En.Citatepedia^®.ro

Innocent As Gravity And It's Raining

Innocent as gravity and it's raining.
Trying to paint a Monarch butterfly into a starscape
where all the wavelengths have been woven
by a third eye into a spider web. This morning
the left and right hemispheres of my brain
are separated like an hourglass undergoing
the meiosis of galaxies whose lustre's greyed
by the senile pearl of the sky. I want to play
aspirationally like fireflies among the stars,
but a gust of shadows has snuffed all the candles
and if I'm seeing stars at all, it's like a rainbow
wearing a Joseph's coat of colours
at the bottom of a well that hasn't granted a wish in awhile.

My heart's a loom of dissonant wavelengths
trying to weave my bloodstream like a carpet
it can fly away on braiding all these weak threads
and the light of all these images they carry
like the genomes of the souls of the dead
into the d.n.a. of a stronger spinal cord
I can use like a rope to climb up to the sky and beyond.
All my gravitational lensing has turned into bells of glass
and I'm walking on the splinters and plinths
of things that have come and passed, bearing these urns
transmigrationally like amphorae on a shipwreck
to the bottom of a subconscious watershed.
More sad than depressed, but dark just the same
as if all the dazzling suns and lapidary moons
with stars in their eyes that went into the wine
had just closed them in eclipse. Gone back to sleep
as it seems so many flowers to dream a better dream.

What need of my acceptance of what comes or doesn't
when my denial or assent are absorbed in its presence?
As if I had a say in my own solitude. Or the birds
could get in the way of their own singing. Or the rain
could choose the window pane it wanted to look through.
However I labour to refute it, my awareness
is as spontaneously inclusive as time and space,
or closer to home, the sea its own weather, foul or fair.
I can't extinguish the desert that burns within me
in a mirage of water, nor drown the stars in my tears
like the tiny insects that sometimes fly into my eyes
that wash their wings out like sodden punctuation marks
uprooted like sprouting seeds in a sudden flashflood of insight.
I can't catch up to the light. And I can't run from it.
Whether it stings like a nettle or soothes like an aloe
it's always the muse, the mysterium of here and now, as it is,
firefly, or dragon that brings the rain, that I follow
in this discipline of disobedience to what I know and let go of
so that it rains just as often from below as it does from above.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Want to Be Brilliant, Want To Shine Like A Black Star

Want to be brilliant, want to shine like a black star.
Trying to bend space with my mind. Trying to stop time
with my heart. Counting moments like beads on a rosary
of skulls, or shepherd moons on an abacus of gravity.
Though I know they're not all strung out like that.
Asteroids on a wavelength of light, or a spinal cord.
Or maybe I'm just trying to bead a guitar string
with a great black hole, or is it a lunar pearl,
in the center of a lyrical abyss? Workaday world
in a small town, who spends their time like this?
Not fortunate enough to have been born a carpenter,
I'm a mystically surrealistic, poetic astrophyicist
trying to come up with a new grammar for the stars
so all they have to do to express their shining,
is say, Metaphor, and as it is in the abyss, so it is everywhere.

Because I miss you like the main clause of my relativity.
The focal point of all my wavelengths. You're the radiant
and I'm the Martian meteor shower that's dying
to bring the gift of life to the Antarctic like the Leonids
did in the first place as I look at my face in the mirror
and think it's time for a change of species. Sometimes
it's crucial to sustain a few pathetic fallacies about yourself
so when you're under the moonweather of an estranged planet
and a black star breaks through the clouds like the anti-matter
of a waterlily, so do you. Funny how the flowers close their eyes
because none of them wants to miss the eclipse.
One of them said we're all looking through a glass darkly
but I don't see any soot on their petals,
and none of the telescopes are wearing shades.

I like to keep things clear in the light of the void.
I've come along way from the coal mines of space
to shine through your diamond so you can feel
a different kind of translucency that's eleven parts cheap thrill
in all the dimensions I can see you in, and one,
not even you, has discovered yet, that's the orphan of an exile
singing to himself to people the dark in a desert of stars
like a gnostic gospel in the mouth of a cave
to keep the evil jinn and bad spirits away
from the watersheds of my wishing wells
where the angels gather to mingle with the demons like water
they've just turned into wine. As for the other eighty-nine
realms of seeing and being what you see, they're shrines
I've devoted to you, swearing in blood and devotion
on the sidereal plinth of my sword, as I dedicate
all my prophetic skulls from the dark side of the moon
where the crows are wiser about lunar things than the doves,
to the enhancement of your radiance, your love and your art,
by deepening the dark, with a full heart, with things to harvest
that will make the abyss seem like a silo of stars you can break like bread.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Rain Keeps Fallin

I remember the night so well.
The rain was fallin but I just couldnt tell,
If it was you that was callin to my love-sick brain.
But the rain kept fallin on my window pane.
Out of the night the thunder rang in my ear.
I cant fight the feelin, lord, that brings forth my fears.
I wish it was over, lord, please stop the rain.
The rain thats fallin on my window pane.
The rain thats fallin on my window pane.
Every night the rains on time, I can feel it in this heart of mine.
But I dont know what to do.
Well, I guess I could go back home, cause you know back home is where I belong.
But it just aint home without you.
And I dont know what to do, baby.
Well, I guess Im a looser but it just dont seem fair.
I lost all my life so tell me, why should I care?
The night that you left me is the night that it came.
And the rains still fallin on my window pane.
The rain keeps fallin on my window pane.
The rain keeps fallin on my window pane.
You know the rain.
The rain keeps fallin on my window pane.
I said the rain.
The rain keeps fallin on my window pane.
You know the rain.
The rain keeps fallin on my window pane.
I said the rain.
The rain keeps fallin on my window pane.
You know the rain ...
The rain keeps fallin on my window pane.
... keeps right on fallin.
The rain keeps fallin on my window pane.
I said, the rain keeps fallin ...

song performed by by Grand Funk Railroad
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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It' A Gesture Of The Heart

It's a gesture of the heart
that no one can explain
that lays its words down like cool herbs
gathered on the moon
to silver someone else's pain.
We lie down in the same wound
like two stones in the same river
that might make it to the other side
without drowning in the stream
and I speak to you of shores you can reach if you try
and you add yourself like a dropp of water to a shoreless sea, and cry.

