Related quotes: Small, warm birds of feeling,...

Small, Warm Birds

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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In You

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Not To Be With You

Not to be with you,
not to know your breathing beside me,
not to be able to put my arms around you
and kiss the black candles away,
change skies with a glance,
feel your mystery seeping into me
like a veil of rain,
my heart a hive of stars,
my body crazed
by a fragrance of the moon,
to feel the intimate moment hang
like a dropp of dew
poised like the silence that falls before it;
is a mountain peering down into its own valley
at a whisper of cloud
that passes like a secret,
a red carpet of blood that wants to fly
laid out for an unknown dignitary.
You are not here
but I walk with you alone
under the smudged moonlight,
through the tidal shadows of soft, ebbing trees,
and gusts of warm air touch me like your skin,
and the assent in your eyes
is a colour only the heart can see,
and my longing is a map to anywhere
my mouth might meet yours,
and my hands visit the shrines of your body
like pilgrims full of reverence
for an infidel religion
with beautiful eyes,
with sacred scars and a language
that is born along
with the serpent fire of my ripening passion
to annihilate myself in your doorway,
to unspool the river
in the supple coral of your water-rose,
the keel of my tongue
circumnavigating your startled equators,
and all your tender meridians
bowstrings taut with anticipation
of electric arrows released in ecstasy,
both of us wounded by insatiable joy
in a storm of mushrooms and black cherries,
in the oceanic hunger of the sea
for an oracular island of forbidden frenzies,
for mystic releases
that free oblivion from servitude
and teach the chains of existence
to dance to the music
of their own liberation,
their own falling away like rain,
that the true ground of their being
was always the wind
that binds the message to the world
in the arms of lovers creating each other
from black palettes in the darkness,
from moss and apricots,
from the long wharves
of interminable kisses
that gore like the horns of garden snails,
from the fountain-mouths of ancient eclipses,
the dark abundance
of the feast that is received like eyes
and the night chutes that open nocturnal poppies
like auroras of furious sugar
to squander the stars
in the throats of jubilant black holes,
to appease the unattainable
with the inexhaustible satiation of gratified silos.
Not to be with you,
my wings ache with urgent migrations,
and I am as impetuous as a sword
in the foundries of my blood,
and my voice
is the remote thunder of humbled apples,
and my dragons swarm
the abyss of your beauty
like shepherd moons, sunspots,
a calendar of desires
that marks every phase of your body off
as an apostate holiday,
the omen that winnows
a harvest of bells.
Not to be with you is a cloak
that weighs more than the night sky,
the eyelid of an iron rose,
a feather of lead
that drowns in its own reflection
like the shadow of a flightless longing,
the unquenchable silence
of a well on the moon
listening for rain.

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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Not Quite Dawn

Not quite dawn, night seeping out of the blue,
troubled sleep, no stars, and you, a week gone,
the whole universe applying its laws to your absence
which is the silence everything returns to like water.
I have never touched you, so my fingertips
can still play you into existence on a keyboard,
though the loss of your voice is a dead bird,
and I am a loose thread of blood in a labyrinth
of motherboards and micro-chips like me
who can’t find a way out of themselves without
turning away like a planet from its own stars.
How quickly the light comes, and the darkness
bleeds away like a love-letter under the door.
No eyes. No hands. No skin. No hair. I am
not even the ashes of a cleft witching wand
that went looking for water and caught fire instead,
and we have shared only the light of the mind
that paints a world with the shadows of a ghost,
and might only be the last habit of an amputee to leave,
a mere mime of the way our eyes make us see.
And yet the heart hurts as if you once were flesh,
and I am awake as if another bed denied me my own,
and I am angry and sad, scared and alone as if
the universe were shy one comet, one bead,
one firefly among billions who shone for me
and that light was brighter somehow than a galaxy.
The day grows a new skin over your absence,
and I am as out of place, out of time, as a streetlamp
still shining down on its feet in the morning.
And there could be a thousand and one reasons
you don’t write back, why the black crow caws,
the sky is a concrete rose, the blood of the poppy
runs along the gypsy blade of its undulant smile.
From the heights, I can see a small, blue egg
smashed on the rocks below, a gesture of ruin;
from the depths, the remnants of a shattered star,
and all I can do is stare into the relentless images,
a word without a mouth, like the new moon
shucked from my tongue like a black pearl.

poem by Patrick White
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So Lifetime After Lifetime

So lifetime after lifetime, sorceress of shadows and dreams
you step out of the dark wood of yourself,
a shy doe, a mournful lighthouse and a warning off the coast
of your infinite solitude, you, the singing bird
on the green bough of your flute pouring yourself
like sorrow over the eye of the sea, your tears,
the ancient wells of an eternal longing unanswered by the secret stars
that have entrusted their radiance to you, fireflies
drowning their light in your black candles,
the blind music of your lonely flowing. Is your flute, a bone, then,
and this rose I bring you, this heart, this blood
that has turned into a goblet of luminous wine,
drunk on the wonder and the missing in your phantom music,
is this rose nothing but a wound, a coffin-flower,
the unmarked grave of a mystic embryo?

Do you fear the tenderness, the meeting? Does the moon
strike at her own reflection in the mirror of her midnight waters
to wander like an orphan along her lifeless shores?
Boy and man, you murder me on the steps of your serpent shrine,
your eyes, cold glass, eclipses of crystal, your spirit
that once drew in the light like breath,
now a slow glacier, an age of ice
pushing your heart before it like a boulder,
like a temple-stone that one night flew out of the abyss
and buried itself like a meteor, a charred jewel, the demon seed
of a religion without saviours, your implacable creed
scriptures of blood in a mouthless book
that only love can open. Once there were swallows in the tree of life,
asylums of celebrants greeting the morning in their madness,
in the garden, in Eden, hurled through that first dawn
like a young girl's heart trembling like a dropp of light on a blade of grass.
Now your voice is a gypsy-crow on a dead branch,
your music, confession without atonement, your flute
without leaves, without orchards, an eyeless spring,
buried in its manger-cloth for years, nothing
but a crib-death, a broken wand, a phoenix
that has lost its faith in fire under the weight of its own ashes.

Beloved, again and again you kill me
in this dance of slayer and slain, tear out
this page of love like a like a child's tongue, like a mute heresy
you are doomed to rewrite forever
in the indelible inks of your seeing.

Do you dip your pen like a water-bird drinking
from its own image, putting out your eyes
to deepen the darkness, the scars of your sin
the lightless letters of a hidden language
pricked out on your skin, black stars and braille tattoos?
The pages and the years may turn like wings and hinges,
and a thousand deaths, all your own,
tome the field with gravestones,
breathless flutes and hollow bones, ancient futures;
and you the only mistress of those solitary realms; still,
your legend will remain moonless and sunless,
the story of a night sky, the eyelid of a black rose,
that couldn't break into light. Until
love stands beside the heartwell of another
as if it were its own sacred fountain,
one blood, one wind-mingled music
playing the waves like plectra, and raises the rim
of the single goblet to its lips and tastes,
only silence answers the terrible vastness,
only death graces the obscenity of these loveless wastes.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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First The Tenderness

