I Could Bring You A Shattered Windowpane
I could bring you a shattered windowpane,
I could bring you a musical whip that's been trained
to read the stops of your flute
and how your fingers move like windproof spiders.
I could bring you the red brick of dried blood
that was left of my heart when I threw it through the window,
and it broke into a thousand chips of rose petals
that shed like flakes of dried paint off the eyelids
of a revolution that hasn't woken up yet
to finish what it started in a recurring dream
of mystic junkies flagging their fits
until Faustus sees Christ's blood
streaming across the firmament like mother's milk.
Should I ever come to know you well enough
to let you drink from my hidden starwell in my field of view,
I could raise your spirits up like a candelabra
to be whatever constellation you wanted
among all these myriad stars dying to be given a focus.
And if at first you didn't know where you were, I'd be your locus
until you got your sea legs on the moon,
and learned to walk on fire without getting burned.
You could be the punk mermaid who beguiled
the seasoned sailor of my oceanic awareness
you were still flinging your nets far and wide over
like spatial tides of ionized wavelengths
keeping time with the stars in a Babel of voices
that stratified the lyrics of the seven visible celestial spheres
that could be seen with the naked eye
like the black grammar of the multiverse
trying to keep the light in some kind of context.
And if I drowned to compliment your singing.
You could write a biography of bubbles
about my life and times in the depths with you
and I'd be happy to sign it in the cursive spring
of the year's first seance to prove
every word I've said to you is a cult of the true,
even before I began to write secret loveletters to you
in the nebulae and clouds of unknowing in the stars
that precipitated out of my breath on a glacial windowpane
of an ice age that couldn't thaw fast enough
for me to open my eyes and see you shining
in ten thousand lakes all at the same time
like the orbits of a prophetic skull at vernal equinox.
poem by Patrick White
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I Would Speak To You In My Night Voice
I would speak to you in my night voice
if you were still here. If you were even as near
as the stars commingled in my breath,
I'd thaw my secret zodiac of crystal skulls
and let my mindstream run wild at your feet
like a flashflood waking the dry creekbed up
from its long dream of making the desert bloom
with real flowers in a mirage of metaphors.
I would ignite the pilot lights of a thousand stars
to blaze in an honour guard of mythic starmaps
waiting for you to bless their colours,
because wonder's never been known to start a war
with a world it's amazed by in every mesmerizing detail
without annihilating itself first, bursting
its own bubble in an efflorescent multiverse.
I'm a surrealistic mystic to give it a funny name,
and you've seen my hidden housewells, sacred pools
receiving the moonlight on the water like the blades
of ceremonial swords that tasted my blood first
like a rose bleeds on its own thorns, now let me
show you my watersheds, the fathomless voids
of dark abundance and bright vacancy
where my eyes swim like the Circlet Of The Western Fish
that never swim out of themselves
or the oceanic awareness they're luminously
immersed in up to their gills in the clear light
of the emptiness shining back at them like a distant mind.
Under the icy eyelids of methane seas on shepherd moons
I can feel life stirring like the muse of itself
and though it's too early in evolution to see yet
I've jumped ahead of myself like the light of the Pleiades
and gathered up a herd of wild telescopes
grazing on the stars like big-eyed, thin-legged antelopes
waiting for you to make an appearance on opening night
and watch how they'd dance and leap for you
like grasshoppers in the Bolshoi Ballet
who didn't give a damn that autumn was on its way
to throw cold water on the fire because in this universe
imagination is the physics of the place, and the ants
might busy themselves gathering butterfly wings
like the covers of slender chapbooks of poetry,
but I'm drunk on these lyrical elixirs of the mind
that I take as a sign that you are near in the night
and who has to worry about snow,
when they can live in your light on an occult planet
where myriad seasons can pass in a moment of spontaneity
and the fruits of life invariably fall toward the sky?
Are we both not rooted in the ancient fires overhead?
Nervous systems of black matter, scaffolding the mind
climbs up to paint the origin of worlds before their grand openings,
dark palettes of our third eye, skeletons of pictographic bones
beneath these scriptures of flesh we can read with our fingertips
like holy books and X rays written in the boustrophic signs
of the last time we ploughed the dark side of the moon together
and filled the siloes of the stars with galaxies
that spun like Tibetan prayerwheels, or Moroccan Sufis
or dust devils at the heels of winged messengers
conducting us like the flightfeathers of the dark arcana
we can read in each others eyes like loveletters
written in the cursive dream grammar the heart sings to itself in
when it's a lonely nightbird, and you're there like the stars.
poem by Patrick White
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The Lament Of The Last Train Whistle
The lament of the last train whistle
has disappeared into the distance
mournfully looking for its lost child.
October night in the woods
around an old fire pit of prophetic skulls
blowing ghosts of smoke in my face
that bring me to tears, a neolithic calendar
of all the old and new moons that have passed.
So many, so much, that used to matter
doesn't anymore. Dream figures
that shed their skins like the longer wavelengths
of watersnakes in an infra-red mindscape
of serpent fire dying like the sun
that can tell the hour by the taste of its ashes.
I throw more well-dried thresholds on the fire
like branches that used to be green with the tears
of sweeter departures and arrivals over the years.
All the light's jumped from orbitals
of the tree rings that sag like bags
under the eyes knotted like islands
in the heartwood of their xylem and phloem.
Here where the river parts like long hair
on the skull of a stone, I sit like a demon
in a sacred place, clarified, alert, and alone
as any nocturnal animal in the woods.
The chalkdust of my bones trying
to connect the stars to their constellations
snagged in the trees like the rags of spiderwebs
on the blackboard of a starmap as wide as the sky
and deep as the subconscious of the Burgess Shale.
It's not a betrayal to let go of your faith
when you had none in the first place
and you don't need a parachute on the edge of space
to plunge from paradise, or a weather balloon
of a bad Christian poet to shepherd Dante
like a moon out of hell. Be yourself,
especially when nobody's watching
except that same drone in the sky
that occasionally flashes a flake of silver off
its stone cold third eye to flint your awareness
that it's still there in the cosmic background
like a witness to your dreams and schemes
for a luxuriously appointed life of enlightenment.
Be yourself. The direct copulative imperative
that has supplanted the light as the first word
out of the mouth of creation. Be yourself.
And then let there be light by the side of a good fire
to let you see who that is as acutely
as you can see in the dark who that is not.
The migration of the Canada geese might seem
a broken rosary of new moons calling out
the names of God to you, and one unknown,
or silhouetted against the moon they might
suggest the afterbirth attached to a cut umbilical cord
and your heart might feel reborn somewhere
in the autumn of your life, a child of the fire,
a flower in the full bloom of its solitude
dancing with its own mercurial apparition
on the waters of life in the mindstream
always out of season enough to lag behind
so it can tell the time by the widening gaps in its passage
as it's waiting for the night to catch up to its own shining
like a thief of fire unchained from the rock
that broke the glass window of its transfixed seeing
with a meteor in the hands of an enlightened delinquent.
Or you might read the falling leaves as occult lifelines
on a Tarot deck of overlapping lifespans
like the scales of a dragon playing solitaire
beside the small inferno of a signal fire to the stars,
to let them know you're coming faster
than the time it takes for a thought to make it
all the way to death and back to birth again
as if you were pinging your emotions
like stray wavelengths from the oceans of your awareness
off the horns of the moon the way
you used to skip rocks out over the sea as a boy
to see how long they would keep on going
like a waterclock of stone before they sank
like the flying fish of the hard, cold facts of life back into
the numinous depths of your collective unknowing
where the stars aren't fixed to anything that isn't
flowing along with them like the wind on the mindstream
or a small fire catching its breath in the silence and the solitude
of so much radiance, before it's on its way again for good.
poem by Patrick White
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Spiders In Bubbles Plumbing The Depths
Spiders in bubbles plumbing the depths
of a new medium. Looking up from the bottom
the stars aren't stars, they're water-striders.
And me? I'm walking on the surface of my mind
like a very light-footed telescope. An antelope
who's just woken up from a dream
of a touring ballet company run by lions.
I'm sitting on a skull of rock close to the river
like some bare-footed prophecy
eating locusts and honey in the wilderness
that doesn't know whether to make heads or tails of me.
