my arms around you
and kiss the black candles away,
change skies with a glance,
feel your mystery seeping into me
like a veil of rain,
my heart a hive of stars,
my body crazed
by a fragrance of the moon,
to feel the intimate moment hang
like a dropp of dew
poised like the silence that falls before it;
is a mountain peering down into its own valley
at a whisper of cloud
that passes like a secret,
a red carpet of blood that wants to fly
laid out for an unknown dignitary.
You are not here
but I walk with you alone
under the smudged moonlight,
through the tidal shadows of soft, ebbing trees,
and gusts of warm air touch me like your skin,
and the assent in your eyes
is a colour only the heart can see,
and my longing is a map to anywhere
my mouth might meet yours,
and my hands visit the shrines of your body
like pilgrims full of reverence
for an infidel religion
with beautiful eyes,
with sacred scars and a language
that is born along
with the serpent fire of my ripening passion
to annihilate myself in your doorway,
to unspool the river
in the supple coral of your water-rose,
the keel of my tongue
circumnavigating your startled equators,
and all your tender meridians
bowstrings taut with anticipation
of electric arrows released in ecstasy,
both of us wounded by insatiable joy
in a storm of mushrooms and black cherries,
in the oceanic hunger of the sea
for an oracular island of forbidden frenzies,
for mystic releases
that free oblivion from servitude
and teach the chains of existence
to dance to the music
of their own liberation,
their own falling away like rain,
that the true ground of their being
was always the wind
that binds the message to the world
in the arms of lovers creating each other
from black palettes in the darkness,
from moss and apricots,
from the long wharves
of interminable kisses
that gore like the horns of garden snails,
from the fountain-mouths of ancient eclipses,
the dark abundance
of the feast that is received like eyes
and the night chutes that open nocturnal poppies
like auroras of furious sugar
to squander the stars
in the throats of jubilant black holes,
to appease the unattainable
with the inexhaustible satiation of gratified silos.
Not to be with you,
my wings ache with urgent migrations,
and I am as impetuous as a sword
in the foundries of my blood,
and my voice
is the remote thunder of humbled apples,
and my dragons swarm
the abyss of your beauty
like shepherd moons, sunspots,
a calendar of desires
that marks every phase of your body off
as an apostate holiday,
the omen that winnows
a harvest of bells.
Not to be with you is a cloak
that weighs more than the night sky,
the eyelid of an iron rose,
a feather of lead
that drowns in its own reflection
like the shadow of a flightless longing,
the unquenchable silence
of a well on the moon
listening for rain.

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

I Sit At My Window

I sit at my window
trying to translate the Kufic script
of the shadows of the trees on the snow,
smoking the invisible ink of the light
over the flame of my mind
to clarify my seeing
by realizing there is no deep or shallow
in the fathomless depths of I am,
nothing hidden, nothing revealed.

And it's not so much that I am in the presence of the world,
but that the presence, the world, is me,
and if I go looking for it,
only my fingerprints will be found
like these violet shadows dusted by the snow
under my multitudinous mugshot in the mirror.

So I open my mind and my eye, my heart and my hand
and let things arise as they will,
knowing that even this is a blunder
that advances my tardy illumination by another eclipse.

This morning blue is the taste of the sky
and I am alive again at my desk
to wonder who or what or why I might be
this wondering spontaneity
circling like a bird in the abyss,
feathered by feeling and thought
for a tree or a meaning to perch in
that hasn't already been struck
by the lightning of my homeless insight.

Indwelling energy in the turmoil of a terrible silence,
I am an ambassador of water to an unknown star
that foils my blood with light the closer I approach
and I don't know what the message is
or who it's from, but every time I deliver it,
my head comes off like the moon.

At some point you have to give up looking
to go on seeing, you must
come to a full stop
if you want to liberate the pen
that indicts you like an assassin
with his ear to the wall.

So I go by night, unheeded and alone,
a constellation of my own
that doesn't read the braille of itself
reflected like direction in the starchart on the lake,
cored like eyes into the dice of my bones,
or mummified by a legend in a straitjacket
interred in the long-standing consensus of a guess,
knowing I would only be following my own footprints
like the shadows of these words
that flow from the trees in the snow.

