Related quotes: Isn't it obvious by now...

Isn't It Obvious

Isn't it obvious by now
matter is the language
of the spirit
that expresses itself
as flowers and trees
and you and me
just as we are.

Matter is the mother-tongue
the alphabet
the periodic table of elements
of what can't be said about God
without resorting to signs
like water and oxygen.
The runes of the mountains.
The purple passages of the sea.
And the moon who couldn't find
anything beautiful in her bleakness
long before Samuel Beckett.

Out of an almost perfect vacuum
out of nothing
out of space
its thirteen atoms of hydrogen
per cubic centimetre
like magic beans
a longing for existence arises
spontaneously out of the abyss
as if it just remembered the name
of something that came back to it
like a lost thought
and happily blurted it out like the Big Bang.

God mind the abyss nothingness
the cosmic id
call it what you want
they're all just waves of the same sea
iridescent bubbles rising out of the depths
like independent cells with shapeshifting nuclei
or the membranous worlds in hyperspace
that start with a kiss
and end with a face in the window
staring out into the same old darkness
like a syllable of dust
in awe of the silver-tongued stars.

Mind does its best
to take a good guess
but it doesn't really matter
if you're right or wrong
because everything's
been clear and true all along.
The point is.
There's no point to this.

You just break into song
like a bird that can't help itself.
You gather everything into yourself
like a blackhole
with a creative affinity for stars
and a key turns deep inside you
and suddenly you're walking
through an infinite number of doors all at once
that have freed you from yourself
like a replicating cell.
Water looking at itself
with eyes of water.

Mind looking for mind with mind.
The snake trying to swallow its own head
as a sign from infinity
that it's going to take forever.
Illusions of light
burning like jewels
in the mirror of rain
rooted in the starmud
of the human brain
that thinks if it elaborates enough laws
it can hold the universe to account
for the cause of its behaviour.

Oceans roll off its tongue
like drops of water
from a blade of grass
and things keep on happening
like galaxies and starfish.

Be the bright vacancy
that shines out of your dark abundance
like a waterlily putting a white spin
on the death and decay of the swamp
that aspired to it
like the Buddha watching Venus in the dawn
or a magnanimous loveletter
as long as autumn
at the end of a mean affair
that sweeps it like stars and leaves
off the helical stairways to heaven forever
like the memory of mutant genes.

Be the eleven that comes of seven
and dot the dice with the starmaps
of the chance constellations
that rolled your way
like a genome
without asking for your advice.

If you were really down on your luck
you wouldn't be here to know it
so why not risk it all
like a universe in the beginning
in one throw against
the wall in a dark back alley
that's been breaking banks
and bringing the house down ever since
like an incommensurable decimal
that escaped the confines
of a whole number
that couldn't restrain it like a straitjacket?

Add yourself to things like zero
and amplify their effect
like a deep canyon foretells
the echo of things to come
that are well beyond your voice.
You don't need to choose
when there's nothing you can't refuse.
There's nothing to win or lose.

Time may well be
the adolescence of eternity
that puts cracks in its vinegar
and wrinkles its wine
but who wouldn't rather play
than work at being who they are?

Honour the wound with a scar
that's worthy of what you have suffered
to express yourself as you are
like a firefly in a palace of light
with a deep insight
into the black mirrors of dark matter
that multiply your afterlives like stars
in the eyes of the windows
in the house of life
that were broken from the inside out.

Astound your own vision
with the kind of crazy wisdom
that knows the crown of the universe
doubles as the dunce-cap of a cosmic egg
and say what you have to say
to add yourself to the conversation
like a bridge to the few bars of picture-music
that look and sound just like you
when you refused to crush
the head of the serpent under your heel
like the end of the long interminable road you were on
to salvation.

And you were amazed
when it struck you
like an elixir of life
emerging from the eclipse
of a dark venom
you didn't get up off the ground
like St. Paul who had been Saul of Tarsus.

And you weren't the Tiresias of either sex.
There was no blind catharsis.
But your heels sprouted wings
that mastered the wind like words
and the snake flew away like a dragon
with a lot in common with birds.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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There's A Black Lotus In My Heart

There's a black lotus in my heart, black hole
of enlightenment, black waterstar, sacred eclipse.
Nothing worth attaining that isn't unattainable.
And all the gates are upside down and backwards.
Albino starmaps with black dots shining
on the other side of the mirror, zodiacs
of black matter looping back on themselves
like solar auroras of the sun that rises at midnight.
I don't know what all this means. I may have gone
too far into exile and actually managed to get
to the dark side of the moon. Or I'm a warehouse
of shadows at noon that have lost track of the time
like blind sundials that feel they're being followed.

The light illuminates, but I bloom nocturnally.
I've got the burn marks of stars all over my skin.
I work on the nightshift at the foundry of a constellation
busy pouring itself out like iron and oxygen, blood and air,
forged out the afterlives of hydrogen I've gathered over the years.
A fire-womb engendering one you fill with water.
Fire the midwife of its own daughter. I'm envious
of creative immolations I know I'll never attain.
Though my left brain is in full communication with the right
and I'm a full moon of the bright vacancy, dark abundance
of both sides, and the harvest is ripe, I'm always
a star ahead of my light, so I don't end up
like a dead school furnace in the basement
writing my memoirs like a manuscript of ashes in an urn.

Deconstruct me wholly down to my last atom
and I promise you, if that's all I've got to work with
like one stem cell to another at the beginning
of a matrix of causes and conditions into which
we'll be placed by a Hox gene assessing the chi
of which direction our eyes should face, and how many
degrees of separation there should be between our ears,
I promise you, I'll still burn with the fireflies
and the supernovas like a blind prophet
who saw two wavelengths copulating like snakes
and has been tied at this stake of of a spine,
an oracular heretic of both sexes in synchrony
like the hybrid of a phoenix and a waterbird
burning in visionary serpent fire ever since
for the sake of a muse that always comes
in the nick of time like rain on the moon to my rescue.

When it's night in the diamond of my third eye
is the light not more mystically enhanced by the darkness,
more mystically specific than the white wash of the sun?
The moon is the mitochondrian that tempers
the toxicity of the light so the nucleus of the solar system
can blaze with alien oxygen meteorically across the night.
The black mirror, brighter than the white,
shows you your reflection on the inside
where you're arrayed like a faceless world
that's given up trying to second guess
who's the unerring witness under the lifemask
of the surreal cosmology that doesn't recognize
it's not a self, at first glance, and that all physics
is the psychology of ridding yourself of the delusion
you can, even if you're riding a flying carpet
out into this desert of stars to sweep the constellations away
like mirages that have been throwing bad meat
down your holy wells like sacred crocodiles.

