Restless With The Dead Tonight
Restless with the dead tonight.
Old friends, the gates to abandoned farms,
the roof collapsed and the wind with access
to all their windows, overgrown roads
going nowhere I can walk with them now.
Blue-green the evening sky, still,
without direction, island clouds, but unmoving.
Sparse beginnings, and sorrow in the seed.
Relying on the stars to do for me
what I can't do for myself. Pull me out
of this black hole I keep slipping in and out of
on the rim of my event horizon, stray photons,
butterflies ducking in and out of the dragon's mouth,
a halo of X-rays looking brutally right through me.
Down to the musical instruments of my bones.
Flutes and drumsticks. But I'm void-bound,
trying to shed my skin like a chronic illusion,
liberate the chains I can feel but can't see,
numbed by having to say no
when all I want to do is say yes
over and over again to the picture-music
to the themes, the hints, the clues, the nuances,
the radiance, sorrow and horror of the mystery
wherever it leads, whatever occurs,
be so fully here, I don't exist, not even
as a witness, and be nothing but the listening.
I suffer crucial impasses of circumstance.
My heart is blocked, the way isn't clear.
The emptiness is leaner than usual, longer
than a plague of Egypt living up to a penurious dream.
Third eye of the hurricane slowly closing.
My friends at the end of a tunnel of light.
Reptilian as a camera shutter. I howl
for stars and fireflies, the accoutrements of my bliss
and the pleasure I take in the hidden harmonies
of my drifting, my circuitous blossoming.
Someone is using my skull for a door stop.
Too grounded by the shadows of the impending,
Even here by the river, the sound of distant trucks,
the occasional train bemoaning its way through the dark.
Snakes out hunting the frogs, slide and splash
back into the lake at my approach, estranged enemy,
walking in my place, face covered with ashes
of a man-shaped urn that's avoided me for a while.
The way I like to live. Overlooked by the world.
Unregarded. Obliviously free to disappear
without worrying about what I'm coming back to
or who'll be waiting for me when I do
to tell me while the idiocy of this languor
has got its hands on my throat, I should learn
to get a grip on myself, eat the pain, swallow the bilge,
live like a bear nibbling on the edges of a garbage dump,
give up this discipline of doing nothing
as if mere being were a form of worship
though to what is anyone's guess and why
is just the nature of the mind reveling in itself
the way the stars make me guess their names
peering through the crowns of the trees,
dissociated from the features of their mythologem.
Time with their lifemasks off to be uncontained.
To go mad and not be held to account for it
because it doesn't excite the attention of the crowd
when you're unattainably available to live
as if your eyes were the way the stars touched you in tears
to see how the light labours for its flowering in you.
Thought-moments and light years bringing news
of friends from the past, bats and owls
flashing through the inadvertent moonlight,
the whole of existence in every locket of my cells,
freedom born, creatively, with a starmap for a genome.
poem by Patrick White
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Related quotes
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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Stars
Nina Simone
Stars
(Janis Ian)
I was never one for singing what I really feel
Except tonight I'm bringing everything I know that's real
Stars, they come and go, they come fast or slow
They go like the last light of the sun, all in a blaze
And all you see is glory
Hey but it gets lonely there when there's no one here to share
We can shake it away, if you'll hear a story
People lust for fame like athletes in a game,
we break our collarbones and come up swinging,
some of us are downed
some of us are crowned, and some are lost and never found
But most have seen it all,
they live their lives in sad cafes and music halls
They always come up singing
Some make it when they're young,
before the world has done its dirty job
and later on someone will say
"You've had your day, now you must make way"
But they'll never know the pain of living with a name you never owned
or the many years forgetting what you know too well
That the ones who gave the crown have been let down
You try to make amends without defending
Perhaps pretending you never saw the eyes of grown men of twenty-five
that follow as you walk and ask for autographs
Or kiss you on the cheek and you never can believe they really loved you
Some make it when they're old
(Perhaps they have a soul they're not afraid to bare
or perhaps there's nothing there)
Stars, they come and go, they come fast they come slow
They go like the last light of the sun, all in a blaze
And all you see is glory
But most have seen it all,
they live their lives in sad cafes and music halls
They always have a story
Some women have a body men will want to see
and so they put it on display
Some people play a fine guitar, I could listen to them play all day
Some ladies really move across the stage and gee, they sure can dance
I guess I could learn how, if I gave it half a chance
But I always feel so funny when my body tries to soar
And I seem to always worry about missing the next chord
I guess there isn't anything to put up on display
Except the tunes, and whatever else I say
But anyway, that isn't really what I meant to say
I meant to tell a story, I live from day to day
Stars, they come and go, they're coming fast they come slow
They go like the last light of the sun, all in a blaze
And all you see is glory
But most have seen it all,
who live their lives in sad cafes and music halls
And we always have a story
So if you don't lose patience with my fumbling around
I'll come up singing for you, even when I'm down
song performed by by Nina Simone
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Red Shift Soon Into The Dark, But Not Tonight
Red shift soon into the dark, but not tonight
out of these longer wavelengths of insight
into the ongoing mystery of everything I'm aware of
and what I'm not in the lifelines on the palms of my blossoms
and in the roots of these abandoned orchards of stars.
Unattainable the things of the earth that were given for free,
I long for dark abundance, bright vacancy.
Beauty meets me everywhere eye to eye
on my own terms, and we speak in metaphors
that occur all around us like fireflies and wild irises.
O evanescent river of night, unpartitioned waterclock,
keep time with my heart even as you unravel the past
like a ribbon of blood I've brought to you as a gift.
Keep it supple and fluid and let the light on your waters
mingle in the sweetness of its fruit. Let no cruel day
embitter the wine of the efoliate nerves
of the wild grapes greening their tendrils
like the treble clefs of a living music
that can only be heard with the eyes when you listen.
Off road awhile, let me wander as you do
through these labyrinths of circuitous blossoming
and lose myself in people and things and wonder
at the black and white wisdom of being here
to marvel at all, and give the stars a reason to search.
Keep my wits close to my senses and my instincts
like holy books written on the wind like the smoke
of distant fires I will sit around again
listening to stories told in the tongues
of the polyglot flames. May I always
cherish the pain of separation as my most
sincere teacher, the one who beat me the hardest
for the foolishness of trying to come up for air
while I was still in the womb. May compassion
always come on the winged heels of insight
the way pears come of their leaves
or the heart grows in the hands of its thieves.
