En.Citatepedia^®.ro

Mystic Regency

Blue hole in a swarm of afflicted emotion,
I cannibalize my own event horizons,
to turn off the glare of the lifelight
that boils my brain in delusional bleaches
that present themselves as the truth.
I have known nothing
but the fragility of a tolerable hell since I was born
so I am not fooled into believing
anyone stands on more than quicksand.
And yes, there are women and stars and flowers,
orchids in the shadow of an outhouse,
eclipses that draw the veils
off faces and hearts like shadows and eras,
gold in the bones of extraordinary people
who move like swans across the mind
easy in the grace and dignity of their excellence,
and sometimes, for brief islands of serenity
I am one of those, but only briefly
and only long enough for me to disallow myself
the luxury of thinking I’ve arrived anywhere.
If fireflies were once
the souls of unbaptized children, stillborns and embryos
flirting with the night for salvation, now
they’re the unbound abacus of joy
that has lost count of the days and nights
I’ve stood by myself before a winter window
and looked out into the darkness
and wondered if I am
what I seem to myself
or some other man
I’ve been looking for all these years
better than I am, more courageous,
able to absorb the bitter light
and sweeten it like wine. I can endure
the miseries and sorrows, I can act
when there is call to act, and I can see
into the dark corners
where the spiders age their poisons without malice,
and I can be a tree in the morning
just before moonset, and hear in every bird
the lonely bell of blood that rings like time
advancing the night with departure;
and feel the incredible onceness of being alive,
the igneous beauty of the black virgin
buried in the wound of my own mortality,
and the terrible longing that arises and wants her forever
knowing she’s unattainable and yet prefers this folly
over every other delirium of desire,
certain only of my own demise in the attempt
and the fanatical universe that decrees it
as if it were heresy to try,
but never, never in those depths
have I ever understood so much
as a hair on her head, not even
an eyelash of insight to show for all my agony, not
a word from her lips
for all that I have sung and seen of her,
that wasn’t a falling rose-petal, a kiss upon the skull
that gapes at her feet
like the cold stone
of a full October moon rising over
the lean fields, the empty silos
of my devoted desolation like a crown.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Your Eyes For Awhile

Your eyes for awhile
were the only eyes
I could see through
to catch a glimpse of god;
were windows into my own soul
that I could look through from the outside
without throwing the moon
through my reflection like a stone
in the hand of an angry boy.
And it was always as true
as the way your heart grew
that you could love strangers
easier than I do even now
after all these years of learning how
to talk to mirrors in their own language.
And you were not one woman
but all women forever
when I saw you once
bending down like the dusk
to touch the last of the flowers
as if you would never see them again.
As serene as the evening
there was no labour in your beauty
and I swear when I saw you that night
I felt as if I were the whole world watching
time put a finger to its lips
and pour its fountain
into the flow of your body
as if it were the sum of all passage.
And though I was your friend in all things
every evening since
the candle went out
in the lantern of a lost tomorrow
I have walked out into abandoned fields alone
and asked the saddest questions
of the most distant stars
knowing there is not enough light sometimes
even in the eyes of God
to be a companion of our sorrows.
And the questions grow longer
as the darkness deepens
the echo of my longing
in a well as dry as my skull
and closes its gates like scars.
And then those nights come
like a life or a day
or even just this moment
when I stop asking
why human suffering
is always indescribably true
and joyful as an irreproachable buffoon
sword-dancing alone with the moon
who writes me dangerous loveletters
as if she were the Lady of the Lake
receiving me back
like a funeral ship
into this mysterium of you,
I can almost believe that you know
even though the night mocks the crow
that pines for mercy
and turns its lightless face toward you
as if it could still feel
the warmth of the sun at midnight
in your eyes again
like the afterlife of light
playing with fireflies in the abyss
now that the summer constellations have gone down;
that somehow you must know
like a guitar
on the far side of a room
where someone is singing
as if they had their ear
to the womb
of your irrevocable absence
that binds me to you with every breath
I take for two
as if I had learned to live on death
to keep you alive in me
where you still flow through the seasons
on the nightstreams of my blood
like blossoms and leaves and stars
and the moon leaves no scars on the water;
must know. Or a demon’s a kinder face
to bestow on the darkness
than a black hole without eyes,
though it’s taken many, long, painful years
for the night to share the light with its jewels again
and as many schools as there are fools to fill them
that even just one
of those slightly compassionate smiles
you would send across the room
to cool the furnace of my heart
with the lightness of one snowflake,
one feather
gracing a change in the weather,
knew more about love
as a raindropp knows the sea
than all of us
who have been washed up
on this cold, lonely shore together
thinking we may have been saved
for something more
than this tidal longing
to brave the sea again
and even if doomed to drown
as I have learned
from this shale of pain
that has carbon-dated the eras
of my missing you
like a life that didn’t
flash before my eyes
as I went down for good with everything,
to thank-you, o, yes,
with nothing but love and light in my heart
and your face in the eye of my solitude
as I stand before the sea in gratitude
to thank-you
as you well knew one day I could
for the generosity of the wound
that has run like my life
down these eyes
these windows
this page
these empty mirrors
of autumn rain
that have wept for years without you
just to see you again
for one moment more
than the time I have left
to know that I never will.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Want To Take The Moon Out of the Sky