Ignite even so much as a matchbook at this distance
or turn on a flashlight to see what's in the dark
as if you were looking for your mind with your mind on the light
even though it's as abundantly clear as your eyes it's night out,
and the billions of stars in the next closest galaxy,
Messier 31, at eleven o'clock above the middle star
in Andromeda on the rocks, and two million light years
of enlightenment will gently recede back into the cosmic hiss
and disappear from your field of view subliminally
knowing, because the timing's yours, you're a daylily
covering your insight with the petals of your own hands
because you don't know how to open them sidereally yet
from the outside in, where your darkness shines
and the night you turn your face away from
like the bright side of the moon blinds you
by a reflected glory to the radiance of the origins
of your own vision, deep within, where it all begins
emanating stars of the darkness of your own eyes.

poem by Patrick White
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Enraptured By The All-Inclusive Mystic Specificity

Enraptured by the all-inclusive mystic specificity
of terrestrial things.
Appalled by the inhumanity of the way
humans can so easily inflict
what they fear the most
upon each other
as if there were some strange alien duty
in their reptilian cruelty,
some small nugget of the meteor that struck the earth
back in the late Triassic
that we've retained like an R-complex
savagely jealous of the rest of the brain.
I can get along without matter
as does most of the universe
and the eastern dawns of Asia do
but mind and form are a different issue.
When water thinks deeply
about what it might be
it's always a sea
with a small stream of consciousness running into it like me.
It's a way of picturing the inconceivable for a moment
when time wants to be seen
walking in a world of forms
it effaces like the meaning of dreams.
A provisional scaffolding of smoke
to climb up on and paint
the miraculous birth of water
before it became a saint.
I've sat around the old fires
of autumn ghosts on a distant hillside
and listened to the stories they tell
of how wild and free words were
to name things in the garden as they liked
until God discovered his voice.
And flowers and stars
were no longer mystic gestures
of existential glee
that expressed themselves spontaneously
as if the gene-pool of the fireflies
were always dreaming up
new myths to explain to the constellations
how they came to arise
over the event horizons
of our cosmic windowsills
after so many years of longing,
but a choice they're compelled to make
atom by atom
star by star
as if they were trying to say
something as enduring and meaningful
as an aqueduct flatlining
like a waterclock without a pulse to speak of.
The sun doesn't tell the wildflowers where to grow.
You can't dispel the mystery of being here at all
with the things you think you know.
Let go.
Let go.
Let go.
There's no freedom in a fist.
There's no captive in an open hand.
There's no way to get a grasp on space
without giving it your face.
You can look at life as if it were all absurd.
Credo ergo absurdum.
I believe because it's absurd
according to St. Jerome.
Or you can venture further from home than that
and explore life as if there were nothing to understand
because you already do
or you wouldn't be you
trying to give the word
to every new creation
as if the last thing you wrote
like hieroglyphics in quicksand
kept returning to where it began
like the pearls of wisdom
that come of all these
cosmic grains of the universe
that agitate the tongue of the absurd
into saying something crazy to the moon
she's never heard before.
All things are modes of expression
but the muse doesn't open her door
to the pimps of inspiration
who think she's a whore.
And it's a death worse than neglect
to turn your calling into a project
and build a palace of ice in the desert
to house your accomplishments
like snowflakes in a furnace.
Say what you must say
as if the words weren't your own
but the natural eloquence of the lifestream
saying the moonlight in passing.
Like a man on a long dark road
in an unknown country
who talks to himself
as if he weren't alone with everything
like a foreign language
that asks him his name
and he says it in a way
it can't forget
that water is wave
fire is flame
air is wind
earth is dirt
body is flesh
mind is form
and the seven sisters of the Pleiades
going down over the rooftops
of the abandoned farm
and the roses that have kept on growing
and the hills that have learned
to keep things to themselves
and the gate that hangs by one hinge
like last year
now there's nothing
to keep in or out
are all radically rooted
in what must disappear
in the now and here
of the mysterium tremendum
in order to become
you and I and us and them
looking for signs
of where we come from
to ratify our intellectual pursuits
though our original home
is the same long road
we've been walking for years
that still clings like starmud to our boots
that keep tracking us
like homeless silver thresholds
and the Milky Ways of garden snails
into the house of life.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Between the Creator and Me

I look through my body
at the world, the stars, moons,
stars beyond stars
I know there are stars, moons
stars beyond stars too
circling all within my finite self
this temporary sphere I am crowned with
the aura that shines from these
trillion of cells
all the moving atoms,
electrons, protons,
the universe inside and out
I look at them
from my infinite self
god the puppeteer
skillfully playing
the beginning, the end
I came out of the two walls
the human brain is kept in
to take a peep at myself, the universe
the moons, suns, universe,
stars beyond stars
I find a galaxy I possess
so many stars, moons, suns
the cells blazing with life, light
all working out of my control
as I join god to take
a look at his worlds

a meteor flashes by
a cell loses hold
flushed by blood to another world
all the stars, moons,
universe outside and inside
all the cells that I own
that soon would squeeze me out
to join the plane
where I could view
the beat of the universe
standing beside god
witnessing all his designs
wondering all the motives
behind his pupputeering
the moons, the suns, the universe
the cells acting out his drama round and round
casting off light

I saw a star burst
light light years away
the cancer patient
carrying a cell
that too has burst
soon to cast that black hole
over the finite self
the infinite journeys to
rest on another finite self
the universe

I stand by the creator
to look at his puppeteering
wondering his motives in his design
my mind flying outside the brain
I look at the the world, universe,
stars, moon, meteors, stars beyond stars
and myself that
swing with stars, moons,
stars beyond stars

poem by John Tiong Chunghoo
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Outside Myself

poem by John Tiong Chunghoo
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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O This Morning More Than Ever