Anxieties of surviving the way I am mingle
with lyrics of longing to change
like the metamorphic passage of the river
flowing by me like the not so Milky Way
of my mindstream trying to clarify itself
in the course of its own running. But it's
as hard to part the waters with the wind
as it is with a sword, and I'm not looking
for any anomaly of nature to lead me to the Promised Land.
And I've been to PsychoBabylon and back.
And I had no eyes, I was blind, and I had to
follow my own Orphic skull up out of hell
like a song someone was whistling in the dark.
You live too long with ghosts, you start
asserting your wilfulness for all of them
and pretty soon the seance turns into an exorcism.
The fire that burned of its own accord,
stops crying like a candle and begins scrying
which way it's going on any one of these Roads of Smoke.
I'm a pilgrimage of one to a shrine I've never heard of
who would like to walk part way with you,
heart to heart until you couldn't tell
the new moon apart from the full
and like the snaking of this river
around these islands of birch groves
falling like pencils the beavers have chewed through
down to their stubs, we realize inseparably
it was always the right door to enter by, the entrance,
not this inseparable exit that keeps
stuffing the mouth of the oracle
like the three bells and all's well of a seashell
with oceanic starmaps as to where
we've buried the lost treasures of our hearts and minds
that we've been looking for as if they weren't
hiding out in the open where they've always been.
The hidden harmony of deep love is the dark bond
that ensures there can be no discontinuity
anywhere in the bubble-blowing multiverse
whether there are spiders on the moon in diving bells
that look like Schiaparelli's canali on Mars,
or the peculiar scars on a third eye with a detached retina,
or a neuronic crossroads in the roots of a nervous system
waiting for the wind to show up whirling like a Sufi
to tell it which way to go to transcend its spiritual vertigo
like a computer message from earth to a space rover
exploring the possibility of finding love and life
like mirages gathered around the house wells of a deserted planet
witnessing the return journey of life like a prodigal
to the first threshold it ever crossed over with a smile into exile.
poem by Patrick White
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Out Of So Much
Out of so much experience
so little to signify it
in a language
extraterrestrial life could understand
about our relationship with gravity
and what's crudely human about being a human
we don't even have in common with ourselves.
Out of so much sorrow
so many tears shed
like oceans of wounded salt
like bruised orchids of blood
like the lightyears between windows
living next door to each other
there is so much vastness between us
in an expanding universe
in the way we reach out to each other
like the stars in wavelengths of farewell
toward the red end of the spectrum.
Out of so much radiance
so much shining
not even the ash of anything
to show for it
when the last ghost has left town
with leaving so much
as a loveletter of smoke
propped up against the mirror.
Out of so much that was seen once only for good
and for a moment understood
until we started thinking about it
my eyes taste of what they've seen
like iron apples ripening in the rain
no one can take a bite out of
to improve their education
by learning how to bury the dead
because most of what I've seen
is pain without insight
pain without eyes
like impact craters in the skull of the moon.
A war of windows in a world without vision
without stars
without dawn and moonrise.
Viral eyes that abhor stained-glass
as much as they do the godless clarity
of the most advanced telescopes
playing Russian roulette with the stars
to prove the Big Bang was cosmic suicide
and we're here like living proof of the afterlife
of its bad karma
like a hunting religion in an agrarian society.
Out of so much mystic specificity
so little sense of earthly union
in the fractious sameness
that tries to blame everyone else
for why things are falling apart
as fast as they're coming together.
Five petals open.
And no flower blooms.
The sun rides a victory chariot through Rome.
The moon a deathcart through a slum.
But the stars know
how much the night keeps to itself.
How much it can't say
when the silence clears the sky of birds.
How much there is to express
that leaves even the dead speechless.
Out of so much verbiage
so many words
so many opinions
stuck like bats in burrs
just beyond the porchlight.
Out of so much hatred of life
out of so much hatred
of light and water
air earth and fire
compressed like a fist of coal
around the blood diamonds of the ideologues
who write political suicide notes
for whole nations by proxy
who don't know how to bleed for themselves
or convince the dead
they died for someone else.
Out of so many words
so many civilizations
from the Tower of Babel
to the New York Metropolitan
with its polyglot fire alarms
warning Alexander
about the approach of Caesar
and his love of books.
Out of so many voices
that spoke like trees in the wind
or out of burning bushes
and the light of the stars
or the thunder that follows the revelation
that it's raining on a lifeless Mars.
Out of so much clamour and noise of insight.
Out of so many whispers of stars
and rumours of waves
held up to both our shell-shocked ears
like skulls of oceanic awarenessness
that found us washed up on a beach somewhere
after some serious weather.
Out of so many poems and paintings and heartfelt polygraphs.
Out of so much confessing.
Out of so many speechs.
So many prayers and blessings
So many dead languages that carried their mother-tongue
like mitochondria in the DNA of their mouths
down through the generations
so that every living word
contains the corpse of a metaphor
like a mummy under a pyramid
or Lazarus catching his breath
to be interviewed
about a life after death
that looked exactly like his
when he woke up to this all over again
with nothing much to say about anything.
Out of so many with so much to say
how few are listening
as if their lies depended on it.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Light Doesn't Talk To The Flowers Anymore
The light doesn't talk to the flowers anymore
the way it used to. I can feel a lot of shadows touching my face
as if it were written in braille. Acid in the rain.
Tears of dry ice in the housewell. Weathervanes
knocking at the door to get out of the storms
they used to revel in, and the storms themselves,
no kamikazes riding a divine wind against the Mongols,
at best, a mango-flavoured tempest in a Japanese teapot.
And even Zen can't put an edge on the full moon
to cut through everything like a harvest being threshed.
No songs from the birds that used to wake me up in the morning,
only these spiders weaving their smokey laryngeal webs
like a voice that got stuck in the throat of a chimney
when it forgot, when you sing from the heart,
you don't need a medium or a seance. Not even an art
that's interested in what you're saying unless
you're obeying a grammar of headstones that don't know
what you're talking about until it's not worth
bringing up anymore in anybody's language
whether the metaphors are living or not. Words in a bonebox.
Locks and bars on our eyes. Dumb-bells stuck through our tongues
like someone was doing voodoo on the leaves
or the baton of a drum major in a parade
that's never going to come, afraid to leave home on its own.
Since I was a boy in the late Cretaceous,
I've always wondered about the timing
of the asteroids and comets and why
they had such an impact upon the dinosaurs.
But I hear they were already on their way to extinction
because of the earth's own volcanic activity,
and, at worst, the asteroid just accelerated
the flywheel of birth and death a bit.
Bad spin on an antiquated myth of origin.
Better luck next time, but right now the mammals
have evolved so far beyond that they're destroying themselves
in a long, slow nuclear winter of attrition
that's putting a pillow over everybody's face
like the cloud cover of a screening myth with an air force
that buffers the light with our own ashes
and much prefers smouldering to ignition.
What did Berryman say in a letter to Wang Wei,
centuries after the fact, just before he jumped from a bridge
into an ice-covered river with the Pulitzer Prize in his hands? -
O to talk to you in a freedom from ten thousand things.
Be dust myself pretty soon. Not now. Or words to that effect.
But just the same, it's hard to get into the skull
of the man anymore without the flame of a candle or a dragon
to see where you're going in case you nudge an atom the wrong way
and bring on another astronomical catastrophe inadvertently.
Minefield covered in snow like a pioneer cemetery
buried on the hilltop of an avalanche with a view of the valley below.
Dangerous, too, to move among the stars freely
like a rogue planet without a starmap, causing perturbations
in the orbits of the shepherd moons on an exploratory flyby
to see if there's any kind of intelligent life you can identify with.
The nights are getting darker. The stars are moving further apart.
Sooner or later everything tends toward empty space
until there isn't even any room left in it for itself.
And nothing ever dawns upon you there but endless entropy
and time comes to a sudden halt where spaces runs out
and the bones of the fossilized stars are left like empty chairs
in a dark auditorium with bad acoustics.
I'll write it on the wind now, while I have the chance.
I'll write it like a fire in smoke at a ghost dance.
I'll write it in blood and tears and rivers and stars.
I'll write it in scars and wounds as deep as roses.
