Related quotes: Letting the stars from last...

I want to be a bird that dissipates
in the mauve distance like water in the air.
I want to be a fire whose flames
never stop aspiring to the stars,
though every time they're almost within grasp
they disappear like petals on the wind,
the pages fall out of the book I'm burning
like a sacrificial rose of galactic hydrogen,
and I'm left with a handful of ash
I can stuff my pillow with like the down
of a phoenix in the urn of his worst nightmare.

And being strong seldom helps.
Or feathering your dragons
to convince yourself they're bluebirds.
Strong means condemned to solitude.
Hanging on to the mountain with one arm
to keep it from falling to its death
in the valley it dug like its own grave
in the valley below. Biting the bullet
like a crystal skull until your back molars break
and you're swallowing little flakes of glass
like the beginning of a snow squall
even as you're smiling like a grimace
on a death mask trying to hold its tears back
like a glacier trying to discipline the mindstream.

Strong means you don't use the fossils of other birds
as crutches for your lapwings. Your calender of scars
begins to smile more affectionately at you
as you get older like waxing crescent moons
and this avalanche of meteoric life
looks more like a windfall of ore and apples
with seeds like snake-eyed dice inside
or the seven come eleven of a coal mine
that finally clarified its darkness like diamonds.
When bad news comes you fall on it
like a hand grenade in a daycare center
as you strain to keep yourself together.
Strong means being taken for granted
like the solid cornerstone that can take the weight
of the world that towers above it like quicksand.

Strong means you don't hesitate to eliminate
your distinctions when someone's drowning,
whether they're a fly in a toilet bowl,
Icarus falling out of the sky because his wings
were insincere, Narcissus plunging into his face,
or a siren caught up in the undertow of her song,
you show up like a lifeboat with a lighthouse
full of fireflies for a lantern, words for a rudder
and a star to set sail by and pull everyone in
to your emptiness, happy you've finally found a use for it.

A holy book says that no one's asked to bear
more than they can carry, and it's probably true
from one direction of prayer, but I swear, lately,
one camel isn't enough to shoulder what
it's going to take a caravan on the moon to walk
this cargo of heavy metals to a nuclear dump site
to the dark side where it's always midnight at noon.

One moment there are funeral bells dissolved in the rain
like sugar-cubes of acid in a wishing well
and the next, a spear of insight penetrates my heart
and I can' t tell if it's a pin meant for a butterfly
or a voodoo doll, or as a dance floor for the angels
to learn how to waltz without bumping into each other
like Canada geese taking off from a trashed corn field
as if they needed an air traffic controller and a runway
to bear the souls of the dead west and south
as I begin to wonder if death really is too pricey a ticket
to unload all these camels of their burdens
like sacs of genetically modified bee pollen
I've gathered radioactively from the starfields
so it doesn't derange the hive or taint its honey and flowers,
and travelling lighter than life, go with them.

Yet I know I won't because my heart's
mortared into my Mongol blood like a brick
in the Temple of Life at Samarkand
and I would think of it as genocide
to kill even so much as a single human
who's ever stood nightwatch in a crow's nest
for a fleet sailing into a divine wind.
Sooner or later I'll be washed up
on the event horizon of another black hole
at the center of a galactic starfish
all my lucidities will stick to like myriad universes
nacreously gathering their pearls
like planets and new moons out of the nebulosity
of these lunar sandstorms whipping my eyes
with the radiance of a hundred billion burning stars
that get thrown in my wounds to cauterize
the scream of my fountainmouth hemorrhaging
in the dead silence I keep like a vow to myself
not to shriek out in pain at the arrows
that strike the hearts of the clear-eyed hawks in autumn.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Related quotes

Feel Like There's A Beast

Feel like there's a beast in the darkness
eating my eyes.
I'm a moon-bull
at a crossroads of solar swords
down on it knees
hemorrhaging like a poppy.
And there are constellations
I've never heard before
playing the harp of my horns
with pensive fingertips.
How strange this rag of life
soaked in tears and blood is.
Everything dies like a snowflake on a furnace,
a rock on an autumn mountain,
no two the same.
There are nights, there are
vigils of darkness
when the mirror can no longer bear
the weight of this feather of fire,
this vision of life
that estranges the spirit
of those who love it most
like a funeral bell
that once drank to the folly of love.
I am a snakepit of lightning
knotted in a glacier of ice
and every emotion
is the undertow of the tide in a sea of eyes
on the cold skull of the moon,
every thought, a stone lifeboat
inundated by the waves
it's convinced it's saving from drowning.
Once I was the dupe
of my own ideals,
now I am the master of none.
This far into the abyss
you forget the name of the god
you died in the name of;
you have squandered your certainty
on greater and greater risks,
the enciphered lotteries of mythic necessity,
only to discover,
though you traversed eras like deserts
that made a skull of your faith,
the donkeys have eaten all the mangers,
and there is as much radiance in the eye
of the dead serpent on the road
as there is the eyelash of a star.
A tear is not a fountain of seeing,
nor a dropp of blood, a rose.
How rare the sword in its silence
among all these chatty scissors at war
trying to cut along the dotted lines
of their border highways
crammed with refugees
they once called lovers,
the horizon slashed
and bleeding like a letter.
I want to calculate the half-life of pain;
the pillar of ore it calls home;
the elemental devolution of its atomic evictions
into the leaden passion of a base metal.
I want to know what I've turned into.
I want to know what's making the stars
throw down their spears of light at my feet
though my heart's out in the open
like a voodoo doll
waiting for a donor transplant.
I want to see myself
opening a door in the mirror
to someone with absolute eyes
irrevocable as yesterday's rain.
Let the star know
the flower it engenders;
let the rose
taste its own honey.
Blind in a dream; blind,
what light roots in the darkness
that I should want to
throw off this robe of blood like a sky
to slip through the eye of the needle
that binds the seams of this world
like a bird
with the single thread of a life in its beak,
washed out of God's eye
like a firefly snuffed
in a torrential downpour of stars?
Why am I
always one heart too many
over the threshold of the truth
I had to leave home to discover?
Am I a hoax in tears
or a tear away from a gate and a rafter?
Let the wave know the sea
that packs its caravan on the moon,
let the silence of the waking abyss
write indelible preludes
with a last kiss
that goes on forever
like the white autumn wind
in a turmoil of seeds
that demonically exceed
the life they're after,
flower by flower,
death by death
like the pulse of a bell
setting the doves free
in the towers of farewell.
It's the eloquence of a tree
to say what life is
when the full moon ripens
in its leafless branches
and the heart beats
like a windfall of silver apples,
though I have tried,
but love is a bridge
on a finger of water
that not even the moon
can slip off like a ring
when the wind rises
like a gaping fish
to swallow the chimes and eyehooks
of its matriculate ripples.
And with each breath of the night
I took and returned,
I have aspired to succeed
at every failure I was ever inspired by.
I raised every sail,
crossed every wave,
every eyelid, every petal
of the sea of life
in the heart of the rose
only to dropp the first crescent of the moon
like an anchor
in the furnace of a dream.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Strong Strong Wind