I want to take the moon out of the sky
like a cup, like a rose of black wine
and drink it down to the last shadow of a mountain,
the last, lost eyelash of the light
that floats on the surface, the final crescent.
If I could inhale fire, or snort the stars
like a rail of radiant coke on a black mirror
and pull the darkness up around me
to keep me warm in the night
against the cold drafts that barge through the window,
if the darkness were a woman
I could throw my arms around
and hold her back against my chest in the bay of my body,
a shore I liked to wake up on
still drunk on the moon
and walk in the morning as she
dazzles me with her nakedness and veils,
the litter of the broken jewelry
she arrays in the sprawling waves, I would, o
believe me I would. I would
take this paint rag of a life
this hard, dirty smear of leftovers on the plate
of so many paintings, this injured towel
that has wiped the blood and tears and clouds,
the wounded sunsets from so many faces and rivers,
from so many brushes and knives and tongues
leeched off the rotten rainbows, the flags,
the bad water in the dark well, I would
take this skin of dirty flowers,
this Joseph’s coat of colours,
this blighted, blotted pelt of soiled skies
and corrupted trees, eyes that have dried
into blisters and scabs, lips
that crack like dry peonies, I would take it
and give it a decent burial, already
the poor, leather shirt
of some archaic Indian from the book of changes
lying in the yarrow of his scattered bones.
Or maybe I could acquire the thunder
of a large, rusty oil drum and burn it at night
in the backyard, cremate it and smudge
the evil spirits out of the house
of my prevailing stars, smoke
the adulterous virgin’s disease away,
like clothes after someone’s died of the plague.
There are days, and this is one of them,
when life seems kinder than I thought
to everyone else but me;
mornings and afternoons, but seldom the nights,
that seem like dead dogs
lying at the side of the highway,
ants in their eyes dissolving like soap
and turkey vultures unravelling
their organs and tendons
like the yellow and scarlet yarn of old sweaters
that will be reknitted into something else
that doesn’t fit, days
when I realize I was born middle-aged,
how homeless my heart is,
and how my voice,
though it’s been hurled into the dawn for years,
is such a lonely bird, not even an echo
disappearing into the silence
of the vast, unanswering spaces that overwhelm it.
I write in the air with the wind for a pen
like a madman who gestures at things
no one else can see, believing against belief,
he’s doing his part to better the world
though it comes with asylums
and bills to his door, demanding
mechanical birds on iron boughs,
and revisions not his to give.
I feel like a cinder in someone else’s eye,
a crumb of sleep shaken out of a dream,
a thread of smoke that stings people
into rinsing me out with anger and tears,
the stone of the new foundation cast away
though all I wanted to do
was astound the blind with stars,
make the dark flower with the wild orchids
of a more luminous fragrance,
arrive with islands of wheat and roses and wine
and lay the cool sage of the moon down
like a silver herb on a scalded heart.
I’m a brilliant hoodlum from the late sixties
as one of ex-wives called me, leaving,
and we thought we could heal the world
with love and music and art.
Hearts change, times change, and maybe
I’m the casualty of a slow accident
and this is my coma, these days I spend
witching for water in hell,
for signs of life among the corpses
that fell en mass from a terrible height,
going from one to another,
lifting up their pale arms,
the limp necks of broken swans, looking
at my watch to time the indifferent heartbeat
of the pulsing cursor on the computer screen.
I’m a habit of buoyancy
drifting through dense fog,
an empty lifeboat crying out
to a ship that may have gone down years ago:
“Is anyone out there, is anyone alive? ”
And no one answers
but the gargantuan vacuities
of the atomic distances between us.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Small, Warm Birds

Small, warm birds of feeling,
a profound tenderness,
something to cherish
in the loneliness of being human
in these vast, cold spaces,
as I read your words
like poppies in my blood again.
What stars could I call upon,
what roses could I ask for their skin,
what darkness charge with radiance,
what ploy of dancing buddhas
could I summon
to let you know
you are all my sky within,
and the assent of my soul in the morning
and the bough of my homing at night,
that there is within me a blind fire,
an invisible flame
that consumes me in the ferocious beauty
of its unseen flowering
even in a flurry of faces
and the business tugging the donkey of the day
braying like a knot in a stream of wood,
and all the objects and forms of the world
are burning mirrors I look into to see
the black pearl of your mystic presence within me,
the irridescent luster of your shining,
how you are a message in a bottle from ultimacy,
and a dark shrine of desire
that can wake the valley dragons
with the fragrance of your eyes on the wind.
I want to kiss your kneecaps;
I want to crush cool mushrooms against your lips
and feel my kisses break like bread,
I want to feel my mouth
blossoming on the nape of your neck
and my breath blowing across the shy wheatfields
of the softest gestures of hair on your skin,
I want to taste the silk
of the inside of your thighs
as if it were the flavour of an intimate paradise,
and approach your breasts like crowns,
and under a full moon
tenderly turn the sacred soil of your sex with my tongue
like a stranger in the doorway
of an infinite longing to make you shudder
like the void into light
with sexual eclipses on the back of your eyelids
that will fill you like a palace of water with stars.
I am the luminosity and shadow
of your green lamp that glows like the sea,
and my voice wants to bleed like black cherries
over the alluvial plain of your stomach
and touch you like a prophet
running his fingertips slowly over the pages of a holy book,
savouring the revelations
that throb like a pulse in space;
and there are storms that want to exhaust themselves
over the blue thresholds of your hills
and root their lightning in your body
like a tree of light, a new map of rivers
for your blood to follow back to me
like the echo of thunder in a well.
And all through the day
with its curbs and functions
I imagine the lilt of your fingers
on the rim of a coffee cup,
the cougar in the glance of your eyes,
the way you put a knife down on the table
like a smile without a script
and what it would be like
to circumnavigate the equator of your waist
with a rosary of kisses
to raise you like a sunken continent
out of your depths
and explore all your tides and passages
with the fervour of a dolphin in a bay of wine.
I want to be tangled like a kite
in the turmoil of your hair,
the night watchman of your dreams,
the one who notices
what no one else looks for,
the stone of the small grave
you sweep with your eyelashes
when the leaves of autumn
lie down with the shadows of spring
and the virgin windows of your tears
that no one has ever looked through
weep like glass over the secret root
of a flower only a child could see.
Beyond reason, gates, words,
where the bridges take off their shoes
to admire their feet in the water
and the waterlilies kiss the thorn
of the star that tore them like skin
and whisper ancient pollens to the night
softer than flour and saffron,
and everything I say to you
isn’t a wound in the light,
a mouthful of shadows,
a bell of water with a fish for a tongue,
fleets of butterflies
learning how to sail the oceans of the rose
like the keels and wings
of love-letters you can read in the dark,
I want to fold you in my arms like the moon
and pan the nocturnal urgencies of your eyes
for a gold rush of fireflies
in the all night boomtowns
of a heart that struck it rich
digging a hole to bury its dead.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Crazy Man Dancing With Fireflies

Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
Another one trying to shoot out the stars.
I hear the woman next door weeping again tonight.
I don't know what for.
Desire's a phoenix in love with water
if that's what it is.
The torch is plunged into the wound
to stop the bleeding
and the ashes get carried away.
I've loved nine women for years
and they've all buried me in a different place.
Or saved my skull to consult the dead
about a future that wasn't living up to the moment.
The white poppy of the moon
bats her eyelashs through the pines.
I've never been as innocent as a cynic
nor quite as susceptible
but I remember the pain of separation
like the mirror of the lake remembers lightning
as the most brutal of all its revelations.
And how you can walk in and out of some doors
all your life like faces
without ever opening them
or knowing whose they are.
Everybody longs for the threshold they haven't crossed.
Poor stars trying to live up to their radiance.
Wondering why it's always behind them.
Why the dreamcatchers never get finished
and love ends up like some kind of cold fish
swimming through endless windows.
Music from far across town
this late at night
like a ghost answering a seance.
It rises above the trees like smoke
and disappears into the moonlight.
Someone's trying to bloom in fire.
It happens but it's rare.
I take a firewalk down memory lane
but all my cremations seem no more to me now
than the shadows of candles
and though I feel intimately removed
this afterlife of mine is not scar tissue
whether things got over me
or I got over them
no matter.
Attachment too is a Buddha activity
and though passions that once
made even the trivial sacred
and the impossible slight
have transformed
the hot blue flame of their hydrogen
into the carbon and oxygen
of more sustainable intensities
the selflessness of my impersonality
is not aloofness or indifference or exemption
or the consolation of wisdom won by acclamation.
Time distills the spirit out of all things human
and you can delight in your past
as if it were the future of someone else
who lives it like the unfolding
of leaves in the spring
that shadow the ripening apple
until it tastes like the tears of the autumn sun.
Joy and compassion
and the lucid spontaneity
of staying improbably ageless
again and again and again and again
as the years rejoice in the young and old alike
climbing the ladder of the tree
from so far down in the dark earth
they're beyond the reach of its ancient roots
and the utmost of its aspirant branchs
scratching at the windows of heaven.
And then most amazing of all
someone comes to the window
and parts the veils
and like the last line of the last act
just before the curtain call
you fall.
You fall toward paradise
as if you'd failed
and had to do it all over again.
But if your heart needs healing
offer your love up like a transplant
to anyone who can use it
and your mystic eyes to the stars
that want to see through them
what their light looks like
from deep inside
the expanding vastness within you
that can hold all that shining
like the sky or the sea embraces
all kinds of its own weather
without ever overflowing the brim.
The skull you drink from
like a wishing well
in the desert watersheds of the dead
is a cup without a horizon.
A real mirage with imaginary water.
A seabed of shadows on the moon.
Low-tide at noon.
Providential midnights when it's full.
But if you don't like
what you've been hearing about yourself lately
when you stop to listen
to what your saying
and don't recognize the voice
you're speaking in as your own
hold your ears up like conch shells to the oceans
that have never heard a recording of themselves
and carefully watch their faces.
And if you make the same stupid mistake
you swore not to make again
learn to recycle your ignorance
so you can save a bit of wisdom
for the rest of the world
to remember what it was like once
to be alone in Eden
with no one else to rely upon
and all you had to add
to the conversation of the rivers
that flowed out of it
all you had to share with your solitude
and boundless emptiness
was your unanswerable longing
even as it was being shaped
by their waters
into the form of the unimaginable.
Into the form of a woman
who tasted then
and tastes forever now
of the original light
of spontaneous creation
however many worlds
and lives and years and nights had to pass
before you first saw her
and felt your afterlife condense into a star.
Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
And it doesn't matter
there's no one here
to understand my delight.
Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
It's hard to read me in so little light
but when you fall asleep
it's the world that dreams
and though I feather the wind
with firebirds of desire
and write loveletters
long into the night
that grow like the graceful tendrils
of ink dissolving in water
whatever the sign of the season
there's no bitterness in the vine
and no departure in the reason.
Though I'm a leaf with the wingspan of autumn
even in the dead of winter
the phoenix is green
and by late summer
there's a crazy man out dancing with fireflies
down by the Tay River
who is too carried away
by the picture-music
of what he hears with his eyes
and sees with his ears
of all that he's been and will be
alone together with everyone forever
in love and out
full cup and empty
eclipsed and forgotten
or charged with the radiant urgency
of fireflies after the rain
to care what any of it might mean
when they fire the valley up for a moment
like blasting caps in a beaver dam
that's flooded the road.
And everything's so nimble with light
so vital and effusive with joy
so mysteriously near and always
all darkness all pain all sorrow
all that's lost and weary
and fearful of ever being found again
of being loved or despised
is absorbed blameless into bliss
like a tender intimacy
into a great vastness
that lives within us all
even as we disappear into it
like the sky in the heart of a bird.
Or just before the soft flare of moonrise
through the leafless veils
of the glowing birchgroves
on that far hilltop
where the pioneers
used to bury their boys with a view
a night just like this
as illusory as it is real
suffused with a spirit of water
that heals the wounded swords
the bruised flowers
the fevered promises
that are offered to it from the bridge
between this shoreless delirium
and the next.
A presence that's always flowing away
like a mindstream among the stars and fireflies
with the power of time
and the effortless wisdom of change
that makes the going stay
and the perishing persist.
A night just like this.
A momentary kiss
that keeps faith
with the eternal flames of the fireflies
that adorn the darkness and waters of life
with indefinable joy
in the exuberance of the mystery
and unspeakable trust in the onceness of forever
and an abiding intuition
that even the fiercest thorns of pain
that have tasted first blood
and greyed the hearts of their lovers
can never be estranged
from the beauty of the rose.
A night like this
The great abyss
lucidly alive with its own shining
and a woman's eyes
and a crazy man dancing with fireflies.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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
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A Fluctuation In The Cosmic Void

A fluctuation in the cosmic void,
a wink of atoms,
a fallen eyelash of light,
the seeing of a lifetime
nothing but candle vapour,
ghost-water on the moon,
the exhalation of a vagrant star
looking for its lost constellation
like a berry or a gem
that had wandered off road
from the vine of a crown.
The eye that regards all
as it rises like a blue mystic sun
over the morning eyelids
of the remote hills
waking up in the arms of their shadows
demands exposure of the sky,
a clarity pure enough for stars
as it turns the day over
like the palm of a hand
to reveal how our lifestreams
join and break
at the junction of sacred rivers.
And the vision,
the illusion of the way I see life,
the romantic intoning
into the bell of the abyss
for a hopeless beauty that died like a bird,
the lostness and the loneliness,
the unknown sorrow
that seems to bleed out of the air
like a black rose born to grieve
for the separations of long ago,
and the child in the brutal fire
that pleads at a window
weeping in the heat
for rescue from an afterlife without salvation,
all that the heart features
in the deepest silence of the night,
nothing but the auroral trash
of an over ionized mind
trying to touch its own burns tenderly.
Until I became the knowing
even my own ignorance
didn't recognize me.
Until I vastly improved
the integrity of my lies,
every mirror I looked into
like a woman's eyes
was corrupt,
the prelude to a death certificate
in lipstick, a thorn of honey
that dripped like the fangs of the moon
with mysterious toxins and elixirs
that could scald and bleach the heart
or restore it with the kiss of a silver herb
grown in the garden of a cool eclipse.
My bitterness and fear
have made me less susceptible
to the empty boats that arrive
to take me on like some kind of foreign export,
a cargo of ashes and stars,
the bodybags
of the casualties and refugees
that perished in an unknown holy war of one
that I can't stop waging
against a universe that won't let me in,
but my solitude
could defeat me with a feather,
could shock the fool I am to hide
with the shadow of a wing
breaking the spell of this birdless sky
that seems to go on forever beyond the wind
like a caravan of rain
that's outwalked the longest known road
into a wilderness
of rootless trees in big city back alleys.
When the rose
has been stripped down to its claws and horns,
how few have the eyes
to keep yearning?
Let me drown in tears of fire,
in wells of thoughtful quicksand,
rack me on the iron in my blood
and stub my cherished stars out
like angry pincers applied to my feet
like a firewalk through a snakepit
and I will confess to nothing
but an earnest ignorance,
I will not betray the abyss
where I buried myself like nuclear waste.
I will remain true
to the merciless emptiness
I uttered to myself like a vow
I didn't know if I could keep
four decades ago.
Now I lay my head down to dream
on a stone pillow full of stars
that shine like rare metals in the night,
and when I wake
I seem to know less
about everything it took me a lifetime to master
than when I first
abandoned my eyes
like oceans on the moon to see
inconceivably, what has become of me in my absence.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Were There Stars

