Related quotes: Rubies of blood running like...

Rubies Of Blood Running Like Ruptured Cherries

Rubies of blood running like ruptured cherries
down my arms. The night swarms
like a feeding frenzy of junkies
all in for a little taste. The heat hangs
like something dangerous in the air
as if the atmosphere were on a short fuse
and you can feel the fangs of its potential bared.

Like a bear to berries, I come here for stars.
It's a lair of sorts for wounded wolf hearts
gored by the moon, and it's healing
to look upon the waters when you're in pain.
There's nothing undisciplined about the chaos here.
Everything just seems to fall into place
of its own accord without anyone having
to explain anything to the animated silence
about how it all works effortlessly
in an unintended harmony of living and dying.

The trees understand like an alphabet
that's never gone out of use, what it means
when the wind skims through their leaves
like the synopsis for a serialized book of wisdom
with an ambivalent happy ending
that takes your breath away in awe.
And the waterlilies show their poems to the stars.

The serenity here could almost seem offensive
in its aloofness, as the genetics of random chance
get on with fate, and if you're noticed at all,
it's as a possible threat the beavers choose to ignore.
And the white-tailed deer cue off of them.
Not one of the wild irises clustered
like the indigo fires of the Pleiades
where the river slows down to pay homage in passing
to the decimated groves of the fallen birch
that lie like wrecked wharves in the water
the turtles and the frogs could sun themselves on
like happy freaks with no concern at all for their downfall.

Everything acceptable as a matter of course
with equanimity. A kind of impersonal poise
sustained even beyond death
in the way all living things
give themselves back to things as if
they were returning to the source of their own lives
to lavish the watershed with inexhaustible gifts.
Moonlight on the blades of silver swords
forged among the stars, surrendered
from a bridge between life and death
in a wordless tribute to the crossing of the river.
Or the unsayable insights of the rocks around here
that keep the epics of the glaciers
like enlightened haikus to themselves,
or a poet retreating into his solitude
to see if he can still remember all the names
of the stars that were the herbs and flowers
in the chalice of the ailing kingdom of his childhood
and if they still had the power to heal
what the man in me has left for the boy to feel.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Leaves Sluicing The Rain Down The Back Of My Neck

The leaves sluicing the rain down the back of my neck
to put out my candle of serpent-fire
like an orchid in an abandoned house well,
lightning in its tears, thunder in the hollow
of its telescope when the white runaway horse
pounds its hoof upon it at four in the morning,
the muscled embodiment of moonlight made flesh,
the stars running to peer through their windows
to see what's making that sound.

The sodden path down to the lake, rife with duff,
an Orphic descent whose picture-music
owes nothing to death, and the moss-pated skulls
of the prophetic rocks along the way, every precarious step,
the assessment of an omnipresent danger
that could kick the stool from out under your noose,
though you were foolishly hoping it might be
an Egyptian ankh, granting you long life
in an underworld where anything that's violet
is the toxic shadow of an inconsolable grief
that laments that it had ever met the sun eye to eye,
and try how it might, can't make a way of life
out of suicide. But I didn't come here to grease
the hinges on hell like the wings of rusty birds
or desecrate the place with my omnipresence.

Once I realized the realm of the dead
is no realm at all that can be distinguished from the living,
I've returned to this underground river from time to time
where the roots try to take hold of my skull like the moon
as if it were their last chance at blossoming,
and my bones are scattered along the banks
like socket wrenches from a dead mechanic's tool box
or a coffin that's finally run out of things to fix.
This is where I come to return my harp of water
to a watershed of indistinguishable wavelengths
in homage to the source that handed it on to me,
a voice of my own, and there's a bridge I stand on
no one's burnt down yet, just a fallen log really,
but to me an overarching oxymoron that lets me stand
on both sides of the mindstream at once
to pay homage to a death I long to be worthy of
like a teacher my life is obligated to surpass
to fully honour her undisciplined transcendence.

Like water. A carrying away into a carrying away.
We couldn't tell time if we weren't all dying.
Eternity just a sundial that never closed its eyelids.
The wounded serpent of the waterclock bleeding out
like a human heart to remind us what hour it is,
what windfalls and harvests of the season of our soul
to leave in the begging bowls we place
at the eastern doors of our autumnal burial huts,
hoping we'll see each other again, once are bones are dust,
like Canada geese returning in the early spring.

Some bring silver swords minted of moonlight
thrusting through the parting clouds
and lay them down on the water gently
like children they once cherished abandoned for life
as the greatest gift their hands had ever grasped.
I lay down this gift of a clear voice
that no fear or desire's ever broken in like a wishbone
pimped out like tinfoil to the glamour of temptation.
Whatever storms raged in the crowns of its oracular branches,
this tree never injured any bird that ever sang in it.
I never hung my lyre like a dreamcatcher over the bed,
or used it to seduce butterflies into a spider-web,
dolphins into a bay of fishing-nets, nor yet
let its strings go slack like the pentatonic spinal cords
of a guitar that's lost its nerve in the dark corners of life.
Nor did I ever refuse to sing what the dead asked me to
anymore than I did the living. Nor let the medium
intrude upon the message in such a way
the import of the song couldn't exceed
the wingspan of the bird that released it
into the vastness of its interstellar longing.

Here the dead whisper their secrets to the waters
like coy sylphs of the wind flirting with waves,
and here where dissolution walks in the same shoes
as regeneration, and one step east is one step west
and though there's a coming and though there's a going
birth and death don't know anything about this,
and Prussian blue the wet wind that's been crying
about the sturm and drang of things to the broken pines
whose excruciations have become part of their character,
as if the haloes of the rain rippled through their heartwood
like the echoes of old engagement rings
from wide-eyed springs that have lasted for light years.

