En.Citatepedia^®.ro

Easy

Easy to extract oneself from the climacteric of doom
that will absolve humanity of its horrors
by placing its destiny in its own hands
like a loaded gun in the hands of a child
by taking long nocturnal walks by the Tay River
among wildflowers full of farewell.
To watch the moonrise glowing
on the Texas toes of my wet black boots
as if they'd just been spit polished by morning snails
and sense the just proportions
and inchoate eloquence of eternity
in the trivialities of sublime coincidence.
How randomly everything fits
into this urgent medium of life and death
as if it played the tailor to its own emergence seamlessly
the way the mind stream cuts a path for itself
among a bewildering array of rocks and fallen birch
or a startled rat snake adds its wavelength
like a higher frequency to the laconic water
and yet no river has ever flowed the wrong way to the sea.
Easy to step out of the polluted light of the streetlamps
into the cleaner darkness on the outskirts of town
to renew my innocence
in the macrocosmic reveries of my solitude
enchanted by the mesmerizing details
of the mystically miniscule.
How the New England asters
in the middle of September
that yesterday bloomed like stars
in happier zodiacs than this
today are watching their eyelashes fall out one by one
and the daylilies that blazed with desire
wither like the kisses of old women
when no one's there to receive them.
Easy to accept catastrophe in nature
as the spontaneous gesture of a hidden wisdom
that our eyes are too dependent on the light to see yet.
The muskrat gutted by the cattails
by a posse of rampant coyotes
in a frenzy of panicked hunger
sensing the cold-blooded wind turn vicious.
Soon the air will bare its fangs and snarl.
Soon the earth will harden into knuckles of ice
and the raccoons semi-hibernate
and the blue jays come like thieves
to pick the time-locks on the sunflowers
and the seeds enter the cryonic comas of their afterlives
confident of their revival in a future beyond doubt
as the planet sidles up to the sun at perigee
like an old love affair gone cold
tilting its head away
to rebuff any further advances.
Easy to lose yourself in the life of the mind
and the phantasmagoria of reality
that makes you feel you're walking with gods
you'll never know the name of.
Turn your back on the world
and let your thoughts wander off like smoke
from the fire pits of lost caravans
that have pitched their tents
on the dark side of the moon
where they can make up their own myths
about the strange stars
that have misled them this far from home.
How the creek laps the rock
like a doe at a salt block
left out in a farmer's field.
How the water purls over the terraced shale
that looks like a burnt book in the ashes
of a fire that's just been put out
like the library of Alexandria.
You could do that.
And who could blame you?
You wouldn't be wrong.
It's hard to listen
the way you listen to a star stream
slipping through a grove of birches at night
astute to everything it's whispering;
hard to listen to the blood
gurgling out of a wounded child
like a poppy choking to death.
Hard to fine-tune your sensibilities
to the miscreant devolution of your own species
and not be savagely appalled
into holding a mirror up to nature
that blocks the view as surely
as if you'd put your hands up over your eyes
to escape it all and wake up somewhere else
where skulls are more natural in Eden
than in the abattoirs of human carnage.
A clean life with no skidmarks of despair.
No fingernails scratching at the walls
in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
No graffiti under the bridges of PsychoBabylon.
No university students on the road to Damascus
tortured like Rosetta Stones
that have just had their tongues cut out
for not saying anything
that makes any sense
to the body language of the depraved
mutilating their flesh like slang.
Just the claw marks on the rocks
that have been sanitized by time
like the glacial striations of the last ice age
that gouged out the eyes of the lakes around here.
The bitter aesthetes of retreat run back to paradise
to study demonology by the light of fireflies
to better understand their fellow man
and live tactically out of reach
of their common inhumanity
where there's not chance of a ricochet.
Under a locust tree in full bloom.
A fragrant cloud of honey-bees
with as many thorns as they have stingers
behind a wall of zinnias, cosmos, gladiolas
on a hill in the eye of clearing
completely surrounded by trees
sitting at a picnic table
with a black coffee, cigarette, and journal
inspired by the beauty of the morning to write
before your lover wakes up
to tend nine bean rows in Innisfree
though it's eleven miles
and a hundred years ago
outside Westport Ontario
where you can hear the scarlet carillons
of the wild columbine in the rain
tinkling like delicate wind chimes
and modestly agitated chandeliers
plucked by the rain like the plectra
of home-made harpsichords
on the moss-pated rocks
of their composer's skulls.
No mediocrities in nature
it's hard not to feel like Mozart
whatever you're listening to.
No air raid sirens, ambulances
squad cars or firetrucks
screaming like banshees
like furies and erinyes
to the scene of the tragic event.
No fractious braying of political jackasses
grinding their teeth in their sleep
like the mill wheels of the stony bread
the rich resent the poor
like loaves and fishes and mice in the silo
boat-tailed grackles and black-capped chickadees
salvaging what they can
from the dumpsters of leftover gardens.
No pathological racket of garbage cans
being tipped over in a street fight
to end all street fights
like knights in armour on their backs
in front a shield wall of local police
picking them up to hold them for ransom.
No drunks and druggies in the hallways
only bats velcroed to the burdock
blinded by the porch light
and star-nosed moles and snakes on the threshold
the cats leave like offerings
on the stairs of the temple of Bast.
So much easier to listen to the eerie wailing
of baby porcupines high in the basswood trees
than the shrieks of a family
being dragged out of their beds
by an occupation army
to see which of their daughters sisters mothers
will be raped like the Congo
whose childhood shall be pressed into murder
and who shall be bred out of existence.
Easy to buff the crack of the world with talcum powder
to spare you from getting diaper-rash of the mind
and side-track the ferocity of your insight into the horror
with lightning-rods and tuning forks
you can break with your pinky finger like wishbones
torn from the throats of children
who didn't have time enough on earth
to learn to read the names on their own gravestones
if they're lucky enough to have one.
Easy to have a time-share
in nature's indifference to death
when there no place left
on the surface of a raging planet
that isn't a dangerous vacation.
So much easier to tinker with echinacea
and smudge the bad spirits
out of the renovated farm house with sage
from home-grown herb gardens
than it is to inhale the reek of cordite
or the stench of organic decomposition
of the adolescent flesh of the festering corpse
found in a drainage ditch among the weeds
like a lily that smelled far worse than them
on the outskirts of Argentina
in the stadiums of Chile
in the Tiananmen Squares of China
in the mass hysteria of the bloodbanks of Syria
trying to assail a nest of dynastic vampires
with a silver bullet through the heart of the cloaked one
in the radical slums of Gaza
in the Warsaw ghettos of the West Bank
run by Israel searching children outside the gate
for smuggled vegetables from the Fertile Crescent
in the native reservations of the originals
who peopled Canada
like a charter of indigenous freedoms
without any concept of surveying their mother like real estate.
Outside the emergency exits and entrances of Arizona
where immigrants beaten to death
and dumped on the pavement to die
abandon all hope of ever entering there
and bullfrogs squatting on their sheriff's badge
croak about getting tough on the mosquitoes
by hand-cuffing them to the food chain for deportation.
Flies eggs in the goat's milk.
Spiders sucking the life out of the jewel
in the heart of the American dream catcher.
All that is hideous, grotesque, perverse,
genocidal, fratricidal, patricidal, matricidal, suicidal and worse
than acid splashed in the eyes of Afghani schoolgirls
learning to read through holes in the ozone
by flashlight under the veils of Isis.
Seek ye knowledge even as far as China.
Wheresoever ye turn is the face of God revealed
like the encaustic portrait of girl that came unglued
like a multilated candle on CNN
trying to shine a light on
nur wa nur
what's dark and brutal
about the alif ba ta tha gim
of an alphabet in the mouth of an oral tradition
with an alchemical regime of hashashim for muscle.
You know how many dolls they collected at Dachau?
You know how many soccer balls
have had their feet blown off by cluster bombs in Gaza?
You know how many weathervanes
have stiffened their resolve
to look the other way like iron roosters
with alarmist political agendas
and industrious military complexes
as corrupted as the weather
when the wind is blowing the wrong way
like bad spin from the chimneys of Auschwitz
and Sabra and Shatila lie in the direction of prayer
like the gunsight of a Palestinian sniper?
Is this God's ferocity
or the inconceivable atrocities of mad men
eaten alive by Herodian maggots
seeking the life of the first born of every nation
to preserve their myth of spontaneous generation.
Sweet to see the shadows of the autumn leaves
fossilized like bat wings on the sidewalk;
to notice how they turn
in the same succession of colours
from the outside in
as rainbows sunsets
and the emission spectra of nearby stars
busy on the nightshift making calcium and carbon.
Sweet to know this and to wonder at it
easy in the mystery
among the dragonflies and the blue hyacinth,
nailing bluebird boxes out of the reach of the barn cats
and egg-stealing raccoons
to play your part in it like a companionable spirit.
Asylum from the world.
Sanctuary.
Diplomatic immunity among the great blue herons
because you've stood there so long
without disturbing a fish
they think you're one of them.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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And Should I Recall Whose Eyes

And should I recall whose eyes made the stars most beautiful,
and set the mindstream that flowed though us aflame with fireflies
a moment there and gone and come again like light
in the keyholes of the feral cats that prowled the graveyardshift
wholly to the top of the broom-swept path up Heartbreak Hill,
where the bones of the seven hanged men lay buried
in the duff of our childhood legends, a shadow and a name,
trying love on shyly like new clothes in the shadows of the pines,
where we lay down with the dead on beds of rusty compass needles,
out of sight of the windows of the town, how could I not feel,
here alone now by the Tay, thousands of miles away,
and more years later than it takes to walk a burning bridge,
waiting for the flower moon to appear above the horizon,
the waterclock in the nightbird's song of longing?

