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Never Wanted To Work That Hard To Be Beautiful

Never wanted to work that hard to be beautiful
inside or out, be the rare fossil of a mirror
in the red velvet drawer of a jewellery tower
that slides out like a tiny coffin in a morgue.
Not out to prove that waterlilies have the bones
of astral hummingbirds. Love flowers,
but not in cults. Love the moon enough
not to make a religion of it, life enough
not to resist what it's trying to put me through
whether I'm howling in pain, set afire,
or mystically exalted by vital bliss
or about to scatter my ashes from any of the bridges
that arc like grey rainbows of partially kept truces
with the lies of the lines in between.

Sometimes I'm mining mini black holes
inside the solar system looking for
new motherlodes of metaphor inside
the eye sockets of a skull crawling with Aztecs
like red army ants attending to their gods,
or go panning for stars well beyond the heliosphere
the way I used to catch fireflies as a boy
just to watch them glow a moment and let them go
like an intimate insight into what I still don't know
but never failed to be enlightened by upon their release.

People outside my open window, laughing, talking,
setting up giddy long shots like sexual moves
on a hot summer night with a beer in its hand,
and the drunk demotic of a little English on the cue,
and alarmed car horns throbbing like ear aches in park,
and it's all so intriguingly silly it's got to be human
and I wonder if a thousand years from now will think
this is what we had to be like. And as soon as I
glimpse that, the whole scene is deepened by time
in the eyes behind a veil of eternity I lifted
while I was alive to see that everything here is indelible.
There's a perpetuity in our apparent randomness
in the passing of the moment, that spontaneously
preserves us for greater things than we can imagine
like the Conservation of Data Principle
that holds good even in the singular depths
of a black hole listening like a poet through an open window.

A smudge of life on my poem, but I don't mind
the fingerprints at all. What's a star without planets?
What's a shepherd ushering moons toward
the high blue grasslands without a black sheep
that wanders off by itself once and awhile
to check out other things along the way?
My poems pick things up in their flowing
like rivers pick up leaves and tributaries
and small flotillas of blossoms in the spring,
the occult alphabets of calligraphic oil snakes,
and mingles them all into the picture-music
of the mindstream, the motifs of a symphony,
or the themes of a play, that picks things up
and puts them down again like the moonrise
of a rock on a beach. Few of life's harmonies
are symmetrically balanced crystallographers.
Nights when I look into the eyes of the stars
and even the lenses of my telescope break into tears.

You can take life out of it like a fly in the toilet bowl,
a bumble bee in a jar, a star out of your eye
a spider on a long-handled broom, or the crumb
of a leftover dream from the night before,
or you can leave it in if it wants to come along for the ride.
I've heard for so long from people who say they know
that everything is one, I don't worry about disconnections.
It's the fallible continuity of life that sings
like a nightbird from the dead branch and green alike
most beautifully to me, the way the light and the rain
and love when it's real, make unions of disparate things
that depend upon each other for life like metaphors.
I revel in the crazy wisdom of the oxymoronic contradictions
that bond me to the universe like the small volcanoes
of the ground wasps that erupt between the fault lines
along the continental plates of the sidewalks
and apprentice me to landscaping with lava on the moon.

The circle's wounded deeper into its roundness
once it's broken by a branch, the stillness more profound
for the stone that's dropped into it. Love, when it's new,
trued by separation. The earth itself, an alloy
of the elemental table. To be truly original creatively
is to seek the low place like the sea and let
everything run down into you like myriad streams
that are neither many nor one, pure nor polluted,
and out of that mingling which is the whole of you,
raise them like weather from the bells of the flowers
to the robes of snow on the mountain tops
and know that with every cloud, every raindrop, storm,
every bolt of lightning, and all the life thereby engendered
is you returning like a shape shifter to your own depths
and everything comes along for the ride as if
they were always on your side, like your eyes are.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Stand Where The Listening Begins

I stand where the listening begins
as if my voice were just another one of the echoes
and my tongue were the tip of an edgy precipice
that doesn't dare make a move
over an immeasurable abyss of eyes
that nobody belongs to.
This is a seeing that's older than the stars
that were born of it
like a mirror is born of the shining.
Like a body is born of the mind
and takes on the shape of a universe
as an expressionist gesture of classical reserve.
In the great ocean of being before it turned into everyone
our eyes weren't beaded like two drops of water
strung through our nose
like a statement we were trying to make.
They were waves.
Waves of water.
Waves of light.
Waves of thought and feeling.
They were waterbirds that came and went
without leaving.
They were meteorological events
in the emotional life of the sea
when it played alone with itself like weather.
We didn't evolve hands to prove we had a grip on things.
We didn't evolve brains to prove we were intelligent.
We're not nuggets of insight
panned from the mindstream
that runs down the world mountain
in a rush of gold.
I stand where I can hear the night
breathing like a shadow in its own darkness
and whatever I am not
is as real as whatever I am.
And my sorrows dropp away
like the black fruit of ruined bells
and my joys know a freedom
no holy war ever deserved.
Here my death answers to my life
and not the other way around.
My beginnings are not justified by my ends
and my solitude is so wholly itself
it embraces everything
as if it were space
and time were its only friend.
This is a poetic state.
A dynamic mode of creative annihilation.
This is a phoenix blooming in its own fire.
This is life.
This is the universe full of bright ideas
that come to it like stars in the darkness.
This is the white mare of the full moon in the high field
with the gates open
like wings growing out of her shoulders.
This is a space that is so spontaneously immediate
that you receive the reply
long before you've even asked the question.
It doesn't take thousands of thoughtyears
for the light to get here.
A flower blooms.
A star comes out.
It's as simple as that.
You lift one veil of the mystery like an eyelid.
Nothing has a history.
The old man remembers nothing.
The old woman forgets her name.
Once they were seabeds of meaning.
Now they're just water.
And everything is ok with that.
People go grey
and turn into clouds in the mountains
just to catch the last of the light
and give their lives some colour.
And then it's night again
and the dancing chandeliers of the stars
that are burning like legends
to make a name and a myth for themselves
fall like constellations to earth
and shatter like the rainbows of youth.
Every dawn has a taste of the sunset in it.
What's the end of anything
if not the dark side of its beginnings?
I am the fool of a freedom
that lets things be whatever they want to be
deep within the heavy fruit of a compassionate heart
that ripens in its own lucidity.
There are worms.
There are birds.
There's a green star in the apple core.
My skin is the chameleon of the sun going down.
I know how to swim through stone and water.
There are fish in my treetops
and birds in my roots
and when I drown
it's the sun in the sea
and nothing ever really goes out.
Everytime I open my mouth to sing
this is where the muse
puts a finger to her lips
to teach me what I'm talking about.
I'm a star when I write.
First I let go of the light.
And then the children point fingers at me
and say in mutual recognition
of the stories they make up on the go
there you are
just as we foretold.
It's the same way with water
when it's lost in a desert of sand and stars.
Sometimes it takes a mirage to find your way home.
Death gapes like the jawbone of a mummy
and writes like a pyramid
as if it wanted to make all things last forever.
But when life picks up the pen
around the fires of the stars
to whisper into its own ear
things that only solitude
can suggest to the night
its poems are always tents on the move.
The moon sailing paper lifeboats down a river
like waterlilies
blooming in the pale flames
of their lunar immolations
as if each were a white phoenix
rising above its own ashes and smoke
like someone dreaming of swans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Things I Must Say To You The Crystal Said