O this morning more than ever
I want to disappear into my life
like a bird into the blue oblivion
of a migration of one
that's never coming back.
Things aren't solid.
They're real.
And tonight I will appeal again
to the subtle intelligence of the dark matter
that resonates throughout space
like energy musing upon itself at rest
after long labour
to let me evaporate with the stars
like a breath somebody took
deeply into themselves
and then breathed out.
Did my eyes sweeten the windows
they looked through like women?
Did my looking help ripen the stars?
Strange wounds.
Stranger scars.
There's no end
to the myriad afterlives of water
that a human lives through
like the weather
of an undiscovered sea
and time just keeps
carrying things forth into the carrying forth
like a clepshydra of severed heads
bleeding like buckets
one into another.
An alphabet of prophetic skulls
that never finish a sentence
because the things we say
already have more in common
with the dead
than they do with the living
from the very first word
that falls from our mouths like an apple.
If I have spoken in tongues and symbols
and mixed occult elixirs
like secret constellations
to heal the injured night
my voice never forgot
that it was a mere gesture of moonlight,
a mystic adagio of picture-music
dancing alone in its own shadows.
And if I went crazy in the pursuit
of an earthly excellence
it was just to pass the time.
Anyone with a spirit needs a cosmic hobby.
Anyone with a mind
needs to let go now and then
like a universe that expresses itself completely
and then stands a human up
like a finger to the lips of a prolonged silence.
And what can you say
to those with a heart
that wait for blood to return
like the wind to their sails
with good news
like oxygen from Atlantis
that things are beginning to look up
except drink up
until you're sober as dry land again.
The ecliptic intersects the celestial equator
at the equinoctial colure
and it's spring again
in the northern hemisphere
where the crocuses
are poking their noses
through holes in the snow
like bruises beginning to bloom.
If there is no wonder in your love
you will never know
the profound delight
of being grateful for your life
and the stars won't humble you
when you ask the night who you are
into knowing what they do.
Stop listening to everything with your mouth
and sit down beside the fountain
like a road or a sundial
that's found its way back
and hear what your ears
have been saying for years
about the coin you lost in the mindstream
like your passage across the river of death
coming up like the moon
over your left shoulder
to take your breath away.
Wisdom renounces the wise
and therein lies enlightenment.
Ignorance embraces the fools of the spirit
and there are no words for it.
The best is clarity.
Clarity is all.
This is a doorway.
This is a wall.
And this is all the gold of India
I would give if I could
to sit down with Hafiz
by the banks of the Ruknabad
among all those Persian roses
and steal musical riffs from the stream
to say what we impossibly mean
to the young slave girl
with the mole on her cheek
who's learning to speak our language like a muse.
If I have longed for things all my life
as if they were out of reach
it was one of the dark jewels of my childhood
the died like an eye for a lack of light
that taught me
longing is more creative
than fulfillment
and the nightbird
on its broken branch alone
sings like a wine closer to home
than all the daylight choirs
of happier wings in the vineyard
that inspires the liars into blossoming
like loveletters on the wind
they don't know where to send.
So I tell them without believing
they know what I'm talking about
to take a page out of the orchard's book like I do
and when spring's in the air
send them everywhere.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If I Ever Get To Look Back On All Of This

If I ever get to look back on all this
even if it's just to show me how wrong I was
about so much, how much I risked for so little,
I don't want to have been mean and petty here,
I don't want to have lived short-minded
as if my brain never grew to its proper height
and I had to live close to the ground
with burrowing wasps and centipedes
trading toxins in the grass like slumlords.
Tried to live like a magnanimous man
with an open hand whenever my luck kept pace
with my generosity. Didn't want to die
knowing nothing about the stars, that shining
that grew in time even brighter in the dark within.
Wanted to know the fury and compassion, genius,
the affable kindness, madness and love of humankind.

Used to say we were born to see and be happy,
and if you couldn't find a meaning that suited you,
make one up of your own. Don't waste
the great creative potential of the absurd
and try to fit yourself like a little polyp of sentience
into the fossilized coral reefs of the past.
Go for the galaxies. What's to lose?
If you're going to fall, fall from a height.
Sooner a brilliant failure than a mediocre flight.
You'd be surprised at what the timing of one comet
falling out of the black halo around the sun
can mean to millions watching down below for signs.

Sensible shoes, or starmud on your winged heels,
Icarus or Neil Armstrong using his foot
to take a big step for humankind, walk your mile
standing up as if you were scanning for leopards,
your simian continuum at a fork in the road.
Danger is a capricious muse, but it can still
rivet you with inspiration. The hunters get eyes.
You grow an exoskeleton, then rib
the walls and rafters of the house and soon
the sun decides where the windows are going to go.
The Hox genes talk, and you're the topic of conversation.

You start listening as if
you were listening in on yourself,
all those voices and things
for words you don't understand,
bliss, butterflies, sorrows and assassins,
the victimized heroes of egoistic tragedies,
and the poetry in the pity of unexpurgated passion.
Lovers in the last throes of unmitigated catastrophe.
The rush and turmoil of the picture-music
going on all the time, shapeshifting
from one musical scene into another
and even you with your hands over your ears
sick of listening to the cosmic hiss,
climactic cymbals in the great performance
just waiting to come together like a hadron collider
deep underground where black holes in space
are born of the impact. If you're not already
too calculating, or mesmerized like a stone bird
by the snake-eyes of the dice, put some money
down on yourself as if you had one to lose,
and if for nothing more than the exercise,
kiss your prophetic skulls for luck and let them roll.

And when you love, don't approach a seabed on the moon
with a spoonful of water you can both sip from.
Return like an ocean with a convincing atmosphere.
If fools rush in where angels fear to tread
the angels will follow soon enough, with blessings
on the horns of your head. Learn
every gesture of her eyes like pictographic signage,
of her heart, a grammar for two, of her mind
be the no one to lift its veils, of her body,
apprentice yourself to the genius of her starmud.

Everything that lives is a gesture of the absurd
the imagination delights in elaborating
like people with the personalities of apple-trees
or the encyclopedic prolixity of the Burgess Shale.
I am is not the cornerstone of anything.
I imagine. And the wind is the threshold of the tent
that sheds the desolation of a self like a flower
that blooms in fire. Why water a mirage? Live large.
Squander stars on your vision of this, swallow the abyss
to keep your emptiness well fed, let your wisdom
be the private life of space, your time on earth
be passage and transformation, and your heart
cherish the bliss of all, animate and inanimate alike,
who suffer the same dream of being awake that you do.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Seeing the world with god

i look through my body
at the world, the stars, moon
stars beyond stars
i know there are stars, moon
stars beyond stars too
from my temporary sphere
the aura that shines
from this physical self
the trillion of cells
all the moving atoms,
electrons, protons
the universe inside and out
i look at them
from my infinite self
god the puppeteer
shrewdly playing
the beginning, the end
the two walls
between the human brain
the man innocently walks
to oblivion
some attempt to broaden the width
others like me attempt to
to burst out of the walls
to take a peep outside
the limitations, this physical self
the world outside
the god inside and out
the moon, sun, universe
the things outside
i too have become a galaxy
as i join god to take
a look at his worlds
a meteor flashes by
a cell loses hold
flushed by blood
to another world
an infinite me
looking at the finite me
all the stars, moons,
universe outside
and inside
all the cells that i own
that soon would
squeeze me out
to join the plane
where i could view
the beat of the universe
the expansive universe
myself a galaxy