We walked away before
There were too many storms
We could not get throught
But I still kept loving you
Now fate brought you back to me
This time I won't let you leave
I'm holding on to you, forever,
I'm never letting go
The time I spent away from you
was time that made me see
I need to live this life with you
I need you here with me
Now it would take a strong, strong wind
To take me from your arms again
To take me from your side
It would take a strong, strong wind
To pull away this heart of mine
To make us break apart this time
It would take a strong, strong wind
Hearts sometimes lose their way
But they find their way back someday
To the arms they need
And I need you like the air I breathe
The time I spent away from you was time
lost in the rain
I'm meant to live this life with you
That's something nothing can change
And it would take a strong, strong wind
To take me from your arms again
To take me from your side
It would take a strong, strong wind
To pull away this heart of mine
To make us break apart this time
It would take a strong, strong wind
This time I'm holding on with everything
This time I won't let go for anything
It would take a strong, strong wind
To take me from your arms again
To take me from your side
It would take a strong, strong wind
To pull away this heart of mine
To make us break apart this time
It would take a strong, strong wind
Strong, strong wind

song performed by by Air Supply
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Strong, Strong Wind

We were too hateful
There were too many storms
We could not get through
But I still kept loving you
Fate brought you back to me
This time i won't let you leave
I'm holding on to you Forever
I'm never letting go
The time I spent away from you
Was time that made me see
I need to live my life with you
I need you here with me
And It would take a strong, strong wind
To take me from your arms again
To take me from your side
And It would take a strong, strong wind
To pull away this heart of mine
Make us break apart this time
And It would take a strong, strong wind
Hearts sometimes lose their way
But they find their way back someday
To the arms they need
And I need you like the air I breathe
The time I spent away from you
Was time lost in the rain
I meant to live my life with you
That's something nothing can change
And It would take a strong, strong wind
To take me from your arms again
To take me from your side
And It would take a strong, strong wind
To pull away this heart of mine
Make us break apart this time
And It would take a strong, strong wind
This time I'm holding on with everything
This time I won't let go for anything
And It would take a strong, strong wind
To take me from your arms again
To take me from your side
And It would take a strong, strong wind
To pull away this heart of mine
Make us break apart this time
And It would take a strong, strong wind

song performed by by Heart
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Looking For A Little Black Water After The Fury Of The White

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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What Did You See Just Before You Committed Suicide?

in memory of Heidi Clow

What did you see just before you committed suicide?
Did the snake mesmerize the bird that used to sing inside
your rib cage, turn it to stone, dis the lyrics of its song
with a cosmic hiss that underwhelmed all other sound?
Did you die from the inside out or the outside in?
Was there a light that summoned you to the end of the tunnel
like candles on the hillsides of Blue Skies, or did you
step out on stage in the glare of a bare lightbulb
in an interrogation room where you finally answered
what you were keeping secret from yourself? I won't ask you
to forgive the candour of this if it's cruel. I've been
the kind of demonic fool the earth opens up
and swallows from time to time, so I know
death has its jewels as well as life and when the dark energy
expands your eyes like space, you can see them shine
like wolf's eyes in the black mirror of a midnight lake.

And I've always found the brightest diamonds of clarity
that could cut through everything like the clear light of the void
in the darkest, deepest diamond mines of my igneous soul.
And I remember the cotton candy clouds of the pink angels
before I jumped from paradise, but that was so many shrouds ago
I've learned to keep my fire at a distance from inflammable hair-dos
that have been backcombed and hairsprayed too much.
I don't graft a crutch to the tree of knowledge
and expect it to bloom. And even when the moon blossoms
on the dead branch, what fruit ever comes of it?

I don't think you ever liked me much, but if push
had ever come to shove I would have thrown my weight
like the mass of a black hole on your side of the argument.
My heart was too much of a stump to efoliate
in the fires of spring and I was autumns away
from the gates of the garden you brought to the door
with flaming angels and untempered swords
that weren't hard enough to fall upon yet,
but you were in love with my room mate for awhile
and I gave up my studio to the two of you
so you could both work the guile and wile and style
of your respective arts like alchemical spells upon each other
while I retired to the living room like a benign sunset
with a smile on its face over the darkening hills
to re-read Spengler's Decline of the West
intrigued like a ghost at a seminar-seance
by the morphology of knowledge forms based on metaphors.

And I remember you coming over once,
bombed on Fireball Whiskey, grabbing the neck
of the half-finished bottle like an unexploded artillery shell
and falling backwards over a table into a large rubber plant
as you collapsed like a laughing inferno that bounced back
in adolescent tears as we picked you up like a circus tent
or an emergency parachute that didn't open in time,
covered in potting soil, as you apologized over-crucially
about the slashes and striations that scored a painting of mine
I finally repaired years later with scars of pthalo blue after you died.

And I thought of you as a high wire act on your spinal cord that night
as I mixed the luminosity and values of the hues
on a palette that seemed like a small, sacrificial altar to you
of my grief and affection in the crazy wisdom of a human insight
into the nature of the tragic follies of love and life and how
we endear loss to ourselves like wounds, like graves, like flowers
we inflict upon the heart in such a way they'll never close
because the sorrow is what binds you to us
like a rose to the thorns in our bloodstream.

And then all your friends came over in a squall of concern
as Spengler and I went and stood by the large bay windows
and looked out into a vast night we knew we'd never understand
as you poured your beauty and passion, darkness and doubts
out on the couch in a flashflood of tears and alcohol, realization and laughter.

Only ever saw you in passing after that and sometimes
you'd say hello back and sometimes you wouldn't
as you seemed embedded in some kind of tempestuous trance
oblivious to the world as you danced around your own fire
deep inside, though I never thought it was any of my business
to guess what it was you were praying for or whether
you were firewalking a warpath into the military as I later
heard you did and thought how strange that such a dancer
should want to learn to march and even Spengler didn't have an answer.

