En.Citatepedia^®.ro

Sometimes The Heart Buries Its Sorrow

Sometimes the heart buries its sorrow
like a bell or an hourglass beside the road
as if it came upon a dead bird it couldn't name
and returned it to the earth like unread mail.
There's no gate where I'm going, the air
will tremble a bit and that'll be it. Maybe
a firefly or two, to liven things up,
but no sign of lightning tearing its hair out.

I shall evaporate like a dream someone
couldn't remember having, and what seems
so crucially significant now shall disappear,
disperse, dissipate like smoke from of a fire
and all that will remain of this passionate burning
will be an odd fragrance among the stars
that doesn't arrest the attention of the bees.

And these things of my mother that she gave to me,
Blood, flesh, bone, breath and my love of poetry
and compassion for the world you need to write it,
deeply involved in an unrestricted love affair,
will be scattered like urns on the wind as if
my ashes had no respect for their individuality.
The waterclock ended in a desert of mirages,
not the afterlife of an embryo off to a good start.

The death of an art, the extinction of a species,
not the fall of a sparrow anyone notices,
and I'm not even saying they should if they don't
anymore than they feel the loss of a skin cell.
Some people prefer umbrellas to wild flowers.
Icons of the moon without the dragon.
A mouthful of fire to the taste of water.
Tigers in a zoo, to the dangers of an open door.
It's wrong to make love, music, poetry, colour,
compulsory, anymore than you can demand a friend.
Got to give time and space to the black swan
of a nugget of coal to realize it's a motherlode
of diamonds born out of its progressive dissolution.

Translucent effusions of insight into
a speculative nothing, a flying carpet of wavelengths
unravelling on the loom of the moon,
just because the stars have left their genes
on a helical stairwell of flypaper like a chromosome,
doesn't mean you're a replicant of eternity,
or to see the onceness of life in everything
it's becoming without consulting you
is some kind of exemption you can seek for yourself.
Enlightenment isn't a ticket to pass, it's
not to see the beauty of the chains in the bliss of delusion.
Not to make choirs out of your Maenadic desires.
When have you ever not done this, when
have you ever not realized you were the summum bonum
of your own conspicuous consumption?
But who asks you to die before you're dead
to sabotage your artistic pursuit of happiness
whether you achieve it or not? The absurdity
of the search is enough in itself to make it profound.
Enlightenment ploughs you back into the ground
you came from like grass on the moon
and as a bigger fool that I could ever hope to be
once said: if the cold doesn't go through your bones once
how can there be apricot blossoms in the spring?

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Have Run My Heart Aground

I have run my heart aground
like the keel of the moon on the coral
and the memory of women I once loved
hurts me today
like blowback from the furnaces of autumn
that went out years ago.

It's easier to train a dove than a crow
and I was a reluctant dragon
trying not to roil the water in my wake.

Doubting that forgiveness is ever real,
I give it and ask it
and discharge us all
from the degenerating orbits
of all the radiant photons that reversed their spin
to take one long last look at us
as we unspooled like glaciers
at each others' feet.

Eventually we're all just flavours of space.
And you have to open your hand to hang on,
and learn to live with a heart that tolls
like a bell or an oyster
after its pearl has been plundered
and look upon dark, intimate things without a voice.

I have dug deeper than my own bones to get at the truth
as if I were an abandoned civilization
with nothing left standing
but a succession of meaningless gates
that no one waits by anymore to meet me.

I have added my skull like the moon to the darkness
to appeal more deeply to the nightside of life
that she might reveal
why she always hides me under the bed
when I knock on her door from the outside,
hoping she'll unlock herself like a coffin
and raise the dead.

I may be a starmap blowing down a road on the moon,
but there's no wind, no one to walk it,
no arrival, no departure
no threshold before me, and none behind.

In the light of the silent ferocity
of a black star longing in the distance for contact,
I have intensely held certain, lethal questions
up to my throat like a phase of the moon
and held myself hostage to the answers
until I fell in love with my torment
and all these ransom notes turned into poems.

It's a quaint myth of origin,
and even a delusion is some kind of direction,
and who's to say the stars
aren't in need of correction themselves?
And it isn't as if one mirage
were more sufficient than another,
it's just that we long for the unattainable through them
like kites that have run out of atmosphere,
and the lie that heals is truer than the one that doesn't.

So we insisted on being in love
as wave after wave
we tried to bridge continents
to keep our hearts from flatlining.

What a riot of sorrow and sex and poetry
swung us like bells when we walked
out of our bomb-proof cathedrals
into the intimate dangers of our own lyrical intensities,
gouging the eyes out of the constellations we rolled like dice
against the writing on the wall.

Love's a big, sloppy sky
that smothers you like fog on the ocean
when it collapses like a parachute
at the end of a sustained fall.

Everyone lets go of their demons
like kites in a hurricane,
like blossoms from an orchard,
like flakes of ancient flint
as the heart naps its arrowhead of ice
in the shadows of the sacred night fire
that exhumes the phoenix from the flesh.

Looking back, I am humbled by the memory
of how much I couldn't see
through a painted window
while the moon waited for rain among the willows,
but sooner or later you make peace
with everyone you can't be
and sign a truce with everyone you are
and drown your sword in your own blood
like a holy war you can't win
and keep trying to embody wisdom until you disappear
like a homeless bird in the clarity,
so perfectly isolated by everything you've ever loved
even the sky you fly through
can't fit itself like skin
around the enormity of the tear
that hordes its most intimate fire
like a flame thrust into the darkness of an afterlife
where the eras and the headstones,
the faces under the bedstones,
thaw like lockets of ice.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Enlightenment Isn't Lumpy

Enlightenment isn't lumpy
even if sometimes you've got your heart
stuck in your throat
like a bird in a chimney
warming up like a phoenix
to go the way of the sumac leaves
and the ghosts of smoke
on the pyres of the sky burials
of the Canada geese.
Just because November
can't feel its pulse
and the garden snakes are nesting
like a sloppy knot of wavelengths
deep in the cold heartwood
of a rootless tree that can feel
the brutal chill of serpent fire
running up its spine like a lightning rod
doesn't mean enlightenment's a placebo
you have to keep away from the kids.
It's real enough to be unattainable
without disrespecting the integrity
of the picture plane.
It hides out in the open
where no one ever thinks to look.
The simpler it gets
the bigger the book you need to write
in order to conclude ambiguously
you do and you don't not understand it.
Say not two
and all is well.
And mean it deeper than you can say it
so that pain doesn't adulterate the child
that's trying to transcend it
by hanging on to the lifelines
of his fire-proof constellations
like the kites of distant stars burning in the wind.
Enlightenment doesn't care
if you've lost your integrity.
Your absence of self-respect
for someone who isn't there
is a rare opportunity
to uphold the dignity
of stars and rivers and trees.
Enlightenment's just the blossom.
It's not the fruit
of what there is yet to be.
The smell of autumn
in a windfall of apples
cradled like small planets in your arms.
Enlightenment isn't salvation from pain.
It's an invitation to forsake yourself
in the name of nothing you can explain.
The blossom let's go to make room for the fruit.
The perfumes of the spring give way
to the aromas of decay.
But they're both sweet
because there's nothing about either of them
that's everlasting.
It may be an old root.
But it blossoms in the spring.
It may be a dead branch
but the nightbird stops to sing.
And the full moon shines
like a skull full of signs
above its dark abundance.
Enlightenment isn't out of the reach of anyone
because it's got infinitely long arms
and puts the stars at your fingertips
and says play what you want
as long as it's something
we all can dance to
on our way to the grave
like fireflies in the wake of a thunderstorm.
Enlightenment doesn't take life too seriously
even when it makes a tantrum
of its elemental innocence
and goes supernova.
Deep in the nuclear core of its heart
it's creatively playful on a cosmic scale.
The darkest inspiration
of its genius for making
an art of its existence
is life.
Simple and beautiful
as the laughter of children
collecting sea shells on the moon.
Even when you're severely lost
enlightenment doesn't hand you a flashlight
and say go look for your mind
like the holy grail in a sacred wood.
It deepens your solitude.
It blows the candle out
until you emerge like a star
from the profusion of your own darkness
and stand in the doorway
of your own shining
amazed by what you can see
when enlightenment isn't blinding.