And for a moment you are the devastated solitude
of a runaway in the rain
who can't abide the stranger she's become
as a lipstick butterfly emerges
from the shell-casing chrysalis of your rage
and you put your lips on like wings.
You're a princess with a white flag
approaching the ashes of a dragon
who sleeps in his own fires
to wake him up from his dream of water
and negotiate a rescue now
if only I'll concede to show you how.

You want me to respect you because you're dangerous.
You want to ensnare me
in the white voodoo you're practising
on the dark side of the moon,
you believe in my eyes
and want me to see something
you've never shown anyone before
because a window's as good as a door to a thief
and you know we have neither in this homelessness
that shelters our grief like dark matter in space
or the far side of a face
we refuse to acknowledge is ours.

I can feel your powers
chafing their scales in the snakepit
like straitjackets they're urgently trying to slough off
like the old skins of a hand-me-down moon
that don't quite fit the new one right.
One fang, stars; the other, a starless night,
you know how to open things with a smile
and strike like a gate
should anyone walk between your crescents
like a terrorist with carry-on luggage
who doesn't dream he's been detected
as you recoil like a theme to make your point.

It would be easier to tinker with the genes
of the ancient ancestors of a life before sin
than not to want to sleep with you
like a thorn under the skin of your rose,
than not to want to be your bay for the night
and tell you everything's going to be all right
and mean it and drown the world like a torch or a dragon
in the intimacy of our most urgent delusions.

And even if I didn't put a match to the candles
they would still ignite
and a black sun would rise at midnight
and let the stars and flowers decide for themselves
whether they wanted to open in its light or not,
and for awhile, deep underground,
there'd be laughter in a coffin
as we posted dirty notes on our headstones
like shocking love poems
that just rolled off the tip of our tongues
like drops of water charged with stars and snakefire
humming down our spines
like the deathbed hymns of the hydro lines
when they break the news to God.

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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Night. A Whisper Of Rain.

Night. A whisper of rain. Peace in my heart.
A penny on the third eye of the hurricane
I've been trying to ride out all day without
having it throw me off like a big cat on its back.
Farewell, turmoil. I retract my claws
like quotation marks and crescent moons
around the silence of your name.
The fallen pine boughs of your broken wings.
Inspiration doesn't trample on things
like flowers and stars. No more. No more
of those feelings that were meant to be as famous
as a Trojan horse to a poet grazing on the plains of war.

Eyes running down the windowpane in tears
as if they were teaching it to cry. Listen to the rain
deepen the silence like the roots of silly flowers
when you fire the voice coach
and teach them to paint watercolours.
It's sad. But I add that poignancy to the light
like a fragrance of the moon to an apple orchard
and let it dream like wine in the dark
until I taste it again in the windfalls of late September
and in the retreating rosaries of grace leaving like birds.

For the moment I am the inclusive intimacy
of a passion that doesn't scorn the fruit of its outcome.
I kiss my skull the same way I kiss the blossom.
Come life, come death. Two feet on the same path.
I don't split hairs like the wishbone of the road I'm on
and not expect to lose my way back home
wherever that is now the astrolabe is blind and starless
and I drift like a paper lifeboat in a truce with the sea.
I should raise naval flags like spring flowers
to signal the relative victory of a few short hours
but the candles have already sent the message in flames
and the shadows have answered: message received.

No need of tomorrow and much less of yesterday
let the moment tend to the affairs of its own will
I'm an apostate event unbound from the stake
of the irreligious history of the world trying
to burnish lead into gold in the wrath of a volcano god
someone met on the way to the promised land
and asked to join the caravan at the wells in Median
to compound the absurdity of visionary matchbooks
that rained manna and vipers from the opposite eyes
of the mirage of an hourglass skinny-dipping in the desert
to renew the virginity of time like a sundial on the moon.
Rare revelation to the changelings of lust
released on the river like prophetic decoys in a false dawn
to lure the waterbirds into friendly fields of fire
as if to say you can come this far, no higher.

There's never been a star named after a human
except for Cor Caroli, the heart of Charles the Second,
dimly under Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider,
under the handle of the Big Dipper I raise to the lips
of a mermaid in the desert like real water
to a true believer in the midst of delusion
just to hear her sing again on the rocks of longing
like a waterclock on a windowpane in the rain.
And I don't want to tie her to the bowsprit of a shipwreck
that went down at the end of her song,
the whole town on board this leaking ark
and she's the only one that's crying into a lifeboat
like a woman with her face in her hands at the news.

Forty nights and forty days of rain in the spring,
the earth's a hydrocephalic with water on the brain.
And the roads are cobbled with sloppy frogs,
and the darkness is dense with a wardrobe of sorrows
that hangs in the air like an era of hesitation
above the crystal slipper dancing shoes and rubber boots
in the pungent closets of the watershed
that waltzes them like rain on the Tay River
under chandeliers of light-footed starmud
in the abandoned ballrooms of the willows dancing
like gusts of air to the heritage harps
that shine like constellations in their high-strung hair.

A train howls like a wounded animal in the distance,
an iron horse. The nightwatchmen have gone out
like fireflies, but not the streetlamps that have stayed on
like starmaps in the rain to walk the drunks home
arm in arm, crying in their cups like watered down wine.
Nothing divine, earthly or infernal, the eye of time
no more vernal in the east where the moon rises
than eternal in the west where the sun sets,
I'm not playing solitaire in the rain with old regrets,
I'm at peace with the stars that are caught like civilians
between storm fronts, as their seeds get washed away
like flower bombs in a flashflood of shell-shocked rivulets
someone stepped on by mistake. And I'd rather keep
the worst of my war-stories to myself, than swap them
with the vets being strafed by the rain of ricochets
in the Legion's parking lot where things are fought all over again
as their wives usher them to the passenger side of their cars.