And if I were to say what it was like to be touched by her
when she was brave with hunger and my body
all loaves and fishs in the innocence of her hands
and her breasts and lips magic mushrooms without the flies
that swarmed the garbage cans in the back-alleys below,
and though it was not wise to begin a new life
on the last night of the past we were ending together,
like a bell and a cannon that had been melted down
from the same dark ore of a life we were cut out of
like a wound in a loveletter we left unsigned for one another,
because good-bye was harder to write than just to let things go,
what words could I use that weren't already
denuded of their shining like a windfall
of black dwarfs on the windowsills of time,
and the stars that night that clung to the sky
like bubbles in the evanescence of glass
or the grass to our flesh, all washed off now
as if they were grime, the quiet patina of time
gilding the dust like rainbows on the wings of flies?

And the wind asks, and the water sylphs want to know
and the wild willows are holding their breath like a veil
and the Tay is pulling a curtain of water aside in its wake
to hear about another stranger the earth swallowed
like a sacred syllable in the mouth of a snake
that envied the waterbirds their wavelengths and wings,
and though the skeletal birch and prophetic skulls
in the riverbed plead like the end of a dream
for one more lullaby in the ghost story of the moonrise,
I show them the black pearl of my heart
lustrous as hard coal to burn again in the furnace of dawn
on the dark side of the moon in partial eclipse
as I weep like a dragon for the secrets I keep
like myths of origin in the urns of things that are gone
like the irrevocable flightfeathers of the words and waterbirds
under the lost petals of fire that bloom in the eyes of the flower moon.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A Voice On The Wind

I

She walks with the wind on the windy height
When the rocks are loud and the waves are white,
And all night long she calls through the night,
'O my children, come home!'
Her bleak gown, torn as a tattered cloud,
Tosses around her like a shroud,
While over the deep her voice rings loud,-
'O my children, come home, come home!
O my children, come home!'

II

Who is she who wanders alone,
When the wind drives sheer and the rain is blown?
Who walks all night and makes her moan,
'O my children, come home!'
Whose face is raised to the blinding gale;
Whose hair blows black and whose eyes are pale,
While over the world goes by her wail,-
'O my children, come home, come home!
O my children, come home!'

III

She walks with the wind in the windy wood;
The dark rain drips from her hair and hood,
And her cry sobs by, like a ghost pursued,
'O my children, come home!'
Where the trees loom gaunt and the rocks stretch drear,
The owl and the fox crouch back with fear,
As wild through the wood her voice they hear,-
'O my children, come home, come home!
O my children, come home!'

IV

Who is she who shudders by
When the boughs blow bare and the dead leaves fly?
Who walks all night with her wailing cry,
'O my children, come home!'
Who, strange of look, and wild of tongue,
With wan feet wounded and hands wild-wrung,
Sweeps on and on with her cry, far-flung,-
'O my children, come home, come home!
O my children, come home!'

V

'Tis the Spirit of Autumn, no man sees,
The mother of Death and of Mysteries,
Who cries on the wind all night to these,
'O my children, come home!'
The Spirit of Autumn, pierced with pain,
Calling her children home again,
Death and Dreams, through ruin and rain,-
'O my children, come home, come home!
O my children, come home!'

poem by Madison Julius Cawein
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Bacharach / David Medley

(live)
Any day now
Any day now, I will hear you say,
Goodbye my love youll be on your way
And my wild, beautiful bird,
You will have flown, yeah!
Any day now, Ill be all alone
And you wont be around
Any day now, when your restless eyes meet someone new
To my sad surprise
And the blue shadows will fall all over town,
Any day now, you wont be around
Any love will let me down
I shouldnt want to keep you if you dont want to stay
And until youre gone forever
Ill be holding on for dear life, holding on
Holding you this way
And Im begging you to stay
Any day now, when the clock strikes go, youll go away
Then my tears will fall
And the blue shadows will fall all over town, yeah!
Any day now, you wont be around,
And love will let me down
Baby its you
Its not the way you smile
That touches my heart
Its not the way you kiss
That tears me apart
(*) many, many, many nights go by
I sit alone
At home I cry
Over you
What can I do
Cant help myself
cause baby its you
You should hear what theyre saying about you
They say youve never
Never, never been true
Oh! no! no!
It doesnt matter what they say
Im gonna love you any old way
What can I do
When its true
Dont want nobody
cause baby its you
Repeat (*)
Knowing when to leave
Go while the going is good
Knowing when to leave may be
The smartest thing anyone can learn, go!
Im afraid my heart isnt very smart
Fly while your still have your wings
Knowing when to leave wont let you reach
The point of no return, fly!
Foolish as it seems
I still have my dreams
So I keep hoping, day after day
As I wait for the man
And each night after night as I wish
For the love he can be
Though Im sure that no one can tell what are
Whishes and hopefully, somehow I fell
There is happiness waiting for me
When someone walks in your life
You just better be sure hes right
cause if hes found out, heartches and tears you must pay
Keep both of your eyes on the door
Never let it get out of sight
Just be prepared when the time has come
You arent away
Sail when the wind starts to blow
Bul like a fool I dont know when to leave
Make it easy on yourself
If you really love her
And there is nothing I can do
Dont try to spair my feelings
Just tell me that we are through
And make it easy on yourself
Make it easy on yourself...
cause breaking up is so very hard to do
If the way I hold you
Cant compare to her caress
No words of consolation will make me miss you less
My darling... if this is goodbye
I just know I want to cry...
So run to her before you start crying too
And make it easy on yourself...
Make it easy on yourself...
cause breaking up is so very hard to do
And make it easy on yourself
Make it easy on yourself, easy on yourself
Cause breaking up is so very hard to do
(theres) always something
There to remind me
If you should miss
The sweet and tender love we used to share
That we used to share
Just go back to the places where we used to go
And Ill be there
Oh, how can I forget you
When there is always something there to remind me
Always something there to remind me
I was born to love you
I will never be free
Youll always be a part of me
When there is always something there to remind me
Ill never fall in love again
Dont tell me what its all about
cause Ive been there and Im glad Im out
Out of those chains, those chains that blind you
That is why Im here to remind you
Here to remind you
Here to remind you
Here to remind you
What do you get when you fall in love?
You only get lies and pain and sorrow
So for at least until tomorrow
Ill never fall in love again
Oh, Ill never fall in love again
Walk on by
If you see me walking down the street
And I start to cry each time we meet
Walk on by, walk on by
Make believe you dont see the tears
Just let me breathe in private
cause each time I see you I break down and cry
Walk on by
I just cant get over losing you
So if I should seem broken and blue
Walk on by, walk on by
Foolish pride thats all that I have left
So let me have the tears and the sadness you gave me
When you said good-bye
Walk on by, by
Do you know the way to san jose
Do you know the way to san jose?
Ive been away so long
I may go wrong and lose my way
Do you know the way to san jose?
Im going back to find some place of mind san jose
L.a. is a great big freeway
Put a $100 down and buy a car
In a week, maybe two theyll make you a star
Weeks turn into years, that quick they pass
And all the stars there never were
Are parking cars and punping gas
Ive got lots of friends in san jose
Cant wait to get back to san jose
Do you know the way to san jose?

song performed by by Carpenters
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The Rain