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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My Lovin'

I remember how it used to be you never were this nice
You can't fool me
Now you talkin'
Like you made a change
The more you talk
The more things sound the same
What makes you think
You can just walk back
Into her life
Without a good fight
I just sit back
And watch you make a fool of yourself
You're just wasting your time
Repeat chorus eight times:no, you're never gonna get it, never ever gonna get it, my lovin'
Now you promise me
The moon and the stars
Save your breath
You won't get very far
Gave you many chances
To make changes
The only thing you changed
Was love to hate
It doesn't matter what you do
Or what you say
She doesn't love you, no way
Maybe next time
You'll give your woman a little respect
Then you won't be hearing her say that-
Repeat chorus two times
Doesn't matter what you do
Or what you say
She doesn't love you, no way
Maybe next time
You'll give your woman a little respect
Then you won't be hearing her say that-
Chorus

song performed by by En Vogue
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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A Little Thought In A Big Space

A little thought in a big space, I'm falling
through my own immensities here at my desk,
one of my Icarian propensities for plunging into things.
My voice intimidated by the violence of the silence within.
I'm on the dark side of my eyes.
No one's ever been here before.
No window, no wall, no door,
I'm on the threshold of my homelessness again.
I'm looking at stars, but I feel like rain.
I'm talking to ghosts that I don't remember.
Might be the wrong medium, but it's the right seance.
I don't even know what I'm doing here myself
but it seems I'm free to go or stay as I wish.
I'm wearing my shadow like a candling parachute
that didn't step back from the edge in time.
No point in pretending you're an airborne dandelion
when you feel like a rock with a message
someone just threw like the moon through a mirror
disguised as a sky the night birds keep flying into blind.

No one asks your name here on this pyre of a sky burial
if your birth certificate says you were born in fire.
Desire anything you like. It was all written in smoke
before you came. And these words that are saying me here
have been out of the aviary of the lantern for light years.
Who knows where the light goes or what if falls upon?
Trying to shine in a dark time without taking anything away
from the lunar eclipses that aren't in need of enlightenment.
Don't know if I'm a solar flare, a firefly, a matchbook,
or a lightning bolt that keeps stressing my starmud out
by sneaking up on it from behind and overdoing things a bit.

If you find yourself trying to pry the flowers open
with a crowbar or a koan, and it's nightfall, it's
time to turn your hourglass in for a waterclock
and see how the stars emerge out of nothing
as soon as you deepen the dark with a more acute sense of timing
that let's everything happen spontaneously by itself.
Even if you're the lighthouse of your dreams
that doesn't mean you're the nightwatchman
keeping his third eye on you in the shadows
like a theft of fire you can get away with
this second time around with only a warning.

If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
And if you did, whining about it in your sleep
isn't going to help and who's Spartan enough these days
to stash the fox under their tunic to keep
from being caught while it eats them alive?
If you want to be a dragon you've got to learn
to swallow people's hearts like hot coals as if they were chocolates,
without wincing. The stars don't come out
like emergency candles you've been saving
for exactly this kind of situation. And if
you really want to know the truth about illumination,
try and blow one out. Quick, now, look
and see immediately into the clear light of the void
what it's like to shine without a metaphoric reflection.

The stars here don't hide their nakedness under a cloak
of black holes and dwarfs that take it all in
but give nothing back like the second hand clothes
of serpents shedding their skin. One size fits all
like a bubble in a watershed of dark worlds
dazzled by how much a single eye can contain
whether it's hanging from the lip of a flower in the fall
or going down the drain in spring. I know
you hit it like a snowflake on a furnace
and do your damnedest not to cry. Thing is
as unique among billions as you think you are,
there's not a star in the sky that isn't a rite of passage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Chewing On Memories Like Broken Mirrors In Her Sleep

Chewing on memories like broken mirrors in her sleep
tears of blood run from her eyes.
She doesn't know I'm watching
but I've got windows everywhere.
But for her
just for her
because nobody else cares
third eye satellites with unlimited airspace
in her choice of skies to match her eyes.
A haemorrhage of sunsets.
Fly little bird fly
as if you weren't the shattered sparrow
God took his eye off
when you fell.
Sometimes the mystic oversights
have more to say
about the great revelations of the world
than all the burning bushes in the valley of Tuwa.
Rumours and news.
Fly little bird fly.
Be an apostate waterbird
and let your skull skip out over the lake
like the moon through a glass house
that's been asking for it for years.
There must be stars
that haven't bloomed yet
somewhere in the corner of a leftover garden
that no one's trampled on
like moon rocks
on a firewalk with a spoon
that hisses like the head of a viper
boiling with venom
at the tip of the tongue of a Zippo lighter.
Fly little bird fly
into a state of grace
that isn't tainted by your experience
of the taste of humanity
that threw you like bad meat
down your own wishing well.
How they pried your innocence out of you
like a flower before it was ready to open
like a keepsake from a locket
your mother gave to you on her death bed
like a silver bullet that would keep you safe
from the grave robbers
the moment you used it on yourself.
Fly little bird fly.
I don't know why
people attach more of an emergency
to the exit
than they do to the entrance
but I guess you'd have to ask a junkie about that
who's used to coming in through the back door
with a ticket to ride
that's better than a forged passport
to Disneyland
after you've done business with the Pentagon.
Fly little bird fly.
Don't lose your nerve for enlightenment.
There's the Bodhi tree.
There's Venus in the dawn.
And there's all this emptiness.
Isn't it sweeter
than a hot fix
once you've gone beyond
the last judgment between right and wrong
like the pick up sticks of the I Ching
into the nirvanic bliss
of discovering nothing
was your best guess after all?
Fly little bird fly.
Disappear into your own eyes
like a candle
that's stopped sticking its tongue out at the darkness
looking for a new place to hit.
Fly little bird fly
as if you weren't tarred and feathered like Icarus.
And may the sun that shines at midnight
find you a lot more approachable
than apple blossoms
scattered like ashes on the wind
or fireflies that can't hold their fixed positions
like the stars.
O it's so anatomically true
that life on earth hurts
especially when you've fallen
out of love with love
like a baby out of the nest of a lullaby.
Down will come baby
shaman and all.
I see your bruised body on the bed
like the embryo of some past miscarriage
that taught you how flesh
can grieve for its own death
while it's still alive.
I see the black haloes.
I see the bright horns.
I see the butterfly feelers
that have burnt out
like the short-lived filaments
of your average light bulb
and the place where you were anointed
with holy oil that hissed.
And it's hard to miss where the apple sat
when William Burroughs
shot you through the head
pretending he was William Tel
like your crackhead boyfriend did last night.
Luckily he missed your heart.
He should have hired a firing squad
instead of relying on a sniper.
You don't send a single viper
to do the job
of the whole snakepit
when you take out a contract
on anything as elusive as that.
I've made the bed
and you can lie in it alone
for as long as you want.
I'll keep watch over you
like a mongoose or a lighthouse
over a bird that was stared to stone by snakes
and I won't have anything to expiate
if I see their shadows
sliding hate mail under the door.
Fly little bird fly.
No more skies that lie like windows
about what you're going through.
No more pretending
those bruises on your arm
are rare orchids of jungle love.
When you went to sleep
tangled up in the powerlines
you couldn't teach to dance to your flute
and the rhythm of your body
like bullwhips
you might have felt
like a broken kite on a funeral pyre
but if my magic still works
by the time you wake up
I'll make sure
you open your eyes like a phoenix.
So fly little bird fly.
The world won't heal while you sleep.
Your lover won't have a change of heart.
He broke you like a chandelier
he threw down the road
in a drunken rage
on a Friday night
like a bottle of beer.
One solitude denies another theirs.
Lovers take each other hostage.
The rest is the Stockholm syndrome.
One fanatic.
One addict.
It looks like devotion
It looks like a life raft on the sea of love
but the ocean's gone rabid and mad.
Just look at the way it foams at the mouth.
Things are bad.
Fly little bird fly.
You're not caught in the chimney
with no way out.
You're the genie of the lamp.
You're the one that tunes the power lines
that are humming along with you
like Mozart with a sparrow.
You're the silence
that times the rhythm of the music.
You're the tuning fork
not the lightning rod
of a wanna be god
in a pick-up truck
who keeps you around
to beat on like a false idol
who shalt not come before him.
Stop pecking at the crumbs of your dreams
like the leftovers of a garden
that used to be secret
That's no way to get out of a labyrinth
when you've got wings.
So fly little bird fly.
Disappear into the depths of a starmap
that breaks into flames as you approach
the creative intensities of your own shining
like sumac in the fall.
Here's the dead branch.
Here's the green one.
You be the moon.
You be the blossom.
You be the firefly.
You be the hidden night bird
with the faraway call
that doesn't make the distinction at all
because you're too far gone to tell
by any feature of the light
you can often see things deeper
in a black mirror
than you can in a white.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Undevoted, Free, And Wild

Undevoted, free, and wild,
no one to answer to, no one to answer for,
the urns shattered, and the ashes scattered,
and the fire liberated to perfect its own combustion
and the stars without anyone to walk home,
and the solitude silent, dark, and deep, cool
as the bliss of a wine-cellar talking in its sleep,
I have grown mad in the heat of the purple sun.
I have spoken from the mouths of the caves in the desert
and not expected the echo of my own voice
to return to me like a pilgrim stashing a gnostic gospel
deep in the sand, without realizing
how much closer to the stars dirt is than I am.