Just the rain and me. As if we were born a moment ago.
And neither of us had anything to fight about.
And I was the bud of a wound that hadn't started bleeding yet,
like a shrieking poppy or a stoic rose, and it
wasn't the cure that washed all the blood off
like a paint rag of a sail in a Pacific sunset hemorrhaging at sea.
Just the rain and me. Doing what we both do best.
And all our labour effortless as tears in the eyes of the night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Stars On The Water

By: rodney crowell
1981
Down in louisiana, bayous by and by
Pirogue pole or your natural soul
Keeps you tied to a tree high tide
Beer joint lights come on
And then the crowd starts rollin in
Chorus:
Pretty soon you got stars on the water
You got stars on the water
Its like stars on the water, let it rain
Beaumont to biloxi
Sea breeze at your door
Gypsy rains, dang hurricanes
White silver sandy shore
Blue light lounge is shinin
Way out on the view
Chorus:
It looks just like stars on the water
Just like stars on the water
Just like stars on the water, let it rain
(guitar instrumental)
When its midnight down in mobile
Moonbeams on the bay
They come from miles around to dance the jukebox down
And dig the good time sounds they play
All across the harbour
Night lights shinin in
Chorus:
It looks just like stars on the water
Just like stars on the water
Just like stars on the water, let it rain
Chorus:
Pretty soon ya got stars on the water
You got stars on the water
Its like stars on the water, let it rain
- notes:
Background vocals: timothy b. schmit

song performed by by Jimmy Buffett
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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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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Matter is Music. The Atoms Sing.

Matter is music. The atoms sing. A frog
leaps into the water and strings a guitar.
Tree rings like odes in the heartwood of the apple.
The rain breaks like tears into tiny harps.
A gust of stars, a lyric of dust wheeling
into galaxies like symphonies in hydrogen alpha.
And the light, too, playing the flowers
like the stops of a flute, and the leaves
like semi-quavers, and their fruit, like whole notes.

Adagios of colour, bass runs of taste,
and sound the echo of a shape shifting mirror
that touches the light like a lake
touches the moon inseparably playing
on the plectra of its waves like an encore
among lovers mastering each other's bodies
like first violins. Or red-winged blackbirds,
the woodwinds, or the wavelengths of disparate stars
resonating with the eye into lyres, and eagles, and swans.

And me? I'm this voice that's been scored
by time and space to reveal the contours
of a theme interweaving like a melodic river
through the mindscape of a dream in counterpoint.
And I can hear tides in the rush of the wind
breaking in the leaves of the silver Russian olives
and the great sorrows of children who died young
playing in the rain on the syrinx of the columbine.
And strange and eerie from a distant window
I can hear the muted suffering of a song
whose words I know all too well by heart.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Woke Up Saying Your Name

I woke up saying your name
but in the course of the day forgot.
I should have forgiven you sooner
but my tongue was a noose and a knot.
I should have let you fool my eyes
but not my heart. No Grecian urn
but just the same
I loved the shapely vase of your body
and the fact that my ashes weren’t buried in it.
But those bouquets of angry snakes
you kept trying to arrange
into a Zen garden in Kyoto
or a hair do in Mycenean Greece
kept me looking for an antidote for years
to all those estranged wavelengths
of a gamma ray burst
I stood like a nuclear meltdown in the way of,
though I poured my blood out like heavy water
to get you to stop and cool down.
What it is is what it is only
if you don’t factor in what it’s not.
Otherwise, in the bigger picture,
what it is is just as much what it’s not.
And who can assess
what didn’t go down between us?
I’m sitting on a cold rock down by the Tay River
freezing my proverbials off
because I like being alone with the stars
at three in the morning
because they don’t ask for an explanation
about why I’m up so late
so many light years from home.
And they don’t ask me to translate my scars,
the dead word into the living,
back into wounds
they couldn’t relate to anyway.
And I don’t need to tell them
if you’re going to open yourself up to someone,
if you’re going to bloom, if
you’re going to shine
a rose, a star,
you’re bound to taste your own thorns
or the splinters of broken chandeliers
on your tongue, or a dog
with porcupine quills in its mouth,
howling at the dark side of the moon
as the greater of two faith healers.
Though neither the stars nor I
are into comparative mortality.
And as I approach death and love aimlessly
looking at the stars timelessly alone
I don’t bemoan my brevity anymore
and they don’t flash their eternity in my face.
There’s just stars and eyes for awhile
and both of us agree
death and eternity are none of our business.
There’s just this little bit of heat and light
that flares like a matchbook for a minute
and then goes out
like a holybook, a firefly,
a poem or a flower
burning in its own ashes, smothered
in its own smoke like a pillow
over a dream in a skull
that effaced itself like stars
packed into a snowman that thaws
according to cosmic laws
not meant for our eyes only.
And God, the Zeitgeist,
the Universal Id knows,
how we’ve both tried
to enlighten these lumps of coal,
these sorry excuses for eyes
into diamonds that flow
with love and compassion.
How we have laboured like Sisyphus
to haul what’s deep underground,
the dark ore within us,
up into mountains of light
only to watch it run down again
rivers and rain
into the great night seas beyond
like a heart-mind continuum.
A leaf and a starmap on a lifestream.
We have advanced into our retrogression
like everything else in the universe,
big heavy methane planets
with shepherd moons
that cast their shadows
like beauty spots on Saturn,
and our axes toppled like Neptune’s.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Trying To Express