Were there stars in your hair that night?
I cannot remember,
so taken with your face
and the mystery and the silence and the sorrow
of the tender bell in your eyes
that could summon ghosts
of yesterday's embodiments to the fire
of any passion that lost itself prophetically
at a rave of shadows among the trees.
You eased out of your wardrobe of rivers
like a snake on the moon
sloughing its skin like the eclipse
of a far more vulnerable shining,
and I couldn't tell if you were
a doe or a lynx
stepping out of the alder groves warily
to lap the moonlight
that flaked the shore
with the silver petals of an undulant rose
older and darker than night blood.
I could feel the danger within you,
the abyss of the early grave
that waited for you like a key
to come in out of the pain
that bled you like a shadow
pouring out of an open wound
that whispered to you like a secret scream
only the dead who owned you could hear.
Your hunger desperately sought salvation
from the eyes
that pleaded with you
to blow yourself out like a candle,
cancel the inevitability of your suffering
with the shudder and sigh of sex.
We lay down naked together
by the willow-stained waters
in that summer of flesh
and sought oblivion from each other
like two compatible cremations
that concealed a ravenous phoenix
ending its fast of fire.
Purified by the depth and darkness
of your intensities,
I burned in you
and felt the flames
of a dangerous angel
who had broken her afterlife like a curfew
flow over me
like dawn at a keyboard of feathers.
Your breasts still come up overnight
like supple mushrooms against my chest
and the moist heat of your mouth
throbbing with flowers like July
as you seized your joy
from the agony of the roots you tormented
to give up their dead
like bruised cherries.
I have never died as fully since
at the insistence
of any woman's appetite
nor known a night so final,
so brutal with time and beauty
as the pendulous moon swung
like an executioner's ax
over the nape of its own reflection
swanning on the waters.
We made love as if
we were both defying
the truth we didn't need to say.
I wanted to plead with you,
I wanted to call out into your emptiness
like a beseeching bird
disappearing into a dark valley,
but my voice ran ahead of its echo like light
and the things I would have asked you
not to do
had already been achieved.
Heroin, your asp,
at the funeral I stood back
beyond the baffled wreaths of flowers
and the ambivalent silence
of the modest gathering that mourned you,
maculate in the shadows
of the Japanese plum tree
we once made love under
and I kissed the rose of your blood
shedding in mine
like a wound
my love was never sword enough to heal
as they closed
and boarded you over like a well.
I spent the night like an empty vase
beside your grave
until the stars that bloomed above you like wildflowers
thawed my tears in the morning light.
I walked out of the cemetery
through the hard harps and spears
of its iron gates
and I have never been back.
The years since have been
chameleonic as a hooker
who plys her art
on the stairs of a temple
even the priests of my lust
are forbidden to enter,
but as you said I would
as you lay with me that night
like a knife beside the sea,
I have returned to you over and over again
like a witching wand
looking for water in hell,
like a cult of one to a lost island
that holds you like a secret
and wept like a candle of honey
in the dark hive of your unanswerable silence,
intoning the names
of an impossible god
on a rosary of black suns
until my heart hangs like a bell
dumb with grief
looking up at the stars
you rinsed like a tide from your hair.
And I lean on the crutch and the crook
of a shepherd's question,
looking everywhere for you
like the wind
sweeping the shadows of fireflies
like the fall of hair from your eyes
that night you tore yourself away from me
like a veil of blood and sorrows
wounded by the terrible light
of the black pearl
that ripened within you like the skull
of a full eclipse.
O my poor, broken angel,
you might have been fat and frumpy by now
if you had lived.
I could have watched your beauty
shed like the moon over the years,
and smile like an island
to remember how lost I was in your tides once,
a constellation of starfish
tumbled like dice in your dark undertow,
trying to shine, god, how
I tried to shine for you, how
I ached to embrace your planet safely
in the mandala of an empowering radiance
that could show you
I was worth living for
if nothing else.
Given the freedom
of the emptiness that engulfed us both,
we could have lived within each other,
we could have evolved our own atmospheres,
appointed our own stars,
written our own myths of origin
on the black pages of that journal of skies
where you scribbled down the events
of your pre-emptive afterlife
as if you wanted to make your ghost indelible.
As it was, the only thing I could do,
was take you in
like the last breath of a summer night
I could never let go of
without following it
like a shadow of you into death.
I haven't wished for much over the years,
and the dreams have come and gone as they will,
and my hair has gone gray
and my eyes are looped like powerlines
and the sad bells of a heavy solitude
that has yoked me to the grindstone of the turning world
to mill the stars like a tide
on the blood wheel of a worn heart.
I finally burned and broke all the weeping mirrors
I consulted like half-assed mediums
to see if I could restore you somehow
to the more intimate shining of that last night
you turned and ran back,
your shoes in your hand,
to make sure your final kiss would endure like a temple.
You pitied the agony of shapeshifting
you knew the black water ahead
was about to go through
as it smashed like goblets and crystal chandeliers
on the roaring skulls of the rocks.
You pitied me because you knew I loved you,
because you knew you were already
a future memory
and I was a prophecy from the past
that had ridden beyond itself like light
to illuminate nothing but your absence
measured in the filaments and lifelines
of eyeless oceans
like a seabird
circling a blind lighthouse on the moon.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Something Said Softly

Something said softly in the night
like a tendril on a windowsill
tasting the moon, a whisper, a word
that walked in the light without
abandoning its shadow,
a phrase with wet wings
dreaming itself out of its chrysalis
not knowing whether it's a leaf or a dragonfly
until the whole tree wakes up beside it,
something sought but rarely said
saturated with the meaningless life of meaning
that could touch space like flesh
and make it feel the thrill of new eyes
running down its arm like tears.
And it's not that I want
to unsay the night or God
to define myself as a human,
and it's of little moment to me,
seed on the wind,
what worlds are born of my words,
what ends, what begins,
what comes of what I cannot say,
but I want to say something
with the savour of time in it
that's worth living for a little more each day
like a small tree rooted like a thought
in a crevasse of eternity,
greening the moon.
Late at night, in the darkness,
while the silence is off preserving something,
and all I can hear is your breath
off in the distance like an ocean,
I want to unpack my vagrant heart
like a patched guitar-case,
a grave-robber in a pyramid,
and attune my afterlife
to the key of this one
in such a way
I can play like a new star in Orion
to all the sad, beautiful fireflies of the moment
that hover over us like living constellations of our own
not bound to any paradigm of light
that can only be touched by a mountain of stone.
I want to paint something
that feels like the flower
that just brushed against your hand,
I want to be inspired by the mystic blue of midnight
like window glass fired in the kiln of a star
that has looked upon the suffering of humans for so long,
their atrocities and deprivations,
their terrors and wrecked joys,
compassion has turned it into an eye so clear
you can sip water from it like tears
that taste of the history of blood and wine
that danced alone like a vine at its own wedding
with a bride of rain that unveiled herself
like falling chandeliers.
Unfailingly, absurdly, obsessively human
in the shadow of thundering magnitudes
that feel like the extinctions of gods
that time has wheeled out
to the enormity of the gravepit
that limes every abyss of the heart
with the stars of a new universe,
I want to add one candle to the shining
in a folly of insight so illuminating
even the earliest galaxies
forever entering the darkness
on the threshold of their first shedding
could see it, something
so profoundly vernal and intimate
even I can believe in it.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Musing In The Aftermath