I'll write it on the skins of the snakes that I've shed
like serpent fire running up the lunar thread of my spinal cord
like a lightning rod tattooing the clouds of unknowing
with the insights of fireflies into the mysterious darkness of life,
who know that one glimpse is enough of a Big Bang
to satisfy even the blind who go looking for their eyes
with their eyes like a windfall in a thunderstorm of picture-music
though they're still hanging on to the same old lifeline
like an umbilical cord between the backdoor and the barn
in blizzard of stars and butterflies. I'll write it in light.
I'll write it on the eyelids of eclipses and occultations alike.
I'll write it on the foreheads of the mute rocks
in runic striations of glaciers retreating north in tears,
I'll write it on my bones before I'm buried under the hearthstones
with a big rock on my chest like an asteroid
rolled over a cave to make sure I'll never rise again
like Jesus and Muhammad said I would if I was good,
or Ali Baba and the forty thieves muttering their shibboleths
on the thresholds of an artificial paradise, in case I wasn't.
Now is the light. Now is the loving and the living.
Now is the hour for the hidden nightbirds to raise their voices
in the sacred groves of the moon to celebrate
the brevity of their own longing for the unattainable
blossoming on the dead branch of their aspiration.
There's only so much time, and then, in a moment or two, forever.
The heart sings awhile like a red-winged black bird on a green bough.
And then the eyeless silence of the stars
who have looked down upon nothing for 14.3 billion lightyears
and watched the fireflies dancing to the music
of their own tiny hearts, lockets of light, of insight,
that open like seeds and eyes sown into the abyss
to let all winged things, and even star-nosed moles can fly,
out of the cages of their earthbound solitude like dragons
taken down like occult books from their hardwood shelves,
with the wingspan of constellations singing in the night to themselves.
poem by Patrick White
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When My Heart Isn't A Hummingbird
When my heart isn't a hummingbird on a keyboard,
it's a spider on a guitar. The long fingers of a surgeon
my mother used to say, the air bright with potential
and the creature with a purpose, a future it meant,
a destiny it was born to fulfil like a chain reaction.
Now it's an error of evolution just to make it through another day.
And nights, sidereal ballerinas leaping like Cygnus at zenith
over the toxic wavelengths in this snakepit of street life.
Blessings on everyone's head, I've shed a few lives of my own,
but I mean the nights, sometimes the nights,
scatter my own ashes over my head in mourning
like a nuclear winter that won't let me forget.
Now there's nothing perennial about my paradigms
and the flowers don't grow as imperial as they used to.
Ferocious weeds spring up among the downtrodden
and swarm the gardens of the sun-king, the cattails
impaled, and the heads of the poppies on pikes by the gate.
I'm looking for new moons in the calendars of chaos
to sow the teeth of a dragon under. Soil made vintage
by the dissolution of the dead who are buried in me
as I keep on living their deaths like an impossible ending
to a recurring dream I haven't woken up from in years.
Red alert. Don't climb higher than the mountain is tall
unless you've got a star in your eye you're going to follow
for the rest of your denatured life. But no one's listening.
They're all taking polls of bad examples on talent shows.
Can't stand the artificial lights or the trained hilarity
of the audience defrocking sacred clowns at a cult ritual.
But I found a flap at the back of the circus tent
I like to slip out through and let the darkness
wash the patina of blazing out of my eyes
and encounter six thousand stars whose shining
ease the mind by enlightening its unique insignificance.
I like to blunder my way into places alone
where who I am is nobody's business but the willows
and they're not saying anything to the wind
that's heard it all before. One moment you're the canvas
and the next you're a paint rag up to your alligators
in muddy oils trying to save an orchid from its own hysteria.
If there's any rafter of my life left standing
it's as fragile as a compass needle wobbling on a thorn.
One moment you're teaching spiders to play the guitar
without barring their chords, and get rid of
those old harps of theirs that have been collecting in the corner
like dreamcatchers they couldn't hold a note
if it were a velcro butterfly, and the next
you're boiling strings like spinal cords in a bird bath.
But alone, where there's no assent or denial,
and the false redeemers are orphaned
in their baskets and mangers among the hay and bull rushes,
I can juggle the crazy wisdom of myriad worlds
bubbling up in my blood like a playful multiverse
without dropping one of them, and swallow the swords
the moon lays down on the lake in tribute.
No blackboards in my freedom. No chalk fossils
among my crayons, I have been schooled
in the ghettos and still life studios of my solitude.
Here where the river emerges from a larynx of dead trees
I can think my way into the most open-minded modes of death
without having to turn around and go home again
or forget I'm just an organ of light that makes things visible
for anyone with an eye to spare, or the time
to listen to the picture-music where their senses meet
like parallel lives that have suddenly come into focus.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Autumn Swings Its Bell
Autumn swings its bell like an eyelid over my heart
and in the penumbral umbrellas that bloom
in a garden of eclipses and sundials,
I discuss you with an enlightened ghost
and an ignorant shadow
that have learned to see star to star
in this echoless abyss of silence and solitude.
Within, where the winds scrawl
their spray bombs on the wall,
delighted with their literary delinquency,
I realize what's beginning to look like
the mouthless howl of an ancient agony,
the collapsed bridge
of that which was separated
from the moon's reflection,
an ache deep in the ores of the earth
before it learned to speak of trees and rivers,
before its longing invested the dead branch
with a fugue of nightbirds
trying to write themselves like a dream
into the black candle of the darkness
with a feather of fire.
My heart is hollow, and empty,
a drunk in an oildrum,
and love seems nothing more
than a harvest of eyelashes
and all my works are seeds on the moon.
A kite crash lands in the powerlines.
A phoenix rises from its dearth of ashes.
I want to go deeper into myself,
I don't want to hover like smoke
over my sidereal cremations,
or atomize the particulars
of how time bends like the arms
of my galactic alarm clocks,
or if I deserve to be this lonely,
a lighthouse that went on shining underwater
after the last flood carried me out to sea.
You make things happen in me,
thinking of you, your lapidary tides,
blue species of emotion
are born, evolve, and die
for reasons unknown
in the space between two thoughts;
and there are crazy black spiders in the wine
that tempt me to swallow them
to know how things are connected,
and always an electric dawn
to dazzle the event with black holes
and blind, astronomical photographers.
I feel the tenderness of time and distance from you,
fountains that no one drinks from,
and space all the jewels and palaces of water
that no one owns or lives in
because they are reserved for your progress alone
through these wounded labyrinths of me
following the stars I've laced
in the wake of living your way free of the maze
that will prove to be
the foundation of another kind of temple,
the cornerstone of a vastly more intimate space
than the eclipse that encloses you now
in the bleeding flames of an endangered poppy.
I wish I were wise, I wish
I were young and becoming,
I wish I could engender a planet
out of this cosmic debris
I spew like a supernova across the night,
the exhalation of my spirit from the lamp I go by,
the arraying of the world in every breath.
I wish I were good and always cooling
on a farmhouse windowsill;
I wish I was not so tormented
by the torn skies that hang from the broken window
I hurled my heart through like a stone with a message.
I wish my enlightenment
didn't knock on every door of delusion
hoping to find no one home.
I place the cool kiss of a nocturnal snail on your skin,
and I look at the words and I wonder
if you'll wake with a silver smear on your breast
like the path of the moon on water
and know it was me
or feel the tremor of a forbidden ecstasy in your sleep
I burn a church to the ground like a ram
to honour the altar of your talent,
the passion, pulse, and fire-voice of your poetry
and the midnight shadows of your blue rose
shedding its eyelids like petals, skin and sky.
My words are metal birds, rocks
wishing for wings
so that this avalanche of mountain thunder
might once take flight in the dusk
toward the valley where you wander like a stream
turning over lost echoes
like the links of a chain with a key,
zeroes looping arms with the past
to bind one moment of the infinite
to the wonder of a passion that lasts.
My eyes are heavier
for having seen the light,
saturated with everything they've witnessed,
honey, ink, and blood,
and every tear is a sea closer to the moon,
and every lyrical efflorescence of the dream
is punctured by thorns,
and even the lies of the most subtle mirrors
have grown obvious
as the beast within is saddened
by its cultivated charm,
knowing what hour it is.