Or I'd watch you from the Perth Restaurant, strutting your stuff
up Gore Street like a model on a runway, range-finding
the effects of your cosmetics and high heels and auburn hair
on an encampment of your boyfriends absent without leave.
But I never saw you, rare for the young women of this town,
being led around by a donkey like an eagle on a leash
and by that I knew the intensity of your vulnerable independence
and the savage innocence of a passionate heart in the wilderness.
Then, I forget who told me, but in a single sentence, you were dead.
An ice storm had shattered the rose like a crashing chandelier
and blunted all its thorns like those stilettoes you used to wear
The dance, the strut, the march was over. Late frost
on an early metaphor for the springtime coming into its prime.

But I need to know, when you fell into the black hole
did it turn into the fountainmouth of a white one on the other side
of a whole new universe that hadn't grown as old and blind as this one?
Teach me the signs so I can rearrange the stars in time
like new astrolabes and starmaps to keep the Milky Way
from turning into the Great Barrier Reef that rips the hull
out of the lifeboat of the moon as it passes over
the brain coral and starmud of other shipwrecked minds
that put to sea looking for salvation in the oceans of the rose
only to return like salvage from the storm washed up
on these isolated shores of haunted islands in the mindstream.

Unborn, unperishing, I believe we're all here indelibly
because you can't pour the universe out of the universe
or where's it going to go, and since the whole is in every part,
that includes you and I and everyone in one way or another
eternally. Is it so, Heidi? Do we move like waterclocks
from world to world, our eyes evaporate into the light
because whatever form we take, fireflies or lightning,
we are, perennially, the shining of our own unique insight
by which the light is known by the light we cast upon it?

That we're the light by which the stars are known
and those immensities in which we hold them deep inside,
as now we do you who have added yourself to the whole
so expansively we must grow like space to keep up with you
and the way we humanize the unknown, as the stars do
like lanterns entering a dark room, is to embrace it as intimately
as you have like the available dimension of a future
we've all been moving into like supernovas and galaxies
from the beginningless beginning of all things, tomorrow
like yesterday, here, now, as you are, and have always been
as if the history of seeing were the biography of the light
that blossoms in each of us like wildflowers in the starfields,
or in every wild rose, as you were, the incarnation of a passionate insight,
even in its passage in the autumn when the rosaries
of the Canada geese call as they're crossing the moon
high overhead, transmigrating the souls of the dead
to the thresholds of new constellations hidden under our eyelids
like Venus in the Pleiades near Aldebaran just before dawn?
No death or birth in the moment, like time in a dream,
how can here and now where we all abide with the stars
and the planets and their shepherd moons ever be gone?

It's night now, Heidi, back in Perth here on earth and it's raining.
I'm watching the ripples in the puddles playing water like music
all up and down Foster Street from my upstairs apartment window.
And how the streetlights are dancing in their garish gypsy scarves
barefoot to the rhythm. As I imagine you're doing right now
among similar wavelengths just out of reach of my eyes
Though I can see you so clearly when I see you with my heart
as I do the stars and the willows and the waterbirds
down by the Tay River when I stand on one bank of life
and look up at the other like the far shore of the Milky Way
wheeling like the girandole of the spiral arm of a starfish.

And though I thought of putting poppies and wheat upon your grave,
remembering you were a sailor back in my hometown,
and hope is a lifeboat that keeps us all from drowning in our tears,
it reminds me of you somehow, and I make a wish upon it
like the star of Isis the ancient sailors used to tattoo
on the left palm of their hands to make it through the storm
and had, somehow, come through the squalls of time like you
there in the heights, a water-sylph of the radiance
shining on like that star just to the right of midnight,
breaking through these clouds of unknowing, like Heidi Clow
looking down upon us all on the nightwatch,
whispering like the carillon of the rain, three bells and all's well.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Begin

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Flesh Your Spirit Out In Starmud

I flesh your spirit out in starmud. No creator.
No created. Between the leaf and the sky
I mix the colour of your eyes on the palette
of a rainbow that let's the darkness
sit at the same fire it does. Because the spirit is free.
I hang crescent moons from your earlobes.
I release the sacred deltas of small night creeks
into your veins, and talk to deserts on the moon
about the manes of sidereal lions for your hair.
I search the darkening hills at night for a black rose
with eyelids as cool as mushrooms, and lips,
that are more the wings of auguries, birds and bows
disappearing into the distance to imagine you
than they are the words and arrows
of a flightless heart dipped in stars that don't ignite.

I'm a blind man in a room, painting eyes,
trying to grow flowers out of last year's fragrances,
interpret every syllable and sacred pixel
of your red ochre glyphs of lipstick
I used to bury myself in when I lived in caves with bears
and rubbed the stuff all over my face
like blood and corn flowers under the hearthstone.
Now I'm a dragon rising from my urn of ashes
like a volcano of serpent-fire out of the chrysalis
of my crystal skull, looking for signs, hints, clues,
any whisper of linear B as to who you are
in the shadows of the sundials of the mountains
you go walking with at night with your dogs.

And the stars you must see in the clear-eyed desert
when the temperature drops and all you've got
to keep you warm from the inside out is not
you in my arms, but this small dropp of blood
in our chests, this cosmic thermometer of a heart
on the night ward of a perilous greenhouse.
And I went to a cactus with thorns like a voodoo doll
with oracular powers to ask about the shape
of the body I should root you in like an hourglass in sand
and she said to me, a rootless peach tree on the moon.
And ever since, I've touched your skin
with eyes at the end of my fingertips
like a new world gnostic gospel for the blind
that can see you in the flesh, naked, sublime
like a desert island it would be worth drowning for
just to be washed up on the curvature of your dunes
like a starfish when the mind comes back to its senses
like the first sign of life on the moon in a long time.

You emerge like wild irises of hydrogen out of
this cloud of unknowing, this cocoon of nebularity
like one star among many in an almost perfect vacuum.
I can see you. I can almost taste you. I can feel
your last lover trying to squeeze into the chrysalis
of the infinite straitjacket of your last exorcism
as if he'd finally run out of dawns as alibis
for why he didn't want to leave just yet. Who
hasn't stood in the doorway of Orion
sinking down in the west? For some
the threshold's the longest part of the journey
and they make a nadir of everything at zenith
by letting their horizons down like a crosswalk
waiting for a change of colour blind traffic lights
that don't know, for all that Stop. Go. Maybe so.,
anymore about passage than the road does
or a starmap that always certain of where it's going
but never has a reason why it should
jump the gun like a star and get ahead of its light
like a car on a long dark dusty country road at night,
one headlight out, trying not to hit a doe
in the glare of the sun at midnight
on its way out of town, whether that's up, down,
or omnidirectionally radiant as the Pleiades in tears.

