En.Citatepedia^®.ro

I Want To Make A Contribution

I want to make a contribution.
I want to leave something on the stairs of the temple
in the dead of the night and steal away like a shadow,
hoping my small gift of a gift is well-received.
That the stars don't think they're wasting their light
to shine down upon it. Nor the wind resent the seeds it carries.
Fifty years of poetry. Painting the picture-music
the darkness pours into my heart and my heart conveys to my ears.
I can taste thousands of wildflowers like eyes in my blood.
I can taste the homelessness of the rogue stars in my tears,
and pull the wounded swords I cull like thorns of the rose
from the stone of my brain that fell in the farmer's field
like a rock through the window of the abyss
and make it clear as Merlin locked in his tower of glass,
that the stars only look fixed from a distance,
up close and intimate as atoms they're in a frenzy of creation
like a cloud of gnats in the last rapture of the sunset
radioactive with the bliss of being alive to know this.
That we're all longing for home in the lap of an expansive awareness
that threw the starmaps away the moment we were born
into the radiance of things that let go of the light
as if they knew something they just couldn't keep to themselves
without doing great injury to the flowers of life
that space was mind, and time was its emotional life
and as the dark mother said to her last incarnation
as it was stepping through the doorway into a stranger,
we're just going to wing it from here on end.

I want to be a strong storm tree twisted and bent by the wind
like the last letter of a sacred alphabet with no alpha or omega
to mark where things begin and end like death in life.
And wind up like a windfall of sweet fruit without end.
I want to make something of my falling, I want to honour
the table I eat at like iron and carbon and oxygen
by bringing something back for what I have received
without asking, or making a decision when I was not aware
of some unimaginable god that holds me personally responsible for it.
What a sleight to humans everywhere matter enjoins them
in a common labour to resonate so perfectly with the light
that lucidity isn't the exclusive property of the unknown,
and just because it's dark, the new moon of the black swan
shedding the feathers of the white, doesn't mean, it's not enlightened.

Though I come like a bird to a windowsill, though I pass
like a star from the window, though I sing of death
on the green bough, though I sing of life on the dead,
though I have been a dragon, a kitten, and a bee,
though I have floundered in sorrows like a lifeboat
way over my head, and lived through starless nights of fear
pulled down like executioners hoods over my eyes,
waiting to see what the morning brings that's vital,
I have not trafficked with my life like a pimp in a flower bed.
I have endured whatever excruciating transfigurations
I've ever had to go through, naked as a knife of light
unsheathed from the ore of this body that can no more
be cast off on the slag heap, than my spirit can paint in blood
a mural of all the changes we've been through like stars and mud.

I want to deepen the roots of the flowering night.
I want to beseech the poppies with my eyes
for more luminous experiences of cadmium red light
for more mystery among the stars than even they're aware of,
for more moons in the apple, more suns in the bread,
for more crazy wisdom than there is the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
I want to show the pine-cones they're pagodas as well
and point out where the mourning doves nest under their eyelids
and the shamans dwell in the upper branches of their evergreens
waiting to see if down will come cradle, baby and all,
or the next ascent is a red-tailed hawk at liberty
to fall upon whatever it likes, raising the snake of the lowest
up into the mystic delirium of the highest
to feather its scales in boas of oxymoronic light.

I want to intensify the dark until people can find
their way home by it, stars that broke into themselves
like morning glory tangled in an old bicycle wheel.
A pine-cone would do, a locket of sky, a piece of straw,
I could offer anything I wanted to, all those nests and pockets
I made in my pillow for years like a cat with a catcher's mitt
trying to find the perfect spot for its nightmare to sleep.
Or any one of a hundred cornerstones that were never built upon
or were torn down before the first brick laid.
Or I could lay my life down like a grain of wheat
among millions, at the feet of a silo so immaculately empty
it's never needed a single one of us, or all the animals
that bleated and bellowed and bled upon the earth
because we started drinking blood long before
we turned to bread like a better body to sacrifice.
Or my eyes like little thumb-drives of everything they've seen.

A gift of a gift as was given to me without a giver,
the ashes of a dead butterfly on a pyre of autumn leaves,
without ritual, celestial spin, I just want to come by myself
like a human in confusion we make the labour of our lives
as if I were stepping out of the trees like a white-tailed buck
come down to the river to drink from the moonlight
and add my reflection to the water that gave it to me,
with my head bowed toward the earth like a broken branch
heavy with the scarred fruits of life that have sweetened
like the moon over the years, poems I can recite by heart,
like the names of the stars and the flowers and the birds
and the ghosts of all those sad, passionate women who
tried so hard to be happy their tears clung like eyes
to the mystery of the windows they kept looking through
as if they were resilvering the mirrors of old telescopes
with the dew of a morning from a long time ago
witching in the dark for stars to explain their loss.