Understand me well
in this rogue season of awareness;
where lightning freezes in the flower-realms
and breaks like branches of ice,
where even black is too garish for clarity,
and sometimes even the sea
loses its nerve,
gaping into its own depths,
an asylum of lightless shapeshifters
for a likeness of itself
that isn't perfectly preserved,
the locket-heart of the last fish on the moon,
a Martian meteor in Antarctica,
this gravel walk of asteroids
through the gates and the gardens
of the whole planet I am in every piece,
though I do not glow like fool's gold
in the pan of the night,
and my throne has crumbled like hard bread,
and love seems to die at the first affirmation
like a bird against a late night windowpane,
this goblet of darkness
that stains the lips with an indelible silence;
though I have been deconstructed
by the suspicious sphericity
of my most cherished symmetries,
toppled like a tower of blood and water,
a shattered river
condemned to the beginning of spring,
a continent sunk in the depths of the mirror
barring this handful of nuggets and islands,
I am still immutable diamond
that learned its flowing from the stars,
and what I write to you
is not a thread of light
that holds the kite of your heart
up to the lightning like a key
to prove that your blood is a good conductor,
not the severed fishing line necklace of eyes
scattered like beads and dice
across the usual geometries
and impoverished granaries of the floor,
not the afterbirth of a morphological wine
that left you burnt orchards
as the fruits of the fire that promised
a feast of pears and cherries,
not the disembodied jewels of a ghost
weeping in the doorway of its skull in the night,
but the threshold and theme,
though for the moment you disdain the stairwells
in the hovels and mansions of love,
embittered by the lonely rose of space and matter
that pours the shining out the backdoor
like the lees of harvest stars
in the corner of the eye of an irisless bell
waking you up mutely
from a dream of falling in a morgue,
but the threshold and theme,
the story-line, the mythogem and motif,
the oceanic pulse and spume
of sidereal ferocities and urgent follies
robed like the king of shells
in the bruised purple of symbols
I take like the pulse of a lightning-rod
rooted like blood in me
to know as constantly as space
that I draw my life from you
like a shadow in a garden of blue fire
that courses through the dried creek beds
of these hourglass deserts
like the mystic tents
of a caravan of rain on the moon.
Wells, goblets, bells, or roses,
or thorns gnawing through chains and lifelines
to let the heart drift
like an empty boat from its moorings,
whatever season you assume
like the changing wardrobes
and unassailable affinities of a life
you must improvise as you go along,
I will always be with you
like shadows and leaves
and footprints and stars,
as I am now your next breath
whatever the scarves of fire
that grace your ghost-dance
with the black ribbons of an abysmal freedom
that feels like the halls of an abandoned prison.
I will liberate the key
like a hanged man
from the noose that adorns your neck,
and raise myself like a bell to your lips
and have you drink
the light and stars and flowers again
from the urn, the crown,
the hive of the heart
that sends its eyes out into a far field like bees
on the perfume trail of a summer constellation
to sweeten the light around you
with honey that burns for an emergent queen to find it.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Not Quite Dawn
Not quite dawn, night seeping out of the blue,
troubled sleep, no stars, and you, a week gone,
the whole universe applying its laws to your absence
which is the silence everything returns to like water.
I have never touched you, so my fingertips
can still play you into existence on a keyboard,
though the loss of your voice is a dead bird,
and I am a loose thread of blood in a labyrinth
of motherboards and micro-chips like me
who can’t find a way out of themselves without
turning away like a planet from its own stars.
How quickly the light comes, and the darkness
bleeds away like a love-letter under the door.
No eyes. No hands. No skin. No hair. I am
not even the ashes of a cleft witching wand
that went looking for water and caught fire instead,
and we have shared only the light of the mind
that paints a world with the shadows of a ghost,
and might only be the last habit of an amputee to leave,
a mere mime of the way our eyes make us see.
And yet the heart hurts as if you once were flesh,
and I am awake as if another bed denied me my own,
and I am angry and sad, scared and alone as if
the universe were shy one comet, one bead,
one firefly among billions who shone for me
and that light was brighter somehow than a galaxy.
The day grows a new skin over your absence,
and I am as out of place, out of time, as a streetlamp
still shining down on its feet in the morning.
And there could be a thousand and one reasons
you don’t write back, why the black crow caws,
the sky is a concrete rose, the blood of the poppy
runs along the gypsy blade of its undulant smile.
From the heights, I can see a small, blue egg
smashed on the rocks below, a gesture of ruin;
from the depths, the remnants of a shattered star,
and all I can do is stare into the relentless images,
a word without a mouth, like the new moon
shucked from my tongue like a black pearl.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Pure Intensity
Pure intensity. The point of a star. Blue acetylene
to burn out the slag of the soul and burnish the gold
that pours from the ore like the full moon out of the new
without any fear of ever growing old.
Give up it all up like nothing less
than everything all the time
until there's nothing left for death
to get its hands on. Nothing to curse. Nothing to bless.
But you can't always tell which is which
as the witchdoctor minimalist
at the back of the wax museum
steps out of the shadows of his spider-web
and says less is more and more is less, more or less
as the crow flys. But there's deceit in his eyes
and you haven't got time to consider all that
when your hair is on fire like a tie-dyed comet
and everyone's mistaking you as a sign
of their second coming, when all you want to do
is plunge your coma in the sun that shines at midnight
in every third eye of dew on the enlightened stargrass.
Everything passes, it's true. But if you pass
fast enough, time stops, and that grave in the closet
you've been hauling around with you for light years
becomes as huge as a sky burial
at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, or the pyre
of your own skeleton stoking the fire
that's boiling the marrow out your bones.
Stay inflammable like orchids and carnations,
waterlilies imported from your
igneous passion for the moon.
Don't ever let the gods chain you to a rock
in the Caucasus for a theft of fire
they didn't even bother to prove
before they put your liver on the daily menu
and sent vultures to peck your eyes out
like hors d'oeuvres. It's ok to be a wildflower
and bloom in fire once every seven thousand years
like the return of a Buddha in an urn of ashes.
But never lend your third eye out to an arsonist
who says he's having trouble focusing
and uses it as a lens to burn a black hole
in the middle of a poem that's been taken
out of context like a table of contents.
We've got the stars for that, and who needs
another epilogue to keep the fire going
long enough to be the third man on the match
for a bullet you didn't see coming like a space craft
because you were blinded by your own blazing?
Climbing the stairs to Joan of Arc's place,
she was conditioning her hair with a fire extinguisher
and getting ready to pull up stakes
and move back to the country where you can see
six thousand stars with the naked eye
or you can jump through the fire
like a witch without being burned
by the Burgundians for reigniting France
without a permit in a month of unbearable heat.
Even though hagiographers prefer
the fragrance of their saints in urns.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Something Deeper Than Stars
Something deeper than tears to weep for you.
I weep blood. I weep the silence
on the backstairs with the screen door
that bangs like the sound of one hand clapping
all through the night at the slightest gust of wind
as if a constellation were trying
to strike up a insightful conversation
with a wet match, the sceptre of a spent blossom.
I need a moon deeper than water to drown in.
I need to dance the pain away
in a sword dance of serpents
that know how to carry a tune
like a well fledged arrow, a beautiful toxin,
straight to the heart of the mysterious apple
that's sitting on top of my head like a prophetic skull.
No flower can say. Not any number of song sparrows
returning to the budding tree in spring,
no green leaf of an innocent tongue,
not even this dry leaf of mine in autumn
writing lyrics on the wind no one can read,
not even among ghosts, can find a voice
that isn't already the dead language
of an absence that can't be adorned
by a seance of words.
I light no candles. I summon no gods.
No pretence of knowing where you've gone.
No black hole that's as empty as
your ring on the table, no halo
that ever fell as far from heaven.
Good-bye's too optimistic and farewell's
the rudder of a grave on the rocks.
And if I were to raise the paper sail
of another poem like the waxing phase
of the funereal moonboat
that carried you away,
I'd make it black. I'd raise it
like the shroud of a black magician
that can make things disappear,
like an eclipse at half mast
and patch it with the skull and crossbones
of a different phase of the moon on the dark side.
I wouldn't return your personal belongings
back to the morning like starlings and doves.
But there aren't enough sacred syllables
swimming like moonlit fish
in the watershed of the silence
to open this fountainmouth of grief
like an aviary of flightless birds.
Nor would I risk having you remember me,
and turn around like a false start,
supposing you can still recall anything at all,
like a light you left on in the hall
the night you left home for good.
You were magic while you were here to work it.
You were the black nun of an enlightened cult of one.
