Dying Young In Autumn
Dying young in autumn,
the ideal death of a flower or a star
whose beauty's still as obvious
as a door that's been left ajar at night.
The fireflies are search parties
out looking for someone
who's made an escape through the woods,
or they're lamp lighting deer
out of the dark into the glare of their insights.
Train whistle in the distance
works its ghost to death
Doppler-shifting its lament
into an infra-red eclipse of existence.
And then the stars in the eyes
of the recurring storm of the trees,
flaring over-eagerly like candles and dragons
to burn for the sheer delight of it.
I make my way through a labyrinth
of foliage and moonlit shadows
to nowhere in particular
with a rocky slope glacially graded
down to what the locals say
is a fathomless lake none of their childhoods
were ever deep enough to plumb.
I lie down upon the cool poultice of the earth
and I can feel it drawing
all the fever out of me like the effluvium
of swimming the thousand polluted mindstreams
I've become osmotically enculturated to
like a dendritic form of spiritual gangrene.
The moon puts a new dressing on my wound.
I urge the pain to rest like a homing bird
on a limb that's healing like the rafter of a house
that broke under the weight of what it upheld
when a three alarm fire in the heart
sought sanctuary from an ice storm
and it was nobody's fault but my own
that I didn't let it go out like a flagging comet
with the rest of the daylilies
that died in harness like parachutes.
I've kept it alive for lightyears
like a book of the occult in an industrial library.
I've cupped its light in my hands
like an ancestral offering
to the enlightenment of my peers
and though the clouds have raved
and the wind turned vicious
it still burns in me like a dragon in an aviary,
a canary in a mine, a muse in a lantern,
a genie in an old lamp, a female demon
that only blooms in fire like a black waterlily
with nothing to fear from the new moon.
Or the fireflies trying to find it on a star map.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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These Days, This Late At Night
These days, this late at night, I'm usually a lone wolf sage
high above the timberline in a sanctuary of solitude
that occasionally breaks the silence
with the elegaic echo of the anquished shriek of a hawk
wheeling in the abyss like the stars overhead
feeling as if its flightfeathers just caught fire
and for a few brief moments no longer
than the wingspan of a wavelength
it was shining like them and there were jewels
like a woman's eyes cracking the rock
of a heart that's been more of an asteroid
than habitable planet with a few ancestral skulls of its own
for moons and a creative atmosphere where the clouds
can move mountains to tears with the beauty
of what can bloom spontaneously out of nothing
like wildflowers strewn all over the starfields
as if they were expecting someone to come
of the things we really feel are worth crying for.
These days, this time of night, I delight
in looking for the most beautiful nocturnal metaphors
I can compare to you inside and out and beyond both
like a spirit of female serpent fire that haunts me
into paying tribute to her like a muse
who's beginning to possess me like the sea does
when the moon swims out to practise witchcraft
on a lonely island retreat that sings to itself at night.
Even from here, I can hear the song being carried
across the light years like the dove of a deep lament
she keeps like the wind in a locket the size
of the noose around her neck, and the flying carpet
under her feet all that's between her
and firewalking on stars like a burning kite
someone let go of like the umbilical cord
of a lifeboat that had come unmoored in a lunar storm.
Maybe I'm just fossil hunting on the moon
I've been howling at all these years
over the bone pits of dark wisdom I've dug up
on the far side of a black mirror
that doesn't insult your seeing with a night light.
But I swear sometimes when I think of you,
what lies like an archives in the riverbeds
of the sedimentary starmud you put back down
like a book you've read eras of time before,
and look out the window like a door
where you don't have to leave your body
on the threshold like shoes at the edge of the sea
when you walk into your own depths up over your head
to see if your eyes can still swim
with the dolphins and the stars and the flying fish
you left in your wake like a locust plague of urgent telegrams.
I know we're still more strangers to each other
than intimates, that there maybe watersheds
we have in common, and maybe it's still too early
for the fountains to come into blossom yet
as the last stars of the season become
the chandeliers of the morning stars of the next
like dusky candles going out in the blue light of the dawn.
And maybe there are ladders of fire to paradise
trembling like crutches on the edge of a shaky precipice
trying to climb higher than its cloud cover
to break into light like the Pleiades
just above the moon and Jupiter on a good seeing night,
but these days, this late at night, I've been inhaling
a lyrical lantern of oxygen and breathing out stars
like the circumpolar constellation of a healing dragon
pole-dancing with the caduceus of the celestial axis of the earth.
I'm laired with the unmarrowed riddles of bones of my own
I'm trying to read like the yarrow sticks
of a bird skeleton with rose-arbour wings
to see if the light I sense approaching out of the dark
is a mirage of fireflies disguised as a lightning bolt
or the soul mate of a rogue planet
that wants to ghost dance around the third eye
of a first magnitude star that doesn't have any idea
of what I'm doing up here, nor how far
a whisper of light away can seem
to a man fully awake these days, this late at night,
writing in the shadows cast by the candelabra
of a homeless zodiac off the beaten path
like the first draft a waking dream
sleepwalking beside me like the dakini
of a star struck maniac lifting the veils
of the inconceivable like the paint rags
of the night vision shining in the eyes behind them
that even in the dark make everything seem
so incredibly counter-intuitive and lucidly beautiful
I'd be truly out of my mind, like a crystal cranium
that's lost touch with its own translucency
if I didn't find it wholly believable
down to the last mystic detail my enlightened lunacy
howling like a wolf seer at the rising of a new moon
out of a valley where I can hear the distant barking
of the seeing-eye dog that follows Orion around
like a traffic light for the blind compared
to the way you light me up like the Pleiades
whenever I'm trying to get a parallactic fix
on your radiance dancing like a cult of fireflies
on the event horizons of my prophetic skull.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Im Beginning To See The Light
I never cared much for moonlit skies
I never wink back at fireflies
But now that the stars are in your eyes
Im beginning to see the light
I never went in for afterglow
Or candlelight on the mistletoe
But now when you turn the lamp down low
Im beginning to see the light
Used to ramble through the park
Shadowboxing in the dark
Then you came and caused a spark
Thats a four-alarm fire now
I never made love by lantern-shine
I never saw rainbows in my wine
But now that your lips are burning mine
Im beginning to see the light
song performed by by Ella Fitzgerald
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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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
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You Don't Need To Put A Supernova In The Window
You don't need to put a supernova in a window
like a candle in a telescope
to help me find my way back to you
from the next galaxy over. I'm gone
like a sixties light show after the music was over.
But I didn't close you like a door behind me,
I didn't find you like a threshold
in the spirit's lost and found
and try to return you to the house you belonged to.
I've always been a little ahead of myself
so when I said good-bye, it will be light years yet
before you know anything about it.