I want to bring a word that's been so deeply hidden in the open
like the flower of a rootless tree, it's got no colour of its own,
no seed, no leaf, no humming bird or bee, the tuning fork
of the nightbird, but no song, no honey, no nectar,
no likeness anywhere to compare it with, demonic or benign,
no meaning no mouth has ever wrapped itself around
like the atmosphere of a habitable planet, though the wind has tried,
a word so indelibly original it can't be washed out
like the whisper of a watercolour in the ear of a solar flare,
a word so private it gets said over the graves of the sacred syllables
that died in the mouths of men like the names of their gods,
not a prayer, not a mantra, not the shriek of a war-cry,
not a curse, not a blessing, not the answer to anything,
and I want to say the unsayable so unsayably free of veils
no junkie in the snakepit of a burning spoon, no lover
thawing virgin watersheds in the nunnery of Madame Moon
has ever stood so naked in their own eyes
even the emptiness inside felt overdressed for the occasion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Faceless This Time Of Night

Faceless this time of night, my skin evaporates like dry ice
into a deepening sense of containment
by a dark space with distant cities of light
trying to colonize the Pythagorean fireflies of Cretona,
or the shimmering mirage of Port Angeles
dancing like a seance at the foot of the mountains
across a hundred miles of the Georgia Strait at night,
the immensity of the freedom that dwarfs the stars
with the sheer magnitude of the labour before them.

The fragility of a spinal cord traversing the abyss
of a one-stringed box guitar made of cardboard
when you were a kid, the mere filament
of an anachronistic light bulb with the lifespan
of the wick of an apostate candle at a black mass,
disappointed it wasn't born a flower,
but a weed more at home among the stars
that uprooted it from its intimacy with the earth
like a kindred spirit of light
that must wander through its own solitude
like music at night from an open window
in the life of the mind to reach out to them
like a tendril of smoke from the embering nugget
of the heart nesting in a private crown of fire
that abdicated its empire of ashes for a single note
of the night bird's longing to sing back up
like a bell for a sad universe that's always on the road.

I hear crying in the distance, the dark lament of the hills.
The night creek weeping unseen through hidden valleys.
I can taste the deaths and sorrows, the broken promises
of the rain, drifting like the fragrance of a waterlily
like a star reflected on the undivined watershed of its tears
saturating the air. Matter a condensation of the light,
I can feel life moving through this body, this flesh,
this scrap of starmud, a rush of water, a gust of stars,
a purple passage of blood, a breath of fire and wind,
and the earth, not solid, but real, animating all my limbs,
my vital organs like the ripening fruit of a rootless tree
as if time wept like a bell in me as well, and its tears,
heavy with the weight of too many separations,
yet wise in the ways of the sky, sweetened the fall to come.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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When Someone Loves You And You're No One

for Kristine Marie

When someone loves you and you're no one,
what happens then? What do you have to give
that they aren't already in full possession of?
The many I have loved have become one woman.
And this is an orchid that blooms in fire at night.
And this is the dove that returns from earth
with a wing like a broken arrow and asks to be healed.

When someone loves you and you're no one,
what happens then? This picture-music flowing
like a carillon of bliss and despair through
my body, heart, mind as if they were all
poured like dragon iron into the casting of the same bell
that yesterday raised like a sword to kill it back into life?
And this is a doorway you can stand in forever
as if you were greeting someone who never comes.
And this is that butterfly among wildflowers
that flutters about like a symbol of the mind
as if it didn't know whose loveletter it is yet.

When someone loves you and you're no one,
what happens then? Do you give them your emptiness?
Do you wrap space around them when they're cold
like a star-studded shawl you asked the night to weave
for someone very special into astrology?
Or do you minutely examine the mystic specifics
of your life as you've known it up to now
and from somewhere in some dark room
way back of the heart, feel the urge to apologize
to the stars for how much their light's been through
for so little? The star labours, and candles are brought forth.
And this is the delirium of a window the moon drinks from.
And this is that jewel of a tear that didn't
make a big splash on the rock like other tears
and by that you know it's a diamond in disguise.

When someone loves you and you're no one,
what happens then? Does the air as now revel
like autumn in a gleeful chaos of images and insights
the wind unravels like leaves in a tantric realm of crazy wisdom?
Do you see a woman coming through a gate
as if she'd lived her whole life among roses and razor-blades?
And she's not asking for rapture, but you're beginning to feel
there's a peony of a supernova in the house of Cancer
waiting to express itself in the beauty of the way
it relinquishes itself like the moon to the waters of earth.
And this is that mysterious spell that beguiles
the expert hunter into baiting his trap with his own heart
hoping it's irresistible to the fox he wants to take it.
And this is that dawn of a new day that arises like
a strange exorcism of everything that's ever possessed you before
as you greet every ghost in passing off the lake
the same as you've always done, the waterbirds.

