En.Citatepedia^®.ro

Every Leaf, Every Page, Every Poem, A Patch

Every leaf, every page, every poem, a patch
that's been ironed on to a leak in the mindstream
I've been watching from the stone bridge on Gore Street
while the Perth Water Tower stands astride the Tay River
like a Martian colossus out of the War of the Worlds,
its reflection wavering like the dissipating wavelengths
of watersnakes as the moon ascends like a pearl
above the ragged willows pouring their hearts out
along the shore where a long overhanging veranda,
an iron stairwell and several backyards end at.

A commingling of poetry and prose, I've got
to walk several miles out of this sleeping town
before a Zen cowboy can take his spurs off in the wild
and wrestle his boots like sections of chimney pipe
in exchange for a pair of winged heels that can fly by night
like an autumn waterbird. Let my life flow on without me
like a spinal cord I've been hanging on to
like a rope I used to try to climb up to heaven on
like serpent fire entwined around the axis of my backbone,
on the flip side now, an anchor chain of chakras
tied to my body like a lifeboat my heart isn't in anymore.

I lament the dry paper that became of the orchids
and waterlilies, the skin of weathered women
or an aging snake that slipped out of itself like a condom.
Autumn in my earth mind, I'm consoled by the stars
gleaming through the leafless trees of my emotions.
The whole forest floor, a sodden library underfoot,
trying to get to the roots of things like etymologists
reverentially deciphering the cartouches of dynastic words
that were once as common as the Huron all through these woods
until smallpox, the Jesuit, and the decultifying schools
that savaged their magic with white, and taught them
to turn the other cheek to the dark side of the moon,
brought on an onslaught of the Iroquois who finished the job
a few beaver pelts, an arquebus, and Champlain
in a war canoe, without really wanting to, had begun.

Somehow their ghosts in the birch groves
make everything seem more human to a trespasser
that responds more like a guest at a seance
than the host of the exorcism that drove them
from their lands. The moon's not a swan
and I'm not laying traps like a snapping turtle.
Nothing heals here, but the wounds seem more manageable
and death isn't a dirty secret sequestered in a hospital.
Everything out in the open you can even
have sex with the stars and nobody's eyelashes
are going to fall off like a haystack of pine needles
that blinked once too often at what they couldn't believe
they were seeing without their death masks on.

I like the symphonic chaos of the place as life
over writes itself like wild grape vines climbing
a trellis of deer ribs like the palings on an unhinged gate.
It's really just a matter of taste what you prefer
to furnish your solitude with. I like to spend my time
in the company of things suffering the same fate I am.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Looking For A Little Black Water After The Fury Of The White

Looking for a little black water after the fury of the white.
Dark energy after the light as peace
settles down gently upon me,
the sediment of the eras and rivers of my life.
And this cool night in early autumn,
a woman in a dark cloak and hood
I could almost caress if I could just breathe
a little more deeply than the abyss
I've been dogpaddling in because
there's nowhere else among all these stars
I can swim from the shallow end of myself
into the watersheds of my last drowning.

And there's an unprescribed silence,
a herb of the moon that's salving the wound
of the lunar thorn I just pulled out of my heart
delicately with my teeth. I'm trying
to tune my spinal cord to the guitar string
of the Tay River, so I can resonate in harmony
with the flow of things. Starfire walking
on the water of the mindstream without
the crutch of a miracle to help bear me up.

It's not so much a matter of power or self-discipline
as it is well within the spontaneous capacity
of everyone's emptiness to do so because,
labour exhaustively as we do just to find the path
let alone stay on it, all we've had to do
right from the start, is to let life
give us a narrative of our own we can be true to
as it makes you up going along with it
like a lonely survivor singing to himself in a lifeboat
at the last watch of the night. Arcturus
at the tip of our eyelashes, enmeshed
as it sinks in a western treeline of beached shipwrecks.

Reach out, but don't grasp. Accept and let go.
Scatter your blossoms, even when you're
down on your luck, like ripped up lottery tickets
whether they end up in the gutter
or on an impressionist table cloth somewhere
playing checkers with a patient still life.
I've seen whole Japanese plum trees in blossom
be brushed aside like perfect haikus
by a street sweeper at three in the morning
when no one else was watching but me and Basho.

My blood is saturated by an overdose of stars
and I can feel a light from deep within
rooting in my limbs like nightfall
as my awareness is enhanced
by how much unknown compassion
there is the silence, love in a dark time.
Blue moons on the wild grape vines,
approaching the autumn equinox in Virgo
as if they could read my mind like a purple passage
intoxicated on the wine that can be pressed out of its own decay.

The waterlilies are gone with the fireflies,
and the reupholstered cattails are beginning
to show signs of wear already. And soon
the Canada geese will be flying high overhead
bearing the souls of the dead to new latitudes of seeing
where the starmaps fall from their hands
like the feathers and leaves of being
flowing along with the mindstream
like the wiverns, wavelengths, and water sylphs
playing on the shores of the Milky Way
with as many burning bridges,
as there are flames on the phoenix
in the immolated sumac, as there are eyes
to see across these circuitous waters
to the other side of where we've always been going
alone together with everyone who's ever come aboard.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Lament Of The Last Train Whistle

The lament of the last train whistle
has disappeared into the distance
mournfully looking for its lost child.
October night in the woods
around an old fire pit of prophetic skulls
blowing ghosts of smoke in my face
that bring me to tears, a neolithic calendar
of all the old and new moons that have passed.
So many, so much, that used to matter
doesn't anymore. Dream figures
that shed their skins like the longer wavelengths
of watersnakes in an infra-red mindscape
of serpent fire dying like the sun
that can tell the hour by the taste of its ashes.
I throw more well-dried thresholds on the fire
like branches that used to be green with the tears
of sweeter departures and arrivals over the years.

All the light's jumped from orbitals
of the tree rings that sag like bags
under the eyes knotted like islands
in the heartwood of their xylem and phloem.
Here where the river parts like long hair
on the skull of a stone, I sit like a demon
in a sacred place, clarified, alert, and alone
as any nocturnal animal in the woods.
The chalkdust of my bones trying
to connect the stars to their constellations
snagged in the trees like the rags of spiderwebs
on the blackboard of a starmap as wide as the sky
and deep as the subconscious of the Burgess Shale.

It's not a betrayal to let go of your faith
when you had none in the first place
and you don't need a parachute on the edge of space
to plunge from paradise, or a weather balloon
of a bad Christian poet to shepherd Dante
like a moon out of hell. Be yourself,
especially when nobody's watching
except that same drone in the sky
that occasionally flashes a flake of silver off
its stone cold third eye to flint your awareness
that it's still there in the cosmic background
like a witness to your dreams and schemes
for a luxuriously appointed life of enlightenment.

Be yourself. The direct copulative imperative
that has supplanted the light as the first word
out of the mouth of creation. Be yourself.
And then let there be light by the side of a good fire
to let you see who that is as acutely
as you can see in the dark who that is not.

The migration of the Canada geese might seem
a broken rosary of new moons calling out
the names of God to you, and one unknown,
or silhouetted against the moon they might
suggest the afterbirth attached to a cut umbilical cord
and your heart might feel reborn somewhere
in the autumn of your life, a child of the fire,
a flower in the full bloom of its solitude
dancing with its own mercurial apparition
on the waters of life in the mindstream
always out of season enough to lag behind
so it can tell the time by the widening gaps in its passage
as it's waiting for the night to catch up to its own shining
like a thief of fire unchained from the rock
that broke the glass window of its transfixed seeing
with a meteor in the hands of an enlightened delinquent.