When you're no one but the wind in disguise
you don' need to be humble, you don't need to wise,
nothing to trust, and no one to rely on,
you can watch the dead at night
streaming toward Orion
like a blue-white ribbon of light
undoing the gift wrappings off the bodies and eyes
of people who can see and be again.

And you know it comes to everyone
like a nebular orchid with a fragrance of stars,
that the Sahara will green and bloom again
and the wind sing hymns to the grass
and the gazelles sport their elegant legs,
adolescents in the spring brush,
running like violins succulent with beginnings,
and it doesn't matter you're alone out here
listening to the ashes of a mirage
make up legends to tell the fire
about its ancestors buried on the moon anonymously
and how their blood once stained the earth
like a scarlet letter even the stars couldn't wash off.

The mystic anti-hero of my own dragon myth
I exalt in my isolation like a shriek of revolution
and overthrow myself like a book in the flames
to keep something I don't understand alive in me
as if I had to keep on dying to sustain myself
and the distinction between one and the other were lost upon life.
It's a touch, it's a feel, it's a hole in veil
with one eye looking out at me to see
if I've intensified the dark enough to break into stars,
if I can unravel my heart like smoke like water like fire
and perfectly disappear into the atmosphere of my dispersal
without a shudder of farewell to the masks I wore like scales.
Not to be constrained by even so much as
the single thread of a straitjacket, the husk
of an abandoned sanctuary left to the imagination
of the hermetic flowers to do with as they wish.

I shriek freedom across the heavens like the death cry
of a hawk waking the valley up in the morning.
I whisper to the water things the wind was never meant to hear.
So faithful to my calling, I lead those who come, away from me,
as if it were the perennial custom of the universe
to meet like this for a moment in time and space
and then disperse into the darkness alone like a unlit candle.
I'm a riot of fools in the sublimity of the presence within me
that elates the crazy wisdom of my spontaneous ignitions
and schools the black lightning of its absence
in the folly of trying to enclose my spirit in gates
like a candle in the niche of a tempestuous vision.

Yeeeeeeessssss, I scream into the face of nothing
like the efoliant scripture of my confession and protest
that life doesn't need an alibi to live and die by,
no extraneous, no outer, no other, no object, no subject
no flying buttress to act as a bridge
over a flowing river of Gothic stone,
no strong tree standing on its own to cut down
and carve into a crutch, no cork to keep the ocean out,
no bucket to bail the moonlight out of the lifeboat,
no jade Buddha to make your supplications to,
no footprints on the water Jesus walked,
no cave in Ramadan to receive the angel of light,
no Kabbalah to baffle your way through the night,
no Schmidt-Cassegrain reflecting telescopes
on clock driven equatorial mounts geared to the heavens
to thread the golden needle of the mystery
without any knots in your spinal cord,
to penetrate the vulva of the sea like a sacred shell
that once gathered armies on a burning hillside
to contest their revelations with the tongues of swords.

I shall tell you, my brother, I shall hasten to you my sister
like moonlight through your window, I shall not
hold back from you the least shadow of the furthest star
releasing its dark wisdom like the black doves
of its own excruciating ashes glowing like the pain
of horrendous transformations into light.
I shall not bring you the skins of the dragons I've shed
but inspire you with a fire you've never been burned by before,
a spiritual immolation into a godhead without a metaphor
to guide you by, a torch you can't drown in your tears,
a long firewalk down to a river of stars,
and there you shall cross on a burning life raft
of the bones you've been carrying around for lightyears like a body.

And it's a heresy of silence to say, but there
you shall you shall lie down in the nocturnal emptiness
in the long blue seagrass of the moon
and empower out of your own creative abundance
whatever worlds your longing inspires you to embrace
to amuse the bright vacancy of eternity with time, like love,
and the dark abundance of unperishing potential
with space, like wisdom, and the clear light of the void
and the unspeakable absence of any other voice
to ruin the silence with the bliss and sorrow of seeking
the mystic night you found within you longing like a bird
for the stillness to write it like a lyric of the wind,
a passage of blood through the labyrinth of the heart,
a shadow against the moonrise of a compassionate awareness
there's a divinity that sings like a human
in the heart of everything that breaks its long fast of nothing
with praise and celebration, with fire and light and rain
with the firstt sacred syllables to touch the lips
of the black rose charred in the heart of the dragon, like poetry.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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And Should I Recall Whose Eyes

And should I recall whose eyes made the stars most beautiful,
and set the mindstream that flowed though us aflame with fireflies
a moment there and gone and come again like light
in the keyholes of the feral cats that prowled the graveyardshift
wholly to the top of the broom-swept path up Heartbreak Hill,
where the bones of the seven hanged men lay buried
in the duff of our childhood legends, a shadow and a name,
trying love on shyly like new clothes in the shadows of the pines,
where we lay down with the dead on beds of rusty compass needles,
out of sight of the windows of the town, how could I not feel,
here alone now by the Tay, thousands of miles away,
and more years later than it takes to walk a burning bridge,
waiting for the flower moon to appear above the horizon,
the waterclock in the nightbird's song of longing?

And if I were to say what it was like to be touched by her
when she was brave with hunger and my body
all loaves and fishs in the innocence of her hands
and her breasts and lips magic mushrooms without the flies
that swarmed the garbage cans in the back-alleys below,
and though it was not wise to begin a new life
on the last night of the past we were ending together,
like a bell and a cannon that had been melted down
from the same dark ore of a life we were cut out of
like a wound in a loveletter we left unsigned for one another,
because good-bye was harder to write than just to let things go,
what words could I use that weren't already
denuded of their shining like a windfall
of black dwarfs on the windowsills of time,
and the stars that night that clung to the sky
like bubbles in the evanescence of glass
or the grass to our flesh, all washed off now
as if they were grime, the quiet patina of time
gilding the dust like rainbows on the wings of flies?

And the wind asks, and the water sylphs want to know
and the wild willows are holding their breath like a veil
and the Tay is pulling a curtain of water aside in its wake
to hear about another stranger the earth swallowed
like a sacred syllable in the mouth of a snake
that envied the waterbirds their wavelengths and wings,
and though the skeletal birch and prophetic skulls
in the riverbed plead like the end of a dream
for one more lullaby in the ghost story of the moonrise,
I show them the black pearl of my heart
lustrous as hard coal to burn again in the furnace of dawn
on the dark side of the moon in partial eclipse
as I weep like a dragon for the secrets I keep
like myths of origin in the urns of things that are gone
like the irrevocable flightfeathers of the words and waterbirds
under the lost petals of fire that bloom in the eyes of the flower moon.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Lighting It Up And Blowing It Out