Roxette - the rain
I was raised the northern way and my
Father had a northern name, I did my
Crying out in the pouring rain. and a
Season turned into another one, I found
A heart bright like the morning sun. he
Touched my lips, so softly, with his fingertips.
But I kept the rain falling down on me
All the time, all the time. I kept the rain
Falling down on me all the time, all the time.
And some things in life wont ever
Change, theres a smell of a rusty chain
And of love disappearing like an aeroplane.
Ive kept the rain falling down on me
All the time, all the time. Ive kept the rain
Falling down on me all the time, all the time,
All the time.
White lion - broken heart
Here I stand, all alone
Trying to fight the pain from a broken heart
Why she left me? I dont know
It really doesnt matter anymore
I thought our love could last forever
But here I stand lost and all alone
Start a new day, but not alone
Im gonna break away from this broken heart
Ill meet a woman. Im gonna take her home
(where) Ill pick all the pieces and start all over again
I know that life will be much better
Cause I know the (light) will shine again
Chorus:
There is life even after a broken heart, broken heart
You can fight the pain from a broken heart broken heart
I know that life will be much better
Ch:
Repeat ch
White lion - farewell to you
Well its time to say goodbye my friend
Im glad you stayed until the end
I hope that youve enjoyed the time we spent
Though I know that I will be back again
I dont know just how soon my friend
Until we meet again just think of me
Ill think of you
It was easier to say hello
Than to say goodbye
Now the bus is leaving once again
I bid farewell to you
Oh oh yeah
I remember all the fun we had
And all the tears when times were bad
But you were there when we were down nout
And I know that I will not forget
What was written and what was said
And who was there when we were not on top
Of the world
It was easier to say hello
Than to say goodbye
Now the bus is leaving once again
I bid farewell to you
Oh oh yeah
Yes its time to say auf wiedersehn
Sayonara nciao my friend
Youll always have a place within my heart
And rock will come and rock will go
The scene will change and time will show
But still I hope that Ill be there for you
Be there for me
It was easier to say hello
Than to say goodbye
Now the bus is leaving once again
I bid farewell to you
Oh oh yeah
White lion - its over
Theres a little note beside this empty bed
I hear the back door slam nbaby youre on your way
You know I cried a thousand times before you left
You say that this is it
But baby cant you wait
You take your love and go far away
But Ill be missing your everyday
Cause its over
And theres nothing I can do
Yeah its over
But Im still in love with you
Over, over, over
But I love you girl
And I want you back again
This house is lonely and cold without you here
I wish the pain inside my heart would disappear
I know that I was wrong to treat you like I did
But dont you think our love deserves a second chance
When all the love is gone from your heart
And everything we had falls apart
Then its over
And theres nothing I can do
Yeah its over
But Im still in love with you
Over, over, over
But I love you girl
And I want you back again
Tears are falling from my eyes as I cry
I only wish that you were here
If only you had told me
If only I had known
Maybe you would still
Be sleeping in my arms
Wont you let me know
Wont you let it show
Now its over
And theres nothing I can do
Yeah its over
But Im still in love with you
Over, over, over
But I love you girl
And I want you back again
White lion - love dont come easy
There comes a time
When baby you nme
We gotta work it out
Whatever it will be
It feels so right
But somewhere deep inside
You dont know how you feel
You dont know if it is real
Do you want it
Do you need it
Cause love dont come easy
Do you want it
Do you need it
Cause love dont come easy
There comes a time
When you wake up one day
Not knowing if our love
Will take us all the way
Then suddenly,
You feel you must decide
If we should carry on
With what weve just begun
You know that it aint always easy
You know that it aint always right
When love finds a place in your heart
Do you want it
Do you need it
Cause love dont come easy
Do you want it
Do you need it
Cause love dont come easy
You can walk out thru this open door
Just like so many times before
If you dont find what you are looking for
You may be lost forevermore
You know that it aint always easy
You know that it aint always right
When love finds a place in your heart
There comes a time
When baby you should know
We are gonna make it
You gotta let it show
Cause I cant wait
And find out in the end
That you will not be standing
Right here by my side
White lion - till death do us part
As we talk the golden mile
Down the pretty aisle
I know that you are mine
And theres nothing in this world
That I know that I wanna do
To be near you everyday
Every hour every minute
Take my hand and let me lead the way
All thru your life
Ill be by your side
Till death do us part
Ill be your friend
My love will never end
Till death do us part
When I wake up everyday
With you lying in my arms
I wonder if Im dreaming
When I look into your eyes
I just cant believe its true
That my heart belongs to you
Baby you can have it all
Take my hand and let me lead the way
All thru your life
Ill be by your side
Till death do us part
Ill be your friend
My love will never end
Till death do us part
Therell be good times
And therell be bad
But I will stand beside you woman
All the way
And thru the years
As life goes on non
When snow will fall on winter nights
Ill keep you warm inside
Yeah baby I will
All thru your life
Ill be by your side
Till death do us part
Ill be your friend
My love will never end
Till death do us part
White lion - youre all I need
I know that shes waiting
For me to say forever
I know that I sometimes
Just dont know how to tell her
I want to hold and kiss her
Give her my love
Make her believe
Cause she doesnt know
She doesnt know
Youre all I need beside me girl
Youre all I need to turn my world
Youre all I want inside my heart
Youre all I need when were apart
I know that shes always
There when I need her loving
I know that Ive never
Told her how much I love her
I see her face before me
I look in her eyes
Wondering why
She doesnt know
She doesnt know
Youre all I need beside me girl
Youre all I need to turn my world
Youre all I want inside my heart
Youre all I need when were apart
Say, say that youll be there
Whenever I reach out
To feel your hand in mine
Stay, stay within my heart
Whenever Im alone
Ill know that you are there
Youre all I need beside me girl
Youre all I need to turn my world
Youre all I want inside my heart
Youre all I need when were apart
Youre all I need, etc.
All that I need
Is for you to believe
All that I need
Is you

song performed by by Roxette
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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If Only I Could Remember Things For Awhile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Answering The Wolf

Answering the wolf.
Its agony, my own.
Its long howl of irreproachable pain
enough to silence the mountains
with trepidation before something holy.
Desecration. A photo. Two dozen wolf corpses
pouring over the tail-gate of a pick-up.
The bounty of two happy hunters
kneeling beside their rifles
as if something had been accomplished
it would be worth telling their children about.
Hard truth. Here is a human. My species.
It can do this to anything that lives.
From blue algae to Auschwitz,
Uganda, Syria, Wounded Knee.
Whales, buffalo, Sabra and Shatila, the Amazon,
twenty-five million famished children a year,
an avalanche of wolves at the back of a pick-up.
Beyond wanting to know why
there's this black spot
in people's hearts and minds,
where sentience turns rabid,
where intelligence seems
the most inspired enabler of death,
where the wine of empathy turns into an oil slick,
how do you answer the innocence
of the wolf, the child, the old growth forest?
Life gets in the way of our enterprising hatred of it?

You kill a wolf. You kill a whole landscape.
You kill a wolf. And the moon marks you out
with an X on your forehead
for a thousand excruciating transformations.
You kill a wolf. And the rivers
will turn against you and bide their time
until you come down to the water to drink
from your own blood-stained reflection.
The sun will begrudge you a shadow.
The wind feel fouled by your smell
like dead meat in your own house well.
Even the maggots who will come
to your heart one day
like undertakers and garbage-collectors
will look upon it not
as the virtue of a noble enemy
but as an undertaking that's beneath them.
They will not stoop to clean your body like a wound.

Wolf-spirit, wolf-heart, wolf-mind, wolf-mother,
even the white-tailed buck laments
this atrocity of psychotic caprice
that slaughters simply because it can.
I see the moon bare its fangs in proxy for these
and the stars dip their spears in poison.
And I will dance around the fire with you
mad with grief at this wounded eye of life
and smear my face with the ashes of a deathmask
to regret everything about me that is
pathogenetically deranged and inhuman.
To rid myself of the reek of those who could do this.
Do this to our own. Do this to natives.
Do this to wolves. Do this to the air and the water
they breathe and drink from. Do this ultimately
to themselves when there's no one left to care or notice.
These kill to eat.
These eat to kill. You and all like you
who did and condone this, I ask you,
what will you do with the bodies of these wolves?
You never ravened for the meat;
was it their death that glutted your heart?
Were you compensating for some hidden impotence
giddy with the knowledge you could
extinguish life anywhere on the planet on a whim at will?
Were you urinating on your own wombs,
the graves of your ancestors because
you're the illegitimate runt of your own myth of origins?
Are you angry at life because you were born?
Do you despise the rose and admire the thorn?
I see the narrowing in the eyes of the ancient taboos
you've violated like thresholds with your boots on,
bruising sacred ground without knowing
where it is you walk or the risk you take,
the danger you will encounter,
because you have been made deaf, dumb, and blind
robbed of your eyes, ears, tongue, heart, mind
insensate to what now lifts its nose to the wind
to find you when you least expect it
from the least expected quarter.

These you killed. You killed in the concrete,
and exonerate the act in the abstract.
These were blood, flesh, fur, bone, each
with a mystic specificity of its own,
wild, free, whole, intelligent, and communal
each the work of some unknown muse of life,
the spontaneity of some lavish genius,
the inspiration of the same dark mother
that never creates the same masterpiece twice.
These had seeing, mind, emotion.
These had been touched by the mystery of life
and in the shrines of the trees and the mountains
offered their delirium up to the moon
like drunks beneath a vacant window
singing to their own reflections. These
accepted their homelessness in this strange place
without doing it any harm as if
there were no other place they could belong to.
These were at peace with themselves and the earth
in a way you weren't born with the courage to imagine.
These were alert and alive and quick with curiosity.
These were noble without lording it over anyone.
Were they executed for their innocence?
Was there not enough room in your cage
for their kind of freedom? Did you envy
an understanding they had among each other
you haven't enjoyed once in the last twenty years
you stayed drunk as a gun lobby in a lazy-boy
staring back at the glass eyes of the animals
looking down upon you like a decapitated zoo
with the pity of the unaccusing
that anything that's ever lived
could be so full of self-hatred,
so full of disgust at the inadequacy of themselves
in the midst of so much spontaneous sufficiency,
from blue algae on over to blue whales,
could be so estranged from their inalienable nature,
could be so vindictively blind
they'd rather shoot the eyes out of the stars
and finger the braille of the bullet holes
they've put in the side of their coffins
like a mailbox with a return address on it
than open their own and read the writing on the wall.
Does Cain still blame God
that his sacrifice was unacceptable?
The farmer! The farmer! Not the hunter?
The meat of the hunter not sweet to Her nostrils?
So you murder your brother
and then you murder the animals
as if they somehow let you down.
And in the death shroud of the dark mother
she sends a crow not a dove,
not the wolf, nor the eagles of Rome
to teach you how to bury the dead,
to teach you how to sow the earth you've salted
with meat and bullets and how they only bloom
and come to fruition in you
like self-inflicted wounds square
in the third eye of your own infertility.
There used to be hunters wise enough to know
the animals they stalked were meant as a gift of a gift
not something they ripped off like a petty thief.
Now when they catch a whiff of you coming
it isn't a hunter they run from but
that sickly-sweet freakish smell of death
that clings to the skin of an undertaker
who moonlights as a serial killer
in the deathmask of a terminal disease.

