En.Citatepedia^®.ro

However Gratified I Am

However gratified I am, always I'm left with a hunger
for something more than I've tasted before
as if my emptiness were not perfect yet and I were
ready to let everything ride on a single throw of my skull
up against the wall just to see what falls out of its own will,
or change my species once in a while. Over-reaching
perhaps, spiritual pleonaxia, something amiss with my heart
or maybe I just don't want to be left behind, resigned
to an expanding universe I can't keep up with.

Things are as they are. It's clear. My mind's a hawk
with the blinders off. I've thawed the diamond.
Enlightenment flows through my heart like electricity.
I'm shining. I don't need a star to find my way home in the dark.
I can look upon the earth demonically.
I can see it through the eyes of the angel.
But the fireflies have taught me all they have to share.
And the lightning looks like a slacker compared
to the discipline I exact from myself just to
shock me out of the old growth forest in my heartwood
like a chainsaw, despite the nails I've hammered into it
like a crucifix without a saviour, an ark without a sail.

Though I've beamed like the full moon out over the harvest
the bounty of life never quite fills me all the way up to the brim.
I'm always a dropp shy of my longing for completion,
as if there were always a crack in the cup I drank from.
And this agony has summoned me for years
from as far back as my beginningless beginnings
like a bell that swings both ways between sex and death
and though I answer it like the s.o.s. of a lapwing
by the time I get there, it's irrevocably gone
as if it were just a ruse that were leading me on.
Deeper into life? Though what I make of it, like the stars,
I make alone? No trysts on the rainbow bridge at midnight?
No god to rejoice in these works of love within me?
No abyss to delight in the sheer absurdity of it?

A gleeman, a jester, a sacred clown, a morose fool,
a mystic, a scholar, a sailor that went down with the ship
just to stay true to the spirit of the storm within me,
an open doorway for the dead to come and go as they please,
an astronomical prodigy, an optician of mirrors and prisms,
a cowboy Zen master who rode into town on a seahorse,
a poet living on the edge of the word that thrives like weeds
around the graves in the cemeteries of the dead metaphors
I'm always digging up like a dog who buried a bone.
A gardener on the moon, an usher of history, a lover
who learned to sing like a martyr in the flames
of a gnostic heresy that gave up all its claims to knowledge,
a triviality that mentored the grand scheme of things
in the mystic specificity of not just the cosmos,
but the chaos under our noses as well, and all these avatars,
this pageant of characters I look back on now
like a children's crusade, consumed like straw dogs
in the fires of their adoration, and the smoke they left
like a script on the air, unencompassed by any direction of prayer.

A lunar mirage behind a veil of heat, a delusion of water
I raise to the lips of the man on the moon to drink slowly
from his own hands, and the mouth of the man he sees in them.
I hang on a hook through my gut in the air and speak
in tongues of pain nemetic forecasts of the New Year
as a volunteer for the mystic excruciation of agony into bliss,
without insisting that it should be so, and each time
I say next year that's going to be effortless, but it never is.
I've tried denying it to win its affirmation.
I've tried affirming it to have it issue a denial
and still it haunts my solitude like a mute siren I can' t resist.
And don't want to hear. And don't want to listen to.
This undemanding imperative to live more deeply, more darkly
than I ever have before such that all my dragons
are diminished into fireflies at a distance by comparison
trying to burn their way out of the blackholes
I enter like a rite of passage I can't do anything but trust
to the other side of why I risk so much to be here.

I can hear the wind howling through me like a wounded wolf
cauterizing its heart with stars. No mercy on the mountain,
I steel my blood cells with the carbon of old extinctions
and eat the pain, gnawing on a bone in my mouth.
Praying to my own echo for silence, cessation, release,
without taking a step backward over the edge of where I came from.
Let it come, let it come, let it come, encounter or collision the same,
exit or entrance, gate, wall, consummation or the upper limit
of it all just before it turns into a windfall of beginner's luck
and I'm the chance it takes I'm not playing dice with the universe.
That there's more to learn from a curse than a blessing.
That all this isn't just an agonizing farce of humourless shadows,
non-spatial impersonalities slowly being humanized
by life masks of scar tissue as a way of facing up to things.
That a calling isn't just a matter of putting up a plaque
to commemorate the garden life was first introduced to time in.
That humans weren't just born to be sundials of the flesh.
That suffering is a dark enlightenment that's mother of the stars
and compassion tastes of the tears of the tree it ripened on.
That ego isn't the king of thorns in a world full of balloons.

Or if so. A rose is a mere rhetorical device of the blood
and there's nothing beautiful about a puncture wound
to a mythically-inflated universe waiting for a heart transplant.
That art's just the phoney climax of an unbearable impotence
that breeds cunning and guile as an antidote to spontaneity
and it's an indictable offence to bear true witness
to the untenable relationship between the fiction of beauty
and the delirium of meaning that follows in its wake
like gulls behind a river barge of surgically removed body parts
being dumped out at sea like bad meat down a neighbour's well.
Anomie. Ennui. Menses and memes of homogenous angst. Normalcy
of reflexive desecration. Solipsistic nihilism. Home-grown anarchy.
Gnats in the dusk. Frenzied star clusters. Saddles without horses
lined up seriatim along the fence like the pelvises of extinct animals
waiting to get asked to the dance by a water ballet of wheelchairs.
Schools of thought slyly amended by X-box.
Heavily armed poets buying bad ammunition for their books
and the clarity of a life that was never there to return to
going through violent paroxysms of withdrawal in de tox.

Locusts dying in the starfields they swarmed like civilization.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?
I'm out here in the weeds, ploughing the moon back under.
Let the seeds fall where they will on any night of the calendar.
Intense heat. Unusual sprouts. I'm not a hunter, not a farmer.
No ploughshares beaten into swords, no swords into bells.
I don't read meanings into what I sow like dragons' teeth,
open gates to let things in and out or through.
I was an exile in progress the day before I was born
to be returned to my solitude like a waterclock
of siloes and urns on the moon scattering my ashes
among the stars that bloom to be consumed by their hunger,
as it is becoming increasingly clear to me I do
like a salmon leaping upstream against the flow of time,
to spoonfeed the abyss an elixir of remedial eyes.

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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I Stand Where The Listening Begins

I stand where the listening begins
as if my voice were just another one of the echoes
and my tongue were the tip of an edgy precipice
that doesn't dare make a move
over an immeasurable abyss of eyes
that nobody belongs to.
This is a seeing that's older than the stars
that were born of it
like a mirror is born of the shining.
Like a body is born of the mind
and takes on the shape of a universe
as an expressionist gesture of classical reserve.
In the great ocean of being before it turned into everyone
our eyes weren't beaded like two drops of water
strung through our nose
like a statement we were trying to make.
They were waves.
Waves of water.
Waves of light.
Waves of thought and feeling.
They were waterbirds that came and went
without leaving.
They were meteorological events
in the emotional life of the sea
when it played alone with itself like weather.
We didn't evolve hands to prove we had a grip on things.
We didn't evolve brains to prove we were intelligent.
We're not nuggets of insight
panned from the mindstream
that runs down the world mountain
in a rush of gold.
I stand where I can hear the night
breathing like a shadow in its own darkness
and whatever I am not
is as real as whatever I am.
And my sorrows dropp away
like the black fruit of ruined bells
and my joys know a freedom
no holy war ever deserved.
Here my death answers to my life
and not the other way around.
My beginnings are not justified by my ends
and my solitude is so wholly itself
it embraces everything
as if it were space
and time were its only friend.
This is a poetic state.
A dynamic mode of creative annihilation.
This is a phoenix blooming in its own fire.
This is life.
This is the universe full of bright ideas
that come to it like stars in the darkness.
This is the white mare of the full moon in the high field
with the gates open
like wings growing out of her shoulders.
This is a space that is so spontaneously immediate
that you receive the reply
long before you've even asked the question.
It doesn't take thousands of thoughtyears
for the light to get here.
A flower blooms.
A star comes out.
It's as simple as that.
You lift one veil of the mystery like an eyelid.
Nothing has a history.
The old man remembers nothing.
The old woman forgets her name.
Once they were seabeds of meaning.
Now they're just water.
And everything is ok with that.
People go grey
and turn into clouds in the mountains
just to catch the last of the light
and give their lives some colour.
And then it's night again
and the dancing chandeliers of the stars
that are burning like legends
to make a name and a myth for themselves
fall like constellations to earth
and shatter like the rainbows of youth.
Every dawn has a taste of the sunset in it.
What's the end of anything
if not the dark side of its beginnings?
I am the fool of a freedom
that lets things be whatever they want to be
deep within the heavy fruit of a compassionate heart
that ripens in its own lucidity.
There are worms.
There are birds.
There's a green star in the apple core.
My skin is the chameleon of the sun going down.
I know how to swim through stone and water.
There are fish in my treetops
and birds in my roots
and when I drown
it's the sun in the sea
and nothing ever really goes out.
Everytime I open my mouth to sing
this is where the muse
puts a finger to her lips
to teach me what I'm talking about.
I'm a star when I write.
First I let go of the light.
And then the children point fingers at me
and say in mutual recognition
of the stories they make up on the go
there you are
just as we foretold.
It's the same way with water
when it's lost in a desert of sand and stars.
Sometimes it takes a mirage to find your way home.
Death gapes like the jawbone of a mummy
and writes like a pyramid
as if it wanted to make all things last forever.
But when life picks up the pen
around the fires of the stars
to whisper into its own ear
things that only solitude
can suggest to the night
its poems are always tents on the move.
The moon sailing paper lifeboats down a river
like waterlilies
blooming in the pale flames
of their lunar immolations
as if each were a white phoenix
rising above its own ashes and smoke
like someone dreaming of swans.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Would Miss You Were You Not So Deep Inside

