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It's Stranger To Conceive Of Me

It's stranger to conceive of me as I am
than to imagine that I'm someone else.
There's more largesse in the early spring air.
You can tell by the tears that well up in their eyes
the glacial stars are beginning to thaw splinter by splinter
withdrawing their claws from the corpse of the snow
like thorns from the Lion's paw overhead.
I can hear water in the creek tuning up
for the dance to come as soon as
the first violins of the crocuses get here,
the trout lily, the purple passage of the wild violet
under a leaf it took like a page from the book of autumn,
trout lily, hepatica, wood sorrel, grape hyacinth.
I like it here because it doesn't matter who I am.
Things are alert and vivid with life because
they're not threatened by the possession of it.
And time is a lot more honest
here where it lets its hair down
than it is back in town
where it's always now, now, now,
and the streetlights, blinded by their own blazing
turn their backs on the stars
like the distant fires of native peoples
who preferred to dance to see
where they were going at night
than watch their step
like the next best real estate deal.
Even without intention, every time
I try to shape space with my mouth
and say this is who I am, this is me
whatever similitude I use I always feel
I'm exhuming a dead metaphor
from the coffin of a word
that's been taken out of the context of the world
and put on display in a dream museum.
It's as if I can relate the history of smoke
but not the flame that lived it.
As if one of these half-submerged skulls of rock
that have been trying
to pave their way across the creek
for as long as I've been crossing here
were to try and understand the mindstream
that's been ploughing around them for lightyears,
not realizing what they're rooted in like cornerstones,
are islands on the moon, mere shadows of water,
mirages on the tongue of those who have
never tasted it like their own blood
to know whether it was hot or cold,
blue or red, sweet or sour, real or not.
The earth can sleep a little longer yet
under this tapestry of snow while
the dreamweaver at the loom of the moon
is unravelling the threads of a thousand loose night creeks
the sea will gather up again into an oceanic consciousness
of the flying carpet of wavelengths and life themes
we're riding on well out of reach of ourselves
like waterlilies in winter when it's coldest,
and snowflakes on a furnace when it's hot.
It's as fun to say it as it is to play with hula hoops.
The ecliptic intersects the celestial equator
at the equinoctial colure and it's spring
in the northern hemisphere. Canada geese
thread their way like rosaries of snake skulls
through the stars in the eyes of northern lakes
peeping through the cataracts of ice and clouds
breaking up like mirrors that can only
hold this pose of starmud for so long
before it's time to change studios again
to keep up with the light
that's trying to capture your likeness
like the whole of the sky on the skin
of a dropp of the water of life
that reflects like a mirror
but sees through appearances
into the deeper darkness
like a gravitational lens of pure insight,
the lamp in the hand of the light that leads it
like a blind lighthouse to the perilous reefs
of morning on the moon among the corals.
Was I born to wonder what, who I am
or not, as is more highly probable?
Is the persistence of the question, the way
it makes you suddenly look up
from a seemingly unrelated matter
at the moon in the black walnut trees
or a bird in passing that commands your attention
without in the least meaning to
until everything but it feels like the intrusion.
Is the question on the agenda of the answer
or does it have a life of its own,
a journey that doesn't end in a key?
I look at all these twisted forms of life,
not cast out, but abandoned, these
deadly gray limbs of swamp wood
silking their legs in the moonlight,
these mauled pines that look more like weather
than evergreens, the sparse, despirited crimson
of the ground willow paintbrushes
that have lost their handles in the snow
waiting like a newly primed canvas
for the first rose petal of blood
to fall from Virgo as a sign of consummation.
Things, forms, things of the world,
things of the bodymind that shapes them
out of starmud, out of the outer receptacles
of the five senses on each hand,
that conceives of a bee like a hollyhock
calling it into being like the fragrance
of something that was said, but wasn't
meant to be heard by anyone else.
Animate and inanimate alike
a grammar of things, ritual magic
and we're the diction,
we're the verbs and nouns of the spell
that keeps us creating the world in tongues
so even as strangers we end up speaking
the same language as stones and stars and birds.
Maybe the question is just an answer
that's travelled back in time from the future
to ask the prophetic skulls of its own ancestors
if any of them had foreseen what was to come?
Or the question is all and the answer is negligible?
Or left speechless, you achieve wisdom?
Or left unanswered, you awaken
your own creative freedom
like a world you didn't know
you had it in you to make any way you want
in case this one doesn't fit, you don't have to bear it.
Absurd as it seems to seed your dreams
and expect to harvest them when you wake up,
and yet I've seen it happening all around me
every day of my life, objects, symbols, stars,
insights casting shadows of themselves
into the darkness as far as the light
they've been given to go by,
sowing the available dimensions of the future
with a world that isn't so much said into being,
but arrayed lucidly before us
like eyes full of mystery that don't reveal a thing.
I sit on this rock and I watch the night creek
until I can't tell which one of us is flowing
and it occurs to me that maybe the question itself
is the crucial essential of my existential dilemma
and the answer's only the temporary afterlife
of who I'm becoming now. Not as I appear;
not as the psychic life of a heart-broken mirror,
not as the mirage of a snowblind seer
who approachs the desert on my threshold with a broom
as if I were trying to keep house in an hourglass.
I don't sweep the stars off my stairs.
I don't follow a trail of breadcrumbs
in the corners of the eyes of last night's dream
as if someone had been here before me.
I don't pass myself off like counterfeit leaves in the spring.
Honesty isn't a fact. And clarity isn't a starmap.
And love's only another religious con
if it isn't wholly unconditional and inclusive.
I'm not looking for asylum in the abyss
like some petty alternative to living this
without knowing what this is or I am
or at least trying to get my ignorance
as close as humanly possible to it as I can
whether it's aware of me, these stars, this
broken thatch of wild rice, wheat, and cattails, or not.
Then I will celebrate the creativity of its absence
with reverence and compassion for all
that it's left in its wake like a sleepwalker
shaping this mindscape like a retreating glacier.
All that abide here with me tonight
like the gateless gate of an open mind
wondering if there's anything left to catch up to
that embodies the dignity of the beginning
in the dead of winter, as apparently it does in the spring.
Or if we're all words in a language
we're just learning to speak on our own
that can point to anything, say anything
except themselves to themselves
whenever the question comes up
about whether they mean anything at all
when they're not leaning on the world to exist
as we all do, trying to make sense of it
in this dumb-founded dialogue of wonder.