You were the black mass of the sun at midnight
and the blood sister of the moon
that nicked your finger
on both her crescent thorns at once
so one was the cure to the other's wound
like the eyes of a cat, the fangs of a snake.
Given how close to the moon you were
it didn't come as a surprise
when you started writing me loveletters
inscribed in bone as if you'd just invented
a whole new language out of your claws
to make love to a poet in the nude when the moon
didn't lay its silver sword down between us
to keep us a threshold apart from our fingertips.
And it wasn't long before the elixir began to work
and I lost count of the number
of consensual metaphors I had for your lips,
similitudes for the night skies
that surrounded your eyes in a delirium of stars
that revelled in the crazy wisdom
of their mystically inspired atmospheres.
As just as beautiful as they were,
so were they irresistibly dangerous.
How many light years now
have I poured this memory of them
like a love potion over my roots
and waited for you to bloom in my bloodstream
like stars and blossoms streaming
through the heartwood of an ageing tree
that has as many dead branches on it as it does leaves,
and like an orchard anticipating moonrise,
knew you weren't coming anymore,
and the night bird had no one to sing for?
But, hey, I'm still a better seance
than I am an exorcism and if you can hear me
calling the faithful to prayer
in all directions at once like a paper airplane
the boy in me has sent out to search for you
like a loveletter in a hurricane of razor wire,
dripping with clusters of blood
the size of hemorrhaging grapes,
fireflies caught in a spider-web
of starless constellations that aren't a sign
of anything except I miss you worst at night.
If you could sense the tremor
in even the slightest wavelength of light
I'm trying to shine on the darkness to find you,
I'd write you a holy book of sacred silence
inspired by the shadows in my blood
that overtake me like strangers from behind
with an urgent message not to return home
to what isn't there anymore.
I'd sit out here all night by myself
beside the black waters of this night creek
unravelling like a ribbon in mourning,
that's been talking to itself
as it walks in its sleep on the water,
and I would beseech the stars with my eyes
to let me know if they've seen you,
and in my heart I would entreat them
with the solo of a wounded wolf
raising its head up in a wild prayer
to catch a trace of you on the chilly night air,
to give me a starmap to when and where
I can see you face to face again
and touch your eyelids in your sleep
like crocuses coming up through the snow.
Like moonrise in the apple blow of the storm
that scattered us to winds like all these poems
I've tried to write for you ever since
as if you were still somewhere nearby
like another pair of eyes
in my pain and my solitude
watching from the woods
the stars, the water, the moon,
under the stones in the river
that mark your grave and name
above the flowing of this endless epitaph
of leaves and blossoms and poems
as if you alone could still read them,
like the comings and goings,
of waterbirds on the moon,
the first draft of words on the wind,
maple leaves and keys on the mindstream,
and still understand what I was trying to mean.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Even When Life Sometimes Seems Like A Black Hole
for Rebekah Genevieve-Dolorese Garland
Even when life sometimes seems like a black hole,
a dark furnace full of the ashes of burnt roses,
it shapes the galaxies into sunflowers and starfish
and it's whirling with stars like a Sufi in rapture.
All my life I've tried so hard not to be afraid of my joy
and at home with my grief like a comfortable chair
that was beginning to take on the same airs as my body.
A holy war of one, carrying the true cross of the sixties
I thought was worth fighting for even long after
I realized I was doomed to dancing to the music
for the rest of the duration. And it's been as true
as Jim Morrison living the afterlife of Arthur Rimbaud
in deserts so desolate even the stars were shy of the darkness.
And I have wept bitterly as the moon went down
like a toxic goat skull into the only wishing well
for light years around, and it seemed, and it's
still dangerous to remember because time doesn't blunt all knives,
I was witnessing an ideological madness, that had
mineralized all the best ideals into fossils, froth
like rabies at its own hydrophobic reflection.
Biting at its own wounds in vengeance upon itself
for the way the water tasted polluted and there was acid rain
in the wavelengths of its tears more venomous than a recluse spider.
I saw how people brought armfuls of poppies and wheat
to lay down on the stairs of the temple in tribute and love
like a sacrifice from the heart they gentled down
upon the grave of a loved one that had died too young
and hoped would return the blood they were missing
as a sign that the roses were mending their severed petals
like eyelids being stitched back by the very thorn
that had made them bleed in the first place.
In a schizzy world, whatever you sacrifice like a lapwing
sooner or later, because everything tends toward its opposite
like twins that weren't anymore separated at birth
than the first and last crescents of the moon,
engenders in the nest of cosmic eggs it's dying to protect
farce and desecration that tar and feather it like an eclipse.
But every once in awhile that comes as often as now,
you meet someone inconceivably shining
in her solitude like light through a mysterious jewel
into one of the sacred weeping pools of the mindstream
and the moon silvers your heart like a sword
you were about to fall upon to save your face the trouble
and you take the hilt and the blade in both your hands
like an autumn equinox that's just bumped into spring
wandering off the beaten path to tend her lunar garden
and you lay it on the waters because choice isn't an option
like the flightfeather of the other wing of the bird
that can't take the measure of the immeasurable wingspan
of these event horizons, transits, zeniths and thresholds
I'm crossing with you like Leo and Virgo
across a heartscape of enlightened taboos
that have been singing to me all these years from a dark wood
like a lucid wavelength hidden in the ore of a particle
that only seemed so when you looked at it from afar,
that drew the sword out of the stone, the star
out of the darkness, the waterlily out of the marsh,
the heart of someone like you out of the nightsky
like a meteor with a panspermic rosary of life at its core
falling on the Fertile Crescent of a habitable planet,
or a whole new universe, with a punk version
of the Garden of Eden where the birds are all listening
to the Ramones, and Eve is raving with Adam in a mosh pit
teeming with infinite permutations and combinations
of love and life, of colour, poetry, light, energy, joy and devotion,
as if we'd both disembarked from these empty lifeboats of the heart
on the shores of this thriving island of stars
where the Milky Way meets the ocean
and all the constellations that travelled this Road of Ghosts
like the long, dark, strange radiant trip it's been
wash the deathmasks off their faces like old myths of origin
from the starcharts of our comets and scars
that have me smiling at you in wonder like this
as if my third eye had just shed its last telescope like a cataract
and I were the mesmerized gaping witness
to the first moonrise of an avatar of dark bliss
studded with the eyes of Isis raising new pyramids
in a desert of stars, as light as feathers, as light
as the crucibles, chrysales and cocoons of the nebulae giving birth
to these poems that break into butterflies of light,
fireflies and dragons that roar like supernovas
across the firmament, waking the valley up
to the morning of a whole new creation
as I firewalk along these oceanic shores with you
like two constellations when their myriad plinths and petals open
and one flower blooms like a bird with two wings
and sings because this universe isn't the shape of an hourglass
with dry oases and creekbeds dreaming
of solar flares behind the mystic veils
of flashfloods of the heart long over overdue,
but in every illuminated detail of the form you've taken
to enter my life, my love, my art, is a perfect likeness of you
that I am created again and again in the image of,
standing in the doorway of this stargate to love
without your metaphors on, so that after all these light years
of looking for you like a star through the eye of a needle
that felt it had seen enough to know when to turn around and go
a firefly like you out of the midnight blue
suddenly comes into view and ignites the air around me like the aura
of a inflammable passion without a fire extinquisher
to put it out because, at long last, as it is above so it is below.
And whether you drink it long and slow, or deep and fast,
or sip like a humming bird from your own skull
there's an oasis at the bottom of the hourglass
that's greening the sands like the grail of a woman
passing it to you like the love potion
of a water sylph of practising astronomical witchcraft,
standing by her well like Circe on her island on the moon
turning a man like a vapour of longing in a desiccated wasteland
into the full-blooded ocean of the black rose she holds
like the sidereal high tide of my life and my love in her hand
as the birds are singing in the roots of dark matter
like the loveletters of a punk band to the psychedelic sixties
and all the trippy, heavy metal flying fish
are swimming like cults of urgent stars
through the thorns and the crowns of the blossoming locust trees.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Who would be able to think?
I. Who would be able to think?
Who would be able to think
that your eyes as pretty
as stars shining in the heaven?
Who would be able to think
how restless my heart is beating,
that you are more beautiful than I had known before?
Who would be able to think
that your eyes are so pretty?