Drift and mingle, merge, enhance,
dance, glance, shadow and glow,
still more ghost around you than I am a mirror,
I know what it means to be summoned to a seance
and not know what to wear. What lifemask to put on
like a Mason jar full of fireflies trying to decide
what constellation has the fewest short circuits in it
and is the least likely to lead anyone astray
when the lights go on and off like a fickle tranformer
or a Cepheid variable that was just born that way.

And here, now, your ears and your hands, your arms
and bones of your own that don't owe a thing
to anyone else's bird cage after the bird has flown.
And now I think I've got the eyes just right
but it's the heart calling its rivers back to it
like the sea I can't quite find the likeness of
even when I appeal to the most ancient galaxies
in the Hubble mirror for a similitude of love
that might serve as the understudy of a metaphor
in an expanding universe that keeps exceeding
the boundary stones of the stars at zenith
and even the chipped cup of the moon full
and a skull that used to juggle mirrors
like shattered insights into reality for those
so spiritually inclined at harvest time to listen
to the blue moonrise peering through the cedars
like an effulgent pearl of wisdom shedding her skin
like a mystic in rapture on the dark side she keeps to herself.

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Old Sorrow, I've Forgotten Your Name

Old sorrow, I've forgotten your name,
you've been with me so long, pouring
the iron in my blood into the heavy bell of a heart
that's climbed back up this sad tree of my spine
so many times out of the afterlives of my windfall,
these sad planets collapsing in on themselves
under the decaying weight and water of their own tears
from the inside out, and gone to seed
like a small fleet of lifeboats in this floating world,
trying to make it up out of these watersheds
to run the vertical deltas of this autumn orchard
whose roots I keep falling upon like a radical place to begin
climbing back up toward the stars again,
until one night I'll raise my sail
like the moonrise of a blossom on the Milky Way
and be gone like a ghost ship in the fog of a nautical legend.

Old sorrow, I know you like the smoke of a thousand fires
I've danced around alone like the only child
of a midnight sun that abandoned me on the threshold
of a black hole I orbit like the rain in a broken mirror.
Who did you bury that we weep for, what
did you aspire to that you were too earthbound to reach,
what love of yours was so betrayed when it had
its eyes pecked out by the song birds
you never sing anymore when the bees
are in the locust trees, and the ants are opening
the peonies like loveletters from the Pleiades,
except there's a wound in your voice the lyrics
are bleeding out of like a thorn in the eye of a hurricane rose?

Old sorrow, are you the tears deep down in things,
the lachrymae rerum that fill the wishing wells
with oceans of disappointment like the run-off
of our hopes and dreams descending the world mountain
after we'd talked to God like bathyspheres
trying to get to the bottom of our tears
like glass bubbles in our crystal skulls,
our third eyes frozen like the lenses of a telescope
fixed on a star above a shipwreck in Arctic ice,
looking for a northwest passage out of ourselves
toward a mythic Cathay beyond our continental shelves?
And what did God have to say that you kept to yourself
when you came back down from your tete a tete,
and returned your commandments like a library book
that was way overdue in Alexandria?

Old sorrow, I can sense in you how many seasons
have scarred you like a calendar of crescent moons
as you hang like the pine cone of one dolorous note
of the silence you sustain like a blues guitar

ripening in the corner of the room where the spiders
are writing music you'll never play like the wind
in the hair of the willows down by the Tay River
when the black walnuts are floating by
like the scorched planets of sunless solar systems.

Old sorrow, I know you like a heavy boot cloyed in the starmud
of all these roads we've walked together to get
nowhere in particular but wherever we are now
in this graveyard of shadows
that talk to the stars who have none
about how to wash our names and faces off
like deathmasks that are tired of trying to light up the darkness
like a candle at a black mass at high noon
with an eclipse high overhead the flowers won't look at
for fear of burning their eyes. Compendious companion,
you bend my boughs toward the earth
with the low hanging fruit of a giving nature
seasoning your inconsolable wisdom with compassion.

Immoveable buddha, are you the ancient echo
of the birth pang of life, the groan of sentience
being torn up by the roots out of the indwelling forms
of things you used to take shelter in like lenses and mirrors
you could blow into bubbles of the mind
like the multiverse through a keyhole into the abyss of hyperspace?
Old sorrow, were you rounded like a shepherd moon
in the undertow of time, your teeth blunted
like the molars of the asteroids eating stoney wheat
growing wild in the starfields of the neolithic grasslands?
Sometimes I can feel you possessing my heart and body and mind
like the corpse of an ancient ancestor, my spirit
like a prophetic skull on the dark side of the moon
lamenting the loss of its atmosphere like one of its eyes.
Other nights, I look upon you like the ruins
of a palace of water that once greened this desert of stars
like a Persian gardener that ruled an empire of flowers.

Venerable exile, do you despair of ever
finding your way home again through your lion gate
or have you encamped like so many other nations
to weep like Zion beside the rivers of Babylon?
Is your diamond corona occluded by the protocols of coal
that sully your face like the memory of darker days ahead?
I shall call you, friend, given how long
we've known each other like shadows of the valley spirit
blinded by the sundials of the unaging mountains of the moon.
I shall open my heart like a fire to you
and we can share the silence together for hours at a time
on long winter nights when the wind is howling outside
and there's no need to speak of things
that neither of us understand about why
the fountains with the deepest watersheds
are always sadder than the last of the flowers
in a late autumn rain, or the willows along the Tay.
Slowest of rivers, you can sit saturnine and soporific,
red shifting into the longer wavelengths
of the oldest of your dreams, if you still dream yet,
and I'll work on a poem in the shipyards of the mindstream
that will displace its weight in tears, and hopefully,
though you probably know better, keep us both afloat
like a paper boat shooting the rapids of a waterclock
that's been running a little late like the two of us for light years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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War Means

War Means death
War Means destruction
War Means fire
War Means bombing
War Means sorrow
War Means turmoil
War Means tears
War Means guns
War Means blood
War Means confusion
War Means explosions
War Means mutilation
War Means sickness
War Means killing
War Means occupation
War Means loss
And lots more

But after one side
Or the other side
Has finally had enough
And lays down their arms
To surrender and give up

War Means Peace

poem by Brie Carter
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War Means

But after one side
Or the other side
Has finally had enough
And lays down their arms
To surrender and give up

War Means Peace

poem by Mrunal Nandankar
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So Lifetime After Lifetime

So lifetime after lifetime, sorceress of shadows and dreams
you step out of the dark wood of yourself,
a shy doe, a mournful lighthouse and a warning off the coast
of your infinite solitude, you, the singing bird
on the green bough of your flute pouring yourself
like sorrow over the eye of the sea, your tears,
the ancient wells of an eternal longing unanswered by the secret stars
that have entrusted their radiance to you, fireflies
drowning their light in your black candles,
the blind music of your lonely flowing. Is your flute, a bone, then,
and this rose I bring you, this heart, this blood
that has turned into a goblet of luminous wine,
drunk on the wonder and the missing in your phantom music,
is this rose nothing but a wound, a coffin-flower,
the unmarked grave of a mystic embryo?

