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I Sit At My Window

I sit at my window
trying to translate the Kufic script
of the shadows of the trees on the snow,
smoking the invisible ink of the light
over the flame of my mind
to clarify my seeing
by realizing there is no deep or shallow
in the fathomless depths of I am,
nothing hidden, nothing revealed.

And it's not so much that I am in the presence of the world,
but that the presence, the world, is me,
and if I go looking for it,
only my fingerprints will be found
like these violet shadows dusted by the snow
under my multitudinous mugshot in the mirror.

So I open my mind and my eye, my heart and my hand
and let things arise as they will,
knowing that even this is a blunder
that advances my tardy illumination by another eclipse.

This morning blue is the taste of the sky
and I am alive again at my desk
to wonder who or what or why I might be
this wondering spontaneity
circling like a bird in the abyss,
feathered by feeling and thought
for a tree or a meaning to perch in
that hasn't already been struck
by the lightning of my homeless insight.

Indwelling energy in the turmoil of a terrible silence,
I am an ambassador of water to an unknown star
that foils my blood with light the closer I approach
and I don't know what the message is
or who it's from, but every time I deliver it,
my head comes off like the moon.

At some point you have to give up looking
to go on seeing, you must
come to a full stop
if you want to liberate the pen
that indicts you like an assassin
with his ear to the wall.

So I go by night, unheeded and alone,
a constellation of my own
that doesn't read the braille of itself
reflected like direction in the starchart on the lake,
cored like eyes into the dice of my bones,
or mummified by a legend in a straitjacket
interred in the long-standing consensus of a guess,
knowing I would only be following my own footprints
like the shadows of these words
that flow from the trees in the snow.

And there are squirrels that leap from branch to branch
of these arboreal letters like commas
that don't know where they go
and wrens that perch like quotation marks
around things that can never be said
that everyone claims they know
as they call out their name
like the echoless vocabulary
of a febrile grammar in a mad dream
as if their whole life were ingathered into one last scream
that might shatter the mirror of the way things inevitably seem.

I listen to the world and hear in each person and form
the mindstream moving through the night
like the voice of a mystic alphabet
returning to the sea
with news of itself
whispered into its own ear.

And if sometimes the stars think
my seeing goes too far,
my seeking exceeds the bounds of the light,
as it turns planets like doorknobs
to open new rooms in a dark mansion
that stands like an abandoned cornerstone of the night on a hill
waiting for me to return like a lost threshold,
or the faceless side of the moon to a window,
then let me here and now confess to my own denial
and knock on the door of the next false address
to see if I can find who wrote
this loveletter that slashes me open like a smile
and reads me out loud to the stars on the wind
as if I were the last flare from an empty lifeboat.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Lighting It Up And Blowing It Out

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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When The Blue Dove Turns Back

When the blue dove turns back,
exhausted by looking for things
she hoped to find,
blue blood to the dark side of the heart,
no land in sight, no blithe word,
no sprig of olive in her beak,
and the bruised sky turns black
and there’s nothing to seek
but the misdirections of the stars,
she looks for shelter
under the wing of the dragon
that takes her into his darkness
like the night takes in the moon.
Just for her he disarms
the claws on one wing and a prayer
like a dead branch to receive her blossom.
She thaws like snow in the heat
of his ancient serpent fire
and weeps like a window
for things that go on forever.
Like the homeless continuity
of her random flight plan.
He speaks to her tenderly
like silence out of the enormity
of his solitude within
as if she were standing
in the shadows of opening doors.
No lover, no assassin, no eclipse,
no starmap to anywhere,
not a sage of snake wisdom,
his yellow eyes slashed like full moons,
he says, you’ve got wings, just like me
and maybe it’s not landfall you’re looking for
not something continental
to rest upon like a mountaintop
but the wind, whichever way it blows,
wherever it goes
that is always vagrantly at home
and everywhere in touch with itself.
Just as the night sea never
severs itself from its own weather
whatever mirror it wears
with or without a facelift,
you might think you’re so far out of it
you’re flying a kite on string theory,
a high note on a stave of power lines.
But what are these if not
your own umbilical and spinal cords
attached like wavelengths and lifelines
to everything in the womb of the dark mother
who keeps on giving birth to you
from one bucket of a waterclock
to the next forever?
And when you’re lost in your own eyes,
is the night not compassionate,
does it not lay out a starmap before you
and say go whichever way you want,
follow whatever star you choose.
In an omnidirectional world of light
they’re all true north
even when you’re walking
in the shadows of your own shining.
Even when you’re trying to reach landfall
by cooking rocks in a tinfoil crack spoon
like the feminine gender of Columbus
in the Caribbean islands
when you break up
like Pangaea into continents
as if you were fracturing prophetic skulls
that didn’t take their own advice,
hoping someone might name one after you.
And I can think of a few
that could be immediately renamed after you
though you’re not the first
nor the last to discover them.
Mu and Atlantis.
But they’re not the kind of place
you want to pilot an ark to.
And if you think it’s hard now
try tugging a shipwreck up from the bottom
to see if even one of a kind survived.
There you can eat the carrion of corpses
like the white crow
Noah sent out first
to look for dry land
then cursed the bird
for feeding off the drowned
with a hoarse voice
and an eclipse of black feathers,
turning diamond back into coal
you can cook in a spoon
like forty nights of new moons
that never open their eyes
because they’re as stillborn
as the porcelain doorknob
of a cosmic egg
you can only break out of
on the inside
by letting the world
unfold your wingspan
like a loveletter to yourself
you finally decide to send back like word
of a blue dove at peace with herself
at the first sight of real land
even from the crow’s nest
you’re living in now
from hand to mouth.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Earth Hides Nothing From You

The earth hides nothing from you
when its time comes to be revealed.
Not the bones of the dead, not the green wind
blowing on the young leaves of the maple
to see if it still remembers how to break into flame
or the loaded horse-hair brushes of the flowers
trying to decide what colours to apply first
to the blue-toned underpainting of the sky on their easel.

And this is the essential freedom of information act.
Walking with a thoughtful, cooly blissful, festive spirit
on a windy night by a spring lake trying on stars
like earrings to go with the season like crocuses
realizing, as if you weren't there alone, though you are,
how inestimably unique and precious it seems
just to be aware of this lake in the moonlight
trying to grow waterlilies in her Mars black hair
and one wild iris, because she's obviously French.

And I can tell by the way the eddies and ripples
circle and tendril the sensuous undulance
of her dark depths, and the way she's eyeing me
as I toe my way along the path I'm making up on the go,
she's intrigued and modestly threatened
or she's got other things on her mind
if I'm meant to know, I'll know, in her good time, not mine
because there is no birth or death in the present moment,
it doesn't have a future, it doesn't have a past,
and it flashes by so fast, it hasn't even happened yet
so everything is still and silent and timeless
and yet nothing is hidden, nothing held back.
Everything's shining out like a star
that can't keep what it knows to itself.
And any lingering question
of who you might have been is everywhere
reflected in the universe like a face in a mirror
with no one standing in front of it.

Something deep within and without me seems
to humanize the lake in my mother-tongue
and how astoundingly wonderful just to listen
to the lake's accent when she answers back
in a language I can fully understand is universal,
rich with metaphors and similitudes that are the bloodlines
of everything in existence rooted in a grammar of dark matter
that can be as eloquent as the stars
when it waxes lyrical in spring, its uncontainable heart
overbrimming with joy at the return of the nightbirds.
The great, blue, lunar heron and the solar ray of the osprey
returning after long absence to their nests,
like lost jewels to a ring, eyes to the skull of a blind seer,
high in the Ys of the dead trees that look like harpoons
and dangerous tuning forks and witching wands
out whaling for water, stuck in the flukes of the lake.