Everything sings, the shadows of the winter branches against the streetlamp
laced on the windowpane ribboned by dirt, backddoors and rooftops
and yet I am enveloped in this silence without wings, this voice
that valleys the universe like a dropp of water down the spine of a leaf
to the root of no flower, no heart, no simple mystery of the night
maturing into stars. I’m in a room with books, paintings, lamps,
plants, computers, easels and cats. Things are neither right nor wrong
though I flatter myself that I have grown from mistake to mistake,
defeat to defeat and cloak the sum of all my failures
in the unconvincing authority of experience.
It’s rude to take your masks off in the light.
I try to see myself in the darkness like a star
with too much to say that loves to give its hiding place away. Forgive
this indiscretion of my solitude, but my name has obligations
and there’s nothing in the house to eat but swans.
Soon enough there’ll be a term to all these spectral visions
that add their shadows to the lead migrations of my thought
and traverse the motionless deserts of the skull-faced moon.
And what can I say to the pilgrims who come to visit my heart,
all these lean feelings without deceit or art
who crowd around the miracle like damaged mystics and moths
hoping their agony will be immolated in the serene ferocity of the void?
Space is only the rough draft of my emptiness
and ghosts confer in the wings like uninspired actors or lie detectors trying to interpret the crimes of my last passion play. Before I was born
to cross the sky in a blue coffin with a black rose
among all these islands of light, I was the ashes of a bird
in the cold furnace of my life, a jest of the indifferent wind
that toys with the lamp and candle of my seeing.
Now, in every word, among a hundred million burning stars,
it’s enough to watch a vagrant firefly, a constellation of one
blind the universe in a single flash with marvel
as I slide down the helical bannisters of every descending starwell
toward the dark by which the dark is known.
Together with everyone I heed the mystery alone
and I don’t know how I got this way
or if I’m a shadow or a wing, the gesture of anything,
but when the moon is in my window, the night arrayed,
musing in the aftermath of life’s homely escapade,
a little afraid, I feel someone dying, and I sing.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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In You

In you I come to the end of roads,
and an alphabet of burning wings
falls from an indigo sky
like meteors trying to write
the unsayable in a slash of light,
in a language of luminous scars
the night beatifies with mystic knowledge
that wants to name you
so deeply in thresholds and stars
the charged silence
is giving birth to an indelible mouth,
a doorway of blood,
an ancient grammar of fire
the wind puts on like a robe
to scry the darkness for a voice
that could fill the goblets
of the moon's dead seas
with the wine of a radiant wound,
so much within me
already the tongue of a bell
that can taste you like blackberries.
The whole of you
in every single dropp of your eyes,
you are the black swan
of the eclipse that rares its reflection in water,
the dark orchid in the shadow of the dragon
that sways like a bell in the night,
even your absence a shape of cherishing,
a harvest of shadows beyond the light
of the lamp that burns for you.
Within the deepest abyss of myself
where the heart stands alone
like a single black pillar
in the twilight wasteland of the world,
a mysterious temple to the ultimacy
of having been here once
to suffer the passage of form and time,
everything a gesture of space
that thaws back into itself,
I have written your name
in the hourglass of my blood
like a whisper of secret ink
that once voiced the light to be
and shook the stars like wheat
out of its blind abundance
and will be remembered forever
as the first intimacy of the sea,
and there is the rumour
of a dream in the air,
the fragrance of an approach,
that out of an ocean of light
the tide will embody a woman
like the shore of an island
littered with fingertips and kisses
enmeshed like galaxies and starfish
in the exhalation of her veils
and our lips will meet like archers,
and our bodies will sing like arrows
sunk like orchards through the heart
and long after the last flame of life is shed,
the night will silence the birds
in the groves where we bled like poppies
to open the gates of the mystery
like keys and rain, or the rosary of black pearls
that chants its prayers to the night
like the slow alarm of autumn geese
in the eyes of a human face.
I try to say what can't be said,
pouring my spirit
into the wineskin of every word,
but my heart is a larger apple
than the bough of my voice can bear,
and the silence
that would erect temples everywhere like flowers
spun from the auroral silks of my soul
and perfume the air with the pollen of sacred fireflies,
every emotion a priest with a shaven head
to honour the moon
climbing the stairwell within me
of a million horizons at once
in every breathless step,
falls away behind me like the wake of a sinking ship
that lowers me into my coffin like a lifeboat
or a message in a bottle
that pleads like wine with the emptiness
for an alphabet that isn't in arrears to time
to say you to the night
in a lightning breath of life beyond
these elemental likenesses I carve
from a quarry of stars.
And I know I ask for immortal children
from a human womb,
and wide as my powers are
to exceed the sky with homing birds,
to adorn the dead branch with windows
that dazzle the roots of dawn,
I am the ashes of a black star in daylight,
a stone man with a chain for a tongue
when I try to swim like Atlantis
through the depths of your shining within
and the last word, the last life
to flash across my mind as I drown
again and again like a pulse
in the embrace of your beauty
is always the world as it is
before anything was said.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Am A Dragon