Trying to express a more immediate intimacy
with the life of the mind
without attributing a form to madness
might just be another way
of looking for comic relief
from the actual facts
of the tragic folly that confronts us
like a world that won't tolerate any mask
you want to put on it for long
to lie about the atrocity of your irrelevance
and pretend you don't know
what you're looking at.
I dream I suffer the same
corpuscular purpose as a paramecium.
I wake up from these desert mirages
and it's true.
OK it's true.
Next.
Because nothing in life is an endgame.
And despite the full stop like an empty cup
at the end of a thought
with the lifespan of a punctuation mark
my cup runneth over like the new moon
and everything is drunk on the lunacy of its light.
It's not the content of life that matters
as much as the way space bends
to accommodate it.
It's not the wine
it's the emptiness of the cup
that shapes the forms of our knowing
so that they can be grasped
by our eyes and hands
as separate things in the world.
Mind is a poet a potter a painter a parent a prophet
that will not be bound by its own works
or the laws of the defenceless who expound them.
Look out into space
and the furthest you will ever see
is a face in the mirror that's older than matter.
Space is a vehicle of transformation
that doesn't go anywhere
because anywhere it goes
its wheels are centered
in the still points of themselves
as we are to our navels.
And all lifelines
straight or otherwise
are emanations of its radiance.
Order and logic and reason
are the dry wishbones of the fearful
looking for predictability in a world
that can't be contained
by a unified field theory
or an elaborated straitjacket
on the fashion ramps of science.
Physics says one size fits all
but by the time the spiders
are finished weaving it
the sleeves are always too short
to keep up with a universe
that's growing at the speed of light
and I'd rather walk naked
in the skin of my own clarity
than be clothed
in someone else's hand-me-downs.
I'm not out hunting birds and butterflies
with a dreamcatcher.
I'm not looking for peace and healing
by abstaining from myself
like a promise I broke to my ancestors.
Everyone was born a lifeboat
in an abysmal sea of awareness
or they wouldn't be here to know it.
So who needs to be saved?
Or is there some kind of holy war going on
between the lifeboats and the waves?
And where does Jerusalem go
to free itself of infidels
when it goes on crusade?
All waves are waterbells
that never stop tolling
and the mindstream
they're raised upon
is in everyone
the sum of what's holy about life.
Learn to transcend your certainties
if you want to get over your doubts.
Don't hoard the effects of your efforts
in the name of a good cause
that's so blinded by its own light
that it can't see
that there's as much randomness in the wonder
as there is in the horror.
That what's most terrifying about life
is that it's free
of anything you can say or feel or think about it.
That every part in every moment
is not the sum
but the consummation of the whole
that roots and flowers in everyone
as if it were a secret
that bloomed for them alone.
To know the names of things
like the names of stars and flowers
is to look at them from the outside.
Who called you Eve?
Who called you Adam?
If you know your name
you're already in exile.
But it was not us
who were driven out of the garden.
Knowledge drives the garden out of us.
It turns our eyes around
so we can't see Eden from the inside
where our beginnings are always now
and we are no more dispossessed
of our innocence
than the passion expressed by a flower
in a loveletter to the light
can be disenchanted
of the insight that inspired it.
What's truly tragic about life when it seems so
is not that it's evil
but that it's innocent
and its innocence is older than compassion.
The moon sheds its phases.
The flower its petals.
They're always coming and going
from the same abyss they're heading into.
The emptiness engenders this abundance
out of its own potential for growth
and even death is not culpable.
This is space.
That is space.
But the two
can no more be separated
than a wave can be from water.
You don't need a unified field theory
to understand unity.
You don't need to hold a mirror up
to your face
to see your own reflection
when you can see yourself in everything.
What does space look like to space?
Mind to mind?
Light to light?
The dreamer to the dream?
What could God possibly say to herself
that she didn't already know?
There's nothing hidden.
There's nothing secret.
There's nothing that escapes detection.
There's no simulacrum for the void
that elaborates everyone's likeness.
There's no dead metaphor in the word
waiting to be resurrected.
The absolutes may be in denial
about the way things seem
but even when their eyes
burn through glass like stars
lost in their own immensities
they can't impress the darkness
with a theory of cosmic shadows.
They don't need to look
any further into space
than the ends of their noses
to see the constellations
casting them
across the universe
like the shadows of the stars
that aren't there anymore
trying to throw a light on black matter
by noting its absence.
Gravitational eyes devoid of light.
Black holes without keys
in the doors of perception.
Dry wishing wells on the moon
that have never plumbed the depths
of their bottomless longing
to hear something irrevocably truer
than the echoes of their own voices
coming back to them
like crows and doves to an ark.
By the time you know it
any event is over.
By the time you see the dawn
the sun has already set.
In the seed of every insight
you can read your own gravestone.
You can see there's as much death in it
as there is life.
You can feel the spring coming on
as if you were already buried
under the savage tiger-lilies.
And you can ask
until you're as blue in the face as a hyacinth
what it all meant
after you're dead
out in the incredible open
that's closed to the living
just past the end of their fingertips.
Or if it ever meant anything at all.
You can see and be it this way.
You can go on a long journey
to a prison or a shrine or a hospital
and return home
with no more insight
than you had when you left.
And still wonder if it was all worth it.
Because no experience of life
is truer than another
reality is not separated
from our awareness of it
nor subject to reform.
There is no norm
that isn't a prevailing illusion by consensus.
But the desert isn't looking for water
and only the one-eyed fools
mistake their eye-patchs
for an eclipse of the moon
and their own mirages
for a new way of thinking
when it's thinking's best virtue not to have one.
People and things are ok as they are
but they don't realize it.
They keep trying to live up
to their own reflections.
They keep trying to sweep
the stars and the deserts
off their front stairs
looking for a stairway to heaven
where the dust of the world
can't find a place to rest.
But time is a pulse of the heart
not the heavy pendulum
of a grandfather clock
and as Pablo Neruda once wisely said
the poetry is under your fingernails
and I would less wisely add
as is heaven.
No one's on the wrong path
once they open both their eyes
to what's underfoot
whether you're walking
on water stars or fireflies
or riding dolphins.
Whether your road
is a shoelace or smoke
or the lifeline of an umbilical cord
measured in wavelengths and lightyears
or your journey's still
an astronaut in the womb.
Mirrors holding mirrors up
to judgement for their spots.
Narcissus doesn't like what he's looking at.
So what?
The roads don't suddenly
turn back on themselves
because they lack floors
and a place of their own.
Heaven uses the same return address as hell.
But when death comes knocking in Aleppo
and you're out walking your own mile
in your own shoes
to nowhere in particular
free of arrivals and departures
no one's ever home
and every threshold you cross
is not hindered by an exit or an entrance.
Some walk.
Some run.
Some swim.
Some fly.
Some crawl.
Some ride.
Some dance.
And some sit still by the window
growing younger by the moment
the longer they look into the distance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Stars have eyes! !