Or you might read the falling leaves as occult lifelines
on a Tarot deck of overlapping lifespans
like the scales of a dragon playing solitaire
beside the small inferno of a signal fire to the stars,
to let them know you're coming faster
than the time it takes for a thought to make it
all the way to death and back to birth again
as if you were pinging your emotions
like stray wavelengths from the oceans of your awareness
off the horns of the moon the way
you used to skip rocks out over the sea as a boy
to see how long they would keep on going
like a waterclock of stone before they sank
like the flying fish of the hard, cold facts of life back into
the numinous depths of your collective unknowing
where the stars aren't fixed to anything that isn't
flowing along with them like the wind on the mindstream
or a small fire catching its breath in the silence and the solitude
of so much radiance, before it's on its way again for good.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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The Night Dances With Itself Like An Only Child

The night dances with itself like an only child
to the sounds of its own silence
when it thinks no one is watching.
Every falling leaf, a gesture of the hands,
poised, a word, a bird, a butterfly on a branch,
a sacred syllable from an alphabet that can dance,
caught in the updraft of a momentary insight
of falling to paradise like a flightfeather of light,
and landing the move just right, just so, with perfect timing.

The maples by day, easels for hot palette paintings,
red shift through red, orange, yellow, green
from the outside in toward the trunk, same
as a rainbow, same as the dynastic colours of a sunset.
Same as the fires of life returning to the root.
Same as the starmaps of the visionaries
flying like shamans from the nests they were fledged in.
Same as the ripening of the fruits of the earth,
or roses with green stars under their eyelids.

Different instruments, different voices,
the wind, the rasping of the leaves, the beaver
slapping the startled flesh of the water at my approach,
a twig snapping its drumstick on a rim shot
and the crow, and the squeaking bats, and the lapping
of the waves like the plectra of an aquamarine harpsichord
at the whole notes of the rocks, but a confluence
of picture-music washing the roots of the dead violins
of the wild irises and the timpani of cattails along the mindstream.

Merrily, merrily, row your boat, life is but a dream.
But to judge from the windfalls of green planets
shaken from the black walnut trees, it's a dream
that's urgent with the myriad realities of a multiverse
waking up in a place like here, and a time like now
with a lavish appetite for inhabiting itself
as if appearance weren't just the rind
that had to be peeled away like the skin and the shell
of the meat of the real, the shapes of the known worlds
the rat snakes shed like intimate illusions
that have naturally outgrown themselves,
the new moon in the arms of the old, like a nightsky
leaving the Milky Way, a mythically deflated windsock
tangled in the tree line like a runway that tried to fly by itself.

Now the Great Shedding as the earth turns
like the old abandoned mill wheel upstream
like a circular waterclock making linear time
take its tail in its mouth like an eternal recurrence
that's always pouring itself out of itself like life
into the emptiness between the equinox of one thought
and the solstice of the next like the silence between heartbeats,
the night between the stars, like the inseparable gap
between the distant moon and the intimacy of the moon's reflection
on the newly surfaced dark skin of the water sequencing
its pentatonic scales to the seasonal themes of the mindstream
you can't step into twice, as Heraclitus said in Ephesus long ago,
though it seems that way if all you're doing is dogpaddling
like a delinquent green apple on a snow covered bough, instead
of going along with the perennial renewal of the flow
by letting go of your water skin with its lunar tattoo
like the bright vacancy of an old silo of the light
for the dark abundance of the new insight
into the nature of life when it full in October.

The fall. This hour of my becoming
when everything is burning like the sumac
with the fires of life but nothing is consumed.
Because fire doesn't burn fire and death is unperishing.
And autumn is no less of a transformation than spring
as this new day dances as readily with the old woman
watching from her kitchen window as it does the young girl,
than the rain is to the tides of a lunar ocean
swaying in its shadows as if it were dancing
with its river reeds like a lonely child
in the embrace of her imagination,
like a poet in the grip of his crazy wisdom
flirting like a firefly with the dragons of his madness
without listening to the search parties of the lighthouses
bellowing like the foghorns of mournful trains back on shore
being swept away into the distance like nightwatchmen
and unconvincing ghosts. Things are unmooring
like lifeboats full of seeds and the souls of the dead
taking to their wings like the oars of waterbirds,
and the lowest of earthbound snakes
are dreaming of feathering their scales
into the vans of a dragon firewalking with stars
around the wobbling axis of the earth
on a potter's wheel, turning it like sentient starmud
that's fired up in autumn like an urn that burns like a kiln.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Rubies Of Blood Running Like Ruptured Cherries

Rubies of blood running like ruptured cherries
down my arms. The night swarms
like a feeding frenzy of junkies
all in for a little taste. The heat hangs
like something dangerous in the air
as if the atmosphere were on a short fuse
and you can feel the fangs of its potential bared.

Like a bear to berries, I come here for stars.
It's a lair of sorts for wounded wolf hearts
gored by the moon, and it's healing
to look upon the waters when you're in pain.
There's nothing undisciplined about the chaos here.
Everything just seems to fall into place
of its own accord without anyone having
to explain anything to the animated silence
about how it all works effortlessly
in an unintended harmony of living and dying.

The trees understand like an alphabet
that's never gone out of use, what it means
when the wind skims through their leaves
like the synopsis for a serialized book of wisdom
with an ambivalent happy ending
that takes your breath away in awe.
And the waterlilies show their poems to the stars.

The serenity here could almost seem offensive
in its aloofness, as the genetics of random chance
get on with fate, and if you're noticed at all,
it's as a possible threat the beavers choose to ignore.
And the white-tailed deer cue off of them.
Not one of the wild irises clustered
like the indigo fires of the Pleiades
where the river slows down to pay homage in passing
to the decimated groves of the fallen birch
that lie like wrecked wharves in the water
the turtles and the frogs could sun themselves on
like happy freaks with no concern at all for their downfall.

Everything acceptable as a matter of course
with equanimity. A kind of impersonal poise
sustained even beyond death
in the way all living things
give themselves back to things as if
they were returning to the source of their own lives
to lavish the watershed with inexhaustible gifts.
Moonlight on the blades of silver swords
forged among the stars, surrendered
from a bridge between life and death
in a wordless tribute to the crossing of the river.
Or the unsayable insights of the rocks around here
that keep the epics of the glaciers
like enlightened haikus to themselves,
or a poet retreating into his solitude
to see if he can still remember all the names
of the stars that were the herbs and flowers
in the chalice of the ailing kingdom of his childhood
and if they still had the power to heal
what the man in me has left for the boy to feel.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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First Yellow Leaves On The Black Walnut Trees