When someone loves you and you're no one,
what then? You stare as I do at Venus in the sunset
and write long poems that tunnel through mountains
like work trains full of precious ores that glow in the dark
more intensely as it approaches like a lantern from a long way off?
Or is it just another firefly at the end of my nose
casting galactic shadows across the time and space
it takes to behold them in the furthest reaches of my mind?

I sense a gentleness I haven't known before.
I see a beauty that's as easing to the eyes as moonrise.
And the seeds of words that haven't passed between us yet
are already beginning to open their eyelids and flower.
And there's a soft gray blue sky with a scattering of ashes
to honour the dead and give the wind its due
I can see spilling out of the urn of your heart
to make room for the phoenix I am about to give you
as if it were child's play, when I'm with you,
wholly absorbed like light into bread, to rise from the dead
and feel hunger again, to drink from the fountain mouths
of fire again, and desire and long as I once did
and imbibe the wines of life as if I'd never existed before
without cutting my tongue on the taste
or succumbing to the inconceivable as if everything
that followed thereafter were the afterlife of the inevitable.
And this is the era in which you know
you've already tied your blood like a scarlet ribbon
around a gift no one can determine the value of
if she opens it in wonder, haste and love.
And this is the moment you dread the joy of
when death tastes as sweet as birth in the mouth of life
and autumn lives out of the suitcase of all its memoirs
like the blossoms of a manuscript that has come to bear fruit.

I saw you and you were a gazelle at the easel,
painting the moon like a beauty mark on the forehead
of a sacred slave girl dancing naked in the light that released her
like a butterfly in the jaws of a dragon she could awake with a whisper.
I saw you in a gust of stars, and felt the wings and dust devils
sprouting out of my heels to let me ride the thermals of my heart again
as if the long, dark, strange, radiant journey I'd already come
were merely a hair of the way I had yet to go like the sole copy
of a love poem I had committed to the wind so hopelessly
such a long time ago when my solitude could play
the rosey-fingered sea like a musical instrument
that could make the waves sing like mermaids
without a plectrum or a pick or a ship, as long
as there was desire in your fingertips and urgency in your art.

When someone loves you and you're no one,
what then? Let them be everything to you even
if there's no you to be anything to. Pour your emptiness
into hers and fill the cup up to the edge of the moon
and let it spill over with light as if it had a leak in it
bigger than a record harvest in the horn of the moon at full.
I've cut star wheat in a virgin's hand
in a total eclipse of my senses
and touched flesh as if it were fresh bread
cooling on the windowsill of a hungry man
who can taste the light in it like letters from a child hood
far enough away from home to learn to love it again
with a second innocence more indelible than the first.

As for me and my treehouse with open windows,
I shall welcome a songbird on the cusp of Leo
to every branch and rafter of it, or if need be
at sea on the moon, in the event of a storm,
a lifeboat fashioned out of my own bones
to hang on to like the eye of peace in the skull of the dragon
who looks at you and reads you like fireflies on a starchart
delineating a new constellation out of homeless space and time
and a habitable myth of origin for two exiles in love
among the sacred groves of the rootless trees.

With you I have not come to revere the pain and longing
of hungry ghosts hanging on to every blade of grass
like a flag at half mast in a high wind.
I have come to appeal any destiny
that doesn't bear the seal and signage of your heart.
Nor will I ever surrender any sword to your waters
that wasn't first tempered in the translucent fire of diamonds
that feel like a fool of cool water running down your skin
like a spring thaw of the crystal chandeliers
that melted down their spear points into rain,
that dipped their swords in wax
and trimmed the wicks into fuses
and lit them up like Roman candles
such that my eyes and my heart
are still flowering wildly with you in these starfields.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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These Words Turn Homeward