Evanescent shape-shifters in the vagrant emptiness
learning to read each other like a star group,
say, the Pleiades, the daughters of Atlas,
the cornerstone of the world it upholds like a starmap
adjusting our eyes, our seeing, our unreasonable being here at all,
to the light and gravity of everything around us
in harmony with a life that's never
at peace with itself creatively
to keep the wild grapevines growing like grails
that everyone seeks like sweetness and light
at the root of the truth of themselves, as soon
they'll be sipping bliss from the towering stars
like ruby-throated hummingbirds from the larkspur.

Be empty as a cracked cup or an eyeless skull
and know what it is to be filled
by a lake that takes the low place so you
can flow into it like a bloodbank into the lifestream
of the spring run off of winter stars thawing in the dark hills
like patchy galaxies of snow that have found a way
to get off their islands by realizing
one wavelength of light
one wavelength of water
one wavelength of thought or insight
one wavelength of love and compassion
one wavelength of a seeker with a mindful heart
is all the flowing of the same night creek
growing into consciousness like a stranger
we come face to face with as it dawns upon us
emerging out of this dream of a self
like a dragonfly from its chrysalis,
like the wet sapphire of an eye
from the dark abundance of the seed
that prophesied that it would be so,
the best way to navigate your way
on this ocean of awareness even if you're shipwrecked
like these dead trees at the bottom of the lake
with herons in your crow's nest
is to take your hand off the wheel and let go.

Let go the way an archer releases a bird from a power line
or the first purple marten of the year
from the blossoming bow of an alder branch
hung with catkins in keeping with the fourth month
of Bran in the Celtic calendar and the letter, Fearn,
in the Druidic way of speaking to trees
to ask for directions through life and death and beyond
as if they'd made a library out of the whole forest
by listening to the wind in an alder copse
in a language the alders understood
they spoke in common with the water stars
of the blind and enlightened alike.

And if there's no one to fall in love with,
or out of, this time of the night starwalk
the circuitous blossoming of your way
deep into a nearby grove sometime,
along the shoreline of the improbable concourse
of the way of things like a wild grapevine
gave up being on the go, for growing,
once it got a taste of its own wine,
and watching the Pleiades like crown jewels
in the burgundy upper branchs of a birch
closer to heaven than you could ever
have imagined you could be,
fall in love with a lake with a French accent
and the soul of a Celtic sybil, and doing
what the moon does with her lunar sword unsheathed
lay your silver tribute down upon her waters.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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In You

In you I come to the end of roads,
and an alphabet of burning wings
falls from an indigo sky
like meteors trying to write
the unsayable in a slash of light,
in a language of luminous scars
the night beatifies with mystic knowledge
that wants to name you
so deeply in thresholds and stars
the charged silence
is giving birth to an indelible mouth,
a doorway of blood,
an ancient grammar of fire
the wind puts on like a robe
to scry the darkness for a voice
that could fill the goblets
of the moon's dead seas
with the wine of a radiant wound,
so much within me
already the tongue of a bell
that can taste you like blackberries.
The whole of you
in every single dropp of your eyes,
you are the black swan
of the eclipse that rares its reflection in water,
the dark orchid in the shadow of the dragon
that sways like a bell in the night,
even your absence a shape of cherishing,
a harvest of shadows beyond the light
of the lamp that burns for you.
Within the deepest abyss of myself
where the heart stands alone
like a single black pillar
in the twilight wasteland of the world,
a mysterious temple to the ultimacy
of having been here once
to suffer the passage of form and time,
everything a gesture of space
that thaws back into itself,
I have written your name
in the hourglass of my blood
like a whisper of secret ink
that once voiced the light to be
and shook the stars like wheat
out of its blind abundance
and will be remembered forever
as the first intimacy of the sea,
and there is the rumour
of a dream in the air,
the fragrance of an approach,
that out of an ocean of light
the tide will embody a woman
like the shore of an island
littered with fingertips and kisses
enmeshed like galaxies and starfish
in the exhalation of her veils
and our lips will meet like archers,
and our bodies will sing like arrows
sunk like orchards through the heart
and long after the last flame of life is shed,
the night will silence the birds
in the groves where we bled like poppies
to open the gates of the mystery
like keys and rain, or the rosary of black pearls
that chants its prayers to the night
like the slow alarm of autumn geese
in the eyes of a human face.
I try to say what can't be said,
pouring my spirit
into the wineskin of every word,
but my heart is a larger apple
than the bough of my voice can bear,
and the silence
that would erect temples everywhere like flowers
spun from the auroral silks of my soul
and perfume the air with the pollen of sacred fireflies,
every emotion a priest with a shaven head
to honour the moon
climbing the stairwell within me
of a million horizons at once
in every breathless step,
falls away behind me like the wake of a sinking ship
that lowers me into my coffin like a lifeboat
or a message in a bottle
that pleads like wine with the emptiness
for an alphabet that isn't in arrears to time
to say you to the night
in a lightning breath of life beyond
these elemental likenesses I carve
from a quarry of stars.
And I know I ask for immortal children
from a human womb,
and wide as my powers are
to exceed the sky with homing birds,
to adorn the dead branch with windows
that dazzle the roots of dawn,
I am the ashes of a black star in daylight,
a stone man with a chain for a tongue
when I try to swim like Atlantis
through the depths of your shining within
and the last word, the last life
to flash across my mind as I drown
again and again like a pulse
in the embrace of your beauty
is always the world as it is
before anything was said.

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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The Night In The Wounded Mirror

The night in the wounded mirror
is only a childhood away from my face
and there's always a shattered window
between me and my starless shining,
and a dead bird upturned on the sill
as if the sky, too, had its quota of roadkill.

Looking back from all these
lightyears and constellations away,
on the black day I was born under an eclipse
like a flower clenched into a fist,
an eye without an iris darker than a shark's,
I suspect there was a lot more suffering back then
than I was able to live my way through,
estranged in the corner of a kitchen
that was a feeding frenzy of knives.

I still can't leave one out on the counter
without fearing it's just another punctuation mark,
the claw of a comma in a long sentence of blood.
At best, it's the silver scar of the moon
that slashed me open like a well-honed loveletter
that wasn't meant for me.

And I still don't know how to approach
the child I was, the child I still am
time-travelling through himself like a glacier
as if he could put a stop to evolution
or survive his extinction
by keeping to himself like ice.

I look upon his solitude and silence,
the unaccusing indictment of his face,
like a cold, brass plaque
commemorating the unidentifiable victims
of an atrocity that can't be understood.

He's still seven and I'm looping through sixty
like the spine of a calendar
shedding me like autumn,
a picture of turning leaves on every page,
until there's no way of telling what age we are
in this season out of time,
and I want to love him, I want
to say things that could heal us both like water
before I take him with me into my grave,
but I don't truly know how,
and there are secret vows of violation
that are taken without a mouth
and assassins of intimacy in the shadows
and children sleeping in snakepits
who make up their own bedtime stories
and dream of things that can't be told to anyone
who hasn't been devoured in their ancient infancy
by the furious innocence of the sea.