First yellow leaves on the black walnut trees.
The original digits on the wristwatch of the sun.
Waterproof to any depth you want to drown in.
The trees are homesick.
You can tell by the way they’re giving up.
Comes the season of the dead in harvest time.
The dark abundance of the light
inspired by the muse of the earth
to write poetry
that touchs everyone
like water and wine
whether the apples are gathered or not.
The mystic grape finds enlightenment
in the mouth of a human
when it breaks like a koan
that tastes of something older than the truth.
It’s good to walk through an open field by yourself
as if home were just over the next hill
as the night comes on.
It’s good to feel fulfilled
without knowing much about why
as if some subtle stratagem of the sky
had worked out a truce with life for awhile
and everywhere the armies of the grass
were surrendering their shields like flowers.
It’s late August
and the cedars gather on the hillside
like old testament prophets
come down to the river
to baptize their roots in fire.
Chicory in the eyesocket
of a baby muskrat’s skull
half-buried in the earth like a small moon
that returned to its mother’s breast
several autumns ago.
If the medium is the message
then the message of life
is its timing
and the whole of its content is now.
The dead don’t walk among the living
squawking about things
they’re missing in paradise.
Ten commandments might be good advice
but there’s one bit of wisdom
that wasn’t written on a gravestone
that threatened to bury you
in the valley of the shadow of death
like an avalanche down the world mountain
for ever and ever and ever
should you ever wander off the beaten path
by as much as one black sheep away from the flock:
It’s not your door if you have to knock.
Your life’s the key to your own lock.
You can ask the flowers.
Beauty isn’t enslaved by its own powers.
Clarity sees through the brave
as easily as the cowards
as two sides of the same fear
and no river’s flowing the wrong way to the sea.
Autumn is a lonely voice
that sadly rejoices in what it must be
but what mad wonders
it hides under everyone’s breath
like marvels it keeps to itself.
The best place to hide
is out in the open
like being and seeing and thinking.
And if you smell the wind
at this time of year
you can tell that it’s been drinking
to drown its wanderlust in words
heading south with the birds
who carry the souls of the dead away
like fires that ascended to heaven
on a ladder of bones
and a spinal cord
threaded through the eye of a needle.
A snake sheds its skin and vertebrae at last
and turns its scales into wings
to become a dragon
that burns its bridges behind it
like waterbirds without directions
disappearing from their own reflections
before the first ice.
I reach the top of an old hill
and I can see what I look like
a long way off from here
as Venus breaks like a mirror
low on the horizon
through the black mascara
on the eyelashes of the backlit pines.
And there are spirits of the air
summoned by the darkness
with eyes that glow
like charcoal on the fires
of yesterday’s myth of origins
to look up at the stars
and make up some kind of a story
about what they’re doing there in the first place
like the afterlife of the mystery
of the night before time and space
as if the history of our prophetic skulls
could still foretell the future
of an advanced race of cannibals.
You are what you eat.
But the time is long past
when I could tear my heart out
and offer it up to the unappeasable gods
like the fruit of a human
who has wandered the earth
like a rootless tree
true to his own homelessness
like a fire that kept faith with a heretic
who made the ultimate sacrifice.
Who would be there to receive it?
If I wrapped it up like a foundling
and laid it on the stairs of the abyss
late at night when no one was watching
or sent it down the river
in a basket I wove from cattails
like a baby in an empty lifeboat
drifting down its bloodstream
on its way to something better
than a promised land it couldn’t enter
what life on what distant star
would bend down and pick it up
like a message in a bottle
from life stranded on an island galaxy
waiting to hear the likeness of its own echo
in the voice of the light that answered
help is on the way?
And that sword’s been long drawn
out of the barren stone of the moon
that gave it back to the waters
like the blade of an old perfection
it once fell upon
like the reflection of a man
with a noble calling
in the absence of volunteers.
I haven’t sacrificed my innocence
to that invincible agony in years.
And there’s more than one crown
I’ve thrown off a bridge
like a trinket of my powers
to self-destruct
as if I knew somehow
you can’t keep
what you won’t give away.
You can run deliberately straight as a highway
or weave spontaneously like a river
but if the first
just regard the extreme chaos
of conditioned conciousness
and if the latter
you’ll shed many lives
like skies and skin you’ve grown out of
following the long journey of yourself
all the way from your tail to your head
passing like a serpent through the grass
as if you had a secret
you keep to yourself
that were better left unsaid.
But there’s a third extreme
that just as intense as the others
which is the way I stay the course.
I put wings on a horse
that’s never known a saddle
or been bruised by the stars like spurs
and we’re up up and away
as if we’d never heard of the Medusa.
The Great Square of Pegasus
going down behind the pines
like a card up my sleeve.
I don’t want to turn anyone into stone
or blind them with my shield
as if the light knew judo
and how to use my enemy’s strengths
against it.
I don’t want to decapitate anyone
who was once the priestess
who fed sweetcakes and honey
to the oracular pythons of Delphi
and long before that
along with her two Gorgonic sisters
was the virgin wife crone phase of the moon
shedding her graces like skin.
I’ve jumped into enough snakepits
for one lifetime
to know how easy it is to get in
and how nearly impossible it is to get out.
One fang of the moon kills you.
The other heals you.
But you’re never the same after that
and there are scars that hurt worse than the wound.
But you can see things before the arising of signs
and there’s a crazy wisdom that embodies you
like a candle in the darkness
talking to itself.
And I can hear what the serpent said
quietly to Eve
just before it offered her the apple
from the forbidden tree:
Don’t lie to anyone you’re trying to believe.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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One Side Of My Face

One side of my face what the world
looks like on the inside,
a mindscape I’m walking through
that changes shape whenever I do.
And the other just a clay bust of the moon
that somebody keeps working on
like erosion in Death Valley.
But tonight I’m tired
of looking for signs of life
where there are none.
The air is as smudged with cigarette smoke
as the dirty winter windows
I’m staring numbly through are.
Infra red aura of the town lights
reflected off the big-bellied clouds
as if something were burning
across the highway as those
who are awake yet listen
to the Doppler Effect of the sirens
to know if they’re still safe or not.
A pastel green wall
through an open window
across the street from here.
But I haven’t seen anybody in it
for nearly a year since I moved in here
where every second thought
ends in so what?
Like a cynical kind of cowboy zen
that’s had it up to the proverbial
with koans and haikus
that provide you with spurs to enlightenment
but no winged horse
that isn’t already a corpse
lying by the side of the road like roadkill.
My mind soars like a turkey-vulture
when my heart
wants to swim like a swan
down river with the stars of the Milky Way
as I did one suicidal May in a six man raft
with no rudder or guide
in the spring run off of the Ottawa River
to raise money for
the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario.
But the cheap thrill
of risking my life for virtue
has worn off like chalk on a pool cue
and if light is the function
of the body of the lamp
right now I feel like
a blackhole with a bad complexion
that’s gone snowblind
in the glare of a computer screen.
I figure if I stare back long enough
sooner or later
one of us is going to blink
and discover what’s on the other side
of what the other one thinks
it’s looking at
when it puts an hourglass
up to its eye like a telescope
to know what time it is
and how many light years there are
between solitude and exile.
Between staying in and going out.
The tin gas pipes crackle
like ice breaking underfoot
or a bird in the chimney
trying to peck its way out
of a black cosmic eggshell
that’s as starless as hell on the inside
and tarred and feathered on the other,
assuming, of course,
it ever does crack the koan
in the liberty bell of enlightenment
and emerge with the wingspan of a dragon
into a room full of cigarette smoke
and patchouli incense
rising like the ghost of a white horse
as if someone who just fell off
the cutting edge of the flat earth
were trying to get on again like Icarus
waning in a wax museum on the moon.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sometimes The Heart Buries Its Sorrow

Sometimes the heart buries its sorrow
like a bell or an hourglass beside the road
as if it came upon a dead bird it couldn't name
and returned it to the earth like unread mail.
There's no gate where I'm going, the air
will tremble a bit and that'll be it. Maybe
a firefly or two, to liven things up,
but no sign of lightning tearing its hair out.