Death isn't the derelict of life's glory.
Just as peace isn't the end of passage.
Mid-summer squanders as many flowers
on the capricious rivers of life as it does
the funeral bells of the fallen water birds.
And maybe that's all these words are,
wild iris and daylilies lifting their skirts
above the flowing like troupes of gypsy fires
that like dancing to the flutes of their own desires
as they burn on the pyres of their floral reflections.
Who knows this late in the day, but maybe
I'm just trying to approach my own death
like an unopened gate to a garden
the way I did as a novice to love
when I couldn't tell a larkspur from a hollyhock
nor what sign the star sapphire of the borage
wanted to be planted under like the Pleiades?

Anyway it pans out is ok with me, though.
I like it here where the waterlilies reset their sails
like redemption out of their own salvage
and after a long, grey day of funereal rain,
the clouds begin to clear around nightfall
and my eyes are seeded with the stars
of unnamed constellations of New England asters
that don't conform to any known starmaps
I can follow genetically back like a fuse of dna
to the Big Bang of my first flowering into life.

And maybe I'm a mutant in the ancestry of death
that has always been the subliminal motif
of a symphonic life that wasn't immune
to the picture-music of the celestial spheres
but I can't help noticing how the bones of the muskrat
and the skeletal remains of the heron's stilts
toppled by the stealthy fluke of a fox
all resonate like musical instruments
laid down in tribute on the roots of the trees
and on the sides of the paths that broke like melodies
on the ears of the dead who could taste them
like the tears of the moon on their silver tongues.

In this realm of radiant starmud in a state
of reanimating life out of its own detritus and decay,
I can hear their ghosts returning to life
like native atmospheres
returning to the songs of the lunar night birds
that don't abuse their solitude with a sense of loss
without sweetening the music
with the ripeness of their silence
just before the grande finale
of their next windfall of transcendent whole notes.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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song performed by by Switchfoot
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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What I Would Say

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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Crossing The River On Thin Ice

Crossing the river on thin ice, the next step
the beginning, and the one after that
the end and the whole of the rest of your life.
I’m listening for cracks in a mirror.
I’m jumping from rock to rock
like prophetic skulls
cobbling the yellow brick road
with glacial i.e.d.s
playing chess with my nerves
like the wicked witch of the east
laying bets against my afterlife
should I break through
and be swept under
to look at the stars as I used to do
on summer nights flat on my back
when I was young
only to find, older, I still do,
through a broken window in a palace of ice
like an acid flashback of my whole life
seen through an ice-age cataract
over my third eye
like flowers in the sky
strewn over the dangerous path I took
to get to the other side.
As I do. With the uncanny feeling
I’ve been mountain climbing on the moon.
I can trust the river like an instinct.
It’s purging to risk now and again
falling through something
to get to the other side of it
as if life had given you a pass
and you think, maybe, just maybe
it wanted you here for something
that would be made abundantly clear later
though for now, it’s more than enough
to feel the glee
of having gotten away with something
like the simple bliss of just being alive
to celebrate your victory against the odds.
But it’s crucial not to gloat.
Gloating makes you arrogant.
Arrogance makes you stupid.
Stupid makes a mistake.
And the river, like a country road,
will teach you to respect its leniency
on the way back without any.
So for the next half mile
through the intermittent field hospitals
of the birch groves overwhelmed
by the number of the fallen amputees
the beavers have chewed down to pencil stubs,
I remember Walter de la Mare’s imperative
about treading softly,
for you tread on my dreams,
and take great care not to wake anyone up
grasping stray branches I use
like crutches, walking sticks, and canes
as I place each foot down gently and deliberately
crossing a minefield covered in snow
to make absolutely sure that I don’t.
Because if you don’t let things dream
of whatever they’re dreaming about,
and walk softly whenever you’ve got
a big stick in your hand
like a dead tree trying to help you
get a leg up on crossing it like a threshold,
it could be you that wakes up to the nightmare
on the nasty side of Walter de la Mare.
The leaves claw at the ice-glazed snow
like bats at a glass-blown window,
frozen waves of a tide on the moon
flexing the neck muscles of a maneless horse,
or even more bizarrely
because life is more surrealistic
in the deep end
than it is sane in the shallows,
the mummified feet of Canada geese
who’ve lost their footing in the snow.
Brush wolves off in the distance
baiting the farmyard dogs
to howl at the end of their leashes
like the domesticated pets
that became of the dogs of war,
commissionaires at the door,
or come out and be torn to pieces
like the calves and the lambs
and those who fell for the ruse
and wandered out alone
and had their necks broken
for taking their instincts off the chain
to be something they weren’t anymore.
For accepting the challenge
of their old wild adversarial selves
like the French at Agincourt
only to be found in the fall
like the skeleton of a favourite dog
in hunting season south of Highway 7
when the white-tailed deer
are culled by the locals
to keep the population down
and the brush wolves at a distance
looking on with a hard winter ahead
in their strategic hearts
and pups to feed
learning from their persecutors
how to the steal the farm back
one sheep, one cat,
one calf, one chicken,
one foolish dog off its turf at a time.
As I am with a National Geographic
sixty millimetre refracting telescope
strapped to my back like the easel
I used to bring here in the summer,
as if I were out to cull the stars of Orion
by myself in a wild place
in the middle of the night
in a clearing in the woods
where the wolves watched what I painted
fascinated, warily tolerant, and sated
without treading on my dreams
and waking me up to the danger I was in
if they hadn’t recognized
the same voice that called to me
called to them like the sorceress
of a moonlit summer night
and in the winter,
the spell-binding stars
of a wizard of ice
that indentured us all
wolf, human, dog, deer
river, birch, hill, and telescope alike
to the crazy wisdom of an essential insight
that makes anyone whose blood
has ever risked running
like paint with the wolves,
or dared being driven into
deeper snow like a telescope at bay
or descended into a dangerous darkness
to clarify a wolf’s-eye view
of the millions of grazing stars
moving slowing across the heavens,
an apprentice of the light for life
when life isn’t a chore on the farm
you’ve been brought up to endure
securing a board on a barn door
to keep it shut like your mouth
when you know you should
but a calling you can’t ignore
to risk it all on thin ice
like Hannibal or Lao Tzu
crossing the Alps
like elephants in the dark
with one throw
of the constellations
that bite into the dice down to the bone
just to see what you’re made of
when you’re on your own
far from home
and there’s lots to be afraid of.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Every Leaf, Every Page, Every Poem, A Patch