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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And You Shall Forever Be

And you shall forever be
all that could not be said of me
though I spoke for myself as long as I could
to answer your absence in paint and words
like this night creek talking in tongues to itself.
I see the maple leaves rotting in manuscript
like the dead civilization of a mummified language
that never made it into print.
And though I know every name
of the wildflowers that did, and of the stars,
their perennial myths of origin,
and of the fireflies, their efflorescent haikus,
tonight I walk among bones and pelvises of ice,
the desecration of forms, limbs lobbed off
like the right arms of offended trees and the eyes
of small skulls plucked out like stillborn moons
that never made it through the winter.
Alone with this emptiness which yet remains
the biggest clue I've ever found
to the whereabouts of myself,
I am not estranged by my usual compassion
for outcast things with no voice of their own.
There is no pillow of snow over the mouth
of what can't be said without me.
The dead don't hold their fingers
up to their lips to bid me keep silent.
They're all dancing wildly to lyrics of their own
in a winter carnival of deathmasks
that have shed their bodies
like the hags of the withered waterlilies
trying to wash the brown out of their gowns
like sunspots from the memory of the stars.
As if there were an eloquence
in the radiance of their rags
that overwhelmed the silence
with the sacred syllables of a mother-tongue
that has no word for time or death.
No word for life that distinguishes them from me.
Not just moonlight on the barkless limbs of mannequins
that have shed their skin seductively.
Not the dead of a northern Pompey
frozen in ash and ice and snow
catastrophically posed for generations to come
but the hymns of the homeless
who've finally found common ground
with the tent cities of the stars high overhead
and the gypsy moths in the Dutch elms.
The long vowels of the living joining hands
with the skeletal consonants of the dead
to make one whole word we can say in our sleep
like a secret we keep between ourselves.
And for the moment I feel almost complete here
like the first draft of a book
that the dead have yet to rewrite.
And though I've said it thousands of times before
in as many ways as I was inspired to,
like a fire that reared up at the mere shadow of the whip
to outrun the starlight for the sheer spirit
of challenging the will of this body
dug like a spur in its own ribs,
it was clear from the very beginning,
as clear as poppies and marigolds
in the summer of their oral traditions,
no more can be said in the dead of winter
than can be said by the living
to coax the wild crocuses out in spring.
You might be a lone night bird
that inhabits the woods like a magus
with too many stars to follow
to follow any one of them
and gratify your life by stargazing
and calling the faithful to prayer
like a muezzin in the morning
with the voice of an underground river.
And for all your lucidity you might never find
the long shadows of your ancestors
erecting the waterlilies of their tents
along the riverbanks of those rivers and lifelines
you keep returning to every year like waterbirds.
Or you could find no sign of anyone
for light years who could recognize you
for who you are even as you change time-zones
like a child with ageing eyes
who was raised by the alone with the Alone
in an incomprehensible solitude that included everyone.
Here where distinctions break down
and the dead and the living both draw
from the same source as they've always done
each is known to the other
by attributes that neither of them have.
The warm heart of a black rose
looking back over its shoulder
at a bend in the night creek,
the moon rising up over the valley,
a pearl in partial eclipse,
taking one long, last look
at the broken cages of ghostly tree limbs
and shattered ladders of lifeboat wing bones
that drowned on the way to their own rescue.
Is one side of a window truer than another?
Inner and outer, I and the other
truly separated by this mere hole in my eye?
Do the stars streaming through my mind
feel a subtle change in the nature of the sky
when they do, a different feel to the darkness,
something strange about the flowers
they open like loveletters, sensing someone
has been tampering with their mail
as if the message were still the medium
but with a different return address?
Is my absence any less baffling than my presence?
These with the hearts of departed things
any less whole or real or displaced
or death any less of a prelude to time
than any other point in its passage is?
Even in death, even when the sun
shines at midnight it's always dawn.
The waterbirds go. The waterbirds come back.
Like an ongoing dialogue in an hourglass
where content is the same as timing
and the most enduring of things
are the things that most readily pass
between the bright vacancy
and dark abundance of life
like the moon that keeps growing
without coming or going like a journey
standing in the doorway
of its own unending threshold.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Things Might Be Drifting Away

Things might be drifting away
like an empty lifeboat
with nothing left to save
but the memory of moonlight
on the rush of a wave of the heart
that rose and fell
like a bell of insight on the night watch
that said all's well all's well for the night.
And so it was for a while.

Time might seem
that it's overstaying its welcome
and you've become the estranged guest
of a bad dream
in your own bed
in the thirteenth house of the zodiac
where the dispossessed
shack up with the misbegotten
and the ghosts of everything you've forgotten
don't give you any rest
until all that you've cursed
out of anger and need
has been immensely forgiven and blessed.
And perhaps it appears
you've been the rogue star
of a sign in long exile
far away from now
and that might account
for your misplaced trust in mirrors
and your lack of confidence in star maps.