the zillion of selves
those stars, suns
spinning towards
a full stop?
eternity?
the human brain
stretched towards
a world of no end
suffocated in its attempt
i stand beside god
for just a moment
to take a peek at
all his workings
wondering all the motives
behind his pupputeering
the moons, the suns, the universe
the cells acting out his drama
round and round
casting off light
i saw a star burst
light light years away
the cancer patient
carrying a cell
that too has burst
soon to cast that black hole
over the finite self
the infinite journeys to
rest on another finite self
the universe
i standby the creator
to look at his puppeteering
wondering his motives
in his design
the privilege he gives me
to share a view
of his craft
my mind flying
outside the two walls
of the brain
instead of between
infinity
my body
the universe
i look at them
like the stars, moon, meteors
this infinite me
with a finite self
of stars, moons,
stars beyond stars

poem by John Tiong Chunghoo
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Gray Rain

Gray rain
but the trees
are teaching the stars how to break into leaves.
Good rain on the good earth.
Autumn's a long passage.
Spring is full of thresholds.
Rainbow bridges in the distance
over urgent streams.
Everything's in a rush to become something.
I thought I knew once
who I was supposed to be
but more and more it eludes me
like a future that's already behind me.
I leave it to the world
to finish what I began
and include myself in the mystery
and try to carry on like a man
who looks at a star he won't follow
through the branches of the burgeoning trees
as the history of who I am
now that I'm not anymore.
The less I am the more there is to be.
And one eye doesn't get in the way of the other as much.
There is just this as it is
and what am I beholding
if I'm not looking upon myself as I am
in common with everything
that's changing all around me
like a mind that can't contain itself
in any fixed mode of being
anymore than the eye
can decide what it's seeing.
Everything is burning with life in the rain
and change is the dangerous bliss
we feel when we cease to exist.
The trees might have fingerprints
graven into their bark
and you might accord them
an identity in the dark
and approve of their names
and let them pass as if you knew who they were
but that doesn't make them
any less of a stranger than you are
or the clouds carry passports.
Praise be to the abundance of oblivion
and the cornucopias of blackholes
in the hearts of the galaxies
that keep wounding themselves into life
by falling on their own swords
like a knife that heals.
By day the light gives.
But at night
it steals.
And the mirror lives
and pours water over the eyes of the blind
and suddenly the stars can see again.
And the grape hyacinth is drunk on blue wine.
And I'm walking on water on the moon
even as the moon walks on my tears
without knowing which ones
flowed from the bells of my sorrows
and which overwhelmed me
like birds in the fountains of joy.
First I am a man.
And then I am a boy.
Spring takes itself for granted.
And autumn comes on with regrets.
But they both know
this is as good as it gets
and nothing's missing
in the mind's lost and found.
It's just the way things get around
when you throw the world back in the water
like a life of your own
you gave up years ago
to be who you are now.
Praise be to the stars
that stop by the gate this late
to chat about gardens
and how to keep
the roots of the roses alive
when the ground hardens.
Even if you're a demon in steep descent
or an angel rising from hell
life has the power of a flower
and the genius of a universe
to turn falling into a calling
like planets and Canada geese.
You can walk out alone
into a wide open field at night like I do
and stand there under the stars
that have been staring at you since childhood
like someone they should keep an eye on
and say: This is me. This is who I am as I am
to the whole twinkling lot of them in self-defence
to uphold the savage dignity of the difference.
You can stand there in the vastness
of that one definitive thought
that goes on forever like a silence older than birds
and feel the sweet release of upending joy
trying to master its new freedom
when space morphs into a mouth for a moment
and says softly
o so softly
in a voice that's been singed by compassion:
No.
You're not.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If You Had Any Compassion For Yourself

If you had any compassion for yourself,
others wouldn't have to suffer for you
and the world wouldn't show you
such a sad, woeful, wounded face.
You wouldn't see the withering leaves
and petals of the rose in autumn
as merely the scar tissue of its thorns.
In winter, mend your severance.
In spring, attend to your joys.
Like fishing nets and snow fences.
Like delphiniums in a garden bed
that's beginning to bloom like a starmap.

And you know that stranger inside
that's always witnessing everything we do
like a perfectly clear mirror, even in dreams?
Take another look, you might be surprised
at whose face you see at a meeting of eyes.

It's important not to pass judgement on yourself
for fear of condemning the world.
Show me a mirage that isn't a friend to water
or a wishing-well that resents a rainbow
for the pot of gold at the end, though
no one ever knows which end at the time.

Be kind to your delusive paradigms of life,
as you would an old skin you shed like the moon
when your serpent-fire could no longer contain itself
and broke out of its sacred chrysalis like a dragonfly
that had made itself a house of life out of matchsticks
and went up in flames like a snake with wings.

If you could see your life for what it is,
a teaching device for mentoring your own enlightenment
you might read the books of all the sages
rooted and flowering in you like the wisdom of a seed,
or the star in the ore of a panspermic universe
that was planted in you like the garden you've been from birth.

You might think that the wildflowers
are looking up at the stars to understand themselves
but, in truth, they're looking up at their roots
like rain reveres the lightning that engenders it.

You don't need to convince the wind of your freedom,
you've just got to ride it out to the end,
a friend to yourself, a worthy companion,
the intimate familiar of a cloud with a clear blue sky
or a subliminal lover of the darkness
love mushrooms up in like a moonrise.

If you knew how to nurture yourself
by breaking bread with the spirit of life within you
there wouldn't be millions of children
all over the world who will go hungry tonight.
They'd be licking the spoon with stealthy laughter
like cookie-batter out of the begging bowl of your heart.

Enlightenment isn't going to add one ray of light
or a single star to the night you're already shining in,
and whatever wavelength you're on, regardless
of the mystic polarities your potential flows between,
like dark matter and light, whether the journey you're on
is orange or infrared or the blue white violet of the Pleiades,
absorption or emission spectrum alike, no wave
of thought or mind, light, heart or water
is discontinuous with the oceanic consciousness
they rise upon, so why turn back to the source
like a solar flare to ask for directions from a starmap
that sent you out like a bubble in the multiverse to look for land.
You know, if you were more of an explorer
without a preconceived destination, more
of a space probe leaving the solar system periodically,
the rest of us wouldn't feel so lost or out of place at your table.