Every leaf, every page, every poem, a patch
that's been ironed on to a leak in the mindstream
I've been watching from the stone bridge on Gore Street
while the Perth Water Tower stands astride the Tay River
like a Martian colossus out of the War of the Worlds,
its reflection wavering like the dissipating wavelengths
of watersnakes as the moon ascends like a pearl
above the ragged willows pouring their hearts out
along the shore where a long overhanging veranda,
an iron stairwell and several backyards end at.

A commingling of poetry and prose, I've got
to walk several miles out of this sleeping town
before a Zen cowboy can take his spurs off in the wild
and wrestle his boots like sections of chimney pipe
in exchange for a pair of winged heels that can fly by night
like an autumn waterbird. Let my life flow on without me
like a spinal cord I've been hanging on to
like a rope I used to try to climb up to heaven on
like serpent fire entwined around the axis of my backbone,
on the flip side now, an anchor chain of chakras
tied to my body like a lifeboat my heart isn't in anymore.

I lament the dry paper that became of the orchids
and waterlilies, the skin of weathered women
or an aging snake that slipped out of itself like a condom.
Autumn in my earth mind, I'm consoled by the stars
gleaming through the leafless trees of my emotions.
The whole forest floor, a sodden library underfoot,
trying to get to the roots of things like etymologists
reverentially deciphering the cartouches of dynastic words
that were once as common as the Huron all through these woods
until smallpox, the Jesuit, and the decultifying schools
that savaged their magic with white, and taught them
to turn the other cheek to the dark side of the moon,
brought on an onslaught of the Iroquois who finished the job
a few beaver pelts, an arquebus, and Champlain
in a war canoe, without really wanting to, had begun.

Somehow their ghosts in the birch groves
make everything seem more human to a trespasser
that responds more like a guest at a seance
than the host of the exorcism that drove them
from their lands. The moon's not a swan
and I'm not laying traps like a snapping turtle.
Nothing heals here, but the wounds seem more manageable
and death isn't a dirty secret sequestered in a hospital.
Everything out in the open you can even
have sex with the stars and nobody's eyelashes
are going to fall off like a haystack of pine needles
that blinked once too often at what they couldn't believe
they were seeing without their death masks on.

I like the symphonic chaos of the place as life
over writes itself like wild grape vines climbing
a trellis of deer ribs like the palings on an unhinged gate.
It's really just a matter of taste what you prefer
to furnish your solitude with. I like to spend my time
in the company of things suffering the same fate I am.

poem by Patrick White
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It' A Gesture Of The Heart

It's a gesture of the heart
that no one can explain
that lays its words down like cool herbs
gathered on the moon
to silver someone else's pain.
We lie down in the same wound
like two stones in the same river
that might make it to the other side
without drowning in the stream
and I speak to you of shores you can reach if you try
and you add yourself like a dropp of water to a shoreless sea, and cry.

And for a moment you are the devastated solitude
of a runaway in the rain
who can't abide the stranger she's become
as a lipstick butterfly emerges
from the shell-casing chrysalis of your rage
and you put your lips on like wings.
You're a princess with a white flag
approaching the ashes of a dragon
who sleeps in his own fires
to wake him up from his dream of water
and negotiate a rescue now
if only I'll concede to show you how.

You want me to respect you because you're dangerous.
You want to ensnare me
in the white voodoo you're practising
on the dark side of the moon,
you believe in my eyes
and want me to see something
you've never shown anyone before
because a window's as good as a door to a thief
and you know we have neither in this homelessness
that shelters our grief like dark matter in space
or the far side of a face
we refuse to acknowledge is ours.

I can feel your powers
chafing their scales in the snakepit
like straitjackets they're urgently trying to slough off
like the old skins of a hand-me-down moon
that don't quite fit the new one right.
One fang, stars; the other, a starless night,
you know how to open things with a smile
and strike like a gate
should anyone walk between your crescents
like a terrorist with carry-on luggage
who doesn't dream he's been detected
as you recoil like a theme to make your point.

It would be easier to tinker with the genes
of the ancient ancestors of a life before sin
than not to want to sleep with you
like a thorn under the skin of your rose,
than not to want to be your bay for the night
and tell you everything's going to be all right
and mean it and drown the world like a torch or a dragon
in the intimacy of our most urgent delusions.