II. Who would be able to think?
Who would be able to think
that your eyes are prettier
than the sun hidden by banks of fog,
than the stars shining in heaven,
that the tears glittering on your cheeks
comes with a deep meaning?
Who would be able to think
that your eyes are prettier
than the glowing champagne which I am pouring
that the look in them would bring me to a confession
about feelings which hide in my heart like a lizard
while we touch glasses
and who would be able to think this?
III. Who would be able to think?
Who would be able to think
that your eyes are prettier than stars,
that you bring new meaning, to stars hanging in the sky
that your tears glowing against your cheeks
comes with a deep meaning?
Who would be able to think
while we touch glasses
that you are lovelier than I could comprehend before,
that you bring new meaning, to stars hanging in the sky
and when I pour sparkling champagne
the look in your eyes, could bring me to a confession?
Who would be able to think
how restless my heart is beating,
about feelings which hide in my heart like a lizard
that you bring new meaning, to stars hanging in the sky,
how deep I drown in the depths of your eyes
and that for a life long I have missed you?
Who would be able to think
that you bring new meaning, to stars hanging in the sky?
poem by Gert Strydom
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Snow-White (Part 1)
Hers were the beautiful blue eyes and the black long hair,
She watched her blood dropp freezing to burn in the air.
Her pale lips were keeping the mark of her love's glow,
She wanted a child having the skin as white as the snow,
The hair as black as ebony and the lips as red as the blood.
That red on that white looked as beautiful as a flower bud.
She was sewing and watching the ebony of her window's frame.
An angel became visible in the air to tell her the child's name.
''Light up this love, my Lord, and give me this child of light
Unbearable is this pain of mine, light up my soul and my sight.''
Coming up the stairs, the king saw this and he told his queen,
'This white angel is the most beautiful creature I've ever seen! ''
The queen's heart used to be like a little book being unread,
But in front of her husband, it has become an open thread.
He tenderly kissed her, ''Your broken heart is no longer dead,
Because for Snow White on the snow your secret has bled.''
When she gave birth to her child, the sun rose to be so bright
And everything in the castle could be seen in the holy light,
But when the king came to see them, he heard only the sighs.
When he saw his dead queen, sad tears flooded his black eyes.
While he was living with his child being a lonely sad father,
The king thought to bring to little Snow White a new mother.
''Light up this life, my Lord, because I have only fears and sighs,
Change my fate, because I need a new morn in my sad eyes! ''
He married again, but the queen's heart was mercilessly beating.
She was like a dangerous snake and poisoned was her greeting.
Her sarcastic lips were always keeping the mark of her hatred,
Her powers were hidden, because for her the devil was sacred.
She kept her frozen air, although the snow was melting in Spring,
Her words could remain suspended in the air to freeze everything.
‘'Mirror, dear Mirror on the wall, who in this land is fairest of all?
‘'You, my queen, are fairest of all'', echoed the mirror in the hall.
The Snow White grew up becoming more beautiful than the queen,
The king told her, 'You're the most beautiful child I have ever seen! ''
When the mirror told the queen, ‘'You, my queen, are fair; it is true.
She added, ''Little Snow-White is still a thousand times fairer than you.''
The king started seriously to think of the passion they had known
‘Cause the queen's self-satisfaction and insensibility have grown.
He realized that it's a wretchedness to continue sharing their bed.
He wanted to open a dialog with her, but the words left all unsaid.
poem by Marieta Maglas
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Want to Be Brilliant, Want To Shine Like A Black Star
Want to be brilliant, want to shine like a black star.
Trying to bend space with my mind. Trying to stop time
with my heart. Counting moments like beads on a rosary
of skulls, or shepherd moons on an abacus of gravity.
Though I know they're not all strung out like that.
Asteroids on a wavelength of light, or a spinal cord.
Or maybe I'm just trying to bead a guitar string
with a great black hole, or is it a lunar pearl,
in the center of a lyrical abyss? Workaday world
in a small town, who spends their time like this?
Not fortunate enough to have been born a carpenter,
I'm a mystically surrealistic, poetic astrophyicist
trying to come up with a new grammar for the stars
so all they have to do to express their shining,
is say, Metaphor, and as it is in the abyss, so it is everywhere.
Because I miss you like the main clause of my relativity.
The focal point of all my wavelengths. You're the radiant
and I'm the Martian meteor shower that's dying
to bring the gift of life to the Antarctic like the Leonids
did in the first place as I look at my face in the mirror
and think it's time for a change of species. Sometimes
it's crucial to sustain a few pathetic fallacies about yourself
so when you're under the moonweather of an estranged planet
and a black star breaks through the clouds like the anti-matter
of a waterlily, so do you. Funny how the flowers close their eyes
because none of them wants to miss the eclipse.
One of them said we're all looking through a glass darkly
but I don't see any soot on their petals,
and none of the telescopes are wearing shades.
I like to keep things clear in the light of the void.
I've come along way from the coal mines of space
to shine through your diamond so you can feel
a different kind of translucency that's eleven parts cheap thrill
in all the dimensions I can see you in, and one,
not even you, has discovered yet, that's the orphan of an exile
singing to himself to people the dark in a desert of stars
like a gnostic gospel in the mouth of a cave
to keep the evil jinn and bad spirits away
from the watersheds of my wishing wells
where the angels gather to mingle with the demons like water
they've just turned into wine. As for the other eighty-nine
realms of seeing and being what you see, they're shrines
I've devoted to you, swearing in blood and devotion
on the sidereal plinth of my sword, as I dedicate
all my prophetic skulls from the dark side of the moon
where the crows are wiser about lunar things than the doves,
to the enhancement of your radiance, your love and your art,
by deepening the dark, with a full heart, with things to harvest
that will make the abyss seem like a silo of stars you can break like bread.
poem by Patrick White
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No Gravegoods In My Solitude
No gravegoods in my solitude, no trinkets
from any spiritual world inside or outside this one.
The totem belongs to the dream that's buried with it
as the flower's engendered by the root it's taken from.
Mind is matter. Matter is mind. And it isn't as if
one is blind to the other because one shore
isn't parted from the other by the flowing
of the mindstream in between. Try to separate
the reflection of the moon from water in a dream state.
The moon is a characteristic of water as the water
is a feature of the moon. If you want to mediate
until you turn the vertebrae of your spine into a bridge
to get to the other side of a life you're already standing on,
that's ok as long as it's burning. Otherwise it's just going
to obstruct your path when you're shooting the rapids
of the Milky Way like your own spring run off
trying to saddle a rush of stars with a rudderless liferaft
and oars for spurs. Better to be a waterbird
with wings of your own, but what a thrill
to ride the snake until you can fly like a dragon
among the stars like Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider,
in the handle of the Big Dipper like a warrior Bedouin
testing his eyes on the dune of a tribal hourglass to see
if he can tell what hour it is by the dance of a distant binary.
It's getting late. Nightwatch at the well. The town
unpeopled by sleep. A choir of train whistles
practising their inquisitive requiems at every crossing
like Canada geese migrating south when the autumn stars arise.
More lonely than mournful, I can taste the shadows
in the honey of life as readily as the light. I can smell
the fragrance of time like the first snowflakes
in a lover's hair, trying to turn her into a constellation
to sweeten the night air. And even in the ashes
of the starmaps the shining sets afire
and scatters like a library in the urn of the heart
on a wind that carries away the passions of this art
of exhuming more life out of a shallow grave than went into it,
I can still burn in the dark like the ore
of undisciplined diamonds. I can still squander my light
on the eyelids of the fallen flowers like a final kiss farewell.
Time wastes a death on me. Years ago the wind arose
and blew that candle out in the open window
of an abandoned house and ever since I've been
drifting like a ghost of smoke in a diaspora of stars.
I bequeath to the rose, the blood of my wounds.
To the thorns of the moon, my scars. To the night
I leave my eyes. To the wind, my breath. My voice
to the nightbird whose longing put my lyrics
to the picture-music that's haunted me all my life
like the song of someone who loved me once
before I was born and began to forget. But my heart
that I could judge the worth of like a bell bound to the earth,
or a feather of fire in hell, in the palm of my hand,
I give that to everyone like the windfall of a tree in a storm.