I shall evaporate like a dream someone
couldn't remember having, and what seems
so crucially significant now shall disappear,
disperse, dissipate like smoke from of a fire
and all that will remain of this passionate burning
will be an odd fragrance among the stars
that doesn't arrest the attention of the bees.

And these things of my mother that she gave to me,
Blood, flesh, bone, breath and my love of poetry
and compassion for the world you need to write it,
deeply involved in an unrestricted love affair,
will be scattered like urns on the wind as if
my ashes had no respect for their individuality.
The waterclock ended in a desert of mirages,
not the afterlife of an embryo off to a good start.

The death of an art, the extinction of a species,
not the fall of a sparrow anyone notices,
and I'm not even saying they should if they don't
anymore than they feel the loss of a skin cell.
Some people prefer umbrellas to wild flowers.
Icons of the moon without the dragon.
A mouthful of fire to the taste of water.
Tigers in a zoo, to the dangers of an open door.
It's wrong to make love, music, poetry, colour,
compulsory, anymore than you can demand a friend.
Got to give time and space to the black swan
of a nugget of coal to realize it's a motherlode
of diamonds born out of its progressive dissolution.

Translucent effusions of insight into
a speculative nothing, a flying carpet of wavelengths
unravelling on the loom of the moon,
just because the stars have left their genes
on a helical stairwell of flypaper like a chromosome,
doesn't mean you're a replicant of eternity,
or to see the onceness of life in everything
it's becoming without consulting you
is some kind of exemption you can seek for yourself.
Enlightenment isn't a ticket to pass, it's
not to see the beauty of the chains in the bliss of delusion.
Not to make choirs out of your Maenadic desires.
When have you ever not done this, when
have you ever not realized you were the summum bonum
of your own conspicuous consumption?
But who asks you to die before you're dead
to sabotage your artistic pursuit of happiness
whether you achieve it or not? The absurdity
of the search is enough in itself to make it profound.
Enlightenment ploughs you back into the ground
you came from like grass on the moon
and as a bigger fool that I could ever hope to be
once said: if the cold doesn't go through your bones once
how can there be apricot blossoms in the spring?

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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My Secret Place

My secret place down by the Tay River.
I deer-bed down among the autumn grasses
and last of the New England asters
half-lotus in cowboy boots
with a clear view of the stars
dancing on the water.
The waterlilies have perished.
Jupiter.
And the moon at last crescent.
No one knows I'm here but me.
I've never come here with another.
A place where I talk to the universe alone
as if it existed
more personally
than the mere immensity
of a cosmic intelligence
super-saturating time and space.
Belief's a bad habit of mine
and sometimes I want to be deceived
into believing someone's listening
even when I know they aren't
and that the worst always happens for the best
even though I know it doesn't.
The sky's a windowpane I can fly through
without breaking my neck on delusions
and the moon feels like
a cool poultice on a hot wound.
I watch a spider repair its dreamcatcher
and say good luck.
And the stars don't really give a damn
how they shine deep in my dark inner spaces.
Everything is so perfectly entranced with being itself
I wonder what it is about a human
that has to take time out like me
to reconsider what I'm doing here
wandering around on the earth
without any certain purpose
other than the ones I make up like poems
to spin bedtime stories out of my nightmares.
A birch leans out over the water
like a woman washing her hair in the river
and I sense there's an inevitability about a tree
that isn't like me.
I can't find a fixed reality
to be in harmony with.
I have no doubt the rocks along the shore
are getting it right
but with me consciousness is a light
that contradicts its own clarity
the moment it reveals itself.
There is no path to follow
no way to flow
no aspiration to fulfill
that isn't pure folly.
Or just another way of running out of myself
like sand in an hourglass
piling up pyramids
until I've exhausted myself like Sisyphus
rolling stones uphill.
And then I'm overturned like an empty shotglass
to begin again
or just sit here by the river like an amphibian
and let the universe do what it wants to my brain
without assuming it wants to do anything
or that the damage hasn't already been done.
A new way to be partially whole!
Flesh and blood with a mineral soul!
Prophetic tents full of snakeoil salesmen.
But I've never been tempted
by things I couldn't give my heart to
and the curse of spiritual valium
is the same as it is on earth.
The withdrawal is as dangerous
as following the addiction
all the way through
to the emergency ward in heaven
that handed out the prescription in the first place.
It isn't the soul of a butterfly I see
when I look the money-maggots in the mouth.
I'm not praying for an afterlife that's worthy of me
as if anyone knew what that amounts to.
What would you suggest
for an agony of snakes in a bag of skin
that's got nine holes in it?
The tears I've wept for the world
have all turned into serpents.
The tears I've wept for myself
watered the roots of a mirage
in a desert where the stars
burn your eyes like sand
and turn your blood to glass.
I wonder if the birch knows
what's passing it by.
If the river is its mindstream.
And then it comes to me
like a message in a bottle.
Maybe my sole purpose on earth is passage.
Maybe I'm just time looking for a reason for itself
to go on like a season that's known by the way it changes
by always being estranged from itself.
Maybe I'm the more-than-me I can't conceive of.
Maybe all these things seem
self-possessed in their tranquility
because I'm a mess.
Maybe my being as screwed-up as I am
helps get them through it
and all my pain and turbulence
all my preposterous longings
to be well-meaning and beautiful
all the black elixirs of the ruthless mystery
I've drunk from my own skull
held up to the gods
like the begging bowl of the moon
when it's full
just to see if the darkness tastes of light
the way a lump of coal
foreshadows diamonds to come
after aeons of excruciating transformations
and if there's more room for chaos on a calendar
than there is space in the scheme of things for thought.
But there I go again.
You see what I mean?
Fish jumping out of the stream at the stars
that lure them up out of their depths
like low-flying insects
to take one great leap into a new medium
out of themselves
like an arrow through the back of a bulls-eye of ripples
it didn't know it was aiming at.
But things are getting too elaborate
and at this rate I'll soon be speaking in voices
like some right-brained polyglot in a rapture of saying
going on like the Rosetta Stone
as if I weren't sitting here alone
like the misbegotten seventh son of zero
trying to come to terms
with a formless reality
I keep stubbing my heart on.
Mahaprajnaparamita.
Great wisdom for the further shore.
Gone! Gone! Gone!
Altogether gone beyond.
Isn't that what the Buddha said
in his secret place
when he went out of his head
trying to stare the world in the face
and all he could see was Venus in the dawn?
Desire and its afterbirth
at the beginning of nothing at all?
An insight into what's unearthly about the eternal
or just the way the light's bent by an atmosphere?
To those who can't let go of things
and to those who cling to letting go
impermanence is suffering
and the only way to cure that
is to pour yourself out upon the earth
like the bitter cup of the moon
when she's had enough of herself
and find peace
in the sweet potential of your emptiness
to be filled up again.
To sit here in a secret place
like I do
tangled in my human roots
with waterlilies on my brain
strung out all the way from earth to Venus
like a chain of thought
severed in the distant past
we had resolved would never come between us.
Where is the peace?
Where does that flower bloom
that's rooted in blood and starmud
if not in the solitude of a human heart
that's wandered this far from home
along the shores of its longing to return?
Why does my heart argue
against the will of the world
like a salmon swimming upstream
on the down slope of a cosmic mountain?
I'm not trying to scheme my way out of
my dream of this
like someone who turns his back on his eyes.
I'm sick of lies.
I'm sick of universal truths.
I'm sick of how blithely everything obliges death
with every second breath.
I'm sick of the grailquest.
I'm sick of the hypocritical crusades.
I'm sick of Aztecs and Christians
with the blood of gods and children on their lips.
I'm sick of atheists who claim it's lipstick.
The lightbulb in the well on the moon
to keep the water from freezing up
has gone out
and I'm sick of the way things don't flow anymore
like a tide in a sea of shadows
like the road of ghosts
through the cold dark vacant interstellar spaces
of an enlightened lunatic with a creative abyss for a heart.
I'm sick of the bitter black ghost bread of my art
that tastes like the futility of burnt paper.
I'm sick of trying to understand
what isn't understandable
about my own and human nature.
I'm sick of all these long incommensurable interminable questions
I've walked all the way to the end of time and again
only to return with an ambiguous answer
that's rarely communicable through form.
In all humility
take the low place like the sea
and the sewage of the world runs down into me.
Take the high like the open sky
and the mountain turns into a mudslide.
The best is to be here right now as I am
with all my dilemmas answers contradictions
insights questions and aspirations,
all the paradoxical sorrows that have come
of my physical assurance that life is joy
and ultimate unity is bliss
without the oxymorons
and love's a deeper insight into life than death
if only by a breath
and though why we're here in the first place
is anyone's good guess
intelligence is not the anti-Christ of chaos
but the genius of dark matter becoming aware of itself
like a hidden secret that wished to be known.
What is dark will appear light
if you surround it with something darker
like a star shining in daylight
no one notices
until the night reveals it
like a wolf that lies down with the lamb.
And the best is to be wholly here right now as I am.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Stars So Near