And even if I didn't put a match to the candles
they would still ignite
and a black sun would rise at midnight
and let the stars and flowers decide for themselves
whether they wanted to open in its light or not,
and for awhile, deep underground,
there'd be laughter in a coffin
as we posted dirty notes on our headstones
like shocking love poems
that just rolled off the tip of our tongues
like drops of water charged with stars and snakefire
humming down our spines
like the deathbed hymns of the hydro lines
when they break the news to God.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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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
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Is Silence The Negative Space Of Words

Is silence the negative space of words,
darkness, the stars? A fact is just a fact,
static and inanimate, until it moves and breathes,
a dynamic of the mind, sinks into the heart
and mingles in a confluence of the nuances
of chaos that characterize each one of us
in solitude, is it alive, one eye plucked out
of a voodoo doll, a sunflower at a black mass,
a fable of truth in time that time, too, will pass.

Venus and Jupiter near Spica in Virgo
and Arcturus in Bootes, still stand offish
as it was through the canopy of branches
of the black walnut trees this summer.
The worst place to discover your loneliness
is when you're dancing like the new moon
in the old moon's arms, and it's the old moon
that's having all the fun. Everyone wants to
fly with the waterbirds. The third eye of the river
turns itself into a simulacrum of the sky, but still,
it only runs. As the star that would efoliate
like the starclusters of the New England asters,
merely burns like a chip off the focus
of a magnifying glass in the hands
of inquisitorial children cooking butterflies.

Here is a bend in the Tay River about ten miles
outside the town of Perth. When is another
cold night on earth I had to get out of the house
to bathe my nuclear cabin fever in the heavy water
of the moon washing over me as if a lunatic
were immune to the craziness of going sane.
Why is the content of life that counter balances
death's bad sense of timing. How is a matter
of doubting the cure and trusting the pain
to turn you into someone you could never imagine.

The fish don't jump. It's Lent for the blackflies.
The leaves have torn up their book. The retina
of the river is partially detached. There's
more resentment in the woods than there was
even a month ago. As if the only way
you could live here were by trespassing.
As I do, furtive as a fox, wary as a wolf
listening to the distant barking of farmyard dogs.
The air's taken a vow of chastity that burns my face
in the warped clarity of the hottest part of the flame.
The atmosphere's renewed its virginity
like a windowpane in an infertile November rain.

The grass brittle and the starmud hardened
into shards of pottery in a midden of ostrakons.
I'm exhilarated by the way I'm threatened
by my own vulnerability at the possibility
of being eaten alive by the elements, rather
than expiring slowly en masse like the hungry ghosts
of the homogeneous consumers back in town.
No place for an old man, maybe, but the young
don't fare much better here either. Birth
is on the clock. No one's born on the nightshift.

Only the salt lick left out for the deer
isn't frosted like a cake in a famine
of mean-hearted snowflakes that don't adhere
like toupees and wigs to the judicious skulls of the rocks
but blow off in any slight gust of the wind
like tears of dry ice that don't know what there is
to cry about, and keep holding themselves back
like the locks out at Murphy's Point or the boats,
their sails furled like daylilies and withered poems
at Rideau Ferry. Even the dragons that used to
feather the staghorn sumac in their flames
are barely a skeletal candelabra of wicks
that have gone out. Just the dendritic deltas
and bloodlines of dynastic lightning whose roots
go all the way back to the sky, but don't
flash their sabres as much in the legendary storms
that once made them famous among
the usurped crowns of the sacred oak trees.

Laureled in poison ivy, their blood slows down
like the xylem and phloem of imperial Rome
wintering north of the Danube or Ovid in exile
on the Sarmatian shores of the Black Sea,
waiting for the Ister to freeze like a meat locker
while a tryst of sorrows pleads to be forgiven
for the joys they once took in living life erotically
as if frost-bitten toes were as close as he
were going to get to Augustan purple in his afterlife.

I wonder what my eyes have contributed to the stars,
what might have been added to their shining over the years
I've looked up at them, if anything at all,
in this inter-reflecting hall of incommensurable mirrors
warped by the mirages of my frozen tears
in this desert of snow grinding them into lenses.
Clear. Cold. Far things brought near out of the darkness
like moths and stars into the more intimate fires
of my heart. Per ardua ad astra, I reach for the stars,
the lamps and the urns, the eagles and swans,
and they scatter my ashes like a snow squall
along the Milky Way disappearing into a black hole
in a mindstream of its own like images of this occult art
of reviving my life by returning it to deeper, darker waters.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Some People Like To Take A Water Droplet

