En.Citatepedia^®.ro

One Day You Realize You're Looping

One day you realize you're looping,
Mars retrograde in Virgo,
through all the stations in life
you once progressed through,
and the door you return to
is a second innocence
more profoundly seasoned
than the one you first left by.
Everything else in the universe
is regressing ahead in accord with time
like a night sky doubling back on itself
to take its tail in its mouth
as a symbol of regenerative eternity.
Or moonrise. How likely is it
I'm not? That I'm
the only long-haired wavelength
that got straightened out
on a nineteen sixties ironing board
like the girlfriends
I was always waiting for back then.
That there's no twist in my stairwell?
No wheeling red-tailed hawks in my thermals?
No spirals in the sunflowers of my genomes?
No starfish in the bend of my galactic propellers?
No Sufis at the dance. Straight-laced crucifixions
of corkscrews and bottles of wine
that nailed it wrong
and turned back into sober water.
Not a chance. Or as they say in calculus
a straight line is just a special form of a curve.
Ask space. Ask the atoms.
I'm always one step behind my next birth
at an unexpected bend in the river.
You remember that old Etruscan god,
Vertumnus, whose name meant river's turning,
and later, adopted by the gullible Romans
turned into Morpheus, the shapeshifter?
I think the zodiacal kings of Etruria
got it more right
than the perfectionists who keep
trying to get it righter,
and water and light and dream
are closer to my original nature
than this snake of a road
I've been riding like black ice for light years
in a holy war of spurs and fangs,
the sacred thorns of a black rose
in a last duel with the first
and last crescents of the moon.
And as Lao-Tzu says in the Tao Te Ching
what isn't soft and supple
turns brittle and breaks
like a cataract of thin ice
over a flowing lens
it's easy enough to drown in
if you lose you're focus in the rapids.
Even glassblowers must need to cry
real tears now and again
that splinter like rain at their feet.
The fittest cornerstones all do Yoga.
Their twisted like the roots of trees
not a square uncarved block
of disciplined quicksand.
Look at the synchronous swimmers
in the undulation of an hourglass,
the S curve of a woman's figure,
the sign of a long distance snake in the desert
the Egyptians used as a glyph for intelligence.
Can you hear the same creek at midnight I do
whispering its way through the woods
as if it had no one to tell its secrets to but itself
taking the long way home like waterlilies
just coming into bloom
along the banks of the mindstream?
Makes me want to float poetic moonboats
like enlightened shipwrecks down river
when the fleet comes in
like Japanese plum blossoms in Atlantis
with a cargo of koans and haikus on board
that could be easily mistaken for loveletters.
And, hey, whether it's Cygnus above
in the Summer Triangle,
or a black swan on the Ottawa River,
I'm happy to take this trip alone
shooting the rapids of time
like an urgent waterclock
afraid of drowning in a flashback of its life
or a lifeboat full of moonlight
that came to the rescue of itself.
I won't beat the dust
out of the thread-bare wavelengths
of the flying carpets of life like stars
or houseflies that got in the way
of my broken window.
And o when I was young
I used to pray the day would never come
when I would talk like this,
but as the years turn into eras,
you can't help but see
a lot of things in life
some of which you wish you hadn't.
The beauty and the terror.
The candle in the dark doorway
at the back of the morgue,
whose light can go no further
than a prayer for the dead
behind closed eyelids.
Ferry, chariot, or limousine
it's still Charon at the toll gate.
No exit, no entrance,
thresholds of light upon light,
petals of a black rose
blooming in the shadows
on the far side of the moon
like the flight plan of a crow feather
that doesn't consult the tower anymore
for permission to take off and land
and leaves the trees to the night birds
to exorcise their longing
and by their singing,
as their fruits, be known.
Every step of the way
I've stood at the gate of a stranger
that looked a lot like me yesterday
without this death mask on
that doubles as a blossom
of the full moon on a dead branch.
Green bough. Dead branch.
Same song.
And the lights play on
long after the music's over.
You can see and hear it
in the picture-music of the stars
that shine over you even after
both you and they
ahead of your own light
by the time it gets
to where it's going are
are long gone, gone, gone,
altogether gone beyond
firewalking with virgins on Mars
like bridges and crosswalks in transit.
You can't pour the universe
out of the universe
like a fish in a waterclock
that jumps up into your moon boat
at the strike of midnight at noon
to tell you what hour it is
when you know that every hour
every step, every breath,
every river, road, gate and doorway
is a death in life experience of this one.
Not the wounded wavelength
of a heartbeat on crutches
come to a game of snakes and ladders
that can't find anything to lean on
on the opposite side of the river
because the mindstream has no banks
and the bridges go on forever
like the wavelengths of snakes
with their tails in their mouth
going the way they came
like bouquets and fountains,
tears in the valley
that echo on the mountain
like snow at the feet of the stars
back into their deep watersheds
where the dry seas of the dead mingle
with the ebb and neap of the living
like the moon on the waters of life.
And I mustn't forget
as I sometimes do
even when I'm drowning
like a starfish in my own waters
that this flash of life,
this brevity of a firefly,
this lifespan of an insight
into this life, this death,
unborn, unperishing,
is just a galaxy's way
of bringing me back down to earth
without forgetting where I come from.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Night Dances With Itself Like An Only Child

The night dances with itself like an only child
to the sounds of its own silence
when it thinks no one is watching.
Every falling leaf, a gesture of the hands,
poised, a word, a bird, a butterfly on a branch,
a sacred syllable from an alphabet that can dance,
caught in the updraft of a momentary insight
of falling to paradise like a flightfeather of light,
and landing the move just right, just so, with perfect timing.

The maples by day, easels for hot palette paintings,
red shift through red, orange, yellow, green
from the outside in toward the trunk, same
as a rainbow, same as the dynastic colours of a sunset.
Same as the fires of life returning to the root.
Same as the starmaps of the visionaries
flying like shamans from the nests they were fledged in.
Same as the ripening of the fruits of the earth,
or roses with green stars under their eyelids.

Different instruments, different voices,
the wind, the rasping of the leaves, the beaver
slapping the startled flesh of the water at my approach,
a twig snapping its drumstick on a rim shot
and the crow, and the squeaking bats, and the lapping
of the waves like the plectra of an aquamarine harpsichord
at the whole notes of the rocks, but a confluence
of picture-music washing the roots of the dead violins
of the wild irises and the timpani of cattails along the mindstream.