It's just that time doesn't linger in the doorway
of enlightenment, and eternity isn't any closer to God
than the next moment is. A hundred billion stars
two thousand lightyears away and you,
checking the wiring on blasting caps in a beaver dam
that's threatening to flood the road you're on
as I go off like a firefly already
two mellenia into the future that's looking forward
to meeting you eye to eye in a brighter place than this
just to see if you recognize me as I am.
Black matter in the lifemask of a blossom
peaking through the keyhole of the universe next door
to see if I've returned to my room like the moon
with a curfew it's in my nature to break forever
whenever we are, if the timing's not right.
If you can't see in the dark what the light owes
to the shadows who have died for it
just to attract your attention from afar again
like a man who's been tarred and feathered
and set aflame like a phoenix in the rootfires of the sumac.
Like an immolation that scatters the ashes of a burning house
all over the garden you've been tending
like a urnful of flowers about to come out.
Like a candle in the darkness enlightenment
snuffed out on the dark side of the moon
to keep you from being lost in the blazing like a star at noon.
I lead you away from me, like all I've ever wanted.
I say good-bye to keep death from saying hello along the way
as if it had met you somewhere before I came on the scene
like a flame thrower with a flare for arson burning
like the passion flower of a dragon on a pyre beside the Ganges.
To raise you up shining out of the grave of your aspirations
like lightning and fireflies in the updraft of my expedient means.
So when you cry over someone you're missing like me,
your tears have the power of a sunflower in the garden after dark,
and the ashes turn green. And scarlet runners bind themselves
like the happy home fires of heretics to the triune axes of your tent poles.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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When Someone Loves You And You're No One
for Kristine Marie
When someone loves you and you're no one,
what happens then? What do you have to give
that they aren't already in full possession of?
The many I have loved have become one woman.
And this is an orchid that blooms in fire at night.
And this is the dove that returns from earth
with a wing like a broken arrow and asks to be healed.
When someone loves you and you're no one,
what happens then? This picture-music flowing
like a carillon of bliss and despair through
my body, heart, mind as if they were all
poured like dragon iron into the casting of the same bell
that yesterday raised like a sword to kill it back into life?
And this is a doorway you can stand in forever
as if you were greeting someone who never comes.
And this is that butterfly among wildflowers
that flutters about like a symbol of the mind
as if it didn't know whose loveletter it is yet.
When someone loves you and you're no one,
what happens then? Do you give them your emptiness?
Do you wrap space around them when they're cold
like a star-studded shawl you asked the night to weave
for someone very special into astrology?
Or do you minutely examine the mystic specifics
of your life as you've known it up to now
and from somewhere in some dark room
way back of the heart, feel the urge to apologize
to the stars for how much their light's been through
for so little? The star labours, and candles are brought forth.
And this is the delirium of a window the moon drinks from.
And this is that jewel of a tear that didn't
make a big splash on the rock like other tears
and by that you know it's a diamond in disguise.
When someone loves you and you're no one,
what happens then? Does the air as now revel
like autumn in a gleeful chaos of images and insights
the wind unravels like leaves in a tantric realm of crazy wisdom?
Do you see a woman coming through a gate
as if she'd lived her whole life among roses and razor-blades?
And she's not asking for rapture, but you're beginning to feel
there's a peony of a supernova in the house of Cancer
waiting to express itself in the beauty of the way
it relinquishes itself like the moon to the waters of earth.
And this is that mysterious spell that beguiles
the expert hunter into baiting his trap with his own heart
hoping it's irresistible to the fox he wants to take it.
And this is that dawn of a new day that arises like
a strange exorcism of everything that's ever possessed you before
as you greet every ghost in passing off the lake
the same as you've always done, the waterbirds.
When someone loves you and you're no one,
what then? You stare as I do at Venus in the sunset
and write long poems that tunnel through mountains
like work trains full of precious ores that glow in the dark
more intensely as it approaches like a lantern from a long way off?
Or is it just another firefly at the end of my nose
casting galactic shadows across the time and space
it takes to behold them in the furthest reaches of my mind?
I sense a gentleness I haven't known before.
I see a beauty that's as easing to the eyes as moonrise.
And the seeds of words that haven't passed between us yet
are already beginning to open their eyelids and flower.
And there's a soft gray blue sky with a scattering of ashes
to honour the dead and give the wind its due
I can see spilling out of the urn of your heart
to make room for the phoenix I am about to give you
as if it were child's play, when I'm with you,
wholly absorbed like light into bread, to rise from the dead
and feel hunger again, to drink from the fountain mouths
of fire again, and desire and long as I once did
and imbibe the wines of life as if I'd never existed before
without cutting my tongue on the taste
or succumbing to the inconceivable as if everything
that followed thereafter were the afterlife of the inevitable.
And this is the era in which you know
you've already tied your blood like a scarlet ribbon
around a gift no one can determine the value of
if she opens it in wonder, haste and love.
And this is the moment you dread the joy of
when death tastes as sweet as birth in the mouth of life
and autumn lives out of the suitcase of all its memoirs
like the blossoms of a manuscript that has come to bear fruit.
I saw you and you were a gazelle at the easel,
painting the moon like a beauty mark on the forehead
of a sacred slave girl dancing naked in the light that released her
like a butterfly in the jaws of a dragon she could awake with a whisper.
I saw you in a gust of stars, and felt the wings and dust devils
sprouting out of my heels to let me ride the thermals of my heart again
as if the long, dark, strange, radiant journey I'd already come
were merely a hair of the way I had yet to go like the sole copy
of a love poem I had committed to the wind so hopelessly
such a long time ago when my solitude could play
the rosey-fingered sea like a musical instrument
that could make the waves sing like mermaids
without a plectrum or a pick or a ship, as long
as there was desire in your fingertips and urgency in your art.
When someone loves you and you're no one,
what then? Let them be everything to you even
if there's no you to be anything to. Pour your emptiness
into hers and fill the cup up to the edge of the moon
and let it spill over with light as if it had a leak in it
bigger than a record harvest in the horn of the moon at full.
I've cut star wheat in a virgin's hand
in a total eclipse of my senses
and touched flesh as if it were fresh bread
cooling on the windowsill of a hungry man
who can taste the light in it like letters from a child hood
far enough away from home to learn to love it again
with a second innocence more indelible than the first.
As for me and my treehouse with open windows,
I shall welcome a songbird on the cusp of Leo
to every branch and rafter of it, or if need be
at sea on the moon, in the event of a storm,
a lifeboat fashioned out of my own bones
to hang on to like the eye of peace in the skull of the dragon
who looks at you and reads you like fireflies on a starchart
delineating a new constellation out of homeless space and time
and a habitable myth of origin for two exiles in love
among the sacred groves of the rootless trees.
With you I have not come to revere the pain and longing
of hungry ghosts hanging on to every blade of grass
like a flag at half mast in a high wind.
I have come to appeal any destiny
that doesn't bear the seal and signage of your heart.