Dark-hearted jewel
of a child in the night,
older than light
who has made more of me
than I can make of him,
when I weep for what he knows
and will not say, what am I,
what are these words
in the inky shacks of the trees
but the lengthening shadow
of the darkness that pours out of him like blood,
or duct-tape like moonlight
over the mouth of a scream?

And if I come back now
like the legend I have made of his sorrow
to gather him up in my arms
like a harvest under a full moon,
and if I sit with him all night
without saying anything
here on this skull of a rock
until each of us is the memory of the other,
could it make anything better,
would it take the thorn of the moon
out of the eye of the dragon
that sheds its skin like childhood skies,
not knowing where things end, things begin?

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Not Even The Light

Not even the light of the stars
shining like the keys to the ancient love-letters
bound among the secret jewels
of the queen of heaven
penetrates me as deeply as you do.

The planet wheels into the night
bearing its burden of humans
murdering each other
to enforce one state of ignorance
upon another
as the rabid bees
strafe the demented flowers
on the far side of the world
for enriching their radioactive pollen,
convinced in their madness
more honey than blood will flow from the wound.

I walk by myself
along the brittle banks of a frozen stream
among the detonations of the cattails
waiting like Napoleonic cannoneers
to stoke the charge of the next volley.

The snow in the sunset
is stained a spectral apricot
that disappears like breath on a cold window
and the sky is vast with my insignificance.
Two or three decades of life left,
if I'm lucky,
and though I have tried to use my time
to leave a gift for someone I will never meet,
long ago I realized
there is no way of assessing
what they will find
after the coffin closes like an eyelid
on this long, dark, radiant brevity
that once shone like the moon
in the ores of my blood.

Like the wandering of this rivulet
my heart has always been
a pilgrim without a shrine
and the direction of prayer has encompassed all
like a man getting up off his knees
and walking through an open door
to drink from the cup of his lover
in the shadows of the autumn willow
that sways like kite-tails
from the flights of fire
she ignites among the stars
that gather in the dark like strangers
before their own ghosts.

What the wind
has torn away from me like apple-bloom,
like poems, like smoke and leaf, like skies,
like tears and blood and faith
it has replaced
with these deeper revelations of you
that hang like a windfall of scarlet bells
from the branch of a dead tree in winter.

The wine of your life and light
has matured in the ferocious crucibles of the sun
and you have been poured out
like the passion of a sword
to cleave the stone of my heart
with these truant rivers of wounded silver
that flow through me like blood.

A young breeze
tries to hone the edge of its blade
on the rising moon
as a black ribbon of water
runs like a snake of oil
between the enclosing jaws
and cataracts of ice,
tiny wavelets scaling its skin
scintillant with the small commotions of stars overhead.
The bush wolves
have been nosing for muskrat
and you can almost taste the steam
rising from hot meat on the air.

I squeak like a pulley through the virgin snow,
following the banks of my own meandering,
owing nothing of myself to anyone,
wholly my own solitude,
as I pass through the gates
of the enclosing darkness
trying to enter the abyss and the mystery
of what I have lived so precariously
over the last sixty-three years,
what it means, if anything,
to be a human among these paper birches
on an island in the stream,
looking up at the intimate unattainability
of the stars,
knowing you are growing old,
that death is more populous with friends
than life, that love
has sloughed you so many times
like a viper's skin,
like the phases of the moon,
like a shrine of smoke and ashes,
that the phoenix hesitates
to robe itself in the full glory
of its former plumes of fire.

My mother will die soon.
I must say it,
voice it in my blood
to be able to bear it
and my children are clouds in the world
that no longer look for their reflections
in the eyes of the lake they arose from
as if they were merely breathed out.

And how in any god's name
can a man define the absence
he has grown to be,
except he standardize his own spinal cord
as the only measure of loss
he has to go by?
And even after
all the millennia of my walking,
standing up,
I'm still only six feet closer to the stars
though my mind can embody all of space
in a solitary thought.

And the deep, inner silence
in the empty throne-room of my heart
where even the most profound events of my life
are seen to be ultimately no more
than the antics of a jester
playing with shadows,
turns out after all to be
just another mode of weeping.

It takes a lifetime
for a dropp of water
to gather the courage to fall
from the tip of a blade of stargrass,
and the tongue has tears
the eyes know nothing of.
I admire the cool crimson
on the brushes of the ground willow
as they try to catch my likeness
on the ice-primed canvas of the snow,
but suggest
to portray me as I lived
they need to be loaded with blood not paint.

Like the moon
I have worn the same blossom
as a face
for years now
and I still don't know the fruit
that ripens beneath it;
whether my life has sweetened
in orchards of light,
or black dwarf of the forbidden apple
on a dead tree,
I taste like a full eclipse.

And what could it change even if I did know?
When the diaspora of my starseed
breaks bread
at a harvest of thorns;
who is the host
and who is the guest
and who asks for a menu?

And no matter how far from home
the journey takes him,
whether down a dead-end alley
or further than the stars
was there ever a man
who didn't walk to his own funeral
like a bell
looking for any beginning
that might not be lost in the end?
Or does the snake
that takes its tail in its mouth
as a gesture of eternity
eventually end up swallowing
its own head
like this stream before me
making its way to the sea?

I stepped across a star sill
through a vertical door into life
and in the leaving of it
I shall knock from the inside
on a door that's horizontal
to continue my descent toward earth
down a ladder of thresholds;
and what began so earnestly
among family and friends and lovers
will be concluded by a stranger
who will wear my name like a gravestone.

But here among the tangle
of these fallen trees, their roots
fleshed out
and washed like a corpse
by the water and the snow,
Venus peers through the fingers
of the branches above
where two crows have paired
like quotation marks
around the hearsay of the night
though I am left speechless
by the random beauty of the scene,
as if my voice had been released like a bird
into its own most intimate, inward vision
and that vision were everywhere you like the sky
it disappears into like I do
everytime my heart is opened
like one of the lockets of time
and I stare into your eyes
and the universe stares back
as you breathe out the night with all of its stars
and then I breathe you in
just as a golden feather of the moon
lands without a ripple
or unravelling wake
on the mirror of these lonely, black waters
I have followed deep into the darkness
like the urgent secret of my own lifestream,
and I know it's you. I know it's you.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A Little Thought In A Big Space

A little thought in a big space, I'm falling
through my own immensities here at my desk,
one of my Icarian propensities for plunging into things.
My voice intimidated by the violence of the silence within.
I'm on the dark side of my eyes.
No one's ever been here before.
No window, no wall, no door,
I'm on the threshold of my homelessness again.
I'm looking at stars, but I feel like rain.
I'm talking to ghosts that I don't remember.
Might be the wrong medium, but it's the right seance.
I don't even know what I'm doing here myself
but it seems I'm free to go or stay as I wish.
I'm wearing my shadow like a candling parachute
that didn't step back from the edge in time.
No point in pretending you're an airborne dandelion
when you feel like a rock with a message
someone just threw like the moon through a mirror
disguised as a sky the night birds keep flying into blind.

No one asks your name here on this pyre of a sky burial
if your birth certificate says you were born in fire.
Desire anything you like. It was all written in smoke
before you came. And these words that are saying me here
have been out of the aviary of the lantern for light years.
Who knows where the light goes or what if falls upon?
Trying to shine in a dark time without taking anything away
from the lunar eclipses that aren't in need of enlightenment.
Don't know if I'm a solar flare, a firefly, a matchbook,
or a lightning bolt that keeps stressing my starmud out
by sneaking up on it from behind and overdoing things a bit.