And there are squirrels that leap from branch to branch
of these arboreal letters like commas
that don't know where they go
and wrens that perch like quotation marks
around things that can never be said
that everyone claims they know
as they call out their name
like the echoless vocabulary
of a febrile grammar in a mad dream
as if their whole life were ingathered into one last scream
that might shatter the mirror of the way things inevitably seem.

I listen to the world and hear in each person and form
the mindstream moving through the night
like the voice of a mystic alphabet
returning to the sea
with news of itself
whispered into its own ear.

And if sometimes the stars think
my seeing goes too far,
my seeking exceeds the bounds of the light,
as it turns planets like doorknobs
to open new rooms in a dark mansion
that stands like an abandoned cornerstone of the night on a hill
waiting for me to return like a lost threshold,
or the faceless side of the moon to a window,
then let me here and now confess to my own denial
and knock on the door of the next false address
to see if I can find who wrote
this loveletter that slashes me open like a smile
and reads me out loud to the stars on the wind
as if I were the last flare from an empty lifeboat.

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

As If Beyond Death

As if beyond death today,
as if I lay already under the eyelid of the moon,
the echo of my heart
pumping shadows
through my perfectly preserved corpse
in a silence that's never known the wind,
a fallen wharf without arrivals or departures,
and sad enough not to care why,
blood on the dolphin in the black tide
that pours me out of the horseshoe of the bay
like a road from its boot,
wipes me like the pollen and dust of dark matter
off the windowsills of the constellations,
my unknown mass crucial
to the cosmic contractions
that might give birth to the world again,
and I'm here alone in the high field
drowning in the twilight with the wildflowers
and the sky a last exhalation of the blue-green luster
that flirts with the mystic violet
on a homing crow's head
as the shadows assemble the wings
of a total eclipse
and a new dragon is born of the pain
that shrieks like lightning in the mouth of the abyss,
a torn animal
peeled out of its own skin like an eye
to add its darkness to the furnace of the black rose
that roars in the night
to blood the hungry mirror
with the thorns and talons of clarity,
to feed the wound of its existence
its existence.
And when I walk to the end of myself
through the golden rod and waist-high asters,
the seed of the stars that sleep with the daughters of men,
some of the flowers close up like fists and kisses
and others grasp themselves like a key
to a door that the whole universe can walk through,
and there are strange birds
flying from the eyes
in the rising skull of the moon
that sing like the pyres of cremated guitars
that died like trees in their solitude
and even the gates are weeping like wild dogs.
And there's a wind, intelligent, dark
the ghost of an ancient serpent
horned without ears,
an ocean of mind that exceeds itself like a wave
that howls like a secret it can't tell itself,
like a root blind to its own flowers,
that wants to lead my voice away in chains,
that wants my tongue to try
like a leaf in the updraft of a fire storm
to scream its agony out in the night
so that even the furthest star shudders
with the horror of its final liberation
like an arrow through the throat of a caged hawk.