Nor will I ever surrender any sword to your waters
that wasn't first tempered in the translucent fire of diamonds
that feel like a fool of cool water running down your skin
like a spring thaw of the crystal chandeliers
that melted down their spear points into rain,
that dipped their swords in wax
and trimmed the wicks into fuses
and lit them up like Roman candles
such that my eyes and my heart
are still flowering wildly with you in these starfields.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Lament Of The Last Train Whistle
The lament of the last train whistle
has disappeared into the distance
mournfully looking for its lost child.
October night in the woods
around an old fire pit of prophetic skulls
blowing ghosts of smoke in my face
that bring me to tears, a neolithic calendar
of all the old and new moons that have passed.
So many, so much, that used to matter
doesn't anymore. Dream figures
that shed their skins like the longer wavelengths
of watersnakes in an infra-red mindscape
of serpent fire dying like the sun
that can tell the hour by the taste of its ashes.
I throw more well-dried thresholds on the fire
like branches that used to be green with the tears
of sweeter departures and arrivals over the years.
All the light's jumped from orbitals
of the tree rings that sag like bags
under the eyes knotted like islands
in the heartwood of their xylem and phloem.
Here where the river parts like long hair
on the skull of a stone, I sit like a demon
in a sacred place, clarified, alert, and alone
as any nocturnal animal in the woods.
The chalkdust of my bones trying
to connect the stars to their constellations
snagged in the trees like the rags of spiderwebs
on the blackboard of a starmap as wide as the sky
and deep as the subconscious of the Burgess Shale.
It's not a betrayal to let go of your faith
when you had none in the first place
and you don't need a parachute on the edge of space
to plunge from paradise, or a weather balloon
of a bad Christian poet to shepherd Dante
like a moon out of hell. Be yourself,
especially when nobody's watching
except that same drone in the sky
that occasionally flashes a flake of silver off
its stone cold third eye to flint your awareness
that it's still there in the cosmic background
like a witness to your dreams and schemes
for a luxuriously appointed life of enlightenment.
Be yourself. The direct copulative imperative
that has supplanted the light as the first word
out of the mouth of creation. Be yourself.
And then let there be light by the side of a good fire
to let you see who that is as acutely
as you can see in the dark who that is not.
The migration of the Canada geese might seem
a broken rosary of new moons calling out
the names of God to you, and one unknown,
or silhouetted against the moon they might
suggest the afterbirth attached to a cut umbilical cord
and your heart might feel reborn somewhere
in the autumn of your life, a child of the fire,
a flower in the full bloom of its solitude
dancing with its own mercurial apparition
on the waters of life in the mindstream
always out of season enough to lag behind
so it can tell the time by the widening gaps in its passage
as it's waiting for the night to catch up to its own shining
like a thief of fire unchained from the rock
that broke the glass window of its transfixed seeing
with a meteor in the hands of an enlightened delinquent.
Or you might read the falling leaves as occult lifelines
on a Tarot deck of overlapping lifespans
like the scales of a dragon playing solitaire
beside the small inferno of a signal fire to the stars,
to let them know you're coming faster
than the time it takes for a thought to make it
all the way to death and back to birth again
as if you were pinging your emotions
like stray wavelengths from the oceans of your awareness
off the horns of the moon the way
you used to skip rocks out over the sea as a boy
to see how long they would keep on going
like a waterclock of stone before they sank
like the flying fish of the hard, cold facts of life back into
the numinous depths of your collective unknowing
where the stars aren't fixed to anything that isn't
flowing along with them like the wind on the mindstream
or a small fire catching its breath in the silence and the solitude
of so much radiance, before it's on its way again for good.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Guardian and BloodRose
BloodRose,
Rose of my love,
My love for Dark moon,
Dark as my heart,
Black as my soul,
And gave me my rose.
The rose of blood,
With petals soft and black,
Never as a rose so beautiful,
Grown not in light,
But under a dark moon lit sky.
Guardian,
Yes a guardian of BloodRose,
With teeth long and sharp,
Claws hard as diamonds,
Scales as dark as night.
My dear sweet guardian,
Guardian black as my heart,
Fire in your eyes,
Shadows in your soul,
A dragon of the dark moon.
A single rose,
With petals so fare,
As dark as my heart,
I now hold in my hand,
The rose of blood.
You are my darkness,
Fear of this love,
This love for you,
Love for darkness,
The cold shadows in my heart
That makes me yearn for you.
Now as you lay dying,
I hold a single rose,
The rose you gave me,
And as I hold it tight,
The thorns slice my hand,
Covered with blood,
My blood.
I have one fear,
The fear of death,
Symbol of my lost love,
Rose as dark as me,
Laying in a pool of blood,
Blood from me.
As I lay dying,
I remember my name,
BloodRose,
I am the rose of blood,
And I died of my own creation.
A creation of perfect beauty,
Petals dark black,
Thorns like small daggers,
Grown from my love,
My love for a dragon,
A dragon as dark as my heart.
Even in my death,
I think of you,
And the rose you gave me,
The rose that killed me,
The Rose of Blood.
poem by Nicolette Gonzalez
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Brighter The Light, The Deeper The Shadow
for Rebekah Garland
The brighter the light, the deeper the shadow.
Shine. And anyone who can see will follow.
Just make sure the stars are real and not tinfoil.
You don't need to know where you're going
to be a good guide when you yourself are the path you're on.
Shine. You're the blue orchid in the Pleiades.
You're the firefly in the skull that kicked in
like a bioluminescent emergency light
when the dead woke up to discover they had no eyes.
You're the last candle dancing to the pulse of the dragon's heart.
You have suffered and lost. Suffered and won.
Suffered and healed like wounded water on the moon.
Shine like a fountainmouth. Shine like a watershed
that can feel the galaxies swimming through it like starfish
whirling like Sufis at the crossroads of a black hole
like the navel of the wheeling world with the singularity
of a hidden jewel in it like the third eye of a lump of coal
shining out like a diamond of the first magnitude.
You can do cartwheels across the sky
as if your legs and arms were spokes.
You can listen for a voice in the abyss of time and silence
until your ears turn into radio telescopes
turning like calla lilies on a jinxed prayer wheel
looking for signs of extraterrestrial rural life
like pendulous Zen pagodas hanging like bird feeders
on the errant limb of a locust tree, waiting for birds.
Shine like a sword of fire outside the gates of your re-entry
from a long return journey of the smokey dove
that wasn't sacrificed, but volunteered
to go see what happened to the crow that was sent out first
to witch for land with an olive branch of lightning in its beak
as a sign of the truce we seek with the rain,
we seek through our tears, we seek like the new moon
wholly reflected in every plinth of our shattered mirrors
of what appeared to be real, until, like hungry ghosts
we tried to grasp it and it slipped through our fingers
like an hourglass full of stars, a rosary of Canada geese,
a slaver's neckchain made of gold like a Celtic torgue.