Things I must say to you the crystal said.
Jewels I must turn in the light.
Things I have gathered
like wild herbs from the starfields
to make a cool poultice of the moon
to draw the pain out of the wound
like a child that got turned around
when she was born
on the nightside of her blue eyes
to colour outside the lines of her constellation
like one of the original watersheds of Aquarius
that didn't take to the bottle and spoon of lesser wells
that warily sip from themselves
as if they were testing for poison,
but poured herself out
in an elation of so many lifelines
so many rivers vital with beginnings
the world mountain discovered her
like gold in the stone
gold in the mindstream
gold in the ore of its bones
gold that shone even in the darkest of valleys
wherever she flowed
like the white moon
when it wants to be mistaken for a swan
and sheds her eyelids like the petals of a waterlily
that's gone, gone, gone beyond herself
like a waterbird into the undetectable mystery of things
that lifts us up from our own reflections
and calls us to exceed ourselves
by flying beyond our own wings
past the last lake at the end of the universe
we could bask in like a keyhole
in the third eye of an unrelenting sky.

There. That's a breathful.
A dust-devil in a gust of stars.
A precipitous river of my own.
But I like listening to the green mountains
talk about things that are perennially true
that no one ever believes.
There's inspiration in the fires
that inspires their leaves
to burn like old myths
and poems that went up in flames
true to the muse of autumn
that has forgotten their names.

And I'm listening to this little world mountain
this dolmen of a crystal you gave me
this palace of mirrors
that sits above my desk
and tells me things about you
only an older spirit than the road I'm on could know.
It whispers to me at night
like a fragrance of light
from the unseen flowers
behind your eyes
flowing down from the high fields
and unscalable facets
of the mystic mountain you live upon
planting trees.
Abruptly enlightened medieval Rinzai Zen masters
did the same
in the mountains of Japan
as if they were rooting their pupils
like worlds within worlds
within a grain of sand
like the cornerstone of it all.

Trees are the future memories
of a prophetic skull
that stays true to its ancestors
like pines in the fall.
Anyone who plants a tree
raises a temple to the wisdom of birds
who will speak to you
in the native tongue of a new language
in voices older than words.
Anyone who plants a tree
attains what lives beyond them like an afterlife
that's always rooted in now
and even the dead branch
that holds the autumn crow in the rain
when things are bleak with the passage of things
will turn into a strong rafter in the house of life
and the moon will add its blossom to it
and the sun its butterfly
and everything that grows
will greet you as a child of its own.
And life will hold you up
like a candle
like a Douglas fir
like a star
like the tiered pagoda
of a pine-cone
like a mirror
like a bird
like a quiet smile
in the sweetest of solitudes
and well-pleased with what you've sown
hang you like a thousand shining chandeliers of rain
in the sacred groves of the Pleiades
to show you what has grown over the years
from the labours you undertook
from the tears you shed
to green the wounded mountain back to health
by adding your life to its life
is you returning
like a prodigal daughter of water
to the mystic springs
of your own starcrazy source.

Ride the wave.
Ride the snake.
Ride the wind.
Ride the fire.
Ride your own eyebeam
like a sword that delivers
the boon of life
like the first word
of a new universe
that's just heard its name called
like an endless beginning.

You are comet. You are wheat. You are starwheat.
You're a comet in the starwheat
making crop circles.
Aquarius.
Aquarians can take their skin off
and put it on again like water
and pour themselves out forever
like the sea in every dropp
so when the tide returns
it's never empty-handed.
I see a naked watersnake
swimming through the moonlight
like the path of something perpetually true
and inconceivably beautiful
as if time itself had learned to move like that
and every ripple was an era
widening its wingspan in its wake.
Hic sunt dracones.
That's how dragons learned to fly.
The highest and the lowest all in one.
The snake in the claws of the eagle.
Wisdom in the lawlessness of insight.
God.
You.
Me.
The Mysterium.

For those who haven't opened
the eyes in their blood yet
to see the bloodflowers
the bloodstars
talking to each other
like variations of the same light
these visions are the lost dream grammar
of an ancient madness
you can't recover from like a fever.
But to those who know the fireflies
are lamps on the road
the stars are not useless
and everywhere is the clarity and passage
of a river that forever arrives.

And I can see the wounded child
who's brave about her pain
but feels like a ladder in the rain
no one will hold for her
to climb down like the moon from her window.
And those that should have been waiting down below
to catch her if she falls
have scattered like stars
on the insides of her eyelids when she blinks.
Abandonment is that hollow shell
you find washed up somewhere on a beach
and raise to your ear
to hear the sea far off
like a life that's going on without you.
Even the sea can't fill that cup.
Only another emptiness
could feel at home
in the homelessness of that space.
Abandonment is getting up every morning
and putting your face on inside out
and thinking of it as some kind of good luck
you're on the other side of the universe
all on your own.
And though you howl like a wolf on the wind
the moon still cannot hear you.
That's how longing is born
in the fires of separation;
that's how the universe is called
every moment out of the nothingness
like someone to love,
and the deeper and darker the emptiness
the higher and brighter the mountain.
The watershed holds the fountain up
like a bouquet to the rain.
Emptiness doesn't stand like a god
in the shadow of an unknown definition.
It's the selflessness of everything that is.
Unborn it lives without distinction in the heart of things.
Unperishing it dies for everyone
without leaving anyone out.

When insight blossoms
like the moon
on a dead branch
compassion's the fruit
that's always in reach.
Life doesn't practise
what the heartless teach.

This morning
I'm sitting at the feet
of your little crystal buddha
enthroned in full lotus position
as he turns my heart in the light
like a jewel in the eye of a diamond-cutter.
And the sky is generous with tears
as it clarifies the windows of perception
with eyes as old and wise
as the sun at midnight.
And every thought I have of you is a fierce peace.
And every feeling a black mirror
deeper than white
that has extinguished my face
like one of last night's stars
in the bliss of a greater illumination.
The mystic specificity of my mind
pales like the moon
in a blinding abyss
of no-minded indistinction.
And the stars that shone down on nothing for so long
like an indecipherable language
are now looking up at you
like the fountainmouth
high above the treeline
in the mountains
of an Aquarian understanding
of what they've always meant to say.
There are no echoes in the voices of love.
No avalanche of Rosetta Stones.
No scoffing crows.
No genuflections of the dove.
There are no shadows hiding like daggers
under the cloaks of day
to get even at noon
for things that happened at midnight.
Love is a feather
from a passing bird in flight
life puts into the scales
and the earth turns eastward toward the light
and death takes its finger off the measure
of life's most cherished treasure.