Do you fear the tenderness, the meeting? Does the moon
strike at her own reflection in the mirror of her midnight waters
to wander like an orphan along her lifeless shores?
Boy and man, you murder me on the steps of your serpent shrine,
your eyes, cold glass, eclipses of crystal, your spirit
that once drew in the light like breath,
now a slow glacier, an age of ice
pushing your heart before it like a boulder,
like a temple-stone that one night flew out of the abyss
and buried itself like a meteor, a charred jewel, the demon seed
of a religion without saviours, your implacable creed
scriptures of blood in a mouthless book
that only love can open. Once there were swallows in the tree of life,
asylums of celebrants greeting the morning in their madness,
in the garden, in Eden, hurled through that first dawn
like a young girl's heart trembling like a dropp of light on a blade of grass.
Now your voice is a gypsy-crow on a dead branch,
your music, confession without atonement, your flute
without leaves, without orchards, an eyeless spring,
buried in its manger-cloth for years, nothing
but a crib-death, a broken wand, a phoenix
that has lost its faith in fire under the weight of its own ashes.

Beloved, again and again you kill me
in this dance of slayer and slain, tear out
this page of love like a like a child's tongue, like a mute heresy
you are doomed to rewrite forever
in the indelible inks of your seeing.

Do you dip your pen like a water-bird drinking
from its own image, putting out your eyes
to deepen the darkness, the scars of your sin
the lightless letters of a hidden language
pricked out on your skin, black stars and braille tattoos?
The pages and the years may turn like wings and hinges,
and a thousand deaths, all your own,
tome the field with gravestones,
breathless flutes and hollow bones, ancient futures;
and you the only mistress of those solitary realms; still,
your legend will remain moonless and sunless,
the story of a night sky, the eyelid of a black rose,
that couldn't break into light. Until
love stands beside the heartwell of another
as if it were its own sacred fountain,
one blood, one wind-mingled music
playing the waves like plectra, and raises the rim
of the single goblet to its lips and tastes,
only silence answers the terrible vastness,
only death graces the obscenity of these loveless wastes.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You Were The Intimacy

You were the intimacy
of the things I loved
that were so impossibly far away
I could never reach out and touch them
except by touching you.
In the long silence of these past thirty-seven years
I have never been able to look at people again
the way I used to see them before I met you.
There's a fear in the way I love them
that I learned
from living your absence.
A deep black wounded space within
that has sadly outgrown the stars
like October outlives its fireflies.
And every threshold I've crossed ever since
has turned into a long road
with a precipice at the end of my spinal cord
swaying like the first night I met you
on the Capilano Suspension Bridge
and you said
the only way
to overcome your fear of falling
is to have the courage to jump.
And I laughed and said
staring into the gorge
and the thin silver water down below
what's to fear
if you know how to fall toward paradise?
And you knew right away
I was your kind of challenge.
And I knew you wanted
to sword-dance with razorblades
you laid out like the Tarot
later back at your place
as if you wanted to convince yourself
you were still silly enough to believe in tomorrow.
The candle beside the cards on the floor
didn't turn out to be
enough of a lighthouse
to warn us of the approaching storm.
We were sincere in the darkness
for a little while
astounded by the expert innocence
of our mindless flesh.
You shone like the sun at midnight
and I came undone like Icarus
to prove I was falling
without regrets
like a spent star
into the singularity
of a whole new universe
where everything that didn't happen in this one
came uncannily true in the next
for both of us
as if we were at last worthy
in each others' arms
of our own happiness.
When happiness is brave
it's bliss.
And when it's afraid
there's nothing sadder
than a gift that was never opened.
Joy is a warrior that risked hoping
there was nothing left dying for.
Sorrow comes up with a million reasons.
The only way of life
is not making a way of life.
Nor making
not making a way of life
a way.
One day you just get off the road
and start taking the long way home through the starfields.
You stop looking in the mirror
to see if you still have eyes.
For years after your death
no matter what I looked at
I always saw the same thing.
The black clarity
of your existential absence
staring me in the face
without turning me into stone
because that would have been mercy.
Try how I might
I could never quite
shut the lid on your coffin
or accept
that you were buried in me for good
or that my blood burned
like the infernal red
of an emergency exit
to show me the way out
of heaven and hell
by falling on them both
like a two-edged sword
that killed me deeper into life
than your death ever did.
Either life's unfair
or I'm not man enough
to live up to your suicide
but I remember how I used to love
feeling the weight
of the nightstream of your hair
as it poured through my hand
like a landscape that could feel
for the first time in a long time
water running in the dry creekbeds of its lifelines.
Things woke up.
And I saw the flowers
among the thorns
that had been guarding them
like the secret names of God
you had to know
to get past the burning angels
through the gates
of your sad return to Eden alone.
The eloquence of your flesh
when you walked on the earth
as if your heart danced to your blood
like an old song we both knew
now a broken harp of bone,
a wounded guitar,
someone laid down for good.
A prophetic skull
without a future
anyone can foretell.
The full moon going down
like a spare penny
into a dry wishing well.
Me looking at the dark hills
like the contours of your corpse laid out
under a collapsed tent
as they wheeled you into the ambulance
to spend your first vast impossibly long night in the morgue
among the dead
who don't catch their breath
or break their bodies like bread
alone in the stillness
that can't distinguish one death from another.
However I wept for you
all the hard bitter baffled tears
all the sweet radiant wellsprings
that washed the dust like stars
off the wings of the birds
that had laboured to carry the souls of the dead
far to the west
when I remembered
how blessed I really was
that things had been
so beautifully dangerous for awhile.
And all the dark fathomless watersheds of lucidity
I drowned in like a eye in a grail
looking for butterflies in a suicide note.
All the black pearls
the diamond skulls
the eclipsed chalices
all the precious jewels of my grieving
that death hoarded underground
nothing in the end
but nameless water
frozen between the cracks
of a gravestone as old as the moon.
I remember how I loved your ice-blue eyes
and how they burned with an Arctic clarity
you had to dress warmly for
if you didn't want to suffer from frost-bite
but there's more nightshade in them now
than chicory
when I look into them like tundral flowers
and the light turns hurtful and eerie
when I recall how the melting snow
washed itself clean of itself
all those years ago
when we didn't know
what all this meant.
It's of little relevance
that we once loved each other
the way we did
and once you've exhausted
the meaning of signs
like galaxies expanding
ever more deeply into space
less significance.
What does it look like from Mars?
Your death was a koan
not a fortune-cookie
and the koan broke me
like a man it couldn't understand
rationally.
There is no scar for you.
You will always be
this open wound inside of me.
When I look at the stars
I can't dissociate beauty from absurdity.
I cherish their clarity
as something that can't be
contaminated by my eyes
when they're nothing
but two black holes in space
a snake-bite of the light
in the middle of my face
like a colon without the following:
the kind of faith
that makes what little is left
so incommensurably greater than what's been lost.
I can see the blue morning glory in the garden
as if moonlight had turned to skin
just to feel what it's like to flower
but I can't forget the frost
that fell like your death over all of it
when I went so numb
space turned into glass
and time pulled the blind down on the window.
I closed my eyes like a mirror
content to let the stars make sense
of their own reflections.
I gave up on directions
and burned my starmaps
and followed who I was
without caring what I became.
Absolutes of ice
spread like cataracts
over the relativities of the river
that went on flowing
as if nothing had changed
and my life was still a dream without eyelids.
A ghost would be easier to deal with
than the fact
that you don't exist anymore
except as bare bones
denuded of the world
like yarrow sticks
thrown before the Book of Changes.
But then I expect
you'd exorcise yourself
at a suggestion of the night
that the stars would be so much brighter
if you only blew out the candleflame.
You'd do it just to see
if things got better.
You'd leave me in the dark again
staring at the stars
like white ink
on a black loveletter
you left unsigned
as you disappeared into death
like your last breath on a cold windowpane.
I've long since forgiven you my solitude.
I've long since forgiven you
the severity of the wisdom
that hardened my eyes
like diamonds in the darkness
that could cut through anything
except my attachment to you.
I have forgiven you
for the way I have grown through suffering
to realize
how much I owe your death
and the terrible eyeless abyss that followed it
like an enlightened insight
into the impersonal nature of compassion.
I have forgiven you
the way I am spontaneously compelled
to love a world that is so estranged from me
I feel like water on the moon
trying to imagine what it must be like
to fall like rain on the intimate earth
with a reasonable expectation
of coming up flowers
that weren't destined
to be laid on your grave.
I've gone grey gathering them up
and bringing them to you
like bouquets of paints and brushes
that are ready at hand
should you ever wish
to pick them up again
and show me what the world looks like
without a body for a picture-frame
as you play the part of the upstart genius
who lived the black farce of creative pain
like the agony of the wick
burning at the stake like a heretic
between the flesh of the wax
and the spiritual aspirations of the candleflame
thrusting spears into space at the stars
as if the only way you could ever know God
if you ever met up
was by the scars.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Want To Make A Contribution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If You Were To Give Me Your Hands