I would miss you if you weren't so deep inside.
I would send the fireflies out like a search party
to beat the bushes and the stumps to see where you hide
were you not the stars within that lead me home.
I would cry out in anger and tears, World, you are not fair,
were you not the mystic intimate of my indignation.
I would look upon the illuminated world
thriving in its garden, and accuse the sun of being blind
did I not see more in your eclipse, the abundance
of your darkness, than I do by the vacant light of day.

Let others bathe like birds in the fountainmouths
of happier lyrics, I drown in your watershed,
a starfish on the moon, and the darkness shines
like a nightsea the colour of your eyes. And there's a sky
full of shipwrecked constellations without lifeboats
that went down into fathomless time with all hands on board
like a cargo of bones that reached its destination
by giving them all up to you, like yarrow sticks
to the Book of Changes, whether you read them as such or not.
Nine in the fifth place. Enlightenment in hell.
I am the nightwatchman with the moon for a lantern
that strikes the bell of his heart three times and says
all is well, all is well on the bottom of the sea.

I would be planting supernovas like a terrorist with i.e.d.s
in the Milky Way by now to add to the chaos
were you not the black hole of a galactic inspiration
that's mastered me like a magic latent in the heart
to burn the sum of all my destructions in a blaze of insight
by which the light is known to the light, the way
a tree is by a breeze, or ashes know the fire's out.
How could I reach out to you except with your own hands?
How could I speak to you in any way you'd understand
did not your voice coax the words from my mouth
like a dream grammar of sacred syllables betokening
the things of the earth like the echo of a prayer we forgot?

Too intimate to be the principle of anything
and yet your impersonality can only be approached
with tenderness, like a feather floating through space,
or the cloud that grounds the mountain like the cornerstone
of a temple to the emptiness it floats upon.
Were you not the valley my grieving shadow wanders through
like the lachrymose theme of another lonely psalm
trying to palm itself off as poem, how could the eagles
shriek eureka in the heights at the very next insight
into the nature of your vulnerability moving down below?

We might both dance to the same music as if it were true,
but you're the silent witness when I listen to the wind,
you're the charmed locket of darkness the light conceals,
you're the secret jewel that's wholly transparent
to all the eyes in the universe that have spent their lives
looking for you like a sky that's been hidden from sight
right over their heads and under their feet
like an atmosphere and ocean that never left the moon.
Even here on earth, the silver fish are frenzied in your tide.
Lunar horses graze like waves on your seagrass
and run wild when you spook them like an ocean
with a bit in your hands, and the look of an angry teacher.

If your absence were not deeper than my solitude
how could I resist the consolations of oblivion
and carry on as if I'd never missed you? Who
would I long for to affirm my presence in this emptiness
that engulfs me like an eye with something in it
like a star that can't be washed out? I was not
born a warrior to surrender to anyone less than you.
I do not open my heart and my mouth to sing
lullabies to houseflies growing dozy on the windowsills
as the cold comes on like the sheet music of ice.
Who would I dedicate the works of my nightshift to
like the journal of a dark demon writing to himself
about the spiritual intricacies of jumping from paradise
just to meet you naked in the garden again
as if we were born to be exiled together by the pain
that is visited like swarms of killer bees upon those
who break taboos like white canes over our knees
and throw their cornerstones around like dice
to entice blind luck into taking a chance on their disobedience?
Who would inherit the crazy wisdom of my human divinity
if I did not know how many lives you'll outlive me
like the randomness of an alibi based upon a truth
that reprieves everyone from death on desolation row
by undermining the limits of our culpability with compassion.

You, the sorceress of meaning, you, the beast mistress
of my savage emotions, you, the fire sylph at the hearth
of my homeless wandering into these evictions of self
that bury the days with no names on their graves.
You shake the lightning like a spear of fury in a lion's skull.
You wake the dragon from its dream of lotus fire
You touch me on a night when nothing else will
as if I were real, and the solidity of my atoms sublimates
like a ghost of dry ice into a mirage in space
so I could see in the grand paradigm of things
even the most enduring pyramids in a desert
are the work of the wind when the mind is inspired
to move things around like the grave goods of the heart
in the hands of a tomb robber that frees us of them
to travel light without baggage through the gates of Orion.
The past has no need of any other afterlife than the present
nor the future the prelude of a promise of better things to come.
Born into a life with a ferocious childhood for an introduction,
I have grown young again in the ashes of those fires,
like a skin transplant of flowers over a burnt face
to hide the scars, and give the stars some space.

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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Apparitions Of The Muse

Apparitions of the muse
hanging her stars
from the end of my nose
like an exotic fragrance of night
more revealing than the light.
There. That's mine.
The constellation of the donkey,
and there beside it, do you see
that red-haired star
blazing like a woman with a carrot and a stick?
I've followed that star for fifty years
always a mountain away from the valley
like a passionate Sisyphus
rolling the earth up a hill like a stone
happy with my own absurdity,
happy to go mad for her sake alone.
Elixirs of moonlight
mingled with strange waters
and I drank until I drowned
in the ferocity of my own delirium
like a myth that's forgotten
which stars it belongs to.
I've never been much of a martyr
and bored with lies
I've always been two hells shy of a messiah
but I have fallen on the thorns of the moon
more than once
after my long descent
down the burning ladders
of God's last word on the matter.
So there's no splinter of the true cross
to needle the issue
like a compass or a crucifix.
And it still puzzles me
why it's always my blood
that rushes to the end of my emergency
like a volunteer army
but it's always somebody else's flag
that gets raised above the rubble.
Pyrrhic victories at best
when I'm not feeling cursed or blessed
by any kind of mystic meaning
convincing me I can firewalk
barefoot on stars
when I can't even get
this blue pebble of a planet
out of my heart like a shoe.
But even letting go of all their leaves
like starmaps home from spiritual refugees
the trees can only go so far
as the wind and streams will let them.
And then there's a darkness that doesn't taste of stars.
And decisions that cut like the smiles of broken mirrors.
And turmoil in the snakepits of desire
that are thrown like angry acids
in the eyes of the seers
who saint the rain with their sorrows
like old calendars of crossed-out tomorrows
playing x's and o's with the moon.
It's a freak of enlightenment
to turn love into a discipline
inspiration into a law
and godless wonder into superstitious awe.
So I listen and say nothing,
see and don't reveal,
understand but never think I know
the gates that pass through me
when I call out to the wild geese in the fall
and I am startled by the loneliness of the answer.
I've seen you in the nightstream down the mountain,
the river and the sea
that sits below the salt
at her own table,
and I still suspect it was you
that turned my bitter tears
into the brittle chandeliers
that fell like ice-storms in a fountain
to silence the voices of the mirrors
the birds kept flying into
like windows at war with the sky.
I was out of the egg.
I was out of my mind at last
like a gift I didn't deserve
and the universe was full of your absence
because you were the embodiment of my longing,
the darkness in the light
that stood aloof from the meaning of everything
as if your only proof were your eyes
and that were enough
to answer the empty skies with stars.
You may put on flesh and blood
and in your human proportions confess
you don't believe this,
but you can never be attained,
never be embraced
never be contained
by any avatar of who you are
because like space in all directions
you are limitless
and even time is consumed
in the root fires that grabbed you by the ankle
and pulled you underground
to dress a goddess of light
in the nocturnal jewels of the dead.
And it is not a prerogative of the beatifically born
to be demonically wrong,
but I have heard the skulls in the song
that allures the unwary sailors
to the lunar horns of your fishbone harps
to smash them on the rocks
as if you took a tragic delight
in the sheer delinquency of your power
to arouse and extinguish desire.
Anyone can come up
with a meaning for life
but you are the muse
of meaning itself,
the meaning of meaning
when anyone asks
without expecting an answer.
What woman that I've loved
like a river reaching the sea
have you not been
over these long, intense years
of radiant tenderness
and creative commotion
and an ominous darkness out over the ocean
when the moon turned around
like a bride in bed
and revealed the far side
she kept to herself like stars?
And it's still a shock and a marvel to me
when you disappear into the air
like a breath someone neglected to take
when it bloomed on the window.
I don't doubt your capacity to devastate
and I have the urns and the burns
and the ashes to prove it
and know on a whim of your arrogance
you could leave the phoenix out in the cold
and douse the dragon like a torch
in your fire-proof waters.
But lately, out of the flesh,
I look for you behind the eyes
of every woman I meet
and it's rare that I find one
whose blood and passions
you've worn as your own,
whose mind is a jewel of yours
that flows like a star sapphire
down a dark mirror
older than the meaning of life
that relflects you in the light of a black sun.
And I know enough not to ask
about those lockets of blood
you hang like thorns
around the neck of your mystic rose
like the first and last crescents of the moon.
I opened one once to see
whose picture you carried inside
like a butterfly you were working on
like message in a bottle you never sent
like a ship to the rescue
and I'm still not certain
I was demon enough
to survive the miracles
you released upon me
like a hive of angry angels
but I came to know
what the loss of heaven meant
when I ran from the garden
through the closing gates
of the harp you stuck in my throat
like a voicebox of sacred syllables
and came up on the short end of a wishbone
like another rib I was happy to lose
like third on a match
in trench warfare with any muse of a woman
who catches me blindfolded out in the open
in the crosshairs of an inspiration
she knows I can't help but surrender to
like a white Russian iris of a poem
to a firing squad of stars aimed at my heart
just to see if I were as ready to die for her
when she put her finger
like a moment of truth
on the trigger of the moon
up to my temple
as I claimed in thousands
of Zen haikus and enlightened alibis
that fell like Japanese plum blossoms at her feet
I was ready and willing to die for any art
where she wasn't the medium
that fired me up with mystic urgency
to write long loveletters
like a moth in a window
to the candles she inspired in my heart
like the fairest flames of life I have ever expired in.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Undevoted, Free, And Wild