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

Journey

I’m on some kind of journey
but I don’t know where it’s going;
I’m growing wings and shedding them,
and I’m true to every thought in my head.
I’ve got a heart, worn down at heels,
a used voodoo doll quilled like a native,
a meteorically battered planet
that wobbles between a kiss and a fist
in the way it keeps running itself around.
I spend too much time alone.
There are no obstructions in any direction;
and barefoot, I’m walking on stars and poppies,
talking to myself like a candle,
weaving my way among the shadows
like a fish through the supple harps
of the silver river reeds. I see
that I’m taking a bath in my own grave
to wash the soiled skies of the painted world
off my eyes, to behold
the brief career of the leaf of life
and how the light gusts out from the windows
like curtains and bird-nets. Life is short
and the new temple never gets further built
than a hole and a single cornerstone, the rest
left to the business of the earth,
all that beauty and magnificence,
unravelled among the mud weavers.
I was inoculated against death
by a splinter of the moon;
by how little time there is for love,
for the root to get drunk
on the fruits of enlightenment and compassion,
by how little I will ever know
of the road to the doorway I stepped through
to stand in awe before the moonspill
on the raven blue waters,
and to look so deeply into the eyes of a woman
who has just conceded an island in her passage,
and the fragrance of unheard music
that I am a pillar of wonder
before the unsayable
as she lets dropp her shadows and feathers of light,
and the blood-god assumes
his flowering crown of fire
to enhance the splendours of his courtly intensities.
What I have lost in the river
I will find in the river
and what I have taken from the sky
I will give back to the sky,
and there shall come a day
when the eclipse will be the brighter mirror,
and the darkness that overtakes me now
will be a gate of stars to a water palace
where the dragonflies and waterlilies
are the sceptres and crowns of a human divinity
that will endure like a whisper of radiance,
a more haunting taste of light,
the rumour of a black rose
that outshines the angels
that coax the lanterns out of the night.
I will evaporate like the flaring of fireflies
on the windy shore of a trembling lake,
like the blue hat plume of smoke
from a gallant winter chimney
into the vastness of my own mind
like a waterbird without a trace into a sweeter, wilder solitude.
And these words will come and go
like the tides of the ocean I was,
like the providential leaves
of unfurling fortune-cookies,
like an avalanche of gold
washed down from the mountain upstream.
I write them in flowing diamond,
I write them in auroras of blood,
in dawns bluer than the iris of a peacock’s eye,
in fire and water and the mystic inks of the night
in the fleeting, indelible dream
of doors and hands and moons,
in warm breath on a cold window,
in a halo of comets
smeared into light by the sun,
in the sidereal wines that bled from bitter wounds,
I have said what it was mine to say
on a page of the wind
that whistled through me like life
greening the sands of the hourglass
with visions that ripened the bell of blood in my heart
to fall like wisdom from its tower
toward a fallible paradise
that won’t leave me as I am for long.
And I will jump again
into this cauldron of joys and sorrows
to string my spinal cord
over the abyss of the guitar-shaped universe,
walking upright
to plead with my own answers
to thaw like a mirror
estranged from the world it reflects
in the self-effacing flames
of the passionate gardens that dance on the wicks.
The awakening seed
echoes these flowers of fire
in the valley of a voice in the furnace
that lies down in the cool grass
by a stream of idle stars
and arrays its vagrant heart
like a breeze of blood in the dust
to the refugees in the shadows.
They move like eyelids
through all the phases of the moon
from an unspooled well of darkness
to the slash of a razor of light
to the threshing of the full harvest
in the siloes of the nightwind
enthroned like a breath of life
in the midst of its own dispersal.

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

Deep In The Night

Deep in the night that shells its husk of blue
to pan the nuggets of its stars from a darker stream,
the heart an executioner with a fistful of pardons,
and the soft, moist, lulling of the evening air,
the threshing of slow fish,
I'm enthroned alone in a crucial palace of light
that realigns its domains to the borders of the wind,
and I don't want to feel lonely but I do,
and I don't want to miss so many, so many faces
stripped from the bough like a savaged telephone-book,
so many feathers of light drifting through the shadows of their names,
and the black granite of the uncarved bell
that turtles the blood under the eyelid of the knowing,
that makes my eyes want to scream
until the pillars of the dead sea fall like rotten salt:
how long can one road endure the passage of everything
walking life off into the stars that measure the miles in skulls?

Was I young? Were you there in the brindled moonlight?
Did I remember how to love you well; did I see with long eyes
how you rose out of the chest of the hills like a spirit leaving,
the blue effulgence of your nebulous departure
almost a cocoon of morning mist, the last breath of a lake
as if an indigo thistle released its silk to the wind
or a dandelion relinquished its ivory mane?
Were you the soul of me that lingered by gates and wharves?
Have you come back now with your bells of blood and lamps of flesh?
Can I feel again the leaves of the silver herbs
in the gardens of your fingertips?

Touch me like the breaking of a fast,
find me like a river in the night,
the dazzled theme of a wandering valley,
and pour your journey into mine like stars into a vine,
shadows running down the worn convictions of the stairs,
the midnight wines of old eclipses in the goblets of your eyes.