Black walnuts and wild apples. Solar systems
of peaches and pears in the leftover orchards
of organic gardens bearing the fruit of a habitable planet
at the autumn equinox of the New England asters
and modest suns of the Jerusalem artichokes
for the birds and the squirrels and the bears.
You can't keep what you won't give away
and it's no good to you in a grave when it comes time
to throw yourself overboard to stay afloat
and weather the squalls on your own sea of awareness
like an empty moonboat drifting through the fog
calling out to anyone who'll listen on the coast
of a new universe that discovers you like Atlantis
to a ghost of the old world looking for a passage
back to the more familiar labyrinth of home.
Liberation is freedom through creative form, not from it.
Liberation is life. And life is all entrance, no exit.
And you weren't asked at the door for any i.d.
And no one's going to stop you from lowering the fire escape
to get away from yourself. And if you were to ask
the mirrors of your own awareness, they'd stop staring at you
as if they'd never seen a new world savage before.
Everyone's going to leave an empty chair at the table
sooner or later. Like the skull cup of the moon
you've got to pour your prophetic lees out upon the earth
if you want to give your abundance another chance.
You can make lanterns out of fireflies in canning jars
or you can abandon them to the spiders
in the corners of your eyes like dreamcatchers and kites,
but if you want to shine of your own accord,
albino fish in the darkest depths with stars in their eyes,
you've got to see the sun flowering at midnight,
you've got to greet Venus in the Pleiades at dawn.
You've got to unsilver the mirror like a stripper
until you disappear like a bird in the house of life
through an open window like a crack in a cosmic egg
to feel the vastness of the sky that transcends
the limit of your wings. Despite the eye-witness
in the mirror, where time is always in arrears to eternity,
you've got to give it all up like your shining reflection
if you want to stay here for your own protection.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Stars And The Moon
Sitting down on a bench outside my residence,
I could see the stars far away in heaven;
It seems to me like,
The stars are spelling out my name.
Over here in Africa,
I keep on wondering about the nature of things;
The very patterns of the Creator's mind which,
Is yet to be understood by many!
At times it is very easy to see the stars up there,
But at times too there are no stars at all! !
How far are they, if i may ask?
How big are they, viewing from my compound?
This makes me wonder about the stars at night.
Oh creation, why has it taken us such a longer time?
We still don't understand many of your wonders;
Are we clever to see or, too blind to see?
I don't even understand some of your myths.
Like the mystic cloud of the air is,
My delight of the realms to write this muse;
There are days that i could see the Stars but,
The Moon takes over at times.
The very moon-light that helps us in the villages,
The very time to gather around by the fire side;
To listen to stories and folklore tales like,
The tales by the moon-light as the saying goes.
The 'Kwaku Ananse' stories and,
That of 'Mr. Tortoise' stories from our Elders.
Sitting on a bench outside in Africa,
I could see the stars spell out my name;
Lovely Stars of my heart,
My candle is yet to burn out;
At times, i do see the Moon as well.
My state of heart is for you oh Moon!
One day, i will visit you up there;
Directional moon to my soul,
How sound is your hospitality out there?
In my viewing views, i could see you up there;
In my wondering of things, there you are!
Oh, the Stars and the Moon out there;
Greetings from me to you all.
poem by Edward Kofi Louis
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Looking At Stars From Spy Rock
Looking at stars from Spy Rock
on top of Foley Mountain,
Westport glowing like an alloy
of red algae and fireflies down below
around the sacred pools of small mouth bass
raised from fingerlings
to lure the fishermen of Hazelton Pennsylvania
to this pioneer pantry of wildlife up north.
I can remember you naming them out loud
like Santa Claus’ reindeer.
Deneb, Vega, Al Tair.
And I tried hard to look
but I couldn’t take my eyes off of you.
And I’m up here again by myself many years later
and there are two ghosts on the wind
casting their shadows on the Milky Way
two black holes in time
that took it all in
then disappeared.
We didn’t separate.
We just evaporated into thin air
and I can hear the flowers saying
in their small damaged voices
I’d rather die than put up with this time of year.
Semi-hibernating raccoons
and the occasional brown bear
looking for a last snack before sleep
before snow
before the flame of life
is turned down so low
it’s merely a candle living off
the lifespan of its own fat
just long enough to keep the dream
of what bears dream about alive
until hunger drives them out of their caves
twelve thousand years later
into a world they can no longer recognize
as the one that dressed up in their hides and their skulls
and spit-painted on their cave walls
and appealed to their power not to kill it outright
as it begged forgiveness for its trespass.
Bear magic on Foley Mountain.
Ursa Major in starlight.
And for awhile I thought you might be
my circumpolar girlfriend
and I could be your mystic star map.
You had the right ascension as me
but the wrong declination
and like everything else
that’s ever led me out of the wilderness
like the only direction left to go in
you rose and set over my event horizon
and what had been the fixed stars of my eyes and heart
wandered off like fireflies and chimney sparks
into a darkness I could only imagine
enhances your shining somewhere
like a warm breath of life and light
hovering in the cold night air
as mine is exorcised here.
We breathe the stars in
and then we breathe them out
and it’s been going on like this
for thousands of light years.
Three more nights
and the moon will catch up to Jupiter.
You said you couldn’t be famous
standing in my shadow
but what you didn’t realize at the time
I was the shadow of your shining
whenever you approached the earth
like Venus on a moonless night.
But how remote it all seems now.
Encounters of the human kind
reverting like the unploughed fields around here
to something intimately alien and wild.
We embodied all these stars once.
We stood here on this mountain once together
and breathed these vacant interstellar spaces in
as if we could hold all of space and time
like a single dropp of insight
into the circuitous blossoming
of our riverine hearts
and oceanic minds.
And what myth of spring fish
could fathom our depths
though it jump like Pisces into the boat?
Up here in my eagle-eyed eyrie
do these receding hills at my feet
remember anything as vividly as I do
as the sound of your voice when you spoke
and the mountain came down prophetically
like an avalanche of stone tablets
across the ups and downs
of the road that led us up here
to look into the empty beyond
as far as the light
we were given given to go by
whether it be the hundred billion stars
of Messier thirty-one
two million light-years away
like the sister galaxy you are to me tonight
just this smudge of light at eleven o’clock
above the middle star
of the constellation Andromeda
or a firefly in the spider mount of a parabolic mirror.
Sometimes you can notice things more clearly
that you can see head on at the time
out of the corner of your eye
as you look away from your line of sight
astronomical units of light later.
I have come back to those moments
from so long ago
like time with an expanded field of vision
of wildflowers dying all over the mountain
like cornflowers in the grave of a Neanderthal
incarnadined by red ochre
though none were ever buried here
we still share this common ground of death
or Indian tobacco at the eastern gates of theburial hut
of an Algonquin who once stood here as I did
and gazed upon the moon in wonder
estranged by the wound of the rapture
just moments before he disappeared for good
into the bone-box of his having been here once
to amaze his solitude with precipitous stars
looking up from the godless pulpit of Spy Rock.
The cedars sway in the wind
like children learning to swim beside a pool
ploughing the air with their arms.
And the shadows tremble
like the waters of life
inside the heartwood of a rootless tree
the moon ripples with forgotten springs
that once made the fish jump at fireflies
wavelengths out of reach of their eyes.
Sight is a kind of love.
As above so below
like the palindrome of the moon goddess Anna
in the Arabic jana
the English heaven
and the Greek ouranos
Romanized into Uranus analeptically.
O what a brutal exchange.
All that life and light and love
all those stars
all that seeing
just to exhume a few dead metaphors
and breathe a little life into them
as if you were giving
mouth to mouth
heart to heart
spirit to spirit
resuscitation to words
that once saw their whole life flash before them
before they drowned
up to their necks and out of their depths in stars.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Over Here, You See
Over here, you see, this is where I keep
a hospice for the strawdogs and voodoo dolls
that wander in off the road like spiritual emergencies
that have had enough of being used at sacred rituals.
I made peace between my blessings and my curses,
blew the angels off the heads of the pins
they were dancing on like the axes of uninhabitable planets
stuck through my eyes, the splintered glass
of wreckless stars it took more than light years of tears
to wash from my seeing when everything looked so painful
and the angels were grinding reflecting mirrors
to give corneal transplants to the way I looked at things.
Away with the blessings. Away with the curses.