If you find yourself trying to pry the flowers open
with a crowbar or a koan, and it's nightfall, it's
time to turn your hourglass in for a waterclock
and see how the stars emerge out of nothing
as soon as you deepen the dark with a more acute sense of timing
that let's everything happen spontaneously by itself.
Even if you're the lighthouse of your dreams
that doesn't mean you're the nightwatchman
keeping his third eye on you in the shadows
like a theft of fire you can get away with
this second time around with only a warning.

If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
And if you did, whining about it in your sleep
isn't going to help and who's Spartan enough these days
to stash the fox under their tunic to keep
from being caught while it eats them alive?
If you want to be a dragon you've got to learn
to swallow people's hearts like hot coals as if they were chocolates,
without wincing. The stars don't come out
like emergency candles you've been saving
for exactly this kind of situation. And if
you really want to know the truth about illumination,
try and blow one out. Quick, now, look
and see immediately into the clear light of the void
what it's like to shine without a metaphoric reflection.

The stars here don't hide their nakedness under a cloak
of black holes and dwarfs that take it all in
but give nothing back like the second hand clothes
of serpents shedding their skin. One size fits all
like a bubble in a watershed of dark worlds
dazzled by how much a single eye can contain
whether it's hanging from the lip of a flower in the fall
or going down the drain in spring. I know
you hit it like a snowflake on a furnace
and do your damnedest not to cry. Thing is
as unique among billions as you think you are,
there's not a star in the sky that isn't a rite of passage.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Listen To The Silence

I listen to the silence, not the ambassador birds of the message
aligned along the branch of a black tree,
waiting to have their say, deliver
the formal meaning; I follow them back
to the original fountain-mouth of the silence
that isn't dawn or sunset, or a woman in a garden,
but a clear light with the presence of a feather
and, almost at times, a face, that's always been there
behind the racket and the paint rags
of the cacophonous actors gathering on stage,
the understudy that hovers like a silver fish
in the reeds and the shadows of the undulant curtains,
rarely seen, and more of a fragrance of light
than a second queen, an unverifiable void
with delicate gestures that turn all my questions
back on me like the soft underside of milky green leaves,
as if something took my hand and turned it over
to show me the answers pearled in my palm.
And it would be wrong to attribute eyes to this silence
though I feel it's the space where the seeing happens
in the beginningless moment before
the watcher and the watched rework the seeing up into a play
of heroes, villains, events, and fireflies of awareness
in a chronic struggle of opposites.
And it would be wrong to accord it a mouth, lips, a tongue
because it seems to say everything
without saying anything, without
wounding itself on the quick edge of a word. And there are times
when it almost seems to smile upon my childish efforts
to know what it is, to return to the sea,
to the corals of the moon, with my hands full of cherries and stars,
the abundance of living on the earth
with waterlilies and rat snakes.
It indulges me with the serenity of an old, unknown sorrow
that had to create the world to speak itself to the end
and now sits enthroned in the emptiness of its own presence.
And just when I think I've come up against its impassable clarity
like a fly against a windowpane;
I discover myself immersed in it like an eel
undulating like a free banner of water
through its unpartitioned enclosure,
hardly a wavelength of distinction between myself and it;
and everything I write is an oracle
that swims away knowing more about it than I do
before I decided not to ask it for a name.
And though it may have been the voiceless cachet
of the divine numinosities that opened
the resplendent roses of the past
that squandered their eyelids on asphalt and scripture,
the watershed of the snow-robed mountain gods,
now it's a dropp of water holding its breath like the moon
at the tip of the green sword of the cattails
ready to send a shudder of tears and blood and fruit
through the mirror again like the first pulse
of its falling into existence, hazelnuts into the mouths
of waiting salmon, things losing their balance
against the backdropp of the hidden harmony
by which they are created in the image of their own conception
and known: apple-blow from the orchard
or ashes from the nightshift crematoria.
And, perhaps, this is that silence that seizes the heart with the love
of an unsayable emptiness as infinite as the beloved
that can't be filled by anyone less,
as a question must be returned like a wave to the sea that asked it
before it realizes on the threshold of its own depths
there never was a brevity of being
that hasn't always been the perfect answer.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Your Own Life Is The Way

Your own life is the way
whether it charm itself through the woods
like a small snail
or kick the stars up like dust
along the Road of Ghosts
or hang back like the sea
enduring its own weather
waiting for the next loveletter
to arrive like a sail
over the event horizons
of so much unopened junkmail.
But you're a long way off
and deeper in darkness
than you realize
if you're using a searchlight
to look for a star.
There's no reason
to keep showing up
at the wrong address
like a bad definition
of who you are.
You go looking
for the meaning of things
as if meaning were precious and rare,
baby teeth under a pillow
or lost wedding rings
through the noses
of unmarried skulls.
You chase your own tides
back out to sea
and then go ask the waves
trembling in their tidal pools
like children you've frightened
about the meaning of water.
But when they tell you
your mouth hangs open
like a grail in the hand of a drunk
who's sure she just drank poison.
You want to pry
the petals of the flowers open
before they're ready to bloom
as if you were unwrapping your presents early
although nothing's been hidden from you,
cloaked, eclipsed, or covered by a lie.
You paint the window you sit at
all the colours of a parrot
to enhance the clarity
of your longing for stars,
or scare yourself to death
with things you can see in the night
like someone who's been left behind
like a key under your own doormat.
The return journey goes faster than the first
as you progress backwards
looping like a planet
through all the stations of your youth
into the second innocence of awareness
knowing how deeply the soul
can be soiled by the truth
of things as they are
and how, sometimes
to the baffled astonishment of the purists
it takes a little dirt to wash it off;
which is to say, you're human.
Not one reason for everything.
You keep ploughing the same broken record
like a season stuck in a groove
never leaving anything long enough to itself
to germinate and bloom.
Even when the moon
walks on your waters
tapping its white cane
at the curb of every wave
to show you how to master
your own blindness
with your own light in the darkness
of why you won't open your eyes and look,
you cover your face with your hands like a book
you fell asleep reading.
But you can't wake up from a dream
you're not having.
You can't look into life
like a window from the outside
or arrange your eyes
like lenses in a telescope
to view things at arms length.
I know how hard
you've been looking for enlightenment
and the agony of your disappointment
that you can't pull the sword from the stone
or the apple from the seed like autumn.
You account the waste
of time, energy, aspiration,
and want to burn the whole orchard down
like a bride widowed in her wedding gown.
But the fire you set
like a last blossom on a dead branch
goes out like a torch in your own reflection
and you're lost in the woods at night
without a road going in any direction.
You thought you'd hang around
with the constellations,
but there you are
whenever you kick the earth
like a stool away from your feet
dangling like a streetlamp in space
with only go slow and stop
the three expressions
that ever cross your face
like birds hoping they're heading south.
And I don't want to sound mean or unkind,
or suggest that I know
how stars taste to the blind,
or that you're not a fury of insight,
a blazing chandelier, a broken mirror,
but when you cry
you launch your tears like submarines
into your own paranoid depths
to listen to what the others
are saying about you now
and you deploy your emotions like spies
to keep an eye on the opening night projections
you're trying to groom into a movie
where everything comes true
all at once
in a stunning climax of you
holding out like a bridge at the fall of Rome.
Let go. Give up. Let the barbarians across
that you've abused
with the severity
of your savage passions for years.
Abandon the walls
you've beaded like a rosary of skulls
around your imperial frontiers.
How can the frowning jewels
of a dying civilization
dragging itself by the heels
like a corpse through the night
compare with the more imperfectible delights
of leaving the mindstream to its own devices
as if it were wise enough all alone
to make its own circuitous way home
like blood returning to the heart
while we, who don't know the answers,
throw our swords back into the lake
as if we were surrendering to water.
We could feed the demons
of our startling immensities
all those doves you sent out looking for land
that came back like cornerstones of quicksand.
We could stop trying to square the circle
like college dropp outs
trying to corner the rain
and forgo the blinding lucidity
of what we think we know
for the darker esprit
of being swept far out to sea
like two castles effaced by the undertow
of an abyss even the light can't cross.
We could lower our bridges
and open our gates
and liberate our prisons
as if we were making love
like two more bad little reasons to live.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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No Gravegoods In My Solitude