The stars so near it seems the approaching morning
could wet its thumb and forefinger
and pinching their wicks like intimate candles
that have held the lovers close
and the ghosts at bay all night
put them out with a hiss.
An ancient mirror deep within me
I couldn’t bring myself to bury
with the woman who once looked into it
is beginning to flood like a river of eyes with autumn rain
and I want to cry for things
that have departed like water birds
from their circuitous reflections on the mindstream
and leave the heart knocking
like an empty lifeboat against the rocks
that no one sings from now.
I’ve stared at the moon several nights in a row
as if we drank from the same skull
and I want to elevate my tears to a higher level
as a rite of passage worthy of what I mourn
but no lights on in the lockmaster’s house
me and the moon both know
how impossible it is to raise the dead
from their watersheds
by adding a few tears to a dry seabed
out of the largesse of the living
in the wake of so many shadows.
I’m trying to align my third eye like a bubble
in the middle of a balance beam
and build on the cornerstone of the moon
a Taj Mahal of lunar coral to commemorate
the loss of so much beauty
to the things it touched like braille
as if it wasn’t enough just to light them up
but parting the depths of its fathomless veils
open their eyes as well.
I shall turn three times in the silver grass
and stretching my body out like a scar upon the earth
lay down in a deer-bed by the river
with her absence bigger than the night for awhile
and listen to the frogs and crickets
as I used to listen for her footfalls on the creaking stairs
and the moon won’t lay its sword of light on the waters
like a vow of separation to keep us apart
and I shall ask every star
down to the sixth magnitude of time and shining
what has become of her who used to weave
English ox-eyed daisies into her hair
as if she were already among the constellations
showing off the lesser luminaries of earth
as if there were nothing so small
nothing so slighted or disregarded
no moment of life so devoid of inspiration
even the fireflies that can’t stay fixed in one place
long enough to beat a path into a zodiac
and elaborate their own creation myths
into something unborn and unperishing
weren’t enlightened
by the immaculate darkness of her transience.
To suffer everything as if it were a blessing she once said.
I look up through the leafless bough of an aging maple
twisted like a burnt match stick
whose fire’s just flared out.
I look up at the stars
as if they’d built their webs between the branches
like momentary dream catchers.
And I can’t manage it.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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More Past In My Brain As I Get Older Than Future

More past in my brain as I get older than future,
intrusive memories like ghosts come seeking absolution
I still can't give them sincerely after all these years
of irrelevant tears evaporating through holes in the ozone.
Things I'd wholly forgotten about, returning to this seance
convened by the mother of the muses in her crone phase
like stars and flowers come back to make you smile again
for something as simple as remembering their names
you thought you'd lost in the grass like rings on a key chain.
Painful images I wish I'd never lived to see
but came to understand slept just under the eyelids
of the things most people dream of damaging
by inflicting the worst wounds on their own savage humanity.
Lovers that reoccur in the night air like fireflies
recalling some moment when we touched illicitly
double-crossing all of our mutual taboos to risk
the burning bridge of the dangerous blessing
of the passionate dragon on the far shore of our urgent flesh.
The riverine sediments of the mindstream's starmud,
an encyclopedic compendium of outcomes and random eventualities.

Any single one of these mystic details is the table of contents
of a whole other life than the one I've been living so far,
stars matted in the hair of the leafless willows mad with despair.
Joy, pleasure, tenderness. Sorrow, anger, recrimination.
With the planet tilted a feather's weight more toward joy
on its axis, or we wouldn't have anything to cry about
when the season passes. When the wild irises
burn out like pilot lights in the urn of the furnace of the phoenix
losing its will to rise again out of its own ashes.
And through it all, so many afterlives arrested by the mystery
of what we were to each other now that kept
calling us back to each other like wolves in the fog
on opposite hills of the heartscape we couldn't find a way out of.
There's still generosity in my fingertips
when I touch the eyelids, the lips, the lunar thorns,
the feldspar pictographs that have been carved into me
like the braille cartouches of the dynastic royal houses and scars of love.

I like to err on the side of a generous spirit as if
there's always a factor that stands outside the equation
like a fulcrum maintaining a balance that has nothing to do
with equality, but deeply affects the course of a parallel universe.
And I can see through the eyes of the chorus of a hundred voices
chanting like a mantra for me to look at it one
of a thousand other ways to say yes what happened between us
was meant to be, and hear all these fanatical pamphleteers
trying to exonerate the culpability of what we had to do
to survive one another like two separate shoes going their own way.

As sorry as things often turned out, I celebrate the intent
because that part was honest, of who we really wanted to be
to each other, and hoped we were, before the labour
grew too intense, and we took off the pretence of our life masks
and stared into each other's faces like black mirrors in full eclipse.
And I don't need a philosophy to back me up on this.
It's just the way I prefer it. An artistic flourish of the soul, perhaps.
Blue chicory by the side of the road instead of poison ivy.
Strewing more rose petals on the starmap of the path
we walked together for awhile than thorns.
Trying in everything to ennoble the way
I'd like to see myself when I'm on my death bed,
not as some mean-hearted ghoul living under a bridge
but a man who lavished himself like poetry upon life
as if he were sowing stars into the abyss of the wound
love opened up in him like the chasm and chrysalis of a loveletter
always addressed to someone on the other side
of this surrealistically romantic starfish of a universe
where we first met in a ghost dance of enchanted binaries.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Every Morning Of The Moment, A New Creation

Every morning of the moment, a new creation,
the distillation of the dreams of the night before
when the moon was as fertile as the dew we were born from.
I start out each day with a new face. By nightfall
it's just another phase of the same old ageless deathmask,
heavier than a bell that's been talking through my mouth
for more light years than I've got tears to measure in mirrors.
That's usually when I start thinking like a potato about stars.
Blood sugars in my mindstream ripening me like a vision
I'll only ever get to see backstage like a forlorn clown
trying to hang on to his faith in laughter.