Hard, the longing to know. Harder to know you don't.
Hard to be the dunce in the corner of your own illumination.
The persecuted voodoo doll of a witch hunt.
The shabby philosopher with a heart of gold
who took the long way round to the back of the abyss.
Or an eclipse with its thumb out trying
to hitch hike down the Milky Way like a punk rocker.
And those who live to see death in their children's eyes,
as the ferocity of their frozen tears breaks
into little plinths and roseate splinters of shattered sky.
Hard to see people uncrazed by their own creativity
like a wet book of matches frowning at solar flares,
sceptics doubting the crazy wisdom of their own stars.
To see friends who were the pillars of the wharves
you said hello and good-bye on, pull away one last time
like empty lifeboats with nothing left to save.
And the lovers who know each other like junkies
on the same drug, love potions using the same alibi
to excuse the mystic delirium of being caught
by their third eye, exalting in their passion
for whispering old-fashioned things into each other's ears
on the thresholds of enlightened taboos. Imagine
going through withdrawal from your own imagination
burning little black holes through the windows
until they look like starmaps that forgot the way back home.
And the hasty bones that were buried en masse
like yarrow sticks in an incriminating Book of Changes.
Poverty, atrocity, war, disease, and these we ignore,
and these we praise for trivializing our attention span.
Hard to be human and embody all this in your heart.
But don't stop. Keep flowing. Making your own path up
on the fly as you go, knowing it's going to get harder yet.
Let me live it like a dream I'm always waking up from
with no regret. Let me cherish the terrors
for the dark jewels they sowed like dragon's teeth
in their wake, and celebrate the fools of my doubtful virtues
like a poet in autumn dancing with the last of the flowers
as if they still had the voices they had in the spring.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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My Third Eye Opening Oceanically Of Its Own Accord
My third eye opening oceanically of its own accord.
The wingspans of the flowers bloom omnidirectionally.
The blue sky lays a balmy smile upon my flightfeathers.
Blood hums to the blissful resonance of being alive.
Even the glowing concrete seems benign. The gates
with their rusting guns triggered like locks, the fences
holding the occupying gardens with their placard poppies
back like riot cops. Time without haste. Consumed
by a moment as perennial as summer on earth.
Nothing urgent in the fulfilment of small destinies
in the grass, no antecedents necessary to know
how to live this, no event trivial or especially significant,
I'm as open-minded as the wind on a shoreless afternoon
that tastes of the stars gusting in the dust at my feet.
Wild parsnip, Queen Ann's Lace, mullein, goldenrod,
purple loosetrife and cattails in the ditches along the roads,
Lichens of the moon on the staves of the cedar rails
where the red-winged blackbirds sit
to paint their picture-music on the unprimed air
like the musical notes of a cadmium red and yellow song
with overriding tones of nocturnes to come.
Sweetness of life when it takes its mind off of everything
and requires nothing of the living but attendance.
Just to be here like a vagrant wavelength of awareness
among things as they are without trying
to gouge your eyes out like bluejays at the sunflowers
to get at the roots of the flowering mind deep in the heart
of the hidden harmonies basking on the surface
they're joy riding like the elegant riffs
of the dolphins and flying fish that leap out of the shadows
into the enraptured atmosphere of their own auras
like blue damselflies and green tree frogs and old guitars
working their necks like weavers, or fleet-footed spiders
walking on water like heavy metal on a Ouija board,
like thorns in the eye of a bubble, hoping it doesn't
wash them out like tears in the eyes of a voodoo doll
looking through the keyhole of a needle it couldn't find
like paradise on the other side of its blind blessing.
Not for long or far, I'm still walking a habitable planet
full of wonders. Though the road keeps getting shorter
like a fuse behind me the further I travel down it,
and the asteroids keep making newsbreaking fly-bys,
and there are rosaries of bubbling methane rising
from under the shrinking skull caps of the poles,
and people are still trying to keep each other's attention
by stabbing one another in the eye, but for a moment
that isn't concerned about whether anything lasts or not,
there are no omens stuck in the throats of the rocks,
or blood of children splashed on the hollyhocks. A re-run
of provisional innocence in a few hundred acres of woodland
swept under the rugs of abandoned farms as not worth the trouble.
Lapwing gates hanging by a hinge to distract
the wild grapevines away from her empty nest
as if it still cherished its emptiness out of a force of habit.
I look upon the Tay River at sunset, the reflection
of the darkening hill quivering in the cooling breeze
like the more mercurial downside of itself,
and the sky opening the blue-green eyes of the peacocks
like stars with too much make-up on, and a handful
of charred crows flying through the roots of the trees,
trying to make sense of themselves like a burnt manuscript.
And what can you say to the stars that are beginning
to look for themselves in the approaching night
except this too is the world where even the lost,
in attempting to return to themselves through
the unattainability of the past, shed light all along the way?
Nightfall and the silence intensifies the conversation
with bioluminous insights of the radiance
blazing out of the darkness of a white coma
as if it depended upon the contrast oxymoronically
just to be noticed like waterlilies in the shallows
of the conscious mind anchored by a spinal cord
to the reptilian epodes of its own illustrious starmud
as every thought moment is, like kelp and kites
and river reeds swaying like synchronized swimmers
to the currents and wavelengths, the turns
and counterturns, of thematic waters with a musical motif
that plays to its own depths from the bridge
of a burning violin dancing like fire on the water
with no fear of ever being drowned out by the moon.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Earth Hides Nothing From You
The earth hides nothing from you
when its time comes to be revealed.
Not the bones of the dead, not the green wind
blowing on the young leaves of the maple
to see if it still remembers how to break into flame
or the loaded horse-hair brushes of the flowers
trying to decide what colours to apply first
to the blue-toned underpainting of the sky on their easel.
And this is the essential freedom of information act.
Walking with a thoughtful, cooly blissful, festive spirit
on a windy night by a spring lake trying on stars
like earrings to go with the season like crocuses
realizing, as if you weren't there alone, though you are,
how inestimably unique and precious it seems
just to be aware of this lake in the moonlight
trying to grow waterlilies in her Mars black hair
and one wild iris, because she's obviously French.