No gravegoods in my solitude, no trinkets
from any spiritual world inside or outside this one.
The totem belongs to the dream that's buried with it
as the flower's engendered by the root it's taken from.
Mind is matter. Matter is mind. And it isn't as if
one is blind to the other because one shore
isn't parted from the other by the flowing
of the mindstream in between. Try to separate
the reflection of the moon from water in a dream state.
The moon is a characteristic of water as the water
is a feature of the moon. If you want to mediate
until you turn the vertebrae of your spine into a bridge
to get to the other side of a life you're already standing on,
that's ok as long as it's burning. Otherwise it's just going
to obstruct your path when you're shooting the rapids
of the Milky Way like your own spring run off
trying to saddle a rush of stars with a rudderless liferaft
and oars for spurs. Better to be a waterbird
with wings of your own, but what a thrill
to ride the snake until you can fly like a dragon
among the stars like Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider,
in the handle of the Big Dipper like a warrior Bedouin
testing his eyes on the dune of a tribal hourglass to see
if he can tell what hour it is by the dance of a distant binary.

It's getting late. Nightwatch at the well. The town
unpeopled by sleep. A choir of train whistles
practising their inquisitive requiems at every crossing
like Canada geese migrating south when the autumn stars arise.
More lonely than mournful, I can taste the shadows
in the honey of life as readily as the light. I can smell
the fragrance of time like the first snowflakes
in a lover's hair, trying to turn her into a constellation
to sweeten the night air. And even in the ashes
of the starmaps the shining sets afire
and scatters like a library in the urn of the heart
on a wind that carries away the passions of this art
of exhuming more life out of a shallow grave than went into it,
I can still burn in the dark like the ore
of undisciplined diamonds. I can still squander my light
on the eyelids of the fallen flowers like a final kiss farewell.

Time wastes a death on me. Years ago the wind arose
and blew that candle out in the open window
of an abandoned house and ever since I've been
drifting like a ghost of smoke in a diaspora of stars.
I bequeath to the rose, the blood of my wounds.
To the thorns of the moon, my scars. To the night
I leave my eyes. To the wind, my breath. My voice
to the nightbird whose longing put my lyrics
to the picture-music that's haunted me all my life
like the song of someone who loved me once
before I was born and began to forget. But my heart
that I could judge the worth of like a bell bound to the earth,
or a feather of fire in hell, in the palm of my hand,
I give that to everyone like the windfall of a tree in a storm.

Black walnuts and wild apples. Solar systems
of peaches and pears in the leftover orchards
of organic gardens bearing the fruit of a habitable planet
at the autumn equinox of the New England asters
and modest suns of the Jerusalem artichokes
for the birds and the squirrels and the bears.
You can't keep what you won't give away
and it's no good to you in a grave when it comes time
to throw yourself overboard to stay afloat
and weather the squalls on your own sea of awareness
like an empty moonboat drifting through the fog
calling out to anyone who'll listen on the coast
of a new universe that discovers you like Atlantis
to a ghost of the old world looking for a passage
back to the more familiar labyrinth of home.

Liberation is freedom through creative form, not from it.
Liberation is life. And life is all entrance, no exit.
And you weren't asked at the door for any i.d.
And no one's going to stop you from lowering the fire escape
to get away from yourself. And if you were to ask
the mirrors of your own awareness, they'd stop staring at you
as if they'd never seen a new world savage before.
Everyone's going to leave an empty chair at the table
sooner or later. Like the skull cup of the moon
you've got to pour your prophetic lees out upon the earth
if you want to give your abundance another chance.

You can make lanterns out of fireflies in canning jars
or you can abandon them to the spiders
in the corners of your eyes like dreamcatchers and kites,
but if you want to shine of your own accord,
albino fish in the darkest depths with stars in their eyes,
you've got to see the sun flowering at midnight,
you've got to greet Venus in the Pleiades at dawn.
You've got to unsilver the mirror like a stripper
until you disappear like a bird in the house of life
through an open window like a crack in a cosmic egg
to feel the vastness of the sky that transcends
the limit of your wings. Despite the eye-witness
in the mirror, where time is always in arrears to eternity,
you've got to give it all up like your shining reflection
if you want to stay here for your own protection.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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It Isn't That I'm Looking

It isn't that I'm looking for eagles in a barnyard
or a phoenix in a match-head
when I observe
by the number of wrecks on the rocks
how few lighthouses there are these days
among so many flashlights.

What can the hair say about the horn
or the feather teach the wind
or quicksand preach
for the edification of the cornerstone?

And must I put a healthy leg
at the service of a broken crutch
to limp along with the mob
at the end of a dying culture
that insists that all roads end
in a cult of cripples?

If I'm walking alone to the stars
on a pilgrimage of one
finding my way in the going,
my heart aligned like the needle of a compass
to a darkness brighter than the light,
and the only map the clarity of my eyes,
why should those
who weep in their ashes like rain,
trying to put glasses on a fly,
who have never dipped
the thorn of the moon
in the night of their blood
and written a love poem
to a skull in a desert,
care if I want to roam
in the hills and valleys of myself
like some homeless shepherd of the wind
taking the stone of the earth for a pillow to dream on
in the high grasslands
where the stars walk
whispering eternal intimacies like black swans
barging the ores of a vacant throne
through my bloodstream,
as all along the shores of my flowing
ancient flowers wake mysteriously
like candles in an eclipse?

If I take the sky for the walls of my house
and leave the rest
like an autumn of junkmail
looking for a door and a last known address,
if I choose not to contrive a world
to accommodate my absence
in the available dimension of the future,
wiping my shadows and ghosts
like mirrors off at the threshold,
even letting go of the door
to enter empty-handed
as the applause
for an understudy of the dawn
that never got over its stage-fright
in the abyss of an abandoned theater,
happy to let the river pan itself for gold,
not laying a claim to anything,
making sure the gate-latch
clamps down like a dog on a bone
when I close it up
like a straitjacket in its own thoughts,
not stringing my spinal court to a wishbone
or the warped neck
of an obvious guitar,
but taking my voice with me
like a wounded bird in my hands,
a star struck from a stone,
moonlight in an empty boat,
the taste of silence
in the mouth of a mask,
my name a rainmark
on the eyelid of a dusty bell
I've left to the dream it keeps returning to;
why should it matter to anyone
who lies to the bleeding door
that is wounded by their entrance
everytime they say it's just me
as if a pillar answered?