Merrily, merrily, row your boat, life is but a dream.
But to judge from the windfalls of green planets
shaken from the black walnut trees, it's a dream
that's urgent with the myriad realities of a multiverse
waking up in a place like here, and a time like now
with a lavish appetite for inhabiting itself
as if appearance weren't just the rind
that had to be peeled away like the skin and the shell
of the meat of the real, the shapes of the known worlds
the rat snakes shed like intimate illusions
that have naturally outgrown themselves,
the new moon in the arms of the old, like a nightsky
leaving the Milky Way, a mythically deflated windsock
tangled in the tree line like a runway that tried to fly by itself.

Now the Great Shedding as the earth turns
like the old abandoned mill wheel upstream
like a circular waterclock making linear time
take its tail in its mouth like an eternal recurrence
that's always pouring itself out of itself like life
into the emptiness between the equinox of one thought
and the solstice of the next like the silence between heartbeats,
the night between the stars, like the inseparable gap
between the distant moon and the intimacy of the moon's reflection
on the newly surfaced dark skin of the water sequencing
its pentatonic scales to the seasonal themes of the mindstream
you can't step into twice, as Heraclitus said in Ephesus long ago,
though it seems that way if all you're doing is dogpaddling
like a delinquent green apple on a snow covered bough, instead
of going along with the perennial renewal of the flow
by letting go of your water skin with its lunar tattoo
like the bright vacancy of an old silo of the light
for the dark abundance of the new insight
into the nature of life when it full in October.

The fall. This hour of my becoming
when everything is burning like the sumac
with the fires of life but nothing is consumed.
Because fire doesn't burn fire and death is unperishing.
And autumn is no less of a transformation than spring
as this new day dances as readily with the old woman
watching from her kitchen window as it does the young girl,
than the rain is to the tides of a lunar ocean
swaying in its shadows as if it were dancing
with its river reeds like a lonely child
in the embrace of her imagination,
like a poet in the grip of his crazy wisdom
flirting like a firefly with the dragons of his madness
without listening to the search parties of the lighthouses
bellowing like the foghorns of mournful trains back on shore
being swept away into the distance like nightwatchmen
and unconvincing ghosts. Things are unmooring
like lifeboats full of seeds and the souls of the dead
taking to their wings like the oars of waterbirds,
and the lowest of earthbound snakes
are dreaming of feathering their scales
into the vans of a dragon firewalking with stars
around the wobbling axis of the earth
on a potter's wheel, turning it like sentient starmud
that's fired up in autumn like an urn that burns like a kiln.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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As Much As I Love The Stars

As much as I love the stars, I know
the spirit must seek its lost radiance
in the midst of the filth of this world,
even when its third eye is trying
to wash it off in tears it really means.
Under the half-closed eyelid
of the pine cone pagoda in oceanic meditation
is a fire-seed waiting for immolation
like an overdue urn about to give birth.
And do you see how the moon
feathers the waves with silver,
and the breathing waters so much
like the flesh of a woman undulating
under the caress of an unaccustomed hand
shines back like fish swimming through a starmap?

As above so below. Same with inside and outside.
Astrophysics is psychology. Noumena, phenomena.
Are you looking for a unified, field theory of your mind?
Study that small sacred syllable of a black ant
with the torn wing of a butterfly
under full sail in its mandible
it's taking back to the heap
of a thriving passage tomb burial
like a high card it's going to lay on the table
without intending to call anyone's bluff.

The moon on the lake isn't timed.
Death's not too late. Life's not too early.
Not all the flowers bloom at once
in a wave of mass hysteria at a sports stadium.
Time is as generous to the dandelion
as it is to the hyacinth or the rose.

When a total eclipse of the soul
can be as illuminating to a firefly
as the enlightenment of the full moon
can be to the mad at harvest time
and the night bird sings on the same branch
out of the same longing
as the mourning dove does
on the burgeoning bough,
how far must a wave look for the grail
before it realizes it's swimming in it
and by virtue of it having never been lost or found,
like the universe you're surrounded by
dipping its other wing in the cup you drink from
like blood from your own prophetic skull
or an elixir of love from the goblet of a black tulip,
as an antidote to falling into a cult of trances,
trying to teach rattlesnakes to ghost dance for rain
when everywhere you look as far as the eye can see,
nothing but the bleached bones of their vertebrae
crumbling like aqueducts across a sea of sand
looking for the holy hourglass to green it again?

When things are like this, why send
a caravan of mirages like thought-trains
on a pilgrimage for water on the moon?
Is a course correction more innocent
than its original direction or is it
just another change of heart on the part
of a weathervane that thinks linearly
it's got its hand on the rudder of the wind?

Best thing to do in a storm
is let go of the wheel of birth and death
and either go down with the ship like a constellation,
or trust in a bubble-shaped universe you still might float
like a turbulent waterlily above the turmoil of it all,
anchored to the bottom like a key on a kite
to lure the lightning to your spinal cord
the way copulating snakes make their own caduceus,
twin wavelengths from the same inner matrix
ascending like helical thermals under a dove's wings,
so that dragons are born of cosmic eggs
that know how to heal fire with fire
that can consume itself like life
without ever getting burnt out
even when autumn's coming on
and you can begin to smell
the smoke and ashes on its breath.

Enlightenment the inspiration of the search,
the spirit returns to the candle in your hand,
to dance with the flame of life within you
on your own threshold, in your own doorway as you realize
like someone waking up from a dream
in their own bed, their head on a softer pillow
than they imagined a moonrock could be
at one sixth the gravity of earth, what
was there to aspire to that could possibly be
higher and wiser than a cloud circling a mountain
or down in the valley where the stars slum
once they get off the night shift, more compassionate
than a honey bee in the eye of a stargazer lily
smothering it in a rusty ochre dust storm of pollen
the way we prepared our dead when we lived in caves
to bloom like a hive when its spirit returns to matter
in its next incarnation as a gust of wildflowers on Mars.
Hawkweed and Indian paintbrush I would think.
And the unusual fruits and flowers that can sprout
from a windfall of intensely radiant meteor showers
flung out of the darkness by the hands of generous sowers
that were ploughing the moon for themselves
long before the ox of the mind showed up
like the blessing of a delusional dependency
that makes you think, gone to seed, you need it.
When the truth has always been mindful
and mindlessly green as the thorns and the leaves
of the locust trees in spring coming into blossom
as easily as the mindstream follows its own lead everywhere
with nothing but its own flowing for a navigator.