Happiness just happens
like good luck and grace
and the creative inspiration
to rejoice in your time and place here
as if the purpose of your voice
were always to praise
even on the darkest of days
when the only thing
that shone in your eyes
weren't the stars you kept
locked away in your tears
like the face paint of clowns
or the crown jewels of the Pleiades
but a bitter farce of black holes
in the veils of the mirage
that eclipsed your enlightenment
with a starless night
it's impossible to get beyond.
And so it may well be
for those who've been
as far gone for as long you have.

But even the blind are shining
though they can't see it
and the deaf are still singing
though they can't hear it
and the dead are still living
though they can't feel it.
And those who have given up seeking
still find what they were looking for
like a loveletter with a return address
and an open door that recognizes them
like the prodigal threshold
of a homeless human
about to cross one more
like the last step of a long journey
that lost its way back in all directions
like the radiance of a star in space and time
that never took its eye off the past.

We cherish the flowers of summer that bloom last
more poignantly than those of the spring
because we feel our own hour of farewell
in the progress of their passing.
The sadness of an earthly excellence
fulfilled and surpassed
we see in the shedding of the aster's petals
and in the lowering of the wild rose's eyelids
and in the lengthening of the black walnut's shadows
that move like cool water
across the dry grass of a late afternoon
signs of the same night approaching us.
And we know it will be dusk soon.

We'll look up at the blue moon in late October
and whether the silos are full or empty
wonder if every harvest
wears the same death mask we do
with the smile of a scythe on its face
or if the goddess of the grain
bears true witness to
the perennial innocence of death
in the way she enhances
the white spectre of the first frost
to shock the garden down to its roots
with the same koan she uses
to enlighten the dew on the stargrass.

And you might dread the coming excruciations
of the scarecrow immolated on the pyre
of its own substance
like the short straw of flesh
that once sustained it
lost in a draw with death.
And come to scorn your heart like an urn
filled with ashes in the aftermath
of the same fire that once filled it
so full of desire to bloom
it could no more contain itself
than a seed can keep a secret from the spring.

You could see it that way.
And who among those clinging
like a blue atmosphere
to this homeless grain of dust
in the vastness of these sidereal immensities
within and without
that animate us like starmud
to join in this dance of life and death
like a legacy of shining
that can't be washed out of our eyes
though tears have fallen for lightyears
on the root fires of what we've loved and lost.
Who among these
could say you were wrong?

Because no river's flowing
the wrong way to the sea
in this reunion of arrivals and departures
at the stations of our afterlives
on this wheel of birth and death.
We're all going to make it back
to where we came from
one way or another.
Some like rain.
Some like ice.
Some like snow.
Some like the lingering ghost
of morning mist on the lake
that's gone before noon
and some like water on the moon.
The flowing of the river
summoned by the sea
to the source of its coming and going
is the calling of life everywhere
to transcend itself
by passing into the unknown
like the available dimension of a future
that's no further beyond us
than the past is
in the light of distant stars.

The sword doesn't wound itself.
Fire doesn't burn itself.
Water doesn't drown in itself.
And life doesn't bleed out of itself
like the dream of a fortune-telling poppy
or a water clock that's run itself to ground.

The eye isn't the seeing.
The ear isn't the hearing.
The tongue isn't the tasting.
The skin isn't the touching.
The voice isn't the saying.
The brain isn't the thinking.
The heart isn't the feeling
anymore than life
is the carrying in
and death is the bearing out.
The darkness isn't a lack of light
and the light isn't the absence of night.
Death is unborn.
Life is unperishing.
Formless in a world of forms.
Two wavelengths of the same awareness.

You say you can see night gathering
under the door you're afraid to answer
long before anyone knocks
and though you dream by your own light
you don't know who's casting the shadows.
Is sorrow any younger in the heart of a child
than it is in the memory of an old man?
Joy any less vivid in the eyes of an old woman
attending to the flowers in her garden
than it is in a girl having tea with her dolls?
Is this day not as new to the widow
as it is to the newly-wed?
Experience is the capstone and dunce-cap
of the sum of destructions
that made us who we are today.
And in life it's the brilliance of our failures
that throws more light on the dark matter
of the issue before us
than all the star power
of the blazing successes
that blind us to our own shining.

You step out of a backlit doorway
into the dark
and slowly the darkness grows
the eyes you need to see the stars.
And maybe death is like that.
Nothing to look at but black
until we blow the candle out
that's been misleading us all the way.
Maybe that's why the jaws of skulls
are always caught gaping at something
that's more than they can say.
But look at the expressions on their faces.
Maybe their eyes
are too overwhelmed by what they're seeing
to want to get in the way.
You could see it like that.
You could see it through the eyes of the rain.
You can taste it on the tongue of a candle flame.
You can read it from right to left
in the Kufic script of the wind.
You can hear it in what the stars are whispering
through the keyholes in the pyramids.
You can feel it all around you
like bubbles of skin and air.
Like empty rooms with atmosphere.
As many ways and roads and rivers as there are
that flow into it down the world mountain
back to the sea
back to the same undifferentiated watershed
of these myriads of mystic specificity
and who could number them all
as many as the stars
or all the grains of sand
of all the deserts and beaches on earth
as many as the dead of every kind who've come and gone
all that blood mind passion dream and imagination
all those tears all that despair lucidity and apprehension
love and familial affection
all that waste and hatred and emotional sewage
dissolved wholly back into the sea
like a watercolour left out in the rain
like a name written on water
by a poet who died young
in a foreign language far away from home
just as birth arrays the universe before us
and says make of it what you can
so death approaches no less a peer of life
than we are in our relationship with all things
and offers us
the same great creative opportunity life does.
Green bough.
Dead branch.
Sunset.
Moon rise.
The hidden night bird alights
on either alike
and folding its wings
like gates and books
and the eyelids of those who dream
at the beginning and end
of a long dark radiant journey,
sings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Jumped Out Of Nothing

Jumped out of nothing. The fish did. Golden.
A flake of the moon. When I wasn't looking.
Into a lifeboat cupping something precious in its hands.