I can't find anything
less than everything to call a self
and there are no mirrors
in an abyss more naked than the sky
to consult like the oracular flights of words
that litter the windowsill of this seeing
like flies that spent themselves,
flints on an empty lighter,
wicks on a glass candle,
consuming the ferocity
of their lives against the illusion of the world outside
they brain themselves against again and again
like small meteors
doused like torches in the eye
of the upper atmosphere
just above the open window.

When everything is absurd as this,
and even the tuning forks of the rain
are an era off in their pitch,
and music is merely
the coming and going of ants
in an abandoned syrinx,
and the drum of the heart alone
isn't enough to start a band,
and the only melody
is a road the wind blew away
like a hair off the shoulder of the night,
and everyone's trying
to unmarrow the moon like a fortune-cookie,
and every snowflake in the furnace
of this dark fire
thinks it dies like a galaxy
when it's only an inflection of tears,
am I not free to walk in harmony
with the savage senselessness of it all,
without hanging a bell of advice over my head
like the only corpse
on an island full of gravediggers
who can't get out of the holes they've dug
to bury me in?

I don't want to live waiting for yesterday
like the light of a star
that's already gone,
or dream like a seed of constellations to come
like a roll of the dice,
or watch the surplus of your smile
rotting on the docks of a famine.

And don't think these harvests I leave you
like a trail of breadcrumbs and dead flies
out of this wilderness of thought
are any more than stars
caught in the throat of the labyrinth
that follows itself like a snake with its tail in its mouth,
trying to find a way out of itself
by eating its own head.

And by some chance
if you ever make it out this far,
I've mailed back
the same map of fireflies
with its legend of smoke,
three lifetimes a lightyear,
you once handed me to find you
and marked every place I'm not
with a black hole.

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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My Lonely Island Music

My lonely island music,
already I see in your eyes, devastation in the dead zone,
skulls littering the field, autumns wandering away
weeping like windows that mistook themselves for the sky
and murdered a bird. Mystic September, vamp of this vision,
how could the moon not leap from my tongue
in praise of the world that shines through you
bathing alone in the dawn of every moment, utterly
alive, your beauty the page of a unwritten scripture
poised in the ink at the nib of every blade of grass to say
beyond the saying
what can’t be said. How unbearably sad
in this defeated hour that so few know the truth
that walks ahead of them like their own footprints
returning to the door they left by, already lost,
their houses, foundation stones of quicksand. Get it right in the seed,
get it right in the root of the eye, let the wind
take the ashes, sweep the shadows from the stairs,
and all the moons of yesterday are caravans of blossoms on the water.
Get it wrong and you’re a widow plundering corpses
for wedding rings and pocket-watches, black rain
on the open eyes of the dead. Devoid of transcendence
in the mirroring awareness, on a diet of fire,
you’ll end up combing your hair with a ladder.
Can you hear this bell of green before it rings, can you see
the painting in your blood before the brush is lifted
like a maggot of consciousness to the rose?
If you can, then check your shadow at the threshold
and walk naked into the far fields of your seeing, your feet
on the ground, your head in the stars; if you can’t,
you’re deepening your ignorance by ignoring your depths,
your light passes over itself like an eclipse or the hand
of a black magician, conjuring. Peril in the seeing.
A mask of frost over the surgical face of the heart. Understand
deeply and with authority that this dream cannot be understood,
taste this dream for yourself and look once
into the brilliant darkness that lies beyond wisdom and forsaking
and acknowledge in a crown of water
you are queen of that, your own teacherless realms.
Can’t you feel the roots of the black orchid of this space
wounding the soil with the stars of another night-sky
already opening above and below you? Rightly and brightly,
you are that opening, the sum of all the awareness of the whole of your life
expressed in the unborn no-point of a star of perception in space,
blue knowledge beyond the scope of the death-sighted.
Why study your own legends like snapped twigs on the trail
and send yourself in a straitjacket to school
when you already know by heart
the book of the breath you must live? Open your fist. Where
did it go? What’s in your hand? Do you understand? Our lives
are the shadows of birds sown like seed across the skies,
fish-maps printed on water, compasses looking for directions
that don’t exist. We are brief and we are vital, pilgrims
on a bridge of ancient zeroes, angels under every stone,
gypsies at home. Hold your life up like a match to a mirror in a dark room
to see whose face it is
then blow yourself out like an orchard
before blazing becomes a kind of blindness.
Put the world to your lips like a finger
in the black clarity of the silence. Do you see, do you see
the white songbird of the moon enter the throat of the well
to flaunt its plumage privately in an empty theater,
the roar of the ghosts of the infinite aeons for applause,
the sound of one hand clapping? Anciently, you were so
and now you are so
and tomorrow after tomorrow you shall be so, hidden
right under your own nose, calling yourself like a girl to her friend
when the game is over to come out of hiding. Most people
never understand more than a keyhole and a whisper of themselves,
trembling behind the dangerous doors of their own names
when they’re called to come out and play
with a universe that begins in every moment,
a fire-fly in a canning jar. They graze on the fodder of illusions,
domesticated by their own cupboards and cowardice,
peopling the wilderness beyond their artificial paradise
with demons that threaten to behead them in a palace coup
for the genuine liberation of an empty throne.
The blossom doesn’t know its own beginning,
nor the snowflake, its end. Can you find your true face
in this mirror of echoes,
the one you wore before the birth of silence?
I shall come looking for you like the wind
and I shall find you among trees and flowers
and among the grasses of the fields
and in the living light that breathes over the harvest
and in the water-mind of the stream that flexes the reeds
and playfully graces the ripe honey of the sun
with a sweetness unknown to the business of bees. No inside, no outside,
everywhere I step is the arrival and the walking of my blood
the whole of the way to you from whom I cannot be separated,
slipped like a letter under a door that opens, a mouth in space,
to paint the moon on an eye of scarlet water. One leaf falling,
the whole history of the world
in the way I love you by letting go; in the way
when you are closest, your heart, the thunder
of subtle intimacies in a lost well,
I drown in the vastness like a bird in the reflection of the sky,
happy refugees all along the side-roads of my nerves,
my mind, a fool of the moon, all parade and passage.
Do you understand? Not different, not the same,
we are rain on a window, faces beyond
the blindness of mirrors that use our eyes to see.
In every feather, in every leaf, in every flight of the word
ten thousand dawns, all of the earth,
this emptiness within emptiness singing to itself in the void.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Begin