If you were to give me your hands, break your prayer
and offer each wing up to me, broken halves of the heart,
I would make one burning dove out of them
that would carry a ribbon of flame in its beak,
a comet in the night, a vision of life and love,
a message to God she couldn't ignore, a wild flower
that emerged out of the ashes of her abyss
like a star waking up from a bad dream
in the skies over the darkening hills of Perth.

If you were to give me your eyes for a moment
like the lily pads of two eclipses, I'd put my lips
to each of your eyelids like the kissing stone of the Kaaba,
and erase all memory of its igneous fall to earth,
and when you opened them at moonrise,
where I touched you, there'd be two waterstars
shining as if they'd just fallen from the Pleiades
among the waterlilies and crazy raptures of the nightbirds.

Spare me a tear, and I'll return it to you like an elixir
that will dye your grief like the palette of an autumn tree
that's been painting for years, a sidereal Prussian blue,
with a touch of alizarin crimson, to burn
like the subliminal passion of a dragon in the background.
And when the fish return to their sacred pools on pilgrimage
like water sylphs, even when your mindstream
breaks like a rosary into billions of separate beads
flowing over the precipice of your eyelashes into the void,
you'll be the bird that amazes the sun and moon
reflected in each of them as they are in your eyes
as you wheel like the phoenix of a double helix
with the Swan and the Eagle across a summer
of clear night skies casting the nets of their constellations
far and wide, like a spell that gathers them up like shepherd moons.

If you were to give me your breasts, your lips,
your arms, your legs, I'd come like spring to a landscape,
clouds and rain to the moon, a hummingbird
to the goblet of your body, water to a wishing well
full of stars and fireflies, even at noon,
that's just realized all she ever had to do was ask.
I'd make your flesh feel like the shores
of some vast sea of unexplored sensual awareness
and walk them like a beachcomber in a red tide
of radiant starfish pumping light into your blood.

I would not ask for your soul or your spirit,
knowing the eternal sky does not inhibit the flight
of the wild waterbirds startled off the lake,
and even the wind can't hold them for long
like leaves and kites, when autumn says it's time to move on.
But if you were to give me their chains,
I'd retool them into royal cartouches,
ellipsoid orbits, halos, and shield-shaped lozenges,
to distinguish your name, like a waterclock
in an hourglass of desert queens firewalking across the sky
by the Milky Way, as if you were on pageant
sailing up the Thames or the Nile in a barge of moonlight.