Shine. I know there's a genie of blue hydrogen in your lamp
and you don't need a nightwatchman to ignite it every night,
though I expect you'd meet up later at a seance,
like the creative medium of a spiritual adept at sensual silence.
But when you do, you fire up hell like a school furnace
as easily as you illuminate paradise with a poppy and a sunflower.
Shine. This is your hour. When it's darkest and it matters the most.
Be a lighthouse off your own shipwrecked coast.
Be the many-petalled matchbook of a flower that blooms in fire
once every seven thousand years, and when the wind
doesn't feed it anything but the milk and bread of ghosts,
I know you've got the ferocious courage
not to blow it out just because you can. Shine
like a wavelength ploughing the dead seas of the moon
like a garden it intends to plant in its wake
that will keep on expanding like the growing edge
of tree rings emanating like cambium from the heartwood
of a cosmic tree that never stops bearing fruit
even when it feels like a Pre-Cambrian tree in a petrified forest
under the Arctic ice of a new polarized ice age.
Don't hide in the weeds and the shadows
of the star you were meant to be at this zenith
of your ascendency whether you're peaking or at nadir.
Shine. And let me see if I can recognize by one star alone
what constellation you're shapeshifting into
like a starmap with flightpaths and insights of her own
through the eye of the hurricane
in the crowns of the black walnut trees
where the nightbirds are waiting as autumn's coming on
for you to show them how to make their own way home.
Be a lamp in the arms of your own journey.
Just as the moon that's apprenticed like a sorceress
to all the phases of your beautiful, crazy wisdom is.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Eyes In The Shadows, In Blood, In Space
Eyes in the shadows, in blood, in space, incubating the light
that has yet to be born, wild asters in the deflowered fields of death,
and the return of the living out of the eyeless abyss, delinquent,
and a redness in the air of this September night,
saturating it like a deep wound it holds under its breath,
a black rose, a fossilized thorn that no longer grows old,
memories fixed like crucified bats to the sticky brown stars
of the fanatical burdock trying to wear me like a starmap
as if every day of my life has felt like the approach of autumn
watching the constellations turn like the pages of a calendar,
a waterclock of new moons flowing like dark matter,
sundials at midnight encircling me like shark fins
slashing the water like sabres with surgical precision
and their eyes, oblivion, a focus of shadows, perennial night
after a supernova of dismemberment, dehumanizing horrors
in a hydrodynamic abattoir. Spirits of old root fires
smelling of pine and cedar at large in the dark like hunting magic.
And the clouds a wolf pack of shapeshifters among the stars,
the exhilaration of spiritual wariness out in the woods alone at night
where it's unwise to trust anything too beautiful at first sight,
and a sudden flash of inspired self-destructive courage
to do just that in protest of the abuse of beauty as a Venus fly trap.
But it's not hard to tell a real muse from a false one
because a real muse never wastes her passion on the sane,
and if there isn't an occult side to a poet who works his madness
like a medium in the dark he had to sacrifice his eyes to see
beyond the visuals of the retinas and the cameras
with lizard eyelids that blink like guillotines, into
these visionary realms where galaxies are shed
like the feathers of migrating swans, gravity's gone,
and if you want to go up, you've got to go up without a parachute on.
Mystic physics. The illogic of the heart delighting
in the absurdity of itself just because it can and you can hear
a sword master of black Zen singing his heart out in a brothel:
A good heretic never disciplines his disobedience.
The brutal moon offers me the cup of my own skull
and says drink, and I know it's death to hesitate
because you lose control of everything in the moment
if you do, so I drink it like an elixir of dark tears
from the eye of the shark in eclipse, and I peer
into the black mirror of a midnight lake to see
if I'm still alive or dead, and the mirror breaks
like the unleavened bread of a gnostic gospel in my hands,
wholly enraptured by a spell I wasn't ready to wake up from,
and I can feel the lustrous radiance of a light
so inconceivably darker than the one I go by
like a shadow of that, the ferocity of the clarity
immolates my heart with a terrible joy
in a prophetic furnace of hot diamonds
that howl like the insights of a firestorm of dragons in extasis
breaking out of their cosmic shells like stars out of the void
shining out of the dark heart of things within
like eyes seasoned by compassion
for the low hanging bells and fruits of the earth
trying to express the infinite solitude between birth and death
where we walk alone together forever with everyone
and everything, like pilgrims sleepwalking
in the unattainable dream that animates us all
to keep on divining the inspired limitations of the impossible.
poem by Patrick White
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Cinder In The Sun's Eye
Cinder in the sun's eye, there's fire in your tears.
You plunge into the light like a moth on a mission
and it's the sun that disappears to shine at midnight
in the black mirrors of your eyes. Dark light, intense,
starling, charred swan, you know as well as I do,
the occult approach to the optimism of an eclipse
is to act radically in the name of things you can
only unattainably conceive of. Love on your wrist
like a hawk whose wing you healed, dwelling
in your homelessness without a fear of eviction.
No truth in the mouth of the snake that's pulled
the fangs of its conviction out of the sky
like crescent moons, pins from the eye
of a voodoo doll you've nursed for light years
on the nightshift of a morgue that's aroused by death.
Milk of your left breast kills. The other practices compassion.
Whole snakepits in the shrines of the wavelengths
mourning the death of Medusa, as if snakes too
had something to mourn that makes them shine within you.
Ten thousand photos from an orbiting satellite
with X ray vision and a spectrographic trajectory
couldn't improve upon the license of your beauty
like a black pearl at the magmatic core of planet
trying to make herself as habitable as she can to visitors.
And for those who aren't used to your kind of light,
you hand out sun-visors and starmaps
and black candles to show them the way home
through the same old doorway they came in by.
You're an ambassadorial firefly from the third eye
of dark matter where the roots of the light are embedded
and you've got a message for the blossom
that looks like a love letter. The moon
budding on a dead branch like a crack in the door
you left ajar like an orchard in waiting on a cold spring night.
And who but you could stand eye to eye with the bravery
you practise like a World War II canary
in an underground armaments factory that isn't bomb proof?
There's nothing yellow about the skin of your ammunition.
You confront cosmic dangers in the intimate details.
You ignite and defuse the supernovas and black holes
that endanger the lives of those who follow you like a cult
and though you like their company, you'd much rather be
maculately alone with someone who can see for themselves
that those who were driven out, exiled
into the emptiness of the unknown extremes of the mind
often return with their hands full of the strangest gifts
that time and distance have ever offered anyone
to prove how off course the shore-huggers are
in assessing the course of a life as far out
and comprehensive as the sea. Deeper than stars.
Emotionally more expansive than the immensity
of any shining that can be palmed off cheaply
in the pawn shops of the retinal tidal pools clutching
to the relics and icons of disembodied crab claws.