And I can tell by the way the eddies and ripples
circle and tendril the sensuous undulance
of her dark depths, and the way she's eyeing me
as I toe my way along the path I'm making up on the go,
she's intrigued and modestly threatened
or she's got other things on her mind
if I'm meant to know, I'll know, in her good time, not mine
because there is no birth or death in the present moment,
it doesn't have a future, it doesn't have a past,
and it flashes by so fast, it hasn't even happened yet
so everything is still and silent and timeless
and yet nothing is hidden, nothing held back.
Everything's shining out like a star
that can't keep what it knows to itself.
And any lingering question
of who you might have been is everywhere
reflected in the universe like a face in a mirror
with no one standing in front of it.
Something deep within and without me seems
to humanize the lake in my mother-tongue
and how astoundingly wonderful just to listen
to the lake's accent when she answers back
in a language I can fully understand is universal,
rich with metaphors and similitudes that are the bloodlines
of everything in existence rooted in a grammar of dark matter
that can be as eloquent as the stars
when it waxes lyrical in spring, its uncontainable heart
overbrimming with joy at the return of the nightbirds.
The great, blue, lunar heron and the solar ray of the osprey
returning after long absence to their nests,
like lost jewels to a ring, eyes to the skull of a blind seer,
high in the Ys of the dead trees that look like harpoons
and dangerous tuning forks and witching wands
out whaling for water, stuck in the flukes of the lake.
Evanescent shape-shifters in the vagrant emptiness
learning to read each other like a star group,
say, the Pleiades, the daughters of Atlas,
the cornerstone of the world it upholds like a starmap
adjusting our eyes, our seeing, our unreasonable being here at all,
to the light and gravity of everything around us
in harmony with a life that's never
at peace with itself creatively
to keep the wild grapevines growing like grails
that everyone seeks like sweetness and light
at the root of the truth of themselves, as soon
they'll be sipping bliss from the towering stars
like ruby-throated hummingbirds from the larkspur.
Be empty as a cracked cup or an eyeless skull
and know what it is to be filled
by a lake that takes the low place so you
can flow into it like a bloodbank into the lifestream
of the spring run off of winter stars thawing in the dark hills
like patchy galaxies of snow that have found a way
to get off their islands by realizing
one wavelength of light
one wavelength of water
one wavelength of thought or insight
one wavelength of love and compassion
one wavelength of a seeker with a mindful heart
is all the flowing of the same night creek
growing into consciousness like a stranger
we come face to face with as it dawns upon us
emerging out of this dream of a self
like a dragonfly from its chrysalis,
like the wet sapphire of an eye
from the dark abundance of the seed
that prophesied that it would be so,
the best way to navigate your way
on this ocean of awareness even if you're shipwrecked
like these dead trees at the bottom of the lake
with herons in your crow's nest
is to take your hand off the wheel and let go.
Let go the way an archer releases a bird from a power line
or the first purple marten of the year
from the blossoming bow of an alder branch
hung with catkins in keeping with the fourth month
of Bran in the Celtic calendar and the letter, Fearn,
in the Druidic way of speaking to trees
to ask for directions through life and death and beyond
as if they'd made a library out of the whole forest
by listening to the wind in an alder copse
in a language the alders understood
they spoke in common with the water stars
of the blind and enlightened alike.
And if there's no one to fall in love with,
or out of, this time of the night starwalk
the circuitous blossoming of your way
deep into a nearby grove sometime,
along the shoreline of the improbable concourse
of the way of things like a wild grapevine
gave up being on the go, for growing,
once it got a taste of its own wine,
and watching the Pleiades like crown jewels
in the burgundy upper branchs of a birch
closer to heaven than you could ever
have imagined you could be,
fall in love with a lake with a French accent
and the soul of a Celtic sybil, and doing
what the moon does with her lunar sword unsheathed
lay your silver tribute down upon her waters.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Out Here Alone
Out here alone so late at night
with all these spectacular stars
burning through the clean glass
of the freezing winter air
I can almost hear them thinking
behind the myths of the cover stories
they've told for years
dark truths about life and light
it would be madness in a man to understand.
Don't try to stuff the impersonal secret
of the universe
into your sentimental heart.
How could you ever fit its likeness
into a locket
and finger it lovingly as your own?
Out here alone so late
even if you have come
like a thief in the night
to steal from the light
when nobody's home
there are no cracks no facets no gaps
no backdoors, unlocked windows
or emergency exits,
no stairwells or entrances
in these jewels of insight
that can feel your eyes falling upon them
like rain running down a mirror
that shuts you out
like someone in the bathroom crying
for reasons that are light-years beyond you.
However deep and sincere your tears are
they're still only dry wells
in that vast ocean of awareness,
black snowflakes
on the roaring furnace of the abyss
and if you reach out with affection
hoping to make things better
by embracing it all
you're still only tendering a kiss
to the gaping jaws of your own lipless skull.
There's a silence older than space
in the bottomless heart of things
that makes intelligence seem
the unlikeliest of exaggerations
a human could ever mean
holding his mind up like a lamp to the stars
as if he could find his own way back by his own light
without the dream that themes his mindstream with creation.
But as foolish and futile as it is to surmise
or try to get a leg up on the wise
I don't think the darkness
is the negative space
around the troubled face that appeared
after all the dots were connected
like rising constellations
in a child's colouring book.
And I don't think there are gods
squatting like frogs
on the lotus of the world
making us up as they go along
like wheels and roads
to the grunts and groans
of an axial mating song
anyone could mistake for a joke.
And I don't think the stars
believe the things we say about them
or even remotely feel the mystic dread
of what it is to be a human
looking up at their shining
out of deeper darknesses within
where no direction can be given to the lost like eyes
that would never find their own way home again
were it not for the stars and fireflies that mislead us
from one illumination to the next
by giving the finger to the braille of the text
that would school a gust of stardust into us
like God gave life to Adam
and Eve gave life to God
long before there were any laws to blind them
like Satanic lightning bolts
uprooting their eyes like rain from the clouds
to put those fires out.
I look up at the stars
with the eyes of an exile
through the diaspora of my breath
and I want to think them all to death
like the people and things I've left behind me
when it was time to go my own way
anywhere into the darkness inside me
to see if I could shine a light upon myself
that didn't blind me to the fact
neither in the beginning
nor in the end
was I there to witness the act
that made a certainty as good as a doubt
to the great indifference
that wasn't trying to find me
like a needle of light in the heart of a haystack.