You can pursue happiness, but it will only
run from you like the light, or you can cover your eyes
and try to avoid it for fear of losing it like the last time,
but when you turn around, it's right behind you,
flirting with your shadow. Better to let it come and go
of its own accord, like a waterbird in a moonrise
reflected on a lake. Then when you speak of things
you increasingly know less about the more
you're intimate with them, your voice isn't
a bird net trying to cage words on the fly
but an aviary as open as the sky when
Cygnus and Aquila are up, and the Lyre's
a larynx for the asking. And you're free
to sing your heart out as if no one were listening
but you and the trees and the stars you hit like high-notes.

Or shriek like a rabbit seized by the coydogs
if you run out of lucky feet and that's what comes up
like snake eyes. Lap the experience out of the bone
until there's nothing left to eat but your appetite itself
and among the myriad flavours of life you've exhausted
that will taste the sweetest of all to that emptiness
that harvests the world like a blue moon that's never full.
Is the moon not the equal of its waxing and waning alike?
Is it trying to enlighten its dark side?
When the candle goes out, does the light have any trouble
handling it? Fear returns to what it knows the best.
It hugs the shore like a tidal pool beside the sea,
a dead starfish or two it can get its arms around
like a worm's-eye view of the galaxy, and the shell
of a red sunset in the morning on the carapace
of a crab that left its hovel for a house in
a more upwardly mobile zodiac. Sometimes
it comes down to that. Quantum level gravity.
A gravitational eye with myopia that bends the light
like a stick in the water, a mirage of sand in an hourglass
that's afraid of being swept out to sea
with nothing to hold onto but the lifeboat
of a shucked clam Venus just stepped out of onto land
to have sex in a new medium like an artist
who's just switched from water colours to oils.

You've got to accept the down times as all part
of the same wavelength you've been riding
like a snake scaled in white caps of light
that break on shore in a turmoil of kelp.
The cosmos doesn't need to be put in order
and chaos doesn't need any help. Listen to your sorrows.
Summon them to a seance of yourself
and apologize to their ghosts for not having the voice
to let them speak through you about
learning to swim with the stars further out of your depths
than you've ever been before. First you drown
in the fathomless immensities of even the smallest detail,
and then you bubble back up to the surface
of a multiverse with an oceanic awareness
of what's been hiding under every eyelid of a wave
like a overturned lifeboat that's waking up
to the fact that everything floats like the moon
in the reflection of its own mindstream.
And whatever sail you spot coming up over
your event horizon, whatever constellation
or black hole you take for a sign of salvation
or salvage, it first had to sink
before it could rise to the rescue.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Bared Of Its Leaves Like Native Peace Treaties

Bared of its leaves like native peace treaties
with the westerlies who never kept them,
the last red planet of the chokecherry falls
into the claws of a black squirrel eyeing it
like a space rover looking for life on Mars.
O the myriad worlds you can see in a single mystic detail.
Bring me a hair of God and I'll pass through it
like a wormhole into the dark matter of the mind
going on behind the light like vital events
that are deeper than skin and blood on stage.

Just count the number of pathways through the woods
compared to the roads to know whether
you're in a good space or not. If people
wander to work in their own good time
or rush from one abyss to another
trying to get ahead of an ion waterclock.
Take the solitude out of society
and there's not much left worth talking about.
So I enjoin the silence to keep the acuity of my wonder
sharp as the thorns of a heart with nothing left to guard
after the wild rose ran off in one of her phases with the moon.

I have long conversations with the stars
without a word or a gesture of grammar being said
in either of our mother-tongues that can't be understood
immediately, without the intermediary of a metaphor
or a dictionary that gets to the roots of things
like a star-nosed mole with no flowers in its soul.
No end of the distance between us when you measure it in miles
but insight travels faster than the speed of light
and both of us are shining in the same dark space
like an eye looking back at itself from a long way off.

The night is lonely, cold, and ageing but there's a fire
blazing in my heartwood the trees huddle around
as the shadows of the flames dart from trunk to trunk
with the alacrity and cunning of a wolf
that knows it's the last of its kind in these darkening hills
to embody the magic of its elders in its way of life.
Fear is the mind-killer. So I stay enthroned
by the stone navel of my firepit flowering
all around me like the corona of the sun at midnight
just to say I know the protocols of being as well as the rocks
when I rise to embrace strangers in my solitude
as the new spiritual familiars that will accompany me
on my long firewalk to the stars that are never
any further away than my future is from my past
or now is from here to there every step of the path

The stars spin their webs in the crowns of the trees
into dreamcatchers with mythically inflated origins
that answer the paradigms of the constellations
by connecting the dots like wild grape vines
to the shapeshifting starmaps of the mind
I keep shedding like leaves and feathers and scales
to understand the underlying scaffoldings and skeletons
I climb up on like monkey bars
to repaint creation in everybody's image
but my own. My fire. My heart. I'm the host
of an expansive space that's generous enough
to embody it all without standing in jubilation
like an angel in the doorway as if there were
somebody home no one could account for.

A stranger in the thirteenth house of a misbegotten zodiac
of birthmarks driven out into the wilderness
like maniacs, prophets, poets and astronomical wise men
as scapegoats for the fate of upper class tattoos
that don't wash off any easier than the wind
teaching the stars that have just learned how to print
this cursive script I'm writing in like a mindstream
punctuating its passage with toadstools and pine-cones,
chokecherries, black walnuts, wild crab apples
and shepherd moons in decaying orbits around
the black hole at the center of the universe
we're all attached to like hinges to a gate
that only has to swing open once to everything
and it's good for as many lifetimes as you want to go through
like a labyrinth of exits leading into a clearing
deep within your heart where nothing exists
and yet inconceivably everything insists upon shining.

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sometimes The Intimacy Of The Silence

Sometimes the intimacy of the silence
can grow so profoundly intense
it seems impersonal. Or the heat of life
burn like the dry ice of the holy ghost
as you shudder with spiritual chills in the cold.
And when you see things whole in and of themselves
it's always as if you were looking through a broken window.
Truly fulfilled, you realize everything you're missing.
The more you explore the mystery of what you're doing
just walking around on the earth, aware
of your awareness, the more of a stranger
you seem to yourself, decultified of your identity.

The birches are glowing in skin tight moonlight
and there are sixties hash burns in their white leotards
and the leaves are falling and the river's flowing
and the Canada geese are sowing themselves
in the wake of the plough of the moon
like black and white sunflowers seeds further south again
and my heart is saturated with autumn's sad sugars
like a mournful apple at the pathos of their passage
as if time had abandoned everything and all
the solitary soul can do is harvest the loss like a human
with a romantic sense of irony as we dance
on the graves of the dead to celebrate
the bright vacancy, dark abundance of our starmud
occluding and enlightening our solitude
until you're enthralled to conclude, the darker the night,
the brighter the light. And appearances are only deceptive
to those who haven't broken on through to
the other side of the mirroring awareness yet like a hymen
over a virgin black hole that's all iris with no pupil
so all it can ever see are moondogs of exclusion
that begin to look like haloes after awhile.