Once for the flame that dances on the wick of the tongue,
Once for the orchards that plead with the heart for birds,
Once for the envelope that read the letter it married,
and you, by the river, a sapphire among rocks,
tender blue grass in the translucent water-skin of the night,
loving me once as if your hands were autumns full of departure
and your eyes, the gulf of the world in your eyes, your eyes
were the soft flowing of the dark honeys
that leak from the wounded hives
we carry like knives to the grave.

Distinguished among broken clocks,
sultry and bitter, a quarantined bay of refugee stars,
caught in the threshing blades of a circular waterfall,
a mess of tents I've furloughed across the milky distances
like a chain-letter from a secret constellation to you,
I blue the intimate spaces between us with time
and patch the maps with the confluence of our lifelines
and try to restore the eyes in the sockets of our bridges
under a brow of swallows in the dusk. And I remember
all the names of the flowers, all the names of the stars,
all the badges of love that heaven and earth once offered
in lieu of the reasons why
love bares the skin of a poppy
to the teeth of the hunting sun
and then flares like a firefly
over the water-lamps of the moon,
but when it dies of its own self-inflicted wounds,
slashed by shadows among the ripe fruit of its vowels,
and the seed wasn't asked and the harvest had no choice
there are always two skies,
one bound by roots, the other, eyes,
at the back of every voice.

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

Poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mad or Enlightened

Mad or enlightened the same, the universe
is an embryo of darkness born in upon itself, everywhere
its own womb breaking into the pulse of stars within stars,
and everywhere, the shining before the light, the dark mirror
showing the light its own face for the first time,
how in an eventually that is always now
it would attain flowers and eyes along the way
and become the skin of the rain as it falls to earth in April.
If I change to fire, these letters burn, blow away as ash
on the tongue of the wind; if water, then the stars put themselves out
in their own weeping like candles drowning in tears.
Every step of the journey around ourselves
is another world, another garden to plant the seed-names
we’ve shaken from autumns in other realms
and carried around like sacred jewels
we forgot in the corners of our pockets and hearts. Believe it;
when I am all stars; you are all the listening darkness
I pour myself into like a drunkard into a bottomless glass
and you raise me to your lips and drink yourself up
until you’re blinded into clarity
by all the open cages of the light.
Why lie in your own coffin, night after starless night,
if you’re not empowered by your long obedience?
Better to open your eyes on the other side
of your horizontal door, better to come knocking from the outside,
deluded vertically, than suffer this poverty of blood within
the hushed precincts of your skyless realm,
the skull-bone basilicas of your private Vaticans and law libraries.
When it wakes up in the morning
there’s no book-dust in the eyes of the light.
Before you now, in your endless beginning, the dream
you thought you had rubbed from your eyes, you
waking up like a key inside the heart of the dream.
There’s nothing you can’t unlock, even
gardens on the moon or the ancient futures of past lives
death only pruned back with shears to bloom again
in the efflorescence of your eyes, early dawns in the new arraying.
Who you are flows into who you are, all one river of seeing,
dizzy and composed in its own running, all
your own eddies and currents, swamps and white-water,
auroral maids of the mist when you fall in separate drops,
weeping’s just a waterfall, and frenzied tides of being
when you crash ashore out of your own wholeness into buddhas and bums.
In the fire, everyone’s crazy with passion and intelligence,
everyone’s smashed on the wine of an unknown guest
trying to be remembered by his friends.
What visions abound in the orchards of the blessing,
What hearts are torn out and thrown upon the fire
like planets called home by the longing of the sun? We are the white shadows
of the someone else who is walking up ahead
like the moon on the path of its own reflection.
Catch up to yourself and drown in the luminosity of your own being.
Who needs a map to the road they’re walking
or sages pointing all along the way, grey as barnboard signs,
or luminaries at night
pointing to the darkness. The pivot of the worlds points to itself.
True north is not a direction. Haven’t you guessed by now; the stars
all circle you like stormbirds drawn to a lighthouse on the coast of heaven,
too in love with your light to heed your warning about
the deep dragon grief that opens the mouth of the wound
that killed it into life, a one-edged sword of light
in the hands of a holy assassin darker than the silence
of the sun at midnight. If you listen with your eyes,
you can hear in that mournful emptiness
God calling out to God, lover and beloved,
through the echoless valley, across the waveless sea,
yours the name on the prow of the ship that breaks through the veils of the storm,
and yours the name of the storm. You are the bird
that answers the green bough; the lightning in the rigging.
You are the sigh of the silence
and the mystic pen in the hand of the saying.
Whatever worlds you dress for, fields and flowers,
or stars and hourglass elsewhere zones, you are the body of being,
and yours the gowns and robes of creation you draw from the abyss
like clothes from a private closet, dignified in your scriptures,
intimate in your jewels. And everywhere you coyly let yourself fall
like earrings of rain, scarves of fire, fragrances of light,
and watch to see who of the many lovers that are you
bends down like the sky to pick them up at your feet
and return them to you like the first crescent of the moon
rising like an eyelid out of sleep
to greet itself reflected in your face.