I am a dragon,
but I’ve got cloudy teeth.
You are a vase among jars,
a feather among scales.
Obviously you are the sea
and I am the seabed.
In the darkness you are the shining.
I come to you
like lead to an alchemist,
base metal to gold.
Already I am transformed
by your mirrors of fire.
There is a light, a glow,
invisible but more illuminating,
not of the moon, or sun, or a star,
but of the heart and mind,
the light of life itself
when it’s the only candle in the room
dancing behind its veil of shadows,
and in the least filament
of the down upon your thighs,
there are suffusions of fireflies and galaxies,
mystic lanterns
ripening like apricots
over the open doors of worlds within,
over eyes that bloom like wild asters
rooted in the earthly fields of the heart.
I have been a ghost
trying to say itself into existence;
and my bread and my blood
have been the whisper and breath of you.
Not the mountains, not
the mothering floors of the wheat seas,
not the forests or the hills or the rivers,
not the ladders or roads or miles between us,
nor the seasons of the threshing clock,
have kept us one eyelash apart;
we have been wings to each other;
we have been the secret tides of the rose
in a bay of blood to one another;
we have been the substance of a dream
that lingers like the impression in cool grass
of where the deer slept the night before.
In the flights of winter birds,
on moist winter days,
I have rehearsed endless summers to come,
when the sky whispered your eyes
in bells of sidereal fragrance
into the abyss of my longing for you
and love seemed a petal of light on the wind,
and you were that petal,
and I was that wind.
And though I have stood for eras
on this bridge of night alone
waiting for you like a letter, an afterlife,
a voice of fire in a well urgent with stars
I want to live with you,
we have always embraced, not two,
arrow and bow,
pilgrim and shrine,
release and enlightenment
reflected in these visions
the insistent palettes of the heart
paint on the impassioned waters
of the deepening lifestream.
I have been a storm of blood and stars;
I have drowned in the crypts of my own tears
and learned to breathe through a new medium,
set the crown of my fin on a rose of gills,
and bloom in a mythically enhanced
immensity of sorrows,
and the shadows under my eyes
have mourned for me
like black bells in a tower of thorns,
two horses of night chained to a heart
that dragged itself around like a hearse
looking for a lost grave.
I buried myself in women
who were torn like the satin lining
out of a coffin just
when they were about to give birth.
Their pain always tasted of an afterlife
that danced like lightning on the tip of my tongue
until my blood caught fire
like a rose with a voice of wine.
Black, apostate, madonnas
of body, heart, and mystery,
even the moon a bead of devotion
on a thread of their blood,
a dream vow under the eyelid of an eclipse.
I never knew what to say
that wasn’t a life shy
of an inadequate skeleton
trying to reflesh itself with the ashes
of its last sidereal cremation.
I was born again and again
like a sword drawn out of a stone
to hurl my humanity
like a sparrow
against the windows and eyes of the gods.
They knew I was right
to live the prophecy
written in the book of my wings by the wind,
but their tears fell like glass rice
on the stairwells of the bridal mirrors
that wept like silver serpents
at the heels of the moon
and whatever road I walked,
whatever direction I wandered in
like a drunken river
I passed through my own ribs
like an opening gate
to a sealess exile on the moon,
a lighthouse to the sail of a ghost in a desert.
Events of the spirit,
and the imported executioners
of tormented ecstasies
that made our bodies shudder with oblivion
until even our shadows glowed
like feathers of light
that glutted the abyss we pillowed like stone
to lay our heads down upon and dream,
every emotion,
keyed like a highwire
over the infinite emptiness
of a guitar in the corner of a tomb
eating the dust of a blackboard
that schooled the scrawl of the angels
into the writing on the wall.
How many lovers have perished in me
like the rings and eras of a tree,
and what enormities of childhood it takes
to sweeten a single ruby of fruit,
what tides of blood and light
collapsing like eyelids on the mystic circus
that pulled off miracles
under the sheets and skies and skin
of our lascivious tents:
now I am a dunce in a wizard’s hat,
a cone of light,
the pillar of a fallen shadow,
freeing the wings of wounded birds
from the nets and mesh of the stars.
I am a dragon
with the soul of a bridge to here and now,
a weed on the stairs of an unknown temple
to a god that sweeps me away like ashes
with the broom of my shadow,
and my face is the footprint of the wind
as flowers are the footprints of the light,
and my heart is a pebble
I keep dropping down a well
to listen for an echo from the depths,
for a whisper of fire on the water,
to deliver me like a burning dove
with a leaf of the moon in its beak,
a letter from you,
to say there is a south of the heart
that can thaw this arctic desolation
that overtakes me like an ageless night
as my thoughts fall away
like the flames of descending matches,
like angels and demons
tilted from heaven,
from the plane of their orbital hearts,
toppled like towers and lighthouses
by an urge to kiss their own reflections.
I am a dragon
chained to the nightrain
that inks the roots of the locust tree
with thorns and stars and flowers,
and my blood is a dusky mess of dawns and ancient sunsets.
My heart was scaled like the moon
by the phases of an empty cup,
my eyes were birdless skies
and nothing flew higher
than the feathered shadows of the trees
that roosted in the grass like water,
and there were no tears left
in the wineskin of the heart
withered like a lily that bloomed for a day,
the soft clarion of a bruised trumpet.
Now I think of you
so many nights and miles away,
and I walk like a bridge toward you,
and my wings are spread out
like the pages of ample skies
that have yet to be written on by the stars,
and I must blow on my longing to be with you
like a spoonful of hot diamonds
just to keep the deserts of my thought
from etherealizing the tropics of my blood,
my eyes evaporating like crucial oases
in the heat of these visions
that burn the air
with fountains of fire
in this tavern of mystic passions
where I drink alone to you,
the furnace of my blood
silked like a black poppy
when I reach out,
a tree in winter,
the afterlife of lightning,
to touch your face like the moon.
I have been a lonely crusade of one
fighting for the gravestone of a dead god
enthroned in the leaf-fire of his falling,
lost in his dream like salt in the sea of the world,
stars in the seed of the apple,
a shadow devoted to the cause of the wind.
I am an era of scars
inspired by the talons of the moon
seizing my heart like a rag of meat
in these elevated bone-bowls of birth and death.
I have been a poet among humans,
an indignant warrior of the heart
with an army of seasoned candles
reconnoitering distant fires in the night
that bloomed like the breath
of insurmountable divinities
gathering like birds
in the border hills of the darkness
that always took the form of a luminous woman
bathing naked in a sea of eyeless windows.
Crowned like an apple star
for the brilliance of my defeats,
I fall like a key of crazy sugar,
a mysterious elixir of midnight orchids,
a squall of renegade stars
into the transformative valleys and bays
of your forbidden paradise,
happier than a fireproof heretic in the flames,
singing into the abyss of an unknown god
that has robed my heart like a wounded boat,
a solitary on his island,
in these auroral tides
that play my blood like the pulse
of this keyboard of light
where I drown like a stone messiah
true to the excruciations of his faith
in these delinquent oceans of you.
All my poems, chalk-dust,
all my mystic nightbirds iron weathervanes
bent by the lightning toward earth
like the forlorn hope of a battered metal,
all my paintings a bleeding and bruising of snow,
and the sincerity of the ways I got lost
in this labyrinth of mirrors
unspooling like a thread of blood
from an immortally wounded star,
an agony of human fire
rooted in the voice of the wind like a bird
the abyss of a night without bounds
squanders on the supremacy
of the oldest silence
time ever distilled from the eyes of the dead,
the perjury of a perishing light,
if I did not love your ashes and orchards more,
the way you tear your constellations
on the thorns of the moon
and bleed like black silk
for an innocence that never found its way home.
I can taste the dark prophecies
and oracles of infernal delight
written in scars on the dangerous mushroom
of your nuclear body,
and flow like the silt of stars,
white mountain gold and night honey,
through the hives and deltas
that enshrine the ore of the rose.
I can prolong the dawn like the wishbone of a note
broken like a harp
in the throats of the singing masters of the flesh.
I can blood the night with a fever of poppies
and scoop weeping diamonds
from the black fountain
in the furnace-heart of an electric glacier.
I can wield ecstasy
like a blade of the moon bewitched by its wound.
I can untie the knots and nooses
in the spinal cord of the butterfly
pinned like a calendar of eclipses,
a quarantined blossom,
to a dead branch under a bell of glass
and wire Eden back
to the infernal nerve of the lightning
that severed the afterbirth of the moon
from the dark mother in the garden
like an angel with a slash of fire at the gate.
I know how to make love
like an embassy of shadows
to the most distant longings of a woman in exile.
I can pour the oil of winged serpents
into the lamp
and entice a ghost of snow
to dance naked in the fire.
I can lead the lost cloud
out of the mountains of the key
to the doorway of candles and stars
enshrined in the skulls of seeing.
And even when I turn my back
on the darkest flowers of fire in my roots
to rise up like rain
into the immeasurable wingspan
of these desert clarities
that bead me like a caravan
of nomadic moons,
no more than a breath of light
in a gust of stars,
I’m still only a ladder of thresholds away
from stealing you away
from the refugees and shadows
that crowd your room
like the night sky
through the astounded vowel of an open window.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Can't Say