Lighting it up and blowing it out
I try to make my way through the dark
by beginning at the end
as if the coming and the going
were the same door
or good-bye were the first thing
you would say to a friend.
I approach things like a night stream
as if my death were already achieved
and behind me.
And all the atoms of my being
dancing like frenzied gnats
in the sunset glow of a last eye-beam
are certifiably primordial
and any one of them
when they lose it in the light
could begin a world.
And what can you say more of a life
that dreams of what it is
than it's the taste of the same wine
in many different cups?
And as any fox knows
the grape is always sweetest
when you can taste it with your eyes.
Though why foxes eat grapes is anyone's guess
but life makes itself up as it goes
like music in a fish's earlobes.
It feathers its themes in fire and light
and goes up in smoke
like the ghost of a tree
looking for habitable planets among the stars.
New wounds with innocent root-room for old scars.
Chalking the cue to bank the long shot
you're trying to spin off into
the deep, dark pockets
of your game-winning afterlife.
And I don't believe in much anymore
though that hasn't stopped me from crying
like a slow window trying to keep
the stars from leaking out of me
as if there were a black hole
somewhere in my heart
waiting for an iris to make it an eye
whose seeing might be a new way of healing
what can't be healed.
Once here. Here forever.
But whether we're the eternal children of forever
or just another breath on the night air
that doesn't even know we live,
even death is just another way of killing time here.
When everywhere's the center of everything else,
the centre holds,
things don't fall apart.
They disappear.
And that's the mystic art
of knowing how to make the most out of existence
by offering no resistance
to the rocks in your own mindstream
that part the waters like the thoughts
of an exile in the promised land
who can't go back the way she came.
The river can't step into the same you twice.
And in every direction
your eyes have ever burned like stars
you can see the dark jewel of your own life
from the inside
before it breaks into light.
Sometimes I'm the lonely sign
on the only path to nowhere
and others I'm positively amniotic
with the schools of my blue lucidity
the albino dolphins of the moon leap through
without a chance of changing their colour.
A flower of prophetic blood bleaches my skull.
I swallow the snakefire of my last eclipse
like a lump of coal
I'm trying to turn into a diamond
that doesn't burn
and never sloughs its skin.
Reality isn't a religion or a science,
or the back and front of a mirror
that doesn't know whose eyes its looking through.
Religion: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Science: how many pins can dance on the head of an angel?
Totem poles on a telephone booth where no one ever picks up.
Voodoo dolls that hex the cause of their effects.
The apple bloom on the tree of knowledge
lets go of its flightless wings
and follows the wind
like the eyelids of unfeathered angels
who opened their eyes like flawless fruit
as they fell toward paradise
without a parachute of smokey virtue
or the scale of a snake for a vice.
Emergence into the open
like a hidden secret revealed
is the engine of evolution
that empowers the dark matter
of this incorporeal starmud
to arise like the high note of a bird
that's flown beyond the night in its voice
like light beyond its myth of origin.
And the peduncle is lost in the ensuing phylum
as a madman is lost in the scream
that woke up the asylum,
or a god is lost in his own creation.
And the mountains listen
to the holy voices
in the valleys of their shadows
they deepen as they arise
like the guests of an echoless calling
to greet the unknown host.
It's what the moon feels
when she fondles her locket of water
and memories pull at her heartstrings
like tides on earth
and music is the way she recalls
the sirens that used to sing
like the brides of empty lifeboats
that prayed like smashed guitars
for the night to sow the seedless sea with stars.
And in every fish that swims through fire
like the sacred response of life
to the longing in its own desire
she knows they got their wish.
Fireflies in the ashes of the phoenix tree.
And the eggs of cosmic words
like serpents in a bird's nest
learning to fly like dragons
that have just swallowed the moon.
And it's one thing to pull the sword from the stone
but it's a greater power than magic and proof
with no urge to rule
that summons the butterfly from its cocoon
by giving the fool who inches toward the truth
along the green branch toward the apple-bloom
that already tastes like the forbidden fruit
of some radical insight
the whole orchard in a pair of wings
and more than enough night and light on its palette
to start a revolution in seeing among the flowers
who still labour in the chains of their roots
to turn their earthbound lucidities into stars
who might look back for a change
with eyes that have gathered like water out of the shining
and taste the light in the honey
that kissed their eyelids into gold
long before the night was old
and it wasn't enough just to see them.
When you opened your eyes
in the burning clarity of your lone vision
before this matrix of space and time
gave birth to the world
you were free to be whatever you could see.
That's when the light first spoke to you
in the mother-tongue of your seeing
and your voice broke
like a secret name in the mirror
that didn't know who you were
and the moon on nightwater
the thief at the window
your breath like stars on the cold, night air
summoned the whole of being
in every particulate shard
and radiant plinth of the mirror
to drive your shining into the shadows
so myriad things can appear as they are.
Many eyes open. Night. An eclipse. One star.
And the darkness an anti-romantic
in love with the moon from afar.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Woke Up Saying Your Name

I woke up saying your name
but in the course of the day forgot.
I should have forgiven you sooner
but my tongue was a noose and a knot.
I should have let you fool my eyes
but not my heart. No Grecian urn
but just the same
I loved the shapely vase of your body
and the fact that my ashes weren’t buried in it.
But those bouquets of angry snakes
you kept trying to arrange
into a Zen garden in Kyoto
or a hair do in Mycenean Greece
kept me looking for an antidote for years
to all those estranged wavelengths
of a gamma ray burst
I stood like a nuclear meltdown in the way of,
though I poured my blood out like heavy water
to get you to stop and cool down.
What it is is what it is only
if you don’t factor in what it’s not.
Otherwise, in the bigger picture,
what it is is just as much what it’s not.
And who can assess
what didn’t go down between us?
I’m sitting on a cold rock down by the Tay River
freezing my proverbials off
because I like being alone with the stars
at three in the morning
because they don’t ask for an explanation
about why I’m up so late
so many light years from home.
And they don’t ask me to translate my scars,
the dead word into the living,
back into wounds
they couldn’t relate to anyway.
And I don’t need to tell them
if you’re going to open yourself up to someone,
if you’re going to bloom, if
you’re going to shine
a rose, a star,
you’re bound to taste your own thorns
or the splinters of broken chandeliers
on your tongue, or a dog
with porcupine quills in its mouth,
howling at the dark side of the moon
as the greater of two faith healers.
Though neither the stars nor I
are into comparative mortality.
And as I approach death and love aimlessly
looking at the stars timelessly alone
I don’t bemoan my brevity anymore
and they don’t flash their eternity in my face.
There’s just stars and eyes for awhile
and both of us agree
death and eternity are none of our business.
There’s just this little bit of heat and light
that flares like a matchbook for a minute
and then goes out
like a holybook, a firefly,
a poem or a flower
burning in its own ashes, smothered
in its own smoke like a pillow
over a dream in a skull
that effaced itself like stars
packed into a snowman that thaws
according to cosmic laws
not meant for our eyes only.
And God, the Zeitgeist,
the Universal Id knows,
how we’ve both tried
to enlighten these lumps of coal,
these sorry excuses for eyes
into diamonds that flow
with love and compassion.
How we have laboured like Sisyphus
to haul what’s deep underground,
the dark ore within us,
up into mountains of light
only to watch it run down again
rivers and rain
into the great night seas beyond
like a heart-mind continuum.
A leaf and a starmap on a lifestream.
We have advanced into our retrogression
like everything else in the universe,
big heavy methane planets
with shepherd moons
that cast their shadows
like beauty spots on Saturn,
and our axes toppled like Neptune’s.

poem by Patrick White
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And It Comes And It Takes, It Levels And It Defies

And it comes and it takes, it levels and it defies.
And not all the sorrow in the world
is enough to cool the burn. Will death make
as big a splash as birth did when it jumped in the pond?
How will you die? At home in bed
with your kids banked around you
like a zodiac of grieving signs, head on
at seventeen into a drunk ambulance
like a suicide you backed into like a ventriloquist
afraid to call your own bluff? Heart attack, cancer,
eating the Angel of Death like the wrong mushroom
in a rainy spring, your extinction, one of seven
horrible oddities of random selection to make the news
like a public health warning not to take the chance?
And you, having just finished medical school?

The wise man dies, the fool, the lover, the glutton and baby.
Death plays solitaire by opening and closing doors.
Death is not amused by the meaning of our lives.
Death doesn't read the menu
of what we've avoided and cherished.
It comes and it takes, it levels and it defies.
Are you going to die like an old woman
evaporating in her sleep like a dream lingering on a lake
until the dawn mistakes her for a ghost
and brushes her aside like a spider-web?
Pity the poor body's infantile helplessness at the end.
Pity the terror in the eyes of the imprisoned one
who could feel his chains slipping away like a spinal cord
into an immaculate freedom ungoverned by circumstance.

Even the stars, chalk on a blackboard, and death,
the brush that wipes them away before the next class.
As it is with the flowers, the jewel of life is slowly
pried out of our hands with soft crowbars of sunlight.
God, how we labour to leave something behind
like a fragrance of our having been here once
like a human on a hillside deeply in love with the clouds.
Death panics us into believing we're achieving
something enduring and benign, but truth is,
given that one good can adumbrate another that's tragic,
we're just setting our heads on fire like matches
to add our blazing to the darkness of the blind.
We strike, we ignite, we flare, we fade like a daylily
into an abyss of stars we're all apprenticed to
and the light goes out like a firefly in a black hole.