poem by Patrick White
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Honeysuckle And Wild Raspberries

Honeysuckle and wild raspberries.
Enclaves of sap green shadows
where the grasshoppers take shelter from the sun.
Cerulean blue chicory by the side of the road
and star clusters of New England asters
thrust like a bouquet of constellations
through the broken down stave
of a cedar rail fence
that's past caring
whether it keeps things in
or lets them out.
Here once
many years ago
I tried to live far away from pain
and here again
though I know better now
than to think paradise
is any kind of anodyne
my eye is caught off guard
by every manner of earthly excellence
that isn't ambivalent or deceitful.
I once walked this dirt road
for five miles one night
followed by what looked like
a black wolf with ruby eyes
that flashed like an ambulance in the moonlight
every time I turned around
to see if it was still there
or if it were closing on me.
A fire walk of fear.
I won't say I found courage that night.
I would say I was unscared.
The moon weaves silver dreamcatchers
for the spiders
and even the low growl
of a wilderness that's grown curious about you
can be a liberating mantra.
I approach this place
like the creative imagination of a good teacher
unfurling the sails of the morning glory
like spare parachutes
to catch the wind
and sail all the way down the Yang-tze River
like the swans of anonymous loveletters.
Violet loosestrife and goldenrod.
Flowers are what
complementary colours look like
when they're dancing.
And here I learned
picking up the skulls of squirrels and groundhogs
as if they were pinecones
and watching the bewilderment
of a wounded doe
try and fail to clear a fence
that would have been child's play to her yesterday
and the two children
buried before they were four
at the turn of the century
up on the top of the high hill
under a shipwreck of an oak
that's never put to sea
how death is as equally acceptable to life
as life is to death.
The wild grapevines
are writing their own kind of music
drunk on whole notes
and the dragonflies are coming down
like C.I.A. drones
on cells of terrorist mosquitoes.
Though I'm cellularly immersed in it
there's a gap between me and nature
that isn't so much the space between
one thing and another
as it is a bubble of thought and passion
in a great sea of vivifying awareness
washed up on the shores of consciousness
like a bottle from a faraway place
with no message inside
except light years and light years of longing.
Nature is the midwife of a serial killer.
Nature is the dark mother that gives birth to all things.
Nature is a metaphor for me
as I am for it.
A coincidence of the contradictories.
Closer than a face is to its own reflection.
Closer than the sea is
that wraps this airy nothing in a skin of water
and then treats it to the tattoo it's always wanted
on its birthday
like the sign of the house it was born under
in the black stars of an unforgettable constellation.
Someone once said
that death was self-containment.
I disagree with that.
Life is a bubble.
And poof!
In the twinkling of an eye
there goes the neighbourhood.
Death is rapid expansion into the open.
Life toes the threshold
but it's death that crosses it
and enters its homelessness
like the primordial atom
on the road to nowhere
that isn't here and now.
Down to the swamp
to check out the water lilies.
I painted down here for years
with a French easel as shaky as a fawn
getting up on its folding legs for the first time.
A blue heron snaps the air like a wet sheet
and startles the frogs into popcorn.
Life soup.
Green scum.
A deer path
and a beaver
repairing a mud hut
that would have turned into civilization
if it hadn't harvested trees
instead of grass.
You can hear the silence
of a watchful presence
over and above the sounds
of life going on all around you
when you're alone in a marsh like this.
You can smell the transformation
of the duff and decay
into the beauty food of the waterlilies.
You can tine the air like the tongue of a snake
and taste the cauldron brewing
the eye of the newt
and the one-legged frog
into the ambrosia of water hyacinths
as blue as Raphael.
I feel like the sorcerer's apprentice
the first day on the job.
A praying mantis.
A Vietnam of dragonflies.
But what I saw here day after day
through all four seasons of the year
I'd come down here to paint
showed me nature is nurture
and life suckles at death's tit.
But you can't tell
who's being raised by whose assassin.
Who's the exit.
Who's the entrance.
Because there's just one big open gate
hinged like birds to the sky
with nothing written above it
as a sign of welcome or warning
and you're greeted by nothing but your own presence.
And I've sat out here by myself
until the first light of morning
just to look for clues among the stars.
But the mysteries don't answer you
like questions it occurred to you to ask
They go on and on forever
like wounded joys
the radiance and the wonder
cut so deep
they never want to heal.
You can appeal to the stars for clarity.
You can look for small suggestions in the grass.
You can get a feel
for where the wildflowers
like to gather in abandoned fields
and where the pioneers
who grew them in gardens
just behind the summer kitchen
like Bouncing Bet
whose sap they used for soap
buried the tiny children
who died of scarlet fever
under the crude grave stones
of the Canadian Shield.
And the hills they chose like nannies
to watch over them
with beauty and affection.
And the silence and the sorrow
of the long sparse walk
back down to the farm without them.
And when you put your ear up to their abyss
you'd swear you could hear their voices
asking you the same questions
that they asked of themselves.
Is there a meaning to all this
that's more than just a flash
of lightning and fireflies?
Anything you can say or feel about life
that isn't always two children shy of the truth?

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Out Here Alone

Out here alone so late at night
with all these spectacular stars
burning through the clean glass
of the freezing winter air
I can almost hear them thinking
behind the myths of the cover stories
they've told for years
dark truths about life and light
it would be madness in a man to understand.

Don't try to stuff the impersonal secret
of the universe
into your sentimental heart.
How could you ever fit its likeness
into a locket
and finger it lovingly as your own?

Out here alone so late
even if you have come
like a thief in the night
to steal from the light
when nobody's home
there are no cracks no facets no gaps
no backdoors, unlocked windows
or emergency exits,
no stairwells or entrances
in these jewels of insight
that can feel your eyes falling upon them
like rain running down a mirror
that shuts you out
like someone in the bathroom crying
for reasons that are light-years beyond you.

However deep and sincere your tears are
they're still only dry wells
in that vast ocean of awareness,
black snowflakes
on the roaring furnace of the abyss
and if you reach out with affection
hoping to make things better
by embracing it all
you're still only tendering a kiss
to the gaping jaws of your own lipless skull.

There's a silence older than space
in the bottomless heart of things
that makes intelligence seem
the unlikeliest of exaggerations
a human could ever mean
holding his mind up like a lamp to the stars
as if he could find his own way back by his own light
without the dream that themes his mindstream with creation.

But as foolish and futile as it is to surmise
or try to get a leg up on the wise
I don't think the darkness
is the negative space
around the troubled face that appeared
after all the dots were connected
like rising constellations
in a child's colouring book.

And I don't think there are gods
squatting like frogs
on the lotus of the world
making us up as they go along
like wheels and roads
to the grunts and groans
of an axial mating song
anyone could mistake for a joke.

And I don't think the stars
believe the things we say about them
or even remotely feel the mystic dread
of what it is to be a human
looking up at their shining
out of deeper darknesses within
where no direction can be given to the lost like eyes
that would never find their own way home again
were it not for the stars and fireflies that mislead us
from one illumination to the next
by giving the finger to the braille of the text
that would school a gust of stardust into us
like God gave life to Adam
and Eve gave life to God
long before there were any laws to blind them
like Satanic lightning bolts
uprooting their eyes like rain from the clouds
to put those fires out.

I look up at the stars
with the eyes of an exile
through the diaspora of my breath
and I want to think them all to death
like the people and things I've left behind me
when it was time to go my own way
anywhere into the darkness inside me
to see if I could shine a light upon myself
that didn't blind me to the fact
neither in the beginning
nor in the end
was I there to witness the act
that made a certainty as good as a doubt
to the great indifference
that wasn't trying to find me
like a needle of light in the heart of a haystack.

I look up at the stars
like a scarecrow in winter
trying to put its pants on
one leg after another
like a man
with nothing but time to burn
scattering his ashes among the stars
urn after urn
skull after skull
of the heretics and mystics
that were martyred by his scar-crossed heart
in the name of nothing real.

I don't know what they feel
but I look up at the stars
like a black rose
of blood and starmud
in the last death throes
of self-immolation
and see in my own image
what I've always had
in common with creation.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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My Hands Were Once

My hands were once the afterlives of birds
that caressed the cheeks of the sky
and brushed back the wind from its eyes,
and took a finger to intercede with a tear
not to start a pilgrimage without a little laughter,
and I am of the stuff of three stars
and a fire in my loins
that inseminated space with planets
and wrought red iron into bells of blood,
and leaned on calcium for ladders of bone
and taught the four-armed shivas of carbon to grasp life
and dance for the wheat and the grapes and the poppies,
and man lying down with woman
in waters urged by the fires of thought
furiously rooted in the gardens of the stars.

I am the ancestor and offspring of everything
and even my solitude is the loneliness of the mountains
sleepwalking over their own seabeds,
and the way I love, a trigger of oxygen,
and the way I see, a whisper of time and space,
a feather of moonlight dipped in the ink of the night.