Some people like to take a water droplet
and turn it into a haiku.
Some people like to write
like the loose thread
of a quick-witted alpine stream
trying to unravel the mountain all the way down
with dazzle and flash.
But when I shoot my mouth off
about what I don't know about nightingales
it always comes out ice-hot stars
above a rush of northern rivers,
the Mackenzie, the Fraser, the Thompson
and when I want to risk
my cowboy B.C. French in public,
the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Some people like to weave their mindstreams
into lakes with their third eyes open
to the flight of the white clouds
and the sky that doesn't inhibit them,
but me I like to flow and fall and crush
swell and fork, shift, shape, loop, swerve,
destroy, nourish, and change course
like the Ottawa or the Skeena
in the May spring run off
when the ice floes and weight-lifting waters
are flexing their muscles
in powerfully sculpted anthracite and jade.
A river, yes, blackwater and white alike;
what could be more
quintessentially Canadian than that?
A river as inhospitable and bleak as the Arctic
toward life in its beginnings,
and still as wild and dangerous as Hell's Gate
as it approaches the sea
after many perils and epiphanies.
I am the sorcerer's apprentice
when it comes to rivers
but I like to go with the flow, the power, the depth
the cosmic expansion of their homelessness,
the cataracts and wetlands of their manic mood swings,
the way they uproot and sustain,
carve traffic islands out of granite
and tear down bridges in their path
and then slow down mellifluously
to let a doe come out of the woods to drink
from the reflection of the way the water sees her.
I give the orange spruce root rot in rusty shallows
and strip the bark from defrocked trees
the herons nest in like a brain trust.
Grizzly, moose, cougar, wolf,
elk, deer, beaver, mink and muskrat,
eagle, loon, drake and Canada goose,
what totem of star mud
has not mingled its blood in my flowing,
what stars have not tingled on my skin
like butterflies landing on single sunlit hairs,
what tribes have not sat around their fires
while I flint-knapped the moonlight
into radiant silver spears
as the waves made small music
like a background theme of silence?
I don't need to know where I'm going.
I can be Kelsey, Thompson, or La Verendrye,
and keep a journal of where I've been
and make rough sketches of what I've seen
because flowing freehand isn't a point
it's a destination that's always on the move
shooting the rapids of the life line
in the palm of your hand
as if life were precious enough to risk it all
to see how far you had to go
to flow off the edge of a starmap that doesn't know.
Clash, dash, swirl and recover,
turn, counter-turn, stand
I like to waltz my way out of knots and nooses
like an Horatian ode in the glands of a Romantic poet.
I like to boost the torque of my whirlpools and currents
and open up the throttle
on the straightaways of cobbled river stones
as if I had a big four-stroke between my knees.
Underwhelm the birch groves before the beavers do,
tear the cedars out like molars,
turn whole villages into houseboats
and take my wrath out on the petty roads
that whine like potholes and puddles
if it so much as even rains.
All weak threads of ancillary streams
are gathered up into the strong ropes
of northern rivers with enough spine and backbone
to have all their chakras open
like the lunar and the solar filaments of serpent-fire.
My poems taste of stone and glacier,
unnamed valleys where the red-tailed hawks
have never set eyes on a human
and the sound of a voice
leaves the mountains speechless,
not knowing what language to echo.
Roil, roll, tumble, and spume,
lost in a froth of creative chaos
that brings forth rainbows and stars
and auroral veils of water and light
to mystify the message in the medium
by frustrating the logic of syntax
in the scintillant radiance
of counter-intuitive metaphors
that relate in myriad family ways
like salmon swimming upstream
summoned out of the spontaneity of the past
against the flow of the timely waterclocks
up to the sacred pools of birth and death
to die like old moons in the arms of the new.
I wreck whole forests like the Spanish Armada.
People run to me like a lifeboat
for shelter and sanctuary from the fire.
A northern river is the jugular of a snow dragon
with its wings spread as wide as Canada
breathing fire like two year old red oak
in a Napoleon airtight with a see through window
and a ten inch Selkirk chimney
that looks like it were cast out of moonlight
instead of polished aluminum
on a cold clear winter night in the country.
A poem should not mean or be
but do something to you like Vancouver,
rip off that life raft you've moored yourself to
like a running shoe tied up at a dock
and throwing it down like a gauntlet at your bare feet
see if you can learn to sink or swim for yourself
or, at least, walk on stars,
or pull the thorns of crescent moons
you're bound to step on along the way
out of your heels with your teeth
like a wolf pulls a porcupine quill from its paw
with barely a whimper of regret.
Sometimes you've got to bite the bullet
to get it out.
But a river's like a barbed arrowhead
and it's better to push it all the way through
than it is to let it tear at your flesh
like a bobcat on its way out of the bag.
It's not a good idea when you're in a northern bar
to start arm wrestling
with drunken men who build dams for a living
but you can get away with it
if you're a river and not a highway,
because they of all people
know your potential for destruction
when you're backed up
and there's no other way out
except straight through a brick wall.
El Toro!
And there's a crack
in the cement cape of the matador
that taunted the broad-shouldered bulls of the river
like a cattle prod in their stalls,
and a horn through his gored heart.
Torrent, rage, acquiesce, and chill out,
yes, a northern Canadian river
will do just fine as a similitude
for the way I like to write,
a neural connection to the planet,
a water root of dendritic black matter,
the circuitous blossoming
of wild irises and quaking aspen groves
all along the great water ways of life.
And as for inspiration
who needs more than the coming and going
of the waterbirds
to learn how to master words
as if they were as free to be what they are
as I am?