You don't live like the collateral damage of the sun
and the sea. You don't ask amputees to show you
a way out of the labyrinth by the light of spent candles.
Cinder in the sun's eye, there's fire in your tears.
A luminosity that flows unceasingly
from the watersheds of broken mirrors.
You just have to cry. And dragons as immutable
as diamond cutters take up flower arranging
in a Zen teahouse enlightened by the rain.
poem by Patrick White
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Celestial Warfare
The sun has fallen to rest,
And the moon shows up to play,
Clouds glaze the skies,
Racing with the arctic winds,
Attacking the lunar sphere,
Skies turn to black,
It seems the moon has died,
'What fallacy is this! ',
the Moon exclaims,
Reflected light piercing through the clouds,
'I will not leave this plane! '
Stars join in the brawl,
Flash of light radiates the earth,
a Star victim to the clouds.
Sun
The lantern of earth awakes,
Moon and Stars flee,
this Solar star perforates the Clouds,
Its sword a burning flame,
the Clouds counter with thickening,
the Sun struggles to maintain,
And unleashes its true prowess,
a Red Giant is formed,
the Clouds meet their demise,
the giant grasps them,
With its mighty flair,
Hungry for growth,
It turns on the moon,
David vs. Goliath,
Darkness falls upon our earth,
Cloudless skies raining Red,
the Moon has killed itself.
poem by Brandon Griffee
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Like the moon Like me
Like the moon and the star
staying there in silence
A star falls is a single tear
the moon turns into shadows
Hidding from my fear
red moon brights the sky
The rage in me is releases
the moon goes away
when the sunlight comes out
pushing my worries away.
when the star gets closer to the moon
I make new friends.
When the stars fade away from the moon
I lose my friends.
when the clouds block my light
I feel useless and betrayed.
I hide from everything.
As the moon stays in the sky
I stay alive.
When the moon are in peices
My life has ended
Like the Moon
Like me
We are the same
in this suffering world
poem by Sarah Frank
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No Gravegoods In My Solitude
No gravegoods in my solitude, no trinkets
from any spiritual world inside or outside this one.
The totem belongs to the dream that's buried with it
as the flower's engendered by the root it's taken from.
Mind is matter. Matter is mind. And it isn't as if
one is blind to the other because one shore
isn't parted from the other by the flowing
of the mindstream in between. Try to separate
the reflection of the moon from water in a dream state.
The moon is a characteristic of water as the water
is a feature of the moon. If you want to mediate
until you turn the vertebrae of your spine into a bridge
to get to the other side of a life you're already standing on,
that's ok as long as it's burning. Otherwise it's just going
to obstruct your path when you're shooting the rapids
of the Milky Way like your own spring run off
trying to saddle a rush of stars with a rudderless liferaft
and oars for spurs. Better to be a waterbird
with wings of your own, but what a thrill
to ride the snake until you can fly like a dragon
among the stars like Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider,
in the handle of the Big Dipper like a warrior Bedouin
testing his eyes on the dune of a tribal hourglass to see
if he can tell what hour it is by the dance of a distant binary.
It's getting late. Nightwatch at the well. The town
unpeopled by sleep. A choir of train whistles
practising their inquisitive requiems at every crossing
like Canada geese migrating south when the autumn stars arise.
More lonely than mournful, I can taste the shadows
in the honey of life as readily as the light. I can smell
the fragrance of time like the first snowflakes
in a lover's hair, trying to turn her into a constellation
to sweeten the night air. And even in the ashes
of the starmaps the shining sets afire
and scatters like a library in the urn of the heart
on a wind that carries away the passions of this art
of exhuming more life out of a shallow grave than went into it,
I can still burn in the dark like the ore
of undisciplined diamonds. I can still squander my light
on the eyelids of the fallen flowers like a final kiss farewell.
Time wastes a death on me. Years ago the wind arose
and blew that candle out in the open window
of an abandoned house and ever since I've been
drifting like a ghost of smoke in a diaspora of stars.
I bequeath to the rose, the blood of my wounds.
To the thorns of the moon, my scars. To the night
I leave my eyes. To the wind, my breath. My voice
to the nightbird whose longing put my lyrics
to the picture-music that's haunted me all my life
like the song of someone who loved me once
before I was born and began to forget. But my heart
that I could judge the worth of like a bell bound to the earth,
or a feather of fire in hell, in the palm of my hand,
I give that to everyone like the windfall of a tree in a storm.
Black walnuts and wild apples. Solar systems
of peaches and pears in the leftover orchards
of organic gardens bearing the fruit of a habitable planet
at the autumn equinox of the New England asters
and modest suns of the Jerusalem artichokes
for the birds and the squirrels and the bears.
You can't keep what you won't give away
and it's no good to you in a grave when it comes time
to throw yourself overboard to stay afloat
and weather the squalls on your own sea of awareness
like an empty moonboat drifting through the fog
calling out to anyone who'll listen on the coast
of a new universe that discovers you like Atlantis
to a ghost of the old world looking for a passage
back to the more familiar labyrinth of home.
Liberation is freedom through creative form, not from it.
Liberation is life. And life is all entrance, no exit.
And you weren't asked at the door for any i.d.
And no one's going to stop you from lowering the fire escape
to get away from yourself. And if you were to ask
the mirrors of your own awareness, they'd stop staring at you
as if they'd never seen a new world savage before.
Everyone's going to leave an empty chair at the table
sooner or later. Like the skull cup of the moon
you've got to pour your prophetic lees out upon the earth
if you want to give your abundance another chance.
You can make lanterns out of fireflies in canning jars
or you can abandon them to the spiders
in the corners of your eyes like dreamcatchers and kites,
but if you want to shine of your own accord,
albino fish in the darkest depths with stars in their eyes,
you've got to see the sun flowering at midnight,
you've got to greet Venus in the Pleiades at dawn.
You've got to unsilver the mirror like a stripper
until you disappear like a bird in the house of life
through an open window like a crack in a cosmic egg
to feel the vastness of the sky that transcends
the limit of your wings. Despite the eye-witness
in the mirror, where time is always in arrears to eternity,
you've got to give it all up like your shining reflection
if you want to stay here for your own protection.
poem by Patrick White
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Faceless This Time Of Night
Faceless this time of night, my skin evaporates like dry ice
into a deepening sense of containment
by a dark space with distant cities of light
trying to colonize the Pythagorean fireflies of Cretona,
or the shimmering mirage of Port Angeles
dancing like a seance at the foot of the mountains
across a hundred miles of the Georgia Strait at night,
the immensity of the freedom that dwarfs the stars
with the sheer magnitude of the labour before them.