No gate, no lock, no pivot, no hinge, no waterclock
trying to put the fire of life out in a bucket brigade
of community-oriented arsonists, departure
never any further off the beaten path from home
than its arrival can be lead astray
by the shadow of the return journey
it casts behind it like the widening wake
of a waterbird's wings unravelling
the flying carpet of the water that wove it
like wavelengths of the hidden harmonies
that are on your side like your eyes are
when you step out of the blazing house of life
once in a while, into the expansive solitude
of your own inimitably creative darkness,
without a candle, a firefly, a lightning strike
for a guide, and look up, just look up
in any direction you wish, and don't pick any one
of the six thousand stars you can see
with the naked eye in the country,
no matter you don't know their names
or myths of origin, or much about shepherd moons,
or what an antikythera is, then run around
looking for an underground circumpolar sage
to show you on a starmap where your shining is at
like the light of the star, though you cry
in bliss and sorrow, delusion and insight,
you can't wash out of your own eye
anymore than you can Venus in the dawn
when you're sitting on a mountain under a Bodhi tree
trying to attain the unattainable empty-handed
in the same breath that's been giving it all away
for light years, inexhaustibly, like a flower-mouth
of enlightenment in everything you say or do,
the world in the creative wake of whatever medium
that's shapeshifting into you like water into fish,
darkness into star, sky into a bird on the wing
in a homesick sunset, or the shining of the source
like the lantern in your hand you needlessly labour
at keeping lit to go look for it without realizing
it's your own blazing that blinds you to the gift
of what the darkness arrays before you like candles and stars
and nocturnal waterlilies opening like a new moonrise
amazed by the occult mystery of the fire that burns
in the subliminal watersheds of your fathomless eyes.

In this boundless space, why should you be surprised
behind all the masks of God, her best disguise
when the hidden secret wished to be known
and she revealed herself, was your own face,
your eyes, your mouth, your ears, your voice alone
pouring the universe like the light of picture-music
into your own ears like the spirit of a word
that can't be enlightened until it's been heard by you.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Scouring The Patina Of Time Off With Stars

Scouring the patina of time off with stars
the way I used to grind pyrex plates
with varying grades of carborundum
down into telescopic mirrors, then silver them
with a vapour of aluminum to add
to the luster of their parabolic eyes.
Been looking into the darkness so long
I'm beginning to shine on my own.
Now from moment to moment
there's as much darkness coming out of the light
as there are black holes sand-blasting
the hour-glass shape of this bubble of the multiverse
with firestorms of desert stars as I make my way
from one oasis to the next where the mirages
wander in out of the night to drink
from the reflections of their own faces
with hands cupped like the hulls of leaking lifeboats.

I don't believe a life of delusion is any less painful
than a life of enlightenment, even if
your scarecrow self is finally standing naked
under a full moon that's come to realize
that an orbit isn't the same as an enlightenment path
that can loop back on itself like a snake or a shoelace
or the retrograde motion of Mars, without
wandering off the road you were meant to walk
because that's the way you went. Give them both
sixteen ounce gloves and let reality
have it out with delusion in eternity
like two siblings of the same dark mother
trying to get some rest from the racket
after giving up on interceding
by putting some distance between them
light years out of earshot of the nightbirds
that have been longing for her return ever since.

Even the first bliss of the blossoming of illumination
grows sad if it's not wholly shared like an orchard
with everyone as the wind turns around like a fist
flowering into a more open-handed approach to life.
Enlightenment is in everyone like a wavelength
is in a particle when no one is watching.
And if today you're an angel in a coma of ice
tomorrow the diamonds will fall out of your dark halo
and slowly thaw you out as you get closer to the light
like a comet plunging into the sun like the vapour
of a bridal veil you've finally shed like a snakeskin
that had to come off like the white-out of the eclipse
you were living, to see the stars that were rooted
in the darkness within emerging out of your own starmud
like waterlilies and larkspur and the peony buds
of the remote observatories on cold mountaintops
breaking into life like planets at a suggestion from the ants.

Stations of our perishing, perhaps. Phases of the moon
topping my skull up again like the cup that she drinks from
with the crazy wisdom of the lunatic she takes for a companion.
First crescent after the crone. Death's door left ajar
to let a little of the light out for those of us
who like to walk down long country roads alone at night
brindled by shadows, runged by black flames
like ladders of prophetic fire with nothing left to lean on
but the event horizons of their own imaginations
exploring the inevitable exits and entrances
of the passage of life like a waterclock of stars
descending the dark stairwells of the night with the maple keys
to the secret cellars where they age the best wine
by letting it stare into the dark so long
it begins to shine like a blind dream with a light of its own.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Living On The Cutting Edge Of The Lunar Waste

Living on the cutting edge of the lunar waste
I made of my last moonrise. A truce
with underwhelming circumstances for awhile,
no apparent pitfalls on a Saturday night in Perth,
too cold for snakes, and the leaves playing their cards
close to earth and the air a knife at your throat,
I can remember when I tried harder to exist,
and it's still a holy war every day just to subsist
and not let it scar your spirit into being cauterized
like a bad tattoo of the moon you had effaced,
but tonight I seek the ease of a solitude older than humans
down in the wetlands of the Tay River just off
Sunset Boulevard before you cross the first bridge.

Waist high in the broken antennae of the brittle grass
yellow as the fossils in a graveyard
of green praying mantes, decultified romantics,
I pad the skull of rock I usually sit on like a prophetic throne
with the old manuscripts of fallen maple leaves,
recalling lines from poems like lyrical snippets of chromosomes
I'd written many years ago to adapt my heart
to the changes it had to go through to recast
the cannon it was into the life of a shapeshifting bell
with the pulse of a nightbird lamenting the dead
instead of a twenty-one gun salute like a firing squad
aimed at the stars. Death is the saddest loss of discipline
the spirit will ever be called upon to master in order to survive.

It was sitting here one night, staring into the eye socket
bored into the albino nugget of a crow's skull,
the boney harps of its wings torn off their hinges
like gates that weren't strong enough to keep something out,
as the black flight feathers of a long eclipse slowly passed
across my eyes, that I realized, dead or alive,
existence is an interactive creative medium that doesn't care
whether you live it like a seance or an exorcism
and there are untold ages of the shining left
even in the oldest ashes of a star strewn on the path
of these long nocturnal firewalks through the mind
and that hello and farewell were the two wings
of the same waterbird, beating in unison
that empowered it to fly like a phoenix of imagination
out of an aviary of urns of its past lives
that might not sing for awhile but never lose their voice.

Cultivate the kind of spirit that can sing to you in the silence
when you're down, about the beauty of just being here
to live it, though you don't want to hear it,
you want to drown in your sorrow like a bell
but somehow the sound of life cuts through you
like a lunar blade with a growing edge
through wounded water and you can't help but wonder
what your ghost would give just to be here again
if only one more time, to resonate with the pain
like a back up singer to the universe,
who knows all the loneliest lyrics by heart
like a waterbird out on the river late at night.