Undevoted, free, and wild,
no one to answer to, no one to answer for,
the urns shattered, and the ashes scattered,
and the fire liberated to perfect its own combustion
and the stars without anyone to walk home,
and the solitude silent, dark, and deep, cool
as the bliss of a wine-cellar talking in its sleep,
I have grown mad in the heat of the purple sun.
I have spoken from the mouths of the caves in the desert
and not expected the echo of my own voice
to return to me like a pilgrim stashing a gnostic gospel
deep in the sand, without realizing
how much closer to the stars dirt is than I am.

When you're no one but the wind in disguise
you don' need to be humble, you don't need to wise,
nothing to trust, and no one to rely on,
you can watch the dead at night
streaming toward Orion
like a blue-white ribbon of light
undoing the gift wrappings off the bodies and eyes
of people who can see and be again.

And you know it comes to everyone
like a nebular orchid with a fragrance of stars,
that the Sahara will green and bloom again
and the wind sing hymns to the grass
and the gazelles sport their elegant legs,
adolescents in the spring brush,
running like violins succulent with beginnings,
and it doesn't matter you're alone out here
listening to the ashes of a mirage
make up legends to tell the fire
about its ancestors buried on the moon anonymously
and how their blood once stained the earth
like a scarlet letter even the stars couldn't wash off.

The mystic anti-hero of my own dragon myth
I exalt in my isolation like a shriek of revolution
and overthrow myself like a book in the flames
to keep something I don't understand alive in me
as if I had to keep on dying to sustain myself
and the distinction between one and the other were lost upon life.
It's a touch, it's a feel, it's a hole in veil
with one eye looking out at me to see
if I've intensified the dark enough to break into stars,
if I can unravel my heart like smoke like water like fire
and perfectly disappear into the atmosphere of my dispersal
without a shudder of farewell to the masks I wore like scales.
Not to be constrained by even so much as
the single thread of a straitjacket, the husk
of an abandoned sanctuary left to the imagination
of the hermetic flowers to do with as they wish.

I shriek freedom across the heavens like the death cry
of a hawk waking the valley up in the morning.
I whisper to the water things the wind was never meant to hear.
So faithful to my calling, I lead those who come, away from me,
as if it were the perennial custom of the universe
to meet like this for a moment in time and space
and then disperse into the darkness alone like a unlit candle.
I'm a riot of fools in the sublimity of the presence within me
that elates the crazy wisdom of my spontaneous ignitions
and schools the black lightning of its absence
in the folly of trying to enclose my spirit in gates
like a candle in the niche of a tempestuous vision.

Yeeeeeeessssss, I scream into the face of nothing
like the efoliant scripture of my confession and protest
that life doesn't need an alibi to live and die by,
no extraneous, no outer, no other, no object, no subject
no flying buttress to act as a bridge
over a flowing river of Gothic stone,
no strong tree standing on its own to cut down
and carve into a crutch, no cork to keep the ocean out,
no bucket to bail the moonlight out of the lifeboat,
no jade Buddha to make your supplications to,
no footprints on the water Jesus walked,
no cave in Ramadan to receive the angel of light,
no Kabbalah to baffle your way through the night,
no Schmidt-Cassegrain reflecting telescopes
on clock driven equatorial mounts geared to the heavens
to thread the golden needle of the mystery
without any knots in your spinal cord,
to penetrate the vulva of the sea like a sacred shell
that once gathered armies on a burning hillside
to contest their revelations with the tongues of swords.

I shall tell you, my brother, I shall hasten to you my sister
like moonlight through your window, I shall not
hold back from you the least shadow of the furthest star
releasing its dark wisdom like the black doves
of its own excruciating ashes glowing like the pain
of horrendous transformations into light.
I shall not bring you the skins of the dragons I've shed
but inspire you with a fire you've never been burned by before,
a spiritual immolation into a godhead without a metaphor
to guide you by, a torch you can't drown in your tears,
a long firewalk down to a river of stars,
and there you shall cross on a burning life raft
of the bones you've been carrying around for lightyears like a body.

And it's a heresy of silence to say, but there
you shall you shall lie down in the nocturnal emptiness
in the long blue seagrass of the moon
and empower out of your own creative abundance
whatever worlds your longing inspires you to embrace
to amuse the bright vacancy of eternity with time, like love,
and the dark abundance of unperishing potential
with space, like wisdom, and the clear light of the void
and the unspeakable absence of any other voice
to ruin the silence with the bliss and sorrow of seeking
the mystic night you found within you longing like a bird
for the stillness to write it like a lyric of the wind,
a passage of blood through the labyrinth of the heart,
a shadow against the moonrise of a compassionate awareness
there's a divinity that sings like a human
in the heart of everything that breaks its long fast of nothing
with praise and celebration, with fire and light and rain
with the firstt sacred syllables to touch the lips
of the black rose charred in the heart of the dragon, like poetry.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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Things Might Be Drifting Away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Crazy Man Dancing With Fireflies

Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
Another one trying to shoot out the stars.
I hear the woman next door weeping again tonight.
I don't know what for.
Desire's a phoenix in love with water
if that's what it is.
The torch is plunged into the wound
to stop the bleeding
and the ashes get carried away.
I've loved nine women for years
and they've all buried me in a different place.
Or saved my skull to consult the dead
about a future that wasn't living up to the moment.
The white poppy of the moon
bats her eyelashs through the pines.
I've never been as innocent as a cynic
nor quite as susceptible
but I remember the pain of separation
like the mirror of the lake remembers lightning
as the most brutal of all its revelations.
And how you can walk in and out of some doors
all your life like faces
without ever opening them
or knowing whose they are.
Everybody longs for the threshold they haven't crossed.
Poor stars trying to live up to their radiance.
Wondering why it's always behind them.
Why the dreamcatchers never get finished
and love ends up like some kind of cold fish
swimming through endless windows.
Music from far across town
this late at night
like a ghost answering a seance.
It rises above the trees like smoke
and disappears into the moonlight.
Someone's trying to bloom in fire.
It happens but it's rare.
I take a firewalk down memory lane
but all my cremations seem no more to me now
than the shadows of candles
and though I feel intimately removed
this afterlife of mine is not scar tissue
whether things got over me
or I got over them
no matter.
Attachment too is a Buddha activity
and though passions that once
made even the trivial sacred
and the impossible slight
have transformed
the hot blue flame of their hydrogen
into the carbon and oxygen
of more sustainable intensities
the selflessness of my impersonality
is not aloofness or indifference or exemption
or the consolation of wisdom won by acclamation.
Time distills the spirit out of all things human
and you can delight in your past
as if it were the future of someone else
who lives it like the unfolding
of leaves in the spring
that shadow the ripening apple
until it tastes like the tears of the autumn sun.
Joy and compassion
and the lucid spontaneity
of staying improbably ageless
again and again and again and again
as the years rejoice in the young and old alike
climbing the ladder of the tree
from so far down in the dark earth
they're beyond the reach of its ancient roots
and the utmost of its aspirant branchs
scratching at the windows of heaven.
And then most amazing of all
someone comes to the window
and parts the veils
and like the last line of the last act
just before the curtain call
you fall.
You fall toward paradise
as if you'd failed
and had to do it all over again.
But if your heart needs healing
offer your love up like a transplant
to anyone who can use it
and your mystic eyes to the stars
that want to see through them
what their light looks like
from deep inside
the expanding vastness within you
that can hold all that shining
like the sky or the sea embraces
all kinds of its own weather
without ever overflowing the brim.
The skull you drink from
like a wishing well
in the desert watersheds of the dead
is a cup without a horizon.
A real mirage with imaginary water.
A seabed of shadows on the moon.
Low-tide at noon.
Providential midnights when it's full.
But if you don't like
what you've been hearing about yourself lately
when you stop to listen
to what your saying
and don't recognize the voice
you're speaking in as your own
hold your ears up like conch shells to the oceans
that have never heard a recording of themselves
and carefully watch their faces.
And if you make the same stupid mistake
you swore not to make again
learn to recycle your ignorance
so you can save a bit of wisdom
for the rest of the world
to remember what it was like once
to be alone in Eden
with no one else to rely upon
and all you had to add
to the conversation of the rivers
that flowed out of it
all you had to share with your solitude
and boundless emptiness
was your unanswerable longing
even as it was being shaped
by their waters
into the form of the unimaginable.
Into the form of a woman
who tasted then
and tastes forever now
of the original light
of spontaneous creation
however many worlds
and lives and years and nights had to pass
before you first saw her
and felt your afterlife condense into a star.
Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
And it doesn't matter
there's no one here
to understand my delight.
Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
It's hard to read me in so little light
but when you fall asleep
it's the world that dreams
and though I feather the wind
with firebirds of desire
and write loveletters
long into the night
that grow like the graceful tendrils
of ink dissolving in water
whatever the sign of the season
there's no bitterness in the vine
and no departure in the reason.
Though I'm a leaf with the wingspan of autumn
even in the dead of winter
the phoenix is green
and by late summer
there's a crazy man out dancing with fireflies
down by the Tay River
who is too carried away
by the picture-music
of what he hears with his eyes
and sees with his ears
of all that he's been and will be
alone together with everyone forever
in love and out
full cup and empty
eclipsed and forgotten
or charged with the radiant urgency
of fireflies after the rain
to care what any of it might mean
when they fire the valley up for a moment
like blasting caps in a beaver dam
that's flooded the road.
And everything's so nimble with light
so vital and effusive with joy
so mysteriously near and always
all darkness all pain all sorrow
all that's lost and weary
and fearful of ever being found again
of being loved or despised
is absorbed blameless into bliss
like a tender intimacy
into a great vastness
that lives within us all
even as we disappear into it
like the sky in the heart of a bird.
Or just before the soft flare of moonrise
through the leafless veils
of the glowing birchgroves
on that far hilltop
where the pioneers
used to bury their boys with a view
a night just like this
as illusory as it is real
suffused with a spirit of water
that heals the wounded swords
the bruised flowers
the fevered promises
that are offered to it from the bridge
between this shoreless delirium
and the next.
A presence that's always flowing away
like a mindstream among the stars and fireflies
with the power of time
and the effortless wisdom of change
that makes the going stay
and the perishing persist.
A night just like this.
A momentary kiss
that keeps faith
with the eternal flames of the fireflies
that adorn the darkness and waters of life
with indefinable joy
in the exuberance of the mystery
and unspeakable trust in the onceness of forever
and an abiding intuition
that even the fiercest thorns of pain
that have tasted first blood
and greyed the hearts of their lovers
can never be estranged
from the beauty of the rose.
A night like this
The great abyss
lucidly alive with its own shining
and a woman's eyes
and a crazy man dancing with fireflies.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sit Warmly Here With Me Awhile

Sit warmly here with me awhile
and I will smother you in fireflies
until your aura looks like
a dandelion constellation
or a globular cluster of first magnitude stars.
My scars have exhumed the knives of old wounds.
And though I confide in the void
like an echo returning to its own voice
or a breath to the sacred groves of the lungs at sunset
and superseded my quota of regrets
to make an expandable universe liveable
every firefly of insight's
got the engine of a dragon behind it
and it burns like a dark clarity within me.
Wrap your silence and mystery around me
like a chrysalis or cloak
and let me rest in your indivisibility awhile
until I disappear deep in your eyes
like a nightbird into its longing.
Let me sit around the lonely fire of your heart
as if I were the only house of the zodiac
who comes to you like an illicit love affair
with its lights still on
long after all the others have gone out.
My solitude is bruised by an abyss
that keeps digging deeper into me
and sometimes it feels as if
it's looking for water and a well
and then other times it's a midnight burial
of someone I can only catch a glimpse of
once and a while under a full moon
that looks like an undertaker
through the leafless veils of the weeping willows
digging his own grave
but feels just like a spade hitting my skull
like a strange form of paydirt
buried like the black pearl of the new moon
in a hope chest of star mud.
Take the coin from under my tongue
like the last sacred syllable
of my unconditional humanity
and throw it down this black hole in my heart
like the moon in a wishing well
and embrace me as if I were not dead awhile.
Out of the ashes the smoke and the flames
like two candles under the stars
let's make up myths of origin
where the gods have no names
until the wildflowers that have outgrown
the gates of the Garden of Eden
look back at where they come from
like a long way away
and give them one
like the elders of an Ojibway tribe
decide on the names of the new born
each according to the totem of a dream.
Pull this thorn from my eye
like the eyelash of the last crescent of the moon
and let me see you face to face
without a thousand and one tears between us.
I shall glorify you like a mosque in lapis lazuli
that can no more contain your image
than the day the night
or one constellation
the whole of the Milky Way.
I shall paint your portrait in picture-music
like the moon reflected on the black water gardens
of the Taj Mahal in mystic hues
of nocturnal waterlilies and cobalt blues
to highlight your eyelids when you sleep
and on your lips rose drops of blood
to wake you like a kiss from your dream
when the waterbirds rise from the lake.
Receive me like a sword into your depths
I throw in tribute from a bridge that crosses over
to the other side of myself
as if you were the far shore of my mindstream
come near to sit with me here awhile
and reminisce like water
on the things that have been and passed
as we listen to the tender laughter of the waves.
I will lift up my shirt
and show you the scars of all the holy wars
I've fought with myself like a faithful heretic
who knew he was doomed to lose
and the spots where the spearheads of insight
penetrated my heart like a voodoo doll
baptized in hot whiskey and cold blood
to take a message to the gods
about human suffering
in a language they could understand
wasn't just the echo of their own voices.
Sit with me here awhile like a face beside a mirror
looking out upon the same starfields
without a trace of our own reflections in the view
and I will teach you
the healing powers of a wounded mouth
like the secret grammar of a grail that seeks itself.

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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This Is An Old Sorrow

This is an old sorrow, almost beautiful in the way
it underwhelms me from above, a sky caving in
like a circus tent under the weight of the rain,
a ghost of fruit that could not bear the weight of its tears.
This is a random sadness that's got me as its only friend
when it thaws like a mirror
looking back over its shoulder
at its glacial past, ex-lovers, friends, certain pets,
and eyes that were glass weeping
in the intense mystic heat of a blast furnace full of stars
for how little they understood at the time, things pass
like Canada geese migrating across the moon
like a river you can't step into twice.
Though it doesn't make any sense to say so.
This is an ancient sorrow. And though one direction
is as good as many, I'm still following
the herds of the grazing stars as far north as I can.

O we shall sit down on the good earth half lotus sometime
and cry together for the wound of being alive.
The rose has teeth. And celebrate the scars
in the herb garden as if they were crescent moons.
Or the eyes of a powerful wraith of sadness
saturating the atmosphere with the pathos
of a lament that's been sublimely burning
through its heart for lightyears
like some deep emptiness it knows can never be filled.