The fragility of a spinal cord traversing the abyss
of a one-stringed box guitar made of cardboard
when you were a kid, the mere filament
of an anachronistic light bulb with the lifespan
of the wick of an apostate candle at a black mass,
disappointed it wasn't born a flower,
but a weed more at home among the stars
that uprooted it from its intimacy with the earth
like a kindred spirit of light
that must wander through its own solitude
like music at night from an open window
in the life of the mind to reach out to them
like a tendril of smoke from the embering nugget
of the heart nesting in a private crown of fire
that abdicated its empire of ashes for a single note
of the night bird's longing to sing back up
like a bell for a sad universe that's always on the road.
I hear crying in the distance, the dark lament of the hills.
The night creek weeping unseen through hidden valleys.
I can taste the deaths and sorrows, the broken promises
of the rain, drifting like the fragrance of a waterlily
like a star reflected on the undivined watershed of its tears
saturating the air. Matter a condensation of the light,
I can feel life moving through this body, this flesh,
this scrap of starmud, a rush of water, a gust of stars,
a purple passage of blood, a breath of fire and wind,
and the earth, not solid, but real, animating all my limbs,
my vital organs like the ripening fruit of a rootless tree
as if time wept like a bell in me as well, and its tears,
heavy with the weight of too many separations,
yet wise in the ways of the sky, sweetened the fall to come.
poem by Patrick White
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Compassion Is The Sweetness That Enters
Compassion is the sweetness that enters
the wounded apple of knowledge after
you've taken your first bite out of it.
It's not an antidote to the facts of life and death.
And you should know by now if you've suffered at all,
and it's impossible not to from the moment you open your eyes,
the night is not a reward, nor the lantern of the light
that goes before you on a graveyard shift of the stars.
Compassion is the oldest instinct of the heart
and first muse of the mind that can taste only
the blowing blossoms and bitter green apples of the spring,
gripe brain, before it ripens like a sunset in your blood.
That's why the heart knows more about it than the head.
And I expect, on that basis, no one is more capable
of loving us who must doubt that we're worthy of love
to live up to the truth of it than the dead who can open
the tiny koans of the seeds at the core of things
like the lockets of fortune-cookies that break
like twisted cosmic eggs in a rush to spread their wings
like waterbirds who write the lyrics of their songs on the fly.
Words for the eye. Words for the ear. Words
for the voice of the wind like black walnut trees
and kites in a storm. And if you really know how to listen,
I mean if you can hear the wavelength of a black snake
swimming across your blood like a mantra
of terrifying, beautiful wisdom that keeps its secrets
to itself, or hear the unfathomable oceans in the black rose
whose petals and eyelids are always smashing
like white eyelashes in a squall of sunbeams
against the breakwater of a white dawn that passes
like an albino eclipse in a moonlit leper colony
of extinct black rhinos. If you even remotely
hear what I mean when I speak like this sleepwalking
through a dream grammar like a prophetic skull in a trance,
words that dance like light on the mindstream
rejoicing in the clarity of the voice that expresses
the hidden message encoded in the genes of the fireflies.
You have mouths. Speak for yourselves.
Some like lighthouses along the banks of life.
Some like thieves with searchlights for eyes on a bomber's night
when everyone is underground and the bummers are out
plundering the evacuated houses of the zodiac.
Might be the ravings of a star struck maniac talking to himself
to make sure nobody else is listening. Might be
the surrealistic lament of a Dadaist night bird
singing out loud in its sleep for things it doesn't know
it longs for, or maybe a lunatic is waxing prophetic
in a labyrinth of his own echoes trying to sound his way out
of the mountains without end he's being trying to befriend
like a cloud or an eagle silvered a moment
like the ore of a dream in the corner of the eye
of a moonrise coming on like a hurricane
with a black pearl in its teeth. The eclipse of a sacred lie
compassion concedes to an alibi without a myth of origin.
Compassion is the child of imagination that identifies
with its simulacra of suffering by applying the heart
like a bloodbank to the wounded eidolons of eyeless images
that didn't know how to bleed, or breathe, or cry or see
until compassion tempered their impression of themselves
as paradigms of rationality, by shedding real tears
in an ice age of lenses that kept their illusory distance
from the stars that came out after the rain, wet and shining,
laughter radiating through our tears, because life isn't a dry fire.
It's the hand on the rudder of a lifeboat
that keeps you from drowning from the day you were born
in the undertow of the tides of the new moon
until the night of the full when you haul everyone aboard
who's been swimming through glaciers of tears
like baby mammoths for the last twenty-five thousand years
afraid of extinction if they ever stopped to catch their breath.
Compassion is accepting everyone's death as a portion of your own.
Everyone's life as your third eye, a vital organ of your own body.
Compassion is an undisciplined action of the heart.
Compassion arises like a moonrise of inspiration
in the eyes of the older sister of the muses
who walks too much alone as if she'd devoted her solitude
to the suffering of a wounded stranger she met along the way
when she let her hair down like willows of rain
to cool the scorched earth and slake the roots of pain
until they bloomed like foxfire in the shadow of her passing.
Most poets sit around the lesser fires of their art
trying to divine the smoke of what's burning in their hearts
like autumn leaves they've heaped into books
that smoulder in tears more often than they break into flames.
But if compassion turns her eyes toward you
like a star in the darkness beyond your blazing
the Milky Way runs like a bloodstream through your veins
and you see in terrifying clarity the great mystic details
in the deep watersheds of picture music efoliating
like wildflowers and galaxies, grails, fountains,
lunar herbs, and starfish raised up off the ground
to take their place among the shining, radiant with life,
in the low valleys and high fields of an imagination that heals.
poem by Patrick White
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I'm A Savage Mystic With Chamelonic Passions
I'm a savage mystic with chameleonic passions.
Serpent fire with meteoritic nano-diamonds for eyes.
The black slash of the wounded crescent of the new moon
bleeding to death like a thorn among the willows
who grieve for me like Arab women under their veils.
I'm a house of ill-repute on the outskirts of the zodiac
and under my eaves and eyelashes I can hear
the storm cloud pigeons cooing like shepherd moons.
I'm dark ore with a star in it, a star
giving birth to dark ore where I mine the eclipses
that pour out of me like igneous swords and snakes
I temper in the dead seas of my mystic watersheds
hissing in the cool bliss of a cosmic riverbed
waiting for the next flashflood of insight
just to hear the frogs singing again among the wild irises
who come with blades of their own as sharp as mine.
And this could be the slipppery slope to solipsism,
subjective idealism, rabid Narcissusism,
Vishnabandu's eighth century Mind-only
non-conception of inconceivable enlightenment
being everything all at once the moment being
ceases to exist chasing its own tail around the mulberry bush,
I'm never all that sure myself, but for the moment,
I'm swimming through stars like flying fish,
I'm drying the painted tear on the face of a clown.
I'm trying to put a smile on my deathmask.