These words turn homeward
toward you, my dark wood,
because of all assignations of the night
you are West, you are dream and secret
you, deeper than jewels, sweeter
than the taste of stars
in the eyes of wounded black berries.
You, longing and lucidity,
singing in the last of the shadows
of the sacred trees for the unattainable
that summons me to you.
Endless, the farewell, endless
the dusk the nightbirds follow
after the swallows
have danced for the stars
in an aerial display of their own.
You, my star field, my wildflower,
whose skin is the skin of lunar waterlilies
and the tide at the tips of my fingers.
My new moon, my despair,
my solitude, my silence, my absence
which among these thousand lonely lakes
has looked upon you and seen
as I have seen in your incomprehensible eyes
how unfathomable they are to themselves
in your depths, your death,
the fullness of your abiding evanescence.
the quiet intimacies
that have just crept up on me
over these intervening years
that have done nothing
but linger in the moment
as if you would always be there
and could be found nowhere else
but now forever in this doorway
this broken window into my heart
to let go of
over and over and over again
like the rain, this stone, that leaf,
the wraith of your breath
hovering like a thin autumn mist
always at a distance over the harvested fields.
O diminished one, subtle one, free,
how is it you can inspire me still
though your ashes were given back to the stars
like a message for their eyes only
so many years ago that time itself
has upgraded all my starmaps
and made you alone, far one, bright one,
this lonely holy road that’s walking me home
as if my final destination, like yours, like you
were everywhere in whatever direction I turn
to ask the next star, where you’ve gone,
has it seen you, has it heard
was it too soon, was it too early
is it too late, too perilous, too absurd
for the morning to return you
like a singing bird to a green bough
to the dead branch that lost the moon
like its only blossom
on the rootless tree
that it took you from
when it took you from me?

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Does The Eye Of The Rain

Does the eye of the rain know it's a tear?
Does that ray of light know
that even at night
it's a revolutionary among flowers?
Between the giver and the given
between a human and his god
between a human and her void
the gift of a gift of a gift.
And the gifts aren't hidden
even when you cover your eyes.
I saw a baglady the other day
who hadn't given it all away yet
who was positively beatific
in an atmosphere
that only she could breathe
but the shining under her rags
told me she lived on light.
She was a waterlily in a swamp.
And I wondered if she knew it.
What I don't know I intuit
so even if she did
how could that add
one dropp of bliss
to an abyss that was already full?
Experience makes a gift of a school.
The blossom grants the apple its absence.
The wind is Johnny Appleseed.
Or the mad old farmer at the end of his life
that was seen hanging on to the tail
of a black bull
in the backwoods of Westport
sowing the groves with grain.
So the birches had bread
he gave away his brain.
So the dead know
we haven't departed
we leave them our pain
in the company of flowers.
Things don't have origins.
They have givers.
Even in math
giving is an axiomatic fact.
Does the sumac know it's a phoenix in the fall?
The lifework of a universe
in every eyelash
in every bud on the locust tree
in every branch of coral on the moon.
If the all were not whole in the least of us
all things would cease to exist.
Life wouldn't be possible
if it ever short-changed itself,
watered a gram,
diluted the whiskey
thinned our blood like a mosquito.
Life would be an also-ran
that didn't quite make it to the moon.
Does the stone
that forged it out of fire and iron
know it's giving Excalibur
back to the water?
Or the magician his wand?
The diviner his witching rod?
The poet his computer?
Giving isn't a moral vow
you make to the universe.
It's the way we survive.
Say one word truly in any language
and you've endowed the gift of speech
on inanimate things that were mute
about all the things they had to tell you
in your own voice.
This is not mysticism.
This is not science.
This is not the Uncertainty Principle
of some random atomic spiritual life.
I'm not drinking my reflection
from the wellspring of a mirror.
It's as clear as a chandelier.
You can't keep
what you won't give away.
And it isn't the giver.
It isn't the given.
It's the giving that's crucial.
The Buddha gave Ananda a rose.
I don't know what kind of flower it was for sure
but let's suppose.
It isn't the rose that's famous
it's the giving that has come down to us
through the years
thorns and all
heart to heart
hand to hand
human to human
rose petals on the mindstream.
The enlightened dreams
of an unattainable man.
If you're cosmic ice,
absolute Kelvin,
dispassionate as entropy,
profound as blue glass
to an ancient Roman
you're still not sublime
until you learn to give it all away.
Empty the urns of the fireflies
like the ghosts of earthbound insights
and scatter their ashes on the wind
and they'll tell you how
to light the night up
and play like water
that doesn't know how to live any other way.
Giving took water for a body
as soon as it saw how beautiful
the wild iris and blue narcissus were.
Wisdom is water.
Compassion is water.
And there's no end of the modes of it.
Water is the light's favourite mirror.
And the most fun.
And what are we
if not clouds
if not wombs
cut off from the sea like kites,
if not sacks of water,
fruit that leaks like a crucified pear
hoping if we've got to be poured out of ourselves
like pitchers
it's over a garden.
Chandeliers of rain when we cry,
even the windows have learned
to weep along with us,
glaciers and glass,
slow inexorable tears
that like to linger on the past
as if their futures weren't the past
just gone on ahead of them
to greet them when they come.
Like a garden in the fall
that gives what it's got left to the birds,
However you think
you've emptied the cup of the moon,
such is the generosity of water
there's always one last
unfathomable watershed of a dropp left
to give back to the water-giver.
And when you do
pour it away from you
like Dogen Zenji
or someone who has drunk their fill
in a single gulp of the bowl of their skull
as a sign of respect for the river.