Or we're as indelible as a menage a trois of water.
The triune identity of existence, three phases of the moon.
No onceness to our being here forever.
Persist in beginning and you condemn yourself to death.
The jewel turns you in the light of your infinite facets.
Your eyes turn to you and ask what they're looking at.
Death wants an explanation for what you're up to.
And life couldn't care less whether you had one or not.
A dead child can lead you to enlightenment
and a live one to despair. Two hinges of the same gate,
putting their hands together in prayer like birds on the wing.
We live in pain. We live in unexpected bliss. But what we are
is imaginations beyond this. We embrace life. We dis death.
We separate. We hold lanterns up to the fog
like empty lifeboats far out at sea at night but what if
everyone swam safely ashore as they did
in their mothers' wombs? We aren't drowned out
like the cosmic hiss of negligible wavelengths
that once accomplished mighty things. The senses
don't age into old colours and old sounds.
Whatever you reach out to touch is as new and forever as now.
Has it ever been this day before you woke up to it?
Did yellow die overnight? Did red have a heart attack?

Inside. Outside. There are no walls in this palace of space.
No doors you have to enter seriatum. No locks to undo.
No ordeals to endure. No sod to turn over like a gravedigger
to lay a foundation stone that's the whole of the building
as if you buried a turtle under its own shell.
A song bird under an iron bell. The sacred syllable
of a black pearl under the tongue of an oyster. To no avail.
The wave rides you like a flying carpet, not a sail
that has to wait for the wind to arise again or the tide to crest.
It's just like a photon of insight. When you look at it
trying to grasp it as something fixed in your mind,
it acts just like the particle you were expecting to see,
but as soon as you turn your eye away from it,
it slips away from you like the cosine of a snake
back into its own chameleonic medium of water and light.
Everywhere is the centre of your boundlessness
like the nave of a wheel on a hearse
that doesn't equate once around the sun on its axis
with the distance of the journey in time and space and mind
it takes to realize, whatever size of the circumference you make
like the ripples of interlocking bracelets of rain
or tree rings in the heartwood of a black walnut
that all fixed points in the wheeling world turn on zero.
That there's not a wavelength of difference between
what is and is not, that you've been attributing an identity
to things that emerged with you from the polymorphous perverse
in order to recognize a self distinct from the universe
that mothered it into existence out of nothing
but the dark nature of life to fuel the mind
with the radiance of diamonds burning in the light
without anyone or anything ever being consumed
or the night diminished like an ageing constellation
by even so much as a single vital sign
of unending exploration carrying forth of its own accord
The lamp bears the flame that lends the lamp its eyes.
When the flame goes out, everything it's every seen
and been and tried to mean goes with it into
worlds within worlds that keep adapting themselves to you
like stars to the eyes of those who keep looking back at them
as the source of their own shining by a river
that's constantly changing shapes in its flowing
to reflect the mind's protean approach to the inconceivable.
And it comes and it takes, it levels and it defies,
but you can look upon it with the luminous eyes
of enlightened mirrors that can see whole worlds
abounding in every piece it breaks to improve the view.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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There Was Nothing Ever To Forgive You For

There was nothing ever to forgive you for
I'd say to you now if you were still alive.
Pain doesn't maintain an agent,
though as many who have lived
have been named as perpetrators;
it just occurs
like happiness just happens
like a stroke of luck, a touch of grace
in an astronomical lottery of famished chances.
Voices arise in my head to address you
in the immensities of time and sorrow
like spokesmen for my heart
and another part of me
listens from the audience to this play
that's been going on for light years without you.
I suspect I'm still trying to perfect the way I loved you
out of force of habit, knowing how
redundant and absurd that is
long after the play closed
and the plaster cherubs
on the Ionian cornices of the theatre
were buried in the rubble
along with the comic and tragic masks
that shed their petals when the lights went off
and everyone was left face to face with themselves.
You have drifted in and out of my poems for years
like a curtain at an open window
in an abandoned house,
like blue smoke from an autumn fire,
the fragrance of the bath you draw from the stars
and sweeten with the salts of lunar wildflowers
whenever you want to renew your virginity
like the kings' mistress
stepping out of the sea
like some Renaissance Venus
covering her sex up with a serpentine lock of hair.
You're the sparrow on the finger of Catullus' lover
except now you can only make it as far
as my windowsill
though I leave everything open to you
to come and go as you please and must.
No illusory skies. No broken necks.
No more finger-stroking the soft walnut of a bird's head
like a lost locket full of grief,
like a small lamp that can't grant anymore wishes
however you caress it.
Ah, the genie's out mingling with the Milky Way
like all unencompassed spirits of the night,
like dead souls in the bodies of Canada geese
heading southwest
though their echoes are veering northeast
as if their homeless ghosts
had a place and mind of their own,
an airy nothingness
without a local habitation or a name.
In my view of the world as picture-music
in an expanding universe with its foot to the floor
on a pedal of dark energy
the vision's always too big
for any frame or stage or star map
you bring to it to try and express
where things are improbably at now.
We were young together for awhile
and we sought to embrace the world
and everything in it
even if it meant kissing the dead on the forehead
to wake them up gently from their long dream
of flying in formation with Canada geese,
though it never did.
I tried it on you more than once.
I kissed every bead on a rosary of prophetic skulls.
And still to this day no one answers, no one hears.
I tried to scry the future
in the crystal balls of my tears
but all I ever saw was the same old moon,
the same old stars that crossed us off
their birthday guest list
like a calendar of total eclipses
that had already taken place.
And I knew the future was far behind us.
And your early death could only make you more beautiful
as the years wore out their threadbare flying carpets
and those rare bright nocturnal spirits of life
you were meant to meet and fall in love with
like the heart loves its bloodstream
like a waterclock loves the passage of time
when it's full to overbrimming
with water on the moon
grow rarer and further apart
like stars on the skin of our cosmic enlargements.
Just like this open window
that never lets eternity become a barrier to the dead.
I've never closed the curtains on the play.
I've never drawn a veil over
the fountains and the waterfalls
the wetlands and rapids of my mindstream
and said to the lady of the lake
in her garment of mist
this is live water
and that water's dead
as if there were a wave of difference
between the one that carries forth
and the one that carries away.
The cloud and the snow on the mountaintop
both speak the same language,
share the same mother-tongue
as does the fog in the valley
the ice, the rain, the dew,
as if what's false about the living
were true of the dead as well,
everything sublime, everything trivial.
Hydra-headed water shapeshifting
through our hands
like the desert sands of an hourglass
that dump the pyramid
and finally get out of the box.
Lunar landscapes
with transmogrifying mindstreams
that apply themselves like water
to mending gardens on the moon
while death waits like a stranger at the gate
to commend you on the green thumb
that's apparent in your choice of wildflowers.
I can still feel you bend time
like the body of a guitar
when you're around me
trying to tune the spider webs
in the corner of the room I write in
to your cosmic whole note of silence.
And just as you were a muse of mine in life
and I drew your intoxicating waters
deeply from the well
and we walked under the stars awhile
without caring where we were going
so even in death
I can feel you come to the dead branch sometimes
like inspiration to a night bird's heart
when it doesn't really matter
if anyone answers or not
because you flower like longing
in the roots of my solitude
and the moon blossoms
and my poems unfold like leaves.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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When The Geriatric Drunk Next Door

When the geriatric drunk next door who was
raising chihuahuas to make a living,
but couldn't part with one them when it came time to sell
came over one day in my childhood,
shaking like an aspen leaf in the fall,
going through withdrawal, to ask if he could borrow
a few bucks, I watched my mother give him five
of the last ten she had to raise four kids
for half of the rest of the month before
the next welfare check arrived, and say,
Here. Don't hurt yourself. Something to ease the pain.
Though she didn't drink and he'd been drinking too long
to turn the herd that had trampled him around.

She didn't judge. She didn't try to give advice.
She didn't belittle the man in the way she gave.
She didn't count how much the giving took off her plate.
She wasn't indulging her progressive, liberal, altruism.
She wasn't breaking loaves and fishes on a hillside
or trying to win a popular election.
She just gave like the sea, the earth, the sky,
like fire gives heat and light, all in one easy action
of a heart that has suffered enough on its own to know
we're all in the same lifeboat on the moon
white-water rafting through the rapids of a waterclock.
And that has been my religion ever since.