And should, never perish the thought, you see fit
to offer me your heart, not as a fortune-cookie
with a happy ending, but like the complementary colour
of the world's biggest emerald, or the red berry
to a crown of prickly holly leaves, never
would any of my thorns ever draw even so much
as a dropp of blood from you to gray the greening
of this lyrical innocence that sings in the urns of autumn
as if Eurydice raised Orpheus out of the grave for a change,
or wild geese carrying the souls of the dead south
out of a threshed cornfield under the first frost of the stars,
or awoke the Sleepers in the Cave, to a new age
that believes if you can't dream it with your third eye closed
it isn't real. It doesn't sail. It isn't champagne that's breaking
like a bottled wave against the bow of a moonboat
that's been in drydock long enough to heal its wounds
and drift down the mindstream of the muse
like a feather of life, with a leaf for a starmap,
a message of love, with no astrolabes or compasses up its sleeve
and a fleet of poems flying high over head across
the lifeless sea of shadows below, the crane bags of Hermes
reaching your delta where the river greets the sea of bliss
breaking into bloom like a third eye from its chrysalis,
a dragon at dawn, a planet in the sunset, a dream figure
that woke reality up from a firepit of illusion
like foxfire in the scorched roots of an old growth forest
where lightning sows the seeds of illumination
like fireflies and transformative storms of stars
under the heavy eyelids of the pine-cones
that have fallen into a deep meditation on the koans
that have rooted love like an unlikely windfall
of constellations, whether your walking on stars or their ashes,
in the unsalted soil of its own galactic immolations.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Holding It In, The Pain, The Doubt, The Solitude

Holding it in, the pain, the doubt, the solitude.
Caging my wild heart out in the open where the stars live,
and the bars are all on the inside like toppled pillars
still holding up the friezes of a few high ideals as much
out of habit, as to show a lot of class
in the way you fall to your knees like a bull
in a tauromachia of the zodiac with seven sunbeams
like acupuncture needles or porcupine quills in your back,
as your ear is cut off like Van Gogh's and thrown
like a rose of blood to a lady in the crowd.

Living in the lunar half light of all my uncertainties.
Trying to see things I've been dying for most of my life
not as expiring consolations on a terminal night ward,
night lights in the morgue, flowers beside the bed,
soft, white shoes whispering down the polished halls of the dead
so they could get a good night's sleep, knowing
there were more nightmares in their lives
than the hard pillows of the world
they lay their heads down on as if
they were getting used to their gravestones.
Stripped of meaning like the frayed ends
of my thinning neuronic synapses pared to the bone
without any insulation to bear up to the next lightning strike,
that would make even the weathervanes shriek like rust
with the pain, the pain I'm holding in, on trust
it's going to transmogrify itself into something
death-defyingly creative, the art of a noble calling,
like a snakepit of gamma ray bursts as if space and time
were hemorrhaging like a miscarriage of the heart.

Biting the bullet, eating the pain like an organic vegetable
that's good for you, hoping the character it builds
isn't Frankenstein, or the missing link in the madness
of some other species of suffering keeping its distance
because it can't believe it's descended from you.
My heart numbed by laughing gas, an ice age of novocaine,
I'm still trying to pull the thorns out with my teeth
like a physician who knows how to heal himself
but if the truth be told, feels more like a toxin
than an antidote milked from the fang of the moon,
a junkie slumped in an abandoned back alley easy chair
like a lotus-eater among the feral cats inclusively alone
to nurse his despair into dreaming of no better life than this one.

I'm still trying to pull the sword out of the stone,
a syringe out of the arm of a lion, the last hinge of the door
that's hanging like a lapwing without a wingspan anymore.
Down on myself like a meteor shower trying to exchange
one hundred and thirty-five million years of dinosaurs
for just one warm-blooded moment with a mammal.
As new a day to me as it is to a baby, and I'm doing my best
to live wholly and now in the moment,
without losing my appetite for time
or letting the starfields be overgrown by underbrush,
but when there are more scars and skeletons on your dance card
than there are wounded new moons making a recovery
on the rebound, you can feel like the abandoned ark of a barn
scuttled on Mt. Ararat like a love cruise that wants its money back.
And time is just a snake-oil salesman that heals nothing.

Space turning to glass. Time in convulsions
having tasted a little of its own medicine
and the light that broke this morning like a halo of hope
around the rim of the black hole that had swallowed me live
I was being so cooly detached about, though my heart,
voodoo doll it may have been in the past, beat as fast
as the rain stitching up the seams of the mirrors on the street
as if they were on the same wavelength as a surgical sewing machine,
until it realized this false dawn was as dark as the last
and all it was doing was patching up the ghosts of the past
with clouds of unknowing that had no secrets to reveal
and pathetic fallacy aside, knew nothing about the way I feel.

Trying to be a human who healed more than he wounded.
Trying to be a man that his jeans aren't ashamed to wear.
Trying to be a Zen hard rock strong enough to climb the mountain
than come down on everyone like an avalanche of cornerstones
giving up like Sisyphus on pushing another moonrise up the hill
even when I'm swimming through quicksand
or paving a way that others might follow as lost as I've been
on this long, dark, strange, radiant road
that isn't just another starmap with pit stops,
that isn't the asphalt of spiritual La Brea Tarpits,
or a labyrinth that ends in a cul de sac of glass ceilings
like the crumbs of the dreams of a habitable planet
I saved like a rosary of near-earth asteroids
just a few fly-bys outside the Van Allen Radiation Belts
I wore like a bodhisattvic warrior without any scalps
to bring things back together that have been too long apart.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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These Days, This Late At Night

These days, this late at night, I'm usually a lone wolf sage
high above the timberline in a sanctuary of solitude
that occasionally breaks the silence
with the elegaic echo of the anquished shriek of a hawk
wheeling in the abyss like the stars overhead
feeling as if its flightfeathers just caught fire
and for a few brief moments no longer
than the wingspan of a wavelength
it was shining like them and there were jewels
like a woman's eyes cracking the rock
of a heart that's been more of an asteroid
than habitable planet with a few ancestral skulls of its own
for moons and a creative atmosphere where the clouds
can move mountains to tears with the beauty
of what can bloom spontaneously out of nothing
like wildflowers strewn all over the starfields
as if they were expecting someone to come
of the things we really feel are worth crying for.

These days, this time of night, I delight
in looking for the most beautiful nocturnal metaphors
I can compare to you inside and out and beyond both
like a spirit of female serpent fire that haunts me
into paying tribute to her like a muse
who's beginning to possess me like the sea does
when the moon swims out to practise witchcraft
on a lonely island retreat that sings to itself at night.
Even from here, I can hear the song being carried
across the light years like the dove of a deep lament
she keeps like the wind in a locket the size
of the noose around her neck, and the flying carpet
under her feet all that's between her
and firewalking on stars like a burning kite
someone let go of like the umbilical cord
of a lifeboat that had come unmoored in a lunar storm.