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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Tenderly The Evening Descends Into A Dark Bliss

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Night's A Black Hole Of A Begging Bowl

The night's a black hole of a begging bowl
that doesn't know what to ask for anymore.
Shall I throw the new moon of another beginning in
like good coin of the realm, in passing,
or bite the bullet of a counterfeit eclipse
in the silver silo of the dark abundance
I'm trying to trigger into stars again
like apocalyptic insights going off in my brain?
The heavens roll like an old thirty-eight
I raise to my temple for old times' sake.
But the gate I used to close behind me
in the high starfields to keep nothing in
is hanging on like a lapwing by one rusty hinge
to the wing and the prayer it's dragging on the ground.

It's getting a little late for suicide. The timing's
overtaken the importance of the content.
And this close to the end, it would be a shame
not to see yourself out like friend in the doorway
saying farewell to yourself as you say in return
I'm glad you came to the stranger whose threshold
you crossed like a star in transit at zenith.
My pulse is still hammering swords of light out
on the anvil of my heart for me to fall upon,
but lately I've been bending them like horseshoes
to put them out of use and return them in tribute
to the water sylphs in the sacred pools of my mindstream.

Inspiration ages into crazy wisdom that still
doesn't take its own advice but never fails to sing
in a voice worthy of a wolf or hermit thrush at moonrise.
I've been firewalking my way through this
long, dark, strange, radiant dream since I first
opened my eyes and the stars began to shine
but I've never lived the same thing twice.
Though the morning star falls like Lucifer
in the false dawn of enlightenment, the abyss
cannot be bridged by anyone's trajectories
however high we ascend, how ever deep we plunge,
until we're burning like maple leaves and shooting stars
in the second innocence of our return journey back to earth.

Fletched arrowheads of the sky, even the birds
falling short of the unattainable miss the mark
and return to the green boughs of their beginnings
just like the flight of these words in the sunset
as the night overwhelms us all unspeakably
with the proto-nostratic of the stars
like a mother-tongue of light that leaves nothing unsaid
in the autumn darkness fragrant with the decaying dream grammars
of the dead slipping their shadows like secret messages
under the door of the book we're writing between us,
the beginningless prelude of the endless epilogue
of the memoir of the love life we had with Venus in Virgo
when the new moon was in the claws of sensuous Scorpio.
Big, red-hearted, archaic Antares
threshing the green wheat of Spica
as if the harvest had been achieved before the seed was planted.

Just because we die doesn't mean that life
is finished with us like the draft of a manuscript
we threw into the bonfires of the maple trees
to inspire our ashes to rise out of the open urns of our firepits
like the feathers of a dragon enflamed by the wind
so our spirits could ride their own legends a breath
higher and closer to the stars every time we open our wings
to re-read the lyrics it took a lifetime to write in scars
like thorns in defence of the mystery of the black rose
we were happy to bleed for as if our blood had no other use
than the ink in the pens of these leafless woods
dreaming of new foliage in the spring returning
like the plumage of eagles to the lonely flight feathers
of their skeletal quills. Fossil constellations
in the darkness that whisper between the lines
of the alpha and omega of the life themes that once ran
like purple passages of the mindstream
that can still shed light on our afterlives in a book of shale
long before we had eyes to read what we were writing
like loveletters to ourselves on intimate terms
with the inconceivable solitude of this distant future
we're all living now in celebration of yesterdays yet to come.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If Only I Could Remember Things For Awhile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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Willow-Minded Friend Of Mine

Willow-minded friend of mine
you're the star of Isis in the palm of my hand
that keeps me from drowning in a sea of glass.
How often have I been washed ashore
on the coasts of your flesh
like a naked sailor in an icestorm
of breaking chandeliers
and been taken to see the king
by a princess doing laundry?

A firefly in the distance
might be a great star up close
and your every breath
seed the whirlwind
with golden drops of rain
after the tempest has exorcised its pain
and you grow more beautiful picture by picture
like someone who wants to be redeemed
in her own eyes
for things that only she could be.

But that's not why I love you.
No siren no muse no priestess no witch
no shepherdess of exotic snakes
squirming with the future
like mystic themes around your body
no sacred whore ready to party in the temple
with Minervan night owls and Cepheid movie-stars
that don't want anybody to turn the lights on
to see what's going on in the darkness
they are to everybody,
you are to me more
than I have eyes to see
to the beginning and end of things
but I can feel the night within
flowing like dark energy through space
and tendrils of time growing like paisley lifelines
into something sweeter than the wine
the white mirror drinks from its own reflection.

Before the arising of signs
I can feel your presence moving in me
like unborn constellations playing chess with time
to see who shall be the blossom
who the root
who the leaf
and who shall prime the lightning of the vine.