And now the buddha turns into
two lovers sitting upright
face to face
in a lotus embrace
of enlightened connubium
in a coincidence of the contradictories
as if two were not the extinction of one.
And when desire opens its flames like petals
and blooms like a phoenix
there are no strangers in the fire.
And love doesn't burn its feet
by making a firewalk
of the nameless constellation
rising from the dark innocence
of its sweet dreamless sleep
like the thirteenth house of the zodiac
with two people home from everywhere
with myths of their own
like Venus and Mars
turning the lights on and off
like lovers and stars
while the neighbours stare in amazement
through closed windows and locked doors
at the bright vacancy of the rumours
the dark abundance of the night
that knows all we are and do
and will and have done
is true to the overproof joy I take
in this lyric of a jewel in the light.
It turns me like your eyes
turning the key in the dark gate
of a mystic moonrise
where fate elaborates the worlds
like pearls from grains of sand
and time refires its last hour
like a master glass blower
to make more space
for stars in the desert at night
by breathing on the flames
that feather the ashes of the moths
in the urns of our names
with the wings
of a dragon
the wings of a phoenix
the wings of a sphinx in the rain
planting trees on the slopes of a pyramid
to watch the dead mountain grow green again
and know all the secret paths down into its afterlife
like a river running through the wilderness
or this theme of stars on the mindstream
beguiled by the mystic wiles
of a cougar caught in the moonlight
like a jewel in the eye of a dreamcatcher.
Or the seasoned seer in a mirror like me
enraptured by the anarchic fireflies
beading themselves
like the mandalic stars
of a new constellation
only the enlightened can see
enflamed like a prophecy
empowered by love
to rise in the night of your name.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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When Lightning Fries Your Hard Drive

When lightning fries your hard drive
and you're trying to weave a flying carpet
out of snakey wavelengths that took
millions of light years before you were born
to get here. So you feel you're doomed
to live the eternal recurrence of the past.
Don't forget about me. I'll be your friend.
I'll be your all night window. I'll be
the third eye of your hurricane.
The occult template of your moonrise mirage.
I'll be the antidote to your travelling nightmare
and we'll stay up all night, drinking coffee
and smoking chain letter cigarettes
as we watch the moon through the window
painting her toe nails above the bank.
And if you want to hear wise and profound things,
poetically put in response to the dichotomic genius
of your own spiritual dilemmas,
or just let your hair down like Medusa
and kick back at a black mass of lost wisdom,
I'll be your friend. Your Wizard of Oz.
I'll liberate cages and cages of morning doves
and arise to the occasion in hot flashes of insight
like fire from the ashes of the Library of Alexandria.
I'll put my stones and swords away for awhile
and blow on a forge of stars that stay cool
as nocturnal waterlilies blooming along the banks
of the Fall River in early autumn.
I'll be your Merlin. And I won't teach you
the one forbidden thing
I don't want you to know.
You can just look at things. Or not.
Like alla prima mindscapes I'm painting impromptu
in picture-music on the lyrical night air.
But if all you want to do is bring over some poems,
I'll listen like Seti to the first verifiable signs
of extraterrestrial life. I'll listen like a hacker
that's just broken into an encrypted web-site
through a black hole into the next universe.
Your choice. Or we could just sit there
nibbling on the silence like fish
that have surfaced to feed on the moonlight.
But if you're feeling a little sanity deficient these days,
I'll talk to you about the extreme chaos
of conditioned consciousness in such aromatic words
you'll think a thousand hummingbirds
were swarming the towers of your hollyhocks
like ruby-throated endomorphs and opioids
that just found the sweet spot on your neural receptors.
And by the end of my mystic lucubrations, believe me,
you won't be drinking black cool aid in Jonestown
or stand there frozen in time, your knees
buckled like Stonehenge trembling
like a calendar girl before a total eclipse
at the winter solstice you don't think you're ever
going to get over like a beginning
that just can't get past itself.
I'll paint you naked and blue
firewalking on stars like a Pictish tattoo.
We'll take a moonboat out for a test run
and I can be the sail and the rudder
and you can be the wheel of the zodiac
and we'll sail around omnidirectionally
among enlightened islands in the mindstream
and we won't run aground on the reefs of syntax
like a dead language looking for a loveletter from anyone.
And I'll whisper things you should have heard
in the logic of metaphoric dream grammars
long before the light left, like a Druid
in an old growth forest mentoring a night bird.
And when lightning fries your hard drive
like an ancient oak in July on a Thursday
I'll be your friend. I'll make all those
taboos and curses pinned to your skin
like eclipses in a scenic calendar
fall away like leaves
Or we could stay where we are and shine
in the depths of our own bioluminescence
like the new moons of two black pearls
that would rather keep their prophecies to themselves.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Anyone Can Say What They Feel

Anyone can say what they feel
but how few can sing what they dream.
You put your heart into any art
and people will follow you like a bloodstream.
In self defence against the omnipotence
of being interdependently originated,
you can substantiate your absence
to prove you're not living in the same world
we all do, but where's that going to get you in the end?
You can true your delusions anyway you want
but that's not going to clear you for the truth.
The destroyed see deeper than those who survived.
That man puts a straitjacket on
everytime he says he's arrived.

Just because it's absurd doesn't mean
it isn't believable. Me sitting here
writing this to a caste of albino stars
I haven't reconfigured into a constellation yet
because my imagination keeps shape-shifting me
like a gust of fireflies into myriad myths of origin
since I realized, cosmically speaking, one size
doesn't fit all like a house of transformation
in an Etruscan zodiac. Or a prayer wheel.
Or the ecliptic of a mystic head band
still bound to the skull of a Druid who died young.

Fifty years, a poet, but I don't expect
this is as mad as it's going to get.
I've been deepening my ignorance aesthetically
for light years, but when I cry for things I regret
my tears are still wet, and my mindstream suggests
there was no other way of flowing at the time.
I hang on the hook of the moon prophetically
until the pain grows profound
and ten scribes in a tower write it all down.
I am blessed. I am cursed. I am hunted and ignored.

I love disingenuously to keep from being bored.
And when there's nothing else for the fire to feed on
I offer it my body, my soul, my solitude
and the rare acquiescence of a tumultuous mind
like the third eye of a hurricane with a corneal implant.
I don't keep the impersonality of what I feel about life
in a little drawer with a skull on a keychain
I use to master the coffin doors of the slumlords
that won't open of their own accord
like rosebuds in a rusty locket that's come unhinged.