I'll write an epithalamion on my wedding night with death,
but while I'm alive I like to toy with euphoric elegies
that weep like old rivers in the discrete depths
of their watersheds. I spend hours by myself
watching the spiders of time stringing contellations
like bird nets between the sacred upper branches
of the aspens to catch fish on the fly the way I
wait for insights to start riffing on the blues guitar
in the corner jamming with the silence of itself
like a poignant wildflower blooming unfashionably late.

If you stare intensely enough into the emptiness,
if your focus is searing enough to burn holes in space,
seemingly self-contained things will emerge like particles
you can elaborate in time and space like the fractals
of worlds within worlds engendered by your own seeing.
But turn the light down, turn your eyes away, dissipate
your concentration, everything reverts to the wavelengths
of the flying carpets unwoven on the waning loom of the moon.

Things done. Things undone. Does the water remember
the growth rings of its ripples, does the snake cling
to the loss of its skin, or fire reminisce in its ashes?
Or scars in autumn long for the springtime of their wounds?
Nights like this sensation haunts me like the ghost
of an amputated heart I dedicated to poetry to add my pulse
to a dying art like the blood of a noble enemy who knew
without saying, the only way to keep the calling alive
was to practice an excruciating discipline of heretical infidelity.

And that's why I'm out here alone in the woods,
still trying to think my way out of the bone box of my decline
by taking my mind off things by letting go
of the paradigms and symbols that kept me afloat
like the lifeboats and wandering starmaps
of the habitable planets of the past bobbing
like the prophetic skulls of black walnuts back down
the mindstream to Mitylene in Lesbos
where Orpheus still dreams of singing himself
back up from the detritus of his cosmic dismemberments
like Vega in the lyrical grip of a dreamcatcher
casting spells like a widow's veils on the water
to snare the stars like a fisherman who drowned on the moon.

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

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

poem by Patrick White
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Tenderly The Evening Descends Into A Dark Bliss

Tenderly the evening descends into a dark bliss
and lays its poultice like a cool leaf against my forehead
and draws the fever of the day out of the night.
I ease back on my elbows like an easel down by the river.
When I'm burnt, I make a blister
and cushion myself with water,
a more useful approach to tears.
The mosquitoes swarm like insistent circumstances
that thin my blood, but a soft wind
is blowing them away from Pearl Harbour.
The long blue grass yields as easily to a man as a deer.
I want the stars near enough to overhear what they're whispering.
Still amazing to me I can embrace all of them with a thought
as if they were my idea in the first place
and feel humbled and exalted at the same time
by the sublimity of their radiance and the strangeness of my own.
The river sustains its clarity by wandering.

Single male in the autumn of life, I've let go of so much
the only thing left to let go of is the letting go itself.
I've forgone the commotion of inducing myself into creation.
Things will fall out by themselves. Playfulness
return to surrealistic perversity
to explain the shape of the universe
and fools like me counter-intuit the crazy wisdom
of squandering their lives on voices in the distance
leading them on deeper into the subtleties of a poetic narcosis
that haunts them like the face
of a beautiful woman they once knew.
Don't we all belong to a nobility of longing, even though
we don't live up to it, and start to grasp and scratch
like dead branches screeching across
an intransigent windowpane on a stormy night
that let's us look at the fire, but doesn't let us in?
Where do you go with your serious spirit
when you've been rejected by your solitude?
Do you know the secret art of being enhanced
by the qualities of anything you're not attached to,
without killing off the desire for what you're missing?
Live with gratitude for the abyss in your heart
it's impossible to fill like a grave
that took more out of you than it put back in.

You can be adorned by your failures.
You can be humiliated by your victories.
Coming and going, your path can be strewn
with roses or thorns. You could be walking on stars.
You could be lying down beside a river at night like I am
savouring a sorrow you like the poetic taste of,
because it includes everything within it
like the skin of the dew and the moon as the source of life.
Even sweeter than a rainbow body of light
or an atmosphere with ocean to match,
this last touch of clinging before you evaporate
into the mystery of everything you're leaving behind.
No more than you can pour water out of the universe
through a black hole, can your mindstream be poured by time
into the uncomprehending darkness of the black mirror
you're looking for an image in tonight
in the eyes of all these stars shining down upon us,
knowing our starmud is just as old as their light
and we're not wandering orphans lost in their shadows.
We're firewalking on water like stars in the shapes
of self-immolating swans, two parts flammable
from the start, and one of oxygen like a toxin
we depend upon for life like an alien export we adapted to.
Same with death. Until you include it in the nucleus,
inviting your enemy in to feast behind the gates
that laboured like water to keep life in the seas,
you're vulnerable to the delusion of your own exclusion
like the face of an exile in your mirroring awareness.

Don't underestimate the creative potential
of the dark genius of death to come up
with new paradigms of seeing and being
that make us feel we lived our whole lives
confined and blind in the coffin of a seed
that stored a harvest of what we've reaped in a silo.
Out of the dead ore of the moon
pours the white gold of wheat
like metal from a stone in a starfield
that yields more life than can be lost
in the living of it. Without a sword. Without a ploughshare.
Isn't it in the nature of our evanescence to move
like light and water and wind from urn to urn
of one sky burial to the next at sea and then the earth
like a water clock that runs so urgently
from full to an emptiness that has to keep expanding
like the human heart just to contain it
so when the cup's broken like a skull
you can drink the whole of the sea and the sky
in every single dropp of your mindstream
and the stars will still be climbing your roots
up to the flowers within that bloom every year
like a deepening insight at zenith into
the dark generosity of becoming something
even beyond the scope of death to imagine extinct.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Stranger In The Leaving