The mind an old junkyard that's been collecting windows too long.
So many points of view. So many glass eyes
looking for the stuffed animals they belong to.

Death after knowledge. The silence that follows the music
after the bird has flown. Is the abyss death's rebuke
of life's dangerous proposal to let us look through the keyhole

at what's going on in the uninhabitable room next door?
To dream a little in the interim between two enormities
abstracted from the need of our perishing to persist

aeonic light years beyond anything we can imagine?
The golden fish jumps into the boat like an unsought insight.
No hook in it. And you can tell by the scales of light it emanates

it's risen from the starless darkness of its own depths
like moonrise out of the encyclopedic corals
of accumulated knowledge that's found a place for everything

like a polyp on a library shelf, calcium in a cave
shaping itself into temples from the top down.
Stalagmites and stalactites of cathedrals inspired by water

to enshrine themselves in form as an aid to the blind.
Though things along the way might change
does the journey stay the same ad infinitum?

Did you amount to everything you dreamed you might be,
or were there more stairs to climb than doors to enter,
more walls than windows in the way you saw things?

I've seen the most sublime things humbled by their own insignificance.
And I think I've heard God more than once
weeping at the stern of a sinking ship for a turn of events

she couldn't do anything about once they were set in motion.
And I've listened to people my whole life
talking in their sleep about how to put a rudder on a dream

as if there were a focus and a direction for life to flow in
like a solid, particulate thing instead of the wandering wavelength
of this exiled mirage of water that it appears to be

depending on the mood of the chameleonic mirror you're looking into.
The donkey looks into the well and the well looks back at the donkey.
It couldn't be any clearer than that. Tat tvam asi. But, then, again

why muddy the mirror by dropping the penny of the moon
down a wishing-well that never gets what it wants
and ask for something you've never really been missing?

I learned in my mother's kitchen long before I went to school
that just because you can ask a question doesn't mean
you have a right to expect an answer that satisfies you.

And even when you do receive an answer unexpectedly
it will be the quality of the question that determines its nature.
The single petal of a candle flame the size of the fire of life in your heart

like the apple-bloom of a thousand orchards in the Okanagan
thrives on the winds of change that blow it out and away
like a butterfly from the open palm of your hand

wise enough to know a hand is not just for grasping
and let it go like a mind of its own without knowing where.
Indirection is an indeterminate voyage of discovery,

a star's way of probing the darkness radiantly
without knowing how the light's going to be bent ahead of time.
Destination is a postcard from the edge of nowhere.

If you want to see anything worth looking at
while you're still alive enough to know it like your own name
don't adjust your eyes to the size of the window

you're looking through like the keyhole of an orbitting telescope
but the spaciousness of your own mind like a sky
no starburst of bird, word, or thought has flown to the end of yet

Whether they're bearing the souls of the dead south or west
like early transmigratory hearses yoked to a brace of angels or not.
Life still greens the tree with meaning even in the wordless dead of winter.

And who hasn't been, from time to time, a thriving neighbourhood
that left town to seek its fortune buried in its own back yard
only to return empty-handed to watch its homelessness being torn down?

Those who see themselves as strangers in the doorways of their own houses of life
are those who ask the most questions about who that is
that threatens them the most from the inside out,

that offer escalating ransoms to their own shadows to let them go unharmed
the longer the silence refuses to identify itself like an answer
to the incomprehensible questions about what they're doing here

like rivers weeping over what's going to become of them
or the sun worrying about opening the wrong flowers
like somebody else's mail without a return address

though all flowers like stars are loveletters addressed to everyone alike,
and it's not hard to recognize a river in captivity by its handwriting
or the jewels of the dead from the eyes of the living by the accent the light

they speak in through the medium of a mother-tongue that slurs the distinction
between a seance and an exorcism once we realize we've been summoned
to the comings and goings of every breath, every step, every

mistake we make with our lives like a revealing insight into who lies
under these deathmasks we wear like crocuses in the spring
under the unpaginated duff of last autumn's petals and leaves.

The way life carries on, it feels to me, is no different
in the heart of the incomprehensible mystery
than the wind that sweeps us away like death

the stars off the stairs in one and the same breath that blew them there
to ensure our continuity is always within reach of attaining
like a river that at all times and everywhere is in touch with itself.

Like a waterclock. Or a goldfish in the deserts of an hourglass
swimming through mirages on the moon that launches
our lifeboats and coffins alike on the same undifferentiated ocean of insight

that washed us ashore in the first place like islands in the night
that have more in common with the stars that at first glance
we might think we do in the vastness of the spirit's lost and found.