I look up at the stars
like a scarecrow in winter
trying to put its pants on
one leg after another
like a man
with nothing but time to burn
scattering his ashes among the stars
urn after urn
skull after skull
of the heretics and mystics
that were martyred by his scar-crossed heart
in the name of nothing real.
I don't know what they feel
but I look up at the stars
like a black rose
of blood and starmud
in the last death throes
of self-immolation
and see in my own image
what I've always had
in common with creation.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Before Choir One Friday Eve
Before choir practice
before entering
the vestry door
you and Judith
stayed behind
and waited until
the others
had gone inside
and Judith said
look at those stars
and how dark blue
the sky is
you gazed up
at the evening spread
of dark blue
and stars
and moon
to one side
and you put
your hand
around her waist
and drew her close
and she lay
against you
and you said
I read some place
that some
of those distant stars
burned out
centuries ago
and what we see
is the ghostly glow
of dead stars
and she turned your head
towards her
and kissed you
and the pressing
of her lips on yours
and her hands
on your waist
and her 13 year old
breasts pushing
against your
14 year old chest
and the sound
of the choir starting up
in practice in the church
and the flight of bats
across
the evening sky
and she holding you near
and the lips engaged
and the eyes closed
and the breathing
taken in
coming up for air
and behind you
the aging graves
the tombstones
with moss
and half lit
by moonlight
and star's glow
and you held her
in place face to face
with your hands
upon the cheeks
of her behind
eyes still closed
in the land
of the love sucked
blind.
poem by Terry Collett
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Woke Up Saying Your Name
I woke up saying your name
but in the course of the day forgot.
I should have forgiven you sooner
but my tongue was a noose and a knot.
I should have let you fool my eyes
but not my heart. No Grecian urn
but just the same
I loved the shapely vase of your body
and the fact that my ashes weren’t buried in it.
But those bouquets of angry snakes
you kept trying to arrange
into a Zen garden in Kyoto
or a hair do in Mycenean Greece
kept me looking for an antidote for years
to all those estranged wavelengths
of a gamma ray burst
I stood like a nuclear meltdown in the way of,
though I poured my blood out like heavy water
to get you to stop and cool down.
What it is is what it is only
if you don’t factor in what it’s not.
Otherwise, in the bigger picture,
what it is is just as much what it’s not.
And who can assess
what didn’t go down between us?
I’m sitting on a cold rock down by the Tay River
freezing my proverbials off
because I like being alone with the stars
at three in the morning
because they don’t ask for an explanation
about why I’m up so late
so many light years from home.
And they don’t ask me to translate my scars,
the dead word into the living,
back into wounds
they couldn’t relate to anyway.
And I don’t need to tell them
if you’re going to open yourself up to someone,
if you’re going to bloom, if
you’re going to shine
a rose, a star,
you’re bound to taste your own thorns
or the splinters of broken chandeliers
on your tongue, or a dog
with porcupine quills in its mouth,
howling at the dark side of the moon
as the greater of two faith healers.
Though neither the stars nor I
are into comparative mortality.
And as I approach death and love aimlessly
looking at the stars timelessly alone
I don’t bemoan my brevity anymore
and they don’t flash their eternity in my face.
There’s just stars and eyes for awhile
and both of us agree
death and eternity are none of our business.
There’s just this little bit of heat and light
that flares like a matchbook for a minute
and then goes out
like a holybook, a firefly,
a poem or a flower
burning in its own ashes, smothered
in its own smoke like a pillow
over a dream in a skull
that effaced itself like stars
packed into a snowman that thaws
according to cosmic laws
not meant for our eyes only.
And God, the Zeitgeist,
the Universal Id knows,
how we’ve both tried
to enlighten these lumps of coal,
these sorry excuses for eyes
into diamonds that flow
with love and compassion.
How we have laboured like Sisyphus
to haul what’s deep underground,
the dark ore within us,
up into mountains of light
only to watch it run down again
rivers and rain
into the great night seas beyond
like a heart-mind continuum.
A leaf and a starmap on a lifestream.
We have advanced into our retrogression
like everything else in the universe,
big heavy methane planets
with shepherd moons
that cast their shadows
like beauty spots on Saturn,
and our axes toppled like Neptune’s.
poem by Patrick White
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Beauty In The Aloofness Of My Usual Sorrows
Beauty in the aloofness of my usual sorrows.
A respite in time and care. A hole in space
I can escape through without setting off any alarms.
And I don't care what this poem is going to be about
I can write it with no preconceived deceptions,
no utilitarian intent, no split lip ego-defects.
For a moment, the ice age is thawing
and the blue chicory and English ox-eyed daisies
like the taste of the air, and the drainage-ditches
are a riot of Queen Ann's Lace and Viper's Bugloss.
Temperate consolations modify my mood
into a truce with the bleaker conditions of life.
I'm gulled by the sunshine. I'm a schill of the mindstream.
The killer bees are away from their hives.
Amber tears of Baltic honey flow in my veins
without attracting flies. Life is unconscionably reasonable
in the efflorescence of its mystically specific details.
Even my dragon skull basks in the beatific wavelengths
of a better attitude toward its own martyrdom
in the greener fires of earth like salt in a flame.
And later tonight, if I'm still so entranced,
I'll make my way down to the Tay River
to see if the fireflies are out dancing pianissimo
with the abandoned lighthouses of the stiff-necked cattails.
I'll sit on a rock that doesn't aspire to lord it over
anyone's kingdom, and I'll stare at the stars
until they're tattooed like an indelible starmap
on the back of my eyelids, to keep my tears
from diluting them like smeared watercolours
or my more igneous aspects, from shattering them
like the menagerie of a zoo with glass bars.
And o, basking in the freedom of my own madness,
hilarious as peace, the infinite homelessness
of knowing I come from everywhere all at once,
and there's nowhere I've walked alone in my life
down any road beset with assassins, or feathered
like strippers in boas of white sweet clover,
I haven't been stepping across the threshold
of another wilderness always as vast
and cautiously intriguing as I am mysteriously lost
when the human intimacy of a longing heart
encounters the sentient impersonality
of an infinite mind that isn't aware of anything
the heart doesn't bring before it like a child's drawing.
And there are themes you can follow
like bush wolves through the back woods
trampled down by the padding of their circuitous descents
into the dangerous pantries of the farms
pseudomorphically nestled between the hills.