I don't pour the ocean into a teacup anymore
as much as I used to and there's a little more wisdom
in my love lyrics I haven't completely
taken to heart yet, but I'm trying. I stand
an intimate distance away from the things I cherish.
I'm dying as we all are, but it doesn' t feel
as if I'm going to perish. My emotions are ageless
and inspiration's only the whisper of a star away
and though my dark energy keeps expanding the starfields
further apart, so I have to walk further
to find a wild flower I can identify with,
the dark's beginning to shine like a black candle
with my spinal cord dipped in serpent fire
like a total eclipse of dragon's blood as its wick.

I rave like the vision of a sacred clown who's become
the misfit of his own crazy wisdom, heretically so,
to live up to the standards of my own disobedience,
a saintly truant in the labyrinths of spiritual malfeasance.
A shepherd of wolves, I don't drive the stars
up into the high fields like a small herd of scapegoats
like a hard rock on a mountain keeping
its fossils to itself like apocalyptic alibis
for the silence in the voice of the void that unwords me.

No truth ever mattered a damn to me
if it defeated people who were just trying
to get on with not knowing what to do with their lives.
No beauty ever took my breath away for long
that wasn't emotionally siderealized
or hadn't drowned like a sorceress on an island
in the oceans of the black rose of a new moon.
I prefer to look at the blessings of life
through a broken window more than
the polished mirror of a purified mind
blinded by its own blazing to the diamonds
that pour like stars from the eyes of weeping meteors
that have initiated the extinction
of too many, too much, without rancour
for the fragility of the afterlives in the ashes
that emerged from the inside out
into the available dimensions of a random future.

Time might observe the protocols of its waterclocks
for some who still drink from wishing wells
and hourglasses that are always pouring another
for the road, but in the intimacy of my solitude
time acts extemperaneously upon my heart
like a stranger who could always feel his way past
what he didn't know about what could hurt him
if he ever stopped long enough anywhere to find out.
I'm grateful to the abyss for the black hole
in the centre of my life that can't be fulfilled
galaxy after galaxy at a feast of light that keeps
my appetite for the moonrise of the mystery
intrigued and hungry. My mind was never an experiment
nor my heart the rube of experience.
I didn't map the rain to know where to go.
I let the mountain be my goat-footed guide to the top
and when it came time to come down,
I won my wings falling toward paradise
with more joy in taking the plunge
than I relished in the angelic aviary of my arrival
where nobody jumps unless they've got a parachute on.

Buff the risk with a safety net or you'll candle
like a daylily all the way down into an early grave
people used to say to me when I was a young precipice
ferociously faithful to exploring the nether depths of myself
like a comet jumping the orbitals of a dark halo
to shed a little light like a petal of the sun
on why I'd rather perish in the night like a firestorm
on a purple passage of the wind, than blossom
like the wildflower of a savage mystic
in the genetically engineered garden of a false dawn.

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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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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Obliterations Of Beauty And We Weep

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
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Compassion Is The Sweetness That Enters

Compassion is the sweetness that enters
the wounded apple of knowledge after
you've taken your first bite out of it.
It's not an antidote to the facts of life and death.
And you should know by now if you've suffered at all,
and it's impossible not to from the moment you open your eyes,
the night is not a reward, nor the lantern of the light
that goes before you on a graveyard shift of the stars.
Compassion is the oldest instinct of the heart
and first muse of the mind that can taste only
the blowing blossoms and bitter green apples of the spring,
gripe brain, before it ripens like a sunset in your blood.

That's why the heart knows more about it than the head.
And I expect, on that basis, no one is more capable
of loving us who must doubt that we're worthy of love
to live up to the truth of it than the dead who can open
the tiny koans of the seeds at the core of things
like the lockets of fortune-cookies that break
like twisted cosmic eggs in a rush to spread their wings
like waterbirds who write the lyrics of their songs on the fly.

Words for the eye. Words for the ear. Words
for the voice of the wind like black walnut trees
and kites in a storm. And if you really know how to listen,
I mean if you can hear the wavelength of a black snake
swimming across your blood like a mantra
of terrifying, beautiful wisdom that keeps its secrets
to itself, or hear the unfathomable oceans in the black rose
whose petals and eyelids are always smashing
like white eyelashes in a squall of sunbeams
against the breakwater of a white dawn that passes
like an albino eclipse in a moonlit leper colony
of extinct black rhinos. If you even remotely
hear what I mean when I speak like this sleepwalking
through a dream grammar like a prophetic skull in a trance,
words that dance like light on the mindstream
rejoicing in the clarity of the voice that expresses
the hidden message encoded in the genes of the fireflies.

You have mouths. Speak for yourselves.
Some like lighthouses along the banks of life.
Some like thieves with searchlights for eyes on a bomber's night
when everyone is underground and the bummers are out
plundering the evacuated houses of the zodiac.
Might be the ravings of a star struck maniac talking to himself
to make sure nobody else is listening. Might be
the surrealistic lament of a Dadaist night bird
singing out loud in its sleep for things it doesn't know
it longs for, or maybe a lunatic is waxing prophetic
in a labyrinth of his own echoes trying to sound his way out
of the mountains without end he's being trying to befriend
like a cloud or an eagle silvered a moment
like the ore of a dream in the corner of the eye
of a moonrise coming on like a hurricane
with a black pearl in its teeth. The eclipse of a sacred lie
compassion concedes to an alibi without a myth of origin.

Compassion is the child of imagination that identifies
with its simulacra of suffering by applying the heart
like a bloodbank to the wounded eidolons of eyeless images
that didn't know how to bleed, or breathe, or cry or see
until compassion tempered their impression of themselves
as paradigms of rationality, by shedding real tears
in an ice age of lenses that kept their illusory distance
from the stars that came out after the rain, wet and shining,
laughter radiating through our tears, because life isn't a dry fire.
It's the hand on the rudder of a lifeboat
that keeps you from drowning from the day you were born
in the undertow of the tides of the new moon
until the night of the full when you haul everyone aboard
who's been swimming through glaciers of tears
like baby mammoths for the last twenty-five thousand years
afraid of extinction if they ever stopped to catch their breath.

Compassion is accepting everyone's death as a portion of your own.
Everyone's life as your third eye, a vital organ of your own body.
Compassion is an undisciplined action of the heart.
Compassion arises like a moonrise of inspiration
in the eyes of the older sister of the muses
who walks too much alone as if she'd devoted her solitude
to the suffering of a wounded stranger she met along the way
when she let her hair down like willows of rain
to cool the scorched earth and slake the roots of pain
until they bloomed like foxfire in the shadow of her passing.