If only to hit one perfect note of sadness, one tine
of separation and suffering like a phantom waterlily
adding its shining to the light like the art
of knowing how to paint starmaps on your tears
indelibly on water for light years to come
to let people know you were once here,
you listened as they will by the side
of this river of life to the same songs, hurt and alone,
as they must if they want to step out of the chorus
and sing solo through their tears in their own voice
before they're gone to a hundred billion stars
that are listening to the same echo
being whispered in their ears like the fires of life
carried away by the desire to live on
like the empty lifeboat of a song full of moonlight
drifting down river to an ocean of awareness
where the gateways of the crow are refeathered
like the exit and entrance of an eclipse of wings
still keeping time to the picture-music that shines
like a new moonrise in the voice of a mindstream that sings
its way through the woods at night alone like a wild grape vine
sustaining the tears of its spiritual high notes until they turn
into the euphoric lunacy of a poetic wine aged in an earthly urn.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Morning After Everything

for Luke Cochrane

Saturday morning rain in Perth
and things seem as intimately far off and strange
as the new maps of water running down the windowpane.
No birds on the black boughs of the November trees
and black mirrors in the empty funeral home parking lot
and on the other side of me
the stalwart bloodbrick of a wet church
that looks better in the nicotine lingerie
and dusky seaspray
of a single yellow floodlight at night
that can't get it up to be a lighthouse.
It would be a lie to say that I'm not in love
and happily alone, but I most wistfully am,
as I excuse myself for being me
and put myself off like the small death of another way
I could have taken to get back home, but didn't.
November's an orphanage after the last kid has left
and I'm sure there's an ancient chthonic wisdom
under the duff and detritus
of all these slick, leechy leaves
that the earth has applied to herself like a poultice
to draw the violets and worms out in spring,
but right now my mouth is not a wound
with anything deep to say
about things too deep to be said
and there are memories of women and friends in my head
sleeping like keys in the bottom of a drawer
that I have saved for when the day comes
to open the flowers and doors
that I've forgotten,
all the soft sorrows that rime the radiance
of the halo around a black hole
haunted by these ghosts of light.
I am absorbed like tears in a tenderness of grey
and there's more healing than thorn
in the cool aloe of the air
moist with a seance of emotions
that gust lightly around me
as if yesterday were merely a fragrance
hovering over an eye of wine
like the dust and smoke of today
that bottles its purity like water.
Sometimes love passes like a glacier over you
and there are runes and scars and striations on your skin
and lakes and craters and eyes the sky fills in
and the sun comes out like an exorcist
and you feel like you've been baptized in ice
or tucked into the crevice of a wailing wall
like a baby mammoth, or an unanswered prayer
and you try not to care
that you're a freak of your own evolution
trying to clone yourself out of the museum into a zoo
and that all these people are staring at you
like a missing link between the parentheses of your tusks
that have unhinged you from the gate of time
you once swung on like your next breath,
and if you were asked about the extremes of mercy
you would say, without hesitation, death.
Sometimes it's that hard to accept
that nothing that happens here, including death
is ever over, and that the absence of something or someone
doesn't mean they've ceased to exist
like footprints that lead down to a river.
Because we all live the same beginningless beginning
that is the once and forever of this universe
even if it should call itself home occasionally like an eye,
we go on living and dying each other alone
like an extinct species always asking the time
when the moonlight burns like lime in a grave
and then, once more, absurdly never the same
riots of flying fish leap from every dropp of rain
that remembers the passion of the wave
offering itself in the life of every moment
like a jewel thawing, or an icecap over the eye
or the opening of a brittle window
to be scoped out by the nightwind
that longs like a thief for the sea
to gather him up like one of its belongings.
But you can't pour the universe out of the universe
where the whole is sustained by every part
anymore than you can empty the human heart
that is renewed by its own exhaustion like a tide.
Time is always prelude
and death has never known when
to take down its sail like a tree in the fall.
And because things are never the same twice
and the road back is not the road taken
the world and everyone in it
just as they are, have always been here.
Things don't come and go
like migrating geese ascending southward out of a field,
or things fallen returning to their leaves
because there's nowhere to come from
nowhere to go to
that isn't now and here
as intimately far as it is impersonally near.
Ask almost anyone who they are
and they'll look down a well in a mirage
to haul up their reflection on a wheel
and insist it's real
when they ladle their face to their lips
like the moon on dark water.
Or they'll tell you a story around an unending fire
where the shadows are always truer than the flames
and the most illuminating themes burn like stars without names.
Mind is space and there is
nowhere inside or outside of anything
that is closer or futher than anything else
because everything is mind as far as you can be.
So I can stand here in my lengthening shadow
like a long departure
turning into the wind like a sail or a sundial
as if I were the last of my species of eclipse
and life were merely the long, hard discipline
of unmastering the art
of saying hello to the living
and good-bye to the dead,
or turning the telescope around
and saying good-bye to the living,
hello to the dead as I please,
but I'd rather shed myself
like all these falling maps to anywhere
that once arrived like the fleets of the leaves like me
on the shores of this rootless tree
that doesn't let go of things for its own survival
but lives in itself like a stranger come
to the opening gate of an endless arrival.
I let the birds come and go, the apples fall,
the stars build their webs in my crown,
and grow like a holy road I take as my own,
like geese passing overhead at night,
or the small birds that come to me like voices
a moment here then gone
who taught me that it's always dawn
because there's no end of the beginningless beginning
and it may be a green bough
or a dead branch
you hop up and down on like the hidden notes
of something you're singing
on the rungs of these crazy snakes and ladders
that long like flesh and bone in the night
for things they can't see anymore in the light,
or fish dying of thirst in a fathomless pond
or a fire putting itself out in its own eye
or someone dying and someone else asking why
and the whole of creation left alone at home
feeling it doesn't belong under its own sky
like this Saturday morning rain in Perth
the day after your death
that falls like a loveletter too late upon the earth
or the harvest moon of a delinquent heart
above an untimely skeleton
that can't decide whether it's a tuning fork
or a witching wand
looking for answers like water
under every stone on the moon,
the way we cry for people we think are gone,
but green bough, dead branch, Luke, same song.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Looking For A Little Black Water After The Fury Of The White

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Let Go Of My Mind, Like A Kite, Like A Snake

Let go of my mind like a kite, like a snake
I've grabbed by the tail to make a daisy chain of eternity.
Take the bit out of the Great Square of Pegasus
and pour myself out like the billions of stars in the Milky Way.
I'm hemorrhaging poetry. I'm bleeding to death like a rose.
Let it go, let it go, let it go. Blood knows its own way home.
I'm not weaving straightjackets of circumstantial vetch
into an embroidered chrysalis that never opens up.
I'm not trying to pour the sea back into the cup of the moon.
There's more to me than I could ever drink up.