I have within me,
deep in the vaults of my wounds,
swords from the wars of the grass and the trees,
and words that sang like arrows in the sacred groves
to answer why I live and what I'm looking for
and why all my foundation stones are shoes worn out with roads,
and who is it looking back at me like a dark echo in a dream
to see if I'm coming like a shadow with a voice.

And there are mysterious robes lighter than a breath of silk,
auroras and lightstorms, waterskins of the water-walking stars
that have plied themselves like the rings in the heartwood of a tree,
journals of light and rain, to sailor my spirit in a chronicle of flesh,
and be a brief thing in a brevity of eras, to know
why the tiger dies looking into the open, its eyes
yellow lamps in the bluing of the early morning
as if its death were already achieved a breath behind it
and a man crawls toward a meaning on his knees.

All the deaths are mine, the births, the names,
and my heart is the shrine of the moonrise and the dawn,
the blue honey hive of the stars and the wildflowers in their fields,
and the wind takes down what the mute rocks repeat for my sake,
and every face is a blossom or a leaf or an apple from the bough
of the orchard that seasons my emotions to advent and passage,
to the transformative oceans that drink to the bottom of themselves
and leave their empty cups on the moon to be filled again.

I have within me a beginning and an end
that open like the wings of a single gate
I passed through long before the birth of time
like the prelude of a world I hadn't read yet
because I hadn't finished living it in tears and blood,
running my fingers over it like the tender braille of a breast,
lapping it like blood from my own skull to see what kind of drunk I was.

And there are lifelines on the palms of everyone's hands
valleys, rivers, nerves, creases, roots, deltas, lightning
that together make a map to every dream I've ever lived,
all the tragedies and joys of fugitive spirits
trying to shoot the rapids with a broken oar,
and secrets that put a finger to the lips of the dead
like the horizontal threshold of a man who stands
like an infinite pause in the doorway of waking up
and just looks at himself with nothing special in mind,
a commotion of swallows in the radiant spoons of last night's rain.

But there's you now, who is not me,
because I long for you like a tide longs for its island,
and can find nowhere within myself the likeness of your face,
and though I know the water knows you like an ancient migration
it leaves no trace of your vines on the lips of its waves,
and there are skys where you shine among the stars for hours
where I've found threads of your shadow
torn on the thorns of the constellations
like rivers unravelled from your wilderness skin,
and even once I found your footprint like a boat on a beach
but you were not in it, and the emptiness was out of reach.

And I think if I find you, if I look hard enough,
if I stare into space as still as a lizard or a telescope,
if I check every leaf the doves bring back in their beaks,
every eyelid of snow that lowers the pines into sleep,
and lace the wind with fragrant spells and tragic pleas,
if I can break the code of the rocks that ore their silver secrets
like love-letters, like poems, deep in the throat of the earth,
if I grow new eyes for the seeing from the oldest wines of my being,
and the sky has to turn black forever not to have you pale like a comet,
not to lose you like a chandelier of fireflies in a galaxy,
not to reach out and touch you like the creatrix of the creator,
I can part from this life like a gift I left in the night on the stairs.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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So Far Down This Road

So far down this road
without a destination
my childhood doesn't
recognize me anymore.
So far into this life
I've never been outside of
I can speak to myself
in a foreign language
that no one can understand
as if it were the ancient dream-grammar
of a past tense
that talked its way into the future.

So far into what I've become
the peduncle is lost
in the ensuing phylum
and of all thought
I'm the first monkey
to look for its origins in an asylum.

The crow on an autumn branch
in the white rain
laughs more than it ever did
at the specious foundations
of my ephemerid profundities
dropping like apples at my feet.

The minstrel warrior of the forlorn hope
I took up arms in a holy war of one
I was doomed to lose
like a sad generation of demons
who knew the wound would never close.

If heaven isn't a club-med in a specific place
but saturates all of space
like mystically dark matter
then we're all falling toward paradise
like particles and wavelengths of water.

Heaven may be the whole cup
and hell a crack in the wine
and earth the place you sober up
like a bad hangover from the divine
but it's a party I walked out of aeons ago
more a stranger than when I came
like a manger without a sign
like a magus without a logo
to an inn that had been empty for years.

I don't presume to teach people
what they already know.
Even hanging on
is going with the flow.
This is a delirious place
where the mysteries cut deep
and silence is the native tongue
God speaks to herself in.

So far down this mindstream
like a paper boat I made of a poem
and set aflame like an orchid of fire
to honour a poet
who said it right in China long before me,
I bloom on the water of a prophetic dream
true to the unpredictability
of a sleeping dragon
to wake from the brevity of oblivion
with the eyes of a narcoleptic chameleon.

Joy binds
what sorrow releases.
And thought might prick the lifelines
of an amniocentesis
and offer up my embryo like a thesis
on whether I should have been born or not,
but I drink from my own skull like the moon
when it's full to the brim
above the starwheat in the Virgin's hand
to the stealth of the wind that dropped me here
like a lone seed in a huge empty silo
I'm trying to stud like the Venus de Milo.

It's not easy rooting in stone
like the invasive metal
of a sword that will make you
king of the waxing year.
Things just fall apart on their own
like grain from the chaff of a fickle harvest
that rose from the dead
like the bitter bread
of an abandoned homestead
that walked out on itself too soon.

But I've never been one to talk
about leaving it all behind
like some dark gate of the mind
I could pass through
like a unilluminated comet through space
to shine in the light of a star
that was alarmed at my approach
and blind to my passing.

I'm more at home in the dark
with a firefly and a chimney spark
rolling koans like constellations of loaded dice
as if they were two diabolical buddhas
in the back alleys of enlightenment
pushing their luck to the wall.
They rise
and I fall.
I rise
and they fall.
Readiness is all.
Ripeness is all.
Lear shakes his fist at Hamlet.

The blue harvest moon in total eclipse.
All loveletters die like political pamphlets
up against a closed door.
So far into this cloud of unknowing
I have given up hoping
will ever become a star
and break into light in all directions
to show me where I'm going
I give up on myself like rain
and release my waterbird eyes
to fall wherever they might.

Readiness is spring.
Ripeness is fall.
Seven come eleven.
No one wins it all.
Two squared skulls
up against a crooked wall.
I shake the dice
and you call.
You shake the dice
and I call out to luck like a random goddess
to see if she still loves me
as she did once tomorrows ago
when I won everything back.

Whether you're giddy with happy truths
or more profoundly belled by the sad facts
it's scary at night in the spirit's lost and found
when the lights go out
and no one's around to look for anything.

Gardens of black umbrellas,
the wings of folded bats
stacked like unseasonal eclipses
that have lost the will to bloom
like flowers at a lavish funeral
for impoverished aristocrats.

And courage isn't a home
that's all that easy to return to
when you're out here on your own
like a lifeboat full of midnight on Mars.

So far along this long homeless road home
I have worn out my faithless friends like shoes
I took from the feet of the dead
to walk on ahead of myself
like a star with a jump on where it's been.

Now even I don't know what I mean
when the words say me
like some black benediction
over an unknown grave
as I mourn the roadkill
and try to bless the turkey-vultures.

Earth. Air. Water. Fire.
Four cultures that bury their dead differently
but all to the same end.
Who could have guessed
the angels that came to earth first
had the wingspan of loitering scavengers?
I give my soul up to the birds.
I give my eyes up to the sky.
I give my voice up to these words.
I give my mind up like water to water
light to light
darkness to darkness
to the star that has misled me this far
into this wilderness of myself
where I'm preaching stealth to shadows
and air to ride the wind.

I give my heart up
to the thorn that gored the rose
like a deep insight
into the nature of the moon's
bright vacancy
dark abundance
like two sides of the same face.

I give my will up to chance.
My blood to the conviction of the poppy it's fire.
So far beyond my last event horizon
I'm never coming back this way again
what does it matter if the path
is crooked or straight?

I lay my tiny wisdom down like a hazelnut
on the track of the silver thought-train
to see if it can crack it like a koan.
I lay the mantle of my dynastic ignorance
over the shoulders of an avalanche like snow.

However much
you love the valley
it will be the mountain
that sweeps you off your feet.

I give my imagination up like a black wine
that tastes a little like me
to the muses who bruised it
like the great night sea
they drank from my skull
whenever the moon was full.

Among so many sages
it was good to be a fool.
One by one the schools
dropped out of me
and settled like mud at the bottom
of a clarified way to see
that everything that passed through my head
like a shapeshifting cloud
was just water looking into water,
me looking into me with water for eyes.

Why be shocked
by the predictability of death
when it's life that always comes as a surprise?

I may have been lame
in my approach to things
and limped my way like an iamb into wings
but I wanted to look down
from way up there
as if I were a star without strings
and be the way things are
when they shine down on nothing
until a nightbird in a far tree sings.

Carrying forth into the carrying forth
eternity might be the ghost
in the starmud of time that perishes
to give forever a meaning
but it's this life now
that talks the talk
and walks the walk
of a human being.

I give my eyes up to the seeing.
So deeply lost upon myself
like an empty lifeboat drifting through
these veils and visions of things
that appear like sails in the fog a moment
and then evaporate into their nebularity.

I give my blessing to the waywardness
of the course
that took me the way I am.
I give up my pain
I give up my sorrow
I give up my love my joy my laughter
like orchids and ashes on the mindstream
that flows out of me like a waking dream
that doesn't insist on seeing me here tomorrow.