But of this I am bold enough to remain uncertain of my bearings indefinitely.

poem by Patrick White
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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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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I Wish Everyone In The World Were As Mad As You Are

I wish everyone in the world were as mad as you are.
I wish everyone in the world talked the same nonsense you do
and meant as much.
Stop crying.
I wish everyone in the world were as good as you are
and didn't lie to anyone else
other than themselves
about what the truth is.
You shape chaos to your mind
like light to space
to make a habitable planet you can live on
and if it isn't round sometimes
and O doesn't always cast the same shadow
that the others mimic with theirs
I wish everyone could put on your kind of airs
and be as good to life as the kind of atmosphere you are.
Come on now.
Here.
Dry your tears with this.
All those constellations you made up
out of the stars in your eyes
are your own private myths and mandalas
and you're free to change them as you will
and I wish everyone made as much
of the light they were given to go by
as you have.
I'm too much of a thorn
to paint the delicate iridescent watercolours
I see smeared on your tender bubbles
like original pictures of the universe
from a thousand spaced-out Hubbles
but I wish everyone in the world
had your kind of genius for vulnerability.
You hold up a single feather of light
like a candle among stars
like a green leaf in the middle of winter
and the world that is inured to three dimensions
for infinitely tedious reasons
would rather put its eyes out
and gape like blackholes
than see as you do
that there are countless seasons to the soul
that burn like a phoenix
and there's nowhere you can point to in the darkness
that isn't an equinox of love and understanding
when the sun shines at midnight
and spring harvests what the autumn sows.
Having a deep cosmic insight
like a stranger beyond lucidity
into the windows of the houses of your own zodiac
might make you look like a maniac to the neighbours
who keep watch in their asylum
against any kind of freedom
that might release them from their lighthouse
like a geni from a lamp
that doesn't conform to anyone's wishs but her own
but I wish everyone had the courage
you have not to be them.
Life isn't fair or unfair.
Life isn't kind or cruel.
It isn't half-Buddha and half-fool.
Neither impersonal
nor sentimental
life isn't a kind of obedience
to its own rules
as if it were bound like God to keep its word.
Or what?
Who else is there to answer to?
All the taboos want to be thresholds
and all the thresholds
want to run away from home.
Could be a curse.
Could be a blessing.
Could be just more idle words.
But you're not like that.
You're not a fountain mouth
that mistakes alphabets for birds
and holds them to the letter of the law
in a world full of music.
It's enlightenment to sing to a window.
It's ignorance to sing to a mirror.
But you don't sing to either
and your song is clear as running water
all the way down the mountain.
The picture-music
of your eyes and your ears
can already hear the ocean from here
that gathers to receive the flowing
like the heart receives blood
like the mind receives your thoughts.
Look out at the world.
You're the host.
Look inward.
You're the guest.
You can break bread with the dead
without being a ghost.
You can drink wine with the living
and it's the wine that gets high on you
flowing into a seabed of shadows on the moon
that hasn't touched a dropp for years.
Don't believe what the cynics say about innocence.
They have the sensibilities of blackflies
trying to draw blood from the Mona Lisa.
Don't grieve if you're a butterfly
that can't follow the flightplans of the maggots.
There's only a slight difference in wingspan
between a waterbird and a phoenix
but it would take lightyears
to measure a single feather of yours.
There's no cult of the rose
that insists it fall upon its own thorns first
or the moon draw first blood
on the blades of its own crescents.
You don't have to scar
your own deathmask with experience
just to prove you knew
how to eat the pain and bleed.
You don't have to wear your face in public
as if it were something you kept up your sleeve.
Dice might be the foundation-stones of the lost
but that doesn't mean
you have to go pearl-diving
for the moon in quicksand
or change your song like a jukebox
playing the slots
when you're a mermaid on the rocks.
I wish everyone had the same chance
to risk it all as you do
and win back their lives
like eleven come of seven
insteading of seeing everything
as if they were jinxed by inasuspicious birds
turning the wrong way on a prayer-wheel
that keeps coming up snake-eyes
with every roll of their skulls.
You can't heal the luck
of a wounded Nazi
by turning his swastika the other way.
You can't teach snakes to bite other people.
And you don't know enough
if there's anything left to say or understand
and even then there's a silence
that still longs to be heard
like a humming bird sipping honey from your ears
or deep in a telescopic wishing well of stars
burning in a dream of mirrors
they walk across
like fire on the water
or the distant blue notes
of the hidden nightbird
that echoes your tears
as if it were crying out in the darkness
from the safety of a secret place
for the same reasons you are.
As if it were trying to befriend its own sorrow
and weep for tomorrow as you do
for all the things of the past
it won't even know it's missing.
I wish everyone in the world
could live the future as you do
as something that is already happening now.
Even when you're crying
because you don't think you're brave enough
not to.
You're not a lame princess
that anyone needs to rescue.
You're a dragon bringing rain.
And if the snakepit hisses at you
like a social structure
and calls you insane sometimes
because you have wings
and they still hug the earth
all tied up in knots
taking their poisons out on each other
to keep from feeling anything
it's just their way of defining sanity
by the standards of the numbest.
It's not you that's crazy.
It's not you that's the dumbest.
I wish everyone in the world
were as warm-blooded and wise as you are.
When the serpent fire at the base of your spine
has passed through the doors
of all your chakras like vertebrae
and you're already a circumpolar constellation j
just a little off true north
shining like Draco
why worry if you're no good
at the game of snakes and ladders
they play like politics and religion back here on earth
to see who gets to be the pillar
and who the quicksand.
You understand way more than that.
I can tell by the fire in your eyes
that you're a phoenix among stars
and you've transcended the eagles and the houseflies
that can't even begin to imagine
the kind of heights you can reach to
or the depth of the view below you
when you're riding your own thermals
like beautiful helices in the mindstream
for the sheer joy of being only you.
Even now.
These tears
that run all the way down to your lips
as if water had fingertips
what are they
but the way you cry for things
that everyone else didn't?
I wish everyone in the world could be like you.
I wish you could teach us all
to stop living a spiritual lie
on the deathbed of an earthly truth
as if that were the only way
to foolproof ourselves
against reality
like a stranger looking through our windows at night
who doesn't recognize herself in us
because most of us aren't as brave and free as you are
to leave the door ajar
and let whatever wants to come in
come in.
Some track in mud.
Some.
Stars.
And the mud flowers in light.
And the stars bloom in fire.
And one looks up
and the other looks down
on each other's likeness
reflected in the other
as if they were engendered by the same being.
Sight is a kind of love
and I wish everyone in the world
were inspired by the mystic dimensions
and intimate clarity of your kind of seeing
that even through these tears
that I'm not having much luck in wiping away
can comprehend a world
that's more wonderful than it thinks it is.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A Haze Of Dust On The Windowpanes

A haze of dust on the windows at dusk,
cataracts glowing in the epiphanous sun
that leaves the night coming on like a door ajar
for the light to get out on its own like a cat.