You can put a burning candle in the window and wait for me
but I'm going to follow the smoke wherever it leads
like stardust on the chalkboard of accelerated space
in a burning schoolhouse that had nothing much to teach
about the unknown in the first place. Order's
only a special mode of chaos like a straight line
is a special form of a curve, and there are snakepits
of wavelengths that only serve as flying carpets
growing thin under the windows the dragons look through
like dark energies that can turn space to glass
like gravitational eyes bending the light to their point of view
as if fire were as good a medium as water to see through.

I'm shucking the worlds off my fur like a wolf
on the far side of the river I've just swum across
and I'm howling at the moon reflected in every single dropp
as if I were a mad multiverse of permutations and combinations
that could be everywhere at once, above the timberline
where I can't be hunted into extinction like a black dwarf
that knows there's another kind of shining on the inside
deeper than the obvious scintillance when the moon
plays the lake like the nightbird of a lonely harpsichord in vain.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Even When Life Sometimes Seems Like A Black Hole

for Rebekah Genevieve-Dolorese Garland

Even when life sometimes seems like a black hole,
a dark furnace full of the ashes of burnt roses,
it shapes the galaxies into sunflowers and starfish
and it's whirling with stars like a Sufi in rapture.
All my life I've tried so hard not to be afraid of my joy
and at home with my grief like a comfortable chair
that was beginning to take on the same airs as my body.
A holy war of one, carrying the true cross of the sixties
I thought was worth fighting for even long after
I realized I was doomed to dancing to the music
for the rest of the duration. And it's been as true
as Jim Morrison living the afterlife of Arthur Rimbaud
in deserts so desolate even the stars were shy of the darkness.

And I have wept bitterly as the moon went down
like a toxic goat skull into the only wishing well
for light years around, and it seemed, and it's
still dangerous to remember because time doesn't blunt all knives,
I was witnessing an ideological madness, that had
mineralized all the best ideals into fossils, froth
like rabies at its own hydrophobic reflection.
Biting at its own wounds in vengeance upon itself
for the way the water tasted polluted and there was acid rain
in the wavelengths of its tears more venomous than a recluse spider.

I saw how people brought armfuls of poppies and wheat
to lay down on the stairs of the temple in tribute and love
like a sacrifice from the heart they gentled down
upon the grave of a loved one that had died too young
and hoped would return the blood they were missing
as a sign that the roses were mending their severed petals
like eyelids being stitched back by the very thorn
that had made them bleed in the first place.
In a schizzy world, whatever you sacrifice like a lapwing
sooner or later, because everything tends toward its opposite
like twins that weren't anymore separated at birth
than the first and last crescents of the moon,
engenders in the nest of cosmic eggs it's dying to protect
farce and desecration that tar and feather it like an eclipse.

But every once in awhile that comes as often as now,
you meet someone inconceivably shining
in her solitude like light through a mysterious jewel
into one of the sacred weeping pools of the mindstream
and the moon silvers your heart like a sword
you were about to fall upon to save your face the trouble
and you take the hilt and the blade in both your hands
like an autumn equinox that's just bumped into spring
wandering off the beaten path to tend her lunar garden
and you lay it on the waters because choice isn't an option
like the flightfeather of the other wing of the bird
that can't take the measure of the immeasurable wingspan
of these event horizons, transits, zeniths and thresholds
I'm crossing with you like Leo and Virgo
across a heartscape of enlightened taboos
that have been singing to me all these years from a dark wood
like a lucid wavelength hidden in the ore of a particle
that only seemed so when you looked at it from afar,

that drew the sword out of the stone, the star
out of the darkness, the waterlily out of the marsh,
the heart of someone like you out of the nightsky
like a meteor with a panspermic rosary of life at its core
falling on the Fertile Crescent of a habitable planet,
or a whole new universe, with a punk version
of the Garden of Eden where the birds are all listening
to the Ramones, and Eve is raving with Adam in a mosh pit
teeming with infinite permutations and combinations
of love and life, of colour, poetry, light, energy, joy and devotion,
as if we'd both disembarked from these empty lifeboats of the heart
on the shores of this thriving island of stars
where the Milky Way meets the ocean
and all the constellations that travelled this Road of Ghosts
like the long, dark, strange radiant trip it's been
wash the deathmasks off their faces like old myths of origin
from the starcharts of our comets and scars
that have me smiling at you in wonder like this
as if my third eye had just shed its last telescope like a cataract
and I were the mesmerized gaping witness
to the first moonrise of an avatar of dark bliss
studded with the eyes of Isis raising new pyramids
in a desert of stars, as light as feathers, as light
as the crucibles, chrysales and cocoons of the nebulae giving birth
to these poems that break into butterflies of light,
fireflies and dragons that roar like supernovas
across the firmament, waking the valley up
to the morning of a whole new creation
as I firewalk along these oceanic shores with you
like two constellations when their myriad plinths and petals open
and one flower blooms like a bird with two wings
and sings because this universe isn't the shape of an hourglass
with dry oases and creekbeds dreaming
of solar flares behind the mystic veils
of flashfloods of the heart long over overdue,
but in every illuminated detail of the form you've taken
to enter my life, my love, my art, is a perfect likeness of you
that I am created again and again in the image of,
standing in the doorway of this stargate to love
without your metaphors on, so that after all these light years
of looking for you like a star through the eye of a needle
that felt it had seen enough to know when to turn around and go
a firefly like you out of the midnight blue
suddenly comes into view and ignites the air around me like the aura
of a inflammable passion without a fire extinquisher
to put it out because, at long last, as it is above so it is below.

And whether you drink it long and slow, or deep and fast,
or sip like a humming bird from your own skull
there's an oasis at the bottom of the hourglass
that's greening the sands like the grail of a woman
passing it to you like the love potion
of a water sylph of practising astronomical witchcraft,
standing by her well like Circe on her island on the moon
turning a man like a vapour of longing in a desiccated wasteland
into the full-blooded ocean of the black rose she holds
like the sidereal high tide of my life and my love in her hand
as the birds are singing in the roots of dark matter
like the loveletters of a punk band to the psychedelic sixties
and all the trippy, heavy metal flying fish
are swimming like cults of urgent stars
through the thorns and the crowns of the blossoming locust trees.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Every Morning Of The Moment, A New Creation

Every morning of the moment, a new creation,
the distillation of the dreams of the night before
when the moon was as fertile as the dew we were born from.
I start out each day with a new face. By nightfall
it's just another phase of the same old ageless deathmask,
heavier than a bell that's been talking through my mouth
for more light years than I've got tears to measure in mirrors.
That's usually when I start thinking like a potato about stars.
Blood sugars in my mindstream ripening me like a vision
I'll only ever get to see backstage like a forlorn clown
trying to hang on to his faith in laughter.