As if God would never be enough for herself
and the whole of the universe were
one long maternity of endless creation
that is manifested in its entirety in each one of us
the way the moon's reflected in a dropp of blood
hanging from the thorn of a rose
with the last of two beautiful sunsets for eyes
like the sheen of auroral silk glancing off the scales
of a black watersnake at nightfall when the swallows go in
and the bats come out on the nightshift
like the winged heels of some demonic messenger
with minions that squeal in a frequency too high to hear.

But however you send it, by sound or by silence,
by light or by night, be assured the message you send
however time and space bend things
is the message that's received, like a bee by a flower
or a star by the eye that transcribes it creatively
into hieroglyphic metaphors of picture-music
following a dream grammar of starmud
with a bird stuck in its voice like a phoenix in the Arctic.

Time washes the dust of the road off
by shedding the moonlight like a snake's skin
and skinny-dipping in the fathomless lakes of eternity
it finds along the way like eyes along the mindstream
full of stars and fireflies and what blooms in the soil of its sorrows
beside the stairs at the back doors of all those tomorrows
that left the way they came without saying good-bye.

Volcanic lunar oceans that are only as deep
as the dark tears I have left within me
when I dip the leaking cup of my heart
like the goblet of an impact crater
into a watershed of compassion that looks like the holy grail
and share it with my fellow mirages in this desert of stars
as if they were all as thirsty as I am and everyone
deep down inside somewhere within them
like the green star you can find at the core of an apple,
had a fountain within them like a moon dial or a wine glass
they smashed on the high notes of the nightbirds
just to express their joy as a kind of defiance
in the face of their lots in life, though, in fact
nothing is longer or shorter than anything else in eternity
just as there's only so much time and then there is forever.
And it's the black magic in the roots of a demon
that blossoms like Venus in the west
or New England asters up around Westport in the fall.

And though there's something beautiful in this sadness
that eludes me like a Braille starmap
I can't quite put my finger on to see what's shining
like Aldebaran through the tree line of a bride in a widow's veils,
as I listen to a whisper of flesh
pleading in the darkness not to be excluded
from the presence of time, or left behind by the spirit
like a false clue of cast off rags on a hawthorn bush
to say where it's gone forever and ever and ever
as if whatever the spirit and the flesh had
going on between them never mattered,
whenever the clarity cuts through
the thin-skinned mirror like this
as if it were trying to slash my eyes open
like an insight into what's beyond the obvious,
immediately out of a wounded mouth
I am healed by the balm in a voice of compassion
that rises sweetly like the new moon from the womb
of a scarred guitar that didn't know it had such music in it.

And it says in moonlit windows and nightbirds
that make all the dreaming children wake up and listen
to the intimate strangers that speak as gently as fireflies
to the vast nightskies of their own imaginations,
that the world that casts these shadows on your wall
like a crow preening its feathers, or a bell
that's lost its faith in knowing, and plunges like an apple
into its next afterlife, are merely the holy petals
and sacred syllables taken like pages from the Book of Life
left out like an orchard in a nightwind for every one to read
like a story each of us writes for ourselves
to help us drift gently off into sleep again
to find out how it all ends in a dream that goes on forever
like the fragrance of lilac in an old woman's memories
or the marrow of the apple bloom
that clings like the moon to our bones
or stars to the flypaper stairwells of our chromosomes.

No other way to explain the shining of this sadness deep within
as if my very blood mourned the passing of the things
that have drowned and disappeared into it over the years
like honey-bees in the lees at the bottom of a black tulip
full of rainwater, and by that I know
this is a sadness common to all
that's worthy of the stars in its windows,
and the dreams in the mirrors that paint our faces
like quick watercolour life studies of rainbows in tears.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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O Igneous Rose

O igneous rose, are you the furnace or the urn of the butterfly?
Or should I ask the vatic wind which pyre is mine?
Will I be be food for the stars again, will I mulch
the dark matter of the roots with my remains
or will my ashes retain some semblance of the light
like the ghost feeling in the heart of a spiritual amputee
or linger among archetypes like fossils in the Burgess Shale
that haven't reached their full potential yet?

Not Hell, not Heaven, not Hades, Sheol, Tartarus
Dis, Avernus, Jana, Jahannum, Nirvana, Samsara,
or the great abyss where nothing is even in the slightest,
and presence, and absence, and time aren't even
anachronisms of their past lives. I'm not going
anywhere when I die, because death is not discontinuous
from life in the known universe, though one's a lifeboat
and the other's what you need it for to stay afloat.

Wherever your mind walks in unison with your heart
deep in emotional thought without too much attention
to where you're going, you break trail like a river
and the stars start flowing into your alluvial fields
and the green mountains you left walk with you
all the way into the pyramids like the source of the Nile,
not tombs of death, but tombs of life pointing like starmaps
to the indelibility of your afterlife in Orion
as the scion of a great house of mystic hunters.

I'll be here. Just behind your eyelids. Like a dream
I'm having until things come true again for the sake
of distinguishing my extinction from one bone to the next
like yarrow sticks throwing away their crutches
like the hands of a clock to read the Book of Changes
to see what's bubbling up like the multiverse from the bottom
and every eye of air, each a complete science unto itself
or an occult art, where it's been fully realized
chaos is the root of all imagination
even when it's writing Horatian odes and haikus.
Chaos is as smooth as Hermes writing his own flightplan
with his heels, and where he arrives, is as much of a message
as the word he holds in his mouth
like coin for the ferryman in his moonboat
at the end of the long wharves that are the last to see us off
to the other side of everywhere. O come now

surely you didn't think life was going to let you off
its prophetic hook that easily before it got
its last crescent snagged like a koan in the mouth
of the golden fish that thrives in the dead seas of the moon
that reels it in for questioning, only to throw it back?
Everybody satisfied with the answers for awhile
until the questions get bored with hanging around
like mere coathangers, and bite off more of you
than they can chew again. No more than a windowpane

can hold the whole of the sky the way any dropp of rain can,
can you without washing the dye out of your tears like an iris
that encircles the blackholes like rainbows around a wishing well
where what you see is what you wished for from the beginning
because chaos conforms to any vision of reality and delusion
that conceives of it as a feature of the conditioning mind
that shapes it like a simulacrum of the inconceivable.
So the same well that the stars and fireflies look into
holds a mirror up to them like a reflecting telescope.
And all it takes is a quarter gram of vaporized aluminum
to silver the whole universe with a prism and a dropp of dew
trembling in the web of a spider mount like a psychic butterfly.

Chaos and cosmos. Igorance and enlightenment. Reality
in contradistinction to delusion. Life and death yoked
like two oxen to the oxymorons of the helical star wheels
that dance like Sufis at the naves of their retrograde crossroads
to weird what direction to go in like witching sticks
in the mouths of the dragons that undo the locks
on the gates of the rain with skeletal keys of lightning.
I shall be here. Where the light and the water
illuminate the blossoms and quench the roots of things
at the intersection of time and the timeless where
there's no more need of religion than there is crosswalks
or moonboats and ferrymen to the other side of the river
that know what season it is by the colour of your sails.

I've always flown under the skull and crossbones
like a sea wolf that didn't evolve back into a whale
howling in the mountains on the moon in a savage agony
of the longing to live yourself to death as intensely as you can.
The sublimity of laughter that makes the clown profoundly sacred.
That beatifies the candles like eyes in the unapproachable darkness.
That takes one world after another in hand
like a party balloon and lets the clowns and magicians
twist it into the shapes of worlds within worlds
where the ground of being is always and only
the liberated exercise of their creative imaginations.
And every world we pass through the sum of all
we've imagined it to be, and a little bit more
just to keep the mystery from being perfectly contained
in the three and a half pounds of starmud we call a brain
and root our shining in it like flowers gone to seed.

Make a muse of the wind, or a church out of a rock, the same,
or pitch a tent or a pyramid on the dunes of the shifting stars,
or in a nunnery of desert mermaids who gave up singing to take vows
make your obeisance to the unknown with laughter, grace, and style.
Best show in town, and the ticket was free, and who
so ungrateful they could leave the table that fed them, fouled?
Holiness isn't a threshold where you take your body off
at the door and separate your mind from the Braille of the flesh
you need fingertips to read just as you need eyes in your blood
to see a lover's heart from the inside out. True holiness
is not holy. It's not fool proof. It's not stake-prone.
It doesn't pour honey all over your head in the morning
just to feather you with doves and expect you to glow
like secret diamonds in the dross of the ore. Listen.