And the next moment all the eyes
that were on the road to Damascus
blinded by a revelation are returned
from the darkness of their clarity
to their normal muddy mundane vision
and I can see the birch groves from here
upping their quota of white canes on the nightshift.

And isn't it strange how things emerge
from one mindscape into the next
like a serpent shedding its skin
like a sky it's been consulting about wings,
or the effortless birth sacs of the dragons
who have made the same transition
from the lowest of things to the highest
like a flying doctor bearing true north?

Polaris and Draco wrapped around
the tilted axis of the earth as if it were
the sign of a caduceus in the hand of a messenger
that says night is the best time to heal
and leaves us to the moonlit herb gardens
we planted in the spring of our dreams
when wild crocuses where just beginning
to poke their innocent noses through the snow?

Now the dark when the magicians come out
and the bats and the stars, and the fairies
are enthroned on their mushrooms and sacred stones
and retinal responses to reality
turn visionary in their pursuit
of an earthly excellence of their own
that doesn't belittle them again
as the gods and goddesses of a world of their own.

And me, I'm sitting here alone
wondering if I do empty myself of myself
so perfectly there's no one left to tell me
I've finally become no one fit enough
to lift the veils of Isis without expecting
to find just another starmap in hiding.

Or if I've rinsed myself clean enough of myself
to be washed from her eyes in tears
that fall like mirrors of mercury
in a fever of mystic thermometers
stuck under my tongue
like the silver bird bone flutes
of the perennial theme songs
I've been offering to ferrymen
in lieu of the obol of the full moon,
my penny in a wishing well,
to pay for my passage into death and back
like an enlightened return journey of a poet
who knows how to find his way home on his own
like a prophetic Orphic skull.

Ride the dragon. Play the flute of fire.
Cast a spell on the winter sunset
and take it off again in spring. O
inestimable nothing
what could I ask of the flower
that I didn't receive from the leaf?
It takes a rootless tree
to show you the way home.
But it doesn't take a road to know you've left.

I can hear my eyes weeping behind a deathmask.
Early wood sorrel under a leaf of duff.
Venus is in my rain washed window,
closer than blood could ever be.
The sky thinks it's a strutting peacock
but I know I painted that window
well over a year ago when I grew weary
of being myself like a stage without a play.

Do you know me yet? Can't you tell
when the roses bloom in the palm of my hand
like the stigmata of a starfish on the moon,
I'm the lost cause of a shadow
demanding more of the light
than a sacred clown on a burning ladder
could possibly know what to do with?

Meagre, meagre me. What immensities
I aspire to with a broken bouquet of arrows
like stalks of wheat in Virgo after a hailstorm.
I am not the slayer. I am not the slain.
I don't hold the crescent moon up to my jugular vein.
Or cut the throats of poppies to milk the dream.
And I don't care a hair for the difference
between the enlightened and insane.
I look at Venus through my windowpane
and the window's clean. Burn white. Burn silent.
Express yourself, but don't ask it to mean
anything more than you are to yourself
when no one's home, including you,
and you're shining for someone else.

poem by Patrick White
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The Nightwind