Though I've never said anything to her about it.
How much I loved her in that moment
of compassionate tenderness, how she pulled
one thread out of the straitjacket of despair in his eyes,
and rewove it not on a loom like the moon but a harp
into a flying carpet of joy so another human
in as much of a mess in her own way as he was
could gain some altitude for a little while above the misery,
and hang on to at least one single wavelength of threadbare radiance
that could still fall on the shit everybody was living in
and turn it into a flower. Indelible,
the understanding in their eyes when he
looked at her incredulously for a moment
and she knew exactly what he meant
as she laughed at herself with a soft, wry smile
as if she'd just seen the sacred fool behind her best sentiment.

That was the whole of enlightenment to me.
The beginning of a spontaneous discipline
and still is, though it's sometimes bitter to practise,
when your giving is mistaken for having been taken
and you lament how many people can't tell the difference
between a theft and a gift anymore. How they deprive themselves
of so many jewels of inestimable value,
and that human touch that can pour the heart like gold
from the darkest of ores, the deepest of mines,
or bring meteors to shed hot tears like diamonds upon impact.
Or oxygen and the bases of protein.
Though it be a nuclear winter outside.
Though the bride was left standing at the altar
and there was no one there to lift the veils of Isis
to see the stars in the eyes of the Queen of Heaven even at nadir
like a chance someone wasn't willing to take.

Though common sense dictate a rational sacrifice,
and Ayn Rand and the Union of Spiritual Snakeoil Salesmen
preach that you've got to learn to love yourself first
as if you had a self to nurture that wasn't rooted
like a mirage in a desert in an hourglass that poured
through your fingers like water when you tried to grasp
the delusion of the flower. Though all the mystics
try to annihilate what doesn't exist to see God as she really is
as they come before her like busy, busy bees
with money in their pockets and honey in their hives
and all their martyrdom proves to be just another mode of suicide.

You can give a piece of garbage you've picked
out of a dumpster like the bruised fruits of the earth,
and when you give it to someone you can eat
from the Tree of Life with impunity without having to choose
between the serpent and the apple, the evil and the good,
or the knowledge you must suffer to be understood
as a human, who can gain altitude by erring on the side
of someone else's plight without even wearing wings,
to the wonderment of the angels and demons alike,
and occasionally, like me, your angry, eldest son,
who didn't know until that one moment whether
he should approach the world like a fist
with teethmarks on the knuckles, or
an open palm with lifelines thrown out to another
like billions of umbilical cords woven like a strong rope
into a mother who didn't need to build an ark to be a lifeboat.
Who could see lucidly through a glass darkly
the veils of her own nebulosity breaking out of the fog
like the search lanterns of the stars
out of the most ancient mystery of love
hidden in her heart without the aid of a teacher or telescope.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Lightning Hits The Horns Of The Morning Snail

Lightning hits the horns of the morning snail
like the tines of a tuning fork
and the larkspur sees in the ashes of the holy one,
a tiny urn, no bigger than a cigar butt,
a deep connection to the stars
at the root of its ultramarine towers,
the ugly and despised become luminously beautiful
by what they've been touched by. Same
with candles, night, the human spirit, a poem
and the stars and planets
that ride the film of our eyes across the sky
or slide across the poppies of blood that bloom
on the other side of our eyelids in the sunshine
like blue sunspots and serpentine rainbows
on the deft wings of the houseflies aspiring
to penetrate the heights and mysteries of being
as if they approached God like an ineffable windowpane,
and the black mirrors of the oil slicks
that eclipse our faith in our transformative power
to change things. Two petals of violet cosmos,
two eyelids of a new way of looking at things,
swaying ethereally in the wind
as if they were keeping time
to a faint music they can hear
way back somewhere in their mind's eye, fall
and stick themselves to the back of a snail
inching its way along a garden path in metric
through a crosswalk of rococo shadows,
and who would have believed
something so low and slow could fly
if they hadn't seen it with their own eyes?

Show me anything your eyes have ever been deprived of,
however ugly, however visually tantalizing,
inside our out, even if you can count more than the usual three,
and I'll show you someone who hasn't learned
how to be grateful for the generosity
of the black hole they're living in
like one of the darlings of light.
Clarity isn't just a matter
of straightening out the wavelengths in your line of sight
and then looking upon everything you see
as if it were flatlining in parallel event horizons
everywhere you looked for signs of life
and came upon death, and mistook it for peace.
It isn't just a matter of contemplating sundials
in erratically disciplined Zen gardens
until you come to understand how to use the shadows
on behalf of your own spiritual insight
as readily as you've mastered your weapons of light.
No one's ever been purified by a holy war.
Not even the warrior minstrel of the forlorn hope.
You can exhaust a whole new generation of third eyes
trying to make it all one out of a lot of little separate pieces
that reflect the whole in every part
of your shattered chandeliers and mirrors,
that long pilgrimage, that fire walk of shining splinters
that dazzle you into believing it's skip to my lou my darling
all the way down a Milky Way of stars
from here like a fingerling of light
to there like a wild salmon of oceanic enlightenment.
Beauty isn't an essence you can extract from the ore
of who you are as a human like an existential alchemist
trying to distill the stars from the medium they're shining in
as if you were pulling a sword from a philosopher's stone.
All the shining spiritual metals, copper, silver, mercury, gold,
unless they're alloyed with the darker elements of earth,
are too soft for combat. Merlin relies
on the iron forge in his own blood to work his magic.
He knows a holy war is just an exorcism
on crusade against a seance. A calling
of the dead to the dead. Not the work
of the living spirit that resides
in the human divinity of everyone of us
like a birthright of shining
that's as indefensible and unassailable
as time and space. Clarity doesn't try to part the heavens
like a mansion into single rooms for every afterlife
that goes into exile looking for an excellence within itself
that knows how to keep a promise to the earth.
Knowing how to fall is half the art of rising.
Learning how to get up off
your knees, your prayer rugs, tatami mats
and all those flying carpets
that don't fly straight in any direction
with compassion for the human being you are
as you see yourself looking at you
through everyone else's eyes,
and hear creation being said within you
like the fleeting meanings of life
that shadow the life of meaning
as fast as it's being spoken
in the mother-tongue of everyone
who can look upon a morning snail
and hear how a grubby little buddha
of a sticky sacred syllable
that crosses your path in the morning
is saying you into existence twenty four seven
the way everything else is each other
in the wholly imaginable beauty
of a creative language that isn't
a tongue-tied stranger to anyone.

Look at any grain of dirt on whatever path you're on
and light it up with the shining
from the oil lamps of your own eyes
and you'll see how easy it is to enlighten
what's under your feet like the billions of stars
that spontaneously followed suit like wildflowers
once you got the first one lit and realized
in whatever direction you search and seek
the spirit isn't looking for the right road of thorns
to cut its feet on, or lacerate its knees on a holy stairwell.

Put a pair of cosmic wings on a morning snail
and the whole earth turns into a landing strip
of green boughs in blossom, even
when the fireflies take over the nightshift
like microcosmic demonic nightwatchmen.
Go ask the bees if you don't believe me.
They can read the petals of the secret starmaps
that bloom like love notes and shared recipes
for honey that tastes like a solar flare
transformed by the transactions of a spiritual atmosphere
that pearls this grain of nacreous earth
as surely as the air that breathes us does,
into auroral arrays of beauty and compassion.

If you can't love the veils, how are you ever
going to learn to love the face behind them
that smiles back at you in a likeness of yourself,
all eyes, and stars, flowers and nocturnal metaphors
for what you're looking at?
A morning snail with two petals of cosmos for wings,
with flashy grains of dirt on its back, each
a world within a world in its own right,
rising chromatically over their event horizons
as a sign of a significance of their own
as poignant as the silicates and stars they're reborn from,
delivering the mail at its own pace
as if its wings were two loveletters
addressed to itself by the wind personally
each sealed with a kiss
like two complementary eyes
you must look into deeply if you want to see
how the hourglass flowers in your gazing
like larkspur and shapeshifting desert stars.
If you don't want to live your whole life
like a scar looking for a wound you can believe in.