The doves and the crows, the veils and the bars,
and the way some stars burnt like meteor showers,
chimney sparks, with the radiant of a welder's arc
trying to repair the rip in the hull of my heart in drydock
whenever I scuttled it like the moon on a coral reef.
And this is the matrix of the lost and found
of all I've known and seen and couldn't find
any other context for other than the artificial paradise
of this womb in waiting everything that hasn't happened yet.
There are generations of orphans here
with toyboxes full of the enduring relics
their mothers left like endearing fossils
of a love that never came back to claim them.
Petrified butterflies among the sea life of the Burgess Shale.
I keep a place for them in my heart like a pressed flower
until they can root on their own, and bloom
like a star they can follow anywhere, and it's home.
This is the dark closet where I hang my skeletons
like a wardrobe of mannequins that have worn
my skin from time to time like the flying carpets
of world-creating cosmic membranes blowing
shapeshifting bubbles into hyperspace like alternative lives
that occasionally pop on the razorwire of their umbilical cords
like prophylactic thorns on the miscarriage of a rose
as never to have existed, as Sophocles said,
is the best part of life, bar none. Whether you're dressed
like a zodiacal king in the cochineal robes of the universe,
or wear the richer rags of a man who walks naked.
And you don't want to know what's in there,
but over here in this chamber next to where
the picture-music has a sound proof room of its own
when its rehearsing the silence of the mystery that beguiles it
like a lyric of blood in deep irreconcilable exile,
if you look through this little mica window
you can see the dragons glassblowing their tears
as delicate and fragile as the rain that falls
like chandeliers from a lunar watershed just below
the manic desiccations on the sun-baked surface
of a reflected glory that doesn't come
with dedicated flowers devoted to hummingbirds
that showed them the sweetness of life in surreal replication.
And this water palace has a thousand rooms
with great bay windows and walls that can speak
of the great events of tragedy and bliss
they've witnessed discretely in a cosmic context,
hung with heavy velvet curtains of blood
and tapestries of loose ends the moon unweaves at night
into a million separate wavelengths of enlightenment
it will gather on a loom of blood into the narrative unity
of tomorrow when the tide draws back like an arrow on a bow.
But there's one floorless, wall-less windowless room
ageless as eternity and bigger than the abyss
that's lit by the dendritic candelabra of fireflies and stars
coming into blossom nocturnally like an apple tree
on a cold night in spring, I especially want you to see.
This is the doorless niche of my solitude I burn in like a candle.
This is the inexplicable emptiness in my heart
that's learned to cherish the abyss with open arms,
not just as space, though learning that is wisdom,
but as living people and inanimate things, stars,
leaves, ants, wolves and windows expressing forms
to console themselves in the pervasiveness of their isolation
by taking a hidden secret and making it known
as the black waters of earth long for the moon as a companion.
And this is where I have enshrined your dark radiance
like a telescope in an observatory buzzing with stars
at the prolixity of wild flowers opening themselves up
like loveletters they received anonymously in the night.
This is the sacred grove of the silver-tongued silence
where the birds of insight ripen the fruits of their longing
like windfalls of jewels in the ores of the darkness like eyes
that have sweetened and deepened their seeing enough
to orient the Parthenon to the rising of the Pleiades
liberated like a flock of doves flying off everywhere
in the ubiquitous directions of prayer voiced by the light
of the sailing ones nursing the catasterism of the heart
risking a more enlightened suicide
by falling in love from ever greater
mythologically inspired heights in the depths
of my astronomical awareness of the shining that is you
as if you were the only mirror in the room I can look into
and see way more than the eclipse of myself
than I ever expected to.
poem by Patrick White
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In the Spirit of the Vernal Equinox
In the spirit of the vernal equinox,
Arriving on the 20th of March in 2010.
And in this year and on that day,
For us Spring then begins.
To spark the budding of love,
That awakens nature all over again.
Yes...
Spring is near!
In the spirit of the vernal equinox,
An equal twelve hours are shared...
Between daylight and night.
Normally only true on the Equator.
And for the rest of us,
We get more or less!
Depending upon where we live,
In the Northern Hemisphere.
And what that chosen address.
Shared with those we wish to make known,
Our feelings made to them clear.
With an assisted lingering of eye contact,
Obviously fix with just a bit of lust that appears!
Just a bit to test the interest.
Yes...
Spring is near!
In the spirit of the vernal equinox,
Spring is just a date.
Real Spring might arrive sooner or later.
Although some folks may be preheated...
With anticipation,
For a blooming awaited that takes place.
Yes...
Spring is near!
Keeping those with a patience.
But admitting...
The blood within them races and pulsates!
'You bring out the dog in me,
Clarice.'
~And 'WHO' is 'this' Clarice?
My name is Wanda! ~
poem by Lawrence S. Pertillar
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Who Isn't Trying To Live
Who isn't trying to live
as they vaguely hope they are
whatever extremes of moderation they've gone to
behind all the masks and fraud?
Crosswalks and bridges of fire
trying to get to the other side of themselves
like the promised land, or God,
ladders up to heaven
like vertebrae and ribs,
and ropes like spinal cords
down a well on the moon
that hasn't enthroned hell in her depths yet,
everyone's trying to put a face on chaos
they remotely hope is their own.
One by one the plum blossoms
fall to the nightstream
like loveletters
from the branch of the tree
that read them once and then let go.
No one knows where they're from
or where they're going.
Some give their wings up
like graduate degrees to the ants
and others are raising their sails
like the flames of a great fire
that consumes the prophet
who wanted to hold his arms up
like a wishbone to the lightning
in the revery of his desire
until everything is ash and nails,
and others who think they're
the rudders and keels of the flowing.
Sometimes I am nothing more
than this terrible inevitability
of flesh and bone
alone in the vastness of my unknowing
where neither ignorance nor wisdom prevails
and then it's as clear as stars
on both sides of the window
that everyone's everyone else's good guess
as they encounter one another
passing the time
in a crumbling game of graveyard chess.
I don't know why what's wise about me
always ends up listening to myself
like a fool's confession
but I've run out of rosaries
like habitable planets
and my homelessness has exposed
the ruse of divining purity
in the afflictions of compassion
as if everything had evolved in sorrow
like a heart-bending occasion for tears
as the mountains that fell
like an avalanche of cornerstones
into the valleys they've dug
like pyramids and graves over the years
abide like salt in the eye of the sea.
Intelligence might be an elaborate mode of paranoia,
but eased into the wonder of being here at all
with trees and stars and the midnight rainbows
on the necks of the grackles
and the hectic butterfly among the grape hyacinth,
since I was enlightened
by my absolute uncertainty,
I have gathered all my voices together like leaves
and burned the old texts of myself
for not being much of a liar.
Five petals opened
and one flower bloomed
like a good laugh.
Now my awareness
is a kind of playful fire that doesn't burn
what it consumes
though the light
still tastes of the jewel
and even as the good-byes deepen their voices
like echoes in wells,
because I've grown older
and autumn keeps shedding its choir,
the hellos still take on a life of their own
as if nothing had changed.
An illuminated clown
I am astounded by the profundities
in every jest of being
revelling in the creative hilarity
of its mystic specificity
and how every time I get serious about something
as if I had just remembered myself,
I bring the house down.
Only a hypocrite is humble enough
to underestimate his own irrelevance,
and go sorting through himself
like a cellphone in the ashes
but for those who have become fire,
aspiration is achievement
and fulfillment and desire,
one breath. In every event
there's nothing to be
further than you can see.
But that doesn't mean
take a harder look
as if your life were a book
you were learning to read
or a mirror you had to stare into
until your eyes bleed
to know who you are.
When you stop thinking
every perception is a clue
to who you are
you'll shine out like a star
ahead of its own light
and stop trying to recognize God
through the featureless eyes
and vigilant simulacra
of a stolen identity.
You will be neither partially
nor wholly yourself
and before and beyond
will not seem
the unending extremities of now
rounding the skull of a clock
that's lost its way home.
Your seeing will grow deeper than eyes
and you will stop sending
your reflection out
like the moon's last lifeboat
to haul you up out of the abyss
like a fisherman gilled in the tangled mess
of his own s.o.s.
You'll let go of the oars
and breathe easy like the sea
and in every blossom of being
you will taste the whole orchard
drunk on its knees in laughter,
not knowing where to begin.
poem by Patrick White
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