And even if you've made a vehicle
of the wheel of birth and death
and think you have a firm grasp on things
with your arm out the window in the driver's seat,
enjoying the passing view with the wind in your hair
without clinging to anything along the way
it still might be a good idea to learn how
to come down off your throne like a pauper
and change a flat tire now and again.

Your life is not an untimely interruption of eternity.
The eternal sky does not inhibit the flight of the white clouds,
and it even bends down sometimes toward the earth
to pick up Venus like a lost earring in the sunset.
It's your point of view that turns your back on yourself
like the retrograde motion of Mars, not
the planet itself playing rope tricks with your spinal cord.

Why go looking for your mind
like a lighthouse with a flashlight,
a flame for the source of the fire
or a star for the constellation it belongs to,
or the homeless for a home when everyone's
the foundation stone of their own habitation
wherever they are at the moment.

If you chase the wind, it will be you
that loses its breath like the atmosphere of the moon.
And when you run out of air, breathe light, breathe space,
and don't try to fix an expanding universe
to your nostrils like a bicycle pump
to get you back on the road again.
Or you'll find you're swimming out of your depths
to run to the rescue of an empty lifeboat
that's already unloaded its contents ashore.

If you don't want to go blind as a starless night
it's prescient to eclipse your blazing from time to time,
turn the lights down low, snuff the candle,
and learn to see in the dark there's just as much reflected
in the depths of the dark abundance
of a black mirror, though it takes time to focus,
than there is in the expansiveness
of the bright vacancy of the white
that takes things in at a glance.
The seed of a every glimpse of insight contains
the whole of the vision in advance,
and at the core of the apple of the issue
is a green star with dark auburn eyes
on the nightshift of the maternity wards of spring.

And o come on now, how long can you hang on
to being this box kite on a string
watching another phoenix ride your thermals
like inspiration on the wing, without feeling
like the premature ghost of yourself at the onset of spring,
all smoke, and no fire, your flightfeathers smouldering
like a pyre of wet maple leaves who haven't got the courage
to break into flames and flap their wings and rise above it all.
Better to be a weather balloon losing altitude like Icarus
or even a candling parachute taking the fall for all of us,
as daring said feathers and falling took flight,
than not risk falling through the black holes of life to paradise?

And what if I were to tell you're they're just the pupils
the light enters through like your eyes into your imagination
to be transformed from a visual into a vision,
the visible form into the invisible shining of the spirit
that raises everything in the known and unknown multiverse,
and the trees and the stars, the rocks and the clouds
are all counting on you to do this for them,
because this is what you're here for,
if you've ever wondered,
to raise them up to eye-level
with a human who knows the names of things
like parents know the names of their own children
running toward them down the street. It's how
we were meant to meet and greet the universe.

So if once, just once, for my sake, your sake, the sake
of the forsaken with their elbows on the windows of the world tonight
watching it all go by like stars on the firewalks beneath their noses,
that are not embedded in cement like a mausoleum
of movie-stars that refused to become fossils
before their shining was spent,
you took a chance, and that's all it would take,
one step forward with no return address,
to risk falling down at the dance,
and seven times down, eight times up,
such is life, get up on your own two good feet again
and discover you've got wings and spurs on your heels
the rest of us wouldn't feel so lame
when we came over to your place
like a riot of erratic fireflies to celebrate
the lightning moves of the rain that's dancing on our graves
where the dead lie down like the corpses of candles
knowing they'll be reincarnated
as wildflowers and Luna moths
because nothing that's ever given its life up
to this business of shining on everything alike
from a first magnitude star, to the night light in the hall
that shoos the ghosts away from their portraits on the wall
so the whole world can bloom in the tears of your eyes,
the fire in your heart, and in the human divinity
of the spirit of your imagination, can ever be put out
because every shadow of doubt
leads back the light that cast it
in love and sorrow, time and space
like the life and death mask of your own face.

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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Life's A Genius