Most poets sit around the lesser fires of their art
trying to divine the smoke of what's burning in their hearts
like autumn leaves they've heaped into books
that smoulder in tears more often than they break into flames.
But if compassion turns her eyes toward you
like a star in the darkness beyond your blazing
the Milky Way runs like a bloodstream through your veins
and you see in terrifying clarity the great mystic details
in the deep watersheds of picture music efoliating
like wildflowers and galaxies, grails, fountains,
lunar herbs, and starfish raised up off the ground
to take their place among the shining, radiant with life,
in the low valleys and high fields of an imagination that heals.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Stars So Near

The stars so near it seems the approaching morning
could wet its thumb and forefinger
and pinching their wicks like intimate candles
that have held the lovers close
and the ghosts at bay all night
put them out with a hiss.
An ancient mirror deep within me
I couldn’t bring myself to bury
with the woman who once looked into it
is beginning to flood like a river of eyes with autumn rain
and I want to cry for things
that have departed like water birds
from their circuitous reflections on the mindstream
and leave the heart knocking
like an empty lifeboat against the rocks
that no one sings from now.
I’ve stared at the moon several nights in a row
as if we drank from the same skull
and I want to elevate my tears to a higher level
as a rite of passage worthy of what I mourn
but no lights on in the lockmaster’s house
me and the moon both know
how impossible it is to raise the dead
from their watersheds
by adding a few tears to a dry seabed
out of the largesse of the living
in the wake of so many shadows.
I’m trying to align my third eye like a bubble
in the middle of a balance beam
and build on the cornerstone of the moon
a Taj Mahal of lunar coral to commemorate
the loss of so much beauty
to the things it touched like braille
as if it wasn’t enough just to light them up
but parting the depths of its fathomless veils
open their eyes as well.
I shall turn three times in the silver grass
and stretching my body out like a scar upon the earth
lay down in a deer-bed by the river
with her absence bigger than the night for awhile
and listen to the frogs and crickets
as I used to listen for her footfalls on the creaking stairs
and the moon won’t lay its sword of light on the waters
like a vow of separation to keep us apart
and I shall ask every star
down to the sixth magnitude of time and shining
what has become of her who used to weave
English ox-eyed daisies into her hair
as if she were already among the constellations
showing off the lesser luminaries of earth
as if there were nothing so small
nothing so slighted or disregarded
no moment of life so devoid of inspiration
even the fireflies that can’t stay fixed in one place
long enough to beat a path into a zodiac
and elaborate their own creation myths
into something unborn and unperishing
weren’t enlightened
by the immaculate darkness of her transience.
To suffer everything as if it were a blessing she once said.
I look up through the leafless bough of an aging maple
twisted like a burnt match stick
whose fire’s just flared out.
I look up at the stars
as if they’d built their webs between the branches
like momentary dream catchers.
And I can’t manage it.

poem by Patrick White
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Looking At Stars From Spy Rock

Looking at stars from Spy Rock
on top of Foley Mountain,
Westport glowing like an alloy
of red algae and fireflies down below
around the sacred pools of small mouth bass
raised from fingerlings
to lure the fishermen of Hazelton Pennsylvania
to this pioneer pantry of wildlife up north.
I can remember you naming them out loud
like Santa Claus’ reindeer.
Deneb, Vega, Al Tair.
And I tried hard to look
but I couldn’t take my eyes off of you.
And I’m up here again by myself many years later
and there are two ghosts on the wind
casting their shadows on the Milky Way
two black holes in time
that took it all in
then disappeared.
We didn’t separate.
We just evaporated into thin air
and I can hear the flowers saying
in their small damaged voices
I’d rather die than put up with this time of year.
Semi-hibernating raccoons
and the occasional brown bear
looking for a last snack before sleep
before snow
before the flame of life
is turned down so low
it’s merely a candle living off
the lifespan of its own fat
just long enough to keep the dream
of what bears dream about alive
until hunger drives them out of their caves
twelve thousand years later
into a world they can no longer recognize
as the one that dressed up in their hides and their skulls
and spit-painted on their cave walls
and appealed to their power not to kill it outright
as it begged forgiveness for its trespass.
Bear magic on Foley Mountain.
Ursa Major in starlight.
And for awhile I thought you might be
my circumpolar girlfriend
and I could be your mystic star map.
You had the right ascension as me
but the wrong declination
and like everything else
that’s ever led me out of the wilderness
like the only direction left to go in
you rose and set over my event horizon
and what had been the fixed stars of my eyes and heart
wandered off like fireflies and chimney sparks
into a darkness I could only imagine
enhances your shining somewhere
like a warm breath of life and light
hovering in the cold night air
as mine is exorcised here.
We breathe the stars in
and then we breathe them out
and it’s been going on like this
for thousands of light years.
Three more nights
and the moon will catch up to Jupiter.
You said you couldn’t be famous
standing in my shadow
but what you didn’t realize at the time
I was the shadow of your shining
whenever you approached the earth
like Venus on a moonless night.
But how remote it all seems now.
Encounters of the human kind
reverting like the unploughed fields around here
to something intimately alien and wild.
We embodied all these stars once.
We stood here on this mountain once together
and breathed these vacant interstellar spaces in
as if we could hold all of space and time
like a single dropp of insight
into the circuitous blossoming
of our riverine hearts
and oceanic minds.
And what myth of spring fish
could fathom our depths
though it jump like Pisces into the boat?
Up here in my eagle-eyed eyrie
do these receding hills at my feet
remember anything as vividly as I do
as the sound of your voice when you spoke
and the mountain came down prophetically
like an avalanche of stone tablets
across the ups and downs
of the road that led us up here
to look into the empty beyond
as far as the light
we were given given to go by
whether it be the hundred billion stars
of Messier thirty-one
two million light-years away
like the sister galaxy you are to me tonight
just this smudge of light at eleven o’clock
above the middle star
of the constellation Andromeda
or a firefly in the spider mount of a parabolic mirror.
Sometimes you can notice things more clearly
that you can see head on at the time
out of the corner of your eye
as you look away from your line of sight
astronomical units of light later.
I have come back to those moments
from so long ago
like time with an expanded field of vision
of wildflowers dying all over the mountain
like cornflowers in the grave of a Neanderthal
incarnadined by red ochre
though none were ever buried here
we still share this common ground of death
or Indian tobacco at the eastern gates of theburial hut
of an Algonquin who once stood here as I did
and gazed upon the moon in wonder
estranged by the wound of the rapture
just moments before he disappeared for good
into the bone-box of his having been here once
to amaze his solitude with precipitous stars
looking up from the godless pulpit of Spy Rock.
The cedars sway in the wind
like children learning to swim beside a pool
ploughing the air with their arms.
And the shadows tremble
like the waters of life
inside the heartwood of a rootless tree
the moon ripples with forgotten springs
that once made the fish jump at fireflies
wavelengths out of reach of their eyes.
Sight is a kind of love.
As above so below
like the palindrome of the moon goddess Anna
in the Arabic jana
the English heaven
and the Greek ouranos
Romanized into Uranus analeptically.
O what a brutal exchange.
All that life and light and love
all those stars
all that seeing
just to exhume a few dead metaphors
and breathe a little life into them
as if you were giving
mouth to mouth
heart to heart
spirit to spirit
resuscitation to words
that once saw their whole life flash before them
before they drowned
up to their necks and out of their depths in stars.