The nightwind is dancing with the leafless trees
under a new moon
as if they were crutches
that couldn't keep up with its moves.
April night.
All potential.
Lilac month in the valley
and blue hyacinth soon
in the corners of forgotten yards
and for the first time today
down by the Tay where the willows
are going blonde
that bruise of a flower
that looks like a cross
between a broken egg and the moon.
A crocus
like a dab of violet paint
in the foreground of a drab impression.
The apple-trees are waiting for their brides like blossoms.
Saturn's in Virgo
and I'm out for stars
on my hobby-horse of a telescope
that's jealous of the easel I paint on
because it thinks it's the unheralded genius
and can do more with light
than that other moron.
More Copernicus for the moment
than van Gogh
I cut through fields
that look like November all over again
now that the snow's gone
to keep from being blinded
by the blazing of the town
attentive as a doe to the barking
of distant farmyard dogs.
I'm a one man band of snapping twigs
and slashing branches
moving deeper into the silence
away from windows and doors.
My telescope sneers at the vanity
of birches posing in the nude
because they've heard I'm a painter
into feminine nocturnal effects.
And I've been here before
looking for suitable subjects
but tonight I'm out for stars
and the wounded mystery of being alone
in a place that everything's adapted to
but where nothing feels it belongs
to judge by the way they keep to themselves.
Wherever I am
the stars have always reminded me of home
as if this were the place of exile
and the testing ground
of life on earth
to see who makes it back
and I am stilled and mindbound
by such a commingling
of longing wonder and sadness
my blood burns like a lovesong
to the great absence that keeps us apart
and how much time and distance it takes
to abandon a heart that clings
like colour to the clouds.
How much darkness
must be intensified by a human
into black matter
before the ore
is prodigal with light.
All the good stars are going down with Taurus
though I can see the snakes
still flaring lethally in Al Gol
like the Medusa's severed head
and there's that poor man's chandelier
the Pleiades
still enchanted with the charms
of Alcyone and her sisters
though like me
they're getting on in years.
Longer wavelengths
Longer shadows
shifting into infrared.
All the blue-white fury
that was the frequency of my youth
the mellow yellow of the autumnal truth
that the seeing might be as ageless
as the perennial insight
into the beginningless birth of the mind
but my eyes are estranged from the light
like two drops of water on a starless night
ripening like bells
sweetened by thoughts of perishing
above the abyss below them.
Hanging from the tip of a blade of stargrass
they're trying to remember
without crying
what became of the wedding
that wore them like an orchard up the aisle
before they're lowered
like the eyelids of a crocus
and disappear
into the source of themselves
like a well that can't hold back its tears
when it remembers
light on the mindstream
like a voice in a dream
they haven't heard for years.
What can you say?
Life is a breathful.
And if I were to guess
it's probably better that way.
Don't wear the silver off the mirror
with too much looking
but glance at it out of the corner of your eye
in passing
as if to say under your breath
o.k. you've got my attention
what now?
You should stay alert to things
without crowding them out of their eyes
the way a snakecharmer
listens to the cobra
not his flute
and maintains his dangerous distance.
And don't judge things by their magnitude.
Sometimes it's the dim stars
like the pale one above the middle
of the brightest three in Andromeda
that can lead you to a galaxy.
But there too you have to look askance
even to see hundreds of billions of stars
shining at such a great distance
right next door.
When everything in the knowable world is relative
it's because of the interdependence of its origins
on everything else
and blood is thicker than water
except when it's not
but when all is said and done
we're all the seventh son of the seventh son
of an identity theft.
Muddy Waters
there's another mule
kickin in your stall.
Born of fire without smoke
you're a jinn.
Born of water without ice
you shine like a sea urchin.
Born of earth without roots
there's starmud on your boots.
Born of air without clouds
you're welcome everywhere.
Born of stars without eyes
you come as quite a surprise to them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
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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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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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This Is An Old Sorrow

This is an old sorrow, almost beautiful in the way
it underwhelms me from above, a sky caving in
like a circus tent under the weight of the rain,
a ghost of fruit that could not bear the weight of its tears.
This is a random sadness that's got me as its only friend
when it thaws like a mirror
looking back over its shoulder
at its glacial past, ex-lovers, friends, certain pets,
and eyes that were glass weeping
in the intense mystic heat of a blast furnace full of stars
for how little they understood at the time, things pass
like Canada geese migrating across the moon
like a river you can't step into twice.
Though it doesn't make any sense to say so.
This is an ancient sorrow. And though one direction
is as good as many, I'm still following
the herds of the grazing stars as far north as I can.

O we shall sit down on the good earth half lotus sometime
and cry together for the wound of being alive.
The rose has teeth. And celebrate the scars
in the herb garden as if they were crescent moons.
Or the eyes of a powerful wraith of sadness
saturating the atmosphere with the pathos
of a lament that's been sublimely burning
through its heart for lightyears
like some deep emptiness it knows can never be filled.

As if God would never be enough for herself
and the whole of the universe were
one long maternity of endless creation
that is manifested in its entirety in each one of us
the way the moon's reflected in a dropp of blood
hanging from the thorn of a rose
with the last of two beautiful sunsets for eyes
like the sheen of auroral silk glancing off the scales
of a black watersnake at nightfall when the swallows go in
and the bats come out on the nightshift
like the winged heels of some demonic messenger
with minions that squeal in a frequency too high to hear.

But however you send it, by sound or by silence,
by light or by night, be assured the message you send
however time and space bend things
is the message that's received, like a bee by a flower
or a star by the eye that transcribes it creatively
into hieroglyphic metaphors of picture-music
following a dream grammar of starmud
with a bird stuck in its voice like a phoenix in the Arctic.

Time washes the dust of the road off
by shedding the moonlight like a snake's skin
and skinny-dipping in the fathomless lakes of eternity
it finds along the way like eyes along the mindstream
full of stars and fireflies and what blooms in the soil of its sorrows
beside the stairs at the back doors of all those tomorrows
that left the way they came without saying good-bye.

Volcanic lunar oceans that are only as deep
as the dark tears I have left within me
when I dip the leaking cup of my heart
like the goblet of an impact crater
into a watershed of compassion that looks like the holy grail
and share it with my fellow mirages in this desert of stars
as if they were all as thirsty as I am and everyone
deep down inside somewhere within them
like the green star you can find at the core of an apple,
had a fountain within them like a moon dial or a wine glass
they smashed on the high notes of the nightbirds
just to express their joy as a kind of defiance
in the face of their lots in life, though, in fact
nothing is longer or shorter than anything else in eternity
just as there's only so much time and then there is forever.
And it's the black magic in the roots of a demon
that blossoms like Venus in the west
or New England asters up around Westport in the fall.

And though there's something beautiful in this sadness
that eludes me like a Braille starmap
I can't quite put my finger on to see what's shining
like Aldebaran through the tree line of a bride in a widow's veils,
as I listen to a whisper of flesh
pleading in the darkness not to be excluded
from the presence of time, or left behind by the spirit
like a false clue of cast off rags on a hawthorn bush
to say where it's gone forever and ever and ever
as if whatever the spirit and the flesh had
going on between them never mattered,
whenever the clarity cuts through
the thin-skinned mirror like this
as if it were trying to slash my eyes open
like an insight into what's beyond the obvious,
immediately out of a wounded mouth
I am healed by the balm in a voice of compassion
that rises sweetly like the new moon from the womb
of a scarred guitar that didn't know it had such music in it.