Even a morning snail, if you've got the eyes for it,
can make a trail of the silver veil it leaves in its wake
like a smeared mirror on the path to enlightenment.
If you only love the light at moonrise,
and despise what's fallen into the dirt
like so many windfalls of
demons, stars, snails, angels, apples and humans before it,
your life is not adjusted to the time-zone you're living in
and your heart keeps missing a beat
you go endlessly wandering over the earth to look for
through the gardens on the moon
and the starfields above
when everywhere and always
it's been right under your feet all the time
like a snail path shining like the Milky Way
on the garden walkway through
the blue and white stars of the larkspur
like lightning in the morning
that flashes from your own eyes.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Blonde Shock

The blonde shock of wild sea grass from New Brunswick.
At first I thought it was your hair.
And tiny beads of iridescent peacock seeds
as small as the myriad hopes of a poppy
she'll come again
that fell out of the envelope
into my coffee
as a muse of patchouli oil
inspired the air like an Egyptian temple
tending to the rites of Isis
when the moon's in the nymph phase
of her ancient seduction.
And a drawing of a rainbow phoenix
in the form of a flower
and a money-order for five hundred dollars
to paint violet horns
on the black inverted star
with its plinths open like legs
giving birth to helical vines and snakes.
A symbolic tattoo
that means you
that will hang like a flag from your spine
down your back
as a sign of whose country it is
should anyone ever get lost.
You're right.
You can't draw butterflies.
But your darkness intrigues.
Your light is true to its star.
Space bends around you like water.
And there's not a chained tree
in the whole of your wilderness.
The gates of your rivers are open and free
as the salmon who jump them
conjured out of the sea
by the siren who sings to them
like a journey of things to come
at the end of the long way home.
Love breathes life into death
and even on the fly
love is the prime circumstance of now.
And I feel the gold of your harvest in every seed.
And there's no scarecrow with a sword
trying to defeat the ploughshare
it was born from
like the moon as it moves
like a white horse
through a wounded valley
looking for its lost rider
somewhere out there like the wind.
I've been blinded by squalls of stars before
the sphinx blew in my face
and I have felt my eyes
evaporate in the blazing
of certain fireflies
who could read the braille of my face
like elegant fingertips of light
deciphering the writing on the wall.
And I've lived through it all like space
whether I was a celestial snakepit of passion
with a mouse for a heart
or I was blowing kisses
like the petals of bruised flowers
into the grave of an enlightened starfish
passing by in a deathcart.
And sometimes the geni gets his wish
by rubbing the lamp on the inside
and asking the night to need him
like water needs a fish
like fire needs a tree
like air needs a bird
like earth an unpoached elephant.
I'm not a species bent on martyrdom
to any cause lesser than the love
I aspire to
and I won't burn my eyes
on insincere candles at a black mass
or the votive fires of delusional crucifixions
that yearn without conviction
for a better infancy in their afterlife.
Things have been tough
but I still go to bed at night
with the door wide open
as hope to folly
to catch a thief
that might put the moon back
she stole from my window
like the coin from my mouth
I had hoped would pay for my passage.
And I've been given up
like the sea gives up its dead
like the ghosts of old cliches
to the voice of a new medium
and I've discovered
that love isn't the forensic history
of a mystery that can be cracked by the truth.
It's apocalyptic lightyears beyond both
like a prophecy
uttered in the secrecy of your solitude
that can only be overheard
with your eyes.
And there is no age in it
no youth that leaves the stage
a wiser happier skeleton
no shrines to spring
no pyres of autumn.
It isn't the beginning or end of anything
that wanders in a world of forms
like a road with all the answers
to questions it never stops to ask.
Love isn't a lost cause
looking for someone to take a risk.
And it isn't the silence
it isn't the singing
it isn't the longing
to be pulled out like the lucky straw
in a random draw among exiles
to decide who should go first.
It isn't a thumb in a plum pie.
It isn't the kiss that lifted the curse.
Or a lifeboat on the moon
that overturns like a blessing
that only makes matters worse.
And it would be unforgivably spacious of me
though I have loved long and intensely
to say what love is
when it wings its own immensity
like a nightbird of blood
that sheds its hood
to fly among the stars
like a fire feathering its own solitude.
But if I were to say anything
I would say
love might be a mighty sword
drawn from a dark ore
tempered in secret waters on the moon
enfolded like time in space
like a worldly loveletter
in a cosmic envelope
with a return address by the sea
that keeps faith with its prey
by giving its word to life
it's not the expedience of the slayer
or the obedience of the slain
not the exaltation of joy in death
or the mystic terror there is in birth
that calls the lightning down
to make the weathervane crow at midnight:
I have tasted the light on my tongue
like the tine of a new direction.
A dragon sheds it skin
like the ashes of a spent fire.
And the serpents of desire
dance to the flutes
of a lyrical resurrection
like words that take
their meaning from us
when love's the native language,
the grammar, the muse, the voice, the silence
the playfully profound way the picture-music
hides like a Rosetta stone
that doesn't want to be found
like a key to the meaning of everything
when we're what it's trying to say.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Sun, The Moon And Stars

Ah-ooh, ah-ah-ooh, ah-ah-ooh, ah-ah-oh-ooh {2x}
It's late and i'm running out of clever things 2 say
The kind that will bring a girl like u 2 tears
There's only one more glass of this ros
Let's throw it on the fire with our past
And dance the night away until...
The sun, the moon and stars
Don't seem as far as they did yesterday
The sun, the moon and stars
In love we r - 4ever, always
It's late and i think it's about time 4 u and me 2 get closer...
2 get closer than we ever did before (ooh)
Whenever there's a tide u can let it ride inside your interior
Lay back, relax upon my shore (ooh)
Ooh-ooh baby, i wanna make love 2 u right here
One inside the other one - no fear, we're here until...
The sun, the moon and stars
Don't seem as far as they did yesterday
The sun, the moon and stars
In love we r - 4ever, always
Blow out this candle sunlight
And come lay down next 2 me
And paint another rainbow - ooh-wee (ooh-wee)
Eclipse this light with extasy
[...]
Come on, come on
Let's lay down
I'm walking out of what to say
That kind of lucky rhyme
Make a chippy wanna say:
whisper in the belly
2 me rocking ros?
Do u like i do
Come on and dance the night away
Let's lay before they get to close the door
U and me, we got 2 get down on the floor
Come on, let the tide ride in and off the shore
I wanna love u once again - and then some more
Lay your head back i got my hand behind your head
Like u do the limbo supple on the bouncy bed
Let's bouncing on the summer spring
And when u start 2 fall
U come like a cold winter due in montreal
(come on baby)
(the sun, the moon and stars) - hey-hey, hey-hey
(the tide ride) - hey-hey, hoo-hoo
(the tide ride - hou)
The sun, the moon and stars
Don't seem as far as they did yesterday
The sun, the moon and stars
In love we r - 4ever, always
The sun, the moon and stars
Don't seem as far as they did yesterday
The sun, the moon and stars
In love we r - 4ever, always

song performed by by Prince
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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You May. You May Not Come. Maybe Tonight. Or Not

You may. You may not come. Maybe tonight. Or not.
When it's not cooking cosmic eggs, boiling heretics
in the hot oil of bubbling cauldrons, the hourglass
is sandpainting sidereal mandalas with stars
to empower the wind to blow them away,
bones of grey chalk watergilding my flesh in ash.

What did I say? What did I say that was so unorthodox
all the bells of your body were left speechless
at the sight of so many grails trashed like empties
from a car window like a litter of roadkill
along the side of the highway? Did I transit
the zenith of the burning bridge of your last loveletter,
or should I have jumped, or fell, or cannonballed in
to make a bigger splash in the blood vats of your heart?
Maybe a meteor to render your old lovers extinct?

I watch the cold windows until they begin to percolate
in an unexpected thaw of disciplined sorrows.
It's getting late. Your absence, a glacial waterclock
followed by a lot of patronymic colons about who
begat what upon whom. I don't want to meet your father.
I'd kill him on the spot. I don't want to prove
to your mother I'm going to be good to you
in ways that she was not as she soaks
the blood from the carpet like gouts
of insincere candlewax. The price you pay
for three meals a day and a creative finishing school
where you can afford the kind of problems
the poor don't make enough to imitate.

They worry about where the next meal
is coming from. You were born knowing
how far out the soup spoon was supposed
to be aligned from the begging bowl
like a shepherd moon in orbit around Neptune.
And me? I eat out of my skull on the run
whenever I'm writing poetry to the moon
in one long howl of anguished wanting.

Were the diamonds too hard? Wasn't I
bituminous enough when I entered the dark
to show you how I could shine out of
my own inner resources like two hundred million
urns of light gathered from the firepits of the stars
by the crows that keep pecking out my eyes
like jackhammers looking for the motherlode?
And when I watched you slicing the throats
of your long-necked swans like ballet dancers
and black daffodils on an angle to preserve them longer
as cut flowers on the coffee table, didn't I
make a Zen comment on the way you'd arranged them?