First the tenderness; I feel the tenderness,
the downy edge of the leaf, the eyelash,
the green tooth of the leaf
gently opening its mouth to the air,
its flag of being high in the branches
unfurling like a sky of its own,
startled by the taste of the first star.
Every dropp of rain that falls
is a jester's cap,
three bells and a splash and that's me
learning how to swim in this new space
with an ark and a flood, you
the dove with the leaf in its beak, returning.
Then I check a little calendar of razor-blades
to see if any of the days
are holy days circled in my blood,
if I'm late for a sacrifice somewhere,
if there's a landmine waiting
like a spiny sea urchin buried in the sand,
glass petals shed from a broken rose,
waiting for me to take my boots off
and walk barefoot dazzled along your shore.
You are honey and wheat, and, angry,
a small storm that bleachs lightning white.
Brave despite myself,
your beauty crowns me King of Fools,
and though I meant to disguise my helplessness
by standing my ground like a iron thorn,
I can already feel the earth turning to quicksand
beneath my feet,
and tremors of an approaching earthquake
that might heave me up out of the sea
like a new mountain.
And it's too early to tell
if it's demons or angels
that prod my heart
with their taunting spears of fire,
or if they're just bored,
hanging out on call,
like a gang of crows
pecking at the seed
I left hope against hope on the moon,
but to judge from the way I feel
like a new element
discovered first on the sun,
all my cells and molecules assuming
a new paradigm, a new mandala,
a new configuration of shining,
an unknown constellation in the doorway,
through either end of the telescope,
they seem to mean business.
Fear rolls out its black carpet
and blood rolls out its red,
but only love walks freely in the starfields,
making its own path in the going
and when I think of you,
I pale like a planet
in the labyrinths of a shadowless dawn,
I am the toy of tides of light,
a rootless island
broken like bread
from the continent I thought I was.
Unless broken from the whole loaf
nothing can be shared, and nothing
can feed the heart
that has not been broken
among the hands of the hungry.
I have seen you as a harvest day in September,
your pulse a windfall of poppies and apples,
your radiance, flying fish
and water goblets shattered translucently on the wave,
a white mare in the mirror trampling a glass serpent,
you were the pure blue of a troubled morning
melting the first frost
on the wild, New England asters
that bloomed among the grounded planets
of an abandoned apple tree
somewhere in New Hampshire;
I thought you were a window of honey
saturated in its own light,
that only the rarest of eyes
that came like bees back to the hive of your heart
could look through.
Now the moon is out. Now
I see the ghost of the water-lily ride the darkness
like the soul of a doomed ship
unloading its cargo in the depths,
or the second blue moon in October
silvering the fields
it threshes with a blessing.
First, the tenderness; I feel the tenderness
overwhelm me in gentle enigmas
of fireflies and small eclipses,
random ignitions of the mystery
that this should be so at all,
and it's as if I could stand beside my heart
astounded by the course of its flowing
as all its rivers run suddenly down to you
like a sea on the moon,
and like the feathers of a stormbird
every sail, every burning paper lifeboat,
every next breath
is a longing off your unmapped coast
and a lighthouse of reason
bawling its warning into the fog
that the star that guides my spirit luminously ignores.
And though my ignorance at this juncture
is a stairwell of wind at a crossroads
and I approach you like a tuning fork
trying to harmonize my ashes
like the urn of a burnt guitar
to sing to you out of the shadows of a summer night,
to touch you with leaves and stars,
to lace the air with the black fragrance
of smouldering roses alluring as the wine of a drunk mystic,
and the beast putting on
his brightest golden chain and collar
to greet your progress through his zoo of desires,
slowly I raise my fingertips to your secret braille of scars
to read the contours of the kells
you have elaborated from your suffering;
the symmetries of passion and solitude,
blood and tears
that ink the mingling of your silent scripture
in the shrine of your deepest intimacy.
First, the tenderness, I feel the tenderness
of a bridge for its stream,
of a fountain on the sun
watching a new comet
rinse the darkness out of its hair with light,
of a tree for its chandelier of ripe cherries
glowing brighter than blood in the night.
And I may be junkmail
on the doorstep to the threshold of your heart,
a wizard shy of magic,
or a kite tangled like a misplaced note
in a stave of humming powerlines,
and I've fallen
on the thorns and swords and obelisks
of my delusions more than once,
lost like a single straw in a stack of needles,
drowned diving
for tiny moons in hard shells on the bottom,
and no one grows fat on the feast
in a crumb of light,
and a rumour of love
is not the burning bush
of prophecy and inspiration in the valley of a woman,
and you are not the blue love letter
of an atmosphere I could take for granted,
but I risk slipping myself under your horizon
like the wingspan
of a homing bird in the dusk,
risk stepping out from the trees into the open
to drink from your reflection
from the waters of a midnight lake
that has eclipsed every other vision
that has intoxicated me indelibly
from the very first sip
to let you know while we live and breathe and love and hope,
though hope is seldom a road that arrives,
the first tenderness; I feel the first tenderness
of being enabled, empowered
by this transfigurative gust of grace
that turns the galaxies deep within me like well-wheels,
to summon the images, wraiths, forms of the world,
as it arrays its jewels
on the flying carpets of life,
to compare with your beauty,
to embody these auroral aspects of you
that play me like a keyboard of light
in the likeness of a woman
whose smile
though it were as many as the leaves of fall,
and eyes
though their shining
outnumber the morning asters,
have never failed to startle me
into realizing everything
I am missing in life and love.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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As If Beyond Death

As if beyond death today,
as if I lay already under the eyelid of the moon,
the echo of my heart
pumping shadows
through my perfectly preserved corpse
in a silence that's never known the wind,
a fallen wharf without arrivals or departures,
and sad enough not to care why,
blood on the dolphin in the black tide
that pours me out of the horseshoe of the bay
like a road from its boot,
wipes me like the pollen and dust of dark matter
off the windowsills of the constellations,
my unknown mass crucial
to the cosmic contractions
that might give birth to the world again,
and I'm here alone in the high field
drowning in the twilight with the wildflowers
and the sky a last exhalation of the blue-green luster
that flirts with the mystic violet
on a homing crow's head
as the shadows assemble the wings
of a total eclipse
and a new dragon is born of the pain
that shrieks like lightning in the mouth of the abyss,
a torn animal
peeled out of its own skin like an eye
to add its darkness to the furnace of the black rose
that roars in the night
to blood the hungry mirror
with the thorns and talons of clarity,
to feed the wound of its existence
its existence.
And when I walk to the end of myself
through the golden rod and waist-high asters,
the seed of the stars that sleep with the daughters of men,
some of the flowers close up like fists and kisses
and others grasp themselves like a key
to a door that the whole universe can walk through,
and there are strange birds
flying from the eyes
in the rising skull of the moon
that sing like the pyres of cremated guitars
that died like trees in their solitude
and even the gates are weeping like wild dogs.
And there's a wind, intelligent, dark
the ghost of an ancient serpent
horned without ears,
an ocean of mind that exceeds itself like a wave
that howls like a secret it can't tell itself,
like a root blind to its own flowers,
that wants to lead my voice away in chains,
that wants my tongue to try
like a leaf in the updraft of a fire storm
to scream its agony out in the night
so that even the furthest star shudders
with the horror of its final liberation
like an arrow through the throat of a caged hawk.

poem by Patrick White
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Night Of Peace

NIGHT OF PEACE

Night of peace in the midst of trouble, of heavy stones
longing for lighter hearts, and cherries swelling like stars
looking for their lost constellations, mournful train in the distance
tracking the past through dark woods, and the thick, moist air
sweating over its anvils, people everywhere in the hot streets
looking for each other in a trance of water, alcohol, dope,
homing in oblivion, face to face, breathing each other in
as enemy, friend, lover, abused and abuser, rich man, pauper,
all the status of alloys and metals, their hands, gold, their faces
iron and copper, radioactive chatter of leaden half-lifes
trying to empty the loneliness out of their boots like stale wine;
this one drinking sapphires, that, the blood of black diamonds,
and the acids that fall on their own hearts like treacherous rain:
and the pain and the pain and the pain of the horrible masks
pasted together of leeches, newspapers, dead skies, wet leaves,
and the look of the windows, resigned to despair and mannequins,
old wedding cakes, the tels and barrows of a round-headed people in arrears,

I would be down on my knees in tears at altars of bone
if you were not the lantern in the roots of the music, if you
in your distant solitude were not the lily of the way that’s open,
the palace of blood with the frozen chandeliers that once wept like time
in a ballgown, you, the willow and the dancer, and me the shadow that asked you,
trembling with stars that might be ready to marry into life again,
and the mirrors that served the drinks to my courage, confounding
the lines, appointing three mouths ambassadors to the answer,
avatars of lime that sleep in the journals of the skirtless poppies,
and now this, before kisses and signs, your hand in mine
and the black swans back on the living river, entwined
in the flowing scripts and unspooled inks of the knowing
and the suicides back in their boxes with the broken dolls in the attic
and the old angers, the flash re-entries, meteors that smashed the pain
on exhibit in their temples of glass in retributive museums.