But most of all
I give my gratitude
to the mystic vagrancy of the great solitude
I approached like a friend
on my way to nowhere like the sea
as if everything came to an end in me
like a life I couldn't foresee.

Though I have mourned
life's preemptive reverses
I have not scarred my lips with curses.
I have not tainted the well I drink from.

And nothing's ever spoiled
the bread I broke with others.
The feast is free
but it isn't hunger or thirst
that makes us sisters and brothers
it's the way we raise
the cup to each other's lips
like a lunar elixir to a solar eclipse
as if we knew we would pass
long before the darkness did
but still made the gesture anyway.

It's the way we hope
we know what we mean
when we say we love people
we've never seen
as if they were everyone in particular
and love's mute theme
were helplessly gesticular.

You can't keep
what you won't give away.
Life's a long sleep
before a short dream
that wakes you up far from home
beside the unknown road you're on
that winds like smoke among the stars
whispering ghost stories around the flames
of their unbelievable fires.

By all means pursue what is true
but don't forget
mercy has its liars too.
I give my life up
to the mystic specificity
of the medium that sustains it
like a wavelength of light
to a sea of dark matter.

And more than I could have ever lived
living alone together with everyone
crammed into the same planetary shoe
I give up all the vastness
of my awareness of the space within
and how far there is to go like light
before you can open
even a single flower of insight
to end your long winter night.

I give up space
like my place at the table
where I stood like a tower of salt.
I give my imagination up
like an underground cult
that gave its secrets away to everyone
like dark spots on the sun.

And whatever beginnings
are behind me now
like things I'll never finish
I give my past and future up
to the omnipresence of time
in all I live today
as if something
were always coming my way
without expectation
from lightyears beyond my eyes
like letters from home
that never reach me
in time to call me back.

If I have shone among luminaries
like a firefly in an ice palace
of radiant chandeliers
that froze in their own tears
it was as a small lighthouse
on the coast of turbulent mirrors
that kept a nightlight on.

I spent the gone on the going
and trusted the darkness
to keep things flowing along
like a river coming down a mountain
without knowing about the sea
that summoned me to the lowest place
like an unfathomable watershed
in every eye of the fountain
that cried out to the birds
in words that feather the dead
for their long flight through the mystery
I am I am I am
the future memory
of my own prophetic history
before I wrote it down
like the path I took
on my way out of town.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Great Big Man

Rust on your fingers, you got trouble at your feet.
Keep the home fires burning, but look out for the heat
'cause there's a man at the window who knows just what you think,
and there's a water boy behind you who won't give you a drink
Well it's a hard, hard time, no easy road in sight,
it takes a great big man to win a great big fight.
When it comes to dying, no matter what you tell,
They'll let you into a heaven 'cause you lived your life in hell.
Well they've got no way to reward you but to let those breezes blow,
And you've got nothing left to do but to let your anger show.
'Cause it's a hard, hard time, no easy road in sight,
it takes a great big man to win a great big fight.
Think about your baby, think about your wife,
Think about your banker who's trying to take your life.
Think about this planet that's rolling through the night.
Oh can you turn your back on such a great big fight?
You got the muscle, big man, you got the power,
but you're getting weaker with each passing hour.
Just like a flame in the rain, like a light in the night,
well if it's you that must stay, well then it's you that must fight!
'Cause it's a hard, hard time, your future's not bright,
it takes a great big man to win a great big
great big man to win a great big fight.

song performed by by Don McLean
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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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
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Lighting It Up And Blowing It Out

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Looking At Stars From Spy Rock

Looking at stars from Spy Rock
on top of Foley Mountain,
Westport glowing like an alloy
of red algae and fireflies down below
around the sacred pools of small mouth bass
raised from fingerlings
to lure the fishermen of Hazelton Pennsylvania
to this pioneer pantry of wildlife up north.
I can remember you naming them out loud
like Santa Claus’ reindeer.
Deneb, Vega, Al Tair.
And I tried hard to look
but I couldn’t take my eyes off of you.
And I’m up here again by myself many years later
and there are two ghosts on the wind
casting their shadows on the Milky Way
two black holes in time
that took it all in
then disappeared.
We didn’t separate.
We just evaporated into thin air
and I can hear the flowers saying
in their small damaged voices
I’d rather die than put up with this time of year.
Semi-hibernating raccoons
and the occasional brown bear
looking for a last snack before sleep
before snow
before the flame of life
is turned down so low
it’s merely a candle living off
the lifespan of its own fat
just long enough to keep the dream
of what bears dream about alive
until hunger drives them out of their caves
twelve thousand years later
into a world they can no longer recognize
as the one that dressed up in their hides and their skulls
and spit-painted on their cave walls
and appealed to their power not to kill it outright
as it begged forgiveness for its trespass.
Bear magic on Foley Mountain.
Ursa Major in starlight.
And for awhile I thought you might be
my circumpolar girlfriend
and I could be your mystic star map.
You had the right ascension as me
but the wrong declination
and like everything else
that’s ever led me out of the wilderness
like the only direction left to go in
you rose and set over my event horizon
and what had been the fixed stars of my eyes and heart
wandered off like fireflies and chimney sparks
into a darkness I could only imagine
enhances your shining somewhere
like a warm breath of life and light
hovering in the cold night air
as mine is exorcised here.
We breathe the stars in
and then we breathe them out
and it’s been going on like this
for thousands of light years.
Three more nights
and the moon will catch up to Jupiter.
You said you couldn’t be famous
standing in my shadow
but what you didn’t realize at the time
I was the shadow of your shining
whenever you approached the earth
like Venus on a moonless night.
But how remote it all seems now.
Encounters of the human kind
reverting like the unploughed fields around here
to something intimately alien and wild.
We embodied all these stars once.
We stood here on this mountain once together
and breathed these vacant interstellar spaces in
as if we could hold all of space and time
like a single dropp of insight
into the circuitous blossoming
of our riverine hearts
and oceanic minds.
And what myth of spring fish
could fathom our depths
though it jump like Pisces into the boat?
Up here in my eagle-eyed eyrie
do these receding hills at my feet
remember anything as vividly as I do
as the sound of your voice when you spoke
and the mountain came down prophetically
like an avalanche of stone tablets
across the ups and downs
of the road that led us up here
to look into the empty beyond
as far as the light
we were given given to go by
whether it be the hundred billion stars
of Messier thirty-one
two million light-years away
like the sister galaxy you are to me tonight
just this smudge of light at eleven o’clock
above the middle star
of the constellation Andromeda
or a firefly in the spider mount of a parabolic mirror.
Sometimes you can notice things more clearly
that you can see head on at the time
out of the corner of your eye
as you look away from your line of sight
astronomical units of light later.
I have come back to those moments
from so long ago
like time with an expanded field of vision
of wildflowers dying all over the mountain
like cornflowers in the grave of a Neanderthal
incarnadined by red ochre
though none were ever buried here
we still share this common ground of death
or Indian tobacco at the eastern gates of theburial hut
of an Algonquin who once stood here as I did
and gazed upon the moon in wonder
estranged by the wound of the rapture
just moments before he disappeared for good
into the bone-box of his having been here once
to amaze his solitude with precipitous stars
looking up from the godless pulpit of Spy Rock.
The cedars sway in the wind
like children learning to swim beside a pool
ploughing the air with their arms.
And the shadows tremble
like the waters of life
inside the heartwood of a rootless tree
the moon ripples with forgotten springs
that once made the fish jump at fireflies
wavelengths out of reach of their eyes.
Sight is a kind of love.
As above so below
like the palindrome of the moon goddess Anna
in the Arabic jana
the English heaven
and the Greek ouranos
Romanized into Uranus analeptically.
O what a brutal exchange.
All that life and light and love
all those stars
all that seeing
just to exhume a few dead metaphors
and breathe a little life into them
as if you were giving
mouth to mouth
heart to heart
spirit to spirit
resuscitation to words
that once saw their whole life flash before them
before they drowned
up to their necks and out of their depths in stars.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If You Had Any Compassion For Yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Lightning Hits The Horns Of The Morning Snail

Lightning hits the horns of the morning snail
like the tines of a tuning fork
and the larkspur sees in the ashes of the holy one,
a tiny urn, no bigger than a cigar butt,
a deep connection to the stars
at the root of its ultramarine towers,
the ugly and despised become luminously beautiful
by what they've been touched by. Same
with candles, night, the human spirit, a poem
and the stars and planets
that ride the film of our eyes across the sky
or slide across the poppies of blood that bloom
on the other side of our eyelids in the sunshine
like blue sunspots and serpentine rainbows
on the deft wings of the houseflies aspiring
to penetrate the heights and mysteries of being
as if they approached God like an ineffable windowpane,
and the black mirrors of the oil slicks
that eclipse our faith in our transformative power
to change things. Two petals of violet cosmos,
two eyelids of a new way of looking at things,
swaying ethereally in the wind
as if they were keeping time
to a faint music they can hear
way back somewhere in their mind's eye, fall
and stick themselves to the back of a snail
inching its way along a garden path in metric
through a crosswalk of rococo shadows,
and who would have believed
something so low and slow could fly
if they hadn't seen it with their own eyes?