I've been scarred by love like a clay tablet in cuneiform
in the library of Ashurbanipal. The crow
has scratched at my flesh to show me where to bury
my dismembered body parts to guarantee
a higher yield over the ensuing light years.
The cat claw of the moon has caught my eye
more than once. Fireflies in a bird net,
I've cauterized my optic nerves on the constellations
of my own signage to keep my brain from seeing
what my heart was afraid to reveal to itself.
I was a blind prophet being led away by a child.

I could witness on the dark side of my seeing
the bird eating arachnids with two red stars for eyes
weaving their wavelengths into low frequency webs
like the bass strings of a slack guitar
to catch the fire of the morning dew in a false dawn
like Cherokee water spiders with hairy down
and scarlet stripes casting magical spells
like the geoglyph on the Nazca pampas
with Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka
in the hourglass waist of Orion trying to squeeze
its abdomen into a whalebone corset
before the Arabs changed its sex
into the belt of a less subtle Hunter
with a trophy line of scalps for wampum.

One of them mine. My eyes transfixed
by the paradigm of an eclipse being peeled back
like a black eyelid of time, or raven tresses
from the skull of the moon. I've known
the innocence of the crow when its feathers
were albino white before its failure turned sinister
as a starless night. A penury of insight
pearl diving for diamonds in a tarpit of love
that swore the new moon would last forever
like apple bloom and silver on the inside of the ore.

But sometimes the Artesian springs we plant
in the starmud of our hearts come up like black holes
and flowers of oil and what's left of the shining
is the tinfoil of a trickster shaman substituting
his hunting magic to gratify the eyes of fools
that revel in their amorous delusions and spurn
the astringencies of enlightenment that burn
like circumpolar suns at midnight illuminating
nothing but the skins we shed to let the snake
out the box like Draco, without getting bit
by the picture-music of our own motives
trying to charm the serpent fire with backbone flutes
jamming with the downed powerlines
of our badly tuned spinal cords riffing
with the cosmic spiders writing the lyrics
of our myth of origins like electrical dreamcatchers
with toxic pincers like the tuning forks of splintered stars.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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It's Stranger To Conceive Of Me

It's stranger to conceive of me as I am
than to imagine that I'm someone else.
There's more largesse in the early spring air.
You can tell by the tears that well up in their eyes
the glacial stars are beginning to thaw splinter by splinter
withdrawing their claws from the corpse of the snow
like thorns from the Lion's paw overhead.
I can hear water in the creek tuning up
for the dance to come as soon as
the first violins of the crocuses get here,
the trout lily, the purple passage of the wild violet
under a leaf it took like a page from the book of autumn,
trout lily, hepatica, wood sorrel, grape hyacinth.
I like it here because it doesn't matter who I am.
Things are alert and vivid with life because
they're not threatened by the possession of it.
And time is a lot more honest
here where it lets its hair down
than it is back in town
where it's always now, now, now,
and the streetlights, blinded by their own blazing
turn their backs on the stars
like the distant fires of native peoples
who preferred to dance to see
where they were going at night
than watch their step
like the next best real estate deal.
Even without intention, every time
I try to shape space with my mouth
and say this is who I am, this is me
whatever similitude I use I always feel
I'm exhuming a dead metaphor
from the coffin of a word
that's been taken out of the context of the world
and put on display in a dream museum.
It's as if I can relate the history of smoke
but not the flame that lived it.
As if one of these half-submerged skulls of rock
that have been trying
to pave their way across the creek
for as long as I've been crossing here
were to try and understand the mindstream
that's been ploughing around them for lightyears,
not realizing what they're rooted in like cornerstones,
are islands on the moon, mere shadows of water,
mirages on the tongue of those who have
never tasted it like their own blood
to know whether it was hot or cold,
blue or red, sweet or sour, real or not.
The earth can sleep a little longer yet
under this tapestry of snow while
the dreamweaver at the loom of the moon
is unravelling the threads of a thousand loose night creeks
the sea will gather up again into an oceanic consciousness
of the flying carpet of wavelengths and life themes
we're riding on well out of reach of ourselves
like waterlilies in winter when it's coldest,
and snowflakes on a furnace when it's hot.
It's as fun to say it as it is to play with hula hoops.
The ecliptic intersects the celestial equator
at the equinoctial colure and it's spring
in the northern hemisphere. Canada geese
thread their way like rosaries of snake skulls
through the stars in the eyes of northern lakes
peeping through the cataracts of ice and clouds
breaking up like mirrors that can only
hold this pose of starmud for so long
before it's time to change studios again
to keep up with the light
that's trying to capture your likeness
like the whole of the sky on the skin
of a dropp of the water of life
that reflects like a mirror
but sees through appearances
into the deeper darkness
like a gravitational lens of pure insight,
the lamp in the hand of the light that leads it
like a blind lighthouse to the perilous reefs
of morning on the moon among the corals.
Was I born to wonder what, who I am
or not, as is more highly probable?
Is the persistence of the question, the way
it makes you suddenly look up
from a seemingly unrelated matter
at the moon in the black walnut trees
or a bird in passing that commands your attention
without in the least meaning to
until everything but it feels like the intrusion.
Is the question on the agenda of the answer
or does it have a life of its own,
a journey that doesn't end in a key?
I look at all these twisted forms of life,
not cast out, but abandoned, these
deadly gray limbs of swamp wood
silking their legs in the moonlight,
these mauled pines that look more like weather
than evergreens, the sparse, despirited crimson
of the ground willow paintbrushes
that have lost their handles in the snow
waiting like a newly primed canvas
for the first rose petal of blood
to fall from Virgo as a sign of consummation.
Things, forms, things of the world,
things of the bodymind that shapes them
out of starmud, out of the outer receptacles
of the five senses on each hand,
that conceives of a bee like a hollyhock
calling it into being like the fragrance
of something that was said, but wasn't
meant to be heard by anyone else.
Animate and inanimate alike
a grammar of things, ritual magic
and we're the diction,
we're the verbs and nouns of the spell
that keeps us creating the world in tongues
so even as strangers we end up speaking
the same language as stones and stars and birds.
Maybe the question is just an answer
that's travelled back in time from the future
to ask the prophetic skulls of its own ancestors
if any of them had foreseen what was to come?
Or the question is all and the answer is negligible?
Or left speechless, you achieve wisdom?
Or left unanswered, you awaken
your own creative freedom
like a world you didn't know
you had it in you to make any way you want
in case this one doesn't fit, you don't have to bear it.
Absurd as it seems to seed your dreams
and expect to harvest them when you wake up,
and yet I've seen it happening all around me
every day of my life, objects, symbols, stars,
insights casting shadows of themselves
into the darkness as far as the light
they've been given to go by,
sowing the available dimensions of the future
with a world that isn't so much said into being,
but arrayed lucidly before us
like eyes full of mystery that don't reveal a thing.
I sit on this rock and I watch the night creek
until I can't tell which one of us is flowing
and it occurs to me that maybe the question itself
is the crucial essential of my existential dilemma
and the answer's only the temporary afterlife
of who I'm becoming now. Not as I appear;
not as the psychic life of a heart-broken mirror,
not as the mirage of a snowblind seer
who approachs the desert on my threshold with a broom
as if I were trying to keep house in an hourglass.
I don't sweep the stars off my stairs.
I don't follow a trail of breadcrumbs
in the corners of the eyes of last night's dream
as if someone had been here before me.
I don't pass myself off like counterfeit leaves in the spring.
Honesty isn't a fact. And clarity isn't a starmap.
And love's only another religious con
if it isn't wholly unconditional and inclusive.
I'm not looking for asylum in the abyss
like some petty alternative to living this
without knowing what this is or I am
or at least trying to get my ignorance
as close as humanly possible to it as I can
whether it's aware of me, these stars, this
broken thatch of wild rice, wheat, and cattails, or not.
Then I will celebrate the creativity of its absence
with reverence and compassion for all
that it's left in its wake like a sleepwalker
shaping this mindscape like a retreating glacier.
All that abide here with me tonight
like the gateless gate of an open mind
wondering if there's anything left to catch up to
that embodies the dignity of the beginning
in the dead of winter, as apparently it does in the spring.
Or if we're all words in a language
we're just learning to speak on our own
that can point to anything, say anything
except themselves to themselves
whenever the question comes up
about whether they mean anything at all
when they're not leaning on the world to exist
as we all do, trying to make sense of it
in this dumb-founded dialogue of wonder.

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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