I can’t say that my breath
isn’t the lengthening shadow
of a tree burning its leaves
like a candlabra in the sunset,
or the moon hasn’t broken its tooth
trying to open the lotus of marrow
I motherlode in the lockets of my bones
like silver and bread
for the long, lean journey ahead.
Sometimes when I look at the stars and wonder
I feel like a cigarette-butt
in a glass of mystic wine,
my little humanity, a grain of dust
on a sidereal windowsill, if that,
and I remember the ignorant sincerity
of the orchards that sweetened their apples
like a windfall of hearts
under my eyelids as I dreamed
night after night
of unknown thresholds
I might cross like a smile or a shadow
down this blood-road of blossoms and storms
that I have carried everywhere with me
like a snake in a bag.
There was a silence at the end of my fingertips
when I reached out to touch a cheek or flower,
so beautiful, so intense
I am certain I felt the pulse of God
throbbing like a bird in her vastness,
that I could almost forgive time
the bridge of cornerstones
that trampled me like a grape
in a stampede of asteroids
and buried me like water on the moon
in an avalanche of skulls.
My tears fall from the eaves of my sorrows
indifferently as rain
trying to wake seeds
like the eye of a needle
to patch the wounded earth with roots.
And I am still demonic enough
to prefer the clarity of the flame
to the pillars of smoke that pass for wisdom,
though I know it means
sailing off the edge of the world
like a galaxy on its own event horizon
with the empty hand of the wind
on a rudder it mistakes for a wing.
I don’t think I’ll go very far when I die.
I’ll pour my snake out like wine, like a candle
like music from the flutes of my bones
and charm my way
like the fragrance of a stone rose
through the dark, nameless gate
I’ve been walking through since I was born.

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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The Women I Have Loved

The women I have loved,
the taste of old fires in my mouth,
wild orchids
that summoned me
with their fragrance in the night
to mystery, ecstasy, danger and agony,
betrayal and loss,
intensities hotter than stars
that could thaw space like glass
in the coldest, deepest abyss of their beauty.

Seizures of flesh, potions of pain,
delirium of black poppies, eclipses, cloaks,
the sweet doom of paradise
in the effulgent bells of their hips
and their skin always
a starmap back to the earth, luminous braille
only the eyes in my fingertips could read.

Each was a way of breathing
in water, in fire, in stone, on the moon,
an atmosphere that clung to me
like the smell of an autumn night in their hair,
an era of seeing
that rooted like lightning
in the starmud of my poems.

Some were the windows of a palatial awareness
that astonished my heart like a peasant
and others, the rocks that crashed through it.
I tuned all my mirrors
to the high notes
of the most beautiful stars
in each of their constellations;
and the ones I loved best
were the windows
that could see both sides of God
and you could taste it in their eyes.

No doubt I was ruinous
in ways that it's taken years
of deep solitude and suffering
to clarify, the ore
wasn't always worth the metal within,
the volcanic rage of my baffled aspirations,
the urge to express, release, affirm, excel,
the way I parted women I loved like seas
in my quest for the promised land
and the way they closed up on me like pharoah,
like a flower that doesn't want to look at the night
and lowers its lonely eye,
like coffin lids
that were once the petals of a mystic rose.

Who knows who was buried
on those sexual slopes
that overlooked the motif of the river
wandering easily
through the vistas of the valley,
or how the story truly ended
that went on writing itself
as it does today
long after we were villages,
tiny necropoli, perfectly preserved,
and wholly usurped
like utensils by the afterlife
of the erupting mountain
that put an end
to the interminable funeral orations
that unrolled us like thunder in hell.

We slashed heaven
with the bloody razor of the moon
like the vicious legates of a papal threat
to spiritually salt the holy ground
we were rooted in
like lava, blood, and lightning.

I am still a confusion
of wounded dreams,
and when I look at the moon,
the bruises, the dead seas,
I am devastated again and again
by a ghostly sorrow
that returns to my heart
like a dove to a dark bell
that once knew the morning with another.

The truth is slurred by time,
and the confessions we made to the sky,
gusts of shame and contrition,
tiny burnt-out match-heads
that once flared into big fires,
slagging their depletion
like ore in the rain,
were abysmally true to the moment,
as we felt the ground beneath our feet
sinking like a continent.

We may have drowned like Atlantis
but how many decades since
have we lain here
like a thousand other toppled shipwrecks
offering the hilts of our masts
sheathed in coral
and the bunting of weeds
to the sea that slowly accepts our surrender?

All the beauty of that seeing,
the laughter in bed,
the aloof eternity in the form of the woman
at the end of the garden,
seen through the kitchen window forever
as if I had never made love to her,
pulling weeds from among the asters,
forever true, forever
preternaturally true,
the mystery that transfixes
and devours me yet.

I have not laid my dream down
like the head of a child
on the pillow of a stony heart.
I have not looked upon the stars
that shone over us those long walks into each other
as if we were two banks of the same river
and we were still a wonder
and a temptation to each other,
two wings of the same gate
hopelessly opening.

I am still summoned against my will
to those dread nights we went out in each other
like down-turned torches,
and the bouquets of the daylilies,
those truces of fire and water
we burned beside,
turned into congested refugee camps
that plunged into civil war with their own reflections.