Stars have eyes

Did anyone ever see the eyes on stars?
The eyes on stars full of soul
Look any longer they take control

Did anyone ever see the eyes on stars?
The eyes on stars behold the sight
Look any longer and glide free like a kite

Did anyone see the eyes on stars?
The eyes on stars oh what a smile
Look any longer they’ll lite your darkness for a mile

Did anyone see the eyes on stars?
The eyes on stars share the love
Look any longer you know it comes from above

Well now you’ve seen the eyes on stars
Shared the beautiful soul amazed by their wonder
Enchanted by the smile
And overwhelmed by the love

But look any longer you will see the pain
The pain on the eyes of stars
Never to be concealed by the rain

The eyes on stars cry
Never to be wiped dry
The eyes on stars cry
The eyes on stars cry blood tears
Permanently there reminding of fears

The eyes on stars cry
The eyes on stars cry

Stars eyes cry
Stars eyes cry
Stars eyes cry
They cry blood
Stars eyes cry

Stars eyes smile
Stars have eyes
Stars eyes.

Lerato Ladyfair Shuping

poem by Lerato Shuping
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When The Blue Dove Turns Back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If Only I Could Remember You As You Were

If only I could remember you as you were
for a few, brief radiant moments as indelible
as light in space and not as time would have it
the way things have changed. To see you
lingering in the doorway on a winter night,
the snow lying lightly on your hair like the Pleiades
over your shoulder descending below the treeline
as if it knew more about saying good-bye than you did,
and o how I loved you for it. If only I could
remember that lonely ghost of a mirage
that hovered over the watershed of your tears
and looked at me like the first lifeboat
you'd seen in a thousand years respond
to your s.o.s. in a hourglass. If only I could remember
the fragrance of the summer rain on your skin
as if it had mistaken you for one of the flowers
and how I used to like wiping your tears away
with my opposable thumb like plum blossoms from your cheeks.

Eternity coming to the surface of time
like old corduroy roads and bones in a makeshift graveyard.
Not likely I'll ever see you again in this life
but if only I could remember you before circumstance
underwhelmed itself and killed the ambiance
of our last dance by turning all the lights on at once.
But there you go, no help for it. The nightbird
transits the moon and the eternal sky as is said in Zen
doesn't inhibit the flight of the white clouds.
And this moment, too, though it's endured
a thousand deaths to come to this afterlife,
always saying good-bye to some aspect of you
that symbolizes the evanescence of love and life
in metaphors that buff the open wound
like scar tissue on the moon, like fireflies
welding living insights into the dead brain coral
of this encyclopedic coma life
can sometimes seem without you, even after
all these ensuing misadventures it would take a fire
and half a dozen bottles of wine to tell you about
if only I could remember you as you once were
like the lamb that laid down with the lion without fear.

For light years, images of you have flashed out of the abyss
as sharp and quick and vital as moonlight
wielding a sabre, or a bird quickened by a purpose
out of the unknown into the unknown
and I recognize them as blossoms that have blown
far from the tree that was lovelier
than the whole orchard to me, though angels
attended upon it like scripture from its roots to its leaves,
you were the locust tree with your demonic thorns
I wanted to tear my heart on like a rag of blood
on the galactic razorwire that encircled your heart
like a storm of dark matter with unlimited potential
for creative destruction that got the light out of the way
long enough for us to see what glowed behind it.
If only I could remember you as you were
when we both made eye-contact with each other
like exo-planets in the void, and understood spontaneously
it wasn't going to take much of a wavelength
for either of us to understand this immediately
as if we could read each other's shadows like Mayan calendars.

Water hemlock, wild parsnip, sometimes
the memories scald like volcanic dew on bare skin,
but seldom have I ever regretted
that I lived through you for awhile,
when the stars raged in my heart like a madman
obsessed by the crazy wisdom of a woman
who had the wingspan of a bow on a bent event horizon
but knew enough about compassion
to push the burning arrow of my fascination with her
all the way through like a blood sacrifice to love and life
and the mystery that moved in the darkness up ahead
like the fork in the road that separated us,
like a wishbone that had granted all it had to give.

How tenderly painful the brevity of what
we actually relive again as if some moments in life
are illuminated by a different light than that
we read by in bed late into the night
looking for translucency in the windows of insight
that keep on opening their eyes in this recurrent dream
like the black waterlilies of new moons coming into bloom.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Turn Out The Lights

I turn out the lights and lie down to sleep
and you open up within me like a lotus of fire
blooming in the darkness of a vast inner space
that has become my only skin, tattooed with stars
as I play solitaire with destiny, using your Tarot
of chameleonic constellations as a firing squad.

Little threads of joy and fear shudder through me,
revelation and lightning, fireflies going off,
the blasting caps of greater detonations yet to come,
and your face is before me, apparition and aurora,
the moon reflected on undulant water,
a jewel turning in the light of itself, blue eyes, full lips,
the blonde smoke of your hair on your cheek
disappearing somewhere as if a match had just been put out,
and your smile, your beautiful, wide, forgiving smile
that seems to flow from the warmest sugars
of an abundant heart; what dawn over a lake
has ever touched me silently like that?