Orchids in the rain that bloom beside the rusting knife
like a slash of blood that rosed the silver with sainted veils,
we shall drink the mystery of our faces from grails
that have kept their secrets safe in the hearts of fools
that know how to love what the others can’t see to lose,
this menagerie of scars and chasms that says me into you
in a voice that was always ours under the bridge of broken choirs
where we lived like token fires fluttering in the ashes.
You, fountain, you, starwheat, you, silk and nightshade
with your small bouquets of linked tears learning to seed
your wounds with mirrors that bleed the arrows away
and the sad pilgrims who wrote in reverse on a puppet-stage,
gone like the children who laughed in their own mad faces.

Gone the black bell full of bees that drowned in their honey
and the darkness that swallowed its stone roads to the fair,
and the bruise in the corner nursing her lyrics of hair
and the blind tree that tore off its clothes in the fire
and went up in a blaze of worms, naked, to the stars.
How can the night know your shy defense of the wind,
and these soft events of light that stagger me with bliss
when I say your name in marrow, in silence, in thresholds and lips,
and oceans wash their keyboards up on the shores of my fingertips
and the only thing I know how to play for the eye of an island
is the gusty phosphor of fireflies that burn like notes in the air?
You, love, you, most, you, dove-fire in the walls of my heart,
You the blue shadow on the stairwells of my life and art,
You the sky that binds my voice in a skin of red auroras,
You, child in a wild apple crown, and you, the lynx by the river,
You more than the me when the moon’s a golden sliver,
You the new magic of waking wizards, you, dawn and dispersal,
You this dolphin tide of leaping seas without reversal,
You the tree where all my words are birds asleep in your branches;
And you, and only you, the candle in the shrine of the mystic chances
I take to know your flame on my water, as the stars grow hotter
and like a stream, like a hand, a vine, a man who loves blue,
this night of peace advances toward the gates of the radiance
he longs to step through like a poet enraptured by fate into you.

PATRICK WHITE

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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It's Good To Know

It's good to know you're there;
though the world is a diatribe
of waltzing trains and threshing razors,

it's good to know
a door burns for me somewhere in the darkness,
a bell waits like a nipple of silence
and your blood waits like a language,
a rose of rain in a starfield,
that my mouth alone can say to the night
in a shudder of light that only the blind can hear,
sipping from a chalice of water
spiked with diamond nails.

My heart flashes across the sky
and buries itself like a meteor
at the cornerstone of a sightless temple
pillared by faithless candles
that flirt with the shadows
of the fire in their eyes,
and I'm bridges beyond any way back the way I came,
my wake the scar of a vapour trail
in yesterday's cherry sunset,
and I still catch myself at my worst
whenever I'm good;
there's always a thread of blood on the water,
and a half-finished suicide note on the mirror
scrawled in manic lipstick,
and a gravestone
I carry around on my shoulders like a skull
that feels like the weight of the world,
and a child leftover from an ancient crib-death
that is often afraid of me,
and a ferocity of freedom
that thaws my deepest thoughts like chains,
and bleaches every feeling like a wound
in the antiseptic of the sun
that bites like a mystic arrow
that was feathered with a message
before I was born to find me;

but it's good to know
your fury and your gentleness,
the glow and heat of your chimneys and fireflies,
your altars of wind and smoke
spuming across the vastness of the solitude
like blood and chalk
and lines written after school
on the blackboard shale of my river skin
still trying to reform its way to the sea;

it's good to look at the moon
through your passionate windows
and taste the fragrant honey of your darkness
attuning the tines of my tongue
to a fork in the road of your body,
to the delta of an unknown civilization,
to the mystery of rivers entwined like serpents.

And the vines of the words
that have sought me out
like blood vessels and burning bushes
and the blossoming fingers of someone
kneading a face
out of the huge volume,
the pure space of my unattainability:

o you have said things to me
in ink and water and brandy and fire,
in night and moonlight and poppies and tears
that have made the hardest rocks
on the highest slopes
of my mountains and cloudy ladders bleed
to be opened like a harvest of love-letters in a bomb-shelter
by the tenderness of your knives again and again,
urgent with beauty and joy
to be overthrown
by the whisper of your voice in the valley
triggering this skyborn avalanche
of nocturnal thrones.

And the bells turn into vases
and the vases into urns
and the urns back into the wombs
of a thousand terminal exiles
tolling like a heartbeat
with a passport and a threshold,
and though I am no longer
the leaf of hope
that aspired to rudder
the firestream of these volcanic transformations,

it's good to drift awhile
in the dreamtime of this endless night
like recoverable salvage
among the lanterns of your searching lifeboats
and the reaping eyes
of your eloquent islands of light.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Turn Out The Lights

I turn out the lights and lie down to sleep
and you open up within me like a lotus of fire
blooming in the darkness of a vast inner space
that has become my only skin, tattooed with stars
as I play solitaire with destiny, using your Tarot
of chameleonic constellations as a firing squad.

Little threads of joy and fear shudder through me,
revelation and lightning, fireflies going off,
the blasting caps of greater detonations yet to come,
and your face is before me, apparition and aurora,
the moon reflected on undulant water,
a jewel turning in the light of itself, blue eyes, full lips,
the blonde smoke of your hair on your cheek
disappearing somewhere as if a match had just been put out,
and your smile, your beautiful, wide, forgiving smile
that seems to flow from the warmest sugars
of an abundant heart; what dawn over a lake
has ever touched me silently like that?

One look at you and I am hurled into another more spiritual dawn
like a bird bewildered into singing by the strange joy
that threatens to consume him in the soaring radiance.
And though I cannot say you, you are the secret
I discern in the stars when they stop to whisper through the trees
to the bones of the holy man humbled on the hill
of his own insignificance; and then you are the only exaltation
that can raise him up again to shine above the night.

Always within me you summon like a bell; you
draw me out of myself like a genie torn from a lamp; my blood
heaves helplessly to the urgent clock of your tides,
teems with life and washes up on the shores
of mysterious realms where you are always the enchantress of the island;
what man or creature could I not become for you,
immersed as I am in the wine of your being? You are
the fullness of woman in the prime of her mystery, the vase of your body,
the shrine of a human divinity that generation after generation
inspires adoration from the brute
that comes, awed and shy of first fire, to lay pink tulips on the staircase,
grails and goblets gathered to be filled by the reeling honey
of your presence, the fire that burns without burning
and leaves even the wind love-sick and longing for ashes. Human,
you are five petals of fire; divine, one flower.

Break, then, if I must; in loving you, I'll break.
And should you never love me back and the air turn glass
and shatter
into a million splinters of emotion that settle at the bottom of the heart,
the broken wineglass, the crippled flower,
severed from its stem, or the moon,
scoured from its reflection on the eyeless river by clouds,
never know the laughter of your fountain, still
in every fractured piece of me
the whole of your face, in time and out, would shine
as it did in the dark before the light began. You are not a mirage
shimmering over vipers in these circumstantial sands
and I am not a candle in a hurricane. Though I love,
I know the world, its gardens and atrocities, its wounded doors
and urgent windows flowing with lace and longing.
It doesn't have much time for itself, busy as it is,
trying to hide the loss; it's looking for its eyes with its eyes,
its head with its head, its feet with its feet.