It's an itinerary that's serviced the pack for years
with a sufficiency that's got them this far against the odds.
And each to their own way, go with the gods
and I'll rejoice in hearing you howl among the trees
to the chagrin of your detractors listening
with a begrudging admiration a civilization away
from what's been bred out of them like freedom
under a full moon in heat. As for me
and my homeless approach to the ghost towns
of future zodiacs, I never want to know where I'm going
until I get there inconceivably as the only path
I could have taken in the first place,
because that's always the way it is
even when you delight in the wiles of going astray.
Signs of your emptiness in the midst of the great unknowing.
Time and space mindscaping the exploration
you keep thrusting into the dark like the light and the lamp
of an estranged nightwatchman, hoping
you haven't been here before, and anything
worth keeping an eye on has already been given away for free.
poem by Patrick White
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Over And Over And Over Again
Over and over and over again
you return to me each time
made more beautiful by the pain
I embrace you with
like the aura of fireflies
in the afterlife of the lightning
that was struck by you.
Over and over and over again
I have watched the birds leave in the fall
and come back in the spring
and whether they were coming or going
especially at midnight when you couldn't see them
high overhead like the souls of the dead
I've always heard the same longing in their call
for something I've never been able to wholly comprehend
except as the way I miss you
on this journey without end
where the destination isn't always
the friend of the road
as the stars foretold it would be.
And I don't know why
I always associate pain with lucidity
like the price of shattered glass
when you hurl the moon through it
from the inside
to let the light in through the damage
and you back into my life again
like the radiant sorrow of a lonely tomorrow
that today already lives in vain
like a weathervane
trying to give the wind a direction
it's never taken before.
Over and over and over again
I have looked for your hidden mystery
in the history of gone
for some living intimacy that lives on
but I've run out of doors and gates and windows
flowers and skies I can leave open
hoping you might find your way back in somehow
from those spaces greater than skin that fit you now
like the dress you were buried in.
The random singularity of death's one demand
might shake the tree
into the soft hooves of the highest fruit
that gallop off like wild horses
spooked by their own windfall into the silence
but over and over and over again
I turn the fact that you once existed
like a jewel I once knew from the inside
into an act of insight
that over and over and over again
rocks me like the aftershock of an earthquake
as if your death weren't once but many
and I would live my way through them all
listening to the geese depart at night in the fall
wondering which one embodied your soul
like a star-bound angel in earthly feathers
and whether you noticed me as you left
over and over and over again
standing in the light by the window
a tiny dark figure down below
listening for you in the darkness
like a vase of full of ashes
wishing it had wings.
poem by Patrick White
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Trying To Express
Trying to express a more immediate intimacy
with the life of the mind
without attributing a form to madness
might just be another way
of looking for comic relief
from the actual facts
of the tragic folly that confronts us
like a world that won't tolerate any mask
you want to put on it for long
to lie about the atrocity of your irrelevance
and pretend you don't know
what you're looking at.
I dream I suffer the same
corpuscular purpose as a paramecium.
I wake up from these desert mirages
and it's true.
OK it's true.
Next.
Because nothing in life is an endgame.
And despite the full stop like an empty cup
at the end of a thought
with the lifespan of a punctuation mark
my cup runneth over like the new moon
and everything is drunk on the lunacy of its light.
It's not the content of life that matters
as much as the way space bends
to accommodate it.
It's not the wine
it's the emptiness of the cup
that shapes the forms of our knowing
so that they can be grasped
by our eyes and hands
as separate things in the world.
Mind is a poet a potter a painter a parent a prophet
that will not be bound by its own works
or the laws of the defenceless who expound them.
Look out into space
and the furthest you will ever see
is a face in the mirror that's older than matter.
Space is a vehicle of transformation
that doesn't go anywhere
because anywhere it goes
its wheels are centered
in the still points of themselves
as we are to our navels.
And all lifelines
straight or otherwise
are emanations of its radiance.
Order and logic and reason
are the dry wishbones of the fearful
looking for predictability in a world
that can't be contained
by a unified field theory
or an elaborated straitjacket
on the fashion ramps of science.
Physics says one size fits all
but by the time the spiders
are finished weaving it
the sleeves are always too short
to keep up with a universe
that's growing at the speed of light
and I'd rather walk naked
in the skin of my own clarity
than be clothed
in someone else's hand-me-downs.
I'm not out hunting birds and butterflies
with a dreamcatcher.
I'm not looking for peace and healing
by abstaining from myself
like a promise I broke to my ancestors.
Everyone was born a lifeboat
in an abysmal sea of awareness
or they wouldn't be here to know it.
So who needs to be saved?
Or is there some kind of holy war going on
between the lifeboats and the waves?
And where does Jerusalem go
to free itself of infidels
when it goes on crusade?
All waves are waterbells
that never stop tolling
and the mindstream
they're raised upon
is in everyone
the sum of what's holy about life.
Learn to transcend your certainties
if you want to get over your doubts.
Don't hoard the effects of your efforts
in the name of a good cause
that's so blinded by its own light
that it can't see
that there's as much randomness in the wonder
as there is in the horror.
That what's most terrifying about life
is that it's free
of anything you can say or feel or think about it.
That every part in every moment
is not the sum
but the consummation of the whole
that roots and flowers in everyone
as if it were a secret
that bloomed for them alone.
To know the names of things
like the names of stars and flowers
is to look at them from the outside.
Who called you Eve?
Who called you Adam?
If you know your name
you're already in exile.
But it was not us
who were driven out of the garden.
Knowledge drives the garden out of us.
It turns our eyes around
so we can't see Eden from the inside
where our beginnings are always now
and we are no more dispossessed
of our innocence
than the passion expressed by a flower
in a loveletter to the light
can be disenchanted
of the insight that inspired it.
What's truly tragic about life when it seems so
is not that it's evil
but that it's innocent
and its innocence is older than compassion.
The moon sheds its phases.
The flower its petals.
They're always coming and going
from the same abyss they're heading into.
The emptiness engenders this abundance
out of its own potential for growth
and even death is not culpable.
This is space.
That is space.
But the two
can no more be separated
than a wave can be from water.
You don't need a unified field theory
to understand unity.
You don't need to hold a mirror up
to your face
to see your own reflection
when you can see yourself in everything.
What does space look like to space?
Mind to mind?
Light to light?