You can pursue happiness, but it will only
run from you like the light, or you can cover your eyes
and try to avoid it for fear of losing it like the last time,
but when you turn around, it's right behind you,
flirting with your shadow. Better to let it come and go
of its own accord, like a waterbird in a moonrise
reflected on a lake. Then when you speak of things
you increasingly know less about the more
you're intimate with them, your voice isn't
a bird net trying to cage words on the fly
but an aviary as open as the sky when
Cygnus and Aquila are up, and the Lyre's
a larynx for the asking. And you're free
to sing your heart out as if no one were listening
but you and the trees and the stars you hit like high-notes.

Or shriek like a rabbit seized by the coydogs
if you run out of lucky feet and that's what comes up
like snake eyes. Lap the experience out of the bone
until there's nothing left to eat but your appetite itself
and among the myriad flavours of life you've exhausted
that will taste the sweetest of all to that emptiness
that harvests the world like a blue moon that's never full.
Is the moon not the equal of its waxing and waning alike?
Is it trying to enlighten its dark side?
When the candle goes out, does the light have any trouble
handling it? Fear returns to what it knows the best.
It hugs the shore like a tidal pool beside the sea,
a dead starfish or two it can get its arms around
like a worm's-eye view of the galaxy, and the shell
of a red sunset in the morning on the carapace
of a crab that left its hovel for a house in
a more upwardly mobile zodiac. Sometimes
it comes down to that. Quantum level gravity.
A gravitational eye with myopia that bends the light
like a stick in the water, a mirage of sand in an hourglass
that's afraid of being swept out to sea
with nothing to hold onto but the lifeboat
of a shucked clam Venus just stepped out of onto land
to have sex in a new medium like an artist
who's just switched from water colours to oils.

You've got to accept the down times as all part
of the same wavelength you've been riding
like a snake scaled in white caps of light
that break on shore in a turmoil of kelp.
The cosmos doesn't need to be put in order
and chaos doesn't need any help. Listen to your sorrows.
Summon them to a seance of yourself
and apologize to their ghosts for not having the voice
to let them speak through you about
learning to swim with the stars further out of your depths
than you've ever been before. First you drown
in the fathomless immensities of even the smallest detail,
and then you bubble back up to the surface
of a multiverse with an oceanic awareness
of what's been hiding under every eyelid of a wave
like a overturned lifeboat that's waking up
to the fact that everything floats like the moon
in the reflection of its own mindstream.
And whatever sail you spot coming up over
your event horizon, whatever constellation
or black hole you take for a sign of salvation
or salvage, it first had to sink
before it could rise to the rescue.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Tenderly The Evening Descends Into A Dark Bliss

Tenderly the evening descends into a dark bliss
and lays its poultice like a cool leaf against my forehead
and draws the fever of the day out of the night.
I ease back on my elbows like an easel down by the river.
When I'm burnt, I make a blister
and cushion myself with water,
a more useful approach to tears.
The mosquitoes swarm like insistent circumstances
that thin my blood, but a soft wind
is blowing them away from Pearl Harbour.
The long blue grass yields as easily to a man as a deer.
I want the stars near enough to overhear what they're whispering.
Still amazing to me I can embrace all of them with a thought
as if they were my idea in the first place
and feel humbled and exalted at the same time
by the sublimity of their radiance and the strangeness of my own.
The river sustains its clarity by wandering.

Single male in the autumn of life, I've let go of so much
the only thing left to let go of is the letting go itself.
I've forgone the commotion of inducing myself into creation.
Things will fall out by themselves. Playfulness
return to surrealistic perversity
to explain the shape of the universe
and fools like me counter-intuit the crazy wisdom
of squandering their lives on voices in the distance
leading them on deeper into the subtleties of a poetic narcosis
that haunts them like the face
of a beautiful woman they once knew.
Don't we all belong to a nobility of longing, even though
we don't live up to it, and start to grasp and scratch
like dead branches screeching across
an intransigent windowpane on a stormy night
that let's us look at the fire, but doesn't let us in?
Where do you go with your serious spirit
when you've been rejected by your solitude?
Do you know the secret art of being enhanced
by the qualities of anything you're not attached to,
without killing off the desire for what you're missing?
Live with gratitude for the abyss in your heart
it's impossible to fill like a grave
that took more out of you than it put back in.

You can be adorned by your failures.
You can be humiliated by your victories.
Coming and going, your path can be strewn
with roses or thorns. You could be walking on stars.
You could be lying down beside a river at night like I am
savouring a sorrow you like the poetic taste of,
because it includes everything within it
like the skin of the dew and the moon as the source of life.
Even sweeter than a rainbow body of light
or an atmosphere with ocean to match,
this last touch of clinging before you evaporate
into the mystery of everything you're leaving behind.
No more than you can pour water out of the universe
through a black hole, can your mindstream be poured by time
into the uncomprehending darkness of the black mirror
you're looking for an image in tonight
in the eyes of all these stars shining down upon us,
knowing our starmud is just as old as their light
and we're not wandering orphans lost in their shadows.
We're firewalking on water like stars in the shapes
of self-immolating swans, two parts flammable
from the start, and one of oxygen like a toxin
we depend upon for life like an alien export we adapted to.
Same with death. Until you include it in the nucleus,
inviting your enemy in to feast behind the gates
that laboured like water to keep life in the seas,
you're vulnerable to the delusion of your own exclusion
like the face of an exile in your mirroring awareness.