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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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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Something Deeper Than Stars

Something deeper than tears to weep for you.
I weep blood. I weep the silence
on the backstairs with the screen door
that bangs like the sound of one hand clapping
all through the night at the slightest gust of wind
as if a constellation were trying
to strike up a insightful conversation
with a wet match, the sceptre of a spent blossom.
I need a moon deeper than water to drown in.
I need to dance the pain away
in a sword dance of serpents
that know how to carry a tune
like a well fledged arrow, a beautiful toxin,
straight to the heart of the mysterious apple
that's sitting on top of my head like a prophetic skull.
No flower can say. Not any number of song sparrows
returning to the budding tree in spring,
no green leaf of an innocent tongue,
not even this dry leaf of mine in autumn
writing lyrics on the wind no one can read,
not even among ghosts, can find a voice
that isn't already the dead language
of an absence that can't be adorned
by a seance of words.
I light no candles. I summon no gods.
No pretence of knowing where you've gone.
No black hole that's as empty as
your ring on the table, no halo
that ever fell as far from heaven.
Good-bye's too optimistic and farewell's
the rudder of a grave on the rocks.
And if I were to raise the paper sail
of another poem like the waxing phase
of the funereal moonboat
that carried you away,
I'd make it black. I'd raise it
like the shroud of a black magician
that can make things disappear,
like an eclipse at half mast
and patch it with the skull and crossbones
of a different phase of the moon on the dark side.
I wouldn't return your personal belongings
back to the morning like starlings and doves.
But there aren't enough sacred syllables
swimming like moonlit fish
in the watershed of the silence
to open this fountainmouth of grief
like an aviary of flightless birds.
Nor would I risk having you remember me,
and turn around like a false start,
supposing you can still recall anything at all,
like a light you left on in the hall
the night you left home for good.
You were magic while you were here to work it.
You were the black nun of an enlightened cult of one.
You were the black mass of the sun at midnight
and the blood sister of the moon
that nicked your finger
on both her crescent thorns at once
so one was the cure to the other's wound
like the eyes of a cat, the fangs of a snake.
Given how close to the moon you were
it didn't come as a surprise
when you started writing me loveletters
inscribed in bone as if you'd just invented
a whole new language out of your claws
to make love to a poet in the nude when the moon
didn't lay its silver sword down between us
to keep us a threshold apart from our fingertips.
And it wasn't long before the elixir began to work
and I lost count of the number
of consensual metaphors I had for your lips,
similitudes for the night skies
that surrounded your eyes in a delirium of stars
that revelled in the crazy wisdom
of their mystically inspired atmospheres.
As just as beautiful as they were,
so were they irresistibly dangerous.
How many light years now
have I poured this memory of them
like a love potion over my roots
and waited for you to bloom in my bloodstream
like stars and blossoms streaming
through the heartwood of an ageing tree
that has as many dead branches on it as it does leaves,
and like an orchard anticipating moonrise,
knew you weren't coming anymore,
and the night bird had no one to sing for?
But, hey, I'm still a better seance
than I am an exorcism and if you can hear me
calling the faithful to prayer
in all directions at once like a paper airplane
the boy in me has sent out to search for you
like a loveletter in a hurricane of razor wire,
dripping with clusters of blood
the size of hemorrhaging grapes,
fireflies caught in a spider-web
of starless constellations that aren't a sign
of anything except I miss you worst at night.
If you could sense the tremor
in even the slightest wavelength of light
I'm trying to shine on the darkness to find you,
I'd write you a holy book of sacred silence
inspired by the shadows in my blood
that overtake me like strangers from behind
with an urgent message not to return home
to what isn't there anymore.
I'd sit out here all night by myself
beside the black waters of this night creek
unravelling like a ribbon in mourning,
that's been talking to itself
as it walks in its sleep on the water,
and I would beseech the stars with my eyes
to let me know if they've seen you,
and in my heart I would entreat them
with the solo of a wounded wolf
raising its head up in a wild prayer
to catch a trace of you on the chilly night air,
to give me a starmap to when and where
I can see you face to face again
and touch your eyelids in your sleep
like crocuses coming up through the snow.
Like moonrise in the apple blow of the storm
that scattered us to winds like all these poems
I've tried to write for you ever since
as if you were still somewhere nearby
like another pair of eyes
in my pain and my solitude
watching from the woods
the stars, the water, the moon,
under the stones in the river
that mark your grave and name
above the flowing of this endless epitaph
of leaves and blossoms and poems
as if you alone could still read them,
like the comings and goings,
of waterbirds on the moon,
the first draft of words on the wind,
maple leaves and keys on the mindstream,
and still understand what I was trying to mean.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Silence Here

Silence here, long whispers of moonlight
suggesting things invisible appear,
occult constellations I read in reverse
on the chilly night air. Wildflowers
in the high abandoned starfields
soaked in the dew of ten thousand eyes
as the lone nighthawk of my overview of life
tilts its wings toward you as if the wrist
of the falconer were the bough of a tree
in the sacred groves on the island of Mona,
though I know you sleep in the shadows
of the mountains of Arizona.

Hear me, sweet one, do you in your dream?
I've filled your pillow with clouds
and the whimsy of mystical flight feathers
to replace the hard rock of the world
you lay your head down upon,
and pull the sword out of the wound
like the thorn of a star
from the palm of your hand,
from the kissing stone of your meteoritic heart.

And I circumambulate it thrice
like a rogue planet with shepherd moons
like lambs that lie down with the wolf
as if you were all directions of prayer at once
and I was marking out magic circles around
your house of life like a wolf star on the wind
high above the timberline
in an agony of longing to touch you
like candlelight in the secret shrine
where you go to heal the eyes of the flowers
the blazing of the desert sun
blinds like midnight at noon.

Too long I've been a lighthouse on the moon
for shipwrecks well past warning.

Too long I've been a night light in a morgue
to usher the ghosts of the dead to the best seats
in the darkened theatre of classic reruns
of the karmic movies they made
like double features of their lives.

Too long I've been the antidote of those
who were snake-bit by happy endings
that were mesmerized stone cold in the eyes
of snakeoil salesmen in a cult of spitting cobras.

Too long I've been the nightwatchman
who walks the long lonely halls
in a library of Coles notes and cheat sheets
where the ingenuous come to apprentice themselves
to the arcane grammars of an antiquated magic
that long ago dropped out of nightschool.

Too long I've been shedding
these old musty graduate robes
to walk alone in the skin of dragons
who know that true enlightenment
doesn't maintain a teacher, as the masters say,
making a deep bow
and then going their own way
knowing their small magic is merely
the porchlight to a palace of wisdom
where you leave your eyes on the threshold
of a doorway into a zodiac of eclipses
where all the house lights have been turned off
and aren't the signs of anything
you can see better in the dark than you can
by the light of fireflies trying
to organize their insights
into a constellation of first magnitude stars.