All along this road
where I carry my life
like the shoes in my hand
there is broken glass,
shattered goblets of the moon
we once drank from together,
shards of the suicidal chandeliers
we once danced under
like the tails of the unnamed comets
that followed us like paparazzi
as if we were the prophecy.

Vampires once cloaked like assassins
in the darkness of the light,
they still come for blood,
pleading in the shadows like beggars for alms,
and I am often aghast at my own compassion,
feeling the quick tendrils
of their tongues flickering in my heart
that my blood still feeds these candles in eclipse.

Perhaps there is more spontaneity
in the darkness
than there is in the light,
but I have not let my mouth
turn into an open wound,
or wielded the cold flame of my tongue
like a dagger of fire that could only be put out
in the blood of another.

Leeches and lilies
are born in the same pond
and I have not denounced one
at the expense of the other,
but have stood before both in silent awe,
trying to overhear any whisper
of what these things might mean
that they should still sweeten and startle
my deepening ignorance
like the shadows and stars
that leap out of their own darkness and light
to ambush and detain us with love and life
all along these lonely, vivid roads
that walk us like the wind
that moves me now to remember
the generosity of loss that is love,
and the flaring of the dust that we once were,
this frenzy of dust, this urgent dance of the dust
that will forever be
like the wind, like love,
like fire and life, like the nights
that bent down over me while I slept
and kissed me good-bye,
the journey whirling in the arms of its own destination.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Stars Are Psanky Egg

The stars are psanky eggs
The rope around the neck of the moon
Is made of clouds
The baby that cries in the night
Is crying for the salvation of man
Yes it is all up to the baby to save us
The night smells of new stainless steel
The cars are rubbing their rubber
Against the asphalt railing that
Captures the dangerously flumes
That chocks the night
I am a walrus wobbling around
In the seascape of my head
Night is caught in an empty bird house
Night is forever being caught in between something
I am a walrus wobbling around
The night that is in a tail spin
The night is forever falling forward
In the fold of my lips grows rubber a rose
Night is full of the sounds of fun
That is forever falling forward
Night is forever calling me
With my rare lips falling forward
Night is forever falling forward full of folly
Found in the left over bits of day
Night is finding its place
Where it can rest against
The street lamps pollution
Night is a fornication
Meant to relieve you of something
Night is sexual
I am a walrus wobbling around
The tale end of night told
Before the break of day.

poem by David E. Patton
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I Sit At My Window

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Someone Lingers In Your Absence Like An Icon

Someone lingers in your absence like an icon, a gate
to an open field where the white horse
that stood in the tall grass, grazing on its solitude
like a phase of the moon come to earth
is gone. A bird, a purple martin with so much
distance and disappearance in it wings
and the open vastness of the skies it was absorbed by
I can barely hear you singing from here
over the raving of an unkempt wind on a crazy night
when the ghosts are rioting in their graves
like old leaves without attachments at the feet of the new
and gravity receives the grave goods of the tree
as do I these strange epiphanies of you
that haunt me retroactively like apple-bloom.

And the depth of the emptiness that informs
the substance of my imaginings, devastates me
like an eclipse slowly swallowing my heart
like a black cataract of snake skin I keep
trying to shake like a cosmic egg without much luck.

As if I were bleeding out like a rose after
the green thorns have hardened into fangs
that are killing and curing me at the same time.
Some nights I just want to join my emptiness to yours
and be done with it, no more of this, no more.

No more of watching the beauty of the world
burn out into a dark radiance that makes me
want to gouge my eyes out so I can see it without wincing.
Without feeling so wounded by the abundance of the rose
that blooms and disappears like the auroral apparitions
of a widow in veils of spider webs and black lightning,
thinking it might be you under there somewhere I can't go
without losing you again. Check-mate. Pain.
And it isn't anything either of us can do anything about.

It just goes down that way. The absence of your shining,
small nonrenewable gestures of your heart and hands
vividly recalled like modest butterfly volumes of poetry
blowing down an abandoned street at night in the rain, you
sewing a patch on my heart with the delicacy of a needle
mending a flying carpet grounded like a wavelength of light.

As I am now that you've become that rip in my heart
all the stars are pouring out of like a puncture wound
I let go right through me like needles and gamma rays
piercing the heart of a voodoo doll of dark matter
that makes me feel like wooden puppet of light
carved out of one of these black walnut trees.

Endure. Participate. See. Wonder.
Praise. Celebrate. Mourn. Do the next best thing.
And when you're hurting your worst, sing.
And even when I'm soldiering my way through stone
like a flying fish in the wrong medium,
or walking alone with the Alone through the woods,
just to meet you where you ask me to when you call
and I come like a burning bridge down to the river,
wondering if I might have lived here once in another lifetime,
I do say these things to myself like medicinal chants
and preventative medicine, healing totems with benign effect
hung in the medicine bag slung around my neck.
Sweet grass and a pinch of sacred earth, just in case
I forget how to dance on my own grave
with grace and flare and style and an enigmatic smile
that really means it if it really means anything at all.

Or not succumb to this ice-age of a bell
my tongue is stuck to like a child's to a wire fence,
or this black diamond nightbird
that cuts my darkness to the quick
because it's got nothing to sing about
that can answer the call of the living for someone
on a foggy hill to come to the rescue of the empty lifeboat
drifting like the corpse of a dead swan downriver,
except the dead air of this strange place
where space is indelibly bruised by the passing
of the beauty it once contained like stars in a Mason jar.

Like a candle in the lantern of a skull
I've carried before me like a nightwatchman
on the edge of a dangerous precipice for lightyears
until I lost my footing and fell in one night,
as I once did into love, and learned to see in the dark
I was growing wings where I had none before
and looking up from the bottom of an empty wishing well
noticed the dead still blooming like stars
in the white shadows of the sun at midnight.

And out of the corners of my eyes
when what I can't see what need to know about being alive
comes looking for me like the sacred syllable
on the lips of a pearl diver on the moon in total eclipse
like a kiss out of nowhere, comes like the singing bird
to the dead branch in my heart
that's having trouble remembering how to blossom
after a long winter, as if you'd summoned me to the trees
like a purple passage in the Book of the Dead,
to teach me how to take the pain
and through the alchemy of the grief
that flows through my heartwood like light and rain
turn it into life again, as if every leaf
were a new loveletter from the dead
I've been saving for years like expurgated starmaps
illustrated by exiled constellations in Braille
to a spiritual lost and found at my fingertips
where they know who you are, and they've seen you
like a soft moonrise glowing through the willows
down by the river that weeps like a black mirror
for the stars and waterbirds in passing
that appear and disappear each in its time
and you wait for me like the longing of the dead
to make some kind of sign, however simple and austere,
the withered star of a wild rose without a flower,
that let's me know you're near, you're here
rooted in me on earth where we've both come
to renew our shining from the bottom up to the blossom.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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