I've pulled the thorn from my heart, the worm from the rose,
the nail from my hand. I've gone mad and madder still,
looked up at hell out of the depths of my despair
and envied such exalted heights. And then it's all turned radiant
for no more reason than a dream, something nameless changes,
even as we plan a way into ourselves, or out,
suddenly an unknown light breaks through, and we have our eyes.

One moment of you, one firefly, in the vastness
I was falling through and galaxies ignited all around me;
the dead branch blossomed, the singing bird came
and the day was no longer a spoonful of ashes. Call it
what you will, pour it into any cup, plastic, crystal, or clay,
or drink it from your hands: it's still the wine, it's still the moon; it's still
always and only you that makes this confusion of stars and birds
in the treetops, this picture-music, this drunk dream, this tavern
that is an outcast's shrine to joy
raise a glass
to the sun in his blood that shines at midnight.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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There Are Masks

There are masks I will not wear,
backstage wardrobes I won't dress up in,
lives someone else can star in,
fires that will never feather my voice,
or sweep the shadows
from my palace of ice and eyes,
faces that will never hang like fruit
from any bough of my being,
daggers I won't bury in the wounds
they inflicted like mouths
the tongue has been cut out of,
dignities of desire
that will not circle the roadkill,
my wings linked to the foodchain.
My heart will never labour
like the ox of a bell under a yoke,
though I plough the starfields;
nor will I fill its rivers
with leeches and eclipses
and let it sip the blood of others
to nourish my own lust.
I will not smudge the clarity of my heat
with greenwood, not sacrifice
the hawk's eye for the ant's,
cloud the integrity of love with acrid reason.
I will not eat the days
like spoonfuls of my own ashes,
a martyr to my own orthodoxies,
trying to be true to a creed of fire
that moves underground like a root-fire
in a choir of cedars, the forbidden flame
smouldering, trying to bite its own tail,
trying to put itself out with its own tears
for the best of reasons,
for lost earrings in a coffin.
Anyone can see
you're a raven worthy of silver
who's roofing her wings with tin,
an urgent orchid with flare
trying to bloom in the shadow
of a nightshift toy factory.
Your wingspan
should be measured in horizons
from dawn to dusk; and you
free to ride your own thermals,
to slide yourself like a theshold or a love-letter
under the door of the wind,
to take the hood off your sky
and explore your own vastness,
all the bridges you built
to lie in the shadows
of the burning cherry trees,
true to your own emergency,
true to your own fingertips and eyes,
the impulse of the serpent at the gate
who whispers to you like skin
when the candles go out,
who comes to you like water to a witching wand
a root-god to the poppy
that shudders with black lightning
to be consumed like a torch in her own flames,
to drown in the black rose
of an exquisite oblivion,
naked in a moist parachute that blooms
like a smile you'd thought you'd lost.
The butterfly can't be
stuffed back into the cocoon,
the bird back into the egg,
the pearl back into the grain of sand
that grew a palace
out of the tiniest foundation stone.
Fire is not a flower of ashes
that sheds its petals twice
There are roads that disappear
like stray threads of hair
over our shoulders
even as we walk them,
every step farewell and arrival,
as time yeasts the envelope
with crucial stars that make things happen,
the wheatfield of an autumn letter
in the loaf of the hollow mailbox
rising like dawn out of a dark mouth
over its own harvest.
You can't live forever like a sentence
balked at the fang marks of the colon
you can't remember biting you.
Because life is not punctuated
any more than space,
things will follow
the promise of the serpent's tattoo
to die back into life,
the black lioness
of your passionate constellation,
not a nun at the stake
of a forbidden lust to live,
but a new moon at the opening gates
of the parenthetical secret
between two crescents.
Are you afraid
to let your life graze like wild horses
on the grasslands
of your own transformations,
do you desecrate a greater law
to obey a smaller;
would you tie your last lifeboat,
your last island full of moonlight
to the sunken pillars of a wharf
that aged like a palace,
an endless prelude
to a book of farewell
that collapsed under the weight
of its own hesitation
to read itself to the end?
Even now your foundation-stones
are turning into quicksand
and the abyss
of what you must jump into
to follow your wings
out of the barnyard
opens like a mouth
trying to clear a wishbone
or a song from its throat.
Are you afraid
to give up your collection of hats,
those skies and overturned nests you walk under,
a hawk behind chicken-wire
for a bough in the wild
without a return address?
I want to hear the nightbird sing
that dazzles the serpent
with the joy of her own being,
slowly ascending the tree like a stairwell
to seize her in the dark rapture
of his amorous coils
and drown her in tide after tide of transfiguring wine,
the secret oceans of bliss
that lie hidden
in every dropp of blood, every tear
that falls from the thorns
of the black star that burns like a rose
in the mouth of the dragon
that is waiting like wings
at her bruised heel
for her to wash off the old mythologies,
naked in the eye of the rain,
and mount the taboo and eclipse
of her own repealed desire
and fly from the graveyard firepits
of the grounded comets
praying for a match in hell
to light the pyres of their own cremations.
Ill omen or good,
the brush is loaded with red,
with roses, blood, fire,
and the sky is primed
like the virgin seabed of the canvas before you.
Staring will not paint the apple
you want to bite into,
install the serpent like a voice
in the tree that tempts you,
run the fingers of the nightwind
through your raven hair like a mad pianist
trying to tune your keyboard
to the crazed scales of the full moon.
If you want to dance naked
under chandeliers of black cherries,
alive enough to get away with yourself
don't turn your eyes to glass
and scan the heavens
like the small end of a telescope
to see if you can spot your own approach
like an astronomical catastrophe
that will burn the house down,
the matchbook flaring of a coffin
that docks like a death-boat
to take on a cargo of ashes;
but lay down one stroke of paint,
risk your own interstellar spaces once,
leap like a wounded dolphin
from the wave of the mirror once,
and life will strew stars in your path
that will awake the dreamer
like gardens in the furrows
of your salted fields.
You will stop living
like an arsonist in a volunteer fire-brigade
before the blaze of your own hunger
for heat and light
and run like a sudden thaw of honey
from the frozen hive
that wants to ride its own melting
like a forge pouring out the hot metals
of the enchanted swords
the dark magicians plunge into the stone
to sort the jesters from the crowns.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Black Fire