Long before your veils are parted by no one
like rivers of insight
I can hear your stars
whispering things into my ear
that make whole worlds appear
rocking life in their arms like water.

Time is a mental space
with different flavours.
You taste like the wounded grace
of an eloquent truce with flowers
or as Dogen Zenji said in l238
the lucky day is when you discover it's all one day
meaning one chameleon
turning many different colours
to match the hours it spends
in front of the mirror
that keeps it guessing
who's the seer and who's the seen.
The grass turns red.
The flower turns green.

How long have I waited for you
like a tide on the moon to come in
like the spoke of a tree for a rim of stars
like a metaphor in the chrysalis of a dragonfly for wings
you could see through like a stained-glass window
divining the silence like a witching wand
in a waterless church?

And it's all just been a moment ago
that isn't at the discretion of birth and death
I learned to breathe with you on the moon
like some atmospheric fish
transformed by a new medium
into whatever you wished me to be
when I was the lifeboat
in the eye of the endless sea
that washed me out like a cinder
with the tears of a passing mindstream
as if I got in the way of my own dream
and you?

You were the mystic specificity
as you will always be
in the lunar pearl of it all
that sometimes doubles for my skull.

And isn't it funny how when the night screams
it's always an aurora
that everyone mistakes for dawn?
A snail of a comet smears the mirror and moves on
and it's as good a path as any to follow I suspect
if I had a destination in mind
that wasn't looping in retrograde like a noose.

I may be as footloose and fancy-free as a ghost
but there's no end of this longing
that keeps making me up as I go along
trying to be true and strong
to what I love the most about being dead.

I think of you
and I burn in the terrible clarity
of a light that's never fallen on anyone
as if illumination were endlessly eyeless.
I think of you
like water looking up at the moon as it rises
and I realize the wingless openness
of the dark gates before me
and pass through like a midnight sun
whose seeing evaporates in the morning
like visions and words and waterbirds
that have been transcendentally uplifted out of the graves
of their own reflections.

We are what we need to be to each other
without knowing what that is
like a phantom kind of picture-music
that's always changing its lyrics
to keep up with the mood of the times
whether it's the high definition tunnel vision
of the smokey beekeepers
trying to bring law to the unruly flowers
or the dark energy of an expansive space
driving the stars like exiles
into the absolute sublimity of a starless place
deep in the heart of God
that even creation can't fill
or we're just kicking pebbles down the road together
through clouds of white sweet clover
like afternoon companions of each other's solitude.

Time is the poetry of the eternal
when love sits by itself under its willow tree
and watches the stream pass by
like the flowing eye it drinks from.
I drink pellucidly on the moon
from old grails of sacred blood
like an ark that survived the flood
only to find itself abandoned like a farm
on a mountaintop with two of every kind
except for one

who made his way down alone with the alone
to sing his lover up out of the dead
as if he were missing one of his eyes
and the other had turned to stone.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Apparitions Of The Muse

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Out Here Alone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You Never Became A Memory