Existential mobiles! Humanizing chandeliers!
Who asks for passports from the mirrors
that coyote us through the desert
like mirages without any tears?
I'm a mountain range of ice bergs on the move.
I'm breaking up camp like a star cluster
to follow a gazelle across
the grasslands of the Sahara
long before paradise poured like sand
between the fingers of an hourglass
to tell it how beautiful it is
when it runs like a flash flood over the rocks
of a dry creek bed with a frayed delta
of lines around its eyes
like a waterclock of life
that knows it's never too late to meet the sea.
And how much thrives in the wake of the journey.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Weary Of The World Tonight

Weary of the world tonight. Can't stand the lies.
Some drunk loud-mouth out on the street
wants all the girls to know he's there,
My noise is bigger than your noise.
Someone playing a guitar badly in a doorway.
A homeless cat cries, lets out a howl
of torment as if its sinews were being keyed
as tight as guitar strings about to snap.
Out of the window that hasn't said anything yet:
you touch that cat again, slugger,
and I'll be right down with an axe
to give you a gender change. He looks up
startled. But all bullies are cowards
trying to deny it to themselves
while wearing their sister's underpants.

The cat makes a quick getaway
through a dark heritage alleyway.

Supercharged like a fire hydrant full of blood
throbbing through my temples, and demons
I haven't seen in years smiling darkly in the mirrors
my shadow always regretted like left-handed virtues
that got the job done. Demonic compassion,
colder than intelligence, with a deep
poetic sense of of infernal irony
whereas a muse ago in this specious present
I was longing for a small hobby farm
on the dark side of the moon, now
I'm a dragon eating waterlilies down
by the banks of my mindstream
quietly letting go of itself
like an unmoored lifeboat full of emptiness
drifting no where in particular I want to be
except here where I can shed my humanity for awhile
among the living and the dead
who don't care what I am and am not
as long as I'm not a threat to them.

Darkness, my solace, moon, my longing,
Star, warmer than any fire I've ever
sat around to exorcise my ghosts,
you, who've danced like my third eye
with the other two still chained to their irises,
the poetic lucidity that mentored me
in the ways of light and taught me
the creative rapture of the fish
that still swam like flashs of insight
to the surface of my oceanic tears,
I don't know how many light years
either of us have yet to shine or cry over,
but tonight, come down from your unindictable heights
and sit with me like the intimate stranger of a candle
in my eyes, in my soul, in my blood,
be the small flame that trembles in my breath for awhile,
be the sole illumination of my spirit for awhile,
ease my bodymind with the elixir of your radiance
emanating from the inside, and let me
be born again of that fire that burns within me,
purge my starmud of these urns and bones and black dwarfs
that weigh me down like disappointed bells
and feisty mastodons in the tarpits of my heart
that sink deeper the more they struggle to get out.

And I don't even care if you're the last firefly
to transcend my cosmic solitude like a wavelength
of the transmorphic singularity at the beginning of time
that woke the valley up with the roar of a dragon
in that elemental morning of mad genius
that's be the dawn of every moment ever since
in this chiliocosm of energies and forms
flashing out of the mystery of the questions we ask
about the inconceivability of being here to ask them.

No purpose. No meaning. Except the one
we all live vaguely as ourselves like a nebularity
out of which we might precipitate stars
of a different order of shining beyond what we can see.
Sit with me awhile as if we both had the same nature.
And you can look at the world and me through my eyes
and I'll look at you through yours as if I were seeing you
from the inside out, and there were ashes in my heartwood
even before I began to burn, as in yours,
there were the urns of heavy elements even
before they were born of their own afterlife.

Be that moment within me when time breaks into light
and even the shadows, like sunspots, shine
in their own right, and nothing is disturbed,
not even the silence that is intensified when the fish jump
or a dog is barking hills away at what approaches
out of the dark, and the waterbirds in their onceness
might seem to fly away, but have been here from the start.
Fill my life with the unimaginable splendour
of all those nights you've looked down upon the earth
and witnessed the horror and the wildflowers
in the same breath on a cold windowpane in winter
etching the light like an artist with an eye for life
or the praying mantis of a small telescope in the summer
its legs spread like a doe about to drink from her own reflection
or one half of a collapsed bridge to the other side
of everywhere at once. I don't ask for bliss or enlightenment.
Just show me how you make the shadows luminous again.
Even on a starless night, how to mourn like the eyeless rain
even as it renews the leaves and roots of the constellations
of the wild asters with their violet plinths and yellow suns
burning fiercely as a distant relation of your myriad myths of origin.

Do that for me and I'll show you how to intensify
the darkness into a diamond chrysalis of transformation
like a deeper mystic bliss in life, enhanced by the ores of pain,
as your light is by the night, or the flying stickshifts
of the dragonflies put the waterlilies in park for the night
as if they'd just got out of a car by the side of an unknown road,
not to find out where they are, but just
to gape up at the stars in the midst of decay
and let the wonder of it all heal me as it always has
by showing me how to make a cradle out of a grave
or the long, slow art of a human out of a wounded heart.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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What I Would Say To You

What I would say to you if you were near,
if this definitive namelessless that walks me down to the river
to add my tears to the flowing, to sit on my rock
and stare at my self in reverse on a throne of water
enrobed in my star-dazzled solitude, setting fire
to poems I never wanted to own,
every burning lily of paper floating away
like another crown I've set free
from this domain of air and shadows
to seek its own regency, its own unknowable moment of shining,
weren't the eyeless oblivion that engendered us both;
I would say to you in the pyres and the petals
of these wild wounded swans, in the black down and ash
of these exorcised ghosts, in the dream wakes
of these poems that confess their love to the flames
with every exhalation, with every feather of smoke
gone to smudge the sky of the stars that brought them here
in the form of a man, I would say,
it was always the hive of your silence
that was the fairest likeness of you, the bluest honey
rarer than night, I've ever tasted.
And I'd try not to talk too much,
letting the fish jump for the two of us,
and the winged serpents of the luminosity slip away
like things not said into the water
and I'd draw you in under the bough of my arm
that was never much of a yoke
as if you were the fruit of an astounded tree,
and hold you a long time in the vastness
before I turned to kiss you for everything
and fall down back into the silver grass
to make love to you on the moon.
And you in my arms again, your cheek on my chest
your leg across mine, my hand, a wing of tender caresses,
I would mingle blood and starlight
with the wine of your body and being
like a chalice lying empty by the river
that has brought us both to drink from one another
like the deer that will come out later from the grove
to drink from their own reflections. And gestures of life and death
would flutter through me like the red-winged blackbirds
among the scepters of the cattails,
and I'd want to thank and accuse the incomprehensible sky
for this night of being human long enough
to understand its brevity is its beauty
and its brevity goes on forever like you and I,
burnt poems, wounded swans, lovers, indelibly.