Evaporating in a black fire.
Don't want to drink the night from the window again.
Won't be a chain trying to escape itself
when I'm already free,
but what an affront of mirrors to be so diminished
because the lions of fire, the dragons
that flare from the eye of the black sun,
their shadows spanning the heartless abyss
of their ferocious lucidities,
pitched their wings like huge, black tents of night
at the gates of the wide-eyed gazelles of emotion
they could bed freely under the moon,
unspool in the blue grass silvered by the wind,
their eyelids waning like a glass of wine.
In the obvious light of the morning
they will run from lesser hunters
mistaking the truce of nightblood
on the horn of the moon
for a rag of surrender, a gesture of clarity
like a star in a well,
the signet of an ancient moment
when the abyss returns to itself
like the echo of a wounded voice
to heal at the foot of a throne of shadows.
Though I could have stung like a serpent,
I was the wind at your heel once, once
like the wind I would have sowed the path before you
with seeds that would have bloomed like the eyes of the stars,
I would have saturated the air with lachrymose diamonds,
and poured the oil of the only lantern of my afterlife out like rain
so you could have shone like a rainbow at night
and your roots were luminously charged
with vital urges of mystic lightning.
I would have come to you like a flashflood of silver on the moon
and run the labyrinth of dry creekbeds
that scar the lifelines on your palm.
I would have kissed the black rose awake from its dream
of being stoned for a miscreance of the light,
and held the nightsky up to its beauty
like the forbidden side of a mirror
to jewel the eclipse you wear like a face.
I would have lain down beside you
like the shore of an unmapped island beside the sea
and answered every wave of your incoming tide
with a nightbird in the mouth of a bell of blood
that ripened in a watchtower on the moon,
but every kiss was a translucent jellyfish,
the auroral rose of an ambivalent Medusa
rooted in the lethal snakepit,
the toxic electricity of her stoned hair,
the trawling storm of her decapitated tresses
when the truth struck like an unexpected fang of light.
Now you spend your time
trying to tie knots in your spinal cord
like the severed filament of the moon,
trying to wick amputated candles in the darkness
that might help you grope your way
back to your head
like the black hole that became of the star
that went looking for its lost planet
like a blind shepherd startled awake by the howling of wolves
running across the sky in a wilder freedom
above the timberline of your eyelashes,
tinkling in the glass womb of your brittle shining
like the tungsten crumbs of a burnt-out dream.
Even now you don't understand
how you can pour so much of yourself into yourself
like an ingrown hair, your love
merely an idea infatuated with itself
that your eyeshadow festers like a palette of gangrene
and like me the vision won't paint you again
in the vivid constellations and kells of braille
you insisted on reading backwards
in the troubled mirror of your own perversity.
No rose in the shadow of the black Pegasus
born from the blood that pours from the vase of your neck
like a dead bouquet of poppies, no inspiration
in the petrified skulls of your past lovers
scattered like the beads of a broken rosary at your feet
you once fingered carelessly
like the writing on the wall.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Journey

I’m on some kind of journey
but I don’t know where it’s going;
I’m growing wings and shedding them,
and I’m true to every thought in my head.
I’ve got a heart, worn down at heels,
a used voodoo doll quilled like a native,
a meteorically battered planet
that wobbles between a kiss and a fist
in the way it keeps running itself around.
I spend too much time alone.
There are no obstructions in any direction;
and barefoot, I’m walking on stars and poppies,
talking to myself like a candle,
weaving my way among the shadows
like a fish through the supple harps
of the silver river reeds. I see
that I’m taking a bath in my own grave
to wash the soiled skies of the painted world
off my eyes, to behold
the brief career of the leaf of life
and how the light gusts out from the windows
like curtains and bird-nets. Life is short
and the new temple never gets further built
than a hole and a single cornerstone, the rest
left to the business of the earth,
all that beauty and magnificence,
unravelled among the mud weavers.
I was inoculated against death
by a splinter of the moon;
by how little time there is for love,
for the root to get drunk
on the fruits of enlightenment and compassion,
by how little I will ever know
of the road to the doorway I stepped through
to stand in awe before the moonspill
on the raven blue waters,
and to look so deeply into the eyes of a woman
who has just conceded an island in her passage,
and the fragrance of unheard music
that I am a pillar of wonder
before the unsayable
as she lets dropp her shadows and feathers of light,
and the blood-god assumes
his flowering crown of fire
to enhance the splendours of his courtly intensities.
What I have lost in the river
I will find in the river
and what I have taken from the sky
I will give back to the sky,
and there shall come a day
when the eclipse will be the brighter mirror,
and the darkness that overtakes me now
will be a gate of stars to a water palace
where the dragonflies and waterlilies
are the sceptres and crowns of a human divinity
that will endure like a whisper of radiance,
a more haunting taste of light,
the rumour of a black rose
that outshines the angels
that coax the lanterns out of the night.
I will evaporate like the flaring of fireflies
on the windy shore of a trembling lake,
like the blue hat plume of smoke
from a gallant winter chimney
into the vastness of my own mind
like a waterbird without a trace into a sweeter, wilder solitude.
And these words will come and go
like the tides of the ocean I was,
like the providential leaves
of unfurling fortune-cookies,
like an avalanche of gold
washed down from the mountain upstream.
I write them in flowing diamond,
I write them in auroras of blood,
in dawns bluer than the iris of a peacock’s eye,
in fire and water and the mystic inks of the night
in the fleeting, indelible dream
of doors and hands and moons,
in warm breath on a cold window,
in a halo of comets
smeared into light by the sun,
in the sidereal wines that bled from bitter wounds,
I have said what it was mine to say
on a page of the wind
that whistled through me like life
greening the sands of the hourglass
with visions that ripened the bell of blood in my heart
to fall like wisdom from its tower
toward a fallible paradise
that won’t leave me as I am for long.
And I will jump again
into this cauldron of joys and sorrows
to string my spinal cord
over the abyss of the guitar-shaped universe,
walking upright
to plead with my own answers
to thaw like a mirror
estranged from the world it reflects
in the self-effacing flames
of the passionate gardens that dance on the wicks.
The awakening seed
echoes these flowers of fire
in the valley of a voice in the furnace
that lies down in the cool grass
by a stream of idle stars
and arrays its vagrant heart
like a breeze of blood in the dust
to the refugees in the shadows.
They move like eyelids
through all the phases of the moon
from an unspooled well of darkness
to the slash of a razor of light
to the threshing of the full harvest
in the siloes of the nightwind
enthroned like a breath of life
in the midst of its own dispersal.

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Flesh Your Spirit Out In Starmud

I flesh your spirit out in starmud. No creator.
No created. Between the leaf and the sky
I mix the colour of your eyes on the palette
of a rainbow that let's the darkness
sit at the same fire it does. Because the spirit is free.
I hang crescent moons from your earlobes.
I release the sacred deltas of small night creeks
into your veins, and talk to deserts on the moon
about the manes of sidereal lions for your hair.
I search the darkening hills at night for a black rose
with eyelids as cool as mushrooms, and lips,
that are more the wings of auguries, birds and bows
disappearing into the distance to imagine you
than they are the words and arrows
of a flightless heart dipped in stars that don't ignite.

I'm a blind man in a room, painting eyes,
trying to grow flowers out of last year's fragrances,
interpret every syllable and sacred pixel
of your red ochre glyphs of lipstick
I used to bury myself in when I lived in caves with bears
and rubbed the stuff all over my face
like blood and corn flowers under the hearthstone.
Now I'm a dragon rising from my urn of ashes
like a volcano of serpent-fire out of the chrysalis
of my crystal skull, looking for signs, hints, clues,
any whisper of linear B as to who you are
in the shadows of the sundials of the mountains
you go walking with at night with your dogs.

And the stars you must see in the clear-eyed desert
when the temperature drops and all you've got
to keep you warm from the inside out is not
you in my arms, but this small dropp of blood
in our chests, this cosmic thermometer of a heart
on the night ward of a perilous greenhouse.
And I went to a cactus with thorns like a voodoo doll
with oracular powers to ask about the shape
of the body I should root you in like an hourglass in sand
and she said to me, a rootless peach tree on the moon.
And ever since, I've touched your skin
with eyes at the end of my fingertips
like a new world gnostic gospel for the blind
that can see you in the flesh, naked, sublime
like a desert island it would be worth drowning for
just to be washed up on the curvature of your dunes
like a starfish when the mind comes back to its senses
like the first sign of life on the moon in a long time.