Begin anywhere.
Topple fall jump stumble plunge
into the eyeless abyss
into the roadless homelessness
of not knowing where you're going
or who'll you'll be by the time you get there.
Slash your way through the stretched canvas
of a painted sky
like a rogue star
with the blood of Betelgeuse
dripping from your brush if you must
perform your own Caesarian
to get out of yourself like an egg
into the Big Abide Beyond
and stretch your wings from dusk till dawn.
Don't hover like a cloud over starmaps
trying to work out a flight plan
waiting for the weather to clear for take-off.
In an infinite universe such as this
wherever you are
in this spatial lost and found
you're always the center of everything.
How could you not know where you are
or who
when there's nowhere to go
and no one to be
that isn't centred in its own origin eternally?
But it helps to get a jump on your own light like a star
now and again
if you want to stay in the game
long enough to turn your farce into a legend
that isn't hard on the eyes.
So begin.
Like a surprise.
Like a leftover birthday you found in the attic
you were saving for a special day that never came.
Get it on.
Begin.
Break the mirror.
Throw a rock through your own reflection.
There's no countdown
for a firefly or lightning bolt
no fuse on the Big Bang that became the universe
so let's just have ignition
spontaneously timeless and complete
go off
get out
get down
like the primordial atom
with your own expression of yourself
before the arising of signs
teaches the flowers
they mustn't colour
outside the lines of themselves.
Don't let the Lilliputians tie Gulliver down again.
Don't imperil Pauline
by tying her to the tracks
like a rehabilitated junkie
to wait for a train in vain
on the same old beaten path
your thoughts tread like cattle
back to the barn of your brain at dusk.
Or horses when it's burning.
Begin in your aftermath.
Shoulder the world that weighs
like a rock in your grave
meant to keep you from rising
and blow it off like dust.
Come down on yourself like a meteor
and begin a new species of life
among the bones of the dinosaurs.
Get lost in this desert of stars
like the Rosetta Stone
of a new language of scars
no one's ever spoken before
around a fire in the night
and be the first word of your own light
to give names to things in the garden.
The happy genius of your own beginnings.
How many nights must pass?
How many days?
How many full moons wane
and ice ages come and go
and trees turn into grasslands
and continents shatter like skulls
that grind their teeth in the night
before you finally let go
and begin.
Mercury had wings on his heels
when he took off on the wind
but look at you
standing there
at the edge of the world
with parachutes on your shoes
like a medium without a message.
Take them off.
Go barefoot over the stars of your firewalk like water.
Take off that used straitjacket
you bought at the Salvation Army
like the larva of a dragonfly
looking for a hand-me-down chrysalis on the cheap.
You can't read your fate like dna
in another man's fortune-cookie.
And there's already enough sky around us
for everyone to share
like a planetary cocoon
without anyone running out of room
for worms to turn into butterflies
wolves into whales
raptors into birds with feathers and scales.
Where things end is where they begin.
They're Siamese twins
you can't separate like a loveletter
into before and after
because they've only got
the one birth
the one breath
between them both
and the same is true of their death.
So if you're already over before you begin
why hesitate?
What have you got to lose
when there's nothing to choose
between lying in wait like yesterday
for what you think you know
will come along in its own good time
and what you can't anticipate
that comes up on you from behind
like eyes to the blind in a dream
and says it's later than it seems.
Where have you been?
You're on in the next scene
right after the death of the old queen.
Let the lines memorize you for a change.
Friends fall apart
when they stop being strangers to one another.
Babies stop turning solitude into single mothers.
You can gnaw on the bone of the known for years
to get down to the marrow of things
and still not be satisfied when you do
and then the hunger you never taught to hunt
begins to eat you.
So jump.
Like a fish in a still pond.
Like a frog from a lilypad.
Go mad.
Go ballistic.
Go beyond that place
where even to say you're lost in space
doesn't make any sense
and nothing's ever moved in a straight line
that wasn't a special form of a curve.
Why wait for the apocalypse
to come down on you like an old rafter
that breaks with every firecracker that goes off
when your own explosive potential
makes that look like a firefly with a wet fuse?
How long have you lepered your stars in the sun
or your constellation paled in the dawn
like a tattoo you had taken off your arm
like an old love affair that's over and gone?
Live on.
Jump from the top stair.
Slide down the bannister
in the opposite direction
like a double helix
in the southern hemisphere.
Do something
you can get away with
that stays true to your disobedience
like evolution.
Draw a line in the sand
then overstep the bounds
like a crosswind that wipes it out.
The measure of a human is a human
without a forwarding address
that can find its way back
like an abandoned cat
to the threshold and doorway
of our homelessness
where we left like a loveletter to the world
that returns unread
with nothing to say
that would have made any difference anyway.
A phoenix might be born in fire
but it doesn't nest in the flames.
You can't keep what you won't give away
so if you want to stay here
like a chameleon in front of a mirror
that likes to reflect things as they change
you have to do it like air
and grow wings.
You have to become a dragon.
Or a snake who knows
how to rise above things
like an eagle or a sea on the moon
that got caught like a fish out of water
in the first and last crescents of its own talons.
Don't let yourself be tossed around
like an overturned lifeboat
that set out to rescue you
from the undertow of reality
and got swept off its own feet
before they could turn into oars.
Don't be a shore-hugger
on the dunes of your own mindstream.
Go along with the flow
like the oxygen in your blood
that was conceived in a fire-womb
in the belly of a star
in outer space
and then took a meteor to this place
where it's bagged by your lungs
and rushed to your face
like a lip transplant for a kissing-stone.
Just as every question is the prelude of the answer
so every prayer for direction
is the direction of prayer.
The Kaaba waits like a pilgrim
for the first crescent of the moon
to circumambulate you
in all directions at once
and in all months of the year
like the sun through the zodiac
when it shines at midnight
and the sky is unusually clear.
The mystery of life
that seeks you out
like its best guess at everything
is just that
is just this
a mystery
not a secret waiting to be told
like a baby without a name
that's grown post-mature
and gummy in the womb
like matter in the matrix of being.
And when things let go of the green bough
like the singing bird in your heart
or a windfall of silver apples
shaken from a dead branch by the wind
when the moon goes down over the hills
and all that's left of the view
is two elbows on a worn-out windowsill
watching things return to themselves for the night
like stars and dust and dew
and love when it's over
tastes autumn on its breath
like long sad thoughts of last September
that always seem to end in death and sorrow
it helps to remember
the seeds in the green apples of spring
that are buried in their birth
as if there could never be a tomorrow
that wouldn't open their small sad eyes
like fireflies in the orchards of earth
that age like the truth
in a purple passage
on the second to last page
they burn through falling asleep
thinking of things to come
as if each were either a lighthouse
or the evening star in the morning
or a tiny Armageddon in a mason jar
as big and bright as the universe
that goes off without warning
everywhere all the time.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Burning World, Take Me

Burning world, take me, fold me in your flaming arms
and let me disappear into the unforgiving night.
Among these blind, here, in their black eggs,
eyeless birds who nest in their own ignorance,
I am the leper of light they drive out
with the stone of the moon, the wolf
with the mystic wound that will not heal until the last star
is born of the bleeding. Return me to the cold, brutal beauty
of your mineral wilderness, my bones on Venus
and my skull an abandoned planet circling the sun at midnight.
Let my eyes be the last of my tears to fall
and my blood be strewn like a gypsy scarf across the darkness.
Erase all trace of me as you do the path of the water-stars
who walk here among the dead like spirits from another world
intrigued by our passing. Pygmies in a circus,
cannibals and emperors all, leaping from thought to thought
rock to rock in the lifestream
to the applause of future funerals, o let them fade
like the idiot savants of last night’s dream, meaning nothing
but what they meant to themselves,
trying to jump their own distorted shadows.
What difference between the venom of the bee and its luminous honey
to these whose flaring in the vastness
was the kingdom of a match? At most
lightning on a water droplet shaken from a blade of grass.
Did they think the great fires of being flowed like blood
around their carbon hearts? Sweet world,
bestow your flowerless garden upon me and let me forget
the holy wars of their tiny gods against my solitude.
Didn’t they see, so full of themselves,
there was never any room in their arks and shrines and coffins
moored like lifeboats to the rotting dock
they built like a bridge to nowhere?
I never meant to be unkind or rise from the depths
in waves of light and blood that wiped them out
like the mythical monster of a shore-bound sailor
too far out deep down to be confirmed by their disbelief
or worse, their shallow faith. Leave them, undisturbed
to the shadows of things they trade in
like spiritual money. I wish them no worse, no better
than who they think they are, little prophets
inveighing against the purity of my absence.
The dark mirror is better, brighter, more abundant
than the poverty of their trembling reflections,
mere nothingness more tender than their lies.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A Fluctuation In The Cosmic Void