You can hear the light walking across the grass.
The snakes are teaching their occult wavelengths
to the shadows of the trees leafing in the moonrise like veils.
There are mad poets all through these pathless hills
waiting for inspiration like a singing coach
to raise havoc among the high notes of the bush wolves
that leave you guessing what they're really mourning for
that's actually missing. Grains of sand,
we grow like pearls and stars and expanding universes
beyond the limits of what constrained us yesterday.
The seed splits its cotyledons like Solomon's baby
and scarlet runners burn like heretics at the stake
in an auto de fe of enlightened immolation
of serpent fire running up the spine to get to the stars
as a circumpolar constellation with small flammable flowers
before the last watch of the night blows them out at dawn.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Seeds Of Fire In A Nightsky

Seeds of fire in a nightsky root like flowers
in the ashes of my eyes I scattered on the wind
like the dust of stars I followed even into oblivion
to remain faithful to the life of the light
whatever transformations within me grew
into the starless darkness of the unknown heart
I've carried in my chest for years like the empty shrine
of a dead lantern to the last firefly to go out.

And this is a seeing without the eyes of the stranger
I no longer recognize as who I thought I was
when I could read the constellations like the Linear B
of the lost civilization that was elaborated out of me
to perish in the mountainous silence of what was abandoned
when I burned my starmaps and entered chaos
like the blackhole of the singularity
that could rejuvenate me out of nothing like a grail
I was seeking at the bottom of the deepest grave
I ever descended into, a spider at the end of its silk,
or a caterpillar like the distant rumour of a butterfly
on a tranformational pilgrimage to an unknown shrine
that crawled with it all the way back to the beginning
of the radical innocence of an radiant world,
before time overran it with arrivals and departures
as if it never meant anything in the first place
to aspire to the light in the hope of a deeper intimacy with life.

And in this darkness, there is no letting go,
or hanging on to what cannot be grasped by understanding
until you realize that understanding only ever finds itself
and the vastness of what's expanding before it
into the unknown, is not a journey with a destination
or a threshold that can be crossed into illumination
like a voice meditating in the silence of its mother-tongue.
I was looking for the light by the light
I was given to go by when the wind blew it out
like a candle I no longer needed
to make my way deeper into this homeless darkness
that does not cast a shadow of time on enlightened extinction.

How can you divine what isn't missing within yourself?
The seeker dies by the side of the road
like a cry for help in the dangerous distance
pleading to be rescued by its own echo, and it comes
but not in a language of its own, not
as the event of anything that could have been anticipated,
not as something you can bring back with you
like the taste of water to the lips of a delirious mirage
to prove there's a reality beyond delusion
where everyone drinks from the same well
the muses of wisdom summon them to without a mouth.

As unsentimental as an overnight frost on the garden,
the larkspur rimed by billions of cold stars,
as if my seeing condensed out of the air
and every insight were a sign of farewell to the mystery
that urged me to risk everything like a tribute
to the divinity of nothing that had seized upon my heart
like a sacred clown faithful to the folly of experience.
Like the footprints of space and time that stretched behind him
for lightyears like the forced smile and phony tear
of the painted lifemask that convinced him he was not dead
to the ordeals of the journey he was leading nowhere
but to where he was every moment of the way
trusting in the crazy wisdom of the laughter
that regaled him every step of the way
like the cornerstone of the absurdity
that kept looking for new hills of prophetic skulls
to roll over like dice in a bone-box.
To wander like a rogue planet on an aberrant wavelength
of dark matter that doesn't express itself like moonlight
talking to itself like the open-mouthed seed syllables
of the waterlilies at night on the Fall river
writing love poems back to the stars that inspired them.

You want to overhear what the universe
is whispering to itself like a madman in his sleep
in the unbreachable silence of a fathomless dream
of random atoms engendering the forms of awareness
like a grammar of chaos out of its own unattainability
trying to make some sense of what it's saying,
an asylum of paradigms that undermines it own existence
in the arraying of a conditioned universe?
You have to learn to learn to hear it in a language
no one has ever spoken before you, as if
you'd never heard your own voice before
from somewhere deep within you saying
let it be as the stars broke into light
like the distant echo of an unknown wonder
that perceives the source of its own extinction
in the birth of everything, in the slightest conception
of the inconceivable rooting in its own ashes on the wind.

We all listen to the eloquence of things we don't understand
like a secret we're forbidden to tell anyone,
that keeps giving us away death after death,
birth after birth to our imperceptible selves.
Imagination seeds the mind of our uninhibited potential
to flower into worlds where the fruit comes before the blossom
as the harvest precedes the seed, or the darkness
wakes the nightbird up to its longing for love and light
and all our deaths are already achieved behind us
long before anyone was born to suffer them.
And yet we suffer them like a truce with the absurdity of the act
that establishes peace like a third-eye
in the middle of a hurricane that gives meaning
to the dark abundance of our extinction gathering into light
by sacrificing our emptiness like gods to our own creations
over and over and over again, as we surrender to ourselves
like candles returning themselves like fire
to the the light that inspired them
like water to the river it was taken from.

The distance of the journey of life is a wingspan
that cannot be estimated in shadows.
And though you master all the meanings in the world
and learn to love their subtleties like the taste
of mystic wine, or enlightened tea,
you're still the guest that's never met its host face to face
because everything you say is always behind you
like the light of a star whose immediate life
is always ahead of it hidden in the darkness like a jewel
that has yet to know the light of a direct encounter.
If you want to see deeply into the shining
you have to grow your own eyes to accommodate
the perennial insight into the restive vision at hand.
And you must learn to live without knowing
what it is you've come to understand
about the ashes of the dragons in the afterlives of the stars.

Don't let the scars intimidate the innocence of your wounds
as if you could never be hurt again by what
you cherished the most in your search to find yourself
in the absence of anything you could be attached to.
Look at the fireflies emerging from the valley fog
of a passing storm like a shapeshifting constellation
dancing at its own wake like a blissed-out drunk at a funeral.
You can taste the whole history of life
like a wandering myth of origin in every sip of water
flavoured with the reflection of things that changed along the way.
Don't mourn the transformations that enabled you to stay awhile
like snow on the mountaintops, dew on the tongues
of the new leaves of the apple-tree that emerge
like the sacred syllables of lovepoems
to the unknown windfalls of the mystery they facilitate
out of the urgency of their own becoming.

Here, where we speak for awhile, in the diction of things
arranged in the mystic grammars and paradigms
of our own likeness reflected like starmaps
to the shining that ripened our eyes from within
as if the whole world were turned inside out
and you had to descend into yourself to see the stars
like an arrangement of chaos expressed in metaphors,
the liars speak clearly in the language of other men's mouths
that can be easily understood, as the tongue-tied sages
blunder like an ineffable silence into the deepening mystery
of the creative eloquence of the unsayable things
that life speaks through them like the facts of a dream
that trues their wisdom to the disparate harmonies
of the illuminated chaos deep within the heart of life
that keeps contradicting itself like a pulse among the dead.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sometimes The Clarity Comes Too Late