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Does The Eye Of The Rain

Does the eye of the rain know it's a tear?
Does that ray of light know
that even at night
it's a revolutionary among flowers?
Between the giver and the given
between a human and his god
between a human and her void
the gift of a gift of a gift.
And the gifts aren't hidden
even when you cover your eyes.
I saw a baglady the other day
who hadn't given it all away yet
who was positively beatific
in an atmosphere
that only she could breathe
but the shining under her rags
told me she lived on light.
She was a waterlily in a swamp.
And I wondered if she knew it.
What I don't know I intuit
so even if she did
how could that add
one dropp of bliss
to an abyss that was already full?
Experience makes a gift of a school.
The blossom grants the apple its absence.
The wind is Johnny Appleseed.
Or the mad old farmer at the end of his life
that was seen hanging on to the tail
of a black bull
in the backwoods of Westport
sowing the groves with grain.
So the birches had bread
he gave away his brain.
So the dead know
we haven't departed
we leave them our pain
in the company of flowers.
Things don't have origins.
They have givers.
Even in math
giving is an axiomatic fact.
Does the sumac know it's a phoenix in the fall?
The lifework of a universe
in every eyelash
in every bud on the locust tree
in every branch of coral on the moon.
If the all were not whole in the least of us
all things would cease to exist.
Life wouldn't be possible
if it ever short-changed itself,
watered a gram,
diluted the whiskey
thinned our blood like a mosquito.
Life would be an also-ran
that didn't quite make it to the moon.
Does the stone
that forged it out of fire and iron
know it's giving Excalibur
back to the water?
Or the magician his wand?
The diviner his witching rod?
The poet his computer?
Giving isn't a moral vow
you make to the universe.
It's the way we survive.
Say one word truly in any language
and you've endowed the gift of speech
on inanimate things that were mute
about all the things they had to tell you
in your own voice.
This is not mysticism.
This is not science.
This is not the Uncertainty Principle
of some random atomic spiritual life.
I'm not drinking my reflection
from the wellspring of a mirror.
It's as clear as a chandelier.
You can't keep
what you won't give away.
And it isn't the giver.
It isn't the given.
It's the giving that's crucial.
The Buddha gave Ananda a rose.
I don't know what kind of flower it was for sure
but let's suppose.
It isn't the rose that's famous
it's the giving that has come down to us
through the years
thorns and all
heart to heart
hand to hand
human to human
rose petals on the mindstream.
The enlightened dreams
of an unattainable man.
If you're cosmic ice,
absolute Kelvin,
dispassionate as entropy,
profound as blue glass
to an ancient Roman
you're still not sublime
until you learn to give it all away.
Empty the urns of the fireflies
like the ghosts of earthbound insights
and scatter their ashes on the wind
and they'll tell you how
to light the night up
and play like water
that doesn't know how to live any other way.
Giving took water for a body
as soon as it saw how beautiful
the wild iris and blue narcissus were.
Wisdom is water.
Compassion is water.
And there's no end of the modes of it.
Water is the light's favourite mirror.
And the most fun.
And what are we
if not clouds
if not wombs
cut off from the sea like kites,
if not sacks of water,
fruit that leaks like a crucified pear
hoping if we've got to be poured out of ourselves
like pitchers
it's over a garden.
Chandeliers of rain when we cry,
even the windows have learned
to weep along with us,
glaciers and glass,
slow inexorable tears
that like to linger on the past
as if their futures weren't the past
just gone on ahead of them
to greet them when they come.
Like a garden in the fall
that gives what it's got left to the birds,
However you think
you've emptied the cup of the moon,
such is the generosity of water
there's always one last
unfathomable watershed of a dropp left
to give back to the water-giver.
And when you do
pour it away from you
like Dogen Zenji
or someone who has drunk their fill
in a single gulp of the bowl of their skull
as a sign of respect for the river.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Down By The River Again

Down by the river again
listening for stars to interrupt my solitude
like the first little nicks of rain to strike a windowpane,
I realize how much I prefer a magnanimous liar
to the tale of a man with a stingy truth
so much so I'm generous in my sorrow
with all things that suffer as I do
however dangerous and estranged
tomorrow might causally seem.

The latest casualty of a dream I had,
I sit down on a prophetic skull of an Olmec rock
surrounded by broken beer bottles,
that remind me of withered waterlilies in the fall
and the cracked shells of cosmic eggs
that took the plunge into the abyss
to test fly the flightfeathers of a new universe
like a baby sparrow on the edge of a nest in the abyss.

My mindstream mingles with the night creek
and we both flow by like avatars of time
wondering what oceanic theme
we might be the tributaries of
as we watch the willows wash their roots
with their hair, and the stars
dip their lures in the water
to catch the silver fish that school on the moon
like a poet and a modest river
that can't find any room for their emotions
stranded on the earth like wingless waterbirds.

Down by the river again, it's easier
to share my pain with a restless companion
in constant change like the moodring of the moon
than it is the meteoritic flash and bling
of the ceremonious cornerstones of life
who might give good advice to a building
like the Kaaba or the black Taj Mahal,
but know nothing about walking
on quicksand and water or stars
without sinking like most of the living
through the fathomless depths of their seeing.

Or the aboriculture of the orchards of rootless trees
tasting the fruits of their wanderlust
like the sad sweetness of farewell on their tongues
as they pass through the gates of becoming
the same way they came yesterday
like sad poems falling from the wings of waterbirds.
Sacred syllables pearling off their feathers
like a windfall of pear-shaped tears in the moonlight.

Down by the river again I can dazzle my sorrow
with the beauty of a fleeting insight
into the nature of enlightened fireflies
that can light up the whole universe
in a single flash of compassion
for everything in passage that can't last
if it doesn't fall out of formation with the past
like Canada geese on a return journey
to the lakes and rivers that don't hang on
to their reflections in the well-thumbed holy books
of family albums any longer than it takes
for them to be on their way again
and gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond
the dark hills that keep their secrets to themselves.

Down by the river again, I can commune
with all the burnt bridges of my long firewalks
through my nebulous heart trying to break into stars
so I can find my way home again
without consulting a starchart of fireflies
where X marks the spot of my biggest mistakes
when I knocked on a plague door from the inside
and the angel of death answered like a distant memory:
Get out. No one lives here anymore.
And the pain was almost more than I could bear.