You emerge like wild irises of hydrogen out of
this cloud of unknowing, this cocoon of nebularity
like one star among many in an almost perfect vacuum.
I can see you. I can almost taste you. I can feel
your last lover trying to squeeze into the chrysalis
of the infinite straitjacket of your last exorcism
as if he'd finally run out of dawns as alibis
for why he didn't want to leave just yet. Who
hasn't stood in the doorway of Orion
sinking down in the west? For some
the threshold's the longest part of the journey
and they make a nadir of everything at zenith
by letting their horizons down like a crosswalk
waiting for a change of colour blind traffic lights
that don't know, for all that Stop. Go. Maybe so.,
anymore about passage than the road does
or a starmap that always certain of where it's going
but never has a reason why it should
jump the gun like a star and get ahead of its light
like a car on a long dark dusty country road at night,
one headlight out, trying not to hit a doe
in the glare of the sun at midnight
on its way out of town, whether that's up, down,
or omnidirectionally radiant as the Pleiades in tears.

Drift and mingle, merge, enhance,
dance, glance, shadow and glow,
still more ghost around you than I am a mirror,
I know what it means to be summoned to a seance
and not know what to wear. What lifemask to put on
like a Mason jar full of fireflies trying to decide
what constellation has the fewest short circuits in it
and is the least likely to lead anyone astray
when the lights go on and off like a fickle tranformer
or a Cepheid variable that was just born that way.

And here, now, your ears and your hands, your arms
and bones of your own that don't owe a thing
to anyone else's bird cage after the bird has flown.
And now I think I've got the eyes just right
but it's the heart calling its rivers back to it
like the sea I can't quite find the likeness of
even when I appeal to the most ancient galaxies
in the Hubble mirror for a similitude of love
that might serve as the understudy of a metaphor
in an expanding universe that keeps exceeding
the boundary stones of the stars at zenith
and even the chipped cup of the moon full
and a skull that used to juggle mirrors
like shattered insights into reality for those
so spiritually inclined at harvest time to listen
to the blue moonrise peering through the cedars
like an effulgent pearl of wisdom shedding her skin
like a mystic in rapture on the dark side she keeps to herself.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Object Of Our Devotion

The object of our devotion
finally asks from us
the very eyes that dazzled us into obedience,
and leads us like a wind,
the last breath we'll ever take,
in the guise of a woman
who beckons at the top of the stairwells and thermals
where the hawk wheels,
a spark of the sun,
to follow her down deeper into a darkness
that even the dead shun
like the deleted shadows of noon,
if I would be her perfect lover.
If I would be her perfect lover,
and the fever of my demon
not go mad looking for her
like water on the moon
to ease the fire, ease the fire
that blazes in my bones,
I must abdicate my consummation
in the intimate otherness of me
and forfeit my eyes
to the deathly absence of the sea
that has unmoored me like a wave.
If I would be her perfect lover
and lift the veil
to see the face she only shows the stars,
I must take myself down
like a torn sail in a storm
and let the current heave me where it will,
the lonely word whose endless sentence is a soul.
I must say her beauty,
I must root her flower in the starfields
and vanquish time from the garden;
if I would be her perfect lover,
I must enlarge my emptiness like space
to linger with the subtle fragrances
of the silks and auroras of her mind
that blow the stars around like dust
and pick the galaxies like dandelions
and raise them like suns above the streaming skylines of her hair
flowing out behind her, the wake of a waterbird
landing like a blossom, the moon, a wing-weary emotion
on the night sky
she keeps to herself
when she bathes alone in the milk of the undulant light
on the other side of her eyes.
If I would be her perfect lover,
and my heart, and my blood,
my mind and my spirit, my art,
this poem says I must
give up this busy corner in the passing world
where my voice
rows and rows
in the leaking lifeboat of an empty coffin
and the guitar in my arms
I've tuned to the furthest stars
who have looked the longest
and were the first to believe
their fire could live,
is a rudder on the wind;
if I would be her perfect lover I must leave
my constellation and my bleeding throne,
this courtyard of pleading gravestones
modelling for the dead they've made a trend of,
and taking off the polluted water-robe
I wore to my last coronation like an atmosphere,
breathe myself out,
the vapour of a dying candle,
and enter the darkness and the solitude and the silence,
slipping like the pollen of a many-petalled theme
into the alloy of a sweeter dream
than ever slept like honey
in the labyrinths of her hive.
If I would be her perfect lover,
I must not amass her private thresholds with my need
like autumns and autumns of junkmail
banked against her door,
nor implore her to patch like an oracular island
the wounded sails of my ongoing shipwreck
by threading my blood
through the needle in the eye of the siren
I came in on like an abandoned message in a bottle
allured by the tides of her song;
I must not wire myself like spam
and blow up like a holy war
vying for grace
and weighing her place like a feather
in the scales of an insurgent creed,
a star gone nova among the stars,
bury her alive and shining
in the black hole
of the afterlife I am.
If I would be her perfect lover,
if I would be her perfect lover,
if I would be her perfect lover
and old bones screech like owls of chalk across the night,
their talons sheathed
like the thorns and swords of the sun
behind the capes of her roses,
and the matador ungored
by the horns of her crescents
on the bull of the moon; if
old bones would blossom
and the dead branch leaf,
the crutch and the baton and the scuttled coffin
would marrow the dry wood
with the urgencies of the orchards again,
then I must heed the wine
and not the snake in the goblet
she pours out of me like music.
I must not labour in the occult mines
of her diamond infallibilities
like a floodlight
that makes everything blindingly clear,
if I would be her perfect lover
and see how she glows by her own light
in the darkness of her own depths
like a fish or a firefly or a vine
or the flame of a star
tending the brittle wicks of the blind
as if they were the tendrils of a supple candle
and not the black monks of a lifeless paradigm
that flares without light
like the hood of a cobra
that's sloughed its last eclipse.
Remember, my heart, how thin the moon is
and not rub it away like white-gold
at the snap of a thumb and finger
but lay it down gently like a kiss on dark water
like the skin of an eye,
the flake of the water gilder,
the first precious breath of your longing
to shake the abyss of the darkness inside
like a white dove at a black window,
if you would be her perfect lover.
And you, my voice, you must become a journey
to what is far and out of reach,
and make boats and birds
of the worn-out shoes of your words
and learn to fly like the barefoot wind
with stars and wings at your heels,
and take down those old bells
that have withered on the bough like apples
and set the seed free from the corpse
and sing like the first of the dead
to sire the living. Not enough
to say your love; you must listen, deeply listen
to the silence within you
that burns like a flame
in the night crown of the lily
and draws you to it
like a gypsy out of the shadows
and know the thread of the candle is the length of a life
that binds the flesh to its own consumption
and you must enter wholly
into your own immolation like a star in the sun
or beg forever at the gates of the fire
like a snake for a mother tongue
that isn't the rearing hiss
of a forsaken bliss,
if you would be her perfect lover.
And you, my body, are you not a flower
rooted in the greater wisdom of the devil
but decked out in the feathers
of an earthbound angel; sometimes
a great volcanic rose
that sheds its igneous petals like islands
and covers the villages on its slopes
under eyelids of ash like a dream
that won't awake for eras
to the curiosity of the shovels that exhume the agony
of being buried alive in yourself like an underground fire
moving from root to root like frustrated desire?
What prophet could stand
at the door of your furnace
like a school janitor on a winter morning
and do anything more than add fire to fire
by admonishing your rage
with the strap of his tongue?
O you who have sustained me like a road, like blood,
and never asked where we were going,
who have endured me like a wound
beyond your healing for years,
and never left my bedside,
what an unacknowledged sage you have been
to temper the hot iron of all these celestial blades
that rise like the grass of heaven
out of these deserts and deserts of stars
at the mere whisper
of the shadow of the mahdi at noon
drawing the first crescent of the new moon from his scabbard;
what wisdom to temper the spirit
like a horse of blood
in the cool troughs
of hunger, desire, and sleep. You have been
water and air and bread on the moon for me,
and led me to the tree
I could sit under in the shade
of a woman in blossom
who smiled like the wile of the wine
in the hand of the stranger
who has worn my features
as I have his
like the inside of a face
turned toward its own light,
that's never known a mirror.
What could I possibly say to you
who are the branch
of my eloquent leafing except
remember, remember,
when you ache with empires,
that all these worlds within worlds as all worlds must
will end like squalls of dust
at her threshold,
and when we're colder than a windowpane
it will be her breath that moves us like a glacier to tears,
and on her windowsill
where we linger with the dead leaves of an unwatered art,
a patina of dark matter among the new lucidities,
new myths fleshing the bones of the constellations
they throw across the sky to prophecy
the things that shall be and the things that shall not,
it will be her finger that traces the words
that will scatter us again
like birds of the morning in a gust of light,
and it will be the sky that clings to her eye
that we will walk under like a figure in a dream
disembodied by the night
looking for any sign of ourselves
like faces we once lost to the stream
when we danced with her
under the chandeliers of the cherries
and she were the whole of our theme,
if you would be her perfect lover
and not just another king of quicksand
sinking on the throne of his own domain.
And as to the spirit, as to that ambidextrous sleight of the light
that gnashes its teeth
like lightning in a cloud
until it flame out like revelation
from the eye of God
and glimpse the ocean of its own vast features
in the merest scintillance of the furthest star
arcing like the tongue of a serpent of light
in the darkest depths of its own unscrutability;
who could say anything about its origins
that doesn't drown the listener
in the widening wake of the wind?
Most of the world goes on like a secret;
and what do we ever know
but the little bit of ourselves
we overhear amid the clamour,
shadows through a keyhole,
people breaking like twigs on the pathway behind us?
But the secret of one is the spirit of all,
the same finger of silence held up to myriad lips,
so there's no need to lament
we're not in on it
when it's the secret itself that leads us to see,
a firefly in a valley of mist,
that the best place to hide is out in the open
with everyone else. How many times, my spirit,
washed away in a dark tide
that's never known an island,
have you come looking for me like a dolphin,
and found me
and nudged me back into the vine-covered lifeboat of the world?
Life is the mother of death
who gave up her own
in giving birth to it,
but you are unborn and unperishing
and your deepest joy is playing
freely alone in the world you array
like the nations of rocks and stars and willows
spread across the hills
where you bed for the night to dream
of the mornings that have yet to come upon you
like clarity to an uncertain lover.
What shadow of a star,
what radiance on the mindstream,
could spar with your flamboyance,
when you are the fire, you are the breath
that crazes my delusions like a poet
into this body of burnished gold
you have raised like lead
from the coffin of a seed long buried
in the fertile valleys of the book of the dead?
And yet and yet and yet
if I were to be her perfect lover,
I must not imperil the night
with deeper dangers and ordeals
than I have the courage to requite
when the daylily fails
and the light is breached in the wombs of my sails
and I wait for you like the premium
on all these returnable grails
to fill me again with the quest
for the coast of a spiritual rumour
that thrives and confides in itself like a woman
far to the west of the world's disclaimer
there are no more continents to risk.
You, more than all, my fleetness, my caul,
the kite and comet of my fall to paradise
when you're the voice in the fire
that speaks to me in tongues,
or scarfing the air with phantoms
from the eye of the sacred lake
whose holiest dream is the loneliest bird
of a free imagination, you must
seep like water at night through her roots
as she's closed up in her flower
and summon the radiance of your lightning
to flash from her tears
when she mourns for herself in the night
like a lost earring,
if I would be her perfect lover.
If I would be her perfect lover,
you must not rise and abase yourself
like the suppliant sun and the sky
that touch their foreheads,
facing west,
to the earth she walks upon,
huddled like wildflowers in the dying light;
you must do this for me, my spirit, my starfeather,
you must weave the subtlest silk of your radiance
on the looms of the space that surrounds her
like the master spider behind a Persian rug
into a vision of life
where the beauty of things that must fly
doesn't evaporate like a mirage of water
in a desert eye,
and the lie between the parentheses of the moon
has no fangs,
and the stars don't burn underfoot,
and the all night windows aren't widows of glass,
and love isn't the maiden voyage of a flagship
that lowers its pennant of blood on the bottom,
when the sea smashes its bottle against the scuttled prow.
You must befriend her solitude without intrusion,
you must be everywhere an open gate,
the wings of the crow and the dove
that are hinged to the days and nights of her passing,
and in everything, in the rock, in the rain,
in the small nugget of the bird
that beats like a heart in the dark,
there must be a whisper of stars,
the suggestion of another world
breathing in the shadows of the lanterns of this
like a door left ajar for the night,
where the dark lucidities
that hang their weary bells in the lost groves
of the shrines she's fled
like divinity from its likeness,
by morning,
are the first words of the light
to begin these worlds within worlds anew,
if I would be her perfect lover,
and drawing myself out like a sword of water
from the wound of my oceanic view,
succumb like a wave on the shore of the island I belong to,
you must be, as you have been to me,
the earthly excellence that abides
in every starbound breath of what the world can mean
when the sails that enter the bay of the rose
like the leaves of a distant lover
are truer than green.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Have Become My Own Season