Life is suggested to us, never proclaimed,
like the course of the river, as the limbs of the fallen oak
look as if they're trying to swim, and one poem
more enduring than the rest,
floats downstream under a frozen elbow
raised to take the next stroke,
and with a final flare as it comes to the end of itself
levitates up into the air and disappears like a buddha
into the absolute perfect emptiness of an enlightenment
that grasps at nothing. Form
is emptiness; emptiness is form, and the poem
had a good death I suppose as a lifeboat in flames,
and though you're not with me now,
we've never been apart, as the shadow of an unknown bird
lands on the water, and then another,
and I think of them as you and I
arriving somewhere together out of the sky and the night
and the bright vacancy
between the sidereal knots
in the nets of the constellations, to drift among the stars awhile
weary of flying, two poems back from the dead.

And I wonder what love is, knowing
love is I wonder what love is,
as the fireflies flash their assent,
and the cars pass in the distance on highbeam,
and the frogs spring away from their flints. And I come here
as much for the island that spreads the stream
into the waterlegs of a woman
like the orchid of her sex, as to be alone with myself
like a wharf deeply saddened by a thousand farewells,
to launch my fleet of poems
like the blossoms of the abandoned orchard on the far bank.
I like being a child alone on the shores of things,
turning the stones over, lost like a fragrance
among the whispering flowers, ruling my loneliness like a stick, .
and I've always asked questions no one could answer,
awed by the fact of being here at all
under stars I can name like personal friends, but here,
everything's got a mouth of its own to answer,
and the answers seem more timeless for being left unsaid.

And I'm never as old by these waters
as I am anywhere else, and the dusty apricot of the moon
you told me to watch as you would
is always so much more on this undulant black mirror
than a window will ever be able to say to a man at a desk.
There's a birch and three willows
and the third of the three is you
dipping your hair in the water
as if you were trying to root in glass.
And it's no surprise to know you know how
to drink the whole river in a single gulp
and swallow a whole star with your eyes
in a single glimmer
the way a solitary dropp of water
at the tip of the tongue of the stargrass
entirely fits the entire skin of the sky
because I already know how you can consume the whole of me
from the nightsong in the flight of the bird in my voice
and from a single hair of your head,
or the eyelash on your cheek
that is all that separates us now,
from the ashes on the last breath of a single burning poem,
so I can be here with you as I have always been
on the other side of death
where everything in creation
above and below this river of night,
from the furthest galaxy
to the dragonfly on my right
is expanding like a lily of fire into us,
as if we were the emptiness that receives the light.
So it's easy to know where it's all going;
releasing these little fire-boats on the stream,
raising themselves up like the breathless flowers of a dream
rooted in the infinite depths of the knowing,
it's always, like birds and stars and fish
been flowing into us.

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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What I Would Say

What I would say to you if you were near,
if this definitive namelessness that walks me down to the river
to add my tears to the flowing, to sit on my rock
and stare at my self in reverse on a throne of water
enrobed in my star-dazzled solitude, setting fire
to poems I never wanted to own,
every burning lily of paper floating away
like another crown I've set free
from this domain of air and shadows
to seek its own regency, its own unknowable moment of shining,
weren't the eyeless oblivion that engendered us both.
I would say to you in the pyres and the petals
of these wild wounded swans, in the black down and ash
of these exorcised ghosts, in the dream wakes
of these poems that confess their love to the flames
with every exhalation, with every feather of smoke
gone to smudge the sky of the stars that brought them here
in the form of a man, I would say,
it was always the hive of your silence
that was the fairest likeness of you, the bluest honey
rarer than night, I've ever tasted.
And I'd try not to talk too much,
letting the fish jump for the two of us,
and the winged serpents of the luminosity slip away
like things not said into the water
and I'd draw you in under the bough of my arm
that was never much of a yoke
as if you were the fruit of an astounded tree,
and hold you a long time in the vastness
before I turned to kiss you for everything
and fall down back into the silver grass
to make love to you on the moon.
And you in my arms again, your cheek on my chest
your leg across mine, my hand, a wing of tender caresses,
I would mingle blood and starlight
with the wine of your body and being
like a chalice lying empty by the river
that has brought us both to drink from one another
like the deer that will come out later from the grove
to drink from their own reflections. And gestures of life and death
would flutter through me like the red-winged blackbirds
among the sceptres of the cattails,
and I'd want to thank and accuse the incomprehensible sky
for this night of being human long enough
to understand its brevity is its beauty
and its brevity goes on forever like you and I,
burnt poems, wounded swans, lovers, indelibly.

Life is suggested to us, never proclaimed,
like the course of the river, as the limbs of the fallen oak
look as if they're trying to swim, and one poem
more enduring than the rest,
floats downstream under a frozen elbow
raised to take the next stroke,
and with a final flare as it comes to the end of itself
levitates up into the air and disappears like a buddha
into the absolute perfect emptiness of an enlightenment
that grasps at nothing. Form
is emptiness; emptiness is form, and the poem
had a good death I suppose as a lifeboat in flames,
and though you're not with me now,
we've never been apart, as the shadow of an unknown bird
lands on the water, and then another,
and I think of them as you and I
arriving somewhere together out of the sky and the night
and the bright vacancy
between the sidereal knots
in the nets of the constellations, to drift among the stars awhile
weary of flying, two poems back from the dead.

And I wonder what love is, knowing
love is I wonder what love is,
as the fireflies flash their assent,
and the cars pass in the distance on highbeam,
and the frogs spring away from their flints. And I come here
as much for the island that spreads the stream
into the water legs of a woman
like the orchid of her sex, as to be alone with myself
like a wharf deeply saddened by a thousand farewells,
to launch my fleet of poems
like the blossoms of the abandoned orchard on the far bank.
I like being a child alone on the shores of things,
turning the stones over, lost like a fragrance
among the whispering flowers, ruling my loneliness like a stick.
And I've always asked questions no one could answer,
awed by the fact of being here at all
under stars I can name like personal friends, but here,
everything's got a mouth of its own to answer,
and the answers seem more timeless for being left unsaid.

And I'm never as old by these waters
as I am anywhere else, and the dusty apricot of the moon
you told me to watch as you would
is always so much more on this undulant black mirror
than a window will ever be able to say to a man at a desk.
There's a birch and three willows
and the third of the three is you
dipping your hair in the water
as if your roots weren't enough for the glass.
And it's no surprise to know you know how
to drink the whole river in a single gulp
and swallow a whole star with your eyes
in a single glimmer
the way a solitary dropp of water
at the tip of the tongue of the stargrass
entirely fits the entire skin of the sky
because I already know how you can consume the whole of me
from the night song in the flight of the bird in my voice
and from a single hair of your head,
or the eyelash on your cheek
that is all that separates us now,
from the ashes on the last breath of a single burning poem.
I can be here with you as I have always been
on the other side of death
where everything in creation
above and below this river of night,
from the furthest galaxy
to the dragonfly on my right
is expanding like a lily of fire into us,
as if we were the emptiness that receives the light.
So it's easy to know where it's all going,
releasing these little fire-boats on the stream,
raising themselves up like the breathless flowers of a dream
rooted in the infinite depths of the knowing,
it's always, like birds and stars and fish in the flowing,
been going to us.

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