I'm listening to Mayan calendars and crystal skulls
in the gloomy backrooms of human sacrifice
weeping like chandeliers of prophetic lightning
shattering my peace of mind like black mirrors of insight
thrown down at my feet like the ten commandments
brought up from the valley of death like imported brides
to marry those brought down from the mountain.
And all I can say, is, aw, come on now, give me a break,
I can remember when you guys used to feed
your Pythian pythons sweetcakes after every oracle.
What have you got them on now, Qualuds?
And even if the world does end
when the sun rises in the west at midnight
and no birds sing in the eucalyptus trees of Israel
where bull-dozed Arab villages used to stand,
and the shepherds of the black camel
build tall buildings in the desert in the Kuwaiti desert
where the black camel is obviously oil,
and the last man in the world is Chinese
and grovels in the dust at his sister's feet,
and the Nazca lines turn out to be a starmap
to the place where extraterrestrials used to stage
the discus throw for flying saucers
when they put on the Olympics once every four light years;
right now while I have a rare chance to,
I'd rather sword dance with enlightened fireflies
to the hillbilly fiddles of the summer crickets
against your gathering storm on the hillside
on the thresholds of life and insight
than goose-step to your martial requiem
on the event horizon of a black hole.
And who knows, if you go a little deeper
into the dark with all three of your eyes open
you might find a dragon like me
full of serpent fire with the alpha and omega
of crescent moons for fangs and claws,
one of which kills you, and the other cures,
spiritual antidotes to toxic cosmic glands,
this remedy in the heart of the disease,
this herb of the moon on the tongue of a snake,
this Eden I've flown into off course today,
not a cinder, but a nightbird in the eye
of the hurricane rose of Armageddon,
where the nations meet on the plains of Jazreel
to dance themselves to death in a moshpit
at a rave of wavelengths out to save the world.
poem by Patrick White
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Nightbird On A Winter Branch
Nightbird on a winter branch.
Dark blossom of the new moon,
Last kiss on the eyelids of the dead
As the snow falls like apple bloom.
I see you’ve left the door ajar:
The backdoor of an eclipse
To let the first crescent of the light out.
The sacred syllable of the mistfits
Lost in the silence and the solitude
You raise like heretical mystics into songs
That only you alone can sing
So that each in their homelessness belongs
To the false dawn of the same secret
They weep over like empty lockets
That stole the moon from their windows
As they burned at the stake, rockets
Martyred in the fire of the holy books
That inspire them deeper into exile
This late at night far from anywhere
Distance is measured by the mile
And not the wingspan of the light-years
It’s taken me to write this.
Like a bird that flew out of the darkness,
That left no trace of the witness
As it blew a kiss of sudden insight.
A word in passing from the dead
About who’s behind the death mask
Of the snow that’s covering my head
Like the polar ice cap of a planet
With the prophetic wisdom of a skull.
Life in the birthmark of the new.
Death in the harvest of the moon at full.
Emptiness devoid of all light.
The first sign of renewal in the urn
Of a nightbird on a winter branch.
Diamonds of ice and insight that burn
Like coal in the eyes of a snow man
With the passion of a phoenix born
A star in the cold furnace of the sky.
Where every passage is a rite of return
That hides its brightest jewels
blossoming like enlightenment on the wing
In the dark ore of a nightbird
When a deathmask opens its mouth to sing.
poem by Patrick White
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Stranger In The Leaving
Stranger in the leaving
than you were before you came.
Is it not always so
when people separate?
Lovers who knew each other intimately for years
close their gates to each other
and say each others' name
as if they weren't philosopher's stones anymore.
And the base metal outweighs the gold that comes of it.
Alone with the alone
in the abyss of the absolutes
what was vivid and vital
turns numb as glass
and what was mystically specific about the other
is no longer a shrine that holds the secret name of God.
Stranger in the leaving
than you were before you came.
You leave with some of my memes
as I leave with some of yours
and we are both no doubt slightly changed for good
by the reciprocity of the encounter
like hydrogen and oxygen make water.
Though now it's all tears frozen on the moon.
Good-bye my lovely
I shall miss your eyes and your skin
and the thrill of your dangerous heart.
I will miss your wounded mouth
I tried to heal with messianic kisses
that never walked on anything but the earth.
And there's no blame
you couldn't fit my lunar month
into your solar calendar.
We had everything in common except time
and our faults were as compatible as our virtues.
I will miss the rumours of alien life in the wavelengths of your hair.
I shall miss losing myself like a firefly
in the wishing wells of your eyes
even if now my own seem more
like impact craters in the prophetic skull of the moon
when I consider what's leaving like an atmosphere from this mindscape.
And I shall always remember
that your heart was as generous as your breasts
and whenever we made love
how the earthly was the envy of the spiritual fact.
You didn't want anyone to know you were gentle.
Not even me.
But I could see through that mask
eyebrow to eyebrow with you
as if we both were intent on showing the same face to the earth
like the crescent fangs of a Georgia moon that said
don't step on me
because we were afraid.
More than enough to have you in the nude
I wasn't a glutton for your nakedness
that demanded you take your illusions off
to prove you loved me.
It would have been an irreverence
beyond the aspirations of heresy
to witness you renewing your virginity
like the new moon bathing in a sea of shadows.
I never tried to pry the petals of the flowers open
before they were ready to bloom.
I was never the ant
that told the peony what to do.
I never tried to look under the closed eyelids of the rose
to see what it was dreaming.
Though I'm not into voodoo
I never desecrated
the bird shrines
of your involuntary taboos.
But now I look in your eyes
and see that yesterday
is less vivid than tomorrow
though neither of them has happened yet.
The new moon is all potential
The full moon all used up.
There are effigies of potential
standing like scarecrows
in late autumn cornfields
and paragons of actuality
who love to star in constellations
that make them out to be the hero.
I try to stay
and I end up going.
I try to go
and the earth moves underfoot.
The root feels the death of its flower
as the autumn stars turn into frost
and burn its petals like old loveletters
to the immensities that didn't have time to read them.
The harmonies of life
are distinguished from the harmonies of death
by a single breath
taken in
and turned out
into the vast expanses of where it came from in the first place.
And the spirit that isn't shy of its own lucidity
knows that everything it illuminates
whether by day or by night
has the lifespan of light
and light is the brainchild of the darkness.
So even when the lights go out
like people and candles
and us
the shadows go on blooming
and even when the stars
are a gust of ghosts at our heels
the dust is rich
with the memory of all the roads
that once got lost in us
trying to find their way back home
like blood and fire and spirit
as if their final destination
were always the place they started from.
And if in the lightyears ahead
you should ever wonder if I remember you
be deeply assured
I shall remember you
as if every footstep I took
were a threshold of this homelessness
I am brave enough to cross without you.
And I shall thank you for this courage
inspired by the muse of your absence
and the feel of my blood Doppler-shift toward
long meditative wavelengths of red
that stream from the intensity
of the wounded white-hot blue of a renewed beginning.