Stranger in the leaving
than you were before you came.
Is it not always so
when people separate?
Lovers who knew each other intimately for years
close their gates to each other
and say each others' name
as if they weren't philosopher's stones anymore.
And the base metal outweighs the gold that comes of it.
Alone with the alone
in the abyss of the absolutes
what was vivid and vital
turns numb as glass
and what was mystically specific about the other
is no longer a shrine that holds the secret name of God.
Stranger in the leaving
than you were before you came.
You leave with some of my memes
as I leave with some of yours
and we are both no doubt slightly changed for good
by the reciprocity of the encounter
like hydrogen and oxygen make water.
Though now it's all tears frozen on the moon.
Good-bye my lovely
I shall miss your eyes and your skin
and the thrill of your dangerous heart.
I will miss your wounded mouth
I tried to heal with messianic kisses
that never walked on anything but the earth.
And there's no blame
you couldn't fit my lunar month
into your solar calendar.
We had everything in common except time
and our faults were as compatible as our virtues.
I will miss the rumours of alien life in the wavelengths of your hair.
I shall miss losing myself like a firefly
in the wishing wells of your eyes
even if now my own seem more
like impact craters in the prophetic skull of the moon
when I consider what's leaving like an atmosphere from this mindscape.
And I shall always remember
that your heart was as generous as your breasts
and whenever we made love
how the earthly was the envy of the spiritual fact.
You didn't want anyone to know you were gentle.
Not even me.
But I could see through that mask
eyebrow to eyebrow with you
as if we both were intent on showing the same face to the earth
like the crescent fangs of a Georgia moon that said
don't step on me
because we were afraid.
More than enough to have you in the nude
I wasn't a glutton for your nakedness
that demanded you take your illusions off
to prove you loved me.
It would have been an irreverence
beyond the aspirations of heresy
to witness you renewing your virginity
like the new moon bathing in a sea of shadows.
I never tried to pry the petals of the flowers open
before they were ready to bloom.
I was never the ant
that told the peony what to do.
I never tried to look under the closed eyelids of the rose
to see what it was dreaming.
Though I'm not into voodoo
I never desecrated
the bird shrines
of your involuntary taboos.
But now I look in your eyes
and see that yesterday
is less vivid than tomorrow
though neither of them has happened yet.
The new moon is all potential
The full moon all used up.
There are effigies of potential
standing like scarecrows
in late autumn cornfields
and paragons of actuality
who love to star in constellations
that make them out to be the hero.
I try to stay
and I end up going.
I try to go
and the earth moves underfoot.
The root feels the death of its flower
as the autumn stars turn into frost
and burn its petals like old loveletters
to the immensities that didn't have time to read them.
The harmonies of life
are distinguished from the harmonies of death
by a single breath
taken in
and turned out
into the vast expanses of where it came from in the first place.
And the spirit that isn't shy of its own lucidity
knows that everything it illuminates
whether by day or by night
has the lifespan of light
and light is the brainchild of the darkness.
So even when the lights go out
like people and candles
and us
the shadows go on blooming
and even when the stars
are a gust of ghosts at our heels
the dust is rich
with the memory of all the roads
that once got lost in us
trying to find their way back home
like blood and fire and spirit
as if their final destination
were always the place they started from.
And if in the lightyears ahead
you should ever wonder if I remember you
be deeply assured
I shall remember you
as if every footstep I took
were a threshold of this homelessness
I am brave enough to cross without you.
And I shall thank you for this courage
inspired by the muse of your absence
and the feel of my blood Doppler-shift toward
long meditative wavelengths of red
that stream from the intensity
of the wounded white-hot blue of a renewed beginning.
You can't teach a bird to fly in a cage
or snakes to bite other people.
But when I first met you
it was as if the serpent-fire at the base of my spinal cord
that was running to keep its thoughts aloft like kites
suddenly had wings
and all my dirt-bag myths
that crawled on the earth among the lowest
were elevated into constellations
that burned like dragons among the chandeliers.
And when the muses of life well up in me like water
as they will
and ask me back
for all the tears they've shed on the sorrow
of the way things had to be
between you and me
for them and us
to happen the way we did
I will show them the eternal flame
of the nightwaterlily
blooming in the clear fire
of its lonely lucidity
not even the rain
the dragon brings
can aspire to put out.
I will show them the sun.
I will show them the moon.
And I'll say
you see?
That's us forever.
That swan in the heart of a phoenix.
And they will be well-pleased with the beauty of the lies
I use to shadow the truth with compassionate alibis
for why the flowers fall.
Sometimes it's the bird that swims through stone
and the snake that flys
in a profusion of fire and water
shadow and form
darkness and light
intensity and death
madness and wisdom.
Sometimes you meet someone
and you realize
this fallible flesh just as it is
is the deepest longing of the spirit fulfilled
like light in a perishable garden.
That there are no flaming swords
in the hands of the angels
at the wounded gates of our exile
trying to keep anything in or out.
Stranger in the leaving
than you were before you came.
The knowledge we have of each other
might want to keep things the same
but like all living things
in this garden of creation
the only way to sustain our innocence
is change.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Listening To The Nightsong Of The Silence

Listening to the nightsong of the silence
in a clearing in the woods that used to be
a field someone rocked and ploughed for cattle corn,
and left the crooked timbers and fieldstone foundations
of a log cabin to be swarmed by the rat snakes, their blood
as the cold comes on, slowing down into
long red wavelengths of hibernation that drives
the raccoons, the bears, and most of the locals
who can't afford migration, to dream half the winter away,
soporifically numb by the woodstove, or numb outside
from the air gnawing at their fingertips and noses
as if they were being whittled out of ice
or numbed by food, sex, alcohol, gossip and drugs
into the Land of the Lotus Eaters in the middle of an ice storm.

Chronic boredom of a white screen they'd
rather smear with something than look at nothing at all,
whether cadmium red on a blank canvas,
blood on the snow next to the hollyberries
the foxes and blue jays have been feasting on,
or the mythic inflation of their own personal offal
gone viral on an internet of a sky full of stars
spreading the rumour around. Wonder what
the drunk loggers of Burridge back in the day
when the cops were afraid to go there,
would have to say about their whiskey barrels
being sawn in half for flowerpots of flagging petunias
and forlorn coleus on the streets of Perth today.

Or me out here on my own looking
for the Orionid meteor showers where the dark
hasn't been distempered by the bottled light of the town.
After thirty-five years of living among these woods and lakes
I still come here as an unrooted stranger to the place
who finds it easier to relate to the wilderness
taking its own back, than the ghosts that abound
like Huron women in the moonlight
beating the wild rice at the edge of the ponds
into the bows of their spectral canoes
silent as waterbirds parting the veils of the waves
before smallpox, Jesuits, and the Iroquois wiped them out.

And yet how beautiful the stars are above the birch groves
just before moonrise, when you see them in isolation,
and you feel your heart gripped by a sense of wonder
so transfixing and sublime, you embody it immediately
as the deepest intimacy of time you'll ever experience
in your passage through it. And it doesn't matter
what the message is, whether you can interpret
the signs or not, or come away any wiser for the sight,
or mistake a knowledge of starmaps and constellations
for real light, you're assured, without ambivalence
of the mortality of the witness, as a deep humility
startles your flesh into realizing its tenuous brevity
is only a temporary deferment of death, long enough
to be stunned by the profundity of these fireflies of insight
as if you'd just dug up your own prophetic skull on the moon.

Death soon. No need to make a fact morbid
by denying it. Right now I'm still a seance
of living fire in the woods the shadows of those
who dreamed and fought, wept, longed, loved,
lived, laughed and died here competently long before me
gather around as if a whole beehive of ghosts
turned out to bid the last flower of the fall farewell
or I were the axial blackhole at the nave
of a prayer wheel galaxy flowing into me
as if the black queen of the sweetness of life
were founding a new colony of natives, exiles,
and immigrants deep inside my soul like the portal
to another world than this one that exhumes and exorcises
all that lives like starmud in a repatriated body.

Or as the Ojibway figured out, ten years
of leaving me food and cigarettes at the sunny side
of my burial hut before my bones turn to dust
and my ghost is free of my fire, before the Canada geese
embody my migratory soul on a long journey south,
there are rituals and protocols of life and death
that must be upheld with a patience and grace
born of understanding how vital it is to adorn
what can't be understood with osprey feathers,
cedar boughs, sage and sweetgrass, growing wild
in the starfields of our dream mothers
leafing the alders in the spring with new metaphors
for the wind blowing through the catkins.

In the beginning was the imagination.
Imagination is the mindscape we're all aboriginals in.
Reality is still a theory fasting on a mountaintop
looking for a totem of itself while it remains awake.
Imagination is a three-feathered chief at peace
with whatever it dreams, even if it dreams it's awake
when the elders gather to name the newborn
after the dancing waters and fire talkers
consult the wisdom of their silence and solitude
in the presence of the inexpressible events
that create the things of the world
like the sensory simulacra of a story
that always dying to be told around the fires of life
in a voice full of distance and time and sorrow
like the wind blowing the blossom of the moon
out of the leafless crowns of the trees
so death might wax fruitful when life is all ears.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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