Sometimes the clarity comes too late
to realize there was never
any need for forgiveness
and nothing to expiate
about the way we made our gracious farewells
into works of art
that would go on hurting forever.
We had a genius back then
for making death seem more beautiful than it is
because we lived on the edge of things
and not their surfaces
and o if we'd only felt all those things
that made us weep at the end
dying in doorways that were more cruel
than any threshold we had to cross to stand there.
If only we could have felt those immensities of good-bye
from the very beginning
what reason would we have had to cry like candles
when the wine turned back into water
and the roses wiped their lipstick off on their leaves?
One goes out.
One goes in.
Because severance
no less than the dance
takes two to make a difference
and as the years go by
the silver flakes off the memory of the mirror
and you can see clear through to the other side
experience is just another log
you throw on the stars
to keep yourself warm on a cold October night
by a small fire out in the open
where it's easier to sublimate
the intensities of fate
by opening the cages you keep them in
and burning your loveletters
like the flightfeathers of half-forgotten songs
to spread their wings in the flames
and give them the freedom to rise higher
than the nest of ashes they were born in.
History isn't the muse
the immeasurable mystery is
and if you don't learn to let things go
you'll never know
how to live lyrically alone in the wild
unbounded by your solitude
by the side of a river whose flowers are dying.
The green bough hisses and blisters in the fire
but the cracks in the heartwood
burn far into the night
and give off way more heat in the autumn
than the pre-emptive lightning strikes of spring.
It's a rite of passage as old as migrating geese
mournfully bearing souls south
whose bones have turned to dust
to take all my prophetic skulls like moon rocks
out of the house of the dead
and arranging them into the ring of a firepit
stand in the middle like the eternal flame
of an unrepentant heretic
to rekindle the dance
even among the skeletal shadows
of a persecuted romance.
Even in sorrow.
Even in the silence
of the great distances
that add their aerial perspective to time.
Not to call ghosts back to a seance
as if they could tell me anymore about death
than I've already lived through
but every year at the second full moon in October
after the harvest is in
and the scarecrow has come down off his cross
and left it to the ravens of nevermore as a church
I lay a blue violin on a funeral pyre.
I stretch my heart out like a skin on a drum.
Dressed in the plumage of solar flares
I enter a trance of firebirds
that have long since disappeared back into the sun
and like Icarus in eclipse
or the last grasshopper
who didn't take the advice of the ants
to drag the leaves and wings of things
piecemeal into a shelter
to prepare for deeper separations yet to come.
I take my chances by the hand out here in the open
and I dance.
I dance with heresy.
I dance with the angels and the demons
that were martyred in the name
of what is unforgiveable about my human nature
and yet more sacred than the rain I dance for
to put the war I dance for out.
I dance with whole asylums of noetic visionaries
who went insane
trying to explain me to myself
like the origins of life on another planet.
And I dance again to the music of the women I've loved
whether in pain or bliss
whether I was hung by the tail
like a plague rat over the abyss
of my cannibalized emotions
like a famished snakepit
or I fell sidereally under the spell
of the fragrance of summer stars in their hair
I dance not as if it were all worth it in the end
but something inestimable to celebrate
that gives the chartered undertakers pause
about what they do for a living
when they see how a poet can dance
to the picture-music of the crazy wisdom
that sings the dead up out of the earth to their feet
without looking down from the mountaintops
or back at the valleys behind
to take the measure of their heart
to see if it's empty or full.
I let the new moon
feel the old moon's arms around it again
like the bright vacancy and dark abundance
of what's joyfully absurd and playful about life
whether it's doing a sword dance with words
or dancing in blue heron feathers
like a shaman among waterbirds
longing for enlightenment
like a tantric star map
to break the jinx of their prayer-wheels.
Or dancing to bullets like a greenhorn
in the main street of nineteenth century Dodge
or like me out here in the country dark
alone with six thousand visible stars
eleven miles outside of Westport
spreading my wings under the sign
of the Eagle and the Swan going down in the west
to add my phoenix to the feathers of the burning sumac
and grabbing the lightning lance of the thunderbirds
like a serpent from their talons
hold it up to the stars to the east and the west
like the wavelength of a crazy insight
into the dark word of the living light
that makes me dance my way
out of time
out of place
out of my mind
without leaving anyone or anything behind.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Eyes In The Shadows, In Blood, In Space

Eyes in the shadows, in blood, in space, incubating the light
that has yet to be born, wild asters in the deflowered fields of death,
and the return of the living out of the eyeless abyss, delinquent,
and a redness in the air of this September night,
saturating it like a deep wound it holds under its breath,
a black rose, a fossilized thorn that no longer grows old,
memories fixed like crucified bats to the sticky brown stars
of the fanatical burdock trying to wear me like a starmap
as if every day of my life has felt like the approach of autumn
watching the constellations turn like the pages of a calendar,
a waterclock of new moons flowing like dark matter,
sundials at midnight encircling me like shark fins
slashing the water like sabres with surgical precision
and their eyes, oblivion, a focus of shadows, perennial night
after a supernova of dismemberment, dehumanizing horrors
in a hydrodynamic abattoir. Spirits of old root fires
smelling of pine and cedar at large in the dark like hunting magic.

And the clouds a wolf pack of shapeshifters among the stars,
the exhilaration of spiritual wariness out in the woods alone at night
where it's unwise to trust anything too beautiful at first sight,
and a sudden flash of inspired self-destructive courage
to do just that in protest of the abuse of beauty as a Venus fly trap.
But it's not hard to tell a real muse from a false one
because a real muse never wastes her passion on the sane,
and if there isn't an occult side to a poet who works his madness
like a medium in the dark he had to sacrifice his eyes to see
beyond the visuals of the retinas and the cameras
with lizard eyelids that blink like guillotines, into
these visionary realms where galaxies are shed
like the feathers of migrating swans, gravity's gone,
and if you want to go up, you've got to go up without a parachute on.
Mystic physics. The illogic of the heart delighting
in the absurdity of itself just because it can and you can hear
a sword master of black Zen singing his heart out in a brothel:
A good heretic never disciplines his disobedience.

The brutal moon offers me the cup of my own skull
and says drink, and I know it's death to hesitate
because you lose control of everything in the moment
if you do, so I drink it like an elixir of dark tears
from the eye of the shark in eclipse, and I peer
into the black mirror of a midnight lake to see
if I'm still alive or dead, and the mirror breaks
like the unleavened bread of a gnostic gospel in my hands,
wholly enraptured by a spell I wasn't ready to wake up from,
and I can feel the lustrous radiance of a light
so inconceivably darker than the one I go by
like a shadow of that, the ferocity of the clarity
immolates my heart with a terrible joy
in a prophetic furnace of hot diamonds
that howl like the insights of a firestorm of dragons in extasis
breaking out of their cosmic shells like stars out of the void
shining out of the dark heart of things within
like eyes seasoned by compassion
for the low hanging bells and fruits of the earth
trying to express the infinite solitude between birth and death
where we walk alone together forever with everyone
and everything, like pilgrims sleepwalking
in the unattainable dream that animates us all
to keep on divining the inspired limitations of the impossible.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Things I Must Say To You The Crystal Said

Things I must say to you the crystal said.
Jewels I must turn in the light.
Things I have gathered
like wild herbs from the starfields
to make a cool poultice of the moon
to draw the pain out of the wound
like a child that got turned around
when she was born
on the nightside of her blue eyes
to colour outside the lines of her constellation
like one of the original watersheds of Aquarius
that didn't take to the bottle and spoon of lesser wells
that warily sip from themselves
as if they were testing for poison,
but poured herself out
in an elation of so many lifelines
so many rivers vital with beginnings
the world mountain discovered her
like gold in the stone
gold in the mindstream
gold in the ore of its bones
gold that shone even in the darkest of valleys
wherever she flowed
like the white moon
when it wants to be mistaken for a swan
and sheds her eyelids like the petals of a waterlily
that's gone, gone, gone beyond herself
like a waterbird into the undetectable mystery of things
that lifts us up from our own reflections
and calls us to exceed ourselves
by flying beyond our own wings
past the last lake at the end of the universe
we could bask in like a keyhole
in the third eye of an unrelenting sky.

There. That's a breathful.
A dust-devil in a gust of stars.
A precipitous river of my own.
But I like listening to the green mountains
talk about things that are perennially true
that no one ever believes.
There's inspiration in the fires
that inspires their leaves
to burn like old myths
and poems that went up in flames
true to the muse of autumn
that has forgotten their names.

And I'm listening to this little world mountain
this dolmen of a crystal you gave me
this palace of mirrors
that sits above my desk
and tells me things about you
only an older spirit than the road I'm on could know.
It whispers to me at night
like a fragrance of light
from the unseen flowers
behind your eyes
flowing down from the high fields
and unscalable facets
of the mystic mountain you live upon
planting trees.
Abruptly enlightened medieval Rinzai Zen masters
did the same
in the mountains of Japan
as if they were rooting their pupils
like worlds within worlds
within a grain of sand
like the cornerstone of it all.

Trees are the future memories
of a prophetic skull
that stays true to its ancestors
like pines in the fall.
Anyone who plants a tree
raises a temple to the wisdom of birds
who will speak to you
in the native tongue of a new language
in voices older than words.
Anyone who plants a tree
attains what lives beyond them like an afterlife
that's always rooted in now
and even the dead branch
that holds the autumn crow in the rain
when things are bleak with the passage of things
will turn into a strong rafter in the house of life
and the moon will add its blossom to it
and the sun its butterfly
and everything that grows
will greet you as a child of its own.
And life will hold you up
like a candle
like a Douglas fir
like a star
like the tiered pagoda
of a pine-cone
like a mirror
like a bird
like a quiet smile
in the sweetest of solitudes
and well-pleased with what you've sown
hang you like a thousand shining chandeliers of rain
in the sacred groves of the Pleiades
to show you what has grown over the years
from the labours you undertook
from the tears you shed
to green the wounded mountain back to health
by adding your life to its life
is you returning
like a prodigal daughter of water
to the mystic springs
of your own starcrazy source.

Ride the wave.
Ride the snake.
Ride the wind.
Ride the fire.
Ride your own eyebeam
like a sword that delivers
the boon of life
like the first word
of a new universe
that's just heard its name called
like an endless beginning.

You are comet. You are wheat. You are starwheat.
You're a comet in the starwheat
making crop circles.
Aquarius.
Aquarians can take their skin off
and put it on again like water
and pour themselves out forever
like the sea in every dropp
so when the tide returns
it's never empty-handed.
I see a naked watersnake
swimming through the moonlight
like the path of something perpetually true
and inconceivably beautiful
as if time itself had learned to move like that
and every ripple was an era
widening its wingspan in its wake.
Hic sunt dracones.
That's how dragons learned to fly.
The highest and the lowest all in one.
The snake in the claws of the eagle.
Wisdom in the lawlessness of insight.
God.
You.
Me.
The Mysterium.