The dreamer to the dream?
What could God possibly say to herself
that she didn't already know?
There's nothing hidden.
There's nothing secret.
There's nothing that escapes detection.
There's no simulacrum for the void
that elaborates everyone's likeness.
There's no dead metaphor in the word
waiting to be resurrected.
The absolutes may be in denial
about the way things seem
but even when their eyes
burn through glass like stars
lost in their own immensities
they can't impress the darkness
with a theory of cosmic shadows.
They don't need to look
any further into space
than the ends of their noses
to see the constellations
casting them
across the universe
like the shadows of the stars
that aren't there anymore
trying to throw a light on black matter
by noting its absence.
Gravitational eyes devoid of light.
Black holes without keys
in the doors of perception.
Dry wishing wells on the moon
that have never plumbed the depths
of their bottomless longing
to hear something irrevocably truer
than the echoes of their own voices
coming back to them
like crows and doves to an ark.
By the time you know it
any event is over.
By the time you see the dawn
the sun has already set.
In the seed of every insight
you can read your own gravestone.
You can see there's as much death in it
as there is life.
You can feel the spring coming on
as if you were already buried
under the savage tiger-lilies.
And you can ask
until you're as blue in the face as a hyacinth
what it all meant
after you're dead
out in the incredible open
that's closed to the living
just past the end of their fingertips.
Or if it ever meant anything at all.
You can see and be it this way.
You can go on a long journey
to a prison or a shrine or a hospital
and return home
with no more insight
than you had when you left.
And still wonder if it was all worth it.
Because no experience of life
is truer than another
reality is not separated
from our awareness of it
nor subject to reform.
There is no norm
that isn't a prevailing illusion by consensus.
But the desert isn't looking for water
and only the one-eyed fools
mistake their eye-patchs
for an eclipse of the moon
and their own mirages
for a new way of thinking
when it's thinking's best virtue not to have one.
People and things are ok as they are
but they don't realize it.
They keep trying to live up
to their own reflections.
They keep trying to sweep
the stars and the deserts
off their front stairs
looking for a stairway to heaven
where the dust of the world
can't find a place to rest.
But time is a pulse of the heart
not the heavy pendulum
of a grandfather clock
and as Pablo Neruda once wisely said
the poetry is under your fingernails
and I would less wisely add
as is heaven.
No one's on the wrong path
once they open both their eyes
to what's underfoot
whether you're walking
on water stars or fireflies
or riding dolphins.
Whether your road
is a shoelace or smoke
or the lifeline of an umbilical cord
measured in wavelengths and lightyears
or your journey's still
an astronaut in the womb.
Mirrors holding mirrors up
to judgement for their spots.
Narcissus doesn't like what he's looking at.
So what?
The roads don't suddenly
turn back on themselves
because they lack floors
and a place of their own.
Heaven uses the same return address as hell.
But when death comes knocking in Aleppo
and you're out walking your own mile
in your own shoes
to nowhere in particular
free of arrivals and departures
no one's ever home
and every threshold you cross
is not hindered by an exit or an entrance.
Some walk.
Some run.
Some swim.
Some fly.
Some crawl.
Some ride.
Some dance.
And some sit still by the window
growing younger by the moment
the longer they look into the distance.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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There Was a Heart that Burnt Out: Light
There was a heart that burnt out: light
Light O god, O god light
Flower, perfume, stars, breeze: light
These are your names, no matter how we shape you
When afternoon rose on the evening's horizon
Who was it in my heart who said: light
Now there is no point in adorning the stars
The season of meeting him is gone: light
Dawn broke on a dream in which
I wrote simply by looking: light
The two curses we are trapped between:
How we live in darkness, how we imagine: light
[Translated by Nukhbah Langah and Lavinia Greenlaw]
poem by Noshi Gilani
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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
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Downhill Path
Life is never a flowering tree and a hurricane snatched some brutality away-
In one sense of the word freedom would rule and
In another, I can only see the rain. I foresee no future-
Only dandelions grow all summer long and
Leaves fall from the maple trees as autumn sets in.
I grew up in a home in which
I often believed I was living in purgatory-
Far away from stars in the sky, although overshadowed by clouds-
The sun always rose at dawn.
Today rain falls upon the essence of time and
I can feel the heat of the brushfires in hell below me
Searing the road I am trying to walk- all uphill with no direction-
I have yet to find my place in this world, in other words, reality-
It hardly matters because behind me exists a downhill path upon
Which I can turn back and walk back upon to the world of my thoughts;
Life has never been a flowering tree and although rain has been said to
Nourish trees and make them grow- fog is dense and I am locked inside
A chamber of madness where the only sounds I can hear and see are
Monstrous beings and voices that cannot be seen or heard by anyone else-
I would pick a bouquet of dandelions in the summer if I believed that
As a gift they could bring joy to somebody- but flowers die soon after they are
Plucked from their mother stems and when all of the flowers have been picked,
All I can see is rolling hills of grass, that is when cloud cover and fog
Become too impenetrable for me to foresee any destiny?
I often wonder if the stars so many speak of truly exist-
If they do so exist, they are many light years away-
Rain is pouring and I can hear the wind, as I walk down that hill where
The world of my fantasies awaits me- there I can find some freedom ruling.
Inside the world of my reverie I cannot fathom what the future holds-
This gives me hope that there is a chance I may someday sit peacefully
Beneath a flowering tree- at dusk looking up towards the sky seeing the stars, and
As past memories dissolve into nothingness and my future remains a mystery to me-
I shall just keep on watching the rain falling- but I am not without hope, as for
Some reason- I know that there is always an end to rain, I have created a world for myself,
And I am certain that the sun shall rise again- even after all of the flowers are gone…
poem by Claudia Krizay
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If I was in the Moon - Pinewood Royal
From an idea by Sophie Mitchell-Dwelly
Before the coming of the night
I see the moon rise all dressed in white
In the crepuscular light
I see the stars come out so bright
As I watch the stars appear
Like diamonds on a velvet blanket
And when the sky is clear
I'm so glad that I am here with you
Oh The Moon she looks so pale
Do you think she's happy in her misty veil?