I have become my own season
living through these renewable eras of you
that come and go
like the fragrances of passing stars
that sometimes stop by the gate
to talk about the garden blooming late.
Some flowers wait for the moon to open,
to throw their arms around space
as if they could encompass everything
in the brief embrace of their petals,
and their seeing is one eye under multiple eyelids
as they burn like jewels in the night
to keep it all shining and bright.
But I've worn out the elbows
of my insatiable longing
on the windowsills of a different insight.
Saddened by the distance, the time, the circumstances,
delinquent desires still hanging out their shingles
like green apples on a dead branch in winter,
withering like the inconsolable eyes of old men
who have died like sons
and now must die like fathers,
mine is the darker radiance
of the faint halo of light
around a black hole
that summons everything
down into it like the sea
sitting below its own salt
at a stranger's table.
You can't look into
the black mirrors in my house
with your eyes open
because they only reflect
what's on the back of your eyelids
where the only light is your own
and you are the road
and the lantern you go by
and everything you feel and think and imagine
is your own true face without skin
not the gate between outside and in.
How could I ever recognize you
in these dark spaces
if it weren't for the trees
and the stars and the moon
and the night stream that runs through me
like a lifeline on the palm of my hand
down from the mountains
in a rush of diamonds and gold
that pour out like the pent-up emotions
of a sword that's just been pulled from a stone?
And how hugely alone the night is
when you love someone as they are
and you realize without effort
that if you hold them a moment in their transience
you hold them like a star in a locket of water
that tastes like the past.
There are people
like treebound barrels of rain
and then there are people like me
who leak out of their lives
like radioactive water
that couldn't pool the pain
long enough to stop the meltdown
long enough to cool the brain,
long enough to let it kill me.
Now in the darkness
seeded with the dust of black dwarfs
trying to clench a fist of coal into diamonds
my auroras are weeping neon dew
like a cheap enlightenment
all over the watercolours of dawn.
And I'm wondering
what kind of an afterlife is this
that I might have foregone
if I were indifferent
to how my solitude deranges me
like a lost continent
wandering through its own mindscapes
like an extinguished star
that wants to make up
just for one luminous moment
a constellation of its own
that doesn't wait upon anyone's eyes
for the themes of its seeing.
And though the skies have changed
like the slides of childhood dreams
with every blink of an eyelid
whenever night approaches me
and asks to sit by my fire
and let the flames and the smoke
of our past lives
speak for the both of us
I look up to give my eyes
like two drops of water
back to their oceanic immensities
and it's always unattainably you
that is shining
like a woman in the window
of a secret house of the zodiac
far off the beaten path
that leads everywhere like a firefly.
And your stars speak to me
as if my flesh were light again
and my heart
that bumps its way through the dark
already a lamp beyond
the Lazarus of wax
that's buried in his own lucidities
like a candle I left for dead.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You Are Crazy