Maybe I'm just fossil hunting on the moon
I've been howling at all these years
over the bone pits of dark wisdom I've dug up
on the far side of a black mirror
that doesn't insult your seeing with a night light.
But I swear sometimes when I think of you,
what lies like an archives in the riverbeds
of the sedimentary starmud you put back down
like a book you've read eras of time before,
and look out the window like a door
where you don't have to leave your body
on the threshold like shoes at the edge of the sea
when you walk into your own depths up over your head
to see if your eyes can still swim
with the dolphins and the stars and the flying fish
you left in your wake like a locust plague of urgent telegrams.

I know we're still more strangers to each other
than intimates, that there maybe watersheds
we have in common, and maybe it's still too early
for the fountains to come into blossom yet
as the last stars of the season become
the chandeliers of the morning stars of the next
like dusky candles going out in the blue light of the dawn.
And maybe there are ladders of fire to paradise
trembling like crutches on the edge of a shaky precipice
trying to climb higher than its cloud cover
to break into light like the Pleiades
just above the moon and Jupiter on a good seeing night,
but these days, this late at night, I've been inhaling
a lyrical lantern of oxygen and breathing out stars
like the circumpolar constellation of a healing dragon
pole-dancing with the caduceus of the celestial axis of the earth.

I'm laired with the unmarrowed riddles of bones of my own
I'm trying to read like the yarrow sticks
of a bird skeleton with rose-arbour wings
to see if the light I sense approaching out of the dark
is a mirage of fireflies disguised as a lightning bolt
or the soul mate of a rogue planet
that wants to ghost dance around the third eye
of a first magnitude star that doesn't have any idea
of what I'm doing up here, nor how far
a whisper of light away can seem
to a man fully awake these days, this late at night,
writing in the shadows cast by the candelabra
of a homeless zodiac off the beaten path
like the first draft a waking dream
sleepwalking beside me like the dakini
of a star struck maniac lifting the veils
of the inconceivable like the paint rags
of the night vision shining in the eyes behind them
that even in the dark make everything seem
so incredibly counter-intuitive and lucidly beautiful
I'd be truly out of my mind, like a crystal cranium
that's lost touch with its own translucency
if I didn't find it wholly believable
down to the last mystic detail my enlightened lunacy
howling like a wolf seer at the rising of a new moon
out of a valley where I can hear the distant barking
of the seeing-eye dog that follows Orion around
like a traffic light for the blind compared
to the way you light me up like the Pleiades
whenever I'm trying to get a parallactic fix
on your radiance dancing like a cult of fireflies
on the event horizons of my prophetic skull.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Background Sadness. Cosmic Hiss

Background sadness. Cosmic hiss. Cool blitz of the rain.
Too late to do the fossils of the flowers any good. Grim air.
Morose silver-grey homogenous sky. Curds of colour.
Though the trees that have hung on to their leaves
like poets afraid to publish their works on the wind,
hoarding them like flakes of dried blood from previous passions,
remind me of the Library of Alexandria going up in rusty flames.
The drainage ditches are full, and the chandeliers
of the New England star clusters aren't shining anymore.

This morning I'm the fragrance of smoke
in a bombed out city that's eaten all its horses.
A drenched scarecrow without a function
wandering through a field of shattered cattle corn.
More smouldering than combustible. The earth
lays a poultice on my heart like green moss
on the skulls of the rocks. And the agony of healing
sometimes hurts worse than the original wound.
Dark starmud clings to my lily-white winged heels.
And though the arrows of my words have been
fledged by the sky like ospreys among songbirds,
I'm still flaking spear heads off the obsidian
of prolific new moons. And it's hard to know
if I'm weeping like a candle that's still burning in the rain
or crying long, slow, pungently languorous tears of resin
down the trunks of the dolorous pines.

Wet raw umber leaves stick to my boots
like decals on a guitar case of one night stands
like the lament of a bird moving from tree to tree
without understanding what it's longing for.
Too many sundials past the equinox
in the season of the dead, I'm hauling
the blue stones of my emotions from distant quarries
as I walk these fallow fields like a crop circle
with notions of refounding Stonehenge here in Lanark County,
stacking pagan trilithons out of heritage Christian cemeteries
as I close the endless gates behind me, chain by chain,
so nothing gets out that isn't meant to, except me
and the fox that's stopped to eye me
from the far side of my field of view
that's been abandoned to its own recourses
for the rest of the year in and year out.

I came for a casual walk, but I find myself
wary and prowling through a carnivorous solitude
like a drenched bush wolf in the middle of too much agriculture
and I'm many long wavelengths away from home.
There's a brutal exactitude about a life that doesn't love you
because you were born with fangs, even when
you lie down with the lamb to share vulnerabilities.
Some like it high above the timberline
where everything is as sublime as nightfall
on a good seeing night and the stars are so ferociously hot
they cauterize your eyes like focused fireflies of blue acetylene
so you never have to cry again quite the way you used to,
or if you do, your tears shatter like chandeliers of dry ice
and weeping glass. And then a black walnut tree
that's been unfeathered by the wind like a snapping turtle says
the trouble with wild predators is they never
get down to the roots of things. Come the autumn
they're still wandering homelessly in the shallows of life alone.
Too sad to argue, I nod my assent, and think to myself
so do your leaves, your blossoms, your seeds, your windfalls,
the burnt planets of your scattered solar systems
strewn at my feet like black cue balls that break for us all.

I allegorize the woods to humanize my lupine mythologems.
And then there are some. Siloes of dark abundance
standing in the starfields of an emotional famine
that have been living on nothing but the crumbs
of the forgivable shining of their former dreams.
Sometimes think I'm one of them as well, among
so many fortune-tellers reading the lifelines
of the open palms of the trees. But I don't get fixed upon it
for fear the fireflies of insight I revelled in this summer
stop burning holes in my starmap that lets me see
clear through these obvious paradigms of the light
to the shapeshifting constellations of chaos on the other side
that unravel these monstrous myths of human origin
as quickly as they weave them out of nothing
so that in the end we're always the beginning of something else.

And there's a hidden compassion in all of that. Mercy
in the mobile protocols of passage that initiate us
into a deeper awareness of the pathos of our passions
emptying the urns of our hearts like the ashes
of the Canada geese flying high overhead above the clouds
that our pristine emptiness might be renewed again
by the yellow leaves we're kicking through in the rain
like sodden flames strewn across the trail
beside the mindstream I've been following like the Tay
where the fleets of sulphur butterflies
timed to the weather reports of the dying flowers
have taken down their sails like the wings of old loveletters
to walk alone with the Alone without saying
anything short-sighted or humanly intrusive along the way.

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

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