Oh her light is everywhere
On a beach of pebbles we're standing there
If I was in the moon
I wouldn't want to leave too soon
If I was in the moon
I might just stay for ever
Oh Dancing in the moonlight
Our feet feel so light
Dancing in the moonlight
Oh the stars are so bright
Owls calling through the trees
And the frogs are chirping in the evening breeze
The crickets play their tune
By the light of the magical moon
If I was in the moon
I wouldn't want to leave too soon
If I was in the moon
I might just stay for ever
poem by GuyPaul MitchellDwelly
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Crazy Man Dancing With Fireflies
Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
Another one trying to shoot out the stars.
I hear the woman next door weeping again tonight.
I don't know what for.
Desire's a phoenix in love with water
if that's what it is.
The torch is plunged into the wound
to stop the bleeding
and the ashes get carried away.
I've loved nine women for years
and they've all buried me in a different place.
Or saved my skull to consult the dead
about a future that wasn't living up to the moment.
The white poppy of the moon
bats her eyelashs through the pines.
I've never been as innocent as a cynic
nor quite as susceptible
but I remember the pain of separation
like the mirror of the lake remembers lightning
as the most brutal of all its revelations.
And how you can walk in and out of some doors
all your life like faces
without ever opening them
or knowing whose they are.
Everybody longs for the threshold they haven't crossed.
Poor stars trying to live up to their radiance.
Wondering why it's always behind them.
Why the dreamcatchers never get finished
and love ends up like some kind of cold fish
swimming through endless windows.
Music from far across town
this late at night
like a ghost answering a seance.
It rises above the trees like smoke
and disappears into the moonlight.
Someone's trying to bloom in fire.
It happens but it's rare.
I take a firewalk down memory lane
but all my cremations seem no more to me now
than the shadows of candles
and though I feel intimately removed
this afterlife of mine is not scar tissue
whether things got over me
or I got over them
no matter.
Attachment too is a Buddha activity
and though passions that once
made even the trivial sacred
and the impossible slight
have transformed
the hot blue flame of their hydrogen
into the carbon and oxygen
of more sustainable intensities
the selflessness of my impersonality
is not aloofness or indifference or exemption
or the consolation of wisdom won by acclamation.
Time distills the spirit out of all things human
and you can delight in your past
as if it were the future of someone else
who lives it like the unfolding
of leaves in the spring
that shadow the ripening apple
until it tastes like the tears of the autumn sun.
Joy and compassion
and the lucid spontaneity
of staying improbably ageless
again and again and again and again
as the years rejoice in the young and old alike
climbing the ladder of the tree
from so far down in the dark earth
they're beyond the reach of its ancient roots
and the utmost of its aspirant branchs
scratching at the windows of heaven.
And then most amazing of all
someone comes to the window
and parts the veils
and like the last line of the last act
just before the curtain call
you fall.
You fall toward paradise
as if you'd failed
and had to do it all over again.
But if your heart needs healing
offer your love up like a transplant
to anyone who can use it
and your mystic eyes to the stars
that want to see through them
what their light looks like
from deep inside
the expanding vastness within you
that can hold all that shining
like the sky or the sea embraces
all kinds of its own weather
without ever overflowing the brim.
The skull you drink from
like a wishing well
in the desert watersheds of the dead
is a cup without a horizon.
A real mirage with imaginary water.
A seabed of shadows on the moon.
Low-tide at noon.
Providential midnights when it's full.
But if you don't like
what you've been hearing about yourself lately
when you stop to listen
to what your saying
and don't recognize the voice
you're speaking in as your own
hold your ears up like conch shells to the oceans
that have never heard a recording of themselves
and carefully watch their faces.
And if you make the same stupid mistake
you swore not to make again
learn to recycle your ignorance
so you can save a bit of wisdom
for the rest of the world
to remember what it was like once
to be alone in Eden
with no one else to rely upon
and all you had to add
to the conversation of the rivers
that flowed out of it
all you had to share with your solitude
and boundless emptiness
was your unanswerable longing
even as it was being shaped
by their waters
into the form of the unimaginable.
Into the form of a woman
who tasted then
and tastes forever now
of the original light
of spontaneous creation
however many worlds
and lives and years and nights had to pass
before you first saw her
and felt your afterlife condense into a star.
Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
And it doesn't matter
there's no one here
to understand my delight.
Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
It's hard to read me in so little light
but when you fall asleep
it's the world that dreams
and though I feather the wind
with firebirds of desire
and write loveletters
long into the night
that grow like the graceful tendrils
of ink dissolving in water
whatever the sign of the season
there's no bitterness in the vine
and no departure in the reason.
Though I'm a leaf with the wingspan of autumn
even in the dead of winter
the phoenix is green
and by late summer
there's a crazy man out dancing with fireflies
down by the Tay River
who is too carried away
by the picture-music
of what he hears with his eyes
and sees with his ears
of all that he's been and will be
alone together with everyone forever
in love and out
full cup and empty
eclipsed and forgotten
or charged with the radiant urgency
of fireflies after the rain
to care what any of it might mean
when they fire the valley up for a moment
like blasting caps in a beaver dam
that's flooded the road.
And everything's so nimble with light
so vital and effusive with joy
so mysteriously near and always
all darkness all pain all sorrow
all that's lost and weary
and fearful of ever being found again
of being loved or despised
is absorbed blameless into bliss
like a tender intimacy
into a great vastness
that lives within us all
even as we disappear into it
like the sky in the heart of a bird.
Or just before the soft flare of moonrise
through the leafless veils
of the glowing birchgroves
on that far hilltop
where the pioneers
used to bury their boys with a view
a night just like this
as illusory as it is real
suffused with a spirit of water
that heals the wounded swords
the bruised flowers
the fevered promises
that are offered to it from the bridge
between this shoreless delirium
and the next.
A presence that's always flowing away
like a mindstream among the stars and fireflies
with the power of time
and the effortless wisdom of change
that makes the going stay
and the perishing persist.
A night just like this.
A momentary kiss
that keeps faith
with the eternal flames of the fireflies
that adorn the darkness and waters of life
with indefinable joy
in the exuberance of the mystery
and unspeakable trust in the onceness of forever
and an abiding intuition
that even the fiercest thorns of pain
that have tasted first blood
and greyed the hearts of their lovers
can never be estranged
from the beauty of the rose.
A night like this
The great abyss
lucidly alive with its own shining
and a woman's eyes
and a crazy man dancing with fireflies.
poem by Patrick White
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My Stories Of You (chapter one)
Back touching back,
but the skin can't feel the other skin,
as clothes get in the way,
and the emptiness of the two,
is uneven for you and me.