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

Old Sorrow, I've Forgotten Your Name

Old sorrow, I've forgotten your name,
you've been with me so long, pouring
the iron in my blood into the heavy bell of a heart
that's climbed back up this sad tree of my spine
so many times out of the afterlives of my windfall,
these sad planets collapsing in on themselves
under the decaying weight and water of their own tears
from the inside out, and gone to seed
like a small fleet of lifeboats in this floating world,
trying to make it up out of these watersheds
to run the vertical deltas of this autumn orchard
whose roots I keep falling upon like a radical place to begin
climbing back up toward the stars again,
until one night I'll raise my sail
like the moonrise of a blossom on the Milky Way
and be gone like a ghost ship in the fog of a nautical legend.

Old sorrow, I know you like the smoke of a thousand fires
I've danced around alone like the only child
of a midnight sun that abandoned me on the threshold
of a black hole I orbit like the rain in a broken mirror.
Who did you bury that we weep for, what
did you aspire to that you were too earthbound to reach,
what love of yours was so betrayed when it had
its eyes pecked out by the song birds
you never sing anymore when the bees
are in the locust trees, and the ants are opening
the peonies like loveletters from the Pleiades,
except there's a wound in your voice the lyrics
are bleeding out of like a thorn in the eye of a hurricane rose?

Old sorrow, are you the tears deep down in things,
the lachrymae rerum that fill the wishing wells
with oceans of disappointment like the run-off
of our hopes and dreams descending the world mountain
after we'd talked to God like bathyspheres
trying to get to the bottom of our tears
like glass bubbles in our crystal skulls,
our third eyes frozen like the lenses of a telescope
fixed on a star above a shipwreck in Arctic ice,
looking for a northwest passage out of ourselves
toward a mythic Cathay beyond our continental shelves?
And what did God have to say that you kept to yourself
when you came back down from your tete a tete,
and returned your commandments like a library book
that was way overdue in Alexandria?

Old sorrow, I can sense in you how many seasons
have scarred you like a calendar of crescent moons
as you hang like the pine cone of one dolorous note
of the silence you sustain like a blues guitar

ripening in the corner of the room where the spiders
are writing music you'll never play like the wind
in the hair of the willows down by the Tay River
when the black walnuts are floating by
like the scorched planets of sunless solar systems.

Old sorrow, I know you like a heavy boot cloyed in the starmud
of all these roads we've walked together to get
nowhere in particular but wherever we are now
in this graveyard of shadows
that talk to the stars who have none
about how to wash our names and faces off
like deathmasks that are tired of trying to light up the darkness
like a candle at a black mass at high noon
with an eclipse high overhead the flowers won't look at
for fear of burning their eyes. Compendious companion,
you bend my boughs toward the earth
with the low hanging fruit of a giving nature
seasoning your inconsolable wisdom with compassion.