Life's a genius.
Not a mediocrity
looking for reasons to live in the morning.
Life's not a plan.
It's a spirit that doesn't need one
whether things go right or wrong.
Life is light and water.
It delights in going everywhere at once.
Mediocrities have genius
but they don't know how
to play with it like a child.
Their eyes peek
through knotholes in the fence
but they sacrifice their longing
on the conventional altars of common-sense
and never throw the ball back over the hills
like the moon coming up
or the sun going down
without worrying about
breaking the neighbours'windows.
Life throws whole mountains around
and turns the cornerstones into quicksand
and goes down with Atlantis
only to come up again like Moby Dick
spewing stars out of its blowhole.
Mediocrity has its feet planted firmly on the ground.
It never goes anywhere it hasn't gone before.
It's the kind of fire
that sleeps with an extinquisher
in case things get too hot to put out.
Mediocrity shares.
But life's the kind of genius
that gives like an apple-tree
that fully expresses itself
through infinitely more
than four seasons
no two alike
without caring if it's of any benefit to anyone.
Mediocrity's stunned by the blossoms.
Genius tastes the fruit.
Life's the kind of fire
that doesn't have a root
you can pull up and take home with you
to add to your garden
like a new word to your vocabulary.
Mediocrity spells it out.
But genius is the dream grammar
of a spiritual alphabet
that isn't used to taking orders.
It doesn't have twenty-six words for inspiration
like potted geraniums all in a row
and only one for freedom
it weeds out like morning glory
and dandelions
whose vagrancy threatens
to overwhelm the rest
with a longing
for the happier memories of their homelessness.
Mediocrity's a highway lined with roadkill.
Genius is a river
that goes around
not through the hill
and though there are fleets of waterlilies all along its banks
that gather like the Spanish Armada every year
to burn the infidel irises on the far shore
back into the true church
they never set sail.
They stay anchored to the coast
like loveletters from buddhas upstream
rooted in the flowing.
Mediocrity writes a great poem.
Genius lets the poem write itself.
Mediocrity signs its own vanity.
like a work done well.
But genius doesn't have
anything to sell
that ever belonged to anyone
in the first place.
Life is the generosity of space
that blows stars in your face
and gives you the eyes to see them.
Mediocrity confines the muses to a hareem
to compel their obedience.
Mediocrity is a great sea without any tides.
Genius sleeps with women
it never thinks of as brides
because it can feel their power
like a waterbird feels the waves
breathing like the sea beneath it
wild and profound
cannibal creators
oceans in the black rose
dripping like the blood
of enlightened virgins
from Kali the Crone Destroyer's mouth
eating her own like the moon
as if she were life itself.
Mediocrity never includes
enough destruction in its creations
to be credible.
It goes along with the swans
like afterlives in the moonlight
but not the snapping turtles
that drag them down into the mud
like constellations brought back to earth like kites.
Mediocrity defangs the moon.
Genius flows down
its first and last crescents like blood
knowing one fang kills you
and the other heals you for good.
Mediocrity is hemmed in
by thresholds it never crosses.
It never colours outside the lines
into the negative space
of the forbidden white beyond.
It's never gone gone gone forever gone beyond.
It's a star with a lazy eye in an expanding universe.
It never reads the writing on the wall
between the lines
like fossils.
It's afraid of the dark.
It fills whole galleries
with works like arks
with two of every kind
that are signed like truces
it made with its imagination
as if the imagination
ever kept its word
to anyone who was afraid of it.
Mediocrity keeps an eye on itself
like a documentary.
It comes to the right door
but it never gains entry.
It's lost in the labyrinth
of its own fingerprints.
It leaves too much evidence
at the scene of the crime
and turns over on genius
at the dropp of a dime
for getting away with everything
like the mastermind behind it all.
Mediocrity sings like a canary in a coal-mine.
Genius howls at the moon
among the mountains
high above the timberline
where she takes
her first and last crescents off
like handcuffs off an escaped convict.
Mediocrity lives
as if it's always
making up an alibi
for something it never did.
It's easier to lie about a sin of omission
than it is to tell the truth
as if you weren't signing
a celebrity confession.
Genius lives out in the open
where everything's well hid
like a mason jar full of fireflies
without a lid.
Mediocrity hugs the shore
like a lighthouse
that's afraid of everything
it can't shine a light on.
Mediocrity shows you its scars.
Genius shows you the wound.
Mediocrity's amazed
that the universe
got as far as it did on its own.
Genius walks the rest of the way alone
and doesn't care if the path it's on
reads like an exit or an entrance.
Mediocrity looks for acceptance.
Genius throws the audience out the window
like an old typewriter with keys missing
and all its loved ones
smiling in the front row
as if they were in on the know
and sits down by itself at the piano
and lets the silence play
whatever it wants
all night long.
Mediocrity makes a big splash
like an inert gas
in a flickering neon sign
advertising one night stands
in a cheap roadside motel.
Genius shapes space like black matter
that stays hidden
on the far side of gravity
behind the leaves
that grow on its boughs like galaxies
that wait like nests in the treetops
for the shamans babies and birds
to fill their bright vacancy
with the dark abundance
of a language older than words.
There are lyrical swords
that have mastered the art
of writing their eloquent history
in scars that pre-date cuneiform.
That's one muse.
And when the dark mother
who gave birth
to the ten thousand things
whispered the mystery of the universe
into her own ear
she said it in stars.
That's another.
And when you listen to the moon
as she summons her own
like lost echoes and mad shadows
to the fullness welling up inside her
she sheds her eyelids like loveletters
she's read over and over again
out loud to the lunatics
like cracks in a dry creekbed
or a prophetic skull
waiting for rain.
She's beauty pain and death
all rolled up into one
black rose of inspiration
she hands out
to those of us she loves
like an eclipse
without an explanation.
Mediocrity doesn't understand this.
Three lucidities in one black mirror
before the arising of signs
and all it's looking for
is its likeness
in the meaning of everything.
Humans may have been created
in the image of God
but the world's not created
in the image of humans.
It's a lot crazier than that.
Mediocrity makes a habit of significance
to justify its eyes
to the nightwatchman in the mirrors.
Genius pulls the hat out of the rabbit
and the magician disappears.

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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Some People Go Looking For Happiness

Some people go looking for happiness.
Some prefer power or beauty wealth and fame.
Some crave intensity.
Some seek peace.
Some search for food and shelter.
Some want to die with a good name.
Everybody takes their lead from the way they came.
And everyone says they're looking for love
though no one knows what it looks like.
They try to fit their thoughts to their words
like skin they can touch
that doesn't scar like the moon
or shed like a petal too delicate for the senses
but most just end up trying
to mummify the mindstream
by laying thousands of years of starmaps
down on troubled waters
like autumn leaves
that don't know where they're going.
Eventually everything's swept away
in the undertow of a dark ocean
that only smells sweet from a distance.
And longing shifts like infra-red into the blackness.
And bones on the moon are the only signs
that life once perished here.
Orphic skulls whose jaws dropped
like gates before their own gaping prophecies.
Time flows like a non-existent future into us
and it fills us with a hunger
for everything we've lost
or feel somehow was always missing.
One of the cardinal features of the emptiness
we are conceived again and again out of
is there's nothing behind its face
you can fix like an identity to space.
For fourteen billion years
the universe has been nothing
but one long beginning without end
making everything up as it goes along
out of nothing
like a man whistling down a long road
far from home
late at night
to let anything that might be listening in the darkness
know he's there
so nothing can take him by surprise.
And every step he takes
he steps across a threshold like a star
just coming into being
whose light goes off in all directions
looking for blind water it can turn into eyes.
Bosons hadrons leptons neutrinos wimps and quarks
the deeper you look into the matter
the more you realize
out to the furthest galaxy and beyond
seeing is being
and being is all fireflies.
And every one of them
is true north of nowhere.
Some people follow their own beginnings
like laws into the future
hoping to become someone else
that doesn't recognize them anymore
for who they were.
The peduncle's lost in the ensuing phylum.
Their future's rich
but their past is always poor.
The planet doesn't spin on its axis for them.
It's hinged like a door
that only opens one way
though it's a two-faced god
that begins them like last year.
But the leaves of autumn
aren't the laundered money of spring
because if our fulfilment
weren't already behind us
we wouldn't be here
trying to true the last to the first
of an unfinished multiverse
like the best to the worst
as if red were the past of blue.
Stop thinking birth is the past of death
or spring is the future of winter
as if they weren't the same breath
and one breath of life weren't enough
to keep the fireflies glowing in your ashes for eternity
and everywhere you look
you will flower like a vine
that divines its way to the wine
by ripening the grapes of gratitude.
You will understand
for all that you have grasped
and brought to fruition
your most exalted aspiration
is a heap of dead branches in the spring
burning like leaves of fire
still reaching out for the sun
and you will hear the mind-mirror whisper to itself
like the wind on far off waters
Narcissus is drowning in his own reflection
like the flashback of a life he left unlived
but everything is immersed in me
like a mind
like a sea in a fish that ran aground
on the uncharted landfalls of its own teaching.
And the wine will flower in your mouth like a grail
that's given up preaching
and finally found its own voice
like a bird returning to a tree at nightfall
to call out in its solitude
to the stars as they appear
we are here we are here we are here
where we belong
at peace with everything we're missing
everything we long for
everything we are and are becoming
that overtakes us like music from within
transforming the silence into song
the water into wine
small beings into a big space
looking into the passing face
of everything's that's mortal about us
with our eyes fixed upon the divine
not to see it in any one place
but with the presence of mind
to be wholly and impurely not that not this
without anywhere a trace of ultimacy
in this world that we take for a sign
we are here we are here we are here
and things are as they are
not as they must be.
Nothing got here legally.
What's the expanding universe
if not a refugee in its own country
somehow exiled from itself for reasons
only it can express?
Citizen Universe
show me your papers
your paintings your poems
show me how you dance on your own
show me how you put your children to sleep
show me how you bar an F chord
show me what you weep for
what you delight in
what you esteem
what you despise
what you ignore
what darkness of yours
feeds that inferno of stars above you
burning its constellations like passports
that aren't going anywhere
show me the black mirror
that says you don't belong here
like some misplaced night of the full moon
not marked on any calendar
show me the law of being human
that says this little piggy has one
and this little piggy has none
show me where it's written
the guest shall turn strangers away
from his host's generosity
like a dog at the door
that bares its teeth at the table
show me the home-made honey
of your wisdom
show me the dead lamps
of the apocalyptic fireflies
that designed your chaotic cosmology
by plagiarizing the light
to prove the stars
don't reserve
a space in the universe
for any insight of yours.
Nothing got here legally.
No one followed a coyote or a law
to cross the border
into this insurgency of being
no one checked the colour of your eyes
or profiled the light
to see if they were fit for seeing.
You don't need a constitution
to verify your liberty.
Well before you were born
you were free and ever shall be
to belong here as we all do
to pursue what makes us
sad mad bad or happy
the way we all got here
the way we all get through
the way we're all alone here together
with one another as we are with you
as we are with her and him and me
as we are with everything
as we are with ourselves
when we don't know who we're becoming
when we don't know the stranger on the bridge
watching the water flow
that's waiting to greet us on the other side
in the only way the unblighted heart of reality
we're all looking for
like blood on a grail-quest for our humanity
accepts the darkness that seeks us out
like a miraculous elixir of insight
so the kingdom won't fail
so the garden doesn't ask us
for a green card to know and grow
in the only way we truly belong here
in the only way we know how to be
so the lifeboat we're all in
like the same boundless mind
is always as full
as it is empty
so no one gets left out at sea
like a wave that couldn't be saved
and no one gets in
who doesn't know how to swim
the way we all got here
and continue to be
all these thresholds of the sea
that steps across us
even as we move like waves
breaking discipline with our own continuum
creatively.
Just to be here.
Just to crawl up on the shore of a new medium
like a refugee planting flowers
we brought from home
hoping we'll still be here
to watch them bloom.