It enters without knocking,
the bitch they call life,
a lie
ripping your butterflies wings
until love is held back, in it's leash.
In this live picture of us,
we stil are
a little bit less in love with each other,
and more distant than those stars,
which may or may not be dead.
Alone, killing my time, in this scented absence of you
I paint the wholeness of my mind
with the loss of you, and with those kisses, that made you my first love, and more than any other girl I've met or not.
Ending it, when you still mean so much to me
is not as easy as I thought it to be.
poem by Serban Raducu Bogdan
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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
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Who Looks For The Sea By Following Its Waves?
Who looks for the sea by following its waves?
Or the sky by following the flights of birds?
Or their mind with their mind?
Who looks for seeing with their eyes?
Dogen Zenji: The place is here. The path leads everywhere.
And that should be the inexhaustible end of it. Freedom.
And all along the river that means
whatever I want it to, my unfinished solitude.
This discrete spiritual protocol between myself and the stars
that don't know how many times they've saved my life
by simply being there to gaze upon, as if in some way
they were so much more cleansing than water
and I could bathe in them to wash off the dust of the world
on any clear night, or, sometimes when you cry
it's the light that pours out, not your tears.
Some memories enter a coma and stay there,
giving you the impression that the past is fixed,
but I know the past is as creatively ongoing as now
and what was isn't the fossilized substance of what is,
by the way it can still sting, bite, caress and grow
into the available dimension of the future,
by how few times I've come here in joy
that wasn't mentored by some diffuse sorrow
that lingered over the lake like a wraith of the drifting mist
that had drowned in it barely an afterlife or two ago.
Always in the background of my heart I feel
this compassionate sadness like the cosmic hiss of creation,
and o how the watersheds of understanding long to be fountains
and exfoliate into flowing diamonds that simply
celebrate the scintillance, without embracing everything
in the mournful tenderness of this space it shares with them
as if in everything I'm aware of, I were always
mourning the passage of flowers. And if not that,
the heretical indignation born of what it appears
we must suffer to be here, without knowing why,
though I struggle most times to suppress that
to make sure the door stays open to any strays
that might wander in like wayward oversights of creative clarity.
There's a sophomoric debate still going on
about whether I'm getting older or not, but alone,
I can feel the weight of this seasoned bell within me
and I ask myself is this the heaviness of the ripening pear
as it bends the branch as well as the light toward earth?
Is that why time approaches me like the night coming on
sweetened with stars, in this second innocence of wonder
before I fall again? Is pain the only intermediary
between our death and our birth and detachment and separation
the only kind of truce or bridge or oxymoron
that could reconcile them even remotely?
So often when I can't see the radiance of the world
I think it's because my eyes are unclean,
that it's my error of perception if the arrow misses the mark,
not any inherent injustice in the way things are,
because who am I to say how it should all be experienced
when I could talk forever without ever knowing
what a thought, an emotion, or a word truly is,
let alone life with all its conditioned chaos
and dissonant harmonies? All these travelling companions
on the same road I am, trying to figure out
whether they're refugees on the run,
or pilgrims without a shrine. And I'm modestly
exalted by my humility when I think like this
until I remember how easy it is to go blind
looking into any source of illumination
watching two serpents copulating like wavelengths
and helical chromosomes. And I turn away
to stay true to the face in the mirror that isn't mine.
I plunge into a black hole, a rite of passage,
and when I come out the other end, even my shadows shine.
poem by Patrick White
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Deep In The Night
Deep in the night that shells its husk of blue
to pan the nuggets of its stars from a darker stream,
the heart an executioner with a fistful of pardons,
and the soft, moist, lulling of the evening air,
the threshing of slow fish,
I'm enthroned alone in a crucial palace of light
that realigns its domains to the borders of the wind,
and I don't want to feel lonely but I do,
and I don't want to miss so many, so many faces
stripped from the bough like a savaged telephone-book,
so many feathers of light drifting through the shadows of their names,
and the black granite of the uncarved bell
that turtles the blood under the eyelid of the knowing,
that makes my eyes want to scream
until the pillars of the dead sea fall like rotten salt:
how long can one road endure the passage of everything
walking life off into the stars that measure the miles in skulls?
Was I young? Were you there in the brindled moonlight?
Did I remember how to love you well; did I see with long eyes
how you rose out of the chest of the hills like a spirit leaving,
the blue effulgence of your nebulous departure
almost a cocoon of morning mist, the last breath of a lake
as if an indigo thistle released its silk to the wind
or a dandelion relinquished its ivory mane?
Were you the soul of me that lingered by gates and wharves?
Have you come back now with your bells of blood and lamps of flesh?
Can I feel again the leaves of the silver herbs
in the gardens of your fingertips?
Touch me like the breaking of a fast,
find me like a river in the night,
the dazzled theme of a wandering valley,
and pour your journey into mine like stars into a vine,
shadows running down the worn convictions of the stairs,
the midnight wines of old eclipses in the goblets of your eyes.
Once for the flame that dances on the wick of the tongue,
Once for the orchards that plead with the heart for birds,
Once for the envelope that read the letter it married,
and you, by the river, a sapphire among rocks,
tender blue grass in the translucent water-skin of the night,
loving me once as if your hands were autumns full of departure
and your eyes, the gulf of the world in your eyes, your eyes
were the soft flowing of the dark honeys
that leak from the wounded hives
we carry like knives to the grave.
Distinguished among broken clocks,
sultry and bitter, a quarantined bay of refugee stars,
caught in the threshing blades of a circular waterfall,
a mess of tents I've furloughed across the milky distances
like a chain-letter from a secret constellation to you,
I blue the intimate spaces between us with time
and patch the maps with the confluence of our lifelines
and try to restore the eyes in the sockets of our bridges
under a brow of swallows in the dusk. And I remember
all the names of the flowers, all the names of the stars,
all the badges of love that heaven and earth once offered
in lieu of the reasons why
love bares the skin of a poppy
to the teeth of the hunting sun
and then flares like a firefly
over the water-lamps of the moon,
but when it dies of its own self-inflicted wounds,
slashed by shadows among the ripe fruit of its vowels,
and the seed wasn't asked and the harvest had no choice
there are always two skies,
one bound by roots, the other, eyes,
at the back of every voice.
poem by Patrick White
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