One look at you and I am hurled into another more spiritual dawn
like a bird bewildered into singing by the strange joy
that threatens to consume him in the soaring radiance.
And though I cannot say you, you are the secret
I discern in the stars when they stop to whisper through the trees
to the bones of the holy man humbled on the hill
of his own insignificance; and then you are the only exaltation
that can raise him up again to shine above the night.

Always within me you summon like a bell; you
draw me out of myself like a genie torn from a lamp; my blood
heaves helplessly to the urgent clock of your tides,
teems with life and washes up on the shores
of mysterious realms where you are always the enchantress of the island;
what man or creature could I not become for you,
immersed as I am in the wine of your being? You are
the fullness of woman in the prime of her mystery, the vase of your body,
the shrine of a human divinity that generation after generation
inspires adoration from the brute
that comes, awed and shy of first fire, to lay pink tulips on the staircase,
grails and goblets gathered to be filled by the reeling honey
of your presence, the fire that burns without burning
and leaves even the wind love-sick and longing for ashes. Human,
you are five petals of fire; divine, one flower.

Break, then, if I must; in loving you, I'll break.
And should you never love me back and the air turn glass
and shatter
into a million splinters of emotion that settle at the bottom of the heart,
the broken wineglass, the crippled flower,
severed from its stem, or the moon,
scoured from its reflection on the eyeless river by clouds,
never know the laughter of your fountain, still
in every fractured piece of me
the whole of your face, in time and out, would shine
as it did in the dark before the light began. You are not a mirage
shimmering over vipers in these circumstantial sands
and I am not a candle in a hurricane. Though I love,
I know the world, its gardens and atrocities, its wounded doors
and urgent windows flowing with lace and longing.
It doesn't have much time for itself, busy as it is,
trying to hide the loss; it's looking for its eyes with its eyes,
its head with its head, its feet with its feet.

I've pulled the thorn from my heart, the worm from the rose,
the nail from my hand. I've gone mad and madder still,
looked up at hell out of the depths of my despair
and envied such exalted heights. And then it's all turned radiant
for no more reason than a dream, something nameless changes,
even as we plan a way into ourselves, or out,
suddenly an unknown light breaks through, and we have our eyes.

One moment of you, one firefly, in the vastness
I was falling through and galaxies ignited all around me;
the dead branch blossomed, the singing bird came
and the day was no longer a spoonful of ashes. Call it
what you will, pour it into any cup, plastic, crystal, or clay,
or drink it from your hands: it's still the wine, it's still the moon; it's still
always and only you that makes this confusion of stars and birds
in the treetops, this picture-music, this drunk dream, this tavern
that is an outcast's shrine to joy
raise a glass
to the sun in his blood that shines at midnight.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If You've Come This Far

If you’ve come this far
by the very fact you could
your solitude is marked for exile.
Those who sustain
are threatened by those who enhance.
There’s a soft night breeze
blowing through the open window
and a chandelier trying to teach a mobile to dance
and a man looking up at the stars
into the abyss beyond
wondering how to be grateful
that chaos took advantage of random chance
and he’s here
amazed by the accident.
Being without intent.
Meaning without a basis in fact.
And a passion for darkness that surpasses the stars.
His longing must have reached them by now.
His compassion must have brought them to tears.
Wavelengths of insight can burn for light years
like fireflies with astrolabes
trying to get a fix on their event horizons
as if their own shining
were the only lead they had to go on.
A mirage in a desert of stars
when you’re lost
can give you a sense of direction
to the watershed of your radiance
as well as any other approach to the vastness can.
He picks a few yellow leaves off a green plant
in a bone-dry apartment
and for a moment he’s Adam in the garden again.
He realizes that promoting life
is his way of cherishing his own.
And then he ruminates on its perishing
on his way to the garbage can
to dispose of the heart-shaped leaves
like phases of the moon
on the pages of an obsolete calendar
with pictures of the scenic past
inviting you to come and visit.
What’s a guest to do by himself
when there’s no one else
in the lighthouse
to play the host
but the ghost of God
wandering like smoke along this lonely coast
trying to make the sea stand still
knowing that’s the one commandment
it can’t fulfill
and probably what got him killed?
Prayers are more sincere at a seance
than they are at church.
Widow watch in a dark tower
long after the search has been called off.
He lights a candle.
He blows it out.
He sits down at his desk
and listens to the raging rant
of a heart-broke drunk outside
smashing the love letter he meant to write
like an empty whisky bottle
in the indifferent street light
on the rocks of a lip-syncing mermaid
who’s just jumped his shipwreck
for a lifeboat that likes her singing.
He gets the message.
He’s not one of her new friends.
The man at his desk
reassesses his loneliness
and decides one bodymind
a lifetime
might be a brighter lamp
than any two a genie could wish for.
New lamps for old.
But the fire doesn’t change.
Desire takes root in its own ashes.
Two birds perch like hinges
on the door of a grand entrance
to a Janus-faced New Year
though it’s only August
that looks both ways at once
at the valley it’s just passed through like a death mask
and the view from the peak
of the mountain it’s on
speaking to God face to face
as if there were no come down to the future
of its unhinged celebrants.
Is love the long binge of a periodic alcoholic
who can’t remember
the damage he’s done
to the weather of a loved one?
Or is there something more to it
that greets the heart
with everything that’s missing from the mind?
An inexplicable mystery
that reveals a starmap
of fireflies for the blind
that no one can follow
like the white cane of a tall ship
witching for water in hell
like a lightning rod.
And in heaven
a bloodline that isn’t wounded
by a grail of sad heavy wine
that cures the ailing kingdom of its symptoms
but not the longing of the disease
for the delirium of the dream
that broke it
like a water clock with a fever.
More heretic than believer
a crow balances
like a black umbrella
on a power line outside his window.
Looking at it
he sees an eclipse of the moon.
Total.
No exit
but time
maybe time.
Even the darkness must pass.
He takes it as a sign
that if he’s come this far
the future is well behind him.
He’s a star beyond shining
and there’s no way
even if he’s recalled from exile
even if he receives a look from someone
he can return to
they’re ever going to find him.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Someone To Rejoice In