You are crazy and beautiful
and wounded and wild
and the youngest daughter
of a coven of poetic sea-witches,
and dangerous as the moon in your changes,
the fragrance of night
hovering over the blue star-honey
of your seductive hive of candles,
the skulls you drink from naked,
anointing the fire
with libations of blood and wine,
dancing to the passionate lament
of ancient serpents
unfolding their wings
like eras in the lives of stars,
constellations that have come and gone like leaves,
seasons that are only distant whispers
in the hourglass of the hills,
voices that have outlived the ears to hear them.
And we are no more contained
than is the wind, the white cloud
in our approach to lucidity,
and we have been wave and shore
many times for each other already,
and I have heard how
the night flute of your solitude
suffers like an island,
and the wizards have worked
an extra contemplative shift
to make you the gift of a gate
when my love of you
alloys my will
to the light of the urgency.
There is a wholeness to your being such that
even when the night shatters like a mirror,
all of you is reflected in every piece,
and your eye at the keyhole
unfolds me like a starchart
trying to locate a deep sky object
burning ferociously in wavelengths of black.
I am enrobed in your mystery like a waterfall
and you swim, a silver fish,
through the roots of my mind like the moon,
and the shadow of every thought
is a likeness of you
that I’ve conjured out of space like an aurora,
a feather of smoke
to limn your features mystically
in apricot-violet fires that flower like paint
and I take you away with me sometimes
where I can savour you alone like a mountain
where the silence prowls like a cougar
and you keep the wilderness to yourself
and your presence is enough of a fountain
to turn my heart into a mouth
entranced into speaking in the tongues
of the hidden grammars of blood
that pi the spirit with golden ratios
and passionate incommensurables.
You are a star caught
in the curtains of my seeing
and we are only eyelids away
from finding a flower
worthy of the sight
as you seed the darkness with light,
and I carve your face,
your transformative beauty,
out of a block of eyeless uranium
that glows invisibly like an emotion
that only blooms in exile,
a genius among elements
that gives herself away
like an orchard in a storm,
a serpent in the labyrinth,
the blessing of a weapon.
How could I know you in any other words;
how could I win the trust of your riddles
and climb the stairs of your neglected shrines
to the reluctant priestess
chanting in the shadows
of her own eclipsed altars
for a sacrifice that would answer
the impiety of a lifetime?
If I don’t touch you there,
if you don’t feel my breath upon the nape of your neck
like the wind on a lake,
if your blood
doesn’t turn into a red light district
without emergency exits
at the thought of being caressed
on the other side of your skin,
on the other side of the tapestry,
how could the hidden clarity
ripen into the crazy wisdom
of the bird that was born of a jewel
and you exceed yourself like wings?
You are all flavours of the fire
that bewitches the tongue of the snake
to divine the air for grails of water
with a branch of conscious lightning
that wants to taste you through its fingertips
like a note in a tuning fork
that will open the dark gate of your radiance
like the key to a secret release.
And I know how often
love is a dream in a graveyard
where only the rootless flowers say
what they can about severance
and the abyss of the heart that falls from its crown,
and the urgent vacancy of a throne
that governs lying down
beat like grief against the cageless door of a cold stove;
I have wept on stone,
trying to make a lie come true,
a mirage turn solid,
a ray of light linger in my bloodstream
like a locket dropped from a bridge,
I have been the timely extinction
of mystic alarms
that woke me early to grief
and what the thief left of my afterlife,
and I have been the razorblade,
the knife that bled to death,
that cut itself out like the tongue of a wound
rather than inflict a law upon love
that would tin the waterlilies
with savage indignation.
I have made one infinity of two zeroes,
and handcuffed myself
to the top of a tree
to throw the pack of chainsaws
that chased me up it like a scared messiah
off the scent of blood
that rippled through the heartwood,
and climbed down
like a quiet last judgment
when nobody was around
and stood in the doorway of my grave
like a letter delivered to the wrong address,
and cursed myself
for all the things I couldn’t save.
I have tried to knit honey
from the smoke of the fire
that spread like pollen over the fields,
but it was always tainted
by the taste of a black saint
retreating into a starless night
like the shadow of a bird
that had nothing to sing to the dawn.
And I withdrew from life
like the cult of virulent addiction
and lived like a ghost in detox
parsing planets like flaws on a rosary
and idling among the late night shadows on the walls
like a stone fish among the reeds.
And my name
was a word in a foreign language
I didn’t understand
until you said it like a wind of light
that had wandered like a road through time
to breathe me again
and pick my body up like a lost glove
lying by the lifelines in the wineskin valleys of your hand.
Until you were you
among the veils and interpretations,
black swan enthroned in a sky of fire,
the ghost of a bell
in the rain mirror
that arrayed your face like a whisper of islands,
I had never looked into my own eyes
as if they belonged to someone else.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You, My House Of Burning Thresholds

You, my house of burning thresholds, come
to me written on the breath of urgent windows,
and the palms of the walls that want their fortunes read, come
with palettes and kittens and your blue notebook of poems
that grows through ages of skin and mushroom kisses
on the forest floors of your flesh, the bracken spume
of the fountain that pebbles its tears in the light,
and the thoughtful rocks with moss-covered shoulders.

Come like a spoon that sips from the heart
and your blood a riot of sea roses, pink and green,
and the black ashes of the eyes of your secrets
and the locks on the loveletters you wrote on the wind
and I will bury my boat in the waves of your mind,
and be your ghost forever, and live as if I were blind.

There are poppies in your paintbrushes, cherries, wine,
earlobes of blue, and the tongues of mute tattoos
that have pierced your body with sad revelations
of the lives that you leave behind, all the simple journeys
that unravel the keys of the mystery in the dark inks
of another face, another crime, dead trains in the tunnels
caught like words in the throat of a mountain
that forgot what it meant to say, the long, mourning sentences
that carry you away from life to life in the arms of today,
and the bells and the lanterns that swing like fruit
in the lonely midnight stations flowering under their names.

Bring me your love, your art, your wounded past,
your wardrobe of rainbows and scars, and the chaste rings
that chain your body like a planet with mutable orbits
to the vast freedoms of stars in the rain, all the comets
you could never explain to the skies you riddled from blue,
and all the men you’ve married under the fallen bridges
of final farewells. Come in the hour of thieves, in darkness
with your windows open, and the ladders we’ll never climb down,
from our islands in the clouds that call like whales across the moon.

And there are laments we can only say in echoes, in valleys,
in the loose threads of the stream, huge shadowing sorrows
that walk like clocks through our dreams, looking again
for faces in the window that passed their orchards in pain;
looking for tomorrows in the way they came in the night
to a doorway at the top of the stairs, that once was theirs.

There are reasons in the blood that we loose like gloves
and seasons and departures, exits and arrivals
that brave the coming and the going with maps and graves
that lead us each like bees to the heart’s destinations.
Let love guide you through the labyrinths and maze
and putting on wings feathered from the fires of sad silvers
that fall away like water and stars from the herons of our rising,
fly from the old reflections of the mirrors at your feet
out of your face of lilies and fish into a deeper darkness
that waits like a man on a bus with a vase, beside an empty seat.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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As If Beyond Death

Night Of Peace

It's Good To Know

I Turn Out The Lights

There Are Masks

Black Fire

Journey

These Words Turn Homeward

I Flesh Your Spirit Out In Starmud

The Object Of Our Devotion

I Have Become My Own Season

You Are Crazy

You, My House Of Burning Thresholds

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