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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Amazing As The Stars In The Darkness My Eyes

Amazing as the stars in the darkness, my eyes,
though I've never seen them directly, only
as a reflection I take at its word they're blue.
And when I look a little deeper, there's
no part of me that isn't eventually invisible.
Everything's like that, the seer and the seen,
so wholly absorbed in each other,
there's no sign of either of them, just the seeing,
the heart and its feeling, the mind and its thought,
the flower and the eye, crocus, turk's cap, tiger lily, lilac
all one spontaneous happening without distinction,
one infinitely collaborative creative event flashing
out of the dark resources of the plenum-void
to give it a name for the sake of rendering experience
communicable through a delirium of form.

If you've ever walked by a mirror and the mirror's disappeared,
mercury into mercury, water into water, fire into fire,
a mother into her child, an unsuccessful lover into his longing,
that's something like it. You're everything
and in that everything you're nothing, you're selfless
to the point of not even knowing what that means anymore
except it's of no significance whatsoever. There's just
this star flashing out of a night it's surrounded by,
just these dark hills where the dead buried themselves
as they did their children, as they had lived, secretly
under the leaves that covered their gravestones,
lichens, moss, growing hundreds of wild columbine
on a modest rock of ages with the sensibilities of a butterfly.

If you stand by a gate that doesn't latch by itself anymore,
and the garden's been left to its own inner resources,
because no one lives there any longer, as, perhaps, even you once did,
o in a dream, how long ago was that? And watch the moon rise,
as if the healer and the wound were remembering
an old love affair that's gone well beyond the inseparable
because there never was a time, a prelude to seeing,
they were ever apart. You'll understand passing
as a perpetually new approach to things, you'll see birth in why
the flowers fall, and death, in why they rise again.
The simultaneity of the life and death of all things.
How present you are in the midst of your longing.
How clear in the absence of everything you're missing.

I've spent much of my life preparing gardens for planting.
Shaking out roots, rocking fields. Wondering
whose house of life the bones I dig up once belonged to,
cornerstones and rafters in arrears
to the temples they once upheld to themselves.
And come nightfall, my work finished for the day,
I've paused and looked to see if I could identify
through the trees, the whole of a constellation
from a single star. As if gazing in wonder at it
in the mutual solitude and hugeness
of the unknown immmensities that surround us both,
and bind us to a weary body and a still heart
leaning on a shovel in a garden, as if the silence
could look up or down, either way, were made sacred
by the poignancy of a momentary insight
that penetrated both our hearts as if time and space
were mere bubbles of awareness in a dream.
And in a differentiated union of not-two,
I saw myself shining through the eyes of a star
as it laboured over what flowers it intended to grow.

Without a thought or a feeling I could call my own
I was a desert of stars without a mirage
to keep up appearances. I was a single point of light
with infinite distances in it, and even the word, one,
had gaps in it I learned to jump like a star.
And I saw with the certainty of water, that
when one was a wave, the other was an ocean
and separation was simply the blindfold we put on
at midnight in front of an imaginary firing squad,
as if our whole life depended upon it, to watch
the stars shoot flowers at the sun like blanks
I seeded the garden with like constellations
breaking ground through the tree tops like Vega in Lyra.
Astro-flowers. The Pleiades approaching
the larkspur like bees. Honey in a new hive.

Light years of perceptions in a garden of starmud
encompassing strangers only an insight away from home.
It's an immensely intimate universe. Go out.
Get down on your knees in the soil. Plant flowers.
And when you go in look at your hands, at the stars
shining under your fingernails as a sign
of some honest cosmic work well done.

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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I Sit At My Window

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Gently Took The Strawberry Heart

I gently took the strawberry heart
of the bird with the broken neck
and buried it in a shrine of leaves and grass.
And in a low voice, whispered a blessing.