Don't underestimate the creative potential
of the dark genius of death to come up
with new paradigms of seeing and being
that make us feel we lived our whole lives
confined and blind in the coffin of a seed
that stored a harvest of what we've reaped in a silo.
Out of the dead ore of the moon
pours the white gold of wheat
like metal from a stone in a starfield
that yields more life than can be lost
in the living of it. Without a sword. Without a ploughshare.
Isn't it in the nature of our evanescence to move
like light and water and wind from urn to urn
of one sky burial to the next at sea and then the earth
like a water clock that runs so urgently
from full to an emptiness that has to keep expanding
like the human heart just to contain it
so when the cup's broken like a skull
you can drink the whole of the sea and the sky
in every single dropp of your mindstream
and the stars will still be climbing your roots
up to the flowers within that bloom every year
like a deepening insight at zenith into
the dark generosity of becoming something
even beyond the scope of death to imagine extinct.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Lament Of The Last Train Whistle

The lament of the last train whistle
has disappeared into the distance
mournfully looking for its lost child.
October night in the woods
around an old fire pit of prophetic skulls
blowing ghosts of smoke in my face
that bring me to tears, a neolithic calendar
of all the old and new moons that have passed.
So many, so much, that used to matter
doesn't anymore. Dream figures
that shed their skins like the longer wavelengths
of watersnakes in an infra-red mindscape
of serpent fire dying like the sun
that can tell the hour by the taste of its ashes.
I throw more well-dried thresholds on the fire
like branches that used to be green with the tears
of sweeter departures and arrivals over the years.

All the light's jumped from orbitals
of the tree rings that sag like bags
under the eyes knotted like islands
in the heartwood of their xylem and phloem.
Here where the river parts like long hair
on the skull of a stone, I sit like a demon
in a sacred place, clarified, alert, and alone
as any nocturnal animal in the woods.
The chalkdust of my bones trying
to connect the stars to their constellations
snagged in the trees like the rags of spiderwebs
on the blackboard of a starmap as wide as the sky
and deep as the subconscious of the Burgess Shale.

It's not a betrayal to let go of your faith
when you had none in the first place
and you don't need a parachute on the edge of space
to plunge from paradise, or a weather balloon
of a bad Christian poet to shepherd Dante
like a moon out of hell. Be yourself,
especially when nobody's watching
except that same drone in the sky
that occasionally flashes a flake of silver off
its stone cold third eye to flint your awareness
that it's still there in the cosmic background
like a witness to your dreams and schemes
for a luxuriously appointed life of enlightenment.

Be yourself. The direct copulative imperative
that has supplanted the light as the first word
out of the mouth of creation. Be yourself.
And then let there be light by the side of a good fire
to let you see who that is as acutely
as you can see in the dark who that is not.

The migration of the Canada geese might seem
a broken rosary of new moons calling out
the names of God to you, and one unknown,
or silhouetted against the moon they might
suggest the afterbirth attached to a cut umbilical cord
and your heart might feel reborn somewhere
in the autumn of your life, a child of the fire,
a flower in the full bloom of its solitude
dancing with its own mercurial apparition
on the waters of life in the mindstream
always out of season enough to lag behind
so it can tell the time by the widening gaps in its passage
as it's waiting for the night to catch up to its own shining
like a thief of fire unchained from the rock
that broke the glass window of its transfixed seeing
with a meteor in the hands of an enlightened delinquent.

Or you might read the falling leaves as occult lifelines
on a Tarot deck of overlapping lifespans
like the scales of a dragon playing solitaire
beside the small inferno of a signal fire to the stars,
to let them know you're coming faster
than the time it takes for a thought to make it
all the way to death and back to birth again
as if you were pinging your emotions
like stray wavelengths from the oceans of your awareness
off the horns of the moon the way
you used to skip rocks out over the sea as a boy
to see how long they would keep on going
like a waterclock of stone before they sank
like the flying fish of the hard, cold facts of life back into
the numinous depths of your collective unknowing
where the stars aren't fixed to anything that isn't
flowing along with them like the wind on the mindstream
or a small fire catching its breath in the silence and the solitude
of so much radiance, before it's on its way again for good.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The River of Me

I launched myself on the river me
Way back when I was two or three
I sailed out through the wall of snow
Beneath the bridge where all kids go

That Cheyenne Bodie was ten feet tall
His voice so deep it filled a hall
And that was who I dreamed I’d be
Until Cochise came on the scene

There was ice on the river and ice on the pond
And the singing nun sang on and on
There were trees on the river bank, cliffs by the sea
And fish galore in the river of me

The fields were full of cows, corn or wheat
The air was thick with bees and heat
The summer lasted all year long
I never knew til it was gone

And then of course came that high school girl
Her glances made my river swirl
More complex than the universe
I never knew what she’d do next

There was light on the river and light on the pond
And the singing nun sang on and on
There were trees on the river bank, cliffs by the sea
And fish galore in the river of me

And up we soared towards the sky
Through songs and dancing by and by
My waterfalls and waves ran high
For just the winking of an eye

And in the distance the quiet sea
was waiting on the river me
And on the banks the weeds grew tall
Where rusting leaves began to fall

Now there’s night on the river and night on the pond
And the singing nun is long since gone
There are trees on the river bank, cliffs by the sea
And memories in the river of me

I launched myself on the river me
Way back when I was two or three
I sailed out through the wall of snow
Beneath the bridge where all kids go

poem by Jim Hogg
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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Darkness, Let Me Enter

Darkness, let me enter. Oblivion, open your arms.
Sweet liberty, lengthen my chain by light years.
Venus in the Pleiades, let me feel your charms.
I want to ride the light, o yes I do, as far as I can
toward some flowering of the mystery
I can add myself to and bloom as the stars do.
My most intimate familiar, solitude, eras of it,
yet it's never known my name. My best feature
once you get pass the indignation and the anger,
compassion. And though love seems to me
the sum of many hearts, trying to express itself
as one, when have I not been a doorway to the dead?

When have I ever preferred my happiness
even as my last rainbow bridge went up in flames
and there was no where else to cross before the falls,
to that of the ironic beatitudes of the forbidden and the blessed?
Make me a star again one day with a few habitable planets,
each with at least one moon that can make me crazy as this one.
Promise? Promise me it will be so and mean it.
I will continue. I will keep on. I will endure like a mountain
that never capitulated volcanically to my own rage.
I'll walk the road standing up. I'll traverse it on my knees.
I'll be the nightbird. The green bough. The apple bloom.
I've learned. I'll listen. And when I'm overwhelmed by words,
I'll give you my voice and let you speak for yourself.

Whoever, whatever, you are not or you are,
though I hear you're too ineffable to get to know,
should the day ever come you want to disclose yourself
like a hidden secret that wants to be known,
I'll understand that, I'll be the night in your mirror
that shows you four hundred billion stars in the eyes
of as many life forms and more in the multiverse
than you can see without being astonished by the beauty
of all the secrets you've kept to yourself for light years.