Someone to rejoice in. Foolish thought.
Epiphanous absurdity. My interminable longing
for a treasure, a happiness, a companion
I'm not even sure I deserve, is agitating
oceans of emotion again,
and wants to run before the wind,
wants to raise up apple blossoms
like sails with the skull and crossbones on them
and skirt the rocky coasts of extinct volcanoes
that once served as lighthouses in the distance
when I was island-hopping
like an infidel among the angel fleets.

The dragon's howl in the dead skull.
Moments when my heart shrieks with life
like a red-tailed hawk falling upon a snake.
I am a ravenous man who wants to eat the light.
The night flows into my bloodstream
like an atlas of arteries.
As time has passed, the pain in me
has shifted wavelengths from the ultra violet
to the infra-red of a less lethal frequency.
I'm at the wide-eyed end of the hourglass,
but I can still bare my fangs
like the moon when I need to.
I can still come down off the mountain
like a hashashim and run the shadow of my knife
like an eclipse across the dreamscape of anyone
who takes too much for granted in their sleep.

So why is it after refueling and buying
a well-upholstered cheesey sandwhich in plastic skin
at the all night Kingston Esso just before you cross the 401
at one thirty in the morning, and begin to enter
the long, dark way home up the old Perth road to Westport,
did I begin to miss you
as if you had sat beside me my whole life?
And I pondered your absence like a hitch hiker
I had just picked up for the first time
and the impact of the encounter
left an indelible impression on my emptiness
as if someone had written something
so eloquent and intriguing as a ribbon of blood
letting its hair down in the water
I couldn't help but feel like a flying carpet
that was unravelling mile by mile of asphalt
like a glacier that couldn't wait to get back to you,
thawing time into rivers to speed things up?

And the night sang as I hadn't heard it in a while.
And the stars flew in through the window like fireflies.
And I rode the road like a rat snake past Devil's Lake
where we agreed to paint en plain air
when the waterlilies were in bloom
like huge starmaps laid upon the water.
Are you the tuning fork that tames the lightning?
Are you the power of silence that shames the word?
Are you the thread of blood on the sword that blesses it?

And I wanted to kiss you good night.
I wanted to embrace you like a nebula
of blue-hearted hydrogen and the dust of dead stars
just to see if I could make you shine or not,
but I thought it was too early in the year,
too premature for the Pleiades to break into light
and I might scare you with the intensity
of what was ingathering out of
the immensities of the last million light-years
of crossing these homeless thresholds
without a star to go by, alone and unconvinced
I hadn't missed the turn several lifetimes back.

Now I sit upright in my bones at my desk
like dice with their eyes fully opened like blackholes
wondering if I should chide my skeleton for cowardice
or alea iacta, risked my luck, and crossed the Rubicon
like an event horizon that's never known a compass or a guide.
And I'm looking under every leaf and stone
and heart I've ever worn upon my sleeve
like a fresh strawberry in a field of burning scarecrows
that started out as potential messiahs
but ended up being immolated as faithful heretics
true to the fire that consumed them from within.
And you, their felix culpa, their happy sin.
The one forbidden thing you must risk your life for to live.

I'm dogpaddling in space and time like a shipwreck.
I'm holding my breath like a lungful of stars
trying to stay afloat long enough
not to see my life flash before my eyes
like a lantern whose last remaining firefly's gone out
like the solar flare of an s.o.s. that bloomed to no effect,
until your lifeboat returns like the moon for survivors.

A swallow again lost in a hurricane of volcanic ashes?
A simian in a cage with a piece of coloured glass
that transfixes it with vulnerable awe and wonder?
The aura of a woman who doesn't know yet
quite how beautiful she is, lingering in the air
like the smell of wild roses when you're out
painting alone in the fields of abandoned farms
and you can feel the uncanny chill of another person
walk right through you like the moon through a summer window.

And o to worry about so many little things again
the world pivots on moment by moment
as if it were a privilege and an honour to cherish them
like signs of love in a Druidic tree alphabet
that whispered coniferous prophecies to the moon
but held a few sacred syllables back under its tongue
that were just meant for one alone to hear
like a secret message between a butterfly and a star.
Or this woman who's just summoned me
like a nightbird to the moonrise of her smile
as if I'd never flown to the end of my longing before
without finding a noose to hang myself with.

But as I do, I do again with less fear than before
and though the shadows in the valley of death
are just as intense, the warmth of a sprightly optimism
that keeps this firefly of insight alive in my heart
to want to see this all the way through
as if it were a rite of passage
that proved the comets true
or the rush of a wild northern river
with a rudder and a sail and a hull
going over a waterfall like the Milky Way,
or a moonboat panning for gold in the mountains.

The rustic pauper prince of Perth, I hadn't
realized what an undernourished bush wolf I had become
after all these years of living in the wilderness
until I understood someone had baited the trapline
with kindness I had forgotten the taste of in my exile.
And though I don't travel with a begging bowl,
by god, I'll hold my skull out to her next time
if I have to, just to taste a sheaf of light
from that harvest again, as if the dark side of the moon
had just broken its long vow of silence and darkness
and she were lingering in space like the aura
of an atmosphere I had lived too long without.