You never became a memory.
You remain as you are in my life.
A living compassionate presence.
I have forgotten more of me
than I ever could of you.
Whenever I want to see beyond the light
I see through your eyes
everything you wanted to show me
that was not petty or tragic or cruel.
I was a profound fool
but you taught me how
to add my darkness to the night
to enhance the shining.
And even now
when things aren't flowering well
I still reach out for you by deepening my roots.
As if I could touch your face again
like a muse of water
lost in her own reflection.
As if I could ignite the same fires again
that blossomed on the dead branch
of the witching wand
that inspired the stars
who thought they had seen everything
to marvel at their own perfection in you.
Inspiratrix of the blue waterstars
that burned like chandeliers
among the constellations of the lilies
pluming themselves like swans
in the feathers of the moon,
how I long to be eclipsed and enlightened again
like a chameleon reflecting the mood of your beauty
as I did before these windows came
like glass-eyed calendars between us
to prove that time isn't space. It's pain.
And change is an absolute
that doesn't like its relatives.
My angel misses you.
My demon misses you
so badly at times
I can't look into the abyss for long
without impeaching my mind
for its awareness of an emptiness
that aches like an existential absurdity
to be put out of its misery
for being born blind deaf and dumb
about whose wind on the waters is rocking
the cradles and crucibles of creation.
The Medusa holds her tits out
like snakepits and grails
and I never know which one to drink from
or if the poison and the antidote
are just the opposite fangs of the moon
as it grows through its waxing and waning
as if a physician found a way
of healing herself
by sloughing her wounds like skin.
The mindstream weaves its way at night
like a garden snake
through myriad blades of grass
like the shuttle of a loom
that doesn't know what theme of life
unspools in the flowing.
And my eyes miss you like light.
I'm a lighthouse on the shore of a dead sea
trying to walk on water like the moon
as the waves chip away at me
like shale flakes off the cold stone
that edges slowly through my heart like a thorn.
And it may make a king of me
to draw the sword out of the stone
but that doesn't close the wound
of having first to fall upon it
to vacate my throne with honour.
If life is the truth
then lying is the only way
to describe death to a god
who doesn't understand it.
What's a church without gravestones?
Aspiration without an expiry date?
And so many different kinds of death
not enough generations of humans
have been born yet to know them all.
Death tries to trivialize the relative
as if the things I miss most about you
had never been.
But your mindwaters are mingled with mine inextricably
like the shoreless starstreams of space
panning for planets in our flowing
we might live on
and have our being and our breath
unblighted by loss. Separation. Death.
And there is no more of the sadness
I used to see in your eyes
as if they were my own
that I still see everywhere in the eyes of all living things
when I know as you would have had me know
as clearly as you did
that even though the neverness
of implacable circumstances and lost last chances
may have separated us like the threads of the rope
you used to climb up to heaven before me
like one who took the short-cut
and one who took the long way home through these starfields
taking his painful time
like the unfulfilled hope of a child
he's not alone when he opens his eyes
like a dream within a dream
that looks but can't find him,
you can polish the missing into a mirror
and wait like a fox by a black hole for things to appear
that will never be the same again
or you can open your tears like windows
and let out the birds of pain
that I have kept as close to me
as the whisper of your voice
in this cold, dark chimney
telling me to let you go as I do now
to rejoice on the dead branch and the green bough
like the flower and flame
of what became of us.
We cannot be the song or the singer
for very long
as our voices dim like candles in the darkness
that have given it all away.
And as you used to say
as if it would always be today without you
and all we have given is all we could keep of each other
like water returned to the river
we raised to our lips to taste
the sad, last drops
of these eyeless elixirs of the moon
that linger like vapours
in the empty goblets of the morning glory,
and I need to believe you more than I do
in this neverness of now
that has come before me without a beyond
or a word from all that has irrevocably gone.
Yes. But the singing. That goes on.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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As Much As I Love The Stars

As much as I love the stars, I know
the spirit must seek its lost radiance
in the midst of the filth of this world,
even when its third eye is trying
to wash it off in tears it really means.
Under the half-closed eyelid
of the pine cone pagoda in oceanic meditation
is a fire-seed waiting for immolation
like an overdue urn about to give birth.
And do you see how the moon
feathers the waves with silver,
and the breathing waters so much
like the flesh of a woman undulating
under the caress of an unaccustomed hand
shines back like fish swimming through a starmap?

As above so below. Same with inside and outside.
Astrophysics is psychology. Noumena, phenomena.
Are you looking for a unified, field theory of your mind?
Study that small sacred syllable of a black ant
with the torn wing of a butterfly
under full sail in its mandible
it's taking back to the heap
of a thriving passage tomb burial
like a high card it's going to lay on the table
without intending to call anyone's bluff.

The moon on the lake isn't timed.
Death's not too late. Life's not too early.
Not all the flowers bloom at once
in a wave of mass hysteria at a sports stadium.
Time is as generous to the dandelion
as it is to the hyacinth or the rose.

When a total eclipse of the soul
can be as illuminating to a firefly
as the enlightenment of the full moon
can be to the mad at harvest time
and the night bird sings on the same branch
out of the same longing
as the mourning dove does
on the burgeoning bough,
how far must a wave look for the grail
before it realizes it's swimming in it
and by virtue of it having never been lost or found,
like the universe you're surrounded by
dipping its other wing in the cup you drink from
like blood from your own prophetic skull
or an elixir of love from the goblet of a black tulip,
as an antidote to falling into a cult of trances,
trying to teach rattlesnakes to ghost dance for rain
when everywhere you look as far as the eye can see,
nothing but the bleached bones of their vertebrae
crumbling like aqueducts across a sea of sand
looking for the holy hourglass to green it again?

When things are like this, why send
a caravan of mirages like thought-trains
on a pilgrimage for water on the moon?
Is a course correction more innocent
than its original direction or is it
just another change of heart on the part
of a weathervane that thinks linearly
it's got its hand on the rudder of the wind?

Best thing to do in a storm
is let go of the wheel of birth and death
and either go down with the ship like a constellation,
or trust in a bubble-shaped universe you still might float
like a turbulent waterlily above the turmoil of it all,
anchored to the bottom like a key on a kite
to lure the lightning to your spinal cord
the way copulating snakes make their own caduceus,
twin wavelengths from the same inner matrix
ascending like helical thermals under a dove's wings,
so that dragons are born of cosmic eggs
that know how to heal fire with fire
that can consume itself like life
without ever getting burnt out
even when autumn's coming on
and you can begin to smell
the smoke and ashes on its breath.