Down by the river again, I can let my dreams
and my nightmares alike flow downstream
like the blossoms of the moon or the feathers
of a my imaginative flight path into an oceanic awareness
there are no trees, there are no branches
there are no seas on the moon or in the abyss
and the waterbirds have nowhere to land,
nowhere to nest, not even the sprigs of peace
they carry in their beaks like divining rods
to anywhere within their starless wingspan.

Down by the river again, it's enough
that what I am answers to itself even
when the nightbird of my longing
comes looking for me like a rootless tree
it used to roost in like a voice from the past
that keeps mistaking me for someone
it's the foolishness of a sacred clown to still hope I am.
And what can I know about what I'm becoming
except it's the sum of all I've forgot
to keep pace with the flowing
where the shapeshifters wait at the river's turning
for a thought to tilt its wings up
in a good-bye remember me if you can
sloppy kind of salute or awkward bow
from all of us whose names
have been written on the wind and water in blood
to all those lightwaves and flash floods of the heart
standing at attention like a parade square
where war's never been declared
and head toward home like an arrow
that's lost its sense of direction
and falls like an illegal immigrant toward earth.

Down by the river again, where change
comes as effortlessly as the fallen leaf
of an apostate hymnal of protest songs, caught up in
the currents, the undertow, the vertigo, the delirium,
the rapids and vapid swamplands of time,
no one claims me, and nothing is mine
and there's a silence that screams
the birthright of my freedom at the stars
and holds up my severed umbilical cord
as proof I've escaped my immortal chains
and chosen this transient path, brief as it is,
of light and wind, root and rain,
the circuitous blossoming of the wild grapevines
wandering like dancing drunks all over the place
underneath the fruits by which we shall know them
like chandeliers of global streetlamps
shining like clusters of pearls in the Pleiades.

Down by the river again, contemplating the world
like an earthbound frog sitting on a cosmic lily pad,
feeling the ghost pains of old wounds
summoned to a seance of scars
like a retrograde excorcism of all life on Mars,
wondering if the surest proof
that life on earth first came here
from that angry libidinous planet
like a seed in the fist of a meteor,
is that life on earth has been at war ever since.

Or if it's too much bliss, or a surfeit of sorrows
that keeps the bubbles of the multiverse
in the rivers I've followed into hyperspace like
the inconceivable tomorrows
of the lonely predecessor of my own dragon line
that's an affable familar with the same starmap on
the palm of my hand, as it holds
like the triune stigmata of serpent fire and snake-eyes
of two black pearls of wisdom and one mystic eclipse
of a new moonrise in the crescents of its triadic claws.

Down by the river again, where my wounds
attend night school in the lecture halls of my heart
and vast significance is explained away
with the whisper of a cool breeze, a gust of stars,
the flaring of a matchbook of daylilies,
goose-bumps on the bare arms of the river,
and the wild white iris doesn't disguise itself as a truce
when it's really a surrender, the sacred silence of the dusk
is animated by a cloud of unknowing gnats
that makes me wonder what they're the aura of
if not the rapture of love that surrounds
the same galaxy of cosmic insights and earthly emotions
my heart has been haunting for lightyears
like the distant lustre of Venus shining like nacreous dawn
under the heavy eyelids of the dusty sunset
nodding off like a spectrograph under the weight
of the longer wavelengths of the red poppies
it's been consulting all day like the green skulls
of gypsy fortune-tellers prophesying the death of stars
that go supernova like nocturnal nightlilies
along the riverways and dirt backroads of the Milky Way
like sleepwalkers in a dream lingering
over the darkening hills of the Lanark Highlands
like an extended metaphor for life, love, and death
that's been trying to keep pace with a sunflower
that blooms at midnight, without running out of breath.

Down by the river again, where I can drown
in the endless baptismal fount of my own myth of origin,
without entering a womb like an unclean thing
asked to wash off the starmud of my afterbirth
like something dirty on the threshold of a shrine of life
I'm asked to leave outside and turn my back
on all the roads and dead end pilgrimages it took to get here,
I refuse to start any new incarnation with an act of betrayal,
and I won't sanctify a saint without lifting the curse
off an heretical dragon's back at the same time,
knowing that for every angel that falls from heaven
like rain to put this hell on earth out,
a demon rises from pandemonium up the burning ladders
of their skeletal remains like watersnakes
on the fire-escapes of emergency moonlight,
to get a rise out of heaven, and warm things up a bit
just to show it that wildflowers can bloom in fire as well
and it doesn't hold a monopoly on bells
that have been beaten out of the afterlives
of experienced swords that have been through the forge
like hot blood through the heart of a warrior poet
who's gone absent without permission
like the rogue star of a conscientious objector for good
from nightwatch in the guardhouse at the gates of Eden.

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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And I Love It Out Here