Show me anything your eyes have ever been deprived of,
however ugly, however visually tantalizing,
inside our out, even if you can count more than the usual three,
and I'll show you someone who hasn't learned
how to be grateful for the generosity
of the black hole they're living in
like one of the darlings of light.
Clarity isn't just a matter
of straightening out the wavelengths in your line of sight
and then looking upon everything you see
as if it were flatlining in parallel event horizons
everywhere you looked for signs of life
and came upon death, and mistook it for peace.
It isn't just a matter of contemplating sundials
in erratically disciplined Zen gardens
until you come to understand how to use the shadows
on behalf of your own spiritual insight
as readily as you've mastered your weapons of light.
No one's ever been purified by a holy war.
Not even the warrior minstrel of the forlorn hope.
You can exhaust a whole new generation of third eyes
trying to make it all one out of a lot of little separate pieces
that reflect the whole in every part
of your shattered chandeliers and mirrors,
that long pilgrimage, that fire walk of shining splinters
that dazzle you into believing it's skip to my lou my darling
all the way down a Milky Way of stars
from here like a fingerling of light
to there like a wild salmon of oceanic enlightenment.
Beauty isn't an essence you can extract from the ore
of who you are as a human like an existential alchemist
trying to distill the stars from the medium they're shining in
as if you were pulling a sword from a philosopher's stone.
All the shining spiritual metals, copper, silver, mercury, gold,
unless they're alloyed with the darker elements of earth,
are too soft for combat. Merlin relies
on the iron forge in his own blood to work his magic.
He knows a holy war is just an exorcism
on crusade against a seance. A calling
of the dead to the dead. Not the work
of the living spirit that resides
in the human divinity of everyone of us
like a birthright of shining
that's as indefensible and unassailable
as time and space. Clarity doesn't try to part the heavens
like a mansion into single rooms for every afterlife
that goes into exile looking for an excellence within itself
that knows how to keep a promise to the earth.
Knowing how to fall is half the art of rising.
Learning how to get up off
your knees, your prayer rugs, tatami mats
and all those flying carpets
that don't fly straight in any direction
with compassion for the human being you are
as you see yourself looking at you
through everyone else's eyes,
and hear creation being said within you
like the fleeting meanings of life
that shadow the life of meaning
as fast as it's being spoken
in the mother-tongue of everyone
who can look upon a morning snail
and hear how a grubby little buddha
of a sticky sacred syllable
that crosses your path in the morning
is saying you into existence twenty four seven
the way everything else is each other
in the wholly imaginable beauty
of a creative language that isn't
a tongue-tied stranger to anyone.

Look at any grain of dirt on whatever path you're on
and light it up with the shining
from the oil lamps of your own eyes
and you'll see how easy it is to enlighten
what's under your feet like the billions of stars
that spontaneously followed suit like wildflowers
once you got the first one lit and realized
in whatever direction you search and seek
the spirit isn't looking for the right road of thorns
to cut its feet on, or lacerate its knees on a holy stairwell.

Put a pair of cosmic wings on a morning snail
and the whole earth turns into a landing strip
of green boughs in blossom, even
when the fireflies take over the nightshift
like microcosmic demonic nightwatchmen.
Go ask the bees if you don't believe me.
They can read the petals of the secret starmaps
that bloom like love notes and shared recipes
for honey that tastes like a solar flare
transformed by the transactions of a spiritual atmosphere
that pearls this grain of nacreous earth
as surely as the air that breathes us does,
into auroral arrays of beauty and compassion.

If you can't love the veils, how are you ever
going to learn to love the face behind them
that smiles back at you in a likeness of yourself,
all eyes, and stars, flowers and nocturnal metaphors
for what you're looking at?
A morning snail with two petals of cosmos for wings,
with flashy grains of dirt on its back, each
a world within a world in its own right,
rising chromatically over their event horizons
as a sign of a significance of their own
as poignant as the silicates and stars they're reborn from,
delivering the mail at its own pace
as if its wings were two loveletters
addressed to itself by the wind personally
each sealed with a kiss
like two complementary eyes
you must look into deeply if you want to see
how the hourglass flowers in your gazing
like larkspur and shapeshifting desert stars.
If you don't want to live your whole life
like a scar looking for a wound you can believe in.

Even a morning snail, if you've got the eyes for it,
can make a trail of the silver veil it leaves in its wake
like a smeared mirror on the path to enlightenment.
If you only love the light at moonrise,
and despise what's fallen into the dirt
like so many windfalls of
demons, stars, snails, angels, apples and humans before it,
your life is not adjusted to the time-zone you're living in
and your heart keeps missing a beat
you go endlessly wandering over the earth to look for
through the gardens on the moon
and the starfields above
when everywhere and always
it's been right under your feet all the time
like a snail path shining like the Milky Way
on the garden walkway through
the blue and white stars of the larkspur
like lightning in the morning
that flashes from your own eyes.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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When Rage Broke Down Into Tears

When rage broke down into tears
over the shattered chandeliers of stars
that crashed against your windowpane
before they thawed in the furnace
of a Promethean thief of fire
human enough to burn,
and you cried, yes you did, I was there,
I took the splinter of light out of your eye
with the corner of the sky where Venus
goes down in the west like the crumb
of a radiant dream that wanted to break
loaves and fishes with the masses
only to find you were swimming through glass;
you cried as if all the birds in the world
had died under your windowsill
like the words to the song
you were dancing to at the time.
And you picked them up one by one
and cradled them in your hand
like a midwife with a manger
and stroked their soft bodies with your finger
as if you would give their lives back to them again
by way of apology for being human
in an ice age of rain
that had lost its purpose in life
like the seeds of flowers on the moon.
And that’s when the wind, that’s always
the moment when the wind cools your eyes
like a glassblower dipping crystal blue birds
in the fountains and watersheds of the moon
and strews your path with the flight feathers
of a nightbird that can see beyond a starmap
fireflies shining in the distance.
And you suddenly realize
a thousand and one ways home ahead of you
like a Nazca landing strip
for alien artists blown off course
into the third eye of a spiritual hurricane.
And you can’t help but fly through it
like an open window into your soul
seeking repose and shelter
among the human totems
of more habitable emotions
scratching fish, birds, monkeys, spiders
jaguars, flowers, trees, fallible people out
in the desert plains of coastal Peru.
Zoomorphic geoglyphs of greeting and return
in every conceivable sign of life
as if the whole planet came out
all at the same time to say hello
and welcome back
like a vow they kept for you
until your myth of origin
returned to its fulfilment,
a nightbird singing
in a rootless tree on the moon,
as if love, rage, life, joy,
death, separation and sorrow
were all pilgrims of one voice.
A pageant of medieval notes
bearing the banners of knights
the hoods and habits of monks,
unholy vocables of middle English
on the tip of your tongue
like the wicks
of holy candles at a black mass
where a young girl dances naked
around a pale fire on the moon
as a flower blooms in the flames,
or sparrows on a stave of power lines,
when the music makes its return journey
like Canada geese in the spring
bearing the souls of the underworld back
like the eyes and stars
and new moons of the dead
to the night of the living
making love in the dark.
Pelvis to pelvis,
heart to heart,
crescent to crescent,
two halves of a broken wishbone
conjoined again into one harp,
one cithara, one guitar
in the ashes of a blue moon,
the second harvest of loaves and fishes
at the spring and autumn equinox.
Every year a new zodiac,
the growth rings in a tree.
Something protean about memory.
The dark matrix of the muse.
A wavelength with its tail in its mouth
that doesn’t ricochet off anything else.
Lamentations, bewitchment, rapture,
time in the hold of the abyss
for not mastering your own powers.
You either cast the spell for yourself
or you wind up gilled
in your own sidereal nets,
a firefly in spider webs of dark matter,
and it’s not likely
you’re being hauled into a life boat.
There are realities, there are windows,
some broken, some whole
even the moon won’t dare look through.
And there are rooms in a palace of water
that move like fish on the moon,
and starmaps that are used to start a fire.
Birds that are the sacred syllables of the sky
that nest in chimneys like hash pipes,
every one of them the Rosetta Stone
to a language of your own
only you can learn for yourself
even if you’re the only one
who was ever born to speak it.
Most people sip spit
from other people’s wishing wells
but they’re always two echos shy of an original
and it’s enough if they put a seashell up to their ears
like a hearing aid to listen to the ocean,
a tidal pool dying like a starfish
out of water and sky,
a shore-hugger that’s afraid
to go along with the ebb and neap
of the dream that gives a pulse to the moon,
your own mindstream
returning to its homeless source
to realize that life and death are both redundant.
That whatever passes away, stays.
And that which doesn’t, goes.
And there are places so deeply secret
that everybody thinks they know
what’s happening to them as it unfolds.
But this is just a way of using knowledge
to keep your eyes closed to the world.
Only a fool would build a gate
and live in a guardhouse
of sword swallowers and fire-eaters
to keep the birds out of the garden.
Or a refugee camp for turtles.
True clarity doesn’t know the light
for what it is.
Reality is as blind to its own translucency
as a painted window.
Two blades of stargrass in a hurricane.
But if you were to take them away
like the long and short straws
of something to win or loose
like the luck of the draw
and chew on them like cud
to get to the deeper meaning
you might get a gesture of it,
you might get the flavour of it
like a dry wad of gum
stuck to the bottom
of a school room desk,
but you wouldn’t get the use of it,
for any reason at all
that should or should not concern anyone.
Have you ever noticed
that time might be
an hourglass full to the brim on top
but it always begins at the peak
of an inverted pyramid
stuck like an arrowhead
in a flesh wound of sand that’s bleeding out?
What’s the point of trying
to claw your way up the heap
to the top of the bottom
when even Sisyphus knows
enough about absurdity
to realize the mountain
climbs its own reflection
all the way down like an avalanche
of all those little rocks
you used to roll up a hill
convinced you were getting somewhere.
And it’s true there’s a different universe
in every grain of sand
and every grain of sand is us.
So why go looking
for what’s already been found?
In any universe there’s no up or down.
And everywhere anywhere you are
from the smallest pebble on the beach
to the most radiant star beyond reach
the gates of the lost
are the end of the search.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Feel The Thorns Of The Rose Making Inkwells Of My Eyes

I feel the thorns of the rose making inkwells of my eyes.
It's me that hurts. But without meaning to,
I'm bleeding for everyone. A watershed of blood and tears.
A reservoir of pain. Not all my own, I drink
before anyone like a hummingbird, or a canary in the mine,
to make sure it isn't toxic. No goat skull in a well
of rotten water. No blood on the horns of the moon.