Enlightenment the inspiration of the search,
the spirit returns to the candle in your hand,
to dance with the flame of life within you
on your own threshold, in your own doorway as you realize
like someone waking up from a dream
in their own bed, their head on a softer pillow
than they imagined a moonrock could be
at one sixth the gravity of earth, what
was there to aspire to that could possibly be
higher and wiser than a cloud circling a mountain
or down in the valley where the stars slum
once they get off the night shift, more compassionate
than a honey bee in the eye of a stargazer lily
smothering it in a rusty ochre dust storm of pollen
the way we prepared our dead when we lived in caves
to bloom like a hive when its spirit returns to matter
in its next incarnation as a gust of wildflowers on Mars.
Hawkweed and Indian paintbrush I would think.
And the unusual fruits and flowers that can sprout
from a windfall of intensely radiant meteor showers
flung out of the darkness by the hands of generous sowers
that were ploughing the moon for themselves
long before the ox of the mind showed up
like the blessing of a delusional dependency
that makes you think, gone to seed, you need it.
When the truth has always been mindful
and mindlessly green as the thorns and the leaves
of the locust trees in spring coming into blossom
as easily as the mindstream follows its own lead everywhere
with nothing but its own flowing for a navigator.

No gate, no lock, no pivot, no hinge, no waterclock
trying to put the fire of life out in a bucket brigade
of community-oriented arsonists, departure
never any further off the beaten path from home
than its arrival can be lead astray
by the shadow of the return journey
it casts behind it like the widening wake
of a waterbird's wings unravelling
the flying carpet of the water that wove it
like wavelengths of the hidden harmonies
that are on your side like your eyes are
when you step out of the blazing house of life
once in a while, into the expansive solitude
of your own inimitably creative darkness,
without a candle, a firefly, a lightning strike
for a guide, and look up, just look up
in any direction you wish, and don't pick any one
of the six thousand stars you can see
with the naked eye in the country,
no matter you don't know their names
or myths of origin, or much about shepherd moons,
or what an antikythera is, then run around
looking for an underground circumpolar sage
to show you on a starmap where your shining is at
like the light of the star, though you cry
in bliss and sorrow, delusion and insight,
you can't wash out of your own eye
anymore than you can Venus in the dawn
when you're sitting on a mountain under a Bodhi tree
trying to attain the unattainable empty-handed
in the same breath that's been giving it all away
for light years, inexhaustibly, like a flower-mouth
of enlightenment in everything you say or do,
the world in the creative wake of whatever medium
that's shapeshifting into you like water into fish,
darkness into star, sky into a bird on the wing
in a homesick sunset, or the shining of the source
like the lantern in your hand you needlessly labour
at keeping lit to go look for it without realizing
it's your own blazing that blinds you to the gift
of what the darkness arrays before you like candles and stars
and nocturnal waterlilies opening like a new moonrise
amazed by the occult mystery of the fire that burns
in the subliminal watersheds of your fathomless eyes.

In this boundless space, why should you be surprised
behind all the masks of God, her best disguise
when the hidden secret wished to be known
and she revealed herself, was your own face,
your eyes, your mouth, your ears, your voice alone
pouring the universe like the light of picture-music
into your own ears like the spirit of a word
that can't be enlightened until it's been heard by you.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Wind in the Hemlock

Steely stars and moon of brass,
How mockingly you watch me pass!
You know as well as I how soon
I shall be blind to stars and moon,
Deaf to the wind in the hemlock tree,
Dumb when the brown earth weighs on me.

With envious dark rage I bear,
Stars, your cold complacent stare;
Heart-broken in my hate look up,
Moon, at your clear immortal cup,
Changing to gold from dusky red --
Age after age when I am dead
To be filled up with light, and then
Emptied, to be refilled again.

What has man done that only he
Is slave to death -- so brutally
Beaten back into the earth
Impatient for him since his birth?

Oh let me shut my eyes, close out
The sight of stars and earth and be
Sheltered a minute by this tree.
Hemlock, through your fragrant boughs
There moves no anger and no doubt,
No envy of immortal things.
The night-wind murmurs of the sea
With veiled music ceaselessly,
That to my shaken spirit sings.
From their frail nest the robins rouse,
In your pungent darkness stirred,
Twittering a low drowsy word --
And me you shelter, even me.
In your quietness you house
The wind, the woman and the bird.
You speak to me and I have heard:

"If I am peaceful, I shall see
Beauty's face continually;
Feeding on her wine and bread
I shall be wholly comforted,
For she can make one day for me
Rich as my lost eternity."

poem by Sara Teasdale
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Stand Where The Listening Begins

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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