As if a dakini, an elixir of light, had appeared
like the planet Venus in the dusk again
and I could feel an updraft of stars
wheeling under my wings
like a winding stairwell of serpent fire
threading through all nine open chakras
and eleven dimensions of a sky wide third eye
in an easy rapture of something unearthly, ascending
to sterling altitudes of blissful vertigo
that whirl me in a wind of fire at the crossroads
of everywhere and here
like the ashes of a mad Sufi
ghost dancing on his funeral pyre for rain
as the first few drops wash his fate from his forehead
like the sheet music of an old song
perched like aging birds on a downed powerline
returning its energy like lightning to the earth
she walks upon in the flowing raiment of fireflies
and the hydrogen negligees of the blue star clusters
embroidered with the harvest gold of the sun
seasoning the grain with the bright vacancy
and dark abundance of the light
still warm in the lunar locket of her heart
as if she'd just put a loaf of bread
out on the windowsill to cool for a moment or two.

And how can I, this famine in an hourglass
beside this silo of the plenum void full of manna
resist whatever befalls me in this desert of stars
whether it be vipers or wheat fields
along the way to the unpromised land of milk and honey,
barefoot on thorns, or walking on soft petals
like the dunes and waves of the ocean in the rose?

Flammable poet, sacred clown of the holy mirage,
mad monk alone in your hermitage, dragon seed
of island pirates wearing the night like an eye-patch
to navigate the stars like a canning jar of fireflies
burning on the inside of their eyelids like starmaps
to the cherished singularities I buried
at the bottom of the fathomless blackholes
firing up the galaxies all over again like the wellsprings
of a muse renewing her wings like starfish and birds
in the fountainmouth of the mountain at a loss for words.
Or as the poet said, what's madness
but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?

And did you not say, I heard you as if my life
depended on it, you were attracted to crazy people,
and did I not ask, if crazy wisdom were close enough,
and you replied, yes, and my heart freefell
a thousand feet without a parachute
when space bent like a longbow into flight.
And I shuddered like a witching wand in ecstasy
over the watershed that swelled under me
when I divined what that could mean to a sailor
lost at sea on the moon as far from shore
as any lunatic has ever been out of his asylum
his heart his mind his body soul and spirit
without dying like a message for the sake of the medium
it was delivered in like longing in the song of a nightbird.
Love in the sound of a word.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Gone Soon Enough

Gone soon enough. To who knows where,
though I suspect the question answers itself
if there's a there to get to at all. Deal with this now
and maybe that, given opposites engender
one another out of their procreative union,
will be tended to as well in every mystic detail.
Mark one jewel and they're all marked.
Do unto one of these and you do unto me.
And maybe this is the belief of every leaf in the fall,
but with me when I'm trying on ghosts
to go with my death mask, it's merely one
of a myriad passing thoughts and scenarios
impassioned by the inspired absurdity
of trying to conceptualize the inconceivable.

Not void bound, though I'm free, I still hope,
more love and loyalty than clinging to mirages,
to take all the stars with me, and the moon and the sun,
the wind, the stone, the flower and all the sorrows
I've venerated over the years as shrines
to unknown lovers who suffered as anonymously as I did
to accord their solitude the dignity of a sword
and their silence the clarity of a window into the soul
transfigured like space by the nature of its contents
into the bodymind of a human who's given up
looking for signs of greater things to come
since he followed the breadcrumbs out of a dark wood
into a clearing where he realized, looking up at the stars
for paradigms of light he might be able to recognize
to get his bearings, the whole of his awareness
from the beginningless beginning was revelation
out of nothing, rootless blossoms on the wind,
emptiness with a thousand stamps on it
like a loveletter he wanted to be sure got there.

No message. No medium. However you parse
the expression into a million punctuation marks
like traffic lights of the silence, and the stillness
irremediable, and the stars not the measure of their light.
The many return to the one and the one returns to transcendence,
as the doge of Zen once said, out of everyone's mouth at once
as he did in twelfth century Tokugawa Japan.
When the Japanese plum tree blossoms,
it's not speaking for itself, it's an expression
with as many voices as the universe has atoms to say it,
solo or in chorus, acapella or accompanied by the wind
lamenting the ashes of the blue guitar of the moon,
neither an urn, nor a womb, or the rain improvising
Scarlatti on a harpsichord of plectral thorns attuned
to our tears and spinal cords. If the painting, the poem,
the life doesn't lead you to the unattainable within yourself,
if you try to contain the feeling, the image, the insight
in the Mason jar of the brain like the spooky green lights
of the fireflies riding their own eyebeams like Einstein
the clock on the town hall tower, until time stops
and space becomes infinite, and nothing outweighs
the feather or the flower, you won't be struck down
by your own light. Things are retaliatory and petty like that.
But it will be awhile before the Canada geese leaving now
bearing the souls of the dead south and west,
return for you bereft in this realm of arrival and departure.

Death, too, has its muses, its nightbirds,
and none of them are widows at the window or the well.
None of them part the curtains or the veils like a death shroud.
They're not the screening myths for what
we dare not say out loud lest the silence is listening
in a deathcart parked across the street. You are
the corpse telling you your own life story
and you're the green fire of the living bough
that lights the funeral pyres of its own ancestral stumps
to burn them out with the intensity of your life
paying homage to your own transformations.

Though everything I've just said is smoke on the wind
to the living, that isn't a sign of its evanescence,
because to the dead, it's an imperishable lyric
sung by a ghost of picture-music so free and unconstrained
they can hear their hearts still beating like the echo
of distant thunder or wild moonlit horses
running through the high fields like Pegasus
flying with eagles and swans among the stars,
albino periods shining at the beginning of endless things
the middle extremes of every moment of the mindstream
rising like a waterbird with unborn life
and imperishable death for wings, and in its voice
all the silence, sacred syllables, and wavelengths
of everything that sings a child to sleep in its dreams
like a new violin safe in the arms of the mystery
that seasons it like the heartwood of a broad-leafed maple,
spruce, or the willow with lyrical eyes down by the river
trying to write a song for the waters of life
in the shadows of birds in passage across the moon
as if she'd just taken the words right out of my mouth.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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