Even if I'm just talking to myself like a waterclock
pouring my mindstream from one ear into another,
whether you're there or not, or just the matriculated anima
of a pineal gland projected onto a holographic space time continuum,
and my spirit be no more than my own breath
condensing on the diminishing window of this cold sky
where I write the name of someone I've never met
with a frost-bit finger, longing for encounters I won't regret,
let me flow into your awareness like a wavelength
into a river of light or let me burn in the immutable darkness
a firefly of thought, a thread of lightning, a distant star,
a thinning fragrance of a wildflower you might have known
a long time ago that reminds you of someone
so many changes away from anyone you'd recognize today.
I'm not looking for someone to whine to.
I've been omnidirectional since I turned forty-five
so I don't need anyone to tell me where I'm going.
I'm not looking for a soft shoulder of the road to cry on.
After so many nights of laying my head
on this hard rock pillow of a world
that's refeathering itself in scales and razorblades
I'm not dissing the occult wisdom of my consolation dreams.
The way it seems is the way it appears. Let it.
I grew up on the streets, drastically. I know how
to break a mirror in case of a catastrophe.

Just let me pretend for awhile out here in the woods
where I always feel as a human it's the first day
of a kid in the schoolyard until I make friends with an owl
or the occasional, curious bush wolf wondering
what I'm doing so far off my natural turf, and why,
just like a dog from the city abandoned on a farm
I feel so disowned sometimes I should learn
to snarl back at the moon when it bares its fangs at me
instead of baying its praises to the rest of the asylum.

Just let me suppose for awhile that a poet
isn't the orphan of the absurd, that there's
a bloodline of meaning that still seeps into everything
like the dye of a black rose in the night that steeps the heart
in all frequencies and colours of the clear light of the void
that tastes like the mystic poetry of the waters of life
on the tongue of a stranger who's just wandered in from the desert,
his lips dusty with the stars he's been drinking
from an hourglass rimed with sand and salt.

I don't want to receive everything only to find out
I prayed for nothing, so I won't, but if you're
the shapeshifting creatrix of subtle intelligence
I intuit you might be sometimes when I'm alone
with the stars like a childhood that hasn't forgotten me,
and there's a sudden breeze out of nowhere
that grazes the back of my neck like a sabre of the moon
so close I could swear we were lovers in another life,
light a candle for me somewhere in the universe,
and you be the light by which the light is known.
Show me your smile like moonrise on the lake.
Let me see your eyes in the rain, so inter-reflected
they can't help shining out of everything as if
no one could keep you a secret for long, except you,
and for the moment, at least, I'm not accepting this.
Don't care if I'm painting a lifemask to put on an abyss
of molecular indifference. You should see the tears
I've smeared under my eyes to save face
with the sacred clowns I've been from time to time.

You keep your distance and I'll play hard to get as well.
You take one step toward me, and I'll go the rest of the way.
Devotion's always been a weakness of mine. One sign
and I'll light up like an esoteric zodiac that just went electric.
I'll meet you on a bridge at midnight, and I won't forget
when fire comes down to the water's edge, fire
has to use the bridge as well. Just tell me that you care,
if not for me, for all these humans that die like roadkill
stunned by the highbeams of oncoming circumstance
as if nothing in life, however rightly or wrongly,
however young or old the blood on the hands of the clock
that kills them as if they were as devoid of characteristics as you
could console them for the loss of what they dared to hold close.
That's the gamma ray burst of the protest that has kept us apart
since my innocence first started bleeding in childhood
for the impersonality that mutilates 3.5 billion years of evolution,
the sum of all our infirmities and strengths, as if there were
nothing to cherish or venerate in us, like a homeless drunk
beaten to death on a fire-escape in a back alley just for the fun of it.

That's the thorn in my heart. I watched my mother
half beaten to death three times by my father before I was seven
and it wasn't you, it was me, that picked up the ax
to put a stop to it. Who could aspire to heaven
when that's going on in the snakepit at your feet?
How do you return to your toy truck after
the cop cars and the ambulance has left with your mother
and the absence is so terrifying even the nightmares
don't dare echo an answer that isn't an atrocity of guile
that lies to a child about the good that will come out of it.

I'm sixty-four now and ever since my eyes were pryed open
like the petals of a flower that wasn't ready to bloom yet,
everywhere I look, the indignity and ferocity
of intrusive happenstance inflicting itself upon life
with a few intermittent truces to lick our wounds
like razorblades in candied apples. Yes, I stand my ground.
Knock me down. I'll get up again. And I'll carry my pain
in my heart, in my voice, in my art, my blood, my arms,
in the urn of everything I've ever cherished
like a silver eagle, a placard, a birthmark back into the tear gas
of the last crusade that never had a chance, if I must,
until the human divinity that broke the seal of our suffering,
small as our light may be now, leaves an indelible impression
upon space and time, or you, if you're there,
like the labyrinth of a fingerprint you can't ignore.

And I'm not asking for an emergency exit,
just take the gate off the entrance and let everyone in
on the secret of why everything seems so brutally true
in the bright vacancy, dark abundance of your absence,
and I'll dance with you in a garden on the moon
until the lemons turn blue as the wild grapes in late October
when you shall be my folly. And I shall be your fool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Like A River

(carly simon)
Dear mother the struggle is over now
And your house is up for sale
We divided your railway watches
Between the four of us
I fought over the pearls
With the other girls
But it was all a metaphor
For what was wrong with us
As the room is emptying out
Your face so young comes into view
And on the back porch is a well-worn step
And a pool of light you can walk into
Ill wait no more for you like a daughter,
That part of our life together is over
But I will wait for you, forever
Like a river...
Can you clear up the mystery of the sphinx?
Do you know any more about god?
Are you dancing with benjamin franklin
On the face of the moon?
Have you reconciled with dad?
Does the rain still make you sad?
Last night I swear I could feel you
Moving through my room
And I thought you touched my feet
I so wanted it to be true
In my theater there is a stage
And a footlight you can step into...
Ill wait no more for you like a daughter,
That part of our life together is over
But I will wait for you, forever
Like a river...
In the river I know I will find the key
And your voice will rise like the spray
In the moment of knowing
The tide will wash away my doubt
cause youre already home
Making it nice for when I come home
Like the way I find my bed turned down
Coming in from a late night out.
Please keep reminding me
Of what in my soul I know is true
Come in my boat, theres a seat beside me
And two or three stars we can gaze into...
Ill wait no more for you like a daughter,
That part of our life together is over
But I will wait for you forever
Like a river...
Ill never leave, always just a dream away
A star thats always watching
Never turn away
Well never leave, always just a thought away
A candle always burning
Never turn away
The moon will hide, the tree will bend
Im right beside you
Ill never turn away

song performed by by Carly Simon
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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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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O This Morning More Than Ever

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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