A fluctuation in the cosmic void,
a wink of atoms,
a fallen eyelash of light,
the seeing of a lifetime
nothing but candle vapour,
ghost-water on the moon,
the exhalation of a vagrant star
looking for its lost constellation
like a berry or a gem
that had wandered off road
from the vine of a crown.
The eye that regards all
as it rises like a blue mystic sun
over the morning eyelids
of the remote hills
waking up in the arms of their shadows
demands exposure of the sky,
a clarity pure enough for stars
as it turns the day over
like the palm of a hand
to reveal how our lifestreams
join and break
at the junction of sacred rivers.
And the vision,
the illusion of the way I see life,
the romantic intoning
into the bell of the abyss
for a hopeless beauty that died like a bird,
the lostness and the loneliness,
the unknown sorrow
that seems to bleed out of the air
like a black rose born to grieve
for the separations of long ago,
and the child in the brutal fire
that pleads at a window
weeping in the heat
for rescue from an afterlife without salvation,
all that the heart features
in the deepest silence of the night,
nothing but the auroral trash
of an over ionized mind
trying to touch its own burns tenderly.
Until I became the knowing
even my own ignorance
didn't recognize me.
Until I vastly improved
the integrity of my lies,
every mirror I looked into
like a woman's eyes
was corrupt,
the prelude to a death certificate
in lipstick, a thorn of honey
that dripped like the fangs of the moon
with mysterious toxins and elixirs
that could scald and bleach the heart
or restore it with the kiss of a silver herb
grown in the garden of a cool eclipse.
My bitterness and fear
have made me less susceptible
to the empty boats that arrive
to take me on like some kind of foreign export,
a cargo of ashes and stars,
the bodybags
of the casualties and refugees
that perished in an unknown holy war of one
that I can't stop waging
against a universe that won't let me in,
but my solitude
could defeat me with a feather,
could shock the fool I am to hide
with the shadow of a wing
breaking the spell of this birdless sky
that seems to go on forever beyond the wind
like a caravan of rain
that's outwalked the longest known road
into a wilderness
of rootless trees in big city back alleys.
When the rose
has been stripped down to its claws and horns,
how few have the eyes
to keep yearning?
Let me drown in tears of fire,
in wells of thoughtful quicksand,
rack me on the iron in my blood
and stub my cherished stars out
like angry pincers applied to my feet
like a firewalk through a snakepit
and I will confess to nothing
but an earnest ignorance,
I will not betray the abyss
where I buried myself like nuclear waste.
I will remain true
to the merciless emptiness
I uttered to myself like a vow
I didn't know if I could keep
four decades ago.
Now I lay my head down to dream
on a stone pillow full of stars
that shine like rare metals in the night,
and when I wake
I seem to know less
about everything it took me a lifetime to master
than when I first
abandoned my eyes
like oceans on the moon to see
inconceivably, what has become of me in my absence.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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As If Beyond Death

As if beyond death today,
as if I lay already under the eyelid of the moon,
the echo of my heart
pumping shadows
through my perfectly preserved corpse
in a silence that's never known the wind,
a fallen wharf without arrivals or departures,
and sad enough not to care why,
blood on the dolphin in the black tide
that pours me out of the horseshoe of the bay
like a road from its boot,
wipes me like the pollen and dust of dark matter
off the windowsills of the constellations,
my unknown mass crucial
to the cosmic contractions
that might give birth to the world again,
and I'm here alone in the high field
drowning in the twilight with the wildflowers
and the sky a last exhalation of the blue-green luster
that flirts with the mystic violet
on a homing crow's head
as the shadows assemble the wings
of a total eclipse
and a new dragon is born of the pain
that shrieks like lightning in the mouth of the abyss,
a torn animal
peeled out of its own skin like an eye
to add its darkness to the furnace of the black rose
that roars in the night
to blood the hungry mirror
with the thorns and talons of clarity,
to feed the wound of its existence
its existence.
And when I walk to the end of myself
through the golden rod and waist-high asters,
the seed of the stars that sleep with the daughters of men,
some of the flowers close up like fists and kisses
and others grasp themselves like a key
to a door that the whole universe can walk through,
and there are strange birds
flying from the eyes
in the rising skull of the moon
that sing like the pyres of cremated guitars
that died like trees in their solitude
and even the gates are weeping like wild dogs.
And there's a wind, intelligent, dark
the ghost of an ancient serpent
horned without ears,
an ocean of mind that exceeds itself like a wave
that howls like a secret it can't tell itself,
like a root blind to its own flowers,
that wants to lead my voice away in chains,
that wants my tongue to try
like a leaf in the updraft of a fire storm
to scream its agony out in the night
so that even the furthest star shudders
with the horror of its final liberation
like an arrow through the throat of a caged hawk.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Don't Think The Wind Sings For Me Alone

I don't think the wind sings for me alone
even in this isolated space where it
silvers the leaves of the Russian olives
like musical scales. Or every thought and emotion,
every image, symbol, or insight
shares the same myth of origin that I do.
Nor all the words that I call my native language
weren't rooted first in someone else's garden.
As the air I breathe was, as the light that has entered
through many more eyes than mine. What I hear
doesn't belong to me, nor what I see,
my private vision. But when I don't grasp
at clouds and water, everything is my reflection
looking back at me as if there were no one there.

I disappear. And I feel my presence everywhere
as real as the sceptres of Queen Anne's Lace
growing old in the moonlight, or the blue fury
of the wild irises burning in their own fires
like the Pleiades. Who can understand
the circuitous wanderings of the mindstream
white water rafting its own axons in an empty lifeboat
when even the questions you raise about it are not your own?
I may well be that, but tonight, I'm not personally involved.
Things occur like spiritual events. The rat snake
strikes the frog, the shadow flash of a bird
transits the moon. Arcturus descends
before the Summer Triangle with the easy grace
of a light that doesn't realize it's being observed intensely.

And I wonder if we're actualizing each other
in some interdependently original way
that it knows as little about as I do.
Or the dead birch tree that's standing by both of us,
naked in its bones as a fan of coral.
Silly man, now you know how a fly
up against a window feels. Or how a mirror
that's deeper than either your eyes
or the light can see into, keeps its appeal.
Been wondering most of my life
in an aloof but wary mode of gratitude
about the great symphony of love and light and light,
like someone who's been hurt by someone they cherish
without knowing why. And whether to laugh or weep
at the absurd tragicomedies that keep appearing
like vulnerable mushrooms in my sleep.

But tonight, tonight, all I want to hear
is the whisper of a dropp of water running down the sluice
of a blade of stargrass. The eerie rustling of the leaves
as if the trees had something to say to me
about my presence among them that leaves me
half again as estranged as when I first came here
to enjoy a freedom that isn't just a matter of changing gates.

Sad man, but tonight I dance with thousands of waterlilies
under the chandeliers of the stars, in three four time,
as if I just remembered how to waltz with the bride
and bow to a flower like a lunar violin. My heart
doesn't look for its reflection in the fire pit
where I burnt all my life masks like straw dogs
when the sacred ritual was over. I denuded myself
basking in the clear light of the void, until
there was no one left, not even me, to notice.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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