And I love it out here this far into my solitude
where the stars are as high and holy and out of reach
as they always were
and everything that is finished irrelevant or gone to waste
discovers a secret peace in its exile and desolation
that doesnâ€™t distinguish one light in the night from another
and there isnâ€™t a road you can take that was meant for someone else.
Even when the wind blows the leaves around
like things I should have said to myself years ago
like things I should have known
that donâ€™t come with a Buddha or a book
heavy with bells and the blissful fruit of wiser autumns
everything takes its place
in the spaciousness of an infinite center
the dislocated cannot exit
and even those who have found themselves
to be nothing real
cannot enter.
Itâ€™s as if all things were wounded so deeply and expansively
by the wary act of their existence
the dagger of circumstance and chance
canâ€™t find a place to strike
and so thereâ€™s nothing to heal
nothing to fear
nothing to watch out for
that could hurt you any worse
than everything already is.
The wind on the water that trembles like skin
and the scales and feathers of the tangerine moonrise
shedding its wings on the serpentine mindstream
that flows off into the distance like a dragon
someone forgot to believe in
because they thought they grew up.
And time doesnâ€™t ask itself what night it is
or the fish the depth of the water
and the flightplan of the hunting hawk
if it has one
is merely what catches its eye.
Parsifal the mottled fool
leaves home with the grail in his saddlebag
and it makes no difference to the kingdom
whether he finds it or not.
The first shall be last and the last shall be first
and then the grass eats the grazer who ate the grass.
Thereâ€™s nothing to change
that hasnâ€™t already been brought to pass
by the leftover leaves in the birch trees
that abandon their bones like old shamans
down by the banks of the river in spring
for the fish and the birds to pick clean.
The silence is moss on the skull of a rock
sprouting elegant chandeliers of columbine
that hang their heads like streetlights
over a long road with no one in sight.
So what could it possibly mean to be a stranger
among your own feelings and thoughts
when there are no gates you can stand outside of
and the enlightened beginning of the waterlily
as five petals open
and one flower blooms advaitistically
is rooted like a deep insight into a mirror that rots?
Is the coming any less endless than the going?
Or an ignorant life any less life than knowing
you canâ€™t know what youâ€™re seeking
until it finds you like someone it overlooked?
The empty heronsâ€™ nests high
in the dead trees of the swamp
are full of moonlight
and everywhere I walk
frogs punctuate the sloppy grammar of the water
that unspools like one long periodic sentence thatâ€™s never complete
as if the world hasnâ€™t finished saying me yet
like something it means.
My delusions rise like waterbirds from a moonlit lake
to go witching for water among the stars
and I let them knowing theyâ€™re
the indirections by which we find directions out.
First you go down a lot of rivers
and then you take the road.
Thereâ€™s a scaffolding of dark matter
we wore on the outside like an exoskeleton
and dark energies
that exhausted themselves like slaves
so we could walk erect in our watchtowers of flesh
like the ego of a candle with a spine for a wick.
Black bones buried somewhere
that once were us.
Churches that wandered off the beaten path like gravestones.
Dark sanctities of a dead lawgiver
that entrusted the truth to a liar
as if the night had a sense of humour.
And everything is as it is without discrimination
in the eyes of the light that falls upon us
as if we didnâ€™t exist
though as far back as I can remember
my spirit has always cast its shadow upon the earth
like Venus on a moonless night
and my body laboured
like a prophet with a whale in his belly
to spread the word.
And subtlety of subtleties
wonder of wonders
my mind got a good look at what it isnâ€™t
and spontaneously learned
to be playfully creative
with the absurdity of being here
whispering into my own ear
like a wind that talks to flowers
descended from the stars
about how far we all are from home.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Since childhood the night scares you

Since childhood the night scares you
as if here in Africa dark things do sneak about
and when the stars appear you start to long

for tomorrows when the sun hangs bright in the blue sky
and it feels as if something almost touchable sneaks up on you.
Since childhood the night scares you

as if even the wind hisses at times like a deadly snake,
as if something dangerous is drinking water from the dog's bowl
and when the stars appear you start to long

do want to replace your fears with my presence,
and you want to baste in the passion of our love.
Since childhood the night scares you

and it feels as if something evil wants to catch you
when you sometimes find shelter in the bath
and when the stars appear you start to long

while I dry the tears from your rosy cheek,
and hold on to you through the night.
Since childhood the night scares you
and when the stars appear you start to long.

poem by Gert Strydom
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Full Moon Behind The Broken Femur Of A Jack Pine

Full moon behind the broken femur of a jack pine
shattered by the wind on the ridge of the hill,
its pagoda of boughs, nothing but a lean-to now
for deer mice, fox, rabbit, groundhogs.
Old manuscripts of rock striated and stacked
by retreating glaciers
washing their hands of themselves.
The hill has never known a messiah
and the glaciers wrote for themselves.
The mast of the moon boat wrecked,
The rectal stake of Vlad the Impaler.
The axis of the world for the auto de fe
of some future heretic
with a penchant for the tragic.
No culpability in the event.
Hawk with an injured wing,
molar, stalagmite, Cinderella
sweeping up the pieces of a broken chandelier
so she won't cut her feet on the stars.
This tree talked to God.
This tree broke like an arrow
to make a truce with the wind.
Detonations of juniper and red ground willow,
splashes of tears and blood
going off like improvised explosive devices
in a mine-field covered in snow.
This tree was caught in a war-zone.
This tree is trying to flag a fighter back on deck.
This tree sailed out and met the French at Trafalgar.
This tree is a seasoned cannoneer
without a leg to stand on.
This tree is the capital A of a sacred alphabet.
The moon rises and shrinks from apricot
to blue-white toward zenith
and somehow metaphors
run off the back of the silence here
like water off a water bird
as a fractured pine
puts its finger up to my lips
and says shhhhhhh
there's nothing that can be said
that's going to make me whole again.
It's not me that you're trying to mend.
The wind shudders
with a bleak chill it doesn't recognize
like a power surge up its spine
as a cult of bats sweep the air helter skelter
like lunar butterflies with teeth.
The brutal clarity of broken things in the wild,
beautiful beyond compare
with anyone's reflexive remedies,
a wound more sublime
than the whole and the healed
among these groves that surround the hill
like devotees at Stonehenge
pouring blood libations
over the dolmen of a Druid
talking in tree language to the full moon
about things that haven't happened yet
and the things that inconceivably have.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Something Deeper Than Stars

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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