And it says in moonlit windows and nightbirds
that make all the dreaming children wake up and listen
to the intimate strangers that speak as gently as fireflies
to the vast nightskies of their own imaginations,
that the world that casts these shadows on your wall
like a crow preening its feathers, or a bell
that's lost its faith in knowing, and plunges like an apple
into its next afterlife, are merely the holy petals
and sacred syllables taken like pages from the Book of Life
left out like an orchard in a nightwind for every one to read
like a story each of us writes for ourselves
to help us drift gently off into sleep again
to find out how it all ends in a dream that goes on forever
like the fragrance of lilac in an old woman's memories
or the marrow of the apple bloom
that clings like the moon to our bones
or stars to the flypaper stairwells of our chromosomes.

No other way to explain the shining of this sadness deep within
as if my very blood mourned the passing of the things
that have drowned and disappeared into it over the years
like honey-bees in the lees at the bottom of a black tulip
full of rainwater, and by that I know
this is a sadness common to all
that's worthy of the stars in its windows,
and the dreams in the mirrors that paint our faces
like quick watercolour life studies of rainbows in tears.

poem by Patrick White
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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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Sometimes The Heart Buries Its Sorrow

Sometimes the heart buries its sorrow
like a bell or an hourglass beside the road
as if it came upon a dead bird it couldn't name
and returned it to the earth like unread mail.
There's no gate where I'm going, the air
will tremble a bit and that'll be it. Maybe
a firefly or two, to liven things up,
but no sign of lightning tearing its hair out.

I shall evaporate like a dream someone
couldn't remember having, and what seems
so crucially significant now shall disappear,
disperse, dissipate like smoke from of a fire
and all that will remain of this passionate burning
will be an odd fragrance among the stars
that doesn't arrest the attention of the bees.

And these things of my mother that she gave to me,
Blood, flesh, bone, breath and my love of poetry
and compassion for the world you need to write it,
deeply involved in an unrestricted love affair,
will be scattered like urns on the wind as if
my ashes had no respect for their individuality.
The waterclock ended in a desert of mirages,
not the afterlife of an embryo off to a good start.

The death of an art, the extinction of a species,
not the fall of a sparrow anyone notices,
and I'm not even saying they should if they don't
anymore than they feel the loss of a skin cell.
Some people prefer umbrellas to wild flowers.
Icons of the moon without the dragon.
A mouthful of fire to the taste of water.
Tigers in a zoo, to the dangers of an open door.
It's wrong to make love, music, poetry, colour,
compulsory, anymore than you can demand a friend.
Got to give time and space to the black swan
of a nugget of coal to realize it's a motherlode
of diamonds born out of its progressive dissolution.

Translucent effusions of insight into
a speculative nothing, a flying carpet of wavelengths
unravelling on the loom of the moon,
just because the stars have left their genes
on a helical stairwell of flypaper like a chromosome,
doesn't mean you're a replicant of eternity,
or to see the onceness of life in everything
it's becoming without consulting you
is some kind of exemption you can seek for yourself.
Enlightenment isn't a ticket to pass, it's
not to see the beauty of the chains in the bliss of delusion.
Not to make choirs out of your Maenadic desires.
When have you ever not done this, when
have you ever not realized you were the summum bonum
of your own conspicuous consumption?
But who asks you to die before you're dead
to sabotage your artistic pursuit of happiness
whether you achieve it or not? The absurdity
of the search is enough in itself to make it profound.
Enlightenment ploughs you back into the ground
you came from like grass on the moon
and as a bigger fool that I could ever hope to be
once said: if the cold doesn't go through your bones once
how can there be apricot blossoms in the spring?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Obliterations Of Beauty And We Weep

Obliterations of beauty and we weep
for what cannot long abide in us
because we, not the rose, are the ones
who are passing so irrevocably away
into an abyss that doesn't
take the measure of anything.

The lake knows the time
by the wingspan of its waterbirds.
I note the location of the stars
in the rotation of the Big Dipper.
And there are crickets
that will yield the time as well.
Time, too, like human solitude
is embodied in the things of this world.

Time perishes when we do,
is born with us, matures,
and embraces our ends as its own nature.
Time sets its pace to the passage of us.
We are the muse, the motivator, the demi-urge
of its passion for shedding
the leaves and flowers and moon like skin.
And we're the ones who grow infinite
at the speed of light so that everything stops
immeasurably from there on everafter.

All things returning to the one, and the one,
returning to transcendence. Which is why
I come here this late at night when the stars
are as far from people as they can be
and yet they're still as intimate to me
as my eyes are. A mutually creative continuum.
The star makes the eye I need to see it by.
I am the fragrance of the wildflowers
and the adamantine insights of the rocks.
The singing master of the nightbirds.
The oracle in the leprous skull of the raccoon.
And my heart is one long, continuous moonrise
when I think of how the dead still animate me.
How they cling to my heart like ants to a peony
to let me know when it's time to bloom.

The dead trees house the mosquitoes and the herons.
The fallen pine cones, the seed koans of Zen masters
under their brittle eyelids waiting for the fire
to crack them deciduously open into evergreens.
I don't lament the passivity of the dead in my life
because I put them to good use in their capacity
as enlightened mentors who urge me
to live splendidly whatever I encounter in the world
for all our sakes. I can be the blossom and the fruit
on the dead branch, as easily as a red-winged blackbird
sings from the green and leafless alike.
Not a bush wolf raises its voice up to the moon
that I don't feel its distant longing in my own throat
like a sacred syllable half way to blossoming among the dead
who always hear it like an auspicious beginning
to the summons of their leave-taking in the fall,
to the deeper greeting in the meaning of farewell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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