What a disgrace it is to be a human sometimes.
What a sorrow when your heart wobbles like a drunk bell
and there are perturbations and precessions in your orbit
it's hard to explain except as the flawed configuration of a dream
with your waking life, though they're both just two waves
of the same sea of awareness, feathers and scales.

Oxymoronic maple keys vertiginous as Sufis
at the crossroads of everywhere and here. My heart
is a bone-box full of elegies for Arctic swans
shrinking like ice-bergs from global warming.
And I'm not as mindless in love as I should be,
though a muse is still pure oxygen distilled
from a thousand undiscovered plants in the Amazon
as beguiling as the ghosts of the fragrances
along the Perfume Trail. And sometimes, I swear,
I can smell the weeping of wild blackberries
eclipsed by the shadows of voracious crows
pecking out their eyes like dark jewels
in a crown of thorns. And there's a feeling
with too low a frequency for words like the afterbirth
of an orphaned universe that resonates within me
like the poignancy of the embrace of one
of the saddest graces of compassion limning its tears
with a star's worth of beauty glowing through the clouds.

And goodness arises within me like a loaf of bread
left out to cool on an August windowsill, and I'd
break it into as many pieces as my heart to share it
if only for one instant, with the hungry and the suffering
as I've heard several people did inconceivably even in Auschwitz,
just to make things better a little bit, if I could,
though I feel like fog trying to put out a forest fire,
knowing among the selfish and indifferent,
a gift is a kind of minority protest
that you have to keep an eye on before it gets out of hand.

Reality's just a truce people make with the way things seem
and what they don't understand, a consensus
of poll-watching dilettantes who average out the crucials
in advance of random happenstance. Perhaps.
Reality can be any kind of copulative verb it wants,
The chimerical fire is whatever you imagine it to be,
but what it does, whether you agree or disagree,
is what moves me to underground rivers of tears
that flare up like the pale fountains and grails of the morning glory
to want to put it out, snuff it like a black candle,
or smother it in a pillow of its own smoke.

To die, yes, the wildflowers can do that better than us,
and the animals enter death as if they were observing
the protocol of an instinctive nobility greater than ours
but to die, to suffer and die inexplicably, to see
the labour of billions of light years of stars, enduring
extinction after extinction to express their shining in us
as if we were the content of the message
they sent on ahead of themselves and we can read
so much so intimately like the ancestry of the universe into it
like a child's eyes, or the luster of a lover's hair
in a moonrise, or the second innocence of an old man
who smiled upon us because he knew he was younger
than we were, and the return journey
was better than the first because from cradle to grave,
he knew the beginning walks with us all the way
like a star through the leafless trees
that's following us home at night down
one long, shapeshifting road of shadows and dreams
to one particular gateless gate that unlocks us from our chains.

To die in ignorance of why, though we guess convincingly.
To love deeply and see what we've cared for,
unspared and squandered as if time had no more use for it
and there was nothing rare or precious that wasn't rendered
more fatally vulnerable than a bubble in a world of thorns
for the cherishing of it. In the brevity of our becoming
who could ever claim they were who
they were supposed to be in the eyes of the mystery
of what we're doing here in the first place
trying to wake up in time to find out why we doubt
our own presence sufficiently to labour a lifetime
to love the unknown well enough like a stranger in passing
we've never met, to enlighten our disappearance?

What doorways of farewell must linger in us yet
for all the graves we've already filled
with everything we've ever loved, autumn after autumn,
like wild grapes or a waterclock of hearts,
each trying to fill another's bucket of emptiness
with the rush of their own blood
like the emergency exit out of a burning theater
featuring a seasonal re-run of the lies
we tell ourselves in the dark to make it through another night?

Yet here we are, like it or not. Unborn. Unperishing.
Delivered and flawed. Mortality longing for eternity
like a darkness it's already the ore of waiting to be refined
like stars emerging in the night, flowers
from the starmud of the earth and though
we have unbelievable conceptions of ourselves
that are capable of breathing in the light
of mystic atmospheres one planet isn't enough to cling to,
most of us still candle back to the earth we arose from
like weather balloons with the tail of a comet between our legs.
As a playwright looking back in anger once said.
Poor bears. Poor squirrels. Compassion kisses the burn.

We get lost in ourselves looking for the grails of better days.
The secret's out in the open which is the best place to hide,
if you had a mind to, in this spiritual lost and found.
Now you see it. Now you don't. It sees you.
And you draw the blind. But the sunflowers
turn with the sun, and the waterbirds wait for the moonrise
and in the autumn of our lives, the flowers are extinguished
like the blue fires of the wild irises along the Tay River,
and there's a scent of smoke in the air
that makes your soul weep for the evanescence of life
and how there's even a palpable beauty in the passage
of the fallen leaves among our gravestones
that's always a prelude to the great unknowns ahead
that can't shake the habit of haunting us like a ghost
from the future, summoned to this seance of now
by a mind reader channelling the wavelengths of the stars
light years before either they or we will even know we're dead.

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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There's A Black Lotus In My Heart

There's a black lotus in my heart, black hole
of enlightenment, black waterstar, sacred eclipse.
Nothing worth attaining that isn't unattainable.
And all the gates are upside down and backwards.
Albino starmaps with black dots shining
on the other side of the mirror, zodiacs
of black matter looping back on themselves
like solar auroras of the sun that rises at midnight.
I don't know what all this means. I may have gone
too far into exile and actually managed to get
to the dark side of the moon. Or I'm a warehouse
of shadows at noon that have lost track of the time
like blind sundials that feel they're being followed.

The light illuminates, but I bloom nocturnally.
I've got the burn marks of stars all over my skin.
I work on the nightshift at the foundry of a constellation
busy pouring itself out like iron and oxygen, blood and air,
forged out the afterlives of hydrogen I've gathered over the years.
A fire-womb engendering one you fill with water.
Fire the midwife of its own daughter. I'm envious
of creative immolations I know I'll never attain.
Though my left brain is in full communication with the right
and I'm a full moon of the bright vacancy, dark abundance
of both sides, and the harvest is ripe, I'm always
a star ahead of my light, so I don't end up
like a dead school furnace in the basement
writing my memoirs like a manuscript of ashes in an urn.

Deconstruct me wholly down to my last atom
and I promise you, if that's all I've got to work with
like one stem cell to another at the beginning
of a matrix of causes and conditions into which
we'll be placed by a Hox gene assessing the chi
of which direction our eyes should face, and how many
degrees of separation there should be between our ears,
I promise you, I'll still burn with the fireflies
and the supernovas like a blind prophet
who saw two wavelengths copulating like snakes
and has been tied at this stake of of a spine,
an oracular heretic of both sexes in synchrony
like the hybrid of a phoenix and a waterbird
burning in visionary serpent fire ever since
for the sake of a muse that always comes
in the nick of time like rain on the moon to my rescue.

When it's night in the diamond of my third eye
is the light not more mystically enhanced by the darkness,
more mystically specific than the white wash of the sun?
The moon is the mitochondrian that tempers
the toxicity of the light so the nucleus of the solar system
can blaze with alien oxygen meteorically across the night.
The black mirror, brighter than the white,
shows you your reflection on the inside
where you're arrayed like a faceless world
that's given up trying to second guess
who's the unerring witness under the lifemask
of the surreal cosmology that doesn't recognize
it's not a self, at first glance, and that all physics
is the psychology of ridding yourself of the delusion
you can, even if you're riding a flying carpet
out into this desert of stars to sweep the constellations away
like mirages that have been throwing bad meat
down your holy wells like sacred crocodiles.

Ignite even so much as a matchbook at this distance
or turn on a flashlight to see what's in the dark
as if you were looking for your mind with your mind on the light
even though it's as abundantly clear as your eyes it's night out,
and the billions of stars in the next closest galaxy,
Messier 31, at eleven o'clock above the middle star
in Andromeda on the rocks, and two million light years
of enlightenment will gently recede back into the cosmic hiss
and disappear from your field of view subliminally
knowing, because the timing's yours, you're a daylily
covering your insight with the petals of your own hands
because you don't know how to open them sidereally yet
from the outside in, where your darkness shines
and the night you turn your face away from
like the bright side of the moon blinds you
by a reflected glory to the radiance of the origins
of your own vision, deep within, where it all begins
emanating stars of the darkness of your own eyes.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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