Under the window of an illusion
like a song you can only hear once
and it's good for a lifetime of listening,
I buried you with your wings together in prayer.

And I prayed to know what to pray for.
I prayed to know what to ask that could ease
the burden of the earth on a nightbird's journey
flying solo deeper into the dark

than even the stars or these eyeless words can go.
And I know death returns even the worst of us
to our innocence again, though our bones
come crashing down like childhood kites around us.

And the flight feathers of the aerial acrobatics
of our love lyrics run out of ink
when there's no one in the dark
to sing for anymore, no stars

to chart where you've gone,
no sign from the heavens you're not alone,
no ghost of smoke from a distant fire
I can summon to a seance of lingering desire

that would console you in the flesh again
like a candle in your solitude reaching out
to the pain of a stranger in the shadows
to make your wound cry out in bliss

as you once did from a greener bough
than this dead branch I sing from now
when we thought blossoms were the answer
to everything we didn't understand at the time

that could befall us like fledglings in the spring
who didn't know what autumn would bring
like an ice-storm in its wake
to things that break against the sky

like the cold-hearted lie of a window
that wasn't open and didn't go on forever.
And though I ask the weather for news of you,
if the wind might have heard

a word or two in passing, all
the silence does is deepen your absence
and teach me not to cling to things
like birds and flowers on the wing.

But if grief is all I can know of you now
I'll console myself with sorrow.
I'll hold onto it like the string of a kite
soaring among the constellations.

I won't let go. I'll play the line out
like a flying fish I caught in Pisces
and hauling it into a lifeboat with a net
I'll take the hook of the moon out of your mouth

and throw you back into the depths like a muse
swimming among the stars like a siren
that keeps calling me to the rocks
like an astronaut to these mountains on the moon

I keep hurling through this earthly view
of a window from the inside out
that breaks just like the shell of a cosmic egg
unfolding a loveletter with a wingspan of light

that penetrates this dark forever
like the third eye of a needle in a haystack
of begging bowls I won't abandon like the nests
of nightbirds with flightplans

that feather our falling into the abyss
of the unbelievable with starmaps
and the beacons of homing metaphors
that make our disappearance inconceivable.

I'll live like the return address on an envelope
with a mouthful of silence for a voice
and wait for you to answer me again
like a songbird at the spring equinox

through a broken window in a house of pain.
And though it hurts worse when the candles go out
I'll refuse to turn my heart away
from your reflection in everything I see.

Everything I hear and do and say.
Everything that was as true as a night sky about you.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Playing Chess With Mundanity To Survive To Write

Playing chess with mundanity to survive to write.
Evading destroyers disguised as Everyman
who hates what I do because he thinks he can't
and ignores it, forgetting I've been trained for oblivion
and writing poetry is the only way you can breathe
when you're swimming in it and the moon is in the corals
trying to grow gills. All the useful functions I serve
I had to make up for myself. I express things
with no regard to having a useful function
though things shape themselves around me as a result.

Let them. I'm as supple as space on a balance beam.
Younger, I sought a name in the fountain mouths of humans
to actualize the pretension of what I hoped I was,
real carrot, real stick, real donkey, by consensus,
like reality, until I began to smell the methane,
and the swarms of squabbly seagulls, and uncover corpses,
and realized the pursuit of fame was just trying
to be something shiny in the garbage dumps
of other peoples' mouths and minds, and any thought
of a literary career came candling down after me
like a collapsed parachute that felt like a punctured lung.

I don't really care how many books you've got published now.
I'd rather howl like a wolf on my own above the timberline lamenting
the loss of the wild spirits that used to animate this wilderness
where my instincts are not blunted like swords of moonlight
on the skulls of first edition gravestones. All those books,
songbirds in an aviary of caged words that have turned you
into a voice coach. I'd rather howl with the wolves
than chirp with the birds, or teach the pigeons to sing
under the eaves of the safehouse built on quicksand
that's taken up residence in you. Moonlight feathers the tarpit
and the rat snake's scales gleam like sequins in the dark
as it slips like a wavelength back into the lake of the abyss.

Try writing four lines that are remembered for nine hundred years
because they intrigue the human heart with the sincerity
of our mortality caught in a rainstorm of bleak sorrows
far from anywhere, and the struggle of blood
to keep a small fire burning in the encroaching solitude.
Humans will keep your memory alive only so long
as they need you to hold out your lantern into the emptiness
like a lighthouse teetering on the brink of a vertiginous precipice
to see if you grow wings on the way down when you jump.

Experiment and experience. Though the former's
old science by now. Objectivity is as obsolete
as a steady state universe with a planetesimal theory
that sank like a cue ball in the pocket of a decaying orbit.
Mystical science. All phenomena are numinous things of the mind.
Two of an infinite number of windows in a palace of water looking out on
the leafless autumn trees like coathangers stripped of their wardrobes.
All seeing is creative. And the dark, a beginning
that isn't trying to upstage the stars it engenders
out of its own inconceivability with waterless mirages
that reflect nothing but what they depend upon for a living.

Focus like a telescope on any star of your choosing,
steady your tripod like a body in meditation and just sit
like a clay owl on the roof of a barn to scare the chickens away
until you're flooded with an inundation of clear light
from the inside out of your usual direction of prayer
and you realize the crazy wisdom of what you're doing here
is neither random nor absurd, nor particularly instructive
given you can't step into the same mindstream twice,
but an occult chance to revel in the light of secret meanings
all of which are your own hidden paradigms of a shapeshifting universe.

I'd rather drown in an outrageous northern river,
slash my wetsuit and puncture my raft
than sail around the rest of my life in a system of locks
in a game of snakes and ladders. Money talks
and the silence walks like the darkness away from the stars.
Don't devote your immensities to the sparkling of tinfoil.
But if that's enough. It's enough. Just as long as you know
that the shamans aren't going to waste good magic on you
if an obvious fraud is enough to satisfy you
and the water sylphs won't reveal their picture-music
like muses with something to sing about if you're afraid
to plunge in and get wet pearl diving for the new moon
that's been growing like a sacred syllable under your tongue
for more light years than you've had occasion to regret
you couldn't hold your breath in your own depths for that long.

The mystery of the wellsprings of life and inspiration
is that it only receives swords that have been broken in tribute
to the fact that everything must be returned in time
not words or lives that can be retrieved from the river
to be used again in a recycled holy war that never leaves a scar
worthy of the blood you had to spill to lose it
as if the singularity of your devotion didn't mean it
or the gatekeeper hadn't informed you on your way in
that poetry, like the heart it takes to live it, is all entrance. No exit.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

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