Immoveable buddha, are you the ancient echo
of the birth pang of life, the groan of sentience
being torn up by the roots out of the indwelling forms
of things you used to take shelter in like lenses and mirrors
you could blow into bubbles of the mind
like the multiverse through a keyhole into the abyss of hyperspace?
Old sorrow, were you rounded like a shepherd moon
in the undertow of time, your teeth blunted
like the molars of the asteroids eating stoney wheat
growing wild in the starfields of the neolithic grasslands?
Sometimes I can feel you possessing my heart and body and mind
like the corpse of an ancient ancestor, my spirit
like a prophetic skull on the dark side of the moon
lamenting the loss of its atmosphere like one of its eyes.
Other nights, I look upon you like the ruins
of a palace of water that once greened this desert of stars
like a Persian gardener that ruled an empire of flowers.

Venerable exile, do you despair of ever
finding your way home again through your lion gate
or have you encamped like so many other nations
to weep like Zion beside the rivers of Babylon?
Is your diamond corona occluded by the protocols of coal
that sully your face like the memory of darker days ahead?
I shall call you, friend, given how long
we've known each other like shadows of the valley spirit
blinded by the sundials of the unaging mountains of the moon.
I shall open my heart like a fire to you
and we can share the silence together for hours at a time
on long winter nights when the wind is howling outside
and there's no need to speak of things
that neither of us understand about why
the fountains with the deepest watersheds
are always sadder than the last of the flowers
in a late autumn rain, or the willows along the Tay.
Slowest of rivers, you can sit saturnine and soporific,
red shifting into the longer wavelengths
of the oldest of your dreams, if you still dream yet,
and I'll work on a poem in the shipyards of the mindstream
that will displace its weight in tears, and hopefully,
though you probably know better, keep us both afloat
like a paper boat shooting the rapids of a waterclock
that's been running a little late like the two of us for light years.

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

Heal Softly, Lover, Burn Gently

Heal softly, lover, burn gently,
the moon is full on your windowsill,
and the stars haven't gone down
over the eyes of your bells
or made a fool of your tears
over a jest of ashes. You are
the nightbranch that reaches for me
and I'm the bird that returns
to your cherry chandeliers,
the ripe goblets of your fire-plums,
and the stars in the quince of your eyes.

And there are blackberries in your blood
thorns and vines, simmering eclipses
broken gates and lonely doorways
where I'll always come to shine,
where I'll wait like a ghost beyond death
for the eyelids and bridges
in the breath of your wine.
Eternity isn't time enough
to hold the sea I bear you
nor a mountain robed in snow
nor a valley heeding voices in the depths,
more than a wound and a toy
to the love I feel for you.

Heal softly, lover, hear me, see
in this dreamtime of the flesh,
how the lanterns
of the lady slippers glow with honey
that fill the hives with light,
and the doe sleeps softly
in the silver grass that jewels the water,
and the fireflies outlive the brass
of graver monuments than these
that write our names on the moon in shadows.

I say it in bees and bruises and orchids
in apples and eglantine,
in roads and doors and thresholds,
in skulls and scars and sunspots,
in grapes and scarlet runners,
in the slips of the cucumber seeds,
and the lips of the velvet borage
that kiss and overflow the stone,
you're the harp in the throat of time
the spider weaves
to hear the morning play.

No widow of burnt guitars,
no journal of summer
pressed between the pages
of the nightshift shales,
no blood on a chain,
or raven lost in the rags and ribbons
of her own black sails, not
frost on a garden that fails,
or a lock that's lost it keys,
or a rock that grieves for its plundered ores,
you are the candle and the seal
of all my mystic urgencies,
the gentle thief of my confessions
at the circuits and sessions
of a doomed man's last appeal
to die in the bay of your arms,
a dolphin, a bottle, a snail
that craved its way to you.

Heal softly, lover, turn with the herbs
that follow the sun like clocks
and when your day is done
bathe in the dusk with the birds
that fly through the air like autumn,
and scented by the apricots
and peacock blues that pour out of my heart
like the eyes and inks of a prelude,
a painter, a pitcher of words,
rise from your ancient solitude renewed
and dressed by the wind
in your scarves and veils,
in your nets, your shawls and auroras,
in anklets, chokers, loops and chains
in your nebulae and orbits
and the lunar rain of your earrings,
wait for me as I will wait for you
where the nightjar sings
to celebrate his lover's soft approach
with every quill and feather of his wings.
And no world will deceive us,
no flame expire, no radiance cease,
no fracture mar the jubilant fire
that recast its heart in hell
to love you long and well.