For those who haven't opened
the eyes in their blood yet
to see the bloodflowers
the bloodstars
talking to each other
like variations of the same light
these visions are the lost dream grammar
of an ancient madness
you can't recover from like a fever.
But to those who know the fireflies
are lamps on the road
the stars are not useless
and everywhere is the clarity and passage
of a river that forever arrives.

And I can see the wounded child
who's brave about her pain
but feels like a ladder in the rain
no one will hold for her
to climb down like the moon from her window.
And those that should have been waiting down below
to catch her if she falls
have scattered like stars
on the insides of her eyelids when she blinks.
Abandonment is that hollow shell
you find washed up somewhere on a beach
and raise to your ear
to hear the sea far off
like a life that's going on without you.
Even the sea can't fill that cup.
Only another emptiness
could feel at home
in the homelessness of that space.
Abandonment is getting up every morning
and putting your face on inside out
and thinking of it as some kind of good luck
you're on the other side of the universe
all on your own.
And though you howl like a wolf on the wind
the moon still cannot hear you.
That's how longing is born
in the fires of separation;
that's how the universe is called
every moment out of the nothingness
like someone to love,
and the deeper and darker the emptiness
the higher and brighter the mountain.
The watershed holds the fountain up
like a bouquet to the rain.
Emptiness doesn't stand like a god
in the shadow of an unknown definition.
It's the selflessness of everything that is.
Unborn it lives without distinction in the heart of things.
Unperishing it dies for everyone
without leaving anyone out.

When insight blossoms
like the moon
on a dead branch
compassion's the fruit
that's always in reach.
Life doesn't practise
what the heartless teach.

This morning
I'm sitting at the feet
of your little crystal buddha
enthroned in full lotus position
as he turns my heart in the light
like a jewel in the eye of a diamond-cutter.
And the sky is generous with tears
as it clarifies the windows of perception
with eyes as old and wise
as the sun at midnight.
And every thought I have of you is a fierce peace.
And every feeling a black mirror
deeper than white
that has extinguished my face
like one of last night's stars
in the bliss of a greater illumination.
The mystic specificity of my mind
pales like the moon
in a blinding abyss
of no-minded indistinction.
And the stars that shone down on nothing for so long
like an indecipherable language
are now looking up at you
like the fountainmouth
high above the treeline
in the mountains
of an Aquarian understanding
of what they've always meant to say.
There are no echoes in the voices of love.
No avalanche of Rosetta Stones.
No scoffing crows.
No genuflections of the dove.
There are no shadows hiding like daggers
under the cloaks of day
to get even at noon
for things that happened at midnight.
Love is a feather
from a passing bird in flight
life puts into the scales
and the earth turns eastward toward the light
and death takes its finger off the measure
of life's most cherished treasure.

And now the buddha turns into
two lovers sitting upright
face to face
in a lotus embrace
of enlightened connubium
in a coincidence of the contradictories
as if two were not the extinction of one.
And when desire opens its flames like petals
and blooms like a phoenix
there are no strangers in the fire.
And love doesn't burn its feet
by making a firewalk
of the nameless constellation
rising from the dark innocence
of its sweet dreamless sleep
like the thirteenth house of the zodiac
with two people home from everywhere
with myths of their own
like Venus and Mars
turning the lights on and off
like lovers and stars
while the neighbours stare in amazement
through closed windows and locked doors
at the bright vacancy of the rumours
the dark abundance of the night
that knows all we are and do
and will and have done
is true to the overproof joy I take
in this lyric of a jewel in the light.
It turns me like your eyes
turning the key in the dark gate
of a mystic moonrise
where fate elaborates the worlds
like pearls from grains of sand
and time refires its last hour
like a master glass blower
to make more space
for stars in the desert at night
by breathing on the flames
that feather the ashes of the moths
in the urns of our names
with the wings
of a dragon
the wings of a phoenix
the wings of a sphinx in the rain
planting trees on the slopes of a pyramid
to watch the dead mountain grow green again
and know all the secret paths down into its afterlife
like a river running through the wilderness
or this theme of stars on the mindstream
beguiled by the mystic wiles
of a cougar caught in the moonlight
like a jewel in the eye of a dreamcatcher.
Or the seasoned seer in a mirror like me
enraptured by the anarchic fireflies
beading themselves
like the mandalic stars
of a new constellation
only the enlightened can see
enflamed like a prophecy
empowered by love
to rise in the night of your name.

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
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Flesh Your Spirit Out In Starmud

I flesh your spirit out in starmud. No creator.
No created. Between the leaf and the sky
I mix the colour of your eyes on the palette
of a rainbow that let's the darkness
sit at the same fire it does. Because the spirit is free.
I hang crescent moons from your earlobes.
I release the sacred deltas of small night creeks
into your veins, and talk to deserts on the moon
about the manes of sidereal lions for your hair.
I search the darkening hills at night for a black rose
with eyelids as cool as mushrooms, and lips,
that are more the wings of auguries, birds and bows
disappearing into the distance to imagine you
than they are the words and arrows
of a flightless heart dipped in stars that don't ignite.

I'm a blind man in a room, painting eyes,
trying to grow flowers out of last year's fragrances,
interpret every syllable and sacred pixel
of your red ochre glyphs of lipstick
I used to bury myself in when I lived in caves with bears
and rubbed the stuff all over my face
like blood and corn flowers under the hearthstone.
Now I'm a dragon rising from my urn of ashes
like a volcano of serpent-fire out of the chrysalis
of my crystal skull, looking for signs, hints, clues,
any whisper of linear B as to who you are
in the shadows of the sundials of the mountains
you go walking with at night with your dogs.

And the stars you must see in the clear-eyed desert
when the temperature drops and all you've got
to keep you warm from the inside out is not
you in my arms, but this small dropp of blood
in our chests, this cosmic thermometer of a heart
on the night ward of a perilous greenhouse.
And I went to a cactus with thorns like a voodoo doll
with oracular powers to ask about the shape
of the body I should root you in like an hourglass in sand
and she said to me, a rootless peach tree on the moon.
And ever since, I've touched your skin
with eyes at the end of my fingertips
like a new world gnostic gospel for the blind
that can see you in the flesh, naked, sublime
like a desert island it would be worth drowning for
just to be washed up on the curvature of your dunes
like a starfish when the mind comes back to its senses
like the first sign of life on the moon in a long time.

You emerge like wild irises of hydrogen out of
this cloud of unknowing, this cocoon of nebularity
like one star among many in an almost perfect vacuum.
I can see you. I can almost taste you. I can feel
your last lover trying to squeeze into the chrysalis
of the infinite straitjacket of your last exorcism
as if he'd finally run out of dawns as alibis
for why he didn't want to leave just yet. Who
hasn't stood in the doorway of Orion
sinking down in the west? For some
the threshold's the longest part of the journey
and they make a nadir of everything at zenith
by letting their horizons down like a crosswalk
waiting for a change of colour blind traffic lights
that don't know, for all that Stop. Go. Maybe so.,
anymore about passage than the road does
or a starmap that always certain of where it's going
but never has a reason why it should
jump the gun like a star and get ahead of its light
like a car on a long dark dusty country road at night,
one headlight out, trying not to hit a doe
in the glare of the sun at midnight
on its way out of town, whether that's up, down,
or omnidirectionally radiant as the Pleiades in tears.

Drift and mingle, merge, enhance,
dance, glance, shadow and glow,
still more ghost around you than I am a mirror,
I know what it means to be summoned to a seance
and not know what to wear. What lifemask to put on
like a Mason jar full of fireflies trying to decide
what constellation has the fewest short circuits in it
and is the least likely to lead anyone astray
when the lights go on and off like a fickle tranformer
or a Cepheid variable that was just born that way.

And here, now, your ears and your hands, your arms
and bones of your own that don't owe a thing
to anyone else's bird cage after the bird has flown.
And now I think I've got the eyes just right
but it's the heart calling its rivers back to it
like the sea I can't quite find the likeness of
even when I appeal to the most ancient galaxies
in the Hubble mirror for a similitude of love
that might serve as the understudy of a metaphor
in an expanding universe that keeps exceeding
the boundary stones of the stars at zenith
and even the chipped cup of the moon full
and a skull that used to juggle mirrors
like shattered insights into reality for those
so spiritually inclined at harvest time to listen
to the blue moonrise peering through the cedars
like an effulgent pearl of wisdom shedding her skin
like a mystic in rapture on the dark side she keeps to herself.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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