You can't teach a bird to fly in a cage
or snakes to bite other people.
But when I first met you
it was as if the serpent-fire at the base of my spinal cord
that was running to keep its thoughts aloft like kites
suddenly had wings
and all my dirt-bag myths
that crawled on the earth among the lowest
were elevated into constellations
that burned like dragons among the chandeliers.
And when the muses of life well up in me like water
as they will
and ask me back
for all the tears they've shed on the sorrow
of the way things had to be
between you and me
for them and us
to happen the way we did
I will show them the eternal flame
of the nightwaterlily
blooming in the clear fire
of its lonely lucidity
not even the rain
the dragon brings
can aspire to put out.
I will show them the sun.
I will show them the moon.
And I'll say
you see?
That's us forever.
That swan in the heart of a phoenix.
And they will be well-pleased with the beauty of the lies
I use to shadow the truth with compassionate alibis
for why the flowers fall.
Sometimes it's the bird that swims through stone
and the snake that flys
in a profusion of fire and water
shadow and form
darkness and light
intensity and death
madness and wisdom.
Sometimes you meet someone
and you realize
this fallible flesh just as it is
is the deepest longing of the spirit fulfilled
like light in a perishable garden.
That there are no flaming swords
in the hands of the angels
at the wounded gates of our exile
trying to keep anything in or out.
Stranger in the leaving
than you were before you came.
The knowledge we have of each other
might want to keep things the same
but like all living things
in this garden of creation
the only way to sustain our innocence
is change.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Scouring The Patina Of Time Off With Stars
Scouring the patina of time off with stars
the way I used to grind pyrex plates
with varying grades of carborundum
down into telescopic mirrors, then silver them
with a vapour of aluminum to add
to the luster of their parabolic eyes.
Been looking into the darkness so long
I'm beginning to shine on my own.
Now from moment to moment
there's as much darkness coming out of the light
as there are black holes sand-blasting
the hour-glass shape of this bubble of the multiverse
with firestorms of desert stars as I make my way
from one oasis to the next where the mirages
wander in out of the night to drink
from the reflections of their own faces
with hands cupped like the hulls of leaking lifeboats.
I don't believe a life of delusion is any less painful
than a life of enlightenment, even if
your scarecrow self is finally standing naked
under a full moon that's come to realize
that an orbit isn't the same as an enlightenment path
that can loop back on itself like a snake or a shoelace
or the retrograde motion of Mars, without
wandering off the road you were meant to walk
because that's the way you went. Give them both
sixteen ounce gloves and let reality
have it out with delusion in eternity
like two siblings of the same dark mother
trying to get some rest from the racket
after giving up on interceding
by putting some distance between them
light years out of earshot of the nightbirds
that have been longing for her return ever since.
Even the first bliss of the blossoming of illumination
grows sad if it's not wholly shared like an orchard
with everyone as the wind turns around like a fist
flowering into a more open-handed approach to life.
Enlightenment is in everyone like a wavelength
is in a particle when no one is watching.
And if today you're an angel in a coma of ice
tomorrow the diamonds will fall out of your dark halo
and slowly thaw you out as you get closer to the light
like a comet plunging into the sun like the vapour
of a bridal veil you've finally shed like a snakeskin
that had to come off like the white-out of the eclipse
you were living, to see the stars that were rooted
in the darkness within emerging out of your own starmud
like waterlilies and larkspur and the peony buds
of the remote observatories on cold mountaintops
breaking into life like planets at a suggestion from the ants.
Stations of our perishing, perhaps. Phases of the moon
topping my skull up again like the cup that she drinks from
with the crazy wisdom of the lunatic she takes for a companion.
First crescent after the crone. Death's door left ajar
to let a little of the light out for those of us
who like to walk down long country roads alone at night
brindled by shadows, runged by black flames
like ladders of prophetic fire with nothing left to lean on
but the event horizons of their own imaginations
exploring the inevitable exits and entrances
of the passage of life like a waterclock of stars
descending the dark stairwells of the night with the maple keys
to the secret cellars where they age the best wine
by letting it stare into the dark so long
it begins to shine like a blind dream with a light of its own.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Enlightenment Isn't Lumpy
Enlightenment isn't lumpy
even if sometimes you've got your heart
stuck in your throat
like a bird in a chimney
warming up like a phoenix
to go the way of the sumac leaves
and the ghosts of smoke
on the pyres of the sky burials
of the Canada geese.
Just because November
can't feel its pulse
and the garden snakes are nesting
like a sloppy knot of wavelengths
deep in the cold heartwood
of a rootless tree that can feel
the brutal chill of serpent fire
running up its spine like a lightning rod
doesn't mean enlightenment's a placebo
you have to keep away from the kids.
It's real enough to be unattainable
without disrespecting the integrity
of the picture plane.
It hides out in the open
where no one ever thinks to look.
The simpler it gets
the bigger the book you need to write
in order to conclude ambiguously
you do and you don't not understand it.
Say not two
and all is well.
And mean it deeper than you can say it
so that pain doesn't adulterate the child
that's trying to transcend it
by hanging on to the lifelines
of his fire-proof constellations
like the kites of distant stars burning in the wind.
Enlightenment doesn't care
if you've lost your integrity.
Your absence of self-respect
for someone who isn't there
is a rare opportunity
to uphold the dignity
of stars and rivers and trees.
Enlightenment's just the blossom.
It's not the fruit
of what there is yet to be.
The smell of autumn
in a windfall of apples
cradled like small planets in your arms.
Enlightenment isn't salvation from pain.
It's an invitation to forsake yourself
in the name of nothing you can explain.
The blossom let's go to make room for the fruit.
The perfumes of the spring give way
to the aromas of decay.
But they're both sweet
because there's nothing about either of them
that's everlasting.
It may be an old root.
But it blossoms in the spring.
It may be a dead branch
but the nightbird stops to sing.
And the full moon shines
like a skull full of signs
above its dark abundance.
Enlightenment isn't out of the reach of anyone
because it's got infinitely long arms
and puts the stars at your fingertips
and says play what you want
as long as it's something
we all can dance to
on our way to the grave
like fireflies in the wake of a thunderstorm.
Enlightenment doesn't take life too seriously
even when it makes a tantrum
of its elemental innocence
and goes supernova.
Deep in the nuclear core of its heart
it's creatively playful on a cosmic scale.
The darkest inspiration
of its genius for making
an art of its existence
is life.
Simple and beautiful
as the laughter of children
collecting sea shells on the moon.
Even when you're severely lost
enlightenment doesn't hand you a flashlight
and say go look for your mind
like the holy grail in a sacred wood.
It deepens your solitude.
It blows the candle out
until you emerge like a star
from the profusion of your own darkness
and stand in the doorway
of your own shining
amazed by what you can see
when enlightenment isn't blinding.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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