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

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
Vote! | Copy!

Not Quite Dawn

Not quite dawn, night seeping out of the blue,
troubled sleep, no stars, and you, a week gone,
the whole universe applying its laws to your absence
which is the silence everything returns to like water.
I have never touched you, so my fingertips
can still play you into existence on a keyboard,
though the loss of your voice is a dead bird,
and I am a loose thread of blood in a labyrinth
of motherboards and micro-chips like me
who can’t find a way out of themselves without
turning away like a planet from its own stars.
How quickly the light comes, and the darkness
bleeds away like a love-letter under the door.
No eyes. No hands. No skin. No hair. I am
not even the ashes of a cleft witching wand
that went looking for water and caught fire instead,
and we have shared only the light of the mind
that paints a world with the shadows of a ghost,
and might only be the last habit of an amputee to leave,
a mere mime of the way our eyes make us see.
And yet the heart hurts as if you once were flesh,
and I am awake as if another bed denied me my own,
and I am angry and sad, scared and alone as if
the universe were shy one comet, one bead,
one firefly among billions who shone for me
and that light was brighter somehow than a galaxy.
The day grows a new skin over your absence,
and I am as out of place, out of time, as a streetlamp
still shining down on its feet in the morning.
And there could be a thousand and one reasons
you don’t write back, why the black crow caws,
the sky is a concrete rose, the blood of the poppy
runs along the gypsy blade of its undulant smile.
From the heights, I can see a small, blue egg
smashed on the rocks below, a gesture of ruin;
from the depths, the remnants of a shattered star,
and all I can do is stare into the relentless images,
a word without a mouth, like the new moon
shucked from my tongue like a black pearl.

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

Getting Up

Getting up on the first legs of the morning,
waiting to remember I know how to walk,
as my body changes shifts
and I emerge from the dream-mist
not knowing if I'm stepping out of a lifeboat or a cocoon,
if yesterday's oars have turned into wings,
or the silver blood of the mud bone
greened like old copper
at the scene of a crime
or if my heart has finally congealed
like a suspicious scar
on the mood ring of the moon
as I resent the orthodoxy of the petty rituals
I have yet to perform with blades and foam and water
on a face that almost scares me
it is so diminishingly mine.

And it's radiant, and the sun
is reflected in every windshield,
in every palace of ice and hovel of glass,
and even the deepest eclipse within me
that weeps like a dragon
is remotely enhanced by the shining.

Today I will make money.
Today I will pay bills.
Today I will fix the car.
Today I will feed myself intelligently and exercise,
trying to prolong my bruising campaign against death;
I will walk in and out of banks and stores
and greet people with as much sincerity
as they are capable of, careful
not to pour the ocean into a teacup
or think a tear sufficient to mourn the dead seas of the moon.

I will be congenial, kind, and generous;
I will scatter tropical trail mix
in the parking lot of Pizza Hut for the birds
though I know it annoys people
who worry about shit on their cars,
and walk away feeling like an insurgent
who bombed the marketplace into life
with dried pineapple not shrapnel,
though it's a pathetic protest to offend
the protocols of their chronic opprobrium
by feeding a few birds more
than made it through the freezing night before
and excuses nothing in me that I often fear is worse
when I consider what I could be doing and don't
because the picket up my intimate ass is the universe
and everything turns on that
like the paddlewheel of a Mississippi showboat.

All day long I will apply Buddhas and Zen masters like poultices
to draw the infection of the world out of my blood
like the noxious fume of a festering rose,
and then upbraid myself insightfully,
confessing to a delegation of mirrors
that it is my seeing, my eyes
that smear the view like slugs,
and that I am obsessively defeated by what I condemn
because I am them, I am them, I am them.

And that's when I pull the trigger on myself like a fire alarm,
knowing no one's coming to put me out,
because I haven't been tested for the right emergency
and there's never a pilot light on the mystic urgency
to at least be right about the way I know I'm wrong.

But no matter how you beat it,
you can't beat a violin concerto out of a gong
or labour the rime of light on the lips of a black hole into honey.
All day I will look upon small trees
chained like slaves to a square meter
of lonely earth in an asphalt parking lot
and profoundly lament
the intrusive derangement of my species
that abomination after abomination, shames the fly.

And the fate of a shopping mall sapling
may be the bathetic token
of something more profoundly unspoken,
but all day my spirit will be unmothered
by the existential complicity
of being here like rain on the blood of the roadkill
my karmic imbalance tries to unmean
as everything I cherish turns slightly obscene.

But I know a star cluster far away beyond my fingertips
with the body of a serpent woman
who charms the clay she caresses
by playing her fates and phases on the flutes of the moon
as if every breath were the wind in a gust of doves
she scatters like the sheet music of a liberated choir.

And all day I will taste the infinite constellation of her stars
unspooling the lifeline of the mystery I follow
through the labyrinth of the moon's horn gates
like cool transfusions of night through my blood
as I turn her image in my heart
like a mysterious jewel
that once wept her crown away
to lift a veil of water like an eye.

And I will smile through the day serenely within
remembering so many things, so many lives,
so many fireflies of tenderness that haven't happened yet,
and the unsayable passion of the lips that wake the dragon
like a flame to the wick that candles the volcano
into a fury of ecstasy that shocks
the starmaps billions of lightyears away,
and she will be my secret and my sail
and I will disappear over her five horizons like a treble clef
or the whole note of a fleeing night bird into its hidden nocturne.

All day she will flourish within me to heal the mystic herbalist
who knows beyond flower and frond
the dark virtue of the black honey
that pours from her own wounded root like time.

And I can be moved by women who are goblets
spilling over with wine, and women
who turn moonlight into glass
and stand sad and empty
against the vastness of the sky,
witching for mirrors, and those
who were Japanese plum tree blossoms in spring,
the dangerous wine of the rose,
now shattered on the ground
as if the moon had slipped its finger from the ring.

And I have loved the loveliest
and least attentive among them,
and those who were mortal and mad,
and the black peonies of the sexually bad
who have indulged me by shedding their eclipses
until we fell down exhausted beside each other,
two petals in the mud.

But she has stars in her blood
that spice the tongue of the snake,
the grail horns of the divining rod
and the tine of the lightning
that tunes the ashes of the burnt guitar
as if it were still a tree
to the tears of the willow,
and I am addicted by a muse
to a delirium of longing
that burns like a loveletter
written in light and blood and shadows
that slides me under her door
with every breath I take
and unfolds me like a sky or a bird,
a fossilized constellation
buried in the shale of a starmap,
to shine deep within all day long
beyond the light like stars
at the bottom of a well at noon
where she comes to drink like the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

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

Things Might Be Drifting Away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

En.Citatepedia^®.ro

Cocoons

Related quotes

The Practical Uses Of Poetry

The Wind Wild

To Be Alive Here

Black Fire

The Serpent

Burning World, Take Me

Not To Be With You

I Sit At My Window

As If Beyond Death

Journey

Deep In The Night

Poetry

As Much As I Love The Stars

Mad or Enlightened

Old Sorrow, I've Forgotten Your Name

Heal Softly, Lover, Burn Gently

A Whole Galaxy Lights Up

Not Quite Dawn

Getting Up

Things Might Be Drifting Away

En.Citatepedia®.ro

Cocoons

Related quotes

The Practical Uses Of Poetry

The Wind Wild

To Be Alive Here

Black Fire

The Serpent

Burning World, Take Me

Not To Be With You

I Sit At My Window

As If Beyond Death

Journey

Deep In The Night

Poetry

As Much As I Love The Stars

Mad or Enlightened

Old Sorrow, I've Forgotten Your Name

Heal Softly, Lover, Burn Gently

A Whole Galaxy Lights Up

Not Quite Dawn

Getting Up

Things Might Be Drifting Away

En.Citatepedia^®.ro